Target Lock

Crab’s Claw Base 0810 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008

The cavern garrison broke and ran, abandoning their gun stations, the crews of the pinisi and the Flores doing so as well, fleeing down the piers to the rear of the ship pen. Harconan could only join the headlong retreat. There was nothing else that could sanely be done in the face of twelve hundred tons of onrushing metal.

He’d gotten clear of the superstructure, making it as far as the LSM’s midships deck when the suicidal frigate roared into the cavern.

The Parchim’s sharp stem plowed into the stern of the first schooner moored to the left-hand pier. The smaller wooden vessel disintegrated like an apple crate under an ax blow.

The Harconan Flores lurched and tilted outboard as the hard-driven frigate wedged between it and the far-side dock. Pier timbers buckled, four-by-fours tearing loose from their spikes and flipping into the air like tossed jackstraws. Abrading hull steel screamed in torment, sparks and burning molten paint spraying.

The wreckage of the first pinisi was driven into the second, both schooners wadding into a mass of splintered timber under the Indonesian warship’s bow, the dying shrieks of slow crewmen faint amid the crunch of frames and planking.

Metal howled and tore overhead: The Parchim’s lattice masts were too tall for the ceiling of the ship pen. The main truck and antenna arrays sheared off at the cavern lip. Power connections arcing, they twisted as they fell, crashing to wedge between the superstructures of the two ships. The broken stubs of the frigate’s masts raked on across the cavern roof, ripping the aged Japanese support girders loose from their anchor bolts. Rusted iron and lava rock rained from overhead.

Harconan had been knocked to the LSM’s deck by the initial collision. He sensed a hurtling mass plummeting from above, and he rolled aside an instant before a crumpled length of I beam and a ton of basalt crashed across the Flores amidships. One of her Dutch mates was not quick enough, the scarlet pulp spraying.

Looking up, Harconan saw the frigate’s battered upper works slide past, riding over the crushed remnants of the pinisi. She reached the stone shelf at the back of the cavern, the distorted bow bucking upward as it tried to lift over that as well. But her momentum was exhausted and her last mad ride was over. With a final dying groan, the warship slid back, her keel broken, inert.

The last echo faded and the cavern was suddenly supernaturally quiet.

Harconan knew this silence would last for only seconds, then the real assault would begin. He scrambled to his feet and bolted across the tilted deck for the starboard rail. The INDASAT and his base here were lost. All of Makara Limited was lost. Everything was lost except for the war.

The gangway had been thrown aside with the impact, but the tilting deck of the LSM now leaned over the right-hand pier. The taipan slid under the bottom cable of the rail. He hung from it for a moment, then dropped to the sprung planks, his mind leaping ahead. He must organize the delaying action and the retreat. As per the disaster contingency plan, he must get his people out and away to the Morning Star bases deeper in the jungle.

And he must take Amanda away with him. That was one prize they wouldn’t win back.

“Everyone! Follow me!” he yelled, rallying the remaining scattered handful of guards and ship’s crewmen on the pier.