The Seawolves were plowing the road.
Cobra Richardson led his four-helo flight in a nose-to-tail daisy chain over the Sutanto and down the length of the inlet. With OCSW turrets cranked hard over and door guns flaming, the Super Hueys mercilessly raked the cliff walls in an all-out sterilization pass, doing what the Sea wolves did best: being there for the guys on the ground or the water.
The Morning Star howitzer did not fire that last round.
The gunnery from within the cavern mouth had slackened as well. Through the haze filling the inlet from the forest fires along the cliff sides, MacIntyre could see his target. Carberry had called it right. Harconan’s LSM was in there, moored to a pier on the right side of the ship pen. But the rest of the available “parking” was filled as well, with a second pier on the left with a couple of good-size pinisi tied up to it.
The pinisi looked the softest.
MacIntyre set his line with a last half-turn of the wheel and reached up to the overhead, slamming his palm on the collision alarm. Alarm hooters cried belowdecks and the Marines and sailors riding it out in the central passageway interlinked arms and braced their feet against the opposing bulkhead in the old glider infantry crash-landing posture.
Stone Quillain dragged Labelle Nichols into the passageway aft of the wheelhouse, shielding her with his own body from what was to come. A shadow swept across the ruins of the bridge as they plunged beneath the lip of the cavern entrance. MacIntyre dropped to his knees, crossing his arms over his face and bracing himself against the wheel stand.
Crab’s Claw Base
0810 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008
The cavern garrison broke and ran, abandoning their gun stations, the crews of the pinisi and the Flores doing so as well, fleeing down the piers to the rear of the ship pen. Harconan could only join the headlong retreat. There was nothing else that could sanely be done in the face of twelve hundred tons of onrushing metal.
He’d gotten clear of the superstructure, making it as far as the LSM’s midships deck when the suicidal frigate roared into the cavern.
The Parchim’s sharp stem plowed into the stern of the first schooner moored to the left-hand pier. The smaller wooden vessel disintegrated like an apple crate under an ax blow.
The Harconan Flores lurched and tilted outboard as the hard-driven frigate wedged between it and the far-side dock. Pier timbers buckled, four-by-fours tearing loose from their spikes and flipping into the air like tossed jackstraws. Abrading hull steel screamed in torment, sparks and burning molten paint spraying.
The wreckage of the first pinisi was driven into the second, both schooners wadding into a mass of splintered timber under the Indonesian warship’s bow, the dying shrieks of slow crewmen faint amid the crunch of frames and planking.
Metal howled and tore overhead: The Parchim’s lattice masts were too tall for the ceiling of the ship pen. The main truck and antenna arrays sheared off at the cavern lip. Power connections arcing, they twisted as they fell, crashing to wedge between the superstructures of the two ships. The broken stubs of the frigate’s masts raked on across the cavern roof, ripping the aged Japanese support girders loose from their anchor bolts. Rusted iron and lava rock rained from overhead.
Harconan had been knocked to the LSM’s deck by the initial collision. He sensed a hurtling mass plummeting from above, and he rolled aside an instant before a crumpled length of I beam and a ton of basalt crashed across the Flores amidships. One of her Dutch mates was not quick enough, the scarlet pulp spraying.
Looking up, Harconan saw the frigate’s battered upper works slide past, riding over the crushed remnants of the pinisi. She reached the stone shelf at the back of the cavern, the distorted bow bucking upward as it tried to lift over that as well. But her momentum was exhausted and her last mad ride was over. With a final dying groan, the warship slid back, her keel broken, inert.
The last echo faded and the cavern was suddenly supernaturally quiet.
Harconan knew this silence would last for only seconds, then the real assault would begin. He scrambled to his feet and bolted across the tilted deck for the starboard rail. The INDASAT and his base here were lost. All of Makara Limited was lost. Everything was lost except for the war.
The gangway had been thrown aside with the impact, but the tilting deck of the LSM now leaned over the right-hand pier. The taipan slid under the bottom cable of the rail. He hung from it for a moment, then dropped to the sprung planks, his mind leaping ahead. He must organize the delaying action and the retreat. As per the disaster contingency plan, he must get his people out and away to the Morning Star bases deeper in the jungle.
And he must take Amanda away with him. That was one prize they wouldn’t win back.
“Everyone! Follow me!” he yelled, rallying the remaining scattered handful of guards and ship’s crewmen on the pier.
USS Cunningham, CLA-79 on Buccaneer Station
30 Miles West of Crab’s Claw Cape
0810 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008
The Sutanto slid out of sight within the cavern. The real-time imaging on the primary large-screen display in the Combat Information Center was beaming back from one of the two Eagle Eye fire control drones the Cunningham had hovering over the engagement zone.
“They’re in, sir,” Hiro’s TACCO commented. “So far, so good.”
“So far,” Hiro replied quietly. “Shift imaging. Bravo drone.”
The tactical officer called up the feed from the second RPV The distant cameras aimed downward on a patch of dense forest growth in the center of the cape. Rents had been torn in the tree canopy by the rocket barrages, and billowing smoke rose in half a dozen locations. Still, there was no visual hint that the landward entrances of the tunnel complex rested below the tree cover. They still existed only as radar traced coordinates in the targeting systems.
Hiro spoke. “Mr. Carstairs, verify gunnery bombardment mission ready to fire.”
“All forward mounts ready to fire. Targeting coordinates set and projectile guidance programmed. The mission board reads green.”
On the Cunningham’s foredeck monitors, the muzzles of the VGAS tubes and the barrel of the bow turret lay trained on the dark smear of land along the blue oceanic horizon.
“Mr. Carstairs, proceed with the mission.”
“On the way, sir. Firing the mission.” The TACCO’s thumbs flipped a pair of guards up and off from over a pair of glowing green keys. The keys went white as he depressed them.
Whump!.. Crack!.. Whump!.. Crack!.. Whump!.. Crack!..
Autoloaders and firing circuits cycled sequentially, the two big fixed VGAS tubes fired a round apiece every fifteen seconds, with the lighter five-inch turret mount adding its contribution in between. The black and orange muzzle flashes were small compared to the flame jets of the ATACM launches, but still most impressive.
Like the ATACMs, the 155- and 120-millimeter “smart shells” extended guidance fins as they cleared their gun barrels. In a world of shockproof, solid-state technology, it was easier and more effective to simply tell the projectile to steer where it was supposed to go than it was to try and precisely aim the gun.
Using terminal laser targeting, the average area of probable impact for precision-guided shells such as these could have been reduced to a circle a meter and a half across. For this mission, however, GPU guidance alone with a fifteen-meter area of probable impact had been deemed adequate.