Choosers of the Slain

31

Under way again, the Cunningham was cutting into the outermost fringe of the cold front, and a fine, hard snow was hissing across the facing of her windscreen to fuse with the droplets of freezing spume being whipped off the wave tops.

"Ken, you keep the con," Amanda called back over her shoulder as she pulled an issue parka out of a gear locker. "I'm going aft to monitor the recovery. I'll feed you bell and steering commands as needed. For now, steer three zero zero and keep us quartering into the sea. That'll both put the wind across the helipad and get us some sea room away from the pack."

"Will do," the exec replied, assuming the command chair.

"And kill the Black Hole Systems. That'll give Arkady a thermal plume to follow home."

"Will do again. You watch yourself out there on deck, Skipper. It's getting nasty."

"Just worry about the ship, Ken. I'll be fine."

The main passageway on the weather-deck level of the superstructure was jammed with Air Division personnel, all hands made bulky and clumsy by a combination of cold-weather gear and emergency equipment.

"Coming aft! Make a hole!" Amanda slid along the grab rail until she reached CPO Muller at the hatchway. "We set to go, Chief?"

"Yes, ma'am," the burly aviation man replied, "but it's going to be a bitch of a recovery. We're at Force Six now and we're beyond the book limits clear across the board."

She accepted the safety belt Muller passed to her and cinched it around her waist. Removing her light mobile headset, she replaced it with a heavier-duty mike-and-earphone combination that used a hard link. She ran a quick communications check with the bridge and then snapped the end of her safety belt's jackline onto the hardpoint beside the hatch frame.

"Set, Captain?"

"Set. Let's go."

"Right. Crash and Salvage teams! Aviation Fuel Repair team! RAST crew! Move out!"

The hatch slammed open and they streamed through, Amanda cutting over to the starboard rail while the helipad crew deployed to their stations.

The Cunningham's RAM decking, tolerable when dry, was ominously slick under the rubber soles of Amanda's sea boots, and the wind, once merely freezing, now was cold flame. When she gripped the nylon strap of the railing, she could feel the ice crystals that had worked into the fabric, their bite making her wish for a heavier pair of gloves.

No time to worry about it now. Clawing her hair out of her narrowed eyes with a quick swipe of her hand, she peered forward, sighting along the Duke's flank in the failing polar twilight.

"Bridge," she said, cupping her palm over the lip mike, "forget the load limits and bring the stabilizers up full. Then give me a couple of extra revs on the starboard propulsor pod. It'll help us hold the course line against this weather."

Years before, when she had been attending the Naval Surface Warfare School, she'd had a run-in with a senior captain on the faculty. This individual had apparently believed that the female officers assigned to his class should serve double duty as a personal harem. Amanda had corrected this misconception with a sharp backhand across the face.

Afterward, she suspected he'd tried to derail her career by having her diverted to duty aboard a Fleet ocean tug instead of the surface combatant that she'd wanted. Now, however, she blessed the name of that fanny-pinching son of a bitch. For in the two years she'd commanded the Piegan, she had learned more about this brand of down-and-dirty seamanship than she had during all the rest of her tours combined.

"There he is!"

The Sea Comanche's low-vis camouflage made it almost invisible against the overcast, but Amanda could make out that Arkady had already jettisoned his torpedoes in preparation for a rough-weather landing. On the Cunningham's end, the crash barriers had already been deployed and the RAST hands were standing by to accept the helo's line.

In heavy seas, it is almost impossible to simply set a helicopter down on a small-surface platform. The fantail of a ship, rising and falling in a twenty-foot arc in response to wave action, can literally swat a hovering helicopter like a fly. That was why the RAST (Recovery Assistance Securing and Traversing) system had been developed.

The helicopter dropped a cable that would be connected to a deck winch that, in turn, would pull the aircraft down out of the sky. This permitted the helo pilot to flare back against the tension of the line, maintaining a controlled separation between the copter and the deck until touchdown.

Angling in across the Duke's helipad, Zero One lowered its landing gear and then popped the reel of RAST line out of a belly niche. A deck hand dashed after it and snared the light steel cable with a grounded catch crook, the static charge accumulated by the helo arcing brightly at first touch.

It took only moments for the RAST team to clear the cable from the reel and to feed it into the winch pickup. The wand man passed the ready-to-haul sign up to the helo and Arkady flashed his landing lights in acknowledgment.

