Choosers of the Slain

by James H. Cobb

  In effect, she was a chameleon, camouflaging herself by matching the color and pattern of its background. In theory, the Argentine radar systems would discard the Cunningham's, return along with the rest of the trash.

  Of course, there was always the risk that some technology-distrusting curmudgeon on the other side might just switch his filters off and take a real look around.

  "So far, so good, Captain," McKelsie reported. "No shift in enemy scan rate or frequency. No fire-control radars coming up."

  Amanda eyed the Alpha Screen critically. The convoy was right where it was supposed to be, almost dead-on beyond the Cunningham's bow. However, the distant covering force was still designated as an outlined block of empty space off to port, a best-guess estimate of their position.

  "You know, boss ma'am," Christine's voice sounded in Amanda's headset, "if the distant covering force has reversed back over to this side of the convoy's course line for any reason, this heading is going to have us plowing right into them. We could end up being exposed worse than I was the day my bikini broke at Waikiki."

  Amanda smiled in spite of herself. "You aren't likely to enjoy it nearly as much either, fa' sure," she replied into her lip mike. "I'll take it under advisement, Chris."

  Amanda called the thermographic imaging from the mast cameras up onto her own flatscreens and mentally demanded that they show her the presence of her enemies. Arkady looked on as well, from the station he had taken for himself behind the command chair. He was quiet, saying nothing, but she could sense his presence on the fringe of her personal space and catch that scent of Old Spice and kerosene that she had come to associate with him.

  "Direction-finder arrays are picking up make-and-break static off multiple targets," Christine reported, suddenly businesslike. "Triangulating now."

  How easy it was to forget how to breathe.

  "Yeah! Confirm the distant covering force! Right where they're supposed to be! Passing down the port side at a seven-mile range! We're getting RSM reflection off them now."

  Breathe.

  A trio of target hacks replaced the empty block of space on the Alpha Screen and Arkady's hand appeared in the corner of Amanda's vision, a clenched fist with an upraised thumb that gave an emphatic shake. The time-on-target display for the cruise missiles ticked down past four minutes.

  "Helm, return helm and lee helm to full manual control. Maintain current speed and heading."

  "Aye, aye, helm and lee helm answering on manual."

  Amanda keyed her headset over Main Engine Control. "Chief, we're in the groove and on final approach. If you've got any more revs in your pocket, I can use them right now."

  Thomson's response was the slow quivering of the iron log up toward forty-three knots.

  For a moment, she considered switching over to the MC-1 circuit and addressing the crew. Then she discarded the notion. She had either made them ready for this moment or she hadn't.

  The time hack wound down to three minutes.

  "Dix, set up a triple-deuce pattern on that nearest DD in the escort perimeter."

  "Aye, aye, ma'am."

  "Don't wait for my order. Lock up on him and launch the second we go active."

  "Will do."

  Dixon Beltrain's voice was completely level, totally confident. Whatever specters of personal weakness that might have haunted him at one time had been exorcised.

  Two minutes.

  "Enemy scan pattern changing!" McKelsie called out from his systems bay. "The lead, nearside destroyer."

  "Does he have a lock on?" Amanda demanded.

  "Negative, but his primary system is tight-sweeping this sector. He thinks he sees something out this way, but he's not quite sure what."

  "Any fire control coming up?"

  "Negative."

  "Chris, anything on his talk-between-ships circuits?"

  "All channels still clear. He isn't yelling yet."

  A few miles away, on the other end of that radar beam, an Argentine skipper was mentally flipping a nickel, just as she was.

  "Let's wait him out," Amanda ordered.

  Sixty seconds.

  Amanda started at a touch. Concealed in the low-lit dimness of the CIC, Arkady's hands had come down off the back of the command chair and were now resting on her shoulders. It was a good place for them to be, and she leaned back and braced herself against their warm pressure.

  The time hack came up triple zero.

  "SCM target-acquisition radars just went active on the western horizon!" Christine yelled. "Argentine search-and-fire control systems coming up all across the board!"

