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He stared upward at the roadway of the great bridge, one of the longest spans in the world. The ship was almost close enough to where he could hear the rumble of traffic above. With growing satisfaction, he observed the other helicopters pulling away, their pilots realizing that they were exposed and defenseless against rocket fire. Kanai turned his attention to the two Coast Guard cutters, with their white superstructures and hulls and the wide-angled orange stripes and CG insignias set off from narrow blue bands behind them. The two cutters were approaching the LNG tanker on opposite sides of her great hull. Their intention was clear, but their guns looked woefully inadequate to cause major damage to the Invader.
Now it was his turn, he thought with amusement. But before he could give the order to his Viper teams to launch missiles against the cutters, they both opened fire simultaneously with twenty-five-millimeter Bushmaster guns mounted on their bows. The twin-barreled guns seemed insignificant to the task, too minuscule to cause damage to such a monster ship.
The starboard cutter concentrated its armor-piercing rounds on the three-eighth-inch steel bulkhead of the bridge and wheelhouse, while the cutter on the port side blasted away at the lower hull of the stern in an attempt to penetrate the thicker steel plates that shielded the engine room. The men manning both guns were careful not to aim anywhere close to the giant tanks filled with the deadly propane.
Kanai threw himself to the deck as the twenty-five-millimeter rounds slashed through the bridge, taking out the windows and ripping into the control console. The Viper at the helm was killed instantly. Another fell mortally wounded from the unanticipated assault. Scorning the storm of shells, Kanai reached up and snatched the radio from the bridge counter and shouted, "Launch surface-to-surface missiles now!"
He lay on the deck and looked up through the shattered windows. The Invader was less than a mile from passing under the bridge. He also noticed that the bow was swinging slighdy to starboard. Shot to pieces, the navigation console was a mass of jagged holes, the computerized controls unable to send a course command to the rudder.
He called down to the engine room. "Report damage."
The Viper, who was a former chief engineer on naval ships used for secret operations, answered in a slow and deliberate voice. "Gunfire has disabled the port generator, but the engines are untouched. I have one man dead and one badly wounded. Shells are penetrating the bulkhead like wind-driven hail, but they're pretty well spent by the time they strike the machinery, which keeps damage to a minimum."
Kanai saw that the tanker was beginning to veer out of the channel toward a buoy. "The bridge controls are shot away. Helm the ship from down there. Bring her back on course three-five-five to port or we'll collide with a bridge span. Hold steady until I order you otherwise."
He crawled out on the bridge wing and peered down and saw a Viper lean over the starboard railing and fire missiles point-blank onto the bow of the Timothy Firme. The first passed through the thin deck and through the hull, exploding in the water. The other exploded against a bulwark and sent shredded steel cascading across the deck and cutting down the men manning the twenty-five-millimeter Bushmaster. Pieces of the gun flew in the sky like burning leaves.
Then the air on the opposite side of the Mongol Invader was torn apart, as another missile bored into the funnel of the William Shea. It struck like a giant hammer, heeling the ship ten degrees and sending out a huge spray of debris and a cloud of dense black smoke. But the lone twenty-five-millimeter Bushmaster on her bow still peppered away at the hull surrounding the Mongol Invaders engine room.
A second missile slammed into the Timothy Firme. Her hull trembled and flames burst out of her stern. An instant later, another plowed into her superstructure below the bridge. The explosion scattered steel splinters throughout the forward part of the ship. Coast Guard cutters were not heavily armored, as most naval vessels were, and the damage was severe. Half the officers were down on the bridge. She lost headway and began to fall away from the LNG tanker, afire in two places, smoke pouring out of her, badly crippled and drifting helplessly. More savage crashes and explosions rocked both Coast Guard cutters, smoke and flame twisting into the sky.
Kanai had achieved the tactical advantage.
He was gratified at the way the battle was going in his favor. He threw a glance astern and saw both of the larger Coast Guard cutters battered and nearly reduced to burnt-out derelicts, drifting helplessly. There would be no further worry from surface ships.
