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."