The engagement became a savage two-dimensional dog fight, wakes and tracer streams tangling wildly as the two unlike forces struggled for tactical advantage. The larger seafighters had the speed and the firepower, while the smaller Union gunboats had sheer number and a tighter turning radius.
A rhythm became established within the battle, a grotesque dance of fire and destruction. A Boghammer swarm would converge on the Queen, striving to pen her in and pin her down like a dog pack on a bear. Steamer would firewall his throttles, breaking out of the ring, then reversing back upon his attackers. Cutting one gunboat out of the pod, he would herd the Boghammer away from the covering fire of its squadron mates, then position so that his weapons crews could smash it.
It was a new page in the history of warfare, a naval engagement such as Mahan or Yamamoto never dreamed of. And yet Steamer found himself struck by a sense of déjà vu, an overwhelming sense that he had experienced this all before.
In a free instant between maneuvers, he recognized the source. The shouts and cries of his gunners over the intercom, like the dialog of an old World War II air war movie.
“Bogs at ten o’clock!”
“Watch it! Manassas is out that way! Watch for her strobes. Do not blue on blue!”
“Hear ya, Chief!”
“Fuck! I’m jammed! Port-side forty is down! Somebody cover port-side!”
“This is Danno! Covering port!”
“Bog going to starboard, trending aft!”
“Starboard forty has acquired! Target still trending aft! Stern mount, take him!”
“This is stern … we see him! Mister Lane! Gimme rudder! Gimme left rudder! … I’m on him! I’m on him! God, that sucker’s burning!”
As the hovercraft swerved and bucked across the sea, the ammo humpers couldn’t stay on their feet down in the main hull. Rather, they dragged the ammunition cases to the door mounts on their hands and knees. Supported by their monkey harnesses, the gunners stood ankle deep amid smoldering shell casings, blessing the spray that hazed in through the open hatches. It cooled the blazing-hot gun barrels, staving off meltdown.
Then there was that other sound as well, beyond the hoarse shriek of the engines and the yammering of the weapons. A sound almost felt rather than heard, the sporadic thunk … thunk … thunk of high-velocity bullet strikes punching through the bulkheads. The seafighters were mostly armored against rifle-caliber gunfire, but more than rifles were being used against them this night. It was only a matter of time and failing luck.
“Royalty, Royalty, this is Frenchman! We’re hit! We’re hit! We’ve lost a power room! We’re losing cushion!”
Amanda’s head snapped up from the tactical screen. “Steamer,” she yelled, “the Carondelet is in trouble. Steer three seven five! Converge and cover!”
“Doing it!”
She crushed her thumb down on the transmit key. “Rebel, this is Royalty. Close up with Frenchman. Cover her!”
“Already on the way, ma’am. The cavalry is charging!”
Like a school of piranha scenting blood, the surviving Boghammers also converged on the cripple, seeking vengeance against their tormentors. Setting a racetrack fire pattern around the damaged and wallowing Carondelet, they raked her mercilessly, blue-water Apaches circling an isolated fort.
And then the Queen and the Manassas exploded on scene, pouncing into the middle of the swarm, the hammering of their guns becoming a single continuous roar.
The Queen cut a flaming pinwheel arc around her wounded sister, her stern skidding outboard and her weapons spraying death into the night. As the G forces of the wild skid grew, Amanda clung to the grabrail behind the pilot’s seat with her left hand, while with her right she fended off the cascade of searing shell casings raining down from the hatch guns.
“Steamer,” Snowy Banks screamed. “Two of them! Coming across the bow!”
Looking up, Amanda saw a pair of Boghammers cutting directly across the path of the hovercraft. Half a dozen points of flame flickered and danced along the gunwales of the lead boat, the muzzle flashes of machine guns and automatic rifles. In the second craft, the outlines of two Union gunners could be seen, bracing a third upright as he stood in the bow, leveling a Carl Gustav rocket launcher at the cockpit of the Queen. For one indescribable and inescapable moment, Amanda and her crew looked down the barrel of that launcher and waited for death to emerge.
