Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [48]
“We’re coming up on the last minute,” Grafton reported to the lieutenant. “We’re going to have to descend now or we’ll run the risk of exposure to the destroyer in orbit. I don’t have to tell you we won’t be hard to pick out against this mess down below.”
“No, you’re right, Grafty,” the officer replied. He swallowed his misgivings, as always hating the part of the ride where he had no control. “Better take her down.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Grafton flashed an external light that was visible to the men on Tommy barely five hundred meters to port, indicating his intention to enter the atmosphere. He was rewarded immediately with a corresponding reply: Message received and understood.
The pilot used his stern thrusters to drop the boat’s nose, and almost immediately they were swallowed in the gusts of a maelstrom. The craft rocked and heeled, and if the men hadn’t been strapped down, they would have tumbled all through the cockpit. As it was, they hung on for dear life, and many an ice-blooded SEALS felt the blood drain from his face and the acid churn in his belly as they entered the grip of the stormy atmosphere.
“Where the hell is Tommy?” someone asked, and the truth sank in: They couldn’t see more than a few dozen meters in this murk, and they already had lost visual contact with the other drop boat.
“Damn, Lieutenant. My gauges are going all to hell. We’re getting a ton of interference; it’s masking radar, radio, even the magnetometer.”
“No signal from the other boat?”
“Negative, sir. Nothing but static.”
“Hold her steady, Grafty,” Jackson said, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. He toyed briefly with an unpleasant question: Should they abort the mission? But there was no way to communicate that intent to the other boat even if he was willing to give the order.
And the truth was that he couldn’t do it. They were in, come hell or high water.
Although, it looked like they were more likely to end up in a snowdrift than either some semblance of Hades or anything even remotely liquid. White gusts swirled past the canopy; snow was blowing so hard—and was matched to their considerable speed—that it was merely a blur of whiteness. The green lights illuminating the control panel reflected eerily in the frigid murk. Jackson’s small computer screen had gone to its own realm of white, a chaos of static that completely obscured even images that he called up from his own hard drive. It was as if they were in the middle of some kind of powerful electromagnetic pulse.
“Keep trying to raise Tommy,” Grafton barked to his gunner, who doubled as the radioman. “You never know when we’ll get a break in the static.”
Jackson glimpsed the bright strobe of the other boat just once through the swirl of cloud, and he had to be impressed by how well the two pilots were holding formation. They were descending steadily, and he remembered the scouting reports: This ice moon was a very mountainous place. Now he couldn’t help imagining jagged daggers of frosty rock jutting from the moon’s surface to slice the drop boats out of the sky.
“Keep the nose up—shit. I’m losing her,” Coxswain Grafton snapped. His hands were steady on the drop boat’s helm, but Mikey was pitching and hawing violently as the little craft descended through the cloudy, raging atmosphere. “Not much air pressure, sir,” he reported to Jackson. “But what there is seems to be howling past us at about two hundred kph. And damned if it doesn’t switch from a headwind to a tailwind in the blink of an eye.”
It seemed that the gusts did just that as the drop boat suddenly careered forward recklessly, a stomach-churning jolt that had all the SEALS lurching against their safety straps. For a heart-stopping moment it seemed as if they were smashing into a physical object, and then the speedy descent resumed, each man pressed