Target Lock

by James H. Cobb

  “What are the Americans doing, sir?” the watch officer yelled over the rotor thunder.

  “Something they obviously don’t wish us to see,” Basry yelled back.

  The hangar bay ventilator fans raced at full power, pumping a flood of outside air into the space, air that was greedily devoured by the gas turbines of the hovering Sea Fighters.

  “Prelaunch checklists complete,” Chief Petty Officer Sandra “Scrounger” Caitlin reported from the Queen of the West’s copilot’s seat. Glancing down from the cockpit windows, she noted the bay apes dragging the last tie-down strap clear. The same was being done for the Manassas, at her spot forward of the Queen, leaving both hovercraft bobbing on their inflated plenum skirts.

  “Moorings clear,” she continued. “We are free to maneuver.”

  “Roger, that,” Steamer Lane replied. “Going to active station keeping.”

  With one hand on the puff port controller, he held the PGAC in place against the pitch and roll of her mother ship. “Internal station status?”

  “Boards green. All stations report secure and ready for sea,” Caitlin replied “Power rooms indicate they are drawing on the blivit. We got good fuel flow.”

  Below, in the main hull, the other seven members of the hovercraft crew stood to at the weapons-control stations and in the power rooms. The seven Force Recon Marines and the pharmacist’s mate that made up the Queen’s share of the land recon party were strapped into the fold down benches along the bulkheads of the main bay. They shared this confined space with what resembled a gigantic gray slug.

  The small Rigid Inflatable raider boat and the harpoon missile cells that usually occupied the Sea Fighters’ central bay had been unshipped and replaced with a fuel blivet, a flexible Fiberglas-and-plastic fuel bladder that effectively doubled the hovercraft’s 750-mile operational radius.

  The hover commander thumbed the mike button on the air rudder control yoke. “BAYBOSS, this is Royalty. Tie-downs clear and ready to take departure.”

  “BAYB0SS, this is Rebel,” Lieutenant Tony Marlin’s intent voice joined in from the Manassas. “Make that two to go.”

  “BAYBOSS to hovers, acknowledged.”

  Through the open cockpit side windows, the MC-1 speakers bellowed over the turbine shriek and fan moan. “Attention in the hangar bay. Stand by to launch hovercraft. All hands proceed forward of the deck safety lines. Set hangar blackout protocols. Extinguish all portable light sources. All hands go to night vision or stand fast in secure positions. Ten count to blackout … ten … nine … eight … ”

  At the count of one, the hangar bay plunged into total darkness. Steamer and Scrounge flipped down the nite-brite visors of their helmets.

  “Stern ramp opening.”

  In the Queen’s sideview mirrors, they watched the wall of steel behind them crack open to admit the night.

  “Sea Fighters ready to launch, Captain,” Carberry murmured at Amanda’s side.

  “Very well,” she replied absently, intent on the developing picture on the tactical display. The angles were looking good. Very soon Steamer would have an optimum departure heading. But even though the Sea Fighters were very stealthy vehicles, they weren’t totally radar-invisible at close range. Nor was the Cunningham, should it need to be.

  “Let’s take out their radars, Commander. The RBOCs now, please. Curtain pattern astern. Bring up your jammers, full spectrum.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am. Jammers coming up. Firing a pattern.”

  At the aft corners of the Carlson’s deckhouse, the mortar tubes of the Rapid Blooming Overhead Chaff systems coughed hollowly. In a maneuver similar to a Fourth of July fireworks display, the charges they hurled arced high over the sea aft of the LPD. However, upon bursting, instead of a shower of multicolored stars, these charges dispersed clouds of metal foil strips.

  On the bridge of the Indonesian frigate, the watch officer yelled over the aggravating hammer of Wolf One’s rotors. “Captain, look at the tactical display. The Americans are launching chaff.”

  Captain Basry swore fervently and raced to the console screen.

  Truly enough, a curtain of radar-jamming foil was being drawn across his ship’s line of advance, the American flagship fading from detection beyond it. Intermixed with the chaff wall came the jittering blobs and strobing effect of active radar jamming.

