Designated Targets

Star shells burst in the air behind them with a muffled whump, and suddenly the sea was alight with a fierce white blaze of light. The pictures from the battle-cams disappeared momentarily, until Lohrey adjusted the filters. Kennedy bored in toward the target, heedless of the new danger. It was a straight shoot-out, and whoever got off the first good hit would win.

The engines howled at the outer limits of their power, driving the boat across the light choppy waves in a series of long, loping jumps from one wave crest to the next. The sound of the hull as it smacked down was massive and hollow, a series of booms that threatened to shake them apart before the Japs could land a blow.

On screen he saw the first two fish leap from the tubes on the other boat and go racing away, just a second before the word launch flashed up in front of him.

“Fire!” he called out, hoping that the funny little headset he wore was turned on and working.

His own torpedoes launched. The long finger of a searchlight swept over them as all his machine guns opened up to put it out. He swung the boat around in a viciously tight arc as shells exploded in the seas around them, raising plumes of salt water that fell on his decks like heavy monsoon rain. Lohrey was braced in a corner of the wheelhouse, her head tilted at a strange angle, as though she were daydreaming. She could have been staring off into space, but with her eyes hidden behind the goggles, he couldn’t tell.

“Hit!” she called out a split second before he felt the double crump of two torpedoes detonating about a thousand yards away. A few seconds later, the same sound, even closer, as two more struck home. The panel display split, showing two images of crippled ships. While he watched, secondary explosions tore along the aft section of one of them like a string of giant firecrackers. Then one volcanic eruption of fire and light blew the entire ship apart, whiting out one half of the split window. The supersonic blast wave reached them within a heartbeat.

It was like hitting a wall. Everyone was thrown off their feet. The boat slewed around, uncontrolled for a moment while Kennedy wrestled with the wheel.

“New targets, Lieutenant,” Lohrey called out in a strangled voice. She was nursing an arm that dangled lifelessly.

“Got them,” he called back as the navigation screen reappeared on the panel in front of him. He spun the wheel until he’d lined up the flashing blue arrowhead, which designated the bow of the 101, with the red line, along which the battlespace arrays of the HMAS Havoc wanted him to launch his next attack. Or something like that. The details were beyond him now. All he knew was that he had to follow the red line at top speed and trust in some glorified box of nuts and bolts about two hundred nautical miles away, which apparently knew more about these things than he did.

He desperately wanted to snatch aside the blackout curtains and have a good long look at things with his own two eyes, rather than relying on the battle-cams. As long as he didn’t think about what he was doing, it was simple enough to follow the schematics on the screen, but if he gave even a moment’s consideration to the situation, it all got very scary—driving a boat at top speed through a burning formation of enemy ships, with torpedoes and cannon fire filling both the air and the water.

LAUNCH.

The word flashed up, and he relayed the order again.

“Fire!”

The aft tubes spat their loads into the water, and he wrenched them around on a new heading that appeared on the panel. All his guns were firing now, the big twin 50s thrashing away like jackhammers over the ripping snarl of the 30-caliber turrets. The 37 mm antitank gun barked, and the Bofors mount thundered. The uproar was so great, he wondered how anyone heard his orders, even with the little wire microphone sitting so close to his lips.

A distant boom, like the cracking of a mountain.

Lohrey’s voice, strained but not shouting. “We just lost a transport. It must have been carrying ammunition or something.”

ALL TARGETS SERVICED.

Kennedy eased back on their speed and asked Lohrey if she knew where Ross’s boat was. She propped herself against the bulkhead, reached across her body, and used her good hand to pull the injured arm over to where it could rest on a raised knee.

“Broken elbow,” she explained before he could ask. “I’ve medicated myself.”

The flexipad was sheathed in a clear plastic pouch on the bad arm. She used a pencil of some sort to input the query and nodded to his panel. Kennedy looked back and realized that now he had a top-down view of the whole area. Three ships were ablaze and going down, with hundreds of tiny figures streaming over their sides. A small box of text floated next to each of them, marking them as the two destroyers and a troopship. A couple of large floating pools of wreckage and smoke and burning oil marked the points where the other ships had been completely destroyed. They were tagged as FLOATING DATUM POINT 1 & 2.

PT 59 was surrounded by a flashing blue box as it described a long elliptical course around the nearest FLOATING DATUM POINT. Kennedy reached over to tear down the blackout curtains, so he could see where he was going at last.

“You may find it easier to leave them up,” said Lohrey. “Havoc is sending a burst downline now, nav data to grab us up some prisoners.”

As the words left her mouth, the skipper’s slate reformatted into another top-down perspective, with an inset window magnifying a small group of survivors swimming away from one of the sinking troopships. A red line plotted the suggested course to pick them up. It avoided the danger of sailing too close to the crippled vessels, which might yet explode, but seemed to run right through masses of struggling swimmers.

“Can that be right?” he asked.

Lohrey considered the image for a second, before nodding. “You’ll think me unladylike, Lieutenant, but you should just get on with it. We want to clear this area as quickly as possible. Havoc says there are hostile aircraft within the threat bubble. They’ll see the fires.”

Jack Kennedy struggled to keep the distaste off his face. She was suggesting he open the throttles and ride over the top of dozens, if not hundreds, of survivors. Most of whom might not even be Japs, if that Nguyen lady was right.

“Can you patch me through to Barney Ross on this thing? It’s secure, right?” he asked, tapping the headset.

She played with the flexipad and nodded.

“Barney, you there? It’s Jack.”

“I can hear you, buddy. That was great driving before. And good shooting, too.”

His friend’s voice was so clear, he might as well have been standing right next to him in a quiet bar.

“Barney, I’ve got to pick up the prisoners now. You want to get going, and we’ll catch up. There’s bogeys about.”

A short, hard laugh told him that PT 59 wouldn’t be going anywhere until her sister ship was ready to cut out, as well.

Kennedy signed off. This time he did pull down the blackout curtains, and he looked out onto the burning oil slicks with abhorrence distorting his features. The screams of dying and injured men reached him faintly over the industrial noise of buckling metal and exploding munitions. He could see the flashing navigation schematics at the lower periphery of his vision, but he kept his eyes fixed on the waters in front of his boat.

“What the hell’s he doing?”

“He’s threading his way through the survivors,” said Willet, watching the minor drama on the Intelligence Division’s monitor. “Mr. Grey, bring all of the Nemesis arrays online, and keep Lieutenant Lohrey updated on the threat boards via the live link.”

“Aye, ma’am,” replied her exec.

Willet had been crouching over the display for the last twenty minutes, and now she stood up. She stretched her back muscles but never once took her eyes off the feed from the Big Eye drone.

She’d wondered whether Kennedy might do this, endanger himself and his crew rather than run down a few men he’d been trying to kill just minutes earlier. It said something about the ’temps, or maybe just about him, that the war hadn’t yet coarsened their spirits completely.

She envied him, in a way. She’d lost almost any feeling she might have had for her enemies when her sister