by Cuba (lit)
crews had huddled with the crew of the two C-130
Hercs parked on the ramp, studying charts and checking
frequencies. Now it was time to man up.
As the marines in full conibat gear filed aboard
the Hercs, the crews of the Prowlers strapped in and
started engines. Two of the Prowlers carried three
electronic jamming pods on external stations and
two HARM missiles. HARM stood for
high-speed anti-radiation missile. The other two
Prowlers carried four HARMS and one jamming pod
on the center-line station.
With the engines running, the pilots closed the
Prowlers" canopies and taxied behind the Hercs
toward the duty runway. No one said anything on the
radio.
The flight deck of USS
United States
came alive. A small army of people in brightly
colored shuts swarmed around the airplanes that
packed the deck as the flight crews
manned up and started engines.
Light from the setting sun came in at a low angle
like a bright spotlight, illuminating the towering
cumulus which dotted the surface of the sea, and made
everyone facing west squint or shade their eyes.
Soon the plane guard rescue helicopter
engaged its rotors and lifted off the deck as the first
airplanes began taxiing toward the bow and waist
catapults.
Aboard USS
Hue City
and USS
Guilford Courthouse,
the two Aegis cruisers on station in the Florida
Straits, the afternoon had been a busy one.
Twenty-five miles of ocean separated the two
ships, but they were linked together electronically as
tightly as if they were wired together at a pier.
As the Hercs and EA-6BS taxied at Key
West, and
United States
prepared to launch her air wing, the weapons officers
aboard the cruisers checked the ships' inertia!
systems one more time, compared the GPS locations yet
again, then gave the fire order.
The first of the Tomahawk missiles rose
vertically from their launchers on fountains of fire.
The wings of the missiles popped out, then the
missiles began tilting to the south as they accelerated
away into the evening sky.
The first missiles from each ship were still in sight when
the second ones game roaring from the launchers. Each
ship launched sixteen missiles, then turned
to stay in the racetrack pattern they had been using
to hold station.
Sitting in the Combat Control Center aboard
United States,
Jake Grafton felt the thump as the first bow
catapult fired. A second later he felt the
number-three cat on the waist slam a plane
into the air. His eyes went to the monitor, which was showing
a video feed from a camera mounted high in the ship's
island superstructure. Each catapult stroke was
felt throughout the ship as the planes were thrown into the
sky, one by one.
A half dozen planes were still on deck awaiting
their turn on the catapults when the destroyers in the
carrier's screen began launching Tomahawk
cruise missiles.
The television cameraman in the ship's
island swung his camera to catch the fireworks. The
picture captured the attention of the people in Combat,
who paused to watch the.
missiles roar from their launchers on fountains of
reddish yellow fire, almost too brilliant
to look at.
When the last of the missiles was gone, the camera
returned to the launching planes.
Gil Pascal said to Jake, "It'll go well,
Admiral."...Jake nodded and took another sip of
water.
The sun seemed to be taking its good ol' time going
down, Lieutenant Commander Marcus Gillispie
thought.
He was at the controls of an EA-6But Prowler
that had just launched from
United States.
He had worked his way around towering buildups reaching
up to 10,000 feet and was now above them, looking at
the evening sky. The last of the red sunlight played
on the tops of the clouds, but the canyons between them were
purple and gray shading to black. As Gillispie
climbed he delayed the sun's apparent setting for a
few more minutes. Soon the last of the red and gold
faded from the cloud tops below.
A very high cirrus layer stayed yellow and red for the
longest time as Marcus circled the carrier at
30,000 feet. Two FirstA-18 Hornets
came swimming up from the deepening gloom to join on
him.
"You guys all set"..."...Marcus asked his three
crewmen.
His crewmen counted off in order.
The Prowler was the electronic-warfare version of the
old A-6 Intruder airframe. While the
Prowler bore a superficial resemblance to its
older brother, the electronic suite in the
aircraft could not have been more different: the Prowler was
designed to fight the electronic battle in today's
skies, not drop bombs.
The airframe was also longer than the old A-6,
lengthened to accommodate four people and a massive array
of computerized cockpit displays. The people sat in
ejection seats, two in the front, two in the
back. Only one of the crewmen was a pilot, who
sat in the left front seat: the other three were
electronic-warfare specialists. And they were not
CUBA
all men. One of the guys in back tonight was a
woman, a lieutenant (junior grade) on her
first cruise.
