Arsenal

SIX

With the Washington-mandated safety stand-down over, Jefferson immediately returned to full flex-deck operations.

The Cubans continued to clutter up the sky around the ship with sponges of Fulcrums, but popular opinion had it that Admiral Wayne was not likely to allow that state of affairs to continue. The admiral had made it clear that current operations had two main objectives: to locate and retrieve Major Hammersmith and to obtain up-to-date eyeball intelligence on Cuban air defense capabilities.

No one had to tell the VF-95 Viper squadron what the latter information was for. They were going in. It was just a question of how and when.

The demands on the flight schedule allowed even the staff pilots to grab some stick time.

“You have any idea what we’re doing up here?” Bird Dog asked. His index finger was beating out a staccato rhythm on the throttles.

“I know as much as you do.” Resignation tinged the normally taciturn RIO’s voice. “They say launch, I launch.

They say go north of Cuba and look tactical, I give you fly-to points: What else do we have to know?”

“What the hell we’re doing here would help,” Bird Dog snapped. He yanked the Tomcat into a sharp right-hand turn without warning, shoving Gator hard against the seat back.

“Hey! What the hell was that about?” Gator’s words were slightly muffled as he forced them out between clenched teeth. “Give me some warning next time, asshole.”

“Sorry, shipmate, just thought I saw something up ahead, that’s all.”

Bird Dog eased quickly out of the turn and turned gently to port, putting it back on its original heading. Why the hell had he done that? If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that Gator didn’t deserve it. He’d known the unexpected turn would subject the RIO to massive G-forces, and might even have caused him to black out.

There was no reason to take it out on Gator. It wasn’t his RIO’s fault that he was being treated like a less than completely essential part of the battle group. Hell, he ought to be grateful that he was flying, although his orders to proceed from Jefferson to north of Cuba and to orbit on a CAP station with two other F-14s seemed a waste of gas and time. Time he could have better spent sleeping, dreaming about the beautiful Callie. He sighed as images of his fiancee well, almost his fiance erose in his mind, as they were wont to do at the slightest provocation.

Who would’ve ever thought he’d be torn between dreaming about a woman and flying? A year ago, flying would have won hands down.

“We’re a diversion,” Gator said. “There are four Tomcats and four Hornets on Alert Five right now. Since when does the carrier roust that many aviators out of bed simply to support a grab-ass mission?”

“A diversion? Why? There’s nothing going on around here.”

Gator sighed. “Of course there’s not. It’s a diversion, stupid. A diversion happens somewhere besides the main action. Didn’t they teach you that at the War College?”

“The War College was a bit more sophisticated than that,” Bird Dog said stiffly.

The yearlong curriculum concentrated on operational art, with many theories contrasted to old-style campaign planning. Students at the Naval War College looked at the big picture: how best to use military force to achieve political objectives, what composition of large-scale forces were most appropriate to applying pressure to an opponent’s center of gravity. They didn’t get down into the grass, as the professors there were fond of saying. Individual platform capabilities, weapon ranges, and tactics were the province of more junior courses, such as Tactical Action Officer School or even Fighter Weapons Course Top Gun at Naval Station Miramar. The War College students were expected to be beyond that, to concentrate on the high-level planning they’d be expected to do as members of a deployed staff or ashore at the Pentagon. In Bird Dog’s case, he’d had a chance to apply his new skills even before he graduated.

He’d wangled his way out to Jefferson in the Med just in time to take part in the Black Sea conflict.

“Well, maybe they should have,” Gator said. “If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a reason the admiral wants Cuba’s air assets worried about the north. We’re already getting I and Windications and warnings that they’re launching more of them and vectoring toward us.”

“If I’d been planning it, I would have waited until the weather was better.” Bird Dog glanced overhead, looking for any patches of clear sky. No luck. “Where are our playmates, anyway? The ones we’re supposed to be diversioning. If we’re gonna boogie, we might as well do it.”

“I hold a MiG on two-seven-zero at fifty miles,” Gator answered.

“About time you switched into targeting mode, don’t you think?”

‘Too far away.”

“The bad guys won’t know that, will they? No, they won’t,” Gator continued, answering his own question. “Get it through your thick skull. Bird Dog the point of being up here is not to engage another aircraft, it’s to make someone on the ground think we’re up to something interesting. That spells targeting illumination, simulating every electronic and radar signal we generate when we’re actually attacking.

