by Glynn James
Campbell, the others looking to her, said, “What, one that’s going to be no more dangerous? That won’t be thronged with dead? And with good access from the water?”
Drake sighed. “Point taken.”
Handon crossed his arms on the table. “With the Russians skulking around, it increases the risk of the mission. But I say we stick with the plan. We’ll just stay on our toes. It’ll probably be fine.”
Campbell and Handon traded looks. She pretty clearly wasn’t used to shrugging off ridiculously high levels of risk the way he was. But then they had very different jobs. She was paid to keep this floating city floating, and its thousands of inhabitants alive. He was paid to do the impossible, whatever the cost.
Handon looked away, then went on. “Anyway, I’ve never heard of Marines minding about risk. Last I talked to him, Sergeant Coulson was leaning forward. He said his guys have executed this mission profile, scavenging a port facility, a hundred times. The last thing he seemed was worried. I don’t think that’ll change with the new tactical picture. We brief him on the risks, and we keep our heads up.”
“Fine,” said Drake. “We leave the Russians alone, hope like hell they show us the same courtesy – and proceed with the mission as planned.”
Campbell drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “I’ll sign off on it. But we also need to have a serious conversation about intel, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Because we have given zero thought to ISR in the last two years. And it’s only the Russians’ failure to realize they can blow us out of the water that’s keeping them from doing it.”
“Okay,” Drake said. “What’s on your list?”
She started ticking off fingers. “Our satellites – what’s left of them. Theirs – ditto. Our drones, their drones. Our anti-air capabilities against surveillance aircraft, manned or unmanned – and, a rather longer discussion, theirs. Radar, sonar. We’re so long out of the habits of fleet security and surface warfare that ramping everything back up is going to take a serious conscious effort.”
Drake nodded. “Consider yourself deputized – to tackle all of it. Consult with me when you need input – but not authorization. You’re empowered to do whatever needs doing.”
“Roger that.” She stood and looked at the hatch. “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. While we’re still floating.”
“Go,” Drake said, waving his hand. She exited.
Abrams took a heavy breath, and said, “If the Murphy were still floating, this would be a hell of a lot easier – we could just toss a dozen Tomahawks and torpedoes at the Russkies, all from stand-off range.”
“Yes,” Drake agreed. “That would certainly wake Ivan up in the morning. Not to mention swamp his missile defenses, and beat their ECM. But that’s neither here nor there. We already spent the Murphy saving the Kennedy. Now we’ve got to be careful what else we spend, and on what. Because this is nearly the endgame.”
He tapped his fingers on the table and looked across at Abrams and Handon. “So we’re sure about this?” He sounded to Handon like he didn’t trust his own judgment. “That, with the way things stand, the Nakhimov is unlikely to come back and take another shot at us?”
“Basic war game theoretic construct,” Abrams said. “Their captain knows our air group can blow them out of the water at whim, if we commit to it. They also don’t know how many, or how few, attack planes we’ve got left.”
Drake nodded. “They took their one shot and missed.”
“Like you said. Knife to a gunfight. And Russian naval officers are a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one them.”
Handon looked up at Abrams from under lowered brow. “Is reckless one of them?”
He was about to add: And that’s IF that battlecruiser is even under the control of Russian naval officers…
But the door banged open yet again.
It was Fick.
And – the others noted with incredulity – he looked like he’d been crying.
Combat Leaders
JFK - Alpha Team Room
“Well, that sucked about a hundred yards of cock,” Predator grumbled, unslinging his ruck and letting the deflated and packed-up – but still fantastically heavy – combat rubber raiding craft (CRRC) drop to the deck. He made way for the others, wiping sweat from his forehead with a thigh-sized forearm.
The others – Ali, Juice, and Henno, all of them still sucking wind from the panic, the running, and the toting of quite a lot of heavy gear – now filed back into their team room. They immediately started unslinging all the crap festooned on their bodies, and getting it stowed again.
“It could have been worse,” Ali said, setting her assault pack in the corner. “We could all be paddling for it right now.”
