Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Two parachute riggers were waiting with his gear. The moment he entered, they began to put it on him over his flight suit. First he got the nylon webbing harness that would be his parachute harness if the ejection seat fired. Helmet. Comm cord. Nine-millimeter Beretta in holster, small clip folding knife in his right sleeve pocket. Campbell was watching from the passageway, his own helmet under his arm.

  “We don’t even have backseaters. What kind of mission is this? Why are you wasting time with this crap?”

  “Someone needs to do it. If we have to launch, they’ll call us. Got a gun?”

  “A what?” S-3 aviators almost never flew anywhere that required them to carry a gun.

  “A gun. Petty Officer Lorenz, get the man a gun.”

  Campbell raised his arms and the PRs strapped the weapon on his harness.

  “You got coffee? Cookies?” Soleck realized he was talking to dispel his nerves.

  Campbell just looked at him.

  “Okay, okay. We’ve got to go.” He picked up his helmet bag, weighted with publications and kneeboard cards, and started up the ladder to the flight deck. One of the PRs blew his nose.

  “Good luck, thir,” he slurred.

  Soleck ducked into his seat, checked the spreader pin to make sure that he would have a parachute if all went ill, and then ducked back out the ladder and started around the plane. He checked the sonobuoy load and the chaff/flare mix, and he looked at the fans in the engines and he looked at the hydraulics. It was the fastest walk around of his life. He spent some time on the wheels and he paid attention to the state of the tailhook, which was intact and showed no signs of breaking. Then he gave the tail a slap and smiled anxiously at the gray evening, already on the landing. He wriggled up the steps and into the plane. Campbell had the auxiliaries up. Soleck plugged in his comm cord and buckled his harness to the seat.

  “Ready to fly?”

  “You worry about your part, I’ll take mine.”

  Soleck turned and looked at Campbell. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, I want to get back without ejecting, and I want you to get this fucking plane off the deck and back on it without making ten passes, Soleck.”

  Soleck glared back. Anger helped. He refused to let Campbell deflate him. “Okay, Brian. In the meantime, you do your job and don’t leave it to me to get your emitters from the EW module, your surface picture, and your ASuW info. You don’t have Craw to back you up here. Understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll worry about my landing when I get to it.”

  A hesitant intake of breath. “Sorry, man.” Still resentful. Maybe still afraid of Soleck’s landings.

  “No problem.” To Soleck, anger felt better than the fear.

  They started to go through the checklist.

  “NOW LAUNCH THE ALERT THIRTY. NOW LAUNCH THE ALERT THIRTY.”

  “That would be us.”

  Someone passed under the nose and Soleck could feel the minute change in weight as the chocks were removed. He powered the engines up to full. “Ready to go for a ride?” he asked, unconsciously echoing Captain Rafehausen.

  “Good to go.”

  Soleck snapped a salute at the launch officer, and the plane slammed forward down the cat. Ten seconds later they were going for altitude.

  “How’s the back end?”

  “Sweet. MARI will be up in one. ISAR up. We’re good.”

  Soleck turned east and headed for the last reported position of the Esek Hopkins.

  “Get Alpha Xray on comms.” Alpha Xray was the coordinator for surface contacts.

  “Got ’em.” Campbell switched off to talk and Soleck could see his lips moving. Soleck’s screen began to show the datalink, and contacts popped up all over the sea between them and the coast. Still climbing, Soleck used his minimal pilot controls over the MARI to image and tag two contacts while Campbell talked. The contact marked as a white merchant ship in the ASuW module was a dhow. He marked it as such, looked for a bigger banana on surface-search radar and found one, miles farther out to sea than the former contact. He imaged it. Merchant. The big superstructure aft was clear as day.

  “No contact on the cigarette boats, if they’re even out.” Campbell began to target and image every contact on the screen. The sea was still running high, although not enough to move the carrier around. Campbell stopped a moment, listening to some communication from the boat.

  “We’re going to Emcon Charlie. Admiral thinks that cigarette boats might be targeting our comms once they get close.”

