Free Brown, Dale - Independent 02 by Hammerheads (v1.1) Page B

behind the thick wooden door separating
himself from Salazar, obviously high, and his throwing knives.

           CHAPTER TWO
     

                 Gulf of Mexico , South of Marsh Island , Louisiana
                 0217 CST
     
     
                 “Position fix . . . now.”
     
                 Commander
Russell Ehrlich, skipper of WMEC 620, the Coast Guard cutter Resolute , sipped on a mug of coffee as
he tried to relax. The bridge of his cutter was humid with only an occasional
breeze drifting through the open steel doors. Outside the slanted
anti-reflection windows of the Resolute ’s
bridge was darkness, with just a hint of light visible on the horizon to the
north—New Orleans, maybe even a hint of a glow from Galveston or Houston off
toward the northwest. It was a clear, beautiful winter night in the Gulf of
Mexico.
                 As
he scanned the darkness the navigator’s mate centered a set of electronic
crosshairs on the center of a radar blip on the bridge’s navigation radar set
and pressed a button on his control console. Immediately a series of
latitude-longitude coordinates, range and bearing, and intercept information
zipped across a small computer monitor.
                 “Got
it,” McConahay, the navigator’s mate, reported. McConahay was a skinny,
bespectacled ensign fresh out of the Coast Guard Academy in New London and
sea-navigation training. Ehrlich had to smile—McConahay, an electrical engineer
and math whiz out of the academy, looked out of place on the bridge. He was
clearly overawed with the hustle of activity on the bridge and seemed to have
little desire to look at the ocean at all—content to spend most of his time
making lines on his chart and updating his computers. McConahay, it seemed, was
trying to lower his rather high squeaky voice when speaking to the captain. Ah,
the new Coast Guard . . . “Range
thirteen miles, speed perhaps two knots, right on the bow.”
                 “Does
he have any company, Mr. McConahay?”
                 “Radar’s
showing no other ships, sir,” McConahay replied, checking the fourteen-inch
display, “but we’re at extreme radar range now. They may be hard to see or
blocked by the freighter.”
                 “Where’s
our air cover?” Ehrlich wondered. And to McConahay, “Fix our position with GPS,
then verify with Loran. Plot the target’s position. And I want it exact. If we
end up hauling this guy into court I want to prove six ways to Sunday that he’s
in U.S. waters.”
                 “Aye,
sir.” McConahay bent to work—but didn’t the skipper know that his position
fixes were always exact?
                 The
navigator’s mate saved the radar target’s position data in a memory storage
buffer, then punched up the Resolute 's
position on the GPS computer navigator. The Global Position System used
information from a ring of geosynchronous satellites orbiting 22,500 miles
above Earth’s equator to obtain position, groundspeed and time information with
remarkable accuracy—they could record their own position within four feet and
get a fix on another radar-identified target within 100 yards.
                 The Resolute, one of sixteen
Reliance-class cutters in the Coast Guard inventory, was notable for its adv
anced electronic suite and computerized automation of almost every task aboard
ship. As a result, where most large sea-going cutters needed a crew of well
over a hundred, the 210-foot-long, 950-ton Resolute and her Reliance- class sisters had a crew complement of only eighty-six—with
computers and robots doing much of the scut work. From the start the Resolute was designed as a
search-and-rescue vessel, only recently being outfitted for law enforcement and
drug interdiction. She did carry one radar-guided Mk22 3-inch/50 cannon on her
foredeck plus grenade launchers and .50 caliber machine guns