“Crank!” A voice yelled the single warning word through a cockpit window and the first turbine lit off.
“Hey, Skipper!” Over the rising clamor on deck, Amanda heard the shout. Stone loomed at her side, his considerable size enhanced by body armor and a load of personal electronics and ammunition. “The boarding party’s loading down in the hangar now and the lift bird’ll go on the elevator the second you guys clear the pad. We’ll be five minutes behind ya!”
“Right. We’ll fade back and let you close to two minutes’ separation. Hear that, Cobra?”
“Two minutes.” A third tall figure in a flight suit and helmet stood out of the shadows. “Got it.”
“Just like in the planning sessions, gentlemen. The first pass drives off or destroys the pirate craft and traps the boarders on the ship. Second pass suppresses the deck and clears the way for our counter-boarders. Then we clean up the leftovers. Let’s all remember the purpose of this exercise is hard intel and prisoners.”
“Aye, aye!”
“This is our first fight of a new campaign. Good luck to us all!”
She lifted her hands palm out and received a matching pair of stinging high fives in return.
Quillain disappeared back into the superstructure while Amanda followed Richardson to the waiting Wolf One. As she climbed into the cabin and settled in the jumpseat behind the pilots, the crew chief passed her a flight helmet. Donning it, she jacked the combination power and intercom lead into the overhead connectors, testing both the integral head set and night-vision visor.
Wolf One’s pair of armor-clad door gunners were the last crewmen aboard. With their heads grotesque in Head’s-Up-Display targeting helmets and their bodies asymmetrically distorted by the MX-214 miniguns they lugged at their hips, they resembled the grim special-effects creations of some science-fiction filmmaker.
The reality was as strange as any fiction, however. These men were cyborg warriors, literally a physical merging of man and gun into a single weapons system.
One of the lessons learned during the long years of helicopter warfare in Vietnam had been that no fixed aircraft gun mount was as fast or as flexible to use as a weapon directly wielded by a human. Accordingly, the veteran airmobile gunners of that conflict learned to strap their machine guns to their bodies with a carrying harness, making themselves living gun mounts.
The Seawolves remembered the lesson.
Stiffly the door gunners lifted themselves into the bench seats that faced outward through the side hatches. Their monkey-harness straps were locked into overhead hardpoints, and feeder tracks connected the miniguns to the ammunition magazines built into the cabin roof. Power links clicked home — intercom, laser sight, Helmet Mounted Display, gun drive. Systems cycled through checkout mode. Fighting men and fighting aircraft became one entity.
Amanda found the sequence a little chilling.
Flickering rotors occulted the stars, and Wolf One trembled on her skids. Cobra Richardson twisted around in the command pilot’s seat, his rakish Errol Flynn mustache a dark smear across his paler features in the dim light. “Flight ready to launch, Captain. ETA over target approximately twenty minutes.”
Lieutenant Commander Richard “Cobra” Richardson was a unique individual. Formerly of the Coast Guard’s elite Caribbean-based drug interdiction gunship squadron, he had service-transferred to the Navy and to the Seawolves. His motivation had been the same as when he had previously made the jump from the U.S. Air Force’s Air Commando Wing to the Coasties: an unending hunger to go where the action was.
Vince Arkady had recommended Richardson to Amanda. “Cobra is made for your outfit, babe. He’s a solid leader. He can fly any helo you can name right out to the limits, and he loves to operate. You’ll just have to live with the fact that he’s also just a little bit crazy.”
Amanda smiled to herself. Coming from you, Arkady, that’s high praise indeed.
“Get us in the air, Cobra,” she said aloud.
“Aye, aye. Cunningham AIRBOSS, this is Wolf One. Executing departure now. Wolf Two, follow me out.”
The tremble grew into a chest-deep vibration as the collective came back and the rotors caught air. Wolf One gingerly eased off the deck on the lift cushion of ground effect, the tight spotting on the cruiser’s small helipad giving Cobra and his copilot barely an arm’s span of clearance between their rotor tips and those of Wolf Two, Cobra coaxed the Super Huey into a hover, station keeping and bobbling slightly in the ship’s slipstream, then he sheered away sharply. As they cleared the cruiser’s deck and lost the ground-effect lift boost, the heavily laden helicopter fell out of the sky.
Amanda had been warned about this move, but her stomach still knotted through the dive and swoop almost to the wave crests as Cobra deftly exchanged his few feet of altitude for forward flight speed.
“No problems, ma’am,” he commented without bothering to look back over his shoulder.
“I’ll take your word for it, Commander.” Twisting in her jump seat, Amanda looked aft out the open side door. Wolf Two had already tailed them into the air and now was jockeyed into formation. Flying without running lights, the gunship was a shadow against black velvet, only the faint, glowing smear of its cockpit instrumentation marking its position.
Farther away astern, the Cunningham was momentarily outlined against the shimmering path of the setting moon; then she, too, was taken by the darkness. With their engines shrieking at full war power, the Seawolves put their noses down and loped into the night.
Another aircraft reacted to the emergency as well.
From where she circled at sixty thousand feet, the islands of the Indonesian archipelago were black velvet patches against a pewter sea, spangled with the glittering sparks of towns and villages. Global Hawk Teal-Niner was ten hours into her mission profile with another eight to go before her relief bird came in from Australia.
With her turbofan throttled back to minimum cruise, the recon drone had been lazing in a wide racetrack pattern over southern Sumatra and western Java, waiting for a reaction command. So the time on station would not be a waste, her programmers had instructed her to conduct a series of secondary missions while loitering. She had monitored maritime traffic patterns, conducted infrared and low-light scans of some of the more isolated island groups in the area, and maintained a signal intelligence sweep for unusual radio traffic. Nothing particularly challenging for Teal-Niner’s onboard artificial intelligences.
As the data had been acquired, it had been encrypted, packaged for microburst transmission, and fired off through a MILSTAR communications link to Curtin Base and to the drone’s secondary control node aboard the USS Carlson.
So far, nothing of exceptional import had been noted. Intermittently, the Global Hawk would be painted by Indonesian air defense radar, but this was not a matter of undue concern. The Indonsians had nothing that could reach her altitude, and at most, the stealthy drone was a faint, intermittent ghost at the extreme limits of their detection capacity, an easily disregarded UFO.
Abruptly, a command channel opened over the MILSTAR link, a distant human systems operator overriding the autonomous onboard computer. Spooling up to fast cruise, the drone broke away from its preplotted course and swooped toward a new objective. In its belly, sensor and camera turrets swiveled and panned downward, zooming in on a tiny cluster of lights isolated on the sea far below.