“Figured it was better than slapping you. Michael’s the very best there is. We gotta go. You up for this?”
Claudia stared down at the digital feed showing the green outline of a figure moving easily toward the missile launching tubes as if he belonged there. A crew of only thirty men to hide among. Well, he didn’t have to hide for long.
“Okay.” She nodded to herself. “Okay. I’ve got this.” She grabbed Trisha by taking a handful of her flight suit’s sleeve.
“Thanks, Trisha. Now get out of here.” And she shoved the woman out of her helicopter so that she tumbled onto the sand.
Trisha hit with a roll and ran for her own bird. Less than a minute later, they were both aloft. The final moves were coming and they had to be in position.
Chapter 29
Michael knelt in the deepest shadow beside a starboard-aimed missile launcher on the Grad Sviyazhsk missile corvette. The four angled launch tubes rose out of the deck like a growing thing.
He rolled out his Phase IV kit on the deck. With an electric screwdriver, he had the outer service plate off it in a minute flat. The missile’s plate was less forgiving; the missiles weren’t designed to be serviced in the tube. He had just pulled the inner cover plate free when a deep voice called down to him in Russian.
“What are you working on, Yuri?”
Michael didn’t look up but kept his attention focused ahead of him. In Russian he replied, “There is a warning light that we have a bad seal here. The captain said for me to fix right now. So I’m fixing it.”
“You’re not Yuri. Step into the light.”
Michael sighed. He really hadn’t expected the ruse to work.
He stepped forward, and even as the look of surprise crossed the man’s face, Michael had his hand over the man’s mouth. With a sharp twist, he broke the man’s neck. Using the momentum of the man’s collapse, Michael dumped him overboard. If the body was found, it would look more like an accident than if he’d put two bullets in the man’s forehead.
Michael went back to his task.
* * *
Claudia almost caught one of the helicopter’s skids in the waves when she saw the body fall over the side of the ship and quickly disappear astern. Catching a skid in the water would be fatal for the Maven and possibly for her as well. She had to be more careful. Michael was just coming out of his shell, and it would be cruel if she were to die and leave him only to crawl back into it.
When the figure returned to the missile tube, she calmed down and focused on her flying. Five more minutes and she’d be hovering less than thirty seconds behind the missile boat.
* * *
Michael slipped out his Phase IV hot-wire kit. It was much more sophisticated than the wire stripper and clips that he’d used on the fuel truck at Karachala. He jumpered into the programming lead without interrupting it. He didn’t want any warning lights going off on the boat’s bridge.
It took almost five minutes to program the missile correctly. One of the targeting options was a GPS system. The only problem was that the missile used the Russians’ own GLONASS system rather than the American one his controller was set for. He had studied the Russian interface enough to know it well, but it took three full minutes to be sure he had the settings correct.
He set the timer and began closing up the access panels.
* * *
Claudia remained in position. Three feet off the wave tops and idling forward at the same leisurely four knots as the Russian ship. The waiting was killing her. The worst was she didn’t know exactly what her next task was.
Bill’s message had said she’d know when to fire, but that she was to do it from over the missile ship. That way any observers would think her own Hellfire missile had also come from the Russians.
He really could have been a little clearer.
Then she understood.
Bill’s message did make perfect sense.
She heard Michael click his microphone key twice, announcing he was ready.
She swung hard to port, out over the Caspian, and then circled around to fly directly at the side of the ship. This time she did let the skids get wet as they cut through the wave tops.
* * *
Michael moved to the rail of the Russian ship and counted in his head. He double-clicked his microphone when there were fifteen seconds left on the countdown for the missile launch he’d just hot-wired.
At five seconds, he flipped his radio to the Azeri emergency frequency that Bill had given him.
At one second, he covered his face and eyes to protect his night vision and shifted behind a gun mount to protect himself from any backsplash from the rocket motor’s exhaust.
The 3M-54 “Sizzler” lit off with a roar, and he could hear it depart in a big hurry. By the time he looked, it was far to starboard and headed for the land. Thirty feet of rocket was about to make a hell of a bang.
With the missile traveling at just under the speed of sound, he had to wait twenty-nine seconds for it to cross the five miles of ocean and find its target. All hell was already breaking loose on the Russian ship. Everyone was shouting for information that no one had.
The scale of the explosion when it struck the Azeri shore was incredible. Even in Delta, they didn’t get to test such large-scale munitions. The tower of fire bloomed upward. The wooden forms-work for the foundation of where the new pipeline would emerge from the depths onto the land would be utterly destroyed.
He keyed his radio and began screaming his memorized message in Azeri.
The sharp sizzle of a Hellfire missile, a sound he knew well, snapped to life mere feet over his head.
He ducked, then looked up and back just in time to see one of the stealth Little Birds briefly lit in the backflash of the rocket motor. They’d fired so low that the Hellfire actually passed below the muzzles of the ship’s turreted machine guns as it rushed toward shore.
