The Carlson was very close to the breakaway point now. But the range numbers that glowed beside the Indonesian frigate’s position hack began to flick downward. They were increasing speed, overtaking the LPD.
“Captain Carberry, all engines ahead full, and give us a second chaff launch, please.”
“Very well, ma’am. Lee helm, all engines ahead full. Make turns for twenty-five knots. CIC, countermeasures, launch RBOC pattern two.”
Time to put her knight into play. Again, Amanda keyed her headset mike. “Talk between ships, please. Commander Hiro aboard the Cunningham.”
Hiro’s voice came back a moment later. “Right here, Captain.”
“Ken, our Indonesian friend is being difficult. He’s closing with us and I don’t need him underfoot at the moment. Give him the shoulder, please. As we discussed.”
“Understood. Executing.”
On the bridge of the Cunningham, Hiro moved to stand behind the helm control stations. “Helm, come right to one nine zero, convergent course with the Indonesian. Lee Helm, all power rooms to full output. All engines ahead flank. Make turns for thirty-five knots.”
As the Cunningham’s bow started to come around, a red warning tile flashed on the helm console’s Navicom board and a computer-synthesized voice chanted from a speaker grill. “Collision bearing! Collision bearing! Collision bearing!”
Hiro leaned forward and hit the override, squelching the audile warning. “Yeah,” he murmured under his breath, “it certainly is!”
Minutes passed, and the Sutanto plowed ahead through a glittering metallic snowstorm.
“Lieutenant, have you worked through this damn crap and corruption they’re laying down yet?”
“Not yet, Captain.” The sweating radar officer looked up from where he crouched beside his senior systems operator. “The Americans continue to deploy chaff, and their active jammers keep jumping with our radar frequency shifts.”
“Keep working it. I must know what’s going on out there. Quarter master, switch to GPU navigation and watch your fathometer. We’ve got some shoals out there to port.” Basry squinted into the glare pouring in through the bridge windscreen. “Communications! Warn that damn helicopter off immediately!”
“We’ve been trying, sir,” a second junior officer called back from the radio shack aft of the wheelhouse. “We are calling on all standard channels…”
The radio officer’s voice cut off with the blaze of the floodlights. Going dark, Wolf One broke out of its holding pattern beyond the frigate’s bow. Climbing, the Super Huey started to circle overhead, the beating of its rotors still drowning out all sounds less than a shout. But just getting the night back was a relief.
Basry strove to blink the pinkish dazzle blobs from his vision. “That’s something, at any rate. Maybe now… Allah’s prophet! Hard right rudder! All engines back emergency!”
A second bank of floodlights blasted out of the darkness, these set closer to the water than those mounted on the helicopter. The running lights of a ship snapped on as well, a very large ship, very close off the Sutanto’s starboard bow. Basry caught the impression of a huge razor-edged prow looming out of the night, seeming to aim at his vessel’s vulnerable flank. Dual-toned air horns blared an imperious warning.
Without orders, the Sutanto’s quartermaster wrenched down on the horn cord and the frigate screamed in terror. Frantically the helmsman spun his brass-mounted wheel until it locked against its stops. The deck tilted as the frigate skidded into a minimum-radius turn away from the impending collision.
As the Duke pulled alongside the Indonesian man-of-war, Ken Hiro peered down from the starboard bridge wing, expertly gauging the narrow strip of water that boiled between the rails of the two warships. “Okay, helm, steady… steady… slack her off… slack her off… slack her off. .! Okay, steady as she goes….”
A mile ahead, on the bridge of the Carlson, the moment came.
“Sea Fighters, this is the TACBOSS. Launch and execute breakaway!”
Steamer Lane came back hard on the puff port controller. The Queen of the West’s forward thrusters roared, shoving the Sea Fighter backward. Her rearward motion accelerated as she slid down the Carlson’s stern ramp, traversing from the darkness of the hangar bay to the darkness of the night. With an explosion of spray, she hit the water, bucking through the turbulence of the LPD’s wake.
Steamer shifted his grip from the controller to the steering yoke. “Power!”
Scrounger Caitlin knew that her captain wanted it all. She shoved first the propeller controls, then the drive throttles, hard ahead to their stops. The airscrews, which had been feathered at idling power, angled their blades and blurred into shimmering disks within their duct shrouds. The wave crests flattened behind her under the surge of thrust, and the Queen lunged ahead, gathering speed.
Steamer sidestepped the stern of the LPD, racing the hovercraft gun boat up the left flank of the larger vessel. The Manassas followed them down the ramp a few moments later. Chasing her squadron leader, the second PGAC dropped into a line behind the Queen.
Clear of the Carlson’s bow, Steamer paid off in a wide turn, aiming the Sea Fighter column dead on toward the nameless island to port.
“Go… go… go!” Lane chanted.
Scrounger’s eyes raked across the engine readouts on her instrumentation displays. Playing the power levers the way a master pianist might play a vintage Steinway, she kept the temperature bars well up in the yellow, not quite letting them touch red.
A turbine tech by training, Scrounger had come up from the Queen’s power rooms. She’d earned her nickname primping and petting those big Lycomings, using her deft skill at “midnight requisitioning” to acquire the best of the best for them, just for moments like this.
The wave patterns flickered past in Steamer Lane’s nite-brite visor, vanishing under the Sea Fighter’s blunt nose. The Queen was running balls to the wall, gobbling the range to her island target.
“Terry, gimme the MMS.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Ensign Terrence Wilder, the Queen’s executive officer, barked from the navigator’s station. “Activating mast-mounted sighting system… low-light television is imaging on your primary screen now, sir.”
Both Lane and Caitlin grinned to themselves, even under the tension of the moment. Terry Wilder was new, both to the fleet and to the Queen. They’d both been bringing him along with how things were done in the gunboat Navy, but Wilder still suffered from Annapolis flashbacks in times of stress.
Flipping up his nite-brite visor, Lane swapped the fuzzy green luminosity of the AI2 system for the sharply defined gray tones of the more powerful low-light television pod atop the Queen’s snub mast.
The nameless landfall lay a few thousand yards ahead now, a low, dark mass rising only a few feet above the sea. More important, however, was the wavering white line even closer, the surf breaking over the reefs that circled the islet.