“Right. We’ll fade back and let you close to two minutes’ separation. Hear that, Cobra?”
“Two minutes.” A third tall figure in a flight suit and helmet stood out of the shadows. “Got it.”
“Just like in the planning sessions, gentlemen. The first pass drives off or destroys the pirate craft and traps the boarders on the ship. Second pass suppresses the deck and clears the way for our counter-boarders. Then we clean up the leftovers. Let’s all remember the purpose of this exercise is hard intel and prisoners.”
“Aye, aye!”
“This is our first fight of a new campaign. Good luck to us all!”
She lifted her hands palm out and received a matching pair of stinging high fives in return.
Quillain disappeared back into the superstructure while Amanda followed Richardson to the waiting Wolf One. As she climbed into the cabin and settled in the jumpseat behind the pilots, the crew chief passed her a flight helmet. Donning it, she jacked the combination power and intercom lead into the overhead connectors, testing both the integral head set and night-vision visor.
Wolf One’s pair of armor-clad door gunners were the last crewmen aboard. With their heads grotesque in Head’s-Up-Display targeting helmets and their bodies asymmetrically distorted by the MX-214 miniguns they lugged at their hips, they resembled the grim special-effects creations of some science-fiction filmmaker.
The reality was as strange as any fiction, however. These men were cyborg warriors, literally a physical merging of man and gun into a single weapons system.
One of the lessons learned during the long years of helicopter warfare in Vietnam had been that no fixed aircraft gun mount was as fast or as flexible to use as a weapon directly wielded by a human. Accordingly, the veteran airmobile gunners of that conflict learned to strap their machine guns to their bodies with a carrying harness, making themselves living gun mounts.
The Seawolves remembered the lesson.
Stiffly the door gunners lifted themselves into the bench seats that faced outward through the side hatches. Their monkey-harness straps were locked into overhead hardpoints, and feeder tracks connected the miniguns to the ammunition magazines built into the cabin roof. Power links clicked home—intercom, laser sight, Helmet Mounted Display, gun drive. Systems cycled through checkout mode. Fighting men and fighting aircraft became one entity.
Amanda found the sequence a little chilling.
Flickering rotors occulted the stars, and Wolf One trembled on her skids. Cobra Richardson twisted around in the command pilot’s seat, his rakish Errol Flynn mustache a dark smear across his paler features in the dim light. “Flight ready to launch, Captain. ETA over target approximately twenty minutes.”
Lieutenant Commander Richard “Cobra” Richardson was a unique individual. Formerly of the Coast Guard’s elite Caribbean-based drug interdiction gunship squadron, he had service-transferred to the Navy and to the Seawolves. His motivation had been the same as when he had previously made the jump from the U.S. Air Force’s Air Commando Wing to the Coasties: an unending hunger to go where the action was.
Vince Arkady had recommended Richardson to Amanda. “Cobra is made for your outfit, babe. He’s a solid leader. He can fly any helo you can name right out to the limits, and he loves to operate. You’ll just have to live with the fact that he’s also just a little bit crazy.”
Amanda smiled to herself. Coming from you, Arkady, that’s high praise indeed.
“Get us in the air, Cobra,” she said aloud.
“Aye, aye. Cunningham AIRBOSS, this is Wolf One. Executing departure now. Wolf Two, follow me out.”
The tremble grew into a chest-deep vibration as the collective came back and the rotors caught air. Wolf One gingerly eased off the deck on the lift cushion of ground effect, the tight spotting on the cruiser’s small helipad giving Cobra and his copilot barely an arm’s span of clearance between their rotor tips and those of Wolf Two, Cobra coaxed the Super Huey into a hover, station keeping and bobbling slightly in the ship’s slipstream, then he sheered away sharply. As they cleared the cruiser’s deck and lost the ground-effect lift boost, the heavily laden helicopter fell out of the sky.
Amanda had been warned about this move, but her stomach still knotted through the dive and swoop almost to the wave crests as Cobra deftly exchanged his few feet of altitude for forward flight speed.
“No problems, ma’am,” he commented without bothering to look back over his shoulder.
