by Tom Clancy
Tico launched her first quartet of missiles as the targets reached a range of ninety-nine miles. The rockets exploded into the air, leaving a trail of pale gray smoke. They had barely cleared the launch rails when the mounts went vertical and swiveled to receive their reloads. The load-and-fire time was under eight seconds. The cruiser would average one missile fired every two seconds. Just over three minutes later, her missile magazines were empty. The cruiser emerged from the base of an enormous gray arch of smoke. Her only remaining defenses were her gun systems.
The SAMs raced in at their targets with a closing speed of over two thousand miles per hour, directed in by the reflected waves of the ship’s own fire-control radars. At a range of a hundred fifty yards from their targets, the warheads detonated. The Aegis system did quite well. Just over 60 percent of the targets were destroyed. There were now eighty-two incoming missiles targeted on a total of eight ships.
Other missile-equipped ships joined the fray. In several cases two or three missiles were sent for the same target, usually killing it. The number of incoming “vampires” dropped to seventy, then sixty, but the number was not dropping quickly enough. The identity of the targets was now known to everyone. Powerful active jamming equipment came on. Ships began a radical series of maneuvers like some stylized dance, with scant attention paid to station-keeping. Collision at sea was now the least of anyone’s worries. When the Kingfish got to within twenty miles, every ship in the formation began to fire off chaff rockets, which filled the air with millions of aluminized Mylar fragments that fluttered on the air, creating dozens of new targets for the missiles to select from. Some of the Kingfish lost lock with their targets and started chasing Mylar ghosts. Two of them got lost, and selected new targets on the far side of the formation.
The radar picture on Nimitz suddenly was obscured. What had been discrete pips designating the positions of ships in the formation became shapeless clouds. Only the missiles stayed constant: inverted V-shapes, with line vectors to designate direction and speed. The last wave of SAMs killed three more. The vampire count was down to forty-one. Toland counted five heading for Nimitz.
Topside, the final defensive weapons were now tracking the targets. These were the CIWS, 20mm Gatling guns, radar-equipped to explode incoming missiles at a range of under two thousand yards. Designed to operate in a fully automatic mode, the two after gun mounts on the carrier angled up and began to track the first pair of incoming Kingfish. The portside mount fired first, the six-barrel cannon making a sound like that of an enormous zipper. Its radar system tracked the target, and tracked the outgoing slugs, adjusting fire to make the two meet.
The leading Kingfish exploded eight hundred yards from Nimitz’s port quarter. The thousand kilograms of high explosive rocked the ship. Toland felt it, wondering if the ship had been hit. Around him, the CIC crewmen were concentrating frantically on their jobs. One target track vanished from the screen. Four left.
The next Kingfish approached the carrier’s bow and was blasted out of the sky by the forward CIWS, too close aboard. Fragments ripped across the carrier’s deck, killing a dozen exposed crewmen.
Number three was decoyed by a chaff cloud and ran straight into the sea half a mile behind the carrier. The warhead caused the carrier to vibrate and raised a column of water a thousand feet into the air.
The fourth and fifth missiles came in from aft, not a hundred yards apart. The after gun mount tracked on both, but couldn’t decide which to engage first. It went into Reset mode and petulantly didn’t engage any. The missiles hit within a second of one another, one on the after port corner of the flight deck, the other on the number two arrestor wire.
Toland was thrown fifteen feet, and slammed against a radar console. Next he saw a wall of pink flame that washed briefly over him. Then came the noises. First the thunder of the explosion. Then the screams. The after CIC bulkhead was no longer there; instead there was a mass of flame. Men twenty feet away were ablaze, staggering and screaming before his eyes. Toland’s only thought was escape. He bolted for the watertight door. It opened miraculously under his hand and he ran to starboard. The ship’s fire-suppression systems were already on, showering everything with a curtain of saltwater. His skin burned from it as he emerged, hair and uniform singed, to the flight deck catwalk. A sailor directed a water hose on him, nearly knocking him over the side.
“Fire in CIC!” Toland gasped.
