Aussie, using his legs in a scissor hold around the left stanchion of the roll bar, had his arms free to check and put on his Draeger rebreather. Dixon, with more recent practice, was already “in suit,” the fright he’d experienced from the burst of fire replaced with a surge of anger. It was the first time he’d been shot at, and he was surprised how quickly his outrage had evicted fear. Now he wanted to shoot back. Freeman was on the radio, calling Jensen at Keystone. No response, not even the sound of static.
“Shot to ratshit!” Aussie informed him, indicating the console, the radio’s innards a mess of shattered circuit boards and wiring on the RIB’s deck. With that, Freeman unclipped his Ziploc-encased cell phone. But Murphy’s Law was at large, solar flare activity knocking out all satellite bounce-off signals in the ionosphere high above his fog- bound environs.
Cursing but undeterred, the general grabbed one of the RIB’s three marker buoys, switched on its flasher light and pulse signal locator, and tossed it overboard. Hopefully the NR-1B now had its scientists and crew aboard and was already under way, en route to assist his team.
Choir geared the RIB down to quarter speed and made for what Freeman had hurriedly described as a “rocky island.”
As the RIB approached it, however, the SpecFor team could see it was in fact no more than a stack of granite thrusting out of the bay — an islet thirty feet in diameter, its highest, westernmost half a serrated wall four or five feet above sea level. Its eastern half, closest to the approaching RIB, seemed to be awash in choppy water, the result of turbulence radiating out from the waterfall-sea interface as the falls tumbled from a wide slit halfway up the heavily vegetated cliff face.
“We should be out of sight of that shooter once we get to these rocks,” said Freeman.
“Providing he doesn’t move farther around the bay,” replied Choir, raising his voice above the ear-dunning roar of the three-hundred-foot-wide wall of white water pouring into the crescent-shaped bay with the unyielding power of a dam whose spill gates were opened for maximum runoff. Fire support for Dixon and Aussie, should they call for it, would be blind, Freeman, Choir, and Sal realizing that the best they could do would be to fire a “banana” arc through the fall in hopes of keeping any shooter’s head down. There was a sudden series of crashes as dark branches and clumps of earth plummeted down in the otherwise pristine curtain of water.
“Son of a bitch!” said Sal. “With our radio kaput, Aussie and Dixon won’t be able to call us.”
“No sweat, Brooklyn,” Freeman assured him, with more confidence than he felt. “We’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Wait for ’em to swim back and report.”
“Why the hell would a shooter have just opened up on us like that?”
“You been smoking something, Sal?” asked the general, Choir answering the question as he coaxed the RIB alongside the islet on the off, protective seaward side. “Because he thought we saw something.”
“Jesus — the midget sub?”
“A perfect hide,” said the general. “Falls are a perfect curtain — cold water to throw off any infrared snooping UAV.”
“Don’t fancy those whirlpools, General,” opined Choir, looking toward the falls.
“They can swim,” said Freeman tersely. “ ’Sides, they can pull their rip cords if they have to.” He meant that Aussie and Dixon could activate their Mae West inflatables.
Choir nudged the islet’s side with the RIB and, despite the foamy, choppy water, could see a protruding ledge three feet below. If there was a sudden suck-down, the RIB’s fiberglass keel could find itself on the ledge and tip.
“Piece o’ cake,” Sal told him, Salvini sensing Choir was worried about what could be a tricky docking in the chop.
“You ready with that line?” Choir asked Sal.
“Good to go, Mr. Williams.”
“When I say go — right?”
“Right.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The ROC F-16 was escorted by two of
Admiral Crowley, though still in shock over his squadrons’ failure to prevent the bombing of Penghu, nevertheless had to force himself to concentrate on the Bizarro situation. His position about not allowing the Falcon to land still stood. For one thing, the Taiwanese Falcon, not being a carrier aircraft, did not have sufficient underbelly strength to make a hard carrier landing; hence the nickname “Jelly Dick,” by which “Hard Dick” Navy aviators condescendingly referred to Air Force fighters. An F-16 pilot, at his best, trying to minimize the shock of hitting the carrier deck, would probably collapse his landing gear, the fighter skidding and cartwheeling and either crashing into billions of dollars of
“We could put out a net,” Cuso suggested, but Crowley shook his head; the idea of using “Badminton”—a big net stretched across the deck — to break the touchdown of a plane so low on gas that it didn’t have enough fuel left for a “go-around,” or was in some other way incapacitated, still ran the risk of the Falcon crashing into
“No,” said Crowley with an air of finality. “He’ll have to ditch. Have our chopper pick him up.”
Cuso nodded assent, but felt compelled, no doubt because he’d been an aviator himself, to add, “Chipper says the pilot’s shot up pretty bad. Ejection might not be an option.”
“Life’s tough!” Crowley said brusquely. “If he can’t eject, maybe he can ditch — stay afloat long enough for our helo to snatch him.”
Cuso said nothing. They both knew that if the pilot was so badly wounded that he couldn’t reach down to grab the snake — the F-16’s ejection pull loop — then he almost certainly didn’t have the strength required to boss the controls to pancake long enough for the Jolly Green Giant helicopter reach him.
Crowley conveyed his decision to the rescue helo, Chipper Armstrong, and Manowski.
“Thrilling mission, Chip,” came the wry voice from his backseat.
“Well, look at it this way, Eagle,” said Chipper. “Maybe Bizarro is the son of one of those super-rich Taiwanese industrialists, and when he gets home, Daddy’s gonna be so grateful, you and I get a big, fat envelope — reward for fishing Junior out of the chuck.”
“Your oxygen feed must have dropped below twenty, right?”
“Maybe,” Chipper answered, his voice tired but, not surprisingly, no longer as tense as when FITCOMPRON took off. The sight of the carrier, and the focus needed for landing on a “postage stamp,” was always a pick-me-up. The only problem remaining, given that the Taiwanese fighter’s radio was out, was that either Armstrong or Manowski would have to make it clear to Bizarro that he or she wouldn’t be allowed to land on the carrier and would have to eject or ditch. Eagle Evans, however, already had the potential problem solved. Using his navigation highlighter, on the inside of his cockpit he’d drawn a rough, simple diagram of an L-shaped pilot’s seat inclined backward, showing an arrow curving up and out from it, his large drawing clearly visible to the pilot of the shot-up Falcon.
“Outstanding, Eagle,” said Manowski on the far right side of the Falcon. “I can make that out from here. If Bizarro can’t see that, man, he’s blind.”
Chipper brought the Hornet in closer to the Falcon, his thumb gesticulating to Evans’s ad hoc poster, which Chipper now knew would pass into the folklore of the “boat,” along with the sadness of having lost so many good aviators in the miscalculation of the ChiComs’ intentions over Penghu.
“He sees it,” Manowski said, the wingman glimpsing the Falcon’s driver, who, though grimacing in pain, slowly raised his hand from the control stick and pointed a bloodied thumb. “He’s gonna do it,” Chipper advised
