“I’d appreciate economy of speech,” snapped Fawkes.
“As long as the bread I signed for is good, you’re the boss, boss.”
“Ready,target range?”
“Yeah, movin’ into position now.”
I “Good.” Fawkes glanced at his watch. “Five minutes and ten seconds I till Hogmanay.”
“Hog … what?”
“Scots for a smashing New Year’s Eve.”
Fawkes clicked off the mike and noted thankfully that the NUMA helicopter had continued on its leisurely course toward Washington and disappeared beyond the bluffs upriver.
At almost the same instant, Steiger altered the controls and banked the Minerva M-88 helicopter in a wide, sweeping turn over the Maryland countryside. He kept low, shaving the tops of the leafless trees, dodging an occasional water tower, grimacing at the words that came over his earphones.
“They’re beginning to get nasty,” he said casually. “General Somebody-or-other claims he’s going to shoot us down if we don’t get the hell out of the area.”
“Acknowledge,” said Pitt. “And tell him you’re complying.”
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VIXEN 03
The Iowa
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“Who should I say we are?”
Pitt thought a moment. “Tell him the truth. We’re a NUMA copter on special assignment.”
Steiger shrugged and began talking into his microphone.
“Old General Whosit bought it,” said Steiger. He angled his head toward Pitt. “You’d better get ready. I judge it about eight minutes to the drop.”
Pitt unclasped his seat belt and waited until Sandecker did the same, then moved into the helicopter’s small cargo compartment. “Do it right the first time,” Pitt said into Steiger’s ear, “or you’ll make an ugly red mess on the side of the Iowa.”
“You’re looking at a neatness nut,” Steiger said with a diluted smile. “All you have to do is hang tight and leave the driving to old Abe. If you have to drop early, I’ll make damn sure you’ve got a nice cushion of deep water under your ass.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“We’ll come around and swing in from the west to cloak our outline against whatever darkness is left.” Steiger’s eyes never strayed from the windshield. “I’m flicking off the navigation lights now. Good luck!”
Pitt squeezed Steiger’s arm, stepped into the cargo section of the Minerva, and closed the cockpit door. The compartment was ice cold. The loading hatch was open and the wintry morning air whistled into what seemed a vibratinaluminum tomb. Sandecker held the harness out to him and he strapped it on.
The admiral started to say something and then hesitated. At last, his cast-iron features taut with suppressed emotion, he said, “I’ll expect you for breakfast.”
“Make my eggs scrambled,” Pitt said.
Then he stepped into the frigid dawn.
Lieutenant Alan Fergus, leader of the SEAL combat units, zipped up his wet suit and cursed the vagaries of the high command. Not more than an hour ago he’d been rudely awakened from a dead sleep and hurriedly briefed on what he regarded as the dumbest exercise ever to come his way during seven years in the Navy. He pulled on his rubber hood and tucked his ears under the lining. Then he approached a tall, burly man who sat slouched in a nonregulation director’s chair. His feet were propped on the bridge railing and he peered intently down the Potomac.
“What’s it all about?” asked Fergus.
Lieutenant Commander Oscar Kiebel, the dour skipper of the Coast Guard patrol boat that was ferrying Fergus and his men, twisted the corners of his mouth in an expression of distaste and shrugged. “I’m as confused as you.”
“Do you believe that bullshit about a battleship?”
“No,” Kiebel said in a rumbling voice. “I’ve seen four-thousand-ton destroyers cruise upriver to the Washington Navy Yard, but a fifty-thousand-ton battleship? No way.”
“Board and secure the stern for Marine helicopter-assault teams,” Fergus said irritably. “Those orders are sheer crap, if you want my opinion.”
“I’m not any happier about this outing than you,” said Kiebel. “I take my picnics as they come.” He grinned. “Maybe it’s a surprise party with booze and wild women.”
“At seven o’clock in the morning, neither holds much interest. Not out in the open, at any rate.”
“We’ll know soon. Two more miles till we round Sheridan Point. Then our objectives should be within - ” Suddenly Kiebel broke off and cocked his head, listening. “You hear that?”
Fergus cupped his ears and turned, facing the patrol boat’s wake. “Sounds like a helicopter.”
“Coming like a bat out of hell without lights,” Kiebel added.