“What the hell ain’t!” the sailor screamed.
Toland fell to his knees and looked outboard. Foch had been to their north, he remembered. Now there was a pillar of smoke. As he watched, the last Kingfish was detonated a hundred feet over Saratoga’s flight deck. The carrier seemed undamaged. Three miles away, Ticonderoga’s after superstructure was shredded and ablaze from a rocket that had blown up within yards of her. On the horizon a ball of flame announced the destruction of yet another—my God, Toland thought, might that be Saipan? She had two thousand Marines aboard . . .
“Get forward, you dumbass!” a firefighter yelled at him. Another man emerged to the catwalk.
“Toland, you all right?” It was Captain Svenson, his shirt torn away and his chest bleeding from a half-dozen cuts.
“Yes, sir,” Bob answered.
“Get to the bridge. Tell ’em to put the wind on the starboard beam. Move!” Svenson jumped up onto the flight deck.
Toland did likewise, racing forward. The deck was awash in firefighting foam, slippery as oil. Toland ran recklessly, falling hard on the deck before he reached the carrier’s island. He was in the pilothouse in under a minute.
“Captain says put the wind on the starboard beam!” Toland said.
“It is on the fucking beam!” the executive officer snapped back. The bridge deck was covered with broken glass. “How’s the skipper?”
“Alive. He’s aft with the fire.”
“And who the hell are you?” the XO demanded.
“Toland, group intel. I was in CIC.”
“Then you’re one lucky bastard. That second bird hit fifty yards from you. Captain got out? Anyone else?”
“I don’t know. Burning like hell.”
“Looks like you caught part of it, Commander.”
Bob’s face felt as if he’d shaved with a piece of glass. His eyebrows crumpled to his touch. “Flashburns, I guess. I’ll be okay. What do you want me to do?”
The XO pointed to Toland’s water wings. “Can you conn the ship? Okay, do it. Nothing left to run into anyway. I’m going aft to take charge of the fire. Communications are out, radar’s out, but the engines are okay and the hull’s in good shape. Mr. Bice has the deck. Mr. Toland has the conn,” XO announced as he left.
Toland hadn’t conned anything bigger than a Boston Whaler in over ten years, and now he had a damaged carrier. He took a pair of binoculars and looked around to see what ships were nearby. What he saw chilled him.
Saratoga was the only ship that looked intact, but on second glance her radar mast was askew. Foch was lower in the water than she ought to have been, and ablaze from bow to stem.
“Where’s Saipan?”
“Blew up like a fucking firework,” Commander Bice replied. “Holy Jesus, there were twenty-five hundred men aboard! Tico took one close aboard. Foch took three hits, looks like she’s gone. Two frigates and a destroyer gone, too—just fucking gone, man! Who fucked up? You were in CIC, right? Who fucked up?”
The eight French Crusaders were just making contact with the Backfires. The Russian bombers were on afterburner and were nearly as fast as the fighters. The carrier pilots had all heard their ship go off the air and were consumed with rage at what had happened, no longer the cool professionals who drove fighters off ships. Only ten Backfires were within their reach. They got six of them with their missiles and damaged two more before they had to break off.
USS Caron, the senior undamaged ship, tracked the Russians on her radar, calling Britain for fighters to intercept them on the trip home. But the Russians had anticipat
ed this, and detoured far west of the British Isles, meeting their tankers four hundred miles west of Norway.
Already the Russians were evaluating the results of their mission. The first major battle of modern carriers and missile-armed bombers had been won and lost. Both sides knew which was which.
The fire on Nimitz was out within an hour. With no aircraft aboard, there were few combustibles about, and the ship’s firefighting abilities equaled that of a large city. Toland brought her back to an easterly course. Saratoga was recovering aircraft, refueling them, and sending all but the fighters to the beach. Three frigates and a destroyer lingered to recover survivors, as the large ships turned back toward Europe.
“All ahead full,” Svenson ordered from his seat on the bridge. “Toland, you all right?”
