by Larry Bond
The sea and sky were dark again — lit only by the strange, flickering glow of ships on fire.
Calhoun straightened as he received new instructions from the Aegis cruiser’s helo coordinator. He keyed his mike. “Three zero minutes. Understood. Roger.” He turned to his pilot. “They think the attack’s over — at least for right now. Take us up to two hundred feet and head for Tartu’s last reported position. We’re supposed to search for survivors, then go to Leyte Gulf for an in-flight refuel.”
“Any news on Simpson?” Alvarez asked.
“Yeah. She’s hit bad. At least one fire. Maybe more.” The sensor operator saved the worst news, at least from their perspective, for last. “And she’s got a foul deck. It’ll be a half hour before they even know if they can clear it. Leyte’s hit, too — fore and aft.” His businesslike tone and the work at hand pushed away the questions they had about their friends and their ships.
Alvarez pushed his throttle forward and pointed the helo’s nose toward the drifting, burning wreck. Maybe her crew had abandoned ship before the final blast, or maybe someone had been blown clear. Even as he hoped for survivors, Alvarez knew it was probably wishful thinking.
Clattering low over the choppy Kattegat at seventy knots, they quickly closed in on the battered convoy. Just five miles from Tartu they flew over the first sign that the battle hadn’t been wholly one-sided. There below, the waterlogged wreckage of an enemy fighter bobbed lazily up and down as waves sloshed over its mangled fuselage. Tangled shrouds and a ripped parachute canopy trailed backward from the aircraft’s submerged cockpit. Its ejection system must have gone off on impact.
Calhoun swung the Seahawk’s FLIR up to cover the sinking merchant ship. He found the burning hulk and steadied the black-and-white image in the center of the screen.
They both gasped. The container ship’s clean lines were gone.
Tartu’s deck was twisted and torn open in places. Fires burned everywhere, flashing to superheated steam as seawater hit them. A huge hole gaped in her side, just as though some sea monster had taken a bite out of her. The freighter was down by the stern and listing heavily to port — visibly rolling further and further over as the Kattegat poured in through her shattered hull.
“Jesus, Tom. She’s going down real soon,” Alvarez volunteered. They roared low over the doomed merchantman, bucketing up and down in the hot air currents rising from her fires. He spun the Seahawk around in a tight turn, headed back west.
Calhoun nodded. “Let’s make one more pass to see if anyone’s still on board. After that, we’ll do an expanding search…”
Suddenly a brilliant, searing white flash filled the whole right side of the cockpit window. For half a second, Alvarez thought they had been hit by something, but the helicopter’s engine sound didn’t waver.
Momentarily blinded, he heard Calhoun yell, “It’s Simpson!”
Simpson had been struck by three missiles, the first an ARMAT antiradar missile, one of four fired at the frigate. Detonating a hundred feet directly overhead, it had sprayed the ship with high-velocity fragments, shredding her radars and killing or wounding the few crewmen on her weather decks.
The second wave of aircraft had fired antiship missiles. While Simpson was not the primary target of the attack, pressure on her increased the chances of the other attackers getting through. Four ANL supersonic missiles, hugging the water, streaked toward the frigate. The crippled ship, unable to launch her surface-to-air missiles without her fire control radar, had fired a cloud of shells from her 76mm gun at them, but none of the shell bursts came close enough to knock the ANLs and their armored warheads into the sea.
In the last seconds, chaff blossomed from launchers on either side of the ship. Only the bursting charges were visible in the darkness, but to guidance radars the air over the ship was suddenly filled with bright, reflective targets, larger and more attractive than the ship below them.
With the incoming missiles only hundreds of meters away, Simpson’s Phalanx radar-guided rotary cannon had fired one tearing burst, then another, and a third, finally clipping one of the ANLs. In an eyeblink, the missile spiraled into the sea and exploded — close enough to shower the ship with seawater.
The other three missiles were too close for the Phalanx to engage. One, seduced by the chaff, flew harmlessly past, searching for the ephemeral target created by the silvered plastic.
