Sea fighter

by James H. Cobb

  “All right,” Christine exclaimed. “Exhaust plumes and engine heat. They’re getting under way. Belewa’s bought the package! He’s committing the gunboats!”

  The Promise began to move, pulling away from its anchorage in the channel and heading out through the gap in the breakwaters. The Unity followed in the corvette’s wake, then the Allegiance.The gunboats made the turn southward as they reached deep water beyond the harbor mouth, all three pouring on speed.

  “Wouldn’t it have been a hell of a lot simpler to just sink those damn things at anchor?” Macintyre grunted.

  Christine shook her head. “It would have drawn too much attention back to the harbor area,” she replied. “Besides, for what the boss ma’am has planned next, she can’t afford to have any burning hulks drifting around lighting things up.”

  The intel looked back over her shoulder. “Communications. Inform Moonshade and Strongbow that the gunboats are clearing the harbor. They are go for penetration phase. Then inform the Treestump team they have company coming their way.”

  To the southeast, the Treestump Platoon Leader took stock. “Sergeant,” he called to his Platoon top. “Casualty count?”

  “Two men wounded, sir,” a nearby patch of shadow replied. “Dyksra in third squad’s caught it pretty bad.”

  “Right. Have a detail evacuate the wounded out to the Santana immediately. Have a second detail check for Union survivors. The rest of the platoon will reorient for area defense. Second squad will establish a centralized perimeter here, while first and third squads will reposition north and south along the highway and set up new hasty ambush sites. Deploy area denial munitions and Claymores. Make sure a clear path of retreat is maintained back into the defense line.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the shadow said crisply. “Sounds like you figure we got trouble coming, Lieutenant.”

  “Trouble and the Union army, Guns. We’re going to have to keep their attention for a while.”

  “No sweat, sir.” The shadow faded back into the deeper blackness of the underbrush, whispering orders over the radio link.

  The lieutenant swiped perspiration from his forehead. No sweat, huh?

  Northern Breakwater, Port Monrovia 0040 Hours, Zone Time;

  September 8, 2007

  Standing in a clump of brush beside the service road, Private Thomas Kajenko gave a profound sigh of relief and rezipped the fly of his fatigue trousers.

  “Kajenko, is that you?” The hated voice of Corporal Kuti rang hoarsely out of the night, abruptly erasing the pleasure stemming from Kajenko’s relieved bladder. “What the hell are you doing away from your post?”

  “I had to take a piss. That is all, Corporal,” Kajenko replied, not verbalizing his heartfelt wish that it might have been Kuti’s face he’d been pissing into.

  “Damn you, Kajenko, are you trying to make trouble for me with the patrol sergeant? Get back on lookout! We’ve got a job to do out here. Next time you bloody well piss in your pants before you leave your outpost.”

  “Yes, Corporal, at once.” Kajenko slung his FALN and began to pick his way back down to the water’s edge. A fat lot that hulking bully Kuti cared about any job this squad had to do. He had assigned Thomas and his friend, Robert Smith, the two junior men in the unit, as lookouts along the water’s edge while he and his cronies huddled around the watchfire drinking tea. Be damned that he and Robert were soaked to the skin in the rain. Be damned that they had not been given relief for hours. Be damned to all NCOs, especially Nigerians.

  Moving with caution, Kajenko worked his way down the ten-foot-high tumble of sharp-edged boulders that made up the seaward facing of the breakwater. The sullen flickering light from the bonfire atop the breakwater hindered more than it helped, serving only to deepen the shadows in the rock clefts.

  “Robert? Hey, mon?”

  There was no answer to Thomas’s soft call except for the suck and hiss of the waves among the great stones.

  “Robert?” Spray touched Kajenko’s face, carrying with it a chill. He felt his way a few feet farther along the water’s edge to where he was certain he had left his compatriot.

  “Rob …” The name died off in his throat as his hand closed on wet steel. A FALN rifle like his own lay against the slimy rocks, half submerged in the surging water.

