Choosers of the Slain

47

A number of the secondary monitors in the Combat Information Center had been switched over to the exterior low-light television system. Through them, it appeared as if the ship were a projectile fired through the narrow slot between the wind-whipped sea and the low overcast. Her prow tore through intermittent veils of mist and rain, and once, off to port, an ominously large pan of drift ice flashed past.

Jane's All the World's Warships for 2006 listed the Cunningham-class destroyer as having a top speed of "thirty knots plus," the "plus" being a modestly well-guarded secret. This night, bucking Force Five seas, the Duke's iron log registered a clean forty-two.

The twin prop wakes streaming aft from the propulsor pods met right astern and kicked up a thundering rooster tail that rose above the level of the well deck. The normal pitch and roll of her cruising state was gone, replaced by an unsteady floating sensation as the huge, 80,000-ton hull tried to lift and plane. She was no longer riding up and over the waves; rather, she was driving through them, her sharp-edged clipper bow smashing into each oncoming roller like an ax into soft wood, the jolting impacts radiating back along her frames.

"How are we doing, McKelsie?" All hands in the CIC wanted to ask that question, because over in the counter-measures bay, the battle had already been joined.

With all stealth protocols closed up, the Duke had the radar cross-section of a small cabin cruiser. However, even a small cabin cruiser could be tracked at ranges of up to twenty-five miles by a good surface-search system, and the Argentines had good surface-search systems.

Working in close would require that the enemy's own technology be turned back against him. In high sea states, search radar would frequently pick up "wave clutter," annoying random contacts and ghost targets brought about when the radar sweep reflected off the moving surface of the sea. Modern radars had electronic filters built into them to eliminate most of the phenomenon.

McKelsie and his spook team were counting on that. They were using a vast block of processing capacity to produce a continuously updating computer model of the surface wave patterns that surrounded the Cunningham. Then, employing that model, they manipulated the "mutability envelope" of the ship's Wetball stealth skin, phasing its radar return into the surface clutter being produced around it.

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 miles 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 destroyer.

"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.

The CIC crew felt the deck tilt ominously beneath their feet, and the blaring of a second set of alarms. almost drowned out the moaning of overloaded metal that echoed up out of the ship's structure.

"The roll inclinometer is approaching red-line limits, Captain!"

"I know, helm. Keep pushing her. She can take it."

Amanda was venturing into that unknown territory beyond listed design specifications. She was trusting to her mariner's instincts and to the years she had spent helping to create this ship. Going by the book would not save them now.

If it was bad in the CIC, it was terrifying topside. As the big ship leaned, Ken Hiro and the bridge crew were forced to brace themselves against whatever was available. Peering down and out of the starboard side of the windscreen, they could see the first wave curling green along the full length of the weather-deck railing.

Then it grew worse.

The Argentine corvette came into sight, tearing a furrow through the sea smoke. In the manner of hydrofoils, she was pitching into her turn as steeply as the American destroyer was listing out of hers. The tip of her stern foil was lifting out, slashing open the surface of the sea, and the twin horizontal geysers of her hydrojet drive thundered in her wake. She was attempting to avoid the impending collision as desperately as Cunningham and, just for the moment, the American destroyer hands were wishing her well.

"Okay, helm," Amanda said quietly. "Start bringing your rudder amidships. Not too fast or you'll lay her right over on her side. Let her get her head up."

The inclinometers shifted back into the safety zone and with a heavy, shuddering roll the Duke came upright on her new heading. A meager two hundred yards away, the Argentine corvette was running parallel to her, almost matching her course and speed. Muzzle flashes began to flare rhythmically at its bow and stern, and tracer rounds began to arc out at the Cunningham.

"Gunners, take him! All mounts traverse right and fire as you bear!"

Amanda could feel the shell hits, heavier and more muffled than the discharge of the Duke's own weapons. The first faint scent of burning plastic and hot metal began to seep in through the ventilators.

Back aft at the damage-control stations, the DC officers began calling down the warning lights appearing on their panels.

"I'm showing skin damage above the waterline between frames nineteen and twenty-two."

