Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Roger that, Rafe.”

  “And I promise you, I’m looking at the great-grandmother of all storms here. Due to hit me in four hours and your coast in sixteen. Get it done before then and get ready to move. God bless.”

  “I copy on the storm. Thank you, sir. Craik out.”

  Rafehausen held him with his voice. “Al, I don’t need to tell you we’re putting lives on this and it’s all down to you, right?”

  Hundreds of miles over the stern behind him, Alan Craik was silent as the weight of the responsibility settled on his shoulders. “Got it, Rafe.”

  “Out here, Al.”

  Rafe turned his back on the storm and waved to one of the bridge runners. “Get me Chris Donitz from VFA-231,” he said. “And get me some coffee.”

  In the dimness of the det office, Alan left his hand on the phone and looked at Dukas. The light was pooled on the tables; where Dukas sat against a wall, it was more dark than light. “We’re a go,” Alan said.

  Dukas nodded, frowned, nodded again. He stood, stretched. “I’m done here, then. The job’s in Cairo now.”

  “You leaving?”

  “Morning flight.”

  “Better hit the rack.”

  Dukas waved at his laptop. “I want to get this threat warning out to the Nav. I want that done before I go to sleep.”

  They looked at each other. Alan stood. “I may not see you in the morning. I want to be up there at first light.”

  Dukas nodded again and put a hand on Alan’s shoulder. He seemed about to say something and then didn’t. He patted the shoulder once. “You be careful up there.” Their eyes met, and Dukas’s hand tightened. He looked old in the poor light. “You be very, very careful.”

  DAY

  FIVE

  15

  USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Suez Canal.

  ROSE COULDN’T FIND ALAN ANYWHERE, AND TIME WAS running out. Someone was going to do something. She looked again behind her seat, looked under the control pedals, looked out the big canopy into the swirling gray on the other side and then felt a growing panic as she realized that she was trapped in her seat and the chopper was sinking, was going to roll over any moment and pin her to drown.

  She turned her head and saw her son in a small flight suit, belted into the copilot seat and pointing at something on his side of the canopy. She grabbed at him and something resisted her, and Mikey said “Ma’am! ma’am!” and she came awake at last, wrapped in her sheet and with her free arm grasping the flight suit of a small woman.

  “Ma’am!” the woman said, backing away.

  Tara something, Rose thought muzzily. A dim memory of meeting the woman in the ready room last night. She checked her watch. Three hours ago. The dream was still with her and her heart was going as if she had run a race.

  The little woman’s flight suit said “Hunyadi.” Tara Hunyadi.

  “There’s an alert, ma’am. They want two birds in the air, two alert fives on deck, and door gunners. Ma’am. XO said to wake you.” Tara pushed a stainless-steel mug of coffee at her. “Sorry to wake you like that.”

  “Not your fault. Bad dream.” Rose slugged down a third of the coffee, the dream receding as she drank. “What kind of alert?”

  “Terrorist threat warning from DNI. It’s not very specific, but the message said it could be directed at this ship.”

  Rose handed her the cup and pulled a flight suit off the back of the door. She stepped into her boots and pulled the Velcro tabs closed, wiped her face with astringent, and pulled her black hair back with a hair tie. “You my copilot, Hunyadi?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Let’s walk.”

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Chris Donitz looked like any aviator not on the flight schedule—rumpled. He was at the end of his second sea tour, enjoying his last months of freedom before he got his promotion to lieutenant-commander and had to do work besides flying. Rafe thought he’d probably been in his rack, asleep, and for a moment Rafe envied the shorter man.

  “I need you to fly.”

  Donitz’s sleepy eyes focused. His spine straightened and he was four inches taller. He looked out of the bridge window and back, but all he said was “Okay.”

