Chapter Twenty-Six

The chaos aboard the Isakov had only grown in Hunter’s absence.

Positioned on the far end of the deck, near the wreckage of the last two Sherpas, Bull Dozer and a dozen 7CAV troopers were in a brutal gun battle with the combined trained security details for the ship’s committee members, by far the best fighters on the carrier, and the fanatical NKVD fighter pilots.

There were about eighty of them in all, and they had taken up positions along the carrier’s starboard gunwales near the bottom of the forward superstructure. Armed with AK-47s and RPGs, they suddenly started pouring it on Dozer’s location and hadn’t let up.

Because Dozer and his dozen men were at the far end of the bow, on the same side as these security troops, it had become a deadlock. There were two clear shooting lanes, which meant no one on either side could move or maneuver. There was a lot of ordnance flying around, but no one was going anywhere.

A much larger portion of the 7CAV force, seventy-two troopers and four deep recon men, had indeed gained entry to the carrier through a hatch in the devastated superstructure. They were now on the first deck, which was an interior passageway one level down from the carrier deck. Their objective was the Isakov’s electronic control center. The ECC was the carrier’s brain; everything that made the ship so dangerous emanated from here. If they could seize it, they might at least bring the carrier to a stop.

The troopers were still battling the ship’s crew, untrained sailors firing AK-47s, many for the first time. But this fight, too, was at a stalemate for a very unusual reason. Just as the secret Convoy 56 documents indicated, the Isakov was jam-packed with cargo. But to the surprise of the American raiders, crates and boxes of all shapes and sizes had been stored right inside the carrier’s main passageways themselves. Deck one was the ship’s Main Street; everybody had to pass through it at least once a day. It was now stuffed with cargo pallets, providing the inexperienced crew members with hidden places to fire.

Literally box-to-box fighting, it was going very slow.

All this pandemonium had a soundtrack. Klaxons were going off all over the ship. Smoke alarms, fire alarms, water breech alarms. The bell calling the ship’s company to battle stations was still ringing. The carrier’s electronic foghorn had somehow gotten turned on and was moaning away. The noise of the gun battle one deck below was almost as loud as the one out on the deck. A blizzard of tracers going in both directions. The occasional bang of an MK19 grenade going off. And a raging fire had engulfed the top of the enormous superstructure now, making it look like a skyscraper aflame. All the while, the enormous storm continued to rage, with titanic waves sweeping the deck at the most unexpected times.

Dozer crouched behind the crumpled wing of Sherpa 3, trying to avoid the incoming fire, as well as being swept off the deck by the monstrous waves. He had been in some crazy spots before, but he’d never seen anything like this.

And then it got crazier.

Dozer could not believe that he could hear anything else above the din. But incredibly, about five minutes into the battle, he detected something else. He was changing the banana clip in his M-16 when he heard a mechanical sound, out there in the wind and rain, faint at first, but getting louder. Not a jet … but another kind of aircraft. Something larger maybe?

He told his troopers to stop firing for a moment. All of them heard it then and agreed it was getting closer.

Suddenly, they saw it. Bursting out of the storm not twenty-five feet over their heads, it went right over the top of them and straight down the carrier’s deck. Black, whirling, whipping the rain around, it was a giant Mi-26 Halo helicopter with a large red luminescent stripe running down its side.

Dozer was stunned—they all were. This was no weather for choppers, no matter who was flying them. But even stranger, Dozer had actually seen this copter before. They’d picked it up on their balloon cam a number of times, flitting around Manhattan at night. The bright red stripe was hard to miss. By tracking its movements and listening to reports on Red Radio, Dozer’s intel guys had quickly determined this was the personal air taxi of Commissar Vladimir Zmeya, head of the Russian secret police in New York.

And now, for some reason, it was here.

The copter went into a shaky hover above the deck way down past the burning superstructure. Even the NKVD guards stopped shooting for a moment, surprised their supreme commander’s chopper had suddenly appeared.

But why is it here? Dozer wondered.

The copter didn’t seem particularly weighed down, as it would be if it were carrying reinforcements. And if it was here to attack them somehow, what was it doing hovering over the deck so far away?

Dozer put his night-vision goggles down just as the pilot’s window opened on the hovering copter. The pilot reached out of the window, exposing himself to the wind and rain whipped up by the downwash of his spinning rotor blades, grasping what looked like a handheld remote control device. He was pushing a button on it madly.

Suddenly, a great opening in the deck appeared below the Mi-26. It was the Isakov’s huge remote-controlled flight-deck elevator. At nearly 120 feet across, it was built to handle even the biggest of Russia’s combat helicopters.

As the elevator slowly started descending, the copter descended with it, disappearing inside the ship. Dozer and his men were incredulous.

A moment later, they received a call from one of the 7CAV officers fighting in the crowded passageway on deck one. He was stationed right next to the elevator on a catwalk looking into the ship’s main hangar. He reported the copter had landed on the elevator by this time and had continued on right to the bottom of the ship, where the carrier’s helicopter storage hangar was located.

He confirmed to Dozer that yes, the copter was the personal ride of a top NKVD.

But he’d also seen something else.

As the trooper put it: “It’s something Hawk should know. …”