Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (8 page)

Aboard the
s.s.
Valley
Mistress

THAT SAME TIME

 
          
“Lost
contact with Skywalker,” the reconnaissance technician reported. “I had a brief
lock-on by the Ku-band Crotale radar, then gone.”

 
          
Jon
Masters was mad enough to chew on a bulkhead door. “They got Skywalker,
dammit!”

 
          
“Well,
we’re out of the recon business—and the Iranians will be gunning for
us
next,” Paul White said. On shipwide
intercom, he radioed, “Attention all hands, this is Lightfoot. Our
reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by hostile action. We can expect a visit
from Iranian patrols any minute now. All stations, begin a code-red scrub,
repeat, begin code-red scrub procedures immediately. Initiate Buddy Time
profile procedures. Helm, steer a direct course for Omani territorial waters,
best speed. All section team leaders, meet me on the bridge. Lightfoot out.”

 
          
“Hey,
wait a minute, Colonel!” Masters said. The technicians in the reconnaissance
section had immediately begun deactivating their equipment—not by using the
checklist, but instead by yanking cables and pulling plugs. It didn’t matter if
yanking a hot plug caused a computer subsystem to lock up or suffer damage,
because they were going to fit hundreds of pounds of explosives to all of it,
drop it over the side, then set off the explosives. All paper records went into
red plastic “burn bags” for shredding and burning; software disks went into
“smash bags” for magnetic erasure and destruction. “You called for a code red
without even consulting me? It’s my gear, you know!”

 
          
“Jon,
buddy, stop thinking with your nuts or your pocketbook for one damned second,”
White said as he helped prepare the equipment for disposal. The control units
were mounted in large suitcaselike enclosures, all of which had spaces built
into the frames for cooling and access—those same access spaces made it easy to
slip half-pound bars of C4 plastic explosives into the equipment cases. Fitted
with simple timers activated by seawater, the explosives would sink several
feet before automatically detonating. The pieces would be very, very difficult
to find.

 
          
Yes,
they were now in international waters, and soon they would be in Omani
territorial waters, but White had no doubt in his mind that
Iran
would try to recover any evidence that the
Valley Mistress
was a spy ship. They
would violate a stack of international maritime laws to get what they wanted.

 
          
“It’ll
take one of those Iranian fighters just five minutes to shoot an anti-ship
missile into us and disable the ship,” White went on, helping carry the first
of several dozen containers out to the rail. “Ten minutes after that we could
have an Iranian helicopter assault team dropping on deck. Sixty minutes after
that, we could have an Iranian frigate pull up alongside. Now if they find any
of this gear on board, we’ll be hauled away as spies, and we’ll never see the
United States again—if they let us live.”

 
          
Masters
wasn’t listening. “But at least let me transmit some of the data, save some of
the records,” Masters protested. “This is supposed to be an operational
evaluation—I’m still trying to collect performance data.”

 
          
“It’s
all going to be fish food in about ten minutes,” White said. “Jon, we can’t
have any signs of anything on this ship except stuff that shows we’re a
legitimate rescue vessel. We’ve already got stuff that we can’t hide, like the
air search radar system and the—”

 
          
“It’ll
just take me a minute to do a system dump,” Masters said, pushing past a
technician and furiously typing on a keypad. “I’ll burst it out on the
satellite, and we’ll be done with it.”

 
          
“Jon,
forget it.”

 
          
“Lightfoot,
bridge,” the intercom cut in. “WLR reports inbound sea surveillance signal
contact, possible heliborne search radar, approximate range forty miles,
bearing zero-two-zero and closing, speed one hundred knots.” The WLR-1 and
WLR-11 systems aboard the
Valley Mistress
were passive radar-detection systems— they did not require the use of radar to
pick up an enemy presence.

           
“We’ve just about run out of time,
folks,” White shouted in the reconnaissance center—he forgot about Masters, who
was still typing away on his terminal. “We’ve got about ten minutes to get this
stuff overboard before they get within visual range. After that, it all has to
go out the SDV access hatch.” The same chamber in the bottom of the ship that
allowed Swimmer Delivery Vehicles to dock with the ship without surfacing could
be used to dump some of the classified equipment while the Iranians were
topside—that could give White’s crew an extra few minutes.

 
          
In
less than three minutes, the reconnaissance compartment was cleared out—all
except Masters. White wasn’t going to wait any longer: “Jon, dammit, pack it
up,
now!”

 
          
“I’m
ready, it’s going,” Masters said. “Couple more seconds, and I’ll be done.”

 
          
White
was about to yank the plug himself, when he noticed a blinking UAV SYNC light
on the computer control panel, with a SYNC ERROR light underneath. “Jon, what
in hell is that?”