  Soleck passed over the gator freighter, USS Yellowjacket. “Lots of seasick jarheads,” he noted. Yellowjacket carried the battle group’s detachment of Marines and their air support, mostly CH-46 helicopters. He continued to turn east and climb slowly.

  “Esek Hopkins reports a fast-moving surface contact on radar. I’ve got it in link.”

  Soleck looked down at his screen, even as Campbell was trying to image the contact.

  “Try ISAR, Brian.” Without a second plane, MARI would seldom give a good image of a fast-moving target.

  “I can’t get a lock with the surface-search. I’ll try periscope mode. Got it.”

  The image was a blob with a tall radar spike at the stern, hardly a clear picture like the one MARI provided, but enough to guess that this was a small, fast boat with a huge engine. Both of them had seen similar images in the Adriatic, hunting smugglers. Campbell called in his confirmation.

  The contact was given a neutral symbol, a white square with a dot. Campbell began to search the waters around it.

  “Esek Hopkins is requesting permission to fire if it enters the battle group’s formation.” Campbell sounded tense. “Damn! Where are the others?”

  Soleck looked at his tiny screen and whipped his head back and forth, trying to keep his instrument scan good while looking for surface contacts and trying to think through the problem. The cigarette boats had to be coming down the coast from the north and then heading at them the shortest possible distance. He wondered again how they were targeting. It had to be the submarine they had tagged two days back, which would explain why the boats hadn’t got to them in the night. Their targeting was old, the carrier had moved, and the boats were trying to find them. If the carrier had been north two days ago— “Look north,” Soleck called.

  Soleck turned north, listening for instructions from the tower. They were the only aircraft in the air. The Jefferson, now alarmed, was launching two F-18s. The F-18 pilots were as sick as the rest of the aircrew, and Soleck hoped no one was about to blow a sinus and end his career. Soleck ran an emitters check, just letting the ESM equipment show him every electronic signal coming off the water. The battle group was relatively quiet, with Emcon Charlie keeping signals to a minimum. He could see a surface-search radar on the merchant ship, and he quickly logged it in the link. That would prevent future mis-ID.

  Out to the northwest, ahead of the battle group, was a small, anomalous signal in a radio frequency. Soleck tracked it with radar, using the periscope mode that had worked for Campbell. He got a hit, a small hit, and imaged it with ISAR.

  “Bingo. Brian, look at that.”

  Ahmed Fazrahi was tired, wet, cold, and angry. The fatigue, wet, and cold were all the results of three days spent continuously on the water, looking for the American ships. It seemed like a remarkable coincidence that the Iranian men who had sent him on this mission should lose their ability to track the Americans just a day before they had to launch the mission. Because of the lost targeting, he and his men had spent days tracking the American battle group, strung out in a line forty miles long and using satellite cell phones provided by the smooth Colonel Namjee to communicate. They had a radio direction finder to try and find their prey. It was nerve-racking, dangerous work, and one of their boats had vanished in the storm. Twice they had had to put in to harbors on the Kenyan coast for fuel and food.

  No one complained. The younger men prayed to Allah or simply stared
into the endless sea. The older men made jokes or talked about normal things. The market. Funny people from their villages. Fazrahi listened, but he was silent. The anger grew. He knew he was being used. As long as Americans died, he didn’t care who used him. But the lack of targeting made the mission almost impossible, and he thought he and his boats would be dead if they were discovered. For nothing.

  The big powerboat slammed over a wave and he kept his hand light on the wheel, ready to respond to her tendency to yaw at the crest. And then, just for a second at the top of the giant wave, he saw a low gray dagger shape off to the south. A warship, pale gray on the dark gray of the horizon. Not his target, but surely a picket ship for the target. He raised his cell phone to his lips and used his thumb to hit the call button.

  “Close in on me. Full power! I have the enemy in sight.” He drove the boat forward, powering through the trough of the great waves. “Go for the carrier’s stern. If you can’t hit that, go for the big ship with the Marines, the one that looks like a smaller carrier. Acknowledge.”

