Steamer came awake and functional as swiftly as he had dozed off. “Good work Terr,” he said snapping off the Walkman and returning his seat to an upright state. “What’s the environment, Scrounge?”
“Sterile water and clean threat boards,” Caitlin reported. “Wind direction and sea states are steady.”
Steamer glanced at his tactical display, verifying the setup. “Lookin’ good. Link to the transport we’re standing by and are go for drop. Beacons are going active. Then buzz the Rebel and tell ’em to light it up.”
Reaching up to the overhead control panel, Steamer adjusted the multimode navigational strobe atop the Queen’s stub mast to its infrared setting and switched it on.
Aboard the Combat Talon, the opening of the tail ramp fully admitted the thunder of the turboprops and the roar of the slipstream. Voices could no longer be heard without the medium of the intercom system.
Colonel Mirkle’s copilot called out the sighting. “Surface strobes off the bow. We have acquired the drop site. Bearing looks good. Approach looks good. Little Pig Lead reports ready to accept delivery.”
“Acknowledged.” She skid-turned the aircraft again, aiming precisely for the centerline between the two flashing points of light that had appeared in her night-vision visor. The IR strobes pulsing on the Navy gun boats would give her the base and depth line she would need for the coming LAPES extraction.
“ECM Officer, threat status.”
“Green boards, ma’am. Tactical environment reads secure.”
“Cargomaster, load status?”
“Chocks clear.” A wind-battered voice came back from the cargo bay. “Ramp clear. Drop station manned. Ready for extraction.”
“Very well.” Mirkle’s thumb depressed the drop light switch on her control yoke. “Red Ready light is on. Loadmaster, stand by for cargo release on green…. Copilot, configure for LAPES. Coming back on power…. Flaps down fifteen….”
The avalanche of noise issuing from the engines softened comparatively as Mirkle came back on the Talon’s throttles. Easing the nose up, she faded the massive aircraft back toward its minimal sustainable speed in level flight. Mirkle’s eyes danced in a last data acquisition sweep: engine readout, flight instrumentation, the seaborne beacon lights rushing toward them. She felt the first uneasy tremor in the control yoke hinting at the approaching stall limits.
“Stand by…” she murmured. Once more, her thumb lifted over the drop light switch.
Through their night-vision systems, the observers aboard the Queen of the West saw a massive chunk of shadow tear loose from the sky near the horizon. The shadow configured into a massive, high-winged transport aircraft that skimmed the wave crests. Nose high and with its quadruple propellers turning so slowly the blades could almost be counted, it seemed to float more than fly as it ghosted down upon them.
This was what they had been expecting. This was what they were here for. And yet, the Combat Talon’s abrupt materialization in the night proved startling.
Just as the airspeed indicator wound down to a dangerously low level, the MC-130 swept over the centerline between the two strobes on the ocean’s surface.
The marker strobes edged out of the vision field of her nite-brite visor, and Colonel Mirkle’s thumb came down on the drop-light switch, snapping the drop lights from red to green.
“Drop now! Drop now! Drop now!”
A ribbon chute streamed out behind the Combat Talon. Blossoming in the roaring night, it dragged the first full fuel blivet down the load tracks and out of the Talon’s tailgate.
This was LAPES, the Low-Altitude Precision Extraction System, the most expedient method conceivable of delivering cargo from an aircraft to the earth’s surface: Simply fly very low and kick it out the door. Stabilized and slowed by its drogue parachute, the hoped-for shock-resistant payload would then touch down and skid to a halt across the selected landing ground.
More specifically, this was LAPES-MD the Low-Altitude Precision Extraction System-Maritime Derivation. Instead of the collapsible cargo pallet used in a standard land-bound LAPES drop, the payload rode a Fiberglas hydrosled that would absorb the initial contact shock and prevent the payload from digging into the water and diving under.
In theory at least.
As the sled-mounted fuel blivet touched down, the sea exploded in a towering fan of glittering spray, lifting higher than the tail of the drop aircraft. The load sled burst through the spray wall a stalled heartbeat later, its multi-ton mass skipping across the wavecrests like a stone thrown by a titan, until the combined drag of the water and the parachute decelerated the mass.
With a final buck and wallow like a fighting bass, the blivet came to a halt, afloat and intact.
Cries of victory were screamed, and shoulders were pounded in the Queen’s cockpit.
The second loaded hydrosled followed the first out of the transport’s tail ramp, and then the Combat Talon was away, the shadow merging back with the night in a growing roar of departing power.
“Cargo away!” the load master cried. “We got clean drops!”
Colonel Mirkle disregarded the woman’s jubilant call. She came forward hard on her throttles, regaining her airspeed. Once the payload was out of her aircraft, it was somebody else’s concern. With a warrior pilot’s inbred dislike for flying too long in a straight line, she conducted another random skid turn.
“Flaps full up! Countermeasures, how are we looking?”
“We’re good, Colonel. No radar paint above return levels. Boards are clean.”
Mirkle didn’t exactly sigh with relief, but she did acknowledge the fading of a tension level. The load was on the ground… or in this case water. Now there was nothing to worry about except for getting themselves home.
The chest-vibrating rumble of the engines muted as the tail ramp closed and they settled back at cruise power. From the drop zone, they’d slip through the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Sulawesi and exit into the Celebes Sea. In less than an hour, they could go non-tac and pull up to conventional altitudes. From there it would be a simple transit hop to their turnaround base in the Philippines and then back to Australia. They’d be eating lunch at Curtin tomorrow noon.
“Want me to take it for a while, ma’am?” her copilot inquired.
“Sure, Ed. You have the aircraft.”
Colonel Mirkle unclipped her chin strap and lifted the flight helmet off her graying blonde hair. Lounging back in the instrument-lit darkness of the cockpit, she watched the wavetops shimmer past below the Talon’s nose. A good night’s work, but hopefully next time out they’d be given something more interesting to do than a milk run for the squiddies.
The fuel blivets wallowed in the low waves, supported by the inherent buoyancy of the kerosene they carried, a double row of infrared lumesticks marking their position.
The Queen of the West and the Manassas converged on them. Dropping their tail ramps, the PGAC backed into recovery position. Shotgun armed antishark guards appeared on the upper decks of the hovercraft while skivvy-clad crewhands dove into the warm waters to jettison the load sleds and parachute harnesses and to connect the recovery cables.
Winch motors moaned and the fuel blivets, like gigantic marine cephalopods, crawled out of the sea and into the bellies of the Sea Fighters, sliding up the Teflon-slicked tarpaulins that had been unrolled down the ramps to receive them. Checks were made for kerosene leakage, tie-down straps were secured, and glad-hand connectors linked, accessing the new fuel reserve.