Sea fighter

by James H. Cobb

  Peering forward out of the windscreen, Amanda continued to acquaint herself with the decidedly odd sea feel of the air cushion gunboat. She’d sailed fast small craft before, even competing aboard Cigarette-class open ocean racing boats on more than one occasion. None of her past experiences quite matched this, however.

  Despite the flickering rapidity of the wave patterns sweeping under the hovercraft’s bow, the seafighter flowed effortlessly across the ocean’s surface. Riding over the swells instead of driving through them, there was none of the jolt and spank of a displacement hull running at speed.

  “What’s our ETA at Floater 1, Lieutenant?” she inquired.

  “It’s a three-hundred-mile run,” Lane replied. “We’ll be there in about five hours.”

  “Five hours?” Amanda pulled herself out of the jump seat and came to kneel between the two pilot’s stations. “How fast are we going?”

  “’Bout fifty knots.”

  Amanda felt her eyebrows lift. “Fifty knots? I had my old destroyer up close to fifty knots once, evading a wake-chaser torpedo, and she almost shook apart on me!”

  Her “old destroyer.” That was the first time she’d ever referred to the Cunningham in those terms.

  Steamer Lane and Snowy Banks exchanged proud parent grins.

  “This is just good cruise for us, ma’am,” Snowy said. “We can do this all day.”

  Lane glanced at his copilot again, and Amanda sensed one of those nonverbal discussions taking place. Banks gave a minute shrug of her shoulders, a devilish glint showing momentarily in her brown eyes.

  “In fact, Commander, we can do lots better,” the Queen’s commander said casually, reaching the drive throttles. “Strap in, ma’am, and we’ll give you a demonstration.”

  Amanda did so, with alacrity. As a survivor of plebe hazing at Annapolis, plus being a holder of both a Shellback and a Bluenose certificate, she understood the mechanism of initiation into a small, tight-knit, and proud community. One could either respond with a stiff-necked resistance, weakening that bond of community, or one could submit and strengthen it. Drawing the seat belt tight, Amanda braced herself and got a firm grip on her stomach.

  The digital iron log flickered upward—55 … 60 … —the roar of the airscrews growing in proportion, a deep and resonant vibration building within the vehicle frame. 65 …68 … Scrounger Caitlin’s extra knots making themselves apparent. The wave patterns blurred into a blue-steel and frost-white mosaic.

  “All hands, stand by to maneuver,” Land said casually over the interphone circuit.

  “Hey, Skipper,” Amanda heard another voice respond in her earphones. “You want some movin’ music?”

  “Sounds good, Danno. Give me something appropriate for goin’ off the lip.”

  “You got it, sir.”

  Suddenly the driving twang and bite of California surfing music blared over the interphone link, a formidable CD deck obviously having been wired into the system. Cueing off of the music, Lane slammed the seafighter’s helm hard over. The quadruple rudders dug into the blast of the airscrews and the hovercraft tore into a hard left turn. Amanda yelped, groping for the grab bar on the back of the pilot’s seat as, seat belt or not, the G forces threatened to hurl her across the cockpit.

  His powerfully muscled forearms holding the control yoke against its locks, Lane leaned against the lateral pull. Riding with it as well, Snowy Banks deftly trimmed the throttles and propeller controls, using the power of its raving engines to hold the Queen of the West into its minimum-radius turn.

  She could do only so much, however. Amanda felt the stern of the hovercraft start to break loose in a wild aquatic skid, like a racing car spinning out on an icy corner. At that instant, Lane reversed rudder.

  Whump! Amanda piled up against the chart table as the seafighter began to describe the second half of a foaming S-turn, the coastline a speed-smeared streak across the windscreen.

  “That’s interesting, Commander,” she said through gritting teeth. “A major aspect of hovercraft navigation must be judging how deeply your rudders can hold you into the line of your turn at varying speeds.”

  “Exactly, ma’am.” Lane nodded, replying over the jaunty electronic backbeat in the headset “Another thing you’ll have to get used to is that we can work in close. Real close.”

