“This must be the commitment to the attack, General,” Atiba exclaimed. “Everything indicates a beach assault by the American marines on our northern flank. We need to start orienting our reserve forces to cover the northern land approaches to the harbor area.”
“No,” Belewa grunted, leaning over the map table. “We don’t move anyone out of position. Not yet.” For a moment it was as it had been in the old days. A tactical problem to be solved and the animosities forgotten. “This is all nothing, Sako. All smoke and lights and a big show. She wants us to think there will be a landing. She beckons to us. She tries to draw our attention. Look!”
Belewa’s finger stabbed down onto the map circling the northern coastal sector above Port Monrovia. “The Po River. The St. Paul. All these diversions happening to the north of our position. And nothing to the south.”
Belewa’s fingertip arced across the map surface to the southern sector below Monrovia. “What is happening down here, Sako? What is it we are not seeing?”
The two raiders bumped softly together, Stone Quillain’s hand catching one of the carrying loops on Amanda’s craft. Beyond the faint hissing of the raindrops on the sea, the distant, sporadic gunfire of the St. Paul River garrison could be heard away to the north.
“How we doing?” Quillain inquired, lifting a corner of his boat’s RAM hood.
“So far, so good,” Amanda replied, doing the same. It felt good to admit a puff of comparatively cool air to the rank and humid interior of the little raft. “The northern diversions have all gone in. As we expected, Belewa is too smart to bite at them. Drone recon indicates he’s standing pat.”
Quillain gave an acknowledging grunt. “Yeah, but right about now he’s got to be looking back over his shoulder, wonderin’ just where the real crunch is coming from.”
“So we hope.” As per instruction, Amanda had turned the luminous dial of her watch inward to her wrist. Now she flipped the worn Lady Admiral face up for a moment to check the time. “We’ll be giving him a suggestion as to where he can look in another few seconds here. The MADCOIL strike should be going in now.”
Most of the officers and men of the Union army’s 1st Mobile Strike Force were too keyed up to linger inside their humidity rank cinder-block barracks this night. Not with a fight in the offing.
Instead, they loitered around their combat-readied vehicles in the motor pool areas, talking the rambling inconsequential talk of soldiers caught in the inevitable military cycle of hurry up and wait. Shielded from the drizzle, cigarette tips glowed in cupped palms.
This urge to be out in the open instead of under the roofs of the camp’s buildings would save many of their lives in the minutes to come.
They were given no warning beyond a soft droning in the distance, a droning that grew rapidly into a thudding roar. Men looked up, confused. The threat they had been told of lay out to sea, but this sound was coming from inland, from over Union territory.
An officer broke through the hesitation, bellowing a command. The base alarm Klaxons started their urgent metallic honking. Men scrambled for stacked weapons. Vehicle crewmen started engines and scrambled to clear the antiaircraft machine guns atop their trucks and tracks.
All too late to make a difference.
Strike group MADCOIL had followed a devious flight path since crossing the Union coast. With a pair of Eagle Eye recon drones flying point like a pair of cavalry scouts, the helicopter formation had snaked its way inland, hugging the forest canopy to evade the minimal Union radar coverage. Swinging wide around the outlying outposts of the Monrovia defenses, they picked up the meandering track of the Mesurado River.
Here, the helos had turned west, following the track of the river channel back toward the city. Dropped even lower, the aircraft skimmed the surface of the sluggish estuary, the beating of their rotors contained between its thickly forested banks.
In his night-vision visor, Evan Dane saw the shoreline of Bank Island loom ahead. With Bally Island on his right hand, he banked the Merlin to starboard, trailing the curve of river around to the west-northwest.
Shore lights flickered past in the rain, all but invisible to the naked eye, yet piercingly bright in the night optics. The water shimmered two men’s heights below.
Dane risked a single split-second glance down at the GPU screen. Right, still in the slot! Clearing Bank Island to port. The river turned fully to the north here, so their course now angled them across to a point on the west bank.
“On base leg to attack! All aircraft stand by! Come left to two seven zero on my mark!”
More lights dead on off the Merlin’s nose. The riverbank and Capitol Hill beyond it.
“Flight break left and climb! Climb! On attack leg!”
Hard back on pitch and collective! War power to the turbines! Up and into a bank and a zoom beyond anything the big ASW helo had ever been intended for. They were over the shoreline now, the shacks and streets flashing past beneath them. Momentary images of night-wandering Africans gawking upward at the howling monster-birds that had swept in from the darkness.
Shack-street-shack-street shack… Clear sky and over the crest! No hellish glare in the side-view mirrors to announce the failure of a flight mate to clear the hill.
There! The stadium just off the line of flight to the right! The large open fenced area dead ahead with its neatly ranked rows of barracks, so different from the jumble of civilian housing they had just flown over. This is it! This is where we’re supposed to be!
“Target ahead!”
They came down off the hill crest, diving balls to the wall; the airframe shuddered as the airspeed redlined. Move, you old cow! D’you want these bastards to get a shooting line on us?
Over the fence line. Over the objective! The door gunners opened up, hosing tracers at the scattering Union soldiers below.
Dane’s finger closed convulsively on the ordnance release trigger. “Bombs gone!”
Racks designed to drop torpedoes and depth charges instead released fifty-gallon oil drums filled with a home brewed napalm of gasoline blended with soap flakes. A doctored 40mm incendiary grenade screwed into the filler hole served adequately as a detonator.
Dane’s night-vision system overloaded, and he tore the dead visor up and off of his eyes. The makeshift incendiaries sprayed across rooftops and splattered in spectacular blossoms of fire across the tarmacked car parks, exploding vehicle fuel tanks joining in the holocaust in the seconds that followed.
The helicopter formation swept across Barclay barracks, surfing on a wave of orange and white flame. Off his port side, outlined against the glare, Dane could see the big U.S. Sea Stallion riding nose high and with a steady stream of oil drums rolling out of its open tailgate like depth charges off the fantail of a World War II destroyer.
The last canister of hellfire dropped clear. Ordnance expended, the strike group raced away from the army base, racing now for the sanctuary of the sea. A scattering of tracers chased them, and Danes guts locked up for an instant as he saw the spark trail of a shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile arc into the sky.
However, like the night-vision visor, the infrared homing system of the little projectile was overwhelmed by its proximity to the inferno raging within the Union military base. After staggering drunkenly across the sky for a moment, the missile dove into the flames, minutely compounding the disaster.