"Gotcha, Dix. Radar beacon is up for a short count.
Three ... two ... one ... "
On the Alpha screen, an active radar display was overlaid on the graphics map of the Yangtze estuary and the surrounding coast. Now, well up the southern estuary channel, a target hack materialized. The Identification-Friend-or-Foe tran
280 James H. Cobb sponder aboard Arkady's Sea Comanche was interreacting with the destroyer's radar sweep.
"We have the datum point!" the Aegis systems manager announced. The Duke had fixed her enemy's position. Now all that was left was the final killing spring.
"Yeah! V-ROC systems, verify we have a full pattern set of VROC's."
"Full pattern set, Mr. Beltrain. Hot birds on the rails!"
"Integrate your datum point. Stand by to fire. Vince, get your ass out of there!"
Twelve miles to the west, over the river, Arkady called back over his shoulder. "You heard the man, Gus. Up dome."
"Dome coming up, sir. This guy sounds like he's powering up to get under way."
"We're not going to let that happen. Retainer Zero Two, do you copy?"
"We copy, Zero One."
"Secure search and disengage to the east. Expedite!"
"Roger."
The Sea Comanche bobbled in hover as the sound head clicked up into its carrying mount in the sonar pod.
"Dome up, Lieutenant."
"Right."
Arkady pedal-turned the helo around the axis of its rotor head and came forward on the pitch and collective, gaining way. Retainer Zero Two blazed past a few moments later, heading for safety outside of the target zone.
"Gray Lady, Gray Lady, the Elvis has left the building.
You are clear to engage!"
"V-ROCs, fire!"
Spaced at one-second intervals, four Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Rockets blazed out of the Cunningham's VLS arrays, their boosters flickering balls of orange light arcing away toward their distant objective.
The face of sub hunting had changed radically during the past decades.
At one time, the foe had been the great pelagic hunter-killers of the Soviet nuclear submarine force. Now, though, the threat had moved closer inshore.
Third-world states were turning to the modern diesel elec SEA STRIKE 281
trie submarine as the fast, cheap road to sea power. Sophisticated and silent, these "mobile minefields" were the stingray to the nuclear submarine's shark.
A new generation of weapons had been needed to deal with this new shallow-water threat. The V-ROC L (Littoral) was one of them.
Instead of the Mark 50 torpedo carried by the standard weapon, the V-ROC
L carried a throwback to an earlier age of ASW, a scatterpack of miniature depth bombs similar in design and intent to those of the World War II Hedgehog.
With their boosters burned out, each V-ROC came over the peak of their parabolic trajectory. Plunging in toward their target, a laser proximity fuse gauged each round's distance from the surface of the water. At the appropriate instant, the scatterpack's bursting charge fired, dispersing the ten shaped-charge bomblets carried by the warhead bus. Ten bomblets per round, forty bomblets in all, striking the water in an interlocking pattern. A net to trap the biggest fish in the world.
East of the target area, the two Retainers had returned to a hover, reversing again to observe the weapon impact.
Through the night-vision visor, Arkady watched as the wave of impact splashes swept across the target zone.
Then came the long breath-locked moment as the bomblets sank. The submunitions were each magnetically fused to fire only on contact with a submarine hull.
Two slender columns of water jetted up from the disturbed surface of the river.
"Yeah! Gus, down dome and see if we put a hole in this guy. Gray Lady!
Gray Lady! We have weapon impact and detonation! Two hits out of the pattern. We are trying to verify the kill."
"Acknowledged, Zero One," Amanda's voice came back.
Any triumph she might be feeling was being tightly locked down. "Hold on station. If you've hit him, he's going to try and surface."
Gus Grestovitch cut in abruptly. "Lieutenant, massive transitory on the target bearing! Submarine blowing ballast!"
"Gray Lady! We got him! He's coming up!"
Out in the center of the target zone, a submarine's conning tower broke water. Silt-enslimed from its long concealment 282 James H. Cobb on the estuary floor, the Xia lifted its head sluggishly above the surface like some long-entombed dinosaur.
