by Glynn James
Ali burst through it and turned on her situational awareness full blast, to try and work out what the fuck was going on there. She clocked the idling Seahawk below – it was clearly spinning up for dust-off. Two levels below her, she could hear but not see the 240 crew – the machine-gun chattering she’d heard from the stern.
Farther out and straight ahead, she could see the back of Handon, sprinting down the middle of the flight deck toward the missile impact site, and firing his side arm at… yep, there was their little Russian UAV.
Leave it to Handon to try to shoot it down with his .45.
And even underneath all this noise and chaos, Ali still heard a hatch bang open, way down below her, at the base of the island. Leaning over the railing, she saw Fick emerge out onto the deck, moving fast.
And he had a fucking Stinger missile on his shoulder.
She didn’t even know where that had come from, though she hoped someplace they kept securely locked. Within five seconds, Fick had come to a stop, planted his feet, popped open the cage on the side of the tube, and acquired target – at which point the launch-rocket pushed the five-foot-long missile out of its tube, and then the main rocket fired…
And it was off to the races.
With mixed amusement, relief, and awe, Ali lowered her rifle and just watched the zippy little missile arc off, flash over Handon’s head, and start chasing the Russian mini-UAV around the sky, trailing gray smoke behind it.
It wasn’t much of a chase – the rocket-powered Stinger went about twelve times the speed of the propeller-driven drone, and its passive IR/UV sensors were dogged, ruthless, and more or less unerring.
In a few seconds, both flying objects disappeared in a yellow fireball, and the sparkle of metallic debris floated down toward the ocean surface, just off the prow, like stardust in the morning light.
Ali rested her rifle on its sling, cupped her hands, leaned over the railing, and shouted down to Fick. “…Damn, dude!”
Fick pushed back the bill of his soft-cover USMC cap, looked up at her, and smiled – which as always just made him look scarier, and meaner. He then looked up at the NSF machine gun crew above him, who had for obvious reasons now stopped firing.
“Dumbasses brought a machine gun to a missile fight,” he said. He pulled the bill of his cap down again, and dropped the spent missile launcher where he stood.
Looking out across the deck again, Ali could see Handon had turned and was trotting back toward them. She thought he was laughing, but he didn’t do it long.
Because shit around here had just gotten, and remained, terrifyingly real.
Battle Damage Assessment
JFK - CIC
This time, when Drake entered CIC, he got the unmistakable vibe of being totally unwelcome there. And when he found Campbell, she honestly looked like she might hit him. Hell, go ahead and take a shot, Drake thought. It wouldn’t take more than a soft tap to put him on his ass.
Which might be the best place for him.
Barely moving her jaw, Campbell said, “Commander, CSAR needs to dust off now. Our guy is alone out on open water, with the enemy moving on both sea and air. We need to scramble the other two F-35s, and get the CSAR bird moving now.”
Drake ignored this – which compounded the shock felt by the entire CIC staff, and moved Campbell that bit closer to the hairline border of insubordination. Instead, Drake looked at a radar console and its operator. “What’s the status of the Nakhimov? In the last minute.”
“She’s turned south again, sir. Steaming at 16 knots on heading one-seven-three.” So they were moving away now.
But the unspoken question still hung in the air:
Did we get them?
Drake turned back to Campbell. “Do you have a BDA yet?” This was met with flustered silence. Drake got up in her face. “Is she sinking? Listing? Retreating to stand-off range to do damage control? Repairs? What? What was the result of the anti-ship missiles our birds got off before they were shot down – DO YOU HAVE A BDA?”
Campbell actually sputtered. “No, obviously, our air went down, so they’re not doing a fu— a BDA. Sir.”
“How about the nose-cone video from the missiles? Have you viewed it?”
Campbell looked over to that station. “Not yet.”
“I need to see it. Now.”
“Commander, we do not have time for this.”
Drake exhaled, and looked at Campbell, not unkindly. “We don’t have time not to.”
“Sir?”
“I’m not sending any more aircraft out there until we know what we’re sending them into.” He took an unsteady breath. “You were right before. That we should have sent a drone to scout the Nakhimov’s defenses. If I’d listened to you then, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Now Campbell backed down, out of Drake’s face.
Drake concluded: “And no one else under my command is getting killed today – not because of me.”
“LT!”
Campbell turned and followed the finger of the seaman who spoke, as did everyone else in the room. While they had been fatally distracted with the complete unraveling of the air mission… it appeared something had gone very wrong, very quickly, at SAS Saldanha.
The overhead display with the feed from the mission commander’s shoulder cam showed a scene of stacked pallets and boxes – with sparks and little puffs of dust silently kicking off of them. The sailors in CIC squinted in confusion… until the POV of the camera rose, turned, and sighted down a big assault rifle.
Which then started putting out rapid-fire rounds over the top of one of the crates. Out ahead, at least a half-dozen muzzle flashes were going off in response. It was some kind of a firefight. A huge one.
Campbell was reaching for her channel selector to hail the ground commander and find out what the everloving fuck had gone wrong… when she belatedly noticed that the screen on the right was blacked out. That was the camera on Corporal Raible. Maybe it had failed?
