Light Up the Night (8 page)

“Contact at thirty miles, bearing two-three-five.” Lola Maloney's call over the radio broke the drudgery of the transit flight over water.

Trisha was always amazed at how long such flights felt. Especially since that was most of what a pilot did. Long patrols, transport through safe areas, flying from a safe base to the mission's target zone, and keeping alert while flying back as the mission's adrenal-high cooled in her blood. Especially tough because the flight home always seemed to last forever.

Battle exercises were almost always more intense than the real thing because they were designed to use every minute possible for training. And prior to Iraq and Afghanistan, there was always more training than missions. She wondered how that would be changing with the troop drawdowns.

Shuttling from the
Peleliu
to the aircraft carrier was all about patience, and looking at nothing but your instruments and the other choppers in your flight as you slid over the featureless black of the nighttime ocean.

Now they had a contact, but would it be a “contact of interest” or just some night fisherman? Whoever they were, they floated just a twelve-minute flight to the southwest. Trisha checked her fuel. Just past halfway to the aircraft carrier, they'd only burned twenty minutes of the two hours in her tank. She was fine for now.

“Close in but don't engage.”

Trisha was already rolling to the new heading before the command was complete.
Merchant
and
Max
lagged until the order was complete, but were slightly behind her in the flight so there was no danger of collision. The
Vengeance
, despite being a faster ship, also trailed because she'd been holding formation and was on the outside of the turn.

They all doused their running lights so that, except for the slight glow of their consoles, their choppers were fully blacked out. With the stealth modifications that had been applied to the two attack birds, they'd also be very hard to locate directionally. Stealth made them quieter, though far from silent. Much more significantly, it made their sound very nondirectional. So they could still be heard, but you couldn't tell from which direction if you were on the ground. Likely as not they'd sound like a stealth helicopter that had come out of nowhere and was heading away, when it was actually headed straight in.

In the lead as she liked, Trisha dropped down from the five-hundred-foot transit altitude to ten feet above the waves. The rest of the flight followed her down and then spread wide to allow multiple approach angles. They did it without any communication needed because it was embedded in all of their training—how to take best advantage of many different types of situations.
Merchant
swung a bit west of the mark and
Max
a bit east, leaving her and Lola's DAP Hawk to run up the middle. They'd approach this target from three sides.

“The things to watch for here…” Billy's voice rumbled into her helmet's earphones like a caress. She knew he was talking to all four choppers in tonight's flight, but she could feel herself responding to the voice practically whispering in her ear. She shook it off and focused on his words.

“It appears to be a standard twenty-foot, open fishing boat. If she's a pirate, she'll probably have two engines. A small one that's typical on these fishing dories to save gas and a bigger one for final pursuit of their target. So watch for bursts of speed.”

Like that was news. Wasn't Billy the SEAL supposed to be some kind of expert?

“If it is financed out of Garowe, it will be a seventy-horsepower engine.”

On a heavy twenty-foot wooden boat, that was fast but not exciting.

“If Galkayo, they favor the Mercury two-fifty.”

Okay, that was serious. Trisha decided that maybe Billy the SEAL had his uses. With two hundred and fifty horsepower onboard, the boat would be able to do some pretty amazing things, if the motor didn't shake the boat apart.

“The bosses send them out into the shipping channels with two tanks of gas. They run the smaller engine until it's dry, which gets them into the shipping channel. The big engine only has enough fuel for the pursuit, not enough to return home.”

“Cortez,” Trisha mumbled.

“Exactly,” Billy responded over the radio. “They operate just like Cortez and burn the path home. Put the crews out there, and the only way they're coming back alive is if they capture a boat. Makes them very motivated.”

“It's a goddamn suicide mission. Why do they do it?”

“In Somalia, the average annual income is six hundred dollars American. Average ransom is in the hundreds of thousands, a good one in the millions. Even a one percent share is life changing for both the pirates and their families.”