 
          
Jon
saw the blinking light at the exact same moment and hit a key—the light went
out. “I don’t know,” Masters replied. “The computer is trying to sync with
Skywalker—”

 
          
“Except
Skywalker was destroyed,” White said. But then what was the computer talking
to? “Shit, Jon, shut that thing off! That Iranian helicopter might have an
electronic warfare suite that can send satellite transponder interrogate codes.
Your computer was sending sync codes to the
Iranians,
trying to lock on to it! ”

 
          
“I
didn’t know... I didn’t realize it was still active!” Masters cried, yanking
cables and practically overturning the terminal to shut it down. “Skywalker was
off the air, shot down ... I didn’t think to shut down the uplink channel! ”

 
          
“The
Iranians must be reading our satellite transponder data signals,” White said.
“No way those signals can be mistaken for communication or navigation signals.
And if they picked up Skywalker’s uplink signals and matched them with our
transponder signals . . . shit, the Iranians will know we were talking to
Skywalker. We just gave ourselves away to the bad guys.”

Aboard the Iranian aircraft
carrier
Khomeini

 
          
“Message
from Patrol Helicopter Three,” General Badi reported to Commanding Admiral
Tufayli. “The crew reports non-directional microwave signals emanating from the
salvage ship. They report the signals are identical to the signals transmitted
by the unidentified aircraft.”

 
          
“Excellent!
We have them! ” Admiral Tufayli shouted. “And that unidentified aircraft
definitely constituted a hostile aircraft overflying my fleet without proper
identification or communications. That is an act of war, and I am permitted to
defend my men and vessels by any means at my command. General Badi, what
anti-ship strike aircraft do we have ready at this time?”

 
          
“One
fighter is airborne over checkpoint four, carrying two AS- 18 radar-guided
missiles and two AA-10 air-to-air missiles,” the air operations officer
reported. “It is scheduled to return to base in eleven minutes. Its replacement
will be ready for launch in five minutes.”

 
          
The
patrol point for that fighter was only five kilometers east of the American
warship—perfect! “Divert the fighter over checkpoint four, issue vector
instructions to that American spy ship,” Tufayli ordered. “As soon as the
replacement fighter comes up on deck, launch it as a second strike and air
cover; if the spy ship is still afloat, have the second fighter divert as well.
We must attempt to keep that vessel out of Omani waters until we can reach it
with a boarding party. Divert the destroyer
Medina
and Pasdaran Boghammar patrol boats to the
spy ships location to capture and detain any survivors and to search the
wreckage for evidence; have Patrol Helicopter Four and the
Medina
's
helicopter keep visual contact on the spy
ship until the
Medina
arrives on station. We will teach the
Americans a lesson for spying on my ships!”

S.S. Valley Mistress

 
          
Jon
Masters had that last terminal and all the rest of the equipment packed up,
rigged, and thrown overboard in record time, and he even helped move several of
the cargo boxes into the reconnaissance room, as the crew furiously tried to
make the room look more like a cargo container and less like a control room.
The underwater explosions reverberated through the ship as, one by one, the
fifty-three containers associated with the Skywalker unmanned reconnaissance
drone were blown into a hundred pieces and scattered across the bottom of the
Gulf
of
Oman
.

 
          
“Are
we in Omani waters yet?” Masters shouted to White as he trotted back outside
for another box.

 
          
“Get
your life jacket on, Jon,” White said grimly. He had just returned from the
helicopter deck, where he’d been monitoring the crew as they stowed the surface
and air search radar arrays. The SPS- 40 was already stowed in its container
and was even partially disassembled and the pieces thrown overboard—it would
look very, very bad to have the Iranians find a sophisticated air surveillance
radar on a salvage ship—but the SPS-69, which had been hoisted 100 feet above
the deckhouse, was slow in coming down. It would not be so bad for the Iranians
to find an SPS-69 on the
Valley Mistress,
but it would look very suspicious indeed for it to be up on a 100-foot mast.

 
          
“It’s
down in my cabin.”

 
          
“Then
get it,” White shouted, grabbing Masters’s arm and pulling him around so that
he was facing down the catwalk toward the ladder leading to the crew cabins,
“and don’t let me see you without it until we get back on dry land.”

 
          
Masters
stared at White in absolute terror. “Hey, Colonel...”

 
          
“It
doesn’t matter if we’re in Omani waters or international waters or
U.S.
waters,” White said, “because the Iranians
are coming to get us. Now, get your damned life jacket, and make sure you’ve
got your passport on you and no papers, disks, faxes, or computer records in
your cabin. If you’re not sure, toss the computer overboard.
Move.
”

 
          
Masters
had never seen White this grim, and it scared him even more. “Paul, I. .. I’m
sorry about the terminal, about the satellite.”

           
“Forget it,” White said. “I think
the Iranians were coming for us anyway. Now get going. Meet me right back up
here on deck.” Masters ran all the way back to his cabin.

           
“Lightfoot, bridge.”

 
          
White
keyed his intercom button: “Go.”

 
          
“Air
target one now approaching at one hundred knots,” the radar officer on the
bridge reported.

 
          
Shit,
White swore to himself, that meant trouble. The helicopter was moving into
visual range—reporting to other Iranian inbounds, no doubt. “Any other
targets?”

 
          
“Negative.”

 
          
“There
will be,” White warned him. “Keep me posted. Out.”

           
“Paul?” It was Carl Knowlton,
supervising the work on the SPS- 69 radar.