by FARMAN, ANDY
Again, the vibrations in the deck plate, and confirmation of the weapons status a moment later.
“Captain, we have a solution on the Xia. Bearing one eight zero on a heading of one seven nine, range seven three nine zero, depth eight zero zero, speed nine knots and rising?”
He nodded in acknowledgement.
“Very good…runtime on weapon number three please?”
“Fifty five seconds, sir.”
Looking at his wristwatch the captain allowed the second hand to progress another twenty seconds, he knew the Xia would launch counter measures and he was hoping the interval would be sufficient to ensure that both weapons were not foxed by the same noisemaker.
“Tube four, match bearings and shoot.”
For the fourth time in less than a minute and a half the vessel vibrated slightly as compressed air boosted a torpedo out into the open water. The Spearfish torpedo accelerated into the blackness of the Pacific’s depths steered toward its target by impulses travelling along the wafer thin cable that unravelled behind it. Its own sensor package was in standby mode as a weapons operator aboard the Hood sent guidance instructions that placed the weapon in a tail chase with the fleeing ballistic missile submarine. The Spearfish from tube four was kilometres behind the Xia but like tubes three’s weapon ahead of it; it was outpacing the big submarine. Hood’s captain was quite happy for the Xia to keep going as it was in a straight line as fast as it could, his operators had steered both Spearfish into her six o’clock, every submarines blind spot.
There was little for him do now except wait for something happen.
He took a look around the control room at his officers and ratings, all of whom were hard at their own particular trades. He wondered if any of them knew that the outcome of the war could quite possibly rest in their hands? They were all far too busy to stop and think of the consequences of failure.
“Captain, sonar…” it was time to get back to work. “….aspect change on Xia, course change fifteen degrees to port, now heading one six four.”
So the Xia’s captain had turned to allow his sonar to look behind. They would run now to their best speed and begin chucking out countermeasures.
“Very good…come left to one seven zero, maintain this depth and speed, please.”
“Aye aye, coming left to one seven zero, maintaining depth and speed, sir.”
“Captain, weapons?”
“Go ahead ‘Weps’?”
“Sorry captain, weapon three is now showing a red light.”
At fifteen knots he would not have been surprised if at least one wire had snapped due to the additional stresses, but that was not what the weapons operator was reporting.
“What is the nature of the fault?” he demanded, wanting further information before he would order another weapon launched.
“Sir, the system is telling me it is a non-specified error…sir, I now have a green light once more.”
The captain did not immediately respond as he considered cutting the weapon loose anyway. There was a lot riding on this attack and it was not something he could allow to pass without considering the odds. Had the Hood been built with six tubes he would indeed have ordered a further weapon launched at the Xia, but it only had four and they were all in use.
“Thank you weapons, if the error repeats itself on that Spearfish cut the wire and reload immediately, understood?”
“Aye aye, captain.”
No sooner had that operator finished then a sonar operator was calling for his attention. Weapon four had eaten up the distance now and the PLAN crew was reacting.
“Captain, sonar…Xia launching countermeasures and coming right to two one three.”
“Thank you sonar…Weapons, status of weapon four please?”
“Sir, weapon four running correctly and now twelve hundred metres from the Xia.”
It was time to accelerate the spearfish. “Increase speed on both weapons please but retain control.”
Ahead of them the Chinese boomer as if hearing his words launched two torpedoes of its own before ejecting more countermeasures and making a radical turn to port.
The weapons operator controlling number four steered the Spearfish around to follow the turn whilst number threes operator used the opportunity to make up distance by cutting the corner, steering straight toward the vessel.
The Xia reversed its turn and number fours operator cursed under his breath.
“Sir, the wire to number four has broken, but the weapon is guiding independently.”
“Very good…” Any relief he felt on the assurance that weapon four was guiding began to wilt with the next report.
“Control room, sonar…Xia has launched another decoy.”
The captain just knew what was coming next.
