Target Lock

by James H. Cobb

  Harconan’s thoughts trailed off. There were no landing parties forming up on the deck of that ship. And there was something, an odd flag, flying at the main truck.

  Looking around, Harconan found his binoculars lying on the deck at his feet. Snatching them up, he aimed them at the masthead of the charging vessel.

  Instead of the red and white of the Indonesian naval ensign, the black and white of the skull and crossbones writhed and winked from the mast head, a message and a signature, both sent with the wry and deadly humor of one certain nation’s breed of warrior.

  Harconan let the glasses fall, bringing up the Handie-Talkie. “All gun stations! Open fire! Pour it into her! Turn her back!”

  Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto

  0807 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

  Sparks of orange fire sputtered within the cavern mouth that was revealed at the head of the inlet, and writhing tracer snakes crawled toward the Sutanto.

  “Here it comes,” Stone Quillain yelled, sinking behind the spalling barrier. “Tuck your heads in!”

  Labelle Nichols crouched down behind the helm station, chanting the wry prayer of the old days of wooden ships and broadside-to-broadside warfare. “O Lord, for what we are about to receive, may we truly be grateful.”

  MacIntyre could only recall that spaced between each visible tracer were four rounds that could not be seen.

  The bridge windscreen dissolved in a glassy spray under multiple slug impacts, the thick Kevlar padding below it absorbing rounds with a sodden whock, whock, whock, like a club swung against a wet rug. More bullets skittered and screamed off the steel superstructure frames.

  “That’s gotta be coming from some Ma Deuce fifties,” Quillain commented in a conversational tone.

  “Uh-huh,” Labelle agreed absently, “but they got something heavier too. Looks like a Bofors twin mount maybe.”

  Intermixed with the glittering hornets of the machine-gun tracers were what looked like flaming bowling balls to MacIntyre as he peered over the spalling curtain. As they struck, the ship’s structure jolted under each of their impacts, plating tore and caved in, and the spreading stench of fire and high explosives saturated the air.

  “That’s something like a twin forty, all right,” a calm, studied voice stated. MacIntyre was amazed to find that it was his own. “I’ll bet they’ve put the old Russian 37s back on that Frosch-classer.”

  The Sutanto bucked over a last sea swell, then the wave action dropped away as they roared through the cliff mouth and into the calmer waters of the cape inlet.

  “Almagtig! What’s that madman doing?” Captain Onderdank screamed over the rhythmic coughing of his ship’s guns.

  “I don’t know,” Harconan yelled back. “I don’t know!”

  The Flores’s captain had joined Harconan at the portside of the deck house, where the taipan had been driven by the muzzle blast of the aft turret. Fire spewed from the twin bell mouths of the Russian 37mm anti-aircraft gun, and a steady stream of shell cases clattered onto the deck from the ejector chutes.

  The quad .50-calibers were firing steadily from each cavern pierhead is well, and the aftermost pinisi moored alongside the Flores had mounted and manned its Russian 14mm machinegun stern chaser, bringing it to bear in the fight as well.

  The fire streams that converged and focused on the onrushing frigate were doing damage. Smoke was beginning to stream from the Parchim’s superstructure, but still she plunged on, as unheeding as a charging elephant to a barrage of air-rifle fire.

  Still running at flank speed, she was entering the inlet!

  “He’ll never be able to stop!” Onderdank exclaimed, shouting his bewilderment, “Even if he backs engines full, he won’t be able to stop!”

  The captain of the Flores was right. Without reversible propellers, which the elderly and simply outfitted ex-Warsaw Pact warship lacked, there was no way for the vessel to stop and no room for it to turn in the channel.

  And then Harconan was flashing back to his days in the Amsterdam Maritime Academy and a tour he had taken of French Atlantic Port facilities, and the legend of the Campbeltown.

  During the Second World War; the huge dry dock at the French port of Saint-Nazaire had been the only graving facility on the Bay of Biscay large enough to conduct hull repairs to the German superbattleships Bismarck and Tirpitz. As such, it was a great convenience to the Kriegsmarine and a deadly complication to the Royal Navy.