But the two remaining missiles, already locked onto Simpson by the time the chaff deployed, had stayed on target. Moving at just under the speed of sound, both slammed into the frigate, one forward of her bridge near the Standard missile launcher, the other in the middle of her superstructure, right above engineering.
The sheer force of the two missiles’ impact had heeled her over, throwing everyone aboard to the deck. Their warheads, delay-fused so that they would only explode after they penetrated the skin of the ship, went off together. Each carried 360 pounds of explosive, surrounded by a shell of incendiary zirconium. This metal case, shattered and then ignited by the detonation, turned into hundreds of lethal fragments, driving through the ship. Wherever a fragment passed, it left a trail of flame. Only a few of the frigate’s vital compartments, protected by Kevlar armor, were proof against the deadly projectiles. Elsewhere, scores of men were killed by the blast, by secondary fragments, or in the fires that followed.
Simpson’s captain had known his ship was doomed the instant the fireballs blossomed. Even as choking, toxic smoke filled the bridge, he ordered Abandon Ship, then did his best to get anyone he could find over the side.
By the time Alvarez and Calhoun arrived at Tartu, only thirty or so of their shipmates had received the order and recovered enough to go over the side. Even the bitterly cold waters of the Baltic were a welcome relief from the blazing inferno that was once a warship. They struggled and swam away as best they could, their onetime home now an enemy.
Simpson’s end came suddenly and violently when the fires on board the stricken frigate finally reached her missile and gun magazines. She disintegrated in the blink of an eye — torn apart by a rippling series of smaller explosions too close together in time and space to be distinguished as separate blasts. When the frigate’s shattered hulk slid beneath the Kattegat minutes later, she carried more than three-quarters of her 215-man crew with her.
JUNE 4 — USS LEYTE GULF
Ward watched the half-circles creep closer and closer to what was left of his formation. The little computer-displayed symbols, each with a line pointing straight at his ship, represented F-14 Tomcats from George Washington.
To Jack Ward, they might as well have been angels.
Even though the Aegis cruiser could only make twenty knots, a night’s travel had brought them 150 miles closer to the powerful carrier.
He grimaced. He’d have to call this battle a draw. EurCon had sunk two of his four ships and damaged a third, but they’d been trying for a knockout blow — trying to make the most of their early advantage in catching Task Force 22 strung out across the Baltic. Their own losses had been heavy. He knew there were a lot of French and German aircraft that hadn’t made it home.
Ward thought about all the sea battles he’d read about and studied. He’d fought before, in the Persian Gulf, and he and his colleagues had greedily devoured the lessons to be learned from it and every other modern conflict. But the Gulf had been nothing like this.
Nothing could have prepared him for the speed, the violence, and the confusion of last night’s battle. He’d been scared, so scared that he’d almost been afraid to act, lest he do something wrong. He’d seen the same look on the officers and men as well, and only the fear of letting them down had kept him thinking, and fighting, until his fears had been drowned by his actions.
He coughed, a long, dry spasm that left him gasping for air. The smoke had gotten pretty thick last night. He was sure some of that junk was still in his lungs. Add fatigue, no food, and the pain caused by losing both Simpson and Tartu, and he became very grateful
for the support provided by his command chair.
He hated to admit it, but if the Tomcats hadn’t arrived when they did, he and the rest of his force could very easily have been on the bottom of the Baltic. As it was, Leyte Gulf was hurt. A missile hit close to her bridge had rocked the CIC, damaged one face of the SPY-1 radar, and wrecked her forward missile launcher. Ward silently thanked God the launcher had been nearly empty when they took the hit.
The second missile had been even worse, starting a fire in Leyte’s engineering spaces that killed twelve men and damn near finished her. Only good damage control had stopped the flames from spreading.
So here they were. He was short on missiles, running on half engines, and overcrowded with his own wounded and a few, badly burned survivors plucked from the water near where Simpson and the Tartu had gone down. One of his helicopters, another survivor from the frigate, was camping out on Dallas Star’s helipad. He was still two hundred miles from the relative safety of George Washington’s formation. Beyond that, he knew, Leyte Gulf had a longer trip to the yards for badly needed repairs.
