The Art of War c-17

by Keith Douglass

  Hornet 406

  Three search radars suddenly appeared on Riley’s radar screen just south of the airfield. The Iranians were certain to know that something was en route. May be that’s good, Riley thought. More people would be in the open when the TLAMs hit. And if they were really lucky, some of them would be MiG pilots.

  Tomcat 102

  Johnnie checked the flight path against the mask curve on her screen. It looked fine, she thought. Fastball was flying right on course. She gave a quick check of her kneeboard card, which outlined the prebriefed release point, then depressed the hand-controller trigger, beginning the illumination. Unlike the smaller GBU-series bombs, the GBU-24’s release point had yet to be programed into the Tomcat’s computers, with the end result being that the bombs had to be released manually, based on visual and geographic cues. Johnnie began her range countdown, “three… two… one… pickle!”

  Fastball triggered the first, then, on cue, the second GBU-24. The two bombs dropped from the Tomcat’s undercarriage with a noticeable thump, then deployed their glide wings.

  Morrow angled his fighter away from the target to his left, giving the LANTIRN’s laser-designator its maximum unmasked field-of-view. Both crew members watched the display for a moment, seeing the men on the tarmac around the hanger scrambling about in reaction to the TLAM strikes. The brightness of the flash on their NVGs made them squint.

  Johnnie had just switched back to air-to-air and was about to call the Hawkeye for a “picture” when a sharp deedle deedle deedle rang out over the RWR gear. Her eyes darted to her circular RWR display. “SAM launch. One o’clock. SA-2.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Music on. Packers, Steelers Two, SAM, north Bullseye at fifteen.”

  “Breaking right,” Morrow called. “Watch our mask.”

  Hornet 406

  “Copy, downtown.” Riley loosed one HARM at the missile’s source, then a second. The missiles zoomed off his bird and sped away at nearly Mach 5. Riley loved the SEAD role. It reminded him of the Shrike-armed Iron Hand missions his father flew in his A-4 over the skies of North Vietnam. But the HARM was vastly superior, he thought. It could remember where the site was even if it shut down.

  Tomcat 102

  “Looking good.” Johnnie watched the bombs track and the LANTIRN’s mask or blind spot. “Come left!”

  “Boom boom!” Rat hollered as the two bombs crashed into the hanger. “Free to maneuver.”

  “Second launch!” Morrow slid into afterburner and banked into the SAM before rolling inverted and pulling toward the ground. Johnnie punched three clouds of chaff, just enough to confuse the guidance radar.

  But the two HARMS loosed by Riley smashed into the SA-2’s Fan Song fire control radar, destroying the unit and sending the SAMs ballistic.

  Hawkeye 703

  “Football, Talon, picture, two groups. Southeast, Bullseye for fifteen. East Bullseye for twenty. East group are Tomcats.”

  “Copy your call,” came the response from each element.

  “Steelers, eastern group. Packers, southeastern group.”

  Tomcat 111

  “Steelers One, copy your call.” Lieutenant Commander Steve “Jolly” Rogers quickly evaluated the developing scene. “Send Two after the AEW. Have Three-join on our wing.”

  “Roger that,” his RIO acknowledged, then called the plan.

  Tomcat 102

  “Okay, Rat. Let’s get us a Tomcat.”

  Johnnie studied the JTIDS picture on her TID. The two AEW birds were circling in a long, racetrack pattern at about twenty thousand feet and forty miles out. Either these two crews had yet to detect their Tomcat, or else there were other fighters in the area masked in the valleys of the coastal mountain range. Or, there was a SAM trap.

  “Fastball, this bothers me. Something’s not right.” She glanced out her right then left side.

  “Come on, Rat. We’ve got two sitting ducks straight ahead and you want to play war college tactician. I’m going to get me a Tomcat. Get some balls, girl. Switch to Phoenix!”

  “Will you listen to me! Look at those guys. They’re just waiting. I’m telling you, we aren’t alone!” She waited for a response that never came.

  “Phoenix selected, your dot.”

