Choosers of the Slain

by James H. Cobb

  "Shoot."

  From up forward came the thud-rumble of a cold-fire launch.

  The SLAM (Standoff Land Attack Missile) had been one of those off-the-shelf improvisations that had turned out more successful than even its designers could have imagined. Intended to provide naval aviation with an interim, standoff PGM for striking at heavily defended targets, it was a bastard mating of two different missiles: the airframe, engine, and warhead of the Navy's antiship Harpoon, and the infrared guidance system of the Air Force's air-to-surface Maverick.

  So effective did the air-launched weapon prove that the design turned full circle and a surface-to-surface variant was produced. Armed with the Sea SLAM, a destroyer or frigate could deliver the firepower of a battleship with the precision of a sniper's rifle.

  As the missile came over the top of its booster arc, the thermographic television camera in its nose activated, scanning the sea below it, picking up the ice pan almost at one. On the targeting screen back in the Duke's C1C, it appeared as a dark, irregular mass of no-heat afloat on the slightly lighter backdrop of the sea. A single bright star blazed near the center of the floe, the thermal energy radiating from the burning smoke float.

  The systems operator deftly centered the targeting reticle of the guidance system on the flare and squeezed the actuator trigger, committing the missile.

  To the north, the SLAM blazed down out of the sky and the smoking star fixed in the crosshairs grew until it filled the screen. Abruptly, the television image broke up and went to static as the transmitter ceased to exist.

  "Now, that looked about right," Beltrain said with some satisfaction.

  From their position, station keeping just east of the floe, Arkady and Grestovitch couldn't see the spray of shattered ice lift into the sky, just a flash of blue light through the mist.

  "Down dome, Gus. Set depth three-fifty."

  The transducer hit the waves and Grestovitch watched his depth gauge as the tether paid out. Setting the reel lock, he listened intently for results.

  The local acoustic environment was still reverberating from the explosion, and it took a couple of minutes before he could hear past the echoes: the slamming and creaking of metal, the bubbling of air, and the sush-sush-sush of a fast-turning screw, all suddenly undercut by an urgent, throbbing hum.

  "I got him. Propellers bearing three five zero true and opening the range. Numerous metallic transitories, and he's just cut in a bilge pump. We hurt him, Lieutenant! We hurt him and he's running!"

  "Yeah!" Arkady exclaimed fiercely. "Mark one up for the home team. Good work, my man!"

  The aviator thumbed the transmit button on the end of the collective controller.

  "Gray Lady, Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. The strike was effective. We confirm that the Argy has been damaged and is attempting to disengage to the northwest. Do you wish us to continue to prosecute the target?"

  Amanda Garrett's answer crackled back almost instantly. "Negative, Retainer! I repeat, negative! Return to the ship for immediate recovery. Expedite!"

  The Lady was sounding worried.

  OFF THE ANTARCTIC SEA ICE PACK

  FORTY-SEVEN MILES NORTHWEST OF CAPE LLOYD

  1720 HOURS: MARCH 26, 2006

  Under way again, the Cunningham was cutting into the outermost fringe of the cold front, and a fine, hard snow was hissing across the facing of her windscreen to fuse with the droplets of freezing spume being whipped off the wave tops.

  "Ken, you keep the con," Amanda called back over her shoulder as she pulled an issue parka out of a gear locker. "I'm going aft to monitor the recovery. I'll feed you bell and steering commands as needed. For now, steer three zero zero and keep us quartering into the sea. That'll both put the wind across the helipad and get us some sea room away from the pack."

  "Will do," the exec replied, assuming the command chair.

  "And kill the Black Hole Systems. That'll give Arkady a thermal plume to follow home."

  "Will do again. You watch yourself out there on deck, Skipper. It's getting nasty."

  "Just worry about the ship, Ken. I'll be fine."

  The main passageway on the weather-deck level of the superstructure was jammed with Air Division personnel, all hands made bulky and clumsy by a combination of cold-weather gear and emergency equipment.

  "Coming aft! Make a hole!" Amanda slid along the grab rail until she reached CPO Muller at the hatchway. "We set to go, Chief?"

