Columbian Neighborhood

Manuela's overnight capture has really stirred the hornet's nest even as far as one perfect little Medellín neighborhood. The sidewalks held together and trash pickups occurred at dawn every day. Police patrolled by to keep the peace and keep men like Bartista from flaunting their dirt, and the loudest sounds during the average day were church bells and playing children.
Underneath it, however, Heero Yuy sensed tension bleed from the men and women as they glared from their shaded stoops. Heero didn't exactly standout as a threat, either. He dressed casually, as usual, and carried nothing but a foam football with peculiar wings jutting out. He patted it around like a hot potato, and swiveled his head around, as if looking for kids to play with.
He stopped at a corner approximately a football field away from the safe house Bartista's brainy business school graduate slept over at.
Heero had a name and a thorough background. The guy's not Columbian at all and actually grew up as a member of a Texican crime family. He'd made good at Baylor and had successfully funneled the family's assets into something more respectable. As an intern, he'd even successfully formulated Governor Murphy's stunning presidential election of North America. Now he's doing the same cerebral work to tie his family in with Bartista, and when a soldier of Manuela's caliber disappears, the brains can only figure that other men of talent may be picked up, too. Here goes. Heero the stalker draws his arm back, steps his lead leg forward, balancing most of his weight on the back, shifts the opposite direction, and lobs the plaything far and away. It spirals upward to its pinnacle, then declines on terminal guidance. "Vamanos!" An alert senior bodyguard in shades sees it coming, and orders the others to scram. He sees that Heero's pass had a perfect bead on the big black Cadillac and he jumped into the driver's seat, opened the sunroof, leaped out, slapped shut the door.
Heero watched none of this however, instead he distanced himself from the scene, running a block and ducking into a blind ally. He heard the explosion, however, and turned his head as people are expected to do.
The youth then proceeded to dart under a clothesline weighted down by whites, then took a walk to a parking lot. From there he keyed open a two-door Chevrolet, the most low-end on the market. Twenty-years old, at that. He turned over the ignition, and drove for the slum rent house he kept.

Indian Ocean

Abdul nearly fainted upon hearing the news that the cannon had disabled his surveillance assets in orbit, but he got over it and dispatched Afmad and Auda aloft from Cyprus in a pair of turboprop maritime reconnaissance planes, so he'd have something more than his obsolescent hydrophone network to work with.
Their superior speed put them in the Indian Ocean fast enough to give hope of catching the fleet.
"Listen, you oddballs, Trowa had the foresight of using the cannon to hammer them while they exited the shallow water along the coast, and it knocked some bolts loose on their hardware. Consequently, I heard transient sounds from their vessels for a few (minutes) before they tightened up. I have a fresh bearing southeast from Somalia. They were heading into blue water at flank speed with no signs of changing their bearing. Since then, they cut speed and I lost contact."
From his terminal inside a recon plane cabin, Afmad scratched his beard thoughtfully.
"Thanks, Abdul, I just checked out your findings a couple knots ahead of your plotting with the neutering radar at full blast, and found a diving Cancer, turning starboard. You see that?"
In Luxemburg, Abdul lifted his sunglasses, and peered at the networked display.
"I see your contact, and confirmed it by catching a 'knuckle' in the water there." Afmad: "I narrowed the beam to a single degree, so I could sustain intensity. Still holding course."
Abdul saw it.
"Yeah, I'm hearing some bubbles there. Still trying to maintain contact, but I think we'll have him soon."
Afmad's voltage drained, but Auda accepted the handoff, and tracked the thin ocean swell.
"My batteries will recharge in time to scratch your back," Afmad chirped, "The cancer's leveling off."
"Okay, guys, I've established a continuous contact," Abdul alerted, "so go ahead and depth charge this sucker!"
"Affirmative, buddy, we're bombing our best solution. Depth, 780 meters, heading, speed, and location fixed, and one star cluster depth charges away!"
It was overkill, and it was costly, but the rapidly sinking canisters blanketed the cancer's vicinity.
"Ha! He tried to run, but I here a breakup! You got him, Auda! Label him Master zero, the origin of our success. I picked up a general broadcast from an underwater telephone, and I'm listening to it again. The language is English, and it's addressing the fleet," Abdul narrated his work, excitedly.
He played them the tape, and relayed its position.
"Comrades, we're being shadowed by the UN! Silent running!" Auda rubbed his smooth chin.
"Who was that?" Abdul thought it out.
"It came from a towed array moving at eight knots. Seed some sonar buoys over there and see what you find."
Auda's pilot complied, and Abdul heard the ripples reach out from the dropped buoys.
Auda detected the cable detach from the carrier, and hurriedly calculated a solution.
"I've got him!" He issued a hasty snapshot with a precious torpedo, and watched it chase the contact.
The "fish" plunged through the surface and went active seconds before reaching the last known location.
Luckily, the active acoustic energy rushed over the suspected contact, Master one.
"I have a ping!" All three Maguanacs watched Master one, a Pisces mobile-suit, turned hard rudder port at all possible speed. It threw a diverse array of decoys around, and tried banking starboard after starting a power dive. No use.
"He's broken up! Auda, that was risky; you didn't really know just what the origin of that sound was!" Auda rebutted.
"It's a matter of deduction, my friend. If you were to ditch a towed array, rather than reel it in, would you release the array, and keep the useless cable?" 'Yes,' thought Abdul, 'because our budget is so tight, we can't even afford to replace those.'
"Well, I'll take your silence to mean you're astounded by my logic!"

