“And?” Heath asked.
“And, if I had to guess,” Giuseppe said, “I’d say they were minelayers. Russian-built minelayers.”
“Blast!” Heath spat out. “Soviet mines! That’s all we need.”
“Mines in the canal could definitely crimp our style,” Hunter said.
Heath tugged at his mustache with worry. “Should we consider an air strike, major?” the Brit asked.
“I don’t think we can risk it,” Hunter replied. “We could lose some very valuable aircraft to SAMs, especially if they have a P-3 Orion flying around out there. With the AWACs gear on that airplane, they’d see us coming for miles.
“Plus we can sink the minelayers, but that wouldn’t take care of the mines themselves.”
“So what are our options?” Heath asked.
Hunter shook his head. “I’m afraid we don’t have any right now,” he said. “We’ll just have to deal with it as we go along.”
“Christ,” Heath said. “Just one more thing to worry about … ”
Another day passed. Slowly. Tension was building on the carrier, Hunter could feel it in his psyche. Even the Med seemed to be working against them. They were running into strong head winds. The resulting currents were making the towing operation more difficult.
Hunter spent most of his time this day supervising the rewiring of the Swedish Viggen fighters to carry heavy ordnance. The constant, more noticeable pull-push of the carrier in the rough seas made the precise work required twice as difficult.
After the long day finally ended, Hunter walked alone to the stern of the Saratoga. He stood close to the edge of the mighty carrier’s deck, watching O’Brien’s tugs churn up the Mediterranean in front of him, their thick towlines taut and vibrating like a too-tightly-strung violin.
As always, his mind was going in a million different directions. Life was so strange, he thought. He loved the USA. He missed his friends back home. Emma had filled a nice niche in his life, but he yearned for the sweet touch of Dominique. Yet here he was, out in the middle of the Mediterranean, on a disabled flattop, being towed into “the Gates of Hell,” as Sir Neil liked to describe it. Chasing the super-criminal who had so ruthlessly destroyed the fragility of America.
But was it worth it? Was it more like chasing a phantom? Punishing one man certainly wasn’t going to rebuild America from the ruins of The Circle War. Was the fact that Lucifer—then Viktor—had kidnapped Dominique and had used her in his devious plans the real reason why Hunter was so intent in tracking down the madman? Was this crazy adventure simply nothing more than a personal vendetta? Hunter shook his head—he just didn’t know.
The pilot heard someone behind him. He turned to see that it was the strange man Peter.
The prophetic looney-tune had been calmer than usual in the last few days; one of Yaz’s corpsman had injected him several times with a sedative, so Heath had told him. The drug was working; Peter spent most of his time lying in his wooden box-bed, placidly ranting. The Brits had even reduced the man’s four-man SAS guard to just two. Now, as these soldiers took a smoke break nearby, Peter walked to the edge of the deck and sat down, completely oblivious to Hunter, who was standing no more than ten feet away.
He didn’t speak. It appeared to Hunter that the strange little guy was working his way into a trance. He was sitting in an authentic cross-legged swami style, his palms open on his knees, his eyes closed tight. Hunter expected him to start moaning the magic word “Om” at any minute. Instead the man just sat there rigidly, the ever-present stream of drool running out of the corners of his mouth and on to his disgustingly moist and dirty beard.
Hunter moved a little closer to the man. Who the hell was he? he thought. How could anyone so obviously fringed out see the future so clearly? How did the man function from minute to minute, day to day? What spirits haunted him?
Suddenly Peter opened his eyes and turned his strange gaze right at Hunter. The eyes were almost red with intensity. The stare absolutely haunting. “You … ” he said, as if Hunter had just suddenly appeared. “You are the pilot. The Wingman. I see you. In my dreams. Battling the Angel of Death … ”
Hunter knew the man was about to go “off” once again. But he also knew that it was in Peter’s most disordered moments that he was at his most prophetic.
He knelt down beside the man. “What else do you see, Peter?”
The man put his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes in his agitation. “Lucifer,” he said, his voice trembling. “I see him in my dreams too. His face. In the sky. The color of blood.
