Now that he’d found nothing after having put a “rush” on the NR-1B, Freeman felt a rare of case of embarrassment. For his part, Jensen was annoyed, to put it mildly — after all the trouble he’d gone to get the research sub to the West Coast. Then again, Freeman had been the only one who’d offered to help him when he was getting flak from everyone for not having assured a “mine free” strait. And it was Freeman, Jensen knew, who’d given him credit, via CNN, for the fifty-seven-mile coast rerun by Darkstar. So the admiral said nothing, other than to tell Freeman that the NR-1B would be ready if and when Freeman found anything. Besides, there was still a lot the NR-1B could do, the consensus in the Pentagon being that it was the craft best suited to hunt down another small sub.
Freeman glimpsed the sparkle of light beyond the lacy edge of the mammoth waterfall. The nanosecond of recognition was followed by his shouted warning to the other five on the RIB. Whether Aussie, Choir, Salvini, and the diver, Peter Dixon, like the general himself, had reacted more quickly than coxswain Alvaro because of their long combat experience was impossible to discern. Perhaps it was because Alvaro was the most visible, standing up at the RIB’s steering console. In any event, it was Jorge who took the full burst of machine-gun fire, its sparkle of one-in-four tracer now long white darts shattering the console’s Perspex and knocking the young man overboard, the bloody cavity that a second before had been his chest, awash in the wake of the RIB.
The inflatable, with no one at its console, spun out of control, slicing through the smaller but still powerful chop in the bay at such an acute angle that it teetered and would have capsized had Choir not quickly moved from his hunkered-down position behind the roll bar and grabbed the wheel. He brought the sixteen-footer about smartly, cutting through the RIB’s earlier wake and, with his comrades gripping the two hold bars, shoved the throttle to full power, enabling the RIB to surge well away from the waterfall. Choir then just as quickly cut power at the water curtain’s halfway point, where the waterfall was so voluminous that whoever had fired the burst at the RIB would no longer be able to see it.
“Rocky island, one o’clock!” Freeman shouted at Choir. “Take us there. Aussie, Dixon, grab your Draeger, recon beyond the falls. See what we’re up against. Sal and I will man the island with the M-60 and A.T. anchor.”
Aussie, using his legs in a scissor hold around the left stanchion of the roll bar, had his arms free to check and put on his Draeger rebreather. Dixon, with more recent practice, was already “in suit,” the fright he’d experienced from the burst of fire replaced with a surge of anger. It was the first time he’d been shot at, and he was surprised how quickly his outrage had evicted fear. Now he wanted to shoot back. Freeman was on the radio, calling Jensen at Keystone. No response, not even the sound of static.
“Shot to ratshit!” Aussie informed him, indicating the console, the radio’s innards a mess of shattered circuit boards and wiring on the RIB’s deck. With that, Freeman unclipped his Ziploc-encased cell phone. But Murphy’s Law was at large, solar flare activity knocking out all satellite bounce-off signals in the ionosphere high above his fog-bound environs.
Cursing but undeterred, the general grabbed one of the RIB’s three marker buoys, switched on its flasher light and pulse signal locator, and tossed it overboard. Hopefully the NR-1B now had its scientists and crew aboard and was already under way, en route to assist his team.
Choir geared the RIB down to quarter speed and made for what Freeman had hurriedly described as a “rocky island.”
As the RIB approached it, however, the SpecFor team could see it was in fact no more than a stack of granite thrusting out of the bay — an islet thirty feet in diameter, its highest, westernmost half a serrated wall four or five feet above sea level. Its eastern half, closest to the approaching RIB, seemed to be awash in choppy water, the result of turbulence radiating out from the waterfall-sea interface as the falls tumbled from a wide slit halfway up the heavily vegetated cliff face.
“We should be out of sight of that shooter once we get to these rocks,” said Freeman.
“Providing he doesn’t move farther around the bay,” replied Choir, raising his voice above the ear-dunning roar of the three-hundred-foot-wide wall of white water pouring into the crescent-shaped bay with the unyielding power of a dam whose spill gates were opened for maximum runoff. Fire support for Dixon and Aussie, should they call for it, would be blind, Freeman, Choir, and Sal realizing that the best they could do would be to fire a “banana” arc through the fall in hopes of keeping any shooter’s head down. There was a sudden series of crashes as dark branches and clumps of earth plummeted down in the otherwise pristine curtain of water.
“Son of a bitch!” said Sal. “With our radio kaput, Aussie and Dixon won’t be able to call us.”
“No sweat, Brooklyn,” Freeman assured him, with more confidence than he felt. “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Wait for ’em to swim back and report.”
“Why the hell would a shooter have just opened up on us like that?”
“You been smoking something, Sal?” asked the general, Choir answering the question as he coaxed the RIB alongside the islet on the off, protective seaward side. “Because he thought we saw something.”
“Jesus — the midget sub?”
“A perfect hide,” said the general. “Falls are a perfect curtain — cold water to throw off any infrared snooping UAV.”
“Don’t fancy those whirlpools, General,” opined Choir, looking toward the falls.
“They can swim,” said Freeman tersely. “ ’Sides, they can pull their rip cords if they have to.” He meant that Aussie and Dixon could activate their Mae West inflatables.
Choir nudged the islet’s side with the RIB and, despite the foamy, choppy water, could see a protruding ledge three feet below. If there was a sudden suck-down, the RIB’s fiberglass keel could find itself on the ledge and tip.
“Piece o’ cake,” Sal told him, Salvini sensing Choir was worried about what could be a tricky docking in the chop.
“You ready with that line?” Choir asked Sal.
“Good to go, Mr. Williams.”
“When I say go — right?”
“Right.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The ROC F-16 was escorted by two of McCain’s F-18 Super Hornets, one of which was piloted by Chipper Armstrong and his RIO Evans, the other by Manowski and his RIO. Evans was still smarting from having been left out the dogfight against the ChiComs, and Manowski’s RIO was in no better mood as the pair of Super Hornets continued to escort the “Bizarro” Taiwanese Falcon toward the carrier battle group.
Admiral Crowley, though still in shock over his squadrons’ failure to prevent the bombing of Penghu, nevertheless had to force himself to concentrate on the Bizarro situation. His position about not allowing the Falcon to land still stood. For one thing, the Taiwanese Falcon, not being a carrier aircraft, did not have sufficient underbelly strength to make a hard carrier landing; hence the nickname “Jelly Dick,” by which “Hard Dick” Navy aviators condescendingly referred to Air Force fighters. An F-16 pilot, at his best, trying to minimize the shock of hitting the carrier deck, would probably collapse his landing gear, the fighter skidding and cartwheeling and either crashing into billions of dollars of McCain’s parked aircraft or slamming into the base of the island. In either case, there would be massive fire wreckage, which would mean Crowley couldn’t bring in his low-on-gas squadrons coming back from Penghu. It was a nightmare scenario. The rescue of one pilot, Taiwanese or American, wasn’t worth the risk to the McCain and those who worked on her.