  "Light off all radars! Initiate full-spectrum jamming and ECM! Commence firing!"

  Topside, the RBOC mortars thumped as they hurled their aluminum-strip payloads into the sky, while back aft, decoy projectors tossed foxer pods into the sea. The Aegis system came fully on-line and Dix Beltrain's tactical screens blazed with targeting data. The TACCO's hands did their death dance across the keypads, making the designations and locking them down.

  "Hot birds coming off the rails!" he yelled, striking the launch sequencer.

  Thunder and lightning blazed on the Cunningham's fore-deck and the internal monitors glared with illumination overload. Six missiles, four Harpoon IIs and a pair of Standard HARMs, salvoed from the VLS cells. The rocket-driven Standards climbed away in high flaming parabolas, while the turbojet-powered Harpoons followed a shallower arc and leveled out ten feet above the wave crests. Set to short-range, "sprint" mode, they fired their afterburners and punched through the sound barrier en route to their target. At this range, the Argentine destroyer Heroina had only seconds to respond.

  It was almost enough. Her captain had already started to turn toward and in to the faint ghost bogey they'd detected and her countermeasures men had been sitting with their hands poised over their systems controls. They buried their ship under a blanket of chaff and their jammers blared out a squall of electromagnetic white noise. Both of the Heroina's forward Dardo forty-millimeter twin mounts and her bow five-inch turret hosed their firestreams into the flight paths of the oncoming missiles.

  In all, they managed to destroy or divert five out of the six rounds. It was one of the Standard HARMs that got through, fixing on the guidance radar of the Dardo mount that had been trying to kill it.

  It came blazing down almost vertically, smashing through the top of the Fiberglas turret shell and exploding as it impacted against the gun actions. The blast of the 214-pound fragmentation warhead drove the turret down into its own magazine like the blow of a titanic sledgehammer, leaving a flaming, twenty-foot-wide crater torn in the deck.

  Every man on the bridge was killed or critically wounded as shrapnel riddled the superstructure, and all power was knocked out in the forward half of the ship. With her rudder locked into the final turn set by her decapitated helmsman, the Heroina began to circle aimlessly.

  Aboard the Cunningham, there was only a faint flicker on the low-light monitors.

  "Nailed him!" Beltrain exulted. "Single explosion blossom on the target and a pronounced thermal flare!"

  "I confirm that!" Christine called from the intelligence bay. "Initial target's EM suite has just crashed. He's no longer radiating."

  "Target is turning.... Whoa!" Beltrain interrupted himself. "Blossom on the lead transport! Looks like one of the Harpoons the Meko diverted just found a home."

  The Alferez Mackinlay had bad karma three times over. The Antarctic operations transport lacked point defenses or countermeasures beyond the elementary protection of chaff launchers, and as the lead ship in the transport column, she was denied the cover of the other vessels' foil clouds. Lastly, her decks were stacked high with aluminum-skinned housing modules, almost doubling the size of her radar signature.

  The Harpoon II had been lured off by a jamming ghost produced by the Heroina's ECM. After bypassing its intended target, it had reverted to hunting mode. In microseconds, it had located and fixed on the unfortunate Mackinlay, five mile
s inside the escort perimeter. Flashing in over her bow, the missile buried itself in the deck cargo. The explosion that followed showered the freighter from bow to stern with shredded sheet metal and fragments of burning plywood.

  The Cunningham continued her headlong charge. The crippled Argentine destroyer loomed up momentarily through the sea smoke, a distorted silhouette outlined in the light of its own flames. Then the Duke was past, crossing the escort line and racing on toward the heart of the enemy formation.

  Aboard her, voices were starting to rise all around the CIC as training and discipline struggled with the surge of combat adrenaline. Systems operators were absorbing the raw data off their screens, analyzing it and relaying their findings on to their division officers. The officers distilled it down further, using it to make operational decisions within their own fields of responsibility and passing that which they judged to be truly critical on to the command chair.

  "Exocet launch from second Meko!"

  "Any lockup, McKelsie?"

