Christmas at Steel Beach

Chapter 1-2

The sunset was still flooding the Well Deck through the gap above the Peleliu’s unopened stern ramp as U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Sly Stowell did his best to look calm. After nineteen years in, it was his job to radiate steadiness to his customers, the troops he was transporting. That wasn’t a problem.

He was also supposed to actually be calm during mission preparations, but it never seemed to work that way. A thousand hours of drill still never prepared him for the adrenaline rush of a live op and tonight he’d been given the “go for operation.” This section of the attack—presently loading up on his LCAC hovercraft deep inside the belly of the USS Peleliu—was all his.

“Get a Navy move-on, boys,” he shouted to the Ranger platoon loading up, “’nuff of this lazy-a*s Army lollygag.”

A couple of the newbies flinched, but all the old hands just grinned at him and kept pluggin’ along. They all wore camo gear and armored vests. Their packs were only large for this mission, not massive. It was supposed to be an in and out, but it was always better to be prepared.

Two of the old hands wore Santa hats, had their Kevlar brain buckets with the clipped on night-vision gear dangling off their rifles. It was December first and he liked the spirit of it, celebrating the season, though he managed not to smile at them. It was the sworn duty of every soldier to look down on every other, especially for the Navy to look down on everyone else. It was only what the ground pounders and sky jockeys deserved, after all.

The Peleliu was a Navy ship, even if she’d switched over from carrying Marines to now having a load of Army aboard. The transition had worried him at first. Two decades of Marines and their ways had been uprooted six months ago and now a mere platoon of U.S. Army 75th Rangers had taken their place. The swagger was much the same though.

But Peleliu had also taken on a company from the Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment—their secret helicopter corps. They didn’t swagger, they flew. And, as much as Sly might feel disloyal to his branch of the Service, they tended to bring much more interesting operations than the Marines.

He could hear the low roar as the engines on the Ranger vehicles selected for this mission were started up in the Peleliu’s garage decks. The three vehicles rolled down the ramp toward Sly’s hovercraft moments later.

Normally it would have taken an hour of shuffling vehicles to extricate the ones they wanted from their tight parking spaces. But fifty Rangers needed far fewer vehicles than seventeen hundred Marines. The whole ship now had an excess of space. Having a tenth of the military personnel aboard had meant that two-thirds of the Navy personnel had also moved on to other billets.

Sly had been thrilled when his application to stay had been granted. It might not be the best career move, but the Peleliu was his and he wanted to ride her until the day she died.

It had also turned out to be a far more interesting choice, though he hadn’t known it at the time. Marines were all about invade that country, or provide disaster relief for that flood or earthquake. The 160th SOAR and the U.S. Rangers were about fast and quiet ops that only rarely were released to the news.

He watched as his crew began guiding the M-ATVs onto his hovercraft. They looked like Humvees on steroids. They were taller, had v-shaped hulls for resistance against road mines, and looked far meaner.

He’d been assigned to the LCAC hovercraft since his first day aboard. First as mechanic, then loadmaster, navigator, and finally pilot. And he’d never gotten over how much she looked like a hundred-ton shoebox without the lid.

He kept an eye on Nika and Jerome as they guided the first M-ATV down the internal ramp of the Peleliu and up the front-gate ramp of the LCAC. He trusted them completely, but he was the craftmaster and it was ultimately his job to make sure it was right.

The “shoebox” presently had her two narrow ends folded down. The tall sides were made up of the four Vericor engines, fans, blowers, defensive armor, and the control and gunnery positions. The front end was folded down revealing the three-lane wide parking area of the LCAC’s deck. Between the two massive rear fans to the stern—which still reminded him of the fanboats from his family’s one trip down to the Florida Everglades where they had not seen an alligator—a one-lane wide rear ramp was folded down toward the stern.

The LCAC was the size of a basketball court, though her sides towered twice as high as the basket. She filled the wood-planked Well Deck from side to side and could carry an Abrams M1A1 Main Battle Tank from here right up onto the beach. Those days were gone, though. Now it was the noise of Army Rangers and their M-ATVs filling the cavernous space in which even a sneeze echoed painfully.

Still, the old girl could handle them and it had instilled a new life in the ship. She’d been Sly’s home for the entire two decades of his Naval career and he didn’t look forward to giving her up. He sometimes felt as if they both were hanging on out of sheer stubbornness. Hell of a thought for a guy still in his thirties. Hanging on by his fingernails? Sad.

He’d considered getting a life. Mustering out, having a pension in place and starting a new career. But he loved this one.

And he’d been aboard the eight-hundred foot ship long enough that she was now called a two-hundred and fifty meter ship instead. This was his home.

Eighteen year-old Seaman Stowell had nearly s**t his uniform the day he’d reported aboard. She’d been patrolling off Mogadishu, Somalia then. In the two decades since, they’d circled the globe in both directions, though since the arrival of SOAR most of their operations had been around Africa. In nineteen years he’d traded East Africa for West Africa…and a lifetime between.

As he did before every mission, he willed this mission to please go better than the disastrous Operation Gothic Serpent—the failure immortalized by the movie Black Hawk Down that had unfolded ashore within days of his arrival aboard.

Sly didn’t feel all that different, except he no longer wanted to s**t his pants before battle. He still had to consciously calm down though.

Instead of a humdrum routine settling in after the Marines Expeditionary Unit’s departure, the Rangers and SOAR had amped it back up.

SOAR was a kick-a*s team, even by Navy standards. That they also had the number one Delta Force operator on the planet permanently embedded with them only meant that Sly’s life was never dull.

That was one of the reasons that Sly was looking forward to this operation. When Colonel Michael Gibson was involved, you knew it was going to be a hell-raiser.

