Payback wi-10, page 29
part #10 of WW III Series
“Don’t worry, General!” It was Aussie shouting through the nonstop hammer blows of a furious sea. “It’s in there. I’ll bet ten to one.” He paused. “Anyone in a betting mood?”
No one responded. Did that mean, Freeman wondered, they believed Aussie, or that they didn’t want to risk their hard-earned pay?
What negated any positive spin that Aussie might be putting on the situation was the general’s realization that if it had been that obvious to Aussie what he was thinking, the whole team probably sensed his self-doubt as well, and self-doubt was not the stuff of legend.
Choir had his eyes shut, so did Salvini; Gomez and Eddie Mervyn’s eyes were glued to the monitors. At this speed, a hit against a floating log or any other debris churned up by the storm would be a head-on collision at 50-plus miles per hour with no airbags. Johnny Lee, despite another jab of morphine, was grimacing in pain. Finally, Eddie Mervyn said something, but his voice was so quavery from the battering of the sea that Freeman had to ask him to “say again.”
“Force 9 dropping to Force 8,” Mervyn repeated.
Choir looked whey-faced, as if he was about to make yet another contribution to the mission.
“Slowing, five minutes,” said Eddie. “I say again, let’s go for pickup by girdle.”
Freeman didn’t take long to consider the option, which was to try to bring the RS alongside Yorktown in the storm-lashed ocean. As they slowed, everyone could see a clearer picture on the flat screen now that the spray sheath had abated with their decreased speed. The view was of a rolling blue ocean, white-veined with spindrifts. “Concur,” he told Eddie Mervyn. “Pickup by girdle from Yorktown.”
The engine’s jet-pulse noise subsided, Eddie warning them, “I’m gonna have to bring in the stabilizer fins, otherwise they’ll get stuck in the girdle net.”
“What fucking girdle?” said Aussie.
“It’s too dangerous to try to side-dock in this Force 8. We’ll have a helo come get us with their net sling. Divers’ll go under and sling us.”
“Piss on that!” said Aussie, with his usual eloquence. “This fucker’d roll in an early-morning dew. Could slide right out of the friggin’ net!”
“They done this before?” asked Salvini.
“Yeah, NASA uses them to retrieve any fallen satellite debris off Cape Canaveral.” He meant Cape Kennedy.
“Debris?” It was Salvini, looking as alarmed as Aussie.
“Oh come on,” said the general. “What’s the matter with you guys? Going out of a Herk is far trickier than girdle retrieval. Should I call your mommies?”
“The Galaxy,” said Sal. “It wasn’t a Herk.”
“Oh all right, smart-ass,” said Freeman congenially. “The aircraft.”
He has guts, this general, Aussie told himself. In another fifteen, maybe thirty minutes he could be welcomed aboard Yorktown holding nothing more than his dick from the Payback raid, but here he was, indisputably a leader, chastising them despite what must be a hard moment for him. One man dead and the steel-strapped box still unopened. Aussie prayed that as soon as the big flat-headed bolt cutters on Yorktown cut the steel straps off the box, the general would have yet another victory to his credit, not a Waterloo but a moment like seeing Old Glory atop Mt. Surabachi, and no one to tear it down.
“Firing flares for pickup girdle,” said Eddie, and there were two loud bangs.
Choir’s eyes opened slightly, his voice groggy, barely audible. “What’s goin’ on, boyo?”
“You fucking dork,” joshed Aussie. “We’re in Las Vegas. You just missed the biggest pair of tits—”
“Shush!” said Eddie loudly. “Can’t hear Blue Tile. Static.”
“Amazing,” Aussie whispered sarcastically. “Blue Tile can pull in a damn signal from a Mars lander but a mile away from us all we get is static.”
“It’s the storm,” said Gomez quietly, holding up his hand in a sharp signal for Aussie to stop bitching, Gomez’s face creased with the effort of listening to Blue Tile’s instructions for the RS to maneuver itself into the wind.
“We’ve already done that, Einstein,” Aussie answered Blue Tile’s instructions anxiously. There was something amusing to Freeman in the fact that one of the best warriors he’d ever seen, a privilege to have on his team, was getting nervous.
“It’s simple, Aussie,” the general assured Aussie and Sal. “You’ve seen pictures of how they lift out those aquarium whales in those big canvas slings for transport.”
