“Radio operator, any reply yet from Atlantic Command?”
“No response yet, sor,” the Yorkshire-tinted response came back.
Traynor dropped the phone back into its cradle. Damn the admiralty and damn the tenuous two-thousand-mile long line of communications that linked him to their will. He needed instructions now.
He recalled the urgency in the communication he’d received a quarter of an hour before from the American TACBOSS:
HMS Skye. Be advised Union gunboat group en route to your location. Believe attack on your vessel imminent! Advise you divert course immediately. Advise you proceed to seaward and close with USS Valiant for mutual protection! Expedite, repeat, expedite!”
But then Traynor also had to recall the conversation he’d had with his own squadron commander. Remember, lad, beyond all this United Nations humph, you’re still a Royal Naval officer and you’re still working for us. Especially, watch yourself with this bit of fluff the Yanks have running their piece of the show down there. She’s a bit of a wowser who likes to go looking for trouble. Just do your job and obey your orders and you’ll be fine.
Since arriving on station, however, it had appeared to Traynor that the aforementioned “bit of fluff” had more than amply demonstrated that she knew what she was talking about. Still, he had hesitated, banging off an advisory and a request for instructions to admiralty HQ before acting.
It had been the equivalency of yelling into a deep and echoing void. It was after five in London, and no doubt his communication was sitting on someone’s empty desk. It was too late now anyway.
At least he’d been able to go to Action Stations on his own recognizance. For what that was worth, at any rate. Traynor leaned forward and yelled down over the bridge rail. “Gun crew, load and stand by.”
Forward, on the forecastle, the gun team cranked their first round into the breech of the Skye’s single 30mm autocannon. On the bridge wings, the duty machine gunners also fed belts of 7.62mm NATO into their GPMGs. The teenaged rating who shared the port-side bridge wing with Traynor fumbled for long, nervous seconds before he managed to close the breech of his weapon.
“Steady,” Traynor murmured.
“Yes, sir, Captain. Do you think there’ll be a fight, sir?”
“No, seaman, I think they’re just running a bit off a bluff on us,” Traynor replied with far more confidence than he felt. “I don’t think the local lads are quite ready to tackle the Royal Navy yet.”
Twelve miles to the southeast, the Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force aerostat carrier USS Valiant fled for her life. With a jade wake boiling behind her and the silver torpedo of her antenna balloon glinting high overhead, the squat, low-countered little vessel waddled desperately out to sea, running in a race she could never hope to win.
“You have the helm, Sergeant. If we can help by maneuvering, you just pass the word to the bridge.”
“Thanks, Captain,” Gunnery Sergeant Enrico DeVega replied into his headset. “Will do. Just keep heading out to sea for now.”
DeVega stood at the aft end of the Valiant’s superstructure, while below on the long, open winch deck, his twenty-man Marine guard detail stood to their battle stations. Ma Deuce 50s and Mark 19 grenade launchers were mounted onto their low-set tripods along the rails, while right aft, the SMAW teams laid reload rockets out on the deck for their Israeli-designed antitank weapons.
A tight, feral grin arced across the noncom’s swarthy features. Ten years before, he had been a young pachuco living on the bad side of San Antonio. He had escaped a juvenile record by dumb luck and the grace of the Holy Mother and had graduated from high school more by intimidating teachers than by studying. But then had come the day when he had strutted into his mother’s house, sporting his first gang tattoo and feeling like a man.
His uncle Jaime has been visiting, his Marine uncle with the medals from Grenada and Lebanon and Desert Storm. Without speaking a word, he had grabbed Enrico by the collar and had thrown him out into the front yard. There, Uncle Jaime had beaten him in front of the entire neighborhood until Enrico had lain on his belly and begged for mercy. “You want to join a gang!” his uncle had roared down at him. “Fine! But you’re gonna join my gang, see! Then we’ll find out how much of a tough guy you are!”
The next day, Uncle Jaime had marched him down to the Marine Corps enlistment office and had slammed him into the chair in front of the recruiter’s desk.
What would Uncle Jaime say now if he could see his pachuco nephew about to command an entire naval engagement?
DeVega lifted his binoculars to his eyes, acquiring the white wake streaks closing on the Valiant from astern. “Gunners,” he bellowed, “lock and load!”
“Union craft altering formation, Captain!”
“I can see them, Quartermaster.” Traynor swept his glasses across the line of gunboats. The central group of three Boghammers were holding their course and speed dead on toward the Skye. The two end groups were accelerating, however, going wide around on the flanks of the minehunter, the line abreast altering into an engulfing arc.
There was something about the maneuver, something Traynor had read once in a book about Africa. The Buffalo! My God, they’re using the Buffalo!
The Buffalo was the classic tactical maneuver of the Impis, the old Zulu battle regiments. The central group, the “chest” of the buffalo, took the direct impact of the enemy, while the flanking units, the “horns,” swept around to strike from the sides. It was a doctrine that had once conquered half of Africa, and now, applied in a maritime format, it was being used against the Skye.
“Gunners, stand ready!”
Aboard the Valiant, Sergeant DeVega watched as the Union Boghammers swung in, half circling his ship just outside of accurate gunnery range. DeVega had never heard of the Buffalo or of the Zulu Empire. However, he recognized a flanking move when he saw one and he understood the intent behind it. He unslung his M-4 carbine, cradling it in his arms. He had thirty rounds of tracer in the magazine for directing the fire of his gunners and an M-203 grenade launcher clipped under the barrel should the opportunity present itself to get personally involved.
Somewhere someone snapped an order into a radio microphone. Outboard engines howled and the Boghammer groups lunged, the half-circle formations collapsing inward toward their prey.
Traynor and DeVega. Two good men. Two well-trained and capable warriors at a moment of crisis. Each with the same critical decision to make in the same split second, but each coming from a different school and philosophy of war fare.
“Radio operator! Challenge those gunboats! Warn them off!”
“To hell with this shit! Waste the cocksuckers!”
Right down to the last second before, Lieutenant Mark Traynor couldn’t bring himself to believe that it was actually going to happen. And after, he couldn’t believe that it was, indeed, happening.
Suddenly, the nine Boghammers surrounding his vessel unleashed single, synchronized blasts of automatic weapons targeted on the Skye’s upperworks. Eighteen heavy machine guns delivering more than three hundred rounds of armor piercing 14mm per second.
“Warn them off.” That futile command would haunt Mark Traynor for the rest of his life.
Something smashed into Traynor, something hideously wet and mangled that knocked the British officer to the deck. It was the body of the young rating that had been manning the bridge-wing machine gun, disemboweled and blasted away from the gun mount by half a dozen slug strikes.