“True,” Juice agreed, sitting down heavily on a palletized load of gear. “True.”
Shortly after the general-quarters alarm had sounded, Ali had raced into the team room with word that the ship had been hit by missile strikes – but no one yet knew quite how many, or how bad. Then they had all grabbed their crap and made tracks for the stern, and the dock down on the water – to get themselves, and Dr. Park, out of Dodge if necessary.
They’d taken their midsize assault packs, as well as their “go-to-hell bags” – but not the gigantic insertion rucks, which were configured for weeks-long insertions into denied territory. But all of these were kept packed and ready to go at all times.
The midsize assault packs consisted mostly of a Camelbak hydration sleeve, and a shitload of ammo. Their “go-to-hell bags” were smaller, jammed with combat and survival essentials, and rarely out of arm’s reach. These were what they’d grab if things went completely to shit, and they had to displace quickly – maybe alone, perhaps in the dark, probably under fire – and then escape and evade.
And, ultimately, perhaps also complete their mission, working as a one-man team.
In this particularly short-lived emergency, they’d also tried to grab a few other combat essentials – extra water, ammo, food, and radio batteries. All of which, plus them, would have perilously overloaded their CRRC, which was rated for ten passengers – in theory. The little boat was their escape plan – from a vessel that was, as far as they knew, potentially heading for the bottom at any time.
Now Pred, grunting, shoved the boat-in-a-bag across the floor toward its usual position in the corner. As it had transpired, he’d just gotten the damned thing out and unrolled when word came down that, while the JFK had suffered damage, and casualties, it was no longer in any danger of sinking.
It wasn’t that Alpha was any less loyal to the JFK now than when they had all fought balls-out to defend her from the storm of the dead. It was just that they knew there was precious little they could do to help win a set-piece naval battle, or in support of naval surface warfare. Except make sure they were ready to carry on and accomplish their own mission.
And that included if the Kennedy went down, and they had to get the hell off it – and then figure out how to run their own op without a nuclear supercarrier to stage it from. Also, when they had been beached off Virginia, there wasn’t really anywhere for them to go. Now, they were already near their next mission objective – Africa.
Finally, having squared away her bits of weapons and gear, Ali picked up the latest draft of the Somalia mission planning document. It was probably where she could most usefully direct her attention now.
But before she could get her head into it, Juice’s nose started wrinkling, and he looked up at Henno. “Okay – who trumped now?”
Henno shrugged. “Aye, it was me. Better out than in.”
“Better out than in?” Juice boggled. “Maybe on the wide-open Yorkshire moors! This is two decks down on a climate-controlled warship! I say keep it in.”
Henno said, “It already smells like hot dick in here. Fart is an improvement.”
Not even looking up at these two, Ali just muttered, “You can put a man at the very top of his field… in t
he most dangerous and serious line of work imaginable… but give him a half a chance, and he still instantly reverts to an eight-year-old boy. Farting disputes.”
Henno also didn’t look up, but said, “All blokes stop emotional development at age eight. Thought you’d know that by now.”
“Okay, maybe I did.” She paused. “But what I’m slightly more concerned about is the fact that this vessel was very recently fucking on fire.”
Henno looked up, darkly. “Yeah. Not good that, is it?”
* * *
LT Campbell sighed out loud when the hatch to CIC banged open again. She was now neck-deep in some very serious analysis and strategic planning tasks, and she didn’t have time for the bullshit she knew was now coming her way.
Silhouetted in the hatch was the big form of Lieutenant Commander (LCDR) Cole – Commander of the carrier’s Air Group (CAG). As he marched toward her, Campbell didn’t look up. She knew he was vectoring in on her because he was too smart to try this shit on with Drake.
“LT. Why did you stand down our air mission?”
Slowly, Campbell looked up, then followed her gaze with her body, rising and squaring up to him.
The CAG was a big, good-looking, strapping naval aviator, straight out of Top Gun central casting. He was hot, smart, funny, and ridiculously accomplished – and he knew it. Everybody loved him, even though they hated him for it. He was currently all tooled up in his flight suit, harness, and chest gear, though not his helmet, which was presumably still in his cockpit.
