The Edge of Honor

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Old bones, Brian, just old bones. XO, I guess I’ll secure. Count, you let me know if there’s any residual activity. Sometimes after they lose a Mig, they put up a couple more and come out to the coast, like a kid who gets brave after the bully’s gone home. Keep us in the western sector of the box. Night, all.” As the captain left Combat, Brian asked Garuda what that was all about.

  “Cap’n’s dyin’ to bag his own Mig with our Terrier missiles. Only one Red Crown’s actually shot down a Mig before.”

  “Wouldn’t they’d have to really come feet-wet for us to actually reach them?”

  “It’s real close. You know the envelope better’n me, but theoretically we can shoot forty miles. So if we was to hang around forty miles offshore and one of ‘em got careless and came feet-wet, even, say, five miles, they’d be in the envelope.”

  “Not really. That would be a very doubtful shot, Garuda. Guy would have to remain inbound to make the geometry work.”

  Garuda shook his head. “Guy would just have to be there for this Old Man to take a shot.” He looked at his watch. “Tree time; I’ll see you ‘round the midwatch.”

  “Roger that, Garuda.”

  The Migs did not come out to play that night or the next.

  The captain had ordered Hood to resume normal box position, abandoning his perch on the western edge. But on the third night after the feint, at 0230, Garuda was over at the coffeepot getting a refill when the duty AIC, Hoodoo, leaned over his scope, made an adjustment, looked hard, and then said the magic word softly.

  “Bandits.”

  Garuda slopped coffee on the deck plates getting back to his chair, and the word flashed around Combat like lightning. Garuda switched the range scale down to sixty miles and studied the faint smudges of video shimmering under the two unknown symbols Hoodoo had put in the system.

  “Where are the BARCAP?” asked Brian, assuming that the F-4s would be used if the Migs presented a reasonable target.

  “They be tankin’; they on a basketball, two-three-five for eighty-five miles. They off-station. ‘S why these boys came up, most like. BARCAP’s outta position.”

  Brian examined the scope and saw the faint trace of Hood’s missile circle reaching just over the beach to the west. The unknowns’ video was barely ten miles beyond the circle.

  “Surface, SWIC. How much room we got in the box to go west?”

  “Wait one,” responded Rockheart. “Seven miles, SWIC.”

  Garuda turned to Brian. “Recommend tell the bridge to turn west, come up to fifteen knots, and close the western boundary. Then call the Old Man, tell him we got Migs up.”

  Brian nodded, set the maneuver in motion via the bitch box, and then informed the captain of their contacts and that he had turned the ship to close the beach.

  “Good move. I’ll be right up. Get the Count and the exec up there.”

  Brian hung up and made the calls, a little disappointed that the captain’s immediate reaction was to get the first team up into D and D.

  On reflection, though, it made sense. He was still a makee-learn.

  “What’re they doing?” he asked.

  Garuda adjusted his scope. “Orbiting, just west of Vinh military airfield. Altitude’s unreliable from the forty-eight, which means they’re low, keeping down in the mountains for radar cover. Bet the fuckers know the BARCAP’s off-station, too.”

  “Should we assign a missile director to them?”

  “Negatory. That would tip ‘em off. Old Man, he’s gonna want to see if they’ll come east, see if they’ve forgotten about us while they fixate on the BARCAP.”

  “Shouldn’t we break off the BARCAP and get ‘em back?”

  “Negative. They’ve just started fueling; they’d come back below minimum combat package, no good for anything.

  Hoodoo’s not even telling them what we got, ‘cause they’d come back on their own, most likely.”

  The captain came through the door, followed by Austin.

  “Okay, Garuda, lemme have it,” he said. Austin stepped in front of Brian to look at the scope. Brian suddenly felt superfluous as Garuda briefed the captain and answered Austin’s rapid-fire questions. When he was finished, the captain turned to Brian.

