He decided he would remain down at wave height until he got within a quarter-mile of the big ship. Only then would he pull enough altitude to come in over the flight deck and drop the bombs. Converting gas cylinders into aerial bombs was an old trick he learned fighting the Americans back home around Fallujah in Anbar Province. The crude IEDs, as the Americans called them, had contact detonators in their noses as well as cell phone detonators, which he could quickly engage if he needed a backup. The last time he and Batir flew up here, he found it unbelievable that they would be allowed to fly over such ships. No other country was that permissive or stupid with its military bases, certainly not in the Middle East. The Americans even kept a dozen or more of their topline fighters up on deck for show, and two explosions on their flight deck in the middle of those F-18s with their aviation gas, would create “show” all right. In the confusion that would follow, Khan could easily drop back down to wave height, turn north up the James River, and continue to one of the small airfields to the north or west.
“Insha Allah,” he prayed aloud, God willing, the cursed Americans would never know what had hit them.
It was very tight quarters inside the cabin of the Cessna TTX. The sales brochures might tout that it held four people, but that was a considerable stretch. The front featured two very comfortable bucket seats, but the back seats were another matter. The cabin narrowed, the ceiling tapered down, and the two rear seats — more precisely one and a half seats — would barely work for two kids or two thin women with triangular butts on a short sightseeing trip. When one of the passengers was five foot nine inches tall and 165 pounds and the other tipped in at six foot two inches tall and 225, and they were both holding four-foot-long Barrett sniper rifles and a satchel of magazines on the floor at their feet, comfort was out of the question.
While they were squeezing inside, with Bob and Ace sandwiched in the rear, Sharmayne Phillips in the co-pilot seat, and High Rider at the stick, Harry Van Zandt and George Greenfield helped the SWAT team remove the cylinder of C-4 hanging under the wing, making that one less thing to worry about. Sharmayne immediately got on the radio to Quantico, while Carmody powered out to the runway as soon as the cabin doors were closed, pushed the engines up to full RPM, and took off. Once airborne, he opened the throttle and set a heading for Norfolk, Virginia, some 200 miles and 45 minutes away.
“Think we can catch him?” Ace asked.
“It’ll be close. He was bobbing and weaving low and hard when he took off, heading southeast, and trying to outrun me. He probably figured I’d fire a couple of missiles at him, and I’d have loved to. Unfortunately, there’s no way I could do that outside a firing range, but he doesn’t know that.”
“Too much paperwork?” Bob snorted.
“Man, you got that right!”
Sharmayne Phillips broke in, “I have the Langley Tactical Operations Center on the line. Quantico patched me through. I explained the situation and they’re putting two more pairs of F-15s up, one to the west and one to the south, plus the two pair on normal patrol over the region. They’re going to concentrate on the Virginia - North Carolina border, but there’ll be a lot of civilian aircraft in that airspace as soon as the sun comes up, and they aren’t too happy to have a look-alike in their AO. I gave them our transponder number and told them we painted out most of the tail number. Even so, they made it crystal clear they’re not taking any responsibility if we get splashed.”
“Understood,” Bob shrugged as he tried to sit back. “Just another day in the Army.”
“Hell, Ghost, you and me ain’t even in the Army anymore,” Ace said glumly as he picked up one of the Barretts and began checking out its working parts. In the process, the barrel whacked Sharmayne in the side of the head several times. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said with a mischievous smile and nudged Bob. Satisfied, he reached into the satchel at his feet, pulled out a ten-round magazine, shoved it into the receiver, and jacked a round into the breech. Eventually, he leaned over toward Bob and whispered, “Have you asked yourself how the hell we’re going to get off a shot from back here? It’s like trying to do aerobics inside a Porta-John on a roller coaster.”
“Aerobics?” Bob smiled. “I wasn’t sure you were familiar with that term. Is that part of Dorothy’s new exercise regimen for out-of-work former Army sergeants?”
“Don’t ask.”
“That’s what I thought. But to answer your question, I was wondering the same thing myself. In the increasingly unlikely event we get the chance, I figure we can use our Berettas to punch a few holes in the rear window, and then knock out the rest with the pistol butts.”