  The question had been how to eliminate it. Conventional bombing only chipped the massive concrete structure, and the bristling harbor defenses made it all but impossible for a special-operations force to reach the dry dock with a large enough stock of high explosives to do appreciable damage.

  The answer had been to take an elderly American lend-lease destroyer, the Campbeltown, camouflage it to look like a German warship, load it with munitions and a team of heroically suicidal Commandos, and crash the whole affair through the dry dock sea gates at flank speed.

  As was being done here!

  “The bridge!” Harconan screamed into his radio. “Concentrate all fire on the bridge!”

  Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto

  0808 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

  How long to cross half a mile at twenty-five knots? Not long at all, but Elliot MacIntyre had crouched in that disintegrating wheelhouse for eternity, watching the black rock cliff face inch closer with the speed of an advancing glacier. He could feel the deck below him heating from the touch of flame and a trickle of blood down his cheek from a raking metal splinter.

  You wanted all this back, damn you! Well, how do you like it?

  He lifted a hand slowly as if through chilled honey to stare at it. The callused fingers curved without trembling. Well, it’s no worse than the old days, he answered himself, bemused. I guess I’m doing all right.

  Something struck the Sutanto’s superstructure with a slam heavier than anything felt before, a whiplash of shock reverberating through the steel.

  “Shit, that’s heavy stuff!” Quillain yelled.

  “And it hit somewhere aft,” MacIntyre assessed, twisting to sweep the inlet cliff edges towering above them. “The bombardment must not have taken out all of the shore batteries.”

  The Marine made his disgust plain. “It never does!”

  The frigate was tearing around the shallow curve in the inlet channel, and gunfire or not, Labelle Nichols was standing half erect behind the wheel, hunting for the critical strip of dark blue water off the bow.

  A lurch radiated upward through the hull, and the rev counter on the lee helm console jumped as a prop blade nicked a rock.

  MacIntyre caught movement along the forest line above the cliff edge. Amid the wood smoke and barrage-shredded vegetation, a team of Morning Star gunners had brought an artillery piece into the fight, hogging it around and down, angling it toward the ship passing beneath them. The gun and gun crew were damn near on a level with the frigate’s bridge, and MacIntyre found himself looking down the stumpy three inch tube of an ancient American-made 75mm pack howitzer, probably an abandoned weapon from the Second World War.

  The piece vomited flame and a shell and the world exploded.

  The portside bridge wing caught the round and was torn away, that side of the frigates wheelhouse caving in. A blow sent Maclntyre’s K-Pot helmet spinning, and his vision went from gray to red to black and back again. He found himself on his hands and knees shaking his head like a picadored bull. The helm stations …

  Lieutenant Nichols was on her side on the deck, making a sound like a badly hurt cat. And the lee helmsman’s skull was blown open.

  If Vice Admiral Elliot MacIntyre, USN, was going to prove anything to anyone, especially to himself, it had better be now.

  He heaved himself to his feet, his hands closing on the blood-slick wheel, stopping its spin, reversing it. Answer up, you rust-bellied kraut bitch! Get back in the goddamn channel!

  There was a scream and a groan through the frigate’s frame
as stone ravished steel, and MacIntyre felt a faint vibration that meant seawater was cascading in through sundered hull plates. Still the propellers were turning and she was lining out for the cave entrance.

  But that left the Morning Star howitzer. Its crew would have time for one more shot, and it would be aimed squarely at the back of Maclntyre’s head.

  Crab’s Claw Base

  0808 Hours, one Time: August 25, 2008

  The sound of autoweapons fire was a steady roar as Amanda herded her charge down the lateral tunnel through the intermittent pools of illumination issuing from the wide-set work lights. So far she had been lucky: The call to battle stations and the following fight had pulled the Bugis garrison into the main ship pen, emptying the side passages.

  She took the precaution of shoving Sonoo into a shadowed niche be tween two stacks of crates before speaking with him again. “All right,” she said, grinding the muzzle of the Sterling into the small of the Indian’s back. “Where are your quarters?”