  “Tell the bridge to bring her up to twenty knots, then get your Weapons people ready. Count here will take evaluator. Maybe we can get a shot at one of these guys.

  You told CTF Seventy-seven yet?”

  Garuda answered for him. “The unknowns went out over the link, and they’ve called in over the HF net asking us to confirm validity. I told him affirmative, we had skin, that we were watching and waiting for the BARCAP to finish tanking. I’m keeping the symbology at unknown for now.

  We’ll need to change that to hostue before we engage them.”

  The captain nodded and climbed into his chair. He was dressed in khaki trousers, slippers, and a green foul weather jacket over his undershirt.

  Once again, Brian noted that he looked a hundred years old in the harsh lights of CIC. Austin was fully dressed and did not appear to have been roused from a sound sleep.

  “This is Mr. Austin, I have the evaluator watch,” Austin declared peremptorily.

  There was a chorus of

  “Aye, aye, sir” throughout Combat, and Brian retreated to the weapons module as the exec came into Combat. Chief Vanhorn had the FCSC watch, and a first class petty officer named Carter was sitting in the engagement controller position. Van Horn was aware of the Migs and also of the fact that the ship had turned west at twenty knots.

  “Old Man wants a shot.” It was not a question, and Brian, who had moved over to the weapons module, nodded in confirmation.

  “Apparently so, but these guys are way out of the envelope.”

  “These Terriers been known to go fifty miles, if the conditions are right,” observed Vanhorn. He looked up at Brian with an amused expression.

  “You know as well as I do, Chief, that the kill probability goes to shit beyond thirty, thirty-five miles. We’d be throwing one away, we try to take a crossing, low altitude jet at eighty thousand yards.”

  “Bet he takes the shot,” muttered Vanhorn.

  “You just better hope your one director holds up,” replied Brian.

  “What’s the system status, anyway?”

  Vanhorn became all business. He punched out some codes on the keyboard and a display came up showing that the missile fire-control system was in two-minute standby, with one director available and the launcher unassigned and empty. The second missile director was still down for parts after the last power transients. Courtesy of the Engineering Department, Brian thought unkindly.

  The ship trembled as the engineers brought the main engines up to twenty knots. Brian computed that they would reach the western edge of their station in twenty minutes at that speed. He stared down at the scope, watching the unknown symbols. He could no longer see video underneath the symbols.

  Austin was making a radio report to the CTF 77 staff down on Yankee Station. With Wager gone for the night, the unencrypted high-frequency circuit had to be used, so there was a great deal of code-making.

  Everyone had been taught that Soviet HF intercept stations all over the east coast of Asia were listening constantly and that they could flash a warning to the North Vietnamese if Hood revealed that she was tracking two of their Migs.

  The exec came over. “Your systems up and ready, Brian?”

  “Yes, sir, although it’s system, not systems. We’re down to one missile director. But the launcher reports ready, and I’ve got a wing-and-fin crew standing by in the magazine.”

  “Hate to only have one director,” said the exec.

  “Goddamn Spook-Fifty-fives are unreliable enough when they’re working.

  At least with two, you’ve got a chance of completing a shot.”

  Brian nodded in agreement. As a graduate of the Navy’s Guided Missile school, he knew that the A/N-SPQ55B missile fire-control radars, called Spook-55s, were highly com
plex systems. Contained in two turrets mounted on barbettes above the CIC, they looked like giant gray searchlights.

  Within each director mount were three radars bore-sighted concentrically on a common axis. One emitted a narrow cone of energy called the acquisition beam. The second emitted a very high-energy beam barely the thickness of a pencil lead, called the tracking beam. The third broadcast a wide cone of energy called continuous wave illumination. The Spook-55s were the eyes and claws of the Hood’s missile system.

  Brian knew the launch sequence by heart. When a designation was ordered by SWIC, digital data from the SPS-48 air-search radar would be streamed to the directors, which swiveled around to the appropriate bearing and elevation so that the acquisition beam could pick up the designated target, often at ranges of one hundred miles or more. Once the acquisition beam saw the target, the director moved to center the target in its tracking circuits so that the second tracking beam could see it.

