Strike Force Alpha (5 page)

It was Martinez who’d run these unorthodox training sessions. He proved to be a whiz at directing the movements of big machines flying close to each other. Gradually, the team came together. By the end of that first month, Delta could load into the choppers and be airborne inside five minutes, while Ryder could get his jump jet into the air in half that time. And upon their return, they could all get belowdecks in three minutes flat, lowering their exposure to the outside world to the barest minimum. What might have seemed impossible at first—disparate units working as one—became routine. Much of the credit had to go to Martinez.

So, even though Martinez was younger than him, Ryder had come to respect the Delta boss, at least from a distance. He was a by-the-book type certainly, but out here, all alone, that was the best way to be. Martinez also had a certain bearing to him, proud and refined. If you ever insulted him, though, it would be no surprise if he drew a sword and challenged you to a duel, right there on the spot.

Because of the edict that team members refrain from too much fraternization, Ryder and Martinez had talked infrequently since coming aboard, and only about operational stuff. Ryder knew nothing about the Delta officer’s personal life. The only clue was a tiny badge Martinez always wore over his shirt pocket. Inside was a photograph of a pretty 18-something girl, bordered by a black ribbon, obviously a very personal item.

As far as Ryder knew, no one had the balls to ask Martinez whose picture it was.

Upon entering the mess, Martinez walked directly to Ryder’s table and sat down.

“What do you want?” Martinez asked him.

“To kill mooks,” Ryder replied without hesitation.

“No, I mean for your steak,” Martinez said. “It’s from Japan. Kobe beef. Most expensive in the world. Murphy sent it to us.”

Ryder just shrugged. “They got A-1 here?”

Martinez motioned to someone in the galley. A coffee cup full of steak sauce appeared. Ryder dumped it all over his meal.

“Good work last night,” Martinez told him. “I just saw the mission tapes. Can you believe all those old dudes videotaping the whole thing?”

Ryder looked back at him strangely. This was already the longest conversation he’d ever had with the Delta officer.

“We’ll be playing on four thousand VCRs back in the states inside a week,” Ryder finally replied with his first bite. “Not to mention all the news shows. I thought the idea was to stay secret.”

Martinez waved his concerns away. “That’s all been taken care of,” he said mysteriously. “How’s the cow?”

“It’s excellent,” Ryder replied honestly. “I’m glad Murphy is so concerned about our appetites.”

“Keep that happy feeling then,” Martinez told him. “Because today is your lucky day.”

“It is? Why?”

“You’re getting a wingman. Murphy’s decided two jump jets are better than one.”

Ryder was mildly shocked. He’d just assumed he’d be the lone fixed-wing in the unit.

“Can the air techs really handle
two
Harriers? Keeping mine in shape seems to be a full-time job already.”

Martinez laughed. “Hey, they’re Marines—they’re supposed to be able to handle anything.”

Ryder took another huge bite of steak. “Do you know the new guy’s name? Or have we already fraternized for too long?”

“We probably have—but I’ll tell you anyway,” Martinez said. “His name is Gerry Phelan. I don’t know his age, origin, or rank. He’s just out of the Marines’ hot school for Harrier training, though I understand he’s actually in the Navy Reserve.”

Ryder thought about this for a moment, then went back to his steak. The ship started rolling again.

“That’s great,” he said dryly. “If you’ve got to be on the water, you can never have too many Navy guys around.”

Ryder was back up on deck 30 minutes later.

The sun had come out and the sea had settled down again. He was able to enjoy a smoke for a change. They were still in the Med; he could tell by the color of the water. They were heading west, though, which meant Sicily was most likely just north of them and Algeria or Libya just to the south. An interesting part of the world….

A handful of Delta guys jogged by him. The highly trained special ops troops were constantly running around the ship, lugging weights, staying in shape, working on their tans. They looked like teenagers.
Bastards…
Ryder thought. A few weeks ago, he’d been caught in a traffic jam in a passageway with several of the Delta operators. One collided with him unintentionally and apologized by saying, “Excuse me…
sir
.”

It was like someone twisted a knife in Ryder’s chest. The way the soldier had said that word—
sir
. Ryder knew he wasn’t using it in the vernacular of officer and enlisted man, more the way a young student would address his elderly college professor.
Excuse me…sir.
Ryder had noticed his hair getting a little bit grayer every day after that.

He glanced up at the open bridge. The Navy guys were making their breakfast. Or was it lunch? Or dinner? It was hard to tell on the ship. With so many schedules, and people dealing with events in so many different time zones, the ship had no real set time of its own. In any case, the Navy guys had a big grill on the upper deck where they would prepare food while on duty, usually bacon and eggs or grits—but today definitely steak. You could smell it all over the ship. That aroma was the unofficial start of the day for
Ocean Voyager
.

But it was really closer to 10:00
A.M.
His new partner was due any minute.

No jet driver would ever turn down a wingman. Another set of eyes and ears could only help when up on a mission. But not just anyone would do.

Ryder had had some great second bananas in his career. A guy named J. T. Woods stood out among them. He’d been a superior flier, all nuts and guts, and had been a good friend, too. Officially, he’d been lost in action during a very black op about 15 years ago. Ryder looked around the massive undercover ship now. What would old Woody have thought of this?

