“Out of time!” his backseater shouted. “Hot Rock, we gotta get out of here, buddy! His playmates will be within weapons range in fifteen seconds, and I guaran-damn-tee you they’re not going to give a shit about firing over land or collateral damage.”
Hot Rock swore violently, and just for a split second considered ignoring the unfolding geometry. A few more seconds and the MiG would have to turn out of the climb, just a few more —
“Now!” his backseater screamed. “Break off now or I punch us both out!”
Finally, the hot red rage flaming behind his eyes loosened its hold on his brain. If he got the MiG, but added to the loss of civilian life, what was the point?
He pulled out of the climb and looked for Lobo. She was eight thousand feet below him, waiting on him.
“Buster, asshole,” she snapped. “Follow me this time.” She peeled off and headed back for the boat without another word.
Hot Rock followed, but snapped his head around to get one last look at the MiG as it escaped.
I’ll be back for you, you murderous bastard. And next time, no power on earth is going to stop me from smearing you and your aircraft across five acres of sky.
SEVEN
Adele Simpson stared dumbfounded at the black smoke rolling up from the city. The transmissions on bridge-to-bridge radio onboard Heaven Can Wait were incomprehensible. Everyone with a radio was trying to talk at once and give the definitive and only report of what was going on ashore. Each party on the circuit seemed convinced that he and he alone had the truth. As a result, every channel normally used around the Island was completely clobbered.
“Honey? Got that chart?” a voice from overhead asked.
Jack Simpson, her husband of three days. After a long engagement and quiet wedding in San Diego, they had flown to Hawaii and rented Heaven Can Wait for seven days of utter solitude. Adele had grown up around water and was an excellent sailor. Her husband, Jack, a senior engineer with McIntyre Electronics and a Naval Reserve captain, was a fair hand with larger boats but that didn’t necessarily mean he understood the intricacies of driving anything without missiles or a flight deck.
She reached into the chart table and pulled out a fresh copy of the harbor chart. She used tape to hold down the corners as she centered it on the plotting table. “Got it,” she reported, and then went back up to the flying bridge to check their situation.
“So what do we do?” she asked quietly. Adele was not one given to panic, and she found that panicking usually made a bad situation worse.
From the moment they heard the muffled distant explosion, they had both known something was terribly, terribly wrong. Unlike many of their fellow sailors, however, they did not try to pretend that whatever had happened ashore was none of their business and simply continue their cruise or jam the airwaves with rumors. Duty ran deep in each of them, and that had been one of the first things that had attracted her to Jack.
As a result, Adele immediately turned over ship-handling responsibilities to Jack, and gone down below to pull out a chart. What exactly he intended to do, she had no clue, but Jack seemed to think it was important.
“Okay, honey, you know where we are?” Jack’s voice floated down. “Take a few bearings, and get us in as close as you can.”
Adele peered out a side window and took a hasty bearing with a handheld compass. That lighthouse there — and on the other side, the jagged stack of rocks. She slid a ruler across a piece of paper, lined up the bearings, and drew in a small circle where they intersected. Just for accuracy’s sake, she checked against the GPS. It was dead on.
“Got it, on both GPS and visual bearings,” she reported. She hadn’t questioned his request that she take visual bearings, as both of them knew that the global positioning satellite system would be one of the first casualties of any real —
Any real what? War? How had she come to that conclusion so quickly, she wondered.
“Keep track of where we are. I’m going to call off anything of interest, and give you a range and bearing from our position, okay?”
“Okay. But even assuming you turn up something of interest, how are you going to report it to anyone? No traffic is going to get out on any circuit we’ve got,” Adele pointed out.
“Cell phone,” her husband answered. “If I can figure out who to call. Then there’s one other option as well.”
Adele took a few steps back and popped her head up out of the hatch to look up at him. “What do you mean, another option.?”
“This.” He extended the small, black radio about the size of the cell phone. “It is a PRC seven, an emergency aviation radio. Saltwater activated so that if it gets wet it broadcasts a constant beeping. It’s also got a direct transmission limited range.” He pointed at a toggle switch on the side. “If I switch to military frequencies, assuming there’s someone with a receiver in range, I should be able to talk.”
“Where did you come up with this?” she asked.
“I borrowed it from my office,” he said calmly. “Just in case.”
And if any one phrase characterized Jack Simpson, it was that one. Just in case.
Petty Officer Jacobs felt the foam of the headset wearing down the skin on his ears. It had been over four hours without a break. A couple of times, he felt his attention start to wander, just as it had during refresher training, but after a few moments, he remembered exactly how things were.
Centurion had come shallow and attempted to communicate with the naval station, with no luck. Dead static echoed over every official Navy circuit they tried. The harbor channels suffered from exactly the opposite problem — voices shouted in screams, clamoring to be heard over each other. Just outside sonar, in the control room, Jacobs could hear Captain Tran discussing their situation with the navigator.
“I recommend we make a slow, deep approach on the harbor, then come to periscope depth and see if we can figure out what happened,” the navigator said crisply.
The skipper was a good man, probably one of the best officers Jacobs had ever met. But for all that, he was an officer — maybe a little too strict sometimes, maybe a little too prone to worry about things that didn’t make a difference.
Still, since the situation seemed to be going to shit, Jacobs was glad to be serving under him.
“It sounds risky, coming shallow in the harbor,” he heard the captain say. “There’s no way sonar can keep everything sorted out to make sure we don’t surface directly under a small craft.”
“We’ll come up slowly,” a navigator said. “Our bow wave will push them away from us.”
“Probably. I don’t imagine they’ll like it any better than I do,” the skipper said.
If it were only a small boat running an engine, they would hear the vessel in plenty of time to slow their upward motion and avoid crashing into its keel. No, the problem wasn’t motorized boats, although their speed could put them in danger’s way. The problem was sailboats. There was simply no way to accurately detect them by passive means and nobody wanted to put an active sonar tone in the water. Counter detection considerations aside, they’d be lucky if they didn’t fry a swimmer.
“We’ll come to periscope depth now,” the skipper said, making the decision that Jacobs had hoped for. “We’ll assess what the situation is, then decide whether we’re going to proceed in the harbor. If we do, it will be at periscope depth.”