Retribution by Dale Brown Read Free Book Online

plane, he could tell it hadn’t done serious damage.
    Leveling out, Dog took a moment to wipe the sweat from the palms of his hands, then pulled back to climb. He glanced over his left shoulder, looking for the frigate in the distance.
    He didn’t see the ship. But he did see a silvery baseball bat, headed straight for him.
    It was another HQ-7 antiair missile, and it was gaining fast.
    Northern Arabian Sea
0912
    T HOUGH IT WAS SMALL , THE W EREWOLF KICKED UP A PRETTY good amount of wind from its props and engines. Mack had trouble keeping his eyes clear as the robo-helo edged in, its rope and sling swinging below.
    What Starship had called a collar looked like a limp rubber band—a wet, slimy one that packed the wallop of a wrecking ball. As Mack reached for it, a swell pushed him forward faster than he expected and he was whacked in the neck. He grabbed for the rope but couldn’t quite reach it.
    “Get that mother!” he yelled.
    He put his left hand on the raft and lurched forward, jumping across the tiny boat for the collar. He managed to spear his arm through it and immediately began to spin to the right. T-Bone jumped at the same time and also grabbed part of the collar. Dish reached but missed, grabbing T-Bone instead. The three men crashed together, none of them daring to let go. The tied-together rafts twirled beneath them, one of them nearly swamping.
    “I got it, I got it!” yelled Mack. He hung on as the rope bucked back and forth. “Just grab me. Grab onto me and hold onto the rafts. Stabilize them!”
    Starship was trying to tell him something, but Mack couldn’t hear. He felt the helicopter pulling him upward and tried locking his grip by grabbing his flight suit, so that the sling was tucked under his arm. His right leg tangled in the line they’d used to lash the two rafts together, and he felt as if he was being pulled apart at the groin.
    “Hold me and the raft! Hold me and the raft!” he shouted, though by now his voice was hoarse.
    They were moving, though he had no idea in what direction. It wasn’t exactly what he’d in mind, but it was something.
    Aboard the Abner Read,
northern Arabian Sea
0916
    S TARSHIP DIDN’T KNOW FOR SURE WHETHER THE MEN IN the raft had snagged the line until he had to struggle to correct for a shift in the wind. He nudged the Werewolf forward and the rafts came with her, pulling through the water at about four knots.
    The frigate was still coming toward them.
    “Major, I’m going to try increasing the speed,” said Starship. “Are you guys all right?”
    Mack’s response, if there was one, was drowned out by the roar of the Werewolf ’s blades directly overhead. The engineers who had advertised the chopper as “whisper quiet” obviously had a unique notion of how loud a whisper was.
    Starship notched the speed up gently, moving to six knots and then eight. He knew it had to feel fast to the men on the rafts, but it was less than half the frigate’s speed, and the ship continued to close. While the helo was too low to the water for an antiair missile, it was only a matter of time before the frigate’s conventional weapons could be brought to bear.
    “Come to ten knots,” he told the computer, deciding to use the more precise voice command instead of the throttle.
    As the computer acknowledged, a warning panel opened on the main screen—the frigate’s gun-control radar had just locked onto the helicopter.
    Aboard the Wisconsin,
over the northern Arabian Sea
0916
    D OG DROVE THE M EGAFORTRESS DOWN TOWARD THE waves, hoping he could get low enough to avoid the radar guiding the missile toward him. He hung on as the Wisconsin shook violently, the aerodynamic stresses so severe that hethought for a moment the missile had already caught up. He kept his eyes on the ocean as he slammed downward; when he thought it was time to pull up, he waited five long seconds more before doing so.
    By then it was almost too late. The controls felt as if they were stuck in