  “Fox Three on the westbound Tomcat, angels two-zero at twenty-five.” The AIM-54C dropped momentarily, then raced ahead toward its victim.

  “As soon as it’s active, we’re bugging,” Rat called.

  Fastball’s fixation on the departing Phoenix was short-lived. Suddenly, his RWR chirped and showed two AIM-7 Sparrow missiles inbound off his port wing. “Rat, incoming. At our nine o’clock.” He jerked his Tomcat into the missiles, then angled them back on his right side, trying to force the missile’s gimbal to the extreme and break the radar’s lock.

  Johnnie flipped the switch, sending the signal for the Phoenix to go active. “Counter measures,” she called. “Pumping chaff!”

  One of the Sparrows shot over the canopy, failing to detonate.

  “Geez that was close!”

  A second exploded into one the chaff clouds.

  “Two more! I’ve got two more! Three o’clock. Break right!”

  Fastball broke into the missile and yanked his Tomcat down, just as the third Sparrow homed onto another chaff cloud. He brought his nose up, looking in the direction of the last missile.

  “Where are they?” Johnnie’s head spun from side to side. “Where are they?”

  “Phantom! Eleven o’clock. Heading across… he’s turning away!” The Iranian F-4E pulled a hard left slice turn, putting its hot pipes in Fastball’s face. He snaked around, angling his Tomcat for the kill.

  “Switching to heat.”

  “Watch for the second one. There’s always a second one!” Morrow swung out wide to the right then used his rudders to swing his tail around. His Sidewinders screamed at him, locking on the red-orange plumes of the Phantom’s J79 engines. “Tone! Fox Two!” He loosed a Sidewinder.

  The F-4E exploded in a ball of fire, temporarily blinding the Tomcat crew. The fire lit the sky for miles as the debris cascaded to the ground. There was no way that there could have been a shot. It happened so fast.

  “I’ve got two. He’s at our six.” Johnnie called. She was cranked around to her left, holding the turn bar with her right hand. “Swinging out to our right.” She flipped around.

  Morrow pulled up and tried to angle back.

  “He’s slowing. Must be GCI.” The F-4s lacked night gear and were undoubtedly being guided by a ground controller or the Tomcats. “Dive… burner out. Get below the mountains.”

  Fastball reluctantly complied, tugging his throttles into idle and nosing over toward the desert below.

  A flash appeared from the Phantom’s left wing.

  “Launch! Break right!” She popped a string of flares. The maneuver jerked her to one side, throwing her against the cockpit instruments.

  The Sidewinder raced harmlessly past the Tomcat after one of the flares. She was damned glad these were older modeled Ps. The Mikes, she thought, wouldn’t be so easily fooled.

  “Missed!” shouted Fastball.

  “We’re pulling away. He’s losing us. Come right… overshoot! There… at our eleven. Forty degrees high.”

  Fastball jerked his nose up and shoved into afterburner, powering toward the confused Phantom with a vengeance. “Make it count!” he cried, punching his last heat-seeker at the twin plumes. “Fox Two!”

  “It’s tracking!”

  “Splash one Phantom!”

  Johnnie looked away, then refocused her eyes on her radar. It took a second, but she noticed that one of the Tomcats that had been circling to the east was gone.

  “Fastball, we got one of the F-14s! It’s gone!”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Iranian submarine

  Friday, May 7

  1200 local (GMT +3)

  “That’s the last of them, sir.” The captain breathed a sigh of relief as the sonarma
n made his report that the last mine had been deployed. With each one now tethered to the bottom with a weight and mooring cable, he was free to leave the area and return to port.

  The mines he had deployed across the Straits were not the most advanced models available in the world. They were activated by both contact and magnetic influence. They possessed no capability, as many more advanced models did, of distinguishing between large ships and small ships. Nor did they have a “counter” that would tell them to detonate on the fourth or fifth target they encountered, nor did they have the acoustic classification capabilities and processors that would have told them the difference between the U.S. Carrier and any other large ship.