Get with the program.”

Bird Dog sighed and switched the powerful AWG-9 radar into illumination mode. The ESM sensors arrayed along the coast of Cuba and perched on its highest peak would undoubtedly detect it within seconds. “There.

Are you happy?”

“I am. The question is are the Cubans?”

The small RHIB-rigid-hull inflatable boat slid smoothly up the side of one swell, picking up speed as it descended into the trough. The eight SEALs on board held grimly to the ropes around its hard rubber sides.

Their bodies had gotten accustomed to the rhythmic movement thirty minutes earlier, and even the greenest of them was well past worrying about seasickness.

Not that SEALs got seasick. Or that they’d ever admit to it if they did.

A cold front had moved into the area yesterday, increasing the difference between wet-bulb and dry-bulb temperatures to less than two degrees. Consequently, dense fog was forming on the surface of the ocean, wafting up and enveloping the Special Forces platoon in a cloaking mist.

Overhead, low clouds were rolling in, spitting short bursts of rain that left their wet suits gleaming in the low ambient light diffused about them. Each man held his weapon with his free hand, close to the chest. Not that they’d need them-at least, they wouldn’t if everything went well.

“Three miles,” Huerta said softly. He stretched his legs, twisted his torso to loosen the muscles growing stiff from the cold and damp. “Be ready.”

One by one, the team members flashed a silent hand signal in acknowledgment. As if it were needed. SEALs were always ready.

The brief mission was relatively simple in planning, with the potential for unexpected complications in execution.

They were to go ashore and take a quick sneak and peek at the Cubans’ facility on the southwest corner of the island.

The overhead imagery revealed new construction on the base, as well as the possibility that the downed American pilot was being held hostage there. Their orders allowed them to take action, if they could do so without compromising the unit’s safety, to free him. Every one of them had firmly resolved to do just that if at all possible.

In addition to the normal bag of tricks, Huerta carried a few extra goodies. A low-light camera, capable of concentrating the ambient light to take pictures even under the worst of conditions. Two small, portable motion detectors, each barely larger than a small tape recorder, for mounting at the entrances to their areas of surveillance.

And finally, the piece of gear responsible for the particularly grim expression on their leader’s face a microcircuitized Geiger counter.

The muffled hammer of the specially silenced engine attached to the RHIB soaked into the fog around them.

Barring exceptionally poor luck, the team was undetectable.

“Shore,” Sikes said finally. He pointed forward in the fog.

Barely discernible was the dark outline of land. The SEALs made their final preparations for disembarking, careful to keep metal from hammering against metal and alerting a randomly patrolling sentry.

The boat ground ashore with a harsh rasp, small pebbles and rocks digging into the thick rubber bottom. Minutes later, the boat was dragged out of the water and safely concealed under a clump of brush in a small grove of trees.

The eight SEALs broke into two teams of four, the first headed for what satellite imagery showed as the new construction area. The second group slanted away from them toward the highly fortified encampment that intelligence specialists suspected contained the captive pilot.

They would meet back here in two hours, with or without the pilot and with or without the information they were after.

The insistent beeping of the ALR-45 radar warning and control system shattered the silence of the cockpit. Gator moved quickly to silence the alarm, then called out the identification. “MiG just watching.”

Bird Dog swore quietly. At this range, the MiG could be on top of them in ten minutes. His orders were to avoid an actual confrontation with any Cuban aircraft. It ate at his gut to have to run, but if he allowed the Cuban to approach them, the other pilot would quickly see through their deception. Still, to let the Cubans think that the mere presence of this MiG could make the Americans turn and run was distinctly distasteful.

“Bird Dog, get us the hell out of here,” Gator ordered.

“We could have some fun with him,” Bird Dog suggested. He held the Tomcat steady and level.

“I mean it. You know what our orders are.” The RIO’s voice notched up two notes on the octave. “There’s no point in being a diversion if we blow it the second they come out to take a look.”

“But what would be a more realistic deception than to go toward the MiG? The rest of the flight can turn tail and run, but the presence of one aircraft lingering around here is bound to get ‘em interested.

Besides, there’s only one launching, right?”

“As far as I can tell,” the RIO admitted grudgingly. “This is one of your worst ideas ever.”

Bird Dog reached forward and flipped off the radios.