  Suddenly, the sea tore open at Kajenko’s feet. Powerful hands closed around his ankles and heaved, yanking his legs out from underneath him. Kajenko found himself falling. He opened his mouth to yell, but gained only a terrifying inrush of cold salt water. Steel-strong arms sheathed in rubber closed around him, dragging him deeper into the sea, dragging him deeper into the darkness that encompassed him.

  The waves broke over a second lost rifle at the base of the breakwater. Then shadows trickled up and out of the sea. Black-faced, wet-suit-clad shadows wearing soft-soled coral boots. Half a dozen of them flowed silently up the face of the seawall to merge with the shaggy salt growth along its top, moving in to surround the rain-dimmed bonfire on the access road.

  The shadows looked on as a four-man mobile patrol walked in out of the night to exchange a few routine words with the squad leader at the fire. The shadows had already clocked the schedule of this mobile patrol. They noted how the squad leader stirred his men into a semblance of alertness shortly before it was due to arrive and how they rapidly sank back into lax casualness after it departed. Weapons lain aside, the Union soldiers stood close to the warmth of the bonfire in the rain, staring into its flames.

  The shadows moved closer. Drawn Ka-Bar knives gleamed like bared fangs.

  “The Bearclaw team should have the door open for us soon,” Amanda whispered from raft to raft.

  “Should,” Quillain growled back. “Hey, can you tell me something? Where in the hell did we get this screwed-up list of call signs? Dewshine, Bearclaw, Fathertree, damnedest damn things I ever heard of.”

  “Oh, uh, Christine came up with them. I think they’re out of some kind of comic book she’s fond of.”

  “Shoulda known—” Quillain broke off, listening to a voice in his headset earpiece. “Okay. That’s it,” he said after a moment. “The door’s open.” He keyed his tactical transmitter. “This is Strongbow lead to all Strongbow and Moonshade elements. Move in. I say again, move in.”

  Quillain’s and Amanda’s raider craft cast loose from each other, both surging forward toward the breakwater in an electric motored rush. Kneeling in the bow of her boat, Amanda touched the transmit pad of her own PRC Leprechaun transceiver.

  “Moonshade to Palace. Starting penetration. I say again, starting penetration.”

  The stealth hoods were thrown back and hastily stowed. The passengers aboard each small craft flexed and stretched cramped muscles in preparation for the explosion of exertion about to be called for. Ahead, the dim luminescence of a single, shielded glowstick marked the landing point.

  This night, the assault teams were using CRRCs—Combat Rubber Raiding Craft—a fifteen-foot inflatable rubber boat with a soft bottom instead of a rigid keel and bellypan. Less seaworthy and more fragile then the RIB-class raiders, they had one decisive advantage. They were far lighter to carry, and that would become critical over the next few seconds.

  Riding the low waves, the boats nosed into the side of the breakwater.

  “Over the side!” the coxswain commanded in a fierce whisper.

  Amanda and the others of her boat team rolled over the low bulwarks of their little craft. She plunged chest deep into the sea, her boots scrabbling for purchase through the algae slime that coated the steep-sloped rock jumble of the breakwater wall.

  “Haul out!”

  Like a pack of gigantic horseshoe crabs seeking haven on the shore, the boats began a many-legged crawl up the side of the seawall. Hands clutching nylon carrying loops, the Marines heaved themselves and their equipment and motor-laden
burdens upslope a few agonizing inches at a time, the only sound of protest being the harsh whistle of breath through clenched teeth.

  Amanda scrambled up the breakwater with her own team, straining at her own share of the burden. A muscle cramped from her long hours huddled on the wet bottom of the raider and hot agony tore up her leg from calf to thigh. She fell forward onto unyielding granite, her palm tearing open on the sharp-edged quarry stone.

  She ignored both. Gathering her legs back under her again, she caught up the carry loop once more and arched her back into the next lift. At that moment she would have died without hesitation rather than push her share of the load off on the straining silent men around her.