  "Yes, ma'am," the burly aviation man replied, "but it's going to be a bitch of a recovery. We're at Force Six now and we're beyond the book limits clear across the board."

  She accepted the safety belt Muller passed to her and cinched it around her waist. Removing her light mobile headset, she replaced it with a heavier-duty mike-and-earphone combination that used a hard link. She ran a quick communications check with the bridge and then snapped the end of her safety belt's jackline onto the hardpoint beside the hatch frame.

  "Set, Captain?"

  "Set. Let's go."

  "Right. Crash and Salvage teams! Aviation Fuel Repair team! RAST crew! Move out!"

  The hatch slammed open and they streamed through, Amanda cutting over to the starboard rail while the helipad crew deployed to their stations.

  The Cunningham's RAM decking, tolerable when dry, was ominously slick under the rubber soles of Amanda's sea boots, and the wind, once merely freezing, now was cold flame. When she gripped the nylon strap of the railing, she could feel the ice crystals that had worked into the fabric, their bite making her wish for a heavier pair of gloves.

  No time to worry about it now. Clawing her hair out of her narrowed eyes with a quick swipe of her hand, she peered forward, sighting along the Duke's flank in the failing polar twilight.

  "Bridge," she said, cupping her palm over the lip mike, "forget the load limits and bring the stabilizers up full. Then give me a couple of extra revs on the starboard propulsor pod. It'll help us hold the course line against this weather."

  Years before, when she had been attending the Naval Surface Warfare School, she'd had a run-in with a senior captain on the faculty. This individual had apparently believed that the female officers assigned to his class should serve double duty as a personal harem. Amanda had corrected this misconception with a sharp backhand across the face.

  Afterward, she suspected he'd tried to derail her career by having her diverted to duty aboard a Fleet ocean tug instead of the surface combatant that she'd wanted. Now, however, she blessed the name of that fanny-pinching son of a bitch. For in the two years she'd commanded the Piegan, she had learned more about this brand of down-and-dirty seamanship than she had during all the rest of her tours combined.

  "There he is!"

  The Sea Comanche's low-vis camouflage made it almost invisible against the overcast, but Amanda could make out that Arkady had already jettisoned his torpedoes in preparation for a rough-weather landing. On the Cunningham's end, the crash barriers had already been deployed and the RAST hands were standing by to accept the helo's line.

  In heavy seas, it is almost impossible to simply set a helicopter down on a small-surface platform. The fantail of a ship, rising and falling in a twenty-foot arc in response to wave action, can literally swat a hovering helicopter like a fly. That was why the RAST (Recovery Assistance Securing and Traversing) system had been developed.

  The helicopter dropped a cable that would be connected to a deck winch that, in turn, would pull the aircraft down out of the sky. This permitted the helo pilot to flare back against the tension of the line, maintaining a controlled separation between the copter and the deck until touchdown.

  Angling in across the Duke's helipad, Zero One lowered its landing gear and then popped the reel of RAST line out of a belly niche. A deck hand dashed after it and snared the light steel cable with a grounded catch crook, the static charge accumulated by the helo arcing brightly at first touch.

  It took only moments for the RAST team to clear the cable from the reel and to feed
it into the winch pickup. The wand man passed the ready-to-haul sign up to the helo and Arkady flashed his landing lights in acknowledgment.

  Zero One came back on her line like a recalcitrant puppy on the end of a leash and the winch began bringing her down.

  Amanda had looked on as these evolutions had taken place. Now she glanced forward again to read the seas they would be encountering for the next few critical seconds.

  The sky had changed. It was as if the misty atmosphere off the Cunningham's bow were coagulating into something solid. A wall of darkness was rushing down upon the ship. "Slack off!" she screamed. "Slack off! Slack off!" Too late. The squall line hit them like the expanding wave front of an explosion.

  The destroyer reared like a startled stallion under the impact, and almost everyone on deck was taken down and inundated by the spray that geysered over the railings. The wall of water that had been pushed ahead of the storm rolled back under the Cunningham's keel, lifting the aft end of the ship and then letting it drop with savage force. Amanda heard a sharp crack, like a small-caliber rifle shot, and then a yell over the wind and rotor roar. "Jesus! The RAST line's carried away!"