“Jefferson will see what we’re doing,” he continued blithely.

“If they want us to RTB return to base they’ll let us know.”

“Not with the radios off.”

“Who says the radios are off? Communications problems are not unknown in the Tomcat, you know.” He could hear the RIO’s disgusted sigh over the ICS-the interior communications system.

“You’re going to do this no matter what I say, aren’t you?” Gator said finally. “To hell with your career, my career let’s give it all up so you can play grab-ass with the Cubans. You’ve been missing that ever since we were on patrol in the Spratlys.”

“Think of it as a diversion within a diversion,” Bird Dog suggested.

“The rest of the flight turns away, and I’m the diversion that lets them go. It makes sense perfect sense.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with this plan. A really critical factor.” The RIO’s voice was harsh.

“What’s that?”

“Somebody forgot to tell the Cubans it’s just a diversion.

What if they take it a little more seriously than that?”

The SEALs slipped silently through the vegetation, invisible in their woodland-patterned cammies and face paint.

They moved slowly, brushing vegetation aside carefully to prevent inadvertent rustling of leaves, watching where they placed their feet in order to avoid twigs and branches underfoot. Not that the woodland debris would have cracked under their feet the entire area was as sodden, and as dark, as a rain forest.

Ahead of them, the wire-mesh perimeter fence barely reflected the ambient light in a regular pattern. The SEALs crept up to within six feet of it, still hidden by the underbrush.

The SEAL leader motioned to his second in command, using only hand signals to convey his intentions. The other SEAL nodded, reached into his belt, and withdrew a heavy-duty set of wire cutters. Intelligence had indicated that the fence was electrified, but not alarmed, and that the Cubans lacked even rudimentary pressure sensors and motion detectors along the perimeter.

The SEALs waited. Their luck held within a couple of minutes, a bulky Cuban patrolling sentry came into view, his presence announced five minutes earlier by his clumsy, stumbling progress along the perimeter.

The SEALs held their breath, watched him pass by them on the interior of the fence and then disappear in the dark.

They waited a little bit longer, until they were certain he was out of earshot. Then Sikes motioned sharply Move out!

Garcia scampered up to the fence, slipping on his heavily insulated gloves as he moved while holding the heavy wire cutters with their rubberized handles in one hand. He crouched low, blending in with the low vegetation already struggling to reassert its domination over the trimmed area.

He worked quickly but carefully, snipping away the heavy strands and finally tossing aside a semicircular portion of the fence. Grinning, he held it aloft for a moment for his compatriots to admire, then laid it carefully on the ground. He scuttled back to join his teammates and resumed his normal position in the formation.

Sikes led the way, moving quickly across the open area.

Behind him, at two-minute intervals, the rest of the team followed.

They regrouped at the rear of a ramshackle wooden building. The short, hundred-meter dash had driven the last traces of stiffness and cold from their muscles. They paused for a minute, regrouping, then employed the same silent dart-and-wait maneuver to move steadily across the rest of the compound.

Their target was the open field to the north of the main cluster of buildings, the one the satellite imagery had shown as under construction.

“I need altitude,” Bird Dog said as a warning. He slammed the throttles forward, kicking the massive jet into afterburners, and yanked back on the yoke. The Tomcat rotated in the air to stand almost on end, its nose pointed toward the one clear patch of sky Bird Dog had found. Rain still spattered the canopy, the drops driven quickly aft by the jet’s wind speed to leave most of the forward part clear. Five hundred knots of airspeed was better than any windshield wiper ever designed.

“They’ll think you’re getting into firing position,” Gator warned.

“That’s what I want ‘em to think. Let’s see if we can get him to play our game.” Bird Dog tightened his stomach and torso muscles, forcing blood up from his extremities into his brain to prevent graying out.

“I’m staying in search-right radar mode, so he shouldn’t have any reason to get excited.”

“Cubans don’t need a reason,” Gator gritted.

The construction churned up the vast field to their north, raw, black dirt furrowed and rent, bearing an odd resemblance to the sea they’d just crossed. Past the square of disturbed earth, the field resumed its green march to the hot horizon, low shrubbery and tall grass surrounding the construction.

