Sea Strike

by James H. Cobb

  Arkady slammed down his night-vision visor, changing his world from night black and starlight silver to multitones of softly luminescent green. The instrument readouts and navigational displays that had glowed within the HUD now were being projected directly onto the retinas of his eyes, showing the path that he must follow. Tilting his aircraft's rotors forward, he gained way down the invisible corridor that led into the mouth of the Yangtze.

  SEA STRIKE 271

  It was critical that the Retainers keep precisely to their preplanned flight path. Very shortly, the airspace around them was going to become occupied by some very uncaring and dangerous neighbors. The Cunningham's missile salvo had been only the first shots of the engagement. Even as the Sea Comanches crossed the Shanghai defense perimeter, a second wave of cruise missiles, sixty-plus strong, crested the horizon, howling down upon the city.

  It was the twenty-first-century variant of the classic time-on target barrage: multiple weapons firing to simultaneously strike at the same objective. The missile flight paths radiated outward from their launching point in a fanlike pattern to engulf the Shanghai area, the lead Tomahawk flights bypassing the city, then hooking around to converge on the target area from all angles.

  Each round had been meticulously programmed to impact at a specific one-meter-wide point at a specific instant in time. Each strike was carefully calculated to maximize the damage and shock effect to the city's defense infrastructure.

  The antiaircraft guns defending the deepwater hiding hole of the Xia boomer died at precise twenty-five-second intervals.

  The spacing had been selected to ensure that the trailing rounds would not fratricide amid the debris clouds cast up by the initial hits.

  Each big 100-millimeter mount was first smashed down into its gunpit by the overpressure wave of a half-ton warhead detonating ten feet above it. Then it was vomited back into the sky by the fiery explosion of its own ready-use ammunition magazine.

  Downtown, the night-duty operators in the Shanghai civil telephone exchange screamed as a cigar-shaped eighteen-foot projectile crashed through a third-floor window with a dying whine of its turbofan engine.

  Shedding its wings, the Tomahawk crashed through three switching banks before piling up against the rear wall of the building. The shockproof solid-state timers within the T-LAMs detonator pack patiently ticked off three minutes before firing, giving time

  272 James H. Cobb enough for the exchange to be evacuated. When they had, the aged brick structure burst like a pricked balloon.

  At the PLAAF air-defense installation west of the city, the ready-alert flight of F-7M Airguard fighters stood poised at the end of the base runway, engines idling. They had been scrambled at the beginning of the attack and now awaited final clearance to launch. It wouldn't be coming.

  First, there had been a flicker of reflected moonlight over the air-defense control bunker, then the bunker had belched flame from its air vents and doors. A moment later, the control tower had been hit, folding into a spreading pool of fire.

  With his air base going to hell around him, the lead pilot went to war power, kicking on his afterburner. Better to try for the sky than to die on the ground. With his flight mates following, he roared down the conflagration-lit tarmac.

  Passing through one hundred knots and approaching rotation speed, the Red pilot glanced up. Something was coming in the opposite direction down the runway.

  A cruise missile was streaking along the centerline, fifty feet above the deck. Firecracker flashes danced around its nose as bomblets were kicked out of its submunitions dispenser.

  A wave of minor explosions raced along behind it as the ' ' breaker"

  charges shattered the tarmac.

  Frantically, the Red pilot yanked back on the joystick, but his aircraft was still a critical ten miles per hour below flight speed. A landing-gear tire hooked into a smoking crater and the fighter cartwheeled and exploded. One after another, caught in the same trap of speed, time, and distance, the three other Airguards plowed into the holocaust, drawing a curtain of flame and debris down the full length of the runway.

  Well executed though it might have been, the cruise-missile attack did not go through perfectly. One Tomahawk went cybernetically psychotic, screaming away into the west on a beeline for Mongolia. Another, clipped by a 25millimeter antiaircraft round, staggered off course to vaporize a tragically overcrowded apartment block. A third, tasked with taking out a torpedo-boat moorage on the Huangpu River, suffered a gyro table failure, burying itself in a Yangtze mud bank.

