Payback

clock showed them that the team had only four minutes to reach the RS before castoff, the reversible-submersible sitting on the sandy bottom of the crescent beach’s surf line in two fathoms of water, and rolling in the storm surge despite the craft’s computerized stabilizer fins that were constantly moving in and out from their recessed sheaths.

“Choir’s not going to like this rockin’ and rollin’,” said copilot Gomez.

“No,” said Eddie with uncharacteristic brevity and finality. His temptation as pilot was to risk a quick “up scope,” but he dismissed the idea. Even in the twelve feet of water that afforded the RS at least a three-foot “hide” margin, they could hear the firefight moving ominously closer to the beach from the slope beyond, which meant that the team must be coming down the Y, laying suppressing fire behind them.

The team was doing just that, to allow Salvini time to recover the MANPAD box, from where he’d dropped it off trail among the stiffly resistant bushes and nettles, and reach the beach.

Raising the search scope would enable Mervyn to see what was going on, but rather than aiding Salvini in any way, the “up scope” might identify the craft’s position to any pursuing NKA troops, who by now, Mervyn guessed, were coming pell-mell down the Y.

“What the hell’s that?” Gomez asked, indicating the passive sonar’s waterfall. It looked as if the wafer-thin waterfall screen of sound lines had suddenly been violently kicked, the normally placid cascade of vertical lines broken up into a high-pitched, sizzling static. But this was not the jamming static purposely emitted by the powerful generators aboard McCain and its battle group to support the Payback team mission. It was clearly coming from a local source.

The source was the extraordinary vibrations caused by the NKA’s upgunned T-55. Having rolled past the warehouse, it was now descending the Y astride the Y’s flooded track, the tank belching coal-black exhaust from its twelve-cylinder diesel engine and spraying a hail of both 7.62mm and higher-caliber rounds from its coaxial and independently fired machine guns as it lumbered down toward the beach. Crushing all in its path, mashing stout brush and tangled vines into the rain-sodden earth, the tank’s vibrations shook the electronic life out of the RS’s waterfall screen, the RS itself now no more than seventy yards away as the behemoth dipped then climbed up the western side of the last sand dune between it and the hard, wet sand at the surf’s edge.

“They’re out of the shed,” John Cuso quietly informed Admiral Crowley as they watched the latest satellite pix’s infrared readout on McCain’s Big Blue. Officially, Cuso was off duty, but no one in SES or on the bridge wanted to be caught sleeping during one of the most exciting McCain-launched missions in the carrier’s long and illustrious career. What made it especially riveting for the relatively small number of men and women who’d been selected to participate in the highly secretive launch of the RS was that they knew, together with the other nearly six thousand souls aboard the boat, that this had been the officially sanctioned retribution—“media deniable,” of course — for the horrors unleashed in the murderous MANPAD attacks against American civilians.

Up till now, the fury of the Force 9 charging south from Siberia into the East Sea had clouded SATPIX infrared surveillance, but, through a break in the deceptively calm eye of the storm, the big blue screen, or rather, the state-of-the-art computers that fed its data blocks with information relayed by the satellite, had enough clear weather to pick up the action 22,300 miles below the satellite’s orbit.

“Looks dicey,” commented off-duty air boss Ray Lynch. “What’s that big job with the camouflage net over it?”

“A tank,” said one of the twelve electronic warfare officers who sat reverentially beneath Big Blue.

“Upgunned T-55, we think,” put in another, to ameliorate his fellow EWO’s sarcasm. “A hundred and thirty- five millimeter.”

“Laser guided,” proffered another EWO.

“Possibly,” said his colleague.

Air boss Ray Lynch shook his head and moved back a little from the screen, nursing his thick mug of java. He didn’t say anything, but some of these Navy guys knew squat when it came to tanks. Before he’d become air boss and was a fighter jock during the Iraqi wars, he’d been in action against tanks, particularly the ubiquitous T-55, of which Russia alone had over 25,000, and he’d never seen a 135mm T-55. Putting that size cannon on a 36-ton T-55 chassis would be like mounting a howitzer on a pickup. Fire a round and the recoil’d kill everyone aboard. But he didn’t say anything — just stood there, watching the screen.