Sikes nudged his partner and pointed. Black iron girders jutted out of the ground at improbable angles. To the right, a yellow crane sat silently waiting, poised at the edge of the disturbed surface like a praying mantis. Just to the right of the crane, a stack of neatly arranged metal and wooden boxes rested. The metal ones were at least forty feet long, and bore the scrapes and gashes Sikes associated with shipping containers. The wooden boxes were smaller, measuring merely six feet in length. Associated equipment, he supposed. Based on their intelligence, there was little doubt in his mind as to what the larger crates held.

The girdered structure had the look of something almost complete, as though the addition of a few more support members would transform the collection into a stark, meaningful machine, one capable of handling the missiles he was certain were nestled in the longer boxes.

He glanced to his right, and saw his partner had already extracted the portable Geiger counter from his carryall.

Huerta pointed the probe toward the field.

The light on the face panel, which glowed a barely discernible zerozero-zero in the dark, shivered, the movement then picked up by the other two digits. Figures mounted rapidly, rising well above the threshold of what Sikes knew was regular background radiation.

He shivered despite the warm night. The trip to shore on the boat, the silent creep through the quiet compound, hell, even his last operation in the Middle east none of it chilled him more than those three green digits staring at him now out of the gloom.

“He’s onto us!” Gator twisted around in his seat to try to maintain visual contact with the approaching Cuban aircraft.

“Got a VID-visual identification?” Bird Dog queried.

“No.” Gator rapped out the word more harshly than he’d intended as a twinge of pain spasmed through his lower back. Turning around to look over his shoulder in the cramped confines of the cockpit probably provided more business for chiropractors than he liked to think about.

“Doesn’t matter. We know who he is.”

“And he knows who we are.”

“That’s the whole point of it, isn’t it?”

“Not if that puts him in a shitty mood.”

Gator gave up trying to see through the clouds and mist and turned back to the radar display. The other aircraft was plainly visible on the scope, a fluorescent green solid mark against the scattering of returns generated by the thicker storm cells in the area. Solid, its edges well defined and moving toward them at six hundred knots. He tried one last time. “Bird Dog, we need to rethink this.”

“Ain’t nothin’ to think. Gator. He’s close enough now, I’m going to turn tail and let him chase us.”

“Missile lock!”

Bird Dog swore. Without responding, he tipped the nose of the Tomcat back toward the water and began trading altitude for speed and distance. Distance most of all with the MiG, he needed at least another five miles of separation before he’d feel even relatively safe.

“Still no visual too much haze,” Gator said rapidly, his fingers flying over the peculiarly shaped knobs and buttons around his seat. Each one had its own special shape, one that no RIO could forget, even if there was no illumination. Bird Dog might be able to fly the aircraft by the seat of his pants, but Gator could launch weapons by the feel of his fingers.

“We’re out of range,” Bird Dog announced. “Especially if he’s carrying” “It’s not falling off. Bird Dog,” Gator said urgently. “It should have by now.”

“Jesus! What the hell? Hold on.” The Tomcat’s dive steepened, throwing both aviators against the ejection harnesses that held them in their seats.

“Watch your altitude.”

“I am, I am! Get ready with the chaff.”

Gator’s world narrowed down to the small round scope in front of him; nothing else was important. A few small surface contacts. Fishing boats, probably, one part of his mind noted dispassionately. Then the one aft of them, the only radar contact that mattered. Indeed, unless Bird Dog was successful with his latest maneuver, nothing else would matter in the next five minutes except his view of the Almighty. Or, more important, how the Almighty viewed him.

He knew what his pilot was planning on doing, and the idea frightened him almost as much as the approaching missile. Get down low, get near the churning, violent sea below them, and try to hide within the spatter of radar returns generated by the ever-changing wave structure of the surface of the ocean. It was a chancy move, but that coupled with countermeasures such as chaff and flares might be enough to distract the weapon long enough for them to get away.

“Might be.” With a regular missile, it would have been, of that he was certain. But given the extended range on this one, a range he’d never even heard hinted at during intelligence briefs, who knew what else was new? An improved seeker head? A more accurate radar capable of distinguishing between sea clutter and the sweetheart metal contact that the Tomcat would generate on its sensors? He shook his head, shuttling the fear back to some small dark compartment of his mind. He couldn’t get distracted now, when his primary task was to serve as a second pair of eyes and make sure the Tomcat stayed out of the water.

