Across in the Union camp, guerrillas scattered, snatching up arms. The smudge fire was extinguished with a sweep of earth and someone emptied an FALN in the direction of the Marine line. The deliberate slam of the heavy-caliber rifle was joined an instant later by the fast, harsh brrrriiiip of a Sterling machine pistol.
“Marines! Return fire!”
The piercing crack of 5.56 NATO answered the bigger bore Union weapons. Quillain took a second to send a 12-gauge slug load booming on its way toward a muzzle flash before slapping his hand onto the Leprechaun’s transmitter key. “Royalty, Royalty! We got a firefight here! Get that gun boat off us!”
“…We got a firefight here! Get that gunboat off us!” Amanda and the crew of the Queen didn’t need the shouted radio call to tell them what had happened. They could see the flame of the Boghammer’s bow mount and could hear the growing crackle of gunfire through the open side windows of the cock pit.
Chief Tehoa, manning the cockpit guns, also didn’t need orders to know the proper reaction. Powering the dual Brownings around to bear on the Boghammer, he pressed the trigger bar, walking a twinned stream of tracers in on the Union gun boat.
Amanda flinched away from the cascade of hot shell casings raining down into the cockpit and yelled into her command headset. “Fire control! Guns free! Engage the Boghammer! Commence! Commence! Commence!”
At the number-one fire-control station beneath the cockpit, Danno O’Roark heard the call. He’d been holding the Boghammer dead on in the crosshairs of his targeting scope, and now, convulsively, he squeezed the joystick trigger.
And nothing happened.
Frantically, his eyes raked across the symbology on his ordnance status boards:
***PORT PEDESTAL***
1**30MM /\ GUNSAFED**
2**30MM \/ GUNSAFED**
Shit! He hadn’t cleared the safeties!
“Fire control! Engage that Boghammer! Expedite!”
Panicking, Danno clawed at the settings of the ordnance menu. Calling up new ones, he crushed down on the trigger once more.
Up in the Queen’s cockpit, a second demand for covering fire was coming in over the loop. “Royalty! Royalty! We still got that damn gun on us! When’re you… Jesus Keeerist!”
A rippling dinosaur scream tore the air and something blazed past the side windows of the cockpit. An instant later, the entire world lit up blue and orange as the forest exploded.
At his fire-control station, Danno O’Roark realized that something had gone incredibly, catastrophically wrong. His haste inspired error glared back at him from the ordnance menu.
***PORT PEDESTAL***
1**2.75 RKT /\ SEQUENTIAL FIRE
2**2.75 RKT \/ SEQUENTIAL FIRE
His brain screamed at him to get off the trigger, but his hand remained frozen on the joystick as the rocket pods emptied out their warloads.
Two pods. Seven Hydra rockets per pod firing at one-half second intervals. Ten pounds of high explosives per rocket; 140 pounds of high explosives delivered at point-blank range in three and a half seconds. The effect could only be called spectacular.
The rockets barely had time to arm before impacting. The camouflage around the Boghammer evaporated, leaving it outlined darkly in the glare for a split second, like a photographic negative of itself. Then the gunboat itself dissolved into a billion splintered fragments of Fiberglas.
Man-thick tree trunks shattered and century-old man groves toppled as the rocket stream chewed its way back into the forest. Flaming limbs rained down on the Queen’s upper works and Amanda, Lane, and Snowy all ducked as shrapnel pinged off the windscreen. Bellowing savage implications, Chief Tehoa tumbled down into the cockpit as well. Whether it was a deliberate dive for cover or he’d been knocked out of the gunner’s saddle by concussion, even he couldn’t say.
And then it was over and the only sound was a softly moaned “Oh fuck… oh fuck… oh fuck…” over the interphone.
“Check fire! Check fire! All mounts! Check fire!” Amanda snarled into the interphone.
“What in thee hell happened?” Lane demanded angrily, straightening in the command seat.
“I’m not sure, sir, but somebody’s gonna pay for it,” Tehoa growled, pulling himself up from the cockpit deck.
“Forget that for now,” Amanda snapped back. “We might have walked some of those rockets into the Marines. Damn! Damn! Damn!”
An ominous silence reigned out in the darkness. The firefight hadn’t resumed following the impact of the barrage, and all that could be seen beyond the windscreen was a small patch of flaming gasoline guttering on the surface of the channel.
“Mudskipper, Mudskipper, this is Royalty! Do you copy?” Amanda spoke urgently into her headset mike. “Mudskipper, report your status!”
Following a protracted and agonizing pause, a baleful voice replied from out of the night. “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?”
“Quillain, are you all right? Do you have any casualties?”
“Negative, negative. No casualties, but we’re going to be spittin’ splinters for a month! Jesus God, woman! I just asked for you to take out the gunboat! Not the whole damn island!”
Given the circumstances, Amanda elected to let Quillain’s cavalier mode of address to a senior officer pass. “Sorry, Mudskipper,” she replied meekly. “We, ah, had a little weapons malfunction here. We have it locked down now.”
“I am pleased to hear it, Royalty. And we got Union guys coming out of the bush with their hands up. Those that can still walk, anyway.”
Amanda went relief limp in her seat. “Look at it this way, Mudskipper. At least we convinced them to surrender.”
The whisper mike at the other end of the circuit caught a faint but decisive snort. “Hell, two yards closer and you’d have convinced me to surrender too!”
Standing clear of the tidal channel once more, the Queen of the West blazed with real illumination. With her running and interior lights turned full up, she conducted a simultaneous loading and unloading operation. Her miniraider shuttled Marines, captured documentation, and Union prisoners out from the boat hide to the loitering hovercraft. There the documentation and prisoners were, in turn, winch-lifted to a hovering Marine CH-60 cargo helicopter for transport to Conakry.
The deck-to-helo transfer of unwilling individuals in total darkness was an exacting and tricky business. Even so, there was no other option. The Queen had other calls to make this night, and she couldn’t be burdened with unnecessary passengers.
Forward, under the cockpit, Danno O’Roark sat leaning forward into his console, his face held in his hands. “I’m dead,” he murmured. “I am so goddamn dead, my corpse stinks.”
At his side, his co-gunner and friend, the Fryguy, could only nod thoughtfully. “Yeah. That about sums it up.”
Suddenly, the Lady herself hunkered down between the two fire-control stations. “All right, gentlemen,” she said crisply. “Let’s hear what happened.”
Gritting his teeth, Danno described what had led up to the erroneous rocket firing, his gun-safety error, his fumbled miscall of the weapons menu, his buck fever and personal panic. He left nothing out and made no attempt to spare himself. He’d bitched his duty and had likely ruined any future he had in the Navy, but by God, he wasn’t going to further humiliate himself by trying to make lame excuses.