A bell up on the bridge started ringing. This was a very low-tech early-warning system the Navy guys had rigged up. They had an ultraadvanced over-the-horizon radar installed in the combat center that could spot anything flying within 20 miles of the ship dead-on, even something that had been dipped in stealth paint. Whenever a bogie was picked up on this radar set, someone would ring the bell. This meant anyone who wasn’t dressed like a Filipino crewman had to clear the deck immediately, as something was about to fly overhead. The bell always set off a predictable scramble, with those crewmen wearing battle fatigues going down the chutes as if they were in a U-boat that had been told to dive, sometimes carrying their breakfasts with them. The deck could be cleared in under a minute this way, usually in plenty of time for everything to become “normal,” at least looking down from above.

But this time Ryder didn’t bother to move. He knew the sound of a Harrier engine by now—at least he thought he did. His ears had been bothering him lately, too. He waited and the noise got louder. Then finally he saw it. A jump jet, coming out of the south, starting to curve into a long elliptical orbit around the ship.

Someone in the combat control room was talking to the pilot by now, he was sure, not on the radio but on an SCP, a satellite cell phone. For security purposes, this was how the ship communicated with its tiny air force. Cell phone mikes and speakers had been installed in everyone’s crash helmets; the dialers had been sewn into their flight suit knee pads. Landing instructions, responses, and replies were all set in code, using words heard frequently during shipping operations. On special occasions, or when things got too hairy to speak in code, the SCPs also had a scrambler mode, which could distort any two-way conversation for up to 30 seconds. This quickly drained the phone’s internal batteries, though, and was used only as a last resort.

The incoming Harrier got a 20-mile clearance, too, meaning nothing was within 20 miles of the ship in any direction. This was the designated time frame in which a jump jet could land or take off from
Ocean Voyager
. Anything closer and the pilot would have to fly away for a while and wait until he was called back for another try.

But the all-clear was sounded, via the ship’s equally low-tech foghorn, once the CAC got a visual and confirmed that this guy was a friendly. The Harrier glided over the ship with admirable precision just a minute later. Ryder straightened a little. This speed jockey looked good, thank God. This was not a mission to have a wet noodle watching your six. Three containers had been rolled away and one of the aircraft elevators appeared from below. It arrived with a whoosh of clean hydraulic power. Following hand signals from a trio of Marine Aviation guys, the Harrier slotted in perfectly above the mobile landing platform, known to all as the pancake. As Ryder well knew, matching a hover with the speed of a moving ship was an art that would take even a test pilot a while to master. Yet this guy was doing it with ease.

The plane started coming down. Like Ryder’s Harrier, this jump jet had been “ghosted,” upgraded in the area of radar avoidance. The plane had been coated with a thick black and gray paint to absorb unfriendly radar signals. Movable heat deflectors had been installed to cool its various jet exhausts. All the plane’s sharpest angles had been smoothed over, and anything that had been previously hanging off the fuselage or wings was now recessed inside them. The plane even had a specially tinted canopy, nearly opaque from the outside. In other words, the jump jet was now stealthy, and, ironically looked more like the original British version of the plane, than the current U.S. model.

Ryder stepped back; so did the Marines. They’d seen Ryder land enough times to know that whenever a Harrier came down there was a bounce and then a flare of hot thrust deflecting off the pancake. The new pilot didn’t need their help anymore, so they’d moved off to safer footing.

But this Harrier came in so perfectly, it touched down without anything remotely resembling a thump. Nor was there any hot kick-up. This, too, brightened Ryder’s spirits. The person behind such a smooth landing
must
have had at least as much flying time as he, possibly more. Chances were good he was a real veteran, in both service and age.

“This guy will be ancient,” Ryder predicted aloud.

The Harrier shut down, its canopy popped, and the pilot climbed out. Ryder took one look at him and nearly fell off the boat.

He looked younger than the Delta guys.

They met at the edge of the pancake. He was short, as many fighter pilots were. Maybe five-seven on a good day. He took off his crash helmet to reveal a cross-cropped surfer dude haircut. He also had a pair of Walkman-type earphones wrapped around his neck. The wire led into his left-side breast pocket, where a mini–CD player was located.

Ryder introduced himself and they shook hands. Phelan was a lieutenant, Ryder was a colonel, but there was no need to salute here.

It sounded like a line from a movie, but Ryder just had to ask him. “How did you learn how to fly like that?”

Phelan smiled—it was a Pepsodent smile. “Well, the Navy paid for it, but the Marines were the ones who taught me, sir….”

There was that word again.

Ryder pointed to the earphones. “And you listen to music in the cockpit, Lieutenant?”

Phelan was looking around, taking in his new surroundings. “Had to do the jump in radio silence, sir,” he said plainly. “So why not?”

Ryder started to say something—but stopped. What was there to say, really? The kid came across not so much cocky as supremely self-confident, in that rookie sort of way. Typical of the Top Gun, Navy jock, Tailhook crowd.

He reminded him of someone, though. His mannerisms, the attitude.