  They crested the slope and pushed through the rain-sodden brush that fringed its top, coming to a halt at the edge of the service road. The enemy was close, no more than a hundred and fifty feet away in either direction.

  “Hold.” The barely breathed ghost of a word drifted down the line from Stone Quillain. The nearby watch fire burned low now. No one was left to cast wood and palm oil upon it. The wet-suit-clad point men of the Bearclaw team had already hauled the last body out of sight.

  Quillain waited until all five of the assault boats were aligned along the edge of the road, then he waited a moment more, granting a second of rest to let lungs recharge on oxygen and nerves steady down.

  “Stand ready.… Step out on my mark … three … two … one … go.”

  Moving simultaneously, the five teams hustled their boats across the narrow roadway. An observer at the watchpost fifty yards to shoreward would see only a single, brief occulting of the next bonfire along the line, a single shadowy passage that would not be repeated. Something easily shrugged off as unimportant.

  The climb down the inner side of the breakwater was only marginally easier than the pain-racked ascent of the outer wall. The rubber boats slithered smoothly onto the water as if grateful to be returning to their proper element, the raider teams scrambling back aboard with equal gratitude.

  Unseen hands grasped Amanda’s MOLLE harness, hauling her over the gunwale. She collapsed into her place in the bow, the water sluicing from her soaked utilities pooling in the bottom of the boat.

  The power cells engaged and the electric outboards came to silent life, the tiny flotilla moving off into the rain-misted shadows of the inner harbor. Amanda could feel the difference here, the sheltered smoothness of the water. And there was silence beyond the faint ripple of the bow wave. No gunshots. No shouts. No flares. No hooting alarm sirens. They’d done it.

  She reached up once more for the touchpad of her radio. “Moonshade to Palace. Penetration successful. In harbor. I say again, in harbor.”

  Back atop the breakwater, the Bearclaw team settled into the rank foliage once more. Their evacuation craft waited for them offshore. However, they had one more task to accomplish here.

  In approximately ten minutes, the Union foot patrol that scouted this section of the harbor rim would return to this point on their sentry-go. If they found the squad assigned to this outpost gone, an alert would be sounded. However, if the foot patrol also quietly disappeared, it would likely be at least another fifteen minutes before an alarm would be raised.

  The Bearclaw Marines unwrapped their silenced auto-weapons from their protective plastic covers. Nestling gun stocks to shoulders, they lay quietly and waited for the crunch of boot soles on gravel.

  Inside the Port Monrovia Breakwaters 0105 Hours, Zone Time;

  September 8, 2007

  The raider craft ghosted across to the very center of the mile-and-a-quarter triangle of dark still water.

  Quillain had explained that in reality they would actually be safer after they’d entered the harbor than they’d been loitering around outside. The “psychology of the camp” would be working for the boarding force. The harbor garrison, by instinct, would focus outward, toward a perceived external threat, and not inward, toward what they would subconsciously consider as “safe” territory.

  Still, Amanda felt horribly exposed in the presence of her enemies. Were it not plastered down wetly, she was certain the hair on the back of her neck would be standing up like that of a startled cat. Lifting a pair of night glasses to her eyes, she scanned the shoreline from south to north.

  Quillain’s objective, the tanker Bajara herself, lay moored outboard alongside the oiling pier, bow to the breakwater and her stern to the harbor channel. Her hull was backlit by the pier arcs and lights glowed golden around her deckhouse. With her boilers cold, she’d be drawing her power from a pierside land line, and that would be all for the better here presently.

  Amanda panned the glasses across to the massive Bong Mining Company pier a mile north along the Port’s shoreside. There, tied up at the far end float, she saw her target, the harbor tug Union Banner.

  No lights on the float. Only the dim glow of what looked like cabin lights aboard the tug itself. The thermographic scans made by the recon drones indicated that a skeleton crew manned the craft at night. Also, there would be sentries and a series of dockside patrols that seemed to work to a random search pattern.

