by Ian Slater
Compared to Douglas Freeman, the fiftyish captain of the Port Townsend — Keystone ferry was a pushover for her. He redirected his stare from the tightly sheathed orbs of her Angora sweater to his radar, amusing the third mate, who, standing behind Marte as the Skate first hailed them, gazed without embarrassment at her curvaceous derriere enveloped in a pair of tan microfiber pants that seemed no thicker than Saran Wrap. The ferry’s captain, annoyed that the Skate was making such a “big deal” of his radio being out, reverting to a signal lamp, lifted his bullhorn again and told the Skate he was on a tight schedule. “I’m transporting highly classified personnel to Keystone.”
“Who are they?”
“None of your business.”
This retort snapped the ferry’s third mate out of his reverie with Marte Price’s anatomy. Aware of the guns bristling all over the Skate, he dared suggest to his captain that he should welcome the boarding party, which was now bobbing up and down in their RIB immediately aft of the Skate.
“I was specifically told by Washington,” the ferry captain told his mate, “not to allow anyone on board other than the NR-1B’s scientific party and Ms. Price’s assistants, and she is only permitted a camera interview with them for later broadcast, subject to the military censors and—”
“We’re coming aboard! Stand by to assist!”
Admiral Jensen, watching through his binoculars from the Keystone ramp, was as perplexed by the boarding party as Marte Price aboard the ferry. But to the Marines, there was nothing perplexing about it — it was FUBAR, situation normal, fucked up beyond all recognition, a classic case, the age of electronic wizardry notwithstanding, of one branch of the government not knowing what another was doing. In this case, someone, somewhere, had failed to notify the admiral that the military airlift flight scheduled to deliver NR-1B’s two scientists and their crew from the east coast to NAS Whidbey had been canceled due to anonymous but “credible” bomb threats. Instead of having the NR-1B’s personnel from out of Newport en route to Keystone, the new delivery point selected was Port Townsend.
As the Skate’s RIB approached, the bellicose ferry captain, reverting to his high school macho in front of Marte Price, was about to call up the four heavily armed military police who had been assigned to guard the NR-1B team on the cafeteria deck.
Marte, quick to see the possibility of tragedy and brushing her hair back, its sheen enhanced by the early morning sun, said, “Captain, you’re handling this superbly. I wonder, though, if it wouldn’t be just as well to lend them a hand. You know, everyone’s so jittery these days. Besides, I was wondering if I could get a shot of you welcoming the Navy aboard. Brothers in arms, you know. I think the American people need to see that sort of thing. What d’you think?” Her smile could have launched a thousand RIBs.
“Er, well—” began the captain.
Marte was hurrying the cameraman. “You think you could put on your cap?” she asked the ferry skipper. “I think that would give us just the right air of authority.”
“What — my cap?”
“Yes.”
“Huh — I guess, if you think—”
The Skate’s mate snapped him a salute from the RIB. That did it. Marte heard an intake of air, the captain’s chest visibly expanding, his waist morphing from a generous 44 to an alarmingly fit 36, possibly even a 34. The captain barked at a deckhand, “Look lively!” and brusquely indicated that the RIB party be given prompt assistance up the rope ladder. Another deckhand, hastily unfurling the wooden-slatted ladder against the ferry’s side, all but knocked the Skate’s mate out of the RIB.
“Steady on, man!” barked the captain with the authority of a Royal Navy chief.
“They’re aboard, sir,” the Skate’s OOD informed the gunship’s captain via his walkie-talkie.
“I can see that, Rolston! Who’s he got on board?”
Freeman’s RIB was taking punishment, Alvaro, at the console, doing all he could to cross the ocean swells that had rolled in through the choke point between Vancouver Island and the Olympic peninsula. Because of the rain that periodically poured down on the Olympic peninsula — up to twelve feet a year on Mount Olympus itself — hundreds of waterfalls cascaded here and there over rock cliffs into the sea, new falls born overnight as the Pacific-bred storms caused fresh erosion of the peninsula. To the bitter disappointment of Freeman’s six-man recon team, when they reached the position, the isotope anomaly had disappeared.
“Probably sucked out in the high tide’s drain-off from the strait,” said Sal, his voice all but drowned out.
