Read an Excerpt
THE EVIDENCE
A NOVEL
By AUSTIN BOYD NAVPRESS
Copyright © 2006 Austin Walker Boyd, Jr.
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57683-944-7
Chapter One
FRIDAY, DECEBER 18, 1998: ATHENS, GREECE
JOHN TUMBLED HALF-CONSCIOUS into the nightstand, sending a glass crashing across the cold marble floor.
The pounding that had awakened him still rocked his door. "Launch the alert crew!" the voice shouted again.
Dancing around the jagged glass shards, John sprang into a flight suit before the last knock sounded. Up and down the spartan hallway, shouts and clatter from his groggy combat aircrew shattered the early morning calm.
Seven minutes later, all twelve airmen piled into a cramped European van at the hotel's entrance, flight bags in hand. The smelly diesel-fueled shuttle lurched out of the portico and began a race to Athens airport and the crew's U.S. Navy submarine-hunter aircraft, the P-3C Orion. They had one hour from notification to be airborne.
John glanced at his watch. Nine precious minutes had passed. They caromed down vacant, narrow streets paved with ancient cobbles. Aware that all eyes were on him, John balanced on a tiny, bouncing perch at the front of the van and studied the classified message in his hand. "The Russians just popped up north of Libya. Victor III class," he said.
A low whistle came from a short crewman stuffed in the back. The Victor III was the stealthiest of Russian attack submarines, the quietest of all underwaterpredators in this, the noisiest water on the planet. No Mediterranean-based crew had ever tracked a Victor III; it was the elite of the Russian fleet. This could be history - if they succeeded.
"I don't just want to track this Ruskie. I want to humiliate him. The U.S. Navy is here to stay." John surveyed his experienced crew, a dozen brassy aviators on the verge of a great hunt, every one of them hungry for bear.
MEDITERRANEAN SEA, NORTH OF THE GULF OF SIDRA
eleven hours later, orbiting over the last known location of the submarine, the crew continued to scan the sea for some sign of their quarry. Patrol Plane Commander John Wells and his copilot shifted in their seats in the cockpit, struggling to stay alert after nearly a half day in the air.
"Any contact, Sonics? I mean anything?" John asked on intercom.
"Zero, Flight. Nothin' in this water but fish and freighters."
The tactical coordinator chimed in. "We're almost out of sensors, Hawk. Want to leave early?"
"No way," John said. "Only takes one sonar contact to claim we got him. We stay." He wasn't about to quit what might be his last chance to nail a Russian. In a month, John would be home, his last tactical flying assignment completed. He was almost out of time.
"Only got ten sonar buoys left, Flight. Better drop 'em right on him, or it's all over." John's whiz tactician "Choke" Baciocco sat ten feet behind him in the loud aircraft, planning their next move in this crucial game. The final decision - stay or go - was up to John.
John nodded and double-clicked his microphone switch in silent reply. With a little luck, one of their deep hydrophones would get a "sniff," a brief acoustic trace of the silent craft. Visually scouring the water for any clue to the submerged warship, John strained for a last-minute chance to salvage this historic opportunity.
"Aw, come on, Commander. It's time for Happy Hour," said a voice on the intercom. "Friday night ... Athens ..."
"Ouzo!" someone else chimed in.
Not a chance. You never left time on the clock, sensors in your aircraft, or extra fuel in your tanks. Anything could happen - like during the cold war, those glory days when he and Choke flew their first missions together, chasing every variant of Soviet missile submarine that slipped into the frigid North Atlantic. Countless covert missions more than a thousand miles from the nearest land, far from rescue, swearing never to divulge the day's secrets. Those missions were distant memories now, but the lessons were vivid.
"We stay," John said. He snugged his safety harness tighter and rolled into a crisp turn to hit the next computer-predicted drop of another hydrophone. Five thousand flight hours in a dozen models of aircraft guided his smooth control of the airliner-sized plane. Four engines roared as he advanced the throttles, accelerating toward the next sensor waypoint.
John's one consolation in the sunset of his tactical flying career was his return to family. The constant separation from his wife Amy, and his infant son tore at him. He pulled her picture from his sleeve pocket and wedged it under the instrument visor in front of him. As much as he loved to fly, to match wits with the enemy, he was ready to be home, to be a father and a full-time husband.
There was one more benefit to his return: the possibility, however remote, of astronaut selection. "Astronaut" was John's lifelong goal; Amy would say it was his whole life. He'd worn his knees out praying about it. Now, after years of work and eight NASA applications, he was a finalist. Surely God understood that he had to make it this time. Soon he'd be thirty-six. The window for selection was about to close.
He buried his anxiety, pushing it deep to get his head back in the game.
The sun flirted with the horizon in front of him. Somewhere behind his right wing was Crete and beyond it, Greece. To his left, Benghazi and the infamous Gulf of Sidra. The flat Mediterranean shimmered like a golden platter before the brilliant sinking sun. It was an incredible panorama from the cockpit of the P-3C Orion, two miles above the ocean.
