Ten-one-thous—
The blinding white-hot downstroke looked like an impossibly straight bolt of lightning, yet was almost perfectly silent, because the sound generated by the superheated hypervelocity kinetic kill warhead was still struggling to catch up through the soupy atmosphere. The sound and shock of the schooner exploding—flying instantly into an angry, roiling cloud of debris—hit his ears the same moment as the up-dopplering sonic boom of the warhead’s shrieking descent.
Small metal fragments—hissing hot and spinning viciously—spattered the starboard hull, a few spanging off the chest-high rail encircling the Maldive Reckoner’s pilot deck. Pinero shrugged out of his windbreaker, checked the straps on his life jacket, popped the cap on the shark repellent, and calculated. It had taken the schooner five seconds to launch her four missiles, and ten seconds for the Arat Kur to identify and successfully interdict her. So, all told, it was about a fifteen-second response time, from first launch to arrival of counterfire munitions. Of course, the little boats had fewer missiles to launch, and that gave their masters and lately added weapons-specialists more time to escape. The crews were sent over the side before firing commenced, with orders to stay far away from any other hulls. But on the bigger ships like the Maldive Reckoner, it would take at least twice the time to see all the munitions off the deck. It would be a narrow thing, indeed.
Pinero checked his watch, waved to the second mate, who waved back. All weapons checked and cleared. He pressed the remote signals operation button on his palmtop. Twenty feet overhead, the radio mast of the Maldive Reckoner was sending out a single coded string that announced that she would be deploying her payload in precisely twenty seconds. He checked his watch again, waved to the one remaining deckhand, who had joined the second mate at the bow, crouched low. The deckhand jumped up, hefted a tightly bound canvas package over the port bow. Pinero saw its line tighten and then loosen. Good. The self-inflating raft had pulled free of its canvas sleeve and was now in the water. In ten seconds it would be ready for passengers. He moved to the portside elbow of the weather-walk, estimated the jump to the water at just above ten meters. He didn’t like heights, so he didn’t look for more than a moment.
He checked his watch: twenty seconds.
It had been a strange five weeks, the busiest, most terrifying, and yet strangely rewarding of his life. The Reckoner had made three trips from Shanghai to Jakarta, carrying rice: just rice. On the second trip, there must have been a sub sneaking in beneath them. Pinero had been instructed to hold a dead-straight heading from one hundred kilometers beyond the blockade line to within fifteen kilometers of the Tanjung Pasir headland. That, and the close crowding of ships around him during that voyage made him wonder if it was all part of an attempt to block, confuse, overtax the Roaches’ overhead sensors. But today, it was all over. The grand mission of mercy was, in its last moments, transmogrifying into a grand ambush. The ships that had carried food to Indonesia were now carrying death to it instead.
Twelve seconds.
The small ships had launched first so that the self-teaching Arat Kur computers and their operators would initially identify the little, indigenous boats as being more dangerous, both because they were the only observed source of launches and were harder to hit. Once the computers had finished that recategorization of their targets, it would likely take several precious seconds, and possibly a direct operator override, to shift the firing priority to the freighters, once those larger hulls started unleashing their massive payloads. By the time that shift occurred, there would be too many large, lethal rockets on the way in for the overworked invaders’ PDF systems to handle. At least, that had been the theory. Time to see how Reckoner would fare as one of the first big hulls to unload.
Five seconds.
Pinero raised his hand, then crouched down. The solid metal weather-rail and its height above the deck protected him from the launch exhausts, but that sudden cyclone was likely to send fragments of the crates sleeting and skittering in all directions.
Zero and launch.
Pinero cut downward with his whole arm and hunched lower.
The rearmost rank of rockets and missiles launched first. Their simultaneous exhausts hit the lower extents of the Maldive Reckoner’s superstructure, imparting a blow akin to a hefty bow-wave. Pinero came up just in time to duck again as the heat of their rapidly dwindling wash came level with the bridge. They were well over the bows and climbing into shallow ballistic arcs that would take them into or past Jakarta.
The second launch’s tsunami of white hot exhaust blew Pinero’s hat off and cracked two of the bridge windows behind him. The thickest of these four missiles rode off its ramp like it was skating upright on its tail, cleared the bows and then climbed at a fifty or even sixty-degree angle. From what the Japanese techs told him, that was either a pod carrier which would deploy six semiautonomous remote operated vehicles into Jakarta’s airspace, or a decoy dispenser which would scatter five times that number of smaller vehicles which, by dint of electronic and radar signature, would mimic ROVs, or even larger, more lethal drones.
As the third and fourth waves went up, and shattered and scorched bits of wood casing spattered against or spun down into the weather walk, Pinero checked his watch. They were twelve seconds into the launch sequence. He put a hand atop the rail, wished he had remembered to take off his pants before it had all started. He didn’t want any extra weight on him when he went into the water.
The fifth wave of missiles shrieked off the deck, catching up the ramps and debris from the previous launches in a complicated tornado of overlapping shock waves. It looked like a house of cards being hit by several different garden hoses all at once. He felt a strange, urgent pressure in his calves and behind his knees, but knew he couldn’t obey it yet, couldn’t get up on the rail and plummet down into the marginally greater safety of the water. He and the deck techs had to wait, to be prepared to correct a misfire.
And they had one on the last launch. The far starboard weapon—a thrice-handed-down fourth-generation Yingji missile that should have been junked three decades ago—remained inert in its rack, shaking as the rebounding backwash from the other three jarred it. The second mate, turning back from his face-away crouch and uncovering his ears, saw the missile, then looked at the bridge.
Pinero glanced at his watch: seventeen seconds. They had no time left. But they also had their orders. He waved twice to the second mate, who sprinted to the remaining missile while waving off the deckhand—who went over the side. Good, one more life that might be saved. Pinero glanced at his watch, missed what the Japanese missile tech was doing: twenty seconds. They were living on borrowed time. Pinero looked down. The second mate was scrambling away, trailing a wire, waving. Time to go.
As Pinero rose, so did the Yingji, wailing away with an initial sputter. Pinero, staggered by the comparatively light backwash, missed making a quick hop to the top of the weather rail. As he climbed up again, he saw the second mate end his sprint to the portside gunwale with a long horizontal leap that cleared it. He wasn’t wasting any time.