  SEA STRIKE 273

  The forward machine guns of the Five Sixteen boat hosed a wild burst into the sky.

  "Cease-fire there!" Lieutenant Zhou Shan yelled over the bridge spray shield. "Save your ammunition!"

  The inexperienced bow gunner looked back from his mount, his fearful expression momentarily illuminated by a bomb flash. Shan could not fault him. There was any amount of fear abroad this night. The urge to do something to keep it at bay could become overwhelming.

  Shanghai seemed ablaze from a thousand sources. The city antiaircraft batteries, blinded and cut off from central command though they might have been, still raged, spewing streams of pink and green tracers into the sky. Half a dozen major fires could be seen from the boat moorage, and every few seconds the thickening smoke over the city glowed from the flare of a new missile detonation.

  "Is there word from Fleet Command yet?" Zhou demanded of his radio operator, half shouting over the rumble of the gunfire.

  "No, Comrade Lieutenant," the radioman replied. "Fleet Command has gone off the air. The shore line is dead as well."

  Zhou turned to face Bosun Hoong, who was leaning stolidly back against the snub mast at the rear of the cockpit.

  "What do you think, Bosun?"

  Hoong removed a well-smoked cigarette butt from between his lips and flipped it over the rail. "I think we have the Yankees angry with us.

  The Nationalists couldn't do all of this."

  "I think you are right, Hoong."

  Something new echoed from the sky, a deeper rumble that climbed the scale rapidly into a crackling roar as it passed invisibly across the zenith: jet engines, far more powerful than those of the cruise missiles. Equally more powerful were the two massive explosions just upriver within the Hudong shipyards. Flaming wreckage spun through the air, and all hands on the deck of the torpedo boat cowered down as the shock wave cracked over them.

  "Do you wish to send a runner to Fleet Command, Lieutenant?"

  Hoong inquired, unfazed.

  274 James H. Cobb Shan hesitated only a moment more before angrily shaking his head. "Fleet Command be damned! We're getting out of here now. Start engines and prepare to cast off all lines. Signal the rest of the squadron to follow us. We'll take our chances out in the river."

  "At once, Lieutenant," Hoong replied, sounding faintly pleased.

  More bombs racked the shipyard area; the Huangpu River was lit blood-red by the growing fires as the Five Sixteen boat backed into the channel.

  As Hoong had said, it had to be the Americans, and somehow, in a way that he couldn't explain, Zhou Shan also knew that it had to be the ghost ship as well.

  It had returned and it was waiting for him out there in the burning night. They had affairs to conclude.

  RETAINER ZERO ONE YANGTZE ESTUARY

  0140 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 28, 2006

  The pair of Sea Comanches flew below a cathedral ceiling of scintillating fire. The shells from the flak emplacements on the northern and southern banks of the great river were converging high overhead.

  It was easy to read the caliber of the guns by their tracer patterns.

  The wavering spark streamers were issuing from the light, ultra-rapid-fire ZSU-23s. The deliberate beads-on-a string issued from the older 37-millimeter single mounts, while the more intermittent twinned rounds came from the more potent 57-millimeter doubles.

  The really heavy guns, the 85- and 100-millimeter semi autos,
threw no tracers at all. There was just the ground flare of the battery firing, mated to the flash of the shells detonating 25,000 feet above the Earth.

  Three times, Arkady also saw the inverted meteor trail of a Guideline SAM climbing into the sky.

  Fortunately, none of this lethal ironmongery appeared to be coming in the direction of the Retainers. Amanda's strat SEA STRIKE 275

  egy was working. No one was noticing the two rotor-winged mice creeping in under the edge of the holocaust.

  "Approaching second datum point by GPU fix, Lieutenant.

  "

  "Thanks, Gus. I see it. Coming left to two nine zero on the hack."

  "We're in the groove. Zero Two is following."

  Arkady was careful not to nod a reply. He was "seeing"

  through the eyes of the Sea Comanche's Forward Looking Infra-Red Scanner. Each movement of his helmeted head was being translated into the swiveling of the camera turret beneath the helicopter's chin.