“I guess that’s as good of a plan as any, but if you take a close look, you’ll see that’s some serious plexiglas masquerading as window glass. It’s gonna take more than a little knocking. But once we have the glass out, you think we can stick both Barretts out whichever side is facing his plane and try to engage?”
“With ‘try’ being the operative word,” Bob agreed. “Resting the rifle on the window frame of a moving airplane and trying to get a stable enough shooting platform to hit another moving airplane is going to have a somewhat low probability of success.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Bob smiled. “Unless Carmody can get us real close.”
“But you and me? The two greatest shots in the Western Hemisphere and all this ammunition? All we need is one good hit, and nobody’s going to count the misses.”
Bob leaned forward and proceeded to outline the shooting plan to High Rider Carmody.
“You’re going to knock the window out and blaze away from the open window with both Barretts?” Carmody shook his head and laughed. “I can turn the window toward him and try to hold it steady, but you’re going to get some serious buffeting with that glass gone. God, if I only had the Blackhawk with my mini-gun, I’d tear that Cessna to pieces.”
“Copy, but don’t underestimate what a .50-cal round from a Barrett can do.”
“Or a whole bunch of them,” Ace agreed.
Mergen Khan was elated to see that his dead reckoning and seat-of-the-pants navigation had proven to be more accurate than he expected. He crossed what he believed was the wide mouth of the Pamlico River in eastern North Carolina and soon saw the bright, rotating light of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in the distance to his right. Across the broad Pamlico Sound lay the Outer Banks. There was no need for him to go that far east, so he stayed inland and followed the swampy coast of the mainland until he saw the lights of Manteo, Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, and the other tourist towns of the popular sandy strip to the east.
That was when he saw the sky getting lighter, and he could make out the thin, pink line where the dawn rose over the deep-blue Atlantic Ocean. He looked at his watch and saw it had taken him an hour and five minutes to get this far. That was twenty minutes slower than his estimate, but that was based on flying a straight line from Fayetteville to Norfolk. Still, he remained convinced he had chosen correctly. He had heard no warning calls over the radio. No one was shooting at him. And he had not encountered any angry American Air Force jets. Not yet.
Staying within Currituck Sound, between the mainland and the narrow strip of the Outer Banks, he took the plane back down to within ten feet of the water surface, opened the throttle even more, and continued speeding northwest. When the water of the Sound ended at another marsh, he knew he had finally crossed out of North Carolina and entered the city of Virginia Beach. He was very close to his target now. Ten miles? Certainly, no much more. Ten miles, then victory, Insha Allah!
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Norfolk Navy Base
“The Air Force is starting to get pissed at us, Burke,” Sharmayne Phillips said as she turned her head and looked into the backseat. “If he was headed their way, they say he should have been there by now, unless we dreamed the whole thing up.”
“Did we dream it up?” Bob replied.
“They’re the ones who need the convincing, not me, and they ain’t seen s
quat.”
Their Cessna crossed Lake Drummond on the Virginia state line as the morning haze began to clear. The sky was now much lighter, turning a beautiful cerulean blue, and visibility would soon be unlimited. Carmody held the Cessna at 2,000 feet with the engine wide open as they sped across the southern suburbs of Chesapeake, Virginia. Straight ahead through the windscreen, the broad expanse of the Elizabeth River opened in front of them. Along its eastern bank to the right lay the City of Norfolk with the tall buildings of its downtown, its coal piers, and finally the sprawling Norfolk Navy base, which stretched from downtown to Willoughby Point. That was where the Elizabeth River merged with a half-dozen other rivers to create Hampton Roads, which flowed to the right into the Atlantic Ocean.
It was a beautiful setting. Unfortunately, they weren’t sightseeing. All four pairs of eyes inside the small plane scanned the skies to the left, right, and straight ahead. They saw half a dozen commercial airliners crisscrossing at a higher altitude or coming and going from Norfolk International Airport or Newport News, two F-15s far to the north, and small planes of every size and description, but they saw nothing that looked like the other Cessna.
