Creata fiddled with the controls for a moment, then nodded.
“Turn to nineteen degrees,” she said, yawning. “Sorry. Range… one hundred kilometers.”
Souhi was getting very tired of this round-robin. The brief rest in the hotel had done nothing but make him look forward less to this trip.
The sun was setting as they headed northwest towards the tanker. At least the weather was good. And there were no other boats around. He’d heard about the other boat so he kept looking behind him. But, so far, nobody.
The radar tech on the Ronald Reagan was watching the activity with interest. Everyone on board had heard the news and the captain had added some additional items. And now everybody knew the reason they’d been steaming up and down the coast for the last week. But the tech suspected she was the only person onboard that was actually doing anything about it.
A P-3 radar craft was circling high over the area, sending its take back to the Ronald Reagan and not even looking at it itself, supposedly. She knew the crew was probably sneaking a peek.
And there was stuff to watch, now. A single track had exited the Abacos chain and was headed for the freighter. Another track had exited not long before but they turned east and were now doing a slow figure-eight. The tech did some calculations and determined that they would, probably, be below the horizon of the fast mover.
As she watched, two more tracks came into the area, surface fast movers, then a helo came up from the Abacos, flying not far off the water and fast. It was going faster than a Super Cobra. And no transponder. Interesting…
Mike opened the door and slid out, holding onto the rope secured to his STABO harness.
There had been two choices. Try to capture the ship and then take down the cigarette from it or take down the cig and take the ship from it. Taking down a ship is hard, especially in the initial assault. SEALs trained in it, extensively, but the Keldara had not. Mike was unsure about taking it down at all, but if they did it would have to be by surprise.
Which meant capturing the cigarette and, even more important, the driver. The driver, obviously, was going to be the only one who knew where the mother lode was.
He reached the end of the harness, hanging a mere fifteen feet under the helo and spinning like a top. Spreading his arms he stabilized, then held his right arm out.
Pavel was having more trouble but Mike could tell he was grinning behind his balaclava. Oh, hell, so was Mike. He was having a blast. But he wasn’t going to let it interfere with the mission.
They linked hands as the helo banked, turning to come in behind the blacked-out cigarette.
Souhi had stopped looking behind him. There hadn’t been anything by dark and it was unlikely that anyone could track in on him out here. There weren’t any aircraft in the sky, nothing but these damned rollers. This was, in a way, the worst part of the trip with the waves coming in at an angle, a nasty quartering sea that sent the cigarette corkscrewing on each breaker.
The damned movement was a bitch. The targets were corkscrewing back and forth and the driver was seated. All that was really visible was his head and shoulders. Doing the shot was going to be a stone bitch. Which was why he was doing it.
“Keep going,” Mike said, thumbing his mike with difficulty. “Get right over the son of a bitch.”
There was a strange note to the engine. Like a whopping sound. But it was still running. Hopefully they would make the ship. There was a technician onboard just in case they had problems.
“Strike, NOW!” Mike shouted over his mike.
The helo sped up and Mike, still holding Pavel’s hand for stabilization, slid across the boat, his feet barely over the heads of the startled muj in the back, and fired the taser downward into the shoulder and neck of the driver.
It was a tough shot. Forget the corkscrewing, he had to figure windage for a vessel going nearly seventy miles per hour and he was swaying in the STABO harness.
The taser plunked into place perfectly and the driver began spasming.
Which created its own problems. His hands fell away from the steering and the boat went into an out-of-control turn, nearly broaching in the waves.
The helo banked, throwing Mike and Pavel outwards. Due to the same effect that children use to play “Crack the Whip,” they suddenly started pulling more Gs than Mike wanted to experience ever again.
“Fuck,” Kacey snapped, seeing the boat go out from under her. “Lasko, where’s it at?”
“Left, it went left,” Lasko said. Then, as she was banking, he shouted again: “No, it’s turning back right!”
“Where’s the Kildar?” Kacey asked.
“Over it!”
Hoping against hope, Kacey dropped the helo down.
Mike felt the lurch downward and saw the boat coming up at him, fast. He let go of Pavel’s hand and braced, expecting to slam into one of the many hard surfaces that were more or less vertical.
Instead his feet hit the deck, right between the driver’s seat and the AD’s, as the boat was jumping over a wave. He grabbed one of the chicken bars, hit the quick release of the STABO and lurched across the driver, his feet going airborne, to kill the throttles.
That fucking pilot was magic. He didn’t pay her nearly enough.
The two muj in back were scrambling to their feet but his pistol came out faster than they could react.
“You can be martyrs if you’d like,” Mike said as a dripping Pavel dropped onto the deck. “I really don’t care.”
The muj had been winched into the helo, Oleg’s strike team had been brought up and Mike was now headed for the rendezvous, Dragon banking off to take up attack positions. The range on the freighter’s radar, to waterline, was about thirty miles. They were still over fifty from the freighter so the intercept shouldn’t have been visible.
“So far so good,” Mike said. “Now comes the hard part.”
“We will do it,” Gregor Makanee said. Oleg had felt that, by rights, he should be one of the men on deck. But Mike had pointed out, persuasively, that none of the muj on the boat were over two meters, blond and weighed in at damned near a ton. The three darkest Keldara in his team had been chosen instead. Mike figured that the rendezvous was going to use minimum lights. The fun part is that they probably didn’t stop. He wished Randy was driving. He was a SEAL with some time in a Cig. This was something for an expert.
“Yes, we will,” Mike said loudly. “We always fucking do, don’t we?” he added, so quietly he couldn’t be heard.
The tech was really resenting the security restrictions on this take, now. Wow. They’d intercepted and presumably captured a cigarette doing damned near seventy. That had to have been fun. And now it was headed for the freighter. And the other cigs and the helo were hanging back, presumably out of range.
This was gonna be good…
“So, they have the cigarette,” the President said. Just because the CVBG commander couldn’t watch didn’t mean the President couldn’t.
“And they’re going to use it to assault the ship,” the defense secretary said, nodding. “That’s going to be fun.”
“We could have sent SEALs,” the President pointed out. “We’ve got two full teams sitting on their hands.”
“Presumably the Kildar didn’t want that. One suspects he wants the freighter crew. Alive.”