The bell went off again, and the ELF message printed up as EQT SPEC OP, or “execute special operation” in proper English. Tucson was now nine thousand yards behind Sierra-Eleven, and fifteen from Sierra-Twelve.
“We’re going to do one fish each. Firing order Two, One. Do we have a solution light?” the captain asked.
“Valid solutions for both fish,” the weapons officer replied.
“Ready Tube Two.”
“Tube Two is ready in all respects, tube flooded, outer door is open, sir.”
“Very well. Match generated bearings and ... shoot!”
The handle was turned on the proper console. “Tube Two fired electrically, sir.” Tucson shuddered through her length with the sudden explosion of compressed air that ejected the weapon into the seawater.
“Unit is running hot, straight, and normal, sir,” Sonar reported.
“Very well, ready Tube One,” the captain said next.
“Tube One is ready in all respects, tube is flooded, outer door is open,” Weps announced again.
“Very well. Match generated bearings and shoot!” This command came as something of an exclamation. The captain figured he owed it to the crew, which was at battle stations, of course.
“Tube One fired electrically, sir,” the petty officer announced after turning the handle again, with exactly the same physical effect on the ship.
“Unit Two running hot, straight, and normal, sir,” Sonar said again. And with that, the captain took the five steps to the Sonar Room.
“Here we go, Cap’n,” the leading sonarman said, pointing to the glass screen with a yellow grease pencil.
The nine thousand yards’ distance to 406 translated to four and a half nautical miles. The target was traveling at a depth of less than a hundred feet, maybe transmitting to its base on the radio or something, and steaming along at a bare five knots, judging by the blade count. That worked out to a running time of just under five minutes for the first target, and then another hundred sixty seconds or so to the second one. The second shot would probably get a little more complicated than the first. Even if they failed to hear the Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo coming, a deaf man could not miss the sound of 800 pounds of Torpex going off underwater three miles away, and he’d try to maneuver, or do something more than break out the worry beads and say a few Hail Maos, or whatever prayer these people said. The captain leaned back into the attack center.
“Reload ADCAP into Tube Two, and a Harpoon into Tube One.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” the Weapons Officer acknowledged.
“Where’s that frigate?” he asked the lead sonarman.
“Here, sir, Luda-class, an old clunker, steam-powered, bearing two-one-six, tooling along at about fourteen knots, by blade count.”
“Time on Unit Two,” the skipper called.
“Minute twenty seconds to impact, sir.” The captain looked at the display. If Sierra-Eleven had sonarmen on duty, they weren’t paying much attention to the world around them. That would change shortly.
“Okay, go active in thirty seconds.”
“Aye, aye.”
On the sonar display, the torpedo was dead on the tone line from 406. It seemed a shame to kill a submarine when you didn’t even know its name ...
“Going active on Unit Two,” Weps called.
“There it is, sir,” the sonarman said, pointing to a different part of the screen. The ultrasonic sonar lit up a new line, and fifteen seconds later—
—“Sierra-Eleven just kicked the gas, sir, look here, cavitation and blade count is going up, starting a turn to starboard ... ain’t gonna matter, sir,” the sonarman knew from the display. You couldn’t outmaneuver a -48.
“What about—Twelve?”
“He’s heard it, too, Cap’n. Increasing speed and—” The sonarman flipped his headphones off. “Yeow! That hurt.” He shook his head hard. “Unit impact on Sierra-Eleven, sir.”
The captain picked up a spare set of headphones and plugged them in. The sea was still rumbling. The target’s engine sounds had stopped almost at once—the visual display confirmed that, though the sixty-hertz line showed her generators were still—no, they stopped, too. He heard and saw the sound of blowing air. Whoever he was, he was trying to blow ballast and head for the roof, but without engine power ... no, not much of a chance of that, was there? Then he shifted his eyes to the visual track of Sierra-Twelve. The fast-attack had been a little more awake, and was turning radically to port, and really kicking on the power. His plant noise was way up, as was his blade count ... and he was blowing ballast tanks, too ... why?
