Target Lock

Java Sea, Northeast of the Laut Kecil Island Group 2205 Hours, Zone Time: August 15, 2008

Three hundred miles to the north, another carefully choreographed military evolution was under way.

To many, a visualization of the Indonesian archipelago would bring to mind tightly clustered green islands under a tropic sun, their azure waters busy with a multitude of small craft going about their affairs.

And so it was, in places.

Elsewhere, there are ’tween island straits broad enough to warrant the name of sea. No hint of land save for a cloudbank on a far horizon, no shipping, no movement save for the waves and the wheeling of a weary seabird in transit.

In the center of one such emptiness, the Sea Fighters came to rest. Coming off the pad, the PGACs powered down and settled to the surface of the sea, drifting silently beneath the ten million and one stars of the tropic night.

Steamer Lane slid open the cockpit side window, admitting a puff of sea-fresh air and the sound of waves lapping against the hull.

“Position check,” he called.

Ensign Terrence Wilder, the Queen of the West’s junior officer, thumbed a display call-up on the navigator’s console. “Sir, Navicom indicates we are on station for rendezvous,” he reported crisply. “I show matching coordinates on both Global Positioning Systems.”

Lane slipped his helmet off and balanced it on the bow of the instrument panel. “That’s good, Terr, we have arrived. Time check, Scrounge?”

“On the line, Skipper,” Caitlin replied. “Fifteen minutes to rendezvous if the Air ‘Farce’ is up to it.”

“Super good.” Lane donned the earphones of the Digital Walkman he had clipped to the sun visor. “Terry, you have the con. Position the Queen and Reb for the drop reception… quietly. I’m going to catch a fast forty. Gimme a yell when we have the replenishment bird in sight.”

Startled, Wilder looked forward from the Nav station. “Aye, aye, sir.”

A twangy whisper of California surf rock drifted across the cockpit as Lane reclined against the back of his seat. With a developed warrior’s knack, he was asleep in seconds, snatching the opportunity for brief refreshment.

Wilder hesitated, wrestling with his pride. But, as he was in fact an intelligent and capable young officer, he twisted his seat around to face the copilot’s station.

“Hey, Chief,” he whispered. “Could you help walk me through this? I’ve never handled a drop replenishment at sea before.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Wilder,” Scrounger Caitlin replied cheerfully, pulling a ring-bound procedures manual from the rack by her knee. “Nobody else has either.”

Fifty miles to the south, Lieutenant Colonel Edwina Mirkle, United States Air Force, looked forward, first through the night-vision visor of her flight helmet, then through the nite-brite-attuned Heads Up display, and finally out through the windscreen of her MC-130J. Her knuckles clinched white on the control yoke, and her eyes burned dryly from her fixed stare.

She was not tense in the conventional sense of the term. This was simply how one flew a Combat Talon when one was so low the six bladed Allison turboprops kicked rooster-tails off the wave tops and spume rattled against the nose. One stayed focused. Very, very focused.

After departing Curtin Field, the Air Commando transport had flown north conventionally from Australia until its sensitive IDECM (Integrated Defensive Electronic Countermeasures) arrays had sensed the Indonesian air defense net. The Talon had “gone tactical” then, staging incrementally lower and lower to stay under the radar net until they were literally skimming the surface of the sea.

The island of Flores had risen like a wall before them, and the MC-130 had climbed just enough to snake through one of the narrow passes in the central volcanic range, an unidentifiable black shadow blasting low over the isolated mountain villages.

The tension had risen incrementally when the Global Hawk drone, riding shotgun high overhead, had down-linked the warning of an interceptor scramble from an Indonesian air force base near Jakarta. However, the bewildered Anghkatan Udara Eurofighters soon turned back, the fragmentary radar track that had launched them having disappeared amid the lava crags.

Reaching water once more, the Talon returned to the deck, racing out over the Flores Sea, its stealthed radar cross section blurring into the surface return.

That had been two hundred over-ocean miles ago. The altimeters had read zero continuously ever since. For the Air Commandos of the U.S. Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing, the mission stank of the routine.

“Course correction,” Colonel Mirkle’s navigator murmured. “Come right five degrees to zero… one… two.”

Mirkle eased down on her right foot pedal, nudging the big plane into a slow skidding turn on the rudder alone, keeping the wings fixed dead level by the artificial horizon. A conventional bank would put a prop arc into the water, cartwheeling the Talon across the sea in a spectacular crash.

“Steering zero… one… two,” she read back.

“On the beam, ma’am. Ten minutes out. Global Hawk link verifies our customers are on station and waiting for us.”

“Thanks, Johnny. Ed, tell the chief to rig for payload extraction.”