  "Negative, Captain. Missile trending aft down the port side. Second launch now ... also trending aft. I think he's designating on a chaff cloud or one of our decoy pods."

  "Right. Chris, what's the distant covering force up to?"

  "The covering force appears to be concentrating on the cruise-missile stream. No fire-control emissions coming in from that bearing."

  "Stay on them! McKelsie, keep those decoys coming!"

  It was a critical, fragile structure built up out of fast judgment calls made under awesome pressure loads.

  Arkady was out of the immediate command loop, so he could afford to concentrate on her. She was leaning forward now, her head turning constantly between the Alpha Screen and her reporting officers, demanding and absorbing the information she needed for her decision making.

  There was an edge and a vibrancy to her voice that he had never heard before, an aliveness he had never seen in any woman. Amanda was the junction point of the staggering technological capacity of the Cunningham and the skill and dedication of her crew. She was the diamond lens that focused that potential into a searing beam that she turned upon her enemies. She burned bright.

  The deck bucked and slewed underfoot, and he grabbed for the chair frame to keep himself upright. Vince, he said to himself grimly, this is one hell of a time to start feeling horny.

  "Captain, do we follow up on the initial target?"

  "Negative, Dix. Dead one, drop him. Shift fire to the lead transport."

  On the Large Screen Display, a designation box blipped into existence around the lead ship of the convoy column. Two more Harpoons pumped out of their launch cells, this time aimed with deliberation.

  The Mackinlay's firefighting parties were unreeling their hoses forward along the ship's weather decks when they saw the missiles burning in like wave-skimming meteors. The lead Harpoon center-punched the hull, exploding deep within the midships holds. Her crewmen felt her decks shudder underfoot for an instant before the plating buckled upward and tore open like the capsule of an erupting volcano, casting them down into the flames below. The second round struck aft, at the base of the transport's superstructure, the quarter-ton warhead blowing it apart like a gasoline-soaked house of cards, destroying alike the propulsion and steering systems and those who operated them. A headless leviathan with the fires of hell glowing within her, the Alferez Mackinlay began to fall off and lose way.

  Headless also was the entire Argentine naval force. Fate had decreed that the first ship hit had also been the command ship of the close escort group. Its captain, an experienced and capable officer, had been almost the first man to die in the engagement, ripping a massive hole in the Argentine command structure.

  The remainder of that structure was now decoupling under the shock of the assault. Those voice communications channels and data links not yet taken out by the Duke's cascade jammers were loading up with calls for help, demands for targeting data, and pleas for someone to, for the love of God, tell them what was going on!

  The man who should have been bringing order to this chaos was Admiral of the Fleet Luis Fouga, the man who less than twenty-four hours before had claimed overall command of the task force in his President's office. However, Fouga was a political officer. He had never seen a minute of combat in his thirty-year military career. More important, he had never truly prepared himself for that first critical minute.

  Now, with his command under attack and his own flagship struggling to survive against the cruise-missile stream it had encountered, he was incapable of coherent speech, much less effective leadership.

  Despite that, and despite the panic and disorganization, the Argentines were beginning to fight back.

  "Dix, what's happened to that nearside trailing escort?"

  "Escort three ... Shit! It's gone!"

  "Check your Alpha Screen replay. Find him!"

  Amanda dropped her eyes to her own flatscreens and called up the computer-recorded imaging from the Aegis system, cursing herself twice over. That starboard-side close escort had been the one she had not been able to get a positive identification on, and now, in the flurry of the strike, she had lost positional awareness of it. She found herself recalling the old fighter pilot's dictum, "The thing that you miss is frequently the thing that doesn't miss you."

  Amanda initiated the high-speed replay from the point where the Duke had activated her radars. Watching intently, she saw the Argentine ships begin their antimissile zigzag ballet and the strike blossom on the lead Meko. Then she saw the trailing escort make its move.

  From its slot at the four-o'clock position off the convoy's stern, it accelerated sharply, better than tripling its speed in what must have been a matter of seconds. It sheered inward toward the transport line, closing the range with it and merging into the purple blobs of chaff trailing back in the wake of the cargo ships.

