Well, Spiderwoman had found her own personal Superman and she wouldn’t be filing any complaints with the casting department.
Chapter 13
Pete was tracking the USS Germantown. She was based out of Sasebo, Japan and the six hundred-foot ship was on the move.
Sasebo, Kadena Air Base, and the mouth of the Qiantang River in China made a neat triangle around five hundred miles on a side.
The Germantown was an LDS—landing dock ship—capable of deploying multiple helicopters and large hovercraft at a moment’s notice. A powerful rapid deployment force. It would appear to any watching Chinese radar that the Germantown was on one of her frequent patrols from Japan down to Taiwan.
Tonight her course would bring her atypically close to shore, though she’d still remain outside both the twelve-mile territorial waters and the twenty-four-mile contiguous waters of China. However, she’d be deep inside the exclusive economic zone of two-hundred miles. While this wasn’t necessary to make the passage, it was done on occasion to serve as a reminder to China that the U.S. could deploy heavy forces much farther forward than any other nation could hope to match.
The USS Germantown had no need to go to Taiwan—a week ago Taiwan hadn’t been on her schedule until the following month. And she certainly had no need to pass so close.
Her entire voyage and its relatively close passage to China’s shore actually served only one purpose, to distract the Chinese from paying any attention to the Germantown’s sister ship.
The Ashland, also based out of Sasebo, also would be cruising toward Taiwan a hundred miles farther offshore. Rather than carrying their usual complement of Marine helos, she was traveling empty. The Ashland would be the base for the 5E’s operation.
Five hundred miles from Kadena to Qiantang was much too far for ease of operation. The Chinook and DAP Hawk could operate from five hundred miles out, but the Little Birds couldn’t. And lingering on site so close to the Chinese mainland brought on a whole other set of issues.
The Black Hawk and Chinook could stay aloft as long as they could get mid-air refueling every four hours and the crew could stay conscious. But the Little Birds LeeLoo and Linda were limited to two hours and three hundred miles per sortie and then they had to land somewhere to refuel. Thankfully, the position of the Ashland placed China well within the tiny gunships’ range.
By placing the Ashland a hundred and twenty miles offshore, they could fly the night’s mission from there. A hundred and twenty miles, two-fifty round trip, well that was a sweet spot.
Pete ordered everyone aloft at full dusk. They slipped out of Kadena Air Base with no one the wiser. Two hours later all four helos landed on the deck of the Ashland. Pete had always liked these ships.
Unlike the big aircraft carriers, or even the massive helicopter-carrying LHDs, the Navy crew to run the Ashland was relatively small. With the standard complement of a couple hundred Marines and all of their craft left ashore, this should be a very quiet operation.
Pete had considered leaving the Little Birds behind; this op really only required the Chinook and the DAP could offer plenty of protection.
“Don’t be a Newfie!”
Pete decided it was better to not ask for a translation of this one in case Danielle calling him a Newfoundlander was even more disparaging than it sounded. She’d proceeded to talk him out of leaving Linda and LeeLoo behind by listing her reasons.
“One, if anything goes south in this operation, you absolutely want their power close behind us. If the Black Hawk were damaged or lost, my Chinook would be very vulnerable. The Carrie-Anne is an assault craft, not an attack craft. Two…”
Pete didn’t know why he’d ever tried to argue with Danielle, every single time he’d tried in the last month, he’d lost.
“…leaving half the team behind for our first-ever mission. C’est vraiment poche pour le morale.” At his uncertain expression she translated, “it would suck for morale and you really need to learn French, though that’s Québécois. Literally it’s truly pocket and I couldn’t tell you why we say it that way.”
Granted, though. It would suck to be left behind.
“Three…”
She never stopped simply because she’d already won—which never failed to make him smile.
“We should have the whole team along because of the unexpected.”