“Captain, weapon four is rapid pinging…weapon four is accelerating and tracking the decoy, sir.”
The plot showed the Xia continuing its starboard turn whilst the decoy continued straight ahead, with the Spearfish from tube four completely fooled and closing rapidly.
“Status on weapon three, please?”
“Weapon three is still under control and closing on the Xia, captain.”
“Control room, sonar…explosion bearing one nine seven, weapon four has destroyed the decoy…captain please be advised the weapons from the Xia appear to be steering independently on a heading of zero three zero, and we are currently outside of their detection sphere.”
That at least was some good news; they would not have to risk losing contact in manoeuvring to avoid the Xia’s torpedoes.
“TorpedoTorpedoTorpedo…two weapons in the water bearing three one zero, range seven five zero zero, heading one six five, speed forty five knots…Chuntian has opened fire on us captain.”
The captain acknowledged the last report before commenting.
“If he was trying to put us off our stroke he’s left it a bit late, and travelling at that speed they will have precious little fuel left when they get close.” There was no way that the Chinese attack submarines weapons could influence the outcome now he thought, but they would eat up the intervening distance so he would have to keep a close eye on them.
“Captain, permission to accelerate weapon three and cut the wire?”
“Granted.”
The Xia began to reverse its turn once more but feinted, turning even harder to starboard and pumping out noisemakers as fast as it could but the Spearfish was too close for them to have generated enough sound in time to register on the weapon.
The Hood’s captain watched the plot, the tight turn the boomer was performing and the Spearfish closing at fifty knots, closing until both tracks merged…and then diverged.
“What the…”
“Captain, weapon three has failed, sir.”
That damn red light earlier the captain thought, cursing himself for not cutting the wire at the time and launching another weapon instead, but it was too late now to waste effort in self-recrimination. The Spearfish continued unwaveringly onwards without any attempt to reacquire its target.
Had the captain been alone he would without doubt have lashed out at some inanimate object, but now was not the time or place.
“Aspect change on the Xia, target is now making turns for ten knots, bearing two zero zero, range four nine five zero on a heading of one eight three, depth six eight zero…six seven zero, she’s heading up captain.”
“Captain, Chuntian’s torpedoes have acquired us…impact in two minutes, sir?”
He took a deep breath and dismissed the feeling of unfairness that had briefly invaded his thoughts.
“Thank you…reload tubes three and four with Spearfish, come left to one eight eight and give me turns for twenty knots…standby countermeasures.”
“Aye sir, reloading three and four with Spearfish…heading is now one eight eight…making turns for two zero knots…countermeasures loaded and ready, sir.”
“Captain, wires have broken on one and two…sonar reports weapon two has ac
quired the Chuntian…Chuntian launching countermeasures and accelerating but maintaining her course and depth.”
The captain felt a tinge of respect for the Chuntian’s captain, his job was to protect the boomer and he was obviously intent on just that. Heading towards a weapon in the vain hope that noisemakers launched into his vessels wake would distract that weapon was a plan doomed to failure. The attack submarine moving at full speed was far noisier than any gas-generating countermeasure could ever be, but despite this the Chinese commander was trying because there were no other options open to him.
The captain looked towards the weapons board, seeing red lights still shining on the status boards for tubes three and four but he made no comment, knowing that the forward torpedo room troops were the best there was and nobody could do it any faster right now.
“Sonar, status on Xia please?”
“Sir, her forward speed is down to five knots but she’s going up fast. Depth now two six zero, course same.”
“Weapons, reload One and Two with Spearfish as soon as you can, and do you still have a solution on the Xia?”
“Yes sir, constantly updating it captain.” His weapons officer looked slightly puzzled.
“Is she trying to hide in the surface noise clutter or something, sir?”
The captain gave him a tight smile but one that was totally devoid of humour as he answered with a question of his own. “Think about it a moment Gavin, what would a boomer’s launch profile be?”
