Ten minutes later she picked up another cruise missile coming at her head-on. The Sidewinder might be able to hack the angle, but why waste one? She turned right into a four-G pull and let the cruise missile pass her. When she rolled out pointing toward it, it was tracking at a thirty-degree angle to her left, an angle that was increasing. The Sidewinder went after it like a starving wolf.
What am I going to do when I run out of Sidewinders?
Captain Fereydoon Abassi of the Iranian navy stood on the pass overlooking the Gulf of Oman and listened. He could hear jet engines, not too far above. “American,” he said, then swore.
He was here to launch five antiship missiles, which the Iranians had purchased from Russia. SS-NX-26 Yakhonts, the finest antiship missiles in the world. The Russians had, of course, loudly advertised that fact, and even though they were Russians, infidels and users of alcohol to excess, Abassi believed them, because he had seen a demonstration of the Yakhont with his own eyes.
Even listening to the American planes overhead, looking for him, he felt privileged. The admiral had personally chosen him to deliver this mighty blow to the American navy. This was, he well knew, the zenith of his career. No honor he would ever receive in this life or the next could compare with the pride he felt at this moment.
There were, he knew, two American aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Oman. With a little luck, he would hit them both and do massive damage. With just a smidgen more luck, he might even sink one, which would be a feat that would be remembered for many generations. However it worked out, the American navy would be taught a bloody lesson, one that would humble its pride, one it would never forget. He mouthed a prayer to Allah that He might make it so.
The missiles were fire-and-forget; they carried their own radar, the latest Russian design, and they were extraordinarily fast, between Mach 2.0 and 2.5. They also flew low, jinking flight paths to their targets, so they would be extremely difficult to knock down with defensive weapons. In short, the Yakhont antiship missile was the U.S. Navy’s worst nightmare.
Although they were capable of carrying a one-hundred-kiloton warhead, the Supreme Leader had refused to release one or two for these missiles, so tonight they carried conventional 750-pound warheads, which could still punch deep into an unarmored ship and do massive, perhaps fatal, damage.
All Fereydoon Abassi had to do was ensure the American carriers were within range and launch the missiles properly.
He went from launcher to launcher, checking everything. The semitrailer launchers were stabilized with hydraulic feet; the missiles themselves were housed inside closed-end containers, which had been properly elevated; a course was set into their computers. The diesel engines in the launchers were running, providing electrical power.
He looked at his watch. It would soon be dawn, and he and his men must be off this ridge by then-and the missiles must be in the air.
He sent his launcher crews marching away north, down the road out of the pass. Then he walked a hundred feet south, past the launchers, along the road to the mobile radar van. One man, the operator, was manning it. The diesel engine was snoring nicely; the lights on the panel were on.
“Are you ready?” he asked the sailor, who stood at attention.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Let us proceed. A very short look. I want the distance and azimuths to the two carriers, and the instant I get it, I will tell you to cease radiating. You must stop radiating immediately, shut down the diesel engine and run after the others.”
“We will abandon the equipment?”
“If the Americans do not destroy it, it will still be here tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Abassi straightened his uniform as the operator threw switches. Over the man’s shoulder Abassi could see the scope, which glowed. Even as he watched, blips appeared.
“Over a dozen ships,” the operator said, staring at the scope as he manually moved the azimuth cursor.
“The largest ones,” Abassi said, “in the center of the formations.” The Americans were so predictable.
“Range ninety kilometers, bearing one-seven-two degrees”-the operator turned the knob-“and range ninety-five kilometers, one-six-five degrees.”
“Cease radiating. Shut down the engine and run.”
The operator quickly did as directed. The diesel abruptly died, leaving only the faint sound of the diesel engines in the launchers.
In an EA-6B Prowler, the radiation from the Russian-built mobile radar was detected and recognized for what it was. These radars, the U.S. Navy intelligence officers believed, were often used by the Iranians to aim cruise or antiship missiles.
