Choosers of the Slain

by James H. Cobb

  The CIC crew felt the deck tilt ominously beneath their feet, and the blaring of a second set of alarms. almost drowned out the moaning of overloaded metal that echoed up out of the ship's structure.

  "The roll inclinometer is approaching red-line limits, Captain!"

  "I know, helm. Keep pushing her. She can take it."

  Amanda was venturing into that unknown territory beyond listed design specifications. She was trusting to her mariner's instincts and to the years she had spent helping to create this ship. Going by the book would not save them now.

  If it was bad in the CIC, it was terrifying topside. As the big ship leaned, Ken Hiro and the bridge crew were forced to brace themselves against whatever was available. Peering down and out of the starboard side of the windscreen, they could see the first wave curling green along the full length of the weather-deck railing.

  Then it grew worse.

  The Argentine corvette came into sight, tearing a furrow through the sea smoke. In the manner of hydrofoils, she was pitching into her turn as steeply as the American destroyer was listing out of hers. The tip of her stern foil was lifting out, slashing open the surface of the sea, and the twin horizontal geysers of her hydrojet drive thundered in her wake. She was attempting to avoid the impending collision as desperately as Cunningham and, just for the moment, the American destroyer hands were wishing her well.

  "Okay, helm," Amanda said quietly. "Start bringing your rudder amidships. Not too fast or you'll lay her right over on her side. Let her get her head up."

  The inclinometers shifted back into the safety zone and with a heavy, shuddering roll the Duke came upright on her new heading. A meager two hundred yards away, the Argentine corvette was running parallel to her, almost matching her course and speed. Muzzle flashes began to flare rhythmically at its bow and stern, and tracer rounds began to arc out at the Cunningham.

  "Gunners, take him! All mounts traverse right and fire as you bear!"

  Amanda could feel the shell hits, heavier and more muffled than the discharge of the Duke's own weapons. The first faint scent of burning plastic and hot metal began to seep in through the ventilators.

  Back aft at the damage-control stations, the DC officers began calling down the warning lights appearing on their panels.

  "I'm showing skin damage above the waterline between frames nineteen and twenty-two."

  "Confirm that. We've got shell hits opposite number-two Vertical Launch System. Damage-control team Alpha Bravo responding."

  "Roger, inform the TACCO that number-two VLS is going down. I'm pulling the safety breakers."

  "Shell hits astern. Frame forty-one. I'm showing skin penetration and a high-temperature warning light."

  "Confirm that. Team Alpha Delta responding. Fire in the hangar bay!"

  Arkady gave Amanda's shoulder a parting squeeze and then he was gone, racing aft.

  The Duke was not passively accepting the attack. She was repaying in kind. Danny Lyndiman, the same young gunner's mate who had been on-line the day of the first Argentine air strike, was at his new duty assignment at number-one gun-control station. Both of the Oto Melara Super Rapids were slaved to his hand controller, with both turrets firing to the same aiming point. Laying the crosshairs of his targeting screen on the Plimsoll line of the hydrofoil, he squeezed the trigger.

  The Oto Melaras raged, each slamming out its stream of 76mm projectiles. They weren't tracer rounds, but their superheated steel glowed green in the thermographic sights, marking their flight. As the converging shell streams touched the Argentine's hull, skin shredded and hellfire spilled out. With the precision of a metalsmith wielding a cutting torch, Lyndiman began to draw the stream of shell-bursts across the length of the corvette's hull.

  Simultaneously, dazzling white points of light began to dance across the hydrofoil's upperworks. The Duke's second duty gunner had placed the starboard Phalanx mount under manual control and had brought it into the engagement, the vicious little tungsten penetrators stitching through the superstructure of the smaller craft like a needle through tissue paper.

  The Argentine vessel couldn't stand it. The two vessels thundered along side by side, exchanging broadsides like two Napoleonic ships of the line. They were trading a near-equal amount of fire, but the American vessel had almost eight times the displacement to absorb it with. The destroyer was being hurt, but the corvette was being torn apart. Her captain, in a desperate bid for survival, accelerated and veered off, trying to open the range.