Trisha considered. She could barely support her music habit on fifty dollars a month, never mind an iPod to play it on while she was working out. How did these people live on that little? “In abject poverty” was the answer.

She checked all systems as well as flashing one of the center console's screens momentarily to a weather-radar sweep. No surprise thunderstorms anywhere about, just clear skies. She flipped back to a tactical sweep, peripherally aware of Roland's confirming nod that they were ready.

Hard not to be aware of every motion of someone sitting less than six inches away. If it were Billy instead of Roland in the copilot seat, they'd probably be rubbing shoulders because his were so wide. When two guys were flying Little Birds in full flight gear, their outside elbows always stuck out into the wind. Yet another reason to fly without doors—two bigger guys and their survival gear just wouldn't fit otherwise.

“There will be ten to fifteen pirates.” Billy the SEAL must love lecturing. “The leader won't be the one at the tiller. He'll be the one with the RPG launcher or the largest-caliber automatic weapon. They're his badge of honor. Probably only a 7.62 NATO round, not a .50 caliber on a craft this small. Most of the others will have the smaller 5.56 NATO round or something similar.”

At least Billy didn't sound all superior about it like a Ranger, whose job it was to be cocksure of himself, or regular Army who often had an inferiority complex on the rare occasions they were aboard a SOAR craft. He was just sharing needed information.

“That's some comfort,” she shot back at him just to keep him on his toes. The bigger NATO round could crack her windscreen pretty good, and if it came in the side, even if her armor did stop it, she'd be hurting like hell afterward. A .50 cal could probably punch the windscreen, and definitely her armor. That was all assuming the RPG didn't get her.

“If the heat gets too hot for you, Army, then—”

“Five thousand yards to target,” she cut him off sharply. One minute at her present speed. Maloney tolerated a little chatter, but not much. So she'd spare him learning that the hard way.

“Are we sure these guys are pirates?” Max asked.

Trisha hadn't even thought about it. She was about to answer with, “Who else would be headed straight out into the ocean a dozen miles off the coast at near enough to midnight?” But she thought better of it. She knew nothing about fishermen. Did they fish at night? She left that one for Billy.

“About a five percent chance they're fisherman.”

“
Vengeance
will overfly,” Chief Maloney answered. “Then we'll turn to cover from the south. Let's see what they do.” Then she lay down the hammer on her big DAP Hawk and began pulling ahead. That was one thing to say for the big bird—she could sure hustle her butt when she had to.

The DAP flashed over the fishing boat at twenty feet up and going nearly two hundred miles per hour. No way someone could get a bead on the chopper.

But someone tried.

In her helmet's infrared view, Trisha could see the heat of the bullets streaming upward.

“Kill their engine.”

Trisha slowed. She was directly to the side of the boat. So she aimed the target circle projected on her visor well off the stern of the boat. She'd sweep up from behind so that she shot the engine first, but not the boat or its occupants.

The moment before she opened fire, the boat leaped away.

“Shit!”

“What was that, O'Malley?” Chief Maloney clearly didn't like the loss of focus.

Trisha checked for
Merchant
to make sure her airspace was clear, then swung to follow.

“He's running the two-fifty. Am in close pursuit.”

A low squeal in both earphones of her helmet told her that an RPG was coming straight at her, little more than a red dot on her visor.

She slewed left as Roland released a flare set to starboard that should attract the RPG's attention if it had a heat- or light-guided head.

The Dopplering squeal, shifting from low to lower, told her the threat was past. Before the guy could rearm, she called out to Roland.

“Now!”

He lit off one of the miniguns and she steered it right toward the stern of the boat.

High whistles reported incoming rifle fire. The bullets were occasionally pinging off her windscreen as she slewed to the other side, but not piercing or even cracking it. Again, Billy had been right, 5.56 mm ammunition. In the infrared-enhanced projection inside her visor, she could see one of the pirates firing from the middle of the boat accidentally execute the guy seated high in the stern to steer the engine.