The EA-6B operator informed the E-2 Hawkeye circling over United States and her sister ship, USS Columbia, even as he flipped a switch to jam the radar. However, the few seconds it took for the jammer to go to that frequency proved to be too much. The Iranian radar had ceased radiating.
In the flag combat control spaces aboard United States, Admiral Stan Bryant gave the order. “Possible missiles inbound. Code red. Notify all ships.”
The warning would merely sharpen the troops already at battle stations. Bryant had ordered battle stations, and the closure of all watertight doors, throughout the task force prior to the first launch earlier this morning. Buttoned up tightly, all internal air circulation in the ships was now secured. In the red-lit passageways the damage control parties stared at the bulkheads and each other.
***
Captain Abassi walked quickly-he refused to run-toward the first launcher, which still had its prime mover attached. The lid for the control panel was already open. He checked the switches and settings one more time, then manually tuned the azimuth control to one-seven-two and range control to ninety kilometers. Satisfied, he raised the covers of the two fire buttons and simultaneously pushed them both. Then he jumped into the cab of the fireproof prime mover, pulled the door closed and jammed his fingers into his ears.
Ten seconds later the missile’s solid-fuel booster engine ignited in a stupendous roar and a blast of white-hot flame that illuminated the area as the missile shot forward off the launcher. It raced away toward the dark ocean, accelerating quickly so that the liquid-fueled ramjet engine could ignite when the booster burned out. It rapidly became a receding star.
Abassi fought the temptation to watch it and climbed out of the cab. He ran to the next launcher and repeated the process. One-seven-two degrees, ninety kilometers. Pushed the buttons and climbed back into the cab. This missile followed the first.
On the third, fourth and fifth missiles, he dialed in one-six-five degrees, ninety-five kilometers. In less than three minutes, they had followed the others on their way to glory.
Fereydoon Abassi jumped from the cab of the last prime mover and raced off down the road after his men, as fast as his feet would carry him.
“Missile launch!” The sensor operators in the EA-6B were the first to detect the distinctive radiation from the radar in the nose of the Yakhont missile. “Missile in the air.”
A moment later, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot flying above the coast of Iran, invisible to antiaircraft radar thanks to its ALQ-199, spotted the brilliant plume of a Yakhont coming off the launcher and shouted to the E-2 controller, “Missile in the air. Headed south. We are attacking the launch site.”
He jerked his plane around, stuffed the nose down and pushed the throttle forward. His wingman, well out to his left, followed him down. As he descended and flipped switches on the stick with his thumb to select the proper ordnance, he saw the last of the Iranian ship-killers lift off and go streaking southeast. He already had the master arm switch on and the crosshairs of his bombsight pointed at more or less that spot, so now he sweetened his aim and designated that spot as the target.
Within seconds his computer began giving him steering to his release point. His eyes flicked to the panel. He was going to salvo all his ordnance, six five-hundred-pound cluster bombs, two at a time, at minimum intervals. The clamshell ho
using on the bombs would open well above the ground and scatter a cloud of bomblets, each of which would detonate and spray shrapnel when it hit something solid.
Heart pounding, he concentrated on following the computer’s steering commands. Passing four hundred knots, six thousand feet, the computer released the bombs with a short series of trip-hammer thuds.
He pulled up and left, out to sea, to clear the area for his wingman while he watched the ground. He saw multiple flashes as the bomblets scattered over the empty launch vehicles and mobile radar van. There were no explosions on the ground since all the missiles were in the air.
Running down the road, Captain Abassi heard the swelling noise of jet engines at full throttle, and the whip-cracks of the cluster-bomb containers opening. The noise of the jet peaked when the bomblets went off, so he didn’t hear them. He did hear the second plane roll in, and he heard the containers open. This jet had dropped a little long-and several of the bomblets hit the hard road around him and exploded with white flashes. Shrapnel cut into his legs and body, scything him down.
He was lying in the road, bleeding and laughing, when the sound of the jet engines finally faded. He had done it!
