“Messengers,” Coyote said. “In the end, it’ll help them, too. They’re going to have to push that flaming mass of metal over the side one way or another, and right now they’re working at cross angles to the wind. We turn, we give them a tail wind.”
“Dangerous.”
“It always is.”
Batman stared down at the flight deck, watching the coordinated chaos that represented one of the finest fire fighting actions he’d ever seen anywhere, in training films, in drills, in actual videotapes of disasters. The missiles that had hit the flight deck had come in at a low angle. One had plowed through four helos parked aft, another had taken out two E-2 Hawkeyes parked next to the island. He shuddered as he studied that particular hit. Another twenty feet and the missile would have snapped the tower right off the ship.
Finally, Batman said, “Do it. But don’t kill anyone in the process.”
“Okay, stand by,” the team leader shouted. “Hosemen, get over to the other side and get the windward hangar door open. It’ll take them about two minutes to get us abeam of the wind.” The team leader looked over at Beaman. “I hope to hell you’re right about this. DCC thinks you are.”
Beaman tried to speak, but all he could manage was a hoarse croak. Pain rattled down his throat as scorched tissue protested. The corpsman leaned over him and pressed a canteen of water into his hand. “Drink a little more — you’re headed down to sick bay, man.”
Beaman struggled to his feet and tried to shove the corpsman away. He took another slug of water in, rolled it around in his mouth and let it seep into the damaged tissue. Finally, he felt the tightness in his throat start to ease up. “Not yet,” he whispered. “I have to see if it works.”
The corpsman grabbed him by the arm and tried to pull him over toward a transport litter. “Going down to triage now.”
The team leader stepped between the two of them, breaking the corpsman’s hold on Beaman’s arm. “Not yet. He earned this.” A hard, shuddering, grating vibration ran up through the soles of their feet, and all three turned to stare at the hangar bay doors slowing inching back along their tracks. The world outside was solid gray, and sheets of rain were already pelting the remaining gear inside the hangar bay. Water slashed across the vastness of the hangar bay, flashing into steam as it hit the still raging fire. The howl of the fire competed with the hiss of steam and the keening of the wind through the four-foot gap in the beam of the ship.
“More. All the way,” the team leader said into his walkie-talkie.
Beaman broke away from the rest of them and walked unsteadily toward the massive, three-story metal doors. He heard a shouted curse, then the corpsman joined him, steadying him by holding one elbow as they moved as quickly as they could across the open bay. They fell in side by side along the line of men and women straining to move the massive bulk of the hangar doors.
Beaman found a handhold and felt a moment of despair at that massive inertia with which the steel doors resisted the best efforts of the team. The doors inched back achingly slow, grinding and squealing inch by inch over the greased tracks upon which they rode.
Then something gave. Almost imperceptibly, the doors picked up speed, increasing the thin slit window open to the weather outside.
The difference was noticeable almost immediately. The wind picked up, battering at the flames, driving them out of the open doors on the opposite side of the hangar. The fire licked hungrily at the edge of the deck above and the low catwalk that surrounded the flight deck. Beaman saw a canister life raft sway unsteadily as the flames reach it. First one support line gave way, then the second. The canister tumbled down into the fire, and as the plastic seal around it gave way, it gouted forth the eerie shape of an automatically inflating life raft. It seemed to float for a moment on top of the burning hot air, tossed upside down by the draft, and then the tough plastic vaporized in the flames. Beaman saw one small fragment spiraling in the updraft before the wind forced it out the other side of the ship.
“It’s working,” the team leader shouted. “Come on now — put your back into it!” Each person redoubled his efforts, pushing muscle and sinew past the point of pain, welding their flesh with that of the ship they sought to save.
“I see it,” Beaman shouted. “Grissom, I see the boundary of it.” He dropped his hold on the door, now sliding easily along its track, and raced forward to the fire. He stopped just twenty feet away, the hard pounding rain and wind almost driving him forward into the inferno involuntarily. He turned back to the team leader. “We need some shoring timbers, then some flat sheets of metal. And yellow gear.”
“You think it will work?” Grissom asked.