“Er, probably maintaining an even keel, making no headway at a depth of between sixty and one hundred feet, captain…he’s going to launch his missiles, isn’t he sir?”
The captain did not answer because just then the red lights on the board turned to green. “Flood Three and Four, open outer doors, match bearings with the Xia and shoot.”
The torpedoes were launched, and even as they left the tubes every member of the crew heard the first solid Ping from one of the Chuntian’s fast approaching weapons.
“Launch countermeasures, come left to one five zero at thirty knots, make your depth two zero zero!”
“Control room, sonar…explosion at bearing three one eight…very faint breaking up noises.”
On the plot the tracks of the Chuntian and Hood’s Spearfish had met head on. No one cheered.
The Chuntian’s crew may have lost the battle but the Xia could still win the war for them.
Hood’s captain took hold of the back of the coxswain’s seat for support as the deck canted to one side and tilted as the Hood headed up to the surface, turning out of the Chinese torpedoes path as she went.
The Xia reached one hundred feet below the surface and came to a dead stop. Her bow doors opened and she launched three torpedoes towards the Hood, which could plainly be heard now.
In her current stationary state discharging noisemakers would be a futile act, and as she carried no more of the Ghost Lamp decoys it was a race against the Spearfish she could also hear in order to launch her ICBMs.
On a count of three, he and the ships political officer’s keys turned in their respective secure weapons panels and initiated a fully automated launch routine. He knew exactly which target each missile was allotted to and what their place was in the launch sequence. If only one missile was launched before the torpedoes struck, the second attack in history on Pearl Harbour would be a thousand times more devastating than the first.
The vibrations resounded through the big Chinese submarine as the outer doors of the launch tubes opened two by two and seawater began to fill the voids around the missile launch canisters sat within.
Aboard the USS Tucson they listened to the sound of the battle in full knowledge of what it would mean should HMS Hood fail to kill the Xia before she launched. They had tracked every torpedo from each vessel from the time they themselves had outrun the weapons Chuntian had sent after them. Every twist, turn and feint of the combatants had been recorded and plotted. And never before had the crew of the US submarine felt so totally impotent as when the Xia came to a dead stop and opened her launch tube doors.
They heard the distant, double ping of torpedoes own sensors as they acquired and the sound of the weapons propellers become shrill as they drove them at their targets at maximum acceleration. Finally the hammer blows as warheads detonated, followed by the gut churning sound of bulkheads buckling and the sea rushing in.
CHAPTER 8
Gansu Province: Same time.
Colonel Chandler could see sparkles of light ahead of his own force, they seemed to be anything but randomly targeted as there were concentrations at whichever level the aircraft of the Wild Weasel sweep under Dark Light flight were. Each short-lived flash of light represented an exploding shell dispensing expanding clouds of shrapnel.
It was shocking to behold and the colonel who had flown across Baghdad on the first raid of the Gulf War could honestly say that what he now beheld had to be four, maybe even five times heavier than what had been thrown at them on that night.
Searchlights probed the heavens and he could almost pinch himself in order to check he was really here and not watching a WW2 newsreel.
Twenty-eight miles to the east he could see a similar scene in the direction of the airbase and the space centre, but only at the airfield was the attack being pressed without casualties. It was ironic that at the one target where aircraft had passed so close to the gunners that they could make out markings with the naked eye, they were unsuccessful in downing a single one.
The airbase attack opened with B1-Bs dispensing runway cratering weapons and mines along the tarmac, this was carried out at an altitude of just sixty feet.
The Tower, tank farm, and hangars were attacked even as the runway was still being cratered by the B1-Bs submunitions. Laser-guided weapons struck every hanger and this destroyed all but two of the Flankers based on the airfield. Owing to the inclement weather all had been brought in from the dispersal shelters that were open on three sides to the elements and kept in the hangars free of snow and ice. No CAP had been in place due to the extreme remoteness of the location and its distance from the nearest known enemy forces, but instead a pair was kept on permanent runway readiness.
