Trial by Fire - eARC (54 page)

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 got 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.

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

Central Jakarta, Earth

“Christ! What a stink!”

Tygg turned toward Gavin with a raised eyebrow. “You wanker. 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 AK’s, 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. Itt’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 were 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.”

And damn it that Jake Winfield has to be out in the middle of this shitstorm…

Tanjung Priok docks, Jakarta, Earth

Another of the moored freighters, this one only one hundred meters away from the wharf, took a Russian missile beneath the taffrail. Perversely, the explosion lifted her bow up, like an overloaded truck feebly trying to do a wheelie, before she dropped back down, her aft settling rapidly as the fuming, growling water rushed into her half-amputated stern.

Good,
thought Lieutenant Jacob Winfield, watching the last element of the circling Arat Kur combat air patrol break off and head out to sea,
they’ve decided the ships in port are all victims, too.
He wondered if the four savaged freighters had all been part of the plan—selected and hit by ROVs—or just dumb luck. Scanning the remaining ships, he sought the telltale signs for which Tygg had told him to look.

Within seconds, Winfield found seven hulls showing the right combination of innocuous features that indicated there was an incognito spec ops team aboard. Each ship was a small freighter, each had one or more white T-shirts hung on a makeshift laundry line, and each had a severed hawser hanging from the port bow. On three of them, small fires were burning. Too small to be caused by missiles, but smoky and angry enough to add to—and blend in with—the panic and confusion that reigned in Jakarta Bay and all along the docks of Tanjung Priok. Boats of all sizes, from derelict barges to opulent pleasure craft, were afire, horns hooting, bullhorns blaring in half a dozen different languages. In direct violation of the “no contact, no dumping” restrictions upon the freighters, cargo containers and crates—along with canvas bags and desperate seamen—were streaming over their gunwales and into the comparative safety of the debris-choked water. It was chaos—but slightly more than could be explained by a handful of hits by large missiles and a few score by smaller ones. Winfield smiled.
All part of the plan
.

On one of the ships with a severed hawser, Winfield heard a set of muffled blasts which, to a practiced ear, recalled the sound made by older, twentieth-century grenades. A wash of thin gray fumes, and then a quickly growing plume of blacker smoke, emerged from a companionway, along with apparent shouts of distress. Winfield looked around: most of the Hkh’Rkh still manning the harbor checkpoints were too busy to look up, and those that did immediately returned to whatever task had occupied them the moment before. There was too much happening, too much that they weren’t familiar with, in an alien environment suddenly gone mad.