As her copilot relayed the command to the loadmaster, Mirkle eased back minutely on the control yoke. The chief was going to be walking around back in the cargo bay, and the aircraft might bobble with the weight shift. Best to take her up a little.

Within the First Spec Ops Wing, Mirkle had a reputation as a cautious veteran pilot. Neither a hot dog nor a cowgirl, she recognized her own limitations and preferred leaving a margin for error.

The Talon climbed to a solid twenty-five feet and leveled off once more.

Maneuvering on their electric propulsors, the Queen of the West and the Manassas positioned a quarter of a mile apart, nose on to the wind and sea. Mast-Mounted Sighting Systems panned along the horizon, low-light television intently scanning for intruders, while ECM monitors suspiciously sniffed the ether.

Inboard, the auxiliary fuel blivets in the central bays of the hovercraft were flat and flaccid. The kerosene they had carried had either been consumed or transferred into the Sea Fighter’s integral tankage. With an assist from the Marines, the gunboat crews rolled and lashed the empty bladders into compact bundles for storage, making room for their replacements.

In the Queen’s cockpit, Ensign Wilder reached forward and touched Steamer Lane on the shoulder. “Sir, we have established a datalink with the replenishment aircraft. They’re on approach. Five minutes out. We are positioned for drop reception.”

Steamer came awake and functional as swiftly as he had dozed off. “Good work Terr,” he said snapping off the Walkman and returning his seat to an upright state. “What’s the environment, Scrounge?”

“Sterile water and clean threat boards,” Caitlin reported. “Wind direction and sea states are steady.”

Steamer glanced at his tactical display, verifying the setup. “Lookin’ good. Link to the transport we’re standing by and are go for drop. Beacons are going active. Then buzz the Rebel and tell ’em to light it up.”

Reaching up to the overhead control panel, Steamer adjusted the multimode navigational strobe atop the Queen’s stub mast to its infrared setting and switched it on.

Aboard the Combat Talon, the opening of the tail ramp fully admitted the thunder of the turboprops and the roar of the slipstream. Voices could no longer be heard without the medium of the intercom system.

Colonel Mirkle’s copilot called out the sighting. “Surface strobes off the bow. We have acquired the drop site. Bearing looks good. Approach looks good. Little Pig Lead reports ready to accept delivery.”

“Acknowledged.” She skid-turned the aircraft again, aiming precisely for the centerline between the two flashing points of light that had appeared in her night-vision visor. The IR strobes pulsing on the Navy gun boats would give her the base and depth line she would need for the coming LAPES extraction.

“ECM Officer, threat status.”

“Green boards, ma’am. Tactical environment reads secure.”

“Cargomaster, load status?”

“Chocks clear.” A wind-battered voice came back from the cargo bay. “Ramp clear. Drop station manned. Ready for extraction.”

“Very well.” Mirkle’s thumb depressed the drop light switch on her control yoke. “Red Ready light is on. Loadmaster, stand by for cargo release on green…. Copilot, configure for LAPES. Coming back on power…. Flaps down fifteen….”

The avalanche of noise issuing from the engines softened comparatively as Mirkle came back on the Talon’s throttles. Easing the nose up, she faded the massive aircraft back toward its minimal sustainable speed in level flight. Mirkle’s eyes danced in a last data acquisition sweep: engine readout, flight instrumentation, the seaborne beacon lights rushing toward them. She felt the first uneasy tremor in the control yoke hinting at the approaching stall limits.

“Stand by…” she murmured. Once more, her thumb lifted over the drop light switch.

Through their night-vision systems, the observers aboard the Queen of the West saw a massive chunk of shadow tear loose from the sky near the horizon. The shadow configured into a massive, high-winged transport aircraft that skimmed the wave crests. Nose high and with its quadruple propellers turning so slowly the blades could almost be counted, it seemed to float more than fly as it ghosted down upon them.

This was what they had been expecting. This was what they were here for. And yet, the Combat Talon’s abrupt materialization in the night proved startling.

Just as the airspeed indicator wound down to a dangerously low level, the MC-130 swept over the centerline between the two strobes on the ocean’s surface.

The marker strobes edged out of the vision field of her nite-brite visor, and Colonel Mirkle’s thumb came down on the drop-light switch, snapping the drop lights from red to green.

“Drop now! Drop now! Drop now!”

A ribbon chute streamed out behind the Combat Talon. Blossoming in the roaring night, it dragged the first full fuel blivet down the load tracks and out of the Talon’s tailgate.

