Target Lock

Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto 0805 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

The inlet mouth grew closer, the basaltic jaws on either side of its blue-water gullet gaping wider.

MacIntyre checked his watch against the bombardment time count. “Incoming, ladies and gentlemen. Ninety seconds to impact.”

“Yes, sir,” Labelle Nichols answered from the helm station. Moistening her lips, she couldn’t keep herself from glancing upward. “A short round would be kind of unfortunate, wouldn’t it?”

“Wouldn’t be good,” Stone Quillain agreed, shooting his own look toward the overhead. “What worries me most is that we got those damn things from the Army.”

The Army Tactical Missiles engines burned out after a few seconds of furious acceleration, leaving the flight of projectiles to coast up their steep ballistic trajectory. Peaking at more than a hundred thousand feet above the earth’s surface, the missiles began their dive to their target, dispersing in a smooth fan pattern down the length of the peninsula far below.

As the missiles plunged back into denser atmosphere, their guidance fins angled, spinning them like rifle bullets as they fell. A laser range finder in each missile’s nose bounced a light beam off the earth’s surface, and at the moment when the rotation speed reached its peak, a bursting charge fired, peeling back the projectile’s outer skin.

Hurled by centrifugal force, M-74 cluster bomblets spewed outward in an expanding cone pattern, nine hundred fifty of them per missile, each with the explosive power of a hand grenade.

Other than the wail of the attack siren, the first warning the Morning Star surface garrison had was the sequential crashes of the empty missile frames slamming into the forest. Then came a soft metallic pattering, like metal rain. Hundreds upon hundreds of small gray cylinders were tumbling out of the sky, filtering down through the tree canopy, bouncing off limbs, thumping into the soft earth, saturating Crab’s Claw Cape.

The Morning Star veterans had frequently faced the grenade launchers and mortars of the Indonesian Army. They’d even tasted field artillery more than once, but this was nothing they recognized as a weapon. Some dove for cover, many hesitated, a few even picked up the seemingly inert little cylinders out of curiosity.

Thousands upon thousands of microchip fuse timers all reached zero simultaneously.

Aboard the Sutanto they saw something like chain lightning flicker and blaze blue-white beneath the trees on the cape. A billowing gray-brown cloud burst outward from the forest cover in all directions, first lifting, then settling heavily, as if the jungle were somehow reabsorbing it.

The sound came next, like God ripping a continent-size canvas tarp in two.

Stone Quillain nodded approvingly. “That had to hurt. Not bad, Army.”

“Indeed,” MacIntyre agreed. “Now let’s see what Commander Richardson can do.”

Inside the cavern, the guard hustled Amanda and Sonoo down the steeply angled gangway from the main deck of the Flores to the right-hand cavern pier. Sonoo stumbled in the dim lighting. Wheezing, he clutched at the cable railing of the gangway, begging to be allowed to go slowly.

Amanda found herself sandwiched between her guard and the Indian. For the first time the guard was neglecting to keep his distance.

Impatiently the Bugis snapped something in Indonesian over Amanda’s shoulder at Sonoo. Not a reply but a command. The status of the technical representative had apparently dropped suddenly. Amanda could guess why, and was already incorporating the factor into her own plan of action.

The honking Harconan Flores’s air horns joined in the clamor of the ship pen Klaxons. Deckhands were hastening topside, dragging the canvas covers off the 37mm mounts, while within the hull, air starters hissed, kicking over the LSM’s engines.

Up forward, the work boss of the stevedore gang bawled curses and encouragement to his men as they winched the encapsulated INDASAT up the bow ramp.

Bugis gun crews were mustering at the quad fifty emplacements at each pier end while other guards dashed to internal security posts, some with assault rifles, others with grenade launchers, all responding to a practiced drill.

Just as they reached the foot of the gangway, something exploded outside. To Amanda it sounded like a gigantic chainsaw cutting a battle ship in two. Her ears popped as pressure waves pressed in from beyond the cavern mouth and down the inland entry tunnels. Scores of tiny starlike holes appeared in the dark inner facing of the camouflage screen; shrapnel hissed and ricocheted within the dock, and the heavy nylon curtain billowed inwardly like a sail in a high wind, the hot acid stink of high explosives flowing with it. Someone got unlucky with a bomblet fragment, his scream rising, then trailing off.

“What is it?” Sonoo squealed to Amanda. “What’s happening?”

“As we say in my country, Professor, ‘the Iceman cometh.’”

The guard hurried them on toward the tunnel entrances at the rear of the cavern.

Two miles to the southeast of Crab’s Claw, a row of eight helicopters went to hover in a parallel line that extended the length of the cape. Sweeping into firing range during the shock of the ATACM’s strike, each helo positioned over a precisely precalculated fix on its Global Positioning Unit system. With equal precision, each aircraft aligned on a specific gyrocompass heading and lifted its nose a precise number of degrees by its artificial horizon, flight and navigation systems serving the role of the training and laying gear of a gun battery.

“Guns hot, guns hot, guns hot,” Cobra Richardson chanted into his lip mike, his thumb flipping the trigger guard up and off the firing but ton on his collective lever. “Stand by… shoot!”

Seven similar trigger buttons depressed.

The helo line was engulfed in smoke and flame and the dinosaur scream of salvoing Hydra rockets. The firing circuits cycled with machine gun rapidity, alternating between the pods on either side of each aircraft at quarter-second intervals, balancing the weight distribution and reducing the risk of round collision. Each Huey expended its base load of 56 bombardment rockets in fourteen seconds, the larger H-60s requiring twice that time to release their swarm of 112 projectiles.

Six hundred seventy-two rounds delivered on target in less than thirty seconds. This is the advantage of the bombardment rocket over tube artillery: Instead of one round at a time, it all arrives at once.