  Looking up, she saw Retainer Zero One flailing off into the storm like a kite with a broken string.

  Aboard the helicopter, Vince Arkady snarled in survival fixation as he battled to keep his suddenly berserk aircraft away from the ocean's surface. There had never been a simulator scenario drawn up for this kind of situation. Given this set of parameters, the experts would simply say that you'd die and have done with it.

  That left Gus Grestovitch, reduced to the status of a helpless passenger, to look on as the Cunningham's outline faded away into the blizzard.

  "We're screwed!" he whispered hoarsely.

  "Bridge! Illuminate the ship! Running lights, anchor lights, work lights, everything! Full up now!"

  The near-night that had fallen across the destroyer was broken by the sudden, acknowledging glare. Pulling herself back to her feet, Amanda ran across to the RAST station through a curtain of red-lit snow.

  CPO Muller and the recovery team were clustered around the winch in its recessed compartment, already struggling with what looked like a titanic fishing-reel snarl.

  "Chief, how bad is it?" she yelled over the wind roar.

  "As bad as it gets. The cable snapped right at the connector on the helo's belly. There's no line left to bring 'em down on, and there's sure no way in hell we can recover him in this kind of weather without the RAST gear."

  Peering into Muller's face, Amanda could read the deadly finality there. With any of the Navy's other LAMPS-class helicopters, it would have been easy enough to drop another line from the cabin. The Sea Comanche, with its cramped, fighter-type cockpits, had no such second-chance option.

  Twin beams of white light lanced down out of the darkness and panned forward to play across the Duke's stern.

  Zero One was back under control and coming up on the ship again, forging ahead slowly through the blizzard.

  "Captain, this is the CIC," a voice sounded faintly in her headset. "Lieutenant Arkady is requesting permission to talk to you, ma'am."

  "Okay. Patch him through on this deck circuit."

  Click!

  "Gray Lady, this is Zero One. Looks like we have kind of a mess here."

  Amanda hunkered down beside Chief Muller and tried to shield the headset mike from the booming wind gusts.

  "Acknowledged, Zero One. We can confirm that your RAST line has carried away completely. We are assessing the situation."

  "Not much to assess, Gray Lady. We're not getting this aircraft back aboard tonight." Vince Arkady's reply was laced with the same kind of finality that Muller's had been.

  Down inside, where she lived, the knot began to tighten.

  "Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Retainer. If we have to, we can write off the helo. You can execute a controlled crash inside the containment barriers."

  "Negative, negative! If we bust a fuel cell, we could have a major deck fire. If we go over the side, we could damage a propulsor pod. I won't place the ship at that kind of risk."

  "That decision is my responsibility, Retainer."

  "No, Captain," Arkady repeated grimly over the radio link. "As aircraft commander, this one is my call."

  Amanda gritted out one of those phrases that a lady shouldn't use but a naval officer sometimes has to.

  "Chief, there has to be some kind of alternative procedure here!" she said, flipping the lip mike back.

  "Maybe if he could hover in close enough for us to get a line on his cargo-transfer shackle ..."

  The destroyer's deck lurched as she came off the slope of a quartering sea, and another wave crest exploded over the rail, marking the futility of Muller's tentative proposal.

  "Gray Lady, this is Zero One. Our just hanging around up here isn't going to accomplish anything. I'm going to break off and head for the Antarctic Peninsula. We'll set down at either the Russian or Polish station and ride the storm out there. We can set up a rendezvous when we get the weather again."

  "What? No! Stand by, Zero One."

  Muller had been listening in on the circuit as well. The CPO reached over and grabbed Amanda's shoulder.

  "He'll never make it! He doesn't have the fuel reserves to fight this kind of weather. Even if he did manage to find one of those installations, odds are that even the Lieutenant wouldn't be able to make an unassisted landing in one piece. If he's going to get down anywhere, ma'am, it's gotta be here!"