This was LAPES, the Low-Altitude Precision Extraction System, the most expedient method conceivable of delivering cargo from an aircraft to the earth’s surface: Simply fly very low and kick it out the door. Stabilized and slowed by its drogue parachute, the hoped-for shock-resistant payload would then touch down and skid to a halt across the selected landing ground.

More specifically, this was LAPES-MD the Low-Altitude Precision Extraction System-Maritime Derivation. Instead of the collapsible cargo pallet used in a standard land-bound LAPES drop, the payload rode a Fiberglas hydrosled that would absorb the initial contact shock and prevent the payload from digging into the water and diving under.

In theory at least.

As the sled-mounted fuel blivet touched down, the sea exploded in a towering fan of glittering spray, lifting higher than the tail of the drop aircraft. The load sled burst through the spray wall a stalled heartbeat later, its multi-ton mass skipping across the wavecrests like a stone thrown by a titan, until the combined drag of the water and the parachute decelerated the mass.

With a final buck and wallow like a fighting bass, the blivet came to a halt, afloat and intact.

Cries of victory were screamed, and shoulders were pounded in the Queen’s cockpit.

The second loaded hydrosled followed the first out of the transport’s tail ramp, and then the Combat Talon was away, the shadow merging back with the night in a growing roar of departing power.

“Cargo away!” the load master cried. “We got clean drops!”

Colonel Mirkle disregarded the woman’s jubilant call. She came forward hard on her throttles, regaining her airspeed. Once the payload was out of her aircraft, it was somebody else’s concern. With a warrior pilot’s inbred dislike for flying too long in a straight line, she conducted another random skid turn.

“Flaps full up! Countermeasures, how are we looking?”

“We’re good, Colonel. No radar paint above return levels. Boards are clean.”

Mirkle didn’t exactly sigh with relief, but she did acknowledge the fading of a tension level. The load was on the ground… or in this case water. Now there was nothing to worry about except for getting themselves home.

The chest-vibrating rumble of the engines muted as the tail ramp closed and they settled back at cruise power. From the drop zone, they’d slip through the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Sulawesi and exit into the Celebes Sea. In less than an hour, they could go non-tac and pull up to conventional altitudes. From there it would be a simple transit hop to their turnaround base in the Philippines and then back to Australia. They’d be eating lunch at Curtin tomorrow noon.

“Want me to take it for a while, ma’am?” her copilot inquired.

“Sure, Ed. You have the aircraft.”

Colonel Mirkle unclipped her chin strap and lifted the flight helmet off her graying blonde hair. Lounging back in the instrument-lit darkness of the cockpit, she watched the wavetops shimmer past below the Talon’s nose. A good night’s work, but hopefully next time out they’d be given something more interesting to do than a milk run for the squiddies.

The fuel blivets wallowed in the low waves, supported by the inherent buoyancy of the kerosene they carried, a double row of infrared lumesticks marking their position.

The Queen of the West and the Manassas converged on them. Dropping their tail ramps, the PGAC backed into recovery position. Shotgun armed antishark guards appeared on the upper decks of the hovercraft while skivvy-clad crewhands dove into the warm waters to jettison the load sleds and parachute harnesses and to connect the recovery cables.

Winch motors moaned and the fuel blivets, like gigantic marine cephalopods, crawled out of the sea and into the bellies of the Sea Fighters, sliding up the Teflon-slicked tarpaulins that had been unrolled down the ramps to receive them. Checks were made for kerosene leakage, tie-down straps were secured, and glad-hand connectors linked, accessing the new fuel reserve.

With refueling complete, lift and drive turbines lit off with a rising whine.

“We’re only eight minutes long, sir,” Caitlin reported as the Queen came up on her inflating skirt.

“Well, damn. We can tell the Lady another of her screwball ideas wasn’t so screwball after all. Terry, you get the replenishment confirmation off to the task force?”

“Aye, aye, sir. I just got the microburst off. We’re getting a data dump from the Carlson. It looks like a mission update.”

“They got tomorrow’s hide for us?” Lane inquired, coming forward on the airscrew throttles.

“That’s an affirmative, sir. It looks like a mangrove swamp on the Kelantan coast of Borneo. Coordinates coming up on your Navicom display now. We’re instructed not to attempt the transit of Makassar Strait until tomorrow night.”

“Gotcha. Anything else?”

“Yes, sir.” Wilder’s voice lifted in excitement. “We’re getting targeting data! Intel has an objective for us, sir. A village called Adat Tanjung on the western Sulawesi peninsula. We’re receiving a bunch of stuff on the place.”

“Right.” Steamer checked the iron log, watching their surface speed climb toward good cruise. “Put it on hard copy, then let’s call our pet leatherneck up here and start making medicine.”