Target Lock on Love

Chapter 1-3

Mick watched for the first one to unfreeze; a junior officer twitched like he’d had his butt pinched.

Mick dodged the Linda back into the storm with all the agility of her Terminator II namesake the moment before the deck lights flashed on.

“Camera.” It was their first really close look at a Nampo-class light frigate; though he had no time to look himself.

“Never stopped recording,” Patty answered back.

“Good girl,” not that he’d expected less.

“Woman!” She sniped back just as he’d planned.

“Where?”

Her growl was music to his ears.

This time he approached from the starboard side, flew directly over the bridge and disappeared to port.

“Woman! Like the one who’s gonna shove you out on the next fly-by. Then you’ll be shipped off to North Korea and no longer chapping my ass.”

“So scared. Eek,” he delivered it deadpan.

She spared a moment to punch him in the arm, lightly, so that she didn’t jostle his control.

Mick focused on keeping the bridge crew distracted. They didn’t begin to understand the high technology of his Little Bird. Across the inside of his helmet was displayed the image of any direction he looked. With a thumb control he could look up, down, even straight behind him as if he was sitting alone in the night sky without a helicopter wrapped around him. Outside, multiple mounted cameras routed thermal-enhanced seamless images onto his visor.

A slap of wind tried to slew him into the high bow of the frigate. He lifted enough to clear the railing, but kept his landing light aimed directly in their faces as the ship slewed across beneath him. Between the wind and the waves and the crap visibility, this was getting nasty even by Night Stalker standards.

“How are the others doing?” he asked Patty.

“You just focus on keeping us alive and this crew distracted.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Am not. I’m a woman. I get,” and she went for song, “R.E.S.P.E.C.—”

“First ship tampered,” Sofia reported over the radio, cutting off Patty’s grossly off-key efforts. “The Leeloo, she is clear.”

Sofia’s naturally musical tones only emphasized the degree of murder that O’Donoghue had been perpetrating on Aretha.

“The wet team, it is headed now to Beatrix’s target.”

Mick was damn glad to not be on the wet team. It was a given that SEALs were comfortable in water, but this storm was ugly even from the air. From the small rubber boat that the Carrie-Anne had delivered astern of the KPN’s ships, it must be pure hell.

Beatrix’s ship was second. The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk was named for Uma Thurman’s role in the Kill Bill movies; a very appropriate moniker. The DAP Hawk was the most heavily armed helicopter in any military. There were less than two dozen of them—all designed by and built for the Night Stalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Mick had flown the big helo on a couple of familiarization flights, but he’d always been partial to his Little Bird. Hard not to be impressed by the DAP Hawk’s raw power, but he preferred the super-agility of his aircraft. Less maneuverable, he hoped Beatrix was being careful while distracting their target. He shouldn’t worry, Rafe and Julian were almost as good a team as he and Patty. He worried anyway.

A hard gust smacked him sideways and he yanked up on the collective to avoid eating the frigate’s radio mast.

“Hey look! They do still have an Mi-4 helo tied down on their stern. Ooo! Big wave just buried it in spray. Salt water, fifty year old hardware, bad deal guys.”

Mick wished he had a moment to look, but that was Patty’s job as copilot in situations like this. He actually appreciated the running commentary as she cataloged the ship’s features for the recorder that was also capturing the video for later study by whoever cared.

They were playing an elegant trick on the North Koreans. A DEVGRU team—that the public had called by their long abandoned name of SEAL Team 6 for so long that they’d taken to calling themselves Team 6 anyway—had been launched in a boat by the lurking Chinook helicopter. The team was dodging in behind each of the Korean ships, one by one, and performing a death-defying stunt.

The plan, suggested by the SEALs themselves because they were just that crazy, was to partially disable each ship. Not in a dangerous way, in case they hit a big storm on their way home, but enough to be immensely awkward.

When a particularly tall wave lifted the stern of each ship high enough for the rudder to clear the water, the SEAL team would zip forward in their tiny boat. Undetected due to the helicopters playing distraction games around the command bridges, the SEALs would slap a super-epoxied bar of metal to the hull directly in front of the rudder.

The bar extended out alongside the rudder. The result was that the Koreans would be able to turn to starboard without a problem. But if they tried to turn to port more than a few degrees, the rudder would hit the bar and that was it. Any time they came too far off their course, they’d have to go in a full circle to regain their heading.

For the North Koreans to cut the bar, they’d require calm seas, a skilled diver, and an underwater cutting torch. It was a fair bet that they probably weren’t carrying the last item, especially as the bars were titanium—light to handle but with an unusually high melting point.

Even if they were able to cut it, they wouldn’t be able to hide the bar itself—it would take a shipyard and new plating to remove it from the hull. Three senior captains were about to be in immense trouble.

“The Beatrix, she’s complete,” Sofia updated him.

The tactical display showed that the heroine of The Fifth Element, Leeloo, and the Beatrix were standing off in case he needed help with distracting his own light frigate, the largest of the three.