Yessss! For the glory of Allah, and Iran!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dick Hauer and JoAnne Rodgers were still flailing around in the darkness over western Iran in their F-15E, trying to find their target, Tunnel November, even though they were twelve minutes past their target time. Rodgers refused to give up, and Hauer wasn’t about to abort the mission unless his WSO suggested it first.
Both of them were startled when a missile plume came up out of the darkness several miles off to their right. Their first reaction was that the Irani ans had launched a surface-to-air missile at them, but they quickly realized that wasn’t the case. The exhaust plume illuminated the thick air with a dull glow as the ballistic missile rose on its pillar of fire, going straight up, accelerating.
“They just fired that thing from our goddamn target,” Dick Hauer said heatedly over the ICS. “Our fucking target is right down there, right where they launched that thing!”
His positive statement did little to help Rodgers. The INS was worthless, the radar was only usable in an area search mode, and even with the position inputs she was getting via data-link from AWACS, she couldn’t get the system to update her current position. She was doing everything right, she thought, but tonight, in the darkness and turbulence, flying with Mr. Major Asshole, the system had taken a shit.
“Turn toward that spot,” she told her pilot, who dumped the right wing and pulled, which caused the radar picture to go blank for a second or two as the gimbel limits were exceeded. As he was turning, another ballistic missile came up out of the gloom, following the first into the heavens.
“I’m going to fly over those shitheads and dump the load, armed,” Hauer said. As good as his word, within twenty seconds, all his bombs were on their way.
Even as the bombs were falling, he keyed the radio and reported the two ballistic missile launches to the AWACS, who already knew about them from sensor data and had yet to give him the word.
Cussing silently to himself, Hauer turned the Strike Eagle westward. “Think you can find our goddamn base?” he asked his WSO, who didn’t reply.
Behind him in the darkness the bombs exploded on a hillside about a mile from Tunnel November, injuring no one, hurting nothing.
The F-15 was fifteen miles away heading west when the first of the Tomahawks fired at November exploded right in front of the tunnel, killing the launch crew and destroying the empty missile launchers. Within three minutes, three more Tomahawks arrived to flail the area with blast and shrapnel.
Approaching the Iranian border, the missile launch light began flashing on the instrument panel in front of Hauer, and an audible warning assaulted their eardrums. According to the threat indicator, the missile was coming from the left. Hauer jammed the left wing down and turned hard toward it as he manually pumped off chaff, just in case the automatic system was malfunctioning.
In the soupy darkness, the missile’s exhaust plume was starkly visible as it rose toward them.
“What the fuck happened to the ALQ-199?” Hauer demanded of Rodgers, who didn’t have time to answer before the missile hit.
Neither crew member managed to eject from the out-of-control, flaming plane as it plummeted from the sky.
The Iranians had scored their first kill of the night.
Aboard United States, the incoming Yakhont missiles were not picked up by the carrier’s surface search radar. Nor did Columbia see the three aimed at her.
One of the Super Aegis cruisers four miles north of United States, USS Hue City, picked up the incoming missiles on its radar, and the tactical action officer rippled off a salvo of four SM-2 missiles, hoping they would connect with something. But the Yakhonts were too low and traveling too fast-over fourteen hundred knots-and all but one of the Standard missiles failed to find its target. That Standard struck its Yakhont a glancing blow and failed to explode; still, the forces of impact were so great both missiles disintegrated.
USS Hue City failed to get a firing solution on any of the three incoming Yakhonts. They were too low and too fast, and their flight path was too erratic.
Aboard United States, Admiral Bryant watched the computer symbols that depicted the incoming ship-killers with a growing sense of horror. He knew these symbols were merely computer estimates of the Yakhonts’ position because none of the radar systems airborne or shipboard had managed to get a sustained lock. The computer derived a theoretical position, course, speed and time to impact based on very fragmentary data.
