Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  nodded in satisfaction at the display. The Predators were worth every nickel of the billions spent developing and procuring them.

  “Sixty seconds, Admiral. Would you like to shift to the gallery?”

  Ericcson nodded to the air ops boss and went through the light lock doors to the observation deck, the inclined windows overlooking the flight deck. On the forward catapults two F-22s were connected to the cats, the canopies down. Their jet exhaust glowed in the wee hours’ darkness, the exhaust deflector shields rising slowly out of the deck behind the aircraft. Support crew swarmed over the planes, but backed away as the moment for launch neared. A single man on the deck stood near the cockpit of the port F-22, the first jet that would be launched, wearing a large helmet with a Mickey Mouse headset. He carried two large red-lit wands, handling them with the deftness of a drummer holding his drumsticks. As the hour of strike aircraft launch approached, he exchanged signals with the pilot in the F-22. Ericcson watched with mixed emotions, wistfully missing the sensations of the cockpit, but loving this moment of fleet command, his men and machines moving to his conductor’s baton.

  Far below the island on the flight deck, the port catapult’s F-22 throttled up, then down. The jet’s whining was loud enough to deafen a bystander. The tail’s elevators rotated up and down, the rudder moved left and right. In the dimness of the flight deck lights, the tail’s emblem could be made out, a black field with a white skull and the crossed bones of the Jolly Roger squadron, Ericcson’s former command.

  In the cockpit of the port fighter, Squadron Commander Diane “Fuzzy” Whitworth took one last run through the checklist, testing the interphone to the radar intercept officer and squadron executive officer, Commander Jane “Baldy” Felix. Whitworth’s nickname came from her degree in artificial intelligence and her fondness of fuzzy logic. Baldy Felix’s moniker had come from her comments that when she was anxious, she was “going bald over it.” The two had clicked early

  in their careers, the detailers keeping them together as Whit worth took over the Jolly Rogers. The deck officer below gave her the signal that she had permission to take off. She curled her nomex-gloved fingers over the throttles on the port kneeboard, the “keys,” and pushed them smoothly to the forward stops. The engines howled behind her. The needles on the faces of the electronic instrument panel displays rotated to show a hundred percent thrust. She pulled the keys to the right to the detent, then pushed them farther forward, engaging the afterburners.

  If the jets had been roaring before, they were screaming now. The jets became rocket engines as the JP-5 flowed into the jet exhaust and the nozzles constricted. Twin twelve-foot long flame cones flared out of the tailpipes. The fighter vibrated beneath her with the shear power of the thrust on afterburner. Whitworth checked the panel and nodded to the deck officer, then threw him a salute, indicating she was ready for launch. He saluted back with one of the wands, then turned his body so that his feet were widely spread on the deck, in line with the catapults. In one graceful motion, he quickly waved the wand high over his head in an arc that pointed forward, extending his wand all the way to the deck, then brought it up to point straight ahead, the catapult officer’s signal to activate the catapult.

  One instant Whitworth was strapped into a howling fighter jet held restrained on the deck. The next she was slammed into her seat and traveling upward through a vertical tunnel with the blood roaring through her ears. The feeling of sitting in a horizontal plane changed to that of sitting on an upright rocket, the g-forces making it seem to her brain as if the carrier deck was a wall and she was flying straight up. The stick came into her waiting right hand, her left still fighting the g’s on the keys, and the airframe shook as the catapult disconnected. The tunnel of the carrier deck flying toward her melted into the dark sea and the slightly lighter starlit sky. The fighter’s ride was suddenly smooth after the hellish catapult shot, struggling for altitude as it left the carrier behind. Whit worth pulled up and the sea vanished. Only the stars were visible. She glanced in the side mirror at the dimly lit carrier behind them, the deck becoming smaller as the fighter climbed, the jets shrieking behind them. The instrument panel’s display of altitude wound up as the fighter climbed through a thousand feet and higher. Whitworth put the jet into a left turn, orbiting the John Paul Jones until she leveled off at forty thousand feet. She flew to the coordinate of the hold position, awaiting the launch of the rest of the squadron.

