Dale Brown - Dale Brown's Dreamland 04 - Piranha(and Jim DeFelice)(2003) (36 page)

 
          
“Hawk
Leader. I need that low-and-slow run, give me your best shot,” said Danny.
“Three and Four, move in, I’ll locate the natives for you in a second.”

 
          
“Machine
gun,” said Bison.

 
          
“Everybody
gold. Hold!”

 
          
Danny
keyed the feed from Bison’s helmet to his, but he couldn’t make out what Bison
had spotted.

 
          
“You
sure, Bison?”

 
          
“I
got something moving, Cap,” said Powder.

 
          
“What’s
going on?” said Stoner.

 
          
Danny
held up his hand, needing him to be quiet. He was in automatic mode now,
punching buttons. The scram of things had a swirling logic of their own and you
wanted to keep yourself on the edge, away from the whirlpool.

 
          
“Everyone
hold on,” Danny told his people. “Hawk Leader, we’re ready for you now,
Captain.”

 
          
“Hawk
Leader,” acknowledged Fentress.

 
          
The
Flighthawk dropped to a hundred feet over the island, literally at treetop
level. Though it was moving slow for an aircraft—just under 150 knots—the feed
nonetheless blew by in a blur. Danny calmly hit the freeze frame as the first
building came in view.

 
          
Three
figures in one hut, one figure in another. Four, maybe five in the pen.

 
          
Three
more up near Squad Four.

 
          
“Floyd,
you have three natives on your right, above that ridge there. Everybody else is
in the hut, or the pen—those are animals in the pen. I don’t have Squad One and
Two in view. Hang tight.”

 
          
Danny
clicked forward on the feed, still didn’t have them. He could wait for another
run or just go.

 
          
Waiting
was conservative, but it meant giving the people in the village more time to
man weapons, plan a defense.

 
          
“Three
and Four move in,” Danny said, finding another solution, “One and Two hold.”

 
          
“Aw,
shit,” said Powder.

 
          
“Hawk
Leader, another run, further east,” Danny said.

 
          
“Copy
that,” said Fentress.

 
          
The
Flighthawk came over again—two people were walking south toward Liu’s team.
Danny fed the details to Liu, then ordered One and Two to move in.

 
          
“Take
us there,” Danny told the
helo
pilot, who gunned the
engine on the small helicopter. The scout rocketed forward so fast Danny flew
back in the seat.

 
          
“Go,
go, go!” Bison was yelling. Danny clicked in the Flighthawk feed, saw an
explosion on the west side of the camp. Going at the machine gun, the team used
flashbangs
and smoke grenades. Voices shouted in his
ears. He struggled to stay above it all—outside the scram.

 
          
“Quick
Birds, hold your fire,” said Danny. “That smoke is from our grenades.”

 
          
He
clicked into the feed from Bison—the trees moved swiftly, then he saw ground,
smoke—an old tree trunk in front of his team member.

 
          
The
machine gun.

 
          
“Shit
fuck,” said Bison.

 
          
“All
right, everyone relax now, relax,” said Danny.

 
          
“Got
two guys here,” said Powder. “Older than the hills.”

 
          
“Powder,
watch it—natives coming at you,” said Liu.

 
          
“We’re
on it.”

 
          
Danny
pushed up the helmet screen, looking through the windscreen of the Quick Bird
as the pilot pointed to the ground. Stoner leaner over, trying to make out what
was happening.

 
          
“Can
you get us down?” Danny asked the pilot.

 
          
“I
can hover over that roof there,” he replied. “You’ll have to go down the rope.”

 
          
“Yeah,
do it,” said Stoner.

 
          
“Do
it,” said Danny.

 
          
There
was gunfire to the right of the helicopter. The pilot hesitated, then pitched
his nose toward it, steadying into a firing position.

 
          
“Hold
off,” said Danny, touching the man’s arm. “Powder, what the fuck?”

 
          
“Wild
stinking dogs,” said the sergeant. “Mean motherfuckers.”

 
          
“What
about the people?”

 
          
“They’re
all right,” he said. “We’re okay. We have two, three natives secured. No
resistance, Cap. ’
Cept
for the barking dogs. Man,
they bug the shit out of me.”

 
          
Danny
let go of the pilot’s arm. “We’ll use the rope,” he said.

 
          
By
the time Stoner got to the ground, the village was secure and the huts had
already been searched. The unrehearsed, ad hoc operation had gone remarkably
well, so well, in fact, Stoner thought the Whiplash people might actually give
his old SEAL team a run for the money.

 
          
A
run, nothing more.

 
          
Even
the Marines had done well. The only casualties were six dogs, probably kept by
the villagers for food.