  Three boats responded.

  Campbell put the new contact in the link and tried to pass it to Alpha Xray on the ship. Both of them were trying to do the work of two men and they had never had a chance to run the postlaunch checklist.

  “Got another, north of the first,” Brian said.

  “Tell Alpha Xray they’re spread in a search line over thirty miles of sea.”

  “Contact Two is turning in.”

  “Contact One is increasing speed.” That in a tinny voice from Esek Hopkins.

  “Okay, Brian. Get us our engagement rules.”

  “Roger. Hopkins is asking the same. F-18s are two minutes to launch.”

  One minute too late, Soleck thought. He made his decision and turned north, leaving Hostile One to the Esek Hopkins. They had a 76mm radar-guided deck gun that ought to be crushingly effective against a fiberglass boat. He put the nose down and pushed the throttle past military and down to max. The twin turbofans roared.

  “Contact Three has gone to seventy knots and turned south.”

  “Contact One has entered the formation. She’s passing Hopkins.”

  Going for the carrier? Contact One was emitting constantly now on a radio frequency. Somewhere in the battle group, someone was trying to talk to her. Maybe she would turn.

  “Contact One is two minutes from Yellowjacket.” Someone on the Hopkins was on the ball.

  Campbell labeled a new contact “Contact Four,” just north and west of the formation and already coming south and east. Soleck now had the rooster tails of Contact Two in visual sight, and he began to dump speed, easing the throttle back and using his flaps and his attitude. It was a very pretty piece of flying, if he had to say so himself. He turned hard to the east, almost crossing the cigarette boat’s stern, and then ran up her wake. He was trying to frighten her off. She didn’t change her course.

  “Alpha Xray, this is Alpha Hotel One-Zero-One,” Soleck called. “Contact Two is still on course.”

  “All units, this is Alpha Xray, over. Weapons free. Repeat, weapons free.” On the screen, Contacts One through Four blinked from squares to red diamonds. “Contact are designated hostile. Repeat, contacts are designated hostile. Esek Hopkins will engage Hostile One. Alpha Hotel One-Zero-One, can you engage Hostile Two, over?”

  Soleck finished his turn, having flown through one hundred and eighty degrees on a wingtip, only meters above the wave crests. He was looking at the stern of the little boat, less than a mile away.

  “Engaging.”

  He had to find a balance between too much speed, which would ruin his shot, and too little speed, so that he wouldn’t catch his target in time. He could see the big gray shape of the carrier through the haze ahead of the cigarette boats.

  “F-18s are launching.”

  The S-3 doesn’t have a bombsite, and shooting unguided rockets requires a steady hand, practice, and a lot of luck. Soleck ran off most of the mile of separation. He was dead astern. He could see a man on the boat. If they turned, he’d lose his shot.

  “Esek Hopkins is firing.”

  He pushed the throttle back down and used his flaps to slow until he was barely moving relative to the boat, like a hawk swooping on its prey. Four hundred meters. A man on the stern raised something to his shoulder and fired. Soleck hoped it wasn’t a missile.

  “Weapons hot,” called Campbell.

  He fired his whole left pod, every rocket in succession. He’d never have another chance.

  The plane moved as they rippled away. The first struck just to the right and the second a little farther to the right. He touched the stick, trying not to overcompensate, and his aim point drifted over the boat just as the rocket’s force caused it to deviate from its course. The third hit right in the crew compartment, and the fourth disappeared into a secondary explosion.

  “Hostile Two destroyed.” He pulled them up and hard to port, turning to look for the other two boats. Campbell dropped chaff and flares in case the boat had shot a MANPAD, a man-portable air defense missile. He managed to get his chaff/flare combination going and use his screen while communicating. It was as if he had three hands. “Hostile One destroyed. Hopkins shot her.”

  Soleck and Campbell were leaning forward now, trying to find Hostile Three in the haze. Soleck looked down on the screen. Somebody’s radar was still tracking Hostile Three. He pulled farther to port.