  This was intolerable! First the Americans blind his eyes, and now his radar!

  “All engines ahead flank!” Basry roared. “Close the range!”

  “Chaff deployed, ma’am.”

  “Very good, Commander. We have it on tactical. Good disbursement. I don’t think we’ll need another dose for the moment.”

  On the Carlson’s bridge, the chaff curtain existed only as an oblong graphics box on the tactical display, showing its area of effect on the Indonesian systems. For the United States vessel, the countermeasures cloud was as transparent as glass.

  Chaff’s effectiveness was dependent upon matching the length of the scattered foil strips to the wavelength of the radar being jammed. These loads had been carefully cut to leave a frequency “window” open that could be used by the U.S. systems, a window beyond the operational spectrum of the earlier-gen Indonesian radars. Much the same kind of peephole existed in the barrage of electronic noise being thrown up by the active jammers.

  The Carlson was very close to the breakaway point now. But the range numbers that glowed beside the Indonesian frigate’s position hack began to flick downward. They were increasing speed, overtaking the LPD.

  “Captain Carberry, all engines ahead full, and give us a second chaff launch, please.”

  “Very well, ma’am. Lee helm, all engines ahead full. Make turns for twenty-five knots. CIC, countermeasures, launch RBOC pattern two.”

  Time to put her knight into play. Again, Amanda keyed her headset mike. “Talk between ships, please. Commander Hiro aboard the Cunningham.”

  Hiro’s voice came back a moment later. “Right here, Captain.”

  “Ken, our Indonesian friend is being difficult. He’s closing with us and I don’t need him underfoot at the moment. Give him the shoulder, please. As we discussed.”

  “Understood. Executing.”

  On the bridge of the Cunningham, Hiro moved to stand behind the helm control stations. “Helm, come right to one nine zero, convergent course with the Indonesian. Lee Helm, all power rooms to full output. All engines ahead flank. Make turns for thirty-five knots.”

  As the Cunningham’s bow started to come around, a red warning tile flashed on the helm console’s Navicom board and a computer-synthesized voice chanted from a speaker grill. “Collision bearing! Collision bearing! Collision bearing!”

  Hiro leaned forward and hit the override, squelching the audile warning. “Yeah,” he murmured under his breath, “it certainly is!”

  Minutes passed, and the Sutanto plowed ahead through a glittering metallic snowstorm.

  “Lieutenant, have you worked through this damn crap and corruption they’re laying down yet?”

  “Not yet, Captain.” The sweating radar officer looked up from where he crouched beside his senior systems operator. “The Americans continue to deploy chaff, and their active jammers keep jumping with our radar frequency shifts.”

  “Keep working it. I must know what’s going on out there. Quarter master, switch to GPU navigation and watch your fathometer. We’ve got some shoals out there to port.” Basry squinted into the glare pouring in through the bridge windscreen. “Communications! Warn that damn helicopter off immediately!”

  “We’ve been trying, sir,” a second junior officer called back from the radio shack aft of the wheelhouse. “We are calling on all standard channels …”

  The radio officer’s voice cut off with the blaze of the floodlights. Going dark, Wolf One broke out of its holding pattern beyond the frigate’s bow. Climbing, the Super Huey started to circle overhead, the beating of its rotors still drowning out all sounds less than a shout. But just getting the
night back was a relief.

  Basry strove to blink the pinkish dazzle blobs from his vision. “That’s something, at any rate. Maybe now … Allah’s prophet! Hard right rudder! All engines back emergency!”

  A second bank of floodlights blasted out of the darkness, these set closer to the water than those mounted on the helicopter. The running lights of a ship snapped on as well, a very large ship, very close off the Sutanto’s starboard bow. Basry caught the impression of a huge razor-edged prow looming out of the night, seeming to aim at his vessel’s vulnerable flank. Dual-toned air horns blared an imperious warning.

  Without orders, the Sutanto’s quartermaster wrenched down on the horn cord and the frigate screamed in terror. Frantically the helmsman spun his brass-mounted wheel until it locked against its stops. The deck tilted as the frigate skidded into a minimum-radius turn away from the impending collision.

