"So you agree with Major Brennan that they're a lure of some sort?"
"I think so-very much so, in fact-but I don't have enough data to say for certain, General. If I had to take a punt, I'd say they've been sent down as sacrificial goats. Not to lure the Havoc into a fight, exactly. More to soak up whatever she fires at them."
"Let's hope we can get you some data, then," MacArthur grunted as the torpedo boats began to churn up a lot of water. It showed on the display panel as an explosion of lime-green fairy floss on a dark emerald sea surface. Everyone in the room with a view of the monitor could clearly see individual figures moving to their stations on the deck.
"They're accelerating for the run in."
"Which one's Kennedy?" somebody behind her asked.
"The lead vessel," said Nguyen.
"Ha, that figures."
She couldn't tell whether the speaker meant well or not. She ignored him to concentrate on the feed from the drone. In contrast to the Japanese ships, the Americans weren't giving anything away. They maintained radio silence, and no telltale jewels of light sparkled from within their blacked-out cabins. They were shut up nice and tight.
Great fans of seawater began to spray back from their bows as they sliced through the swell. None of the small jade figures on deck moved now. They would be coiled and waiting. Nguyen wondered how loud their engines would be, and whether any lookouts on the Japanese ships had managed to obtain night-vision equipment of their own. Some had certainly fallen into enemy hands.
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, CORAL SEA
Ensign Shinoda, on the bridge of the Wakatake-class destroyer Asagao, did not have any night-vision goggles. Nobody on any of these ships did. In fact, the junior officers joked that the only new piece of equipment they'd taken south was a giant bull's-eye painted on the hull.
But Shinoda, who had graduated near the bottom of his class, did not question the wisdom of their orders. He had no doubt there was some good reason why they were nursing three ships full of Chinese and Korean prisoners through some of the most dangerous waters in the world. He was equally certain the captain would have been told why this most difficult task was assigned to two of the oldest, least capable ships in His Majesty's fleet.
So the young man pressed the Tsushima vintage binoculars to his eyes and scanned the obsidian blackness that lay beyond the windows, with the zealous devotion of a true believer. Even without the glasses that saw in the dark, or the ghost planes that floated just over the mast and took pictures that could see right through a man's uniform, even without the death beams and super-rockets of the gaijin, he still would bring honor to his ancestors. He would-
"Shimatta!"
The clouds parted for a second and let through a shaft of moonlight as bright and clear as a searchlight. And roaring toward him through the small oblong of illuminated ocean were two enemy vessels.
PT boats!
Shinoda screamed out a warning to the officer of the watch, turned his head away for just a second, and lost sight of them completely as the broken clouds knitted back together again. Chaos erupted on the bridge as Klaxons sounded to bring the crew to general quarters. Someone was yelling at him to explain, someone else was stabbing a finger at the skies, insisting that super-rockets were flying toward them. Curses and shouts reached him from the open decks, where men hurried to the ship's sad little battery of 4.7-inch guns.
The floor began to tilt as they came around to bear down on the heading where he'd last seen the boats.
"We've been spotted," Kennedy said with such detachment that he surprised himself.
"Pity," Lohrey said, staring into the pearly glow of her data slate. A dense mosaic of data and images was quickly filling all the available space. "Helm, bring us around on two-two-five," she said. He heard her voice through the strange cushioned pads that covered his ears, as though she were talking on the phone.
"We'll see if they got a lock on us, or just a sneaky peek," she added.
Kennedy spun the wheel, and on the slate in front of him caught a glimpse of the other boat biting into the swell on a new heading, just as the rush of the first shells screamed overhead. He felt and heard them explode behind them. His men held their fire, not wanting to give away their new position.
"He's changing course, but blind," said Lohrey. "He got lucky, that's all, and it won't last. Follow the strobe in, Skipper, and let 'em have it."
Star shells burst in the air behind them with a muffled whump, and suddenly the sea was alight with a fierce white blaze of light. The pictures from the battle-cams disappeared momentarily, until Lohrey adjusted the filters. Kennedy bored in toward the target, heedless of the new danger. It was a straight shoot-out, and whoever got off the first good hit would win.
The engines howled at the outer limits of their power, driving the boat across the light choppy waves in a series of long, loping jumps from one wave crest to the next. The sound of the hull as it smacked down was massive and hollow, a series of booms that threatened to shake them apart before the Japs could land a blow.
On screen he saw the first two fish leap from the tubes on the other boat and go racing away, just a second before the word launch flashed up in front of him.
"Fire!" he called out, hoping that the funny little headset he wore was turned on and working.
His own torpedoes launched. The long finger of a searchlight swept over them as all his machine guns opened up to put it out. He swung the boat around in a viciously tight arc as shells exploded in the seas around them, raising plumes of salt water that fell on his decks like heavy monsoon rain. Lohrey was braced in a corner of the wheelhouse, her head tilted at a strange angle, as though she were daydreaming. She could have been staring off into space, but with her eyes hidden behind the goggles, he couldn't tell.
"Hit!" she called out a split second before he felt the double crump of two torpedoes detonating about a thousand yards away. A few seconds later, the same sound, even closer, as two more struck home. The panel display split, showing two images of crippled ships. While he watched, secondary explosions tore along the aft section of one of them like a string of giant firecrackers. Then one volcanic eruption of fire and light blew the entire ship apart, whiting out one half of the split window. The supersonic blast wave reached them within a heartbeat.
It was like hitting a wall. Everyone was thrown off their feet. The boat slewed around, uncontrolled for a moment while Kennedy wrestled with the wheel.
"New targets, Lieutenant," Lohrey called out in a strangled voice. She was nursing an arm that dangled lifelessly.
"Got them," he called back as the navigation screen reappeared on the panel in front of him. He spun the wheel until he'd lined up the flashing blue arrowhead, which designated the bow of the 101, with the red line, along which the battlespace arrays of the HMAS Havoc wanted him to launch his next attack. Or something like that. The details were beyond him now. All he knew was that he had to follow the red line at top speed and trust in some glorified box of nuts and bolts about two hundred nautical miles away, which apparently knew more about these things than he did.
He desperately wanted to snatch aside the blackout curtains and have a good long look at things with his own two eyes, rather than relying on the battle-cams. As long as he didn't think about what he was doing, it was simple enough to follow the schematics on the screen, but if he gave even a moment's consideration to the situation, it all got very scary-driving a boat at top speed through a burning formation of enemy ships, with torpedoes and cannon fire filling both the air and the water.