In the meantime, though, she was still a fleet unit. Most of her weapons systems still worked, and the all-important SPY-1 radar and Aegis computers were back on the line. She could still fight.
“We’re ready, Admiral.”
Captain Ralph Gunston, Leyte Gulf’s skipper, had taken over as Ward’s chief of staff. Jerry Shapiro was in sick bay with a broken leg and a chest full of missile fragments. Gunston looked more like a marine than a ship’s captain, stocky with a blond crew cut.
“No signs of damage?”
“We found a few rattled circuit boards, but everything’s been checked, and we’ve reloaded all the target packs, just as you ordered.”
“Very well, Captain. We’ll launch on schedule.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Ward stood up slowly, leaning heavily on his chair for support at first. It took him a while to climb one level to the bridge and step out onto the bridge wing, but he wanted to be there when the cruiser showed these French and German bastards her teeth.
The fresh air on the bridge wing woke him up. Their own course and speed turned a cool breeze into a chilling gale. It was already slackening as Leyte Gulf slowed and turned. Even though the wind was within tolerances, Ward didn’t want anything risked. Not for this.
Deep inside the ship’s superstructure, Gunston issued the final orders.
An amplified voice declared, “Now hear this. All hands on the weather decks, remain clear of the fantail.” It was the third, and last, warning — really only a formality. Ward heard a shrill beep, beep over the speakers before all sounds merged in a single, deafening roll of thunder.
It was different, being outside when a missile was fired.
Leyte Gulf’s launchers had roared last night, but, with the ship at general quarters, the CIC had been tightly sealed. And Ward had been too busy thinking about other things to pay much attention to the noise. Things like fending off the sudden, surprise attacks that seemed to come from every compass point. Like the men who had been dying. The men he’d hoped to keep safe.
Now he had time to watch. Every ten seconds, a twenty-one-foot-long, finned gray shape thundered into the clear blue sky above the Aegis cruiser’s fantail, riding high on a pillar of fire before turning and heading south. Twenty Tomahawk missiles, his entire load, were carrying the fight to EurCon’s north German airfields. It would exact a small measure of vengeance for his murdered men and lost ships.
The last Tomahawk roared off, skimming southward past a long thick pall of white exhaust smoke curling behind Leyte Gulf.
Ward stepped back inside. His body cried out for sleep, but he had work to do and priority signals to send. The paybacks had just started.
U.S. SPACE DEFENSE OPERATIONS CENTER
Brigadier General Howard Noonan, USAF, occupied the watch officer’s desk — overlooking a room filled with row after row of consoles crowded with control keyboards, communications gear, and display screens. Soft, subdued lighting and the quiet, ever-present hum of air-conditioning created the illusion of a calm, restful working environment. Space ops center duty officers and noncoms sat in comfortable chairs behind each console, monitoring space surveillance data flowing in from radar and optical telescope networks scattered around the globe, in low earth orbit, and in geosynchronous orbit.
All duty stations faced an enormous, wall-sized computer-generated display showing the world and man-made objects in orbit around it. Although the men and women working in the operations center routinely tracked nearly six thousand objects, right now the main screen showed only a few specific satellites that were of extraordinary interest. Bright lines showed the predicted orbital path for each satellite, and small vector arrows showed their current, plotted positions.
Noonan, a trim, dapper man, nodded gravely to himself — satisfied by what he could see. As a young man he’d been fascinated by outer space and the possibility of space travel. As a young officer he’d narrowly missed qualifying for astronaut training. He’d taken the setback in stride and buckled down to do his best for the country. Now, at forty-five, he commanded the world’s most advanced space defense force.
After years spent in research and development and after bitter congressional funding battles, the first elements of the G-PALS system were in orbit and operational. G-PALS stood for “Global Protection Against Limited Strikes.”
One of the red phone symbols on his computer monitor flashed. He had an incoming call — direct from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally.
