“Heard about the MEU?” asked Lynch. MEU was the battle group’s Marine Expeditionary Unit.
“No,” said Cuso, straining to be polite but growing weary of Ray Lynch, who, he figured, was about the best air boss in Pacific Command’s six carriers but was definitely on the short list for CNG — chief naval gossip. John Cuso understood it. After the hair-raising business of landing 80-million-dollar planes on the roof for four hours, the need for relief, the temptation to talk about anything other than flight-deck ops, was too strong. “What about the MEU?” he asked dutifully.
“It’s throw-up central over there. Crew says you can see ’em hanging over Yorktown’s side. Looks—” Ray began to laugh. “—like it’s covered in flies.”
The Yorktown was the battle group’s Wasp-class LHD-26B, Landing Helicopter Dock ship, part of the U.S. Marines’ “Gator Navy,” so called because of the potent amphibian force the Marines had proved to be in the great and bloody amphibious landings from Guadalcanal to Saipan. It was a measure of the storm’s ferocity that even the 45,000-ton carrier that housed a 1,700-man battalion of Marines, 45 assorted choppers, several of the hybrid Ospreys, 2 F-35s, and 3 LCACs, or Hovercraft Landing Craft, was rolling and pitching enough in the storm to make so many Leathernecks ill. In fact, only 150 or so Marines had felt the urge to deposit their breakfasts into the Sea of Japan, but the crews in the battle group’s protective screen took perverse pleasure in seeing their indisputably tougher and, from the point of view of the women aboard McCain, aggressively politically incorrect Marines on the receiving end of things for a change.
“Serves ’em right,” chortled Ray Lynch. “Yorktown’s old man should be keeping her into the wind ’stead of beam-on, for cryin’ out loud.”
Cuso shrugged noncommittally. He’d seen a radar zoom shot of the Marines on the big blue screen. It told him why the skipper of the LHD Yorktown, the ship named, like all new LHDs, for an illustrious World War II forebear, was not heading into the wind. The skipper was probably giving the Marines, his men, and a few women, a taste of what it was like to be readying to go forth in a relatively light 160-ton hovercraft while taking the big Pacific swells broadside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The RS was fourteen minutes from docking with the McCain, or, as Gomez was suggesting, given the rough weather, being picked up by the special girdle-equipped helo from the Yorktown. But already General Douglas Freeman had the sinking feeling of a man about to meet his Waterloo. Deep within the general’s psyche there arose the conviction that just as another military legend, Napoleon, had lost it all, albeit by the skin of his teeth, in what the victorious Wellington had called a “damn near run thing,” Douglas Freeman would lose it all. He felt that he’d been convinced, or rather had convinced himself, that he might be the victim of an Intelligence ruse that would heap humiliation on top of failure if there was nothing in the box after all. “After all” included the loss of Bone Brady, who’d committed himself to Freeman’s command largely on the basis of the general’s quick thinking and to-date successful derring-do. What had he, Freeman, always said? “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” He had gone in with audacity, banking on surprise, and he’d succeeded in blowing the target to smithereens and grabbing what he had told the team would be the prize of a shoulder-fired launcher and missile. In short, he had convinced himself that, following Gomez’s suggestion, when he and the team reached the Yorktown and the world wasn’t the eye-juddering experience it was here as the RS planed the ocean swells like a Hummer on a corrugated speed-bump road, he would find nothing but a pile of rocks or dirt, the box’s only resemblance to that of a real MANPAD box being that the ingredients weighed the same. Clever bastards. No doubt their purpose was to achieve an enormous propaganda victory to accuse the U.S. of blatant aggression and the U.S.’s running-dog lackeys of Britain, Australia, and the like that there was no evidence whatsoever of North Korean involvement in terrorism.
“Don’t worry, General!” It was Aussie shouting through the nonstop hammer blows of a furious sea. “It’s in there. I’ll bet ten to one.” He paused. “Anyone in a betting mood?”
No one responded. Did that mean, Freeman wondered, they believed Aussie, or that they didn’t want to risk their hard-earned pay?
What negated any positive spin that Aussie might be putting on the situation was the general’s realization that if it had been that obvious to Aussie what he was thinking, the whole team probably sensed his self-doubt as well, and self-doubt was not the stuff of legend.
Choir had his eyes shut, so did Salvini; Gomez and Eddie Mervyn’s eyes were glued to the monitors. At this speed, a hit against a floating log or any other debris churned up by the storm would be a head-on collision at 50-plus miles per hour with no airbags. Johnny Lee, despite another jab of morphine, was grimacing in pain. Finally, Eddie Mervyn said something, but his voice was so quavery from the battering of the sea that Freeman had to ask him to “say again.”
“Force 9 dropping to Force 8,” Mervyn repeated.
Choir looked whey-faced, as if he was about to make yet another contribution to the mission.
“Slowing, five minutes,” said Eddie. “I say again, let’s go for pickup by girdle.”
Freeman didn’t take long to consider the option, which was to try to bring the RS alongside Yorktown in the storm-lashed ocean. As they slowed, everyone could see a clearer picture on the flat screen now that the spray sheath had abated with their decreased speed. The view was of a rolling blue ocean, white-veined with spindrifts. “Concur,” he told Eddie Mervyn. “Pickup by girdle from Yorktown.”
The engine’s jet-pulse noise subsided, Eddie warning them, “I’m gonna have to bring in the stabilizer fins, otherwise they’ll get stuck in the girdle net.”
“What fucking girdle?” said Aussie.
“It’s too dangerous to try to side-dock in this Force 8. We’ll have a helo come get us with their net sling. Divers’ll go under and sling us.”
“Piss on that!” said Aussie, with his usual eloquence. “This fucker’d roll in an early-morning dew. Could slide right out of the friggin’ net!”
“They done this before?” asked Salvini.
“Yeah, NASA uses them to retrieve any fallen satellite debris off Cape Canaveral.” He meant Cape Kennedy.
“Debris?” It was Salvini, looking as alarmed as Aussie.
“Oh come on,” said the general. “What’s the matter with you guys? Going out of a Herk is far trickier than girdle retrieval. Should I call your mommies?”
“The Galaxy,” said Sal. “It wasn’t a Herk.”
“Oh all right, smart-ass,” said Freeman congenially. “The aircraft.”
He has guts, this general, Aussie told himself. In another fifteen, maybe thirty minutes he could be welcomed aboard Yorktown holding nothing more than his dick from the Payback raid, but here he was, indisputably a leader, chastising them despite what must be a hard moment for him. One man dead and the steel-strapped box still unopened. Aussie prayed that as soon as the big flat-headed bolt cutters on Yorktown cut the steel straps off the box, the general would have yet another victory to his credit, not a Waterloo but a moment like seeing Old Glory atop Mt. Surabachi, and no one to tear it down.
“Firing flares for pickup girdle,” said Eddie, and there were two loud bangs.