“Mr. Hiro, execute a single surf ace-search sweep to the west with the Aegis arrays. Minimum duration. Full output.”
Aboard the Five Nineteen boat, the turbine howl was growing louder, intermixed with the boiling hiss of a hull cutting water. In the wet darkness, it was hard to get a bearing on the sound.
“Hoong?” Lieutenant Zhou ordered. “Get forward and raise the anchor. Helmsman, prepare to start engines. Radio operator, open the channel to the Flag boat … ”
“Scan complete, Lieutenant,” the Aegis systems operator reported. “Securing primary emitters.”
“Imaging in storage?”
“Acknowledged, ma’am.”
“Yes!”
“Lieutenant Rendino, what’s going on?” Ken Hiro demanded.
“Some very-heavy-caliber shit, sir,” Christine replied.
Her ebullience was fading now, as she began to analyze and project the potential of what she had just discovered. “Some very-heavy-caliber shit indeed.”
Aboard the Five Nineteen boat, Lieutenant Zhou lifted the radio mike to his lips.
In the Cunningham’s Combat Information Center, all hands jumped as a tense, staccato voice suddenly issued from a speaker in the intelligence bay. Of the duty watch, only Ken Hiro understood what was being said.
“Five Nineteen boat to squadron command! Contact report … ”
Topside, Christine’s voice crackled urgently out of the squawk box. “Bridge, this is Raven’s Roost! Somebody’s just lit off a radio transmitter out there.”
“Where away!” Amanda demanded.
“Close! Real close! Too close to get a bearing!”
It would have taken a superhuman not to glance up, just for an instant.
“I repeat, Five Nineteen boat to squadron command. Contact report … ”
The words choked off in Zhou Shan’s throat. He saw a flash of white in the darkness, a broad, low-riding V of foam at wave-top level. A bow wave. Then a ship’s stem materialized out of the night, sharp edged and radically raked, impossibly close and towering over the hydrofoil.
Zhou was the Five Nineteen’s captain. He knew it was his responsibility to save his ship and crew. But he found that he had no miracles to spend.
Vince Arkady shifted his eyes back to the FLIR monitor just in time to see a shadowy form disappearing under the outline of the Cunningham’s, prow. There was no opportunity to order a course change, no chance to make any kind of formal sighting call.
“Watch it!” he yelled. Lunging down over the lee-helm controls, he slammed the throttles closed and threw the propeller controls into neutral.
The Cunningham’s cutwater touched the port flank of the Five Nineteen boat.
Fire blazed under the flare of the destroyer’s bow and all hands on the bridge were thrown forward. It wasn’t an impact as much as it was an abrupt deceleration as the Duke drove through the disintegrating hulk of the Chinese fast attack craft.
“Stop all engines!” Amanda yelled, dragging herself back to her feet.
“All engines answering stop, Captain!” Arkady replied, disentangling himself from the lee-helm pedestal.
“Bridge,” the intercom speaker blared. “What’s going on up there?”
“We’ve just PT-109ed a Red patrol boat,” the aviator responded into his headset mike. “Stand by, CIC.”
Amanda scrambled out onto the port wing of the bridge and peered down over the side. The Chinese hydrofoil had been torn completely in two and its bow section was rolling down the destroyer’s side, rasping and scraping along her waterline. Above the crumpling-oil-can noises of the breakup came the sound of a human voice screaming.
Instinctively, Amanda reached back over the aft bridge rail. Flipping open a cover plate, she revealed a small T-grip handle. Giving it a twist, she yanked the handle outward, then socked it back in.
An access panel in the superstructure swung open and a twelve-man life-raft capsule ejected into the sea.
As the Duke continued to forge ahead under her residual momentum, Amanda watched the raft and the wreckage swirl away aft to be lost in the darkness.
Don’t foul the props, she thought feverishly. We can live with anything else, just don’t foul the props.
“Main engine control!” she snapped into her headset.
“Main engines, aye,” Chief Thomson’s steady voice came back.
“Run full clearance and alignment check on both propulsor pods. Expedite!”
“Will do. I think we’re okay, Captain. I think you got her shut down in time.”
“Damage control, report!”
“All boards still read green, Captain. Preliminary reports from DC team Alpha Alpha indicate no leakage and no buckling in the forward frames.”
In the encounter between the Duke’s reenforced bow and the Red Chinese FAC, the destroyer had won cleanly.
“Main Engine Control to Captain.”
“Go, Chief.”
“Clearance and alignment checks completed. Propellers are clear. Ready to answer bells.”
Thank God. Thank God. Now to get out of here, granted the Reds would let them.
That would be an act easier said than done. Down in the stealth systems bay, Frank Mckelsie and his team watched aghast as their threat boards blazed. Surface-search and firecontrol radars were lighting off all around the mouth of the estuary. Powerful mobile and fixed emitters were intently beginning to probe the night. A series of weaker, but closer, seaborne units had also appeared, extending off to the north of their position.
“We’re screwed,” one of the systems operators whispered.
“Screwed, hell!” Mckelsie snarled back. “We’re so far beyond screwed, they’re wheeling us into the delivery room. Stand by your jammers and decoys. We’re going to need ‘em.”
Another outline for potential disaster was unfolding in the central CIC work space. A new voice issued from the speaker tuned to the Communist command frequency, demanding and repetitive. Again, Ken Hiro was the only one to fathom its meaning.
“Nineteen boat, respond! Squadron Flag calling Five Nineteen boat. Do you receive? State your contact … “
Abruptly, the Cunningham’s exec levered himself out of the captain’s chair. “Put a transmitter on that frequency,” he roared, charging into the radio shack.
After a moment’s fumbling, one of the sparks extended a hand mike. “You’re up, sir.”
Accepting the microphone, Hiro began to speak into it urgently in Chinese. “Nineteen boat to Squadron Flag. An unidentified naval vessel has just made a pass near our location. We are proceeding to investigate.”
Releasing the mike button, Hiro yelled over his shoulder.
“For Crissake, somebody get on the horn to the Captain! Tell her to get the ship moving to the east!”
On the Duke’s bridge, Dix Beltrain’s voice issued from the overhead speaker. “Captain, Mr. Hiro says to get the ship moving to the east. He’s on the radio with the Chinese, and I think he’s trying to run some kind of a substitution play on them.”’
Amanda picked up on her executive officer’s stratagem almost instantly. Even fully stealthed, the Cunningham would produce a return on a highpowered military radar at close ranges, especially during low sea states such as they were experiencing now. However, that return would not be much different in size than that of the small craft they had just sent to the bottom.
On their screens, the Reds would be tracking only a single target, which they would think was their own picket boat.
Amanda blessed Ken Hiro, then she blessed herself for never trying to suppress the personal initiative of her officers.