Then, from overhead, the tracer streams of Chief Tehoa’s guns slashed and thrust like a saber blade, the storm of heavy slugs smashing and crumpling the living weapons mount. The barrel of the Carl Gustav sank toward the Boghammer’s deck and the fist of its gunner clinched convulsively around the launcher’s handgrip as death claimed him. The rest of the Bog’s crew followed an instant later. The 84mm antitank round slammed into the ammunition cases lining the belly of the gunboat.
The Boghammer vanished in a blue-white fireball. The Queen’s windscreen shattered and blew inward, bullets and shrapnel ripping through the cockpit, shorting systems and exploding telepanels. Holding its course, the surviving Union gunboat turned inside the arc being cut by the seafighter, its weapons angling back and hosing the hovercraft.
Steamer Lane tore off his night-vision visor, its lenses smeared and blinded by the blood streaming from his lacerated forehead. He had only one weapon at his immediate disposal, and he didn’t hesitate to use it. Slamming the drive throttles against their stops, he locked the air rudder and puff-port controller hard over, his turn tightening into a pursuit curve.
The crew of the Union gunboat saw the nose of the seafighter come about and aim with deadly deliberation, kerosene-fired turbines shrieking. Suddenly enormous, the bow of the hovercraft loomed above the Boghammer, its broad painted shark’s mouth snarling in outrage and triumph.
The Queen’s foreskirt rode up and over their fragile shell and the sea monster ate them alive.
Amanda felt the thud and scrape of splintering Fiberglas under the Queen’s plenum chamber and heard Steamer’s short, fierce cry of victory over the intercom. “Yeah! Busted your ass!”
“Report!” she yelled into her headset over the slipstream, now howling unchecked through the cockpit. “Anyone hit? Systems status?”
“M’okay,” Snowy wheezed, pulling herself upright in her seat. “Hit on the vest. Wind knocked … out of me. I’m okay!”
Steamer glanced across at his copilot, then dragged his attention back to his console. “Primary controls functional. Console readouts are down.”
“Are we still battle worthy?” Amanda demanded.
The hover commander swiped another handful of blood out of his eyes. “We’re good!”
“Steamer … You’re bleeding!”
“Fuck that, Snow! Reboot the screens! Get me some instrumentation!”
“On it!” The young woman began working intently over the ruins of the control board.
The panels at the navigator’s station were still operational. Amanda turned to the tactical display, seeking to regain track of the battle, only to find that it was over.
Only six target hacks remained in the battle area: the three blue friendlies, clustered tightly together, two circling warily about the inert third; her own craft; and the Manassas, guarding the crippled Carondelet.
To the westward, three red hostiles fled the engagement grounds—the three survivors of the Boghammer squadron. The remainder of the Union flotilla had been converted into a slowly widening debris field: scattered bits of drifting wreckage, puddles of flickering gasoline on the night sea, floating bodies, some still feebly struggling.
The convoy of oil carriers had disappeared. During the sacrifice of the gunboat force they had vanished into the network of small lagoons and salt swamps bordering this stretch of the coast.
“Frenchman, this is Royalty,” she called into her lip mike. “What is y
our status?”
“This is Frenchman,” Lieutenant Clark, the Carondelet’s commander, replied promptly. “Situation under control. Starboard power room knocked out by AT rocket. Two crewmen wounded. Fires are out and medevac is inbound. No loss of flotation. Weapons and sensors operational. Vessel is underway in swimmer mode.”
“Roger that. Can you operate as a search-and-rescue platform?”
“Affirmative, Royalty.”
“Very well. Frenchman and Rebel, initiate combat-zone search and rescue.” She shifted her address to the two Patrol Craft lurking just over the horizon. ”Santana and Sirocco, this is Little Pig Lead. Move into the engagement area and assist Carondelet and Manassas. We have a lot of men in the water.”
The string of acknowledgments sounded in her headset. Twisting in her seat, she yelled forward to the control stations. “Steamer, come right to two seven zero! All engines ahead full! We’ve still got three Bogs out there, and Belewa isn’t going to get them back!”
