Choir’s eyes opened slightly, his voice groggy, barely audible. “What’s goin’ on, boyo?”
“You fucking dork,” joshed Aussie. “We’re in Las Vegas. You just missed the biggest pair of tits—”
“Shush!” said Eddie loudly. “Can’t hear Blue Tile. Static.”
“Amazing,” Aussie whispered sarcastically. “Blue Tile can pull in a damn signal from a Mars lander but a mile away from us all we get is static.”
“It’s the storm,” said Gomez quietly, holding up his hand in a sharp signal for Aussie to stop bitching, Gomez’s face creased with the effort of listening to Blue Tile’s instructions for the RS to maneuver itself into the wind.
“We’ve already done that, Einstein,” Aussie answered Blue Tile’s instructions anxiously. There was something amusing to Freeman in the fact that one of the best warriors he’d ever seen, a privilege to have on his team, was getting nervous.
“It’s simple, Aussie,” the general assured Aussie and Sal. “You’ve seen pictures of how they lift out those aquarium whales in those big canvas slings for transport.”
“I haven’t seen ’em do that,” Aussie riposted, turning around to look at Choir behind him, the movement an awkward one, given his tightly strapped H harness. Despite the RS’s stabilizer fins having been withdrawn, causing the craft to roll like a stunned whale, the Welshman’s mood was suddenly upbeat with the prospect of being transported to the 45,000-ton Yorktown, a craft much more substantial than the 16-ton RS. He winked reassuringly at Aussie, giving his comrade-in-arms the thumbs-up.
“Oh, look at this,” said Aussie. “The rough rider from Wales is giving us the old A-OK sign. That’s reassuring. He’s whacked out on Gravol and dehydrated from upchucking for the last four hours. It’s affected his fucking brain.”
Johnny Lee couldn’t suppress a laugh, though it sent a piercing pain shooting through his arm. The PMS — postmission syndrome — as SpecOp leaders, tongue in cheek, described the release of tension and concomitant surges of euphoria and general silliness that followed hot on the heels of a near-death experience, was palpable inside the RS after the firefight, where they were outnumbered by at least ten to one. The odds Aussie was now giving were that there would be a MANPAD in the box.
The general was having his own surge of optimism, witnessed first by his jocular inquiry whether the team wanted him to call their “mommies” to reassure them that the girdle lift was safe, and second by the shift in his mood that occurred when he realized that there was a very straightforward explanation for the NKA’s lone T-55 and lack of any fast armored fighting vehicles during the total of the hellish twenty-five to twenty-six minutes they were ashore and trying to get Bone back into the RS.
The straightforward answer was the very thing the general had been so careful to plan. His own ruse — telling the President, his National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty, and the Joint Chiefs that his SpecOp team would need at least six weeks’ preparation time — was a well-intentioned lie, so that should news of the planned Payback mission leak out and the North Koreans’ Intelligence relay it back to Pyongyang, the Dear Leader’s military would figure they’d have at the very least a month to reinforce Beach 5 to annihilate the U.S. raiders. That this was clearly the reason for the lack of a sophisticated NKA trap reminded the general once again how often people, such as himself, who lived in a dangerous world in which there was so much intrigue, habitually sought intriguing or conspiratorial answers when the obvious was staring them in the face. You idiot, he told himself as he heard the approaching wokka wokka sound of one of the Yorktown’s heavy-lifting Super Stallion transport helicopters. You set up a six-week wait time, lull the NKA into a sense of security, giving them what they think is lots of prep time for a possible U.S. attack, then you turn into a worry guts because your plan worked. What’s the matter with you, Freeman? Georgie Patton would’ve had your guts for garters. Get a grip, you’re renowned for leadership cool. Show it. Bone would expect it. Freeman’s strong will notwithstanding, however, what had been a kernel of suspicion was growing, and the more he tried to suppress it, the more it demanded attention.
“If you start barfing again,” Aussie warned his wan-looking Welsh swim buddy, “I’ll throw you in the drink!”
“I just burped, you Aussie bastard!”
“Ah!” cut in Freeman, smiling. “Feeling better are we, Choir?”
“Yes, sir,” said Choir. “I’ll be even better when I put my two feet on the old terra firma.”
“Holy shit!” cut in Aussie. “What the hell—”
“Relax, Aussie,” said Gomez. “It’s the sling hitting the hull.” The sound of tackle and cable block they heard was quickly followed by two loud splashes outside the spun-carbon composite skin of the RS. The noise was that made by the two JRDs — jump-rescue divers — from the Super Stallion, the transfer of the RS to the Yorktown getting under way once the divers had completed shackling the starboard and port-side hooks of the rubberized Teflon sling to the U-bolt that was now dangling from the end of a cable being played out through the block-and-tackle arm that stuck out from the big Super Stallion’s belly.
The “wire,” as Eddie Mervyn was told by the Stallion’s pilot, was “barge haul” tough, but for Aussie, who glimpsed the wire on the search-scope’s flat screen, it looked no thicker suspended from the hundred-foot-long helo than a piece of black cotton thread. The SpecOp, SpecWar warrior, who had distinguished himself from Siberia to Germany’s Dortmund Pocket and the hard desert of two Iraqi wars, had no trust whatsoever in the cable. “I’ve seen the bastards snap.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Eddie Mervyn. “That helps.”
“No BS,” said Aussie. “I’ve seen ’em snap, go across the deck like a cattle whip — cut a man clean in half.”
“It’s not gonna snap!” said an irritated Gomez, who was nevertheless crunching in the numbers for torque-to-angle ratios. But the RS, he noted uncomfortably, despite it being much lighter than the prototype, weighed sixteen tons, fully loaded with men and gear. The Super Stallion’s external sling capacity was 16.7. No doubt, like the crush depth of the RS or any other sub, specification tolerances always had an inbuilt safety margin, but the swells they were slopping around in in this Force 8, even with the RS into the wind, would mean it wouldn’t be a lift from a stationary position. One swell over the craft would momentarily add tons of water to the weight.
“He’d better make the pull on a crest, not in a fucking trough,” opined Aussie.
“Aussie!” It was General Douglas Freeman speaking in his rare stentorian tone. “That’s enough!”
Aussie was watching the screen intently, so much so that Gomez and Eddie Mervyn wondered whether Aussie had heard the general. Sal and Choir knew he had; they also knew better than to say anything right now. The three of them had been with the general longer than Lee, Gomez, Mervyn, or Bone. Sal and Choir had been with Aussie in Iraq — they’d seen the aftereffects on Aussie of the terrible street by street, building by building, room by room fighting. It had marked them all with memories that stayed repressed until times of stress.
Apart from Aussie’s wife, Alexsandra, Choir and Sal had been the only ones who had also witnessed the softer paternalism of the warrior who’d made his way from the Australian Outback, where few Australians ever venture, down through the then hard urban seafront of the Rocks area in Sydney, before it became yuppified, working with down-and-outs prior to his starting on what was going to be a working holiday to America but which ended up in a love affair with the Australian-style openness of the United States.