Medellín, Columbia

The bomb possibly weighed as little as a few full soda cans, and it exploded in an empty armored Cadillac. Yet, for all its tactical ineffectiveness, it scared the devil out of Mordred Bartista that morning. The ace bodyguard described it as an "antipersonnel smart bomb" because he'd seen it fly in and inter the luxury tank from the roof, adding that it looked like one of the target-marking flares dropped by warplanes.
Well, too bad for him, he'd never heard of the line of foam footballs marketed by a Hall of Fame quarterback in the United States. That football actually came with stabilizing fins that gave it awesome flight characteristics and the appearance of a generic bomb.
"He's unhurt, but after the attack, I couldn't convince him to stay in the country, and he says he'd like to leave the country. I convinced him that he'd be safer if we stowed him away for the next few days," said the guard, telephoning a contact to Bartista.
"That's all I have to report, out." Twenty-one thousand miles overhead, an electronic intelligence "bird" sponged the wireless broadcast, and ferried a tape of the message down on a drop vehicle, where it stayed until a recovery crew in the canal zone scooped it up and E-mailed the contents to Heero's address. The message tape, the retrievers knew, came with a thermite charge in case anyone tried to read it before transliterating it into a one-time pad, an unbreakable code. The retrievers had to let another computer handle all the processes of handling the message without keeping a human in the loop. The computer in fact handled the task of breaking the one-time pad that guarded the booby-trapped recording, then it had to encode the message, and send it automatically, all without exposing any of the processes to a human, so it ran these tasks without revealing them with a printout through any human interface.
Only through these secure means did Heero alone discover the whereabouts and mindset of the bodyguard when that guard spoke with his contact.
'They think an air strike did it, but I wouldn't call in an air strike, because I think all our air groups are compromised,' he mused, sitting in his dark rent house, reading the text.
'My next task is to drive to the next house where the call was made, and conduct another hit.'
He deleted the message, and electronically mapped out a plan to the address where the call was made. His mapping software let him know that this was another private home, so Heero accepted the assumption that this was another safe house. If it weren't, no big deal, the owners would just have to find another house; the pilot would still have to torch it.

He never parked a car used in a hit at his house, that would be a cardinal sin, so Heero walked a distance to the spiritual bookstore where he'd parked his white Chevrolet, and drove it on the route he'd outlined.
He sped through a back street with little traffic, not caring what the cratered road did to his two-seater, and abandoned it at a recycling center just out of sight of the target.
Heero kept trees between him and the house until he crossed the road, then he gracefully scaled the fence, and palmed his toothless key.
Yuy rolled under the windows, and resurfaced at the backdoor, where he inserted the key. This toothless key came with a crank, and when one turns the crank, teeth will protrude from the naked rod one inserts in the lock. Eventually, the protruded teeth match up with the lock, and an intruder can open a door. That's how the Preventer skeleton key worked.
'I'm in.' The house looked empty, but Heero cautiously scoped the house as he made the way to the central heater/cooling unit. He yanked open the service door, found the pilot light, wrenched it apart with his hand, and turned on the gas. He sniffed it, then walked to the back door, and lit a candle before sealing the door shut, and retracing his path.
He broke into a sprint and ducked into his car just before the gas combusted inside that brick-and-mortar home.
'Just another air strike,' his mind quipped. Heero Yuy felt satisfied this is what the bodyguard feared the most, carefully targeted explosives falling from nowhere.
He didn't retrace his path home, instead, the Gundam pilot drove a circuitous route to a supermarket parking lot far from home, entered the store, exited through an 'employees only' service door, and ran to a boat garage, where he had a different car waiting. This one was a gray Dodge Neon, a sedan capable of seating four.
This one he drove home.
Preventers Central Office Building

