Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “It’ll get straightened out,” said the first mate.

  Though the rush of relief flooding over them was a well-known experience for the team and the veterans of the Iraqi wars among Petrel’s crew, for most, the surge of success, exaggerating their own part in “getting the sub,” bordered on hysteria. It was infused in part by the real and present danger they had faced on board what had been an essentially defenseless ship while being machine-gunned. The death of one of their number and the condition of Sandra would dampen their celebratory remarks later on, but right now the sudden turn of fate from being victims to victors was too powerful for them to moderate their behavior. Cookie was all but unmanageable in his adolescent fervor, raining insults down at the fog-shrouded depths where the broken sub now lay.

  “General’s a bit sullen,” the cook told Aussie while lighting up a cigarette.

  “Uh-huh,” Aussie replied noncommittally. Criticism of Freeman by those in his own team was one thing, but Cook wasn’t in the team. How could he be expected to understand the present reserve of a man generally known for his garrulousness and forthrightness, Aussie thought, a man who had become a legend because at crucial times he had neither behaved nor thought like other men.

  “He’s probably exhausted,” added the bosun, sensing Lewis’s quiet disapproval.

  “Guess we all are,” said Aussie, but in truth he had also been struck by Freeman’s increasingly down mood. Was it churlishness that he, Douglas Freeman, would not reap the glory that was the fuel of his insatiable ego? Another Patton or MacArthur?

  Walking past the general, now a solitary figure in the penumbra of the deck lights, Aussie said lightheartedly, “I lost a good pair of boots back there.”

  The general, leaning on the gunwale, his focus somewhere in the fog, didn’t respond.

  “History’ll know, General.”

  “Have you ever seen such fanaticism?” the general asked Aussie. “That machine gunner? Those three coming up out of that hellhole after you’d blasted them silly?”

  Aussie thought back, a string of desperate firefights crowding his memory. “Maybe once,” he said. “Funny thing is, it was a Republican Guard, during that punch-up we had ’round Hadiya.”

  Freeman stood up and looked across at Aussie. “To hate America that much. That’s what we’re up against, Aussie.”

  Aussie nodded. “Formidable.”

  “That’s the word.”

  “Well, General, we’ve won this round.”

  “Yes,” said Freeman, right thumb and forefinger massaging his forehead. “There’s something—” He paused. “—something bothering me.” He stopped massaging himself and, arms akimbo, took a deep breath. “Know what I mean? A feeling. I’ve missed something.”

  “We’ll find out more when we bring that sucker up,” said Aussie. “Go through it. Might find out who did it — Chinese or towel heads.”

  Freeman unexpectedly laughed. “You want to win your bet?” Before Aussie could answer, Freeman added, “A few Asians so far, only a couple of Chinese.”

  Aussie was glad to see the general loosening up, and promised himself as soon as they got ashore at Port Angeles he’d try to contact Marte Price, set her straight about just what did happen, make sure Freeman got his full measure of recognition — well, the team too. He was encouraged to do it because, after his chat with the general, he realized that what the cook and no doubt others had interpreted as a sullen exhibition of petty ego was in fact a leader’s concern. The general, famous for attention to minutiae, was bothered by something like a detail in a persistent dream that takes flight the moment you wake, yet remains in the background of your mind all day.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Admiral Crowley had just had his second and last coffee of the day. Any more and he knew he’d feel on edge. Especially after the kamikaze attack, which, despite the absence of the kind of proof that would stand up in a court of law, everyone on the carrier believed was instigated by the Communist Chinese air force to cow, or at least slow, the carrier from advancing further into the Taiwan Strait and effectively refereeing the two-China “incident,” as Beijing was calling the two-China war.

  Now, Crowley’s voice was at once serious and upbeat as he addressed McCain’s air wing.

  “Gentlemen, we all know just how badly the Navy’s been hit at home. There isn’t a man or woman on the boat who hasn’t known or lost someone during the rampage of that sub’s attacks in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A lot of folks on the other vessels in our battle group have also lost loved ones. But I’m here to tell you that initial reports of the sub’s demise have been confirmed.”