As they passed downtown Norfolk and got their first view of the huge Navy Base, Sharmayne Phillips turned toward Bob and asked, “The Air Force is rotating their F-15s again and sending these guys to back to Langley to refuel. Where you want us to go?”
Mergen Khan felt as if he were up to his waist in an ice bath. His legs had grown cold, he felt chills run up his body, and he was exhausted. Even the simplest movement seemed as if it were in slow motion and required all his prodigious strength and concentration to execute. He reached down once again and felt his thigh to ensure his makeshift tourniquet was still in place; but that wasn’t the problem, and he knew it. He had lost a lot of blood and didn’t dare look at the leg, the seat, and the floor for fear he’d see how much. Forget that! He screamed to himself. Concentrate! It wouldn’t be much longer now.
As he flew along the Virginia Beach ocean front, at no more than five feet above the waves, he marveled at the miles of white-sand beach and tall hotels that lined the boardwalk, reminding him of what the Beirut ocean front once looked like. He finally saw the two lighthouses at Cape Henry where the land ended. One was the old stone monument and the other the taller, more modern black-and-white one. As he passed them, he managed to put the plane into a graceful, banking turn to the left as he entered Hampton Roads moving low and fast, hugging the beach even more tightly, because the Navy Base was only minutes away now. His arms could hold the course, but his legs were anything but steady. When he pressed down on the right pedal, the dull pain in his thigh would suddenly explode through the top of his head, making even the simplest maneuver choppy and disjointed. This was no time to crash into the water, he finally told himself as he eased back on the stick, gaining a few feet of elevation and slowing the plane down so he could keep control.
He banked left with the shore again and soon reached the big highway bridge that led across the bay to the Eastern Shore. That was one more reference point passed, he congratulated himself with a half-smile. As he flew over the top of the road, the increased altitude gave him a quick glimpse of the Little Creek Marine Corps base and the big regional airport inland to his left before he dropped back down to water level. But he was so tired now, so utterly exhausted and sick to his stomach, that there was less and less to cheer about. Finally, he reached the last stretch of beach before the long I-64 bridge-tunnel that crossed the wide mouth of the bay between Norfolk and Hampton. The naval base was no more than five miles away now. Five miles, no more, he thought. Once he cleared this last bridge, the aircraft carrier piers were just around the corner to his left. Five miles! Finally, he dared to look out his window at the lever just outside the door that he would soon pull to release his two bombs. Five miles!
The other Cessna continued down the center of the Elizabeth River, curving slowly to the east with the shoreline. Bob was about to answer Sharmayne’s question when he glanced to his right and saw the dozen or so long, wide concrete piers of the Norfolk Navy base, home port of most of the big ships in the US Atlantic Fleet. The piers were built perpendicular to the shoreline and extended straight out into the Elizabeth River. The first piers they passed contained the smaller ships of the fleet, such as the frigates, minesweepers, and destroyers, with one or two moored to each side of a pier. Next came the larger cruisers, a couple of light carriers or amphibious assault ships. Finally, parked along the last piers at the north end of the base, he saw two behemoth nuclear aircraft carriers — the Harry Truman, with the number 75 painted on the front end of its flight deck, and the George H. W. Bush with the number 77, the last of its type. Almost identical, they were the last of the Nimitz class carrier, now being replaced by a new class represented by the Gerald Ford, which was being finished across the water at the Newport News Shipyard. The Truman and the Bush displaced over 100,000 tons, two to three times as much as a WW II era carrier. They were 1,100 feet long and carried 90 aircraft and a crew of over 3,200. Looking down, Bob saw that the rear and sides of the Bush’s wide flight deck was covered with at least three dozen frontline F-18 fighter jets as the ship got ready to go to sea.
Harry Van Zandt was right. “Look at those suckers!” Bob said as he turned his eyes away and scanned the bright sky around them.
“Decision time, Burke, we’ve run out of land,” Sharmayne told him. “Which way do you want to go?”
Looking to the west, visibility was almost infinite. To the right, however, it was almost impossible to see into the bright glare of the rising sun. “We know he isn’t coming from the south. We just came up that way; and he isn’t coming from the north. That leaves east or west. If I was him, that’s where I’d come in from,” he pointed to the right, “from the east, out of the sun. Carmody, let’s get a little altitude and see if we can find him. He’s got to be there. Mergen Khan isn’t the kind to go quietly into the night.”