  “Al Craik is going to launch some kind of strike against the guys who did the Harker attack. He’s going in on the ground, but he wants an armed F-18 to fly cover. I want you to get a plane you like and take a full load of gas, two iron bombs, and maybe a HARM if you think you can get it off the deck in this shit. Once you’re airborne, you call an emergency. Up to you what you call; I’d stick with hydraulics, because the Kenyans must be used to that by now. Use the emergency to land at Mombasa. That way the Kenyans can’t tell you no.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Get it done, Chris.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Donitz gave Rafe a smile that burst into a grin. Rafe thought, I used to be the one they picked for these stunts. Now I get to send others.

  Three hundred miles north and west of the battle group, the skipper of the Esek Hopkins listened to his acting battle-group commander grimly. Esek Hopkins wasn’t a three-hundred-yard-long supercarrier with built-in stability and deep draft to ride the rollers; she was a forty-one-hundred-ton frigate with a tendency to roll too far in heavy seas, and Captain Rafehausen had just ordered her to turn across the massive waves and head for the lee shore.

  Tom Bento—captain by position on the ship, commander by rank—braced himself as the ship gave a buck like a horse and watched yet another cupful of coffee splash on the deck. The cup was still securely in his hand. He touched the rosary that hung from his command chair and started to give the orders that would turn the ship. He held up his hand to the helmsman and leaned out to watch the rollers, still only twenty feet high this far west.

  “Stand by,” he called, waiting to cross the crest. Then they were over and into the full force of the wind, which he intended to use to get his stern around before the next roller came. The ship would ride better with the rollers under the stern, too; he had that in his favor. On the other hand, in twelve hours, he’d have less than twenty miles between his keel and the coast.

  He looked around the bridge, where every sailor was braced, some harnessed to their stations. He felt a subtle change in the motion of the ship, a feeling that told him he had reached the moment.

  “Execute,” he ordered, and the ship began to turn.

  Donitz had flown F-14s in the north Norwegian Sea and he had punched off a deck in high winds and heavy seas, but he had never worn a harness just to get to his plane. The wind over the deck was coming in excess of sixty knots. Donitz knew from experience what that would mean to his lift off the cat. To further complicate matters, he would have to time his launch with the height of the bow so that the catapult didn’t shoot him into a wave front. In the dark.

  All in a day’s work.

  He got soaked checking his plane and wished he had had the time to preflight in the comparative safety of the hangar deck. The plane looked good, although the constant stream of wind-whipped spray couldn’t be good for anything. He got in and wrestled the canopy closed and enjoyed a moment of calm, then felt the action of the wind on the wings. He could almost take off without the cat. He got the engines started and raced through his checklist, eager to get the job done.

  He was nervous.

  He rolled on to the cat and felt the familiar vibration as the storm-harnessed sailor under the nose linked his nose gear to the catapult’s shuttle. A burst of salt water marked their arrival at the bottom of the trough between two waves, and a net of spray leaped over the bow and fell on the plane and deck crew, obscuring Donitz’s view of the launch officer. The catapult took the weight of the plane, and the nose came down like a feline ready to make a leap on its prey.

  Tension.

  The bow was rising. Chris scanned his instruments and took his engines to full power, his head moving and his eyes scanning steadily across the board and the heads-up display, noting agai
n the presence of a 500lb bomb under each wing. He had a full bagload of fuel and he was heavy to launch, although the high wind whipping over the deck would aid him. He pushed and pulled the stick, driving all the control surfaces through full rotation and back to position for takeoff. They felt a little sticky, which was rare in a fly-by-wire airplane, but he took it as the result of an unexpected dose of seawater.

  Bow rising faster. Touched the lock on his harness, eyes on the engine power one last time, a thought that he missed the old days in the F-14 when he had another guy to share the responsibility of a tough launch, and then an inconsequential thought that in the old days, sailors would wait for the top of the roll to get the most range out of a cannon. A little feeling of sag, or less acceleration up the wave.

  Top of the roll. As he moved his eyes, he saw something he didn’t like on the board in front of him, something that caught at his attention even as his hand went up to give his salute, snap—

  Click, thud. And down the deck, zero to one hundred and twenty miles an hour in sixty feet. Left turn away off the cat, the water already far below. It was like launching out over a cliff, the ocean was so far down. The wind punched at him and he fought it, the back of his neck suddenly cold as he realized that he was fighting his controls; they were sluggish, and far below, the black water rolled on and the carrier started down the next slope toward the trough. His hydraulics were really bad.