  It didn’t take long. The carrier’s catapults pumped out fighter after fighter until all but the reserve force was airborne. Whitworth’s squadron formed up behind her, and without a radio transmission, she wiggled the wings of the F-22 and headed northwest at full throttle. The fighter sped up to Mach 1 and went supersonic, the squadron on her wings. In the next hour she expected to engage the Red Chinese Panda strike fighters and their Cobra antiair missiles. Once both threats were burning on the waves below, the squadron would head in and put their large load of Mark 80 JSOW Joint Standoff Weapons into the Red carrier, the Beijing-class battle cruisers and the assorted heavy cruisers of the Red fleet.

  “You with me, Bald?”

  “Looking good, Fuzz,” the interphone crackled. “So far we’re alone. The Jolly Rogers own the skies.”

  In the air operations gallery of the John Paul Jones, Admiral Ericcson watched in satisfaction as the last jets were launched. The reserve jets were attached to the catapults, their engines at idle. They would wait out the battle here, waiting to guard the carrier. Ericcson put out the cigar and walked back into air ops, lighting a second Partagas as the squadrons flew toward the Red force.

  “Port Royal, Sea of Japan, Coral Sea, and Atlas Mountain are commencing Equalizer cruise missile launch, Admiral,” Commander Weber said, looking over from his display. The heavy supersonic large-bore cruise missiles would fly horizontally off the short decks of the cruise missile carriers, then climb at a thirty-degree angle for the heavens as their solid

  rocket first stages pushed them to fifty thousand feet and their ramjet engines came on-line for the trip to the Red fleet.

  “Oh, God, smash the teeth in their mouths,” Ericcson muttered around the cigar clamped in his teeth to no one, thinking of the Red fleet. “Break the jaw-teeth of these lions, Lord. Let the whirlwind snatch them away. Then the just shall rejoice to see the vengeance and bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.” Ericcson looked up to see Pulaski staring at him, and shrugged. “Psalm fifty-eight,” he said.

  Eighty-two miles ahead of the John Paul Jones and five hundred feet below her keel, the fast-attack nuclear submarine making full turns at fifty percent reactor power made way swiftly toward the Red Chinese Battlegroup Two while screening the Jones task force, without the knowledge of the fleet she protected.

  The control room of the USS Hornet, a Virginia-class submarine never truly finished by the Pearl Harbor DynaCorp Naval Shipyard, was rigged for black on the orders of Commander Browning “B.D.” Dallas, the submarine’s commanding officer. Dallas had been chain-smoking since local nightfall, the ship’s clocks showing just after eight in the evening Zulu time. There was no doubt, Dallas thought as he coughed, he would have to give these things up, but better health would have to wait until the end of his command tour. Dallas had a heavyset medium height frame, and had been gaining forehead real estate for some years. Dallas was Squadron Seven’s top commander. Dallas stood on the conn talking quietly to the officer of the deck, young Dick Jouett.

  “Cyclops has the Jones task force, even with her in the baffles,” Jouett said. “The onion array is updating the battle space and the aft acoustic daylight array has the wider dispersed ships of the formation.”

  “How good is the solution to the target battle group Dallas asked in his harsh somewhere-west-of-Chicago accent.

  “USubCom’s updated us with a snapshot telemetry picture from Jones’s Predators. It would have been better in real time,

  but it’s all we have. It’s down loaded into Cyclops, but we’re
either going to have to put up our own Predator to confirm the targets or use a UUV.” The Mark 60 Unmanned Underwater Vehicle operated like a torpedo but collected intelligence for the mother submarine, relayed back either by a wire to the torpedo tube or by trailing a small buoy that transmitted to the overhead tactical satellite, which could then be transmitted to the submarine’s passive reception buoy to the Cyclops system. “It sets us back having the satellites and the network out,” Jouett complained.

  “That’s war,” B.D. Dallas said, his attention fixed on the acoustic daylight imaging display of the Cyclops system on the command console. “You have to be able to play hurt. If that’s the only battle casualty we have, it’s an easy day. Officer of the Deck, man battle stations We’re going to hit the Chinese with the Vortex battery as soon as we can power them up. Make Vortex tubes one through twelve ready in all respects and open outer doors.”