As Carmody banked the small plane to the right, they saw Willoughby Bay spreading out below them, then Willoughby Spit and the Interstate bridge-tunnel that led over to Hampton. That was when Sharmayne Phillips suddenly screamed, “There, down there!”
Bob unbuckled his seatbelt, leaned over Ace, and looked out the passenger-side window. Sure enough, down below, coming toward them low and fast, almost lost against the white sand and surf-line was their evil twin, the second Cessna TTX. With its white wings and fuselage, if they hadn’t caught the movement, they’d never have seen it.
“Call the F-16s!” Bob yelled to her. “Where the hell are they?”
“I’m calling them now,” she answered. “I think one pair’s to the west looping over Suffolk, and the two are patrolling the North Carolina border.”
“They’re fast, but they’ll never get here in time,” Ace told her as he pulled out his Beretta. “Fire in the hole, ladies,” he said as he capped-off four 9-millimeter rounds into the center of the thick plexiglas window and followed up with a sharp blow with his elbow. That sent most of the spider-webbed window tumbling out into the Chesapeake Bay, while he dislodged the rest with the butt of his pistol. That was when it became chaos inside the small cabin, with four anxious people talking and moving at the same time, as the cold air and engine noise suddenly cascaded in through the missing window.
Sharmayne was on the radio to the Tactical Air Command in seconds.
Bob and Ace raised the barrels of their Barretts, bumping themselves as they swung the long rifles out the side window, narrowly missing Sharmayne’s head and forcing her to duck.
“High Rider, bring the plane around and as close as you can, so we can get a shot out the window,” Bob yelled.
“Roger that, just don’t shoot our own wing. It’s full of Av-gas.”
As they looped around and dove down on the other Cessna, Carmody managed to keep the window perpendicular to Mergen Khan’s flight path, allowing Bob and Ace to get off their first shots. The Barrett is
arguably the world’s best long-range sniper rifle. Its powerful .50-caliber bullets could blow big holes through almost anything and had terrorized enemy soldiers for over ninety years. Unfortunately, it was never intended to be employed like this. Accuracy flew right out the broken window due to the simultaneous movements of two airplanes in the wind, but the Barrett’s one redeeming virtue was that if they did hit the other airplane with even one shot, the damage was likely to be devastating. In rapid succession, Bob and Ace each emptied their first ten-round magazines. Diving downward, their plane was moving much faster than Mergen Khan’s, and they quickly closed the distance. That elevated what had been an absurdly impossible shot to the mere ridiculous.
“Did you hit him?” Bob asked as they each reloaded.
“I think so,” Ace answered over the roar of the plane.
“Me too. I know I put a couple into the wing and the fuselage.”
“As we get closer, I’ll go for the engine. You go for the cabin.”
“Roger that,” he said as they both leaned forward and took aim again.
Mergen Khan’s eyes were focused on the shoreline ahead as he raced along the beach. He barely missed a white SUV as he soared over the bridge-tunnel approach and dropped back down to water level in Willoughby Bay, with the Navy Base straight ahead. However, even that movement ratcheted up the pain in his leg again, making him want to close his eyes and scream; but he could do neither. All he could do was continue to gut it out.
Finally, straight ahead, he saw what looked like a wide, six-story building, only to realize he was looking at the side of one of the two of the immense nuclear aircraft carriers parked there. He had seen the photographs, but they did not do justice to seeing one up close like this. For that instant, he felt so insignificant, as if he were a gnat trying to sneak up and take a bite out of a big gray elephant. No! If he was to be the first Iraqi Air Force pilot to bomb an American aircraft carrier, if there was to be any honor in attacking a great enemy such as this, then he would do it like a man. He would gain altitude and come at them from the open water, attacking from above, diving down on them, onto their flight deck, and drop his bombs in the center of all those F-18 airplanes. He would see them and they would see him, eye to eye and man to man. Then, he would place himself in Allah’s hands and Insha Allah, God willing, he would live or die trying.
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 43