  Sonoo spoke in a stammering Hindi, then caught himself. “The end of this passage and to the left. A room off the connecting passage in back.”

  “Will the others be there? The other technical representatives?”

  “They should be. We were told to return there should there be trouble.”

  “Guards?”

  “Yes, at the door or escorting us…. Please, Captain, we are noncombatants! We have nothing to do with all of this!”

  “You are a receiver to stolen property, an industrial spy, and an accomplice to mass murder, Professor,” Amanda grated back. “And if you want to come out of this alive and with a chance to turn state’s evidence, you will do exactly as I say. Understood?”

  “I understand. I will cooperate in every way.”

  “Good. We will be walking to the end of this passage and turning left. Go to your quarters as if you were just following your emergency drill. I’ll be walking behind you with this submachine gun. If I tell you to get down, do it fast. If you don’t, you may regret it … briefly.”

  “I understand …. I understand.”

  “Good. Go!”

  Here at the end of the laterals, the air was still and dank, and lichen and seepage deposits encrusted the concrete tunnel walls. Heavy steel blast doors, their facings a solid sheet of rust, alternated on either side of the tall-man-high passage.

  They made the turn. Perhaps forty yards ahead, past the other three lateral mouths, two armed Bugis stood talking in a light pool at the end of the gallery. Sonoo started toward them, his breathing ragged. Amanda paced close behind him, keeping the Sterling at port arms and concealed behind the Indian’s broad back.

  As she walked, a thought snagged at Amanda’s mind, and she swore in silent fervor.

  In his private SOC instruction program, Stone Quillain had been working her through the standard military firearms of the world, but they had yet to put time in on the L2 Sterling. She’d had instructions on how to load and fire weapons of its general class, however, and she knew that there would be a three-notch setting lever on the frame. Her thumb found the Sterling’s. One setting would be Safe and one Single Shot mode. The third and the one she wanted would be Autofire.

  Which would be which?

  They were within twenty yards of the Bugis guards. They were looking up and taking note of Sonoo, and Amanda didn’t have time to pause to read her damn gun. She took a deep breath and considered the guard who Harconan had sicced on her during her captivity. He had been good. He would have been one of Makara’s best, too smart a soldier to wander about with an automatic weapon not set to safe.

  Amanda whispered “God bless our choice” and flicked the mode lever all the way to its opposite stop.

  Ten yards. The two-man guard post had been set outside of one of the tunnel side doors, and light could be seen leaking around the corroded frame. The guards, one carrying another Sterling and the other an M-16 with a duct-taped stock, were frowning as they studied the approach of Amanda and Sonoo. Perhaps it was the lack of an accompanying guard or possibly the expression on the Indian’s face, but the Bugis with the assault rifle started to bring his weapon up to the ready position.

  “Get down!”

  Sonoo fell, whether in a swoon or a dive for safety, Amanda couldn’t say. She whipped the Sterling’s stock to her shoulder with one hand curled around its pistol grip and the other bracing its horizontal magazine.

  Stone Quillain spoke to her. Choppers’ll climb as you fire a burst. Aim at their knees and hose ’em down with a zigzag pattern as the muzzle lifts.

  Amanda’s call on the mode lever had been as correct as her Marine comrade’s training. The Sterling spat, its sharp-edged briiiiiiiiiipp of firepower reverberating in the tunnel. Enmeshed in the bullet stream, the Bugis door guards twisted, writhed, and fell.

  Amanda felt an instant’s relief, then an indescribable cacophony of sound … warping and buckling steel, splintering wood, shattering stone—all reverberated through the complex. The entirety of Crab’s Claw Cape trembled under an earthquake’s shock.

  Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto

  0809 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

  Elliot MacIntyre looked up as something hurtled out of the smoke curtain rising above the head of the inlet: a chunky, sleek gray shadow that seemed to dive head-on for the frigate’s ruined bridge. Pulling up at the last second, it flared past, literally at masthead height. Rotor song thundered, counterpointed by the ripping scream of Gatling guns and the hammer of grenade launchers.

