The Gulf (39 page)

The launch went fast and normal. Still, Schweinberg kept shouting irritably to hurry; he wanted to get aloft before the sand closed in again.

When they were strapped in, Hayes punched the ship's coordinates into the navigation computer. The engines whined, and the rotors began turning. Slowly at first, like the hands of a clock, then faster and faster till they seemed to disappear. Through them came the power that wrenched Two One suddenly off the deck and instantly, violently, into the sky.

*   *   *

The convoy and its escorts marched away below them till they disappeared into the heavy hazy air. The storms suspended dust as high as ten thousand feet. Today it was still murky at angels two. From there, though, they could see the departing storm, a tan mist as of disintegration, returning the sea and sky and the land that their radar said lay to the south to a vague chaos that might be anything or nothing.

Schweinberg gave his copilot the controls. He stretched and lifted a cheek, then followed the fart with a sigh. The heavy lunch sat uneasily in his gut.

He loosened his harness, then twisted to look back into the cabin. This was a one-crewman flight. He'd decided he didn't need Christer. If they had to detonate a mine, or fire a warning burst, as they had at the dhow, Kane could do it.

A moment later, he looked back at the ships. Narrowed his eyes. Then clicked onto the data link. “ATACO, Killer Two One.”

“Go, Two One.”

“Hey, what's with the convoy? Why've we got a merchie up front?”

The voice was silent for a moment; then it told them about the mine strike and the reorientation. “You mean you didn't know that? I thought everybody aboard knew that. Where were you, asleep?”

“Don't get smart,” Schweinberg growled. “Nobody bothered to tell us, that's all. A mine, huh. Well, what do you know.”

“Wouldn't have happened with us out here,” said Kane, from aft.

“I hope not. But, jeez … let's lose some altitude here and get to work.”

They skimmed ahead of the lead ship, keeping their eyes overboard. Shit, Chunky was thinking. He wished he'd been up here earlier, wished he'd seen the mine first. But then, what if somebody hit one in an area they'd checked out? As it was, the air arm was in the clear. He decided to be happy with things as they were and not try to improve them in his head.

They patrolled back and forth in front of the convoy for some time. Once, Hayes caught a dark object in the water; they dropped still lower as they approached it, Kane swinging out the M60. It was a sheep. Schweinberg wanted to give it a burst anyway, but the ship nixed that without comment. He lapsed into a sulk.

Hayes sat slumped, moving the stick slightly from time to time. He was getting bored again. Bored and hot. His mind drifted. They'd have to move. Joyce didn't like new houses and she didn't like suburbs. She liked older homes in settled neighborhoods. Four bedrooms should do it. Maybe they could find something for eighty, ninety thousand.…

“Want to play a tape, sir?”

“Yeah, go ahead, something country,” muttered Schweinberg.

There was a pop and then a hiss on the ICS circuit. Then the jury-rigged Walkman cut in. “Oh, shit, not that goddamn disco tape again,” he howled. “Kane, you little prick, I'm gonna tear your arms off when we get back.”

A transmission from the ship overrode the enlisted man's comeback. “ATO, ATACO: vector zero-eight-five to investigate small contact.”

“Oh, wilco … I mean, roger.” Hayes clicked off and banked, not bothering to ask Schweinberg's permission. They came around and headed east, picking up speed till the needle nudged 150. The wind rose to a steady whistle. “Turn that thing down, Kane. ATACO, how far away is he?”

“Twelve miles, in and out of the big oil field.”

“Roger.” Hayes had the derricks now. Their tops pricked the sky fine as needles. Schweinberg said nothing. Behind them, he could hear Kane whistling, breaking up as the voice-actuated mike cut on and off. The rigs marched over the curve of the sea like the flat video-game reality of a flight simulator. Two One droned and rumbled like an old pickup on a gravel road. The waves flashed by. From sheer habit, both men scanned the gauges, then lifted their eyes again.

“Got him yet?”

“Nope.”

“He's probably oil-rig service, in and out of the structures.”

“ATACO, ATO: gimme a re-vector, we got
nada
here.”

“Hold him … wait … hold him zero-nine-five from you, between two platforms. Wait. There's more than one.”