  Amanda started as something bumped her boat. Quillain’s CRRC had come alongside once more. “Okay,” he whispered. “We’re at point of separation. Everything set with you?”

  Answer him! He can’t see you nod! Make your damn throat work! “Yes. Ready.”

  “We’re by the numbers, then? Ten minutes to position. Then the strike. Then we go.”

  “By the numbers. Carry on, Stone.”

  “See you after the show, Skipper.”

  Quillain pushed off, and his raider motored silently away. The other four CRRCs of the boarding team followed. Blackness swallowed them, and Amanda’s boat drifted alone. She scooped up a palmful of salt water and rinsed the parch from her mouth with it. Spitting the water out over the side, she keyed her transceiver. “Moonshade to Palace. At point of separation. Strike in ten. I say again. At point of separation. Strike in ten.”

  Mobile Offshore Base, Floater 1 0105 Hours, Zone Time;

  September 8, 2007

  The distant thump of Claymore mines and the angry clatter of autoweapons fire issued from the overhead speakers in the briefing trailer. The taut voice of the Treestump force team leader followed.

  “Palace, Palace, this is Treestump! We have hostile forces advancing north along coastal highway toward our positions. Estimate company strength. Secondary ambush has been triggered. Ambush team falling back to our perimeter under fire. How long until we are cleared for extraction?”

  Christine windowed up the wallscreen segment that covered the Treestump diversion mission. “Treestump, this is Palace,” she replied into her command headset. “We see your situation. It looks like you are being probed by the King Grey’s Town militia garrison. We project fifty to sixty light infantry, small arms only.”

  “Concur, concur on that. Southern ambush team is back within perimeter. They report hostile infantry probe is retreating. We’re not worried about those guys, Palace, but intel indicates we have heavies coming in from the north. Request instructions, over.”

  “Acknowledge that, Treestump. Stand by.”

  Christine looked first to the wall graphics and then to the Admiral. Red target hacks marched steadily southward toward the diversion site—the gunboats offshore and the mechanized column along the coastal highway. Hands on hips, Macintyre scowled at the graphic imaging. “The Union’s moving faster than you figured, aren’t they?” he commented.

  “Yes, sir, they are. We counted on the Port Mech column losing more time passing through the city. It’s not happening. And those gunboats are pulling a higher rate of knots than we projected as well.”

  She looked up at Macintyre. “Sir, we need to get those guys out of there soon. But if we pull them out too soon, it could give Belewa time to realize that this is just
another fake out. He could reorient on the harbor area in time to bitch the boarding ops.”

  Macintyre leaned forward to the map. Not bothering with the computerized scale, he used a V of fingers as a compass, gauging distances. “This extraction is going to be tight, very tight. Can we kick any of those SeaSLAMS loose to kill those Union gunboats?”

  “We only have twelve cells out there, sir. Every round’s committed to taking out a key node in the Monrovia power and communications net.”

  “Hell, and we can’t sic the seafighters on them without leaving the boarding teams in the lurch. Those damn gunboats are the problem, Chris. I’m willing to risk having the Marines swap a few rounds with that Union armor, but the Santana is going to be out there alone with three hostiles moving in on her. If she gets driven off station before she can recover the Treestump team …”

  Macintyre stepped forward again, callused fingers measuring times and distances once more. The land-based armored task force had pulled ahead just slightly. Macintyre assessed, then spoke. “Get me an open channel to Treestump lead.”

  Christine pointed to the signals operator and snapped her fingers. The S.O. executed the fast call-up and nodded back to the intel.

  “You’re up, sir.”

  “Palace to Treestump, do you copy?” Macintyre spoke levelly into his lip mike.

  “Treestump ’by, Palace. Standing by for instructions.” The tension in the young Marine officer’s voice had ramped up minutely.

  “Lieutenant Southerland, I believe it is. This is Admiral Elliot Macintyre. You’ve done your job, son, and I think it’s time we start getting you out of there.”