  But their disadvantages were outweighed by the fact that that they were cheap, plentiful, and that the submarine had the technology to accurately deploy them. And, of courses, they were exceptionally effective.

  The captain consulted his chart, then said, “Come left to course 350. Five knots. What is the weather predicted for tonight?”

  The navigator spoke up. “Partly cloudy, with a three quarter moon.”

  The captain grimaced. Far from ideal conditions. When the submarine came shallow to snorkel, she would prefer a completely black night. Rain was also good, as it helped mask the submarine’s profile while shallow.

  Still, it was not as though they would have to do this many times. One day at most, and they’d be back in home port. Certainly, a submarine was more vulnerable tied to a pier than submerged and underway, but despite his chosen profession, the captain had always viewed sailing beneath the surface of water as slightly unnatural. For a submariner, he was not as comfortable under water as he should’ve been. As his counterparts were.

  Perhaps that was the result of having spent most of his career in shallow water. Maybe the ability to transit in the deeps, to know that he was acoustically and magnetically undetectable, would have given him a greater sense of security. But here in the Gulf, in the shallow, hot water, he had all the disadvantages of a submarine and none of the advantages.

  On impulse, he pushed the bitch box button and contacted the chief engineer. “If we had to, could we make port without recharging?”

  “Yes. But I wouldn’t want to chance it, Captain. We’d be dangerously low on battery charge, down to reserves. And if anything went wrong, we would have no reserves to maneuver.”

  It was as he thought. Well, the decision would not have to be made now. He could reserve for later tonight, perhaps picking a moment when clouds were thick overhead to obscure visibility. But it was good to know that if he had to, he could get home without recharging.

  And was five knots the right speed? Perhaps slow to two or three. Battery endurance was logarithmically proportional to speed, and he’d use far less than half of the same battery power at three knots than he would at five. He weighed that against the lure of being back on solid land and decided to stay at five knots. Allah willing, they would be home by the next morning.

  USS Seawolf

  local (GMT +3)

  The Seawolf moved through the water, completely silent. No one moved more than was absolutely necessary. Commands that might be barked out at other times were whispered, passed from man to man quickly down the length of the ship.

  “Conn, sonar. I have a firing solution.” Renny’s voice was low. Even with part of his conformal array degraded, he was certain he had a solid lock on the other submarine.

  “Sonar, acknowledged. Hold fire for now.” The captain looked at the chart for a moment, wondering what it was that made him hesitate. Deploying mines was most certainly an act of war.

  Not that the Iranians agreed, of course. They claimed the entire Gulf as well as the Straits as their territorial waters, to do with as they pleased.

  But international law and the agreement of most nations felt that there was an inherent right of free passage. To acknowledge that the Iranians owned those waters would be to allow them to impose taxes, duties, and all sorts of other onerous restrictions that would unfairly affect trade. So, the captain concluded, he was well with in his rights to execute an immediate attack upon the submarine.

  But still, there was the bigger question of what the battle group was actually up to. His last communication with them had been broken off just as they had entered the Straits, when they dived below by the attack. It could be that the tactical situation right now was even more precarious than it had been before.

  There were no certainties, not even if he came up to confer with Admiral Wayne. And this was what he was paid to do, what he’d trained to do for decades — make the tough calls when he was alone — and make the right decision. The captain made his decision.

  “Take us in close and hold us there. Maintain firing solution at all times — manual plot as well as the computer-generated solution. We’re going to take this bastard now.”

  Even as he prepared to destroy the Iranian submarine, the larger question still loomed in the captain’s mind. What was the battle group going to do about the mines themselves?

  Should he could come shallow to communications depth and let the carrier know that the Straits had been mined. That would make Seawolf an easy target complicating the problem of cleaning the area. It would put the ship at serious risk. And maybe it wasn’t necessary. He considered the alternative distasteful. There was every chance that one of the heavily laden merchant ships transiting the Straits would make the danger abundantly clear to the carrier very shortly. Once the carrier heard the distress calls and saw the ship listing in the water, it would be obvious what had happened. But as dramatic as a sinking merchant might be as a warning, that would not tell the carrier where the mines were or that the entire Straits were mined.