“More than one, aye. Coming right.”

“Let's drop some, Buck; if they're small, we need to get down to two-three hundred.”

“Got to watch these towers.”

“Well, no shit. Let's just do what Uncle Claude says, shed some fucking altitude, okay? And do it now. These could be the guys laid that mine.”

The water came up close, its corrugated surface flashing past. They were so low they could see sea snakes, plastic trash, a sheen of slick trailing from one rig. This low, the water was a grim tan-green, flat, as if the storm had sanded off the tops of the waves.

“Should be headed right for him.”

“What size are these guys, ATACO?”

“We don't hold them anymore, Two One. Lost in the clutter. Don't you have visual yet?”

“Negat … negat. Hey, Chunky, is that something over there? See there, by the smoke? It's moving, got a wave system behind it—”

Two One, still descending, came right. The dot ahead, trailing rippled Vs on the sea, grew rapidly larger. Hayes bored in straight and level. He wanted to get it identified and get back to the convoy. Schweinberg focused the binoculars. He caught a vibration-blurred glimpse, and frowned. Not a boat. Smaller than a boat, but kicking up a plume. Something narrow and vertical. Not masts, but …

Then, just for an instant, the field steadied and he saw it. A vertical line, swelling at its tip to a black bulb. The sea flung apart in white cascades as it rolled. Behind that, a stouter, shorter pipe, with a faired black protrusion, trailing a brown haze of exhaust. A third vertical, thin and bent: an antenna.

And beneath, a shadow slipping through the tan-green Gulf.

“Holy
shit,
” he whispered.

“What is it?”

“ATACO, Two One: We got a fucking sub out here! I mean, mark, datum! Headed zero-five-zero, looks like ten knots, scope and snorkel out of the water, black in color—”

“Two One, ATACO, say again your last—”

Bucky Hayes, jerking his head around as they rocketed over it, saw it, too. And lifting his eyes, he saw something else. Something beyond it, sliding out from between two oil rigs. A boat. Two big outboard motors; four men, seated well forward; a dark green tube …

“Look out, Chunky, they've got an escort!”

At the same moment he shouted, Hayes wrenched them into a violent turn. Two One responded instantly, the horizon and sky and rigs all swinging up, the black derricks reaching for them like spears. She shuddered as the rotors lost their grip on hot air. He grabbed for the collective at the same moment he saw, out of the corner of his vision, a white-hot brightness climbing toward them from the crazy tilt of the sea, building a pillar of billowing white. It curved inward rapidly, then disappeared behind them.

Kane's voice broke scared over the ICS. “Missile, rear sector!
Missile!
”

“Flares,” screamed Schweinberg just as Hayes's finger hit the button. The dispenser fired twice.

There was a blow against the back of their seats and a sheet of flame shot forward between them. Hayes felt things tear through his seat back, flak jacket, lungs. Schweinberg felt his left eye shrivel and blacken. “Son of a bitch,” he shouted, and the air he drew back in was suddenly burning hot. “We're hit—ATACO, Two One, we're hit—got a—did you get what I said about the submarine—looks like he's diving now—fuck it, we're going down! Buck, Kane, prepare to ditch.”

Hayes didn't answer. Chunky couldn't see him real clearly, but his ATO seemed to have no chest, like in the scene in
Alien
where the thing comes out of the guy.

His mind scrambled over a cascade of sensations, terror, thought, while at the same time it tried to estimate damage. The rocket must have hit as they turned, exploding back by number-one engine exhaust. Two One was quivering like a wounded quail. Anyway, they were falling, and he couldn't seem to get the collective down to autorotate. And there was no way out of the aircraft, no nice rocket seats like the jet jocks had.

The gray machine fell like a shot bird, dying but still with lateral control. Okay, Chunky boy, his voice said calmly in his brain. You're the shit-hot pilot, let's see you fly your way out of this. He still had 120 knots forward airspeed. Lot of kinetic energy there. He could choose where he'd hit, within say a five-hundred-foot circle. And that was it. They were going to ride it in.

