Eight men clustered around the fire, some in ragged jungle camouflage, the others in the sun-faded khakis of the Union navy. Assault rifles and submachine guns leaned against log seats and a tea billy hung suspended over a low, smoldering flame that served as a mosquito smudge rather than a source of warmth. An outboard motor had been carried into the circle of firelight as well and stood half disassembled on a makeshift wooden stand, two of the navy hands working over it. Tools and tin cups clinked, and there was a low murmur of conversation interspersed by an occasional burst of laughter.
Quillain’s AI2 visor adapted to the higher illumination levels, the low flames of the smudge sparkling with a clear and crystalline light. Glancing aside, he could see the IFF lights bobbing close to the ground as the fire teams established position on either flank. Suddenly, a dazzling pencil point of brightness appeared within his field of vision, swinging toward the cluster of men around the fire. A second followed, a third, more. Small, clear-cut dots of light converged on the Union guerrillas, seeking out and fixing on heads and chests.
Peering through a conventional set of gunsights while wearing a night-vision visor was not an easy task. Instead, each Marine had a small helium-neon infrared laser clipped to the lower grab rail of his M4 carbine or MP-5 submachine gun, the laser carefully dialed in to focus at the weapon’s point of impact at short range. Where the laser would touch, the bullet would strike.
The AN/PAQ-5 laser sight was a mated system to the AI2 night visor, its targeting beam filtered to be visible to the wearer of the vision system but invisible to the naked eye. The Union guerrillas were unaware of the death dots dancing across their bodies.
The range was about fifty yards, and Quillain had a discarding sabot slug load in the breech of his shotgun. Coming up on one knee, he rested the side of the Mossberg’s barrel against the coarse bark of a small mangrove. Picking his man, a tall, gaunt soldier who had kept a hand resting on his FALN rifle as he sat in the smoke plume of the smudge, Quillain pressed the laser actuator with his thumb. He could swear that the Union jungle warrior looked up for a moment as the beam touched him.
“Team Red to Mudskipper,” the words of the detached fire team leader leaked into his awareness through the radio ear piece. “We are in behind the gun emplacement. Emplacement is manned. Two-man crew with Bren gun.”
“Roger, Red. Can you make capture or execute a quiet takedown?”
“Negative. Two-man bunker. Both men inside. No line of fire. Grenade.”
“Acknowledged. Grenade. Get yourself set. Burn ’em on my word.”
The U.N. rules of engagement issued to UNAFIN required that any potentially hostile elements encountered must first be challenged and a call to surrender issued before the use of lethal force was authorized. Quillain was quite aware of those rules of engagement, and he was also quite ready to ignore them.
Sorry, Mr. Secretary Goddamn General, but that ain’t how things work in the real world.
Quillain would give as many of the Union guerrillas as much of a chance as he could afford, but not by putting his people at risk. And that brought up another problem.
In his mind’s eye he sketched out the situation. The potential fire zone was roughly triangular in shape. Quillain and the bulk of the squad were at the peak of the triangle while the Union camp was at the center of the base. Off to the left point of the triangle from Quillain’s perspective was the Union machine-gun emplacement, covered and set to be taken out by his detached fire team.
Off to the right, however, was the Boghammer moorage, out of night-visor range and partially screened by a scattering of trees and underbrush. The database on the Union gunboats indicated that they usually had a crew of six, and Quillain had visuals on only four Union sailors. Were the other two seamen standing watch on the gunboat, manning its weapons and covering the sea approaches?
Quillain’s first instinct was to peel off a second fire team to scout out the boat moorage. However, given his limited man power, he also recognized the danger of “detaching himself to death,” losing the advantage of mass and firepower by dispersing his meager forces too widely. In addition, the longer he and his men stumbled around out here in the dark, the greater their chance of being spotted.