The Hydras burned out within a second or two of launching. As with the larger ATACMs, their momentum carried them on to target, but each exhausted rocket motor trailed a thin stream of smoke behind it. To Cobra Richardson, peering out through the propellant-smeared windshield of Wolf One, the rocket swarm in flight was like an incredibly swift gray storm front that lifted above, then settled down on, Crab’s Claw Cape.

And wherever it touched, the earth exploded.

For a long, agonizing half minute the peninsula looked as it must have looked in its primordial days of creation, when the lava flows boiled down its length into the sea: fire, steam, jagged orange light, and a continuous rumbling roar that could be heard even over the beat of the rotors. And when the last incoming round had detonated, another cloud roiled into the sky, this one dense and black.

“Fuck!” Richardson’s copilot whispered.

“Yeah,” Richardson agreed. “So that’s what it looks like.”

Atop Crab’s Claw, the torn and stunned survivors of the ATACMS strike were just pulling themselves to their feet when the new holocaust cascaded from the sky. But whereas each ATACMs bomblet had had the approximate explosive force of a hand grenade, the Hydra bombardment rounds each carried a fourteen-pound charge of high explosive.

Few Hydras actually reached the ground. Fused for impact detonation, the thick forest canopy intercepted the bulk of the projectiles. This was no boon to those trapped in the open. Entire trees disintegrated under the rockets’ impacts, dagger-sharp wooden splinters and jagged steel shrapnel filling the air. Palm trunks were hurled like cabers, end over end, to crash down and crush, and men were entombed under an avalanche of falling timber.

The Morning Star guerrillas were brave men and good soldiers, dedicated veterans of years of jungle skirmishing, but never had they experienced, known of, or even dreamed of an onslaught such as this. Those on the landward end of the peninsula fled back into the deeper shelter of the mainland jungle, while those inside the shelter of the old Japanese bunkers hung on, screamed, and rode it out. Those trapped out in the heart of the conflagration had no option except to die.

In the ship pen, the rock underfoot shuddered. Rust clouds sifted down ominously from the support girders overhead, and the lighting system flickered.

Amanda, Sonoo, and the guard had just entered the left-hand access tunnel at the rear of the cavern. Here it was as if an enraged thunderstorm were trying to squeeze its way down the passage from the surface, the pressure waves it pushed ahead of itself hammering at the eardrums.

Their guard hesitated, glancing around uneasily. A tunnel carved deep into the earth was not a natural fighting ground for a Bugis sea raider. Cutting a look back over her shoulder, Amanda twisted her fingers into the strap of the binoculars she had so carefully husbanded. For this moment and maybe for a few moments more, this particular length of tunnel was empty save for the three of them.

A rocket slammed into the inlet wall near the pen entry. Its detonation tore loose the supports of the camouflage curtain, sending thousands of square yards of nylon and their guide tracks crashing down into the water at the cavern mouth. An explosion of daylight flooded the cavern.

The unexpected glare at his back startled the already edgy guard. For all his veteran years, the Bugis warrior spun around, taking his eyes off Amanda for the first and last time.

She spun as well, using all of her strength to swing the binoculars like a flail at the end of their strap, aiming for the back of the guard’s head. Lenses, barrels, and skull all shattered at the impact.

Before the guard’s body had a chance to fall, Amanda lunged at him. Tearing the Sterling out of his flaccid hands, she twisted about once more to bring the machine pistol’s muzzle to bear on Sonoo. “The other technical representatives,” she snapped. “Take me to them. Move!”

The Indian did so, with alacrity.

Amanda tore the single thirty-four round reload magazine out of the fallen Bugis’s belt and followed, praying that in the confusion of the attack no one had noted the turnabout of affairs.

The hammering barrage ceased as abruptly as it had begun, leaving behind the sour puckering scent and taste of picric acid and the charcoal smell of burning wood. Somehow the returning silence was as stunning as the previous crushing concentration of sound. Men tried to shake away the shock, convulsively starting to move. Instinctive leaders sprung into action, hastening the process.

“Get it over the side, heave!” Makara Harconan shouted, adding his shoulder to that of the other deckhands on the fantail of the Flores. By brute muscle power they hogged the snagged tangle of tarpaulin and cable off the stern of the ship and into the sea, the mass of heavy fabric tearing a stretch of the aft railing out of its shackles as it fell.

The seaman half of Harconan noted abstractly that clearing the LSM’s propellers for departure was going to be pure hell. The more immediate and practical portion of his mind counterpointed with the question of whether the Flores was going to sail at all.

Harconan had no idea what was happening atop the cape. He was only certain that the Indonesians couldn’t be behind it, nor were the Australians or any other of the regional navies. None had this brand of fire power at their beck and call. It had to be the Americans. Somehow they had located his base. No, somehow she must have led them here.

For one moment as he stood along side the crumpled railing, Harconan felt a soul-deep explosion of rage and betrayal aimed at Amanda Garrett. That bitch! He had accepted her word, her parole!

And then the taipan laughed. He straightened amid the ruins and he laughed aloud, to the bewilderment of the seamen around him. And what would he have done in her place? How had she gone about it? He was sure he’d covered every eventuality, leaving her nothing. Harconan reached up and wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Someday he would have to ask her about that.

He shook the ringing from his ears, taking stock of this tactical situation. No more fire was incoming. But that Indonesian frigate certainly was. She must be within a half mile of the inlet mouth and coming on like a bat out of hell.

Was she trying to move in fast to put assault boats over the side? Let her try it. The barrage might have taken out most of the clifftop emplacements, but the intact cavern guns could cut any landing party to pieces. He still had time to consider his options. There was always the contingency plan for a fallback to the Morning Star bases in the mountains. But about the satellite…

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!”