“Either that,” shouted Aussie over the crashing of the nearby surf against the rugged sea-stack shoreline, “or the spill’s faded because the sub’s turned into some supply cove or something.”
No one else commented. Everyone, including Aussie and Sal, were gripping hard on the handrails midships of the inflatable, its fiberglass keel smacking hard into swells, over unbroken crests, then sliding fast into the troughs. Had it not been for Alvaro’s seamanship, the RIB would have capsized in a backflip several times over. The Mexican-American saw that one of the SpecFor warriors, the Welsh-American they called Choir Williams, was turning a faint yet distinct shade of green, made even more sickly looking by the drizzle of rain that continuously leaked from the gray status along the coast and the dreary mist, which, unlike the cloud cover sixty miles to the east, around Whidbey, had not yet been burned off by the pale disk of autumn sun.
“We’ll go in the quieter water, wait till this rain passes,” Alvaro assured Choir, indicating a natural rock-strewn, crescent-shaped harbor off to their left on the port quarter. The harbor, about a half mile across and several hundred yards deep, was fed by a massive, flood-controlled waterfall, about fifty feet high and three hundred feet wide, plunging precipitously from the hundred-foot-high cliffs that ran the whole curve of the beach, forming a vine- and bush-covered amphitheater. It looked as if the side of a volcanic seamount had been blown out eons before.
Choir raised one hand in thanks to Alvaro as the RIB passed through the pummeling surf, his other hand still white from gripping the roll bar. The rough forty-three-mile trip out from Port Angeles had convinced Freeman even more how difficult and, frankly, how useless David Brentwood would have been in the rough weather.
In less than four minutes the RIB’s shallow draft keel passed over a sandbar covered in a foot or so of water, and the six men immediately felt the change, their grips on the hold bars relaxing, the roar of the cataracts plunging all along the cliffs a welcome sound after the constant, bullying roar and buffeting of the open sea. Aussie became excited for a moment, pointing to something man-sized in one of the many channels that ran out from under the heavily vegetated cliffs in the area. A second later he saw the figure reappearing from behind the curtain of the waterfall into one of the water channels.
“Seal!” said Salvini.
“Sea lion,” Aussie corrected him.
Freeman took his cell phone from its double Ziploc bag and called Admiral Jensen at Keystone, the much-relieved COMSUBPAC-GRU-9 commander telling the general that the NR-1B’s two scientists, two officers, and three enlisted men had just arrived at Keystone. Jensen didn’t bother to bore the general with the “screw-up,” as the Marine CO had succinctly described the fracas between the Navy’s Skate and the Washington Ferry Corporation’s captain.
Now that he’d found nothing after having put a “rush” on the NR-1B, Freeman felt a rare of case of embarrassment. For his part, Jensen was annoyed, to put it mildly — after all the trouble he’d gone to get the research sub to the West Coast. Then again, Freeman had been the only one who’d offered to help him when he was getting flak from everyone for not having assured a “mine free” strait. And it was Freeman, Jensen knew, who’d given him credit, via CNN, for the fifty-seven-mile coast rerun by Darkstar. So the admiral said nothing, other than to tell Freeman that the NR-1B would be ready if and when Freeman found anything. Besides, there was still a lot the NR-1B could do,
the consensus in the Pentagon being that it was the craft best suited to hunt down another small sub.
Freeman glimpsed the sparkle of light beyond the lacy edge of the mammoth waterfall. The nanosecond of recognition was followed by his shouted warning to the other five on the RIB. Whether Aussie, Choir, Salvini, and the diver, Peter Dixon, like the general himself, had reacted more quickly than coxswain Alvaro because of their long combat experience was impossible to discern. Perhaps it was because Alvaro was the most visible, standing up at the RIB’s steering console. In any event, it was Jorge who took the full burst of machine-gun fire, its sparkle of one-in-four tracer now long white darts shattering the console’s Perspex and knocking the young man overboard, the bloody cavity that a second before had been his chest, awash in the wake of the RIB.
