Ian Slater: Payback

“If you start barfing again,” Aussie warned his wan-looking Welsh swim buddy, “I’ll throw you in the drink!”

“I just burped, you Aussie bastard!”

“Ah!” cut in Freeman, smiling. “Feeling better are we, Choir?”

“Yes, sir,” said Choir. “I’ll be even better when I put my two feet on the old terra firma.”

“Holy shit!” cut in Aussie. “What the hell—”

“Relax, Aussie,” said Gomez. “It’s the sling hitting the hull.” The sound of tackle and cable block they heard was quickly followed by two loud splashes outside the spun-carbon composite skin of the RS. The noise was that made by the two JRDs — jump-rescue divers — from the Super Stallion, the transfer of the RS to the Yorktown getting under way once the divers had completed shackling the starboard and port-side hooks of the rubberized Teflon sling to the U-bolt that was now dangling from the end of a cable being played out through the block-and-tackle arm that stuck out from the big Super Stallion’s belly.

The “wire,” as Eddie Mervyn was told by the Stallion’s pilot, was “barge haul” tough, but for Aussie, who glimpsed the wire on the search-scope’s flat screen, it looked no thicker suspended from the hundred-foot-long helo than a piece of black cotton thread. The SpecOp, SpecWar warrior, who had distinguished himself from Siberia to Germany’s Dortmund Pocket and the hard desert of two Iraqi wars, had no trust whatsoever in the cable. “I’ve seen the bastards snap.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Eddie Mervyn. “That helps.”

“No BS,” said Aussie. “I’ve seen ’em snap, go across the deck like a cattle whip — cut a man clean in half.”

“It’s not gonna snap!” said an irritated Gomez, who was nevertheless crunching in the numbers for torque-to-angle ratios. But the RS, he noted uncomfortably, despite it being much lighter than the prototype, weighed sixteen tons, fully loaded with men and gear. The Super Stallion’s external sling capacity was 16.7. No doubt, like the crush depth of the RS or any other sub, specification tolerances always had an inbuilt safety margin, but the swells they were slopping around in in this Force 8, even with the RS into the wind, would mean it wouldn’t be a lift from a stationary position. One swell over the craft would momentarily add tons of water to the weight.

“He’d better make the pull on a crest, not in a fucking trough,” opined Aussie.

“Aussie!” It was General Douglas Freeman speaking in his rare stentorian tone. “That’s enough!”

Aussie was watching the screen intently, so much so that Gomez and Eddie Mervyn wondered whether Aussie had heard the general. Sal and Choir knew he had; they also knew better than to say anything right now. The three of them had been with the general longer than Lee, Gomez, Mervyn, or Bone. Sal and Choir had been with Aussie in Iraq — they’d seen the aftereffects on Aussie of the terrible street by street, building by building, room by room fighting. It had marked them all with memories that stayed repressed until times of stress.

Apart from Aussie’s wife, Alexsandra, Choir and Sal had been the only ones who had also witnessed the softer paternalism of the warrior who’d made his way from the Australian Outback, where few Australians ever venture, down through the then hard urban seafront of the Rocks area in Sydney, before it became yuppified, working with down-and-outs prior to his starting on what was going to be a working holiday to America but which ended up in a love affair with the Australian-style openness of the United States.

They heard a series of loud, splitting noises as the hitherto slack U-belt of the sling tightened into a noose around the RS’s midships, the sea rushing by them like a torrent. “Splitting noise is fine,” said the general, as if casually assuring everyone in the craft about the reversible-submersible and not just Aussie.

“Yeah,” added Sal. “Just the dried salt on the cable. Gets between the strands and spits out when you put any weight on it.”

There was a surge of static on the flat screen, and outside another roaring of water as the Stallion’s crew chief, operating the winch, quickly dunked the RS back into the water, giving the cable slack rather than “torquing” it during a sudden “wash over” by a rogue cross-wave. No one in the RS could see any sign of the cable on the flat screen anymore because of the spray generated by the big helo’s seven titanium-sparred rotor blades. Incongruously, or so they thought at the moment, the Yorktown ’s Blue Tile SES was feeding their flat screen with cable TV signals, the color washed out, giving only sepia-toned, jerky, documentary-like shots of a group of Arabs talking to some woman.

“What’s going on?” asked Choir. “I know that woman’s voice, but I can’t see her.”

“You know squat,” Sal joshed, hoping to lessen Aussie’s anxiety about the wire, whose spitting had quite frankly scared Sal too. He’d never heard it that loud before.

“Edward,” said Choir, addressing Eddie Mervyn in a good-mood imitation of a British lord, “turn up the volume, there’s a good chap.” This little bit of theater, he thought, might draw Aussie’s attention away from the possibility of an errant strand giving way.

“It’s Marte Price,” said Aussie.

“I’ll be damned. What’s the leader strip say?” he pressed, his attention and that of the other seven, especially the general, shifting to the flat screen where Yorktown ’s own Signals Exploitation Space was linking the wallowing RS to an Al Jazeera/CNN broadcast.

“Oh shit, shit, shit!” It was Gomez, looking away from the screen at his six comrades, as if pleading with them to tell him it wasn’t true.

“Be quiet!” said Freeman. “Listen!” He had no sooner given the command than they all felt the sudden jerk of the wire and heard the sound of the Super Stallion’s three engines howling to full power and the noise of the huge canvas sling gripping the RS around its belly. This created a teeth-grating sound, as of hundreds of broken chalk pieces on a blackboard, making it impossible for them to clearly hear the SES feed on the flat screen, the sound of their weapon rack creaking as the Super Stallion took the full strain doing nothing to improve matters. All that Gomez and Eddie Mervyn, closest to the screen, could hear through the continuous groaning of the RS, its composite carbon skin protesting against the tight canvas, was “American attack…White Hou…” Aussie heard it too, the picture on the screen now scrambled.

“The White House has been attacked?” he asked.

“No, no, no!” It was Gomez, almost beside himself with anguish. “ Dios mio! Didn’t you see? My God!”

“No, I didn’t!” Aussie yelled sharply to be heard above the racket of wind, stormy seas, and the giant helo’s constant roar.

Mervyn, preoccupied with the controls so that nothing would be inadvertently switched on during the crucial lift, had had his eyes off the screen, leaving Gomez to deal with what he had seen, which had all but struck the SEAL technician-specialist dumb. The usually sallow complexion of the Spanish-American had turned to what in the light of the flat screen’s bluish hue seemed a grayish, seasick pallor.

“It’s Bone,” he said. “The—”

“C’mon, man,” said Freeman, who so far had heard only a word or two from whom he, like Choir, was sure was Marte Price of CNN. “Spit it out, Gomez. What the—”

“They — they know all about the attack,” said a shaken Gomez.

All eight felt a sudden bowel-chilling drop, profanities breaking out in and outside the craft, including one from Johnny Lee, his fear of the wire snapping momentarily shoving his pain aside. There was another shout — this time muted — from outside the craft, or rather on top of it.