Lynch was already violating the strict Blue Tile prohibition against smoking and bringing food and beverages into the SES, but he was allowed to get away with it because of the extraordinary stress and awesome responsibility of his job. Managing the equivalent of four metropolitan airports at peak hour simultaneously, and all this on a four-and-a-half-acre slab, required lots of coffee and the nerves of a quarterback. And he’d just brought in the entire “Snoopy Gang,” as McCain’s aviators referred to both the roto-domed early- warning Hawkeye and the magnetic-anomaly-detecting sub hunter Viking, the two of these relatively slow, fixed- wing aircraft having been protected by Chipper Armstrong, Rhino Manowski, and the other two pilots of the Joint Strike Fighter quad. All eleven men had been talked down through the violence of the Force 9 by Ray Lynch, who hadn’t considered his job done until he’d personally observed that the Hawkeye’s pilot, copilot, Combat Information Center Officer (CICO), air control officer, and radar officer, the latter three known as the plane’s three moles, had been safely deplaned.

After hours of being cooped up in the Hawkeye’s windowless, equipment-stuffed section of the fuselage and staring at nothing but their banks of computer screens and data blocks, looking for the HAN-class sub and losing contact with her in the lightning rage nor’nor’west of Ullung Island, the moles, as was usually the case, were blinded by the dawn’s early light, weak though it was in the storm’s eye. Only after Lynch had seen the three moles linking hands and led childlike from the plane by a white shirt did he allow himself a coffee break.

As he was watching the drama of Beach 5 unfolding on Big Blue, the hushed tones of McCain’s EWOs unintentionally only adding to the tension rather than ameliorating it, Ray Lynch reaffirmed his conviction that no matter how heart-stopping it could be to be a fighter jock, such as aces Armstrong and Manowski, flying the most lethal war machines man has ever made, or how stressful it was for him to be the man who had to bring them safely down on the boat’s roof, surely nothing could compare with the hard, brutal work of warriors killing other warriors face-to-face.

Ironically, the white IR image of the T-55 appeared much sharper on the screen, because of the clarity of Big Blue’s computers, than it did in the NVGs of Freeman, Choir, Lee, Aussie, and Bone as they poured concerted fire through a 180-degree arc at the IR blobs of white that were the NKA soldiers using the brutish tank as protection.

Again, Freeman’s hard-driving physical training was paying off, enabling his small band of warriors to maintain a highly accurate and concerted fire on their NKA pursuers. As opposed to the excited, wild shooting by the NKA regulars, the bursts of directed fire from Freeman’s AK-47, Aussie’s and Lee’s HK submachine guns, and Choir’s and Brady’s SAWs were a rapid-moving IR study in “effective fire,” wherein no round was wasted. “If you can’t see it!” went the general’s axiom, “you can’t hit it,” and so none of his trainees ever got away with the excuse that they were merely laying down suppressing fire. “A waste of ammo!” would be the general’s terse reply. “You’re not on a Hollywood set!”

The team had taken out eight NKA before the T-55 reached the base of the big fifty-foot-high dune, the supra-athletic ability of Payback’s five shooters enabling them to move with remarkable agility in and out of the sodden brush and sea grass that covered the dune like rain-matted hair on some enormous scalp. Their extreme physical fitness also meant that when they took aim, either stationary or on the run, their heart rate was so comparatively low, around 50 per minute, that, like any champion triathlete, their “shakes” factor was at a minimum, their kill shots usually within an inch of the aiming point.

As Salvini reached the hard-packed sand at Beach 5’s shore, with the six-by-two-by-two-foot-long box marked “MANPAD” in Korean, Eddie Mervyn, hearing his harsh, dragging footsteps via the fine, catlike “nose-hair” sensors on the RS’s bow, down-geared the craft’s treads to slow ahead, and Gomez prepared to exit the hatch. “I’ll help ’im. Sounds like he’s haulin’ something heavy.”

Back in McCain’s Blue Tile, Air Boss Ray Lynch held his breath, his mouthful of java unswallowed.

“Son of a—,” began one of the EWOs. “Tank’s on top of the dune!”

“Wish,” said John Cuso, “we had our Strikers overhead now, Ray.” Ray Lynch hadn’t realized the