“I’ll take your word for it, Commander.” Twisting in her jump seat, Amanda looked aft out the open side door. Wolf Two had already tailed them into the air and now was jockeyed into formation. Flying without running lights, the gunship was a shadow against black velvet, only the faint, glowing smear of its cockpit instrumentation marking its position.
Farther away astern, the Cunningham was momentarily outlined against the shimmering path of the setting moon; then she, too, was taken by the darkness. With their engines shrieking at full war power, the Seawolves put their noses down and loped into the night.
Another aircraft reacted to the emergency as well.
From where she circled at sixty thousand feet, the islands of the Indonesian archipelago were black velvet patches against a pewter sea, spangled with the glittering sparks of towns and villages. Global Hawk Teal-Niner was ten hours into her mission profile with another eight to go before her relief bird came in from Australia.
With her turbofan throttled back to minimum cruise, the recon drone had been lazing in a wide racetrack pattern over southern Sumatra and western Java, waiting for a reaction command. So the time on station would not be a waste, her programmers had instructed her to conduct a series of secondary missions while loitering. She had monitored maritime traffic patterns, conducted infrared and low-light scans of some of the more isolated island groups in the area, and maintained a signal intelligence sweep for unusual radio traffic. Nothing particularly challenging for Teal-Niner’s onboard artificial intelligences.
As the data had been acquired, it had been encrypted, packaged for microburst transmission, and fired off through a MILSTAR communications link to Curtin Base and to the drone’s secondary control node aboard the USS Carlson.
So far, nothing of exceptional import had been noted. Intermittently, the Global Hawk would be painted by Indonesian air defense radar, but this was not a matter of undue concern. The Indonsians had nothing that could reach her altitude, and at most, the stealthy drone was a faint, intermittent ghost at the extreme limits of their detection capacity, an easily disregarded UFO.
Abruptly, a command channel opened over the MILSTAR link, a distant human systems operator overriding the autonomous onboard computer. Spooling up to fast cruise, the drone broke away from its preplotted course and swooped toward a new objective. In its belly, sensor and camera turrets swiveled and panned downward, zooming in on a tiny cluster of lights isolated on the sea far below.
“Ah, be advised, TACBOSS, Seawolf Lead, and Dragon 6, this is Raven’s Roost. We have a situational update. Stand by to copy.” The intel officer’s voice sounded in Cobra Richardson’s earphones, tersely clipping off the data.
“Target ship is Russian motor vessel Piskov, twenty-four thousand tons displacement, six hundred and ten feet in length. She is a Finnish built roll-on/roll-off trailer carrier…. Outbound from Vladivostok to Haifa, Naples, and Marseilles. All cargo decks loaded. Stern offside ramp, starboard side … high deckhouse aft … short mast at break of forecastle…. Midships decks are clear except for a double row of ventilator housings…. Vessel is dead in the water, but illuminated.
“We can see approximately eight armed hostiles topside…. The crew is apparently being held belowdecks…. We have three Boghammers tied up alongside, starboard side aft…. A fourth Bog is holding off the stern…. Heaviest weapons apparent are assault rifles and light machine guns.”
Richardson found himself grinning in an appropriately wolfish manner. It would be a challenging tactical setup, but
a fair first bag.
Amanda Garrett, leaning forward between the pilots’ seats, must have read his mind. “Remember, Cobra,” she warned, “I want pieces to pick up afterwards.”
He glanced across his shoulder at her. “Three out of four adequate?”
“I can live with that.”
“Got it covered, then.”
“And not too many holes in the Russian,” she added. “I need her seaworthy.”
Cobra shot another glance down his shoulder. “You do enjoy doing things the hard way, don’t you, ma’am?”
She gave a wry grin. “If you wanted things easy, you could have stayed with the Air Commandos.” Reaching up, she toggled her lip mike from Intercom to Radio. “Dragon 6, are you back there?”
“Roger that, Skipper,” Stone Quillain’s radio-filtered reply came back. “We got you on our FLIRS. We’re about two miles astern of you.”
“What do you think of the setup?”