“No complaints.” No point in it, the ship’s hospital was more than full with hundreds of major injury cases. There was no count of the dead yet, and Toland didn’t want to think about that.
“You were right,” the captain said, his voice angry and subdued. “You were right. They made it too easy and we fell for it.”
“There’ll be another day, Captain.”
“You’re Goddamned right there will! We’re heading for Southampton. See if the Brits can fix anything this big. My regulars are still busy aft. Think you can handle the conn a little longer?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nimitz and her nuclear escorts bent on full speed, nearly forty knots, and rapidly left the formation behind. A reckless move, racing too fast for antisubmarine patrols, but a submarine would have to move quickly indeed to catch them.
21
Nordic Hammer
HILL 152, ICELAND
“I know that was a fighter, and there had to be more than one,” Edwards said. It was raining again, probably for the last time. The clouds to the southwest were breaking up, and there was a hint of clear sky on the horizon. Edwards just sat there in his helmet and poncho, staring into the distance.
“I suppose you’re right, sir,” Smith replied. The sergeant was nervous. They’d been on this hilltop for almost twenty-four hours, a long time to be stationary in hostile country. The best time to move out would have been during the rain showers, when visibility was cut to a few hundred yards. Soon the sky might be clear again, and it wouldn’t get dark again for quite a while. As it was, they sat on their hilltop in camouflage ponchos that kept them partly dry and wholly miserable.
There was a heavy shower north of them that prevented their seeing Reykjavik, and they could barely make out Hafnarfjördur to the west, which worried the sergeant, who wanted to know what Ivan was up to. What if they detected Edwards’s satellite radio and began to triangulate on it? What if there were patrols out?
“Lieutenant?”
“Yeah, Sarge?”
“We got those phone lines on one side of us, and those power lines on the other—”
“You want to blow some up?” Edwards smiled.
“No, sir, but Ivan is going to start patrolling them soon, and this ain’t a very good place for us to make contact.”
“We’re supposed to observe and report, Sarge,” Edwards said without conviction.
“Yes, sir.”
Edwards checked his watch. It was 1955Z. Doghouse might want to talk with them, though they hadn’t called in to him yet. Edwards broke the radio out of the pack again, assembled the pistol-grip antenna, and donned his headset. At 1959 he switched on and tracked in on the satellite carrier wave.
“Doghouse calling Beagle. Doghouse calling Beagle. Do you copy? Over.”
“Well, how about that.” He toggled the Transmit switch. “Roger, we’re here, Doghouse.”
“Anything new to report?”
“Negative, unless you want to know about the rain. Visibility is down. We can’t see very much.”
The communications watch officer at Doghouse looked at a weather map. So it really was raining there. He hadn’t been able to convince his boss that Beagle could be trusted. Edwards had answered the questions that the counterintelligence guys had come up with. They’d even had a voice-stress analyzer handy to check the tapes of his answers. The needle had pegged on the last answer about his girlfriend. That hadn’t been faked. Copies of the relevant parts of his personnel package had been faxed to them. Upper fifth of his class at Colorado Springs. Good in math and engineering studies, did extremely well in his postgraduation studies in meteorology. His eyesight had worsened slightly during his tenure at Colorado Springs, becoming just bad enough to keep him from flying. Regarded as quiet and shy, but evidently well liked by his classmates. Not a warrior type, the psychological profile said. How long would the kid last?
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND
One MiG-29 was flying. The others were in the hardened shelters the Americans had only just finished at the end of runway eleven. The fighter’s mission was twofold. It was a standing combat air patrol aircraft should an incoming raid be detected, but more importantly, it was being tracked carefully by the ground radar controllers: their radar needed to be calibrated. Iceland’s irregular terrain made for troublesome radar performance, and as with the surface-to-air missiles, the instruments themselves had been badly jostled by the trip aboard the Fucik. The fighter flew circles around the airport while the radar operators determined that what their instruments told them was correct.
