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“I’ve got target lock with an Exocet missile, and I’ve run out the 120mm cannon. I’ve also got two Gatlings deployed for antimissile defense.”
The Exocets were launched from tubes mounted in the deck with hatches designed to look like typical inspection ports. The Gatling guns were placed in the hull and protected by metal plates that could swing out of the way. The big cannon, which used the same fire-control system as an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank, was housed in the bow. Clamshell doors opened outward, and the gun was run out on a hydraulic carriage that gave it almost one hundred and eighty degrees of traverse. This system’s only drawback was that the gun had to be decoupled from its autoloader at the extremes of its swing.
On the main view screen was an aerial image of the Myanmarian ship cutting through the waves. Every few seconds what appeared to be a cotton ball would burst from one of the twin muzzles of her turret-mounted main guns as they continued to fire at the Oregon. The ship was about one hundred and seventy-five feet in length, with a knife-edged prow and boxy superstructure. The resolution was crisp enough to see she was a tired-looking boat.
Cabrillo called up the specifications of the Chinese-built gunboat and grunted aloud when he saw it had a top speed of over thirty knots. The Oregon could still outrun her, but they would be in range of her 57mm deck gun for an uncomfortable interval.
“Wait, how fast did you say she was approaching?” he asked.
“Fourteen knots, steady.”
“Gotta love the Third World,” Juan said. “They don’t have the money for proper maintenance. I bet that’s all the speed she’s got.”
A warning alarm went off at the radar station. “He’s got a lock on us,” Linc warned.
“Jam it!”
“Missile launch detected.”
“Murph?”
“Got it.”
The portside Gatling gun, with its own radar, scanned the sky and spotted the big missile as it came at them at wave-top height. With its three-hundred-pound shaped explosive warhead, the rocket would blow a hole into the Oregon big enough to rival the damage done to the USS Cole. The Gatling’s computer processor designated the threat, adjusted its aim slightly, and let rip with a four-second burst. It didn’t sound like a gun as it fired but rather some sort of mechanical saw. It was the sound of tearing on an industrial scale.
At the same time, chaff launchers threw up a curtain of thin aluminum strips that obscured the Oregon from enemy detection on the off chance the missile got past the Gatling. And luminescent flares to confuse its heat-seeking capabilities were launched with the gusto of a Fourth of July fireworks show.
T
he missile tracked in dead level and ran into the hail of 20mm Gatling rounds when it had traveled less than three miles. Two hundred and seventy-six rounds completely missed the rocket and plummeted harmlessly into the sea. One round did connect, and the missile exploded, smearing the sky with an elongated trail of fire as its charge went off and the remaining solid rocket fuel detonated catastrophically.
But that wasn’t the end of the battle. The destroyer’s deck guns continued to fire at nearly eight rounds a minute. With both ships on the move, and the Oregon’s cross section half of what it should be because of some radar-absorbing material applied to her superstructure, the shots were falling pretty wild.
Juan checked their speed and guesstimated that they would remain in range for the better part of fourteen minutes. That left the potential for more than a hundred rounds coming at them. A few were bound to be magic bullets and hit. His ship was armored against the types of weapons pirates employed—heavy machine guns and RPGs fired at the hull. An explosive round arcing in on a high parabola would slice through the deck plates, and the charge would detonate inside the ship with deadly results. If it managed to hit the liquid nitrogen storage tanks, the resulting explosion would unleash a deadly cloud of superchilled gas that would freeze the entire crew solid and so distort the hull’s steel that the ship would crush herself under her own weight.
It was a risk he couldn’t take. He noted too that a Hainan-class destroyer carried a crew of seventy. An Exocet launch would sink them. And there was no close-by shipping to rescue survivors.
He made his decision quickly.
“Helm, bring us hard about one hundred and twenty degrees. Wepps, when you have a bearing on that ship, engage with the one-twenty. Let’s see if we can convince him that this is a fight he can’t win.”
The Oregon dug her shoulder into the sea as her directional jets, with the help of an athwartship thruster, threw her into the tightest turn she could make. Loose items flew off shelves, and everyone had to lean into the turn to keep balanced. As the bow came about, Mark Murphy waited until he had a lock and then opened fire. Typically, they could fire twice as fast as the Burmese ship, but the gun was at its most oblique angle so the autoloader had to reengage after every round.
Unlike the smaller gun firing at them, the 120 fired at a flat, lancing trajectory. The Oregon shuddered when the gun roared.
All eyes were on the view screen. A second after the cannon discharged the discarding sabot round, the tungsten dart hit the destroyer square in the turret. The kinetic energy blew through its thin armor without a check in speed, and it impacted the breech of one of the two 57mm guns and detonated the round that was in the chamber. The turret came apart like an opening umbrella, its skin flaying up and out in a blistering cloud of fire and smoke. The smoke curled and coiled over the ship’s deck as she charged on blindly for a few seconds.
Juan gave them a count of ten, and, when the Mayanmarian ship didn’t slow, said, “Fire two.”
The big cannon had gone through the complicated loading sequence automatically, so when Mark pressed a key on his computer, it discharged another round.
This time he put the shot right through a bridge window. Had he used a high explosive, it would have killed everyone in the room. As it was, the sabot round hit with massive force, blowing out all the windows, wrecking helm control, and turning the radio room just aft of the bridge into a charred ruin.
The Hainan-class destroyer began to slow. She would have sheered away on a different course but could no longer control her rudder, and it would be several minutes before anyone senior enough left alive transferred steering to auxiliary control.
“Nicely done, Wepps,” Juan congratulated. A smile tugged at his lips when he saw Maurice enter the bridge, carrying one of his artificial legs. This limb was all titanium struts and exposed mechanics and looked like something out of a Terminator movie. The steward had had the foresight to bring Juan another pair of shoes. “You don’t know how ridiculous I feel without that thing.”
“And look, Captain,” Maurice deadpanned. “How ridiculous you look too.”