 
          
The
locals were sitting grim-faced in a small circle in front of one of the huts.
They were all old, easily in their fifties if not well beyond. The place was
what the girl had told him it was—a refugee village started by people who had
fled from another island.

 
          
Captain
Freah was consulting with his people, dividing the surrounding area into
quadrants for a detailed search. To Stoner, it seemed a waste of time, though
he wouldn’t bother pointing it out.

 
          
“Looks
pretty clean,” said Danny.

 
          
“We
have to hit the atolls,” said Stoner. “Sooner rather than later.”

 
          
“Yeah,”
said Danny, his voice still flat. While the captain turned and went back over
to his men, Stoner looked at the huts. They couldn’t have been here for more
than a few months.

 
          
“We’ll
go out through the beach,” said Danny when he came back. “It’s quicker. Marine
helo
will shoot us to the base. I have to leave one of my
guys here to supervise, and one at the security post. That’ll give us a total
of six people, including myself.”

 
          
“We
can use the Marines,” said Stoner.

 
          
“I
have an okay for an armed recon already,” said Danny. “If we add Marines, that
has to be cleared. They’ll probably want to fly in more forces, set up a whole
operation. It’ll be thorough, but it’ll be overkill—and it won’t happen till
tomorrow night. You told me you wanted to go sooner rather than later.”

 
          
“I
do.”

 
          
“Then
let’s do it.”

 
          
Aboard Iowa

 
          
They
gave the Chinese carriers a wide berth, working their way close to the
Vietnamese coastline before heading back west. It occurred to Dog this very
same B-52 frame might have pulled many missions here decades ago, dropping its
sticks on North Vietnamese targets, maybe even mining Haiphong harbor. Dog had
an unobstructed view of the coastline from roughly 25,000 feet; it seemed like
a faceted jewel, a piece of intricately cut jade. He’d missed Vietnam, and
wasn’t the nostalgic type besides, but even to Dog, it looked like the last
place on earth a war would break out.

 
          
Then
again, so did the empty ocean in front of him.

 
          
“Two
minutes to our search area,” reported Rosen.

 
          
“Delaford,
how’s it looking down there?” Dog asked him.

 
          
“We’re
ready when you are, Colonel.”

 
          
“We’re
talking to your friends in the
Orions
. They haven’t
found anything for us yet.”

 
          
“Tell
’
em
to listen harder,” said Delaford.

 
          
“I’d
give ’
em
new hearing aids if I thought it would
help.” Dog did an instrument check, then turned his gaze back to the side
window, looking down at the now-peaceful sea. His quarry was somewhere below,
but where?

 
          
Armed
with the satellite information as well as intercepts from SOUS and another
hydrophone net, the Fleet intelligence officers had analyzed the probably
course of the Chinese submarines. They had decided, given the mission, the subs
would work as direct a course to the carrier group as possible, and probably
get regular updates as they closed. This scenario presented several
opportunities for finding the subs; not only would their route be somewhat
predictable, but the subs would probably pole their masts above the surface
from time to time. The
intel
officers looked for
specific choke points—in this case, places where it would be easy to find the
subs as they passed—and concentrated their resources there. It sounded good,
but so far, it wasn’t working. There was so much sea to cover, and without
support vessels and submarines to assist, the
Orions
had a relatively limited view.

 
          
Dog
wondered about the possibilities of extending Piranha’s range—not by the factor
of two, which Delaford had said was doable, but by ten or even a hundred. It
would be much more effective to launch it now and let it go find its target on
its own.

 
          
Actually,
they could, theoretically, do that. Just launch and search. Set a course
southwest, toward the Chinese carriers; they’d find the subs sooner or later.

 
          
“Tommy,
what do you think of launching Piranha blind and letting it look for the subs
on its own?” Dog asked Delaford over the interphone.

 
          
“You
mean completely without contact?” asked Delaford. “The problem is, Colonel,
it’s such a wide area to cover. Considering Piranha can only stay in the water
for eighteen hours—well, twenty or twenty-one …”

 
          
“It’ll
stay longer than that,” said Dog.

 
          
“Right,
I mean, it can only pursue at speed for that long, then runs down.”

 
          
“But
if we figure, say, an eighteen-hour patrol, so the last six hours or so it’s
near the carriers—I don’t know, can you plot something like that out? How close
would we have to be?”

 
          
“Let
me talk to English.”

 
          
“
Orions
are clean,” reported Rosen. “You know what we need?
Hot dogs.”

 
          
“Oh,
that’d be great on a long mission,” said Dog sarcastically.

 
          
“Break
up the monotony.”

 
          
“Colonel,
we think we have a good drop,” said Delaford, coming back on the line. He laid
out a plan to launch Piranha at 260 nautical miles from the carrier task force
and run it on an intercept. When it reached a point twenty miles from the
carriers, it would then sweep ahead in an arcing search pattern.