  Jouett smiled. “Aye aye, sir, man battle stations and spin up Vortexes one to twelve. Diving Officer, over the 1MC, ‘man battle stations

  Thirty-two minutes later, twelve Vortex Mod Echo missiles were away, blasting through the water at a supercavitating velocity of three hundred knots, their processors loaded with the locations of the Red battle fleet.

  Fuzzy Whitworth checked her Breitling as BBC Radio Taipei came over the radio circuit, waiting for the half past three weather report coming on. The attack profile called for absolutely rigid em-con—emissions control, the modern term for radio and radar transmission silence—to aid them in surprising the Chinese battle group At the same time, the attack needed to be coordinated with a time-on-target assault, so that at the designated second in the designated minute, all their ordnance would be exploding at once over the ships of the Red fleet. Anything less coordinated than that risked the battle fleet being alerted to the attack, and the ships would be much more

  vulnerable in a defensive maneuver at full antiair warfare battle stations The Viking wanted the Chinese asleep in the middle of the night, steaming in their normal formations, with no idea of the incoming strike. The sensitive radio direction finders and frequency scanners would not be able to detect the aircraft if the Americans kept their radars and radios completely shut down.

  The aircraft had been directed to tune to BBC Taipei, and when the bottom-of-the-hour weather report came on, em con would be lifted, and all the radars would light off at once, locking on to their targets in fractions of a second, the firecontrol computers sorting out the targets in the next ten seconds, and minutes later the missiles would arrive on target and detonate.

  “.. . Red Chinese Strategic Rocket forces were brought to full alert today according to U.S. military sources at the Pentagon,” the BBC reporter announced. Whitworth tapped her helmet with her left hand, waiting. “And the Red ambassador was called to the White House this morning, reportedly to account for the fueling of the PLA missile silos.”

  “Baldy, what’s the status?” Whitworth asked.

  “All JSOWs armed and powered up, awaiting target assignment from firecontrol radar.”

  “You standing by with your finger on the radar set?”

  “My finger hurts from holding it on the toggle switch.”

  “.. . concludes our world news. At half past the hour, BBC Radio Taipei brings you this weather report, sponsored in part by Samsung flat panel displays—”

  “Radar energize!” Whitworth shouted.

  “Radar on, and targets illuminated,” Lieutenant Commander Felix replied. “Firecontrol computer assigning targets on the attack profile presets.”

  “Come on, Bald. I need to shoot here.”

  “Firecontrol target assignment at nine zero percent, firecontrol is go! JSOW one, foxtrot!”

  “JSOW fire one,” Whitworth said calmly, arming the stick weapons control, selecting missile number one and punching

  the fire button on the stick. On the starboard outboard wing rail, the first standoff weapon ignited to full thrust and left the wing launcher. Whitworth was temporarily blinded as the missile accelerated away, diving gently downward on its serpentine glide slope to the aircraft carrier Nanching. Felix called units two through six, and Whitworth fired them, the F-22 then coming around in a Mach 2 seven-g turn as Whitworth cleared the launching position. The fighter climbed to an altitude five thousand feet higher, at her operational ceiling. The reports from the other planes of the squadron came in, reporting their weapons releases, since emission control had ended at the weather report.

  Throughout the heavens, missile trails began at the wings of the jets of the Jolly Roger squadron and descended in snakelike wiggles to the ships of the battle group While the JSOWs flew down to their targets, the Equalizer cruise missiles all turned to fly straight up over the ships of the fleet, then arced over and descended straight down from directly overhead-partly because antiair warfare was usually designed to defend to an angle of seventy degrees above the horizon, and partly so they would avoid interfering with the incoming JSOWs.

  At zero three thirty-three Beijing time, ninety plasma-tipped American missiles sailed toward the ships of the Red Chinese formation, all of them supersonic, all of them unstoppable, and of the ninety, only one missed the intended target, its airframe crashing into the sea forty feet west of the frigate it had been aiming for. The others impacted within sixty-five seconds of each other, and during that minute the heavens rained down fire and brimstone upon the ships of Red Chinese Battlegroup Two. By zero three thirty-five, the attack was over. Only fourteen ships of the original sixty remained on the surface.