  Once the pencil beam got on target, the target’s return was captured by computer-tracking circuits. At this point, it was considered “locked up,” and the Spook tracked it automatically under control of the missile fire-control computers. A target, such as a jet aircraft, could twist and turn and do all sorts of evasive maneuvers, but it could rarely defeat the tracking algorithms working at near light speed in the computers.

  If the target closed in within the ship’s forty-mile missile envelope, the command to fire could be given.

  The launcher crew down in the missile magazine would slap wings and fins onto the body of a Terrier missile and report ready to the engagement controller in Combat via keyboards. The EC would press the load button and the launcher would lock its arms to the front face of the missile ramp structure on the forecastle as the magazine doors swung open. The missile would then slide up on rails within the ramp and out onto the launcher rails. The doors would close and the launcher would be assigned to the control of the tracking director, turning to point in the same direction as the Spook, and the final beam, the illumination beam, would be activated. The launcher would continue to point in the general direction of the target, and a three-second pulse of warm-up power would be applied to the missile, after which it would be fired.

  The Terrier would be kicked off the rail by a solid rocket booster. Once the eight-second boost phase was completed, propelling the Terrier to a velocity twice the speed of sound, the missile’s seeker head would be uncaged and energized by its onboard computers and the seeker would begin looking for energy being reflected off the target from that third continuous wave illumination beam. Once it detected the reflected energy, the missile would home in on the target and typically fly right through it at about five times the speed of sound. But as everyone knew, every element of the system—the computers, the three radars, the launcher, the missile’s seeker head—had to work perfectly for any of it to work.

  “We try a shot out there on the edge of the envelope, we’re gonna waste a bird,” Brian said again.

  The exec overheard and shot him a warning look. “We could always get lucky,” he said.

  Brian shook his head. “No, sir, not unless the target is coming right at us at a great rate of knots. The Terrier has no energy left for anything but a head-on shot at that range. It can’t do pursuit out there.”

  The exec drew closer, put his hand on Brian’s shoulder, and turned him away from the FCSC console. He spoke softly. “Brian, I suggest you talk to the captain about doctrine sometime when there aren’t Migs up. But otherwise, let me give you some advice—he says shoot, you shoot it.”

  Brian was taken aback. “Of course, XO. The captain gives an order, we carry it out. But—”

  “Yeah, I hear you. And I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong. But remember my advice. This kind of an engagement, there won’t be a lot of time to discuss it.

  His Mig gets away ‘cause the Weps boss wanted to talk about it instead of shoot it, life’ll get unpleasant.

  Follow me?”

  “Yes, sir. Clear as a bell.”

  “Now don’t get all hurry. This is still his ship, remember.

  If the geometry is out of envelope, report it. He says shoot it, pull the damn trigger.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The exec went back over to the SWIC console. Brian stared down unseeing at the FCSC picture, his face flushed, while Chief Vanhorn tried to pretend he had not overheard the exec’s counseling session. They’re wrong, Brian thought. They’re going to shoot a missile at a target that’s basically out of range. Anybody who looks at the reconstruction will be able to see it. He tried to focus, to see where the Mig symbols were. The exec was talking to the captain, who looked over briefly in Brian’s direction.

  “Give me a bearing and range,” Brian ordered, his voice curt.

  The chief worked some buttons. “Unknowns are bearing two-seven-six degrees true, range ninety-six thousand, five hundred eighty-five yards, crossing. Forty eight miles.”

  The Migs appeared to be keeping just out of range, as if they knew the critical distance to the Hood’s station.

  Except that the ship was closing them. If nothing else changed and the Migs maintained their current orbit, the ship would close in to forty-one miles. He overheard CTF 77 ask for the time remaining to tank the BARCAP.