Pete had to admit, he did like the layers of backup it provided. He’d always preferred to keep a mission as lean as he could. And if they’d done that at bin Laden’s compound, they’d have been screwed. When they lost a helo at landing, the tiers of backup they already had in place made it cost them less than two minutes. Aside from the forty million dollars when they had to blow up the crashed helo.
So, the full flight of the 5E landed on the aft deck of the Ashland, taking up all of the available space.
The deck service crew was hand-picked and as lean as possible, but still they kept gawking at the birds as they attached temporary tie-downs. The grapes—purple-vested deck crew who ran out refueling lines to all of the craft—kept tripping over themselves in the desire to look the craft over despite the dimmed nighttime-op deck lights.
“Last chance to swim back to shore!” Danielle called out over the radio. That earned a laugh. In minutes everyone was out on deck, stretching, shaking out limbs, doing some light calisthenics even though the flight to the ship hadn’t been all that long. The rest of the night would be.
Danielle headed over to LCDR Luke Altman, and Pete let himself drift along to the rear ramp of the Chinook in her wake. The SEAL team members weren’t doing any workouts, they were going over their gear once more. That’s when he figured something out. SEALs were always careful, but these guys were…
“Hey Luke, I thought you were on Team 5. When did you go DEVGRU?” Which most civilians thought was still named SEAL Team Six, not true for about thirty years.
None of the SEALs reacted except Luke who rose very slowly to his feet.
“What makes you say that, Pete?”
Pete had forgotten quite how big a man Altman was.
“You just made his argument for him, Commander Altman,” Danielle spoke as if there wasn’t a very pissed looking SEAL suddenly looming over them, his face lit red and dangerous by the ship’s night-operations deck lights.
“Your guys aren’t moving like I’m used to your guys moving,” Pete explained keeping his voice as casual as Danielle’s in hopes that Luke didn’t decide to break them in two over his knee and toss them overboard. “Team 5 dudes would be kicking back, maybe taking a quick nap.”
“We are invading China tonight.”
“Only a little,” Danielle argued. “If you really want to invade China—”
She wasn’t about to reveal that he’d just been in Tibet, was she? He could get his ass fried for—
“—there’s this rare blue flower I need. It’s at the base of a Tibetan mountain that leads you to a monastery high on the cliffs. And—”
Pete and Luke laughed together. Luke in chagrin and Pete in relief. Doubting Danielle’s discretion was a pointless exercise. It was always perfect, just like her lists of reasoned arguments. Yet by the same unfathomable logic, her judgment included being with him. Danielle had said this wasn’t just sex between them, and he’d agreed. But what had he agreed to? In her superior brand of perception was he…“The One” for her?
He swallowed hard.
Pete trusted her implicitly, but had she suddenly gone blind? He was a bad bet for a woman like her. Bad bet? A dead loss, more like. He had a proven track record, bad.
“Tell me again,” Danielle was thankfully focused on Luke, “why you aren’t going in with a diver vehicle?”
“I would have preferred that, but the Chinese coast is wired underwater within an inch of its life. They have more microphones down there than we sunk outside of Russia’s harbors back in
the fifties and sixties.”
“So, they’re more vulnerable up on the surface.”
Luke nodded, “You’ll dump us as deep in the harbor as you can. We take this Zodiac,” he hooked a thumb toward the rubber boat they’d loaded in the back of her Chinook, “and sneak in the rest of the way. Same trick in reverse coming back out.”
“If everything goes well,” Pete put in.
“Chances of which are…?” Danielle had on that smile she’d shown the moment before attacking him back at the ryokan.
Luke apparently didn’t know how to read that yet, but he’d learn. The DEVGRU commander shrugged.
Danielle laughed and wandered back to follow her crew chiefs’ inspection of the bird. No one redid the preflight on a bird after such a simple flight, but Danielle and her crew did. He glanced around and saw that every member of the 5E was doing it to their craft as well. Just like DEVGRU. The woman was never going to stop surprising him.
“Got it bad, Pete,” Luke spoke softly beside him.