  Sixteen minutes after the initial attack, twelve Vortex missiles coming in from deep beneath the surviving ships impacted. Twelve more explosions mushroomed over the darkness-made-daylight. The supply ships untargeted by the Jolly Rogers’ JSOWs and the Equalizer cruise missiles all vaporized or were blown to splinters. The surviving fourteen ships dwindled to a paltry two.

  Commander Fuzzy Whitworth listened to the radio chatter on the way back. The overhead radar aircraft made a battle damage assessment for the admiral on the carrier. From what it sounded like, the attack had been a success. Whitworth was almost sorry there had been no Chinese Pandas to engage in a dogfight, but then, an easy ambush meant she and Baldy would live to fly another day. She lined up in sequence, the night still pitch-black as she descended on the glide slope to the deck of the John Paul Jones. She brought the heavy fighter in, hit the deck on the numbers and caught the tailhook on the arresting cable, and decelerated from 120 knots at full throttle to zero in a half second, her eyeballs wanting to leave her eye sockets. She taxied off the landing area and lifted the canopy and smiled at her maintenance chief petty officer, climbed out of the cockpit and walked into the island to the squadron room for the debrief.

  The fleet oiler Taicang labored through the gentle seas, the mid watch routine as the ship steamed in formation with the battle group toward the Strait of Formosa. The deck officer on the bridge was a junior-grade lieutenant named Fang Xiou. He’d been qualified as deck officer for a year, but had spent much of his childhood in the water on his father’s fishing boat. If his father could see the bridge of the Taicang he would scoff at all the modern conveniences. Navigation by GPS satellite, phased-array surface search radar to see the distant shoreline and the closer blips of the ships of the formation, computer controlled high-resolution display screens showing the charts updated with the positions of the fleet’s ships, air-conditioning, and tilted polarized bridge glass with circular spinning glass sections that could see through heavy weather. The helm station looked like a prop from one of the Westerners’ science fiction movies.

  Fang yawned, the mid watch always seeming hours longer than a morning or afternoon watch. Fortunately, he would only

  stand the mid watch for the next week. Then he would rotate off the watch bill for four days and return to the morning watch for a week. He picked up his binoculars and scanned the ships of the formation, checking their running lights to make sure no one had turned early in th
e zigzag pattern, the risk of collision more of a danger than any lurking submarine. He put his face in the radar hood, confirmed the ranges to the surrounding ships, then picked up his binoculars. The carrier Nanching was not quite over the horizon. She was still visible, though hull down, at bearing zero nine zero true, on the port beam. The image of the carrier was an array of lights rather than the actual outline of the hull. It would be another three hours before dawn began to break, and the carrier’s haze gray color became evident in contrast to the dark blue sea and the light blue sky. Fang was about to drop the binoculars when the windows of the bridge exploded inward. The blast shock blew him back against a bulkhead, the flying glass slicing his flesh, only his face spared by the uplifted binoculars. In the two seconds it took him to sink slowly to the deck, he watched in disbelief as the Nanching exploded in a white ball of flames. His retinas were burned by the fireball, the sparks dancing in his field of vision. Explosions lit the seascape. The night vanished and was replaced with noontime suns all shining on the horizon as the other ships of the formation were replaced by the glaring detonations. Fang’s hearing was gone, he realized, the first explosion deafening him. He sank lower, so that he could no longer see out the glass-less windows, but the flickering daylight still came in the bridge, the room alive with the light of the fires of the fleet.

  He wondered for a second if the enemy would target a fleet support ship such as the Taicang. As if in answer to his question the deck rose slowly and became vertical. Fang could see out of what used to be a tiled floor at the bow of the ship, which was enveloped in flames, the fireball blasting into the bridge from the ragged gash in the deck. The force of it ripped Fang’s body in half, his consciousness freakishly continuing in hellish slow motion as the bridge fell back into the flames of

  the explosion. As the fire surrounded him, Fang finally, gratefully, passed into the calm blackness, and his war ended.

  Around the horizon, the fires of the explosions calmed, and the seascape gradually returned to normal, the few oil fires left extinguishing in the gentle waves of the East China Sea. Thousands of scorched bodies littered the sea, joined by empty life preservers, capsized lifeboats, mattresses, and assorted flotsam, some of the bodies blackened by the oil slick that covered a mile diameter around the site of the former fleet.