“Hard dock!” Selkirk exclaimed jubilantly. “Three probes, three locks, and three green lights! Recovery completed. Drone systems are powering down.”
“All right!” Lane lifted his hands off the air rudder yoke for an instant, fists clenched in victory.
A red light flickered near Amanda’s right knee and an audial warning from the threat board demanded her attention. “I’m very pleased to hear that, Mr. Selkirk, because we’ve just been painted by a Plank Shave search radar. The bearing is from the south, and it has to be our friend the Syrian Tarantul … and he has just gone to tracking sweep interval. He’s getting a return off of us!”
Selkirk wiped his telescreens clear of the drone recovery displays, calling up the Queen’s ECM systems. “He’s got more than that, ma’am. Bass Tilt fire-control radars coming up now. He’s trying for a firing lock!”
The decks of the Raqqah shuddered as her CODAG propulsion system rammed its maximum output through her three racing propellers.
“All engines answering ahead flank, Captain,” the helmsman yelled over the combined diesel roar and turbine howl. The glowing numerals of the iron log on the helm console registered thirty-five knots. The little Russian-built warship was giving her all to close the range with the intruder.
“Where in damnation did he come from, Taluk?” Shalakar gripped the bridge grab rail, holding himself in place beside the radar operator.
“From inshore, sir. From inside our patrol line. A single, very small, fast surface contact. I thought for a moment that there were two … an airborne as well … but now there is only the one.”
“How did he get inside of us? Identify!”
The SO shook his head. “Impossible to say. It is a very faint return. Possibly a Zodiac-type small craft…. Speed holding steady at twenty five knots. Range closing…. He’s cutting across our bow at five kilometers.”
“Acknowledged. Lookout! Do you have a visual sighting?”
“No visual at this range, Captain!”
Shalakar’s fist slammed against the side of the radar cabinet. “Zodiac or not, I want target locks! Lieutenant Sadrati! Arm the SSN 22s and the bow 76 turret both! Prepare to engage on my command!”
“We’ve got missile-seeker heads activating.” The tension level in Selkirk’s voice rose a notch. “SSN 22 Sunburns, arming for launch. He’s getting serious about this, ma’am.”
“Understood, Mr. Selkirk. Stand by on your chaff launchers and decoys. Mr. Lane, I think it’s time we get out of here.”
“I’m good with that, ma’am. Jumping to light speed!”
Steamer’s lips peeled back in a fierce, tight grin. His palm shoved the propulsion power levers forward to their check stops. The roar of the airscrews grew into a frame-shaking thunder, and acceleration shoved all hands back into their seat padding.
“This is the Lady to all elements,” Amanda called over her command circuit. “Initiate broad-spectrum countermeasures. Commence! Commence! Commence!”
“Captain”—the radar operator’s shout was half strangled with surprise—“the target is greatly increasing its speed. Forty-five knots … fifty … fifty-five and still accelerating! It is now opening the range, sir!”
Shalakar glared down into the screen. The bogey wasn’t just opening the range, it was pulling away effortlessly, turning almost twice the Raqqah’s best rate of knots.
“That’s no Zodiac!” he growled. “Missile Officer! Clear master safeties on all cells! Stand by to fire!”
“Captain,” the SO cried out again, “look at the screen.”
From a broad arc all along the western edge of the radarscope, flickering cartwheels of light strobed and intermeshed, blanketing the screen image. A myriad of smaller sparks and blobs of illumination crawled and danced between the pulsing spokes. The faint, spectral image they had been pursuing began to melt into the electronic chaos.
“Captain,” another urgent voice cut in from the overhead squawk box, “this is communications. All voice channels and datalinks have just gone down. High-intensity cascade jamming all across the range. Multiple sources!”
Shalakar’s dry throat resisted his swallow. What is out there? Blessed Allah, what is out there?
“Captain!” His missile officer wouldn’t give him time to pray or to think. “Targeting systems no longer have acquisition! Missile-tracking locks broken! Switching missiles to independent proximity homing … ! Captain, we can still fire on the bearing … ! Captain, what are your orders?”