Zero One came back on her line like a recalcitrant puppy on the end of a leash and the winch began bringing her down.

Amanda had looked on as these evolutions had taken place. Now she glanced forward again to read the seas they would be encountering for the next few critical seconds.

The sky had changed. It was as if the misty atmosphere off the Cunningham's bow were coagulating into something solid. A wall of darkness was rushing down upon the ship. "Slack off!" she screamed. "Slack off! Slack off!" Too late. The squall line hit them like the expanding wave front of an explosion.

The destroyer reared like a startled stallion under the impact, and almost everyone on deck was taken down and inundated by the spray that geysered over the railings. The wall of water that had been pushed ahead of the storm rolled back under the Cunningham's keel, lifting the aft end of the ship and then letting it drop with savage force. Amanda heard a sharp crack, like a small-caliber rifle shot, and then a yell over the wind and rotor roar. "Jesus! The RAST line's carried away!"

Looking up, she saw Retainer Zero One flailing off into the storm like a kite with a broken string.

Aboard the helicopter, Vince Arkady snarled in survival fixation as he battled to keep his suddenly berserk aircraft away from the ocean's surface. There had never been a simulator scenario drawn up for this kind of situation. Given this set of parameters, the experts would simply say that you'd die and have done with it.

That left Gus Grestovitch, reduced to the status of a helpless passenger, to look on as the Cunningham's outline faded away into the blizzard.

"We're screwed!" he whispered hoarsely.

"Bridge! Illuminate the ship! Running lights, anchor lights, work lights, everything! Full up now!"

The near-night that had fallen across the destroyer was broken by the sudden, acknowledging glare. Pulling herself back to her feet, Amanda ran across to the RAST station through a curtain of red-lit snow.

CPO Muller and the recovery team were clustered around the winch in its recessed compartment, already struggling with what looked like a titanic fishing-reel snarl.

"Chief, how bad is it?" she yelled over the wind roar.

"As bad as it gets. The cable snapped right at the connector on the helo's belly. There's no line left to bring 'em down on, and there's sure no way in hell we can recover him in this kind of weather without the RAST gear."

Peering into Muller's face, Amanda could read the deadly finality there. With any of the Navy's other LAMPS-class helicopters, it would have been easy enough to drop another line from the cabin. The Sea Comanche, with its cramped, fighter-type cockpits, had no such second-chance option.

Twin beams of white light lanced down out of the darkness and panned forward to play across the Duke's stern.

Zero One was back under control and coming up on the ship again, forging ahead slowly through the blizzard.

"Captain, this is the CIC," a voice sounded faintly in her headset. "Lieutenant Arkady is requesting permission to talk to you, ma'am."

"Okay. Patch him through on this deck circuit."

Click!

"Gray Lady, this is Zero One. Looks like we have kind of a mess here."

Amanda hunkered down beside Chief Muller and tried to shield the headset mike from the booming wind gusts.

"Acknowledged, Zero One. We can confirm that your RAST line has carried away completely. We are assessing the situation."

"Not much to assess, Gray Lady. We're not getting this aircraft back aboard tonight." Vince Arkady's reply was laced with the same kind of finality that Muller's had been.

Down inside, where she lived, the knot began to tighten.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Retainer. If we have to, we can write off the helo. You can execute a controlled crash inside the containment barriers."

"Negative, negative! If we bust a fuel cell, we could have a major deck fire. If we go over the side, we could damage a propulsor pod. I won't place the ship at that kind of risk."

"That decision is my responsibility, Retainer."

"No, Captain," Arkady repeated grimly over the radio link. "As aircraft commander, this one is my call."

Amanda gritted out one of those phrases that a lady shouldn't use but a naval officer sometimes has to.

"Chief, there has to be some kind of alternative procedure here!" she said, flipping the lip mike back.

"Maybe if he could hover in close enough for us to get a line on his cargo-transfer shackle…"

The destroyer's deck lurched as she came off the slope of a quartering sea, and another wave crest exploded over the rail, marking the futility of Muller's tentative proposal.

"Gray Lady, this is Zero One. Our just hanging around up here isn't going to accomplish anything. I'm going to break off and head for the Antarctic Peninsula. We'll set down at either the Russian or Polish station and ride the storm out there. We can set up a rendezvous when we get the weather again."

"What? No! Stand by, Zero One."

Muller had been listening in on the circuit as well. The CPO reached over and grabbed Amanda's shoulder.