“Lucifer’s minions will attack us. I see them now. Their boats can fly on the sea. The storms do not bother them. They are protected by the Death Angel’s face in the sky.”
Peter took his hands away from his eyes and looked again right at Hunter.
“The multitudes turn away when they see his face. But you, The Wingman, do not turn away … ”
Suddenly Peter was on his feet and grabbing Hunter by the collar. His face was desperate. Tears rolled out of his wild eyes and down his soiled face. “You do not turn away!” he said, tugging at Hunter’s flight suit. “I can no longer help you! Don’t you understand? I’ve done all I can!”
The man let out a long, unearthly, agonizing wail.
“This ship,” Peter said, more tears flowing. “This ship was once mine. I tried! I tried to defeat the Red demons. But I abandoned it! Yes, abandoned it!
“Now it’s up to you. It’s your ship now. You must use it. You must defeat the great Evil sent to this world. You! The Wingman. My dreams … Your battles to come. God help me! Why was I cursed this way!”
By this time, Peter was screaming at the top of his lungs. His SAS guards were on the scene and dragging him away. Hunter was stunned. He couldn’t move. A strange feeling had completely wrapped around his body, holding him rigidly in place. It wasn’t so much what Peter said—to anyone else it was only so much raving, drooling malarky. But it was how he said it. A psychic link existed between him and the strange man. Peter’s words had penetrated the deepest recesses of Hunter’s soul. The place where the feeling came from. Now an ice-cold chill enveloped his body as he watched the SAS men lead Peter into a hatchway in the carrier’s superstructure.
Do not turn away. The words echoed in Hunter’s ears. Do not turn away!
Chapter 24
ONE OF THE COMMODORE’S boat captains saw them first …
The carrier fleet had passed through the Strait of Sicily and was about 100 miles due east of the island of Malta. Captain Olson had decided the best way to utilize the Liberte Marina was to deploy them forward of the carrier. This way they could serve as lookouts and warn the Saratoga of any treacherous waters ahead.
So now the proud fleet of armed yachts, converted workboats, ferries, and trawlers plowed the sea, spread out anywhere from ten to fifteen miles ahead of the carrier force.
It was mid-afternoon. The day had dawned hot and nearly breezeless. Hunter was in the CIC, catching up on the latest radio intercepts from Lucifer’s Empire, when a frantic call came in from one of the Commodore’s lead boats.
“Emergency! Emergency!” the heavily accented voice cried out from the radio speakers. “We are under attack! Enemy aircraft! We are under att—”
The radio suddenly went dead.
“Christ,” Heath said to Hunter. “What the hell was that?”
Hunter didn’t reply. He was already out of the CIC, and up on the ship’s bridge. There, the six men of Yaz’s group charged with keeping the carrier on course had also heard the message and were already reacting. Yaz himself was crouched over the bridge radar. It had momentarily picked up several blips just as the panicky call had come in from the Freedom Navy boat. Now Hunter was peering out of the ship’s powerful telescope, searching the horizon for the boat that made the call.
The first thing he saw was a faint wisp of smoke off to the northeast.
“Yaz, can we establish contact with any of those boats out ther
e?” Hunter called out, zooming in on the smoke.
Yaz moved over to the bridge radio and started punching buttons and twisting dials. “We’ve only got radio linkup with a few of them,” he said. “I’ll try the Commodore’s boat itself. He’s in that area.”
At the same time, a call came in from one of Olson’s frigates. “We’ve got enemy aircraft out here,” the calm, cool, Norwegian-accented voice reported via the bridge radio speakers. “They have sunk one Freedom Navy boat. They are attacking others. We are moving in to engage … ”
Hunter gave up on the telescope—the action was too far away from them. Instead he moved to the bridge’s backup radio set and called the frigate commander. “This is Major Hunter. Please ID number of enemy aircraft and type.”
The radio crackled with a burst of angry static. Then the same Norwegian voice came back on, this time a little less calm. “We are now under attack ourselves!” the radioman reported. “At least twenty-five aircraft! They are firing on us with cannon and missiles … We are … ” Another burst of static drowned out the man’s word.
