“Radford, Valetta.”
“WE HAVE YOUR contact on radar. Looks like he’s coming down hard.” The voice was that of a junior-grade lieutenant who had the CIC duty this night. Radford was an aging Spruance-class destroyer heading for Naples after an exercise with the Egyptian navy. Along the way she had orders to enter the Gulf of Sidra to proclaim freedom-of-navigation rights, an exercise which was almost as old as the ship herself. Once the source of considerable excitement, and two pitched air-sea battles in the 1980s, it was now boringly routine, else Radford wouldn’t be going it alone. Boring enough that the CIC crewmen were monitoring civilian radio freqs to relieve their torpor. “Contact is eight-zero miles west of us. We are tracking.”
“Can you respond to a rescue request?”
“Valetta, I just woke the captain up. Give us a few to get organized here, but we can make a try for it, over.”
“Dropping like a rock,” the petty officer on the main scope reported. “Better pull out soon, fella.”
“Target is a Gulf-Four business jet. We show him one-six-thousand and descending rapidly,” Valetta advised.
“Thank you, that’s about what we have. We are standing by.”
321
“What gives?” the captain asked, dressed in khaki pants and a T-shirt. The report didn’t take long. “Okay, get the rotor heads woke up.” Next the commander lifted a growler phone. “Bridge, CIC, captain speaking. All ahead full, come right to new course–”
“Two-seven-five, sir,” the radar man advised. “Target is two-seven-five and eighty-three miles.”
“New course two-seven-five.”
“Aye, sir. Coming right to two-seven-five, all ahead full, aye,” the officer of the deck acknowledged. On the bridge the quartermaster of the watch pushed down the direct engine-control handles, dumping additional fuel into the big GE jet-turbines. Radford shuddered a bit, then settled at the stern as she began to accelerate up from eighteen knots. The captain looked around the capacious combat information center. The crewmen were alert, a few shaking their heads to come fully awake. The radar-men were adjusting their instruments. On the main scope, the display changed, the better to lock in the descending aircraft.
“Let’s go to general quarters,” the skipper said next. Might as well get some good training time out of this. In thirty seconds, everyone aboard was startled into consciousness and running to stations.
YOU HAVE TO be careful descending to the ocean surface at night. The pilot of the G-IV kept a close eye on his altitude and rate of descent. The lack of good visual references made it all too easy to slam into the surface, and while that might have made their evening’s mission perfect, it wasn’t supposed to be that perfect. In another few seconds they’d drop off the Valetta radar scope, and then they could start pulling out of the dive. The only thing that concerned him now was the possible presence of a ship down there, but no wakes were visible before him in the light of a quarter moon.
“I have it,” he announced when the aircraft dropped through five thousand feet. He eased back on the yoke. Valetta might note the change in descent rate from his < transponder, if they were still getting a signal, but even if 322 they did, they'd assume that after diving to get airflow into his engines, the better to achieve a restart, he was now trying to level out for a controlled landing on the calm sea. "LOSING HIM," THE controller'said. The display on the screen blinked a few times, came back, then went dark. The supervisor nodded and keyed his microphone. "Radford, this is Valetta. Juliet-Alpha has dropped off our screen. Last altitude reading was six thousand and descending, course three-four-three." "VALETTA, ROGER, WE still have him, now at four thousand, five hundred, rate of descent has slowed down some^ course three-four-three," the CIC officer replied. Just six feet away from him, the captain was talking with the commander of Radford $ air detachment. It would take more than twenty minutes to get the destroyer's single SH-60B Seahawk helicopter launched. The aircraft was now being pre-flighted prior to being pulled out onto the flight deck. The helicopter pilot turned to look at the radar display. "Calm seas. If he has half a brain, somebody might just walk away from this. You try to splash down parallel to the ground swells and ride it out. Okay, we're on it, sir." With that, he left the CIC and headed aft. "Losing him under the horizon," the radar man reported. "Just passed through fifteen hundred. Looks like he's going in." "Tell Valetta," the captain ordered. THE G-IV LEVELED out at five hundred feet by the radar altimeter. It was as low as the pilot cared to risk. With that done, he powered the engines back up to cruising power and turned left, south, back toward Libya. He was fully alert now. Flying low was demanding under the best circumstances, and far more so over water at night, but his ^-orders were clear, though their purpose was not. It went rapidly in any case. At just over three hundred knots, he 323 had forty minutes to the military airfield, at which he'd refuel one more time for a flight out of the area. . RADFORD WENT TO flight quarters five minutes later, altering course slightly to put the wind over the deck from the proper direction. The Seahawk's tactical navigation system copied the needed data from the ship's CIC. It would search a circle of water fifteen miles in diameter in a procedure that would be tedious, time-consuming, and frantic. There were people in the water, and rendering assistance to those in need was the first and oldest law of the sea. As soon as the helicopter lifted off, the destroyer came back left and raced off with all four main engines turning full power, driving the ship at thirty-four knots. By this time the captain had radioed his situation to Naples, requesting additional assistance from any nearby fleet units--there were no American ships in the immediate vicinity, but an Italian frigate was heading south for their area, and even the Libyan air force asked for information. THE "LOST" G-IV landed just as the U.S. Navy helicopter reached the search area. The crew left the aircraft for refreshments while their business jet was fueled. As they watched, a Russian-made AN-10 "Cub" four-engine transport fired up its engines to participate in the search-and-rescue mission. The Libyans were cooperating now with such things, trying to rejoin the world community, and even their commanders didn't know very much--indeed, hardly anything at all--of what had gone on. Just a few phone calls had made the arrangements, and whoever had taken the call and cooperated knew only that two aircraft would be landing to fuel and move on. An hour later, they lifted off again for the three-hour flight to Damascus, Syria. It had been originally thought that they would fly right back to their home base in Switzerland, but the pilot had pointed out that two aircraft of the same ownership flying over the same spot at nearly the same time would cause questions. He turned the aircraft east during the climb-out. 324 Below to his left, in the Gulf of Sidra, they saw the flashing lights of aircraft, one of them a helicopter, they were surprised to note. People were burning fuel and spending time and all for nothing. That thought amused the pilot as he reached his cruising altitude and relaxed, letting the auto-pilot do the work for the remainder of a long day's flying. "ARE WE THERE yet?" Moudi turned his head. He'd just changed the IV bottle for their patient. Inside his plastic helmet his face itched from his growing beard. He saw that Sister Maria Mag-dalena had the same crawly, unwashed feeling he had. Her first action on waking was to move her hands to her face, stopped short by the clear plastic. "No, Sister, but soon. Please, rest yourself. I can do this." "No, no, you must be very tired, Dr. Moudi." She started to rise. "I am younger and better rested," the physician replied with a raised hand. Next he replaced the morphine bottle with a fresh one. Jean Baptiste was, thankfully, still too heavily drugged to be a problem. "What time is it?" "Time for you to rest. You will attend your friend when we arrive, but then other doctors will be able to relieve me. Please, conserve your strength. You will need it." Which was true enough. The nun didn't reply. Accustomed to following the orders of doctors, she turned her head, probably whispered a prayer, and allowed her eyes to close. When he was sure that she was back asleep, he moved forward. "How much longer?" "Forty minutes. We'll land a little early. The winds have been good to us," the co-pilot answered. "So, before dawn?" "Yes." "What is her problem?" the pilot asked, not turning, but sufficiently bored that he wanted to hear something new.