There was more panicked shouting coming from fore and aft of the Russian ship. That was his cue. He started to repeat his message, then cut it off in mid-word. He pulled on a black mask, crossed his arms over his chest, and let himself fall backward over the rail.
He splashed into the Caspian and did his best to pretend he was an invisible piece of driftwood.
Searchlights and wild gunfire sprouted from the ship even as its big engines roared to life and the propellers dug in. But none of it came near him. As far as he could tell, they were simply firing in all directions in panic, a swath of 30 mm shells cast forth upon the deep.
Then he saw it. The Russians would probably never know they’d made a hit as they roared off into the night, because it wouldn’t show on their radar.
By the light of the Point Brower patrol boat exploding into flames five miles away, he watched the shadow of a Little Bird helicopter tumble out of the sky.
* * *
By the time Michael swam the hundred yards separating them, the Little Bird had already sunk out of sight. He reached the middle of the flotsam and dove. He had to clear his ears twice before he was deep enough to reach the bird. With open sides, the cockpit had trapped no air to keep it afloat and the helo sank quickly.
In the darkness he found an opening and grabbed on. Copilot’s side. No one there. He groped across the cockpit as the helicopter jarred hard and slammed into him. They hadn’t had time to sink a hundred feet yet.
He ignored everything else and fought his way through the swirling wreckage over to the pilot.
His fingers found a limp figure in the darkness. He slapped the seat harness release and tried to shove the person out the pilot’s side door.
Trisha or Claudia. Which would be worse?
Don’t think, Gibson!
Something was blocking the pilot’s opening. He reached out and felt steel.
If he could see, his vision would be tunneling from lack of oxygen. Years of
training were all that kept him from the fatal mistake of gasping for air that every instinct in his body was screaming for.
Locking a fist through the pilot’s harness, he dragged the pilot out the copilot’s side of the craft. And launched them both into the air.
He gasped in a wracking breath that scraped across his lungs. He kept the pilot afloat, face up. No response. He couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive. Or which of the women it was through all the gear.
Which would be worse? Telling Bill or accepting his own loss?
Stop it!
His head cleared from the anoxia.
How had he surfaced so quickly?
The mangled helicopter floated just a few feet away.
But something was different. It didn’t float. It lay crumpled across the bow of a small submarine. Bill had dived under it and caught it across his bow.
Michael swam over, dragging the pilot with him.
“Who? Is she alive?” He heard the desperation in Bill’s voice as he stuck his head out of the hatch.
“Don’t know… Got to—” Breathe.
He handed the pilot to Bill without stopping to look and climbed back into the helicopter. He found the timer on the self-destruct charges, set it for ten minutes, and pulled the pin. He gave the Little Bird a kick, and it slid off the submarine and began its final plunge into the depths.
Bill was looking at him when he turned. “It’s Claudia. She’s breathing, I think. Hard to tell.”
“Give me a harness. We’ll run on the surface.”
In moments they were rigged and heading east at five knots. He sat with his back against the rear of the sub’s little conning tower. His feet dragged in the water to either side.
And Claudia lay in his arms.
Chapter 30
Michael was thankful that the exfiltration was uneventful, but that was the only good thing.
Trisha waited on the abandoned oil derrick that they’d identified as a rendezvous point. They hadn’t dared risk radio traffic. By now, every frequency was being monitored. Azeri patrol boats were circling the wreckage near shore and hunting for any watercraft.
To lighten the load of the May, they stripped the ammunition cans out of the backseat and the weapons off the external mounts. They loaded it all into the submarine.
Bill pointed the sub northeast and set it for a slow descent. He rode it down for the first minute to make sure it was on track before surfacing and swimming back to the derrick.
In two hours, ten miles away and five hundred feet down, a demolition charge would destroy the craft along with its load of U.S. military hardware. From that depth, nothing but a few air bubbles would reach the surface.
Michael climbed into the Little Bird’s tiny rear seat and cradled Claudia against him. The engine spun up, not fast enough. She took off, not soon enough. Medical help was several hours too far away.
They’d determined that Claudia was breathing and had no external signs of injury. It was all they could do. It would be four long hours back to the Peleliu before they could learn more unless she woke on her own.
She didn’t.
Chapter 31
Claudia woke slowly. Sounds, smells, soft voices impinged. Clean sheets. Echoes that told her she was aboard a ship. She opened her eyes to dim lights and Trisha slouched in a nearby chair.
“Hey there.”
Trisha jolted upright. “You’re awake?”
“No. I’m speaking to you from beyond the grave.”
“Uh, okay.” Then Trisha offered one of her electric smiles. “As long as you’re speaking, I’m cool with it. What’s it like over there?”
She inspected the room again. The Peleliu’s infirmary. “Safe.”
“Safe is good.”
Then it crashed back in. She tried to sit up and her head nearly exploded. She collapsed back onto the pillow.
