Trial by Fire - eARC

by Charles E Gannon

  Tygg angled the mil-spec transceiver so Trevor could see it. It was scrolling a text message that read like a transcript from an insane asylum. “Bananas *D. Balloons zero-zero.” “Bananas *D” indicated that the Arat Kur still retained roughly eighty-five percent of their PDF capability. About what had been expected, at this point. Almost all of the fifteen percent reduction would be due to overloaded or destroyed arrays. “Balloons zero-zero” indicated that the enemy tactical air assets remained at one hundred percent. Again, pretty much as expected, until the missiles from the grain ships started landing—

  As if on cue, there was a flash and thunderous blast of sound and debris halfway between Trevor and the presidential compound. The impact sent a tremor through the street, shuddered the walls of the sewer. Some masonry detached and plunked in the ankle-high water.

  “Now that’s more like it.” Stosh almost sounded festive. “The freighters have joined the party.”

  Two more blasts rattled the manhole cover on its four-corner props like a closed lid on a boiling pot. One rocket had struck someplace inside the compound. The buzz of the enemy PDF systems rose to an insane, saw-toothed scream. The sound was music to Trevor’s ears. At this rate of fire, those systems were going to overheat, run out of ammo, or both, within seven minutes, ten at the most. “They’ve committed their reserve systems,” he speculated. “We’ve got their groundside interdiction capabilities pushed to the max.”

  Confirmation came in the form of a rippling cascade of sharp, thin sonic booms. Trevor could hear the smile in Tygg’s voice. “They’re having to augment with orbital interdiction.”

  Yeah, but that also means they’re sinking our ships by the dozens right now. Despite the steel rain in the streets outside, Trevor was glad he wasn’t anywhere near the fifty-kilometer nautical limit at that moment—

  “Five seconds,” shouted Stosh.

  Very far to the south, Trevor heard a susurrating whisper of faint, nonstop detonations. Probably missile-deployed cluster bomblets reaching one of the smaller airports. God knows how many of those missiles were being lost for every one that reached its target, but once hit, those runways and vertipads would take days to repair. And this game was going to be finished today. One way or the other.

  “And—mark!” bellowed Stosh.

  Trevor discovered he was listening and watching so intently that he was holding his breath. A second went by, then another, followed by a cold wave that rolled over the skin of his arms, chest, back, belly. The tactical-level repeater system hadn’t worked as planned. It was either disabled by all the falling debris or stray rockets, or had been instantly discovered and jammed or—

  The pager emitted a long tone.

  Two hundred meters up the street, three rocket-propelled grenades flew out of different windows with a surging whoosh, trailing white smoke plumes toward the compound. Following on their tails were the hammering applause of automatic weapons of diverse calibers: some high, spitting reports from Pindads, some rapid barking by venerable AK-47s, and a few steady, deep, jackhammer roars from belt-fed weapons that sent tracers chasing after the rockets.

  “Behold, the Jubilee!” proclaimed Stosh, celebrating the activation of the net as if he were a testifying evangelist.

  But the return fire, articulated by the sharp supersonic cracks of advanced dustmix support weapons, and even coil guns. answered within three seconds, chipping concrete, shattering windows, tearing apart parked cars with a sound like the ripping of perforated tin. Directly overhead, overlapping blasts indicated missiles being intercepted at close range. Then three large rockets, survivors of the Arat Kur PDF fire, landed with a collective, up-dopplering rush. One went straight into the compound. After one heart-stopping moment, there was a long, shuddering roar—and a noticeable drop in the volume of outgoing PDF fire.

  However, another one of the rockets went straight into and obliterated the building from which the first of the three rocket-propelled grenades had been fired. As if all combatants were equally staggered by these heavy blows, there was a moment’s lull—which was then immediately refilled by a gushing of bidirectional small-arms fire. But there was a new sound in the cacophonic symphony. High-pitched cries of pain and shock rose over the layered thunder of diverse, concentrated weaponry. A dog—dragging a spurting stump that had been one of its rear legs—emerged from the billowing smoke, ran past at close range, showering blood in all directions, yelping in time with its frantic gait. Trevor squinted into the smoke: Behold the Jubilee? No, Stosh, “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

  And damn it that Jake Winfield has to be out in the middle of this shitstorm…

  Tanjung Priok docks, Jakarta, Earth

  Another of the moored freighters, this one only one hundred meters away from the wharf, took a Russian missile beneath the taffrail. Perversely, the explosion lifted her bow up, like an overloaded truck feebly trying to do a wheelie, before she dropped back down, her aft settling rapidly as the fuming, growling water rushed into her half-amputated stern.