Beaman nodded. “The wind is driving the smoke away from us, the rain’s acting like a fogger, and we got fresh air coming in. Come on, we got to get it off the deck now.”
Within moments, the damage control team had a makeshift tractor rigged on the front of the yellow gear. “I got it,” Beaman said and stepped forward to take the driver’s seat.
“No way.” This time, the corpsman locked his arm around Beaman’s neck and pulled him back. Beaman felt pain flash in his upper arm, then looked up at the corpsman. The man’s features were fuzzy — and there was something about a fire, some reason Beaman had to stay awake, had to, had to get to the — With the urgency beating his brain, Beaman slid to the deck, unconscious.
The corpsman held up the empty syringe. “Morphine. It’ll do it every time,” he said aloud.
But no one was listening.
“That’s the last of them,” Batman said, his voice heavy with relief. Tilly the crane had just unceremoniously released the last burning aircraft over the open water, her steel cable almost at a forty-five degree angle in the gale force winds. “How the hell they pulled this off, I’ll never understand. Get the chief engineer down there. I want to know how bad the deck is.”
“He’s on his way, Admiral,” Coyote answered. “We’ve lost two Hawkeyes and four helos, along with the Tomcat.”
“Then let the small boys know they’re going to have to pick up the slack in SAR,” Batman said. “The Hawkeyes have enough crews on board to do a hot crew swap.”
“If we can launch,” Coyote said.
Batman stared at him, cold fire shining in his eyes. “Those people didn’t just beat that fire for me not to be able to launch aircraft. You tell the chief engineer it’s a question of when and how — not if. One way or another, I want metal in the air in fifteen minutes.”
1537 local (+8 GMT)
Prison compound
Pushed along by the giant hand of the wind at their backs, Tombstone and Lobo needed only a minute to find the beginning of the runway. It was marked by a circular turning area and a taxiway extending to the south. Without a word, Tombstone turned in that direction. His entire body felt bruised by the wind and rain; he was grateful that the ground was covered in some kind of crushed black rock rather than slick grass or, worse, mud. As it was he had to lean to the left at almost a thirty-degree angle to keep his balance, and his feet gouged sideways ruts in the rock with every step. He tried to keep the AK-47 protected by his body.
An enormous darkness loomed through the rain ahead. Tombstone found some bushes and crept along beside them, hunched over, until he was able to see that the dark shape was a mountain black and craggy. And at its base were several pairs of enormous sliding doors of what looked like galvanized metal. They were inset beneath a stony shelf in the side of the mountain, fronted by a tarmac apron that led to the taxiway. Hangars. Hangars, hidden from aerial surveillance by the mountain and a fringe of desperate-looking trees.
The hangar doors were all closed. How well-guarded were they? What would happen if he crept up for a little peak at —
He started when a hand tugged at his sleeve. He glanced back at Lobo, who pointed to the east. A pair of headlights was brightening the storm.
Lying flat on his belly beside the bushes with Lobo just behind him, Tombstone watched as a big dark s
edan — not a military-style vehicle — approached the hangars. Its horn blasted once, and one of the hangar doors slid open. Bright light poured through the aperture, giving Tombstone a view of what lay within. His heart gave a rapid stutter.
CUAVs. Not like the manta. These were smaller, double-arrowhead-shaped. Like the one that had attacked him in Maryland.
And even in the narrow space he could see, there were dozens of them, stored on tall racks like private boats in a fancy dry dock. Dozens of them, waiting to go.
The sedan pulled just inside the hangar and stopped. An armed guard appeared from somewhere, and opened the back door. Another guard moved into view, escorting a third man. The third man was considerably taller than the others, and dressed in civilian attire. The guards hustled him into the backseat of the sedan. For an instant, just before the door slammed closed, Tombstone had a clear view of the man’s face.
It was Phillip McIntyre.
1540 local (+8 GMT)
Tomcat 306
USS Jefferson
Do your job, Hot Rock thought, over and over again, the words tumbling through his head like a mantra. Two Tone’s right. Just do your job and nobody can blame you, no matter how things turn out. Do your job, do your job…
And of course, in his case, that meant protecting his lead’s ass. Any actual shooting would be executed only in conjunction with Neanderthal’s efforts, and at his direction; for the most part, Hot Rock was there as defender and nothing more.