The Queen of the West flared about and the gale of air blasting in through the shattered windshields grew to hurricane proportion. Snowy Banks fitted her own night-vision visor over Steamer’s face, then crouched low out of the slipstream beside the control pedestal, her eyes narrowed to slits against the slipstream.
Night-vision systems were almost redundant. In the cold light of the full moon, the wakes of the fleeing Boghammers could be made out with the naked eye, silver thread laced across the black sheening silk of the sea. And if the Union gunboats could be seen from the Queen’s cockpit, so she must be visible from theirs, a shadowy, mist-shrouded revenant closing in behind them.
“Fire Control, let’s finish this,” Amanda directed grimly. “Load Hellfires.”
Aft, behind the cockpit, the two weapons pedestals whipped vertical to loading mode. Automatic handling arms sliced downward, locking on and lifting stumpy multifinned projectiles onto the launching rails, laser-guided AGM-114 antitank missiles, navalized into small-craft killers.
“Hot birds and green boards,” Danno O’Roark announced crisply. “Systems are hot. Designators are up. Port-side pedestal designating red.”
A set of glowing crimson crosshairs rezzed into existence on the tactical screen, sweeping across to center on one of the surviving gunboats.
“Starboard designating green,” Fryguy Fry added calmly, his sight snapping up and hunting.
“Cockpit, designating yellow.” Amanda’s hands played across her own keyboard, executing the systems call-ups. “I have the mast sight designator. I am assuming number-two round, starboard.”
The image from the masthead video camera filled her screen, a cartwheel sight centering in it. The northernmost of the gunboats had yet to be designated, and she claimed it for her own. Guiding the camera with her joystick, she ran the death pip up the wake until she reached the dark arrowhead mass at its end. Her thumb rocked forward on the trackball atop the controller and the image zoomed in, the mass expanding until it became recognizable as a boat and crew. Her thumb pressed down and a needle beam from the infrared laser atop the snub mast lanced out, painting the target.
The designation box snapped into existence around the target, and the shrill deedle-deedle-deedle of the audile prompt sounded in her ears. Lock established. An invisible thread of modulated light linked her and the Boghammer now. Upon its launching, sensors in the nose of her missile would recognize the coding of that one specific point of flickering illumination and would home in on it unerringly.
“Target red designated.”
“Target green designated.”
“Target yellow designated,” Amanda completed the litany. “Commence firing.”
“Target red, on the way.”
Danno squeezed his actuator trigger. One hundred pounds of hypertech destruction sprang off its launch rail. Its flame trail studded with shock wave diamonds, it arced up and over the shoulder of the hovercraft, seeking its last home.
“Target green, on the way.”
A second ripping roar and orange-blue glare, the acrid, chemical fumes of rocket exhaust concentrating within the cockpit.
“Target yellow …”
And then the realization came to Amanda Garrett. For fully half her life she had served as one of her nation’s military officers. She had been involved in numerous battles and had commanded in engagements where hundreds had died. And yet not until this moment had she ever personally aimed and triggered a weapon that would take another human life.
Downrange, two of the three surviving Boghammers blazed out of existence as the high-explosive/fragmentation warheads of the Hellfires did their job. Amanda commanded her finger to close on the joystick trigger … repeatedly.
“Cockpit …” a perplexed voice inquired over her headset. “Captain … do you have a hangfire? …Do you want us to assume the round?”
Amanda’ s lips parted to whisper yes.
But at the same instant, an enraged scream welled up from deep within her, directed at herself and resounding within her soul … HYPOCRITE! Amanda’s hand closed convulsively and the final round of the battle howled on its way. She forced her eyes to stay open, following the dwindling fire plume away into the night until it climaxed in a white flare on the surface of the sea.
Without needing orders, Lane backed off on the hover’s throttles. The battering torrent of wind pouring in through the empty windscreen frames softening to a brisk breeze. Amanda took a deep and deliberate breath. “Maintain this heading, Steamer. Let’s see if there are any survivors out there we can pick up.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am. That was one hell of a show.”