The inflatable, with no one at its console, spun out of control, slicing through the smaller but still powerful chop in the bay at such an acute angle that it teetered and would have capsized had Choir not quickly moved from his hunkered-down position behind the roll bar and grabbed the wheel. He brought the sixteen-footer about smartly, cutting through the RIB’s earlier wake and, with his comrades gripping the two hold bars, shoved the throttle to full power, enabling the RIB to surge well away from the waterfall. Choir then just as quickly cut power at the water curtain’s halfway point, where the waterfall was so voluminous that whoever had fired the burst at the RIB would no longer be able to see it.
“Rocky island, one o’clock!” Freeman shouted at Choir. “Take us there. Aussie, Dixon, grab your Draeger, recon beyond the falls. See what we’re up against. Sal and I will man the island with the M-60 and A.T. anchor.”
Aussie, using his legs in a scissor hold around the left stanchion of the roll bar, had his arms free to check and put on his Draeger rebreather. Dixon, with more recent practice, was already “in suit,” the fright he’d experienced from the burst of fire replaced with a surge of anger. It was the first time he’d been shot at, and he was surprised how quickly his outrage had evicted fear. Now he wanted to shoot back. Freeman was on the radio, calling Jensen at Keystone. No response, not even the sound of static.
“Shot to ratshit!” Aussie informed him, indicating the console, the radio’s innards a mess of shattered circuit boards and wiring on the RIB’s deck. With that, Freeman unclipped his Ziploc-encased cell phone. But Murphy’s Law was at large, solar flare activity knocking out all satellite bounce-off signals in the ionosphere high above his fog-bound environs.
Cursing but undeterred, the general grabbed one of the RIB’s three marker buoys, switched on its flasher light and pulse signal locator, and tossed it overboard. Hopefully the NR-1B now had its scientists and crew aboard and was already under way, en route to assist his team.
Choir geared the RIB down to quarter speed and made for what Freeman had hurriedly described as a “rocky island.”
As the RIB approached it, however, the SpecFor team could see it was in fact no more than a stack of granite thrusting out of the bay — an islet thirty feet in diameter, its highest, westernmost half a serrated wall four or five feet above sea level. Its eastern half, closest to the approaching RIB, seemed to be awash in choppy water, the result of turbulence radiating out from the waterfall-sea interface as the falls tumbled from a wide slit halfway up the heavily vegetated cliff face.
“We should be out of sight of that shooter once we get to these rocks,” said Freeman.
“Providing he doesn’t move farther around the bay,” replied Choir, raising his voice above the ear-dunning roar of the three-hundred-foot-wide wall of white water pouring into the crescent-shaped bay with the unyielding power of a dam whose spill gates were opened for maximum runoff. Fire support for Dixon and Aussie, should they call for it, would be blind, Freeman, Choir, and Sal realizing that the best they could do would be to fire a “banana” arc through the fall in hopes of keeping any shooter’s head down. There was a sudden series of crashes as dark branches and clumps of earth plummeted down in the otherwise pristine curtain of water.
“Son of a bitch!” said Sal. “With our radio kaput, Aussie and Dixon won’t be able to call us.”
“No sweat, Brooklyn,” Freeman assured him, with more confidence than he felt. “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Wait for ’em to swim back and report.”
“Why the hell would a shooter have just opened up on us like that?”
“You been smoking something, Sal?” asked the general, Choir answering the question as he coaxed the RIB alongside the islet on the off, protective seaward side. “Because he thought we saw something.”
“Jesus — the midget sub?”
“A perfect hide,” said the general. “Falls are a perfect curtain — cold water to throw off any infrared snooping UAV.”
“Don’t fancy those whirlpools, General,” opined Choir, looking toward the falls.
“They can swim,” said Freeman tersely. “ ’Sides, they can pull their rip cords if they have to.” He meant that Aussie and Dixon could activate their Mae West inflatables.
Choir nudged the islet’s side with the RIB and, despite the foamy, choppy water, could see a protruding ledge three feet below. If there was a sudden suck-down, the RIB’s fiberglass keel could find itself on the ledge and tip.
“Piece o’ cake,” Sal told him, Salvini sensing Choir was worried about what could be a tricky docking in the chop.
“You ready with that line?” Choir asked Sal.
“Good to go, Mr. Williams.”
“When I say go — right?”