“Time on Unit One?” the captain called.
“Thirty seconds for original plot, probably a little longer now.”
Not much longer, the skipper thought. The ADCAP was motoring along on the sunny side of sixty knots this close to the surface ... Weps went active on it, and the fish was immediately in acquisition. A well-trained crew would have fired off a torpedo of their own, just to scare their attacker off, and maybe escape if the first fish missed—not much of a play, but it cost you nothing to do it, and maybe got you the satisfaction of having company arrive in hell right after you knocked on the door ... but they didn’t even get a decoy off. They must have all been asleep ... certainly not very awake ... not very alert ... didn’t they know there was a war going on ... ? Twenty-five seconds later, they found out the hard way, when another splotch appeared on the sonar display.
Well, he thought, two for two. That was pretty easy. He stepped back into the attack center and lifted a microphone. “Now hear this. This is the captain speaking. We just launched two fish on a pair of ChiComm submarines. We won’t be seeing either one of them anymore. Well done to everybody. That is all.” Then he looked over at his communications officer: “Prepare a dispatch to CINCLANT. ‘Four Zero Six destroyed at ... Twenty-Two-Fifty-Six Zulu along with escorting SSN. Now engaging Frigate.’ Send that off when we get to antenna depth.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tracking party, we have a frigate bearing two-one-six. Let’s get a track on him so we can Harpoon his ass.”
“Aye, sir,” said the lieutenant manning the tracking plot.
It was approaching six in the evening in Washington, where everybody who was somebody was watching TV, but not the commercial kind. The Dark Star feeds were going up on encrypted satellite links, and being distributed around Washington over dedicated military fiber-optic lines. One of those, of course, led to the White House Situation Room.
“Holy God,” Ryan said. “It’s like some kind of fucking video game. How long have we had this capability?”
“It’s pretty new, Jack, and yeah,” the Vice President agreed, “it is kind of obscene—but, well, it’s just what the operators see. I mean, the times I splashed airplanes, I got to see it, just I was in a G-suit with a Tomcat strapped to my back. Somehow this feels dirtier, man. Like watching a guy and a gal go at it, and not in training films—”
“What?”
“That’s what you call porno flicks on the boats, Jack, ‘training films.’ But this is like peeking in a window on a guy’s wedding night, and he doesn’t know about it ... feels kinda dirty.”
“The people will like it,” Arnie van Damm predicted. “The average guy out there, especially kids, to them it’ll be like a movie.”
“Maybe so, Arnie, but it’s a snuff film. Real lives being snuffed out, and in large numbers. That division CP Diggs got with his MLRS rockets—I mean, Jesus Christ. It was like an act of an angry pagan god, like the meteor that got the dinosaurs, like a murderer wasting a kid in a schoolyard,” Robby said, searching for just how dirty it felt to him. But it was business, not personal, for what little consolation that might be to the families of the departed.
Getting some radio traffic,” Tolkunov told General Bondarenko. The intelligence officer had half a dozen electronic-intelligence groups out, listening in on the frequencies used by the PLA. They usually spoke in coded phrases which were difficult to figure
out, especially since the words changed on a day-to-day basis, along with identifying names for the units and personalities involved.
But the security measures tended to fall by the wayside when an emergency happened, and senior officers wanted hard information in a hurry. In this case, Bondarenko had watched the take from Grace Kelly and felt little pity for the victims, wishing only that he’d been the one inflicting the casualties, because it was his country the Chinks had invaded.
“The American artillery doctrine is impressive, isn’t it?” Colonel Tolkunov observed.
“They’ve always had good artillery. But so do we, as this Peng fellow will discover in a few hours,” CINC-FAR EAST replied. “What do you think he’ll do?”
“It depends on what he finds out,” the G-2 replied. “The information that gets to him will probably be fairly confusing, and it will concern him, but less than his own mission.”
