The boats and finger piers were next. An interlocking string of explosions walked deliberately down the edge of the estuary, kicking the piers to splinters and hurling the moored Boghammers aside like the broken toys of a child in tantrum. Marching on, the shell bursts reached the fueling pier and the old dock and its gasoline barge both were engulfed within a mushroom of blazing petroleum.
The string of interlocking detonations reversed itself, working back up the shore, devouring the maintenance sheds and the boat railway like a ravening dragon, leaving nothing — no structure, no wall, no stick or stone unblasted.
The destruction of the boat line complete, the monster shifted objectives, springing across the ruins of the base to the ranked tents of the enlisted men’s billets, smashing, shredding, enflaming. Kinsford could only pray that all hands had fled to the forest in terror.
The motor pool was last, the exploding fuel tanks of the base’s few vehicles adding only a little to the devastation.
And then it was over.
The echo of the high-explosive avalanche reverberated away across the jungle, leaving only a crackle of burning wood and the pop and bang of ammunition cooking off aboard the charring hulks of the gunboats.
Dazed, Kinsford made the rounds of the observation slits, taking stock by the light of the numerous fires. Nothing was left. Or almost nothing. The only two structures left untouched were the command center and ammunition store. Recognizing that the reinforced bunkers might have been sturdy enough to survive even multiple hits by the artillery rockets, their attackers had elected to distribute their fire power to better effect elsewhere.
What good was ammunition, though, when there was nothing or no one left to fire it? And of what use was a command post with nothing and no one left to command?
The radios had toppled off of their stands and the signal men lay beside them, one in a dazed sprawl, the other curled in a fetal position and sobbing. Crossing to them, Kinsford slapped and kicked the operators back into some form of functionality.
“Get me a channel to Fleet Headquarters in Monrovia… No, wait, get me the direct channel to the Mamba Point Command Center. I must… I must report this.”
It was the only thing left that could be done.
It had been a jubilant evening in the Union headquarters building, in all quarters, barring one.
“It is not good, Sako. It is not good. We failed.”
“Obe, I hear you speaking,” Brigadier Atiba replied patiently, leaning back against his general’s desk, “but I do not understand what you say. We have won a great victory. You have won a great victory.”
Belewa himself paced the centerline of his office, scowling at the floor. “That is not the point, Sako. Yes, winning a victory is a very good thing. But winning the war is what is important. Yes, disabling the British minesweeper was useful. Yes, we scored against the blockade. But no, we failed in our primary mission objective.”
Belewa paused in his pacing and aimed his scowl at the wall chart of the Union coast. “If we had destroyed that radar ship, that would have been a true victory. That would have stuck a stick in the Leopard’s eye. I should have known she would have arranged for some kind of onboard defense, and I should have massed and concentrated our forces against the one truly critical target. Instead I allowed myself to become greedy. I allowed myself to become distracted by a target of opportunity. General? Pah! I’m a fool!”
“Then let me buy a fool a drink.” Reaching behind him, Atiba caught up the bottles of beer he had brought with him to Belewa’s office. One after another, he struck the bottle caps off on the edge of the desk. Grinning, he held one of the bottles out to Belewa. “Who was it who told me? ‘Sometimes you can’t win every battle on the first day. Sometimes you must grit your teeth and try again tomorrow.’”
Gradually, a grudging smile crept onto Belewa’s lips. “A fool who was a simple army officer at the time,” he replied, accepting the beer. “I am the leader of a great nation now, Sako, and I must achieve perfection yesterday.”
“To yesterday’s perfection, then.”
The two brown bottles clinked lightly and the two warriors drank to the toast.
“Ahh!” Obe Belewa’s face relaxed for a moment, then the frown returned. “Sako, have you verified that all of the gunboats did, in fact, return from this mission?”
“For the third time, Yelibuya Sound has counted every boat home.”
“No contact with the American gunboats at all?”
“None!” Atiba shook his head impatiently. “By the sacred names of God, Obe. Are you disappointed we didn’t take casualties?”
“Of course not. But I have to wonder why we didn’t.” Belewa circled his desk and sank down into his chair. “If there was no indication of an American pursuit, it makes me wonder just what they might be up to out there.”
“Isn’t it conceivable that we just might have gotten lucky,” Atiba asked with forbearance, coming to sit on the desk edge, “or that they might have fumbled their own operations?”
Belewa cocked an eyebrow. “No, it isn’t. If the Leopard isn’t nipping at our heels, then maybe she’s already gotten ahead of us and is lying in ambush.”
The Chief of Staff laughed shortly. “You and your Leopard, Obe. You make her sound as if she’s some kind of witch doctress.”
“I begin to think that she is, Sako. At times in our briefing sessions, I feel her spirit sitting on my shoulder, laughing at my follies.”
“For the love of God, man. She’s just a woman!”
“Hah! And how many times has ‘just a woman’ made a fool out of you, my friend.” Belewa grinned back and took another draw from his beer bottle. “I seem to recall something about a little dancer in a club in Lagos—”
The corridor door burst open with no preliminary knock. A frightened signalman leaned in through it. “General Belewa! There has been an emergency transmission from Yelibuya Sound! Yelibuya Fleet Base has been destroyed!”
“What?” Brigadier Atiba sprang to his feet. “Who is attacking them? How badly are they hit?”
“They didn’t say, sir. There was only the single transmission. And they didn’t say the base was under attack. They said that they had been destroyed!”
“Get them back.” Belewa rose to his feet as well. “Get some particulars of what’s happened. Find out what’s going on out there.”
“We’ve tried, General. Yelibuya Base does not reply.”
The seafighters turned away from the Union coast and from the glow in the sky over Yelibuya Base. Igniting turbines, they came up on the pad for their sprint home. Yet there was still one blow left to strike. Coffin shaped, the four-round heavy missile cell elevated out of the Queen’s weather deck, up-angling to forty-five degrees.
“SeaSLAMs armed and spinning up for launch, Captain. Ready to initiate firing sequence.”
“Very good, Danno. Launch at your discretion. Let’s finish the job.”
In the screenlight of the fire-control console, Danno O’Roark glanced across at Dwaine Fry. “I got number one, you got number two. Let’s do it right. I don’t want those clowns on the Carondelet to have to clean up after us.”
“Just push the buttons, my man,” the Fryguy replied, his slender fingers closing around his controller grip. “The rock is as good as in the hole.”
A launching charge thudded and the plastic cap of the first missile cell shattered, the nose of a sleek torpedolike projectile bursting through. Spring-loaded swept wings extended from the midpoint of the fourteen-foot fuselage as it cleared the tube, tail fins unfolding and locking outward a microsecond later. Arcing up and clear of the seafighter, a command flashed from one of the SeaSLAM’s onboard computers to the booster module at its stern. The solid-fuel rocket engine ignited and the projectile lunged skyward again.