His demand was so totally unexpected that Amanda mentally fumbled for a moment, trying to put his urgent words into some kind of logical perspective. Her TACCO’s next, even more frantic cry, however, blasted her into action.
“Captain, for Christ’s sake! Ring her down!”
“All engines! Back emergency!”
On possibly any other ship in the world, it would have been too late. However, the Duke’s integrated electric drive saved her. In a battle situation like this one, where sudden bursts of speed might be required, her huge Rolls-Royce/GE turbogenerator sets could be held at their maximum output.
Her actual speed through the water could be controlled through the throttles of her electric motors. With no spooling up lag, she was granted nearly instantaneous access to 100 percent of her power output.
Likewise, her reversible-pitch propellers allowed her to direct that thrust to go forward or astern with equal swiftness.
As the lee helmsman shoved his throttles forward to the stops with his left hand, he also yanked the propeller controls hard back with his right.
The blades of the Duke’s contrarotating propellers pivoted in their sockets, and the water under her quarters lifted and boiled under the impact of 80,000 horsepower. The Duke shuddered to a halt in less than half her own length.
“Stop all engines! Helm, initiate station keeping on auxiliary hydrojets. Don’t let her drift! Dix, what in hell is going on?”
“Watchdog, Captain.” Beltrain’s voice was as bleak as the tolling of a funeral bell. “Right in the middle of the channel.”
“Are you sure, Dix?”
“We don’t have enough definition on the SQQ to be certain, Captain. It could be somebody’s old hot-water tank, for all I know. But we do have an object on the bottom in the center of the channel. It’s the right size for a pressure mine, and it’s sure as hell in the right place for one.”
The same bleakness that had been in Dix Beltrain’s voice settled around Amanda’s soul. Consider a minefield as a wall that you must occasionally pass through. You must leave a passage — a doorway, as it were. And to keep the enemy from using your doorway, you needed a door.
You used a watchdog, a sophisticated naval “smart” mine fused to detonate whenever it detected the pressure changes caused by a ship’s hull displacing water nearby. You deploy the watchdog in your passage channel, then you connect it by underwater cable to a land station, permitting you to arm or de-arm the mine. The door can then be opened, or shut, at your desire.
Since it had appeared that the Chinese had not used any high-tech mines anywhere else within their defensive line, Amanda had gambled that they wouldn’t have one to use here. She had been wrong. The Cunningham was trapped.
“Zero Two, ordnance check.”
“Two Hellfires. Two Hydras,” Nancy Delany replied.
“Two and four here. This is going to be tight. Watch your round placement. Make ‘count.”
“Roger.”
The two Sea Comanches swung wide over the river to the north, moving around to flank the oncoming gunboat before it could reach the area of the two Moondog aviators.
“Gus, bring up your laser targeting. Boresight the FLIR and give me a screen display.”
“Doin’ it, sir.”
Arkady shifted vision systems again, flipping the low-light goggles up on his helmet and focusing his attention on the image that snapped up on the central panel telescreen: a pale negative-image ship on a darkened river, a swirl of thermal wake trailing behind it in both the sea and air.
“Autocannon mounts forward, aft, and amidships,” Arkady murmured. “Single small deck house. Freestanding mast. No stack.”
“Looks like another one of those Shanghai gunboats, sir.”
“No, Gus. No, the scale’s wrong. It’s too big. Way too big. That’s a Hainan-class. Twice the size, twice the firepower, and about four times harder to kill.”
“Oh, thank you, God. Thank you ever so fucking much! Lieutenant, maybe we need to call the ship in on this one.”
“The Lady’s busy, Gus. She doesn’t need us tugging on her shirtsleeve just now. Zero Two, follow me in! Point fire procedures! Take out the bridge and the main gun mounts!”
Amanda kept her voice low and controlled. She could not, she dare not, exhibit an instant of panic or confusion now.
“Lee helm, all engines astern, dead slow.”
“All engines backing astern, dead slow, ma’am.”
She measured the helmsmen’s voices the way a pharmacist might measure the components of a critically needed drug.
Was any tremor there that might foretell a catastrophic failure under load?
“We won’t have much rudder control backing at this speed, so you’ll have to hold her in the center of the channel with the engines. Helm, stay on the hydrojet controls. Lateral thrust. Same orders. Keep us centered.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Will do, ma’am.”
They both were steady. Nobody was breaking yet.
Another wavering howl. Another shell cluster impacted. Closer. The bridge deck plates rang. That had to be dealt with next.
“Tactical Officer. Initiate counterbattery fire. Oto Melara and Sea SLAM. Stealth systems, keep that smoke coming!”
“Aye, aye, ma’am. Aegis systems have shell tracks to active hostile batteries.”
Up forward, she could hear the bow 76mm turret begin to traverse.
“Ken, this is the plan. I’m going to reverse us back up channel. I don’t think we’ve got enough swing room to turn.”
“Then what, Captain?”
“That depends. Tactical Officer, could we detonate the watchdog mine with a command-guided Mark 50 torpedo?”
“I’ve never heard of it being tried, Captain.”
“I don’t give a damn whether it’s been tried or not. Can it be done?”
The forward Oto Melara began to rage during the moment that Dix Beltrain paused, the high-angled gun barrel slamming abrupt three-round bursts into the sky.
“I can’t see any reason that it can’t.”
“How much room will we need?”
“I’d like about a thousand yards.”
“How much will we need?”
“Three hundred and fifty.”
Out on the long reach of the foredeck, the car-length cylinder of the first Sea SLAM counterround sprang out of its launching cell. Its booster rocket blazed, illuminating from within the smoke cloud that engulfed the Cunningham.
“Okay, Dix, set it up. Quartermaster, back us upchannel three hundred and fifty yards by the GPUs.”
Caught in the heart of her own firestorm, the Duke began to gain way astern.
At this moment, Vince Arkady’s world consisted of the green tunnel of vision drilled through the darkness by the FLIR sights. With turbines fire walled and with their airspeed peaking out at a 190-plus miles per hour, he and his wingwoman went for the gunboat’s flank.
Tracer fire flickered past outside the canopy, tentacles of deadly light reaching up from the river to enmesh the two diving helicopters. The Reds were chronically short of state of-the-art technology, but they had been able to equip at least one of their gunboats with night-vision sights.
The rub was that to merely hit the target, they didn’t need to work in this close. Their laser-guided Hellfire missiles had a ten-mile range, more then enough to stand out of the reach of the autocannon.
Unfortunately, the Hellfire was also designed to kill a fifty ton main battle tank, not a four-hundred-ton surface combatant. It was not enough to simply hit the gunboat. To take it down, they would have to precision-strike at specific points aboard it.
On his own targeting screen, a glowing crosshair spider crawled around the image of the Chinese gunboat. Gus Grestovitch was lying in the beam of the laser designator.