And that made sense, Gennady Iosifovich had to agree. Generals tended to think in terms of the missions assigned to them, leaving the missions of others to those others, trusting them to do the jobs assigned to them. It was the only way an army could function, really. Otherwise you’d be so worried about what was happening around you that you’d never get your own work done, and the entire thing would quickly grind to a halt. It was called tunnel vision when it didn’t work, and good teamwork when it did.
“What about the American deep strikes?”
“Those Stealth aircraft are amazing. The Chinese rail system is completely disrupted. Our guests will soon be running short of fuel.”
“Pity,” Bondarenko observed. The Americans were efficient warriors, and their doctrine of deep-strike, which the Russian military had scarcely considered, could be damned effective if you brought it off, and if your enemy couldn’t adapt to it. Whether the Chinese could adapt was something they’d have to see about. “But they still have sixteen mechanized divisions for us to deal with.”
“That is so, Comrade General,” Tolkunov agreed.
FALCON THREE to FALCON LEADER, I see me a SAM track. It’s a Holiday,” the pilot reported. ”Hilltop two miles west of the CLOVERLEAF—wait, there’s a Duck there, too.”
“Anything else?” FALCON LEAD asked. This captain commanded the Apaches tasked to SAM suppression.
“Some light flak, mainly two-five mike-mike set up around the SAMs. Request permission to fire, over.”
“Stand by,” FALCON LEAD replied. “EAGLE LEAD, this is FALCON LEAD, over.”
“EAGLE LEAD copies, FALCON,” Boyle replied from his Blackhawk.
“We have SAM tracks in view. Permission to engage, over.”
Boyle thought fast. His Apaches now had the tank laager in sight and surrounded on three sides. Okay, Falcon was approaching the hill overlooking the laager, code-named CLOVERLEAF. Well, it was about time.
“Permission granted. Engage the SAMs. Out.”
“Roger, engaging. FALCON THREE, this is LEAD. Take ’ em out.”
“Take your shot, Billy,” the pilot told his gunner.
“Hellfire, now!” The gunner in the front seat triggered off his first missile. The seven-inch-wide missile leaped off its launch-rail with a flare of yellow light, and immediately tracked on the laser dot. Through his thermal viewer, he saw a dismounted crewman looking that way, and he immediately pointed toward the helicopter. He was yelling to get someone’s attention, and the race was between the inbound missile and human reaction time. The missile had to win. He got the attention of someone, maybe his sergeant or lieutenant, who then looked in the direction he was pointing. You could tell by the way he cocked his head that he didn’t see anything at first, while the first one was jerking his arm like a fishing pole, and the second one saw it, but by that time there was nothing for him to do but throw himself to the ground, and even that was a waste of energy. The Hellfire hit the base of the launcher assembly and exploded, killing everything within a ten-meter circle.
“Tough luck, Joe.” Then the gunner switched over to the other one, the Holiday launcher. This crew had been alerted by the sound, and he could see them scurrying to light up their weapon. They’d just about gotten to their places when the Duck launcher blew up.
Next came the flak. There were six gun mounts, equally divided between 25- and 35-mm twin gun sets, and those could be nasty. The Apache closed in. The gunner selected his own 20-mm cannon and walked it across every site. The impacts looked like flashbulbs, and the guns were knocked over, some with exploding ammo boxes.
“EAGLE LEAD, FALCON THREE, this hilltop is cleaned off. We’re circling to make sure. No coverage over the CLOVERLEAF now. It’s wide open.”
“Roger that.” And Boyle ordered his Apaches in.