"Confirm that. We've got shell hits opposite number-two Vertical Launch System. Damage-control team Alpha Bravo responding."

"Roger, inform the TACCO that number-two VLS is going down. I'm pulling the safety breakers."

"Shell hits astern. Frame forty-one. I'm showing skin penetration and a high-temperature warning light."

"Confirm that. Team Alpha Delta responding. Fire in the hangar bay!"

Arkady gave Amanda's shoulder a parting squeeze and then he was gone, racing aft.

The Duke was not passively accepting the attack. She was repaying in kind. Danny Lyndiman, the same young gunner's mate who had been on-line the day of the first Argentine air strike, was at his new duty assignment at number-one gun-control station. Both of the Oto Melara Super Rapids were slaved to his hand controller, with both turrets firing to the same aiming point. Laying the crosshairs of his targeting screen on the Plimsoll line of the hydrofoil, he squeezed the trigger.

The Oto Melaras raged, each slamming out its stream of 76mm projectiles. They weren't tracer rounds, but their superheated steel glowed green in the thermographic sights, marking their flight. As the converging shell streams touched the Argentine's hull, skin shredded and hellfire spilled out. With the precision of a metalsmith wielding a cutting torch, Lyndiman began to draw the stream of shell-bursts across the length of the corvette's hull.

Simultaneously, dazzling white points of light began to dance across the hydrofoil's upperworks. The Duke's second duty gunner had placed the starboard Phalanx mount under manual control and had brought it into the engagement, the vicious little tungsten penetrators stitching through the superstructure of the smaller craft like a needle through tissue paper.

The Argentine vessel couldn't stand it. The two vessels thundered along side by side, exchanging broadsides like two Napoleonic ships of the line. They were trading a near-equal amount of fire, but the American vessel had almost eight times the displacement to absorb it with. The destroyer was being hurt, but the corvette was being torn apart. Her captain, in a desperate bid for survival, accelerated and veered off, trying to open the range.

"He's bugging out!" Dix yelled joyfully. "He's running for it! Gunners, stay on him! Stay… Jesus, sweet Jesus!" The TACCO's voice sank to an awed whisper.

The voices of every other person within sight of an exterior monitor were stilled as well.

One of the Duke's Oto Melara rounds had found and damaged the main spar of the corvette's forward hydrofoil assembly. Under the load of the turn, it had sheered off.

Dropping ten feet off the plane, the corvette's narrow forehull had dug into the face of an oncoming wave. At sixty knots, the water might as well have been concrete.

The hydrofoil's immense momentum drove its bow under the surface while its stern was lifted into the air. Its keel whipped like a willow wand, tearing loose hull framings and smashing them out through the Fiberglas skin like bone splinters through the flesh of a compound fracture.

Aghast, the men and women of the Cunningham watched as the stern of the corvette angled higher, fifty, sixty, seventy degrees, hesitating for a long moment at the high point of its arc. Amanda had an instant's hellish vision of what must be happening inside that hull. Ammunition raining down out of magazine racks, tons of kerosene spilling out of bunkerage tanks, white-hot turbines tearing loose from their bedplates and crashing forward through thin bulkheads…

The length of the Argentine's hull split open like the petals of a blossoming flower, disgorging a single, titanic golden-orange fireball. The Duke's deck plates rang under the impact of the shock wave as she swept past the explosion. Then the monitors went empty and dark and she was in the clear, barring a single fragment of smoking metal that came spinning down out of the mists to rattle off the upperworks. From somewhere over near number-one gunnery station, a quietly exultant voice exclaimed, "Yeah! Free game!"

Amanda shook off the effects of the spectacle and returned her attention to the main situational display. Their evasive turn had brought them around more than ninety degrees from their previous course of due north, to a heading of west-southwest. The following firefight with the hydrofoil had carried them clear across the bow of the Argentine transport column from its port side to the starboard.

It had also cost them the initiative of the attack. Dead or not, that gutsy hydrofoil skipper might still kill them.

"Helm, left standard rudder! Bring us back around to zero one zero degrees."

