“Got ’em to the wall, ma’am,” Lane replied over his shoulder. “We’ll maintain hot cruise all the way. Snowy, what’s our ETA to Guinea East?”
“We’ll be on station in about two hours, Captain,” the hover’s copilot replied from her station.
Amanda leaned back in the navigator’s seat and tried to relax. Two hours before the gap in her defenses could be filled. Two hours more before she dare let her weight down. And yet there still was no reaction from the Union. Maybe they’d missed it Maybe they weren’t ready. Please God, maybe today wasn’t the day for the worst-case postulate.
Snowy Banks tilted her head and lifted a hand to her ear phones, listening. “Ma’am, there’s a call coming in for you from TACNET. Commander Rendino on the command channel.”
“Thanks, Snowy. I’ve got it.” Amanda caught up her head set and accessed the com. “Amanda here, Chris.”
“We got trouble, boss ma’am.” Christine’s urgent words crackled over the circuit. “Big trouble.”
“What’s happening?”
“We have a mass sortie from the Union Boghammer base at Yelibuya Sound.”
“How many?”
“All of them! Seventeen boats! Both squadrons launched everything they have that’s operational.”
Amanda’s heart lurched in her chest.” How long ago?”
“Within the last fifteen to twenty minutes. Our Predator made a routine pass over Yelibuya base at 1630 hours and everything looked butt normal. When it made its return sweep — bam, every pier was empty. They must have been standing by to scramble the second our RPV passed out of range.”
“Do we have a track on them?”
“Yeah, the Valiant, out on Guinea East station, has acquired the Union formation on its surface-search radar. The Bogs are headed straight for them.”
“Launch the Carondelet and the Manassas immediately! Have them follow us! Order Valiant to go to general quarters and have her head straight out to sea with all possible speed. Get me drone coverage over that Bog formation, then have a couple of helos prep-loaded with damage control and medical aid gear.”
Amanda snapped out the string of orders like a burst of autocannon fire. then she twisted around in her seat to issue another command to the hover pilot. It was unnecessary. Steamer Lane had already smashed the drive throttles forward through the wire check stops to full war emergency power. Picking up her skirts, the Queen of the West hurled herself shrieking across the sea.
“Commander Rendino, you’d better have a look at this, ma’am.” One voice lifted over the low headset babble within the TACNET command trailer. Christine hurried down the line of workstations to the Electronic Intelligence console. “What’s the problem, Murphy?” she demanded, hunkering down beside the systems operator.
“Radio transmitters. A whole lot of them,” the Elint specialist replied. “We knew the Union had a coastwatcher network, but according to the signal intercepts I’m getting, it’s a lot more extensive than we ever imagined. Take a look.”
On the Elint graphics display, an area box blinked into existence just off the Union coast, a radio transmission detected and triangulated on by TACNET’s direction finder arrays. Flanked by a row of code letters and numerals, the target hack joined a row of three similar boxes.
“See. There goes another one. Whenever the Queen gets within visual range, bleep, another transmitter fires up with a position report. The set emission signatures all match the same make of Indonesian civil sideband transceiver that’s standard issue for the Union coastwatcher net.”
The S.O.’s finger traced the course of the hover squadron flagship down the coast. “They’re tracking her damn near as well as we can, ma’am.”
“Why in the hell haven’t we monitored any of these outposts before?” Christine growled.
“They’ve been sleeper stations, ma’am. Not a single one’s transmitted until today. The Union must have been holding this net layer in reserve for special operations.”
“Shit! Signal intelligence,” Christine lifted her voice, “what are you bringing in from the Union coastwatcher net?”
“Short transmission verbal numerics,” the operator at the next console in line replied. “A station designation and a four or five-numeral data block. Probably a target ID and a heading and speed. They’re using some kind of simple tear-sheet cipher. No way to crack it.”
“Right. We’re not going to get anything worth anything from that. ECM controllers, bring up your countermeasures arrays! All nodes! Set frequency gates to cover the civil sideband channels. Initiate cascade jamming! Broad spectrum! Maximum output!”
The Elint operator looked up, startled. “Ma’am, if you light up all those big burners like that, we’re going to kill all civil sideband traffic from here to Marrakech!”
Christine shot a single icy glance down at the S.O. “Mr. Murphy, do I look like a person who gives a howl in hell about the radio reception in Marrakech? Shut ’em down!”
From the transmitters aboard Floater 1, and the two aerostat carriers and from the TACNET land stations at Conakry and Abadjan, a focused electronic scream radiated out across the ether, burying a massive slice of the radio spectrum under a deafening blanket of white noise.
In the control center, several TACNET operators snatched off their headsets to escape the piercing jammer warble, an action no doubt being repeated at Union coastwatcher posts all up and down the Gold Coast. Christine Rendino gave a curt, satisfied nod. “And that goes for you, my pretty,” she snarled under her breath, “and your little dog, too!”
“Commander Rendino,” another S.0. called out urgently from the Predator control station. “We have a situational change with the Union Boghammer force.”
The intel hastened down to the new crisis point. “What’s happening?”
The drone pilot called up a wall screen, displaying the video output from the RPV he was holding over the Union gunboat group. On the monitor, a multitude of white wakes could be seen combing across the azure blue of the sea. As they looked on, the massive Union squadron divided, roughly half of the gunboats peeling off to assume a new heading.
“Eight Bogs maintaining an intercept vector to the Valiant, ma’am. Nine are now on a heading of three one zero true.”
“Access tactical! What’s out there on that bearing?”
“Nothing, ma’am. Wait a second… nothing except the HMS Skye, that British minesweep!”
“Oh my God! Notify Captain Garrett immediately. Then get on the horn to the Brits and tell them they’re going to have company for tea!”
Lieutenant Mark Traynor, the commanding officer of Her Majesty’s Sandown-class minehunter Skye, backhanded the scalding sweat from his eyes and lifted the binoculars once more. They were coming in line abreast, nine patches of white wake on the horizon, each with the dark dot of a Boghammer hull centered in it.
“Radar has a plot, Captain,” the quartermaster called out from inside the Skye’s wheelhouse. “Range to Union craft, three thousand meters and closing. Speed thirty-five knots.”
“Very well. Maintain the plot.” The young Englishman strove to keep his voice mature and steady, as he had always imagined it should be at times such as this. Likewise, he strove to suppress the tremor in his hand as he lifted the bridge-wing phone from its weatherproof case.