Golden Buddha

33

ADAMS eased the cyclic to the left and banked the R-44. A few seconds earlier he had passed to port of the Chinese corvette and had just picked up a glimpse of the vessel through the fog. It was a wonder the Chinese vessel had not fired on him—surely they had detected the helicopter as it flew toward land. The frigate was fast approaching and Adams planned to give it a wide berth.

He was keeping the Robinson five to ten feet above the tops of the waves—maybe that was shielding him from detection, but Adams doubted it. To avoid radar detection, he needed to be closer to the wave tops—two, three feet maximum. With the weapons pods hanging from each side of his skids and seawater detrimental to their correct operation, Adams was taking no chances. If he had to trade avoiding fire from the Chinese ships to arriving too high to help his team members, he’d do it.

Adams eased forward on the cyclic and watched as the governor adjusted his rotor speed. He was doing 130 miles an hour, and according to his calculations he should be seeing the first Zodiac one minute forty-five seconds after he passed the frigate. He strained his eyes to catch sight of the Chinese vessel, while at the same time watching the dash-mounted storm scope, which was sending a radar signal into the weather.

HUXLEY pointed to the dash of the Zodiac but said nothing.

Seng nodded, then bent down and shouted into her ear. “If I was to guess,” he screamed, “I’d say we have something partially blocking the raw water intake holes on the drive. Might be something as simple as a piece of soaked paper or part of a plastic bag—the problem is, we need to stop and raise the outboard out of the water to check.”

“It doesn’t seem to be getting any worse,” Julia Huxley said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Seng said. “We are in the low red and staying there. If the engine can run at those temperatures for a little longer, we might just make it out of here alive.”

Huxley scanned the water through the fog as they raced along. She turned and caught a quick glimpse of the Zodiac being piloted by Kasim off the starboard stern. The pair of diesel cruisers had yet to get close enough to catch sight of either vessel, and if they maintained their speed they never would.

“Too bad we can’t ask for a time out,” Huxley said, “so I can clean the water intake.”

Eddie Seng strained to hear Huxley’s voice over the noise of his racing outboard motor. Something else was causing his ears to perk up—a slight thumping coming from the bow. Then, through the fog, he caught a glimpse of the R-44. And a voice came over the radio.

THE command bridge on the Gale Force was a buzz of shouted instructions. Messages were repeated more than once as the news that the Oregon was starting a turn back to land was relayed from radar operator to captain, captain to helmsman, then around to the other officers. The event was relayed to the captains of the corvette and the frigate, who immediately began to slow.

Captain Ching figured it would take the Oregon close to a nautical mile to complete the turn.

Once again, Ching would underestimate.

WITH magnetohydrodynamics engines powering the Oregon, there was no need to slow down to change directions on the drives. There were no shafts to twist, no props to bend, no gears to strip. The water jets from the stern came out of a rectangular shaft with a scoop on the end that could be diverted like the thrust of a Harrier jet engine to the fore or to the rear. With the push of a few buttons, one of the propulsion engineers could divert the flow of one engine forward and one back and the Oregon would almost pivot on her keel, so long as the speeds were kept below thirty knots. Such an abrupt maneuver made for a rough ride—the ship would kneel over and the gunwales would dip almost into the water—but the Corporation had done it more than once. Other than a few broken dishes and other objects being tossed around, the Oregon had been none the worse for the wear.

The engineer plotted in a turn-radius profile on the computer that resembled a U-turn. Then he alerted the control room that they were ready. Once the ship commander gave the order, the engineer simply pushed a button and held on to a nearby table as the Oregon threaded herself across the surface of the water as if she were on rails. Down in the engine room, Sam Pryor glanced over at Gunther Reinholt, who had just disconnected his IV and was sipping from a cup of strong coffee after inputting the command for the turn.

“Elementary, Mr. Reinholt,” Pryor said, smiling.

“Indubitably, Mr. Pryor,” Reinholt said.

Both men stared at the lying-down U-shaped track on the computer screen for a second.

“Mr. Chairman,” Reinholt said over the intercom, “we’re ready when you are.”

“WE’RE going to do a fast turn and bunch up the three ships chasing us,” Cabrillo said over a scrambled radio link. “You will need to take out the pair of cruisers fast so the Zodiacs can slow before they run up on the stern of the frigate.”

“Understand,” Adams said.

“We’ll alert Seng and Kasim to slow as soon as the cruisers are disabled.”

“I’ll blow all the ordnance of the port pod on the lead cruiser,” Adams said, “and the starboard on the following craft. That should stop them cold.”