  The Queen sheared off toward the land. This stretch of the Guinea coast was open, sandy beach with a respectable, foaming shore break. Lane indeed started working in close, on the very ragged edge of blue water, skirting the line where the incoming Atlantic rollers broke into tumbling surf.

  The ride was no longer smooth now. The Queen bucked and shuddered as she tore through the turbulent crests and depressions of the breaking waves. Spray exploded across the windscreen and Steamer Lane, his jaw set and his hands white knuckled on the control yoke, held them right on the division between honest water and slop, weaving them sinuously along the contours of the coast.

  This was no mere stunt. This was a maneuver carefully thought out and long drilled. Without instructions, Snowy Banks had jacked her seat up to its full height and was scanning far ahead along the surf line. “Clear … clear … clear,” she chanted, allowing Lane to focus on dancing the seafighter through the white-water turbulence of the wave break.

  Not only had Amanda never experienced anything close to this, she had never imagined it, either. The trembling in her body had little to do with the vibration of the vehicle frame, and the rush of adrenaline through her system rendered the experience superhumanly clear and intense. The soaring rock beat in her headset helped to merge her into the great racing warcraft, making her one with it. She yielded to the sensation as she would yield to a lover.

  Then the sandbar was under their bow, a low, tan, wave swept mound reaching out from the shore like the back of a beached whale, one of the deadly “phantom islands” of the African Gold Coast. There was no time, no chance to turn away or avoid. Amanda felt the futile warning cry well out of her and she threw her arms up in an equally futile effort to ward off the shattering impact that must follow.

  But didn’t.

  There was a smooth upward surge as the Queen rode up and over the bar, a long moment of weightlessness as the full ninety-foot length of the hovercraft gunboat launched into the air, and then a soft and resilient chuff as she touched down again on her skirts. From somewhere down in the hull came the exuberant “Yeeeeeeehaaaa!” of a rebel yell.

  Lane pulled away from the shoreline and came back on the throttles, bringing them down to good cruise once more. “And that’s what we can do, ma’am.”

  Amanda flexed her cramped fingers and took a deep, deliberate breath, letting the hammering beat of her heart slow. “Very interesting, Steamer,” she replied, carefully keeping her voice level. “Why don’t we let Snowy take a break for a while and you can start showing me how we go about doing it.”

  For Amanda, the remainder of the journey out to the Mobile Offshore Base didn’t seem to take as long as she had expected. Following her first training session at the Queen’s controls, she’d spent the next couple of hours systematically going over the interior of the hovercraft, getting acquainted with the rest of the small crew and further familiarizing herself with the seafighter’s layout.

  Eventually, the two days’ worth of continuous travel caught up with her and she stretched out in one of the cramped berths in the bunkroom. Not yet adapted to the magnified vacuum cleaner howl of the Queen’s power plants, she didn’t think sleep was likely. However, she could lie with half-closed eyes and consider the potentials, possibilities and problems of this new command.

  Possibly she’d acclimatized more rapidly than expected or her jet lag was more severe than she realized because a touch on her shoulder startled her awake.

  “Begging your pardon, Captain,” Ben Tehoa said, looming over her, “but we’ll
be coming in to Floater 1 soon. The Skipper figured you’d want to be in the cockpit during the approach and docking.”

  “Thanks, Chief,” Amanda replied, rubbing her gritty eyes. “I do. I’ll be right up.”

  The first indication of the Mobile Offshore Base was a silvery finned teardrop hovering high in the sun-bleached sky, the tethered Aerostat balloon that lifted the scanning head of the TACNET radar three thousand feet above the sea. Then, through the heat shimmer of the horizon, a low crenellated form rose up out of the ocean like some mystic floating fortress in an Arabian Nights fantasy.

  On a more prosaic and technological level, that’s exactly what it was.

