Target Lock

Flight Deck, USS Carlson, Corsair Station 35 Miles West of Crab’s Claw Cape 0721 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

Lieutenant Commander Michael Torvald, the CO of ASW/Support Squadron 24, still looked uneasy as Cobra Richardson leaned in through the cockpit door of the SH-60 and draped his arm over the pilot’s seat.

“I still don’t know about this shit, Co,” he yelled over the moan of his helo’s idling turbines.

“Mike, trust me,” Cobra screamed back with the confidence of a used-car dealer explaining away that mysterious squeak. “We got this wired. I got the ballistic charts and manuals downloaded from the Army Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker. The Special Aviation pukes from the 160th have proved the Hydra pod on the Blackhawk airframe and my ordnance guys have set up the igniter harnesses for you. Piece o’ cake!”

Torvald inhaled deeply to bellow. “But my outfit’s not rated for this kind of thing. We’ve never done anything like this before! No Navy helo outfit’s done this before! Hell, the friggin’ Army hasn’t even done this since the seventies!”

“Details! Just do the drill, Mike. Follow my guys in to the firing line.

Establish a hover on your designated GPU fix. Set your bearing on target, set your aircraft angle by your B charts, and pull the trigger when I give the word! It’s going to be fantastic, my man!”

“I hope you know what you’re talking about, Cobra!” The SH-60 driver tilted his head, listening to a voice in his helmet earphones. “That’s it! We got departure!”

“See you on the firing line. You’re going to love it!”

Cobra slammed the Oceanhawk’s door shut and hunkered out from under the rotor arc. When clear, he stood erect and watched as the four helicopters of Heloron 24, the two SH-60 Oceanhawk subchasers and the pair of CH-60 Cargohawk utility aircraft, lifted sequentially into the sky.

As an adjunct to the task force’s antisurface defenses, Amanda Garrett had insisted that all four of the 24th’s Hawk-series helos be equipped to carry and launch both the Penguin and Hellfire air-to-surface missiles. All four had their antishipping snubwings mounted now, but each carried a weapons load different even from what Amanda Garrett had imagined.

Instead of single Hellfire guided missiles on each hard point of the multi racks, the Hawks now carried a seven-round pod of unguided 2.75-inch Hydra bombardment rockets. Four pods per multi rack, four clusters per aircraft.

When Cobra Richardson had assumed command of the Navy’s reactivated Seawolves, he had recognized the squadron’s links with the old HAL-3 of the Vietnam era, not merely as a matter of sentiment and tradition, but as a possible source of tactics and doctrine as well. He began an in-depth study of Seawolf operations over the Mekong Delta. This, in turn, had grown into a voracious appetite for the entire history of rotor winged warfare in the Southeast Asian conflict.

One of the more fascinating discoveries he had made had involved the single Hellfire of aero-artillery.

Modern gunship-warfare doctrine called for helicopters to be used as a precision, direct-fire weapon on specific targets. Aero-artillery called for their use as a fast, mobile platform for area bombardment, a “flying howitzer” versus a “flying tank.”

To a man of Cobra’s inventive nature, this presented all sorts of interesting possibilities. He’d spent the bulk of his spare time this cruise drawing up an operational outline for the use of aero-artillery within the task force order of battle, and working out the technical problems with his ordnance hands. The chance had come to move from theory to reality faster than he had hoped.

He jogged across the antiskid to where Wolf One awaited him. His crew was aboard, his copilot was already running the preflight, and the pad apes were standing by to roll the Super Huey out of the hangar to its launching spot on the flight deck. The smaller helo carried only two of the quad multirack clusters.

As he harnessed up, his copilot looked up from the checklist to watch the larger aircraft of Heloron 24 form up overhead for their first mission as part of a siege train.

“Co, you sure this rocket artillery shit is going to work?”

“Of course it’s going to work—” Richardson paused for a second, running the scenario over in his mind one more time. “I mean… it should.”