Out on the headlands hooded concrete director towers perched atop the low hills, looking out over the estuary approaches.
Inside them, forward observers swiveled their twin headed panoramic range finders around, bringing them to bear on the distinctive shark’s-fin silhouette revealed out in the main estuary channel. New ranges and bearings were barked into the phone lines that led back to the battery control center.
In the CIC, they couldn’t hear the shells coming in. But they could see the geysers erupting out of the river on their television monitors and they could feel the thudding impact of the shock waves against their hull.
“Lieutenant Rendino, what’s the word on these shore batteries?” Ken Hiro demanded.
“Four twin mounts. Eight guns in all. Six-inchers in concrete pop-up emplacements,” Christine replied, rattling the facts off from her memory. “on the southern headland.”
“They’re only dropping four-round salvos in on us. They’re holding back some of those tubes.”
“No, sir,” Beltrain replied. “They’re alternating fire, using half of the battery at any one time to keep us illuminated. Mckelsie, are we being painted?”
“Negative!” the stealth boss yelled back from his systems bay. “The EM environment is still clear. No radiation detected on any frequency.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Dix muttered, “they’re going to kill us with antiques.”
“Clarify that, mister,” the Exec snapped.
“Old-fashioned iron munitions aimed by optical sights! World War-vintage stuff. In this particular tactical situation they nullify every advantage our stealth systems and ECM give us. It’s an even field, sir.”
“What would the old-timers do in a situation like this?”
“Go fast and zigzag like crazy!”
Ken Hiro looked back at the mine-hunter screen and at the ominous, shadowy spheres that hemmed them in. “I hope that there’s an alternative to that,” he said.
From his station upriver, Arkady saw the sudden glare of the starshells to the east.
“Damn, Gus, what’s going on back there?”
“I dunno, sir. The Duke’s Aegis system just came up, though. I’m getting a tactical display over the datalink.”
That wasn’t right. That really wasn’t right. The Cunningham must have been spotted. That would be the only reason Amanda would clear away for a fight like that. Shit! Shit! Shit! This was going to hell.
His thumb moved to the channel control switch on the collective lever, on the verge of switching over to the Duke’s air-operations frequency when his S.O. yelled a warning.
“Lieutenant! Surface contact on the tactical display! Proceeding down river toward us. Speed, twenty knots. Range to this datum point, fifteen thousand yards and closing. Threat board data annex identifies one Skin Head military surface search radar.”
“Goddamn it! Moondog 505, we have a problem. We are departing covering pattern, but we will be back. Hang in there, guys!”
“We aren’t going anywhere, Retainer.”
“Rug. Retainer Zero Two, this is Zero One. Depart covering pattern and form up on me. Stand by for Hellfire engagement. We got a gunboat coming in on us.”
Floating in his life jacket, Digger Graves heard the rotor growl of the two covering helos begin to fade out over the broad reaches of the river. There was still sound out there in the light. The rumble of artillery, the ghost of a siren wail out toward the city.
But around the two drifting fliers, there was a momentary pocket of stillness. Graves could hear the trickling ripple of wind wavelets, and the whisper of his unconscious S.O.‘s breath. Thoughts of his wife, his past, and his future tumbled disjointedly through a mind made sluggish by his growing hypothermia.
God! Was there anyone left alive in the world?
Accordingly, when someone touched his arm, Digger’s heart nearly stopped.
Graves lunged forward, dragging Bubbles with him. There was something else in the water, a dark unmoving mass.
Almost without conscious volition, he went for the survival light clipped in his sleeve pocket. He snapped it on in its flashlight mode, letting the narrowest of beams leak through the fingers of his working hand.
It was someone else who had met their destiny on the great river: a coverall-clad Chinese seaman, dead, the open eye on the unshattered side of his face staring past Graves into the night. Digger switched the flash off and watched as the body merged back into the blackness. Slowly, the current carried the body off downstream, heading in the same direction as his S.O.
A prolonged shuddering shiver racked through Digger, and he held Bubbles closer.
The Five Sixteen boat and her three sisters rafted together in the shallows just below the point where the Huangpu River entered the estuary. Downstream, a battle storm raged — the lightning of starshells and the distant thunder of guns in the darkness. Closer in, they had heard the faint crackle of small arms fire and had several times seen the meteor trail of rockets lash the shoreline.
Still they waited. Lieutenant Zhou Shan wasn’t sure just what it was he was waiting for. But deep down in his belly, he knew it was coming soon.
“Radio operator. Any contact with Shanghai Fleet Command yet?”
“No answer on any naval command frequency, Comrade Lieutenant. No traffic at all except for the river patrol. They are asking for information and orders just as we are.”
“There she goes,” Bosun Hoong interjected from his station beside the port torpedo tube. He pointed to the north.
A pale wake streak gleamed in the darkness, a rakish shadow riding atop it. It swept by out in the deeper channel, heading downstream.
“They must be going to look into that fight out by the minefield.” The bosun looked back into the torpedo boat’s cockpit. “We could follow them out, Lieutenant.”
“No,” Shan replied flatly. “Not yet.”
The first salvo had dropped long, exploding off the Cunningham’s starboard bow. The second dropped off her port quarter, astern. Amanda recognized what was happening: They were starting to walk their shellfire in on her ship, correcting with each salvo until they started dropping rounds right down the exhaust stacks.
Praise God that they didn’t have the minefield channel preregistered. Probably no one had ever thought that an enemy would be mad enough to attempt a penetration of fortress Shanghai like this.
“CIC, how much farther until we’re out of these damn mines!”
“It’s got to be soon, Captain,” Christine replied. “Another couple hundred yards at most.”
Another blaze of light came from beyond the windscreen as the Reds renewed their illumination pattern. In the glare, she could read the growing fear in the eyes and faces of her bridge crew. Flow noise be damned, she had to get them out of this.
“Lee helm, increase speed. Make turns for ten knots.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. Making turns for ten knots.”
“Stealth system, fire RBOCs. Full concealment pattern.”
“Stealth acknowledging. Firing full concealment pattern now!”
Out on the bow and from the forward end of the superstructure, rocket grenades ripple-fired into the sky, bursting like muddy fireworks over the Duke, obliterating the stars.
The Rapid Blooming Overhead Chaff rockets would not serve any of their purposes this night. There was no radar for their metal foil packets to jam. But the grenades also produced thick clouds of multispectral chemical smoke, enough maybe to throw off the targeting of the coastal batteries’ forward observers. Just for the few seconds more they needed.
“Captain, stop the ship!” Dix Beltrain’s voice rang in her headset.