What was worse, the Duke's invisibility had been compromised. The battle damage to her sensitive stealth skin would multiply her radar cross-section several times over.

"Mr. McKelsie, give me a maximum-density RBOC screen and a full decoy pattern."

"Captain, we've only got one decoy set left in the launchers, and the RBOC magazines are getting low."

"Then give me all of what's left. Now, McKelsie! Kill all radars! Cease radiating!"

The Cunningham completed the foaming circle she had begun, coming about more than a full 360 degrees. She was attempting what in an aerial dogfight would have been called a turn and burn, the creation of a knot of radar and thermal clutter that might serve as a false target to draw enemy fire.

"Steering zero one zero, Captain."

"Very well. Steady as she goes. Hold us parallel to the convoy line."

With their sensors disabled and their communication links cut by the Duke's jamming, the two surviving Argentine transports were blindly holding to their original course and speed.

"What's the status of those last two operational close escorts?" she asked Beltrain.

"The undamaged Meko looks like he's going to assist his shot-up partner, and the A-69 is hanging back behind the convoy. He's having trouble getting a burn-through, but he's trying to target on something…"

The exterior monitor covering the stern arc flamed brightly. Half a mile back along the Cunningham's wake, in the heart of the chaff node, a futile Exocet salvo boiled the sea and tore up the sky.

"… and I guess he just did," Beltrain finished.

"Right. Secure EMCON! Radars back up!"

The screens reactivated. Amanda could see the A-69-class frigate turning away, its bolt spent and its missile cells empty. The three ships of the distant covering force still appeared to be milling around in confusion some fifteen miles ahead of the convoy. A glance at the infrared scanners indicated the continuing, intermittent flicker of weapons fire and at least one steady-state glow out along that bearing.

"Dix, what's going on out there?"

"I'm not sure, ma'am. The SCMs should be long gone by now. Maybe we pinked somebody."

Beltrain's assessment was correct. Fate had guided the distant covering force almost directly into the path of the Cunningham's diversionary cruise-missile strike. The cool cybernetic intellects that dwelt within the guidance packages of the SCMs had recognized the Argentine destroyers as worthy targets, and they had swarmed the warships like a school of hungry barracuda.

The Argentines had fought back and had fought back well. Those rounds not decoyed off target were destroyed by a barrage of gun and missile fire. The captain of the fleet flagship Nueve de Julio did not make his fatal error until literally the final minute of the strike.

Seeking to evade the last of the incoming weapons, he had ordered a turn away from the cruise missile stream. But, in doing so, he had unmasked the broad rear facing of his ship's helicopter hangar to the SCM's search radar. The missile was drawn in by this high-RCS target like a moth to a flame. The high-sided structure also blocked a few key degrees of coverage for the Oto Melara point defense mounts, and the twelfth SCM rode in through this narrow free-fire zone and struck the hangar doors with dead-center precision.

Punching through, it had slammed into the tightly parked cluster of helicopters within, bulldozing them into a crumpled jumble against the front of the hangar bay. The cruise missile's engine module had disintegrated, spraying flame and white-hot shrapnel throughout the compartment, while the half-ton warhead had torn loose from the airframe and crashed forward through three more bulkheads before finally exploding.

The blast shattered the midships superstructure of the big Animoso-class destroyer. Both funnels and the mainmast toppled over the side with a hollow metallic scream, the flashback down the stack ductwork demolishing the engine rooms and decimating the engineering watch. Dead in the water, she began to roll broadside on to the force of the waves, while back aft, the burning and bursting fuel cells of her own aircraft turned her stern into a self-consuming inferno.

Dead also was the last Argentine hope for reorganizing into any kind of effective fighting force. Admiral Luis Fouga would never have to face his failure. He had been crushed between the crumpled bulkheads of his flag plot. From this point on, control of this conflict would rest solely aboard the spectral killer that was systematically ripping the heart out of the Argentine dreams of Antarctic empire.

"Coming in on the oiler, Captain!"

