“Brace for impact!” one of the Panther’s flight crew yelled. “We’re ditching!”
Flynn threw one arm around the injured commando and wrapped the other around his seat, holding on with all his strength. Through the doors, he saw the wave-topped sea rushing upward at them with terrifying speed as the wrecked helicopter spun down out of the sky. They smashed into the water with an enormous, shattering impact, sending a wave of white-hot agony sleeting through his whole body.
There was a moment of almost unearthly silence, broken only by low moans and the pinging of hot metal contracting in sudden cold as the shell-riddled helicopter settled lower.
Dazed by the crash, Flynn shook his head frantically to clear it. Blood trickled down his chin. He spat to clear a salty taste from his mouth. Swell, he thought muzzily. He must have gashed his face on something when they slammed into the sea.
“Everybody out! Now!” he heard the Shayatet 13 detachment commander bark. “Go! Go! Go!”
Yeah, no shit, Flynn realized as everything around him suddenly shifted back into full focus. Seawater was already flooding in through the doors. The Panther was going down fast. He dumped his weapons and other gear with frantic speed. Then, hauling the wounded Israeli commando with him, he struggled to his feet and splashed out into the rising sea.
Sidestroking frantically, he swam away from the sinking helicopter — aware of other heads bobbing all around. When he got far enough away, he started treading water. Still cradling the injured man, he fumbled with the straps holding his body armor — desperately shrugging out of it before the added weight could drag him under.
Moments later, the Panther’s mangled fuselage slid out of sight with a sudden spurt of bubbling white foam. Torrents of water were hurled in all directions by its still-spinning rotor blades when they smacked into the sea… and then vanished. A few lighter pieces of wreckage bobbed back to the surface, but that was all.
Still treading water, Flynn turned through a full circle, counting off those in the water nearby. Like him, the Israeli commandos who were not seriously wounded were supporting their bleeding, half-conscious comrades. Miraculously, it appeared that everyone else had made it out of the helicopter before it sank. Off in the distance, he could see the two Morena inflatable boats speeding toward them to conduct a rescue.
With a deep sigh, he wheeled back toward the now-distant Gulf Venture. The huge black ship hadn’t altered its course by so much as a degree. It was still headed away from them, steaming almost due south into the darkness. Small fires guttered in places across the oil tanker’s deck, showing where return fire from the two helicopters had knocked out a couple of its antiaircraft guns and missile launchers. But it was obvious that the ship was otherwise completely undamaged — and now free to carry its lethal secret cargo wherever it wished.
Flynn felt a wave of despair wash over him. He’d failed.
MIDNIGHT was fully underway.
Twenty-Five
Viktor Skoblin took the outside ladder up to the navigation bridge two rungs at a time. He came up onto the starboard wing, nearly one hundred feet above the tanker’s main deck. Two bearded IRGC Quds Force commandos were posted at the hatch leading into the bridge itself. Although they wore ordinary ship’s coveralls instead of their usual desert tan berets and camouflage battledress, the 9mm submachine guns they carried erased any illusion they were regular civilian sailors. Apart from Skoblin and his ten-man Raven Syndicate security team, all members of the ship’s crew were part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“I need to see the captain,” Skoblin growled to the guards. He found it ironic that those in Gulf Venture’s mixed Iranian and Russian crew were forced to rely on the language of their most powerful enemy, English, to communicate with each other. But only one of his men spoke any Persian beyond a few simple phrases, and very few of the IRGC soldiers and sailors aboard had any Russian. Then again, he knew that English was the standard tongue employed at sea — just as it was in air traffic control and commercial aviation in general.
Without speaking, one of the stern-faced commandos waved him through the open hatch.
Skoblin entered the dimly lit bridge. He stood off to the side for a moment, waiting quietly while his eyes adjusted. Together with its port and starboard wings, the navigation bridge ran the width of the six-story-high superstructure which occupied most of the tanker’s aft end. Large windows lined three sides of the bridge, offering almost unobstructed views over the deck and out to sea. The only place higher aboard the ship was an open-air platform studded with radar and radio masts located just above the bridge itself.
Down on the main deck, a damage control party had just finished extinguishing the last small fire. The blackened and twisted twin barrels of a Samavat 35mm gun mount were now slathered in foam. Three blanket-covered stretchers next to the wrecked antiaircraft gun held the mangled remains of its crew.
In other places, sailors were busy repositioning the painted wood panels that formed the fake shipping containers used to hide Gulf Venture’s newly installed guns and missile launchers until they were needed. By the time the sun rose, all of the oil tanker’s weapons would again be camouflaged.
Skoblin nodded approvingly. The Iranians apparently had matters well in hand. The tanker’s captain, Reza Heidari, stood near the helmsman’s station, listening carefully to a report from his second-in-command, Touraj Dabir. Heidari, lean and hawk-nosed, was a high-ranking officer in the IRGC’s naval forces, as was the somewhat younger and bulkier Dabir.
“All fires are now out, Captain,” Dabir said calmly. “The ship’s propulsion and steering, and the Zuljanah rocket storage and control compartments were not damaged. We have minor leaks in a few of the upper oil-storage bunkers, but those are being plugged rapidly.”
Heidari looked pleased. “Very good, Touraj. We certainly don’t want to leave a trail of crude oil floating behind us for an enemy to follow.” He moved to the front of the bridge and stared down at the deck. “What’s the current status of our defensive armament?”
“Two of the guns were knocked out, along with a pair of our Misagh-2 launchers. All other weapons are fully operational.”
Heidari nodded. “How much of our ammunition was expended?”
“The battle consumed approximately one-fourth of our stores of 35mm high-explosive and armor-piercing rounds and roughly a third of our surface-to-air missiles,” Dabir told him.
The captain frowned. Skoblin understood his irritation. Under attack, the ship’s gun and missile crews had fired wildly — hurling hundreds of shells and more than a dozen SAMs at the two enemy helicopters they’d engaged. True, they’d won, downing at least one, and possibly both, of the hostile rotorcraft, but their lack of fire discipline and control had been extremely costly. Without improvements, one or two more such attacks might leave the tanker out of ammunition and missiles, reduced to mere small arms for its own defense.
Still, what else could have been expected, the Russian wondered? The Gulf Venture was not a warship equipped with sophisticated, centralized fire-direction gear. In the short time Voronin had allowed, it had already required something of a miracle for the Shahid Darvishi shipyards to fit this ship with its improvised array of armaments. Jury-rigging the advanced fire direction radars and communications systems necessary to exert more control over a battle would have consumed months of dedicated yard time, not just a few days.