Below in the forward cockpit Ni ran through his checklist, tested the intercom, announced he was ready. Yen waved at the fighter out on the pad, who backed away, and put on ear protectors, then snapped the toggle for the electrical starting motor for number two turbine on the port-engine control-console and watched the engine tachometer as the turbine spun up to speed, the whining noise coming from over his left shoulder. At ten thousand RPM he snapped up the second toggle marked FUEL INJ, beginning the fuel injection to the combustors, then toggled in the IGNITION switch, lighting off the combustion cans. The tachometer needle lifted as the engine became self sustaining He pushed up the throttle-tab to stabilize the turbine above the idle point, then repeated his actions for the starboard number-one turbine, the sound of it spooling up adding to the earsplitting noise-level in the cockpit. When both turbines were up, he engaged the clutch, connecting the power turbines’ output shafts into the main reduction gearbox.
The gears began to moan as the main rotor overhead began to spin slowly, taking some five seconds to complete its first revolution of the seventeen-meter diameter four-bladed rotor.
It took almost a minute for the main rotor to accelerate to full idling speed, and while Yen waited he plugged in his radio headset and adjusted the UHF to the frequency designated for this mission. Immediately he heard a man speaking his call sign on the radio.
Yen listened for a moment and acknowledged, transmitting that he was now taking off.
He lifted the collective lever on his left side, checking the tachometer to ensure that the automatic throttle was compensating for the drag of the increased rotor pitch. As the aircraft lifted off the pad he pushed on his right anti-torque pedal. The heavy assault helicopter lifted slowly off the asphalt of the pad, lights marking the boundary of the pad rotating to the left as the chopper slowly turned to the right. For a moment Yen paused, waiting for the second Hind helicopter to start its main rotor and lift off. When the nose of Yen’s Hind pointed south, he stopped the rotation with his left anti-torque pedal while easing the collective. The helicopter hovered above the pad at two meters, and Yen frowned, aware he was burning fuel while waiting for the second Hind. Finally the other chopper was ready. Yen raised the collective and pushed forward on the cyclic stick between his knees. The helicopter took off from the pad and accelerated forward, suddenly getting a burst of lift as it passed through transition velocity, the rotors now in air undisturbed by the rotor-wash blasting off the ground.
The Hind accelerated to one hundred and fifty clicks, the Hangu base fading away, the terrain of the land coming in rapidly from ahead. Within a few minutes the water of the bay flashed below the fuselage, and a few moments after that, the piers of the P.L.A complex at Xingang came into view.
Yen smiled as his target became visible.
The ship began to respond to the rudder, the bay beginning to turn beneath Lennox. His mind momentarily fogged by Baron’s death, it took him a moment to realize that the ship was in fact turning in the wrong direction, the stern headed south toward the supertanker pier instead of north. Lennox had intended to have the stern come around to the north, where he would have put the rudder amidships and gone ahead flank, just like pulling a car out of a driveway and. heading off to work. But goddamn if the screw wasn’t walking the stern in the opposite direction as the rudder and so pulling his tail in the wrong direction. No wonder they always used tugs to get out of the slip.
Lennox realized hundreds of lives depended on his next decision. The stern was now pointing almost southeast, too late to reverse the direction of the turn.
He would either have to continue in a semicircle going backward until his bow was pointed east or go forward with the bow pointing north and do a one-hundred eighty-degree turn to the south. The first option could cause the stern to ram into the supertanker-pier. The second would cost him extra time.
Whatever, he couldn’t continue to be at the mercy of the goddamned rudder and screw. He had to get the ship to be predictable again. As he watched the bay turn around him in the wrong direction, he felt a pain in his chest and wondered if he was having a heart attack. No … it had to be the anxiety from the screwed-up maneuver. Good thing Murphy was below, Lennox thought. At least the captain couldn’t see this amateurish ship handling.
“All ahead full,” Lennox barked.
“ROGER, ALL AHEAD FULL.”
The screw aft of the rudder, a moment before pumping water forward, slowed, stopped and began rotating in the opposite direction, now pumping water aft, thrusting the ship forward. The water above the scimitar blades of the spiral screw boiled and churned in angry phosphorescence. Lennox felt the deck tremble, the hull not accustomed to the force-reversal. The ship slowed to a stop and then began to accelerate as it surged forward. Around them the water was a bubbling foam from the power of the main engines, the P.L.A pier drifting by amidships. The only problem was that they were now going north, not south.
Lennox raised his head above the scarred steel of the top of the sail to look aft, making sure the rudder was turned to the right instead of left. A wrong rudder direction could send them crashing into the P.L.A piers, which would be the end of the rescue attempt.
The deck’s vibrations steadied out somewhat, but the power of the main engines at fifty percent reactor power and the full-rudder order still caused perceptible vibrations. As the ship came around to the south Lennox heard the sound of the Dauphin helicopters coming closer, preparing for another strafing run. He ducked down and reached for a clamshell on the port side of the cockpit — the clamshells were hinged panels that covered the top of the cockpit when rigged for dive, smoothing it out with the contour of the top of the sail. Without the clamshells the cockpit hole would cause a flow-induced resonance, like a breath of air over the mouth of a soda bottle. The clamshell was heavy, made of inch-thick HY-80 steel for breaking through polar ice. While Lennox struggled to raise the panel into the horizontal position he silently thanked the design engineers who had replaced the old fiberglass clamshells with hardened steel. Once the port shell was up, he raised the center forward-and-aft shells, which left him only a small cubbyhole to look out of on the starboard side.
As the choppers approached for their strafing run Lennox ducked into the clamshells on the port side.
The bullets impacted directly over his head, zinging off the heavy steel. Lennox poked his head out the starboard clamshell, ducked quickly back in as he saw the second chopper in its approach. This time he hugged the deck of the cockpit, the loud clanging of the bullets seeming closer, harder. When the noise died down he put his head out again and saw that the ship was now almost completely turned around, heading south into the deep channel. They should be out of there in no time … He was about to order the rudder amidships, thinking ahead to his next order to increase speed to flank, when he saw the buoys just ahead of him. Sure as hell he was no expert on Chinese coastal buoys, but it struck him that the only plausible reason he could think of to put a line of buoys this close to a deep channel was that there was a submerged obstruction or. God forbid, a sandbar.