Yet the platter had a flaw, pointing straight into the dipping sun, a feather that tore the fabric of perfect gold. It was a wispy submarine periscope wake, unmistakable to his trained eyes, which had found more wakes, or feathers, than any man's in any squadron he'd served in. John had earned his flight call sign, Hawk, by locating submarines the old-fashioned way. With his eyes.
"Tally ho! Periscope. Eleven o'clock!" John called out as he whipped into action. "Radar, get me a fix! Warm up MAD!" The Magnetic Anomaly Detector would sense the slight magnetic field disturbances created by the submarine below, but only if John could get the plane down to two hundred feet, and fast.
"Choke. Set up for active sonar. Might be your last chance."
"Way ahead of you. Active sonar buoy 31, ready to drop. Sonics, d'you copy all that?" Choke said, his voice tight with anticipation.
"Roger that. Goin' active. Ready to pang him."
"Ping."
"Tha's what I said."
"Attack in two minutes, Hawk!" Choke yelled.
"Hang on!" John grinned as he yanked the power levers to idle, dropped the landing gear to increase his drag, and pointed the nose straight down toward the water. He was headed to the surface to slam the Ruskie.
The big plane plunged into a sickening dive. "Yee-haw!" screamed Sonics, their drawling Georgian sonar whiz, as the crew floated weightless in their seat harnesses. John knew his experienced copilot, flight call-sign Bulldog, had been through this hair-raising maneuver a dozen times, but the color still drained from the face of the young man to his right.
John wrapped the plane into a nauseating sixty-five degree angle of bank until all that could be seen in the windshield was water. The huge craft hurled toward the ocean like a suicidal fighter jet.
Bulldog called out rates of descent and completed checklists as the altimeter wound backward in a wild race toward zero. The flight engineer hovered over the power levers and his panorama of dials, switches, and knobs. With one exception, the members of Combat Air Crew Six were a well-choreographed squad. Clutching the radar console behind John, third pilot Phil Armstrong, new to naval aviation, tried to hold down his lunch.
In a flurry of six hands and a dozen levers, the landing gear came up, engines went to full throttle, and the plane leveled in a low-altitude thrill ride just a hair's breadth above the green sea. The surface raced below them at three hundred knots. Surrounded by the piercing whine of four massive turboprops, with a Russian ahead of them and cocked weapon racks below, the adrenaline gushed through twelve modern warriors. This was the stuff of dreams.
"Ready, Choke? Let's waste him."
"Ready, Hawk. Torpedo selected. Get me on top."
The P-3C Orion roared across the water toward the last ripples left by a periscope that had sliced through a flat sea. The sun was half-submerged ahead of them, and the submarine was gone. Ivan was on the run. John shook his head in silence, sure the Russian could hear them. The whine of their engines poured more energy into the sea than a pair of Chinese garbage scows.
No one cared about stealth now. They were about to bang their quarry with everything they had in their peacetime arsenal. Everyone was poised for the magic word: MADMAN - the code word that the airplane's sensitive electronics had plucked a magnetic needle from the saltwater haystack. In the middle of a million square miles of water, they had to fly directly over the Russian to find him.
Had it been wartime, the open bomb bay and its loaded weapon racks would be ready to release a deadly accurate high-speed torpedo to chase down even the fastest quarry. Today, however, their torpedoes were simulated. If they caught him, their quarry would live to see another day - but not before a dreaded active sonar buoy would ping the Victor III into submission, ripping away any veil of stealth. In this high-stakes peacetime game, locating the enemy with an active sonar buoy was as good as a kill.
John leveled his wings and flew toward the invisible submarine, armed with a sixth sense. The Russian was below him. He was sure of it.
"MADMAN! MADMAN!" The sensor operator alerted the crew as the sensitive stylus flailed in a bloody frenzy across his data recorder. "Pen banger!"
"Weapon away! Smoke away! Active buoy away!" Choke yelled into his microphone as he punched a dozen buttons on the tactical panel. A smoke buoy fell to the water, igniting to mark the sub's location, and the sonar buoy began to unreel its acoustic gear seconds after water impact. The bomb bay weapon rack clicked open, releasing an imaginary torpedo to find its prey.
Most eyes were on the tactical computer scopes, but John craned his neck to the left, searching for a sign of white smoke on the water as he counted to himself. He trusted his eyes. John knew that many of his crewmen dreaded what came next. It took a perfect gut-wrenching three-G turn to make the maneuver work. He counted down the final seconds out loud. "... Two, one, now!"
John concentrated on the altimeter as he hauled the big airplane into a sixty-degree turn to the left and pulled hard on the yoke. Any slip in his airmanship at this point and the plane would dive headlong into the ocean below. They were either seconds from death or a minute from the next simulated kill. The force of three gravities drained blood from his head in the tight turn. Over the intercom, Choke let out a piercing war-whoop.
