by Tom Clancy
The helicopter just got off, its strobe lights looping away from the now-stationary destroyer. The moment seemed fixed in time when the ship started turning again, or seemed to, then a violent green flash appeared in the water on both sides of the ship, just forward of the bridge under the vertical launch magazine for her surface-to-air missiles. The knife-like shape of the hull was backlit in an eerie, lethal way. The image fixed in Sato’s mind for the quarter second it lasted, and then one or more of the destroyer’s SAMs exploded, followed by forty others, and Mutsu’s forward half disintegrated. Three seconds later, another explosion took place, and when the white water returned back to the surface, there was little more to be seen than a patch of burning oil. Just like her namesake in Nagasaki harbor in 1943 ...
“Captain!” The copilot had to wrench the control-wheel level away from the Captain before the Boeing went into a stall. “Captain, we have passengers aboard!”
“That was my brother ...”
“We have passengers aboard, damn you!” Without resistance now, he brought the 747 back to level flight, looking at his gyrocompass for the proper heading. “Captain!”
Sato turned his head back into the cockpit, losing sight of his brother’s grave as the airliner changed its heading back to the south.
“I am sorry, Captain Sato, but we also have a job we must do.” He engaged the autopilot before reaching out to the man. “Are you all right now?”
Sato looked forward into the empty sky. Then he nodded and composed himself. “Yes, I am quite all right. Thank you. Yes. I am quite all right now,” he repeated more firmly, required by the rules of his culture to set his personal emotions aside for now. Their father had survived his destroyer command, had moved on to captain a cruiser on which he had died off Samar, the victim of American destroyers and their torpedoes ... and now again ...
“What the hell was that?” Commander Ugaki demanded of his sonar officers.
“Torpedoes, two of them, from the south,” the junior lieutenant replied. “They’ve killed Mutsu.”
“What from?” was the next angry shout.
“Something undetected, Captain,” was the weak reply.
“Come south, turns for eight knots.”
“That will take us right through the disturbance from—”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Definite kill,” sonar told him. The signature on the sonar screen was definite. “No engine sounds from target bearing, but breakup noises, and this here was one big secondary explosion. We got him, sir.”
Richter crossed over the same town the C-17 had overflown a few days earlier, and though somebody might have heard him, that was less of a concern now. Besides, at night a chopper was a chopper, and there were plenty of them here. He settled his Comanche to a cruising altitude of fifty feet and headed due south, telling himself that, sure, the Navy would be there, and sure, he could land on a ship, and sure, everything was going to go just fine. He was grateful for the tailwind until he saw the waves it was whipping up. Oh, shit ...
“Mr. Ambassador, the situation has changed, as you know,” Adler said gently. The room had never heard the sound of more than one voice, but somehow it seemed far quieter now.
Seiji Nagumo, sitting next to his senior, noted that the chair next to Adler was occupied by someone else, another Japanese specialist from the fourth floor. Where was Chris Cook‘? he asked himself as the American negotiator went on. Why was he not here—and what did it mean?
“As we speak, American aircraft are attacking the Marianas. As we speak, American fleet units are engaging your fleet units. I must tell you that we have every reason to believe that our operations will be successful and that we will be able to isolate the Marianas from the rest of the world. The next part of the operation, if it becomes necessary, will be to declare a maritime exclusion zone around your Home Islands. We have no wish to attack your country directly, but it is within our capabilities to cut off your maritime trade in a matter of days.
“Mr. Ambassador, it is time to put an end to this ...”
“As you see,” the CNN reporter said from her perch next to USS Enterprise. Then the camera panned to her right, showing an empty box. “USS John Stennis has left her dry dock. We are informed that the carrier is even now launching a strike against the Japanese-held Marianas. We were asked to cooperate with government deception operations, and after careful consideration, it was decided that CNN is, after all, an American news service ...”
“Bastards!” General Arima breathed, looking at the empty concrete structure, occupied only by puddles and wooden blocks now. Then his phone rang.
When it was certain that the Japanese E-2Cs had them, two Air Force AWACS aircraft flipped their radars on, having staged in from Hawaii, via Dyess on Kwajalein Atoll. In electronic terms it would be an even fight, but the Americans had more aircraft up to make sure it was fair in no other way. Four Japanese Eagles were aloft, and their first instinctive action was to turn northeast toward the intruders, the better to give their comrades standing ground alert time to get aloft and join the air battle before the incoming attack got close enough to catch their comrades on the ground. Simultaneously the ground defenses were warned to expect inbound hostile aircraft.
Sanchez lit off his own targeting radar as he saw the Japanese fighters just over a hundred miles away, heading in to launch their missiles. But they were armed with AMRAAMs, and he was armed with Phoenix, which had about double the range. He and three other aircraft launched two each for a max-range engagement. The eight missiles went into ballistic arcs, heading up to a hundred thousand feet before tipping over at Mach-5 and heading back down, their height giving them the largest possible radar cross section to home on. The Eagles detected the attack and tried to maneuver clear, but seconds later two of the F-15Js were blotted from the sky. The remaining pair kept driving in. The second wave of Phoenixes took care of that.