“I haven’t seen ’em do that,” Aussie riposted, turning around to look at Choir behind him, the movement an awkward one, given his tightly strapped H harness. Despite the RS’s stabilizer fins having been withdrawn, causing the craft to roll like a stunned whale, the Welshman’s mood was suddenly upbeat with the prospect of being transported to the 45,000-ton Yorktown, a craft much more substantial than the 16-ton RS. He winked reassuringly at Aussie, giving his comrade-in-arms the thumbs-up.
“Oh, look at this,” said Aussie. “The rough rider from Wales is giving us the old A-OK sign. That’s reassuring. He’s whacked out on Gravol and dehydrated from upchucking for the last four hours. It’s affected his fucking brain.”
Johnny Lee couldn’t suppress a laugh, though it sent a piercing pain shooting through his arm. The PMS — postmission syndrome — as SpecOp leaders, tongue in cheek, described the release of tension and concomitant surges of euphoria and general silliness that followed hot on the heels of a near-death experience, was palpable inside the RS after the firefight, where they were outnumbered by at least ten to one. The odds Aussie was now giving were that there would be a MANPAD in the box.
The general was having his own surge of optimism, witnessed first by his jocular inquiry whether the team wanted him to call their “mommies” to reassure them that the girdle lift was safe, and second by the shift in his mood that occurred when he realized that there was a very straightforward explanation for the NKA’s lone T-55 and lack of any fast armored fighting vehicles during the total of the hellish twenty-five to twenty-six minutes they were ashore and trying to get Bone back into the RS.
The straightforward answer was the very thing the general had been so careful to plan. His own ruse — telling the President, his National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty, and the Joint Chiefs that his SpecOp team would need at least six weeks’ preparation time — was a well-intentioned lie, so that should news of the planned Payback mission leak out and the North Koreans’ Intelligence relay it back to Pyongyang, the Dear Leader’s military would figure they’d have at the very least a month to reinforce Beach 5 to annihilate the U.S. raiders. That this was clearly the reason for the lack of a sophisticated NKA trap reminded the general once again how often people, such as himself, who lived in a dangerous world in which there was so much intrigue, habitually sought intriguing or conspiratorial answers when the obvious was staring them in the face. You idiot, he told himself as he heard the approaching wokka wokka sound of one of the Yorktown’s heavy-lifting Super Stallion transport helicopters. You set up a six-week wait time, lull the NKA into a sense of security, giving them what they think is lots of prep time for a possible U.S. attack, then you turn into a worry guts because your plan worked. What’s the matter with you, Freeman? Georgie Patton would’ve had your guts for garters. Get a grip, you’re renowned for leadership cool. Show it. Bone would expect it. Freeman’s strong will notwithstanding, however, what had been a kernel of suspicion was growing, and the more he tried to suppress it, the more it demanded attention.
“If you start barfing again,” Aussie warned his wan-looking Welsh swim buddy, “I’ll throw you in the drink!”
“I just burped, you Aussie bastard!”
“Ah!” cut in Freeman, smiling. “Feeling better are we, Choir?”
“Yes, sir,” said Choir. “I’ll be even better when I put my two feet on the old terra firma.”
“Holy shit!” cut in Aussie. “What the hell—”
“Relax, Aussie,” said Gomez. “It’s the sling hitting the hull.” The sound of tackle and cable block they heard was quickly followed by two loud splashes outside the spun-carbon composite skin of the RS. The noise was that made by the two JRDs — jump-rescue divers — from the Super Stallion, the transfer of the RS to the Yorktown getting under way once the divers had completed shackling the starboard and port-side hooks of the rubberized Teflon sling to the U-bolt that was now dangling from the end of a cable being played out through the block-and-tackle arm that stuck out from the big Super Stallion’s belly.
The “wire,” as Eddie Mervyn was told by the Stallion’s pilot, was “barge haul” tough, but for Aussie, who glimpsed the wire on the search-scope’s flat screen, it looked no thicker suspended from the hundred-foot-long helo than a piece of black cotton thread. The SpecOp, SpecWar warrior, who had distinguished himself from Siberia to Germany’s Dortmund Pocket and the hard desert of two Iraqi wars, had no trust whatsoever in the cable. “I’ve seen the bastards snap.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Eddie Mervyn. “That helps.”
