"Roger, inform the TACCO that number-two VLS is going down. I'm pulling the safety breakers."
"Shell hits astern. Frame forty-one. I'm showing skin penetration and a high-temperature warning light."
"Confirm that. Team Alpha Delta responding. Fire in the hangar bay!"
Arkady gave Amanda's shoulder a parting squeeze and then he was gone, racing aft.
The Duke was not passively accepting the attack. She was repaying in kind. Danny Lyndiman, the same young gunner's mate who had been on-line the day of the first Argentine air strike, was at his new duty assignment at number-one gun-control station. Both of the Oto Melara Super Rapids were slaved to his hand controller, with both turrets firing to the same aiming point. Laying the crosshairs of his targeting screen on the Plimsoll line of the hydrofoil, he squeezed the trigger.
The Oto Melaras raged, each slamming out its stream of 76mm projectiles. They weren't tracer rounds, but their superheated steel glowed green in the thermographic sights, marking their flight. As the converging shell streams touched the Argentine's hull, skin shredded and hellfire spilled out. With the precision of a metalsmith wielding a cutting torch, Lyndiman began to draw the stream of shell-bursts across the length of the corvette's hull.
Simultaneously, dazzling white points of light began to dance across the hydrofoil's upperworks. The Duke's second duty gunner had placed the starboard Phalanx mount under manual control and had brought it into the engagement, the vicious little tungsten penetrators stitching through the superstructure of the smaller craft like a needle through tissue paper.
The Argentine vessel couldn't stand it. The two vessels thundered along side by side, exchanging broadsides like two Napoleonic ships of the line. They were trading a near-equal amount of fire, but the American vessel had almost eight times the displacement to absorb it with. The destroyer was being hurt, but the corvette was being torn apart. Her captain, in a desperate bid for survival, accelerated and veered off, trying to open the range.
"He's bugging out!" Dix yelled joyfully. "He's running for it! Gunners, stay on him! Stay… Jesus, sweet Jesus!" The TACCO's voice sank to an awed whisper.
The voices of every other person within sight of an exterior monitor were stilled as well.
One of the Duke's Oto Melara rounds had found and damaged the main spar of the corvette's forward hydrofoil assembly. Under the load of the turn, it had sheered off.
Dropping ten feet off the plane, the corvette's narrow forehull had dug into the face of an oncoming wave. At sixty knots, the water might as well have been concrete.
The hydrofoil's immense momentum drove its bow under the surface while its stern was lifted into the air. Its keel whipped like a willow wand, tearing loose hull framings and smashing them out through the Fiberglas skin like bone splinters through the flesh of a compound fracture.
Aghast, the men and women of the Cunningham watched as the stern of the corvette angled higher, fifty, sixty, seventy degrees, hesitating for a long moment at the high point of its arc. Amanda had an instant's hellish vision of what must be happening inside that hull. Ammunition raining down out of magazine racks, tons of kerosene spilling out of bunkerage tanks, white-hot turbines tearing loose from their bedplates and crashing forward through thin bulkheads…
The length of the Argentine's hull split open like the petals of a blossoming flower, disgorging a single, titanic golden-orange fireball. The Duke's deck plates rang under the impact of the shock wave as she swept past the explosion. Then the monitors went empty and dark and she was in the clear, barring a single fragment of smoking metal that came spinning down out of the mists to rattle off the upperworks. From somewhere over near number-one gunnery station, a quietly exultant voice exclaimed, "Yeah! Free game!"
Amanda shook off the effects of the spectacle and returned her attention to the main situational display. Their evasive turn had brought them around more than ninety degrees from their previous course of due north, to a heading of west-southwest. The following firefight with the hydrofoil had carried them clear across the bow of the Argentine transport column from its port side to the starboard.
It had also cost them the initiative of the attack. Dead or not, that gutsy hydrofoil skipper might still kill them.
"Helm, left standard rudder! Bring us back around to zero one zero degrees."
What was worse, the Duke's invisibility had been compromised. The battle damage to her sensitive stealth skin would multiply her radar cross-section several times over.
"Mr. McKelsie, give me a maximum-density RBOC screen and a full decoy pattern."
"Captain, we've only got one decoy set left in the launchers, and the RBOC magazines are getting low."
"Then give me all of what's left. Now, McKelsie! Kill all radars! Cease radiating!"
The Cunningham completed the foaming circle she had begun, coming about more than a full 360 degrees. She was attempting what in an aerial dogfight would have been called a turn and burn, the creation of a knot of radar and thermal clutter that might serve as a false target to draw enemy fire.
"Steering zero one zero, Captain."
"Very well. Steady as she goes. Hold us parallel to the convoy line."
With their sensors disabled and their communication links cut by the Duke's jamming, the two surviving Argentine transports were blindly holding to their original course and speed.
"What's the status of those last two operational close escorts?" she asked Beltrain.
"The undamaged Meko looks like he's going to assist his shot-up partner, and the A-69 is hanging back behind the convoy. He's having trouble getting a burn-through, but he's trying to target on something…"
The exterior monitor covering the stern arc flamed brightly. Half a mile back along the Cunningham's wake, in the heart of the chaff node, a futile Exocet salvo boiled the sea and tore up the sky.
"… and I guess he just did," Beltrain finished.
"Right. Secure EMCON! Radars back up!"
The screens reactivated. Amanda could see the A-69-class frigate turning away, its bolt spent and its missile cells empty. The three ships of the distant covering force still appeared to be milling around in confusion some fifteen miles ahead of the convoy. A glance at the infrared scanners indicated the continuing, intermittent flicker of weapons fire and at least one steady-state glow out along that bearing.
"Dix, what's going on out there?"
"I'm not sure, ma'am. The SCMs should be long gone by now. Maybe we pinked somebody."
Beltrain's assessment was correct. Fate had guided the distant covering force almost directly into the path of the Cunningham's diversionary cruise-missile strike. The cool cybernetic intellects that dwelt within the guidance packages of the SCMs had recognized the Argentine destroyers as worthy targets, and they had swarmed the warships like a school of hungry barracuda.
The Argentines had fought back and had fought back well. Those rounds not decoyed off target were destroyed by a barrage of gun and missile fire. The captain of the fleet flagship Nueve de Julio did not make his fatal error until literally the final minute of the strike.
Seeking to evade the last of the incoming weapons, he had ordered a turn away from the cruise missile stream. But, in doing so, he had unmasked the broad rear facing of his ship's helicopter hangar to the SCM's search radar. The missile was drawn in by this high-RCS target like a moth to a flame. The high-sided structure also blocked a few key degrees of coverage for the Oto Melara point defense mounts, and the twelfth SCM rode in through this narrow free-fire zone and struck the hangar doors with dead-center precision.