“Yeah, I do.”
So “bad” that he hadn’t even caught onto what Luke was saying until after the Lieutenant Commander turned back and returned to his own team.
# # #
“Sophia, talk to me.”
Danielle was flying in the lead. Pete had arrayed the three weaponized birds behind her, the two Little Birds in close, and the big hammer of Beatrix the DAP Hawk trailing a half-mile behind so that Rafe could provide the unexpected response to any rude surprises.
“Olá, my friend Danielle. It is so good to hear from you.”
Danielle opened her mouth to remind Sophia that this was a mission, not a friendly chat over a meal. But before she had a chance…
“Our friends are very, how you say…grouchy tonight. Many boats have left the harbor of Hangzhou at the mouth of the Qiantang to move out beside the Germantown. Kadena Air Force Command, unaware of our operation, has moved four F-18 jets into a loose formation a dozen miles seaward of the Germantown. This I think is a good addition to our distraction. All of the noise they are making is now south of your position and continuing down the coast. Security forces in the harbor are down at least thirty percent.”
As she’d been speaking, Danielle could see that Sophia was feeding tactical displays to Pete, but she didn’t have time to look at it. Her mind had the bandwidth, barely, but her eyes didn’t.
Flying just a dozen feet above the East China Sea at close to two hundred miles an hour took a great deal of concentration. At this speed, rogue waves would slap her out of the sky faster than she could sneeze. A small fishing boat could radio in a warning to the Chinese Coast Guard just as fast as a patrol craft, so she had to avoid every single boat.
It was like racing a slalom course. Turn one, shipping lane patrol vessel. Turn two, fishing boat with outriggers and bright lights to draw the fish to the surface. Through the center of a gate defined by an oil supertanker and a coastal ferry.
She could feel herself freezing up, a little too tight on the controls, not as smooth as she should be. Not rising the extra two feet on a turn to make sure she didn’t bury a rotor tip in the waves.
What would Spidey do?
He’d loosen up and swing with it. Let the dark night slide by as he slalomed between various craft and the mapped listening buoys.
She found a smoother rhythm, found the groove as she rolled toward shore. It was…Pete. Not the rhythm of their lovemaking, he always made that gloriously unexpected. No, it was the rhythm of his sleeping breath, perfectly matched to the easy step and shift of the powerful Carrie-Anne.
Once she smoothed out, the mission clock finally started moving again. It had been creeping the whole first half of the flight from the Ashland toward their target. Now that she was in the flow it was moving apace.
At the outer barrier islands she called, “Ready alert,” to the SEALs.
She swirled around the outermost islands, small outcroppings of steep rock.
That crossed them from the open ocean into the thirty-mile wide outer harbor, so she called, “Three minutes.” She could take them another ten miles. Maybe a little more.
She made it four minutes and thirteen miles when everything started happening at once and she called twenty seconds. This was her safe limit even in a stealth craft.
The lights of Hangzhou Harbor and Shanghai city came over the horizon. They had been a distant glow, but she’d remained so close to the water that they remained invisible until she was just five miles out from the rocky mainland. The city was set back several more miles from the wide open harbor.
Less than eight miles to the Jiangnan Shipyards. She could see the tops of the tall construction cranes, though the ships under construction were still below the horizon.
The ramp light went on as Jason the rear gunner began lowering the back gate.
“Surface craft north and south, three miles distant,” Sophia reported.
Danielle’s altitude was now two feet, which placed her pilot’s seat at eight. That would have been high enough to see the other boats, but Danielle had turned sideways and slid the body of the Chinook down between two wave peaks. By continuing sideways at twenty-five miles an hour, she managed to stay between the waves with the bulk of the helo in the trough. The rolling swells ranged around ten feet high, so they hid half of the Carrie-Anne. A passing boat would see only the top half of the helo and the big twin rotors…
Except it was ten at night and her helicopter was painted pitch black.