  As the Duke pulled alongside the Indonesian man-of-war, Ken Hiro peered down from the starboard bridge wing, expertly gauging the narrow strip of water that boiled between the rails of the two warships. “Okay, helm, steady … steady … slack her off … slack her off … slack her off. . . ! Okay, steady as she goes….”

  A mile ahead, on the bridge of the Carlson, the moment came.

  “Sea Fighters, this is the TACBOSS. Launch and execute breakaway!”

  Steamer Lane came back hard on the puff port controller. The Queen of the West’s forward thrusters roared, shoving the Sea Fighter backward. Her rearward motion accelerated as she slid down the Carlson’s stern ramp, traversing from the darkness of the hangar bay to the darkness of the night. With an explosion of spray, she hit the water, bucking through the turbulence of the LPD’s wake.

  Steamer shifted his grip from the controller to the steering yoke. “Power!”

  Scrounger Caitlin knew that her captain wanted it all. She shoved first the propeller controls, then the drive throttles, hard ahead to their stops. The airscrews, which had been feathered at idling power, angled their blades and blurred into shimmering disks within their duct shrouds. The wave crests flattened behind her under the surge of thrust, and the Queen lunged ahead, gathering speed.

  Steamer sidestepped the stern of the LPD, racing the hovercraft gun boat up the left flank of the larger vessel. The Manassas followed them down the ramp a few moments later. Chasing her squadron leader, the second PGAC dropped into a line behind the Queen.

  Clear of the Carlson’s bow, Steamer paid off in a wide turn, aiming the Sea Fighter column dead on toward the nameless island to port.

  “Go … go … go!” Lane chanted.

  Scrounger’s eyes raked across the engine readouts on her instrumentation displays. Playing the power levers the way a master pianist might play a vintage Steinway, she kept the temperature bars well up in the yellow, not quite letting them touch red.

  A turbine tech by training, Scrounger had come up from the Queen’s power rooms. She’d earned her nickname primping and petting those big Lycomings, using her deft skill at “midnight requisitioning” to acquire the best of the best for them, just for moments like this.

  The wave patterns flickered past in Steamer Lane’s nite-brite visor, vanishing under the Sea Fighter’s blunt nose. The Queen was running balls to the wall, gobbling the range to her island target.

  “Terry, gimme the MMS.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Ensign Terrence Wilder, the Queen’s executive officer, barked from the navigator’s station. “Activating mast-mounted sighting system … low-light television is imaging on your primary screen now, sir.”

  Both Lane and Caitlin grinned to themselves, even under the tension of the moment. Terry Wilder was new, both to the fleet and to the Queen. They’d both been bringing him along with how things were done in the gunboat Navy, but Wilder still suffered from Annapolis flashbacks in times of stress.

  Flipping up his nite-brite visor, Lane swapped the fuzzy green luminosity of the AI2 system for the sharply defined gray tones of the more powerful low-light television pod atop the Queen’s snub mast.

  The nameless landfall lay a few thousand yards ahead now, a low, dark mass rising only a few feet above the sea. More important, however, was the wavering white line even closer, the surf breaking over the reefs that circled the islet.

  As a true hovercraft, the Queen of the West drew no water at all. But coming in as she was, like a bat out of hell, snagging a plenum-chamber skirt on a protruding coral head could prove catastrophic. Lane rocked his control yoke, fishtailing the Sea Fighter and swinging his camera arc, watching for the dark line in the pale surf that would denote a “shoulder” of a reef break, a tongue of deeper, smoother water showing the way through the jagged teeth of the coral.

  He relied not on any training provided by the Navy but on the wave honed instincts gained in an adolescence spent surf-bumming up and down the California coast. Those instincts had served him well before; they did again now.

  “Yeah, I got it! We got a hole! Rebel, Rebel, this is Royalty! Hey, Tony, maintain line astern! Follow me in!”

  The Queen screamed through the gap in the reef at almost seventy knots, the Manassas hot on her tail. Sand loomed ahead.

  “Snowy! All back! Reverse props!”