  Through those electronically enhanced eyes, the world was delineated in shades of heat. The darker shapes were cooler; the lighter, warmer. Open flame was revealed as a scintillating white.

  There were several patches of that blatant white visible within the sweep of the FLIR, but Arkady watched for two that should be burning out over the river.

  "Got ', Gus. Got the quays in sight. Looks like the cruisers messed ' up pretty good."

  "I ain't gonna cry over it, sir. We are now entering the search area. We are now free-fly."

  "Rug." Click. "Retainer Zero Two, this is Zero One. We are on station.

  Initiate MAD search."

  "Roger, Zero One. Initiating now."

  The trailing Sea Comanche swung out of line angling out toward the center of the river and slowing to search speed.

  Arkady flared back as well, holding his altitude at fifty feet.

  "Extend the stinger, Gus. Hunt's on."

  "Doing it, sir. MAD is active."

  Any massive body of ferrous metal, be it a deposit of iron ore, the body of an automobile, or the hull of a ship, will create a disturbance in the Earth's electromagnetic field. At close range, it can make the needle of a compass divert away from magnetic north. At greater distances, the effect can be registered on a sensitive device called a Magnetic Abnormality Detector. In the shallow waters of the littoral battlefield MAD systems became the sub hunter's best friend.

  The counterpoint was that a MAD search mandated that one fly low, straight, and slow for an extended period of time.

  276 James H, Cobb "Can you say ' duck'?" Arkady murmured. "I thought you could."

  "You say something, Lieutenant."

  "Negative, Gus. Stay on it."

  So far, there had been no indication that the helos had been spotted.

  Arkady wasn't even particularly worried about radar or visual detection.

  But if they ran out of air strike before they found that submarine, on audio stealth, or not, somebody on the beach was bound to hear them poking around out here. If that happened, things were going to get real interesting real fast.

  Off the mine barrier, the flames of the battle registered only as a wavering glow in the sky, the sounds like the rumble of summer thunder.

  The Cunningham circled slowly, awaiting the cue for her next move.

  "Captain."

  Amanda looked back from her position on the bridge wing.

  "What is it, Stewart?"

  "We've just got word up from CIC," the watch officer replied. "The Retainers are on station and have commenced the search."

  "Very good." The watch officer paused in the hatchway for a moment, looking off to the southwest just as Amanda had been. "You think we can pull this off, Captain?"

  "Well, I thought so when I came up with the idea."

  She flipped the weather cover off the bridge wing repeater and called up the mission schedule. "We're still on the time line. The cruisers should all be in by now. From here on, it'll be up to the fast movers to keep them busy."

  "The woman is driving me crazy, Bub. Feet dry at Waypoint Golf. Going tactical."

  "Confirm we are on the tactical grid. Steering two nine zero true. We have acquired target-approach base leg. As far as I'm concerned, Digger, it won't be a drive, it'll be an easy-money putt."

  "Thank you, ever so much, Lieutenant Zellerman."

  The blackness beneath Moondog 505 subtly changed texture as the Sea Raptor crossed the coastline and headed

  SEA STRIKE 277

  northwest across a blacked-out Chinese landscape. As had the cruise missiles, the naval strike aircraft were fanning out to englobe their target. At staggered intervals, they would turn in toward Shanghai on a series of "wheel spoke" approach paths, no two aircraft crossing the target on the same bearing.

  "I mean it, Dig. You needed to tell that woman where to get off a long time ago."

  The two aviators weren't actually paying attention to the personal thread of the conversation. It was an instinctive exercise in mental stabilization, a counter to the tension load that was growing as the range to their objective shrank.

  "Yeah, but then that's what I'm afraid she'll do, get off.

  She's sure drawn a line in the sand now, though. How we lookin' on return limits?"

  "Clear sky. No tactically valid search systems active within range.

  Intermittent target-acquisition traces, but no locks. Shanghai zone defense is down."

  "Right. GPU tracking check?"

  "Ordnance and aircraft GPUs are coordinated and tracking.

  Looking good, Dig."

  "Okay, we are approaching Waypoint Hotel. Time check?"

  "On the line."

  "Okay, Bub. Here we go. At Point Hotel in three ... two ... one ...

