Armageddon by Jim DeFelice, Dale Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

OFF THE OSPREY QUICKLY. THE large blades of the aircraft’s engines whipped up the dirt, pelting the team with a mist of rocks. Danny got to the ground and spun to his right, hustling after his two men as they sprinted the fifty yards to their “airman.” One of the ACR units had engaged the Red unit to the north; from this point out it was going to be a jog in the park.
    The whirling sand blocked Danny’s optical image momentarily, but as it cleared he saw his man a few yards away, standing in his shirtsleeves and waving his hand. His other team members had apparently detoured to protect the perimeter, so Danny went to his airman to tap him per the exercise rules and call the Osprey in for the pickup.
    Except it wasn’t his airman.
    “Bang bang, you’re dead,” grinned Boston, producing a pistol from behind his back. Its laser dot settled on Danny’s bulletproof vest, officially killing him. “Gotcha, Captain. Boy, if I only had a camera right now …”
    Off the coast of Brunei
8 October 1997, (local) 0502
    The stars had begun to fade from the sky, and the ocean swelled with the mottled shadows of the approaching morn. A solitary merchant ship cruised in the darkness, heading toward the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, which lay upriver from the Brunei Bay on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. The ship rode low on the waves with a load of motorbikes and electric goods, along with a variety of items ranging from Korean vegetables to American-style jeans.
    Arriving on the bridge from his cabin, the captain of the ship noticed a shadow on the southwest horizon. He stared at it a moment, trying to make sense of it. The dark smudge moved with incredible swiftness, riding so low against the water that it could only be a wave or some sort of optical illusion; still, the captain went to the radar himself, confirming that there was no contact. His thirty years at sea had made him wary, and it was only when he looked back and saw nothing that he reached for his customary cup of coffee. He took a sip from his cup and listened as the officer of the watch described the expected weather. A storm had been forecast but was at least several hours away; they would be safely in the harbor by then.
    “It is good that we are early then,” he told the others on the bridge in Spanish.
    It was the last thing the captain said on this earth. For as he raised his cup of coffee to his lips, the missile that had been launched from the shadow in the distance exploded five feet behind him.
     
    THE FRENCH-BUILT EXOCET MISSILE CARRIED A RELATIVELY small warhead at 364 pounds; while the explosion destroyed the bridge it would not by itself have been enough to sink the ship. The more damaging blow was landed by the second weapon, fired a bare second and a half after the first; this missile struck at the waterline just ahead of the exact middle of the ship. The warhead carried through the hull before exploding; the vessel shuddered with the impact and within moments began to settle. Nearly a third of the crew had been killed or trapped by the two blasts; the others were so stunned that it would be several minutes before most even got to their proper emergency stations. By then the ship would be lost.
    Five miles away, the man who had given the order to launch the missiles stood over the small video screen, watching through a long-range infrared camera as the doomed merchant ship began to sink.
    The attack had been an easy one; a bare demonstration of the Malaysian navy vessel’s capabilities. Named the Barracuda, the experimental high-speed craft was every bit the voracious predator, clothed in dark black skin made of metal and fiber-glass arranged in sharp facets to deflect radar waves. The craft used a technology known as “wing-in-surface-effect,” which allowed it to skim over the water at high speed; it could reach over four hundred knots, though to fire effectively it had to slow to below one hundred, and had to go even