In the Queen of the West’s cockpit, Amanda accessed a data link from one of the Carlson’s Eagle Eye Remotely Piloted Vehicles. A distant cousin of the Cipher reconnaissance drone the Queen had just recovered, a trio of these little robotic tilt-rotors had popped up over the horizon a few moments before. The jamming modules they carried, combined with the integral electronic countermeasures (ECM) of the Sea Fighters, wreaked havoc with the local ether.
The onboard radars of the Eagle Eyes themselves, however, were unaffected. Tuned to peer through a narrow crack in the scrambled electromagnetic spectrum, they could be used to develop a tactical display of the developing engagement. Amanda did so now.
“Bass Tilt and Plank Shave locks broken, Captain,” Selkirk reported. “We’re below his return strengths.”
“Very good, Mr. Selkirk. Stay on the ECM. Steamer, bring us left to two-seven-zero. Let’s get off his last bearing.”
“Steering two-seven-zero, aye.” Lane eased the wheel over, slipping the hovercraft. onto its new course. “Think he might try a blind shot anyhow? Should we elevate the weapons pedestals?”
Amanda stared into the cool glow of the tactical screen, considering the target hack of the Syrian corvette and the man who commanded it. She’d been watching him all evening as he had trudged up and down the coast on his patrol line. Doing everything the book said should be done, but never anything more.
Would he have it in him to go for broke, attempting a literal shot in the dark against an unidentified and inassessable foe? Slowly she shook her head. “No. He’s past it. I think we’re clear.”
All hands in the Queen’s cockpit held themselves alert for another two minutes. Then, as the range continued to open and the threat boards remained clean, there came the mutual release of held breath and tautened muscles. Amanda settled back into the copilot’s seat and spoke into her lip mike. “This is the Lady to all Little Pig Elements. Form up on Little Pig Lead and proceed to Point Item for recovery. Possum One, Little Pigs are inbound. Maintain coverage jamming for another five minutes, then stand down and secure the operational time line. You may inform NAVSPECFORCE the mission is accomplished. All elements, well done.”
“Rebel, raja.”
“Frenchman, aye.”
“Possum acknowledges.”
Out in the night, two sleek, finned shadows converged on the Queen of the West. Riding on hazy streaks of starlit mist, the Queen’s two sisters pulled into echelon formation with their leader. Reunited once more, the squadron ran free for the open sea.
Amanda slid her seat back on its rails. Unbuckling her safety harness, she popped the latches on her combination life jacket /flak vest. Lifting off her helmet, she shook her sweat-matted hair out over her shoulders. Scrounger Caitlin, with the instincts of a good chief of the boat, leaned in between the pilots’ stations, passing her captains a couple of cans of Orange Crush, fresh from the galley refrigerator.
Amanda took a long pull at the soft drink, relishing the cleansing chill in her tension-soured throat. Glancing at the tactical display once more, she noted that the Syrian corvette had broken off its pursuit and had turned away. Humiliated, it crept back toward the coast.
I suspect I may have destroyed your career out here tonight, she thought, beaming her words through the darkness to the nameless Syrian commander. I’m sorry it had to be done, but such are the fortunes of not-war.
An hour later and fifty miles farther offshore, the Sea Fighters reached “Point Item.”
Ev
er since their departure from the Syrian coast, the threat boards of the Sea Fighter group had been reacting to the vigilant radiating of a powerful SPY-2A Aegis radar array. Now a pale slash of phosphorescent wake could be made out along the median between the black velvet sea and midnight satin sky. Fast ships moving through the darkness, their running lights extinguished.
Amanda smiled and lowered the nite-brite visor of her helmet to watch the closing with the two-vessel task group. For her, this was more than just a return to base. In a way, she was coming home, and she still savored the experience.
The lead ship, the escort, ran closer inshore, poised ready to interpose itself between its charge and the hostile coast.
Amanda knew this ship the way she might know the body of a long favored lover. So much was the same, the great angular shark fin of the freestanding mast array, the low, slope-sided deckhouse, and the uncluttered sleekness of the silhouette against the sky glow, the great radically raked bow slashing open the sea.
