Bugis gun crews were mustering at the quad fifty emplacements at each pier end while other guards dashed to internal security posts, some with assault rifles, others with grenade launchers, all responding to a practiced drill.
Just as they reached the foot of the gangway, something exploded outside. To Amanda it sounded like a gigantic chainsaw cutting a battle ship in two. Her ears popped as pressure waves pressed in from beyond the cavern mouth and down the inland entry tunnels. Scores of tiny starlike holes appeared in the dark inner facing of the camouflage screen; shrapnel hissed and ricocheted within the dock, and the heavy nylon curtain billowed inwardly like a sail in a high wind, the hot acid stink of high explosives flowing with it. Someone got unlucky with a bomblet fragment, his scream rising, then trailing off.
“What is it?” Sonoo squealed to Amanda. “What’s happening?”
“As we say in my country, Professor, ‘the Iceman cometh.’”
The guard hurried them on toward the tunnel entrances at the rear of the cavern.
Two miles to the southeast of Crab’s Claw, a row of eight helicopters went to hover in a parallel line that extended the length of the cape. Sweeping into firing range during the shock of the ATACM’s strike, each helo positioned over a precisely precalculated fix on its Global Positioning Unit system. With equal precision, each aircraft aligned on a specific gyrocompass heading and lifted its nose a precise number of degrees by its artificial horizon, flight and navigation systems serving the role of the training and laying gear of a gun battery.
“Guns hot, guns hot, guns hot,” Cobra Richardson chanted into his lip mike, his thumb flipping the trigger guard up and off the firing but ton on his collective lever. “Stand by… shoot!”
Seven similar trigger buttons depressed.
The helo line was engulfed in smoke and flame and the dinosaur scream of salvoing Hydra rockets. The firing circuits cycled with machine gun rapidity, alternating between the pods on either side of each aircraft at quarter-second intervals, balancing the weight distribution and reducing the risk of round collision. Each Huey expended its base load of 56 bombardment rockets in fourteen seconds, the larger H-60s requiring twice that time to release their swarm of 112 projectiles.
Six hundred seventy-two rounds delivered on target in less than thirty seconds. This is the advantage of the bombardment rocket over tube artillery: Instead of one round at a time, it all arrives at once.
The Hydras burned out within a second or two of launching. As with the larger ATACMs, their momentum carried them on to target, but each exhausted rocket motor trailed a thin stream of smoke behind it. To Cobra Richardson, peering out through the propellant-smeared windshield of Wolf One, the rocket swarm in flight was like an incredibly swift gray storm front that lifted above, then settled down on, Crab’s Claw Cape.
And wherever it touched, the earth exploded.
For a long, agonizing half minute the peninsula looked as it must have looked in its primordial days of creation, when the lava flows boiled down its length into the sea: fire, steam, jagged orange light, and a continuous rumbling roar that could be heard even over the beat of the rotors. And when the last incoming round had detonated, another cloud roiled into the sky, this one dense and black.
“Fuck!” Richardson’s copilot whispered.
“Yeah,” Richardson agreed. “So that’s what it looks like.”
Atop Crab’s Claw, the torn and stunned survivors of the ATACMS strike were just pulling themselves to their feet when the new holocaust cascaded from the sky. But whereas each ATACMs bomblet had had the approximate explosive force of a hand grenade, the Hydra bombardment rounds each carried a fourteen-pound charge of high explosive.
Few Hydras actually reached the ground. Fused for impact detonation, the thick forest canopy intercepted the bulk of the projectiles. This was no boon to those trapped in the open. Entire trees disintegrated under the rockets’ impacts, dagger-sharp wooden splinters and jagged steel shrapnel filling the air. Palm trunks were hurled like cabers, end over end, to crash down and crush, and men were entombed under an avalanche of falling timber.
The Morning Star guerrillas were brave men and good soldiers, dedicated veterans of years of jungle skirmishing, but never had they experienced, known of, or even dreamed of an onslaught such as this. Those on the landward end of the peninsula fled back into the deeper shelter of the mainland jungle, while those inside the shelter of the old Japanese bunkers hung on, screamed, and rode it out. Those trapped out in the heart of the conflagration had no option except to die.
In the ship pen, the rock underfoot shuddered. Rust clouds sifted down ominously from the support girders overhead, and the lighting system flickered.
Amanda, Sonoo, and the guard had just entered the left-hand access tunnel at the rear of the cavern. Here it was as if an enraged thunderstorm were trying to squeeze its way down the passage from the surface, the pressure waves it pushed ahead of itself hammering at the eardrums.
Their guard hesitated, glancing around uneasily. A tunnel carved deep into the earth was not a natural fighting ground for a Bugis sea raider. Cutting a look back over her shoulder, Amanda twisted her fingers into the strap of the binoculars she had so carefully husbanded. For this moment and maybe for a few moments more, this particular length of tunnel was empty save for the three of them.
A rocket slammed into the inlet wall near the pen entry. Its detonation tore loose the supports of the camouflage curtain, sending thousands of square yards of nylon and their guide tracks crashing down into the water at the cavern mouth. An explosion of daylight flooded the cavern.
The unexpected glare at his back startled the already edgy guard. For all his veteran years, the Bugis warrior spun around, taking his eyes off Amanda for the first and last time.
She spun as well, using all of her strength to swing the binoculars like a flail at the end of their strap, aiming for the back of the guard’s head. Lenses, barrels, and skull all shattered at the impact.
Before the guard’s body had a chance to fall, Amanda lunged at him. Tearing the Sterling out of his flaccid hands, she twisted about once more to bring the machine pistol’s muzzle to bear on Sonoo. “The other technical representatives,” she snapped. “Take me to them. Move!”
The Indian did so, with alacrity.
Amanda tore the single thirty-four round reload magazine out of the fallen Bugis’s belt and followed, praying that in the confusion of the attack no one had noted the turnabout of affairs.
The hammering barrage ceased as abruptly as it had begun, leaving behind the sour puckering scent and taste of picric acid and the charcoal smell of burning wood. Somehow the returning silence was as stunning as the previous crushing concentration of sound. Men tried to shake away the shock, convulsively starting to move. Instinctive leaders sprung into action, hastening the process.
“Get it over the side, heave!” Makara Harconan shouted, adding his shoulder to that of the other deckhands on the fantail of the Flores. By brute muscle power they hogged the snagged tangle of tarpaulin and cable off the stern of the ship and into the sea, the mass of heavy fabric tearing a stretch of the aft railing out of its shackles as it fell.
The seaman half of Harconan noted abstractly that clearing the LSM’s propellers for departure was going to be pure hell. The more immediate and practical portion of his mind counterpointed with the question of whether the Flores was going to sail at all.