Pinero’s knees shook as he got up on the weather rail’s wide top. Ten meters to the water looked more like a kilometer…
A blinding white light, like a laser, stabbed down into the Maldive Reckoner, lancing it amidships, splitting the keel dead center, and folding her like a hyperkinetic jackknife. As he was thrown from the superstructure, Pinero felt a brief but sharp increase in heat—
By the time the supersonic thunder of the warhead’s descent arrived behind the heat and then shockwave of the impact, Cesar Pinero was not there to hear it. The few cells that remained of his body were insensate to the secondary explosions which vaporized them, too.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Christ! What a stink!”
Tygg turned toward Gavin with a raised eyebrow. “It’s a sewer. What do you expect?”
“Petunias, Lieutenant, bleeding petunias.”
Tygg shook his head, looked up the ladder past Trevor. “What are you seeing, Mr. Cruz?”
Carlos turned his head away from the ring of daylight above them. “Not much but smoke, sir. Lots of dead clones. And I mean lots. Locals running around with AKs, pistols. Never in groups larger than three or four. No sign of organized units.”
Tygg nodded. “Because they’re hunkered down, waiting to see if the tactical repeater net will activate and call the general attack.”
“Well, we’ll all find out about that soon enough,” Trevor asserted. He tapped Carlos on the calf, who slid down the street-access ladder. Trevor climbed up to their street-level OP, stuck his head up into the halo of daylight—
—And almost bumped his head against the underside of the manhole cover that they had propped up on four bricks like a roof. The car they had pushed atop the manhole was angled so the wheels didn’t obstruct their view of the enemy compound. Most important, they were all but undetectable and the street overhead was an excellent bunker against stray missiles.
Trevor checked his watch again before he could recall his resolve to stop doing so. It just made the rest of the team nervous as they all tried not to think the same, dire thought: what if the tactical cell net didn’t activate? What if something had gone wrong? If it didn’t activate, there was no way for the organized insurgency cells to coordinate their actions with the far more numerous but less organized resistance fighters, or for those fighters to be assured of mounting their decisive attack simultaneously. Scattered, random attacks would be costly, easily suppressed, doomed to failure and mean that the professionally led infiltration forces of the final attack would have a much harder job to do, with a lower chance of success. But if the entirety of the locals’ organized resistance arose at once, was on the same clock, and was also plugged into command updates from offshore, then—
Trevor’s tiny pager—their link to the tactical repeater net—illuminated and then chirped twice. He managed to keep his voice calm, level. “That was the circuit test. Stand by for full activation of the tactical net and commencement of the general attack in thirty seconds. Stosh, keep the clock.”
“Marking thirty seconds, Skipper.”
Trev felt a tug on his pants leg, turned. Tygg handed up a mil-spec transceiver toward him. “We’ve got the first coded sitrep and update from offshore.”
Trevor shook his head. “You read it out so everyone can hear it.” And distract them while we wait to see if the tactical repeater net flies or flops. Because talking to the outside world is not how we’re going to win this battle. It’s our ability to update each other in-country which will make or break us.
Tygg angled the mil-spec transceiver so Trevor could see it. It was scrolling a text message that read like a transcript from an insane asylum. “Bananas *D. Balloons zero-zero.” “Bananas *D” indicated that the Arat Kur still retained roughly eighty-five percent of their PDF capability. About what had been expected, at this point. Almost all of the fifteen percent reduction would be due to overloaded or destroyed arrays. “Balloons zero-zero” indicated that the enemy tactical air assets remained at one hundred percent. Again, pretty much as expected, until the missiles from the grain ships started landing—
As if on cue, there was a flash and thunderous blast of sound and debris halfway between Trevor and the presidential compound. The impact sent a tremor through the street, shuddered the walls of the sewer. Some masonry detached and plunked in the ankle-high water.
“Now that’s more like it.” Stosh almost sounded festive. “The freighters have joined the party.”
Two more blasts rattled the manhole cover on its four-corner props like a closed lid on a boiling pot. One rocket had struck someplace inside the compound. The buzz of the enemy PDF systems rose to an insane, saw-toothed scream. The sound was music to Trevor’s ears. At this rate of fire, those systems were going to overheat, run out of ammo, or both, within seven minutes, ten at the most. “They’ve committed their reserve systems,” he speculated. “We’ve got their groundside interdiction capabilities pushed to the max.”
Confirmation came in the form of a rippling cascade of sharp, thin sonic booms. Trevor could hear the smile in Tygg’s voice. “They’re having to augment with orbital interdiction.”
Yeah, but that also means they’re sinking our ships by the dozens right now. Despite the steel rain in the streets outside, Trevor was glad he wasn’t anywhere near the fifty-kilometer nautical limit at that moment—
“Five seconds,” shouted Stosh.
Very far to the south, Trevor heard a susurrating whisper of faint, nonstop detonations. Probably missile-deployed cluster bomblets reaching one of the smaller airports. God knows how many of those missiles were being lost for every one that reached its target, but once hit, those runways and vertipads would take days to repair. And this game was going to be finished today. One way or the other.
“And—mark!” bellowed Stosh.
Trevor discovered he was listening and watching so intently that he was holding his breath. A second went by, then another, followed by a cold wave that rolled over the skin of his arms, chest, back, belly. The tactical-level repeater system hadn’t worked as planned. It was either disabled by all the falling debris or stray rockets, or had been instantly discovered and jammed or—
The pager emitted a long tone.
Two hundred meters up the street, three rocket-propelled grenades flew out of different windows with a surging whoosh, trailing white smoke plumes toward the compound. Following on their tails was the hammering applause of automatic weapons of diverse calibers: some high, spitting reports from Pindads, some rapid barking by venerable AK-47s, and a few steady, deep, jackhammer roars from belt-fed weapons that sent tracers chasing after the rockets.
“Behold, the Jubilee!” proclaimed Stosh, celebrating the activation of the net as if he were a testifying evangelist.
But the return fire, articulated by the sharp supersonic cracks of advanced dustmix support weapons, and even coil guns, answered within three seconds, chipping concrete, shattering windows, tearing apart parked cars with a sound like the ripping of perforated tin. Directly overhead, overlapping blasts indicated missiles being intercepted at close range. Then three large rockets, survivors of the Arat Kur PDF fire, landed with a collective, up-dopplering rush. One went straight into the compound. After one heart-stopping moment, there was a long, shuddering roar—and a noticeable drop in the volume of outgoing PDF fire.
However, another one of the rockets went straight into and obliterated the building from which the first of the three rocket-propelled grenades had been fired. As if all combatants were equally staggered by these heavy blows, there was a moment’s lull—which was then immediately refilled by a gushing of bidirectional small-arms fire. But there was a new sound in the cacophonic symphony. High-pitched cries of pain and shock rose over the layered thunder of diverse, concentrated weaponry. A dog—dragging a spurting stump that had been one of its rear legs—emerged from the billowing smoke, ran past at close range, showering blood in all directions, yelping in time with its frantic gait. Trevor squinted into the smoke: Behold the Jubilee? No, Stosh, “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”