  She nodded an acknowledgment. If the wind and rotor roar was making it hard to hear, the cold was making it hard to think. Even the best arctic gear in the world would begin to fail when wet, and there was an inch of freezing seawater curtaining across the warship's decks.

  "Gray Lady, do you copy?" Arkady's voice insisted, requesting permission to abandon hope.

  "Negative, Zero One. That is not an option. I repeat, that is not an option. Hold on station until we can come up with something else."

  "Gray Lady, I don't have time for this shit!" Arkady snapped back, a tension edge on his voice. "If I'm going to have any chance at all of finding a place to set down, I have to take departure now! I don't have the gas to fuck around!"

  "Lieutenant Arkady! You will hold on station for two minutes more! That is an order!"

  There was no reply, but the lights of Retainer Zero One continued to dance erratically in the murk above the fantail.

  Amanda knelt on the deck, trying to ignore the pain and the chill creeping up her limbs, and trying to force some kind of possible solution from a mind that suddenly seemed to be growing clouded and empty.

  A shepherd's crook rig of some kind...Not likely with the deck dancing around like this. A line gun up to the cockpit? No! Not up into a rotor arc. Come on... come on!

  Locking her jaws to keep her teeth from chattering, she leaned forward and slammed her fist into the deck, both out of frustration and to drive some feeling back into her hand.

  "Gray Lady." The two minutes were gone, and Arkady's voice was level again, controlled or resigned. "Taking departure for Bellingshausen Base. Good luck. We'll see you guys after the blow."

  "Arkady, you don't have enough fuel!"

  "Don't sweat it, Gray Lady. I can stretch what we've got. I'm jettisoning the MAD pod and the dunking sonar--"

  Amanda's head snapped up. "Wait! Hold it! The dunking sonar! Arkady, hold on to that sonar pod and maintain station for one more minute!"

  She turned to Chief Muller. "Chief, could we recover Zero One on the transducer tether of the dunking sonar?"

  "Hell!" Muller exclaimed. "I've never heard of anyone trying it before."

  "Neither have I, Gray Lady," Arkady added over the circuit, "but all of a sudden it sounds better than dropping in on the Russians for a long weekend. Are you set to receive the tether?"

  "Acknowledged, Zero One. Bring it in now."

  Amanda scrambled to her feet and lifted her voice over the gale. "Recovery cr
ews, stand by! Watch yourselves, because we'll be doing a pickup on a sonar dome. Chief, get that winch clear! You, the guy with the heavy wire cutters! Stand ready! We're going to be needing you."

  The Sea Comanche was nosing in again, gingerly trying to avoid the backsweep of the mast array while positioning to lower the transducer onto the helipad.

  They could see the teardrop-shaped sound head swinging pendulously beneath the aircraft. Unlike the dedicated RAST line, it packed enough mass to shatter bone should anyone fail to get out of its path. The handling crew huddled back against the superstructure as Arkady centered the helo. Then the tether reel was released and the dome crashed down within the confines of the crash barriers with enough impact to crack the deck tiling.

  "Go!"

  The brawniest of the deck hands dove across the helipad and piled onto the transducer as if it were an opposing quarterback, containing it before the wave action could flip it away over the side. The sailor carrying the wire cutters followed them in, clipping through the tether just short of the dome. Another Aviation Division rating cradled the severed device in his arms like an infant and struggled back to the deckhouse with it.

  Arkady dumped more line and backed away, giving both himself and the recovery crew marginally more room to work. The recovery hands hogged the cable back across the deck to the winch, looking as if they were engaged in a tug-of-war with the helicopter. It was a contest they would have had no chance of winning. One bad move on the pilot's part, or one exceptional wave or wind burst, and the tether would be whipped away over the side, probably taking one or more of its handlers with it.

  They got the line to the winch and they clustered around it. They remained there for too long.

  "Chief, what is the problem now?" Amanda yelled, coming to stand at the CPO's shoulder.

  "The friggin' winch guide won't accept the tether! The cable's the wrong diameter!"

  "Damn, damn, damn!"

  "We'll have to rig another winch, Captain!"