The fighters were fully fueled and armed, their pilots resting on cots near them. At the moment, the bowsers were fueling the Badger bomber that had given the fighters navigational and electronic support. Soon it would be leaving to bring in nine more. The Air Force detachment was rapidly finishing their job of clearing the airfield. All but one of the runways was swept clear of fragments now. The remains of the American aircraft had been bulldozed off the pavement. The fuel pipeline would be repaired in an hour, the engineers said.
“Quite a busy day,” the major said to the fighter commander.
“It’s not over yet. I’ll feel better when we get the rest of the regiment in,” the colonel observed quietly. “They should have hit us already.”
“How do you expect them to attack?”
The colonel shrugged. “Hard to say. If they’re really serious about closing this field, they’ll use a nuclear warhead.”
“Are you always so optimistic, Comrade Colonel?”
The raid was an hour away. The eighteen B-52H bombers had left Louisiana ten hours before and landed to refuel at Sondrestrom Air Force Base on Greenland’s west coast. Fifty miles ahead of them were a single Raven EF-111 jamming aircraft and four F-4 Phantoms configured for defense-suppression.
The radar was about halfway calibrated, though what had been done was the easy part. The fighter that had just landed had flown racetrack ovals from due north around the western horizon to due south of Keflavik. The area to the west of the air base, though not exactly flat, was nearly so, with low rocky hills. Next came the hard part, plotting radar coverage of the eastern arc over Iceland’s mountainous center, a solid collection of hills that worked up to the island’s tall central peak. Another Fulcrum rolled off the runway to begin this task, its pilot wondering how long it might take to map all the nulls—areas blanked to radar coverage by the steep valleys—areas that an attacking aircraft could use to mask its approach to Keflavik.
The radar officers were plotting probable troublesome spots on their topographical maps when an operator shouted a warning. Their clear radar screens had just turned to hash from powerful electronic jammers. That could mean only one thing.
The klaxons sounded in the fighter shelters at the end of runway eleven. Fighter pilots who had been dozing or playing dominos jumped to their feet and raced to their aircraft.
The tower officer lifted the field phone to give more exact warning to the fighters, then called up the missile battery commander: “Incoming air raid!”
Men leaped into action all across the air base. The fighter ground crews hit the built-in self-starters, turning the jet engines even as the pilots c
limbed into the cockpits. The SAM battery turned on its search and fire-control systems while the launch vehicles slewed their missiles into firing position.
Just under the radar horizon, eighteen B-52 bombers had just lit off their ECM jamming systems. They were deployed in six groups of three each. The first skimmed over the top of Mt. Snaefells, sixty miles north of Keflavik, and the rest came from all around the west side of the compass, converging on the target behind a wall of electronic noise provided by their own systems and the supporting EF-111 Raven jammer.
The Russian fighter just lifting off climbed to altitude, the pilot keeping his radar off as he scanned the sky visually, waiting for intercept information from the ground-based radar. His comrades were even now taxiing into the open, racing straight down the runway and into the sky. The aircraft that had just landed taxied to a fuel bowser, its pilot gesturing and cursing at the ground crewmen who were struggling to fuel his fighter. In their haste, they spilled ten gallons of fuel over the wing. Amazingly, it did not ignite, and a dozen men ran in with CO2 extinguishers to prevent an explosion as the fighter drank in a full load of fuel.
HILL 152, ICELAND
Edwards’s head jerked up at the noise, the distinctive roar of jet fighters. He saw a dark trail of smoke approaching in from the east, and the silhouettes passed within a mile. The shapes were heavy with ordnance, the up-angled wingtips making identification easy.
“F-4s!” he hooted. “They’re our guys!”
They were Phantom jets of the New York Air National Guard, configured as Wild Weasel SAM-killers. While Russian attention was on the converging bomber raid, they skimmed over hilltops and down valleys, using the crenellated landscape to mask their low-level approach. The back-seat crewman in each aircraft counted the missile radars, selecting the most dangerous targets. When they got to within ten miles of Keflavik, they popped up high and fired a salvo of Standard-ARM antiradar missiles.