the coast from Port Angeles down past Father and Son.”
David knew about Port Angeles, of course, but, apart from the Bible, not Father and Son.
“ ’Father and Son’ are a couple of sea stacks off the Olympic Peninsula’s west coast. I suggested Jensen, COMSUBPAC-GRU-9, run his UAV Darkstar along the coastal sea caves.”
“For IR hot spots,” David said, immediately extrapolating from Freeman’s remark that what would be needed was a diver-capable SpecFor team to either execute a swim investigation or an abseil insertion from a helo, as Brentwood and his team had done in the Hindu Kush.
“Exactly,” confirmed Freeman, his hand flashing out with surprising speed, capturing a fly, which he then flung ferociously against the ponderosa. “Anyway, Darkstar is in pieces. Overhaul. Won’t by flyable till tonight, 2100.”
David glanced at his Swiss issue watch. “That’s only four and a — no, five hours away. Not long.”
The general gave the grunt of a man whose rationality was losing to his impatience. “
“How many planes’d we lose on the
“A few — none of the fighters, thank God. Hadn’t flown out from Whidbey Island. Carrier only takes ’em aboard once the boat’s clear of the strait and in the open sea.”
“If I were the terrorists, I would’ve waited,” opined David. “Hit the carrier at sea — likely to get most of the fighters in the hangar deck and topside.”
“I agree,” said Freeman, taking off his Afrika Korps cap, running his fingers through a shock of silvery gray hair. The general slapped his thigh with the cap. “Got any ideas of what to do while we’re sitting on our bums waiting for Darkstar to be reassembled?”
“Hovercraft,” said David. “They’re equipped with IR scopes for night searches. Helos too — but I’d go for the hovercraft. Low flying helos — even by pilots from the Coast Guard familiar with the coasts — aren’t as good as hovercraft. Hovers are at eye level with any cave or indentation. Helos have to avoid sea stacks. Especially hard to see at night.”
Freeman nodded in full agreement, already striding back to his Humvee, grabbing its phone. Coast Guard HQ in Seattle told him they could let him have three hovercraft, the remainder of the squadron still busy searching for survivors among the more than 389 MIAs still unaccounted for.
“When?” asked the general over the phone.
“We’ll need authorization from Admiral—”
“Hey!” David could hear the general’s sharp retort. “You jokers listen to me. We’ve lost a Nimitz carrier, a state-of-the-art Virginia, and most of the people aboard them, and you want some goddamn piece of paper so you can go look for the sons of bitches who did this? If we lose any more because you—”
“Orders are going out now, General,” cut in the duty officer’s voice. “As we
“Good, I’ll need real-time digital feed of any hot spots the hovercraft get on their video.”
“No video, I’m afraid, General. Strait’s too rough.”
Like most people who hadn’t ridden aboard one, the general, despite his extensive military exposure, harbored the illusion that a hovercraft traveled smoothly over the water on the air cushion.
“Well — hell, then, have them notify me if they see anything that looks suspicious.”
“Roger.”
“Let’s hope,” Freeman told David when he put down the phone, “that nothing hits the fan between now and midnight.”
“Amen to that,” said David. Having rested during Freeman’s tete-a-tete with the Coast Guard, he now clicked a new mag into the F2000, keen to show his old boss just how well he could handle the Bullpup with one good arm.
Freeman, eschewing any of the ear protectors in the stalls, plugged his ears and shouted, “Go!” upon which David unleashed three bursts, all on target, if the target had been a barn door. Certainly nowhere near a sufficiently tight group for the SpecOps qualification.
“How about the grenade launcher?” Freeman asked casually as he lifted the rope-secured range binoculars and studied the grouping.
David had been so intent on overcoming the problem of firing the F2000 with one arm, he’d forgotten about the grenade launcher. It was the essential clip-on module for anyone using the assault weapon, for anyone in a SpecFor group.
“Not yet,” he told the general. “I’ll clip it on now.”
“Good.”
David smiled, but inwardly felt a rush of gut-knotting anxiety, a condition virtually unknown to the Medal of Honor winner in the years prior to the disaster in the Afghan cave. He had good reason to feel apprehensive. The F2000’s grenade launcher weighed another two pounds.
It might not have seemed like much, but “ask a pregnant woman what another two-pound strain on her breast means,” as a Fort Bragg drill instructor had once said to him, Aussie Lewis, Choir, and Salvini.
“Stop it!” Aussie had said. “You’re driving me nuts!”
The DI had had their attention. “When you’re aiming a weapon with a launcher attached from the shoulder, it’s like saying, “Hold on a second, I’ll tie a brick to the barrel. Makes one hell of a difference.”
Now, David’s driver came back down from the Humvee to give him moral support. In his plummeting mood, David ill-advisedly pressed the point by adding, “What other damn module does this thing have?”
“Clip-on bayonet,” said Freeman.
“Like me to get one for you, Captain?” offered the driver.
“That’d be nice,” David responded. “Any other clip-ons?”
“Ah, lessee,” said the driver, not getting David’s sardonic tone. “I’ll go back up to Stores, grab the fire control system, night vision scope — you want all of them, sir?”
“Sure, why not? Don’t want to miss any fun.”
The driver’s laugh trailed off when he saw the tight grimace of pain that had swallowed the captain’s smile.
“Don’t hurry back,” said David.
As the Humvee took off, its dusty wake shrouding him in what he elected to regard as insult upon injury, the SpecFor captain was simultaneously aware that he was giving way to a disgusting wave of self-pity. He lowered himself to the ground for a rest, pushing his back hard against the gnarled pine.
“Hey, Smiley!” It was a distinctly Australian voice, the accent not lost despite Lewis’s twenty years as an American citizen. “What you doin’, mate? Playin’ with your dick?”
“Thought you’d be here sooner,” David replied as Aussie gave the general an informal salute.
“So did I. But the wife insisted we have a farewell quickie. You know me — I wanted to
David forced a grin, which was difficult for either the general or Lewis to see now that the light was fading. Aussie squatted down like an Arab, posterior well off the ground, a lesson learned long ago in the Australian Outback to avoid what Aussie used to describe to his fellow SpecFor buddies as “bloody creepy crawlies.”
“I heard about the screw-up in ’ghan. Not your fault, Harold. Bad intel. A setup. You guys were suckered, plain and simple. You aren’t the first team to lose out to that friggin’ ghost.”
David looked over at his old comrade in arms. “You think Li Kuan’s a ghost?”
“I dunno,” confessed Aussie, snapping off a stalk of passpalum grass and biting on it. “Tell you what, though — I ever run across the ghost, I’ll put a long burst through the apparition — see if the fucker bleeds.”
In the silence that followed, the three warriors could hear the rustling of the grass and pines.
“I lost six of ’em, Aussie.”
It was as if the breeze had abruptly ceased.
“I heard,” Aussie said, spitting out the chewed passpalum. “Everyone but you. Right?”
David, not known for dwelling on what could not be changed, was clearly dwelling on it.
“I’ve got a couple of Kleenex here,” said Aussie. “Trouble is, they’re all screwed up into those unusable balls you have to throw away. But I’ll tell you what I can—” Aussie slapped a mosquito dead on his forearm. “Little