“What the hell?” Oreza wondered.
The sound of many jet engines starting up interrupted the card game, and all four men in the room went to the windows. Clark remembered to turn all the lights out, and stole the only set of binoculars in the house. The first pair of aircraft blazed off Kobler Field just as he brought them to his eyes. They were single-engine aircraft judging by their afterburner flames.
“What’s happening, John?”
“Nobody told me, really, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.”
Lights were on all over the field. What mattered was getting the fighters off as rapidly as possible. The same thing would be happening on Guam, probably, but Guam was a good ways off, and the two fighter groups would be engaging the Americans separately, negating the Japanese numerical advantage.
“What are those?”
Commander Peach and her jammers were also at work now. The search radar was powerful, but like all of its type it also transmitted low-frequency waves, and those were easily jammed. The massive collection of false dots both confused their understanding of the developing air action and knocked back their ability to detect the small but unstealthy cruise missiles. Fighters that might have tried to engage them had in fact overrun the inbound targets, giving them a free advance to the island’s targets. The search radar atop Mount Takpochao picked them up barely thirty miles out instead of the hoped-for hundred, and was also trying to get a count on the inbound fighters. That gave the three operators on the set a complex task, but they were trained men, and they bent to the demands of the moment, one of their number sounding the alarm to get the island’s Patriot missile batteries alerted.
The first part of the operation was going well. The standing Combat Air Patrol had been eliminated without loss, Sanchez saw, wondering if it had been one of his missiles that scored. No one would ever know about that. The next task was to take out the Japanese radar aircraft before the rest of their fighters arrived. To accomplish that, a division of four Tomcats went to burner and rocketed straight for them, rippling off all their missiles for the task.
They were just too brave for their own good, Sanchez saw. The Japanese Hawkeyes should have pulled back, and the defending Eagles should have done the same, but true to the fighter pilot’s ethos they’d come out to engage the first wave of raiders instead of waiting. Probably because they thought this was a genuine raid instead of a mere fighter-sweep. The flanking division of four, called Blinder Flight, fulfilled its limited mission of killing the airborne-radar birds, then turned back to John Stennis to refuel and rearm. Now the only airborne radar was American. The Japanese came on, trying to blunt the attack that really did not exist, seeking to engage targets whose only goal had been the attention of the outbound interceptors.
It was obvious to the radar operators that the majority of the missiles were headed for them instead of the airfield. They didn’t trade remarks about that. There wasn’t time. They watched as the E-2s fell from the sky, too far away for them to guess exactly why, but the remaining AEW aircraft was still on the runway at Kobler as the fighters were racing to get off, and the first of them were approaching the distant American aircraft, which were, surprisingly, not headed in as expected. Guam was on the radio now, requesting information at the same time it announced that its fighters were scrambling off the ground to deal with the attack.
“Two minutes on the cruise missiles,” one of the operators said over the interphones.
“Tell Kobler to get its E-2 up immediately,” the senior officer in the control van said when he saw that the two already up were gone. Their van was a hundred yards from the radar transmitter, but it hadn’t been dug in yet. It had been planned for the coming week.
“Wow!” Chavez observed. They were outside now. Some clever soul had killed the electrical power for their part of the island, which allowed them to step out of the house for a better view of the light show. Half a mile to their east, the first Patriot blew out of its box-launcher. The missile streaked only a few hundred meters up before its thrust-vector controls turned it as sharply as a billiard ball off a rail, aiming it down below the visible horizon. Three more followed a few seconds later.
“Cruise missiles coming in.” This remark came from Burroughs. “Over to the north, looks like.”
“Going for the radar on that hilltop, I bet,” Clark thought. There followed a series of flashes that outlined the high ground to their east. The thunder of the explosions they represented took a few seconds more. Additional Patriots went off, and the civilians watched as the battery crew erected another box-launcher on its truck-transporter. They could also see that the process was taking too long.
The first wave of twenty Tomahawks was climbing now. They’d streaked in a bare three meters over the wave tops toward the sheer cliffs of Saipan’s eastern coast. Automated weapons, they did not have the ability to avoid or even to detect fire directed at them, and the first ripple of Patriot SAMs did well, with twelve shots generating ten kills, but the remaining ten were climbing now, all targeted on the same spot. Four more of the cruise missiles fell to SAMs, and a fifth lost power and slammed into the cliff face at Laolao Kattan. The SAM radars lost them at that point, and the battery commanders called a warning to the radar people, but it was far too late to be helpful, and, one by one, five thousand-pound warheads exploded over the top of Mount Takpochao.
“That takes care of that,” Clark said when the soundpassed. Then he paused to listen. Others were out in the open now, standing around the cul-de-sac neighborhood. Individual hoots joined into a chorus of cheers that drowned out the shouts of the missile crew on the hilltop to the east.
Fighters were still rocketing off Kobler Field below them, generally taking off in pairs, with some singles. The blue flames of their afterburners turned in the sky before blinking off, as the Japanese fighters turned to form up and meet the inbound raid. Last of all, Clark and the others heard the electric-fan sound of the last remaining Hawkeye, heading off last of all despite the advice of the now-dead radar crew.