The battle was surreal in the gray soup. Attention focused strictly on the video game screen of the HUD, with perhaps an occasional glance at some other instrument. This radar blip was Neanderthal; that one was a Flanker; that other one, an incoming missile. Far more Flanker blips than anything else.
Hot Rock kept his gaze focused on the instruments, and his hearing on Neanderthal’s signals radioed from the lead’s position ahead and below. Now and then, when so directed, Hot Rock triggered a missile. Like all the Vipers, he was carrying only two Sidewinders, because the heat-seekers became notoriously unreliable in extremely wet conditions. But he believed he might have contributed to the shooting down of a Flanker with one of his Sparrows. “Nice shot,” Two Tone said over ICS, “but don’t get wild now; remember your job.” Hot Rock felt relieved. It was good to have someone experienced tell you what to do.
With another part of his head Hot Rock kept track of other reports flashing over the air. Splash one, splash two, splash three Flankers. Then a Mayday. One American down. Another. Mayday. Mayday. Unimaginable to bail out in these weather conditions; what hope of surviving the trip down, far less being in the water?
Don’t think about that. Do your job. Fly, watch, fire. Follow the leader.
Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Missile blips appearing unexpectedly on the radar screen, other blips disappearing. Vipers disappearing.
“The stealth bogey,” Hot Rock blurted over ICS. “Two Tone, that UAV they briefed us about, it’s here. It’s taking people out left and — ”
“Do your job, goddammit!” Two Tone snarled. “Stop trying to figure out — ”
The blip appeared and vanished from his HUD almost before it registered on his eye. At the same time, Neanderthal’s blip disappeared, too. There was a throbbing glow in the clouds, swiftly consumed by darkness.
“Neanderthal!” Hot Rock shouted. No response.
Then came Two Tone’s cry from the backseat: “Shit, Hot Rock, get us out of here! That thing’s gonna be after us next!”
But Hot Rock had noticed something. A pattern in the vanished Vipers. The UAV was cutting straight across the Americans, from east to west. Nothing fancy. Locating American aircraft and firing at them from very close range.
Hot Rock saw this, and once he did, it was his responsibility. He owned it. He had to do something about it.
“Shut up, Two Tone,” he said, and banked hard to the right. Now, instead of staring at his HUD, he gazed through it. Let his eyes take in the radar information peripherally, while he searched for holes and gaps in the clouds.
And he saw it. Briefly, almost hallucinogenically, the UAV was there, swimming like a great sea creature through the sky. And Hot Rock remembered something from the briefing: Like American stealth aircraft, the UAVs had their engine exhausts located on top, where they could not be easily spotted by ground-based infrared detectors. But airborne sensors were a different matter….
“Fox One!” he cried, and triggered a Sidewinder. The missile hurtled off his left wingtip, unraveling a garland of smoke behind it as it went, and curved toward the bogey. Instantly, the bogey nosed over in a maneuver so abrupt it formed almost a right angle. Hot Rock couldn’t conceive of the G-forces involved… then realized the UAV was indifferent to G-forces. As long as its wings didn’t snap off, it was fine.
And it was turning toward him. That was the next thing Hot Rock saw before a raft of fast-moving clouds swept across his sight, and the manta disappeared.
Two Tone was howling from the backseat. Hot Rock felt an unnerving moment of doubt, of fear that once again he was screwing up, but of course it was too late to back out now. The manta was after him.
His mind skipped through bits of information the red-headed woman, Tomboy, had fed to the Vipers concerning this bogey. He already knew one thing: She’d been wrong that it depended on visual targeting data. Not in this weather. It had radar, too.
But maybe it liked using sight the best. If it did…
That reminded him of something else: The UAV was subsonic.
The missile-lock alarm sounded in his headset at the same instant he yanked the stick to the left and slammed the throttles forward. A brilliant yellow streak ripped the darkness, passing beneath the Tomcat as it pulled into a vicious, diving left turn. Hot Rock had already tightened his belly against it, but the special darkness of blackout spiraled in from the fringes of his vision. He waited until all he could see was the center of the HUD, then eased the stick forward. The darkness receded; in comparison, the edge of the typhoon looked almost bright and cheery.