Noonan tapped the appropriate key on his board, noted the lights verifying that he was receiving scrambled audio and video communication, and punched the receive control on his console.
A familiar face appeared on his monitor. General Galloway, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, looked tired. He’d been locked up in a nonstop National Security Council meeting since the first reports of EurCon attacks on U.S. and British shipping began pouring in.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ll make this short and sweet, Howard. The President has approved your plan. ‘Blackout’ is a go. When can you initiate?”
“Right away, sir. My people finished rewriting and testing the necessary sections of battle management code about an hour ago.”
Reid nodded, pleased. Then he turned deadly serious. “Take ’em out for us, Howard. We’re going to need every edge we can get.”
“Yes sir. You can count on it.” Noonan had seen the navy’s preliminary casualty estimates. The French and Germans had pretty clearly won the war’s opening round. He planned to help them lose the second.
Five minutes later, Noonan sat with his headset on, ready and alert. A blank inset box on the main display screen suddenly filled with a jumbled string of numbers and letters. They were receiving a system release authorization code from the President. Almost as soon as the code appeared, it vanished — replaced by a blinking notification in large, bold letters: LAUNCH ENABLED.
Noonan switched to the G-PALS command circuit. “You ready, Zack?”
The colonel manning the space defense system duty station answered immediately. “Yes, sir. My boards confirm selective release authorization.”
“Good.” Noonan swept his eyes over his own monitor and the main display one last time for a final check on weapons status and target positions. Everything looked set. He sat up straighter. “Okay, Colonel, let’s do it. Commence firing.”
G-PALS CONSTELLATION BRAVO ONE, IN ORBIT
Four hundred miles above the blue-green, white-flecked earth, a cloud of fifty tiny bullet-shaped interceptors orbited together — circling the globe at seventeen thousand miles an hour.
Each “Brilliant Pebble” was barely three feet long, a foot in diameter, and weighed just a little more than one hundred pounds. Inside the casing, advanced microminiaturization techniques packed enormous computing power into a few tiny silicon chips. Each fist-sized supercomputer drew its tracking data from a nose-mo
unted, miniaturized television camera equipped with a wide-angle, fish-eye lens. Maneuvering rockets and their propellant filled the rest of the remaining space.
The order relayed through the G-PALS command net activated five of the interceptors, triggering a new engagement program uploaded less than sixty minutes before. Minute clouds of vapor puffed into space as maneuvering thrusters fired in a preset sequence. Slowly, inexorably, the five Brilliant Pebbles drifted out of the main cloud — moving into a new orbit. Seeker heads that had been focused on the earth below were now locked on an empty point several hundred miles above the surface.
A tiny shape appeared there, rising quite suddenly above the earth’s curvature and closing rapidly. Sunlight sparkled off solar panels deployed on either side of a two-ton, box-shaped satellite. HELIOS was a French military reconnaissance platform. Its sophisticated cameras could take detailed pictures of objects smaller than a baseball bat — even from orbit.
It was dawn over Eastern Europe, and the low sun would make the long shadows so loved by photo interpreters.
With their prey in sight, the tracking and guidance systems aboard each Brilliant Pebble went into high gear. On-board supercomputers took the images supplied by their TV cameras, matched them against an approved target set, and cycled into attack mode.
More vapor puffed into space as each Brilliant Pebble’s main motor fired. All five darted forward, racing toward the oncoming photo recon satellite. They covered the distance in sixty-eight seconds.
The HELIOS satellite vanished in a single, blinding flash — hit head-on by an interceptor at a relative speed of more than thirty thousand miles an hour. Millions of metal fragments spread over dozens of square miles. Two Brilliant Pebbles a microsecond behind the first plunged right into the heart of the expanding debris cloud and disintegrated. The last two missed by somewhat wider margins and plunged toward the atmosphere, where they would burn up harmlessly.
Deep within the G-PALS constellation, five more Brilliant Pebbles went active. A new shape rose above the distant horizon — a new target. The Franco-German Radar SAR satellite came rushing toward its own destruction. Within an hour, every French and German reconnaissance platform in low earth orbit met that same fate.