  There was whooping and clapping throughout the aviators’ ready rooms and the other departments in the boat.

  “Admiral Jensen, COMSUBPAC Group 9, has verified that two of his hydrofoil fast patrol boats witnessed the kill.”

  “Who were they?” Chipper Armstrong asked his squadron intel officer. “The terrorists?”

  “No verification on that, Commander.”

  “Now, gentlemen, I have a second announcement.” Everyone who’d done at least one tour with Crowley knew that the big news always came last. “As you know, one of our SSNs missiled Penghu. Satellite BDAs confirm wind deflection, courtesy of Typhoon Jane, extended the missiles’ CEP. Some PLA planes were destroyed, but not — I repeat, not—the runway, ’least not enough to prevent quick repair. The President has therefore asked if we can do the job before the PLA can land aircraft resupply.”

  There was some braggadocio, but others were silent. There was that big hole in their roof.

  “Any flier has the right to pass this one up without prejudice to his service record.”

  The admiral waited for reports from all the ready rooms listening to him. All pilots and aircrew volunteered to go.

  “Very well, gentlemen, it’s time. Kick the tires and light the fires!”

  Resounding cheers were heard throughout the carrier, and in minutes, unseen even by some high in Primary Flight Control, scores of invisible colored jackets flooded the deck forward of the carrier’s island and the kamikaze’s bomb crater. The crater, having rendered catapults three and four on the carrier’s aft port side inoperable, was now roped off, with a six-man line stationed in front of it to yell at any of the deck personnel who might back up and impede maneuvering aircraft once launch operations got under way. Elevator 1, starboard midships, forward of the island, clunked and emitted its deep hum as it descended yet again to the hangar deck to reload. High up in Vulture’s Row, the salty sea wind chilling their faces, two off-duty sailors — a young barber from Ohio and a young woman, Angela, a purple-jacketed refueler from Arkansas — held hands in the darkness, saying nothing. Their rapt attention had been captured by the wondrously unique ballet of soft yellow flashlights far below them, strobing through the sea spray in a strangely hypnotic dance of war.

  The scores of deck personnel holding the flashlights were all but invisible. The only thing that approached it in Angela’s memory was a performance by the Black Theater of Prague that she had seen as a schoolgirl, the players invisible, only things moving on the pitch-black stage, as if by magic. The soft yellow bulbs of the flashlights were conveying the same eerie yet comforting display of connectedness and separation, as if countless glowworms were “coming together, coming apart,” as the song goes, joining, separating, and rejoining as the “foreign object debris walkdown” continued, only personnel on the starboard end of the inspection line coming into full view as they passed through the apron of subdued orange light at the base of the island.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Angela asked her beau.

  Despite the cranials they were wearing to protect them from the brain-dulling crescendo that would soon break loose below, the young barber heard her. He’d heard every word she’d said from the moment they’d first met on the boat. “Yes,” he replied. “It is. Like you.”

  She elbowed him playfully, their hands still locked together, her grip tighte
ning as the foreign object walkdown ended and the colored shirts went to work, kicking the tires and lighting the fires. Then fierce purple-white jet exhausts pierced the night, the engines’ feral screams shattering any remaining world of glowworms, the afterburners momentarily illuminating the colored jackets whose earlier, gentler ballet was now a rougher thing altogether. Yet within what at first seemed a chaos of disorganized crew running, kneeling, and signaling pilots with lighted wands, there was an organization so intricate and fast that it would make the busiest civil airport appear indolent, the carrier’s night launch all the more impressive given that only catapults one and two were operational.

  Angela glimpsed a plane handler wanding the first striker, Chipper Armstrong’s Super Hornet, into position. For an instant the ambient light silhouetted Eagle Evans in the Hornet’s backseat as the catapult’s tow bar was lowered into the shuttle, in position to pull the fighter along the deck. With the nose wheel housing’s holdback rod acting like the reins on a caged stallion, the turbofans could now reach full power before release. The shuttle’s pull, in concert with the plane’s own thrust, would catapult the plane off the deck, providing all went well, the night launch and recovery the ultimate test of an aviator’s skill.