The Tomcat was diving now, afterburners throbbing, propelling the aircraft past mach one, and then mach two. Below, the gloom peeled back and he saw the ocean, a savage froth of white and gray. Back came the stick, as did the spiraling darkness. Then he eased out, a hundred feet above the water. “Two Tone!” he cried. “Check our six!”
No answer. “Two Tone!”
Nothing. He realized he’d lost his backseater to G-force blackout. He was on his own.
And he realized something else: That made him happy. Relaxed. Now, whatever he did was entirely his own responsibility. No one to blame, no one to receive blame from.
He banked to the right, then the left, looking over his shoulder. Thought he saw a discoloration dropping out of the clouds. Eased back on the throttle. Let it catch up a bit. Let it —
There was nothing on his radar screen. No one to keep an eye on his tail. He grabbed the control to manually extend the wings, and did so. From behind, the extension would be invisible. Then he waited. Waited…
Over the headset, a moan. “Wha… Hot Rock — ”
“Goodnight,” Hot Rock said, and simultaneously yanked back on the stick and jammed the throttles full forward. This time he actually felt the blood rush out of his head, like water swirling down a drain; the spiral of darkness closed down fast. He pushed the stick forward and grunted as he slammed up against the shoulder straps of his harness. Below him, through his clearing vision he saw the manta-shaped UAV zip through the airspace he had lately occupied.
Putting the nose over, Hot Rock dove and opened up with his cannon. The tracers cut across the UAV like bright needles, but the UAV immediately cranked to the right in one of its physics-defying maneuvers.
Hot Rock executed a more gentle turn in the same direction, and watched his radar screen. There it was. There it was! The cannon hits might not have put the UAV out of commission, but they had holed it, destroyed the integrity of its radar-deflecting slants and cur
ves. There was its signature on his screen, bright as daylight.
“Fox One,” Hot Rock said calmly to anyone who might be listening, and triggered his next-to-the-last Sparrow. The missile leaped away, boring off into the haze. On the HUD, its signal merged with the UAVs. Up ahead the clouds brightened, then dimmed, in artificial lightning.
On the HUD, both signals were gone.
Hot Rock realized something strange had happened to his face; it had an achy, stretched feeling to it. God, what if all the high-g maneuvers had permanently damaged something? Some muscle or nerve? What if…
Then he realized what it was: He was grinning.
1540 local (+8 GMT)
Hanger bay
USS Jefferson
Like everyone else in the hanger bay, Jackson was expected to help battle the fires and damage the missile had done in the hanger bay. There were tons of debris to get out of the way, blackened and useless aircraft to shove into the passing waves, bodies to help move. Time passed in a sweaty, terrifying blur. So this is war, Jackson kept thinking. So this is war.
And outside, the storm just got worse and worse. All the exterior doors were wide open because of the smoke, and wind-driven rain kept blasting in, hard enough to hurt if any of the spray caught you. It also made the decking slippery and dangerous. But the most terrifying thing was the waves. You didn’t expect to look out through those doors and see the crest of a wave pass by, all white and sharp on top like something with teeth. You never expected to see waves that big.
And yet despite his fear, Jackson carried on, doing whatever needed to be done. He worked alongside brothers and sisters at times, and alongside white men or brown men or yellow men at other times. Officers snapped orders, of course, but the next thing you knew, that same man or woman would be right beside you, helping lift a piece of metal off some trapped sailor.
Once he and Plane Captain Beaman were both commandeered by some firemen to help move debris out of the way of a hose. Together, they heaved against a jagged chunk of metal plating that had once been on the outside of the carrier. It seemed to weigh a ton, but they got it out of the firemen’s way. Afterward, for a moment Jackson found himself staring straight into his plane captain’s eyes. There was something speculative there that infuriated Jackson. He knew what it meant. He knew that Beaman didn’t trust him, thought he’d screwed up Bird Dog’s plane. Been incompetent, been lazy. Thought that this kind of work, hauling pieces of metal around, was probably more Jackson Ord’s speed.
Typhoon Season c-14 Page 24