Sea Strike

24

“What do you think, Arkady?”

“About what?”

“Submarine hunting.”

“Mucho divertimento. Very interesting work if you can get it.”

They were heading home, back to the Cunningham. Surfing low over the ocean’s surface, the Sea Comanche’s rotor wash whipped spray up behind her, spinning a rainbow in her wake as the wave crests flickered beneath her. Arkady was again flying with all stealth protocols closed up, seeking to avoid undue attention. Snowy contrails arcing across the blue of the sky marked the passing of other aircraft in the higher reaches, exact identity and intent unknown.

“What’s your opinion of the tech we’re going to be facing?”

Amanda persisted. She knew more than a little about the subject herself, but Vince Arkady was a dedicated LAMPS helo pilot. As such, he was perforce a master of the trade.

The aviator considered for a moment before replying.

“Better than first gen, anyway. The Reds are running albacore hulls and single-screw propulsion trains. I’d call the Han attack boats the equivalent of an early mark Permit class or an augmented Russian Victor 1. Early-seventies stuff, maybe with a few systems updated with imported tech.”

“How about the missile boat?”

“The same, only more so. Have you ever seen pictures of a surfaced Xia? They have a free-flooding deck casing around their missile tubes. I bet when that sucker maneuvers, it sounds like somebody flushing the John.”

“So you don’t think finding these guys is going to be a problem?”

Arkady twisted in his harness and peered at her around the seat back. “Finding a sub is always a problem, just, in this case, maybe not an overwhelming one. What I am wondering about is what we’re supposed to do with these guys after we do find them.”

“That is for wiser heads than us to decide.”

Arkady grunted into the interphone. “Yeah, well, in my experience, ASW is sort of like hunting rattlesnakes with an irrigation shovel. If you manage to find one of the damn things, you have about two seconds to kill it. After that it either crawls into a hole and disappears, or it comes after you.”

It was an ominously succinct assessment.

An outsider intruded into their conversation. The filtered voice of the Cunningham’s air boss sounded in their earphones, feeding them a new intercept bearing out to the ship.

Diverted, Arkady acknowledged the call, replying in kind with a GPU fix and an estimated time of arrival.

Amanda’s twenty-four-hour lack of sleep suddenly seemed to overtake her. Either that, or a sudden subliminal desire to escape the loom of this new bank of problems. The August sun pouring down through the helicopter’s canopy made her skin prickle and burn, and she tried to seek out a fragment of shade in the corner of the cramped cockpit. She closed her eyes.