Target Lock

Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto 0807 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

Sparks of orange fire sputtered within the cavern mouth that was revealed at the head of the inlet, and writhing tracer snakes crawled toward the Sutanto.

“Here it comes,” Stone Quillain yelled, sinking behind the spalling barrier. “Tuck your heads in!”

Labelle Nichols crouched down behind the helm station, chanting the wry prayer of the old days of wooden ships and broadside-to-broadside warfare. “O Lord, for what we are about to receive, may we truly be grateful.”

MacIntyre could only recall that spaced between each visible tracer were four rounds that could not be seen.

The bridge windscreen dissolved in a glassy spray under multiple slug impacts, the thick Kevlar padding below it absorbing rounds with a sodden whock, whock, whock, like a club swung against a wet rug. More bullets skittered and screamed off the steel superstructure frames.

“That’s gotta be coming from some Ma Deuce fifties,” Quillain commented in a conversational tone.

“Uh-huh,” Labelle agreed absently, “but they got something heavier too. Looks like a Bofors twin mount maybe.”

Intermixed with the glittering hornets of the machine-gun tracers were what looked like flaming bowling balls to MacIntyre as he peered over the spalling curtain. As they struck, the ship’s structure jolted under each of their impacts, plating tore and caved in, and the spreading stench of fire and high explosives saturated the air.

“That’s something like a twin forty, all right,” a calm, studied voice stated. MacIntyre was amazed to find that it was his own. “I’ll bet they’ve put the old Russian 37s back on that Frosch-classer.”

The Sutanto bucked over a last sea swell, then the wave action dropped away as they roared through the cliff mouth and into the calmer waters of the cape inlet.

“Almagtig! What’s that madman doing?” Captain Onderdank screamed over the rhythmic coughing of his ship’s guns.

“I don’t know,” Harconan yelled back. “I don’t know!”

The Flores’s captain had joined Harconan at the portside of the deck house, where the taipan had been driven by the muzzle blast of the aft turret. Fire spewed from the twin bell mouths of the Russian 37mm anti-aircraft gun, and a steady stream of shell cases clattered onto the deck from the ejector chutes.

The quad .50-calibers were firing steadily from each cavern pierhead is well, and the aftermost pinisi moored alongside the Flores had mounted and manned its Russian 14mm machinegun stern chaser, bringing it to bear in the fight as well.

The fire streams that converged and focused on the onrushing frigate were doing damage. Smoke was beginning to stream from the Parchim’s superstructure, but still she plunged on, as unheeding as a charging elephant to a barrage of air-rifle fire.

Still running at flank speed, she was entering the inlet!

“He’ll never be able to stop!” Onderdank exclaimed, shouting his bewilderment, “Even if he backs engines full, he won’t be able to stop!”

The captain of the Flores was right. Without reversible propellers, which the elderly and simply outfitted ex-Warsaw Pact warship lacked, there was no way for the vessel to stop and no room for it to turn in the channel.

And then Harconan was flashing back to his days in the Amsterdam Maritime Academy and a tour he had taken of French Atlantic Port facilities, and the legend of the Campbeltown.

During the Second World War; the huge dry dock at the French port of Saint-Nazaire had been the only graving facility on the Bay of Biscay large enough to conduct hull repairs to the German superbattleships Bismarck and Tirpitz. As such, it was a great convenience to the Kriegsmarine and a deadly complication to the Royal Navy.

The question had been how to eliminate it. Conventional bombing only chipped the massive concrete structure, and the bristling harbor defenses made it all but impossible for a special-operations force to reach the dry dock with a large enough stock of high explosives to do appreciable damage.

The answer had been to take an elderly American lend-lease destroyer, the Campbeltown, camouflage it to look like a German warship, load it with munitions and a team of heroically suicidal Commandos, and crash the whole affair through the dry dock sea gates at flank speed.

As was being done here!

“The bridge!” Harconan screamed into his radio. “Concentrate all fire on the bridge!”