freighters. There were at least nine Navy ships sinking and four others being swarmed by what looked like boarding teams. A fast-moving black dart, a helicopter of some sort, sent a volley of rockets into the bridge of the USS
Pinckney
. 45 In the distance, green tracked vehicles moved down the road closest to the shoreline. He suspected they were not friendly. He put the binoculars down when he heard Captain Riley shout into his headset, âJust someone cut the damn mooring lines!â
The
Coronado
âs foredeck was empty. Bloodstains on the deck marked where two more sailors whoâd tried to free the ship had been cut down. Simmons winced, knowing that they would need every sailor they had to get the ship out of this kill zone.
Nearing the
Coronado
âs bow, Horowitz looked up at the bridge. Heâd run out of 5.56 mm rounds for his M4 and had been ferrying ammunition to a sailor firing an M249 machine gun 46 at the nearby freighter.
âOn it!â Horowitz shouted. He raced inside the nearby passageway and pulled out the fire ax. He ran toward the rope but slipped on a pool of blood and cut his palm on the blade of the ax. He couldnât help himself and laughed. The absurdity of slicing yourself with an ax in the middle of a gunfight.
Horowitz belly-crawled out to the mooring line, staying low to avoid the fire. When he reached it, he jumped up, held the ax high over his head, and then smashed it down on the thick braided-Kevlar line tying the
Coronado
to the pier.
It made little impression; the ax parted only a few strands. He lifted it again, and again. Soon his chest heaved and his arms burned, and he couldnât hear anything but the buzzing in his ears. At some point, a bullet struck the ax head, but Horowitz held it fast despite the ache in his hands.
One of the shipâs caterpillar-like SAFFiRs (Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robots) 47 crawled onto the deck nearby and was immediately hit. The child-size robot sprayed a cloud of chemical retardant all over the deck before rolling into the water. âOne last time,â Horowitz said to himself with a grunt, âand then we are out of here.â
He didnât see the Directorate PGZ-07 antiaircraft vehicle 48 that rounded the corner on the rise above the pier. Without any targets in the sky, the PGZ trained its twin-barreled 35 mm cannon on the U.S. ships in the harbor, the closest being the
Coronado
.
âShit,â said Simmons as he watched Horowitzâs shredded body cartwheel into the water.
âTarget, starboard side. Hit that bastard! Heâs the one who just lit us up,â shouted Captain Riley.
The shipâs 57 mm Mk 110 cannon 49 rotated away from the freighter and toward the Directorate vehicle as fast as the gunner could pull the targeting joystick. While the main gun couldnât make much of an impact on a hundred-thousand-ton ship, the rounds chewed apart the lightly armored twenty-two-ton vehicle, and it exploded, sending flaming shrapnel through the building behind it.
Simmons was in command mode, listening to his crew on his headset as much as directing them. He heard shouting one moment, then dispassionate descriptions of overheating or damaged equipment. The crew was proving to be good under pressure, which was exactly why he had driven them so hard.
âWeâve got to go now, Captain. Lineâs all but cut through,â said Simmons.
âYou heard him, get us out of here,â said Captain Riley.
Simmons recognized the false confidence in his captainâs voice. They both knew the
Coronado
would have to battle its way out of the flaming harbor.
A sudden buzzing noise made everyone on the bridge duck. A quadcopter appeared right in front of the bridgeâs windows, nervously hovering, like a wasp looking for a way inside.
The Mk 110 main gun spun to engage the V1000, but the quadcopter hovered inside the gunâs arc of fire, feinting and dodging with the
Amanda J. Greene
Robert Olen Butler
J. Meyers
Penelope Stokes
David Feldman
Carolyn Hennesy
Ashley March
Kelly Jamieson
Karen Ward
Sheila Simonson