Marcus looked at his watch, then keyed his mike.
He waited while his encryption gear timed in with the
ship's gear, then said, "Strike, this is
Nighthawk One. I have my chicks and am ready
to leave orbit. Request permission to strangle the
parrot."
"Roger, Nighthawk One. Call feet dry."
"Wilco."
Marcus Gillispie rolled the Prowler wings
level heading northwest for the city of Havana. Then
he engaged the autopilot. When he was satisfied
that the autopilot was going to keep the plane straight
and level, he flashed his exterior lights, then
turned them off, leaving only a set of tiny formation
lights illuminated on the sides of Ihe
aircraft above the wing root. Finally he reached
down and turned his radar transponder, his parrot,
off. The Prowler and the two Hornets on her wing were
no longer radiating on any electromagnetic
frequency.
The pilot looked back past his wingtips at the
Hornets. One was on each wing now. Like the
Prowler, their missile racks were loaded
with HARM'S. The Hornets also carried two
Sidewinders, heat-seeking air-to-air
missiles, one on each wingtip, just in case.
Already the displays in the Prowler were alive with
information. The electronic countermeasures officer,
ECMO, in the seat beside
the pilot, was really the
tactical commander of the plane. His gear, and that of the
two electronic-warfare officers in the back
cockpit, provided a complete display of the
tactical electronic picture. The information the
computers used was derived from sensors embedded all
over the aircraft in its skin, and from the sensors of
one of the HARM missiles, which was already on line.
The ECMO with Marcus Gillispie was Commander
Schuyler Coleridge, the squadron commanding
officer, who wound up in the right seat of Prowlers because
his eyes
were not quite 20/20 uncorrected when he graduated from
the Naval Academy. The truth of it was, he
thought he had the better job. Pilots, he liked
to say, just drove the bus ECMO'S fought the war.
He had one to fight tonight. The Cubans were going
to get really riled when those Tomahawks started
popping, he thought, and then the fireworks would start.
Just now Coleridge was busy running his
equipment through its built-in tests. Everything was
working, as usual. That routine fact was the greatest
advance of the technological age, in Coleridge's
opinion. In his younger days he had had a bellyful
of fancy equipment that couldn't be maintained.
He was sweating just now, even though the cockpit
temperature was positively balmy. And he
knew his fellow crewmen were sweatingthis was the first time
in combat for all of them.
It will go all right,
he thought. After the tension he had suffered through this afternoon
and evening, Schuyler Coleridge actually welcomed
the catapult shot.
Let's do it and get it over with.
All four of the squadron's EA-6BS were
aloft just now, and the other three also had pairs of
Hornets attached.
As Coleridge looked at the search radars
sweeping the Cuban skies, he wondered if there were
going to be MiGs.
"Okay, peopleea"...Coleridge told his crew, "let's
go to work."
A search radar on the southern coast of Cuba
drew his attention. The signal was being received by the
HARM sensors, which routed the electronic
signal through the plane's computer and displayed it on
the tactical screen.
Coleridge checked his watch. "Any second
nowea"...he muttered to his crewmen.
The Cubans had their search radars wired
into sector facilities, which performed the functions of
air traffic control (Atc) for civilian
aircraft and early warning and ground
control interception (Gci) for military
aircraft. ATC radars in developed countries
rarely searched for non-transponderequipped
targets, but due to the dual usage of these radars,
such sweeps were routine. Consequently one of the
controllers in the Havana sector was the first
to notice a cloud of skin-paint targets closing
on the Cuban coast from the south.
His call to the supervisor was echoed by a call from a
controller looking at targets headed south toward the
north coast of the island.
The shift supervisor stood frozen, staring over the
operator's shoulder at the radar screen. He had
wondered if something like this-might not happen after
Alejo Vargas's television speech, but when he
asked the site manager about the possibility of
Cuba being attacked by the United
States, the man had laughed. "The world has changed
since the Bay of Pigs, Pedro. You are
safehave courage." The response humiliated
the shift supervisor.
Now the supervisor picked up his telephone,
called the manager in his office. "You'd better come
see thisea"...he said with an edge on his voice. "Come
quickly."
The manager was looking over the supervisor's
shoulder when the first Tomahawk crashed into the antenna
of the main search radar on the southern coast. In
seconds three more radars went off the air.
