“Hunter, old bean,” the man said when the pilot entered the room. “I hear our mission was a success in the end.”
“I would have given it all back if we could have avoided this,” Hunter told him, examining his wounds.
“Rubbish, Hunter!” Sir Neil replied, his weakened voice rising a notch. “We needed the weapons, man! We couldn’t very well sail into the Gates of Hell with a popgun now could we? And an unloaded popgun at that.”
“But we need you, sir,” Hunter said. “You were the brains of this outfit.”
“And what the hell makes you think I still can’t be!” the wounded officer said, nearly ripping his head bandage. “What do you intend on doing? Casting me adrift in the Med and going on without me?”
“Wouldn’t think of it, sir,” the pilot said with a grin. “You’ll have to stay here and eat this rotten food with the rest of us.”
Sir Neil managed a smile, then motioned Hunter to come close. Speaking in a voice low enough that his doctors couldn’t hear, he said: “Aye, Hunter, when you get a chance, please slip me a bit of the grape, wot? Just a small bottle would do. Some of Giuseppe’s good stuff. Just to get the blood flowing in the right direction?”
At that moment, Hunter was certain Sir Neil would survive his wounds.
The sun was just starting to break the eastern Med horizon when one of Yaz’s men started pounding on Hunter’s cabin door. He was sound asleep at the time, wrapped very comfortably in young Emma’s arms. But he was up and at the door in a second. He sensed that something was up.
“Sorry, major,” the young sailor said, catching a peek at Emma’s naked breasts out of the corner of his eye. “But CIC reports a large flotilla of ships heading our way.”
“Jeezus,” Hunter cursed pulling on his flight suit and boots. “What kind of boats, any idea?”
“Well, the blips on surface radar indicate that they’re fairly small,” the sailor said. “But there’s more than a hundred of them.”
Hunter was up on the flight deck in a matter of minutes, glad to see that Yaz’s guys had his F-16 fired up and ready for launch.
He met Heath just as he was climbing up the 16’s access ladder. The BBC film crew was nearby, recording everything.
“They’re about twenty-five miles to the northeast,” Heath told Hunter. “Definitely coming right for us.”
“What kind of small boats are floating around here these days?” Hunter asked him as he put on his flight helmet. “Do they make PT boats anymore?”
“Could be anything, Hunter,” Heath told him. “Armed trawlers perhaps. Maybe converted minesweepers.”
“Can you get the Harriers warmed up?” Hunter asked just before he closed his canopy. “If there are more than a hundred of these guys, I’m gonna need help.”
With that, the F-16 roared off the carrier in a burst of steam, climbed, and streaked off toward the northeast.
Hunter clicked on his “look-down” radar and located the fleet of ships immediately. He checked his cannon ammunition indicator. It showed all six of his M-61 Vulcans were full. His computers indicated that no sophisticated weapons were aboard the boats — yet he knew torpedos wouldn’t necessarily trip the computer’s sensors.
He took a deep gulp of oxygen and put the 16 into a dive.
He broke through a light cloud cover at about 5000 feet and found himself right on top of the flotilla. The fleet was spread out for almost two miles. He wasn’t surprised that the boats were all different shapes and sizes — trawlers, pleasure yachts, ocean ferries, even a few armed tugboats similar to O’Brien’s.
Hunter was surprised however when he saw that most of them were flying white flags.
He dropped down to 500 feet and slowed the jet down to a crawl, certain that there were no antiaircraft missiles ready to fire at him. He tipped the 16 to its portside to get a better look at the boats. They appeared to be crowded with armed men — irregulars, he theorized. No specific uniforms. And, far from appearing hostile, they were all waving and cheering as he flew by.
He buzzed the fleet a few more times, noticing several of the boats were carrying radio antennas on their masts. On a chance the boats were carrying modern communications equipment, he searched both his VHF and UHF bands to try to pick up any signal. At the end of the UHF band, he started to pick something up.
“ … Liberte Marina calling,” the heavily Italian accented voice called out through a burst of static. “We are compadres. Please do not attack. We are the Liberte Marina … ”
Liberte Marina? Did that translate into Freedom Navy? If so, what the hell was the Freedom Navy?
Two Harriers arrived on the scene a few minutes later, and luckily one of the pilots was conversant in Italian. As Hunter orbited above monitoring the radio conversations, the two Harriers hovered over the now-stopped flotilla, the pilot speaking with the fleet’s leader.
They were the Freedom Navy, a combination Sicilian-Italian force that had apparently heard all about the Saratoga’s mission to the Suez.
But what did they want?
“We are here to join you!” the fleet leader kept saying over and over in very broken English. “Compadres! We sail with you!”
An hour later the Freedom Navy boats were floating beside the Saratoga fleet. Several Norwegian frigates repeatedly sailed through the Liberte boats keeping an eye on them. A half-dozen helicopters buzzing above them did the same. The BBC video crew was hanging off the side of the carrier deck, diligently capturing all the action on film.
Hunter was back on board the Saratoga by the time the Navy’s leader had been airlifted aboard. He joined Heath, Yaz, and Captain Olson in the carrier’s stateroom, where they questioned him.
His name was Commodore Antonio Vanaria. He was a short, stubby character complete with knee-high boots, a feathered Napoleon-style hat, a mean-looking double-barreled carbine strapped over his shoulder, and bandolier ammunition belts crossing his chest.
He had come to offer help.
“Everywhere people are talking about the Saratoga!” he said in broken English, gesturing expansively. “They say, ‘The men on the Saratoga will stop Lucifer in his tracks!’ The men on the Saratoga—they the bravest in the whole world!
“We — my men of the Liberte Marina—want to join such brave men. We too will fight the devil, Lucifer!”
“Commodore,” Heath calmly began, taking the place of Sir Neil. “We are on a very, very dangerous mission here. You can see the type of ships and weapons we had to hire for protection. I’m afraid your, well, boats, would be very vulnerable to weapons such as the Exocet, especially—”
“We no care,” the Commodore broke in. “We want to fight. We want to fight with the brave men of the Saratoga!”
With that, the strange little man walked to the stateroom’s typically round porthole window, opened it, and screamed at the top of his lungs: “Viva la Saratoga!”
His cry was immediately received with a return chorus of “Viva! Viva la Saratoga!” Amazingly, it was coming through loud and clear from the men on his boats nearby.
“It appears we have a fan club,” Yaz said in an aside to Hunter.
“I guess so,” Hunter said, shaking his head. “And this was supposed to be a secret mission.”
The Commodore returned from the porthole. “Me — my men — we have been waiting. Preparing. Training to sail with you. We know our stuff, signori. We are good fighters. Sea fighters.”