Down inside, where she lived, the knot began to tighten.
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Retainer. If we have to, we can write off the helo. You can execute a controlled crash inside the containment barriers."
"Negative, negative! If we bust a fuel cell, we could have a major deck fire. If we go over the side, we could damage a propulsor pod. I won't place the ship at that kind of risk."
"That decision is my responsibility, Retainer."
"No, Captain," Arkady repeated grimly over the radio link. "As aircraft commander, this one is my call."
Amanda gritted out one of those phrases that a lady shouldn't use but a naval officer sometimes has to.
"Chief, there has to be some kind of alternative procedure here!" she said, flipping the lip mike back.
"Maybe if he could hover in close enough for us to get a line on his cargo-transfer shackle…"
The destroyer's deck lurched as she came off the slope of a quartering sea, and another wave crest exploded over the rail, marking the futility of Muller's tentative proposal.
"Gray Lady, this is Zero One. Our just hanging around up here isn't going to accomplish anything. I'm going to break off and head for the Antarctic Peninsula. We'll set down at either the Russian or Polish station and ride the storm out there. We can set up a rendezvous when we get the weather again."
"What? No! Stand by, Zero One."
Muller had been listening in on the circuit as well. The CPO reached over and grabbed Amanda's shoulder.
"He'll never make it! He doesn't have the fuel reserves to fight this kind of weather. Even if he did manage to find one of those installations, odds are that even the Lieutenant wouldn't be able to make an unassisted landing in one piece. If he's going to get down anywhere, ma'am, it's gotta be here!"
She nodded an acknowledgment. If the wind and rotor roar was making it hard to hear, the cold was making it hard to think. Even the best arctic gear in the world would begin to fail when wet, and there was an inch of freezing seawater curtaining across the warship's decks.
"Gray Lady, do you copy?" Arkady's voice insisted, requesting permission to abandon hope.
"Negative, Zero One. That is not an option. I repeat, that is not an option. Hold on station until we can come up with something else."
"Gray Lady, I don't have time for this shit!" Arkady snapped back, a tension edge on his voice. "If I'm going to have any chance at all of finding a place to set down, I have to take departure now! I don't have the gas to fuck around!"
"Lieutenant Arkady! You will hold on station for two minutes more! That is an order!"
There was no reply, but the lights of Retainer Zero One continued to dance erratically in the murk above the fantail.
Amanda knelt on the deck, trying to ignore the pain and the chill creeping up her limbs, and trying to force some kind of possible solution from a mind that suddenly seemed to be growing clouded and empty.
A shepherd's crook rig of some kind…Not likely with the deck dancing around like this. A line gun up to the cockpit? No! Not up into a rotor arc. Come on… come on!
Locking her jaws to keep her teeth from chattering, she leaned forward and slammed her fist into the deck, both out of frustration and to drive some feeling back into her hand.
"Gray Lady." The two minutes were gone, and Arkady's voice was level again, controlled or resigned. "Taking departure for Bellingshausen Base. Good luck. We'll see you guys after the blow."
"Arkady, you don't have enough fuel!"
"Don't sweat it, Gray Lady. I can stretch what we've got. I'm jettisoning the MAD pod and the dunking sonar—"
Amanda's head snapped up. "Wait! Hold it! The dunking sonar! Arkady, hold on to that sonar pod and maintain station for one more minute!"
She turned to Chief Muller. "Chief, could we recover Zero One on the transducer tether of the dunking sonar?"
"Hell!" Muller exclaimed. "I've never heard of anyone trying it before."
"Neither have I, Gray Lady," Arkady added over the circuit, "but all of a sudden it sounds better than dropping in on the Russians for a long weekend. Are you set to receive the tether?"
"Acknowledged, Zero One. Bring it in now."
Amanda scrambled to her feet and lifted her voice over the gale. "Recovery crews, stand by! Watch yourselves, because we'll be doing a pickup on a sonar dome. Chief, get that winch clear! You, the guy with the heavy wire cutters! Stand ready! We're going to be needing you."
The Sea Comanche was nosing in again, gingerly trying to avoid the backsweep of the mast array while positioning to lower the transducer onto the helipad.
They could see the teardrop-shaped sound head swinging pendulously beneath the aircraft. Unlike the dedicated RAST line, it packed enough mass to shatter bone should anyone fail to get out of its path. The handling crew huddled back against the superstructure as Arkady centered the helo. Then the tether reel was released and the dome crashed down within the confines of the crash barriers with enough impact to crack the deck tiling.
"Go!"
The brawniest of the deck hands dove across the helipad and piled onto the transducer as if it were an opposing quarterback, containing it before the wave action could flip it away over the side. The sailor carrying the wire cutters followed them in, clipping through the tether just short of the dome. Another Aviation Division rating cradled the severed device in his arms like an infant and struggled back to the deckhouse with it.
Arkady dumped more line and backed away, giving both himself and the recovery crew marginally more room to work. The recovery hands hogged the cable back across the deck to the winch, looking as if they were engaged in a tug-of-war with the helicopter. It was a contest they would have had no chance of winning. One bad move on the pilot's part, or one exceptional wave or wind burst, and the tether would be whipped away over the side, probably taking one or more of its handlers with it.
They got the line to the winch and they clustered around it. They remained there for too long.
"Chief, what is the problem now?" Amanda yelled, coming to stand at the CPO's shoulder.
"The friggin' winch guide won't accept the tether! The cable's the wrong diameter!"
"Damn, damn, damn!"
"We'll have to rig another winch, Captain!"
"We don't have that kind of time!"
Wildly, she looked around the deck. Alternatives! The aircraft tie-downs wouldn't do it. Nor was there anything that would work in the winch compartment. For the first time, Amanda cursed the starkness mandated by the Duke's stealth design. Then she saw the personnel hatch just forward of the elevator.
Dropping down beside it, she tore up the recessed dogging lever and threw the hatch open onto its holdback latch.
Down below in the brightly illuminated hangar bay, startled Air Division hands looked up at her.
"Get me two four-by-four shoring spars from the damage control locker and a heavy cable shackle," she screamed. "Move!"
At the other end of the tether, Vince Arkady maintained his precarious balancing act, his eyes flicking from the Sea Comanche's instrumentation to the hazy constellation of ship's lights beneath its nose. In the odd moments he could spare for the FLIR display, all that could be seen were an endless series of green and black storm rollers arcing across
infinity.
"Lieutenant," Grestovitch reported levelly. "Just letting you know that we're starting to get ice buildup in the air intakes."
"I know, Gus. I can feel the power loss."
Lift loss too. The rotors were icing as well. Occasionally there was a soft, clicking impact on the outside of the cockpit as a fragment was flung free of the blades. Soon the Sea Comanche would grow weary of its burden and sink down into the sea.