Pagan called Director Une with the updates. Everything is tied in through Abdul on this mission, so the communications, they hope, will bypass the mole. Pagan brings good tidings, saying that the strike force had successfully taken the Noventa Cannon, that forty-thousand lives were NOT lost, because most of the Mogadishu population stayed at Maxwell House, that the Maguanac Corp was actively pursuing the rogue navy, and that the humanitarian relief team had arrived at the airport.
"Such a relief," she moaned, cradling her phone in the privacy of her office.
"I've got to appear before the talking heads soon, and I could use some good news on my side. It's so hard to convince them that beating terrorism is TOUGH when you're outgunned! Those boys are really something," she confided, admiring a group picture of the fabulous five of 'Operation Meteor.'
The picture came from the 'Peacemillion,' shot by Howard, sometime before the big fight. They congregated in a cafeteria on full alert, but still managed to enjoy themselves with the diversion of chess. Une noticed Heero and sighed despairingly.
'He's never really with the others, even in this photo, and now none of us are sure where he is. Duo honestly expected him to at least show for Thanksgiving, but it seems he didn't care to see them.'
They could contact him by mail and an answering service, but he only responds to their hails to say: "Bug off until you have something urgent."
Une snapped out of her reverie, only so she could tackle even more troubling problems.

Noventa Cannon Complex

"That's it, I fired it at the flotilla and on the enemy-occupied turrets outside, so I think it's time to demolish this gun, unless we want to keep it," Trowa declared, adding, "I think we should bore a hole through it that would temporarily render it inoperable, because enemy forces could still overwhelm us here, and retake the cannon."
Dorothy, Sally, and Nichol agreed, while Townsend abstained.
"Okay, here goes." A thermite charge punched through the gun chamber, making use of the cannon hazardous to the user.
"Well, I think that does it. Now I think we should get out of here and detoxify. Those animals were cruel and unusual to leave that saran gas bomb to explode on us- doubly to do that when they knew we had the protective suits to survive it. My only regret is having some skin exposed around my watch- it may never stop twitching!"
The others seconded in unison, though they all know how much worse it would have been to have their wounded still on the island.
By mutual assent, the five walked out together, and exchanged greetings with the disaster relief squad taking their place in the fortress.
The squad came escorted with some extra-armed personnel and a negotiator, set on ending a standoff with the last remaining elements barricading the sub pen.
"I'm only beginning to realize I missed the big feast, and how famished that left me. I didn't eat before taking on this mission you know."
The team laughed, only to hear Trowa's protest that his sentiments weren't just humorous banter.
"No, I really am hungry!"

Medellín, Columbia

Welcome to the fabulous life of Heero Yuy. After parking his hail- damaged discount Dodge Neon at another commercial parking lot, has again made his way home as a pedestrian. At the door, he found a scribbled note from his maid, and glanced at the message:

"Hola, Boss! Don't be alarmed to find me inside, okay? (I) bashed all night, so don't be over-alarmed if you find me collapsed by the toilet and crashed on the bed. Don't worry, though, 'cause I'll only need a few hours of recharge before I'm up again to clean up. Your dinner's going to be late, though, 'cause I might still be passed out until late.

