Captain Garrett only nodded when he finished. “I see,” she said finally. “Okay, Danno, I want you to write up a report on this event. Concentrate on what changes you think we need to make in our hardware, software and operational procedures to eliminate the possibility of this glitch happening again. Have it ready to go, oh, day after tomorrow. We’ll go over it with Lieutenant Commander Lane and see what we can work out. As the Queen’s senior gunner, we’re going need your help in getting this bug worked out of the system. Can do?”
“Yes, ma’am! Can do, ma’am!”
She straightened, giving the gunner’s mate a light slap on the shoulder. Turning away, Amanda Garrett left behind both an intensely relieved young man and yet another individual who would willingly charge hell at her beck and call.
“There they come,” Snowy called, peering aft from her cockpit side window.
Standing up, Amanda slid open the overhead hatch. With one foot on the arm of the navigator’s chair and a hand braced on the gunners’ saddle, she lifted her head and shoulders up and out of the cockpit for a look around.
At forty knots, the predawn air was deliciously cool and the slipstream whipped her with her own hair, each strand a microscopic tingling lash. A few stars still glinted in the zenith, but streaks of pink and gray on the eastern horizon heralded the sunrise. In the faint ruddy light Amanda could make out two sleek, dark forms overtaking the Queen, each shadow riding atop a pad of pale, faintly luminescent spray.
She dropped back to the deck and reclosed the hatch, locking out the wind roar and turbine howl. Steamer Lane was already in communication with the other two hovercraft.
“Frenchman and Rebel, Frenchman and Rebel. This is Royalty. Form up on me in starboard echelon. Proceeding to objective L3.”
“Very pretty rendezvous, Steamer,” Amanda commented. “We’re right where we’re supposed to be on our time line. The Tactical Action Group has earned itself a very well done so far tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” Lane replied. “About that time line, ma’am. If we crank up our speed a little we can get to that last Union hide while we still have some dark to work with.”
Amanda settled back beside the navigator’s console. “No, that’s really not necessary, Steamer. Hold your current speed and conserve your fuel. Our set ETA on target will be fine.”
Lane shrugged and glanced back over his shoulder at the second passenger in a “Well, I tried” manner. Stone Quillain slumped in the starboard jump seat, his flak jacket unzipped and his shotgun propped beside him. The big Marine smelled of caked mud and sweat and other organics, and his eyes glinted coldly in a face still streaked with camouflage paint.
“You know,” he said after a moment, “somebody’s bound to have gotten away from one of those other hides we hit.”
“There’s a pretty good chance of it,” Amanda agreed quietly.
“They could have gotten to a radio. Got an alert out. This outfit could know we’re coming.”
“It’s a safe bet they know something is up by now,” she replied, fixing her gaze at the dawn beyond the cockpit wind screen.
Quillain sat forward. “They’re going to have their security up. If we go busting in there after first light, we’re going to be spotted and they’ll bug out on us, sure as hell.”
Amanda refused to meet the Marine’s angry glare. Instead she lifted a Styrofoam cup from her console, taking a placid sip of the tea it contained. “Probably.”
“Hell, I’ve said all along that the L3 hide is the one we should have taken out first! It’s their biggest and the closest to Union territory. From that point they have their best chance of successfully executing an escape and evasion! They only have to run south along the coast for a few miles and they’re back in their home waters!”
“Quite right, Captain. As I said during the briefing, those are all very valid points.”
Amanda took another deliberate sip of tea and Quillain slammed back into his seat, muttering under his breath not quite loudly enough to earn a court-martial.
The fiery half ball of the sun edged above the low inland hills as the seafighter squadron stood through the straits between Matakong Island and the Guinea coast. The sky, clear except for the heat haze already building along the horizon, promised another searing equatorial day. The passengers and crew of a pinasse ferrying across to the mainland looked on with concern as the hovercraft formation blasted past.
“Good morrrrrrning, Africa,” Christine Rendino’s voice issued from the cockpit’s overhead loudspeaker, ebullient in spite of a night spent in front of the screens in the operations center.
“What do you have for us, Chris?” Amanda replied.
“Too much neat stuff to tell about. Currently, we have sixteen prisoners in the bag along with four confirmed hostile KIAs. We have over a hundred weapons captured, including four of those Union sea mines. The Brit minehunter guys are turning handsprings over that. Several tons of fuel ammo and supplies have been secured, and we have documents, documents, documents.
“I’ve had a quick look at some of the stuff the helos have brought in, and I can already tell you we have enough stuff to convince even a Berkeley journalist that Belewa and the West African Union are behind the Guinea insurgency.”
“That’s good, Chris, but what do you have for us now? We’re in Matakong Channel about ten minutes out from L3 hide.”
“I got ya a Predator over the hide at ten thousand feet. Real-time visual is up on your datalink.”
Using the Mast Mounted Sighting System, the AQ-1 reconnaissance drone could barely be seen, circling like a distant seagull over the site of the Union boat hide. Amanda accessed the drone’s datalink and a crisp digital television image filled the main monitor on her console. A secondary screen up forward on Steamer and Snowy’s control panel lit off as well, showing a smaller version of the same vista.
The view showed a patch of now all-too-familiar coastal mangrove swamp, sheltered inside the hook of a narrow peninsula that extended out beyond the northern side of the Forecariah River estuary. In the center of the patch, a narrow creek mouth cracked the densely forested shoreline.
“What’s happening down there?” Amanda inquired.
“We’ve got at least three Boghammers in the hide, and our ground sensors indicate twenty-plus people doing a lot of moving around. We’ve had intermittent radio traffic for the past two hours. Some commo with Union Army HQ in Freetown and a lot of attempts to contact the other boat hides. Nobody’s been answering the phone, and I suspect they’re starting to get nervous down there.”
“I told you so,” Quillain growled, peering over Amanda’s shoulder at the monitor.
Amanda ignored the comment, staring intently at the image. “Anything else? Any indication that they’re on the move yet?”
And suddenly there was just such an indication. A towering mushroom of scarlet flame and black smoke sprouted out of the tree cover.
“Whoa!” Christine exclaimed. “Big thermal! Big thermal! That was a gas dump blowing! Stand by!.. Okay, Royalty, we’ve now got lower-grade thermal flares showing under the tree cover as well.”
Amanda nodded to herself. “Okay, their observation posts have us spotted. They’re torching their supply caches. Their ammo bunker should be next.”
As if keyed by her words, a second, muddier mushroom cloud rose above the trees, discharging tracers sparkling around its base.