“Father! For the past eighteen years, I have been telling you there was a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation for everything that happened that night!”
“Yeah, and for the past eighteen years I haven’t believed a word of it!”
For a second he glanced away from the traffic flow to glare at her. Amanda glared back, then the laughter exploded out of them both.
Wilson Garrett encircled his daughter with his arm, gathering her in. They drove on, her head resting lightly on his shoulder.
Conakry, Guinea, is one of those places you can’t get to from here.
Amanda spent eight plodding hours aboard the transatlantic shuttle between Washington, D.C., and London. More than enough time for her to become refreshed on all of the reasons she loathed travel by commercial airliner.
To the good, the discomfort provided a useful counter-irritant to the regrets she had about leaving both Arkady and the Cunningham. It inspired her to bury herself in her new assignment as the most readily available escape. Avoiding the plasticky meal service, the boring in-flight movie, and the repeated conversational ploys of her equally boring seatmate, she drained the power cells of her laptop studying the event and country files available on the West African Union.
She read until her eyes burned and she had to close them for a moment. When she opened them again, a premature dawn was breaking beyond the airliner’s windows and the pilot was announcing their descent into Heathrow.
Transferring over to the RAF Transport Command base, all she saw of the United Kingdom was the lashing rain and overcast of an English spring as seen through a staff car’s windshield. That and the inside of the air base NAAFI canteen as she waited though a long afternoon for her next flight. Again to the plus, however, was the opportunity to exchange the panty hose and scratchy gabardine of her Blues for the soft-worn comfort of wash khakis.
Two paperbacks and innumerable cups of tea later, the departure south to Conakry was called and a lumbering J Model Hercules of the Royal Air Force lifted off from a sodden runway.
Her second night in the air proved to be far more pleasant than the first. As the sole passenger on board, she rode up forward in the Hercules cockpit, talking shop with the congenial RAF air crew and watching the stars gleam beyond the windscreen.
Just after midnight, they executed a steep cowboy descent and touchdown at Gibraltar’s abbreviated airstrip for refueling. Stretching her legs on the darkened tarmac with the shadowy bulk of “The Rock” looming over her in the night, Amanda felt the first touch of Africa, the brush of the warm dry winds blowing northward from the Sahara.
Airborne again, the Hercules started the long propeller driven trudge around the curve of the African peninsula. Taking her turn in one of the narrow crew bunks, Amanda found that sleep came easily.
She was awakened by the light of the dawn sweeping across the cockpit as the aircraft turned southeast. Sipping a mug of ferocious tanker’s tea, she watched as the tip of Cape Verde drifted past under the port-side wing, the land’s end blazing green and gold against an azure sea. An hour later and they were in the pattern at Conakry.
The seafighter service ramp had been established beyond the seaward end of the Conakry base runway. It was something new for Amanda, a naval station with no piers, no docks, no moorages, only a gently sloping beach stabilized by a layer of the same kind of pierced aluminum planking the Seabees used for temporary runways. This was all that was needed by the sleek war machine that lay basking on the ramp like a great sea turtle, its cadre of service vehicles drawn up around it.
Amanda dismounted from the Navy-gray HumVee that had carried her down from the headquarters building. The white flame of the sun danced off the waves in the estuary and the steambath heat and humidity struck as a physical assault. For someone fresh from a mid-Atlantic spring, the environment was going to take a little getting used to. As Amanda’s driver unloaded her seabag and briefcase, she stepped into the shadow of a parked fuel tanker to get her bearings and to examine her new command.
The PGAC (Patrol Gunboat Air Cushion) had started its life as an LCAC (Landing Craft Air Cushion), a fast amphibious shuttle designed by Textron Marine Systems to rapidly move the men and equipment of a Marine landing force ashore from their transport vessels. However, the utility and effectiveness of the basic hovercraft design soon inspired American military planners to look for other applications for the technology. The PGACs, the seafighters, were one such new adaptation.
Much had been altered in the redesigning. The landing ramps and the starkly utilitarian drive-through superstructure of the landing craft had been replaced with a sleek and flattened boatlike hull, crafted with the slightly odd angles and geometrics of stealth technology.
Ninety feet in length by thirty-six in width, the hovercraft nestled down in a mass of heavy, black rubberized fabric like a gigantic deflated inner tube. The simile was apt, as these were the inflatable skirts of the plenum chamber that contained the bubble of high-pressure air that supported the vehicle when it was powered up and running.
A streamlined cockpit or cab sat atop the hull a short distance back from the bow, while two massive air intakes were fared into the deck at the midships line. Right aft, a crossbar antenna mount rose above the hull, running across the full width of the stern like the spoiler foil of a sports car. Centered on the crossbar mount was the black discus shape of a radar scanner. A second snubmast, finlike and sharply raked, rose from just behind the cockpit. At its top was the lensed sphere of a Mast Mounted Sighting System, looking like the head of some goggle-eyed robot. Below the MMS, an American flag hung limply in the still and breathless air of the equatorial afternoon.
The seafighter had been painted in a dusty gray light and dark camouflage, all but under the angle of the broad bow. There, in a touch of swashbuckling individuality, the standard camo pattern had been replaced by a snarling set of black shark’s teeth that ran the full breadth of the hull. Two beady, leering eyes had been added just beneath the peak of the bow to complete the image of a lunging sea monster. Along the rounded curve of the deck rim, just below the cockpit, she wore her ID number and name in phantom lettering:
PGAC 02 USS QUEEN OF THE WEST
Amanda found herself smiling. “Hello, Your Majesty,” she whispered.
Unlike Amanda, the Navy service crew working around the grounded seafighter had already adapted to their working environment. The men worked stripped to the waist, while the female ratings had stagged the sleeves from their shirts and had cut their dungaree pants down to shorts. Tanned skins gleamed with sunblock and sweat, and an ice chest loaded with bottled water stood readily at hand in the shade of another parked vehicle, a succinct one-word order — DRINK! — written on the inside of its open lid.
As she looked on, a man emerged from an overhead hatch in the top of the cockpit and made his way to the deck edge. The golden brown tone of this individual’s skin had nothing to do with the sun. He was royalty caste Samoan, a stocky, powerful keg of a man, square-set and solid muscle, the rating badge of a chief petty officer on the sleeve of his unbuttoned khaki shirt. “Hey, Commander Lane,” he yelled down, “we got the stores shipment secured in the center bay, and Scrounger reports we have a full load of fuel and water aboard. What’s the holdup on departure?”
At ground level, another bare-chested man knelt inspecting the folds of the chamber skirt. Younger, more lightly built, and with hair and mustache sun-bleaching from brown to blond, he rose to his feet. Only the oil-stained oak-leaf insignia on his baseball cap marked him as an officer.