  He mentioned his control issue tersely while he brought the nose around. He continued to climb, already sure that he could not put the plane back on the carrier with controls like this and sure he wouldn’t try. He could cross the distance to the beach in an hour. Unless the plane quit altogether, he’d get there. On the boat, the other guys usually called him “Donuts,” but his other handle was “the Dutchman.” They meant he was a stubborn bastard. He swept his eyes over the board again, thought about ditching the plane. Death sentence. No chopper could fly in this, and no one would be there to pick him up.

  He got up on the guard frequency, calling Kenya Air Traffic Control and declaring a hydraulics emergency. He even got to laugh at the irony. Then he buckled down to the task at hand, six hundred miles out over a killing sea.

  Rose kept the chopper level, so low that her downdraft flattened the water. The searchlight gave the water a transparency it lacked under normal conditions. She eased forward another few feet.

  On either side of her two more helicopters swept the water, looking for mines, swimmers, anything that might be used to attack the ship. Behind them loomed the bulk of the Roosevelt. She was well into the entrance of the canal now, too late to turn around and go back. On her high flight deck, her Marine det was setting up a 30mm grenade launcher at a forward mount, while lights on the bridge wings searched the shore.

  “I wish we knew what we were looking for,” Hunyadi said.

  Cairo.

  In Cairo, Triffler was waked by his bedside telephone from a dream of basketball, a game he was playing with his son and several beautiful girls. It was a wonderful dream, like a TV sitcom, bright-colored and super-real and happy. He hated the telephone after it. He looked at his bedside clock, saw that it was one in the morning, hated the clock as well.

  “Triffler.”

  “Here it is Sergeant al-Fawzi.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “We found the journalist, Mister Jean-Marc Balcon.”

  Triffler woke up all the way. “In Cairo?”

  “He is in the city of Ismailia. He went to there day after death of the regrettable vic, Bob Cram.”

  “Ismailia’s on the canal.” Triffler’s three weeks with Bright Star hadn’t been wasted: he could see the Egyptian map, Ismailia halfway down to Suez from Port Said. “How long to get there?”

  “Two hours by car, drive very fast—straight road. But—I am Cairo cop, not national—jurisdiction is—”

  “This is my jurisdiction, Sergeant. You come along as my guest, okay? And we’ll take three hours to get there, because I’m driving.”

  Two minutes later he was on the phone to Dukas, and then he was on the phone trying to rent a car, an impossible task in Cairo at nearly one in the morning, so he settled for waking Patemkin, the CIA man from Nairobi, and directing him to get them an unmarked car ASAP; and only then did he remember to wake Keatley and tell him that they were leaving town within the hour.

  Off the Kenyan Coast.

  Once Donitz had the plane straight and level, it was less of a fight to keep her in the air, and the flight passed in a tangle of control issues and vague prayers to the god of control surfaces to keep enough hydraulic fluid in the system to get him on the deck. He called ahead, savvy enough to keep the information about his armament to himself. He doubted that Kenya would check his plane at 0200 local.

  Then he was feet-dry over Nyali, the remembered pleasures of a beer at the Intercon a fleeting thought as he used his airspeed more than his control surfaces to descend. He made a clearing turn well out over the countryside, declined the tower’s guidance for approach and asked instead for a straight-in, a simple approach that would keep him clear of traffic in the stack, where he might have to make sudden maneuvers, and equally clear of inhabited areas. He assumed from the feel of the controls (fly-by-wire, and thus not really telling the full story) that every motion pushed more of his precious hydraulic fluid out of the leak. His airplane was bleeding to death.