They had the first M-ATV in place and locked down. The second one rolled up the ramp. Lieutenant Barstowe, the Rangers’ commander, came up beside him with his Santa hat still in place.

“Chief.”

“Lieutenant.”

“That’s one battle-rigged and two ambulance M-ATVs. Why don’t I like that ratio?”

“Because you’re a smart man, Chief Stowell.” The lieutenant moved up the ramp to talk with the driver of the third vehicle still waiting its turn.

They were definitely going into it heavy. That’s what finally calmed Sly’s nerves. It was the preparation he hated, once on the move he no longer had spare time to worry that he’d forgotten something.

At least he wasn’t the only one sweating it. Today was pretty typical December off the West African coast, ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity. Even the seawater from the Gulf of Guinea was limp with tepid heat as it sloshed against the outside of the hull with a flat slap and echo inside that resounded inside the Well Deck.

The last of the vehicles rolled up onto the LCAC hovercraft. For the Landing Craft, Air Cushion hovercraft—technically pronounced L.C.A.C. but more commonly El-Cack! like you were about to throw up—forty tons of vehicles and fifty Rangers was about a half load. But still he was going to keep an eagle eye on them. These young bucks might think they were the bad-asses, but until they’d faced down a Naval Chief Petty Officer—well, that was never going to happen as long as he was in the Navy.

Nika and Jerome guided the last of the vehicles into position at the center of gravity. Nika had been on his boat for two tours now and she’d better re-up next month because he had no idea who he’d ever find to replace her. She worked quickly on chaining down the third vehicle and then gave him a thumbs up. Jerome had six months as his mechanic, but had the routine down and echoed Nika’s signal. His engineer and his navigator reported ready.

The crew had already preflighted the craft, but he liked to do a final walk-around himself. There was only a foot between either side of the LCAC and the Well Deck walls.

The wooden decking along the bottom of the Well Deck was just clear of the wash of the ocean waves, so he didn’t need waders to do the inspection. For conventional landing craft that needed water to move around in, they could ballast down the stern, which lowered the ship to flood the Well Deck a meter deep or more. However, his hovercraft didn’t need such concessions. It was better this way. They could lift off dry without shedding a world of salt spray in all directions.

“Nika,” he called as he headed down to start his inspection, “get that stern gate open.” During the loading, the last of the sunset had disappeared, near darkness filled in the gap above the big door.

The Well Deck’s lights flickered as they were switched over from white to red for nighttime operations. They hadn’t flickered when he first came aboard, but she was feeling her age. He patted the inside of the Peleliu’s hull in sympathy as he reached the wooden planking that supported his LCAC. The huge rear gate let out a groan and began tipping out and down toward the sea.

His hovercraft was ninety feet long and fifty wide and there actually wasn’t much to see during his inspection, which was a good thing. The deflated skirts that would trap the air from the four gas turbine engines, delivering over twenty-thousand horsepower of lift and driving force, now hung in limp folds of thick black rubber. Patches covering tears and bullet holes from prior missions dotted the rippling surface. Above the rubber skirt, the aluminum sides were battered from the hard use—partly bad-guy assholes with rifles and partly harsh weather operations.

Sly saw the former as badges of courage for the old craft…and did his best not to recall how the latter was earned when nasty cross seas had slammed his craft into the sides of the Well Deck entrance. He was a damn good pilot, but there were limits to what a man could do when the ship went one way, the seas another, and his hovercraft a third.

He was halfway around his craft when he first heard it, the high whine of an incoming boat. It hadn’t been there a moment before. The Well Deck acted like a giant acoustical horn, gathering all sounds from dead astern and amplifying and focusing them like a gunshot at anyone inside the cavernous Well Deck at the time. Often you’d hear a boat before you saw it, especially at night.

He stood at the foot of the rear ramp of the hovercraft and turned, but there were no lights to see.

Then there were, incredibly close aboard. A small unit riverine craft by the arrangement of the blinding white lights that had him raising an arm to save his eyes.

The riverine was carving a high speed turn as if they intended to run right up the stern gate and into the Well Deck.

They cut their speed at the last moment with a hard reverse of the engines, but he knew it was too late for him.

The bow wave rushed up the Well Deck planking ahead of the riverine, driven bigger and faster by the abrupt nose-down of the decelerating craft. The wave came high enough to soak him to mid-calf and made him sit down abruptly. The wave washed part way up the rear ramp of his hovercraft before receding—totally soaking his butt.

He wondered who he could blame for this one.

In a moment, he was going to stand up and the fifty Rangers standing on the LCAC’s loading deck were going to be laughing their asses off at the Navy’s expense.

That just wasn’t right.

Sly glared over at the small riverine craft, squinting against the bright array of lights so that he could see who to blame. The bow section folded forward and allowed a tall woman wearing a duffle over one shoulder and carrying a small black case to dismount. Then the craft began backing away from the Well Deck even as the bow section was pulled back up. He didn’t get a good look at any of them. The dogs!

The woman walked up close to Sly and stopped to look down at him.

That initial impression of tall was combined with Navy fit, and a uniform that showed it off in the best way. Her short tousle of dark red hair hung perfectly as if she’d just brushed it rather than gone for a ride on a craft that could hit thirty-five knots. She wore an emblem of a large crescent-shaped “C” over four horizontal stripes. The “C” marked her as a Steward, the four stripes as the new Chief Steward they’d been told to expect.

She looked like a breath of fresh air.

Truth be told, she looked like the goddamn goddess Venus rising from the water as she stepped out onto the last retreating sheen of seawater that was washing back off the deck under her boots.

He stood to greet her properly.

A roll of laughter sounded behind him and Sly turned—remembering a moment too late as he turned his back on the new Chief—the butt of his uniform was still sopping wet.