Yaz was at Hunter’s side as the pilot tried to raise the frigate again. “How can there be aircraft out there, major?” the American sailor asked. “We would have seen it on the radar before it was a hundred miles near us.”
Hunter jumped up from the radio and ran to the radar set. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “You got a few blips when they first attacked, but now, there’s nothing. Unless … ”
“Unless?” Yaz asked.
“Unless, they are flying too low to be picked up on our screens,” Hunter said, quickly.
Heath had by this time appeared on the bridge, quickly assessed the situation, and yelled into a microphone, “Battle stations!” Immediately, the carrier’s warning klaxon began blaring. Men were running around the ship in controlled pandemonium. While deck sailors were feverishly working on Hunter’s F-16, preparing it for launch, others were using the carrier’s massive elevator to bring up the Harriers from below decks. Similar emergency sirens could be heard from the Norwegian escort ships cruising on either side of the carrier. Even the men on O’Brien’s tugs were reacting.
Once again the bridge’s radio speaker came to life. “SOS! SOS!” the Norwegian voice said. “May Day! May Day! We have been hit. Ship is on fire. May Day! May Day!”
Hunter was back at the radio in a flash. “This is the Saratoga,” he called. “Please ID attacking aircraft … ”
There was no reply.
“That does it,” Hunter said, running from the bridge. “I’m going out there … ”
With that, he disappeared from the bridge and was soon climbing into his F-16.
In less than a minute, the jet fighter’s engine was hot and its missiles fully armed. Hunter gave the launch officer the thumbs-up sign, and in a flash of fire and a burst of steam the F-16 was catapulted off the deck. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment. Then Hunter booted it and instantly the jet throttled forward and soon disappeared over the northeastern horizon.
He was approaching the battle a minute later. It was a wild, confused scene, one that took him a few seconds to sort out. There was smoke and flames everywhere. White, streaky missile contrails crisscrossed the sky. Long streams of returning gunfire were coming from the many smaller boats of the Freedom Navy, but the direction of the fire looked to be almost horizontal. Gunners on the two Norwegian frigates on the scene—one of which was smoking heavily—appeared to be doing the same curious thing. At first, it looked as if the ships were firing at each other.
Then, as he drew closer, he saw what was happening. He had guessed right; the enemy aircraft were flying too low to be picked up on radar. But it was the kind of aircraft that startled him.
“Christ,” he whispered. “They’re seaplanes … ”
Then Peter’s words came back to him. The man had said the enemy would have “boats that fly.”
Hunter shook off a chill, then flew directly over the battle. He banked to the right to get a good look. There were two kinds of enemy aircraft that he could see. One type was a large, rather lumbering seaplane, the size of a small airliner. It looked like a bizarre variation of the US-made Albatross Air-Sea Rescue plane of the 1960s, yet it was bigger, with a longer snout and a long, thin, tube-like appendage protruding from its tail.
It took only a few moments for him to identify the strange seaplane: it was a Beriev M-12, a Soviet-built amphibian used years before for antisubmarine duty. But whoever was flying them now had made some major modifications. The original two Ivchenko A1-20D turbo-prop engines mounted on the over-the-top wing had been increased to four. Hunter knew the protrusions on the front and back of the airplane were for radar, but these airplanes were also bristling with literally dozens of gun ports and carrying many wing-launched missiles.
Their tactic was simple and easily recognizable. They would come in just a few feet above the water, passing between the target ships. Their on-board gunners would then blast away from both sides with guns ranging from .50-caliber machine guns to M-61 20mm cannons. Hunter even recognized the distinctive black puff of smoke characteristic of small howitzers.
Against these big flying boats, both the frigate and the Freedom Navy gunners were depressing their gun barrels as low as possible to shoot at the attackers. But many of the antiaircraft guns simply weren’t made to shoot at such a low angle. The enemy flyers had found a weakness and they were exploiting it.
“Ingenious,” Hunter muttered, grudgingly giving the attackers credit.
The other type of attacking aircraft was a small, swift, jet-powered seaplane—a type Hunter had never seen. These airplanes looked almost as if they were assembled from a kit of some sort. They were smaller than the smallest service-type jet, just barely fifteen feet in overall length. Their jet engine was fitted above the boat-like fuselage, sitting centered on the short, slightly sweptback wing. These fighters were also carrying missiles and cannons.