“Do your best to hit them in the sterns,” Cabrillo said. “If possible, we want to keep casualties to a minimum.”

AT almost the same instant that the lead harbor police patrol boat caught sight of Kasim’s Zodiac in the lessening fog, the lookout also reported a helicopter approaching from out to sea. Adams had turned and looped the R-44 around to intercept the lead boat straight on her rear quarter. Placing the crosshairs on the firing screen on the rear third of the forty-six-foot aluminum ship, Adams flipped a switch so all the missiles were targeted to the same spot just above the waterline.

Then he took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

The lookout caught a quick glimpse of the bubble canopy of the helicopter a second before the port weapons pod erupted with a volley of four missiles. The missiles were small—only slightly thicker than a man’s arm—but their noses were packed with high explosives. With a six-foot plume of fire belching from the rear, the missiles raced across the gap and slammed into the side of the lead cruiser and severed the bow from the stern as easily as a machete through a pineapple.

The captain just had time to sound the alarm to abandon ship before the bow started sinking.

“NOW, Mr. Reinholt,” Cabrillo said as an alarm sounded throughout the ship.

Reinholt reached up to the console and pushed a red button, then took hold of the table next to him in a death grip. The Oregon keeled over and started to turn. It was as if the ship were on the track of a roller coaster. The g forces were severe. Everyone in the ship clutched the nearest immovable object and bent their knees like mogul skiers on a gnarly slope. A few moments later, the Oregon came out of the fallen U and rolled upright again.

Lincoln, sitting in a tall fire control chair with a seat belt across his lap, shouted, “Yeah, baby.”

“We’ll pass abreast of the hydrofoil in twenty seconds,” Hanley said.

“Hit them in the pontoon, Mr. Lincoln,” Cabrillo said.

“WHAT the—” Ching started to say as he watched the massive cargo ship change directions. “Hard a’ port,” he ordered.

But before the order could be carried out, the Oregon was almost alongside them.

“EVERYWHEREI go, I’m just a gigolo…,” Lincoln sang as he lined up his target and fired.

The missile battery on the bow of the Oregon popped up and rotated toward the target. Now, at Lincoln’s command, a pair of Harpoon missiles burst from their launchers and streaked across the distance. They slammed into the thin slab-sided pontoon that reached down into the water and blew it off as cleanly as a guillotine would a finger.

The Gale Force was still making fast forward speed when she was hit. Once the pontoon allowing her to ride up above the waterline disappeared, her main deck lurched to the side, then began to topple over. She didn’t quite flip over on her back—it was more of a crippled disintegration into the water. The helmsman managed to place the engines in neutral before she flipped, and that saved lives if not the ship.

A minute after being hit, the Gale Force had her decks awash and she was rapidly sinking.

Captain Deng Ching was bleeding from his nose and mouth after slamming into the command console. He was in a daze from pain. The second in command gave the order to abandon ship.

“A helicopter just attacked,” the captain of the rapidly sinking harbor police boat shouted into a portable radio as he climbed into the emergency raft. “Our boat is sinking.”

“Understood,” the captain of the second harbor boat said. “We’ll come pick you up.”

“I’ll shoot a flare.”

“We’ll watch for it.”

Then the captain turned to a sailor nearby. “Man the deck gun,” he said quickly, “and if any aircraft approaches, shoot it down.”

The first time had worked so well, Adams decided to do it again. Once again approaching from the port side, he lined up the crosshairs on the second harbor boat and pushed the button. Nothing happened. Perhaps the starboard weapons pod had been splashed with more seawater than had the port. Maybe it was simply that the few extra minutes of time had allowed the fog and rain to seep into the circuitry. It could have been a glitch—this was the first time the weapons pod had been used—and rarely did a system work flawlessly the first time out.

Whatever the case, the missiles wouldn’t fire from the tubes.

The R-44 passed over the harbor patrol boat just as the sailor yanked back the lever on the deck gun and flicked off the safety. He pivoted the gun to the correct height and started shooting at the rear of the retreating helicopter. Adams felt the cyclic get mushy as a single bullet nicked a control rod to the main rotor. He flew away into the fog to assess the situation.

“Control,” he said over a secure channel on the radio. “I’ve eliminated one target, but now my horse is wounded and they broke my bow.”

Hanley took the call in the control room of the Oregon.

He scanned the radar screen before answering. “Do you have control of the craft?”

“It’s not too bad,” Adams said calmly. “I think I can set her down okay.”