It was about as fair as putting a professional boxer into the ring against a six-year-old. The Apaches circled the laagered tanks just like Indians in the movies around a circled wagon train, except in this one, the settlers couldn’t fire back. The Chinese tank crewmen were mainly sleeping outside, next to their mounts. Some crews were in their vehicles, standing guard after a fashion, and some dismounted crewmen were walking around on guard, holding Type 68 rifles. They’d been alerted somewhat by the explosions on the hilltop overlooking the laager. Some of the junior officers were shouting to get their men up and into their tanks, not knowing the threat, but thinking naturally enough that the safe place to be was behind armor, from which place they could shoot back to defend themselves. They could scarcely have been more wrong.
The Apaches danced around the laager, sideslipping as the gunners triggered off their missiles. Three of the PLA tanks used their thermal viewers and actually saw helicopters and shot at them, but the range of the tank guns was only half that of the Hellfires, and all of the rounds fell well short, as did the six handheld HN-5 SAMs that were fired into the night. The Hellfires, however, did not, and in every case—only two of them missed—the huge warheads had the same effect on the steel tanks that a cherry bomb might have on a plastic model. Turrets flew into the air atop pillars of flame, then crashed back down, usually upside-down on the vehicles to which they’d been attached. There’d been eighty-six tanks here, and that amounted to three missiles per helicopter, with a few lucky gunners getting a fourth shot. All in all, the destruction of this brigade took less than three minutes, leaving the colonel who’d been in command to stand at his command post with openmouthed horror at the loss of the three hundred soldiers he’d been training for over a year for this very moment. He even survived a strafing of his command section by a departing Apache, seeing the helicopter streak overhead so quickly that he didn’t even have time to draw his service pistol.
“EAGLE LEAD, FALCON LEAD. The CLOVERLEAF is toast, and we are RTB, over.”
Boyle could do little more than shake his head. “Roger, FALCON. Well done, Captain.”
“Roger, thank you, sir. Out.” The Apaches formed up and headed northwest to their base to refuel and rearm for the next mission. Below, he could see the First Brigade, blown through the gap in Chinese lines, heading southeast into the Chinese logistics area.
Task Force 77 had been holding station east of the Formosa Strait until receiving orders to race west. The various Air Bosses had word that one of their submarines had eliminated a Chinese boomer and fast-attack submarine, which was fine with them, and probably just peachy for the task force commander. Now it was their job to go after the People’s Liberation Army Navy, which, they all agreed, was a hell of a name for a maritime armed force. The first aircraft to go off, behind the F-14Ds flying barrier combat air patrol, or BARCAP, for the Task Force, were the E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft, the Navy’s two-engine prop-driven mini-AWACS. These were tasked to finding targets for the shooters, mainly F/A-18 Hornets.
This was to be a complex operation. The Task Force had three SSNs assigned to “sanitize” the area of ChiComm submarines. The Task Force commander seemed especially concerned with the possibility of a Chinese diesel-powered SSK punching a hole in one of his ships, but that was no
t an immediate concern for the airmen, unless they could find one tied alongside the pier.
The only real problem was target identification. There was ample commercial shipping in the area, and they had orders to leave that entirely alone, even ships flying the PRC flag. Anything with a SAM radar would be engaged beyond visual range. Otherwise, a pilot had to have eyeballs on the target before loosing a weapon. Of weapons they had plenty, and ships were fragile targets as far as missiles and thousand-pound bombs were concerned. The overall target was the PLAN South Sea Fleet, based at Guangszhou (better known to Westerners as Canton). The naval base there was well-sited for attack, though it was defended by surface-to-air missile batteries and some flak.
The F-14s on the lead were guided to aerial targets by the Hawkeyes. Again since there was commercial air traffic in the sky, the fighter pilots had to close to visual range for a positive ID of their targets. This could be dangerous, but there was no avoiding it.
What the Navy pilots didn’t know was that the Chinese knew the electronic signature of the APD-138 radar on the E-2Cs, and therefore they also knew that something was coming. Fully a hundred Chinese fighters scrambled into the air and set up their own combat air patrol over their East Coast. The Hawkeyes spotted that and radioed a warning to the advancing fighters, setting the stage for a massive air engagement in the predawn darkness.