  "Hydrofoil!"

  Someone with more cunning than common sense had ordered a thin-skinned coastal craft out into the wildest stretch of sea miles on the planet, and some crew with chrome-steel guts had obeyed-just on the chance that it might screw up someone's attack plan, just as it was doing.

  "Where is he, Dix?" Amanda demanded.

  "I can't pick him out. He's swung around on the farside of the transports and he's being masked by their counter-measures."

  "Can you get a fix on radar emissions?"

  "No, ma'am, he's gone EMCON."

  Amanda lifted her voice. "Chris, Argentine hydrofoils, what do you have on them? Right now!"

  "Sparviero missile corvette, twelve hundred tons' displacement, composite and aluminum construction, submerged tripedal foil system, hydropump propulsion! Sixty knots plus speed! Single OTO Melara seventy-six-millimeter forward, twin Breda forty-millimeters aft, four Exocet cells amidship!"

  "Torpedo tubes?"

  "None!"

  "Right. Helm, maintain intercept heading on the transport line. Dix, what's that second Meko doing?"

  "He's increased speed and has come around to port. It looks like he's cutting across the convoy course line back over to where we were. He's off the port quarter and looks to be passing us astern. I think he's still fixated on our first decoy cluster. Shall I engage?"

  "Negative. If the fool hasn't figured out what the score is yet, don't point out the scoreboard. Target that hydrofoil the second he comes out from behind the freighter's chaff screen. He's up to something."

  "Aye, aye, ma'am, but it's going to be tight. We're running out of range."

  "So is he. Gunnery stations, stand by to engage surface targets!"

  Amanda and her TACCO stared at the primary display, waiting for something solid to materialize out of the haze of chaff and ghost jamming.

  He came, appearing around the bow of the now-leading fleet oiler, cutting the turn so close that he likely panicked every man on the bridge of the larger ship. Search and fire-control radars activating, the corvette raced away from the convoy line, aiming himself dead-on at the onrushing destr
oyer.

  "Captain, target bearing zero degrees relative off the bow. Combined rate of closure ... goddamn, one hundred and ten knots!"

  For a moment Amanda was touched by admiration. This kid had been born of the same breed as the Jervis Bay and the "Little Boys" off of Samar. He was outmatched in technology and in firepower, and he had no hope of organized support. Yet, when the ships he was charged to protect were endangered, his response was a flaming, death-or-glory dive right into the guns of his enemy.

  "Take him, Dix."

  "Can't do it! He's come inside the arming perimeter of the Harpoons. They won't have enough time to come down out of boost mode and unsafely ... Exocet launch!"

  On the exterior monitors, a double streak of orange burned overhead through the fog, wobbling unsteadily. One of the Phalanx mounts burped out a startled responding burst. The closing range had pulled the fangs of the corvette as well.

  "We're going to guns," Amanda ordered. "Gunners, action to starboard, set for full autofire. We'll rake him as we pass. Helm, ten degrees left rudder."

  She had made the decision to angle off and open the range almost without thinking, an instinctive move to provide the Duke with a safety margin in this head-to-head standoff. It was impossible to know that less than two miles away, another captain was issuing the exact mirror to her command at almost the same instant for the same reason.

  "Captain! Target altering course to starboard! Collision bearing!"

  The Navicom system came to the same conclusion as the tactical officer a split second later. Collision alarms warbled at both the helm and command stations.

  "Helm, emergency hard left rudder! Crash turn!"

  Throwing a destroyer into a tight, minimum-radius turn while she's running flat out at flank speed is not generally considered to be a good idea. You could pop seams, crack frames, and shear years off her hull life. You could buckle the rudder post or tear it out altogether. Given a heavy sea state and a little bad luck, you could even capsize a ship as large and well found as the Cunningham.

  Amanda had no choice. To try to reverse out of the turn to starboard meant having to fight the growing momentum of the swing to port they had already begun. To back engines and lose their speed meant probable death at the hands of the Argentine defenses. Survival meant turning inside of the collision point and praying that the Argentine captain could do the same.