  An F-18 flashed by under his wing, only a few meters away.

  “Fuck!” Campbell shouted, slamming back in his seat. “Where’s his wingman?”

  Soleck saw the second F-18 firing something under his wing at a point off to the west.

  “Hostile Four destroyed.”

  Where’s Hostile Three? Soleck was still turning. The haze was thicker here, as if there were a low-lying cloud right in front of the battle group. He saw the F-18 come out of the haze, very low and climbing. Soleck steadied his turn into a very slight descent and waited. If Hostile Three was still in the game, she’d come out of the haze right—

  —there. He gave himself an “A” for situational awareness. Now he was broadside on to a target moving at sixty knots and he had four rockets left. This was going to be the deflection shot from hell.

  Hostile Three was turning a little to port. She was planning to bypass the carrier. She was going for the Yellowjacket and two thousand Marines.

  Ahmed Fazrahi watched his men die. He had never expected more of them than this, that they die bravely, pushing their boats at the foe. He hated the Americans for the casual way their superior technology, their planes and their guns, swatted at his boats until the other three were just plumes of dirty black smoke on the water.

  There was nothing he could do to make it better. With targeting, he might have hit the enemy in the dark, which he had thought was their best chance when they were training. Now he had one boat and he elected to go for the nearest target, a small carrier. A “Marine Landing Ship.” He remembered it from the recognition cards in training.

  “Allahu Akbar!” he shouted at the wind and shoved the throttle all the way forward.

  The * was huge in Soleck’s windscreen. On the deck, someone was firing a thirty-millimeter grenade launcher. It made tiny white puffs and the shells made an inferno of explosions in Hostile Three’s wake. Soleck changed his lineup so that all his shots would go wide of the gator freighter if he missed his target. The grenade launcher kept firing and something else was coming in, probably deck guns from somewhere else in the formation. It occurred to him that he was in danger from friendly fire.

  The cigarette boat staggered a moment and then drove on. Fort Klock had turned out of her place in the formation and her bows appeared with a huge wave as she drove toward her target, her deck gun firing. Hostile Three was definitely slowing. Soleck got his wings level and fired.

  Whoosh.

  Way off, far astern.

  Whoosh, whoosh. Overshot ahead and then closer.

  Whoosh.

&
nbsp; Hostile Three blew up in a spectacular explosion that rocked Soleck in his plane and showered the flight deck of the Jefferson and the Yellowjacket with debris. Everyone claimed the kill later. There was no way of saying whose shell or rocket hit the cigarette boat as she made her final run at her own target. But Campbell and Soleck were always sure it had been theirs, and so was the rest of the S-3 community.

  Campbell reached over and slapped his back.

  “Shit hot!”

  Soleck grinned at him and turned east for the coast.

  “Hey!” Campbell looked over at him, tension still leaving little white lines around his mouth. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

  Soleck was looking north and south. “Ask Alpha Xray if they think there were only four contacts. We need to be released for our mission. We’re late.”

  “We’re what? What mission?”

  “Did you read the classified mission briefing I handed you?”

  Campbell looked contrite.

  “No wonder you asked why you were wearing a gun, Brian. We’re going in over the coast to pick somebody up. Spook stuff.”

  “No shit.”

  Behind them, the sun started its final descent toward the deck.

  South Coast of Kenya.

  The Cessna was heavy with passengers, and the fuel had gone from marginal to critical in the last half-hour. Alan kept the plane flying right along the coast road once he was safe in Kenya’s airspace, ready to land the moment his engine coughed. By his calculations, Mike’s roadside field was only a few miles farther along. He let the plane sink lower.

  Lao was silent, withdrawn. Harry was sitting next to Alan in front, equally silent, and Alan wondered if he was thinking about the last time they had landed on a road in Africa. Alan was past exhaustion, into some new place where his mind worked but his body responded very slowly to new stimuli. He was flying almost exclusively with his right hand, because every movement hurt the left. He rested it on the yoke for balance, but he no longer trusted its grip.