The bow gunner tried firing on the helicopter, but his arc of fire was limited by the wheelhouse directly behind him. The gunner got off a few hundred rounds while the helicopter was still high in the air, but the rounds went wide and then he could fire no more.
Adams raced down in a steep dive. When he was only eighty feet above the stern, he pulled back on the cyclic and up on the collective. This slowed the dive, then began to raise the nose. Just as the R-44 hit the bottom of her arc, Adams flipped up the cover and down on the toggle switch. Both pods dropped from the sides of the helicopter and plunged straight down into the stern of the last harbor police boat. A static spark from the pods being cut loose fired one of the remaining missiles and it streaked down the last twenty feet, igniting the rear of the boat in a maelstrom of destruction.
With the weight and drag of the pods gone, Adams found he had better control. Turning the Robinson toward the direction of the Oregon, he began to scan the water for the outline of the ship.
“Scratch two,” he said quietly. “I’m coming home.”
WHEN a person is far out in the ocean and the weather is bad, the sight of anything man-made brings comfort and solace. For the seven people and one Golden Buddha on the small boats being chased by the Chinese navy, the bow of the Oregon looming up through the fog was as welcome as the sight of four of a kind to a losing poker player.
“Steer over to the davits,” Hanley said over the radio. “We need to get you aboard fast.”
The two Zodiac pilots eased their boats into a pair of davits located off the port and starboard stern of the Oregon. The deckhands had the boats and the people hoisted through the air and back on the deck in less than two minutes. Murphy was climbing off the Zodiac when Franklin Lincoln walked over.
“I played with your toy,” he said. “You can put another ship sticker on the console.”
Murphy smiled. “Good shooting, Tex.”
“Everyone okay?” Lincoln asked.
“All but Jones,” Murphy said, pointing. “We need to carry him to sick bay.”
Lincoln walked across the deck to the second Zodiac and stared inside. “Jones,” he said, smiling, “you look pitiful.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Jones said. “My ribs are killing me.”
“You do what you set out to do?” Lincoln asked.
“Always,” Jones said, pointing to the case containing the Golden Buddha. “Now get me below to the sick bay and fill me up with painkillers.”
“Up you go,” Lincoln said as he reached into the inflatable and carefully lifted Jones from the floor as easily as plucking a puppy from a litter.
“THREE minutes to fire,” a voice said over the intercom on board the Santa Fe. Down in the launch bay, the pair of modified Tomahawk cruise missiles with the experimental FRITZY electronic destruction modules sat ready to launch. The FRITZY system used a burst of electronic waves to scramble the circuitry of any powered electronics. Captain Farragut was waiting anxiously for the launch. The anxiety did not stem from being worried about his crew’s actions—they were highly trained and would perform the task flawlessly. It was caused by the unknown. Farragut was curious if FRITZY was all it was cracked up to be—and if he could soon claim the crown as the first commander to use it in battle. That fact might help at promotion time; at the very least it would be worth a few free drinks once the Santa Fe made port again.
“Doors open, sir,” the chief of boat said, “and all is in order.”
“WE see you,” Hanley said to Adams, “but you need to land now.”
Adams was making his approach behind the stern of the Oregon and lining up for his descent onto the landing pad.
“Two minutes or so,” Adams said.
“In a minute thirty,” Hanley said, staring at a timer, “your electronics will cease to function.”
“Clear the decks,” Adams said loudly. “I’ll climb, then shut the engine off and initiate auto-rotation.”
“Fire-foam the decks,” Hanley said over the intercom. “We shut down all the electrical power in one minute.”
Many people think that once a helicopter loses power it plunges from the sky. Actually, if power to the rotor is lost, the pilot can use the wind from his descent to spin the blades. The procedure, auto-rotation, is tricky, but the maneuver has saved more than a few lives over the years. Usually the pilot has a reasonably large field or clearing to land on. Doing a forced auto-rotation onto a pad just slightly bigger than the helicopter herself takes nerves of steel and fortitude. Adams used his minute to gain altitude. Then he lined up behind the landing pad. When his watch said it was time, he flicked off the governor and rolled back the throttle. The R-44’s freewheeling unit engaged and the drive shaft to the main and tail rotor disconnected.
Adams reached up and turned off the key.
Suddenly, without the noise from the engine, it was strangely quiet, the only sounds the whooshing of the wind racing past the fuselage and the sound from Adams’s lips as he whistled Bobby Darrin’s “Mack the Knife.” The R-44 was making a steeper descent than normal, but Adams was in complete control.
Only when all the lights on the Oregon went dark in the fog did he give it a second thought.
“ONE away,” the chief of boat said quietly. “Now two.”
The cruise missiles left the launch tubes and streaked skyward, then turned and dived down to wave level. Programmed to the target by a sophisticated computer, the missiles raced toward the Chinese corvette and the frigate at 450 kilometers an hour. Once the cruise missiles were close to the two ships, they sent out a concentrated burst of electronic friction similar to that emitted after an atomic bomb blast.