Ian Slater - Payback

“Don’t worry, General!” It was Aussie shouting through the nonstop hammer blows of a furious sea. “It’s in there. I’ll bet ten to one.” He paused. “Anyone in a betting mood?”

No one responded. Did that mean, Freeman wondered, they believed Aussie, or that they didn’t want to risk their hard-earned pay?

What negated any positive spin that Aussie might be putting on the situation was the general’s realization that if it had been that obvious to Aussie what he was thinking, the whole team probably sensed his self-doubt as well, and self-doubt was not the stuff of legend.

Choir had his eyes shut, so did Salvini; Gomez and Eddie Mervyn’s eyes were glued to the monitors. At this speed, a hit against a floating log or any other debris churned up by the storm would be a head-on collision at 50-plus miles per hour with no airbags. Johnny Lee, despite another jab of morphine, was grimacing in pain. Finally, Eddie Mervyn said something, but his voice was so quavery from the battering of the sea that Freeman had to ask him to “say again.”

“Force 9 dropping to Force 8,” Mervyn repeated.

Choir looked whey-faced, as if he was about to make yet another contribution to the mission.

“Slowing, five minutes,” said Eddie. “I say again, let’s go for pickup by girdle.”

Freeman didn’t take long to consider the option, which was to try to bring the RS alongside Yorktown in the storm-lashed ocean. As they slowed, everyone could see a clearer picture on the flat screen now that the spray sheath had abated with their decreased speed. The view was of a rolling blue ocean, white-veined with spindrifts. “Concur,” he told Eddie Mervyn. “Pickup by girdle from Yorktown .”

The engine’s jet-pulse noise subsided, Eddie warning them, “I’m gonna have to bring in the stabilizer fins, otherwise they’ll get stuck in the girdle net.”

“What fucking girdle?” said Aussie.

“It’s too dangerous to try to side-dock in this Force 8. We’ll have a helo come get us with their net sling. Divers’ll go under and sling us.”

“Piss on that!” said Aussie, with his usual eloquence. “This fucker’d roll in an early-morning dew. Could slide right out of the friggin’ net!”

“They done this before?” asked Salvini.

“Yeah, NASA uses them to retrieve any fallen satellite debris off Cape Canaveral.” He meant Cape Kennedy.

“Debris?” It was Salvini, looking as alarmed as Aussie.

“Oh come on,” said the general. “What’s the matter with you guys? Going out of a Herk is far trickier than girdle retrieval. Should I call your mommies?”

“The Galaxy,” said Sal. “It wasn’t a Herk.”

“Oh all right, smart-ass,” said Freeman congenially. “The aircraft.”

He has guts, this general, Aussie told himself. In another fifteen, maybe thirty minutes he could be welcomed aboard Yorktown holding nothing more than his dick from the Payback raid, but here he was, indisputably a leader, chastising them despite what must be a hard moment for him. One man dead and the steel-strapped box still unopened. Aussie prayed that as soon as the big flat-headed bolt cutters on Yorktown cut the steel straps off the box, the general would have yet another victory to his credit, not a Waterloo but a moment like seeing Old Glory atop Mt. Surabachi, and no one to tear it down.

“Firing flares for pickup girdle,” said Eddie, and there were two loud bangs.

Choir’s eyes opened slightly, his voice groggy, barely audible. “What’s goin’ on, boyo?”

“You fucking dork,” joshed Aussie. “We’re in Las Vegas. You just missed the biggest pair of tits—”

“Shush!” said Eddie loudly. “Can’t hear Blue Tile. Static.”

“Amazing,” Aussie whispered sarcastically. “Blue Tile can pull in a damn signal from a Mars lander but a mile away from us all we get is static.”

“It’s the storm,” said Gomez quietly, holding up his hand in a sharp signal for Aussie to stop bitching, Gomez’s face creased with the effort of listening to Blue Tile’s instructions for the RS to maneuver itself into the wind.

“We’ve already done that, Einstein,” Aussie answered Blue Tile’s instructions anxiously. There was something amusing to Freeman in the fact that one of the best warriors he’d ever seen, a privilege to have on his team, was getting nervous.

“It’s simple, Aussie,” the general assured Aussie and Sal. “You’ve seen pictures of how they lift out those aquarium whales in those big canvas slings for transport.”

“ I haven’t seen ’em do that,” Aussie riposted, turning around to look at Choir behind him, the movement an awkward one, given his tightly strapped H harness. Despite the RS’s stabilizer fins having been withdrawn, causing the craft to roll like a stunned whale, the Welshman’s mood was suddenly upbeat with the prospect of being transported to the 45,000-ton Yorktown , a craft much more substantial than the 16-ton RS. He winked reassuringly at Aussie, giving his comrade-in-arms the thumbs-up.

“Oh, look at this,” said Aussie. “The rough rider from Wales is giving us the old A-OK sign. That’s reassuring. He’s whacked out on Gravol and dehydrated from upchucking for the last four hours. It’s affected his fucking brain.”

Johnny Lee couldn’t suppress a laugh, though it sent a piercing pain shooting through his arm. The PMS — postmission syndrome — as SpecOp leaders, tongue in cheek, described the release of tension and concomitant surges of euphoria and general silliness that followed hot on the heels of a near-death experience, was palpable inside the RS after the firefight, where they were outnumbered by at least ten to one. The odds Aussie was now giving were that there would be a MANPAD in the box.

The general was having his own surge of optimism, witnessed first by his jocular inquiry whether the team wanted him to call their “mommies” to reassure them that the girdle lift was safe, and second by the shift in his mood that occurred when he realized that there was a very straightforward explanation for the NKA’s lone T-55 and lack of any fast armored fighting vehicles during the total of the hellish twenty-five to twenty-six minutes they were ashore and trying to get Bone back into the RS.

The straightforward answer was the very thing the general had been so careful to plan. His own ruse — telling the President, his National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty, and the Joint Chiefs that his SpecOp team would need at least six weeks’ preparation time — was a well-intentioned lie, so that should news of the planned Payback mission leak out and the North Koreans’ Intelligence relay it back to Pyongyang, the Dear Leader’s military would figure they’d have at the very least a month to reinforce Beach 5 to annihilate the U.S. raiders. That this was clearly the reason for the lack of a sophisticated NKA trap reminded the general once again how often people, such as himself, who lived in a dangerous world in which there was so much intrigue, habitually sought intriguing or conspiratorial answers when the obvious was staring them in the face. You idiot, he told himself as he heard the approaching wokka wokka sound of one of the Yorktown ’s heavy-lifting Super Stallion transport helicopters. You set up a six-week wait time, lull the NKA into a sense of security, giving them what they think is lots of prep time for a possible U.S. attack, then you turn into a worry guts because your plan worked . What’s the matter with you, Freeman? Georgie Patton would’ve had your guts for garters. Get a grip, you’re renowned for leadership cool. Show it. Bone would expect it. Freeman’s strong will notwithstanding, however, what had been a kernel of suspicion was growing, and the more he tried to suppress it, the more it demanded attention.