“No BS,” said Aussie. “I’ve seen ’em snap, go across the deck like a cattle whip — cut a man clean in half.”
“It’s not gonna snap!” said an irritated Gomez, who was nevertheless crunching in the numbers for torque-to-angle ratios. But the RS, he noted uncomfortably, despite it being much lighter than the prototype, weighed sixteen tons, fully loaded with men and gear. The Super Stallion’s external sling capacity was 16.7. No doubt, like the crush depth of the RS or any other sub, specification tolerances always had an inbuilt safety margin, but the swells they were slopping around in in this Force 8, even with the RS into the wind, would mean it wouldn’t be a lift from a stationary position. One swell over the craft would momentarily add tons of water to the weight.
“He’d better make the pull on a crest, not in a fucking trough,” opined Aussie.
“Aussie!” It was General Douglas Freeman speaking in his rare stentorian tone. “That’s enough!”
Aussie was watching the screen intently, so much so that Gomez and Eddie Mervyn wondered whether Aussie had heard the general. Sal and Choir knew he had; they also knew better than to say anything right now. The three of them had been with the general longer than Lee, Gomez, Mervyn, or Bone. Sal and Choir had been with Aussie in Iraq — they’d seen the aftereffects on Aussie of the terrible street by street, building by building, room by room fighting. It had marked them all with memories that stayed repressed until times of stress.
Apart from Aussie’s wife, Alexsandra, Choir and Sal had been the only ones who had also witnessed the softer paternalism of the warrior who’d made his way from the Australian Outback, where few Australians ever venture, down through the then hard urban seafront of the Rocks area in Sydney, before it became yuppified, working with down-and-outs prior to his starting on what was going to be a working holiday to America but which ended up in a love affair with the Australian-style openness of the United States.
They heard a series of loud, splitting noises as the hitherto slack U-belt of the sling tightened into a noose around the RS’s midships, the sea rushing by them like a torrent. “Splitting noise is fine,” said the general, as if casually assuring everyone in the craft about the reversible-submersible and not just Aussie.
“Yeah,” added Sal. “Just the dried salt on the cable. Gets between the strands and spits out when you put any weight on it.”
There was a surge of static on the flat screen, and outside another roaring of water as the Stallion’s crew chief, operating the winch, quickly dunked the RS back into the water, giving the cable slack rather than “torquing” it during a sudden “wash over” by a rogue cross-wave. No one in the RS could see any sign of the cable on the flat screen anymore because of the spray generated by the big helo’s seven titanium-sparred rotor blades. Incongruously, or so they thought at the moment, the Yorktown’s Blue Tile SES was feeding their flat screen with cable TV signals, the color washed out, giving only sepia-toned, jerky, documentary-like shots of a group of Arabs talking to some woman.
“What’s going on?” asked Choir. “I know that woman’s voice, but I can’t see her.”
“You know squat,” Sal joshed, hoping to lessen Aussie’s anxiety about the wire, whose spitting had quite frankly scared Sal too. He’d never heard it that loud before.
“Edward,” said Choir, addressing Eddie Mervyn in a good-mood imitation of a British lord, “turn up the volume, there’s a good chap.” This little bit of theater, he thought, might draw Aussie’s attention away from the possibility of an errant strand giving way.
“It’s Marte Price,” said Aussie.
“I’ll be damned. What’s the leader strip say?” he pressed, his attention and that of the other seven, especially the general, shifting to the flat screen where Yorktown’s own Signals Exploitation Space was linking the wallowing RS to an Al Jazeera/CNN broadcast.
“Oh shit, shit, shit!” It was Gomez, looking away from the screen at his six comrades, as if pleading with them to tell him it wasn’t true.
“Be quiet!” said Freeman. “Listen!” He had no sooner given the command than they all felt the sudden jerk of the wire and heard the sound of the Super Stallion’s three engines howling to full power and the noise of the huge canvas sling gripping the RS around its belly. This created a teeth-grating sound, as of hundreds of broken chalk pieces on a blackboard, making it impossible for them to clearly hear the SES feed on the flat screen, the sound of their weapon rack creaking as the Super Stallion took the full strain doing nothing to improve matters. All that Gomez and Eddie Mervyn, closest to the screen, could hear through the continuous groaning of the RS, its composite carbon skin protesting against the tight canvas, was “American attack…White Hou…” Aussie heard it too, the picture on the screen now scrambled.