“Right.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The ROC F-16 was escorted by two of McCain’s F-18 Super Hornets, one of which was piloted by Chipper Armstrong and his RIO Evans, the other by Manowski and his RIO. Evans was still smarting from having been left out the dogfight against the ChiComs, and Manowski’s RIO was in no better mood as the pair of Super Hornets continued to escort the “Bizarro” Taiwanese Falcon toward the carrier battle group.
Admiral Crowley, though still in shock over his squadrons’ failure to prevent the bombing of Penghu, nevertheless had to force himself to concentrate on the Bizarro situation. His position about not allowing the Falcon to land still stood. For one thing, the Taiwanese Falcon, not being a carrier aircraft, did not have sufficient underbelly strength to make a hard carrier landing; hence the nickname “Jelly Dick,” by which “Hard Dick” Navy aviators condescendingly referred to Air Force fighters. An F-16 pilot, at his best, trying to minimize the shock of hitting the carrier deck, would probably collapse his landing gear, the fighter skidding and cartwheeling and either crashing into billions of dollars of McCain’s parked aircraft or slamming into the base of the island. In either case, there would be massive fire wreckage, which would mean Crowley couldn’t bring in his low-on-gas squadrons coming back from Penghu. It was a nightmare scenario. The rescue of one pilot, Taiwanese or American, wasn’t worth the risk to the McCain and those who worked on her.
“We could put out a net,” Cuso suggested, but Crowley shook his head; the idea of using “Badminton”—a big net stretched across the deck — to break the touchdown of a plane so low on gas that it didn’t have enough fuel left for a “go-around,” or was in some other way incapacitated, still ran the risk of the Falcon crashing into McCain’s superstructure — the carrier’s island — before it reached the net.
“No,” said Crowley with an air of finality. “He’ll have to ditch. Have our chopper pick him up.”
Cuso nodded assent, but felt compelled, no doubt because he’d been an aviator himself, to add, “Chipper says the pilot’s shot up pretty bad. Ejection might not be an option.”
“Life’s tough!” Crowley said brusquely. “If he can’t eject, maybe he can ditch — stay afloat long enough for our helo to snatch him.”
Cuso said nothing. They both knew that if the pilot was so badly wounded that he couldn’t reach down to grab the snake — the F-16’s ejection pull loop — then he almost certainly didn’t hav
e the strength required to boss the controls to pancake long enough for the Jolly Green Giant helicopter reach him.
Crowley conveyed his decision to the rescue helo, Chipper Armstrong, and Manowski.
“Thrilling mission, Chip,” came the wry voice from his backseat.
“Well, look at it this way, Eagle,” said Chipper. “Maybe Bizarro is the son of one of those super-rich Taiwanese industrialists, and when he gets home, Daddy’s gonna be so grateful, you and I get a big, fat envelope — reward for fishing Junior out of the chuck.”
“Your oxygen feed must have dropped below twenty, right?”
“Maybe,” Chipper answered, his voice tired but, not surprisingly, no longer as tense as when FITCOMPRON took off. The sight of the carrier, and the focus needed for landing on a “postage stamp,” was always a pick-me-up. The only problem remaining, given that the Taiwanese fighter’s radio was out, was that either Armstrong or Manowski would have to make it clear to Bizarro that he or she wouldn’t be allowed to land on the carrier and would have to eject or ditch. Eagle Evans, however, already had the potential problem solved. Using his navigation highlighter, on the inside of his cockpit he’d drawn a rough, simple diagram of an L-shaped pilot’s seat inclined backward, showing an arrow curving up and out from it, his large drawing clearly visible to the pilot of the shot-up Falcon.
“Outstanding, Eagle,” said Manowski on the far right side of the Falcon. “I can make that out from here. If Bizarro can’t see that, man, he’s blind.”
Chipper brought the Hornet in closer to the Falcon, his thumb gesticulating to Evans’s ad hoc poster, which Chipper now knew would pass into the folklore of the “boat,” along with the sadness of having lost so many good aviators in the miscalculation of the ChiComs’ intentions over Penghu.
“He sees it,” Manowski said, the wingman glimpsing the Falcon’s driver, who, though grimacing in pain, slowly raised his hand from the control stick and pointed a bloodied thumb. “He’s gonna do it,” Chipper advised McCain’s CIC. “He’s gonna eject.”