"He'll never make it! He doesn't have the fuel reserves to fight this kind of weather. Even if he did manage to find one of those installations, odds are that even the Lieutenant wouldn't be able to make an unassisted landing in one piece. If he's going to get down anywhere, ma'am, it's gotta be here!"

She nodded an acknowledgment. If the wind and rotor roar was making it hard to hear, the cold was making it hard to think. Even the best arctic gear in the world would begin to fail when wet, and there was an inch of freezing seawater curtaining across the warship's decks.

"Gray Lady, do you copy?" Arkady's voice insisted, requesting permission to abandon hope.

"Negative, Zero One. That is not an option. I repeat, that is not an option. Hold on station until we can come up with something else."

"Gray Lady, I don't have time for this shit!" Arkady snapped back, a tension edge on his voice. "If I'm going to have any chance at all of finding a place to set down, I have to take departure now! I don't have the gas to fuck around!"

"Lieutenant Arkady! You will hold on station for two minutes more! That is an order!"

There was no reply, but the lights of Retainer Zero One continued to dance erratically in the murk above the fantail.

Amanda knelt on the deck, trying to ignore the pain and the chill creeping up her limbs, and trying to force some kind of possible solution from a mind that suddenly seemed to be growing clouded and empty.

A shepherd's crook rig of some kind…Not likely with the deck dancing around like this. A line gun up to the cockpit? No! Not up into a rotor arc. Come on… come on!

Locking her jaws to keep her teeth from chattering, she leaned forward and slammed her fist into the deck, both out of frustration and to drive some feeling back into her hand.

"Gray Lady." The two minutes were gone, and Arkady's voice was level again, controlled or resigned. "Taking departure for Bellingshausen Base. Good luck. We'll see you guys after the blow."

"Arkady, you don't have enough fuel!"

"Don't sweat it, Gray Lady. I can stretch what we've got. I'm jettisoning the MAD pod and the dunking sonar—"

Amanda's head snapped up. "Wait! Hold it! The dunking sonar! Arkady, hold on to that sonar pod and maintain station for one more minute!"

She turned to Chief Muller. "Chief, could we recover Zero One on the transducer tether of the dunking sonar?"

"Hell!" Muller exclaimed. "I've never heard of anyone trying it before."

"Neither have I, Gray Lady," Arkady added over the circuit, "but all of a sudden it sounds better than dropping in on the Russians for a long weekend. Are you set to receive the tether?"

"Acknowledged, Zero One. Bring it in now."

Amanda scrambled to her feet and lifted her voice over the gale. "Recovery crews, stand by! Watch yourselves, because we'll be doing a pickup on a sonar dome. Chief, get that winch clear! You, the guy with the heavy wire cutters! Stand ready! We're going to be needing you."

The Sea Comanche was nosing in again, gingerly trying to avoid the backsweep of the mast array while positioning to lower the transducer onto the helipad.

They could see the teardrop-shaped sound head swinging pendulously beneath the aircraft. Unlike the dedicated RAST line, it packed enough mass to shatter bone should anyone fail to get out of its path. The handling crew huddled back against the superstructure as Arkady centered the helo. Then the tether reel was released and the dome crashed down within the confines of the crash barriers with enough impact to crack the deck tiling.

"Go!"

The brawniest of the deck hands dove across the helipad and piled onto the transducer as if it were an opposing quarterback, containing it before the wave action could flip it away over the side. The sailor carrying the wire cutters followed them in, clipping through the tether just short of the dome. Another Aviation Division rating cradled the severed device in his arms like an infant and struggled back to the deckhouse with it.

Arkady dumped more line and backed away, giving both himself and the recovery crew marginally more room to work. The recovery hands hogged the cable back across the deck to the winch, looking as if they were engaged in a tug-of-war with the helicopter. It was a contest they would have had no chance of winning. One bad move on the pilot's part, or one exceptional wave or wind burst, and the tether would be whipped away over the side, probably taking one or more of its handlers with it.

They got the line to the winch and they clustered around it. They remained there for too long.

"Chief, what is the problem now?" Amanda yelled, coming to stand at the CPO's shoulder.

"The friggin' winch guide won't accept the tether! The cable's the wrong diameter!"

"Damn, damn, damn!"

"We'll have to rig another winch, Captain!"

"We don't have that kind of time!"

