Mack Maloney - Wingman 08, page 24
“We should be on station with an hour to spare,” the captain told Thorgils.
“I pray that we are,” Thorgils replied. Then he turned back to Dominique and, taking her by the arm, led her away from the control room.
“Come with me,” he told her roughly.
As they walked down the long corridor, Dominique could hear the sub’s engines crack to life. Within seconds, she felt the familiar sensation of submerging and moving beneath the surface of the water. But unlike the other Viking subs she’d been on, this one seemed to move through the water like ice on glass.
She correctly attributed this to the sub’s sleek design, a shape more reminiscent of prewar vessels than the lumbering, monstrous Norse Krig Bats.
Everything inside the sub appeared to be high tech, from the steering and navigation equipment to the lighting and
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vent systems. There was no reek of body odor on this boat. Even the crew members she saw looked high-tech. No scruffy beards or dirty uniforms for these men. Each one was smartly dressed in a neat black uniform, complete with heavy boots and a red beret.
Thorgils led her to the door of a small cabin at the end of the passageway and dismissing his bodyguards with a curt salute, he not too gently pushed her inside.
The room was luxurious compared to the cabins she’d been kept in aboard the larger Norse subs. This room featured a bed not a bed, a small galley, and a locker full of unmarked can goods.
“We have much to do,” Thorgils told Dominique once they entered the room. “You must be prepared to carry out the wishes of my father.”
Dominique sat on the edge of the bed, now showing none of the pleasing aftereffects of the myx. She felt tired, and caught herself trembling slightly. It was the uncertainty of what lay ahead that was causing the tremors. Although her experience aboard the Great Ship had been bizarre, at least she had felt a certain sense of security there. Now she was riding a warship right into what Verden claimed would be the biggest action so far by the Norsemen against the United Americans. And just what her role in the upcoming battle was supposed to be, she didn’t have a clue.
Thorgils produced a well-worn notebook from his uniform pocket and opened it to page one.
“These are the instructions for a Valkyrie,” he told her gruffly, obviously not relishing the task of explaining it all to her. “You must learn them, memorize them, before we reach the battle zone… .”
Dominique closed her eyes and tried to will her body to stop shaking. To suddenly let herself cave in to the strange events of the past week would be tantamount to giving up completely. She knew she had to regain some strength, no matter how she did it. Somehow she had to use the situation to her advantage.
She opened her eyes and for the first time noticed that 266
there was a flask of myx hanging from the back of the cabin door. Suddenly her body was revived, her mind flashing with options.
“Go ahead,” she told Thorgils, undoing the top few buttons of her tight-fitting jumpsuit. “If the Verden wishes it, then I am suddenly very anxious to learn …”
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Part Three
Chapter Forty-two
Aboard the USS New Jersey
Wolf stared into the large green eye of the SLNQ-55 surface radar and, for a moment, couldn’t believe his eyes.
Just seconds before, the screen had been blank, the only indications bouncing back to the sophisticated radar set being a handful of small weather systems creeping up the North Carolina coast and the occasional flight of seabirds.
But now the long-range radar screen had come alive with blips.
Wolf checked his watch and then made an entry into his ship’s log: “Enemy has shown himself at 1630 hours.” He shook his head in amazement. Hunter had predicted that the Norsemen would begin surfacing right at this time.
The masked man made a quick check of his present position-fifteen miles off the coast of Fernandina Beach, Florida, and cruising due south-and then punched a brightly red-lit button next to the radar console.
Within seconds, the battleship’s insides were ringing with the sound of an ear-piecing klaxon, calling the crew to their battle stations.
Wolf turned his attention back to the radar screen, and as one of his junior officers read from the long list of directions left by Hunter, he fiddled with the SLNQ’s various buttons and knobs, finally refining the screen’s contrast and focus to peak levels.
“Enter this into the log,” he told another officer. “Five groups of subs evident on surface radar at 1645. Position is
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forty miles south-southwest of our location. Enemy surfacing in packs of three apiece.”
The junior officer wrote as fast as he could.
“Three more enemy groups evident now,” Wolf continued, never taking his eyes from the screen. “All enemy ships are heading due west. Time is 1646 …”
Wolfs gunnery master rumbled into the room, called there by the battle station alert.
“Your orders, sir?” the officer, a Scotsman, asked from beneath a snap salute.
“Prepare all guns,” Wolf told him after a moment of thought. “High-impact HE
shells, long trajectory powder for the sixteen-inchers. Standard draw for the five-inchers.”
The Scotsman snapped another salute and was gone to be replaced by the ship’s defensive systems officer.
“Program all surface defensive systems to automatic, with a slave command to manual,” Wolf told this man, reading from another set of instructions Hunter had left behind. “Switch on all auxiliary generators for the Phalanx guns and make sure that the magazine is sealed tight.”
This officer also quickly saluted and left. Next in line was the ship’s intelligence officer, a former Norwegian lieutenant commander named Bjordson, the same man who captained the ship’s undercover fishing boat.
Wolf quickly motioned Bjordson to the radar screen.
“There they are,” he said, pointing to the staticky white clusters of blips that were now covering the lower left-hand corner of the large screen. “They are coming up in packs.”
