Target Lock

Anchorage off Adat Tanjung 0117 Hours, Zone Time: August 17, 2008

The real-time download from the Cipher showed the villagers streaming down to the beaches and wharves. There was nothing they could do, save to rage helplessly. Their heavy weapons were aboard the flotilla of anchored gunships, and even the boldest pirate was disinclined to put out in a small boat to challenge the screaming sea monsters that had invaded their harbor.

Steamer Lane danced the Queen around until she was between the rafted ships and the shore, ensuring that his misses would scream out over the open ocean and not inland toward the village.

“Manassas, you got Five and Six,” he directed. I’ll take Three and Four.”

“Rog’ that,” Tony Marlin replied in his earphones. “I am in position, ready to fire. Bet mine are on the bottom first.”

“Steak dinner. Taken. Gunners, cannon, fire!”

The Queen of the West hovered bow to bow with her targets, fifty yards separating them: point-blank range for the twin sets of 30mm autocannon she carried in her shoulder-mount weapons pedestals. These were the same Hughes M-230 series chain guns carried in the chin turret of the Apache attack helicopter. Weapons designed to kill armored fighting vehicles, not wooden-hulled schooners.

The cannon jackhammered, spewing their multiple shell streams. The rounds alternated between armor-piercing and high-explosive incendiary. The HE/I rounds ripped away timbers and planking, spraying white phosphorus fragments among the splinters that remained. The AP rounds simply tore through the entire length of the hundred-foot-plus-long hulls of the schooners. In the parlance of the old broadside Navy, this was called “raking fire,” and it was considered the most devastating. What was true then was still true now, especially as the concealed arms lockers and engine room fuel tanks of the pirate pinisi became involved.

The rakish vessels began to settle rapidly by the bow, flames hailing out of their deck hatches and climbing their rigging. After half a dozen long bursts, the 30-millimeters checked fire, barrel overheat warnings sounding at the gunners’ stations.

Scrounger Caitlin looked judgmentally between the two sets of sinking hulks. “I’d call it a draw,” she said.

“Looks like,” Lane agreed. “Tony and I’ll buy you the steak instead. Rebel, Rebel, let’s move it out of here. Set departure heading and form up on me. All ahead… good cruise. Door gunners, finish off the leftovers.”

The hovercraft surged past the burning ships, gaining speed, their OCSW 25mm crews in the side hatches pumping a final few dozen “make sure” grenades into the wrecks.

“Royalty, this is the Reb. What about the last two?” Marlin inquired.

“Missile drill. Hellfires. One off each pedestal. Our guys don’t get a chance to do enough live-fire with those. Let’s not miss the opportunity.”

“Roger that. Hellfires on the rails.”

The Sea Fighters’ weapons pedestals snapped vertical, loading arms slicing down into the gun tubs to acquire and lift the stumpy sleek shapes of Hellfire laser-guided missiles onto the launching rails that ran above the autocannon barrels. The Hellfire was yet another antitank weapon successfully converted to a naval application. It, too, was intended to kill steel and not wood.

The pedestals swiveled and trained aft. Designation lasers lanced out from the Sea Fighters’ mastheads, painting the targets as they fell away astern, pointing the way for the venom to follow.

The Hellfire salvos arced high on golden flame and dove in. The last two pirate vessels dissolved.

“It’s like the Fourth of July,” Scrounger commented as she studied the receding fires in her sideview mirror. “You always shoot off the big one last.”

The people of Adat Tanjung stood on the beach, watching until the last flickering bit of floating wood extinguished itself. No one considered taking one of the village trucks to the nearest polisi post. No one considered appealing for aid to the nearest farm village inland. They were Bugis, and the clan affairs stayed in the clan, even the disasters.

All were silent as they withdrew to their darkened huts. The lament for the lost ships would begin tomorrow. The residents of Adat Tanjung were nominally Muslim, but the old gods stand close behind every Indonesian. First they had lost their men on the Piskov raid. Now their finest war pinisi had been eaten by a strange and terrible foe. It was as if the vested spirit of the sea had turned its back on the clan.

For a Bugis, nothing could be more fearful.

One among them hurried back to his chandler’s shop and to the two-way radio concealed in the storeroom.