Crisply, Campbell answered him. “Wasn’t me. It was Drake. And he called it that way because sinking Russian warships isn’t this vessel’s mission. Sir.”
The CAG got slightly more in her face. “But surely we can’t risk getting bushwhacked again? If I’ve got this right, both our layers of active missile defense are down?”
Campbell just nodded.
“Then that means we have to sink those bastards. These guys have earned a ticket to the bottom. And my guys can put them there, in one sortie.”
Campbell sighed again, and tried to decide how much of this shit she was going to eat. They both knew it wasn’t her call, and thus nothing that was said here mattered. “The Commander doesn’t want to burn the fuel, or risk the birds.”
“There’s no risk to the planes! With our long-range missiles, we’ll be phoning it in!”
Campbell snorted. “Yeah, if everything goes to plan. And what’s ever gone wrong around here lately?” She let that sit out there for a couple of seconds, then said, “Shouldn’t you be in your aircraft?”
He straightened up and looked defensive. “It’s right outside. I can be in the cockpit in thirty seconds.”
Campbell blinked once, very slowly. Finally, she pulled her trump card: the CAG outranked her, but this was her watch, and her station.
“If there’s nothing else, sir, kindly exit this deck. We have ops on.”
This was about as close to Get the fuck out as one could go with a superior officer.
And it was close enough to get the job done.
* * *
Fick pulled the hatch to the briefing room closed behind him, stepped inside, wiped his sleeve across his face, then scanned the faces of Drake, Abrams, and Handon. Finally he spoke. “Sergeant Coulson’s dead.”
Drake’s eyebrows went for his shoes. “What? I’ve got the updated casualty reports right on my desk.”
“He died on the table, two minutes ago. Doc Walker rang me from the hospital.”
“Jesus. How?”
Fick exhaled. “After the missile strike on the foredeck, he made like some kind of half-assed firefighter and ran toward the worst part of the blaze. One of the salvage guys says he remembers seeing Coulson helping with the wounded – but then he saw a body down in the cavity where Ammo City used to be.”
“A live one?”
Fick shrugged. “Who knows? I doubt Coulson cared. Anyway, they say it looked like the fire was under control at that point. So he raced down there to get this guy. But then the fire flashed – at exactly the wrong time for him. The hose teams were overwhelmed. They couldn’t get him out.”
“Jesus,” Handon said. “I was shooting the shit with the man on 02 Deck an hour ago.”
Handon shook his head, remembering how Coulson had survived the front line of a fight against ten million zombies, he’d survived that mad lone-wolf sprint out to Ammo City to rescue those four stranded people… and then he dies in a fire, with not a Zulu for a hundred miles.
But Handon already knew all about the random cruelty and capriciousness of war.
He also now remembered how Ali had held him back from going up to help. Maybe Coulson – who was supposed to be leading the scavenging mission that would step off in a few hours, and who also couldn’t be spared – didn’t have anyone to pull him back.
After a couple of respectful beats, Drake pointed at the elephant in the room. “Okay. So who commands the scavenging mission now?”
Fick poured himself into a chair. “I’m running low on combat leaders.”
Drake pondered. Fick’s previous 2IC, Gunny Blane, had bought it leading from the front in the flight deck battle… and Sergeant Atwell blew himself to kingdom come, just to incrementally beat back a mountain of Zulus that was already eating him alive… and now Coulson, who had also stepped up big time in the battle, had gone down, too.
He’d died heroically. But it wasn’t the kind of heroism Drake needed. And all these dead guys, and their valiant sacrifices, weren’t getting him anywhere. Worse, Drake didn’t feel he could afford to think about all the people who’d died under his command right now. There was too much pressure hitting him from every other direction.
Handon leaned forward and crossed his arms on the table, considering Fick’s lament about running out of combat leaders. He was actually thinking, Everyone in a combat unit ought to be a leader. But he kept it to himself. He knew Fick already knew that. Hell, it was the Marines who had formulated the notion of leadership at every level.
