“Lily Pad, this is Dragonfly. No visual. Low fuel. Over.”
“Stand by.”
Ballantine suddenly noticed a string of dim lights to his right front. He could see the bridge-tunnel about five miles ahead.
“Lily Pad, this is Dragonfly. I acknowledge visual. Over.”
“Roger. Winds twelve knots from the southeast. Heading two-seven-zero degrees. Standing by. You must make touchdown within first fifty meters.”
Ballantine flew past the landing area and then banked hard to the north, making a hairpin turn in the air, his starboard wingtip almost touching the water. He gained altitude, leveled his approach, and picked up the two rows of runway lights. These lights were different. They seemed to be moving some, swaying back and forth, and they seemed to end abruptly, well before he knew he would be able to stop his airplane.
As he neared the landing strip he knew he would have to perform one last tricky maneuver, much like landing in the creek bed near Moncrief.
He came in just above the first lights and then pushed down on his controls, nosing over just a bit before pulling up to a level position. The Sherpa’s wheels grabbed the landing strip, lurching him forward but maintaining a steady roll toward the end of the short runway. He throttled back and pressed on the brakes, skidding hard and diving into darkness. He could not see beyond the windscreen. It was completely black.
Ballantine’s heart was beating powerfully against his chest. Then he realized, Lilypad had built a concealed runway with containers stacked three high on either side and wide enough for his airplane. Ingenious.
He had made it. Miraculously, he had made it.
The deck of a merchant ship had been converted nicely into an aircraft carrier.
CHAPTER 41
Native Virginia Beach resident Gary Austin knew that cobia was best caught near the rocks that supported the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. But there was a current this cool evening as the tide was flowing out to sea, and he didn’t want to run the risk of drifting into a concrete pylon while he focused on pulling in a twenty-pound cobia. Cobia tended to hang around structure, so Gary chose a floating buoy just outside the mouth of the bay to target.
Gary’s father had been the chief pilot, running the pilot boats out of Lynnhaven Inlet, where small crews of navigational experts would come about the merchant ships dotting the mouth of the bay like an armada awaiting the signal to attack. The pilots would board the ships and steer them through the obstacle course that included the bridge-tunnels and the tight channels. The navigational challenges were too many to risk a marginally trained ship captain from, say, Thailand, to negotiate. One wrong turn and a bridge or tunnel would be destroyed, stopping road and sea traffic for weeks.
“Red right returning,” Gary muttered aloud to himself, repeating the seafarer’s reminder of where to keep his boat in relation to the red light when returning to port. He stalled the engine and dropped anchor as a small sliver of the moon looked down at him with a haunting smile. In theory, he wasn’t supposed to be out tonight, as the recent attacks had caused the Hampton Roads Port Authority to issue a warning against all small craft from entering the bay. At 25 years old, Gary had two things in his favor. First, he was a certified merchant-ship pilot, and it was his night off. So if he ran into anyone, it would most likely be someone with whom he worked. Second, he thought the order to keep small craft out of the bay was stupid. With many friends in the military he knew that the more eyes and ears you had out and about, the more likely you were to deter bad things from happening.
“Screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” he said.
He opened the Igloo cooler and pulled a frozen mullet from the chest. Taking his filet knife, he cut the fish in half, leaving two six-inch pieces of fish. He took the one with the head and ran a large hook through the lips of the fish. He then shut off all of his lights, to keep from spooking the cobia, and pulled on a pair of night-vision goggles he had purchased at the Army-Navy surplus store. The goggles were first generation and relied on starlight, but they were a vast improvement over the naked eye.
With the night-vision harness on his head, he picked up his rod and lobbed the baited hook over the side, watching the current pull the bait toward the buoy. He let the bait drift for about a minute, then reeled it in and repeated the process. It had good action fluttering in the current. He let the bait drift again, then locked the spool on his reel once it was directly aside the buoy. Putting the rod in a trolling rig, he set the line so that if a fish took the bait, it would set the hook.
In the same cooler, he found a Budweiser, popped the top, and kicked back in his captain’s chair, looking toward the sky.
Where had the years gone? he wondered. He recalled standing at his father’s knee as he would steer their boat through the wicked currents and how his dad was always able to find the best fishing spots. He had learned well, though, and today he was the younger, salty spitting image of his father. Blonde hair, tanned face, bitten fingernails, and the same Cape Hatteras drawl. He had already begun his career as a ship pilot, following in his father’s footsteps, though a penchant for good-looking women had landed his career in jeopardy a few weeks ago in Baltimore. While docked there, he had allowed the crew to enjoy a few “ladies,” which, after an accident a few years back, was strictly verboten.
Snapped back to the present with the sound of another boat sputtering around the bay, he could hear the distinct hum of a gasoline engine somewhere in the offing.
He heard the equally distinctive snap of the fishing line against the trolling rig. Gary snatched the rod out of its holder and heaved it skyward. He had a cobia.
“Yeah, baby, give it to me,” he said, talking the fish toward the boat. He could see through his goggles that it was not just a cobia. It was a large cobia. Maybe forty or fifty pounds. Cobia were actually members of the shark family, making them terrific fighters. Moreover, their ability to produce thick fish steaks good for grilling made it worth the effort.
As he worked the fish toward the edge of the boat, the engine he had heard became louder — so loud that he had to stop what he was doing, holding the rod high in the air to keep the hook set while he looked skyward.
Gary found it hard to believe, but there was a small, single-engine airplane flying about twenty meters off the water, and it had just turned less than a quarter mile from his anchor position.
Through his night-vision goggles, he suddenly saw bright lights shoot upward from a ship about a mile away.
The cobia kept pulling at his rod but was wearing down. Gary kept his eyes on the airplane as it flew directly at the ship. He’s going to hit the ship, he thought. Grabbing his cell phone, he prepared to call 911.
Then the strangest thing happened. The airplane lifted a bit in the air and dove straight for the deck of the ship, almost like — well, exactly like Navy pilots do on aircraft carriers. He had watched about a million Tomcats take off and land on carriers and at Oceana Naval Air Station. What he was watching seemed, in theory, no different. He watched as the plane blended with the ship, thought he heard a slight noise of rubber screeching on metal, and then quickly reeled in his fish.
He unhooked the cobia, stumbling with it a moment, and stuffed it in the live well, still flapping, and then drew in his anchor.
Gary cranked the engine and sped toward the ship, slowing and slipping into idle as he neared. He kept his night-vision goggles on and the running lights off.
He drifted close to the ship, close enough to see the name under the moonlight: Fong Hou.