Almost as if he were reading Geffar’s thoughts and doubts, Hardcastle called on the secure channel: “Two-Six, what’s your status?”
“Still in close formation with target one.”
“He’s about three miles from shore,” Hardcastle reported. “Customs is ten minutes out to assist in intercepting ground pickups. Two-Five is RTB with the children from the target two intercept. Two-Seven is launching to intercept targets three, four or five depending on which is easiest for him. We’ve got an unarmed Sky Lion airborne to assist with the surface targets.”
“Thanks for the update,” Geffar said. “Continue to monitor. Get two Seagulls ready to track target one after he comes off his land drops. Two-Six will prosecute any shore targets we see—we’ll have a better chance of making the intercept on land.”
“Say again, Two-Six? You want Seagulls to take over for you on the Cheyenne?
“Affirmative. I’m not doing any good up here. We’ll have the Seagulls track this guy as far as they can back to wherever he came from.”
There was a noticeable hesitation from Hardcastle—he still felt that the airborne smugglers should be dealt with before they had a chance to get over land. But he gave her a “Roger” and kept his thoughts to himself . . .
Gullivan Bay was approaching rapidly. This had been a favorite spot for smugglers for several centuries, with almost four hundred square miles of tiny islands, inlets, marshes, bogs and invisible beaches, and limited access to the few inhabitable places. Airboats were usually needed in the area—there were few places to land a helicopter, much less a monster like a Sea Lion tilt-rotor, and any boats with propellers might quickly find themselves caught in shallow weed-choked waters. The smuggler’s plane swooped low, only a few yards above the water, so low that even the aged bent willows and cypress trees towered over the plane.
“He’s throttled back to about eighty knots,” Geffar radioed back to Hardcastle on Hammerhead One. “Looks like he’s getting ready to make a drop.”
“Roger,” Hardcastle replied. “We’re launching a Seagull drone to intercept him on the way out. We read your altitude as less than thirty feet. Do you confirm that?”
“That’s confirmed,” Geffar replied. “He’s low and slow.”
“This might be a good chance to try a shot at his rudder or one engine,” Hardcastle said. “Even if he loses control he won’t fall very far and he’ll land in the marshes. The damage should be minor, to everybody. I recommend giving it a try.”
“No ... I want no other Hammerhead units even to deploy weapons if children are nearby. We can’t risk it.”
Hearing only silence, Geffar returned her concentration on the Cheyenne as it approached its drop point.
Down below at least six airboats suddenly popped out from under the trees. “Airboats beneath me,” she radioed. “Six . . . drop in progress. Mark and record drop point.”
Their operation was done with military-like precision. The airboats were just a few feet away from the impact point as the fiberglass cases hit the marshy water. The agile, speedy propeller-driven boats did not seem to slow down at all as the cases were scooped up and secured at the front of each flat-bottomed craft. As Geffar peeled away to the left and began circling the drop point, the Cheyenne made a hard right turn and headed back out to sea at low altitude.
Each airboat had one fiberglass case on board, so Geffar picked the slowest boat and began tracking it. “Shark, do you have a radar plot on any of these surface targets?” Geffar radioed.
“Negative,” from Hardcastle. “We’re trying to tune out the foliage and we get intermittent targets, but nothing the system can lock onto, and you’re at the northern edge of coverage by KEYSTONE radar. The Customs chopper is five minutes away, and we have one Sky Lion on the way.”
“I suggest they try infrared to pick out the airboats among the trees. Also that Collier County sheriffs block off routes 951 across Big Marco Pass, route 92 out of Gullivan Bay and route 41 through the state park. These guys are still a few miles from shore—we may be able to get some of them.” She focused in on the airboat she was pursuing, and groaned. “On my surface target... they’ve got a child on board there too. Don’t fire on them ...”
Geffar felt sick as she began her pursuit. The young boy on the airboat, who, unlike the other kids, looked Caucasian, was clutching the airboat’s raised pilot’s chair as the boat sped across the murky water. The man in the front of the airboat, also a Caucasian, held a shotgun cradled in one arm while hanging on tight. The kid could have been kidnapped, or an innocent relative of one of the smugglers who had gone out for a ride with his uncle or father, not knowing that he was to be a living shield against the Hammerheads.