But try as he might, Ryder just couldn’t remember who.

That night

There was one drawback to the Air-Land Assault Ship/Special concept.

It had to do with the aviation gas. A Harrier could go through tons of it, literally, in just a few flights. A bulked-up stealthy one burned that much more. The helicopters were also gas guzzlers, but nothing compared to the jump jet. The problem was, the ship could only keep so much JP-8 av fuel onboard. Space on
Ocean Voyager
was at a premium despite its size, and there were safety concerns as well. There had been no good place to set up a fuel reservoir big enough to meet just the fixed-wing asset’s needs, so the copters and the jet had to draw from the same tank, an uneven feeding. (The ship could carry just about enough gas to keep the three of them flying off and on for 14 days.) The rest of the available tank space was taken up by fuel needed to run the ship’s turbine propulsion engines.

Keeping the gas supply up then was an ongoing concern. It wasn’t like they could get a hose boost from a passing Navy fuel ship anytime they needed some extra fuel. Nothing would blow their cover quicker. So Murphy had devised an alternative system. On prearranged nights, Ryder would take the jump jet up to meet an in-flight refueling plane. These aerial gas pumps were almost always USAF KC-10 Extenders, usually flying out of bases in Europe or the Middle East. Their crews knew only that an American Harrier needed a drink, nothing more. If Ryder wasn’t going on a mission, he would fill his internal tanks and some spares on his wing. He’d float back down to the ship and the Marine Aviation guys would drain the extra fuel off into auxiliary buddy tanks for use later on. To have a four-day supply of gas dedicated just to the jump jet was considered optimum. Now that Phelan was onboard, though, that requirement would have to double.

Ryder had run the nocturnal refueling drills several dozen times since the
Ocean Voyager
started operations. They weren’t growing on him. The flying part wasn’t bad. It was finding the tanker. The Extenders were usually on time and at the right altitude. But locating them on the vertical plane took both skill and luck, especially in bad weather.

And it all had to be done without any lights and, of course, no radio.

It was 2350 hours when Ryder and Phelan took off. They were going out on a mission, their first together, even though they hadn’t spoken more than a few words to each other since the junior pilot came aboard. Ryder had barely introduced himself to the young pilot when the typical workday aboard ship kicked into gear. They were both summoned to the CAC by Martinez to be briefed on what would prove to be a long night of multiple assignments. A lengthy airplane prep came next, then a few hours to nap, another to suit up, and the final premission brief. Then it was time to go.

The long night had to begin with one of the aerial fill-ups, though, as both Harriers were low on gas. They’d been told the weather above the ship was clear up 5,000 feet, but after that it would be solid overcast for a while. They went through the first cloud layer with no problems. The cumulus was moving fast, as it always did above the Med at night. They were promised a full moon after 12,000 feet. The tankers always flew at 20,000.

They were going nearly straight up, Ryder out front, Phelan off his right tail, exactly where he was supposed to be. They had reached 11-5 when suddenly an enormous silver shape came out of the night and went over their heads. It was moving so quickly, Ryder and Phelan had no chance to react. It was not the tanker. It was an Italian airliner, Alitalia Flight 7544, Rome to Tunis. Ryder and Phelan had come within 500 feet of it—but it never saw them because the Harriers were ghosts; their signatures would barely register on a military radar. Never would they show up on an airliner’s screen.

This crisis passed only to be followed by another. They popped through the cloud layer at 12,000 feet but found no moon. Wrong forecast? Wrong time? Wrong altitude?

Nope. The moon was being obscured—by an oncoming sandstorm. A big one.

The Africans called them
haboobs.
Clouds of desert sand and dust that looked like gigantic fists, rising with the wind and the heat of the day. Blowing unobstructed across the Med, they could make flying very unpleasant.

Ryder had ridden out two of these monsters already and he wasn’t looking forward to a third. He guessed that the sandstorm would arrive in their part of the sky in about ten minutes. They still had to find the gas truck, hook up, get a drink, and split. Was it possible to do all that in such a short amount of time?

They climbed to 20 Angels and found the tanker just a minute later, right where it was supposed to be. How Murphy was able to arrange these secret refuelings no one knew, but the tankers had not failed them yet. It took another minute for the Harriers to get the right speed and altitude, communicating only through the quick blinking of their navigation lights. The KC-10 could only serve one ship at a time, so Ryder hooked up first. He was full in three minutes. With one eye on the sandstorm, he unhooked and drifted off the nipple.

Phelan went up and in and fucked the duck. But then the Extender started shaking, and Phelan started shaking with it. The windspeed at 20,000 feet had suddenly doubled. Phelan was smart enough to break off contact and then reinsert once the big tanker settled down. But the turbulence came again, not once, but twice. Ryder was riding right alongside Phelan, but there was little he could do except watch his wingman bounce all over the sky, a long nasty stream of fuel spurting from the Extender’s boom. Phelan kept his cool, though. He finally hooked a fourth time and hung on long enough to take a full gulp. Then he flashed his lights once and disengaged.

The tanker immediately banked south, its ordeal over, and disappeared into the clouds, intent on escaping the worst of the
haboob
.

Ryder and Phelan turned north.