  Bellisanus decided that notifying the carrier would have to wait until Seawolf had destroyed the other submarine. If a merchant struck a mine and alerted the carrier first, so be it. The Seawolf would hear the explostion and at least know that the carrier had been alerted. For now Seawolf’s only priorities were to destroy the sub and any other mines she carried and to survive executing the attack.

  Iranian submarine

  1400 Local (GMT +3)

  Had the Iranian sonarmen been trained in the United States in the last twenty years, they would have known that the acoustic signature of the U.S. submarine had changed radically during those times. They would also have known that acoustic quieting and shock mounting had reduced the amount of noise radiating to almost undetectable levels, vulnerable only to the most advanced passive systems. Even their vulnerability to active sonar systems had been reduced, with anechoic tiles on their hulls, a new, smooth hull shape, and, in some cases, soundwave cancellation electronics.

  But the crew onboard the Iranian submarine wasn’t aware of those advances, nor were they really conscious of how outdated their own equipment was. Certainly they knew the technical specifications, but none of them had really had it brought home to them just how antique the sonar systems they were operating were, particularly on the passive side of the house. Nor were they particularly familiar with the sort of blow tones the Seawolf’s damaged sonar dome was generating.

  Since they intended to remain undetected by the remainder of the American forces, the captain was not inclined to use the active sonar. Instead, he relied on the assurances of his sonarmen, who were growing increasingly confident, as they assured him that they were alone undersea.

  That was the captain’s first mistake.

  The peculiar buzz line of a torpedo cut through the submarine like a knife. Each sailor, without exception, felt his gut twist and his blood run cold as the unmistakable sound reverberated throughout their boat.

  In shallow water, there was little the captain could do about it. Certainly he could increase speed, maneuver, and eject decoys in an attempt to confuse it. His other primary option was to conduct an emergency blow and surface his submarine, open the hatches, and try to save as many people as he could.

  But the captain, aware of the reception that would awa
it him in Iran if he simply gave up, chose the first alternative.

  That was his second mistake. And his last.

  The smaller submarine accelerated to flank speed in a matter of minutes, and the captain immediately ordered a hard turn to starboard. He then ejected every noise-maker in his arsenal, hoping to confuse the torpedo into attacking a false target. He even amplified the output of his acoustic transmitter, on the possibility that the torpedo would home in on that fifty yards astern rather than on the submarine itself.

  All to no avail. The U.S. torpedo was massively and inestimably smarter than the captain thought it was. It analyzed, classified, and immediately rejected each noise-maker. The mass of air bubbles churned up by the submarine’s sudden turn was also easily recognized for what it was. The acoustic augmenter trailing the submarine confused it for just a few seconds, but then it detected the warm, roiling wake spewing out behind the real submarine as its propellers turned. The torpedo turned and unerringly followed the wake.

  The captain, realizing his sin of pride in the last moments, ordered an emergency blow in a desperate attempt to save his men. But it was too late. In addition to being much smarter than he’d thought, the torpedo was also faster. It found the delectable propellers with their swirling troughs of air bubbles, and detonated.

  The initial impact severed the propeller shaft and tore it loose from its thrust bearings. As the shock traveled through the ship, old seams sprang leaks, and then completely parted.

  Under pressure, the streams of water rushing into the submarine were like sledgehammers. They smashed sailors against steel bulkheads, killing many of them before they could drown. As the bulk of water increased, it quickly flooded the battery compartment. The combination of seawater and battery acid yielded chlorine gas, and those that were not smashed, or drown, died of chlorine gas poisoning.

  The captain had the presence of mind to order the watertight doors between the forward and aft portions of the submarine shut. Sailors frantic to escape the carnage astern surged forward, and the sailors in the forward compartments had to use their combined strength to slam the hatches even though arms or legs were still in the way. The steel hatches severed the bones, but the remaining flesh and blood fouled the seals and compromised the watertight integrity.