  Good, thought Lieutenant Jacob Winfield, watching the last element of the circling Arat Kur combat air patrol break off and head out to sea, they’ve decided the ships in port are all victims, too. He wondered if the four savaged freighters had all been part of the plan—selected and hit by ROVs—or just dumb luck. Scanning the remaining ships, he sought the telltale signs for which Tygg had told him to look.

  Within seconds, Winfield found seven hulls showing the right combination of innocuous features that indicated there was an incognito spec ops team aboard. Each ship was a small freighter, each had one or more white T-shirts hung on a makeshift laundry line, and each had a severed hawser hanging from the port bow. On three of them, small fires were burning. Too small to be caused by missiles, but smoky and angry enough to add to—and blend in with—the panic and confusion that reigned in Jakarta Bay and all along the docks of Tanjung Priok. Boats of all sizes, from derelict barges to opulent pleasure craft, were afire, horns hooting, bullhorns blaring in half a dozen different languages. In direct violation of the “no contact, no dumping” restrictions upon the freighters, cargo containers and crates—along with canvas bags and desperate seamen—were streaming over their gunwales and into the comparative safety of the debris-choked water. It was chaos—but slightly more than could be explained by a handful of hits by large missiles and a few score by smaller ones. Winfield smiled. All part of the plan.

  On one of the ships with a severed hawser, Winfield heard a set of muffled blasts which, to a practiced ear, recalled the sound made by older, twentieth-century grenades. A wash of thin gray fumes, and then a quickly growing plume of blacker smoke, emerged from a companionway, along with apparent shouts of distress. Winfield looked around: most of the Hkh’Rkh still manning the harbor checkpoints were too busy to look up, and those that did immediately returned to whatever task had occupied them the moment before. There was too much happening, too much that they weren’t familiar with, in an alien environment suddenly gone mad.

  On the ship where the unusual explosions had given rise to equally unusual smoke—probably from a carefully controlled fire of wood and old tires—men and material were now pouring over the sides. Some of the objects plunging into the water were sealed black plastic bags. Winfield squinted. He watched one of the bags sink, leaving a thin line and a fishing bob trailing behind it on the surface. He smiled, wondered how many of the “desperate deckhands” jumping in around that bag were something other than merchant mariners.

  As a SEAL, he also knew to look for the too-straight line of almost invisible bubbles that approached slowly, casually. More slowly and more casually than any fish ever did. Making sure his undersized mechanic’s overalls covered his composite-armor shin guards, Winfield moved to the edge of the wharf, miming an anxious search around the base of its pilings. Within seconds, down at the limit of his vision, a pair of dive goggles appeared, ghostlike in the oily water. He crouched closer, still acting as though he was searching,
searching, searching, and thought, go ahead, check me out. But don’t take too long about it.

  The goggles disappeared. Winfield counted off four seconds before a man dressed as a deck hand swam up and broke the surface, gasping for air and sputtering, splashing his arms about in a frenzy of desperation. Winfield reached down, caught the upper sleeve of the man’s light denim shirt and dragged him up onto the wharf where he proceeded to cough and retch mightily. “Don’t overdo it,” Winfield muttered.

  The man kept his face toward the planking as he apparently coughed up bay water, but managed to say, “Are they watching?”

  “Hell, no. You’re about the two-hundredth semidrowned boater or sailor they’ve seen today. And they’re too busy worrying about the missiles coming from the ocean in front of them and the armed mobs in the city behind them.” Winfield stopped to look at the man again. “You Indonesian?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You look pretty…convincing.”

  The man looked directly up at Winfield. His face was broad, brown, round-cheeked. “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah. You know, you look like a local.”