As the man's body toppled backward into her field of fire, she finished him off, if he wasn't dead already.

No time to think about it.

Driving the fire low and behind, she finally found her mark. Under the water of the stern wake, Roland's bullets began sparking off metal. After what felt like forever but couldn't have been more than a second, second and a half at most, the boat lurched forward. They'd shot off the propeller, and the boat buried its bow in the next wave. Everyone still aboard was tumbled forward off their seats.

She twisted aside just in case Roland didn't get the minigun stopped in time, but he did.

Her side of the helicopter was momentarily exposed to the boat, but that couldn't be helped.

A sharp sting on her thigh and hip. Another on her ribs, but missing her unarmored shoulder, and then she was past the boat and clear.

“You okay?” Roland called out.

Trisha didn't have time to check, just swung the bird left to make sure she didn't run head-on into
Merchant
. Sure enough he was coming up from the bow, right where he was supposed to be. He slowed to a hover before he got quite close enough to draw their fire.

Trisha circled out of easy target range and then spun to bring the weapons to bear once more on the small boat now wallowing between the waves.

“Uh, I seem to be fine.” She flexed a few muscles in her leg and arm without either screaming pain or spastically affecting the foot pedals or the cyclic control in her right hand. Her ribs stung like hell; she hoped she hadn't cracked one. She'd never been shot before. A wave of panic threatened to overwhelm her, but she slammed it aside. Time to deal with that later.

If she'd trusted Roland's timing and Dennis to know his place, as she should have, she could have climbed out right over the
Merchant
without exposing herself to gunfire from the skiff. The chopper's armor was much better than hers. It even had redundant systems in most areas in case something was hit.

She keyed the radio.

“One down, accidentally shot by his own crew, then fell overboard into my path of fire. Max, there's no way he survived, but if he did, he's a couple hundred yards back in your direction off the stern.”

“Roger.” Max's problem now.

She focused on the boat, rolling a thumbwheel to zoom in her display. The pirates were all hunkered as low as they could get in the boat. It looked as if they'd shipped on a foot or so of water when the bow had nosed under, but they were still afloat.

Sure enough, a couple of them began wielding bailing buckets with one hand while resting their rifle muzzles on the thick side rails and aiming outward. None of them were aimed quite at her. Two guys in the bow must have lost their rifles overboard as they now held up handguns.

Though they were all facing in her general direction, at two hundred yards out in the pitch darkness, she was invisible. They didn't know where she was. She kept a special eye on the guy with the RPG launcher. Somehow he'd reloaded it and held on to it, despite what they'd just been through.

Billy called something over the loud-hailer that she didn't understand. Then he followed in English, “Lay down your arms. The U.S. Navy has been notified and a patrol boat is coming.”

The boat's crew spun in shock to face the DAP Hawk hovering in the darkness to the south. Unlike the deceptiveness of the stealth-masked sounds, the loud-hailer was a point source of sound.

Sure enough, the pirates began firing blind into the darkness.

“Four away,” Maloney called out.

So close to simultaneously that it appeared to be in perfect unison, Roland and the DAP Hawk copilot, Guy Nelson, each unleashed a pair of the Hydra 70 rockets toward the boat. With a sharp sizzle of rocket motor as they zipped past the open sides of the Little Bird cockpit, the 2.75-inch rockets hammered down into the water on the sides of the boat.

Tall columns of water fountained upward to either side of the boat, sending another six inches of water aboard to add to what the crew had barely begun bailing.

Most of the guys were laying down their guns. But the leader with the RPG launcher was dumber than should be possible. He was rising again to take aim at the DAP.

***

Bill couldn't believe the guy's audacity.

Of course, the pirate leader in the boat wouldn't truly understand the abilities of a DAP Hawk, but even he had to know it was a no-win scenario against a vastly superior force. He must feel such hate or fury at being stopped that he'd risk everything on the off chance of wreaking death on even one of his enemies before he died.