It would really suck if we lost the missile and slammed into one of the masts on the fishing boats. He frowned, knowing how close to the water Bird Dog was likely to get and how high the antennas and booms extended from some fishing boats.

A brief thought of his wife, Alicia, flitted through his mind. He allowed it to stay there for a microsecond, then compartmentalized it as well. No time for danger, no time for thoughts of love and family all that mattered was getting away, now.

Bird Dog, he had to admit, was one of the best. He’d proved it repeatedly during the Spratly Islands conflict. But this scenario, with the young pilot, slightly rusty from his tour on staff duty, playing grab-ass with a missile of unknown capabilities, was more than either of them had bargained for.

The second SEAL squad had followed the same peek-dart peek transit maneuver that the other one had, with less success. Their target was still over 150 feet away, and under the circumstances, it wasn’t likely that they’d be getting any closer.

“That’s it,” Garcia said quietly, careful to turn the s into a th sound. It was a habit born of long training, turning sibilant consonants that carried for long distances into fricative soft sounds.

“Got to be.”

The other men nodded. They were crouched down in landscaping shrubbery surrounding what appeared to be an administrative building, complete with flagpole out front and decorative bricks around the steps leading up to it. Due east from their position, a two-story cement block building without windows was surrounded by two storm fencing perimeters. The outer one was topped with razor wire.

Bright lights on tall poles cast a harsh glare down on the building and the land a hundred feet around it. They could see two armed men patrolling just inside the perimeter, displaying none of the uncertainty or clumsiness that had characterized their compatriot by the outer perimeter fence they’d already passed through. These were men with a purpose, and with the training to accomplish it. Their steps were swift and sure. They glanced continually into the darkness around them. Sikes saw night-vision goggles mounted insect like on top of one of their heads, evidently shoved back to allow him better visibility in the bright light.

The guards would still be able to see them even if the SEALs were to shoot the lights out.

Not that they would. No, marching orders for this mission were simply to ascertain the location of the prison building and bring the pilot out if possible. Shooting out the lights would put the whole camp on alert immediately, complicating not only their own egress from the compound but compromising the other team as well. They would be lucky to escape with their own lives, much less that of the pilot.

Huerta ground his teeth in frustration. The rescue mission would have to wait for the next intrusion into the camp, if then. But for now, getting the American aviator away from the Cubans was going to prove tougher than his superiors had thought.

He motioned to his team, a quick, sharp hand movement, then faded back into the shrubbery. He strained to hear them moving through the brush, and a grim smile crossed his face when nothing met his ears but silence. They were good, very good.

Unfortunately, this time, it wasn’t enough.

“Pull up! Pull up!” Gator’s voice was frantic. And about two seconds too late. He could already feel the Tomcat starting to nose up, see Bird Dog gently easing the yoke back.

Would it be in time? He hoped to hell the young fool knew what he was doing.

Gator craned his neck around to stare down at the water below them. It was now visible, since they were under the cloud cover and fog that had plagued their mission on the way in. Two thousand feet, maybe less, he decided, staring in horrified fascination at the churning wave tops whitecapped with foam. Not enough.

The Tomcat was almost in level flight now, but still descending as its inertia carried it forward. Gator stared in silent horror, knowing that nothing he could say or do could change the aerodynamic equation now being worked out between the airframe and the atmosphere. Either Bird Dog had judged it right, or he hadn’t. Either way. Gator was out of the loop.

He shut his eyes, not wanting to watch, then opened them immediately.

As soon as he quit looking, every nerve ending in his body seemed to become preternaturally alive, extending out past the skin of the aircraft to feel the warm, hungry sea below him. Better the demons he could see than those he couldn’t.

Finally, fifteen feet above the waves, the Tomcat pulled out of its steep dive. Gator felt a slight shudder, and wondered if the reckless pilot in front of him had nicked the surface of the ocean with the tail of the Tomcat. Still, the reassuring roar of both engines reassured him that nothing was wrong with their propulsion. He felt relief flood him, and waited for the moment when Bird Dog would start grabbing altitude again.

It didn’t happen. The Tomcat streaked on northward, still fifteen to twenty feet above the waves. Gator remained silent, not wanting to cause the slightest distraction to the incredible concentration such low-level flying required. He stared at his radar scope, willing the missile away from them.

“Flares. Chaff.” Bird Dog’s voice was almost mechanical.