-Tonya Lopez"

'What a miserable girl,' He crumpled her letter, pensively regarding her writing, 'last time, her name was 'Tanya'- she doesn't even know her own name.' Even so, the maid made his work easier.
He entered his home, and noted that Tanya/Tonya didn't dim the lighting before "crashing," as she puts it. His little home didn't section the kitchen/dining area from the living room, and when he looked left, where the duel eating area was, he found Tanya/Tonya semi awake, stirring a petite cup of coffee with Irish cream.
"Hangover?" Her chin bobbed.
"Si." Heero struggled to remember which name to use. That's right, when she's down, she's Tonya, and when she's up, she's Tanya, he thinks.
"Well, glad your okay, uh, Tonya. I'm just going to read the news on my terminal for a while. I'll be home for dinner, too, no matter how late it is."
She grinned, and sipped some java.
"Cool, I'll make it sooner this time, but it'll have to be a TV dinner this time, and your home cooked goodies will be reheated leftovers. If you'll forgive me, I'll make up for it by baking a cake tomorrow."
'That's fine,' he consented, but in principal couldn't let her off so easily.
"It's Thanksgiving Day, Tonya, and you grew up in the Bronx, part of the old USA, so that holiday should mean more to you."
She heightened her breathing, and Heero realized he'd crushed her a little too hard.
'Amazing how THAT can give her a panic attack!' His only remedy was to treat her the way a parent treats a child during a night terror.
"Relax, relax, relax, girl! I grew up in a colony in space, so the holiday doesn't even mean anything to me! So it's okay, take it easy."
Now he felt uncomfortable. He felt her breathing deepen back to normal, and he accidentally whiffed her perfume, the same scent as Releana's.
He let go, and turned away. He improved his own breathing, and collected himself.
"Are you alright?" As distant as he tried to be, he still felt concern. She sipped more coffee.
"Sorry, I skipped out on counseling, and Gawd I need it! I'll get an appointment after baking your cake."
As chemically dependent as she was, the maid still kept most of her promises, Heero knew.
"Sure, I'll make sure to remind you before I leave in the morning. By the way, are you staying tonight?"
Tonya emptied her cup, and answered.
"Yeah, I'm not fit to go out again tonight. Besides, this house needs the extra attention," her eyes perked up, "you said you'd be here no matter how late diner is, so you'll stay, too?"
Heero grinned diffidently.
"Um, yeah, at least until six A.M."
"Cool."
"Yeah, I'm going to read the news now." He expelled himself to his room and warmed up the terminal. After a few more menial tasks, the pilot had the world news.
The top story centered around the scene at Maxwell House and Mogadishu. Names aren't given, but Cairo's syndicated columnists from 'The Saharan Sentinel' wrote that three "G-boys" (newsie term for Gundam pilot) lay wounded inside the Maxwell House infirmary, and another Preventer rests in a similar condition. Fifty thousand estimated Somalis are homeless, but luckily fewer than five thousand are estimated dead, "thanks to the skilled foresight of Director Une." Columnist: "The cannon now rests inoperable, and an Earth Sphere disaster relief force now guards over the demolished complex. Sources inside the Preventer Central Office building say a naval flotilla escaped into the safety of the Indian Ocean, but Lady Une scoffs at the claim.
"A few ships tried to flee after our taskforce brilliantly dislodged them from their previous hideout, but you can safely count on our antisubmarine dragnet to sweep up the few remaining pieces of this conspiracy."
Une's confidence is backed up by credible recordings of several successful sub hunts, and the President, Director Une's most vocal supporter, agrees that things are under control."
None of the papers had much more substance than that, but Heero felt satisfied the team had done well.
'Trowa pulled through on this one,' Heero declared. He decided the wounded Preventer must be Hilde Schbeiker, if they decided to take her along. He considers her more reckless than the other likely unit members. Sally Poe, for one, prefers assigning herself to peripheral roles, and everyone usually goes along with it, because she performed those things better than everyone else, save Heero, not present, and Trowa, better utilized on the frontline of a battle.
Heero didn't know Trent Nichol very well, but his mind placed the former Oz officer on the island with or immediately behind the others.
'He's probably cautious, but I just don't know him well enough.' Well, he'd had enough, and logged off.
'Dinner's probably ready by now.'