Campbell couldn’t work out what had happened to him, if anything… until the blackness lightened a bit, and it slowly became apparent the view was actually of a concrete floor. Now, the tiny camera lifted a few inches, and the concrete started sliding by underneath.
The view also now tilted upward, and finally onto a body, also down on the deck, prone and motionless. It was clearly one of the Marines.
And then an arm, the camo sleeve around it torn and blackened and bloodied, stretched out away from the camera… reaching out for the body that lay ahead.
It didn’t make it.
Two bullets ripped into the arm, shredding the fabric and flesh even further. Somebody in CIC gasped, audibly.
Campbell swallowed and started frantically hailing the team. But then her words drowned in her throat.
Up on the biggest screen, the one in the center, was video from the Fire Scout, which was holding a static view of the warehouse that Juice and the Marines had gone into.
Only the scene was no longer static.
A little ant-like figure scurried across the overgrown lawn, right toward the big warehouse. Another appeared from a different edge of the screen, entering from the north. When the first one reached the structure, it started flailing against the outside wall. Several more appeared in the next seconds, some just running, others running manically, coming from different directions, but mostly from the north.
The direction of the Saldanha township.
The dead were converging on the naval base.
And just then, the video from Juice’s camera went black.
Chaos was descending from every direction. And the commanders on the Kennedy were losing their ability to even influence events.
Drake fought another overwhelming wave of nausea, and tried to focus his blurry vision on the room around him.
And he battled to stay on his feet.
* * *
Homer rinsed his mask in ocean water, drained it, and held it up for inspection. The sun still wasn’t very high in the
sky, and currently hidden on the far side of the carrier. The Alpha operators on the dock stood or sat in its cool, monstrously deep shadow. The surface of the ocean all around them was largely opaque.
Homer put the mask on the top of his head and reached for his tank, rebreather, and buoyancy vest. Henno squatted down and helped him shrug into the harness. “What do you expect to find down there, matey?” he asked.
Homer took a deep breath as he buckled seals. “Well, I’m just a little concerned about the Spetsnaz naval brigade on the Admiral Nakhimov.”
The cool air around them seemed to chill a bit more. Pred and Henno certainly knew a bit about Spetsnaz. Mostly about their unrivaled reputation for cruelty, skullduggery, and invulnerability to pain.
Homer switched on his rebreather, tested it out, then removed it from his mouth again. He looked up at the others. “Specifically, the likelihood that they’ve got a midget submarine group and one or more combat diver units.”
“So you’re going to sweep the hull for mines,” Henno said, standing over him.
Pred looked to Homer. “Limpet mines?”
“Affirmative,” he said, affixing his rocket fins.
Henno suddenly got a strange feeling Homer wasn’t telling them everything. He squinted at the SEAL. “There anything else, mate?”
Homer shrugged. “Maybe. Probably not.”
He pulled his mask down, spun on his backside – and did a sitting backflip into the water, slipping smoothly across the border between sea and sky. In two seconds he was out of sight beneath the waves.
Because of the closed loop of his Draeger rebreather, no bubbles rose to reveal his location.
Or even to say whether he was still breathing air.
* * *
LT Campbell, as soon as she had regained her own composure, started whipping her staff into action – beginning by delegating support for the shore fight to her 2IC and a handful of others. As catastrophic as that looked, it wasn’t even the most urgent disaster they had going on.
They had a pilot down in the drink.
And they still had a completely deadly giant Russian warship out there – which until a couple of minutes ago had been steaming straight toward them at high speed.
She and Drake leaned over an air-mission tactical station, watching a video replay from the nose-cone video of one of the LRASMs their guys had gotten off before going down. They had to know what had happened with those missiles – if they had at least damaged the Nakhimov.
As they looked on, they had the vicarious experience of being fired off the weapons rail of an F-35, and then traveling through the air at 900mph, blasting unerringly toward the hull of the Russian ship.
And then they also had the experience of being blasted out of the sky and ripped to shreds by 9,000 rounds per minute of 30mm annular-blast-fragmentation shells, firehosed out of the Kashtan guns on the deck of the Nakhimov. As the hull of the battlecruiser rocketed toward them, they saw about a second of brilliant muzzle flashes – and then blackness.
Drake mouthed curses.
It was exactly the same with the nose-cone video from the next two.
The fourth one, however, seemed to make it through the battlecruiser’s close-in defenses – the video only went black when the hull came racing up at train-wreck speed, right in their faces. But, because it was the last missile, and because there were no aircraft following it, they still had no idea how much damage it had done. Was the Nakhimov burning? Listing? Perhaps even sinking? Or had she just shrugged it off?
Their drone overhead was still showing the Nakhimov’s radar signature. But it was too damned far to show any detail on the video feed. They could definitely see smoke. But it also could have been steam. It could have been a smoke barrage put up to confuse the attacking planes.
It could have been a lot of goddamned things.
Survivability
JFK - CIC
“I thought your missiles could defeat their close-in weapons systems.”