Much as he disliked the thought, he was going to have to rely on somebody. He dropped a hand to the “Press to Talk” pad on the Leprechaun transceiver. “Royalty, Royalty, this is Mudskipper …”
The Queen of the West crept upchannel, the ripples of her wake breaking along the root-lined banks being the only sound of her passage. Her stern ramp and side hatches were open and the leveled barrels of her new weapons mounts probed at the night like questing insect antennae.
The gunners leaned in their harnesses and longed for a chance to lift their night-vision visors and wipe the stinging sweat from their eyes, for an opportunity to flex their aching forearms, for a second to ask for a drink of water.
They were not official gunners’ mates or fire-control operators. According to their ratings badges, they were mechanics and technicians, cooks and clerks. However, when Captain Garrett had put out the call for auxiliary gun crews, they had volunteered, despite the certainty of long hours of extra duty and the probability of increased risk.
They hadn’t asked to come to this war, but they were part of it now. And, to quote General George S. Patton, they didn’t intend to go home saying that all they had done was to “shovel shit in Louisiana.”
“Captain, if we go in much farther, we’re going to lose our turning radius in this channel.”
Lane had a good point. More than one overhanging branch had brushed along the Queen’s flank during the last couple of minutes of the approach. Amanda keyed the laser rangefinder and bounced a microsecond-long burst of light off the head of the inlet. Two hundred yards. That would be about right. Just out of range of any low-grade night-bright optics the hostiles might have.
“All right, Steamer. All stop. Hold us here.”
Accessing the Mast Mounted Sighting System, Amanda panned the low-light television across the head of the inlet. Trees, a tangle of undergrowth along the shore, and, a distance inland, a small fire. Nothing that overtly looked like a moored Boghammer. However, one patch of shaggy vegetation did protrude into the channel in a somewhat odd manner.
Amanda dialed over to the thermographic imager using the trackball on her joystick and took a second look, this time sweeping for passive heat radiation.
There it was. The tangled branches and camouflage netting went transparent under the infrared scan. The angular metal and Fiberglas outline of the Boghammer stood out palely against the ambient thermal background of the salt swamp. The boat had been moored bow-on to the mangrove bank with enough slack to allow it to lift and settle with the tides.
“Royalty, Royalty, this is Mudskipper.” Stone Quillain’s rasping whisper invaded the interphone circuit. “We are on site. Ready to move in. What is your position?”
“Mudskipper, we are in midchannel two hundred yards south of the hide. We have the moorage and camp in sight.” Hastily, Amanda called up another GPU fix from Quillain’s SINCGARS unit. “We have a fix on you.”
“Fine,” Quillain shot back with a touch of impatience. “Can you see the gunboat and can you tell if it has a crew on board?”
“Stand by, Mudskipper.” Frustrated, Amanda cranked the camera crosshairs back and forth across the camouflaged Boghammer. She could make out the gunboat easily enough, but the little craft was moored almost directly in line with the camp inland. The mosquito smudge burning there threw off just enough thermal sidelobe to blur the heat image. She couldn’t tell if there were any human bodies radiating aboard the small craft or not.
“Royalty. Does the goddamn gunboat have a goddamn crew on it, the world wonders?”
Amanda mashed down on her own transmitter key. “I say again, Mudskipper, stand by! We are wo
rking the problem!”
She leaned forward between the pilot’s chairs. “Steamer, Snowy, can you make out anything with your night-vision goggles? Do we have a crew on that Boghammer?”
“Ma’am, I gotta take your word for it that we’ve even got Bog out there,” Lane replied, flipping his visor up. “Check with Danno and the Fryguy on the fire-control consoles. The targeting scopes have better IR definition than the Mast Mounted Sight.”
“Right.”
Danno O’Roark and Dwaine Fry had a small edge over the auxiliary gunner at the door mounts. The weaponry of the seafighter was their primary tasking, and they’d had the official training and the long hours of drill time as the Queen had worked up and made herself ready for combat. However, like the door gunners, neither of them had ever fired a shot in anger.
The sweat soaking their dungarees didn’t all stern from the heat.
“Fire control, check your scopes. Do we have a crew on the Boghammer?”