The island grew silent for a few moments, a strange emptiness to the air as people caught their breath and waited for the second act of the midnight drama.
Only fifty miles offshore, USS Pasadena and three other SSNs came to antenna depth and launched six missiles each. Some of them were aimed at Saipan. Four went to Tinian. Two to Rota. The rest skimmed the wave tops for Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.
“Up scope!” Claggett ordered. The search periscope hissed up on hydraulic power. “Hold!” he called as the top of the instrument cleared the water. He turned slowly, looking for lights in the sky. None.
“Okay, the antenna next.” Another hiss announced the raising of the UHF whip antenna. The Captain kept his eyes on the scope, still looking around. His right hand waved. There were some fuzzy radar signals from distant transmitters, but nothing able to detect the submarine.
“INDY CARS, this is PIT CREW, over,” the communications officer said into a microphone.
“Thank God,” Richter said aloud, keying his microphone. “PIT CREW, this is INDY LEAD, authenticate, over.”
“Foxtrot Whiskey.”
“Charlie Tango,” Richter replied, checking the radio codes on his knee pad. “We are five out, and we sure could use a drink, over.”
“Stand by,” he heard back.
“Surface the ship,” Claggett ordered, lifting the 1-MC. “Now hear this, we’re surfacing the ship, maintain battle stations. Army crews, stand by.”
The proper gear was sitting next to the midships escape trunk and the larger capsule hatch designed to handle the guidance packages for ballistic missiles. One of Tennessee’s damage-control parties stood by to pass the gear, and a chief would work the fueling-hose connector hidden in the casing over the missile room.
“What’s that?” INDY-Two asked over the radio circuit. “Lead, this is Three, chopper to the north. Say again, chopper to the north, big one.”
“Take him out!” Richter ordered at once. There could be no friendly choppers about. He turned and increased altitude for a look of his own. The guy even had his strobes on. “PIT CREW, this is INDY LEAD, there’s chopper traffic up here to the north. What gives, over?”
Claggett didn’t hear that. Tennessee’s sail had just broken the surface, and he was standing by the ladder to the top of the sail. Shaw took the microphone.
“That’s probably an ASW helo from the destroyer we just sunk—splash him, splash him now!”
“Aerial radar to the north!” an ESM tech called a second later. “Helicopter radar close aboard!”
“Two, take him out now!” Richter relayed the order.
“On the way, Lead,” the second Comanche responded, turning and dipping his nose to increase speed. Whoever it was, that was just too bad. The pilot selected guns. Under his aircraft the 20-millimeter cannon emerged from its canoe-like enclosure and turned forward. The target was five miles out and didn’t see the inbound attack chopper.
It was another Sikorsky, Two’s pilot saw, possibly assembled in the same Connecticut plant as his Comanch’, the Navy version of the UH-60, a big target. His chopper blazed directly at it, hoping to get his kill before it could get a radio call out. Not much chance of that, and the pilot cursed himself for not engaging with a Stinger, but it was too late for that now. His helmet pipper locked on to the target and he triggered off fifty rounds, most of which found the nose of the approaching gray helicopter. The results were instant.
“Kill,” he announced. “I got him, Lead.”
“Roger, what’s your fuel state?”
“Thirty minutes,” Two replied.
“Circle and keep your eyes open,” Lead commanded.
“Roger, Leader.” As soon as he got to three hundred feet came another unwelcome surprise. “Lead, Two, radar to the north, system says it’s a Navy billboard one.”
“Great,” Richter snarled, circling the submarine. It was large enough to land on, but it would have been easier if the goddamned thing wasn’t rolling around like the beer barrel at an Irish wake. Richter brought
his chopper into hover, approaching from straight aft, and lowered his wheels for landing.
“Come left into the wind,” Claggett told Lieutenant Shaw. “We have to cut the rolls down for ’em.”
“Gotcha, Skipper.” Shaw made the necessary orders, and Tennessee steadied up on a northwesterly heading.
“Stand by the escape and capsule hatches!” the CO ordered next. As he watched, the helo came down slowly, carefully, and as usual, landing a helicopter aboard a ship reminded him of two porcupines making love. It wasn’t lack of willingness; it was just that you couldn’t afford any mistakes.
They were lined up like an army of mounted knights now, Sanchez thought, with the Japanese two hundred miles off Saipan’s northeast tip, and the Americans a hundred miles beyond. This game had been played out many times by both sides, and often enough in the same war game centers. Both sides had their tracking radars on and searching. Both sides could now see and count the strength of the other. It was just a question of who would make the first move. The Japanese were at the disadvantage and knew it. Their remaining E-2C was not yet in position, and worse than that, they could not be entirely sure who the opposition was. On Sanchez’s command, the Tomcats moved off first, going to afterburner and climbing high to volley off their remaining Phoenix missiles. They fired at a range of fifty miles, and over a hundred of the sophisticated weapons turned into a wave of yellow flames climbing higher still before tipping over while their launch aircraft turned and retreated.