“My God!” Fergus exclaimed. “The Marines have jumped the gun. They’re going in ahead of schedule.”
An instant later every head on the patrol boat turned upward as a helicopter roared past at two hundred feet, a dim shadow against a gray sky. All were so engrossed in the mysterious, darkened craft they didn’t notice the vague shape trailing below and slightly to the rear of the copter until it swept over the decks and carried away the radio antennae.
“What in hell was that?” blurted Kiebel in genuine astonishment.
Pitt would have been only too glad to supply the answer if he’d had the time. Strapped in the harness, dangling under the NUMA helicopter only thirty feet above the river, he barely managed to extend his legs forward as he crashed into the patrol boat’s antennae. His feet took most of the shock, and foftunately-damned fortunately, he thought later-none of the wiring had entangled his body, sectioning him like a lettuce slicer. As it was, he would carry a nice welt across his buttocks where a piece of thin tubing had made brief contact.
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VIXEN 03
The rising sun cooperated by hiding behind a low range of dark clouds, its filtered light obscuring any detail of the surrounding countryside. The air was keen, barbed with the energy of its chill, a polar frigidity that stabbed through Pitt’s heavy clothing. His eyes were watering like faucets and his cheeks and forehead smarted with the intensity of overloaded pincushions.
Pitt was on a ride no amusement park in the country could equal. The Potomac was a blur as he soared over its lazy current at nearly two hundred miles an hour. Trees edging the banks hurtled by like cars on a Los Angeles freeway. He looked skyward and made out a small pale oval against the black doorway of the helicopter and recognized it as the anxious face of Admiral Sandecker.
He felt a sideways motion as Steiger banked the craft around a wide bend in the river. The long umbilical cable that held him to a winch in the cargo compartment arched in the opposite direction, swinging him outward, like the end child in a playground game of crack the whip. The momentum twisted him sideways and he found himself looking at the grounds of Mount Vernon. Then the cable straightened and the huge mass of the Iowa swung into view, her forward guns trained ominously upstream.
Overhead, Steiger eased back on the throttle and slowed the flight of the helicopter. Pitt felt the harness straps pressing into his chest at the deceleration and braced himself for the drop. The superstructure of the ship filled up the windshield in front of the control cabin when Steiger gently eased the helicopter into a hovering position above the starboard side of the ship, behind the main bridge.
“Too fast! Too fast!” Steiger muttered over and over, fearful that Pitt would be swinging ahead of the hovering helicopter like a weight on the bottom of a pendulum.
Steiger’s fears were justified. Pitt was indeed pitching forward on an uncontrollable course, high above the main deck, where he’d planned to land. Narrowly missing an empty five-inch-gun turret, he came to the end of his arc. It was now or never. He made his decision and hit the quick-release buckle and dropped clear of the harness.
From the doorway of the helicopter Sandecker’s eyes strained in the early-morning gloom, his insides knotted, his breath halted, as Pitt’s huddled figure fell behind the forward superstructure and vanished. Then the Iowa was gone, too, as Steiger snapped the helicopter into a steep angle, the rotor blades biting the air, dipping over the forested
The Iowa
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shore and out of sight. As soon as the craft leveled, Sandecker released his safety strap and made his way back into the cockpit.
“Is he away?” Steiger asked anxiously.
“Yes, he’s down,” answered Sandecker.
“In one piece?”
“We can but hope,” Sandecker said, so quietly that Steiger hardly heard him above the roar of the engine. “That’s all any of us has left.”
Fawkes was not overly concerned with the helicopter so long as it continued on its way. He did not see a human form drop out of the twilight, as his attention was directed to the boat that was approaching downriver at high speed. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a welcoming committee, courtesy of the United States government. He spoke into a microphone.
“Mr. Shaba.”
“Sir?” Shaba’s voice crackled back.
“Please see to it the machine-gun crews man their stations and prepare to repel boarders.” Repel boarders. My God, Fawkes thought. When was the last time a captain of a capital ship gave that command?
“Is this a drill, sir?”
“No, Mr. Shaba, this is no drill. I fear American extremists who support the enemies of our country may attempt to take the ship. You will instruct your men to fire at any person, vessel, or aircraft that endangers the welfare of this ship and her crew. Your men may begin by driving off a terrorist boat that is approaching from the west.”