The course the smugglers decided to take was relatively clear of foliage for a mile or so, so Geffar brought her Sea Lion down closer to the water, just ten feet above the airboat. The airboat became more unstable, swishing now left, now right, as the airflow through the boat’s directional rudders and fan was disrupted by its rotors. The pilot yelled something at the gunman, and the gunman promptly raised the shotgun, took quick aim, and fired at the Sea Lion—
“No, ” Geffar yelled, and yanked the cyclic hard left, dodging away just as the gunman fired. She felt a sharp impact somewhere on the right side of the AV-22 just behind the cockpit, and immediately climbed a few hundred feet and checked the engine instruments. “Check for damage on the right wing,” she called back on interphone. “I think we took a hit.” One of her four tactical crewmen low-crawled over the sliding cargo door on the right side and peered out through the wide window, keeping his head clear in case another blast came through. “I see a few large black spots on the underside of the wing and right flap,” the crewmen reported, “but the nacelle looks okay and I don't see any fuel or fluid leaks ...”
“All right, the plane feels okay . . . we’re going back in.” She banked right, started searching for the airboat, found it and began a gradual descent back toward it. When she was about a hundred feet above it, she called out over the interphone: “Hey, I don’t see the boy on the airboat! He was standing on the left side of the airboat holding onto the seat, I don’t see him anymore. He must have fallen off . . .” Geffar started an immediate hover, stopping her forward momentum so abruptly her copilot’s shoulder-harness reel locked as his body was thrust forward. “Prepare to launch the RHIB. Two-man team. I want that boy found.” Gradually she brought the Sea Lion down to the surface of the saltwater marsh and lowered the cargo ramp. A moment later the RHIB was in the water and GefiFar was immediately airborne again as soon as the inflatable boat was clear. It took less than five minutes for Geffar to relocate the airboat and take up the pursuit again.
“Do you see him anywhere on that airboat?” she called out to her copilot.
“Negative.” The copilot had lowered the telescopic scanner goggles and was searching the airboat as it rushed in and out of sight beneath huge magnolias and drooping trees. “I don’t see anything ...”
“I have to know,” Geffar muttered.
“Two-Six, this is boat one,” a crewman on the RHIB radioed. “We found him, seems okay ...”
Geffar clicked on the Chain Gun pod, waited a few seconds until the stowed pod had motored out of the fuselage and locked into position, then armed the cannon and transferred control of the TADS/PNVS nose sensor to her targeting goggles. She flipped the WARNING/TARGET shot mode switch, centered the aiming reticle on the airboat and locked on the sensor so she could concentrate more on flying the Sea Lion at low altitude. After gaining another fifty feet to be sure she cleared a few of the larger trees, she pulled the trigger on the Chain Gun.
Perhaps there was a glitch in the fire-control computer, the electronic system that linked range and azimuth information from the nose sensor and air data from the Sea Lion’s flight-control system to train the Chain Gun in its intended target; or perhaps the gun system somehow mirrored its crew’s thoughts and feelings of anger and revenge. But however it happ
ened, there was no eruption of waterspouts fifty yards ahead of the airboat as designed—instead each thirty—millimeter shell hit directly in the center of the boat. The engine exploded in a bright yellow ball of flame, the airboat skidded sideways and flipped end-over-end, throwing the fiberglass case and one of the smugglers through the air. The pilot, who was strapped into his seat, was literally ripped apart by the exploding engine and slammed into the water as the airboat spun away in flames.
“Shark, this is Two-Six,” Geffar radioed back to the Hammerhead One platform, “mark and record present position coordinates for Customs investigators. Surface target struck and destroyed.” She flipped the Chain Gun switches to safe and found that the WARNING/TARGET mode switch had been left in TARGET. She swallowed hard, moved the switch to WARNING, and continued: “I am returning to pick up one survivor and my RHIB. Out.”