  The Seawolves were plowing the road.

  Cobra Richardson led his four-helo flight in a nose-to-tail daisy chain over the Sutanto and down the length of the inlet. With OCSW turrets cranked hard over and door guns flaming, the Super Hueys mercilessly raked the cliff walls in an all-out sterilization pass, doing what the Sea wolves did best: being there for the guys on the ground or the water.

  The Morning Star howitzer did not fire that last round.

  The gunnery from within the cavern mouth had slackened as well. Through the haze filling the inlet from the forest fires along the cliff sides, MacIntyre could see his target. Carberry had called it right. Harconan’s LSM was in there, moored to a pier on the right side of the ship pen. But the rest of the available “parking” was filled as well, with a second pier on the left with a couple of good-size pinisi tied up to it.

  The pinisi looked the softest.

  MacIntyre set his line with a last half-turn of the wheel and reached up to the overhead, slamming his palm on the collision alarm. Alarm hooters cried belowdecks and the Marines and sailors riding it out in the central passageway interlinked arms and braced their feet against the opposing bulkhead in the old glider infantry crash-landing posture.

  Stone Quillain dragged Labelle Nichols into the passageway aft of the wheelhouse, shielding her with his own body from what was to come. A shadow swept across the ruins of the bridge as they plunged beneath the lip of the cavern entrance. MacIntyre dropped to his knees, crossing his arms over his face and bracing himself against the wheel stand.

  Crab’s Claw Base

  0810 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

  The cavern garrison broke and ran, abandoning their gun stations, the crews of the pinisi and the Flores doing so as well, fleeing down the piers to the rear of the ship pen. Harconan could only join the headlong retreat. There was nothing else that could sanely be done in the face of twelve hundred tons of onrushing metal.

  He’d gotten clear of the superstructure, making it as far as the LSM’s midships deck when the suicidal frigate roared into the cavern.

  The Parchim’s sharp stem plowed into the stern of the first schooner moored to the left-hand pier. The smaller wooden vessel disintegrated like an apple crate under an ax blow.

  The Harconan Flores lurched and tilted outboard as the hard-driven frigate wedged between it and the far-side dock. Pier timbers buckled, four-by-fours tearing loose from their spikes and flipping into the air like tossed jackst
raws. Abrading hull steel screamed in torment, sparks and burning molten paint spraying.

  The wreckage of the first pinisi was driven into the second, both schooners wadding into a mass of splintered timber under the Indonesian warship’s bow, the dying shrieks of slow crewmen faint amid the crunch of frames and planking.

  Metal howled and tore overhead: The Parchim’s lattice masts were too tall for the ceiling of the ship pen. The main truck and antenna arrays sheared off at the cavern lip. Power connections arcing, they twisted as they fell, crashing to wedge between the superstructures of the two ships. The broken stubs of the frigate’s masts raked on across the cavern roof, ripping the aged Japanese support girders loose from their anchor bolts. Rusted iron and lava rock rained from overhead.

  Harconan had been knocked to the LSM’s deck by the initial collision. He sensed a hurtling mass plummeting from above, and he rolled aside an instant before a crumpled length of I beam and a ton of basalt crashed across the Flores amidships. One of her Dutch mates was not quick enough, the scarlet pulp spraying.

  Looking up, Harconan saw the frigate’s battered upper works slide past, riding over the crushed remnants of the pinisi. She reached the stone shelf at the back of the cavern, the distorted bow bucking upward as it tried to lift over that as well. But her momentum was exhausted and her last mad ride was over. With a final dying groan, the warship slid back, her keel broken, inert.

  The last echo faded and the cavern was suddenly supernaturally quiet.

  Harconan knew this silence would last for only seconds, then the real assault would begin. He scrambled to his feet and bolted across the tilted deck for the starboard rail. The INDASAT and his base here were lost. All of Makara Limited was lost. Everything was lost except for the war.