“Surfacing in full battle formations,” Bjordson said, nodding. He had seen the tactic used many times before by the Soviet Navy, yet never on this grand a scale. “They will attack within the hour …”
“We should radio the Americans,” Wolf said, pushing a button and summoning the control room’s communications officer.
“Transmit the last two pages of the log to the American AWAC’s,” Wolf said quickly as soon as the radio officer arrived. “Top code. Double scramble, reply will be the pass
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phrase of the hour.”
Another button was pushed and the ship’s meteorologist appeared.
“What is the exact time of sunset on the Florida coast?” Wolf asked.
The man didn’t miss a beat. “Eighteen hundred hours, fourteen minutes, sir.”
Bjordson checked his watch. “Assuming that the attack plan is to hit the beaches simultaneously, that will give them about an hour to disembark all their troops,” he said.
“That’s the time window we have to hit them,” Wolf said, nodding grimly. “Once it gets dark, the job will be harder by five times…”
‘Ten …” Bjordson replied.
Wolf turned to the navigation officer who was but five feet to his right.
“How long until we reach our station?” Wolf wanted to know.
“Twenty-three minutes,” the officer responded instantly.
Wolf looked back at the SNLQ and pushed a full bank of buttons. The screen suddenly expanded its view, utilizing a grid map that included most of the eastern shore of North Florida. The cluster of enemy subs heading toward that coast was now reduced to a single white dot.
Wolf checked with the officer in charge of reading the SNLQ’s directions and then entered a barrage of numbers into the radar’s keyboard. Soon enough he had conjured up. another white blip, this one blinking every second and indicating the battleship’s approximate position twenty-three minutes from then.
“If we hold true, we can cross their sterns just as they are offloading troops,” Wolf said, moving his projected course-indicator cursor as if he was crossing the top of a gigantic letter T. “In our sector alone that could be as many as thirty boats…”
“Even when they spot us, there’ll be little that they can do,” Bjordson said.
“They can submerge and thereby drown many of their troops or they can stay on top and
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wait for us to hit them with a barrage.”
“A turkey shoot’ is what the Americans call it,” Wolf said somberly. “With us behind them and the American aircraft bombing them on the beaches, it will be a massacre, at least in our sector …”
Bjordson just shrugged. Like many of the Norwegian sailors on board, he had no idea whether the Norse fleet included any relatives. There would be no way to know such a thing. Besides, it was useless to worry about it. They were mercenaries. Their job was to kill a particular enemy. This one happened to be, for the most part, Norwegian.
Still, Bjordson could not help but feel a twinge of remorse for his courageous but woefully unsophisticated and highly predictable enemy. As an intelligence man, he knew the Norsemen’s mind, and massing for a gigantic attack on Florida made sense. In the past, their brutal, plow-straight-ahead tactics had borne results. So why not try it on a larger scale? Casualty estimates among the Norse soldiers were of no consequence. It made no difference how many of them died-they were soldiers, and therefore to the Norse way of thinking, it was their job to die. It was the results of their deaths that made the difference between victory and defeat.
And Bjordson knew the Norse felt the odds were in their favor. To them it was a simple matter of the numbers: naively relying on then-recent smaller attacks on Cape Cod and the mid-Atlantic states, the clan leaders undoubtedly believed that some of their troops would be killed as soon as they reached the shore. But others would not. Some of those units meeting resistance once they moved off the beaches would certainly be battered and destroyed. Yet others would not. Many would invariably sweep past any defenders and advance on the target, and a percentage of these troops would be killed at the target or withdrawing from it. But not all would be. Many would make it back to the beaches to be picked up by the surviving subs, and if past experience was the guide, then that number would be substantial.
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Thus, to the clan leaders, the plan virtually ensured that many units would be successful and that tons of loot would be had in return for the operation.
But Bjordson also knew that the anarchic warriors were not taking into account was the possibility that an accumulation of high-technology weapons-as in the United American ground attack squadrons as well as the New Jersey’s gigantic guns-were waiting to pounce on them once the attack commenced. It hadn’t happened before, so why should it happen now? would be their line of thinking.
And if it did, then so what? Wars weren’t supposed to be a way of life. They were for dying in.
“Reply code received from American station,” the communications officer yelled out. “We now have an open line to the AWAC’s aircraft.”
“On station in seventeen minutes,” the navigation officer told Wolf, anticipating his next question.
“Guns secured” came the radio report from the ship’s weaponry officer.
“Defensive systems on automatic lock” came the defensive officer’s report.
“Will switch to manual on your command.”
Wolf finally took his eyes away from the green screen and looked up at Bjordson.
“We’ll be in engaging within the half hour,” the captain told the intelligence officer. “Better launch the RPV …”
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Chapter Forty-three
Hunter’s entire psyche was vibrating by the time the Harrier lifted off from the Jacksonville Naval Air station.
The adrenaline was pumping through his body like some kind of painkilling drug. His heart was pounding and his brain was locked into its astonishingly computerlike mode.
It was at times like these-the minutes before battle-that Hunter was able to shift his total being into a higher gear.