The plane never dipped. The altimeter looked like it was stuck on two hundred feet as they whipped in a tight circle to capture the escaping Russian. There was nothing to see outside but a watery grave as the plane shuddered in the tight turn. In his peripheral vision, John saw Bulldog shake his head in wonder. His copilot had never succeeded at flying the perfect high-G turn.
"Hydrophone's deployed. Ping it!" Choke commanded over the intercom in the back of the noisy bucking plane.
"Fixin' to pang him ... now!" The Georgian's next move blasted a wall of acoustic energy into the sea that could be heard by whales a thousand miles away. The ear-splitting poing jolted the warm waters as it located the submarine with astounding precision and reverberated through the enemy's soundproofed black hull. Poing! Poing! The Georgian boiled the water with sound.
"Got him! Forty-three yards, bearin' 280 degrees off buoy 31."
"MADMAN! MADMAN!"
"He turned left!" Choke called out orders as John, anticipating the Russian, counted quietly and rolled into a tight right turn. Another three G's of churning guts and head-numbing joy. Behind him, John could hear Phil puke a chunky puddle on the cockpit floor. John's nose wrinkled as he remembered his own days of barfing in hot cockpits where there was no up or down.
"Sorry, buddy. We're not done yet." John's eyes were fixed on the instruments, his lips moving in a silent prayer. He snapped the plane to wings level, bearing down on the invisible prey.
Again, the sub made a radical course correction. But it was too late.
"MADMAN!"
The open bomb bay doors roared in the airstream as Choke simulated the release of a second torpedo. "Weapon away!"
John high-fived his flight engineer as they closed a virtual coffin on the unseen Russian submariners, then wrapped the plane into a third hair-raising turn.
"Time to go," Choke announced moments later, grunting under the G-load. "Relief aircraft above us ... want some of Ivan ... before it's too late ... lots of pukin' back here."
John nodded, clicking the mike twice to confirm his friend's request, then leveled the wings and advanced the throttles. The aircraft leapt forward as John pointed the nose into the sky and headed for home base. The placid emerald waters quickly faded into a blue grey sea far below them.
Half an hour later, on the return to Athens, John turned the pilot seat over to Phil and sauntered to the back through the cockpit's blackout curtains. Choke and the navigator met him at their station sporting wicked grins.
"Message from Naples, sir." The navigator pointed to the printer.
"Guess they got our news, eh?" John said with a smile. "'Saw sub. Sank same.'"
"Seems so." The grins got bigger.
John's smile faded as he eyed his crew warily, sure of a prank. Choke was full of them. "Okay. Hand it over."
The navigator tore off a sheet from the line printer and passed it with a reverential bow to John.
Something was amiss. John yelled at the pilots beyond the blackout curtain. "You guys okay up there? I think I'm about to get had."
"I'm sure you deserve it," Bulldog yelled back. "Read it on intercom."
Now John was sure he was being set up. Bulldog, a quiet young man with no sense of humor, was somehow in on this, too.
John read the terse tactical message aloud. "One-eight December. Well done, crew six. First active sonar contact on Victor III in Med. Admiral Tuttle sends personal congratulations. Additional news for Mission Commander -" John blanched, then coughed, unable to continue.
"Go on, John," Choke urged, his smile widening. "We all want to hear."
John felt light-headed as he scanned down the message. He leaned his tall frame into the white bulkhead and continued. "Skip -" He took a breath and continued. "Skipper advises that NASA requests you report to Houston, Texas, February 1999. New assignment: Astronaut Candidate. Congratulations, Hawk. You finally made it."
MONASTIRAKI SQUARE, ATHENS, GREECE
"No more for me!" John waved off the offer of another souvlaki sandwich and the bottle of cheap yellow wine.
"Come on, Commander. Retsina! Celebrate the kill!"
John shook his head and toasted his happy crew with the dregs of a lukewarm Coke.
"I've really enjoyed this, fellas. Now go home. And don't let the Ouzo loosen you up, got it?" He smiled, sure that at least one of his airmen would drink his way into trouble.
"Where'll we find your skinny body tomorrow?" Choke kidded as they stood up.
"The Parthenon." John slapped his best friend on the back as they parted ways on the crowded sidewalk. "Get 'em to bed, Choke. And sleep in." Combat Aircrew Six, the "Sons of Thunder" from Patrol Squadron eight, flowed downhill toward their hotel, cheering their commander as they sang off-key on their way to the next bar.
Alone at last, John soaked in the night air and the old market district. he loved Athens. He closed his eyes and drank in the odors - roasting lamb, souvlaki spits, coffee shops, olive oil, spices, and that unmistakable but elusive odor of oldness - the ancient city smell.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE EVIDENCE by AUSTIN BOYD Copyright © 2006 by Austin Walker Boyd, Jr.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