  “Yeah? Well, mukha ng tae.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said ‘and you look like shit.’ In Tagalog,” added a new voice. Another face—this one spitting out a slimline rebreather and as distinctly Nordic as the other was Micronesian—appeared over the lip of the wharf. Winfield didn’t find the turn of phrase amusing. Mr. Blonde, Blue-eyed, and Square-Jawed detected the signs of disapproval and offered a sheepish rationalization. “Well, you don’t look like a local, anyhow.”

  Winfield pointed a dark coffee index finger straight at the second fellow’s ski-ramp nose. “And you do?”

  The man smiled as he hauled himself up onto the planks and crouched next to the other two. “You’ve got me there, sir.”

  “Sir? How’d you—?”

  Square-Jaw gave him a sidelong look. “Moment an officer starts talking, you know he’s an officer—sir.” He stuck out an immense, and equally squared-off hand. “Chief Edward Barkowski, Team Three.”

  “Lieutenant Jacob Winfield—” He stopped, remembering. “Well, retired—sort of.”

  The smaller man sat up, coughed one more time, nodded to Barkowski, who threw a child’s bath toy into the water. “I’m Alfredo Ayala, Lieutenant Commander, currently CO second stick, Joint SpecOpCom. I don’t remember your name on the contact lists, Mr. Winfield.” Another half-dozen men, all dressed as deck hands, surfaced near the floating toy and dragged themselves up onto the wharf. Dripping and coughing, they affected exhaustion: damn poor actors.

  “My name wouldn’t be on your pre-infil contact lists. We came in under separate authority.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Winfield showed him the magic card that Trevor Corcoran had loaned him.

  Ayala stared at it, then at Winfield. “Your CO is Nolan Corcoran’s son? No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  Ayala’s voice was suddenly tight with ready resentment. “Is he commandeering my teams?”

  “No, sir. Unless my CO guesses wrong, we have the same objective.”

  Ayala’s eyes narrowed. “And how would you know about my objectives?”

  Winfield repressed a sigh of exasperation. “Look, Commander, I got the same ‘suspect collaborators’ training you did. But today, there are two kinds of humans out in the streets: live insurgents and dead insurgents. If there are any collaborators, they’re indoors and staying there.”

  Ayala nodded, smiled. A little sheepishly, Winfield thought. “Okay, Lieutenant, I’m just an FNG here, so cut me some slack. What’s your CO got for a target?”

  “The Roach motel.”

  “The what?”

  “Sorry. That’s what we call the Arat Kur HQ. The presidential compound at the northwest corner of Merdeka Square. They’ve put up curtain walls, paved over some gardens to make a half dozen vertipads.”

  Ayala nodded. “Yep. That’s where my team—and almost everyone else—is headed. I know the prewar layout, but have only seen a few recent photos.”

  Winfield smiled. “Whereas we’ve got prime intel: current floor plans, hardpoints, and duty rosters. Updated within the last forty-eight hours.”

  Ayala’s eyes were suddenly bright. “You have agents inside?”

  “Yeah. Domestic staff, delivery personnel.”

  “Outstanding. We’ll follow you to your CO.” Ayala waved the last members of his still-surfacing stick to join him in the lee of a smoking warehouse that fronted the bay. Once there, with Barkowski keeping watch, he huddled at their center. “Okay. Weapons out.” Each man reached behind and under his shirt. Waterproof adhesive tape tore noisily away from back skin. The small, flat plastic bags that were in their reappearing hands sputtered as they were ripped open. Within five seconds, each man had readied a small, Unitech ten-millimeter liquimix machine pistol, held in the narrow, shadowed margin between his body and the building. Ayala had not stopped giving instructions. “The lieutenant here is going to guide us to a safe house. We go single file. Weapon mix set to maximum. Single shots only. Never more than thirty meters, or you’re not going to get penetration. You won’t anyway, with the Arat Kur. With the Hkh’Rkh, aim for the articulation points in their armor. And work together. Saturate targets with fire. If you don’t penetrate right away, the multiple kinetic impacts should stun them. Then close in and pour it on.” He turned back toward Winfield, paused, frowned. “What are you smiling at?”

  Winfield nodded at the Unitechs. “You sure you want to use those popguns?”

  The captain looked like he’d taken a swig of vinegar. “You got something better?”

  Winfield shrugged. “How about the assault rifles I stashed in a dumpster about twenty minutes ago?”