The stunned men turned their attention to the radars on
the north coast, and were just in time to watch the blip of a
Tomahawk from
Hue City
fly right down the throat of the radar and knock it out.
The supervisor turned to the manager and calmly
said, "Apparently the war you didn't believe would
happen is happening now."
The stunned manager watched in horror as screen
after screen went blank.
"The Americans rarely leave things half-done,
or so I've heardea"...the supervisor continued. "I
would bet fifty pesos that this building is
also a target of a cruise missile. If you
gentlemen will excuse me, I think I will go home
for the evening."
With that, he turned and walked briskly from the room.
"Everyone outea"...the facilities manager shouted.
"Outside, everyone outside."
The men at the consoles needed no urging. They
bolted for the doors.
The shift supervisor was outside, walking quickly
for the bus stop, when he heard a Tomahawk. He
fell to the ground and covered his head with his hands as the
missile dove into the roof of the sector control
building and its 750pound warhead exploded with a
thundering boom. Within " the next fifteen seconds,
two more missiles crashed into the building.
After waiting another minute just to be sure, the
supervisor stood and surveyed the damage.
Clouds of tiny dust particles formed an
artificial fog, one illuminated by flame licking
at the gutted building. The stench of explosives
residue and smoke lay heavy in the night air.
One hundred fifty missiles swept across
central Cuba, some coming from the north, some from the
south. The targeting had been done quickly, but the
information that made it possible had been mined
from databases painstakingly constructed from
satellite and aircraft photo and electronic
reconnaissance over a period of years.
Four dozen Tomahawks were targeted against every known
radar dish within a hundred miles of the missile
silossearch, air traffic, antiaircraft
missile, and artillery radarsall of them, two
missiles for each antenna.
Another fifty Tomahawks attacked every Cuban
Air Force base along the five-hundred-mile
length of the island. Some of the Tomahawks carried
bomblets instead of highexplosive warheads: these
swept across aircraft ramps, scattering bomblets
over the parked MiGs, damaging them and setting some
on fire. Other cruise missiles dove headfirst
into the Cuban Air Force's hangars, weapons
storage facil-
ities, and fuel farms. Fixed antiakcraft
surface-to-air missile (Sam) sites
received two or three missiles each.
Alejo Vargas learned of the American attack
when the telephone he was using went dead in his hand.
He frowned, jiggled the hook, then replaced the
>
handset on its base. Only then did the dull
boom of the explosion in the central
Havana telephone exchange reach him. A
Tomahawk had dived through the roof.
More explosions followed in quick succession as two more
cruise missiles hurled themselves into the telephone
exchange. One of the problems the Americans faced
with the employment of cruise missiles was assessing
damage after the attack. The solution was to fire
multiple missiles at the same target to ensure
an acceptable level of damage.
The thought that the presidential palace might be a
target never occurred to Alejo Vargas. He went
to the nearest window and stood listening to the roar of
Tomahawks overflying the city on their way to radar
and antiakcraft gun and missile installations
sited around Jos6 Marti International
Airport. The five-hundred-knot missiles were
invisible in the darkness, but they weren't quiet.
The missiles had passed when someone near the harbor
opened up with an antiaircraft gun firing
tracers. The bursts of tracers went up like
fireworks and randomly probed the darkness as the
hammering reports echoed over the city.
Colonel Santana came irito the room and
joined Vargas at the window. "The telephone
system in the city is out."
"It's probably out all over Cubaea"...Vargas
replied.
"They are attacking much sooner than you thought they
would."
"No matter. The results will be the same. Get
a car to take us to Radio Havana. I will make
an address to the nation."
"The Americans may use missiles on the
radio stations or power plants."
"It is possible, but I doubt it. Get the car."
Santana went after a car as Vargas thought about what
he would say to fan the fires of patriotism in every
Cuban heart.
The two C-130's Hercs and four EA-6But
Prowlers that had left Key West were level at
ten thousand feet when they crossed the northern
shoreline of Cuba. The C-130's actually were
flying with their wingtip lights on so that the Prowlers
could easily stay in formation with them. Inside the
Hercs the pilots were using global positioning
system (Gps) units to navigate to the missile
silo sites.
The Prowler crews watched their computer displays and
listened to their emission-detection gear, waiting for the
Cubans to turn on a radar, any
radar. The night was deathly quiet. The
Tomahawks had done their work well.
As the Hercs crossed over the first of the dairy