  "He's bugging out!" Dix yelled joyfully. "He's running for it! Gunners, stay on him! Stay ... Jesus, sweet Jesus!" The TACCO's voice sank to an awed whisper.

  The voices of every other person within sight of an exterior monitor were stilled as well.

  One of the Duke's Oto Melara rounds had found and damaged the main spar of the corvette's forward hydrofoil assembly. Under the load of the turn, it had sheered off.

  Dropping ten feet off the plane, the corvette's narrow forehull had dug into the face of an oncoming wave. At sixty knots, the water might as well have been concrete.

  The hydrofoil's immense momentum drove its bow under the surface while its stern was lifted into the air. Its keel whipped like a willow wand, tearing loose hull framings and smashing them out through the Fiberglas skin like bone splinters through the flesh of a compound fracture.

  Aghast, the men and women of the Cunningham watched as the stern of the corvette angled higher, fifty, sixty, seventy degrees, hesitating for a long moment at the high point of its arc. Amanda had an instant's hellish vision of what must be happening inside that hull. Ammunition raining down out of magazine racks, tons of kerosene spilling out of bunkerage tanks, white-hot turbines tearing loose from their bedplates and crashing forward through thin bulkheads ...

  The length of the Argentine's hull split open like the petals of a blossoming flower, disgorging a single, titanic golden-orange fireball. The Duke's deck plates rang under the impact of the shock wave as she swept past the explosion. Then the monitors went empty and dark and she was in the clear, barring a single fragment of smoking metal that came spinning down out of the mists to rattle off the upperworks. From somewhere over near number-one gunnery station, a quietly exultant voice exclaimed, "Yeah! Free game!"

  Amanda shook off the effects of the spectacle and returned her attention to the main situational display. Their evasive turn had brought them around more than ninety degrees from their previous course of due north, to a heading of west-southwest. The following firefight with the hydrofoil had carried them clear across the bow of the Argentine transport column from its port side to the starboard.

  It had also cost them the initiative of the attack. Dead or not, that gutsy hydrofoil skipper might still kill them.

  "Helm, left standard rudder! Bring us back around to zero one zero degrees."

  What was worse, the Duke's invisibility had been compromised. The battle damage to her sensitive stealth skin would multiply her radar cross-section several times over.

  "Mr. McKelsie, give me a maximum-density RBOC screen and a full decoy pattern."

  "Captain, we've only got one decoy set left in the launchers, and the RBOC magazines are getting low."

  "Then give me all of what's left. Now, McKelsie! Kill all radars! Cease radiating!"

  The Cunningham completed the foaming circle she had begun, coming about more than a full 360 degrees. She was attempting what in an aerial dogfight would have been called a turn and burn, the creation of a knot of radar and thermal clutter that might serve as a false target to draw enemy fire.

  "Steering zero one zero, Captain."

  "Very well. Steady as she goes. Hold us parallel to the convoy line."

  With their sensors disabled and their communication links cut by the Duke's jamming, the two surviving Argentine transports were blindly holding to their original course and speed.

  "What's the status of those last two operational close escorts?" she asked Beltrain.

  "The undamaged Meko l
ooks like he's going to assist his shot-up partner, and the A-69 is hanging back behind the convoy. He's having trouble getting a burn-through, but he's trying to target on something ..."

  The exterior monitor covering the stern arc flamed brightly. Half a mile back along the Cunningham's wake, in the heart of the chaff node, a futile Exocet salvo boiled the sea and tore up the sky.

  "... and I guess he just did," Beltrain finished.

  "Right. Secure EMCON! Radars back up!"

  The screens reactivated. Amanda could see the A-69-class frigate turning away, its bolt spent and its missile cells empty. The three ships of the distant covering force still appeared to be milling around in confusion some fifteen miles ahead of the convoy. A glance at the infrared scanners indicated the continuing, intermittent flicker of weapons fire and at least one steady-state glow out along that bearing.

  "Dix, what's going on out there?"

