The cry was an instinctive reaction. The last thing he had seen before he had fallen had been the forward turret with its glacis plate caved in and its wrenched gun tube angling uselessly toward the sky.
“Someone radio the Flagship! Tell them it’s the freighter! The freighter!”
*
Modern naval warfare was supposed to be a courtly over-the-horizon exchange of precision guided high-tech weaponry. That was why Amanda Garrett ignored the conventions. Trick your way in close where you weren’t expected, she thought, then ravage them! Rip their guts out before they know you’re even there! Preserve your own crew by not giving the enemy a chance to fight back. It had worked for her before and it could work again. It all rested on how fast she could deal death and destruction.
“All batteries! Guns free! Engage to starboard! Fire!”
There as a meager half-mile between the commando carrier and the frigate when the Shenandoah lit up. The two flat-shooting OTO Melara “Super Rapid” auto cannon in the starboard casemates began to spew their eighty-five-rounds-per-minute barrage of 76mm shells, aiming low to body-blow the frigate’s hull.
The Marine gunners manning the Avenger-Hellfire systems and Javelin anti-tank launchers went high. Squinting through their weather penetrating night vision sights, they steered their laser-guided projectiles in on specific targets: the frigate’s bow turret and bridge. The Hellfires and Javelins had not been designed for naval war. They were intended for killing tanks, but they were also adaptable.
The machine gun teams were not meant to engage heavy surface warships either, but they served as well, their tracer streams holding on target. Battlefield multiplication worked in their favor. A .50 caliber heavy machine gun bullet can effortlessly punch through the half-inch plating of a standard ship’s hull and, while one such round won’t do a great deal of damage, several thousand of them can wreak a great deal of havoc indeed.
Over the course of a bare two minutes, the command ship of the Indonesian battle force was gnawed to death, hundreds of minor hits accumulating into major devastation. OTO Melara rounds ripped open her waterline. Automatic weapons fire riddled her sensor antenna, blinding her and stacking the dead up in her gun tubs. Anti-tank missiles burned out her interior one compartment at a time, wiping all life off of her bridge. Fires and secondary explosions began to flare brighter than the projectile hits.
The Shenandoah curved around the Nala in a foaming half circle, the hapless Indonesian held at the center of the turn, the commando carrier’s fire streams linking the two vessels.
“Dead one! Drop him!” Amanda yelled into her headset as they cut across the dying frigate’s stern. “Helm, steady as you go! Clear portside casemate mounts! All Batteries, shift
fire! Target to port! Fire as you bear!”
She glanced at the tactical display. With the straits exploding in front of him, the captain of the third and last frigate in the battle force column, the Malahayati, had put his helm hard over, swinging to port and parallel with the turning Shenandoah, unmasking his own batteries.
To emphasize the point, there was a series of deeper thuds out in the night and the roaring howl of incoming heavy shells. A row of towering spray plumes from the Malahayati’s 4.7 marched past the Shenandoah’s bow.
“CIC! Clear portside missile bays! Let’s give him a broadside!”
*
All along the ridge above the strait, the line of SPEED Cobras bobbed up into their firing positions. On the Indonesian air defense radars, they registered as faint returns blending into the island’s ground clutter. The row of ships registered cleanly on the infra-red sensors of the American attack helos. The only “ground clutter” the helos had to deal with were the thermal blooms of the burning and sinking missile boats along the transport column’s flanks. The wrecks of the smaller vessels were already falling astern and were no longer a factor. The “peeling” portion of the fire mission had been accomplished.
“All flights, salvo fire on my mark!” Arkady commanded. “Three … two … one … mark and fire!”
Far out across the waters, there was a heat pulse on the decks of the Taluk Surabaya as a Crotal area defense missile roared from its launcher cell, aimed at the line of attacking helicopters. But sixteen Penguins replied to the single Crotal, launch flame rippling down the length of the ridge.
Before the Indonesian anti-air missile could reach them, the SPEED Cobras ducked, sinking back behind the safety of the high ground like a row of prairie dogs seeking their holes.
The anti-ship salvo had been launched with as much perfection as the battlefield would allow. There was no place for the ship column to hide.
Then raw, blind fate intervened.
The Teluk Hading was the second ship in the Indonesian line, cruising directly between the frigate Slamet Riyadi and the Teluk Surabaya. The elderly LSM was the feeblest warship in the rebel fleet. It hadn’t even been considered in the Shenandoah’s attack template, being classified as a mop-up target. But now the little ship intervened in the developing battle in a way that no one had expected or desired, especially by its crew and passengers.
The captain of the Teluk Hading had sensibly attempted to augment his ship’s fixed armament of four 37mm anti-aircraft guns with whatever defensive odds and ends that might prove useful from his cargo of troops and military equipment.
But the young Indonesian soldiers he carried were by no means seamen or sea warriors.
Acting in response to frantic orders yelled down from the LSM’s bridge, an Army missile team hastened to the portside rail, trying to load and prep their Mistral MANPAD launcher for firing.
The foot of the number one man of the team – the missileer who actually carried, aimed and fired the launcher tube – came down on a streak of oil that had leaked from one of the military vehicles loaded onto the amphib’s weather deck. He slipped and fell and, as he did so, his hand convulsively tightened on the missile launcher’s handgrip.
The weapon’s external safety should have been engaged. It wasn’t.
Wildly unguided, the little Mistral anti-aircraft missile screamed out of its launcher tube. Bouncing off the deck plating, it skittered under the cluster of vehicles parked in the amphib’s waist. The flare of its exhaust momentarily reflected off the Day-Glo warning painted across the rear face of a tanker truck.
DANGER! PETROL!
A massive mushroom of orange flame geysered upwards and grew on the LST’s deck, lighting the sea around the doomed ship for a mile in all directions. Bright as it was to the naked eye, the heat radiation it threw off was even more dazzling to the seeker heads of the oncoming wave of anti-ship missiles.
The major problem with so-called “smart” weapons is that they aren’t. They can be exceedingly simple-minded when confronted with a problem or decision outside of their very limited zone of expertise. In this instance, a number of the incoming Penguin missiles caught the heat flare of the exploding Indonesian landing ship on the periphery of their guidance sensors. This was something obviously much bigger and hotter than what they had initially been aimed at, so it obviously must be more worth killing.
Three of the Penguin rounds targeted on the Slamet Riyaid skidded in flight and swarmed in on the flaming LSM, as did two from the flight launched at the Teluk Surabaya. In the end, it was, perhaps, better for those aboard the Teluk Hading.
Being blown to bits was marginally a superior death to being burned alive.
*
Of the four Penguins that did continue to home on the Teluk Surabaya, one was deflected by the ship’s countermeasures launchers. Another was intercepted and disintegrated by a burst from one of the big amphib’s AK630 antimissile Gatling guns. The two surviving ship-killers executed their end of run pop-up maneuvers and dove into the decks of the Surabaya.
The warhead detonations reverberated through the hull of the big ship like blows landing on an empty oil drum. The flagship was wounded, but far from slain, and the overhead speakers filled with the elevated voices of the damage control parties as the ventilation system filled with the smell of hot metal and burning paint.
“Admiral! What are your orders, sir? Admiral Ketalaman, what are your orders?”
“Stand on.” The reply was barely a whisper. “Stand on for Jakarta.”
Ketalaman’s Chief of Staff wondered at the thing clutched so tightly in his Admiral’s hand. It looked like a fragment of rock.
*