Bosphorus Strait, Istanbul, Turkey

The Faith Sultan Mehmed Bridge, also called Bosphorus II, spans the Bosphorus Strait, the narrow waterway dividing Asia and Europe, and is named after Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed overcame a nearly unconquerable fortified metropolis right here during the Renaissance, though it took years in the making.
Job Khalid, armed with all the modern know-how and historical reading of what Mehmed went through, jumped into the task of recreating most of the Young Turk's circumstances for victory in a compressed format.
First condition, the Young Turk had to task his army with spanning a bridge across the divide, but Job had two bridges constructed long before he'd concocted his plan.
Second, Mehmed spent time and a fortune paying a Greek named Urban to build siege guns on site. While Job had some problems of his own, his concrete siege morters were paved in Ankara and driven to the bridge on a flatbed tractor-trailer, the entire project taking the time and effort needed to make a city sewage pipe section. The ingenious 355mm mortar pieces boast the capacity to launch one-ton mortar bombs a number of miles, a capability rivaled by the best siege guns of any day.
Third, Mehmed had the challenge of bypassing a naval boom that kept his fleet from entering the Bosphorus Strait. In Job's time situation, he turned the tables on the westerners in his own way, deploying a boat to mine the entrance, and stringing a thick torpedo net across the entire stretch. He used a pontoon bridge to solidify the barrier.
Forth, Mehmed had a formidable Venetian/Byzantine force to deal with, but Job had negligible forces to do arms against. However, his own forces numbered few.

Earlier

Things look rough for his loosely allied compatriots, or so the news agencies are saying. Well, Khalid, together with his closest armed brethren, had this dream operation all fleshed out when the news broke. "Guys, are you hearing this right?" Job asked his buddies what they thought, and a consensus grew out of their fiery debate. "Look, dudes, you see how they're hounding that honey over those loose ships out there? So, what if we convince the world they showed up here, as part of our Operation Mehmed?" Some weren't following, so Job spoke carefully, to keep things plain.
"All we have to do is put on a show for the television cameras. We all agreed we could do a lot of damage, but it could never accomplish a real strategic goal on its own, right? I'm telling you, this attack can destroy Anne Une for good, guys. So what do you say?" They voted in, and at last, Job put everything together, and made a land and sea invasion appear out of thin air.
Now

Two flatbed trucks ran parallel passed the Turkish Polices powerful antiterrorist checkpoint without buzzing the detectors, as is routinely done across the Bosphorus bridges every day. The trucks used transponders to pay the toll, so they didn't have to pay by exchanging material currency. They made a good pace, but a two-car accident ahead forced both semis to suddenly hit the breaks. At the guard shack down the bridge, the Turkish Police admired the reaction times and cool heads of the two truckers, who handled the new situation like pros, as if they'd known in advance that an RV and a Suburban would collide and roll over, instantly shutting down all traffic.
They watched on even as a big tow truck with a massive winch pulled over to pay his toll the old fashioned way. It's cool, though, the invasive antiterrorist sensors would have automatically raised its hackles if the driver had a weapon.
'Some people just don't pay attention to motor safety,' the cop turned his head away from the scene, sinking back into dutiful routine.
"Okay, buddy, that'll be..." The cop's lax behavior failed to detect the winch hooked around the guard shack until the truck driver tugged the building in reverse from its foundation, dragging a fellow officer and that wonderful detection system along for a ride.
Behind, the out-of-place sounds of an artillery bombardment further shattered his reality.
"Central, this is highwayman, I'm under attack!" He crouched behind a bridge guardrail, wailing information to central. He peaked at the artillery; the flatbed trucks?
That's right, someway, those concrete pipes actually worked as weapons.
"Central, you'll never believe this, the city is under mortar attack from the bridge!" He saw some canvassed two-and-a-half ton trucks driving cross-country from a wooded area, with mounted gunners taking aim at the dragged guard shack. The frightened officer's hand settled on his service weapon, the famous Uzi pistol, but he couldn't bring himself to throw one officer's life, namely his, away just to give a pointless assist to the walking dead.
"Central, they butchered him!" Not exactly, the downed peace officer did shoot back. "The shack is gone, and four, I count four, armed vehicles are taking the bridge. Enemy strength unknown."
He ducked prone under the guardrail, and planted his face in the mud.
"I recognized Automatic Kalashnikov, repeat, AK fire. The giant mortars have fired again. Two mortars, and they're REALLY big!"
Central replied.
"Copy, Highwayman, we have confirmed reports from the Foreigner District that shells are falling," the voice sounded composed, "we're assembling the antiterrorist response team, so hang in there, Highwayman." He vowed to stay safe.
"Can you give a troop estimate?" The officer exposed his head, propping himself on his elbows. He spoke into his mike.
"They're dismounting, looks like six a truck. In trucks that size, they must be loaded with hardware," he editorialized, "all have AK weapons, mottled types, secondary tube weapons slung on their backs, also of different types."
The mortars fired again, and he ducked away. He missed how they loaded it, but they seem capable of reloading every ten seconds. Highwayman One knew patrols would soon lurk around the bridge, so he looked for a way to repel fast.