“Aye, Captain.” The radio could not hide the excitement in Shaba’s voice.
Fawkes felt a growing urge to order his unsuspecting crew off the Iowa, but he could not bring himself to admit he was murdering sixty-eight innocent men, men who had been deceived into believing they were serving a country that treated them little better than cattle. Fawkes had a method of casting off any cold tentacles of guilt. He forced an image of a burned-out farm and the charred bodies of his wife and children into his mind and his resolve for the task at hand quickly hardened.
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He picked up the mike again. “Main battery.”
“Main battery ready, Captain.”
“Single fire on command.” He glanced once more at his computations on the chart beside him. “Range, twenty-three thousand nine hundred yards. Target bearing, oh-one-four degrees.”
Fawkes stared hypnotically at the three sixty-eight-foot guns stretching out of the number-two main-battery turret, each barrel and its mechanism weighing 134 tons, obediently lifting its herculean muzzle to an elevation of fifteen degrees. Then they stopped, waiting for the command to unleash their awesome power. Fawkes paused, took a deep breath, and pushed the “transmit” button.
“Are you in position, Angus Two?”
“Say the word, man,” replied the spotter.
“Mr. Shaba?”
“Standing by to fire, sir.”
This was it. The journey that had begun on a farm in Natal had relentlessly run its course to this moment. Fawkes stepped outside to the bridge wing and raised the AAR battle flag on a makeshift staff. Then he returned to the control room and spoke the fateful words.
“You may fire, Mr. Shaba.”
To the men on the Coast Guard patrol boat it was as if they had sailed into a holocaust. Though only one gun of the triple battery had fired directly over the Iowa’s bow, the blast created a path of turbulence and a great arm of incandescent gas that reached out and engulfed the small craft. Most of the men standing were knocked to the deck. The ones facing the Iowa at the moment of discharge actually had their hair singed and were blinded for the next several moments by the flash.
Almost before the effects of the muzzle blast had dissipated, Lieutenant Commander Kiebel had taken the helm and thrown the boat in a sharply cut S turn. Then the windshield across the bridge shattered and fell away. For a fraction of a second he thought he was being attacked by wasps. He could feel the hum as they flew past his cheeks and hair. Only after his right arm was jerked from the wheel and he looked down to see an evenly spaced set of reddening holes through his jacket sleeve did it dawn on him what was happening.
“Get your men over the side!” he yelled at Fergus. “The bastards are shooting at us!”
He didn’t have to repeat the message. Instantly, Fergus scrambled
The Iowa
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across the deck, ordering and in some cases physically shoving his men into the dubious safety of the river. Miraculously, Kiebel was the only one who had been hit. Alone in broad view on the bridge, he stood as though on a stage in the eyes of the Iowa’s gunners.
Kiebel brought the boat so close alongside the Iowa’s hull that the sideboard bumpers were crushed against the vast wall of steel and torn off. It was a wise move; the gunners above could not depress their sights low enough to do more than shoot away part of the patrol boat’s radar mast. Then Kiebel broke into open water, the bullet splashes falling fifty feet to starboard, attesting to the bad aim of his startled adversaries. The gap between them widened. He stole a quick glance aft and was relieved to see that Fergus and his men were gone.
He had run interference for the SEALs. It was their ball game now. Gratefully, Kiebel turned over the helm to his first officer and watched dourly as a chief petty officer broke open a first-aid kit and started cutting away the blood-soaked sleeve of his jacket.
“Son of a bitch,” Kiebel muttered.
“Sorry, sir, you’ll just have to grit your teeth and bear it.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” snorted Kiebel. “You didn’t lay out two hundred bucks for the coat.”
Jogging his way across the pedestrian walk of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, Donald Fisk, an inspector with the Bureau of Customs, gasped out the crisp city air in wispy clouds of vapor.
He was on the return leg, passing around the Lincoln Memorial, his thoughts trailing from nowhere to nowhere from the boredom of the exercise, when a strange sound brought him to a halt. As it became louder, it reminded him of the roar of a speeding freight train. Then it turned into a screaming whoosh, and suddenly a massive crater appeared in the middle of Twenty-third Street, followed by a thunderous clap and a shower of dirt and asphalt.