Gator automatically punched the buttons, watching in wonderment over the fact that his hands still knew what to do while his mind stared at the sea. He felt the gentle thumps on me airframe as the two countermeasure packages shot out from the undercarriage, and wondered what the hell good they would do. They were so close to the sea, both were likely to hit the water before the missile following had any chance to acquire them.

Just as the first thump shook the aircraft. Bird Dog wrenched the Tomcat into a tight roll. The countermeasures, housed on the underside of the aircraft, shot into the air, detonating one hundred feet above the water.

The ocean was now only twenty feet above his head, as sky and water reversed themselves in his perspective. He experienced a moment of vertigo and a sudden tensing in his stomach. God, puking now, upside down it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so serious.

As the last of the countermeasures left the aircraft. Bird Dog rolled the Tomcat upright again and pulled back on the yoke. Gator felt the indescribably delicious sensation of moving away from the water, watching it recede until the hundred feet above it that Bird Dog appeared to settle on felt like a vast safety margin. In other circumstances it would have been far too low for his tastes, but now it seemed like the ultimate in safety.

As the aircraft regained altitude, the hard blip of the missile reappeared on his radar screen. It was now only five hundred feet behind him, far too close for another try at countermeasures. Or maybe it wasn’t. He tried to remember the exact parameters of the countermeasures, calculated the possible maximum speed of the missile, and was still frantically thinking about it when he heard Bird Dog order another set.

Again, his fingers seemed to know what to do by themselves. He studied the scope. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the missile’s trace on the radar disappeared.

Another, more amorphous bloom popped up, and seconds later he heard an explosion behind him.

“What the hell was that?” Bird Dog said.

“You know what it was.” Inexplicably, Gator was now angry beyond all measure. “That fishing boat your low-level stunt decoyed the missile right into it.”

“It was an air-to-air missile not an air-to-surface missile,” Bird Dog said hurriedly. “It shouldn’t acquire a surface ship. No way.”

“How the hell do you know? It shouldn’t have run as long as it did either. Comes in low, acquires the next best target after us, and some sailor is fish bait now. How are you going to like explaining that to the admiral?” Gator stormed. “This is the last time. Bird Dog. I’m never flying with you again.”

The two fishing boats were steaming together silently, all lights extinguished. Their wooden structures were poor radar reflectors, and absent the presence of a high-powered beam, neither one was probably evident on any surface radar.

Finding Leyta on board had been the first surprise and not the last, she suspected. Aguillar had turned her over to him on the docks in Venezuela and told her he’d retrieve her at the same location.

“We’re safe?” Pamela Drake asked softly.

Leyta nodded. “As safe as we can be anywhere. I’ve done this thousands of times you are not to worry. Miss Drake.” His nonchalance gave her more reassurance than his words.

She nodded and gazed off toward the bow of the boat. If the chart was correct, the coast of Cuba was only five miles ahead. Within twenty minutes, she’d be setting foot on Cuban soil. Americans were still barred from visiting Cuba, but the American government had conspicuously overlooked the occasional presence of an American journalist there. She decided not to think about the possible legal consequences and concentrated on outlining the story she’d soon present to the world.

The story how much of it could she tell? More important, how much would her producers believe?

The more members of both Aguillar’s and Leyta’s political groups she met, the more disturbed she was by the degree to which they were interconnected. While most of her viewers would have given little thought to the differences in the two groups’ political agendas, to astute observers on the international scene it had always appeared that Leyta was a violently dangerous reactionary while Aguillar was willing to advance Cuba’s cause within the established political system.

Pamela was no longer sure either statement was true, and she’d made that clear to Keith Loggins during their last conversation.

Regardless of the political realities, she was finally on the last leg of her journey, itself an experience in the degree to which the two groups cooperated. Aguillar’s people had handled the seaplane flight from Venezuela to the Caribbean, while Leyta’s people manned the fishing boat now ferrying her into shore. As she understood it, her contacts within Cuba were almost exclusively Leyta’s people, a fact that caused her some degree of concern.

Well, no matter. A story was a story.

She heard it before she saw it, a brief whine on the edge of her consciousness, like a bothersome mosquito. In seconds it crescendoed to a shrieking scream, and then the boat in front of them exploded into flames. The captain of her vessel had barely enough time to slew the small craft violently to the right to avoid the wreckage and fireball.