“Slick,” was Luke’s compliment which she was too busy to process until after he said, “We’re gone,” and his voice disappeared from the intercom.
“Clear,” Jason reported less than five seconds later and the hydraulics kicked in to close the ramp.
Danielle raised the Carrie-Anne just enough to get the Chinook’s belly clear of the waves and aimed back toward the Ashland.
# # #
Pete knew he was a damn good pilot, but he’d never seen anyone do that with a Chinook before.
He wanted to put a hand to his chest and try pumping some air into his oxygen-starved lungs; he’d been holding his breath without realizing it while Danielle had settled them down between the wave crests.
But he didn’t want to miss a single nuance on their interconnected controls to understand how smoothly she’d done it. No wonder she made love the way she did. She must integrate her entire nervous system into everything she did. Her control was so perfect he could just as easily imagine the Chinook was moving her as the other way around.
She stayed breathtakingly low all of the way back to the Ashland sliding easily around the obstacles that Sophia identified from her Avenger flying on high. Danielle didn’t rise above ten feet until she reached the ship and had to climb to reach the deck.
An hour and a hundred-and-fifty miles each way and she hadn’t done a single thing he could correct.
And if she was going to choose him, he would give up his normal state of idiocy and stop arguing with her.
Chapter 14
Parked back on the deck of the USS Ashland a hundred miles offshore China and doing nothing worked for Pete—for under ten minutes.
Sophia had the Avenger aloft to keep an eye on Hangzhou Harbor. The problem was that she and her copilot were flying the RPA in the white control box back at Kadena Air Base. Which made it impossible to just “drop in” and look over her shoulder.
Aboard the Ashland, Pete bulled his way into the Plot Room—perhaps the most secure room on any ship—partly by nudging Danielle in front of him every time they met male resistance. At first she wasn’t happy with his manipulations, but eventually—if he read her correctly and he hoped he did—she was amused by how well it worked on the swabbies. After all, what chance did they stand against the power of a female Night Stalker.
The Avenger, which Sofia had named Raven for being a
n RPA bird—finally one that wasn’t one of Danielle’s female heroines—could stay aloft for twenty hours on a load of fuel. The side aperture radar offered a surprisingly clear view the distant harbor and the shipyards from sixty thousand feet and a hundred miles offshore.
“Yes,” Sophia reported when they were on the right frequency, “I tracked the SEALs successfully to their destination.” She rolled back the video feed that she was supplying to the ship as she talked. In moments he was again watching the Carrie-Anne sliding along between the boats and the outer harbor islands.
The ship’s captain whistled, “Now that’s some pretty flying. Nice, Major.”
“Thanks, but the Captain was pilot-in-command.”
“Which Captain?”
Pete pointed at Danielle standing close beside him. They were all crowded close to look at the big LCD screen showing the RPA’s feed. He was thankful for the chance to rub shoulders with her in public.
“In that case, that’s real nice, Captain.” The smile he sent her didn’t even worry Pete any more. Danielle might have stood a little straighter, but otherwise didn’t react. Had Pete sounded so sexist in the past? Probably. Being around women like the ones in the 5E forced a man to reevaluate.
“There,” Sophia’s voice drew all attention back to the screen. The helicopter twisted, then kept flying sideways with the waves, though there was no way to see on the display why she’d done that.
Moments later, a blip appeared off the stern of the Chinook, and then disappeared.
“If I do not know where the plan is they go, I would not be able to follow them.” Sophia used a light pen to mark their track on the screen; the blip on the image reappearing only occasionally to mark the track the SEALs were taking.
“Here, they make contact with the Chinese Coast Guard super-ship.”
Jiangnan Shipyard was a maze of construction. A half-dozen vessels ranging from two to eight hundred feet were up in dry docks. As many more floated beside long piers where supplies and machinery were cluttered thickly together. The scattered tracking they had on the SEAL team completely disappeared in the snarl.
Target of the Heart Page 14