The only readily visible difference were the deck guns, below the bridge amidships and on the well deck aft of the helipad. Replacing the smooth, hemispherical bumps of the old OTO Melara 76mm Super Rapids were the larger “ax blade” stealth turrets of her new and vastly more potent 5-inch .62-caliber ERGM systems.
The changes within that rakish hull were too numerous to catalog however.
Once upon a time designated as a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Cunningham had served as the Navy’s advanced test-bed hull for navalized stealth technology. Now, with that mission accomplished, she carried a new designation at her bow, CLA (Cruiser Littoral Attack)-79, and a new tasking, the proving of the evolving technologies of the fleet’s “Force from the Sea” battle doctrine.
But still, she was the Duke. In Amanda’s heart, she was still “her” ship.
When she had started to assemble this new littoral-warfare unit, Eddie Mac MacIntyre had given her a free hand at drawing from the available NAVSPECFORCE resource pool. When it had come to selecting a heavy-firepower escort for the Sea Fighters, Amanda hadn’t hesitated for a second.
High up on the Cunningham’s signals deck, an Aldis lamp blinked a brief signal: All’s well, Captain.
Commander Ken Hiro, her old exec, held sway on the Duke’s bridge now. But he remembered the old days too.
Holding in their echelon formation, the Sea Fighters cut around the stern of the cruiser sequentially ski-jumping her wake. Ahead, the faintly glowing sea track of a second, even larger vessel cut across the Mediterranean.
The USS Evans F. Carlson was both one of a kind and one of many, for LPD (Landing Platform Dock) 26 was the bastard child of the San Antonio class.
Originally the Navy had wanted only an even dozen of this new model amphibious assault ship, one for each of the fleet’s twelve Marine-hauling amphibious warfare groups. But somewhere in the pitch and toss of congressional monetary and political wrangling, an undesired thirteenth of the design had become wedged immovably into the Defense Department budget, a slab out of the pork barrel with no home and no mission.
However, Elliot MacIntyre had a saying: “When confronted with pork, make gravy.” Under his astute machinations, this thirteenth orphan found a home within Naval Special Forces, undergoing conversion into the Navy’s largest and most potent seaborne Special Operations platform. In honor of this distinction, the Navy had “broken class” with her naming. Instead of an American city, she bore the name of an American hero, Brigadier General Evans F. Carlson, the bold and radical creator and commander of the legendary 2nd Marine Raider Battalion of the Second World War.
Given her mission, it was an honor suitable for ship and man alike.
As the Queen of the West swept in behind the Carlson, Amanda scanned the chunky lines of her new flagship through the night-vision visor, comparing them for the hundredth time with her beloved Duke.
It was rather like matching a massive, stocky Percheron with a lean and long-lined Thoroughbred. Yet, much was similar as well. Although built for entirely different missions, the Carlson and the Cunningham were sisters, or at least cousins, under the skin.
At 684 feet in length, the Carlson was not as long as the Cunningham. However, at 25,000 tons, the LPD displaced almost three times as much. While she had a far greater beam and a more massive superstructure than the Duke, the Carlson had a similar geometric, art deco simplicity to her design that denoted a ship with an integrally low radar signature.
Both vessels carried their sensors in clean-lined freestanding mast arrays or built into their angled superstructures as “smart skin” segments. Both were cutting-edge military technology and neither could be taken for granted in any kind of a fight.
Unlike their predecessors, the San Antonio-class LPDs were not mere helpless naval auxiliaries. Their mission would take them close inshore, into “Indian country,” where a fight was something to be expected. Accordingly, these “auxiliaries” mounted more firepower than three quarters of the world’s dedicated surface combatants.
Beyond that, the Carlson possessed a few special surprises unique unto herself.
Steamer Lane eased the Queen of the West in astern of the LPD. Decelerating to twenty knots, he bumped the hovercraft into the trough of the larger vessel’s wake.
“Little Pig Lead to Little Pigs,” he murmured into his lip mike, “prepare for recovery. Formation change. Echelon to line astern … go.”
Two matter-of-fact “Rogers” came back out of the dark as Carondelet and Manassas smoothly folded in to trail behind their squadron leader.
“Permission to recover, Captain?” Lane inquired with a glance in Amanda’s direction.