An ambulance met Geffar at the Hammerheads base at the Alladin City headquarters ramp, but the boy that had been tossed from the airboat and picked up in the salt marshes was able to walk over to the ambulance. Geffar met up with Whipple and Hardy, who had landed a half hour earlier with a cargo hold full of six children. Whipple was lying on the open cargo ramp, letting the sun dry the perspiration off his flight suit. Hardy was a few yards away from the Sea Lion. The rest of the crew was helping the ground crews service the RHIB and reload the weapons pods. “You okay, Whip?” she asked.
“Yeah. God, what a day.”
“How’s Scott?”
“I sent him to the hospital to get checked out,” Whipple said, “but I think he’ll be okay. So what’s the score so far? I’ve been lying here ever since the Admiral told me he didn’t need us.”
“I got one airboat, Customs got one and the sherifFs department got two,” Geffar told him. “One boat is still being tracked by a Sky Lion and we’ve got Shark Two-Eight moving in on him to make the intercept. We lost two airboats and two boats. The Cheyenne is halfway back to South America by now, but we still have a Seagull on him.”
“It was a first-class operation,” Whipple said, staring up at the tail of his Sea Lion from the cargo ramp. “They moved a huge amount of dope with precision and organization . . .”
“Almost military, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would.”
“It fits with what we’ve seen before,” Geffar said. “Cargo-sized aircraft, fighters, heavy artillery, sophisticated weapons, close timing. Not your garden-variety smugglers.”
“They’re smart, powerful and ...” Whipple said, shaking his head, “those kids I brought back said they came along for a pack of cookies. Pathetic.”
“The boy I picked up was kidnapped,” Geffar said, “picked him up in Everglades City. Just asked him if he’d like to go for a ride.” 'AVhat the hell do we do?” Hardy asked. “We can’t protect every kid from being kidnapped or coaxed into riding with drug smugglers. The smugglers have taken the guns right out of our hands ...” “No they haven’t, Will,” Geffar told Hardy. “They didn’t stop us today. We got some of them—”
“Well, we only got our guy because the idiot ran into the Cape Romano light,” Hardy said. “Even so, if Scotty hadn’t had the guts to slip over the side of the RHIB and jump this guy we’d still be out there in a stand-off. We’d have had no choice but to give the guy what he wanted—let him take the RHIB and escape.”
Geffar looked hard at Hardy and Whipple. “You really figure it would’ve been better to attack that Cheyenne? Look, we came out of this thing pretty good. No dead kids, hundreds of kilos of cocaine seized and a bunch of prisoners. We did good.”
“Hey, I’m not a cold-blooded creep,” Hardy said, “but what’s to stop the next joker from trying the same damn thing? Is every smuggler gonna have kids on board? Snatch a kid off the street and stick him in the plane or the boat with him—”
“Maybe they won’t try it the next time,” Whipple said. “If they know their slime-ball buddies still get their butts shot down even with kids on board, maybe they won’t make a trip . . .”
“Nobody in this country would buy it. What if it was your kid that got snatched? How would you feel then?”
“I wouldn’t blame the Hammerheads,” Hardy said quickly. “I thought we were here to do a job. They give us guns and planes to stop those scum. We committed ourselves to the job, we’ve got to do it . . "
“You guys are tired, you’re not thinking straight,” Geffar said, shaking her head. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Hardy and Whipple looked at Geffar, then at each other, decided to shut up, for now. They felt painted into a corner, between the old rock and a hard place.
They weren’t the only ones. Geffar was a silent member of the club. She told herself she ought to feel good about the outcome . . . after all, the smugglers had tried to use the children to get their drugs past the Hammerheads and they’d failed. Wasn't that the bottom line? But what about the ones that got away? They’d be back to dump their poison another day . . .
On Board the Smuggler’s Plane, Heading Southeast Toward Haiti
“It went off without a hitch, Colonel,” the pilot of the Cheyenne reported. He glanced out his window again to check if the black batlike drone was still off his left wingtip—and there it was, flying in ridiculously perfect formation, with its huge bug-eye camera squarely fixed on him. “The Border Security aircraft were right on top of us and they did nothing. We ignored their warnings and their attempts to divert us, just as you said, and it worked to perfection.”