  Hunkered down in the CAT control pod set almost flush into the deck, the yellow-shirted “shooter,” or catapult officer, initiated the flow of superwet nonradioactive steam, provided by a secondary loop off the carrier’s reactor plant. The shooter double- and then triple-checked the combined deck-and-ship speed in regulating the steam pressure flow. Too little pressure and the fighter-bomber, unable to attain takeoff, would be pushed into the sea. Too much, and the aircraft’s nose wheel would be torn asunder.

  Chipper Armstrong, all preflight checks completed, red-ribbon-tagged ordnance pins out, raised his arms high, as if surrendering, but in fact showing the shooter that his hands were nowhere near the controls.

  The shooter, seeing that the green shirts had completed the final checks, gave the okay to Armstrong, who selected “Afterburner” for the Hornet’s twin turbofans and snapped off a salute. The shooter pushed the button and the Hornet rushed forward, Armstrong’s and Evans’s bodies slammed back under the G force, the plane hurtling down the deck, speeding from zero to 150 miles per hour in two seconds. Evans experienced an involuntary erection, his eyes rammed back hard into their sockets, and then the plane was aloft, Chipper taking over the controls.

  As they banked, RIO Evans glanced back at the rapidly shrinking deck, seeing an F-14 Tomcat, one of the four fighters assigned to ride shotgun for the Hawkeye, moving into position, its toy-sized launch crew swarming around their charge. If all went well, the F-14 would be off the deck in under three minutes, longer than usual because of the extra maneuvering required forward of the crater. Despite one sailor in the crater’s warning line being knocked down by the combination of crosswind and jet blast freakishly angling off the catapult’s blast shield, all went well. McCain’s squadrons assembled “upstairs” for a standoff attack on Penghu to finish what Johnny Rorke and Encino’s crew had begun.

  On Encino, neither the officers nor men knew anything about the instructions given to Crowley and his crew. Now they received orders to turn about and head for home, the submersed “blue”-crewed six-month patrol ending. Upon return to Bangor, through the Juan de Fuca choke point, the sub’s “gold” crew would take over after food, lockers, and vertical launch tubes were restocked.

  McCain’s sixteen planes — eight Super Hornets, four A-6E Intruders, and four Tomcats — selected for the mission against the “high-value fixed land target” of Penghu were about to attack. Each surface-to-land missile contained a GPS receiver/processor able to pinpoint the big 1,366-pound missile’s position to within fifty-two feet. And each missile’s erasable programmable read-only memory had received four missions from the pre-launch loader: three possible missions for Penghu, a fourth or alternative target being the PLA-occupied Kinmen Island, a hundred miles west of Penghu.

  In Chipper Armstrong’s Super Hornet, Evans had already selected the first of the three Penghu programs—1.35 minutes before impact the imaging infrared seeker would be activated, each missile’s infrared seeker head “fan-scanning” through 180 degrees and back again in ninety-one seconds. Should anything happen to Chipper’s plane or any other of McCain’s birds, “Mother,” the E-2C Hawkeye, could take over control of the missiles via Hawkeye’s “pancake,” or rotodome. And via McCain’s Super Hornet and Intruder pilot and bombardier/navigator crews, the “standoff” missile’s five-hundred-pound blast fragment warhead had been programmed for “instantaneous” rather than “delayed” fuse.

  McCain’s “Hit Parade,” as the crew of just over five thousand called the strike force of Hornets, Intruders, and Tomcats, were under strict instructions — namely for the benefit of the “nuggets,” the rookie aviators — that the SLAMs must be careful of “fratricide,” by which they meant the destruction of a SLAM by either the explosion or debris of the missile fired just ahead of it impacting. The rippled fire of Tomahawks from Johnny Rorke’s Encino had prevented “too fast a rain,” as missile instructors often stressed, because of the time between each launch.

  Chipper was scheduled to be first to push the button, the other SLAMs to be fired at fifteen-second intervals, the Hit Parade’s launch points well beyond the range of anything PLA’s air-to-air missile batteries might have hurriedly put into place on Penghu.