  "I'm not sure, ma'am. The SCMs should be long gone by now. Maybe we pinked somebody."

  Beltrain's assessment was correct. Fate had guided the distant covering force almost directly into the path of the Cunningham's diversionary cruise-missile strike. The cool cybernetic intellects that dwelt within the guidance packages of the SCMs had recognized the Argentine destroyers as worthy targets, and they had swarmed the warships like a school of hungry barracuda.

  The Argentines had fought back and had fought back well. Those rounds not decoyed off target were destroyed by a barrage of gun and missile fire. The captain of the fleet flagship Nueve de Julio did not make his fatal error until literally the final minute of the strike.

  Seeking to evade the last of the incoming weapons, he had ordered a turn away from the cruise missile stream. But, in doing so, he had unmasked the broad rear facing of his ship's helicopter hangar to the SCM's search radar. The missile was drawn in by this high-RCS target like a moth to a flame. The high-sided structure also blocked a few key degrees of coverage for the Oto Melara point defense mounts, and the twelfth SCM rode in through this narrow free-fire zone and struck the hangar doors with dead-center precision.

  Punching through, it had slammed into the tightly parked cluster of helicopters within, bulldozing them into a crumpled jumble against the front of the hangar bay. The cruise missile's engine module had disintegrated, spraying flame and white-hot shrapnel throughout the compartment, while the half-ton warhead had torn loose from the airframe and crashed forward through three more bulkheads before finally exploding.

  The blast shattered the midships superstructure of the big Animoso-class destroyer. Both funnels and the mainmast toppled over the side with a hollow metallic scream, the flashback down the stack ductwork demolishing the engine rooms and decimating the engineering watch. Dead in the water, she began to roll broadside on to the force of the waves, while back aft, the burning and bursting fuel cells of her own aircraft turned her stern into a self-consuming inferno.

  Dead also was the last Argentine hope for reorganizing into any kind of effective fighting force. Admiral Luis Fouga would never have to face his failure. He had been crushed between the crumpled bulkheads of his flag plot. From this point on, control of this conflict would rest solely aboard the spectral killer that was systematically ripping the heart out of the Argentine dreams of Antarctic empire.

  "Coming in on the oiler, Captain!"

  "Turrets traverse right and engage the target! Dix, arm starboard torpedo bays. Range safeties to minimum. We don't have time to fool around with wire guidance, so set all fish for independent proximity homing. Salvo-fire all tubes as you get a solution!"

  The night-bright optics swiveled to cover the new target along with the gun mounts. Both acquired it simultaneously as the big, slab-sided tanker loomed up out of the sea smoke. The autocannon began to hammer again and golden shell bursts danced along the tanker's deck line, followed by a fiery series of secondary explosions among the replenishment stations and fuel-transfer heads.

  On the Alpha Screen, a cone of yellow illumination radiated out from the flank of the Cunningham's position hack, designating the effective firing arc of her starboard bank of fixed torpedo tubes. The cone enveloped the Argentine oiler.

  "Opening outer tube doors. Solution is set."

  Just above the Duke's waterline amidships, a series of pocket-panel hatches sliced open, revealing a row of blunt, polyethylene-capped warheads.

  "Firing on bearing now. Torpedoes away!"

  With the peculiar, sequential thump-kisss of an above-water launch, five Mark 50 Barracuda torpedoes shot out of their tubes and into the sea. Unlike World War II-vintage tin fish, these stumpy little weapons had only a secondary surface-attack capacity. Their comparatively small, shaped-charge warheads had been intended to crack the shell of a deep-diving nuclear submarine, not cave in the side of a merchant vessel. On the other hand, 110 pounds of high explosives detonating against one's hull plates could not be casually shrugged off either.

  Four of the Barracudas found a home. Four thin plumes of spray kicked up along the flank of the Luis A. Huergo. With her decks aflame and black oil bleeding from her ruptured belly, she began to lose speed.

  Amanda gave a curt nod. "Helm, come right to zero four five. Cut back across the bow of the third transport. Dix, stand by your portside tubes. Same setup. We'll go for a down-the-throat shot as we cross his course line. Gunners, action to port. Shift fire to new target."

