At 684 feet in length, the Carlson was not as long as the Cunningham. However, at 25,000 tons, the LPD displaced almost three times as much. While she had a far greater beam and a more massive superstructure than the Duke, the Carlson had a similar geometric, art deco simplicity to her design that denoted a ship with an integrally low radar signature.
Both vessels carried their sensors in clean-lined freestanding mast arrays or built into their angled superstructures as “smart skin” segments. Both were cutting-edge military technology and neither could be taken for granted in any kind of a fight.
Unlike their predecessors, the San Antonio-class LPDs were not mere helpless naval auxiliaries. Their mission would take them close inshore, into “Indian country,” where a fight was something to be expected. Accordingly, these “auxiliaries” mounted more firepower than three quarters of the world’s dedicated surface combatants.
Beyond that, the Carlson possessed a few special surprises unique unto herself.
Steamer Lane eased the Queen of the West in astern of the LPD. Decelerating to twenty knots, he bumped the hovercraft into the trough of the larger vessel’s wake.
“Little Pig Lead to Little Pigs,” he murmured into his lip mike, “prepare for recovery. Formation change. Echelon to line astern… go.”
Two matter-of-fact “Rogers” came back out of the dark as Carondelet and Manassas smoothly folded in to trail behind their squadron leader.
“Permission to recover, Captain?” Lane inquired with a glance in Amanda’s direction.
Amanda nodded. “Proceed, Mr. Lane. Take us in.”
She flipped up her nite-brite visor to watch the procedure with conventional vision. This was by now a routine evolution for the squadron, but she still found it impressive.
“Okay ma’am. Doin’ it…. Possum One bay control, this is Little Pig Lead. On station for recovery and ready to come back in the pouch.”
“Acknowledged, Little Pig Lead,” the radio-filtered voice of the BAYBOSS replied. “Initiating recovery. Little Pigs, welcome home.”
A streak of dull scarlet light cut across the top of the Carlson’s broad, square stern. Widening rapidly, the streak grew into a ruddy glowing rectangle in the night as the LPD’s huge boarding ramp swung down, its trailing edge touching and flattening the ship’s boiling wake.
Revealed was a huge double-leveled internal bay that ran far forward within the hull of the amphibious ship. Under the blood-colored illumination of the battle lights, the docking crew and the Sea Fighter service teams could be seen jogging to their stations along the gantryways that lined either side of the bay. For her current tasking, the Evans F. Carlson had been optimized for “dry deck” hovercraft operations. There was no need for ballasting down at the stern to flood her internal well, as would be mandated by the use of conventional landing craft. Thus, she was something new, not an aircraft carrier, but a seacraft carrier.
With a masterful jockeying of air rudder and throttle, Steamer Lane eased the Queen’s foreskirt over the edge of the stern ramp. A surge of power to the airscrews then kicked the Sea Fighter upslope and into the bay, her wailing turbine song folding in around her, reverberating within the steel-walled cavern.
Steamer came back on the airscrew throttles and killed the main propulsion turbines, shifting his right hand to the T-stick “puff port” controller on the central console, A deck guide stepped out in front of the idling hovercraft, beckoning forward with his glowing wands. With bursts of the puff port thrusters, Lane taxied the Queen deeper into the bay, clearing the boarding ramp for the Carondelet.
As they trundled forward, Amanda glanced up at the bold artwork mounted above the gantries on the bay bulkheads. In pride, the different elements that made up the Sea Fighter task force had mounted man-tall copies of their unit shields there.
She checked them off in her mind as each badge crept past. Portside… the bamboo-lettered GUNG HO! crest of the Carlson.… Starboard… the ghost-ship silhouette and STRIKE IN STEALTH battle cry of the Cunningham.… Port… the ferociously Disneyesque trio of African warthogs of PGAC 01, THE THREE LITTLE PIGS…. Starboard… the rampant sea dragon of the 1st Marine Raider Company (Provisional)…. Port… a raider-boat silhouette butted into a dagger hilt for Bravo detachment, Special Boat Squadron 1…. Starboard… the all-seeing eye and crossed lightning bolts of Tactical Intelligence Group Alpha…. Port and lastly, the twinned gold and blue Oceanhawk helicopters of Heloron 24.
Each of these elements had been drawn from the NAVSPECFORCE unit pool or, in some instances, created specifically at Amanda’s request to fill out her visualization of the task force. Eddie Mac MacIntyre had given her a blank check to create a “best of the best,” a balanced and self-supporting Navy, Army, and Air Force in miniature that could deploy rapidly to any littoral hotspot in the world and deal with any low- to mid grade threat.
One empty shield space remained to starboard, one unit left to merge into the whole. Then it would be time to see how correct her vision had been.
For Amanda Lee Garrett, ex-destroyer driver, it was a new way of war. But then, there had been a great deal of newness in her life of late. New technologies, new doctrines, new relationships, and new ways of thinking as a task group TACBOSS instead of a single-ship captain. Much had changed over the past year.
At least that sense of frustration and lack of purpose that had once plagued her as the dockside captain of a crippled ship had dissipated. Amanda had come to like this current command and the revised place she had carved for herself in her trade.
But with the gaining of the new, there is frequently a loss of the old. There were lingering thoughts of a youthful, dark-haired lover, a last perfect golden day off Cape Hatteras, and a conversation that had never been finished.
Still, if certain lonely holes remained in her personal life, she could live with them for the time being. Maybe with her career back on track and the task force coming together, she could start to think about patching them up.
“Anything wrong, ma’am?” Lane asked, glancing across from the pilot’s station.
“Nothing, Steamer,” she smiled. “Not a thing in the world. Stand on.”
Captain Stonewall Quillain stood six foot three in his custom Danner Fort Lewis combat boots and was shouldered and muscled to look mountainous instead of merely tall. He considered Valdosta, Georgia, to be the best place in the world to be from, just as he considered the United States Marine Corps the best profession a man could have.
His features were an accumulation of blunt wedges assembled in a way that could never be called handsome, a scowl settling onto them far more readily than a smile. In fact, it was said among his Sea Dragons that “the skipper never actually looks happy, just less pissed off.”
Still, though no one would dare accuse him of it to his face, Captain Stone Quillain had a broad streak of sentimentality in his makeup. Neither he, nor the unit he commanded, had any direct role in this night’s operation, but he had people he called friends who did. Accordingly, he would see them home.
The guts of the Carlson rang with concentrated sound, like the interior of some gigantic brass horn. Quillain had to press the earphones of his command headset closer to his skull to make out the words being passed through it.
“Hangar bay, level two. Prepare to receive and spot hovercraft.”