  Coming right to zero one zero."

  The stars crawled past beyond the canopy as the plane banked away to the north. Gradually, the needle nose of the big fighter bomber came to bear on a series of smoky pools of light on the horizon. The fiery beacon of a burning city.

  "... Mark, zero one zero. We're in the groove."

  "I confirm that. We are on attack heading. Range to target thirty-four miles. Digger, either you get out of the Navy, or you flat out tell your wife that you're going to stay, and take whatever happens."

  "Yeah." Digger Graves shifted in his parachute harness and settled deeper into Moondog 505's ejector seat.

  The flames of Shanghai grew closer.

  "Let's not take all night about this, Gus. This guy has got to be out here somewhere."

  278 James H. Cobb "So is just about every other piece of shit sunk since the Ming fucking Dynasty. The floor of this goddamn river has got to look like the bottom of a goddamn garbage can!"

  "Just find us the piece that's still alive, man."

  It was black magic time again in the rear cockpit of Retainer Zero One.

  Gus Grestovitch totally fixated on the rippling waves of green light that danced across the oscilloscope display. Half a dozen times, he had almost called out a contact.

  But each time something, some undefinable sense of wrongness, had stayed him. The MAD pod said maybe; his instincts said no.

  Instinct, in the end, was what it was all about in this the most totally human of all endeavors. It was an edge man would always maintain over even the most sophisticated of technologies. It was why man would always remain a player, and not just a spectator, in this great game called war.

  Another broad jag rolled down the oscilloscope line. Identical in appearance to the half a dozen others that had gone before ... except for how it felt down in Gus Grestovitch's guts.

  "MAD man! MAD man! Solid contact! We have a solid contact!"

  "Going to hover!" The Sea Comanche check reined like a good cow pony.

  "What d'you have, Gus?"

  "Major contact, Lieutenant. Lookin' solid. Right underneath us."

  "Check it out," Arkady ordered. "We're getting tight on time."

  "Aye, aye."

  Swiftly, Grestovi
tch reconfigured the cockpit workstation, sliding the MAD pod readout onto a secondary telescreen and calling up the primary dunking sonar display.

  "Dunking sonar is up. Ready to drop dome."

  "Roger D. Maintaining hover. Depth by the chart is forty meters. Down dome to thirty."

  "Doin' it. The dome is down."

  A thin Kevlar coaxial cable began to peel off the internal reel of the lightweight SQR/A1 sonar pod slung beneath the helicopter's portside snub wing. Swiftly, the sound head of the system dropped through the rotor-wash-riffled surface of the estuary.

  SEA STRIKE 279

  In the rear cockpit of the helo, Grestovitch sat poised with his earphone gains turned up, ready to begin a passive audio search the second the dome reached depth. Accordingly, he nearly jumped out of his skin when a tremendous echoing crash exploded in his ears. Then, beyond the ringing, he could hear everything.

  There was the humming throb of a multitude of pumps and motors. There was the clang and clatter of numerous metallic transitories. There was even the unintelligible but unmistakable murmur of human voices.

  "Gus, is this guy down there?"

  "I'll tell the world, sir! We just dropped our sound head right onto the sucker's deck!"

  "Gray Lady, we have located the target!" The radio call electrified the Combat Information Center. "We have positive lock and positive ID!"

  "Bridge, this is the Combat Information Center," Ken Hiro began to report. "Retainer Zero One has--"

  "We were monitoring it, Ken," Amanda Garrett's filtered voice interrupted. "Commence your engagement sequence."

  "Aye, aye, Captain. All stations, secure EMCON. Aegis systems manager, bring up your radars. Mister Beltrain, take him out."

  "Yes, sir."

  This was Dix's moment, his and Weapons Division. They had drilled through this a score of times as a computer simulation.

  Now it was time to expend the hardware.

  "V-ROC and SLAM controllers, bring up your initial flights. V-ROCs, start your firing sequence."

  Beltrain keyed into the air-operations circuit. "Retainer Zero One, Retainer Zero One, Vince, this is Dix on line.

  We're setting the datum point now. Give us a short count on your IFF."