With the police helicopters held at bay, he knew he wasn't home free, not yet. The Mongol Invader may have been closing in on the Verrazano Bridge, but Kanai was certain that whoever was in command of the intercept operation would call in military jet fighters before the ship reached relative safety under and beyond the bridge.
Dover checked his body for wounds. He was bleeding from shrapnel cuts on his left shoulder and the side of his head. He felt for his ear and found it dangling by a shred of flesh. Out of frustration more than pain, he pulled it away and stuffed it in his pocket, certain that a surgeon could sew it back on later. He picked his way across the shattered wheelhouse. Dead and wounded men spread across the deck. They were young men who shouldn't be treated like this, he thought absently. This was not a war with a foreign enemy of the United States. This was a battle over internal economics. None of the slaughter made sense to him.
The cutters had been sitting ducks against the concentrated fire from at least four portable shoulder-fired guided-missile systems. He could feel the speed falling off and the ship slowing down. The damage below her waterline was severe, and she was beginning to sink.
Unable to assess the harm to the Timothy Firme on the other side of the Mongol Invader, but assuming the worst, Admiral Dover ordered the only officer of the Firme still standing to turn the cutter toward the nearest shore and ground her. The Coast Guard's struggle against the nightmare ship was finished.
The last thr
ow of the dice, Dover thought grimly. Clutching the radio, he ordered in the three Air National Guard F-16C fighters that had assembled and were circling a few miles out to sea. He instinctively ducked as a missile from the LNG tanker flashed in front of the bridge and burst harmlessly in the water a hundred yards beyond. Then he crouched and peered over the railing, his eyes turned skyward.
He changed the frequency on his radio and said slowly, distinctly, "Blue Flight, Blue Flight, this is Red Fleet. If you hear and understand me, attack the LNG tanker. Repeat, attack the ship. But for God's sake, don't strike the tanks containing the propane."
"Understood, Red Fleet," replied the flight leader. "We will concentrate our fire on the stern superstructure."
"Try for the engine room under the funnel," ordered Dover. "Do whatever it takes to stop her and stop her quickly without setting off the gas."
"I copy, Red Fleet. Launching attack now"
The Blue Flight leader sent his two wingmen in, one five hundred yards behind the other, while he circled to observe the results of the strike and follow up should his lead planes miss the target. He feared that by being too cautious his pilots would fire too far aft on the stern and as far as possible from the tanks, missing the ship completely. As it turned out, his fears were set in the wrong direction.
The first pilot banked and rolled as he dropped in an almost vertical dive. Aiming his fighter arrow-straight for the machinery room deep beneath the big funnel of the Invader, he locked in his missile guidance systems on his target, which was becoming hidden by smoke from the burning Coast Guard cutters. But a split second before he could press his fire switch, a surface-to-air missile fired from the LNG tanker blasted his F-16 into a giant fiery pyre that burst like a fireworks rocket. It seemed to hang for a moment, no longer a sleek fighter jet but a shattered and flaming pile of scrap falling crazily in a thousand pieces and splashing into the sea,
"Break off!" shouted the flight leader to the second aircraft.
"Too late!" broke in the pilot. "I'm locked on-"
He spoke no more. There was no time to take evasive action, no pulling out of his approach dive. No time to react. Another missile belched from its launcher and his plane exploded into a second fireball, which also seemed to hang suspended before plunging into the waiting arms of an apathetic sea, not more than a hundred yards from the watery burial shroud of the first F-16.
The flight leader froze, unable to believe what he had witnessed. Two of his closest friends, National Guard pilots who had responded to the emergency, both businessmen with families, suddenly incinerated within seconds of each other and now lying within the wreckage of their aircraft on the bottom of lower New York Harbor. Numb with revulsion, he was too paralyzed with shock to launch another attack. Instead, he turned his aircraft away from the death and destruction and flew back to the National Guard field on Long Island.
Dover watched the destruction of the two aircraft in stunned horror. He understood instantly what it meant. Everybody on board the cutters, rescue boats and helicopters knew. The loss of the pilots was appalling, but their failed mission to stop the LNG tanker before she passed into the upper harbor spelled disaster now.
