LAUNCH.
The word flashed up, and he relayed the order again.
"Fire!"
The aft tubes spat their loads into the water, and he wrenched them around on a new heading that appeared on the panel. All his guns were firing now, the big twin 50s thrashing away like jackhammers over the ripping snarl of the 30-caliber turrets. The 37 mm antitank gun barked, and the Bofors mount thundered. The uproar was so great, he wondered how anyone heard his orders, even with the little wire microphone sitting so close to his lips.
A distant boom, like the cracking of a mountain.
Lohrey's voice, strained but not shouting. "We just lost a transport. It must have been carrying ammunition or something."
Kennedy eased back on their speed and asked Lohrey if she knew where Ross's boat was. She propped herself against the bulkhead, reached across her body, and used her good hand to pull the injured arm over to where it could rest on a raised knee.
"Broken elbow," she explained before he could ask. "I've medicated myself."
The flexipad was sheathed in a clear plastic pouch on the bad arm. She used a pencil of some sort to input the query and nodded to his panel. Kennedy looked back and realized that now he had a top-down view of the whole area. Three ships were ablaze and going down, with hundreds of tiny figures streaming over their sides. A small box of text floated next to each of them, marking them as the two destroyers and a troopship. A couple of large floating pools of wreckage and smoke and burning oil marked the points where the other ships had been completely destroyed. They were tagged as FLOATING DATUM POINT 1 amp; 2.
PT 59 was surrounded by a flashing blue box as it described a long elliptical course around the nearest FLOATING DATUM POINT. Kennedy reached over to tear down the blackout curtains, so he could see where he was going at last.
"You may find it easier to leave them up," said Lohrey. "Havoc is sending a burst downline now, nav data to grab us up some prisoners."
As the words left her mouth, the skipper's slate reformatted into another top-down perspective, with an inset window magnifying a small group of survivors swimming away from one of the sinking troopships. A red line plotted the suggested course to pick them up. It avoided the danger of sailing too close to the crippled vessels, which might yet explode, but seemed to run right through masses of struggling swimmers.
"Can that be right?" he asked.
Lohrey considered the image for a second, before nodding. "You'll think me unladylike, Lieutenant, but you should just get on with it. We want to clear this area as quickly as possible. Havoc says there are hostile aircraft within the threat bubble. They'll see the fires."
Jack Kennedy struggled to keep the distaste off his face. She was suggesting he open the throttles and ride over the top of dozens, if not hundreds, of survivors. Most of whom might not even be Japs, if that Nguyen lady was right.
"Can you patch me through to Barney Ross on this thing? It's secure, right?" he asked, tapping the headset.
She played with the flexipad and nodded.
"Barney, you there? It's Jack."
"I can hear you, buddy. That was great driving before. And good shooting, too."
His friend's voice was so clear, he might as well have been standing right next to him in a quiet bar.
"Barney, I've got to pick up the prisoners now. You want to get going, and we'll catch up. There's bogeys about."
A short, hard laugh told him that PT 59 wouldn't be going anywhere until her sister ship was ready to cut out, as well.
Kennedy signed off. This time he did pull down the blackout curtains, and he looked out onto the burning oil slicks with abhorrence distorting his features. The screams of dying and injured men reached him faintly over the industrial noise of buckling metal and exploding munitions. He could see the flashing navigation schematics at the lower periphery of his vision, but he kept his eyes fixed on the waters in front of his boat.
"What the hell's he doing?"
"He's threading his way through the survivors," said Willet, watching the minor drama on the Intelligence Division's monitor. "Mr. Grey, bring all of the Nemesis arrays online, and keep Lieutenant Lohrey updated on the threat boards via the live link."
"Aye, ma'am," replied her exec.
Willet had been crouching over the display for the last twenty minutes, and now she stood up. She stretched her back muscles but never once took her eyes off the feed from the Big Eye drone.
She'd wondered whether Kennedy might do this, endanger himself and his crew rather than run down a few men he'd been trying to kill just minutes earlier. It said something about the 'temps, or maybe just about him, that the war hadn't yet coarsened their spirits completely.
She envied him, in a way. She'd lost almost any feeling she might have had for her enemies when her sister was beheaded on camera by Moro Front guerrillas in the Philippines, ten of her years ago. Corina had been a field-worker with the Save the Children Fund when she was kidnapped from a village she was assessing for a new water treatment program and a microcredit loan scheme. The guerrillas had murdered her and two doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres, doing so "live" on the Web.
When Filipino and U.S. Special Forces arrived at the village, they discovered another atrocity that hadn't been broadcast. Everyone in the hamlet who'd been tended to by the "infidels" had been executed, including children who had been treated for cataracts. They'd had their eyes put out with burning sticks. It was the only time in her life that Willet regretted joining the submarine service. For weeks, she'd been tortured by a violent desire to sink her fingers into the throat of the man who'd killed her baby sister. "Captain?"
The Havoc's commander drove away the haunted memories. It'd been a long time since she'd thought of her sister in anything but the most positive terms. Years of therapy had taught her how, but now the defenses she'd erected seemed to be creaking-and threatening to collapse.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Grey. Go on," she said.
Her exec didn't embarrass her by asking if she was all right. He simply relayed the update. "Lieutenant Lohrey reports that they're picking up the prisoners now, Captain. There are two aircraft, probably Japanese flying boats, inbound for their position. ETA nineteen minutes."
Willet nodded, an old melancholy pain settling around her heart. "Tell them to get a move on."
It was just about the worst thing Moose had seen since that night on the Astoria, when the other ship had suddenly "appeared" right inside his own.
Lieutenant Kennedy was stomping up and down the decks, a machine gun in his hand, cursing like Moose had never known him to before. He'd had to shoot a Jap who tried to fire a flare pistol into his face when they pulled alongside him, although to Moose's way of thinking, he should have known that was going to happen. The Japs, they'd sooner swim into the mouth of a shark than surrender. You could tell which ones they were, too. Anybody trying not to be rescued was a fair bet to be working for their ratfuck little Emperor.
These other guys though, Chinese and Koreans according to the lady officer, they were a mystery to everyone. They couldn't swim over to the boat fast enough, and now there was maybe a hundred or more of them jammed up against the hull, all thrashing and yelling and carrying on like Charlie Chan gone loco.