  Amanda had studied the history of the Mobile Offshore Basing concept back to its origins during the war in Vietnam. There, to escape shoreside harassment from communist guerillas, a series of floating strike bases or “seafloats” had been constructed for U.S. Riverine and Coastal Patrol forces. Pieced together out of artillery barges and bridging pontoons and anchored in Vietnam’s rivers and coastal estuaries, these ad hoc staging platforms had served the Navy well. So well, that the Seafloat was resurrected during the Persian Gulf tanker wars of the late 1980s.

  In that instance, as a sidelobe of the protracted Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard began launching harassment attacks against tanker traffic passing through the Persian Gulf. Gulf States political leaders requested U.S. assistance in keeping the Straits open. However, in the face of Iranian saber rattling, these same Gulf statesmen had lacked the political will to permit American light naval forces to stage operations off of their soil.

  As a solution, a seagoing barge platform had been anchored in international waters just inside the Straits of Hormuz. From this strike base, U.S. Navy SEALs, Special Boat Squadron flotillas and U.S. Army “Black Helicopter” flights sortied nightly to wage a secretive and ultimately successful war against the Iranian Boghammer groups.

  Now, given the reduced size of the United States Navy and the shrinking number of foreign bases available to the American armed forces, the concept was being expanded upon again. A new generation of military “cities at sea” was being designed, utilizing the same technology used in the construction of offshore oil installations. Floating base complexes were on the drawing boards, artificial islands that could be towed into position anywhere in the world, each capable of supporting an entire Navy task force and an embarked Marine brigade garrison, complete with airstrips large enough to accept fighter and transport aircraft.

  That was still for tomorrow, however. Floater 1 merely marked another step along that path.

  The offshore base consisted of nine oceangoing super barges, each four hundred feet in length by one hundred and fifty in width, intermoored to form one gigantic rectangular platform better than three football fields long by one and a half wide.

  Elevated helipads had been constructed atop the four corner barges, the “bastions” of the fortress, each large enough to accept several helicopters or VTOL aircraft. Spaced between them were the smaller gun towers of the platform’s defensive armament. A tall glass-walled structure similar to an airport control tower rose from the central barge, adjacent to a towering tripod mast studded with aerial arrays and rotating antenna.

  These were the only fixed installations on the platform. A polyglot village of housing modules, trailers, and cargo containers took up the rest of the extensive deck area, a dully spectrumed patchwork of white, Navy gray, and camo pattern.

  “Circle the platform once please, Steamer. I’d like to look the place over.”

  “Will do, ma’am.”

  As the range closed, Amanda noted the bustling activity aboard the facility. A Cyclone-class Patrol Craft and a pair of LCU landing craft nestled against the platform’s lee side, toy like against its bulk. The little PC, as sleek and rakish as a miniaturized destroyer, took on fuel from one of the barge’s internal cells while a crane methodically hoisted cargo pallets from the well decks of the LCUs. As she continued to look on, a Boeing-Textron Eagle Eye reconnaissance drone lifted off from one of the helipads. The automobile-size tilt-rotor air craft hovered like a wary hornet for a moment before transitioning to horizontal flight mode, flashing away toward the heat-hazed green line of the coast.

  “How close to the beach are we?” Amanda asked, thoughtfully eyeing the drone’s destination.

  “A little over thirteen miles offshore,” Lane replied. “Just clear of the twelve-mile limit and hanging right on the edge of the continental shelf.”

  Snowy nodded soberly. “If you look off to the northwest at night, you can see the lights of Monrovia. They anchored us here because of the shallows and because this is almost the exact center of our patrol line. But boy, it does put us right in the laps of the bad guys.”

  Amanda nodded as well. “And what happens if General Belewa objects to our familiarity?”

  “Then,” Steamer replied grimly, “there is going to be one hell of a fight. We have eight Mark 96 over-and-under mounts in the gun towers. We also have RAM launchers and Stinger teams in case of an air attack and chaff launchers and ECM in the event he scares up some antiship missiles somewhere. Like I said, one way or another, it’ll be one hell of a fight.”

  Amanda noted the curtains of Kevlar armor drawn along the sides of the barge hulls and gun towers and the sand bagged hardpoints on the deck edges. Indeed, should the Union attempt to storm the platform, “one hell of a fight” might be an understatement. This was no Arabian Nights fairy castle. A more apt comparison would be to a frontier Army post deep in Apache territory.