“Yep!” Trisha was back to her merry elfin self. “You should have stayed beyond the pale. On this side of it, you have a really impressive concussion. Doc’s been hovering for three days. I should go get her.”
“No, wait.” Claudia grabbed Trisha’s arm to keep her in place, wincing against the wave of nausea even that motion set up. “If you do, they’ll want to talk about all that medical crap. What happened?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Falling out of the sky after they shot half a dozen shells into my turbine by pure blind luck.”
“Right.” Trisha settled back in her chair and propped her feet up on the bed. “I heard that was pretty spectacular. There was at least one shell that didn’t hit your turbine. It dug a major groove in your helmet, probably what concussed you. The boys said something about rescuing you with the submarine, but I never did get the whole picture.”
“They’re okay? And you?”
“We’re all fine. They’re around somewhere. You were the only one hurt.”
“They dragged your sorry behind out to the rendezvous point and we flew back, even hit Karachala airport again to fuel up on the way home. They had to waste the Maven, the sub, and every bit of my beautiful arsenal.”
“Bill me.” Claudia lay back and could feel the sleepies coming over her again.
“The mission was a hundred percent.”
Claudia fought back to full consciousness and opened her eyes to show she was listening.
“That radio message that Michael transmitted about the Russian attack was done in the name of that drunken officer they’d bribed, then safely marooned. He has very humbly and quietly accepted commendation as a hero of the Azeri people for crying out his warning, even if the warning came too late.” Trisha grinned wickedly. “Apparently he slept right through the whole thing.”
“But no one questions a hero.”
“But no one questions a hero,” Trisha agreed. “Bill and Michael did some quick communicating with the White House. A story was leaked about how the officer had suspected the Russians of preparing an attack on the future Azeri pipeline. His ship’s radio broken, he set out solo to defend his home soil but was too late and had his ship shot out from under him. Only the emergency radio in the rubber utility dinghy allowed him to cry his warning.”
Exactly what Claudia had figured out as she set up her final attack run. A hero and the loss of his ship gave a focus for the news and the people of Azerbaijan. United for the moment by something deeper than oil. They’d found pride in one of their citizens, a man apparently savvy enough to know when to keep his mouth shut.
“The Russians tried denying it. Right up until a European mapping satellite just, ahem, happened to be making a pass and testing new video technology for the first time. Kara captured crystal-clear images of the two shots and released them directly to a news service from a British lab that no one has ever heard of or will again. Kara says you did great, by the way. She didn’t even have to edit the footage to make it look as if both shots came from the Russians.”
“So glad I could help.” She could feel her voice slurring. She fought against the sleep; she wanted the whole story. “Give me the end.”
Trisha leaned forward and took her hand, which helped Claudia focus her attention.
“Russians are backpedaling as fast as they can. The whole crew on that patrol boat are probably going to the gulag or something. The blame went right up the ladder—to levels we’ll probably never hear about—laying blame right and left on whoever ordered the aggressive patrols in the first place. Iranian President Javad Madani has stepped into the breach with a Caspian Sea cooperation accord or some such thing. He’s the hero of the hour.”
Claudia nodded, letting her eyes drift closed. It had worked. A crazy, impossible gamble that only ten people would ever know about—from Emily Beale to the President to her action team—but it had worked. And they’d made it back.
“Where’s Michael?
”
If she managed to speak her question aloud, she didn’t stay awake for the answer.
* * *
For three days Michael, who had never doubted his actions, had come to doubt his sanity. Each hour he sat with Claudia, worrying over her unconscious state, had been torture. Each hour away from her had been worse.
Michael had finally descended into the unused bowels of the ship to get away from everyone. People who’d never spoken to him before were suddenly asking if he was okay, if there was anything they could do for him. He must really look like shit.
Of course, he hadn’t slept since that chair in the Scottish B and B.
Until now.
He’d been deep in the back corner of one of the empty barracks spaces usually packed with Marines. He’d sat because his legs were actually shaking with the exhaustion of his pacing.
Michael didn’t remember lying down on the bare mattress or the slam of exhaustion that knocked him out.
But he remembered the nightmares.
He never had nightmares.
Claudia falling from the sky, except this time the shell had been through her heart, not her helmet.
Nell breaking a branch beneath Claudia’s feet for sheer spite, sending her plummeting to the forest floor.
Worse, watching her face twist in agony as he was the one who fell, Claudia’s face staying in perfect focus even as he tumbled away from her to his death.
He woke as he slammed into the Somali desert from fifteen thousand feet, fighting a parachute the whole way, only to remember moments before he hit that he’d forgotten to pack it before he jumped.
It was wrong.
It was so wrong.
There was only one answer for either of them.
He hated it.
But that made it no less true.
* * *
The next time Claudia woke, she was surrounded.
Her infirmary room was crowded with the women of SOAR. They were all here, even Dilya. The doctor had to practically fight her way through.
Bring On the Dusk Page 29