The Queen of the West crept upchannel, the ripples of her wake breaking along the root-lined banks being the only sound of her passage. Her stern ramp and side hatches were open and the leveled barrels of her new weapons mounts probed at the night like questing insect antennae.
The gunners leaned in their harnesses and longed for a chance to lift their night-vision visors and wipe the stinging sweat from their eyes, for an opportunity to flex their aching forearms, for a second to ask for a drink of water.
They were not official gunners’ mates or fire-control operators. According to their ratings badges, they were mechanics and technicians, cooks and clerks. However, when Captain Garrett had put out the call for auxiliary gun crews, they had volunteered, despite the certainty of long hours of extra duty and the probability of increased risk.
They hadn’t asked to come to this war, but they were part of it now. And, to quote General George S. Patton, they didn’t intend to go home saying that all they had done was to “shovel shit in Louisiana.”
“Captain, if we go in much farther, we’re going to lose our turning radius in this channel.”
Lane had a good point. More than one overhanging branch had brushed along the Queen’s flank during the last couple of minutes of the approach. Amanda keyed the laser rangefinder and bounced a microsecond-long burst of light off the head of the inlet. Two hundred yards. That would be about right. Just out of range of any low-grade night-bright optics the hostiles might have.
“All right, Steamer. All stop. Hold us here.”
Accessing the Mast Mounted Sighting System, Amanda panned the low-light television across the head of the inlet. Trees, a tangle of undergrowth along the shore, and, a distance inland, a small fire. Nothing that overtly looked like a moored Boghammer. However, one patch of shaggy vegetation did protrude into the channel in a somewhat odd manner.
Amanda dialed over to the thermographic imager using the trackball on her joystick and took a second look, this time sweeping for passive heat radiation.
There it was. The tangled branches and camouflage netting went transparent under the infrared scan. The angular metal and Fiberglas outline of the Boghammer stood out palely against the ambient thermal background of the salt swamp. The boat had been moored bow-on to the mangrove bank with enough slack to allow it to lift and settle with the tides.
“Royalty, Royalty, this is Mudskipper.” Stone Quillain’s rasping whisper invaded the interphone circuit. “We are on site. Ready to move in. What is your position?”
“Mudskipper, we are in midchannel two hundred yards south of the hide. We have the moorage and camp in sight.” Hastily, Amanda called up another GPU fix from Quillain’s SINCGARS unit. “We have a fix on you.”
“Fine,” Quillain shot back with a touch of impatience. “Can you see the gunboat and can you tell if it has a crew on board?”
“Stand by, Mudskipper.” Frustrated, Amanda cranked the camera crosshairs back and forth across the camouflaged Boghammer. She could make out the gunboat easily enough, but the little craft was moored almost directly in line with the camp inland. The mosquito smudge burning there threw off just enough thermal sidelobe to blur the heat image. She couldn’t tell if there were any human bodies radiating aboard the small craft or not.
“Royalty. Does the goddamn gunboat have a goddamn crew on it, the world wonders?”
Amanda mashed down on her own transmitter key. “I say again, Mudskipper, stand by! We are working the problem!”
She leaned forward between the pilot’s chairs. “Steamer, Snowy, can you make out anything with your night-vision goggles? Do we have a crew on that Boghammer?”
“Ma’am, I gotta take your word for it that we’ve even got Bog out there,” Lane replied, flipping his visor up. “Check with Danno and the Fryguy on the fire-control consoles. The targeting scopes have better IR definition than the Mast Mounted Sight.”
“Right.”
Danno O’Roark and Dwaine Fry had a small edge over the auxiliary gunner at the door mounts. The weaponry of the seafighter was their primary tasking, and they’d had the official training and the long hours of drill time as the Queen had worked up and made herself ready for combat. However, like the door gunners, neither of them had ever fired a shot in anger.
The sweat soaking their dungarees didn’t all stern from the heat.
“Fire control, check your scopes. Do we have a crew on the Boghammer?”
Wrists flicked as the two young sailors panned the death dots of their targeting screens across the gunboat.
“What do you think, Fryguy?”
“I dunno, Danno. There might be something up there near the bow. How do you call it, man?”
Senior by one ratings grade and four months’ in-service, Danno tried to swallow on a suddenly dry throat. The TACBOSS was waiting for him to give her the word. The Lady herself. He suspected that there might be movement aboard the Bogharnmer as well. But he couldn’t bring himself to say so, not unless he could be absolutely sure.
“We can’t verify a crew on the gunboat, ma’am. We can’t tell.”
“Acknowledged, fire control,” Captain Garrett replied matter-of-factly. “Stand by.”
She’d left the fire-control stations in her communications loop, so the gunners overheard the next exchange with the landing force. “Mudskipper, this is Royalty. We cannot confirm or preclude the presence of a crew on the gunboat.”
“Hell. Okay, Royalty. We’d better do this thing. If there is a gun crew on the Bog and if they open up on us, you’re going to have to take ’em out.”
“Will do, Mudskipper.” Click. “Okay, fire control, you have the word. If we get fire from the Boghammer, you are to engage and suppress with thirty-millimeter cannon. I say again, thirty-millimeter cannon. Check your tactical displays and watch your angles. The Marines will be close to your line of fire.”
“Fire control, acknowledged.”
Now swallowing was an impossibility. Danno called up the port-side weapons pedestal on his panels and linked it with his controller. “I’ve got the mission,” he said hoarsely.
“Team White. Team Blue. We are going for a capture. Hold position and fire only on my command.”
A flurry of acknowledgment clicks sounded in Quillain’s earpiece and he settled the butt of the Mossberg 590 more solidly against his shoulder.
“Team Red. Take out the Bren gun.”
Two decisive clicks replied. Quillain visualized the movements: the hand grenade pins snicking free, the grenadier’s arms sweeping back and then forward in the driving, deliberate pitch, the deadly little eggs arcing upward and then down, their safety levers flicking away with a sharp metallic ping.
…three… four… five.
A double flash of white light and the flat doubled slam of the grenade blasts.
Around the smudge fire, the Union guerrillas sat frozen for an instant, the surprise total.
“Nobody move!” Quillain bellowed. “This is the United States Marines! Raise your hands and move slowly away from your weapons! We’ve got you covered!”
No one moved. It was as if every figure inside the circle of firelight had been smitten by some paralyzing ray. Quillain was about to yell once more when, off on that critically uncovered right flank, a brace of heavy machine guns opened up on the Marine positions.
A heavy 14.5mm slug struck the tree Quillain had been leaning against, the shock throwing his sights off the man he had targeted. The Union gunner was firing blindly in the direction of Quillain’s shouted challenge. The firelash of his tracer streams cut over the heads of the Marines, raining shattered branches and wood splinters down upon them. All hands instinctively dove forward, flattening against the rank island loam.