“We’re coming in your direction now,” Hanley said. “Blow the pods and bring the ship home.”

“What do you mean?” Adams asked.

“There’s a toggle switch on the weapons control panel,” Hanley said. “Flip up the cover and lower the switch and the racks will drop free. We’ll deal with the second boat.”

Adams started an arc toward the harbor boat. “Give me a second,” he said. “I have an idea.”

ACROSS the room, Juan Cabrillo was on the satellite telephone to Langston Overholt in Virginia.

“We had to sink the vessel closest to us,” he said. “But there’s a corvette and a frigate still to contend with.”

Overholt was pacing in his office while talking on the speaker phone. In front of his desk, sitting in a chair and dressed in full uniform, was a United States Navy commander who was attached to the CIA. “I have a naval officer here in my office. My superiors are worried about fallout if you attack and sink the other two ships. How far away from you are they?”

“We are in no imminent danger for a few more minutes,” Cabrillo stated.

“If we can stop them in their tracks,” Overholt asked, “can you effect an escape?”

Cabrillo thought for a minute before answering. “We can retrieve our men and the object we came for and be back at full steam in five to ten minutes,” he said. “As long as the Chinese don’t launch any planes at us, I think we will be home free.”

“As of this instant,” Overholt said, “the only radio transmission that got through was about a helicopter attacking a harbor police boat. Right now, at least as far as the Chinese are concerned, you’re just a cargo ship they can’t reach on the radio. That could change, however, once the survivors of the ship you sank are collected.”

“By then we should be far out to sea traveling south,” Cabrillo said, “and back into the fog bank. With the electronics on board, we can hide from ship-to-sea radar. The fog will keep us hidden from above.”

Overholt turned to the navy commander. “Will this new device affect our ship as well?”

“Not if they turn all the electronics off as it passes alongside.”

“Juan,” Overholt said, “did you hear that?”

“Yes,” he said, “but I don’t understand.”

“It’s a new toy the navy has,” Overholt said, “called a FRITZY. It is designed to short out electrical circuits and we believe it will disable the remaining ships. What we’ll need you to do is shut down all the systems on the Oregon when we give you the order.”

Eric Stone was scanning the radar and said, “We’re coming up on the Zodiacs now.”

“Slow to stop,” Cabrillo ordered. “Prepare to take our people aboard.”

ADAMS climbed to three thousand feet, then dove toward the harbor boat in the steepest angle the R-44 could handle. He could feel his body go light in the seat, and then tighten against the shoulder harness. Through the Plexiglas bubble windscreen, the harbor boat came into view, then grew in size as he streaked down from above.

The bow gunner tried firing on the helicopter, but his arc of fire was limited by the wheelhouse directly behind him. The gunner got off a few hundred rounds while the helicopter was still high in the air, but the rounds went wide and then he could fire no more.

Adams raced down in a steep dive. When he was only eighty feet above the stern, he pulled back on the cyclic and up on the collective. This slowed the dive, then began to raise the nose. Just as the R-44 hit the bottom of her arc, Adams flipped up the cover and down on the toggle switch. Both pods dropped from the sides of the helicopter and plunged straight down into the stern of the last harbor police boat. A static spark from the pods being cut loose fired one of the remaining missiles and it streaked down the last twenty feet, igniting the rear of the boat in a maelstrom of destruction.

With the weight and drag of the pods gone, Adams found he had better control. Turning the Robinson toward the direction of the Oregon, he began to scan the water for the outline of the ship.

“Scratch two,” he said quietly. “I’m coming home.”

WHEN a person is far out in the ocean and the weather is bad, the sight of anything man-made brings comfort and solace. For the seven people and one Golden Buddha on the small boats being chased by the Chinese navy, the bow of the Oregon looming up through the fog was as welcome as the sight of four of a kind to a losing poker player.

“Steer over to the davits,” Hanley said over the radio. “We need to get you aboard fast.”

The two Zodiac pilots eased their boats into a pair of davits located off the port and starboard stern of the Oregon. The deckhands had the boats and the people hoisted through the air and back on the deck in less than two minutes. Murphy was climbing off the Zodiac when Franklin Lincoln walked over.

“I played with your toy,” he said. “You can put another ship sticker on the console.”

Murphy smiled. “Good shooting, Tex.”

“Everyone okay?” Lincoln asked.

“All but Jones,” Murphy said, pointing. “We need to carry him to sick bay.”

Lincoln walked across the deck to the second Zodiac and stared inside. “Jones,” he said, smiling, “you look pitiful.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Jones said. “My ribs are killing me.”