  The men looked up, eyes wide and hopeful. Ayala looked suspicious. “Some old, raggedy-ass AK’s aren’t any better than—”

  “Commander, I’m talking eight-millimeter CoBro liquimixers with extended bullpup feeds and integral RAP launchers. Double load of ammo, heterogeneous mix. Extra hotjuice canisters so you can shoot fast and hard all day long. Interested?”

  The newly arrived SEALs were not merely interested. The looks on their faces were more akin to ravenous fixation. Ayala allowed himself a small smile. “Sure, Lieutenant. Seeing as how you’re throwing them out anyhow, we’d be happy to take them off your hands.”

  Wholenest flagship Greatvein, Earth orbit

  R’sudkaat clattered over as soon as Tuxae raised a claw. “What is it, Tuxae Skhaas?”

  “Fleetmaster, the humans continue to fire missiles from their ships.”

  “And we continue to destroy both.”

  “Yes, Fleetmaster, but while our orbital interdiction assets are destroying their cargo ships, they cannot be tasked to ground targets.”

  “The delay will be brief. Almost all their ships are sunk.”

  “With respect, Esteemed Fleetmaster, additional ground suppression is required not only in and around the cities, but at a number of other sites. Sensors confirm pilot reports that insurgents and more organized forces have invested the margins of our airbases and vertipads with small teams firing portable fire-and-forget missiles. Between these and the cluster bomblet munitions that passed through our PDF systems, air operations are sluggish at Jakarta and stalled in Surabaja.”

  “How many craft have we lost?”

  “Only one or two so far.”

  “Then there seems little problem.

  “I harmonize, R’sudkaat, but our aircraft are constantly having to take evasive action, thereby diverting from scheduled landing or takeoff vectors. Air traffic control is unmanageable. Consequently, by the time they have avoided, decoyed, or interdicted the ground fire and sortied, their targets have left the coordinates called in by our ground forces.”

  R’sudkaat studied the data streams on Tuxhae’s screen, the map in the holotank, then swerved away. The order he tossed over th
e collar-rim of his carapace sounded like gravel in a sifter. “Redeploy the airphibian craft. They must suspend their subsurface patrol duties and join our air assets as quickly as possible.

  “Fleetmaster, the human submarines—”

  “—need not be patrolled for so aggressively. They will be destroyed by orbital fire if they rise to launch depth.”

  “R’sudkaat, if we were so sure of that outcome, would we have developed these amphibian aircraft? Would we not have simply relied on our orbital interdiction batteries?”

  “The airphibian attack craft were a second tier of defense against submersibles, an assurance against other failures. We cannot afford that luxury for the duration of this battle. We must maintain our combat air patrols and tactical air support. Order the airphibian systems to terminate their submarine picket duties and transition for atmospheric operations.”

  “With respect, R’sudkaat, the fighting is also shifting to the major food-shipment cities—Jakarta, Surabaja, Semarang, Cilacap, and Banywangi—and a few other of the larger metro centers, particularly Bandung, Bekasi, and Depok. How do you plan to use the tactical air support and not kill thousands of civilians? Our rules of engagement—”

  “—no longer apply.”

  Tuxae felt his lenses grind together then spring back in shock. “With respect, Fleetmaster—”

  “Assistant Shipmaster, hear and follow this unwavering note. Today, there is but one rule of engagement. Find and destroy the enemy.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Near Bakau Heni, Sumatra, Earth

  Sanjay Thandla watched Lemuel Wasserman try to hide himself behind a palm tree to urinate and fail miserably. Although arguably the world’s most brilliant living physicist, he seemed unable to figure out how to pee discreetly in the wild.

  But of course, Lemuel’s problem was not ineptitude. It was fear. Lemuel was fearful of everything. Just as his reluctance to enter the jungle made it impossible for him to empty his bladder in privacy, his various anxieties imposed other restrictions upon his behavior. He avoided the local food. He never emerged into the sun unless protected by a long-sleeved shirt, cargo pants, and a floppy hat that made him look like a maiden-lady gardener. He would not swim out beyond ten meters for fear of sharks; and he asked incessantly about the intercept capabilities of the Arat Kur PDF systems. He had arrived twelve days ago, questioning everything, yet accepting no one else’s experience as useful information—with the peculiar exception of Thandla himself.