“Sounds like we’ll have to fastrope aboard. We’re going to need a weatherdeck saturation with gas and flashbangs, then we’ll go in amidships. Kinda tricky, but I think we can swing it okay. The big thing is fire suppression when the lift ship is in hover, especially from the freighter’s deckhouse and bridge. We’ll need the bad guys kept off of us for about thirty seconds.”
Richardson thumbed the Transmit button on the end of his collective lever. “Consider that the least of your problems, buddy. The Wolves will be present and accounted for.”
“Roger that. ’Preciate ya.”
Amanda keyed her lip mike again. “Sounds like we have a plan, gentlemen. Raven’s Roost, this is TACBOSS. Do you have any other suspicious surface traffic in the area?”
“Acknowledged, TACBOSS. We have what look like a pair of good sized Bugis schooners loitering about eight miles astern of the Piskov. There’s a high probability these are your pirate mother ships.”
“I concur. They’re holding off until the boarding parties have the target secure, then they’ll close to take aboard the loot. Stay on those mother ships, Raven’s Roost. They are your new top priorities. I want to know where they head after we intervene at the Piskov.”
“We’re not taking them down too, ma’am?” Richardson inquired.
Amanda shook her helmeted head. “Not this time, Co. I want the mother ships to run home to Papa.”
“Ah, nuts.”
At that moment, Wolf One’s copilot lifted a hand and pointed beyond the windscreen. “Lights on the horizon. Bearing zero off the bow!”
Amanda glanced down at the Active GPU display, then she flipped down her nite-brite visor for a fast visual verification. “That’s it. Target in sight. All strike elements, guns clear! Gentlemen, the show is yours!”
“You heard the lady. Wolf Two, heat ’em up. We’re going downtown.”
Cobra felt Wolf One bobble slightly as internal weight shifted. In his sideview mirrors, he saw his door gunners step out onto the small metal grid platforms mounted outside of the Huey’s doors. Supported only by their monkey harnesses, they hunkered against the hurricane blast of the slipstream, targeting visors down and miniguns braced.
Ahead, the lights of the Piskov drew closer.
On the decks of the big Russian freighter, the pirate deck watch paced slowly, assault rifles slung. They were not lax, but they were relaxed. The difficult part of the night’s work was over. The rest should be an often-practiced routine.
The boarding had gone well. A few bursts of machine-gun fire at the bridge had coerced the crew into stopping their engines. The Russian seamen had been herded into their quarters and safely locked away. Prizemaster Mangkurat and his cargo handlers were already below on the vehicle decks, prying open the locks on the trailers listed in his orders. Soon it would be time to call up the pinisi for loading. By the dawn, they would be sailing for home with wealth packed in their holds.
More than one man smiled at the thought of joyous families to greet, of young women to impress, of gifts to bestow.
And then came the thudding drone from out of the darkness, growing in intensity.
Cigarettes were flicked onto the deck. Rifles slid off of shoulders. Bolts ratcheted back. Dark seamen’s eyes narrowed, seeking to pierce the wall of darkness beyond the freighter’s deck lights.
There shouldn’t be any threat or danger out there in the night. The raja samudra had promised it would be so.
Cobra keyed his lip mike. “Wolf Two, this is Wolf Lead. That one Bog trailing astern of the Piskov is yours. Kill him with a Hellfire. I’m taking the guys alongside. I will engage, overfly the freighter, then break left. You break right, cross behind me, and come down the freighter’s starboard flank. Clean up anything I might miss.”
“Roger D.”
The Super Huey shuddered in its shallow dive, redlining just below rotor stall. The Piskov was no longer a glowing constellation on the horizon. Now she showed herself as a gaunt, long-lined freighter, outlined in the glare of her deck arc lights.
“Vajo,” Richardson barked. “You got the twenty-five. Load lethal and arm for proximity airburst.”
Wolf One’s copilot lifted a hand to the overhead ordnance panel, calling up one of the two turret magazines for the grenade launcher and setting the system configurations. A computer graphics cartwheel sight materialized in front of his eyes, projected on the visor of his Helmets Up display.
As his head turned and his point of vision shifted, the chin turret indexed, the muzzle of the Crew Served Objective Weapon tracking on the death pip in the center of the helmet sight. The copilot stared at his target, his thumb flipping the combination safety guard and arming switch open on his pitch lever.