  There was an uneven stammer to the firing of the Oto Melaras now. Both turrets had expended their entire base load, and the shell humpers down in the magazines were having trouble shoving ammunition into the feeder belts fast enough to fully satisfy the voracious appetite of the guns. The mounts were still capable of dealing damage, though.

  The forecastle of the tank-landing ship Piedrabuena shattered under the impact of multiple hits. Danny Lyndiman rocked his hand back minutely and the firestreams walked up the front facing of the deckhouse to focus on the bridge,

  chewing the structure away. Then the torpedoes arrived. Three of them, a triple sledgehammer blow against her hull. Spray exploded out from beneath her forefoot and the entire bow structure distorted and collapsed like a wet cardboard box.

  No surviving human eye witnessed the end of the Piedrabuena. The Cunningham had already swept past on her way to the open water northeast of the ruined convoy. The LST's propellers had continued to race after the torpedoes had hit and the mangled bow doors had acted like a gigantic scoop, channeling a thousand tons of ocean into the overloaded vehicle deck that ran almost the full length of the ship's hull.

  As smoothly and swiftly as a crash-diving submarine, the Piedrabuena began to slide beneath the waves. The men who could have ordered the engines stopped were dead in the wreckage of the wheelhouse. The others followed swiftly as icy seawater exploded into their compartments. Carrying her entire crew with her, she began her final voyage, two miles down into the chill wet dark of Drake Passage.

  "There goes the LST, ma'am," the TACCO reported.

  "She's a goner."

  "I can also confirm that one of the Animosos is out of it. Dead in the water and all electronics are down," Christine called in from Raven's Roost. "We got these dudes up a tree."

  Amanda agreed. She ruled this battlefield now. Her tactical officer had solid locks on the two surviving close escorts. With one word from her, he could kill them both in seconds. She could then double back among the drifting hulks of the convoy. Using them for cover, she could defy or destroy the last surviving elements of the Argentine distant covering force. She could make it a clean sweep if she so desired, and go home with a broom tied to her masthead.

  At this moment, she was the queen of the polar seas.

  "Do you want to reengage, ma'am?" Dix inquired.

  "Negative. Check fire, all systems. Maintain course and speed and pull clear of the area. We've done our job."

  BUENOS AIRES

  0211 HOURS: MARCH 30, 2006

  President Antonio Sparza sat alone in his work office, listening to
the faint pulse-beat ticking of the case clock. He was here responding to something more than nervous tension. It had denied him sleep and had driven him to this place where he had reached the high-water mark of his life.

  The desk phone warbled softly.

  "Yes."

  "Mr. President, this is Admiral Valleo at the Naval Ministry." The officer was speaking with a deliberate conciseness, like a man giving a well-thought-out testimony at a trial. "The convoy has been intercepted."

  "Go on."

  "The corvette Catamarca and the tank-landing ship Piedrabuena have been sunk. The fleet oiler Huergo, the Antarctic operations ship Alferez Mackinlay, and the destroyer Nueve de Julio have all been heavily damaged and are currently burning and dead in the water. At this time it has been considered advisable to remove the crews from these vessels. The destroyer Heroina has also been damaged, but it is believed that she can be saved."

  "What about the North American warship?"

  "The convoy escorts engaged the attacking vessel with gun and missile fire. The results are unknown at this time. We are not in current contact with the enemy."

  "I see."

  There was a silent pause that the officer on the other end of the circuit was almost hesitant to break.

  "Mr. President, we are out of communication with Fleet Admiral Fouga. It is believed that he may have been killed aboard the Nueva de Julio. The senior surviving convoy captain is requesting instructions. What should we tell him, sir?"

  "Tell him to come home, Admiral. Tell him to save whatever he can and come home."

  Sparza set the phone back into its cradle. Getting up from his desk, he went out into the richly carpeted corridor beyond his office. A short distance down that corridor, glass double doors opened onto the balcony that extended across the front of the Casa Rosada and faced the Plaza de Mayo.