Gloves! Forgot my goddamn gloves! To hell with that entirely! Quillain swung over the rail and plummeted down the fast rope, the flesh flaying off his hands, boy and Marine piling up on the deck.
“Go! Go! Go!” Quillain’s bellow was unnecessary. The Queen’s inboard thrusters shoved her off from the side of the Bajara, the drive propellers blurring into a roar of power as the seafighter lunged ahead. With no time to get belowdecks, Tallman and Amanda dropped flat beside Quillain and his dazed prisoner. Steamer locked the Queen’s rudders over, curving her away from the doomed ship, scrabbling for distance.
And then the whole world burst into flames.
A two-hundred-foot jet of fire geysered from the Bajara’s deck. A second, a third, more sequential flaming eruptions, merging and intertwining into an eye-searing incandescent mushroom of scarlet and gold that continued to grow, lifting into the sky for three times the length of the dying tanker. The thermal plume it generated boiled even higher, ripping open the cloud cover over Port Monrovia and evaporating the rain even as it fell from the sky.
The light of it turned the harbor’s night into a furnace bright day. And the sound, not an explosion in any classic sense, but a deep and vibrant thundering, like the wrath of God rolling across the sea.
The moisture steamed from Quillain’s utilities in the radiant glow. Looking across at his POW, Quillain found that the youth had regained consciousness. He also discovered that a miraculous change had taken place. Like the other boy warriors they had taken from the ship, he had reverted back into a child, bravadoless, bewildered, and now awed by the holocaust he and his captors were leaving behind.
Sprawled on the deck beyond the youth, Amanda Garrett looked back into Quillain’s eyes and smiled.
Because we’re the good guys…
The slipstream tore at Amanda as she swung her legs down through the overhead cockpit hatch. Before dropping down into the control deck, she paused for a last look around Monrovia Harbor.
Carondelet and Manassas had re-formed combat echelon, with the Queen and the trio of seafighters streaking for the harbor mouth, leaving behind the death pyre of the Bajara. Even though the PG squadron was fully illuminated by the ruddy petroleum glare, gunfire from the breakwaters had trailed off to almost nothing, the stunned Union defenders finding they had nothing left to defend.
Arching her back, Amanda slid down into the cockpit. With the Union prisoner and Sergeant Tallman secure in the main bay, Stone Quillain followed her through the hatch. Regardless of his damaged shoulder and hands, he kicked down the gunner’s saddle and assumed station at the twin-mount Browning fifties.
“Situation,” Amanda demanded, dropping into the navigator’s seat.
“One bitch left, Captain,” Steamer replied. “The Union gunboat group’s made it back! They’re coming in from the southwest and they’re going to be waiting for us outside of the harbor mouth. They’re maneuvering to engage, ma’am.”
“Fine!”
Startled, Steamer and Snowy twisted in their chair harnesses to look back at her. A part of Amanda’s own mind was surprised by her explosive exclamation as well. Yet a cool flush flowed through her, a kind of battle madness or battle focus that erased the tensions and terrors accumulated during the night’s action.
Along with it came a sure and certain knowledge that this fight wasn’t over yet, but that it soon would be.
Amanda accessed the squadron command channel. “Little Pig Lead to Little Pigs! Enemy gunboats coming in on bearing two one zero. Maintain combat echelon and come left to engage as we clear the harbor entrance. Fire as you bear! I say again, fire as you bear! We’re finishing this, now!”
“Acknowledged!”
“Rajah!”
“Doing it!”
Hellfire rounds and rocket pods slithered up out of the pedestal tubs and slammed onto firing rails. Auxiliary gunners screamed for cool barrels and reloads, and the shell humpers scrambled to respond. Accelerating to full war power, the Three Little Pigs blasted out through the narrow mouth of Port Monrovia, once designated by twin navigational beacons, now marked by the flaming hulks of the Union’s armored fighting vehicles.
Skidding in their turns, the seafighters came around to face their new attackers. However, even before the turn was completed, autocannon tracers streamed in toward them.
The Union corvette Promise was closing the range at full speed, her two smaller sister gunboats running at her flanks. Their bow waves glinted bloodred in the light of the fire column, and their forward gun mounts raved at the American squadron, hosing death. They had no hope of victory now, only the chance for vengeance.
“Little Pig Lead to Little Pigs! Enemy in sight! Engage! Engage! Engage!”
In the briefing trailer, the intel and the Admiral could only stare up at the overhead speaker. With the Eagle Eye drone knocked out, their only link to the battle was the squadron’s Talk-Between-Ships command channel. Disembodied voices called out from the Little Pig cockpits, the adrenaline-wired words backed by the yammer and shriek of gunfire and missile launch.
“Hostiles turning to port! They’re crossing the T on us!”
“Acknowledged, Frenchman. Target the column leader! Get on the Shanghai! Rebel, engage column trailer! We’ve got the corvette!”
“Rog that, Little Pig Lead, Hellfires on the way!”
“Yeah, baby, pour it on! Closing to thirty-mike range! Going to guns!”
“Frenchman, come left! You’re blocking my arc, dammit!”
“Rog that. Rebel, where are you…?”
“Little Pigs, break echelon. Independent maneuver!”
“Acknowledged, Lead… Oh yeah! We just tagged that fucker!”
“Heavy fire… watch the big guy! Breaking left… going for stern enfilade on enemy column.”
“Go for it, Rebel! Steamer, drop in behind Manassas. Carondelet, follow us in….”
“Frenchman executing… Oh Jesus! Jesus!”
“Clark, what’s going on? What’s happening back there?”
“Tony, they got the Queen! They got the Queen! Oh, God, they just blew the hell out of her!”
The gun layer commanding the Z mount of the Union corvette Promise had no idea that he’d targeted the American flag craft. With two fresh clips of ammunition in the breech of his SU-57 twin mount, he’d spotted the flash of a missile launch and had acquired a dim outline silhouetted in the uncertain light of the tanker burning inside the harbor. Hastily setting his sights, he’d smashed his foot down on the firing pedal, hosing all eight rounds at the target.
Fate or misfortune decreed that the Queen of the West would plow headlong into the fire stream.