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The digital iron log flickered upward—55… 60… —the roar of the airscrews growing in proportion, a deep and resonant vibration building within the vehicle frame. 65…68… Scrounger Caitlin’s extra knots making themselves apparent. The wave patterns blurred into a blue-steel and frost-white mosaic.

“All hands, stand by to maneuver,” Land said casually over the interphone circuit.

“Hey, Skipper,” Amanda heard another voice respond in her earphones. “You want some movin’ music?”

“Sounds good, Danno. Give me something appropriate for goin’ off the lip.”

“You got it, sir.”

Suddenly the driving twang and bite of California surfing music blared over the interphone link, a formidable CD deck obviously having been wired into the system. Cueing off of the music, Lane slammed the seafighter’s helm hard over. The quadruple rudders dug into the blast of the airscrews and the hovercraft tore into a hard left turn. Amanda yelped, groping for the grab bar on the back of the pilot’s seat as, seat belt or not, the G forces threatened to hurl her across the cockpit.

His powerfully muscled forearms holding the control yoke against its locks, Lane leaned against the lateral pull. Riding with it as well, Snowy Banks deftly trimmed the throttles and propeller controls, using the power of its raving engines to hold the Queen of the West into its minimum-radius turn.

She could do only so much, however. Amanda felt the stern of the hovercraft start to break loose in a wild aquatic skid, like a racing car spinning out on an icy corner. At that instant, Lane reversed rudder.

Whump! Amanda piled up against the chart table as the seafighter began to describe the second half of a foaming S-turn, the coastline a speed-smeared streak across the windscreen.

“That’s interesting, Commander,” she said through gritting teeth. “A major aspect of hovercraft navigation must be judging how deeply your rudders can hold you into the line of your turn at varying speeds.”

“Exactly, ma’am.” Lane nodded, replying over the jaunty electronic backbeat in the headset “Another thing you’ll have to get used to is that we can work in close. Real close.”

The Queen sheared off toward the land. This stretch of the Guinea coast was open, sandy beach with a respectable, foaming shore break. Lane indeed started working in close, on the very ragged edge of blue water, skirting the line where the incoming Atlantic rollers broke into tumbling surf.

The ride was no longer smooth now. The Queen bucked and shuddered as she tore through the turbulent crests and depressions of the breaking waves. Spray exploded across the windscreen and Steamer Lane, his jaw set and his hands white knuckled on the control yoke, held them right on the division between honest water and slop, weaving them sinuously along the contours of the coast.

This was no mere stunt. This was a maneuver carefully thought out and long drilled. Without instructions, Snowy Banks had jacked her seat up to its full height and was scanning far ahead along the surf line. “Clear… clear… clear,” she chanted, allowing Lane to focus on dancing the seafighter through the white-water turbulence of the wave break.

Not only had Amanda never experienced anything close to this, she had never imagined it, either. The trembling in her body had little to do with the vibration of the vehicle frame, and the rush of adrenaline through her system rendered the experience superhumanly clear and intense. The soaring rock beat in her headset helped to merge her into the great racing warcraft, making her one with it. She yielded to the sensation as she would yield to a lover.

Then the sandbar was under their bow, a low, tan, wave swept mound reaching out from the shore like the back of a beached whale, one of the deadly “phantom islands” of the African Gold Coast. There was no time, no chance to turn away or avoid. Amanda felt the futile warning cry well out of her and she threw her arms up in an equally futile effort to ward off the shattering impact that must follow.

But didn’t.

There was a smooth upward surge as the Queen rode up and over the bar, a long moment of weightlessness as the full ninety-foot length of the hovercraft gunboat launched into the air, and then a soft and resilient chuff as she touched down again on her skirts. From somewhere down in the hull came the exuberant “Yeeeeeeehaaaa!” of a rebel yell.

Lane pulled away from the shoreline and came back on the throttles, bringing them down to good cruise once more. “And that’s what we can do, ma’am.”

Amanda flexed her cramped fingers and took a deep, deliberate breath, letting the hammering beat of her heart slow. “Very interesting, Steamer,” she replied, carefully keeping her voice level. “Why don’t we let Snowy take a break for a while and you can start showing me how we go about doing it.”

For Amanda, the remainder of the journey out to the Mobile Offshore Base didn’t seem to take as long as she had expected. Following her first training session at the Queen’s controls, she’d spent the next couple of hours systematically going over the interior of the hovercraft, getting acquainted with the rest of the small crew and further familiarizing herself with the seafighter’s layout.

Eventually, the two days’ worth of continuous travel caught up with her and she stretched out in one of the cramped berths in the bunkroom. Not yet adapted to the magnified vacuum cleaner howl of the Queen’s power plants, she didn’t think sleep was likely. However, she could lie with half-closed eyes and consider the potentials, possibilities and problems of this new command.

Possibly she’d acclimatized more rapidly than expected or her jet lag was more severe than she realized because a touch on her shoulder startled her awake.

“Begging your pardon, Captain,” Ben Tehoa said, looming over her, “but we’ll be coming in to Floater 1 soon. The Skipper figured you’d want to be in the cockpit during the approach and docking.”

“Thanks, Chief,” Amanda replied, rubbing her gritty eyes. “I do. I’ll be right up.”

The first indication of the Mobile Offshore Base was a silvery finned teardrop hovering high in the sun-bleached sky, the tethered Aerostat balloon that lifted the scanning head of the TACNET radar three thousand feet above the sea. Then, through the heat shimmer of the horizon, a low crenellated form rose up out of the ocean like some mystic floating fortress in an Arabian Nights fantasy.

On a more prosaic and technological level, that’s exactly what it was.

Amanda had studied the history of the Mobile Offshore Basing concept back to its origins during the war in Vietnam. There, to escape shoreside harassment from communist guerillas, a series of floating strike bases or “seafloats” had been constructed for U.S. Riverine and Coastal Patrol forces. Pieced together out of artillery barges and bridging pontoons and anchored in Vietnam’s rivers and coastal estuaries, these ad hoc staging platforms had served the Navy well. So well, that the Seafloat was resurrected during the Persian Gulf tanker wars of the late 1980s.

In that instance, as a sidelobe of the protracted Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard began launching harassment attacks against tanker traffic passing through the Persian Gulf. Gulf States political leaders requested U.S. assistance in keeping the Straits open. However, in the face of Iranian saber rattling, these same Gulf statesmen had lacked the political will to permit American light naval forces to stage operations off of their soil.