Amanda nodded. “Proceed, Mr. Lane. Take us in.”
She flipped up her nite-brite visor to watch the procedure with conventional vision. This was by now a routine evolution for the squadron, but she still found it impressive.
“Okay ma’am. Doin’ it …. Possum One bay control, this is Little Pig Lead. On station for recovery and ready to come back in the pouch.”
“Acknowledged, Little Pig Lead,” the radio-filtered voice of the BAYBOSS replied. “Initiating recovery. Little Pigs, welcome home.”
A streak of dull scarlet light cut across the top of the Carlson’s broad, square stern. Widening rapidly, the streak grew into a ruddy glowing rectangle in the night as the LPD’s huge boarding ramp swung down, its trailing edge touching and flattening the ship’s boiling wake.
Revealed was a huge double-leveled internal bay that ran far forward within the hull of the amphibious ship. Under the blood-colored illumination of the battle lights, the docking crew and the Sea Fighter service teams could be seen jogging to their stations along the gantryways that lined either side of the bay. For her current tasking, the Evans F. Carlson had been optimized for “dry deck” hovercraft operations. There was no need for ballasting down at the stern to flood her internal well, as would be mandated by the use of conventional landing craft. Thus, she was something new, not an aircraft carrier, but a seacraft carrier.
With a masterful jockeying of air rudder and throttle, Steamer Lane eased the Queen’s foreskirt over the edge of the stern ramp. A surge of power to the airscrews then kicked the Sea Fighter upslope and into the bay, her wailing turbine song folding in around her, reverberating within the steel-walled cavern.
Steamer came back on the airscrew throttles and killed the main propulsion turbines, shifting his right hand to the T-stick “puff port” controller on the central console, A deck guide stepped out in front of the idling hovercraft, beckoning forward with his glowing wands. With bursts of the puff port thrusters, Lane taxied the Queen deeper into the bay, clearing the boarding ramp for the Carondelet.
As they trundled forward, Amanda glanced up at the bold artwork mounted above the gantries on the bay bulkheads. In pride, the different elements that made up the Sea Fighter task force had mounted man-tall copies of their unit shields there.
She checked them off in her mind as each badge crep
t past. Portside … the bamboo-lettered GUNG HO! crest of the Carlson. … Starboard … the ghost-ship silhouette and STRIKE IN STEALTH battle cry of the Cunningham. … Port … the ferociously Disneyesque trio of African warthogs of PGAC 01, THE THREE LITTLE PIGS… . Starboard … the rampant sea dragon of the 1st Marine Raider Company (Provisional) …. Port … a raider-boat silhouette butted into a dagger hilt for Bravo detachment, Special Boat Squadron 1 …. Starboard … the all-seeing eye and crossed lightning bolts of Tactical Intelligence Group Alpha…. Port and lastly, the twinned gold and blue Oceanhawk helicopters of Heloron 24.
Each of these elements had been drawn from the NAVSPECFORCE unit pool or, in some instances, created specifically at Amanda’s request to fill out her visualization of the task force. Eddie Mac MacIntyre had given her a blank check to create a “best of the best,” a balanced and self-supporting Navy, Army, and Air Force in miniature that could deploy rapidly to any littoral hotspot in the world and deal with any low- to mid grade threat.
One empty shield space remained to starboard, one unit left to merge into the whole. Then it would be time to see how correct her vision had been.
For Amanda Lee Garrett, ex-destroyer driver, it was a new way of war. But then, there had been a great deal of newness in her life of late. New technologies, new doctrines, new relationships, and new ways of thinking as a task group TACBOSS instead of a single-ship captain. Much had changed over the past year.
At least that sense of frustration and lack of purpose that had once plagued her as the dockside captain of a crippled ship had dissipated. Amanda had come to like this current command and the revised place she had carved for herself in her trade.
But with the gaining of the new, there is frequently a loss of the old. There were lingering thoughts of a youthful, dark-haired lover, a last perfect golden day off Cape Hatteras, and a conversation that had never been finished.
Still, if certain lonely holes remained in her personal life, she could live with them for the time being. Maybe with her career back on track and the task force coming together, she could start to think about patching them up.
Target Lock Page 5
