“Full countermeasures, Pink! Get as low as you can!” Both pilots went to auto-eject on their dispenser racks and edged closer to the wavetops, the chaff streaming behind them glittering in the shell bursts, the anti-IR flares bouncing off the surface of the sea.
The fire streams followed them down, kicking up plumes of spray around the skittering SPEED Cobras. A taller tower of water lanced up behind them as an erratic Crotal missile hit the ocean in their wake.
Arkady grunted his words out in short bursts between jockeying his controls. “Pink … between the funnel and the aft mast … hit his missile tubes! Hose the missile tubes!”
It was another tactic salvaged from Arkady’s intense study of the old days of naval aviation. During the Second World War, American naval aviators had learned how to sink Imperial Japanese navy destroyers and frigates using machine gun fire alone. It was a matter of strafing the stern of the enemy ship until the depth charge racks on the fantail exploded.
Depth charges were no longer standard on modern men of war, but Arkady presupposed that a Harpoon missile tube packed with high explosives and solid rocket propellant might serve as a reasonable substitute.
“This is nuts!” Pinkerton’s mutter triggered his sound-actuated helmet mike. Arkady had to agree.
Flame streaked toward the helicopters from the stern house of the frigate, a Sadral launcher spewing a flight of Mistral missiles. “Evade! Break hard left!” Arkady yelled, instinctively flat skidding the Jeannie II across Pinkerton’s flight path, catching and pulling the SAM flight onto himself.
“Vince, watch it!”
Arkady reversed the controls and tried to pitch out of this initial turn, wing and rotor tips almost touching water. Light streaks blazed past the cockpit; then came the single rivet-loosening slam followed by the thwack and whine of shrapnel against the fuselage.
“Vince, you’re hit! You’re hit!
No shit, Sherlock! Arkady thought feverishly. His entire world was shaking into a blur.
It was a rotor strike. One of the Mistrals had caught and blown away a section of blade, fatally unbalancing both the rotor assembly and the entire aircraft. Arkady fought the controls, trying to both climb and kill the wandering gyroscopic precession dragging at the maimed aircraft. The instruments were unreadable – but the surface of the sea and eternity waited a bare fifty feet and a fragment of a second away.
In a conventional helicopter, it would have been technically referred to as a “terminal flight event.” But the Jeannie II was not conventional.
Arkady got a hand free from the control stick. Tearing up a sealed switch guard on the side console, he stabbed at the uncovered button.
A muffled explosion followed just behind and above his head. Shaped charges sheered through composites and titanium and the entire rotor hub and blade assembly blew away, forcibly ejected from the airframe. The SPEED crews called it “the Jesus Option.” And it was the last resort of all last resorts.
The hammering vibration faded, as did the twisting distortion of the SPEED Cobra’s flight path. Arkady hauled back on the stick and, riding its wings alone, his pure airplane lifted back into the safety of the sky.
“Lead, are you okay?”
“Good question! Ask me later!”
The Jesus option wasn’t supposed to leave a combat worthy aircraft – it was an emergency measure to get a pilot and a battle-damaged airframe home again – but Arkady found he had valid flight controls; his engine readouts were green and he still had a gun and ammunition.
Fuck it! Drive on!
Ahead, the silhouette of the Slamet Riyaid exploded toward them, the slab-sided angularity of British Cold War naval architecture readily apparent. Thank God the Indonesian naval budget had not stretched to include a Goalkeeper or Phalanx Close In Weapons System in the frigate’s refit.
Suddenly, a flood of golden light overwhelmed Arkady’s night vision system. Arkady tore up his helmet visor to find the target ship starkly outlined in the glare of booster flame. The slender pencil of a Harpoon missile was lifting vertically out of its midships launcher tube. They had designated the Shenandoah and they were opening up on her.
“Pink, hit the launcher tubes!” Arkady yelled one last time as he hauled the Jeannie II into a steep zoom after the arcing missile. Crushing the stick trigger under his finger, he hosed cannon shells into the Harpoon’s flight path.
Out of the hundreds of rounds he fired, one connected.
A mammoth orange fireball blossomed above the rebel frigate, crumpling and shredding its masts and upperworks. The Jeannie II was swatted helplessly onto her tail by the shockwave. Arkady felt the SPEED Cobra hover on the verge of a non-recoverable stall and groped for the ejector seat handle. Then, a second massive shock wave struck him from below, knocking the compound helo back into level flight.
Something that looked like a ship’s funnel sailed past outside the cockpit and Arkady realized he was flying through the flaming debris of the Slamet’s superstructure. Against the outline of the frigate’s blazing hull, the aviator caught a glimpse of Pink Pinkerton’s SPEED Cobra sheering off into the night.
“Is that what I was supposed to be doing, Vince?” Pinkerton inquired.
“Yeah. Pretty much. Form up and let’s clear out of here, Pink. Star Child, this is Strike Lead. The last escort is
down. I say again – the last escort is down. Strike is out on the side and you are clear.”
The Bridge of the Teluk Sirabaya
2322 Hours; Zone Time, November 20 2008
Ketalaman didn’t know how he had made his way to the bridge of the flagship. There had been a shattering blow against the side of the amphib’s superstructure that had hurled the Admiral to the deck and the interior lighting had failed, leaving the world lit by the streaks and glares of battery powered battle lanterns.
Choking, Ketalaman had moved, desperately searching for clean air, and somehow he had stumbled into the wheelhouse.
Pebbled glass mixed with blood crunched under his feet. Men yelled into interphones, striving vainly to bring order out of disintegration. Looking out from the bridge over the twisted ruin of the Crotal launcher, all that could be seen of the Teluk Sirabaya was flame and ruin. Massive chunks had been bitten from the amphib’s weather decks by missile hits and men moved amid the twisted steel, some few with purpose, the others, the majority, with the convulsions of the dying.
The waters around the flagship were a maritime charnel house of burning ships, burning lakes of fuel, burning dreams reflecting off oil-streaked waters. Life rafts and struggling life-jacketed bodies were illuminated around the peripheries.
And the Teluk Surabaya was driving deeper into the heart of it all.
Beyond this hell there was only the darkness. Ketalaman could not see the mountains.
On the foredeck, the amphibious ship’s 76mm twin mount began to fire under local control, blazing futilely at the night beyond the bow, trying to strike at the hantu that waited for them, the devourer of lives and futures that had hunted Merpati Ketalaman and invoked this upon him.
“Turn!” Ketalaman heard a raw croaking voice that he scarcely recognized as his own. “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
The Bridge of the MV Galaxy Shenandoah
2324 Hours; Zone Time, November 20, 2008