A cacophony of swearing and exclamations, coupled with screams, exploded on her own craft. She stared in horror at the flaming wreckage, which was flung up into the air, paused at mid-trajectory, then made its comparatively slow descent back to the surface of the warm sea.

Her journalistic instincts kicked in, and she raised the minicam in her hand and pointed it in the general direction of debris, then passed back down to the burning spot on the ocean. Flames everywhere, hurting her eyes as they seared the night-adapted pupils, throwing oddly flickering shadows of goblins over the bulkheads of her craft. She watched it, caught it all on tape, and felt an absurdly inappropriate thrill that she was present to do so.

“Get below.” Leyta’s hand clamped down on her bicep.

He jerked her away from the railing and shoved her toward the cabin.

“I don’t know what’s happened who did you tell you were coming?”

“No one!” she said, with one eye still glued to the camera.

“Shut up and leave me alone.”

“No. Ten of my friends are dead, and you will not be the one to record it.” He shoved her toward the cockpit hatch.

She swung the camera around to film him. “What happened? Why did it explode?”

He stared at her as if staring at an alien being. “A missile,” he said finally. “The noise. I think it was. And where that one came from, there are probably others.”

The prospect of being trapped below decks, waiting unknowingly for an attack, was unappealing. No, more than that completely unacceptable.

She twisted away from Leyta’s grasp and ran to the stern of the boat, again aiming her camera at the burning wreckage. The vague outline of one side of the ship was now visible through the flames. The superstructure was completely gone. As her vessel drew away from it, secondary explosions probably gasoline tanks, one part of her mind noted dispassionately shook the air.

“We have to get away quickly. The authorities will be coming to investigate.” Leyta stared at her. “You will stay there no other parts of the boat, you understand? And no movement.”

She nodded, still filming the burning wreckage. What a scoop.

After the last flaming bit of wreckage disappeared from the sea, Pamela hunted down her equipment bag below decks.

She carefully stowed the camera, then extracted her second most critical piece of survival gear. She punched in Keith Loggins’s telephone number from memory.

“And your fiancee saw it?”

Senator Williams demanded.

Admiral Loggins moved restlessly in his chair. “So she said. She was calling from her cellular phone. I believe she’s off the coast of Cuba as we speak.” He didn’t believe that at allhe knew exactly where she was: on land in Cuba, a far different matter, and one he wasn’t willing to disclose. “She says she has tape, too, at least of the aftermath.”

Senator Williams groaned. “That’s all we need, a full picture of this U.S. mishap on ACN in the next hour. I’d better brief the President.

“You realize this supports the position I’ve held all along,” Williams continued. “Using a carrier in close like that is just too dangerous.

Accidents happen. Pilots get downed, and collateral damage is excessive. The carrier is a battle-ax, not a delicate political instrument. All we need there is the Arsenal ship. The mere threat of that valiant firepower will be sufficient, and it will be far less likely to cause international mishaps than a group of testosterone laden aviators playing grab-ass in the sky.”

Admiral Loggins wheeled on him. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I do.”

Senator Williams regarded him sardonically. “Once a jet jock, always a jet jock. We all know about your exploits during Vietnam, your career as a fighter jock, the times you were shot down. But that was then, this is now. The public is determined there will never be another Vietnam, and that means no screwing around with our nearest neighbor to the south. The Arsenal ship is the answer.”

“Didn’t you learn anything from Vietnam? I sure did. The first lesson is that D.C. can’t be in charge of targeteering.

It’s micromanaging and it won’t work. The on-scene commander has got to be free to choose his weapons, and that means having somebody with enough savvy to know how to do it. And that, in case you don’t understand it, means the carrier battle group. Besides, the Arsenal ship provides little capability to make the kind of instantaneous decisions that are needed in the air.”

“Like shooting down a fishing boat?” Williams let the question hang in the air.

“Our intelligence is better than it was in Vietnam,” Loggins countered.

“The on-scene commander can make the kind of decisions he needs to.”

“Which so far have led to one missing pilot, probably captured by the Cubans, and one dead fishing boat. A pretty impressive catch,” Williams responded sarcastically.

Williams stormed out of the room, heading for the Senate majority leader’s office. A small worry niggled at the back of his mind. Sure, this was an international incident in the making, but why had Loggins not worried more about the fact that his fiancee was on the other boat?