“Do we have radio contact with the helicopter?” His leg hastily bandaged, Belewa pulled himself upright in the open rear door of the command track. The numbness had gone from his torn limb, and he spoke through gritted teeth.
“Off and on, sir,” the radio operator replied. “Jamming is still intense, but we are getting burn-through as he gets closer.”
“There he is!” a guard yelled from outside. The whistling drone of a light helicopter echoed beneath the overcast. Belewa twisted in the hatchway and looked up just as the Messerschmitt-Bolkow BO 105 gunship swept past overhead, flare light reflecting palely from its underbelly.
“Order them to sink the tug! Sink it!”
The attack order came in faintly over the warble of the American jamming, but plain enough to be made out by the gunship’s pilot. “Owl Three Five acknowledges,” he replied casually into his headset mike, not unduly concerned as to whether his reply was heard or not.
Holding his course, he angled out across the harbor area, weaving to snake through the pattern of slowly descending star shells. The target was easy to acquire. The Algerian tanker was a black cutout against the shimmering metallic silver of the harbor, the tug a smaller shadow off the tanker’s stern, the silver water roiling behind it.
A simple matter. The only trick would be to get close enough to ensure that no round could wander and hit the larger vessel.
“Arm rockets. One and four,” he commanded over the intercom. The BO 105 carried four Matra 68mm rocket pods on its snub wings. Two of the six-round clusters would be adequate for the task at hand.
His copilot hit the arming switches and the glowing blue rings of the cartwheel sight materialized on the cockpit heads-up display.
Crossing the harbor, the pilot swung wide beyond the northern breakwater. Coming around again, he set his attack run, pulling the little twin-turbine gunship through an unnecessarily steep bank, deftly flying by instruments and enjoying the drag of the G forces. With the latest fuel restrictions, he needed to draw every bit of pleasure he could from his limited air time.
The night swirled past beyond the rain-streaked wind screen, going level again as they lined up on the target. Smoothly, the pilot eased the helicopter over into a shallow accelerating dive, the crossbar in the center of the weapon sight resting on the tug’s deck, the vertical stroke passing through the pilothouse. Now, to hold that sight picture until they reached firing range.
From what he had heard, the ground-pounders and the navy had been fumbling around with the Americans out here all night. Now it was time to put an end to this children’s play. The pilot grinned tightly and flipped the thumb guard up and off the firing button on his collective lever. The arming tone squalled in his headset.
The silhouette of the Union gunship cut across the monitor as it passed beneath the hovering Eagle Eye.
“Where the hell did he come from?” Macintyre exclaimed, straightening.
“The Aviation unit at Payne Field. Belewa must have been able to keep one of his night-capable helicopters operational. Shit!” Christine spun around to face the S.O. at the drone control station. “Stay on that helo!”
“Aye, aye.” The systems operator’s hands flew across the controls of his remote terminal as he took the RPV out of station-keeping mode. The image on the wall monitor swooped and pivoted as the robot tilt-rotor transitioned to level flight and moved out in pursuit of the manned aircraft.
Macintyre stared at the monitor screen, his fists clinched. “How much armament can that gunship carry?” he demanded.
“Enough!”
The Admiral spun around to face the intel, his voice rising. “To hell with Captain Garrett’s tasking options. Move those seafighters in now! Kill that helo!”
Christine could only shake her head wildly. “It’s too late! Stinger antiair missiles weren’t included in the cell load-out! Surface-to-surface armament had priority! And they’ll never get within gun range in time!”
The Union helicopter completed its overflight of the port area. Centered in the Eagle Eye screen, it kicked up and around in a steep turn, coming back over the northern break water and diving in toward the helpless tug.
“God save us all!” Maclntyre’s fist crashed down on the tabletop.
A choked sob escaped from Christine Rendino. She literally threw herself at the drone operator, knocking him aside and out of his chair. Leaning in over the drone control terminal, she grasped the joystick. Staring intently into the pilot’s view monitor, she slammed the throttle scale to its highest mark.
The image on the wall monitor tilted insanely, as the drone peeled off into a screaming split-S maneuver, the Remotely Piloted Vehicle pitching into a maximum boost dive.
The recon camera automatically restabilized and recentered on the Union gunship. The image of the helicopter swelled explosively in the center of the screen as the course lines of the gunship and drone converged. In the last seconds of transmission, the low-light video imager looked down through the BO 105’s rotor arc and into the canopy bubble, catching the shock and horror on the helicopter pilot’s face as he looked up and opened his mouth to scream.
The wall monitor went abruptly dead.
Christine straightened and took a deep, deliberate breath. Extending a hand, she helped the startled drone operator back to his feet. “Call the flight deck and see if they can set us up another bird,” she said. “I think I sort of busted this one.”
Macintyre palmed the sweat from his brow, brushing back his dampened hair. “Nice move, Commander,” he said, taking a deep breath of his own. “Very nice move indeed.”
“The coward’s kamikaze, sir. You gotta love it.”
The sky lit up, but with an orange glow instead of the harsh eye-stabbing whiteness of burning magnesium. Startled, Amanda looked up in time to see a blazing mass of wreckage rain down into the harbor a quarter mile off the tug’s starboard side. She didn’t have the vaguest clue as to what might have happened out there, but she suspected that someone might have just taken care of a problem for her.
If so, whoever it was, Amanda was grateful. She had enough to deal with just then.
A column of water jetted out of the sea ahead, the WHAM CR-A-A-A-CK of the shell detonation following a split instant later. Heavy weapons this time. The two armored cars, positioned like Scylla and Charybdis at the harbor’s mouth, were opening fire. Aiming low, they attempted to walk their 90mm rounds in on the Banner without hitting the tanker behind the tug.
Amanda shot a final look to port and starboard, gauging their position against the channel buoys. This was as good as it was going to get. Reaching over, she slammed the engine throttles closed, then she touched the transmit pad on her Leprechaun transceiver. “This is Moonshade to all Wolfrider elements. Cutter, Cutter, Cutter! I say again, Cutter, Cutter, Cutter!”
“Acknowledged! ” Steamer Lane’s reply shot back instantly. “The word is Cutter and we are inbound!”
Another Panhard round howled in, this one exploding off the tug’s port side, close enough to rain spray down onto the Banner’s weather decks.
It would be the last.
The Hellfire missiles that arced in from the sea had been designed to destroy the heaviest of main battle tanks. The thin-skinned Union armored cars presented no challenge at all. Plunging downward through the thin turret roofs, the Hell fires dissolved the French-built vehicles, the Panhard’s ammunition stores magnifying the explosion so that both entryway hardpoints were engulfed and devastated.