“Turret up! Proximity set! I got arming tone!”
“Acknowledged. Ten to range.”
“This is Wolf Two,” a voice interjected over the radio. “We are opening fire!”
Blue-orange flame glared from beyond the windscreen. A navalized Hellfire missile slid away from beneath one of Wolf Two’s snub wings. Blazing toward the pirate gunboat loitering astern of the freighter, the hundred pound PGM bobbled along the path pointed by its guidance laser.
The targeted Boghammer dissolved in a pulse of flame and spray. The fight was on.
A tracer stream arced up from alongside the Russian ship, a second and a third following as the pirate gunners engaged the airborne threat. Additional muzzle flashes sparked and danced along the freighter’s rails as the boarding party joined the battle. For the moment, there wasn’t much that could be done about the deckside riflemen, but it was definitely time to deal with those gunboats.
“We got range! Burn ’em!” Richardson roared.
The OCSW jackhammered, spewing high-velocity 25mm grenades. As each round was fired, the inductance coil wrapped around the barrel of the OCSW armed and programmed the proximity fuses of the deadly little projectiles for antipersonnel airburst.
The fire stream reached out for the row of moored Boghammers but didn’t quite touch them. The grenades detonated a few feet short of their target, each round producing a focused blast of shrapnel. Holding down the trigger button, the copilot ran his eyes over the trio of pirate craft, brushing the life away with a whisk broom of high-velocity fragmentation.
Amanda saw the airbursts dance like popping flashbulbs above the gunboats. She also noted the shimmer of moonlit wavetops beneath the helo’s skids. Trapped hair follicles ached under her helmet as she realized the racing aircraft was sinking below the level of the Piskov’s deck, the freighter’s steel flank looming like a cliff before them.
“Cobra?” The cry was a half-strangled one.
The pitch and collective levers slammed back. Wolf One gathered herself and sprang like a Thoroughbred leaping a fence, a skid heel tracing a line across the sea for a split second.
For another split second, a stunned Bugis pirate looked in through the side hatch as the helicopter screamed across the Piskov’s deck between the deckhouse and the foremast.
Amanda’s h
ands locked onto the jump-seat frame as the gunship flared up and over into an incredibly steep banking turn. All that could be seen outside of the left-hand door was the moonlit surface of the ocean. The door gunner, still standing on his platform outside of the aircraft, hung casually from his safety harness with the sangfroid of a commuter waiting at a bus stop.
With the Piskov’s superstructure deftly positioned to block the fire of the pirate deck gunners, the Super Huey snapped level again, racing away into the night.
“Did you say something back there, ma’am?” Cobra Richardson inquired, glancing back over his shoulder.
“Nothing important,” Amanda replied, trying to make her aching fingers release their grip.
With his eyes and face shielded by his gas mask, Stone Quillain gripped a safety strap and leaned out of the open side door of the HH-60 Oceanhawk transport helicopter. As he studied the approaching objective, Amanda Garrett spoke through the tiny inductance speaker taped behind his ear.
“Dragon 6, we are positioning for deck suppression run. State your position.”
“Ninety seconds out and inbound,” he replied into his throat mike, his words relaying via the PRC 6725 Leprechaun transceiver clipped to his chest harness. “Looking good.”
“I concur. It’s your show now, Stone. Secure the ship and crew and get me prisoners!”
“Copy, Skipper. Lord a’mighty woman, I heard you the first time.” Stone was careful to murmur the second phrase only after lifting his thumb off the Transmit key. Stone might have his doubts about some of this newfangled, nonlethal warfare gear they’d be using, but he could understand the need for human intelligence.
Rocking his thumb across the communications touch pad, he toggled over to the cigarette-pack-sized AN/ PRC 6725F squad tactical radio clipped to the side of his helmet. “On final. Lock and load!”
Within the darkened fuselage of the helicopter, well-drilled hands fingered magazines out of harness pouches, socking them home into magazine wells, two per weapon. As did Stone himself, all members of the fifteen-man Marine Force Recon platoon carried the new Selectable Assault Battle Rifles.
Target Lock Page 12
