“Y’all got it, Skipper.”
“Christine. Can you give us a one-day jump-off warning before they make their move?”
The intel nodded slowly. “Yes, ma’am. I believe we can give you a twenty-four-hour notification of event with a reasonable accuracy level.”
Amanda hesitated, meeting Christine’s cool blue-gray gaze for a long moment, then turned away. “All right, let’s get going on this ground work. We’ll start on the details tonight. I want a special 0 Group meeting at 1900 hours for… let’s call it for Operation OK Corral.”
Twenty minutes later, Amanda sat at her desk calling up the first of a protracted series of data dumps on her laptop. A Styrofoam cup of double-steeped tea sat at her elbow. She’d learned that if she absorbed enough caffeine to get through the comparatively cool morning hours, the generalized discomfort of the full day’s heat would keep her awake and operational, without having to resort to the go-pill kit. It was a useful thing to know when all hell was on the verge of breaking loose.
She was just taking her first cautious sip of the hot liquid when a sharp rap sounded at the module door.
“Come in.”
Christine Rendino entered and assumed a parade rest in front of Amanda’s desk, her eyes emotionless and looking somewhere beyond Amanda’s shoulder. “Request permission to speak frankly with the Captain.”
Amanda sighed and pushed the laptop aside. Back during the briefing, Christine had started to look and sound like a naval officer. That almost inevitably meant that the little intel was truly and royally pissed off about something and that she wanted Amanda to know about it.
“You know you always have permission, Chris. Let’s hear it. What’s the problem?”
The intel relaxed minutely, resting her hands on her hips. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with Stone Quillain lately, haven’t you?”
Amanda lifted an eyebrow. “Does this concern my professional life or my personal one?”
“Both! I mean, I’m wondering here if you’ve been hanging around with the Marine mentality so much that maybe some of the gung ho is starting wear off on you.”
The intel’s words were an attack, and an angry nerve-sharpened response almost reached Amanda’s lips. Almost.
Amanda caught herself in time and called the words back. Christine Rendino had been serving as her emotional Jiminy Cricket for years now, and she had come to learn it was bad joss to disregard her friend’s observations.
“Sit down, Chris,” she said quietly. “Pour yourself a cup of this high-octane tea and tell me what you’re seeing.”
After a moment, the little intel stopped bristling and accepted both the tea and the chair. “All right,” she said. “What I think I’m seeing now is something I haven’t ever seen before. Amanda Garrett looking for a fight. Hey, I mean you’ve always done the job, but I have never, ever seen you take your people into a battle that wasn’t absolutely required to do that job.”
Amanda took a deliberate sip of tea. “And you don’t think OK Corral is a necessary fight?”
“What I think isn’t important, boss ma’am. What you think is. And what I am asking is, have you done as much thinking about this job as maybe you should have? Belewa is up against the ropes. If we can just keep the oil tap turned off for a few more weeks, he’s going down.
“That’s the real strategic key to this whole thing,” Christine continued earnestly. “We don’t have to go to guns with this guy. We can starve him to death. If we can bust up this mass smuggling run by means other than by a direct confrontation, it’ll serve the same purpose. And a big bunch of Union… and probably American sailors will stay alive.”
When applied to those most elemental equations of life and death, additional consideration was always in order. Amanda thought for a long moment before replying.
“To tell you the truth, Chris,” she said finally. “I really didn’t do too much deep thinking at all about the OK Corral operation before committing us to it. But then, that’s become rather SOP for me lately. I’m not exactly sure why, but as this campaign has progressed, I’ve found myself reacting to Belewa more and more by instinct and intuition than by logic. If I were back at the Naval War College laying this scenario out as a problem in strategic analysis, I’d probably agree with you. But here and now, living it, my heart and my gut are sending me a different message.”
Christine frowned. “And they’re saying?”
“That this show is a long way from being over. Back in the briefing trailer, you called this bulk-smuggling operation a Hail Mary play. I disagree with that assumption. Yes, we are going into the endgame. Yes, Belewa’s back is against the wall. But that only makes him more dangerous. Belewa is not going to yield passively, Chris. Not while he has a drop of fuel, or a round of ammunition, or a single man responding to orders. This I am sure of. He will only become more driven and more willing to take chances.”
Amanda set her cup on the desktop and leaned back in her chair, the salt-rusted pivot squeaking. “That’s what OK Corral is about, Chris. The fuel is almost secondary. This is a chance to bleed Belewa, to force him into an engagement at something close to our terms. If we can take a large block of his fighting strength out of the game now, it will leave him with that much less to work with when he finally does make his last stand.”
The intel was quiet for a moment, deep in considerations of her own.
“Well,” Amanda inquired. “What do you think of OK Corral now?”
“I think I liked the Kurt Russell version best. Wasn’t Val Kilmer just to die for as Doc Holliday?”
“You called it right, Captain,” Ben Tehoa commented, peering over the shoulder of his squadron commander. “They’re bypassing Port Harper and continuing up the coast.”
Captain Garrett nodded absently as she studied the radar display, her amber hair dull flame in the cockpit’s scarlet battle lights. “Our recon indicates they have truck convoys waiting up at their usual landing points along the Grand Cess coastal highway. I’ve been worried that they might try and bring the smuggling fleet directly in at Harper, but I guess that would be a little too flagrant even for the Union. This was the last big maybe, Chief. OK Corral is good to go.”
“You think they know we’re out here, ma’am?”
“I think they’re expecting us to be.”
The radar sweep etched scores of glowing dots clustered between the ghostfire green of the coast and the incandescent blue of the squadron’s course line. A second console screen carried a real-time download from the low-light cameras of a circling Predator drone. Upon it, dozens of straggling wakes cut across the surface of the sea, outboard engines churning the luminescence from the water.
A mismatched flotilla of small craft trudged westward beneath the full moon, each boat burdened to the point of risk with cans and drums of diesel and gasoline. On their seaward flank, a long line of Boghammer gunboats cruised warily nose to tail, a mobile wall of men and firepower fencing out the threat of U.N. intervention.
Farther yet to seaward, that intervention loitered. The Three Little Pigs padded silently along in swimmer mode, paralleling the course of the Union convoy, awaiting their time.
“Those Union gunboats look like they’ve got bigger crews aboard tonight,” Tehoa commented.
Captain Garrett nodded again. “Um-hmm. They’re running a couple of extra gunners per hull. I had the Predator make a low pass a while ago to check them out and they look like army heavy-weapons men. Every boat’s also carrying a heavy ammunition load. They’re here to fight. No doubt about it.”