Wrists flicked as the two young sailors panned the death dots of their targeting screens across the gunboat.
“What do you think, Fryguy?”
“I dunno, Danno. There might be something up there near the bow. How do you call it, man?”
Senior by one ratings grade and four months’ in-service, Danno tried to swallow on a suddenly dry throat. The TACBOSS was waiting for him to give her the word. The Lady herself. He suspected that there might be movement aboard the Bogharnmer as well. But he couldn’t bring himself to say so, not unless he could be absolutely sure.
“We can’t verify a crew on the gunboat, ma’am. We can’t tell.”
“Acknowledged, fire control,” Captain Garrett replied matter-of-factly. “Stand by.”
She’d left the fire-control stations in her communications loop, so the gunners overheard the next exchange with the landing force. “Mudskipper, this is Royalty. We cannot confirm or preclude the presence of a crew on the gunboat.”
“Hell. Okay, Royalty. We’d better do this thing. If there is a gun crew on the Bog and if they open up on us, you’re going to have to take ’em out.”
“Will do, Mudskipper.” Click. “Okay, fire control, you have the word. If we get fire from the Boghammer, you are to engage and suppress with thirty-millimeter cannon. I say again, thirty-millimeter cannon. Check your tactical displays and watch your angles. The Marines will be close to your line of fire.”
“Fire control, acknowledged.”
Now swallowing was an impossibility. Danno called up the port-side weapons pedestal on his panels and linked it with his controller. “I’ve got the mission,” he said hoarsely.
“Team White. Team Blue. We are going for a capture. Hold position and fire only on my command.”
A flurry of acknowledgment clicks sounded in Quillain’s earpiece and he settled the butt of the Mossberg 590 more solidly against his shoulder.
“Team Red. Take out the Bren gun.”
Two decisive clicks replied. Quillain visualized the movements: the hand grenade pins snicking free, the grenadier’s arms sweeping back and then forward in the driving, deliberate pitch, the deadly little eggs arcing upward and then down, their safety levers flicking away with a sharp metallic ping.
… three … four … five.
A double flash of white light and the flat doubled slam of the grenade blasts.
Around the smudge fire, the Union guerrillas sat frozen for an instant, the surprise total.
“Nobody move!” Quillain bellowed. “This is the United States Marines! Raise your hands and move slowly away from your weapons! We’ve got you covered!”
No one moved. It was as if every figure inside the circle of firelight had been smitten by some paralyzing ray. Quillain was about to yell once more when, off on that critically uncovered right flank, a brace of heavy machine guns opened up on the Marine positions.
A heavy 14.5mm slug struck the tree Quillain had been leaning against, the shock throwing his sights off the man he had targeted. The Union gunner was firing blindly in the direction of Quillain’s shouted challenge. The firelash of his tracer streams cut over the heads of the Marines, raining shattered branches and wood splinters down upon them. All hands instinctively dove forward, flattening against the rank island loam.
Across in the Union camp, guerrillas scattered, snatching up arms. The smudge fire was extinguished with a sweep of earth and someone emptied an FALN in the direction of the Marine line. The deliberate slam of the heavy-caliber rifle was joined an instant later by the fast, harsh brrrriiiip of a Sterling machine pistol.
“Marines! Return fire!”
The piercing crack of 5.56 NATO answered the bigger bore Union weapons. Quillain took a second to send a 12-gauge slug load booming on its way toward a muzzle flash before slapping his hand onto the Leprechaun’s transmitter key. “Royalty, Royalty! We got a firefight here! Get that gun boat off us!”
“… We got a firefight here! Get that gunboat off us!” Amanda and the crew of the Queen didn’t need the shouted radio call to tell them what had happened. They could see the flame of the Boghammer’s bow mount and could hear the growing crackle of gunfire through the open side windows of the cock pit.
Chief Tehoa, manning the cockpit guns, also didn’t need orders to know the proper reaction. Powering the dual Brownings around to bear on the Boghammer, he pressed the trigger bar, walking a twinned stream of tracers in on the Union gun boat.
