Coonts, Stephen - Jake Grafton 7 - Cuba

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