  Austin looked over at Hoodoo, who said fifteen minutes.

  Austin looked at the captain, who nodded.

  “Alfa Whiskey, this is Red Crown. ETC is two-zero mikes.”

  Brian mentally shook his head. The air controller had said fifteen minutes. Austin had reported twenty. Why?

  Because, he realized, that carrier admiral obviously wants his Phantoms to go after the Migs, and the captain wants a shot at them with his missiles, that’s why.

  “Brian?” The captain had swung his chair around.

  “Sir?”

  “If they come in range, this has to go quick. We won’t have the luxury of establishing track for a couple of minutes to make sure we have a smooth firing solution like we usually do in a missile exercise. The moment we bring the Spook Fifty-five on the air, those guys’re gonna head for the deck and get the hell out of Dodge. So if I give you the take order, the moment you get a track light, assign the launcher and fire at once. Understand?”

  The captain’s tone of voice did not seem to encourage a dialogue. “Yes, sir. Understood.” Brian glanced over at the exec, but the exec looked away.

  Feeling cornered, Brian studied the FSCS scope and the panel of system status lights on its side. The panel for system one was dark. The panel for system two showed the system to be waiting in standby, its three radars warmed up and ready to go into radiate, but not transmitting.

  The director itself was still centerlined.

  “What’s the track number of the nearest Mig?”

  “Track two-one-three-two is here; two-one four-seven is—here.”

  “Give me trial geometry, track two-onethree-two,” he said.

  Chief Vanhorn pushed some buttons and a spidery grid of lines appeared on the scope, indicating lines of probability for an intercept with the nearest Mig if the missile was to be fired right now. On the upper-right hand block of a data readout panel, a

  “Pk Low” alert was flashing. The computer was telling the FCSC operator that the probability of a killing intercept was too low to warrant launch.

  “What’s his range?”

  “Range is eighty-four thousand, seven hundred fifty yards.”

  A little over forty-two miles. Brian checked his watch.

  Ten more minutes to the western boundary of the PIRAZ box. As long as the Mig kept going north, up the coast, the range would be in the low Pk band. Brian looked again at the exec, who looked back this time and gave a barely imperceptible shake of his head.

  Vanhorn turned his head and spoke in a low voice.

  “Mr. Holcomb. Recommend we go to dummy load on system two.”

  “Can’t they detect that?”

  “The Russians could.
I don’t know if these guys can.

  But it’ll give us instantaneous response to a take order; otherwise, we wait two minutes. Recommend ask the Old Man for permission.”

  Brian thought about it. The system was in a two-minute standby to radiate mode. The chief was right. If they wanted an instantaneous reaction, they should bring up the radar transmitters and radiate them into an electronic box called a dummy load, which acted like an antenna but did not put a full-powered signal out on the air. The Intel people felt that specialized ELINT ships could detect a missile radar in dummy load, but it was not known whether the North Vietnamese had this capability.

  Brian requested permission to do it. The captain thought about it for a moment, then told him to go ahead, before turning around to talk to SWIC.

  “What’re they doing now, Garuda?” asked the captain.

  “One’s orbiting the airfield, low and slow. The other guy is headed north, up along the coast, but not like he’s trying to get somewhere.

  He’s the closest, Captain. Forty … uh … forty-two and a skosh miles.

  He’s dipping in and out of the hills along the coast, giving us intermittent video.”

  “Brian, how’s the geometry look?” asked the captain over his shoulder.

  Brian took a deep breath before answering. Vanhorn punched up new geometry to refresh the data. The alert still flashed.

  “It’s a no go, Captain,” Brian said, his throat dry.

  There was an instant of silence in D and D. “The geometry indicates a crossing shot at max range; there’s no Pk to speak of.”

  The Captain swiveled back around in his chair, a displeased look on his face. Brian could see that this had not been the expected right answer.

  The exec was studying the deck plates. Austin shot him a pained look.