  Backing off steadily on his throttles, Lane completed his circle of the platform. The middle barge in the downwind, or “stern,” tier of the platform had been cut down and modified to provide for a two-hundred-foot ramp shallow enough for a hovercraft to climb. Lane nosed the Queen in toward this now, humping her up and over the ramp edge. With another consummate coordination of thruster, throttle, and rudder, he and Snowy taxied their command up-ramp to the platform deck and to the waiting reception crew.

  Three large open-sided hangars were located beyond the broad turnaround pad at the head of the ramp, one of which was already occupied by another parked seafighter. “That’s the PG-03,” Lane commented over his shoulder, “the Carondelet. The Manassas is out on barrier patrol this afternoon.”

  Leaning into the air blast issuing from beneath the hover craft, a pair of wand-wielding ground guides assisted Lane as he rotated the Queen around a hundred and eighty degrees, backing her into her servicing bay. Deck baffles shielded equipment and personnel alike from the howling turbulence produced by the seafighter’s lift fans.

  The wand men executed the crossed-arm “cut” gesture as the hovercraft was properly spotted and Lane came back on the throttles. The wail of the turbines faded and the Queen sank down into the nest of her deflating skirts with a protracted sigh.

  “We’re home, Captain.”

  “Thank you for the introduction, Steamer,” Amanda replied, releasing her seat belt. “Now I have some idea of what I have to work with.” She mused for a few moments, then smiled. “The three little PGs. The Three Little Pigs. I like them. I like them a lot.”

  “They can ruin you for the big ships, ma’am.”

  As the pilots continued their shutdown procedures, Amanda levered herself out of the jump seat. She started aft, then paused for a moment. “Oh, and by the way, Lieutenant Banks, I’ve been meaning to have a word with you about certain modifications you’ve made to your uniform.”

  Snowy stiffened in her seat. “Uh, yes, ma’am?”

  “They make good sense in this climate. I’ll have to get some of my khakis cut down like that too.” She slapped the younger woman lightly on the shoulder and dropped down the ladderway into the main hull.

  Her quarters were located in one of the housing modules sited near the hovercraft hangars. Utilitar
ian in the extreme, it was the end cabin in a stark white aluminum-sided shoe box secured to the platform deck by a foundation of scarred 4 × 4s. Plumbing connectors and electrical umbilicals drooled openly from the box’s belly, vanishing down scuttles into the barge’s interior. The sole luxury bestowed by rank would be that she would have the space to herself.

  After her guide had set her luggage inside the door, Amanda released him to return to his duties. Standing in the center of the little cabin, she examined her new living space.

  It didn’t take long. Three chairs, one behind a desk, a locker, and a stripped cot with its thin mattress rolled up at its head. Two small louvered windows flanked the entryway and a second narrow doorway opened into a minute combination head and shower. That was all.

  The bare walls—somehow the nautical term “bulkhead” didn’t feel right—were a use-dingy white, the battered linoleum on the floor, gray. The fixtures and furnishings all bore the mark of long government service.

  The temperature in the room was volcanic. Amanda noticed the small air conditioner mounted in one of the windows and, rather anxiously, she stepped across to it and hit the start button. To her relief, a stream of cool and comparatively dry air began to flow out of its grille after a few moments, albeit with a grinding roar.

  Amanda sank down into the desk chair, relishing the chill as the perspiration on her skin began to evaporate. Her first impressions of the PG squadron were good. Oh, they were unconventional, no doubt about that. But it seemed to be the kind of unconventionality that was born out of adaptive and intelligent flexibility. These were the kind of people who carried their discipline around in their guts, not in a book of regulations. She’d be able to use that, granted she could become as adaptable as they were. Please God, let the rest of her command be as promising as well.

  Amanda sighed and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. That forty-eight hours in transit was catching up with her again. Yet there was that urgent drive to get going, to pull things together. But Lord, where to start?