The onboard radars of the Eagle Eyes themselves, however, were unaffected. Tuned to peer through a narrow crack in the scrambled electromagnetic spectrum, they could be used to develop a tactical display of the developing engagement. Amanda did so now.
“Bass Tilt and Plank Shave locks broken, Captain,” Selkirk reported. “We’re below his return strengths.”
“Very good, Mr. Selkirk. Stay on the ECM. Steamer, bring us left to two-seven-zero. Let’s get off his last bearing.”
“Steering two-seven-zero, aye.” Lane eased the wheel over, slipping the hovercraft. onto its new course. “Think he might try a blind shot anyhow? Should we elevate the weapons pedestals?”
Amanda stared into the cool glow of the tactical screen, considering the target hack of the Syrian corvette and the man who commanded it. She’d been watching him all evening as he had trudged up and down the coast on his patrol line. Doing everything the book said should be done, but never anything more.
Would he have it in him to go for broke, attempting a literal shot in the dark against an unidentified and inassessable foe? Slowly she shook her head. “No. He’s past it. I think we’re clear.”
All hands in the Queen’s cockpit held themselves alert for another two minutes. Then, as the range continued to open and the threat boards remained clean, there came the mutual release of held breath and tautened muscles. Amanda settled back into the copilot’s seat and spoke into her lip mike. “This is the Lady to all Little Pig Elements. Form up on Little Pig Lead and proceed to Point Item for recovery. Possum One, Little Pigs are inbound. Maintain coverage jamming for another five minutes, then stand down and secure the operational time line. You may inform NAVSPECFORCE the mission is accomplished. All elements, well done.”
“Rebel, raja.”
“Frenchman, aye.”
“Possum acknowledges.”
Out in the night, two sleek, finned shadows converged on the Queen of the West. Riding on hazy streaks of starlit mist, the Queen’s two sisters pulled into echelon formation with their leader. Reunited once more, the squadron ran free for the open sea.
Amanda slid her seat back on its rails. Unbuckling her safety harness, she popped the latches on her combination life jacket /flak vest. Lifting off her helmet, she shook her sweat-matted hair out over her shoulders. Scrounger Caitlin, with the instincts of a good chief of the boat, leaned in between the pilots’ stations, passing her captains a couple of cans of Orange Crush, fresh from the galley refrigerator.
Amanda took a long pull at the soft drink, relishing the cleansing chill in her tension-soured throat. Glancing at the tactical display once more, she noted that the Syrian corvette had broken off its pursuit and had turned away. Humiliated, it crept back toward the coast.
I suspect I may have destroyed your career out here tonight, she thought, beaming her words through the darkness to the nameless Syrian commander. I’m sorry it had to be done, but such are the fortunes of not-war.
An hour later and fifty miles farther offshore, the Sea Fighters reached “Point Item.”
Ever since their departure from the Syrian coast, the threat boards of the Sea Fighter group had been reacting to the vigilant radiating of a powerful SPY-2A Aegis radar array. Now a pale slash of phosphorescent wake could be made out along the median between the black velvet sea and midnight satin sky. Fast ships moving through the darkness, their running lights extinguished.
Amanda smiled and lowered the nite-brite visor of her helmet to watch the closing with the two-vessel task group. For her, this was more than just a return to base. In a way, she was coming home, and she still savored the experience.
The lead ship, the escort, ran closer inshore, poised ready to interpose itself between its charge and the hostile coast.
Amanda knew this ship the way she might know the body of a long favored lover. So much was the same, the great angular shark fin of the freestanding mast array, the low, slope-sided deckhouse, and the uncluttered sleekness of the silhouette against the sky glow, the great radically raked bow slashing open the sea.
The only readily visible difference were the deck guns, below the bridge amidships and on the well deck aft of the helipad. Replacing the smooth, hemispherical bumps of the old OTO Melara 76mm Super Rapids were the larger “ax blade” stealth turrets of her new and vastly more potent 5-inch.62-caliber ERGM systems.
The changes within that rakish hull were too numerous to catalog however.
Once upon a time designated as a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Cunningham had served as the Navy’s advanced test-bed hull for navalized stealth technology. Now, with that mission accomplished, she carried a new designation at her bow, CLA (Cruiser Littoral Attack)-79, and a new tasking, the proving of the evolving technologies of the fleet’s “Force from the Sea” battle doctrine.
But still, she was the Duke. In Amanda’s heart, she was still “her” ship.
When she had started to assemble this new littoral-warfare unit, Eddie Mac MacIntyre had given her a free hand at drawing from the available NAVSPECFORCE resource pool. When it had come to selecting a heavy-firepower escort for the Sea Fighters, Amanda hadn’t hesitated for a second.
High up on the Cunningham’s signals deck, an Aldis lamp blinked a brief signaclass="underline" All’s well, Captain.
Commander Ken Hiro, her old exec, held sway on the Duke’s bridge now. But he remembered the old days too.
Holding in their echelon formation, the Sea Fighters cut around the stern of the cruiser sequentially ski-jumping her wake. Ahead, the faintly glowing sea track of a second, even larger vessel cut across the Mediterranean.
The USS Evans F. Carlson was both one of a kind and one of many, for LPD (Landing Platform Dock) 26 was the bastard child of the San Antonio class.
Originally the Navy had wanted only an even dozen of this new model amphibious assault ship, one for each of the fleet’s twelve Marine-hauling amphibious warfare groups. But somewhere in the pitch and toss of congressional monetary and political wrangling, an undesired thirteenth of the design had become wedged immovably into the Defense Department budget, a slab out of the pork barrel with no home and no mission.
However, Elliot MacIntyre had a saying: “When confronted with pork, make gravy.” Under his astute machinations, this thirteenth orphan found a home within Naval Special Forces, undergoing conversion into the Navy’s largest and most potent seaborne Special Operations platform. In honor of this distinction, the Navy had “broken class” with her naming. Instead of an American city, she bore the name of an American hero, Brigadier General Evans F. Carlson, the bold and radical creator and commander of the legendary 2nd Marine Raider Battalion of the Second World War.
Given her mission, it was an honor suitable for ship and man alike.
As the Queen of the West swept in behind the Carlson, Amanda scanned the chunky lines of her new flagship through the night-vision visor, comparing them for the hundredth time with her beloved Duke.
It was rather like matching a massive, stocky Percheron with a lean and long-lined Thoroughbred. Yet, much was similar as well. Although built for entirely different missions, the Carlson and the Cunningham were sisters, or at least cousins, under the skin.