Wildly, she looked around the deck. Alternatives! The aircraft tie-downs wouldn't do it. Nor was there anything that would work in the winch compartment. For the first time, Amanda cursed the starkness mandated by the Duke's stealth design. Then she saw the personnel hatch just forward of the elevator.

Dropping down beside it, she tore up the recessed dogging lever and threw the hatch open onto its holdback latch.

Down below in the brightly illuminated hangar bay, startled Air Division hands looked up at her.

"Get me two four-by-four shoring spars from the damage control locker and a heavy cable shackle," she screamed. "Move!"

At the other end of the tether, Vince Arkady maintained his precarious balancing act, his eyes flicking from the Sea Comanche's instrumentation to the hazy constellation of ship's lights beneath its nose. In the odd moments he could spare for the FLIR display, all that could be seen were an endless series of green and black storm rollers arcing across

infinity.

"Lieutenant," Grestovitch reported levelly. "Just letting you know that we're starting to get ice buildup in the air intakes."

"I know, Gus. I can feel the power loss."

Lift loss too. The rotors were icing as well. Occasionally there was a soft, clicking impact on the outside of the cockpit as a fragment was flung free of the blades. Soon the Sea Comanche would grow weary of its burden and sink down into the sea.

"Hope those guys don't take all night about this."

That was a given. Arkady didn't bother to answer.

The copper sulfate taste of fear was starting to build in the back of his throat. A little while ago, he'd bragged in front of a lady that he'd never been afraid of any aircraft in his life. That had been an inexact statement.

All airmen fear the weather.

Most won't admit it, but the fear is there. Weather doesn't give a damn how good you are, or how well trained, or how lucky. It just fills up your sky, and if you can't escape to the ground, or get out of its way, it kills you with the bland indifference of a boulder rolling over a bug.

"Retainer, this is Gray Lady." Amanda's voice sounded in his earphones, distorted by wind roar and the feedback from the helo. "We have a further complication. The RAST system won't take the tether. You'll have to bring yourself down with your pod winch. We'll give you the word just as soon as we get things secured on this end."

Out of the corner of his eye, the aviator followed the undulating snake of the cable down from his wing until it disappeared into the red glow of the helipad.

"Why not?" he sighed.

The cable end was bent around the center of the two shoring spars and a wrench flashed as the bolts of the shackle were tightened.

"All secure, Captain!" the AC hand yelled up from the deck of the hangar bay.

"Right. Everyone down there stand clear! Way clear!"

Amanda returned her attention to deck level. "All hands! Turn loose of that cable and get back up against the superstructure!"

As she waited for her order to be obeyed, she called in to the bridge. "Ken, we're bringing him down now. Stand by."

"Aye, aye. We're set."

"Retainer Zero One. We're ready to recover. Stand by."

"Roger, Gray Lady. Let's get it done."

She took a final look around to make sure the pad was clear, then she scrambled back herself.

"Retainer, commence recovery now!"

"Executing approach. Up dome!"

The tether went taut and the shoring beams whipped upward and jammed across the hatch frame with a crash that made the deck shudder. Riding that pull, the shadowy outline of the Sea Comanche began to sweep down out of the storm rack.

"Up dome!" Arkady was pushing his flying skill beyond consciousness, adapting and responding to a multitude of different factors simultaneously, with each second. Wind, power settings, rate of descent, the movement of the deck, the need to keep the undesigned load from stripping the gears of the reel drive.

The helipad target grew larger rapidly, then too rapidly, as the Cunningham bucked like a mustang trying to rid itself of a horsefly.

Arkady flared back, heaving taut. However, as the ship fell away once more, he felt Zero One twist in midair. Shit! The off-center drag from the sonar pod was now rolling them onto their side. Instead of trying to correct, Arkady dumped pitch and dove, followed the deck down. An instant later, the undercarriage hit with a crash that took up every millimeter of the shock-absorber play.

Arkady's hands flew around the cockpit. Fuel flow off! Battle damage switches on! Ground brakes locked! Rotor brake engaged!

"Gus, lock the winch reel!"

"Got it!"

Master power off!

"Let's get out of this thing!" Arkady yelled.

"No shit, Lieutenant!"

The canopies swung open and the freezing blast from outside erased the pocket of warm air they had contained in a microsecond. As the two aviators swung down from the cockpit, the tie-down crew moved forward, waiting for the windmill of the rotors to slow before approaching the helo.

