Without remorse - Tom Clancy [237]
'Nice and deep,' Franks observed.
'As far as I need it to be,' Kelly agreed, munching on some toast. 'The objective's right here.'
'Better you than me, my friend.' Franks pulled a pair of dividers out of his pocket and walked off the distance.
'How long you been in this business?'
'Gator navy?' Franks laughed. 'Well, they kicked my ass out of Annapolis in two and a half years. I wanted destroyers, so they gave me a first-sight LST. XO as a jaygee, would you believe? First landing was Pelileu. I had my own command for Okinawa. Then Inchon, Wonsan, Lebanon. I've scraped off a lot of paint on a lot of beaches. You think ... ?' he asked, looking up.
'We're not here to fail, Captain.' Kelly had every twist of the river committed to memory, yet he continued to look at the chart, an exact copy of the one he'd studied at Quantico, looking for something new, finding nothing. He continued to stare at it anyway.
'You're going in alone? Long swim, Mr Clark,' Franks observed.
'I'll have some help, and I don't have to swim back, do I?'
'I suppose not. Sure will be nice to get those guys out.
'Yes, sir.'
CHAPTER 27
Insertion
Phase One of Operation boxwood green began just before dawn. The carrier USS Constellation reversed her southerly course at the transmission of a single code word. Two cruisers and six destroyers matched her turn to port, and the handles on nine different sets of engine-room enunciators were pushed down to the full setting. All of the various ship's boilers were fully on line already, and as the warships heeled to starboard, they also started accelerating. The maneuver caught the Russian AGI crew by surprise. They'd expected Connie to turn the other way, into the wind to commence flight operations, but unknown to them the carrier was standing down this morning and racing northeast. The intelligence-gathering trawler also altered course, increasing power on her own in the vain hope of soon catching up with the carrier task force. That left Ogden with two Adams-class missile-destroyer escorts, a sensible precaution after what had so recently happened to USS Pueblo off the Korean coast.
Captain Franks watched the Russian ship disappear an hour later. Two more hours passed, just to be sure. At eight that morning a pair of AH-1 Huey Cobras completed their lonely overwater flight from the Marine air base at Danang, landing on Ogden's ample flight deck. The Russians might have wondered about the presence of two attack helicopters on the ship which, their intelligence reports confidently told them, was on an electronic-intelligence mission not unlike their own. Maintenance men already aboard immediately wheeled the 'snakes' to a sheltered spot and began a complete maintenance check which would verify the condition of every component. Members of Ogden's crew lit up their own machine shop, and skilled chief machinist's mates offered everything they had to the new arrivals. They were still not briefed on the mission, but it was clear now that something most unusual indeed was under way. The time for questioning was over. Whatever the hell it was, every resource of their ship was made available even before officers troubled themselves to relay that order to their various divisions. Cobra gunships meant action, and every man aboard knew they were a hell of a lot closer to North Vietnam than South. Speculation was running wild, but not that wild. They had a spook team aboard, then Marines, now gunships, and more helicopters would land this afternoon. The Navy medical corpsmen aboard were told to open up the ship's hospital spaces for new arrivals.
'We're going to raid the fuckers,' a bosun's mate third observed to his chief.
'Don't spread that one around,' the twenty-eight-year veteran growled back.
'Who the fuck am I gonna tell, Boats? Hey, man, I'm for it, okay?'
What is my Navy coming to? the veteran of Leyte Gulf asked himself.
'You, you, you,' the junior man called, pointing to some new seamen. 'Let's do a FOD walkdown.' That started a detailed examination of the flight