Firebase overlooking Jalakra
The warning klaxons were the first sign that things were about to get testy, fast. Counter-battery fire was to be expected, but no one had really considered the prospect of it legitimately occurring. Out of sight, out of mind, it seemed.
"Static RADAR is detecting multiple incoming projectiles!" An operator quickly relayed to Ilya, who stood stiffly behind his chair.
The red warning lights lit up the dark interior like a Halloween haunted house, playing with shadows in the corners and casting fires into the eyes of men. As soon as the first volley had been sent downrange, the aging FSIS officer had retreated to the safety of the command bunker towards the center of the compound. It wasn't his first choice, more preferring the open-air post he had set up between two guns along the ridge-line, but one his junior officers had forced upon him out of necessity.
"The opening moments of battle are always chaos," they had claimed. "Last thing our advance needs is to lose you in it."
He couldn't argue with the logic, but logic only served its purpose so long as outcomes were predictable. In war, even the most certain of things became uncertain... casting reason to the wind and leaving men like him with only their instincts and experience. On the screen below him, in front of the operator, he watched as tiny red blips began to fill the screen. His irises burned with each refresh cycle, watching as those hostile red dots grew closer and closer to the center origin.
As they passed a certain phase-mark, the screen flashed green. It was unexpected, temporarily blinded Ilya and causing him to recoil backwards. The entire room went silent for the moment as he and everyone else rubbed their eyes. It was eerie, to hear calm amid the chaos of war going on outside. But it was enough. Even deep within reinforced concrete, he could hear the telltale sounds of the CIWS turrets opening up on the incoming missiles. The green flash was simply an acknowledgement that close-range RADAR had acquired the targets and was engaging.
Immediately he watched as several of the red dots disappeared off the screen. At the same instant, the clamor returned as the systems operators began to receive feedback from the surface. Printers began to scream as they shot out reel after reel of real-time telemetry data, a coffee machine in the break room exploded under the stresses of the situation, gunsmoke from the artillery began to filter into the room, despite the Class-A NBC filters in the ventilation shaft.
Ilya watched intently as the dots kept coming, the red reflecting off the surface of his eyes as he watched them simultaneously disappear and inch closer. He had been a military man all of his life, but not even he could imagine how frantic the CIWS operators were right now. Computer margin of error for the system was set officially at ten percent, same as acceptable casualties, but he knew it would likely be closer to fifteen or twenty. No matter how many of the experimental systems he had, there would always be the ones that got through. One hundred percent, despite the benchmark, was nigh unachievable in a practical setting. Things always tended to fail at the worst possible moment, always came just shy of their factory specifications, but it was up to the operators to squeeze that extra juice from their hardware. And he knew that that "extra juice" was what often made all the difference in a combat situation.
"Ten seconds!" The operator announced.
Ilya frowned as the dots continued to move, the dent his turrets putting in their numbers not enough to thin them out sufficiently.
"Deploy countermeasures!" He ordered, elevating his normally quiet voice over the noise of the room.
"Deploying countermeasures!" A chorus of acknowledgements erupted.
For a split second he felt a body-shaking rumble, but the realization of what had just occurred didn't dawn on him until moments latter. He opened his mouth to bark orders, but was silenced as everything went black.
======
It was ear-splitting as the CIWS turrets opened up, spewing hot metal into the sky in the general direction of the sea. The artillery crews, many of whom had stripped to only trousers and undershirts to provide ventilation in the incessant island heat, stared on in disbelief and awe as they took a brief break to wipe the sweat from their blackened bodies. They had never seen the turrets in action before, being army soldiers and not sailors, but were nevertheless amazed by how quickly their computer-operated hydraulics whirled the guns around to bear.
The warning klaxons were going off, but their sound was muffled by distant explosions and the roar of aircraft circling over the theater. Several puffs of smoke appeared in the sky as the cannons found their mark, resulting the numerous cheers echoing across the plateau. Then one exploded, detonating prematurely only a few thousand yards off, filling the sky with a red-orange fireball. The shockwave alone blew almost everyone off their feet, and as they hit the ground, so too did any notions of their invincibility. It was massive scramble for their discarded gear, anything and everything that might protect them the incoming rounds. The second ring of defense guns opened up, covering the sky in a thick blanket of lead. Seconds later, the third ring erupted.
The artillery crews were in panic at this point, running every which way trying to find any semblance of cover. Concrete walls, foxholes, empty ammunition crates became prime real estate as the time separating flight and detonation shrank. The camo netting above their guns suddenly electrified, blue-white arcs of electricity shooting upwards as the telltale buzz filling the air. Chaff launchers, mounted on the superstructure of nearby concrete bunkers, spewed forth a blanket of ultralight metal shards into the air.
There was no time left.