  Scrounger Caitlin slammed the propeller controls to reverse, inverting the blade angles on the airscrews, changing them from a driving “push” to a braking “pull.” Lane shifted his right hand to the T-grip puff port controller in the center of the console, shoving it full forward. The bow puff ports, vents in the front edge of the plenum chamber, snapped open, the released jets of high-pressure air serving as retro-rockets to help slow the hurtling Sea Fighter.

  The backing propellers and ports wouldn’t quite be enough, however.

  Lane mashed down the interphone button on the control yoke. “Hang on!” he bellowed to all hands.

  The decelerating Sea Fighter hit the beach in an explosion of spray and a tornado of sand. A low dune at the head of the beach launched the huge war machine into the air for a breathless, weightless second before they crashed into an inland brush patch. The Manassas plowed to a halt alongside the Queen a moment later.

  Without requiring the order, Scrounger hit the kill switches, letting the Sea Fighter settle off cushion.

  “Yeah, well, we’re here,” Lane commented.

  On the tactical display, Amanda looked on as the microforce reached the islet, the faint skin tracks of the Sea Fighters disappearing with the land return.

  “Combat Information Center, we have breakaway. How did that look to you?” she inquired.

  “Looked good, ma’am. No RCM reflection on the Indonesian radar frequencies, and except for a degree of screaming about being run down by the crazy Americans, we have no radio traffic out of the frigate. No indication they spotted the launch. Our guys are outa here.”

  “Very good, CIC. All task group element, breakaway achieved. Secure chaff and jamming. Wolf One, you may recover at your discretion. All ships return to standard cruise protocols and proceed on course. Well done.”

  On the bridge of the Cunningham, Ken Hiro watched the Sutanto stagger away into the darkness. Like a cow pony with a recalcitrant calf, the Duke had herded the smaller Indonesian vessel through a full 180- degree turn.

  Hiro took a deep, deliberate breath. The Lady still could make things interesting, even when she wasn’t in the captain’s chair. “Quartermaster, secure the searchlights. Helm, commence station keeping on the Carlson. Lee helm, all engines ahead standard.”

  “This is intolerable!” Basry raged, stalking the Sutanto’s bridge. “Intolerable. Radio room, get me the American commander immediately! I will demand an apology for this outrage!”

  “Captain …”

  “Immediately!”

  “But Captain,” the communications officer pleaded, “we already have a message from the American task group commander, designated for you personally.”

  Basry paused in his stalking. “What? What does he say?”

 
“Uh, ‘To the commanding officer Indonesian warship Sutanto. We regret that you elected to close the range with our formation at an inopportune moment. We were conducting an antimissile exercise with which you accidentally became involved. Please accept our strongest possible apologies for your dis-accommodation.’”

  The communications officer looked up from the message flimsy. “Signature Captain Amanda Lee Garrett, USN, Commander, Sea Fighter Task Force.”

  Captain Basry opened his mouth, then shut it again as he realized he had nothing to say. A woman. On top of everything else, it had been done to him by a woman.

  Basry had no idea of just what all had happened here, or why, or what he had not seen. There was only the deepening suspicion he had been made a fool of.

  Powered down and silent, the Queen and the Manassas lay huddled on the nameless islet. Peering seaward over the low dunes, their MMS systems tracked the departure of the trio of larger ships. Presently, when the task force and its shadower were out of sight beyond the horizon, they would light off their turbines again and take their own departure. From here they would make their way to another hide on yet another nameless islet, dashing and crouching their way across the Indonesian archipelago like a pair of infantrymen sprinting from cover to cover.

  This was what they had been made for.

  For the moment, though, their crews and passengers could take a breather and a cold can of Coke be sipped. All hatches and cockpit windows gaped wide to admit the errant, cooling puffs of the night breeze and the sound of the breaking waves.

  “Real interesting departure, Snowy,” Steamer Lane said softly.

  Scrounger Caitlin’s attention quirked at the murmur. The Skipper did that every now and then. Just like he’d back-slip and use Miss Banks’s name every now and again when things got hot.