"Glad you made it, sir," Chief Muller yelled, coming up to Arkady. "Real rough night out." "Tell me about it, Chief."

Looking forward, Arkady saw a figure, still slender in her cold-weather gear, standing outlined in the glare of the red work arcs.

Up on the bridge, Commander Ken Hiro shifted his vision from one bank of video monitors to another. One set was focused aft, covering the events developing on the helipad. The others, aimed forward, were operating in low-light mode. Scanning the sea ahead of the ship, they granted the bridge crew and the lookout team vision in the now near-total darkness of the failing day.

One of those lookouts now sang out. "Object in the water. Bearing five degrees off the port bow, sir."

More than an object. Hiro saw a small hill's worth of ice rolling down on them, a berg fragment being driven into the destroyer's path by the force of the storm.

"Hard to starboard! Come right to zero zero zero degrees!"

There was just barely enough time to get on the MC-1.

"Beware on deck! We're going into the trough!"

Amanda felt her ship turning across the weather even before Hiro's warning call thundered out of the deck speakers. The only constructive thing she could do in the seconds she had was to knock the open deck hatch off its holdbacks and slam it partially shut on the helo tether. A moment later, a wall of dark water curled up over the portside rail and collapsed down upon everyone on deck.

As with the others of the recovery team, Amanda had been suffering from the slow, invasive chill coming on from the freezing spray and wind. The shock of this glacial-temperature inundation, though, made the heart stagger and slam in the chest and vision gray out.

Amanda clung to the hatch frame until the liquid avalanche had passed. Shaking the salt water out of her eyes, she looked up and around. The majority of the other deckhands had been scythed down by the wave as well, and now, literally looming over them, was a new threat.

There had been no chance to get Retainer Zero One's tie-downs secure. Its only hard connection with the deck was the single point of the sonar dome tether. Now, as the ship wallowed broadside on to the gale, the helicopter began to pivot around that hard point, skidding wildly across the slick decking with the force of the roll.

In the bloody deck lights, the angular form of the helo resembled some insectoid horror from a 1950s science-fiction film, striving to break out of the pen of the containment barriers. As Amanda looked on, the sweeping Fenestron flattened two hands who had failed to get clear in time. Then she saw a third figure riding the side of the copter's fuselage like a cowboy trying to bulldog an out-sized steer.

It was Arkady.

"No!"

She tried to scramble to her feet but found that she was fouled in the tangle of her lifeline and headset lead. Frantically, she struggled to kick clear as the ship reached the farside of its roll to starboard.

Arkady bailed off the helicopter as it began its reverse swing. Dragging the two injured men to their feet, he shoved them forward toward the safety of the superstructure. Instead of following, though, he recovered one of the nylon restraint straps they had been carrying and snubbed one end through a tie-down. The aviator was not going to allow his aircraft to kill itself.

Amanda tore off her headset and hit her safety-belt release, freeing herself, but too late to intervene.

Another deluge raked the destroyer's decks. This time, no one topside could even feel the searing cold of it. As Zero One began its new wild arc across the helipad, Arkady threw himself flat, letting the low-riding tail boom sweep over him. As the helo hesitated at the neutral point between waves, he rolled over onto his back and reached up, snapping the free end of the restraint to a hardpoint under the fuselage.

Captured, Zero One jerked up short.

A moment later, Chief Muller led the general charge to surround the helo and complete the tie-down. Amanda saw a set of wheel chocks adrift at her feet and she caught them up. Joining the rush, she dropped down beside one of the landing-gear trucks and pounded the rubber wedges into place on either side of the tire.

A third wave sluiced across the deck, but without the intensity of the first two. With her turbines outscreaming the wind, the Cunningham was coming around again, clawing her way out of the trough to face the storm once more. It took a while longer to finish battening down the helipad. A dozen more restraint straps had to be linked between Zero One and the deck tie-downs and ratcheted tight. Her rotors were folded back and secured as well, all by men and women who were beginning to stagger as much from exhaustion and exposure as from the movement of the ship.

A growing sense of dull unreality was beginning to fall upon Amanda. So much so that she failed to recognize the symptoms of her own critical loss of body heat. The only thing that seemed to catch in her mind were momentary flashes of Arkady's face as he worked around his aircraft. When she finally led her people back toward the shelter of the superstructure, the glowing oval of the watertight door seemed to be a hundred miles away.