“You do what you set out to do?” Lincoln asked.

“Always,” Jones said, pointing to the case containing the Golden Buddha. “Now get me below to the sick bay and fill me up with painkillers.”

“Up you go,” Lincoln said as he reached into the inflatable and carefully lifted Jones from the floor as easily as plucking a puppy from a litter.

“THREE minutes to fire,” a voice said over the intercom on board the Santa Fe. Down in the launch bay, the pair of modified Tomahawk cruise missiles with the experimental FRITZY electronic destruction modules sat ready to launch. The FRITZY system used a burst of electronic waves to scramble the circuitry of any powered electronics. Captain Farragut was waiting anxiously for the launch. The anxiety did not stem from being worried about his crew’s actions—they were highly trained and would perform the task flawlessly. It was caused by the unknown. Farragut was curious if FRITZY was all it was cracked up to be—and if he could soon claim the crown as the first commander to use it in battle. That fact might help at promotion time; at the very least it would be worth a few free drinks once the Santa Fe made port again.

“Doors open, sir,” the chief of boat said, “and all is in order.”

“WE see you,” Hanley said to Adams, “but you need to land now.”

Adams was making his approach behind the stern of the Oregon and lining up for his descent onto the landing pad.

“Two minutes or so,” Adams said.

“In a minute thirty,” Hanley said, staring at a timer, “your electronics will cease to function.”

“Clear the decks,” Adams said loudly. “I’ll climb, then shut the engine off and initiate auto-rotation.”

“Fire-foam the decks,” Hanley said over the intercom. “We shut down all the electrical power in one minute.”

Many people think that once a helicopter loses power it plunges from the sky. Actually, if power to the rotor is lost, the pilot can use the wind from his descent to spin the blades. The procedure, auto-rotation, is tricky, but the maneuver has saved more than a few lives over the years. Usually the pilot has a reasonably large field or clearing to land on. Doing a forced auto-rotation onto a pad just slightly bigger than the helicopter herself takes nerves of steel and fortitude. Adams used his minute to gain altitude. Then he lined up behind the landing pad. When his watch said it was time, he flicked off the governor and rolled back the throttle. The R-44’s freewheeling unit engaged and the drive shaft to the main and tail rotor disconnected.

Adams reached up and turned off the key.

Suddenly, without the noise from the engine, it was strangely quiet, the only sounds the whooshing of the wind racing past the fuselage and the sound from Adams’s lips as he whistled Bobby Darrin’s “Mack the Knife.” The R-44 was making a steeper descent than normal, but Adams was in complete control.

Only when all the lights on the Oregon went dark in the fog did he give it a second thought.

“ONE away,” the chief of boat said quietly. “Now two.”

The cruise missiles left the launch tubes and streaked skyward, then turned and dived down to wave level. Programmed to the target by a sophisticated computer, the missiles raced toward the Chinese corvette and the frigate at 450 kilometers an hour. Once the cruise missiles were close to the two ships, they sent out a concentrated burst of electronic friction similar to that emitted after an atomic bomb blast.

The electronic circuits throughout both ships shorted as cleanly as if a switch had been thrown. The engines ceased to function and the electronics in the wheelhouse and below went black. Both ships slowed in the water just as a burst of wind and rain raked across the sea.

“YEE-HA!” Adams SHOUTED as the wind hit the R-44.

He was eighty feet back of the stern and twenty feet in the air when he initiated his flare. Pulling up on the cyclic, he pitched the nose up using the drag on the powerless rotor to bleed off forward speed. He was four feet above the pad when the forward speed ceased and the Robinson dropped down on the deck with a thud. The foam reached halfway up the fuselage as Adams pulled on the rotor brake to stop the blades from spinning. Then he unlocked and pushed the door open. Next, he began to unsnap his harness.

Richard Truitt waded through the dissolving foam to the door as soon as the rotor stopped.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Shaken but not stirred.” Adams smiled. “What’s new?”

At just that instant the Oregon started moving again.

Truitt shrugged. “We’re heading out.”

“Open seas,” Adams said, climbing from the cockpit, “here we come.”

“Fill out a repair order,” Truitt said, “then meet me in the cafeteria. We need to do a little planning.”

The two men reached the edge of the foam just as a deckhand began to hose the foam over the side with a stream of seawater. They brushed flecks off their pants as they made their way to the door leading inside.

“Do I need to bring anything special?” Adams asked.

“High-altitude performance charts,” Truitt answered.