Working in tandem with the larger boats flying, the fighters too were operating at wave-top level, zipping in and out of the passages between their targets, pumping missiles and cannon shells into the Freedom Navy boats. All of the seaplanes, big and small, were painted in the same off-green ocean-camouflage color scheme, indicating an organized unit was in action. And they were performing a highly specialized, coordinated attack. Custom-made, it would seem, to stopping a large flotilla in its tracks.
Hunter was in amongst them in seconds, streaking down low between a frigate and an armed Freedom Navy trawler. A large, rather sluggish flying boat was making its way in the opposite direction when its pilot, obviously very surprised to see an F-16 coming right towards him, pulled up sharply. Hunter could hear the big plane’s engines scream as it sought altitude. In doing so, the pilot had exposed his undefended belly to Hunter. He promptly deposited a Sidewinder into its hind quarters—the missile’s heat-seeking system apparently finding something to its liking there.
The enemy airplane continued to climb for a few seconds after the missile exploded inside it, its gunners still diligently firing away at the frigate below them. Then—most likely—a fuel line ruptured, caught fire, and sparked some ammunition. The airplane was just 500 feet above the water when it disappeared in an enormous explosion, showering the ships below with a rain of fiery debris.
Hunter was already picking out his next target—one of the smaller sea fighters. A lone jet was zooming in on an armed Freedom Navy trawler that was desperately zigzagging to deny the attacker a clear shot. Hunter was on the fighter’s tail in seconds. A short squeeze of his nose-mounted 20mm cannon Six Pack proved more than enough. The sea fighter exploded instantly, pieces of flaming wood and metal bouncing off the F-16’s nose as it swept up and over the rescued trawler.
Hunter put the 16 on its ass and did a 360-degree loop. At once, he was on the tail of a large seaplane just as it was beginning its attack on a Freedom Navy converted workboat. All of the ship’s hands were on deck firing at the
slow-moving airplane with everything from a shotgun and rifles to pistols. Yet the ship’s fairly sophisticated deck gun just couldn’t get a clear shot at the flying boat. The airplane’s gunners, meanwhile, were delivering a punishing barrage upon the workboat. The stream of fire coming from the starboard side of the airplane was incredible.
Hunter opened up the Six Pack once again, chopping off the big plane’s tail as well as its radar tube. The airplane immediately hit the water, bounced up once, then twice. Hunter stayed on its tail, lowering his flaps to slow the F-16 down. He pressed his cannon trigger again, catching the airplane coming up off its third bounce and ripping away one of its port engines. The Beriev bounced once more, then plunged nose first into the sea, sending up a fiery stream of water and steam.
Still, the attackers pressed the battle. While they were no match for his interceptor, their sheet numbers proved devastating to the Freedom Navy boats. There were at least twenty of the big flying boats passing in and out of the Liberte Marina flotilla, with just as many of the smaller jets. The Freedom Navy had already lost at least eight boats and several more were burning uncontrollably.
Hunter was glad to see two Harriers arrive on the scene. He briefly discussed the situation with the jump-jet pilots, then the three fighters went to work.
The Harriers proved especially nimble in fighting the big flying boats. They would hover at 150 feet above the water, waiting for one of the lumbering seaplanes to commit to making a pass. Then the Harrier would pounce, ripping apart the slow, large craft with withering bursts of cannon fire. The big Berievs thus occupied, Hunter chased down the smaller, swifter sea-jets.
The battle raged for several more minutes before the attackers finally broke off and retreated toward the north. Hunter had half a mind to chase them, but a more important job would be to get back to the carrier and report the attack. The Harriers remained on the scene of the battle, directing rescue efforts for those Freedom Navy men still alive and in the water. Before leaving the scene, Hunter counted four large seaplanes downed, as well as eight smaller jets. Still, as many as a dozen of the Commodore’s boats were either sunk or sinking. Hunter estimated as many as 100 Liberte Marina crewmen were killed.
Lucifer Crusade Page 17