Twelve seconds, eleven… the missiles were traveling at 2,341 feet per second, moving a statute mile in a little over two seconds. Bryant fumbled for the microphone on the wall and pushed the button for the ship’s loudspeaker system. “Incoming missiles,” he roared, “forward, aft, amidships! Brace for shock.”
He felt the two port-side Phalanx Gatling guns open fire. Those 20 mm weapons were directed by their own radar and internal computer, which aimed and fired them automatically whenever the system detected an incoming target. Each gun vomited out three thousand depleted uranium bullets a minute, a river of heavy metal. They made the deck vibrate at a high frequency, so inside the ship they were felt rather than heard. Bryant’s heart threatened to leap from his chest. Maybe, just maybe…
Then a missile hit. In the flag spaces, Bryant felt a dull thud. The Yakhont arrived at an eighty-degree angle from the bow and hit United States fifty feet above the waterline, below the flight deck, almost exactly amidships. It punched through the steel side of the ship and buried itself deep in the aluminum bulkheads under the flight deck, almost reaching the Number Two Elevator, before it detonated. The explosion blew a hole in the flight deck and blasted a cavern in the offices, bunkrooms and passageways. It also blew a hole in the ceiling of the hangar deck. The blast wrecked two planes on the flight deck, blowing one thirty feet into another plane and collapsing its gear, and smashed three on the hangar deck. And it ignited a thousand square feet of aluminum within the ship. Bodies and body parts were quickly consumed by the flames.
Columbia’s Phalanxes knocked down one of the incoming missiles. The first one to hit crossed above the flight deck too fast for a human eye to follow and smashed into the island superstructure, doing catastrophic damage and killing over fifty men outright. The other went through the opening for Number Four elevator, crossed the hangar deck and blew a hole in the starboard side of the ship. The explosions of both warheads started fierce fires.
Columbia’s bridge was shattered; half the men there were dead or disabled, and the helmsman lost control of the rudders. The massive carrier began a gentle turn to port. She did a complete 180-degree turn, almost colliding with a destroyer, before Damage Control Central managed to get the helm shifted and regain control of the rudders from the after steering room. Fortunately, aboard both ships, the propulsion systems wer
e still intact and functioning flawlessly. The nuclear reactors, also sited below the waterlines, were also undamaged.
Like the well-trained professionals they were, the crews of the giant ships responded immediately to the disasters. On the flight decks, men began moving aircraft forward to escape the fires while other men flaked out fire hoses. Flames, poisonous fumes and severe battle damage to all systems near the blast sites wreaked havoc with ships crammed with explosive ordnance and jet fuel. The battles to save the carriers would last almost twelve hours before the fires were brought under control.
Chicago O’Hare had fired her last Sidewinder and had declared to her flight leader, who was at least forty miles away, that she was Winchester and Bingo fuel. She had to head back to her tanker rendezvous now or she was going to be swimming home. Fortunately the sky seemed empty of cruise missiles. She stuck her hand up under her oxygen mask and wiped the perspiration from her face. Then she wiped her eyes and eyebrows. Her flight suit and underwear were soaked with sweat.
Holy mother!
The E-2 controller came up on the radio. “Ninety-nine Battlestar aircraft, ninety-nine Battlestar aircraft, divert to Qatar.” Ninety-nine was the jargon for all, and Battlestar was the call sign of United States.
O’Hare laid her plane into a lazy turn in the general direction of Qatar and worked on her nav computer while she climbed. Oh, joy, Al Udeid Air Base at Doha was only 110 nautical miles away. She had plenty of fuel for that little jaunt. She looked up the frequency for Al Udeid Approach on her Bingo cards and dialed it into the ready position on her radio.
She wondered how many cruise missiles she and her fellow Hornet pilots had failed to intercept. Well, in life there is always an accounting. She hadn’t seen a nuclear explosion light up the night to the south, so if any got through, they had conventional warheads.
Her next thought was more practical. Were there any more missiles crossing the Gulf?
The Disciple Page 40