Choke Point

FIFTY-FIVE

Ten days later, on a moonlit night at 1930 hours, Ross and his men were shielding their eyes from the rotor wash of a CH-53 Sea Stallion heavy lift transport helicopter landing at Paya Lebar Air Base in eastern Singapore. The base was used by many flying units of the US Navy and Air Force as a refueling stopover and staging post/transit point, and it was also the permanent home of the 497th Combat Training Squadron, which provided operational and logistical support to US Air Force fighters currently training with the Republic of Singapore Air Force.

The Sea Stallion was operated by a crew of four: pilot, copilot, crew chief, and an aerial observer, but it was the crew chief who waved them inside while he and the observer supervised the loading of a crate the size of a Volkswagen Beetle up the chopper’s rear ramp.

‘What the hell you got in the box?’ the chief asked Ross, once they were under way and wearing their headphones and mikes.

‘That’s classified,’ Ross said. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: It makes a lot of noise when it’s angry.’ Ross wiggled his eyebrows and smiled.

Once they’d learned that Duman was, indeed, heading toward Singapore, Ross had a sneaking suspicion that the weapons’ final destination was close, and with that in mind, he’d requested from Mitchell a few of the team’s more offensive tools, one of them particularly large, but that wouldn’t be a problem since there’d be plenty of room to store it on the LCS.

After about a two-hour ride, they neared the USS Independence (LCS-2), a unique littoral combat trimaran warship. Her most recognizable physical feature was an elongated narrow bow with three parallel hulls that inspired the crew to call her a Klingon warship. Her silhouette was most definitely futuristic, with aft landing deck and container-size mission modules on her port sides, the containers capable of carrying all types of mission-specific hardware, vehicles and ordnance. ‘Littoral’ meant that she spent most of her time near the shoreline, and she was the perfect vessel to hunt a ship like Duman in these waters.

Independence’s skipper, Commander Troy Ladd Wagner, Gold Team, was, Ross imagined, settling into his starboard bridge chair and sighting along the ship’s bow, which reminded Ross of a cigar boat. Driving a 418-foot LCS at thirty knots in twenty feet of water was no easy task, Ross knew, but add to that the three dozen fishing boats directly in his path, and Ross figured that Wagner was not having a great night. The pilot had told Ross that the Malaccan Strait fishing fleet was an issue whenever air ops were carried out during east-west prevailing winds that required Independence to travel at right angles to the main shipping channel.

They were four minutes out now and on final approach. The pilot confessed that their landing would be close. If they didn’t set down exactly on time, they would have to abort, be put in a holding pattern, then sent around for another pass, once Wagner repositioned the LCS to avoid the fishing fleet. If Ross were that skipper, he would be wondering why some Special Forces prima donnas from the Army had taken so long to get there. A SEAL operation would have transited aboard three minutes early and with half as much equipment.

Thankfully, the landing went off without a hitch, and within ten minutes Ross was standing in the LCS’s narrow wardroom, speaking with the skipper himself: ‘My apologies, sir. I know our timing wasn’t the greatest. I saw all those fishing boats up ahead. It was getting dicier by the minute.’

‘Nonsense, I welcomed the opportunity to live up to our motto, Libertas Per Laborem Audentium — Independence Through Bold Action.’

‘I appreciate that, sir.’

Wagner was at least six feet tall, graying, and nearly bald. His faded blue eyes had telltale crow’s feet from squinting directly into far too many sunrises and sunsets. He hadn’t escaped from becoming a little chunky from a combination of good Navy chow and living a confined life aboard ship. ‘Now my XO tells me that five or six years ago he transported a SEAL team run by a guy named Andrew Ross. Any relation?’

‘That would be me, sir.’

‘Really? I find that strange. What the hell did you do to get fed to the Army?’

Ross chuckled. ‘Well, they told me the Group for Specialized Tactics is the wave of the future, so I figured I’d give it a try.’

‘And how’s that working out for you?’

‘The hardest part was getting used to being called “captain.” For the first few weeks I kept looking around to see who my guys were talking to.’

‘Well, we’ll forgive you for leaving us too soon.’

‘Thank you again.’

‘All right, let’s get down to it then. We’ve put our Fire Scout over Duman for the past three nights. She’s tracking right down the channel, and we haven’t heard her request a pilot to enter any port. If her skipper is familiar with his destination, he might not even need the services of a local pilot.’

The ‘C’ version Fire Scout Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was equipped with a sensor ball turret that carried electro-optics, IR cameras, and a laser range finder. The robot chopper operated over a line of sight to a distance of 172 miles and had an endurance of fourteen hours at cruising speed of 110 knots. Independence could comfortably shadow the Duman from 100 miles away without fear of counterdetection.

‘I’m alternating my two Seahawks on standby every night. The crew will sleep on board,’ said Wagner. ‘In addition, we have a platoon of Fleet Anti-Terrorism Marines out of Manama, Bahrain, on board. The Chief of Naval Operations ordered the Third Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Battalion to place them under your command. I’ll introduce you to their CO.’

‘That’s excellent,’ Ross replied. ‘And if you’ve got the time, why don’t we head down to the hangar deck, and you can meet the fifth member of my team.’

‘I take it you keep him in that giant crate?’

Ross nodded. ‘He seems to like it in there.’