  It would be hit and run, McCain’s planes returning to the safety of the carrier battle group’s protective screen, for whom there would never again be a “Bizarro” incident. Any bogeys or friendly marked plane approaching the CVBG would be assumed hostiles. And unless proved otherwise by radio-recognized “friend or foe” code, they would be shot down.

  “Weapons free” authority was confirmed by Chipper Armstrong’s six “range known” homing antiradar missiles, fired by Tomcats getting close in at ten miles. Low in the protective sea clutter at ten miles, the missiles homed in on either side-lobe or more direct “back” radiation, to take out whatever early warning radars the PLA might have managed to erect on the island. Although these half-dozen eight-hundred-pound missiles, streaking through the now typhoon-swept sky at Mach 2, were burning low-smoke solid propellant, their vapor trails — two of them crisscrossing — were plainly visible to the crews of McCain, the two Aegis cruisers, and the battle group’s destroyers and frigates. Only the CVBG’s forward and rear subs were unable to witness the HARM attack, the kind of antiradar onslaught that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s early warning network in April 2003.

  Any concern Mother’s electronics crew might have had about an unintended crisscross of two HARMs quickly evaporated as all six antiradar missiles struck their respective targets, the thousands of tiny steel cubes in their warheads swarming the radars’ sensitive antennae.

  Penghu, now “electronically blind,” had no effective defense against the ensuing onslaught of sixteen SLAMs, Penghu’s runway so badly pitted by the SLAMs’ cratering sub munitions that on SATPIX it looked like a moonscape.

  There was collateral damage, but as with the CIA’s post-9/11 attitude, aboard McCain there was “Before Iraq” and “After Iraq.” After the civilian shields Saddam had used to smother targets, which had cost so many American men and women their lives, the phrase “collateral damage” no longer evoked undue alarm in the administration. Similarly, there had been a hardening of hearts among the Australian, British, American, and Polish soldiers of the 2003 coalition, and deep suspicions of white flags.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Resting in Petrel’s dry lab, lazily watching the fog clear as the ship slowly limped back toward Port Angeles, her bow and bow thrusters in critical shape, Aussie, Sal, and Choir were struck by the general’s refusal to feel relieved. Even though Marte Price, following up on the initial and incorrect CNN report, had made it abundantly clear that it was not the hydrofoils who were instrumental in the terrorist sub’s destruction but Fre
eman’s “brave, heroic team,” and Petrel’s gutsy captain and crew, Freeman was still frowning as he walked about the ship, unable to relax.

  “So what if some folks still believe the first news reports and haven’t heard Marte’s follow-up?” mused Sal. “The general knows what went down.”

  “Yeah,” joined in Choir. “There’ll be a White House reception, medals galore, that’s what it’ll be, lads,’cept for Aussie here and his BIGS.”

  “BIGS?” said Aussie, who was as familiar as his comrades with most military acronyms. “What in hell is BIGS?”

  “Aussie’s big grenade screw-up!”

  “You little Welsh squirt,” Aussie said. “I ought to bash your head in.”

  Sal chortled.

  “You too, you Brooklyn bastard!” said Aussie. “I incapacitated the damn thing. It couldn’t move.” Aussie saw Freeman passing by the lab doorway as he headed along the passageway out to the deck. Hoping to bring him out of his mood, Aussie called out, “Isn’t that right, General?”

  Freeman paused, the frown creasing his forehead so severely that Aussie felt like saying, as his mother used to when he grimaced sourly over homework assignments, “If you don’t get rid of that scowl, you’ll stay that way.” Young Aussie used to frequently check himself in the mirror.

  “What’s that?” asked the general, stopping, but so preoccupied that he hadn’t heard.

  “I was just telling these two no-hopers here that it was me who stopped the sub long enough to—”

  “Yes, yes,” Freeman said, disappearing from the doorway as he strode away.

  Aussie waited several seconds, then looked at Sal and Choir. “What a friggin’ rain face! Never seen ’im so down.”

  Sal put his finger to his lips and jerked his thumb toward the stern deck where, having turned sharply on reaching the deck, Freeman had bent down, pulling back the blanket from the terrorist with the badly bruised neck. Once again he irritably threw the blanket back over the man’s face, stood up and walked slowly away.