  He started a long, slow turn to the north to get him to the end of the vector he had marked in his head for his approach. The plane shuddered and he corrected, twice, each time returning the controls to the same position. The second time, the surfaces played along and he was in the curve he wanted. Air Traffic Control tried to badger him and he gave them short answers. He hoped he sounded like a man flying a damaged airplane. Out east, over the ocean he had just traversed, there was a flash of distant lightning, but here it was calm. He traded a little more speed for altitude. His engines were fine.

  Now turning again. This time he had next to no response from his portside control surfaces, and the plane shuddered again and Chris wondered if she would simply miss the envelope of aerodynamics and fall out of the sky. It was the principal danger with all fly-by-wire aircraft—without a computer and constant guidance, the plane wouldn’t really fly. He started to make corrections to end his turn and the shuddering got worse; the plane gave a buck in the air and he corrected and then he was good for lineup, his nose a little high but otherwise okay. He eased up more on the throttle.

  Shudder. Buck. Twist.

  Whatever it was, his plane was dying on him a mile short of the runway, and he would not let it. He had no intention of dropping a thousand-plus pounds of explosive and a burning jet on a friendly country. He corrected, then corrected again. The shuddering became constant and changed in pitch, so that Donitz wondered if he might have physical control-surface damage as well. Now the whole plane was vibrating like a car with unbalanced tires.

  Bam!

  It was not his classic, top-hook, three-point landing, and it sent a bolt of pain straight up through his spine. He started to slow the plane with engines and, later, brakes, no hint of flaps, still afraid even now that something could fail catastrophically before he had rolled out. He missed the sudden comfort of the three wire. On the boat, when you were down, you were done. On the beach, you got to play one more inning. When the airspeed fell below twenty knots, he took a deep breath and relaxed his hands, flexing his fingers on the stick.

  He taxied, called the tower, got permission to roll straight to Al Craik’s det, and his ground speed fell below anything that his plane could use to generate further terrors.

  He opened his canopy to a warm summer’s night full of exotic smells and more than a hint of moisture and decay. It seemed like a reward.

  Al Craik was standing beyond the ground crew, waiting. Donitz powered down the plane, waved the crew boss over, and took him—an S-3 guy—over the control-surface issue.

  “I’m on it, sir. The skipper want
s to see you.”

  “I’ll bet he does, Chief.” Donitz tossed his helmet to a guy on the ground, stuffed his kneeboard and some pens into his helmet bag, and reached behind him for his dop kit. Then he climbed out of the plane, retrieved his helmet, and went to Craik, who was looking at the F-18.

  “You’d get an Academy Award for that performance,” Al said as Donitz approached. “Chief Bakin is probably looking at your hydraulics right now!”

  “Sir, I have some good news and some bad news.”

  “Can I offer you an MRE? Okay, give it to me.”

  “My plane is Tango Uniform. The hydraulics are totally fucked, and the fly-by-wire isn’t so good, either.” Donitz suddenly sagged, his knees weak. A little post-traumatic, he thought wildly.

  “There goes your Academy Award. Hey, you okay?”

  “Sorry. Yeah. Tired, I guess, sir.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “I brought the bombs.”

  “Yeah?” Craik stopped on the tarmac. “And?”

  “I’ll bet your crew chief could rig a cradle and put them on the S-3s.”

  Alan Craik was heading back toward Chief Bakin before Donitz finished his sentence.

  USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the Canal.

  Rose pulled her comm cord, tossed it in her helmet bag, and followed Hunyadi out of the chopper. The night was more gray than black as searchlights probed the banks on both sides of the canal and lights filled the sky in the towns on the Egyptian shore. It was like sailing through a city.

  Rose walked across the crisp new nonskid to the side, down a ladder to the catwalk that ran around the flight deck, and a third of the way down the ship. In the north Norwegian Sea, this walk could be dark and dangerous, with the sea rising forty feet below, but tonight it was like walking out on a balcony in a city. She got to the entrance to the O-3 level and went in, then followed Hunyadi down the passageway to their ready room. Hunyadi was a competent pilot, had a sense of humor, was still at the age where she ran on hormones, but Rose already liked her.