The Black Sea

As per the mandate of Job's plan outlined, a handful of men piloted a crude diesel/electric brown water attack submarine from a tugging vessel toward sunny Yalta, the big Crimean city with a harbor loaded with affluent yachts belonging to loaded people, influential people that would demand of the World President the head of his Security Director in exchange for their boats.
The Captain kept the midget sub running on batteries until it became time to settle at the bottom. Properly nestled between some submerged sandbars, the sub cut down to complete silence, and a crack team of frogmen wormed their way from an escape hatch up top.
Sonar detected the omnipresent wakes of an angry hive of Black Sea patrol boats. The Captain understood they existed for the purpose of finding rivals in the silent service, so he did a great service to himself if he exercised his right to remain silent. He also expected Naval Spetsnez Frogmen floating around searching for his own frogs. However, he trusted them to guard something more important than unoccupied toys, and he banked on that trust. The sonar man detected picket submarines and a few aquatic submarines sloshing through the cold water.
Those pickets didn't have a clue how to find a totally silent unmoving boat hiding with all the clutter at the bottom, and as time lapsed, they didn't interfere with the crew's mute vigil. The Sonar men kept correcting targeting solutions for four different picket subs and the torpedo men kept the four torpedo tubes fully armed, until forty small limpits changed the game by exploding below the waterlines of forty of the most expensive yachts in Europe.
Soft targets explode all over the place, and the patrolmen go crazy as expected. Sonars go active and boats steer evasively from phantom torpedo tracks. A surface boat plows into a surfacing picket. Things are chaos on screen, but the stalled submarine remains it's vigil, waiting for its frogmen to return to the ship.

In a secluded forest of Asian Turkey, a pair of bulldozers push another pair, a pair of Pisces into the Black Sea, a move seen by the surface patrol fleet, and a patrol ship's three inch gun drops a shell into the Asian bank, while the yellow Caterpillars backpedal feebly away. The patrol boat clones the effect, and directs an orbiting patrol plane to dump its dumb depth charges in the general area. Little did they know that these were only hulks.

TV News

"An official Preventers statement released minutes ago reads that Director Une stands by the statements she gave in her press conference, and that the attacks in Istanbul are not related to the retreating Noventa Fleet in any direct way. It reads that it is simply impossible for a quote 'silent running ' fleet to venture from Somalia to the Black Sea in such a short time. Clearly, (to whom?) this news is a devastating blow to the credibility of Director Une, who just minutes ago, as you saw live before you, here on our station, refuted any speculation that the Preventers had lost the lost fleet. Several Senators are now publicly calling for the resignation of Director Une, claiming this fiasco definitively proves the former Oz Colonel is, and I quote, 'deceitful and incompetent.' Names they're floating around as a replacement include Lucrezia Noin. Noin, I'm informed, trained the best crop of students the Oz Organization had ever known, and once stood up to Une one heated time during the war, reportedly loosing her career in the incident in order to prevent a massacre. Furthermore, she graduated the military academy with higher marks than Une, and is also now a soldier within the Preventer Organization. (But wait, there's more!) One other fact of note, as fate would have it, she's currently off the job on vacation, and is therefore, as common sense would tell us, in no way responsible for this fiasco." (Now that the news is finished, why don't you tell us what things are like over there in Istanbul?)
"Heavy shells are still falling all over this district of town, People, a part of town historically reserved for foreign visitors, and let me tell you, this is still the most international district of this highly diverse town. You can expect many folks from all over hurt or worse in this attack. Jacob Goldman, reporting live from Istanbul."

