Harconan had no idea what was happening atop the cape. He was only certain that the Indonesians couldn’t be behind it, nor were the Australians or any other of the regional navies. None had this brand of fire power at their beck and call. It had to be the Americans. Somehow they had located his base. No, somehow she must have led them here.
For one moment as he stood along side the crumpled railing, Harconan felt a soul-deep explosion of rage and betrayal aimed at Amanda Garrett. That bitch! He had accepted her word, her parole!
And then the taipan laughed. He straightened amid the ruins and he laughed aloud, to the bewilderment of the seamen around him. And what would he have done in her place? How had she gone about it? He was sure he’d covered every eventuality, leaving her nothing. Harconan reached up and wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Someday he would have to ask her about that.
He shook the ringing from his ears, taking stock of this tactical situation. No more fire was incoming. But that Indonesian frigate certainly was. She must be within a half mile of the inlet mouth and coming on like a bat out of hell.
Was she trying to move in fast to put assault boats over the side? Let her try it. The barrage might have taken out most of the clifftop emplacements, but the intact cavern guns could cut any landing party to pieces. He still had time to consider his options. There was always the contingency plan for a fallback to the Morning Star bases in the mountains. But about the satellite…
Harconan’s thoughts trailed off. There were no landing parties forming up on the deck of that ship. And there was something, an odd flag, flying at the main truck.
Looking around, Harconan found his binoculars lying on the deck at his feet. Snatching them up, he aimed them at the masthead of the charging vessel.
Instead of the red and white of the Indonesian naval ensign, the black and white of the skull and crossbones writhed and winked from the mast head, a message and a signature, both sent with the wry and deadly humor of one certain nation’s breed of warrior.
Harconan let the glasses fall, bringing up the Handie-Talkie. “All gun stations! Open fire! Pour it into her! Turn her back!”
Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto
0807 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008
Sparks of orange fire sputtered within the cavern mouth that was revealed at the head of the inlet, and writhing tracer snakes crawled toward the Sutanto.
“Here it comes,” Stone Quillain yelled, sinking behind the spalling barrier. “Tuck your heads in!”
Labelle Nichols crouched down behind the helm station, chanting the wry prayer of the old days of wooden ships and broadside-to-broadside warfare. “O Lord, for what we are about to receive, may we truly be grateful.”
MacIntyre could only recall that spaced between each visible tracer were four rounds that could not be seen.
The bridge windscreen dissolved in a glassy spray under multiple slug impacts, the thick Kevlar padding below it absorbing rounds with a sodden whock, whock, whock, like a club swung against a wet rug. More bullets skittered and screamed off the steel superstructure frames.
“That’s gotta be coming from some Ma Deuce fifties,” Quillain commented in a conversational tone.
“Uh-huh,” Labelle agreed absently, “but they got something heavier too. Looks like a Bofors twin mount maybe.”
Intermixed with the glittering hornets of the machine-gun tracers were what looked like flaming bowling balls to MacIntyre as he peered over the spalling curtain. As they struck, the ship’s structure jolted under each of their impacts, plating tore and caved in, and the spreading stench of fire and high explosives saturated the air.
“That’s something like a twin forty, all right,” a calm, studied voice stated. MacIntyre was amazed to find that it was his own. “I’ll bet they’ve put the old Russian 37s back on that Frosch-classer.”
The Sutanto bucked over a last sea swell, then the wave action dropped away as they roared through the cliff mouth and into the calmer waters of the cape inlet.
“Almagtig! What’s that madman doing?” Captain Onderdank screamed over the rhythmic coughing of his ship’s guns.
“I don’t know,” Harconan yelled back. “I don’t know!”
The Flores’s captain had joined Harconan at the portside of the deck house, where the taipan had been driven by the muzzle blast of the aft turret. Fire spewed from the twin bell mouths of the Russian 37mm anti-aircraft gun, and a steady stream of shell cases clattered onto the deck from the ejector chutes.
The quad .50-calibers were firing steadily from each cavern pierhead is well, and the aftermost pinisi moored alongside the Flores had mounted and manned its Russian 14mm machinegun stern chaser, bringing it to bear in the fight as well.
The fire streams that converged and focused on the onrushing frigate were doing damage. Smoke was beginning to stream from the Parchim’s superstructure, but still she plunged on, as unheeding as a charging elephant to a barrage of air-rifle fire.
Still running at flank speed, she was entering the inlet!
“He’ll never be able to stop!” Onderdank exclaimed, shouting his bewilderment, “Even if he backs engines full, he won’t be able to stop!”
The captain of the Flores was right. Without reversible propellers, which the elderly and simply outfitted ex-Warsaw Pact warship lacked, there was no way for the vessel to stop and no room for it to turn in the channel.
And then Harconan was flashing back to his days in the Amsterdam Maritime Academy and a tour he had taken of French Atlantic Port facilities, and the legend of the Campbeltown.
During the Second World War; the huge dry dock at the French port of Saint-Nazaire had been the only graving facility on the Bay of Biscay large enough to conduct hull repairs to the German superbattleships Bismarck and Tirpitz. As such, it was a great convenience to the Kriegsmarine and a deadly complication to the Royal Navy.
The question had been how to eliminate it. Conventional bombing only chipped the massive concrete structure, and the bristling harbor defenses made it all but impossible for a special-operations force to reach the dry dock with a large enough stock of high explosives to do appreciable damage.
The answer had been to take an elderly American lend-lease destroyer, the Campbeltown, camouflage it to look like a German warship, load it with munitions and a team of heroically suicidal Commandos, and crash the whole affair through the dry dock sea gates at flank speed.
As was being done here!
“The bridge!” Harconan screamed into his radio. “Concentrate all fire on the bridge!”
Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto
0808 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008
How long to cross half a mile at twenty-five knots? Not long at all, but Elliot MacIntyre had crouched in that disintegrating wheelhouse for eternity, watching the black rock cliff face inch closer with the speed of an advancing glacier. He could feel the deck below him heating from the touch of flame and a trickle of blood down his cheek from a raking metal splinter.
You wanted all this back, damn you! Well, how do you like it?
He lifted a hand slowly as if through chilled honey to stare at it. The callused fingers curved without trembling. Well, it’s no worse than the old days, he answered himself, bemused. I guess I’m doing all right.
Something struck the Sutanto’s superstructure with a slam heavier than anything felt before, a whiplash of shock reverberating through the steel.