“The White House has been attacked?” he asked.
“No, no, no!” It was Gomez, almost beside himself with anguish. “Dios mio! Didn’t you see? My God!”
“No, I didn’t!” Aussie yelled sharply to be heard above the racket of wind, stormy seas, and the giant helo’s constant roar.
Mervyn, preoccupied with the controls so that nothing would be inadvertently switched on during the crucial lift, had had his eyes off the screen, leaving Gomez to deal with what he had seen, which had all but struck the SEAL technician-specialist dumb. The usually sallow complexion of the Spanish-American had turned to what in the light of the flat screen’s bluish hue seemed a grayish, seasick pallor.
“It’s Bone,” he said. “The—”
“C’mon, man,” said Freeman, who so far had heard only a word or two from whom he, like Choir, was sure was Marte Price of CNN. “Spit it out, Gomez. What the—”
“They — they know all about the attack,” said a shaken Gomez.
All eight felt a sudden bowel-chilling drop, profanities breaking out in and outside the craft, including one from Johnny Lee, his fear of the wire snapping momentarily shoving his pain aside. There was another shout — this time muted — from outside the craft, or rather on top of it.
“Must be a diver riding atop us!” said Lee, his voice cracked and dry.
“Fuck the diver!” said Aussie. “What about Bone, Gomez?”
Gomez was bent over, both hands white on the roll bar. “They’ve got Bone. Saying he confessed the attack was planned by the White House. White House is denying — it’s an Al Jazeera feed to CNN.”
What had been Aussie’s expression of tight-faced shock now relaxed, his incredulity overriding his fear of loss of control that had manifested itself on the wire, over which he had no control. But with the assertion that not only was Bone alive but confessing as well, he had regained control. Aussie had been there, had seen Freeman shoot Brady to put the poor bastard out of his misery.
“Yeah, right!” said Aussie, his tone so pregnant with contempt for what he’d heard, it cut through the maelstrom of noise, penetrating even the noise of the Super Stallion’s engines, which were now in feral roar mode as it strained and picked up the RS. As the craft rose above the chaotic, wind-whipped seas, the RS’s bulbous bow nosed forward toward Yorktown. In the RS, a loose combat pack, Lee’s, which should have been stowed, tumbled forward, thumping hard against the composite bulkhead, dangerously close to the flat screen.
“Stow that fucking pack!” shouted Freeman, the fury in his tone reminiscent of his outburst when in ’93 he’d heard about the slaughter of the Rangers and Delta Force men in Mogadishu when two Blackhawks went down. Eddie Mervyn grabbed Lee’s pack. “Whose is it?” he shouted angrily.
Choir jerked his head around, checking that his own pack was in the rack, as if the accusation was leveled at him. Everyone aboard, including the legendary boss, seemed to be losing it.
“Approaching Yorktown!” It sounded like the voice of God, a booming authority from on high from the sky outside and beyond the RS. Probably coming, Choir thought, from the Yorktown’s flight-deck horn. “I say again, approaching Yorktown.”
“Yeah, yeah,” snapped Aussie. “I heard you the first fucking time. Hooray for the Yorktown. Fucking idiot — where the fuck’s he think we’re heading to, fucking North Korea? Gomez, stop worrying. All that shit about Bone, it’s Al Jazeera — fucking A-rab station. They made it up.”
“But it was a CNN feed,” protested Gomez, while at the same time wanting desperately to believe Aussie.
Aussie’s contempt wasn’t abating, and he was resorting to his childhood epithets. “Ah, stone the bloody crows, mate. Just because it’s C an’ fucking N doesn’t make it holy. One of those bastards did a deal with Saddam’s son, remember? Prick told the CNN guy he was going to have one of his own relatives whacked when he came back to Iraq. Did the CNN guy tell what he knew? No, sir. He had too cozy a deal for CNN exclusives from fucking Baghdad with Saddam’s boy. They’re all in bed together, Gomez. Wake up, they don’t want the truth. All they want is more viewers like you. That Marte Price bitch, she’s no diff—”
“Aussie!” thundered the general. “You get a grip! That’s an ORDER!”
