Target America

83

Ensign Joseph Fivecoat was an SH-60 Seahawk pilot who specialized in search and rescue (SAR). He was attached to the maritime helicopter strike squadron HSM 71. They called themselves the Raptors, and when they were not stationed at NASNI, they were deployed with Carrier Strike Group Three aboard the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74). Fivecoat was twenty-four years old and three-quarters Cherokee on his father’s side. He’d grown up near the reservation in western North Carolina as the youngest of five children, entering the navy through the ROTC program.

The moment the base went on alert, he scrambled to his helo and warmed up the engines in preparation for emergency takeoff. His CO had been taken off of flight status the day before due to an ear infection, and so far no one had been assigned to replace him. He had no idea why the base had been put on alert, but he knew the national defense condition was set at Cocked Pistol, and he wasn’t about to let his helo be caught on the ground in the event of an attack, so he kept the rotors turning slowly. He was still sitting in the cockpit awaiting orders when his squadron commander pulled up in a Marine Humvee and got out.

Fivecoat opened his door. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Do you know where Second Street dead ends into Alameda?” the commander asked.

“You mean right outside the base, sir?”

“That’s right. I just received a call from the secretary of defense ordering me to send the first helo smoking to that intersection. You’re the helo with the rotors turning, so you get the nod. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, Ensign, but it’s goddamn serious, whatever it is, so get this bird in the air and get over there.” He clapped Fivecoat on the shoulder and shut the door.

Fivecoat didn’t have time to even guess at what the helo was needed for. He was airborne within sixty seconds and flying southeast across the base less than two hundred feet off the deck. Within a few seconds, he could see the intersection of Second Street and Alameda Boulevard. There was a large circle in the street made of road flares, and dozens of cops and firemen standing around waving their arms like madmen.

“Christ,” he muttered to himself. “Somebody real important must be dyin’ down there.”

He didn’t like the looks of the power lines, so he chose to set down on base property right across the street inside the eight-foot perimeter wall where a pair of Marines were already opening a maintenance gate, apparently having anticipated his desire to avoid the power lines.

Before he had the wheels on the ground, the young ensign could see two men rushing toward the helo pushing a medical gurney. There was a green lump on the gurney about the size of the footlocker back in his billet. He noticed everyone cutting the gurney a wide birth while rushing past. Even the Marines moved quickly aside as the two men — one of whom was dressed in shorts and flip-flops — rolled the gurney through the gate onto base property and right up to the helo.

They each grabbed an end of the lump and heaved it aboard the aircraft. The guy in flip-flops climbed in on the copilot’s side, and the younger-looking Arabic fellow got into the back with the green lump.

Fivecoat saw the bone-frog tattoo on Flip-flops’s arm and realized he was a Navy SEAL.

“Get us out to sea as fast and as far as you can!” the SEAL said over the whir of the rotors. “And keep it on the deck. We only got five minutes until the damn thing goes off.”

Fivecoat stole a startled look in the back, where the younger man sat against the bulkhead staring at what he now saw was a green metal box. “Until what thing goes off?”

“That!” Brighton said, pointing into the back. “The nuke. They didn’t tell you?”

Fivecoat shook his head, feeling cruelly betrayed. “Nobody told me shit — just to get the hell over here!”

“Fuck! You were supposed to be a volunteer!”

“I didn’t volunteer for a goddamn thing!”

“Four minutes!” Samir shouted from the back.

Brighton looked Fivecoat in the eyes. “The choice is yours, son. You can take off and die a hero by saving San Diego Bay, or you can sit here on the ground and die with half a million other people. I’m sorry those are your only options, but we’re outta fuckin’ time here.”

Fivecoat’s mind went numb as his training kicked in, and he put his feet on the antitorque pedals. He twisted the collective lever to lift the helo back into the air and eased the cyclic forward, nosing the aircraft toward the Pacific Ocean. “If you’re gonna jump out,” he heard himself say, “now’s the time.”

Brighton smiled. “We’re coming with you.”

Fivecoat nodded, minding the power lines as the helo picked up speed and left the base behind, flying barely 150 feet off the deck toward the southwest. “If we fly due west,” he said, grabbing a headset and handing it to Brighton, “we might still be too close to Point Loma when it goes off.”

“Understood.” Brighton pulled on the headset and adjusted the mike. “We go wherever you take us.”

“Three minutes!” Samir called out.

“Does he gotta call out the time like that?” Fivecoat asked over the mike.

Brighton glanced into the back, where Samir’s eyes were glued to the timer. “Yeah, I think he does. He’s hoping it won’t go off because of the corrosion.”

Fivecoat nodded. “Okay, we’re at a hundred forty-six knots. Maxed out at a hundred seventy miles an hour.”

Brighton returned his gaze to the northeast, still able to see Point Loma. “Can you squeeze a little more out of it?”

Fivecoat frowned at him. “Who’s flying this thing?”

Brighton could see the conflicting emotions in the young ensign’s eyes: mixed feelings of betrayal and determination. “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry as hell about this.”

“It’s not all bad,” Fivecoat said, looking forward at the horizon, wondering if he would feel anything when it happened. “I’ll be the twenty-ninth Indian to win the Medal of Honor. That’ll make my mother proud.”

“I’m sure she’s proud already.”

“Two minutes!”

“Barely time enough to sing a song,” Brighton muttered, thinking about his son. He hadn’t called his wife because he was too afraid, too afraid of making her cry, something he’d been putting off for months now.

He chuckled ironically, befuddled by how much easier it was to die than to break the heart of a woman who did not deserve it.

He heard Fivecoat’s voice asking him in the headset, “What’s funny?”

“Nothing really. Just pondering my cowardice.”

Fivecoat gave him a look. “You’re willingly riding a fuckin’ nuke into the wild blue yonder.”

“Yes, I am,” Brighton said. Then he laughed. “You bet your ass I am.”

“One minute!”

Brighton looked into the back, the mirth still visible in his eyes. “Any last confessions?”

Samir looked at him for a sorrowful moment, but then his face finally cracked into a grin. “I used to jerk off to my aunt Rida when I was kid! She doesn’t speak any English, but she’s got great tits.”

Brighton laughed. “Mine’s worse. I was going to leave my wife for another woman.” He smacked Fivecoat on the helmet. “What about you?”

Fivecoat looked at him with a melancholy smile. “One time I was—” He spotted the silhouette of a trimaran-hulled warship a thousand yards to starboard steaming due north at flank speed. “Oh, shit… we’ve killed the Coronado.”

Brighton whipped his head around, seeing “The Crown of the Fleet,” the USS Coronado (LCS-4), an independence-class littoral war ship designed with stealth technology to combat potential asymmetric threats in the littoral zones close to shore.

Brighton touched the glass with his fingertips. “Sorry, guys.”

The RA-115 detonated just under seven miles southwest of Point Loma with a blast of 1.8 kilotons, vaporizing the helo and everyone aboard in a microsecond. The shock wave shot out to a radius of two kilometers, wiping out not only the Coronado but also three trawlers and a handful of sailboats. Hundreds of tons of sea water flash-boiled, and the mushroom cloud zoomed to almost twenty-thousand feet over the next few minutes, visible for miles inland.