“Death,” muttered Claude Schweinberg. “Good. But first—
cheech,
you terrorist raghead
motherfuckers!
”

“Roger that,” muttered Hayes's suddenly airless lips. He stared straight forward. He couldn't move his arms or anything. He couldn't even breathe.

There wasn't really time, there at the end, for them to think. But during those two or two and a half seconds, Claude Schweinberg found time to grin tightly between clenched teeth. He hadn't flinched. And Buck Hayes found time to think: Joyce. Dustin. Jesse.

And blink forward through the bloody mist at upturned, suddenly frozen faces, a dark green motorboat emerging from a white smoke cloud. Directly in the path of ten tons of falling, burning Killer Angel, side number 421.

21

U.S.S.
Mobile Bay

THE first thing Blair said that morning was “Damn.”

She threw back the rough gray blanket, unrolled herself from the sheets, and began hunting around, crossing bare goosefleshed arms over her breasts. A memory of winter mornings in Minnesota crossed her mind, her mother bundling her up, the world-changing wonder of the snow.

She grinned sleepily. And what would her mother think of her now, in her sheer undies, surrounded by three hundred sailors?

She finally found the source of the electronic beeping that had brought her awake. Now she remembered answering it twice during the night. Male voices, asking for the captain. When she'd said he wasn't there, there was silence, then the rattle of a handset hastily hung up. She grinned again, picked it up, and said, tentatively, “Hello.”

“Ms. Titus? Jack Byrne. Thought you might appreciate a breakfast call. It's oh-seven-hundred. They'll only be serving for fifteen more minutes.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you all right? You sound—”

“I'm just cold. I'll be right down.”

She dressed quickly, choosing her heaviest panty hose, a cotton sweater, and a pair of parachute slacks she'd brought for shipboard. Actually, it had been astonishingly restful. Her bed swayed gently and each time she'd drifted up, the murmur of machinery had comforted her, a distant, soothing rhythm, a robot's lullaby.

For a moment she wished she belonged here. How simple to be told what to do. To know your place in an iron universe, free of decisions, personalities, politics. She stared at herself in the mirror over the sink as she brushed her hair, liking the man smell of leather and oil and the faint fragrance of shaving cream. For some reason, she was hungry as a horse. Wasn't sea air supposed to do that to you?

When she opened her door, there was a sailor outside, leaning against a pipe. As he came to attention, she said, startled as he was, “Who are
you?
How long have
you
been there?”

I'm one of the masters-at-arms, ma'am. We stood watch all night out here. Can I escort you somewheres?”

“I'm going to breakfast. Where's that?”

“I imagine the wardroom … follow me. Hold tight on this ladder, they're kind of tricky. Specially in shoes like that.”

The officers sprang to their feet as she came in. She said coolly, “Please sit down, please.” Across the room she caught a flat, angry look: Miller's. When she smiled at him, he dropped his eyes and shouted irritably for coffee.

She ordered from a mimeographed slip. Creamed chipped beef on toast, egg over easy, juice. The men around her seemed shy. Finally one asked her where she was from. She said Washington. The captain shot a glare at him like a laser. He didn't ask any more questions, just fidgeted with his fork for a moment, dropped it, then excused himself.

They'd all finished and she was sitting alone when Byrne came in. He hung up his cap, drew coffee, and sat down across from her. “Sleep all right?”

“Wonderful. Where did everyone go?”

“Quarters, then off to work. We start early at sea.”

“When will Admiral Hart be here?”

“Flight plan says a little after eight.”

“This is to oversee the convoy transit—is that correct?”

“That's right.
Coronado
's his flagship, but he can get a better picture of the situation from an Aegis cruiser. He likes to be on the scene whenever there's a possibility the Pasdaran will come out.”

“Commendable.”

“He's a good man,” said Byrne. He swirled his coffee, squinting as if looking through it into the past. “Speaking as one who's served with some who weren't.”

“I know you find this hard to believe, Mr. Byrne—”

“Why not Jack?”

“I'll think about that. As I was saying, I'm not out here to cast for the Crucifixion. I see nothing to indicate he's not a good commander. I'm only trying to see that our overall policy is correct, and that within that context our resources are efficiently used.”

“There are those who feel you're going about it in an unnecessarily abrasive manner.”