This came from an all-new and steely voice behind the others. Drake and Campbell turned to see Sergeant Major Handon, along with Ali, both standing behind them, arms crossed, both perfectly upright and still, like marble statues, and both watching the video over their shoulders. They had come down upon reuniting on the observation deck, after Fick’s one-man air-defense masterclass.
Handon was still loath to get in the way of shipboard ops. On the other hand, what he’d just witnessed up on the bridge was something like a total breakdown of command. If he and Fick hadn’t acted on their own…
Drake used to think the same thing Handon had just vocalized – that their LRASMs were too fast and stealthy to get tagged by the Russian Kashtans. But this was only like the tenth time today they’d been catastrophically wrong. And it was starting to look like the Russians had seen them coming – that they’d been two moves ahead of them at every stage of the game.
“How did this happen?” Drake asked Campbell.
She shrugged. “Honestly? At this moment I have no idea. We’ll obviously do analysis of the data and telemetry from the missiles’ flight. But right now, sir—”
“I know,” Drake said. “Right now, we’ve got a downed pilot to rescue. Show me the location of the battlecruiser.” This appeared on the big board overhead as a red triangle, its distance from the Kennedy increasing again. “Now show me the location where Cole punched out.” He was determined to understand this battlespace, before he sent more irreplaceable warriors out into it.
“I can do better than that,” Campbell said. “I can show you the exact location of Cole’s transponder signal, right this second.” That came up, as well – between the two ships, but also way out west over the Atlantic, and a little closer to the Kennedy than the Nakhimov.
“And no new air contacts since then?” Drake asked.
“No, there’s been noth—”
“Lieutenant!” a radarman interrupted. “Single air contact! Signature is rotary-wing… it’s the Ka-60, their transport helo.”
Campbell didn’t have to ask him for range, heading, or speed. As a symbol for the Russian air contact automatically appeared on the big board, everyone in CIC could see where it was – and where it was going.
It was now hauling ass directly toward their downed pilot.
* * *
“Oh, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me…” Drake cursed, for the second time today.
The Russians are going out to get our CAG, he thought. And our guys do NOT get taken alive.
When Drake looked over at Campbell, she had a radio mic in her hand. And he only needed one guess about who was on the other end of that line.
“Commander,” she said, looking up at him icily. “There’s no time. CSAR has to go – NOW.”
Drake tried to breathe. He knew there was some other issue he couldn’t quite put his finger on… Oh, yeah – the strike group was down to two helicopters. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. He managed to speak anyway – looking from Campbell across to Handon.
“Lieutenant, if we lose our second-to-last Seahawk, we’re going to have no way to insert Handon’s and Fick’s teams into Somalia. If we lose that bird, it’s the end of our mission – it’s game over. For everyone.”
Campbell was struggling even to hear the words coming out of Drake’s mouth. The “red mist” had descended, and she was absolutely determined to act.
Handon, for his part, knew exactly what she was feeling – somewhat ironically, because he totally got Drake’s point, too. But he had a feeling that if Drake wanted to keep that CSAR crew on the carrier, he was going to have to personally go down and chain their landing gear to the deck.
Because no one here was going to help him.
The LT spoke again, still sounding as if she were struggling to keep the lid on. “Commander, we go and get our people back. ALWAYS.” Her fists were clenching and unclenching at her sides, and her chin was lowered and her shoulders hunched – classic protective physiology, signaling
aggression, or even imminent violence.
And this was on behalf of a man she thought was a nearly complete asshole – and whom she’d last interacted with by telling him to get the fuck out of her station.
But what Handon understood about what Campbell was feeling was that the defense of one’s tribe – assholes included – is an insanely compelling idea. Once somebody has been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing else that has such power – and almost no way they can be dissuaded from doing it. Virtually everyone in the combat arms, who had been under fire with others, knew this. They felt it in their deepest cores. Had lived it.
And, sometimes, there was simply nothing a commander could do to override it. If soldiers were willing to give their lives to protect their brothers, then they were certainly willing to disobey orders to do it.
“Send me.”
“What?”
It took everyone a second to work out who had said this.
It was Ali.
She was like a weightless, colorless shade, standing motionless behind the others, floating in the CIC’s shadows – and now also the thick tension and drama that filled the room.
“Send me on the CSAR bird, as overwatch. I’ll increase the survivability of the mission.”
Taken aback, Campbell managed, “They’ve already got a minigunner. You think you can add firepower to that?”
When no one answered, Campbell got her answer. Evidently Ali’s reputation preceded her.
Handon slitted his eyes, and tried to evaluate this.
In many ways, Ali was the superhero on his team. Whatever personal issues she’d been dealing with lately would not impact her stratospheric level of performance. And as the all-seeing/never-missing sniper and overwatch queen for Alpha – not to mention perhaps the only Somali-American left alive in the world – she was the team member Handon could least do without, going into Somalia.
So why would he let her fly off, straight into the mouth of danger, to rescue a single man – one who Handon hardly even knew? Why would he agree to risk spending her life this way? And this question was right back to the heart of his innermost fear – of not having the wisdom to know when to spend his people’s lives, and when to safeguard them.