"Turrets traverse right and engage the target! Dix, arm starboard torpedo bays. Range safeties to minimum. We don't have time to fool around with wire guidance, so set all fish for independent proximity homing. Salvo-fire all tubes as you get a solution!"

The night-bright optics swiveled to cover the new target along with the gun mounts. Both acquired it simultaneously as the big, slab-sided tanker loomed up out of the sea smoke. The autocannon began to hammer again and golden shell bursts danced along the tanker's deck line, followed by a fiery series of secondary explosions among the replenishment stations and fuel-transfer heads.

On the Alpha Screen, a cone of yellow illumination radiated out from the flank of the Cunningham's position hack, designating the effective firing arc of her starboard bank of fixed torpedo tubes. The cone enveloped the Argentine oiler.

"Opening outer tube doors. Solution is set."

Just above the Duke's waterline amidships, a series of pocket-panel hatches sliced open, revealing a row of blunt, polyethylene-capped warheads.

"Firing on bearing now. Torpedoes away!"

With the peculiar, sequential thump-kisss of an above-water launch, five Mark 50 Barracuda torpedoes shot out of their tubes and into the sea. Unlike World War II-vintage tin fish, these stumpy little weapons had only a secondary surface-attack capacity. Their comparatively small, shaped-charge warheads had been intended to crack the shell of a deep-diving nuclear submarine, not cave in the side of a merchant vessel. On the other hand, 110 pounds of high explosives detonating against one's hull plates could not be casually shrugged off either.

Four of the Barracudas found a home. Four thin plumes of spray kicked up along the flank of the Luis A. Huergo. With her decks aflame and black oil bleeding from her ruptured belly, she began to lose speed.

Amanda gave a curt nod. "Helm, come right to zero four five. Cut back across the bow of the third transport. Dix, stand by your portside tubes. Same setup. We'll go for a down-the-throat shot as we cross his course line. Gunners, action to port. Shift fire to new target."

There was an uneven stammer to the firing of the Oto Melaras now. Both turrets had expended their entire base load, and the shell humpers down in the magazines were having trouble shoving ammunition into the feeder belts fast enough to fully satisfy the voracious appetite of the guns. The mounts were still capable of dealing damage, though.

The forecastle of the tank-landing ship Piedrabuena shattered under the impact of multiple hits. Danny Lyndiman rocked his hand back minutely and the firestreams walked up the front facing of the deckhouse to focus on the bridge,

chewing the structure away. Then the torpedoes arrived. Three of them, a triple sledgehammer blow against her hull. Spray exploded out from beneath her forefoot and the entire bow structure distorted and collapsed like a wet cardboard box.

No surviving human eye witnessed the end of the Piedrabuena. The Cunningham had already swept past on her way to the open water northeast of the ruined convoy. The LST's propellers had continued to race after the torpedoes had hit and the mangled bow doors had acted like a gigantic scoop, channeling a thousand tons of ocean into the overloaded vehicle deck that ran almost the full length of the ship's hull.

As smoothly and swiftly as a crash-diving submarine, the Piedrabuena began to slide beneath the waves. The men who could have ordered the engines stopped were dead in the wreckage of the wheelhouse. The others followed swiftly as icy seawater exploded into their compartments. Carrying her entire crew with her, she began her final voyage, two miles down into the chill wet dark of Drake Passage.

"There goes the LST, ma'am," the TACCO reported.

"She's a goner."

"I can also confirm that one of the Animosos is out of it. Dead in the water and all electronics are down," Christine called in from Raven's Roost. "We got these dudes up a tree."

Amanda agreed. She ruled this battlefield now. Her tactical officer had solid locks on the two surviving close escorts. With one word from her, he could kill them both in seconds. She could then double back among the drifting hulks of the convoy. Using them for cover, she could defy or destroy the last surviving elements of the Argentine distant covering force. She could make it a clean sweep if she so desired, and go home with a broom tied to her masthead.

At this moment, she was the queen of the polar seas.

"Do you want to reengage, ma'am?" Dix inquired.

"Negative. Check fire, all systems. Maintain course and speed and pull clear of the area. We've done our job."