Movement, thinking, even breathing became simple parts of the whole. The souped-up jumpjet was airborne and streaking eastward, Hunter did not so much steer the airplane as he did merge with it. His thought waves combined with the commands of his onboard computer. The triggers for his gun and weapon-launch systems became mere extensions of his fingers. The unique, variable-thrust engine thumped excitedly in beat with his heart.
He took a long deep gulp of pure oxygen from his mask and closed his eyes just for a moment. The vibrations were now in sync. Heart, mind, soul, and machine were lined up and locked in. He was ready to take on the enemy.
The true revenge for what these Norsemen had done to him-and his peaceful life with Dominique-was about to begin.
He was over the coastline within thirty seconds of takeoff.
Already he could see a trio of Norse attack subs, their white hulls turned dull orange in the setting sun, sitting about a mile offshore from Jacksonville Beach disgorging
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the first wave of troops. A half mile to the south, another trio of subs were doing the same thing, as were another three subs a half mile beyond them.
That the Norse considered this attack as their biggest and most elaborate was apparent right away. Instead of their usual see-through rubber boats, the enemy troops were coming ashore on old-style landing craft-not too far removed from the LCB’s and LST’s used more than a half century before on the beaches of Normandy. Several other big subs, undoubtably Volk Bats, were surfaced about a quarter mile beyond the troopships, and it was they who were providing the landing crafts from their enormous storage hulls.
Hunter brought the Harrier up forty-five hundred feet and throttled back. Even with all his preparation for this moment-both physical and spiritual-he was still amazed at what he saw. The line of Norse subs-war boats and supply vessels -stretched in both directions for as far as the eye could see.
Hunter had seen the estimates of enemy sub strength -there was thought to be about sixty to seventy of the Krig Bats troop boats in the Atlantic, and just as many of the supply subs. But nothing could have prepared him for this sight of almost two hundred of the gigantic lumbering submarines, lined up perfectly in groups of two’s and three’s stretching across the horizon like so many orange keys on a
piano.
Each sub was offloading troops into the landing crafts provided by the nearby Volk Bats. Once a landing craft was filled, it would turn right for shore and head at breakneck speed for the white sands of either Atlantic, Neptune or Jacksonville beaches. The scene looked like something out of the original D-Day. Hundreds of white streaks of churned-up foam were left in the path of each landing craft. The difference was the enemy was landing without the benefit of any covering fire.
Hunter’s radio was crackling with reports of similar scenes farther down the coast at Vilano Beach, St. Augus-277
tine, Summer Haven, even off of Marineland. Within just a few minutes it became very evident that, as anticipated, a good portion of the East Coast of Florida was under attack.
Hunter turned the Harrier due south and went down to twenty-five hundred feet.
It felt strange for him to overfly such a large number of the enemy without having to worry about AA guns or SAMs. But the Norsemen had none. Their POW’s from Montauk had readily admitted it, and the search of Norse battlefield dead so far had proved them correct.
In fact, with the exception of some antitank type rocket launchers and World War II-style flamethrowers, the Norsemen relied only on their assault rifles and their battleaxes. And their numbers and brute strength.
By quickly estimating the number of subs that stretched before him, Hunter calculated that there were as many as forty thousand enemy soldiers about to hit the beach, and that was just in the northeast sector alone. Against them, the United Americans had nearly seventy aircraft-fifty of them being attack planes, the rest providing recon and communications support-three regiments of Florida militia, and a battalion of Football City Special Forces Rangers. Plus the USS New Jersey.
In terms of manpower, the Norse had the UA defenders outnumbered by more than four to one. But it was the technology-the guns, the missiles, and the airplanes-that promised to give the Americans the edge.
Still, someone once said that there is quality in sheer quantity, and this is what ran through Hunter’s mind as he screamed over the enemy invasion forces.
And at that moment, the brutal Norsemen seemed like a very formidable foe indeed.
Once he had reached a point just twenty miles north of Daytona Beach, Hunter put the jumpjet into a sharp hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and headed back up north.
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The plan was to let the enemy invasion forces reach the tideline and then strike at them-a strategy borne of necessity and experience. For no matter how good the various UA attack pilots were at their jobs, it was always much easier to hit a target that was on terra firma than one that was bobbing up and down in the water.
Now, as Hunter returned to his original position over Jacksonville, he saw that the first wave of Norse landing crafts was just five hundred yards off the beach. With grim anticipation, he reached down and armed all his weapons.
A pair of cluster-bomb-laden A-7 Strikefighters and a fierce-looking A-4
Skyhawk appeared right on time, and after a few seconds of maneuvering, Hunter had joined them in a finger-four formation. A quick glance once again to his south told him that other jet units were also just now arriving over the invasion beaches and that they, too, were jockeying up into their preattack formations.
High above, a Boeing E-3 AWAC’s plane orbited the north beach sector, monitoring enemy communications and relaying information back and forth between the attack pilots, the ground forces, the New Jersey, and Jones’s command staff back at Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Hunter’s crash helmet headphones played him a veritable symphony of voices reciting call signs positions, speeds and altitude, all backed up by a low undertone of static.