“It’s not over yet.” Amanda switched the com over to base frequency. “This is Little Pig Lead to Floater 1. Bogs are down. I say again, Bogs are down. Initial phase complete. I think we got them all. Can you verify?”
“We verify, Little Pig Lead,” Christine Rendino replied. “Twenty-six out. Twenty-six down. Good shootin’, Tex.”
“Acknowledged, Floater, and thank you. Now let’s go see how the Marines are making out.”
She switched back to intercraft, her nerves beginning to loosen. “Attention, all hands. This is the TACBOSS. Stand down from action stations and rig for search and rescue. Hey, Chief, it looks like we’ve swept the seas clean. Do we have a broom aboard we can tie to the masthead? … Chief?”
A sudden icy chill rippled down her spine. Twisting around in her seat, she reached up into the shadows, toward the gunner’s saddle of the cockpit mount. She touched Chief Tehoa’s leg and her fingers came away covered with a warm dark wetness.
“Steamer! Shut her down! The Chief’s been hit!”
The hover commander slammed back his drive and lift throttles, dumping the Queen onto the swells with a skidding heave. Leaving the turbines idling, he and Snowy scrambled out of their seats to help Amanda ease the CPO’s flaccid body down out of the gunring.
“Oh, jeez! There’s blood all over the place back here!”
“He must have been hit back at the Carondelet! He never made a sound!”
“Snowy, bring up the cockpit lights! Hey, down in the main hull! Somebody get the medical kit up here! On the double!”
Scrounger Caitlin appeared at the head of the ladder bearing the Day-Glo-orange aid kit. Stunned and wide eyed, she looked as Lane pulled off Tehoa’s helmet and tore down the zipper of his flak jacket, seeking for the wound while Amanda held the big man upright in her arms.
Lane worked for a few frantic moments more, then stopped.
“Ah, hell.”
Steamer rocked back on his heels, his face a despairing mask of his own dried blood. “It’s no good. He took one right in the throat, just above his body armor. He never knew what hit him.”
“It must have happened back there when those two gunboats cut across our bow,” Snowy said quietl
y. “He must have been hit right after he saved us.” Without realizing herself that she was doing so, she moved closer to Steamer Lane, her shoulder lightly brushing his.
At the rear of the cockpit, Caitlin clung to the rungs of the ladder, sobbing aloud and unashamed. Amanda continued to hold Ben Tehoa, one hand coming up to lightly stroke his dark hair. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to someone no longer present. “I’m sorry.”
In swimmer mode once more, the Queen of the West inched closer to the Union coast. Standing on the weather deck beside the cockpit, Amanda watched as an awkward shadowy mass emerged from an inlet mouth, creeping crablike out to meet the PG over the moonstruck waves.
Drawing closer, it resolved itself as a big twenty-four-foot rigid inflatable raider boat, one of the type carried aboard the Cyclone-class Patrol Craft. The two pirogues lashed to its flanks distorted its shape, and a line trailed astern to the pinasse it had under tow. Outboard burbling under the strain, the RIB drew slowly alongside the Queen.
“How did your half go?” Amanda called down.
“Pretty fair,” Stone Quillain replied, standing in the bow of his flagship. “A few smugglers got away into the swamps, but we figure we pretty much got all the boats and the gas.”
This had been the other half of OK Corral. Amanda had sprung her trap immediately adjacent to an extensive stretch of isolated coastal swamp, a perfect sanctuary for a flotilla of small smuggling craft under attack. At the start of the engagement, the Union oil carriers had scattered into the protective cover with alacrity, only to find that someone else had gotten there first.
Nights prior, Stone Quillain and his Marines had stealthily infiltrated this same stretch of coastal marsh. Cramped and mosquito-chewed, yet with the patience of a pack of hunting crocodiles, they had lived under camouflage nets aboard their small raider craft, waiting for their prey to be driven into their arms.
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