Indian Ocean

Well, the "lost fleet" may have slipped away, but they at least weren't forgotten. Sonic waves travel differently at different temperatures, and good sub handlers usually know where to find the ocean currents that work to there advantage, but when you have a large fleet traveling a large distance, chances are, someone's going to slipup, run into an anomaly, or both, and a competent search crew's going to make contact.
This was exactly what happened after a long list of searches gone dry. As luck would have it, a warm undercurrent flowing out from Zanzibar suddenly dissipated, revealing a multi-screwed object chopping due west, toward the safety of a noisy coastal surge.
Abdul's hydrophones had no trouble making faint contact.
"I've got something! What number are we up to? Right, designate this one Master four. Six knots and slowing, but it doesn't matter know, because I know where you are!"
Abdul tasked Afmad after it, because he still had both torpedoes under his wings, and he wanted to make sure he had two planes in the air with the capability of firing a torpedo.
"All right, I'll fire this one toward his bow, so he'll have to make a turn to avoid the weapon," Afmad thought out loud, scratching his beard.
The turbines increased power, and the patrol plane moved into the preferred firing position.
A rocket carried the aquatic bullet off the pylon, and it lunged through the choppy waves.
"Master four angling sharply starboard, engines boiling hot. Our friend here dumping Alka-Seltzer doodads and an electric whistle, trying to pass them off as decoys. They shot the garbage out of a tube, and are now using their active sonar arrays as jamming equipment. I'm counting three different ship-finding sonar and one narrow beam commonly used for mine detection. He changed direction but keeps chugging at an increased rate. Twenty-five knots and that's all she's got. Sorry fella! Our torpedo is overtaking him as he fights to maintain full speed. His outer doors are open! I think he's going to fire!"
Abdul's eyes see it happen.
"I didn't know he had a tube at the stern, but it's going in armed, detonates to close. That guy's screws have to be wrecked, and he's probably taking on water. Yep, he's empting his tanks, coming up for air. Guys, a word of caution: this guy may still have some fight in him, so fly away right now. Pagan's calling up Lake Victoria for a flying boat to pick these guys up with, so don't worry about him any longer."
Lady Luck shined on them in this case, as a closer Lake Victoria flying boat was actually taking off from a closer lake, after helping some locals put out a forest fire.
"You don't have to tell me," Auda said, "I'm already out of the vicinity, seeing another patrol grid with my last batch of sonar buoys."
Abdul removed his sunglasses, and rubbed his tired eyes.
"Yeah, don't forget that we have our own ships out there now. Diego Garcia has a picket out there, and Pagan's feeding them into our data stream."
More graphics graces his screen, indicated what he said would happen had become a reality.
"Hey! We have a line of helicopter dipping sonar ten degrees south. There surface ships are also stopping and searching."
Auda has a question.
"Do they have any patrol planes like ours, and what about Victoria?" "No" to both.
"Tell you what, I should have told you earlier, but Cape Town does have a few, and they're in route right now, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn about now. But what do you care? We still have a little more time before we hit bingo fuel."
Got it.
"Alright, our radars are fully charged again, and I was wondering when we should look for sea swells again."
Oh.
"In the next few minutes, before we delegate this task to the guys at Diego." Afmad and Auda both complied, and sterilized the fish again in a wide area Abdul designated highly conductive of the radar.
Instantly, a pair of mobile-suits turned up, detected the electronic energy, and chased survival as both aerial patrol platforms dropped their last torpedoes. Both were Pisces, the most common suits out there, and both raced for the surface, vainly trying to splash the torpedoes' master.
"Master five and six, eliminated," announced Auda's tired voice, "I'm sure looking forward to leaving these sorts of stakeouts to others."
The antennas burned waves through water another minute, but couldn't find anything at any depth.
A quarter hour of listening in also turned in nothing.
"Darwinian process," the bearded one grumbled, "the weak are already dead, and only the ones that deserved to escape are going to." Not exactly, just before drop-off, another bit of luck materialized.
"We have a collision! Masters seven and eight!" Both planes carpet-bombed the collision point, and reaped two different breakup noises.
"Alright, I don't know what types they were, but they weren't ours, and they're dead! Well that's our show for tonight, we'll be back for one last curtain call, and then it's goodnight Victoria. Big shout-out to my homeys at Diego Garcia Naval Base. Goodnight, and Godspeed!"