“I am pleased,” Colonel Agusto Salazar replied over the scrambled telephone hookup to the plane. “Unfortunately the performance of some of your comrades was less pleasing. Several of our ground forces were intercepted by the Border Security forces, and several deaths resulted ...”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” the pilot said. “We may have a similar problem ourselves.”
“What? Fuel reserves? Malfunction?”
“No malfunction, sir,” the pilot replied. “But our fuel is dangerously low.”
“Climb to a higher altitude, reduce power to best range. You have clearance to overfly Cuba. Plot as direct a course as possible.”
“We have done all that, sir, but with all these brats we brought on board, plus the empty fuel bladders in the rear, we are too heavy to continue step-climbing to a more fuel-efficient altitude. We are slightly below the fuel curve without reserves. Our computations show we may be forced to land as much as a hundred kilometers short of the base. Can’t we get permission to land in Cuba?”
“As I told you, that is impossible, ” Salazar told him. “Castro’s politicians are trying to make it seem they are cooperating with the Americans. They will not allow a known drug-smuggling plane to land. If you land in Cuba you will be arrested and possibly even extradited to the United States. That should encourage you to bring that plane back intact. ”
Hammerhead One Air Staging Platform
McLanahan was in his high-backed seat beside the drone control center when Hardcastle came over to him. McLanahan was intently peering at an old Air Force E-6B flight computer, the old aluminum “whiz wheel” circular slide rule used for making mathematical and navigational calculations. After making a few notes and spinning another calculation, he stared at the monitor showing the image of the Piper Cheyenne carrying the smugglers, apparently back to safety.
“Drone status, Patrick?”
“In the green. Looks like he’s about twenty minutes from Cuban airspace. We can send the drone around Cuba as planned and pick him up on the other side.”
“Okay. I’ve already notified Elliott about the overflight. He’ll contact the State Department and have them issue an official protest to the Cuban government for allowing an overflight by a known drug smuggler. They let a drug smuggler overfly but won’t clear our drone or Sea Lions through. So much for their so-called cooperation.
McLanahan nodded, obviously preoccupied. “Something wrong? What are you working on?”
“Just running a bu
nch of range calculations on that Cheyenne,” McLanahan told him, and punched up the computer’s track of the aircraft, which included the plane’s previous sorties into American airspace as well as a prediction of where the plane might likely go next. Most of the lines indicated that the plane would land in one of several Cuban airbases on its northern coast. A few other predictions, not very heavily weighed, had the plane crash landing off Haiti or ditching in the shallow waters near Cay Sal Bank. “You figure the Cubans will let that plane land in Cuba?” McLanahan asked.
“Who knows? The Cubans, talking the good-neighbor line lately, haven’t said a word today except about overflight restrictions. My guess is they’ll let this guy overfly, and they may let him land if he declares an emergency. We have the hot line working to Havana. If we notify the Cubans far enough in advance and feed them some of our radar data on this guy, we might be able to convince them at least to allow extradition if he’s captured. They’re feeling pretty isolated these days.”
“Well, I expect he’ll be declaring an emergency any second, then,” McLanahan said. “Look here, the computer predicts the flight path and arrival point of an aircraft based on unloaded weight plus thirty percent over authorized added internal ferry fuel. This guy dropped fifteen one-hundred-kilo cases of cocaine—that’s well over three thousand pounds of cargo. Add twelve hundred pounds of extra fuel in internal bladders, plus the weight of the five kids we counted on board that plane—this guy was at least a thousand pounds overweight just before he made those drops. He’s gotta be running on fumes.”
“That could be why he’s stayed at fourteen thousand feet all this time instead of heading for twenty-five thousand,” Hardcastle said. “Maybe he can’t climb any higher.”
“More accurately, the trade-off would be unacceptable,” McLanahan told him. “He would burn more gas climbing to a best-range altitude than he would save at the higher altitude.”
“So . . . maybe there’s a real downside to using kids on smuggling runs,” Hardcastle said. “Every kid they put on board is that much less product they can haul into the country. Plus the added weight is a drag on fuel.”
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