"Just worry about the ship, Ken. I'll be fine."
The main passageway on the weather-deck level of the superstructure was jammed with Air Division personnel, all hands made bulky and clumsy by a combination of cold-weather gear and emergency equipment.
"Coming aft! Make a hole!" Amanda slid along the grab rail until she reached CPO Muller at the hatchway. "We set to go, Chief?"
"Yes, ma'am," the burly aviation man replied, "but it's going to be a bitch of a recovery. We're at Force Six now and we're beyond the book limits clear across the board."
She accepted the safety belt Muller passed to her and cinched it around her waist. Removing her light mobile headset, she replaced it with a heavier-duty mike-and-earphone combination that used a hard link. She ran a quick communications check with the bridge and then snapped the end of her safety belt's jackline onto the hardpoint beside the hatch frame.
"Set, Captain?"
"Set. Let's go."
"Right. Crash and Salvage teams! Aviation Fuel Repair team! RAST crew! Move out!"
The hatch slammed open and they streamed through, Amanda cutting over to the starboard rail while the helipad crew deployed to their stations.
The Cunningham's RAM decking, tolerable when dry, was ominously slick under the rubber soles of Amanda's sea boots, and the wind, once merely freezing, now was cold flame. When she gripped the nylon strap of the railing, she could feel the ice crystals that had worked into the fabric, their bite making her wish for a heavier pair of gloves.
No time to worry about it now. Clawing her hair out of her narrowed eyes with a quick swipe of her hand, she peered forward, sighting along the Duke's flank in the failing polar twilight.
"Bridge," she said, cupping her palm over the lip mike, "forget the load limits and bring the stabilizers up full. Then give me a couple of extra revs on the starboard propulsor pod. It'll help us hold the course line against this weather."
Years before, when she had been attending the Naval Surface Warfare School, she'd had a run-in with a senior captain on the faculty. This individual had apparently believed that the female officers assigned to his class should serve double duty as a personal harem. Amanda had corrected this misconception with a sharp backhand across the face.
Afterward, she suspected he'd tried to derail her career by having her diverted to duty aboard a Fleet ocean tug instead of the surface combatant that she'd wanted. Now, however, she blessed the name of that fanny-pinching son of a bitch. For in the two years she'd commanded the Piegan, she had learned more about this brand of down-and-dirty seamanship than she had during all the rest of her tours combined.
"There he is!"
The Sea Comanche's low-vis camouflage made it almost invisible against the overcast, but Amanda could make out that Arkady had already jettisoned his torpedoes in preparation for a rough-weather landing. On the Cunningham's end, the crash barriers had already been deployed and the RAST hands were standing by to accept the helo's line.
In heavy seas, it is almost impossible to simply set a helicopter down on a small-surface platform. The fantail of a ship, rising and falling in a twenty-foot arc in response to wave action, can literally swat a hovering helicopter like a fly. That was why the RAST (Recovery Assistance Securing and Traversing) system had been developed.
The helicopter dropped a cable that would be connected to a deck winch that, in turn, would pull the aircraft down out of the sky. This permitted the helo pilot to flare back against the tension of the line, maintaining a controlled separation between the copter and the deck until touchdown.
Angling in across the Duke's helipad, Zero One lowered its landing gear and then popped the reel of RAST line out of a belly niche. A deck hand dashed after it and snared the light steel cable with a grounded catch crook, the static charge accumulated by the helo arcing brightly at first touch.
It took only moments for the RAST team to clear the cable from the reel and to feed it into the winch pickup. The wand man passed the ready-to-haul sign up to the helo and Arkady flashed his landing lights in acknowledgment.
Zero One came back on her line like a recalcitrant puppy on the end of a leash and the winch began bringing her down.
Amanda had looked on as these evolutions had taken place. Now she glanced forward again to read the seas they would be encountering for the next few critical seconds.
The sky had changed. It was as if the misty atmosphere off the Cunningham's bow were coagulating into something solid. A wall of darkness was rushing down upon the ship. "Slack off!" she screamed. "Slack off! Slack off!" Too late. The squall line hit them like the expanding wave front of an explosion.
The destroyer reared like a startled stallion under the impact, and almost everyone on deck was taken down and inundated by the spray that geysered over the railings. The wall of water that had been pushed ahead of the storm rolled back under the Cunningham's keel, lifting the aft end of the ship and then letting it drop with savage force. Amanda heard a sharp crack, like a small-caliber rifle shot, and then a yell over the wind and rotor roar. "Jesus! The RAST line's carried away!"
Looking up, she saw Retainer Zero One flailing off into the storm like a kite with a broken string.
Aboard the helicopter, Vince Arkady snarled in survival fixation as he battled to keep his suddenly berserk aircraft away from the ocean's surface. There had never been a simulator scenario drawn up for this kind of situation. Given this set of parameters, the experts would simply say that you'd die and have done with it.
That left Gus Grestovitch, reduced to the status of a helpless passenger, to look on as the Cunningham's outline faded away into the blizzard.
"We're screwed!" he whispered hoarsely.
"Bridge! Illuminate the ship! Running lights, anchor lights, work lights, everything! Full up now!"
The near-night that had fallen across the destroyer was broken by the sudden, acknowledging glare. Pulling herself back to her feet, Amanda ran across to the RAST station through a curtain of red-lit snow.
CPO Muller and the recovery team were clustered around the winch in its recessed compartment, already struggling with what looked like a titanic fishing-reel snarl.
"Chief, how bad is it?" she yelled over the wind roar.
"As bad as it gets. The cable snapped right at the connector on the helo's belly. There's no line left to bring 'em down on, and there's sure no way in hell we can recover him in this kind of weather without the RAST gear."
Peering into Muller's face, Amanda could read the deadly finality there. With any of the Navy's other LAMPS-class helicopters, it would have been easy enough to drop another line from the cabin. The Sea Comanche, with its cramped, fighter-type cockpits, had no such second-chance option.
Twin beams of white light lanced down out of the darkness and panned forward to play across the Duke's stern.
Zero One was back under control and coming up on the ship again, forging ahead slowly through the blizzard.
"Captain, this is the CIC," a voice sounded faintly in her headset. "Lieutenant Arkady is requesting permission to talk to you, ma'am."
"Okay. Patch him through on this deck circuit."
Click!
"Gray Lady, this is Zero One. Looks like we have kind of a mess here."
Amanda hunkered down beside Chief Muller and tried to shield the headset mike from the booming wind gusts.
"Acknowledged, Zero One. We can confirm that your RAST line has carried away completely. We are assessing the situation."
"Not much to assess, Gray Lady. We're not getting this aircraft back aboard tonight." Vince Arkady's reply was laced with the same kind of finality that Muller's had been.