The Jungle

Then from over the horizon came a streaking blur that cut the air like lightning. It was a burst from the Oregon’s 20mm Gatling gun dialed up to its maximum of four thousand rounds per minute. At that setting it wasn’t individual bullets she threw into the sky but a solid wall of tungsten hitting hypersonic speeds. Such was the ship’s targeting system that the rounds came within three feet of the chopper’s spinning rotor without hitting it. Had they wanted, they could have blown the helicopter into a falling meteor of scrap aluminum, but the demonstration of such awesome firepower was more than enough.

The Mil banked away violently and soon vanished.

A moment later Juan spotted the Oregon as she waited patiently for her wayward children. Under her patchwork coats of naval paint and artfully applied rust streaks she was the most beautiful sight in the world to him. The garage-style door of her boat garage was opened at the waterline amidships on her starboard side. While Eddie made ready to open the sea cocks and send the Liberty to a watery grave she did not deserve, Juan guided her in to a perfect stop. Max stood on the sloping ramp with two orderlies from medical and a gurney for MacD. Behind them loomed a second RHIB assault craft like the one they had abandoned in the jungle. It sat on a launching cradle that could shoot it out of the ship using hydraulic rams.

Juan tossed Hanley a line, which he tied off to a cleat.

“Good to see you.”

“Good to be back,” Juan said with a weariness he felt all the way to his bones. “I tell you, my friend, this has been a nightmare from the word go.”

“Amen to that,” Hanley agreed.

The orderlies boarded the lifeboat, carrying a backboard to stabilize Lawless and prevent any more injuries. They moved quickly, knowing that they were minutes away from engaging in a battle with Myanmar’s finest gunboat.

Once MacD was lifted clear and was on his way to the infirmary with Julia huddled over the speeding gurney, Eddie opened the seacocks and leapt from the lifeboat.

“Sorry,” Juan said, and patted the Liberty’s coaming before making the jump himself.

Max mashed an intercom button that linked to the high-tech Op Center. “Punch it, Eric. We’re out of time.”

Then came an echoing boom from across the sea followed by the high-pitched shriek of an artillery shell in flight and then an explosion of water thirty yards beyond the wallowing Liberty. Hanley was right. They were out of time. Almost immediately they were bracketed by a second shell. The Oregon was pinned.

13

DEEP INSIDE THE SHIP’S HULL, HER REVOLUTIONARY engines came online with a command from Eric Stone. The supercooled magnets sitting encased in liquid nitrogen began stripping free electrons from the seawater being sucked through her drive tubes, creating an incredible amount of electricity that was transformed into horsepower by the pump jets. Like a thoroughbred that breaks from a standstill to a full gallop, the Oregon took off, a bone in her teeth and a creaming wake at her stern. The cryopumps’ whine soon went ultrasonic and disappeared above the normal range of hearing. A third blast concussed the air, and an explosive shell hit the ocean in the exact spot the ship had occupied moments earlier. It blew up a towering fountain of water that stayed suspended for what seemed like an impossible amount of time before collapsing with a guttural splash.

Cabrillo’s first order, as he was hobbling to the Op Center with Max supporting one arm, was to send a crewman to his cabin to get him another prosthetic leg.

The high-tech room buzzed with coiled energy that gave the air an electric tang. Eric and Mark Murphy were in their customary seats. Hali Kasim was to the right, monitoring communications, and Linc had taken over the radar station generally manned by Linda Ross when the ship was facing danger. Gomez Adams was at a spare workstation, flying an aerial drone over the area. The drone—really, just a large commercial RC plane—was fitted with a high-def Minicam that relayed incredible real-time pictures.

“Sit rep,” Juan commanded when he threw himself into the Kirk Chair.

“Single Hainan-class missile destroyer about twelve thousand yards off the port beam and coming in at about fourteen knots,” Eric reported.

“Wepps, how are we looking?” That was Cabrillo’s nickname for whoever commanded the Oregon’s array of weaponry, usually Murph.

“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.

The 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