“I’ll lead the mission myself,” Fick finally said.
“Not a chance,” Drake said. “You’re needed for Somalia. We agreed on this: Alpha, paired with your Fire Team One – led by you.”
Handon spoke. “I can have one of my guys take the helm – one of my healthy ones. If Fick provides the bodies for the team, I’ll donate the brain.”
Drake squinted. “I don’t adore the idea. But it might be the best option we’ve got.”
Left unsaid was:
Who on Alpha could most be spared…?
Crash Site
JFK - Alpha Team Room
“Back in a flash,” Juice said, cinching shut a team kit bag he’d just quadruple-checked the contents of. No one asked him for an explanation, but he added, “I’ve got a jumper at the door.”
Ali shook her head. “Thanks – first farting, and now paratrooper euphemisms for crapping. And people wonder why women are under-represented in the airborne.”
The others laughed, including Juice, as he slipped out the hatch. He actually wasn’t going to the head. In fact, he needed some air, and a little solitude, and he didn’t know why he’d been embarrassed to admit that, or needed to tell a ridiculous lie about it. Maybe it was because of what he needed the alone time for.
His first thought was to head for the fantail deck, which was usually a good place for solitude and reflection. But something pulled him up short – and drew him up top instead, and toward the fore. Maybe he wanted to see the carnage that had resulted from the missile strike.
Or maybe it was just closer.
He jogged up two flights of ladder, hands in the pockets of his beat-up cargo pants, head down, orange beard nestling on his sleeveless t-shirt. When he pushed out onto the flight deck, the low sun was shining through thin clouds, and a clean breeze blew. He kept his ballcap reversed and instead took out his ballistic Oakley wraps to counter the flaring sun. Now he was pretty much all beard, hat, and sunglasses – his trade
mark look. Casting around, he could see the conclusion of the recovery effort going on, just up ahead.
The last casualty was being rolled away on an actual hospital gurney – Juice couldn’t tell the extent of the sailor’s injuries, but he figured they were either mildest, hence he was at the end of the triage; or most critical, and they’d had to stabilize him before moving him.
As the last medical team disappeared from sight, going down on one of the giant aircraft elevators, Juice picked his way forward. There was still a lot of debris strewn about the deck, chunks of metal and burnt bits of insulation and uniforms, though it was being policed up by industrious sailors.
These guys are like ants, Juice thought – legions of them instantly springing into action to clear and build whatever needed clearing or building.
Red-suited salvage, firefighting, and EOD crew were spraying chemical extinguishers on hot spots around the impact point. And others were resetting the cordon that had previously circled the wreckage of Ammo City, but had been burned away by the thermobaric missile strike.
As Juice cut a wide circle around them, not wanting to make their difficult and dangerous jobs any harder, he found himself nearly stepping in… well, a bloodstain wouldn’t have fazed him. But this was actually the scorched outline of a human figure. Somebody had gone down in this spot – while on fire.
Jesus. They sure hadn’t seen this one coming. But of course those were always the ones that got you. As Ali sometimes put it: “What you don’t see is what you get.”
Eventually Juice reached the front of the ship, folded his arms over a mounted and still dripping water cannon, and stared out at the horizon. And now, suddenly, he knew why he’d really come up here, and to this end of the ship.
It was to see Africa.
And there she was, just a dark smudge upon the fine line where sea met sky. It was as if he had conjured her out of his subconscious. Or, more likely, out of memory.
Yeah, he thought, shaking his head. This would be an excellent place to come back and get killed.
Long before the ZA, across three previous deployments to the Horn of Africa, Juice had always had the feeling he wouldn’t make it out of there alive. There was just something about the place. It was so big and lawless and chaotic, it made a mockery of one’s ideas of being control. It said, You and all your gleaming civilization are just temporary. It sang a song of predation, that resonated with something in genetic memory. You, too, are just a defenseless mammal, just more prey – and you are going to get taken down.