The airbase attack ended with the SAM radars being taken out as they hurriedly came up, and the pair of Flankers stranded at the runways end disappeared in the single explosion caused by a Maverick landing between them.
All the targets on the revised list for the space centre were in hardened shelters that required high altitude attacks with BLU-116s, and these attacks cost them two of the precious B2s to massed 90mm AAA that found the aircraft despite radar having never acquired a solid lock.
Chandler had heard rumours about the Chinese air defence zones, both the fixed and mobile ones. He always figured they were just story’s, kind of like the everlasting light bulb and the salt-water combustion engine.
According to the stories that Chandler had heard the Chinese never threw anything away, they had vast warehouses filled with weapons that were maintained religiously, despite their age. From horse drawn Japanese anti-aircraft guns to modern self-propelled, high altitude pieces and latest generation SAMs, they were stored together awaiting a time when they may be needed.
The thing that had convinced Chandler that the stories were nothing more than popular legend had been the claims that the secondary targeting systems were not laser or radar based, but audio. The altitude of the approaching enemy aircraft would be calculated by the sound of their engines, pre-cathode ray style. Pinpoint accuracy would be unnecessary or so the story went, a thousand guns throwing a wall of fire up into the general direction of an aeroplane would more than compensate for the lack of high technology.
Looking at the sky ahead he now knew the tales had not been bar room banter.
The stealth forces trillion dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art airframes no longer had the advantage; the playing field had been levelled by weight of numbers and all were being targeted upon the American aircraft using technolog
y from the era of the crew’s grandparents.
Ahead of Chandler and the main force there was a flash of light that was larger than all the rest and a moment later a trail of fire was streaming back from a point in the night sky ahead. After a few seconds it angled downwards, gaining in length and girth as the angle increased and the fire spread.
Chandler switched to the Black Light frequency but he did not transmit, he just listened
“…Black Light Zero Four eject…Zero Four eject, eject, eject…come on Jeanette, punch out, get the hell out of there!”
There was no response on the radio and Zero Four’s plunge ended abruptly, a ball of flame rising up to mark the crash site.
“Black Lighters from Zero One, did any of you guys see a chute?”
“Zero Two, Negative.”
“Zero Three, Negative.”
“Black Light Zero One from Spear Gun One, that’s a negative from my Lancers too.”
There were other fires on the ground that Chandler could see; no doubt some belonged to the other pair of F-117As and the two B1-B Lancers from Spear Gun that had already fallen to AAA.
It was clear that without any further radar sites to take out, his Wild Weasel force was providing nothing more than target practice for the Chinese gunners.
“Ring Master, Ring Master, Black Light One…we’re getting murdered here!”
“Black Light this is Ring Master, get your people out of there and standby to hammer any radars that come back up.”
He waited for the acknowledging “Roger” before ordering the main force into a holding orbit while they were still clear of the silos air defence zone.
Chandler wanted to see what the gunners would do once they realised that there were no more aircraft overhead, he was hoping the fire would slacken.
As Chandler’s B2 circled he could see the flames leaping high from over in the east and guessed that the tank farm beside the airbase was the main source. The flames eclipsed any sign of damage that may otherwise have been visible from the space facility. He wished he knew why they had been ordered to attack pointless targets there, the intelligence reports clearly indicated the old vehicle assembly building had become an MT maintenance facility six months before once work on the new and larger assembly building had been completed. The ‘solid fuel booster store’ they had attacked had been a dummy; they knew that and had seen the photographs of its empty interior during the initial planning stage back on Mindanao. The real storage facility was sited three miles away from the nearest building, where any accident would not cause any damage to the rest of the facility. It said a great deal for his crews that they had pressed home their attacks even though all had known they wouldn’t halt the PRC putting satellites up, and wouldn’t even delay them beyond the time it would take to clean up.