Weapons of choice

A wide, beaming smile spread over Damiri's face as he saw two ships collide about a thousand meters away. The sound of the impact reached him as a terrible grinding of steel against steel and he fancied he could even make out the screams and cries of the infidels as they reeled in fear. He smirked.

Shock and awe, indeed.

A missile roared overhead and he ducked without thinking, even though the gesture was pointless. The nearest ship, some sort of passenger liner, he thought, blew apart with a bone-shaking explosion.

"Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar!"

He heard the ghostly, whispering crack of hypervelocity caseless ammunition as it passed harmlessly through the air above the tip of the ship's broken mast.

"They cannot depress their guns far enough, my brothers. Praise God we shall all be in Paradise soon," cried Damiri.

Kolhammer's mouth was a thin, white line chiseled into the granite face of a cold mountain. Alarms sounded throughout the ship and every sailor in the bridge was bracing for the detonation while trying to perform half a dozen emergency drills at the same time. He could feel the deck of the giant ship tilting as she poured on the revolutions and tried to accelerate away from the suicide boat.

He did a quick calculation on just how much explosive material you could pack into a vessel of that size, wondering whether the armor sheath could withstand the blast. Probably not, if Damiri rammed them.

The sea around him was a maelstrom with dozens of ships heading in all directions. Reports of collisions and near collisions flashed up on screens and sounded through the loudspeakers every few seconds. Judge shouted orders to the bridge crew. Spruance had quietly wandered over to the strip window with his hands clasped behind his back while the crew called out updates in the strained tones of men and women trained to die at their stations.

"Trident coming around, sir. No missile lock yet."

"Kandahar is blocked, Admiral."

"Kennebunkport does not have a clear field of fire."

"CAP is sixteen kilometers out, no target lock."

"Comanche lifting off the Kandahar."

A dark shape flashed with a vicious buzz. Kolhammer was about to ask what the hell it was when Spruance called out over the din.

"It's a Wildcat! Off the Enterprise."

The antique fighter roared down the length of the Clinton's flight deck, waggling its wings in a salute. It reached the bow and immediately opened up with all six machine guns. Kolhammer frantically flicked between a dozen battle-cam views on the nearest screen before he found a top-down view of the old F-4F boring in toward the jihadi boat. White light twinkled along the leading edge of its wings. Long, ropy strands of gun smoke trailed behind. Thousand of rounds of good old-fashioned fifty caliber whipped the midnight-blue sea around the Sutanto into a fury of white water. The first shells bit into the metal skin of the ship, and the pilot adjusted the angle of his shallow dive to keep the fire pouring into the decks. Shards of red-hot metal erupted from the small superstructure as the Sutanto shuddered under the assault.

The gap between the Wildcat and her prey closed rapidly.

Seven hundred meters.

Six hundred.

Five hundred.

Smoke and flames streamed from a dozen breaches in the ship's plating.

Four hundred.

Three hundred.

The Wildcat's guns ran dry and the plane peeled away.

Nothing happened for two seconds, and then the Sutanto went up in a stunning eruption that Kolhammer felt in his guts as the pressure wave slammed into the Clinton. His ears popped painfully. Vision swam. Gray spots bloomed. Sailors tumbled to the floor and the great, titanic mass of the supercarrier trembled with the shock. She rose up a little as if riding over a wave, and then plunged down again, intact and safe.

The Sutanto was gone, and with her the little aluminum monoplane that had saved them all.

Well, not all, Kolhammer realized as he straightened up.

The blast wave had been strong enough to tear apart two nearby liners and a hospital ship. Another two civilian vessels had collided in their panic to get away, and one of them was going down quickly. Secondary explosions tore through the crippled liners. Oily smoke and flames poured from the foredeck of the hospital ship and the sea for miles around was in turmoil with dozens of ships, modern and contemporary, scattering to the four points.

"Damage?" cried Kolhammer.

Commander Judge scanned a nearby screen, glancing out the blast windows as though he didn't trust the data over the evidence of his own eyes. Video coverage from drones stationed overhead and feeding from mast-mounted cams through the modern ships began to appear on screens all over the bridge.

"Jesus, it went off like a baby nuke."

Kolhammer couldn't tell who'd said that. One of his people, he supposed, given the reference.

"We came through without major structural damage," Judge reported. "But we've lost three surface assets and another two are in danger."

"Projected casualties?" demanded Kolhammer.