Amanda flinched away from the cascade of hot shell casings raining down into the cockpit and yelled into her command headset. “Fire control! Guns free! Engage the Boghammer! Commence! Commence! Commence!”
At the number-one fire-control station beneath the cockpit, Danno O’Roark heard the call. He’d been holding the Boghammer dead on in the crosshairs of his targeting scope, and now, convulsively, he squeezed the joystick trigger.
And nothing happened.
Frantically, his eyes raked across the symbology on his ordnance status boards:
***PORT PEDESTAL***
1**30MM / GUNSAFED**
2**30MM / GUNSAFED**
Shit! He hadn’t cleared the safeties!
“Fire control! Engage that Boghammer! Expedite!”
Panicking, Danno clawed at the settings of the ordnance menu. Calling up new ones, he crushed down on the trigger once more.
Up in the Queen’s cockpit, a second demand for covering fire was coming in over the loop. “Royalty! Royalty! We still got that damn gun on us! When’re you … Jesus Keeerist!”
A rippling dinosaur scream tore the air and something blazed past the side windows of the cockpit. An instant later, the entire world lit up blue and orange as the forest exploded.
At his fire-control station, Danno O’Roark realized that something had gone incredibly, catastrophically wrong. His haste inspired error glared back at him from the ordnance menu.
***PORT PEDESTAL***
1**2.75 RKT / SEQUENTIAL FIRE
2**2.75 RKT / SEQUENTIAL FIRE
His brain screamed at him to get off the trigger, but his hand remained frozen on the joystick as the rocket pods emptied out their warloads.
Two pods. Seven Hydra rockets per pod firing at one-half second intervals. Ten pounds of high explosives per rocket; 140 pounds of high explosives delivered at point-blank range in three and a half seconds. The effect could only be called spectacular.
The rockets barely had time to arm before impacting. The camouflage around the Boghammer evaporated, leaving it outlined darkly in the glare for a split second, like a photographic negative of itself. Then the gunboat itself dissolved into a billion splintered fragments of Fiberglas.
Man-thick tree trunks shattered and century-old man groves toppled as the rocket stream chewed its way back into the forest. Flaming limbs rained down on the Queen’s upper works and Amanda, Lane, and
Snowy all ducked as shrapnel pinged off the windscreen. Bellowing savage implications, Chief Tehoa tumbled down into the cockpit as well. Whether it was a deliberate dive for cover or he’d been knocked out of the gunner’s saddle by concussion, even he couldn’t say.
And then it was over and the only sound was a softly moaned “Oh fuck … oh fuck … oh fuck …” over the interphone.
“Check fire! Check fire! All mounts! Check fire!” Amanda snarled into the interphone.
“What in thee hell happened?” Lane demanded angrily, straightening in the command seat.
“I’m not sure, sir, but somebody’s gonna pay for it,” Tehoa growled, pulling himself up from the cockpit deck.
“Forget that for now,” Amanda snapped back. “We might have walked some of those rockets into the Marines. Damn! Damn! Damn!”
An ominous silence reigned out in the darkness. The firefight hadn’t resumed following the impact of the barrage, and all that could be seen beyond the windscreen was a small patch of flaming gasoline guttering on the surface of the channel.
“Mudskipper, Mudskipper, this is Royalty! Do you copy?” Amanda spoke urgently into her headset mike. “Mudskipper, report your status!”
Following a protracted and agonizing pause, a baleful voice replied from out of the night. “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?”
“Quillain, are you all right? Do you have any casualties?”
“Negative, negative. No casualties, but we’re going to be spittin’ splinters for a month! Jesus God, woman! I just asked for you to take out the gunboat! Not the whole damn island!”
Given the circumstances, Amanda elected to let Quillain’s cavalier mode of address to a senior officer pass. “Sorry, Mudskipper,” she replied meekly. “We, ah, had a little weapons malfunction here. We have it locked down now.”
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