"There she blows! Gray Lady, we have visual confirmation of the target!
We've got the boomer! I say again, we have got the boomer!"
On the Cunningham's bridge, the exclamations of victory were more restrained: a fist lightly thumped on the chart table, the whispered release of a contained breath.
Amanda leaned forward in the captain's chair, holding her headset mike close to her lips. "Zero One, current status on the target?"
"On the surface and holding stable. We've hurt him, but we haven't killed him."
"Stand by, Zero One."
They'd put the barbs into their whale and they'd run it down. Now they had to drive the lance into its lungs.
"Tactical Officer."
"TACCO, aye."
"Finish the job, Dix. You know the drill. You can't miss on this one!"
"Final-phase safeties are off. All prelaunch systems are green, sir."
Dix Beltrain leaned in over the Sea SLAM operator's shoulder. "Don't commit the round. Keep the missile under manual control all the way in."
"Yes, sir."
"And remember, forward of the sail! Target only forward of the sail. If you can't drop it in right, abort the round."
"I know, sir," the systems operator replied with as much laconic forbearance as a gunner's mate first could afford with a full lieutenant.
"Okay. Shoot."
Among the arsenal of "smart weaponry" proliferating in the twenty-first century, the Sea SLAM was without doubt one of the most brilliant, because a human mind could guide it to its target.
Hurled out of its launch cell, the modified Harpoon Missile extended its cruciform fins and followed in the trajectory of the V-ROCs. Coming over the peak of the arc, the infrared SEA STRIKE 283
imager in its nose activated, beaming a supra-eagle's-eye view of the Yangtze River environs back to its mother station aboard the Cunningham.
The Sea SLAM operator entered the loop. His fingers curled around a joystick and he sent steering commands back up through the datalink to the missile,, guiding it to its target in exactly the same way a hobbyist might fly a radio controlled model airplane. Only, this "model plane" carried a quarter of a ton of high explosives at the velocity of a .45caliber bullet.
There was a further complication as well. There was a zero tolerance for failure. The SLAM round would have to be brought in on the forehull of the Chinese submarine, far enough back to smash the missile-control center and sink the boat, yet far enough forward not to directly involve any of the IRBM silos in the Xia's central launching bay.
If one of the boomer's armed Ju Lang II rounds was hit, the worst that could be expected would be a limited-yield nuclear explosion. The best would be that particles of hyper radioactive plutonium would be sprayed throughout the Yangtze estuary, contaminating the river's mouth for the next fifty thousand years. The fate of one of the great port cities of the world lay in the hands of a twenty-year-old American seaman from Meade, Kansas.
In the crosshairs of the SLAM guidance screen, the target grew from a dark pencil stub afloat in a pale-green creek to a cigar, to a toy, to a looming black hulk all in the space of half a dozen heartbeats. With his joystick, the systems operator rode the nose of his missile down, keeping it fixed on the one exact point he had chosen just beneath the submarine's sail.
The screen flared and went to static.
Upriver in the estuary, the Sea SLAM gave no warning of its arrival, its turbojet powe
r plant leaving no flame trail behind it.
The river rose up under the forward end of the Xia's hull, lifting the boomer's blunt nose into the air. Almost in slow motion, the submarine's bow cap and conning tower tore away, electrical arcs dancing around the opening wounds.
Then the boomer's main hull settled back, wallowing slug 284 Jomes H.
Cobb gishly like a waterlogged tree trunk. A moment more and it was gone, sinking in its shallow water grave, the eternal Yangtze pouring in through its breached bulkheads.
"Yes!" Vince Arkady's voice rang out of the bridge speakers.
"Good shot! Boomer is down! All the way, the boomer is down!" Somewhere behind Amanda, a hand slapped down on the chart table and the sound-activated intercom links sputtered for a moment as someone down in the CIC whooped.
Amanda tilted her helmeted head back for a few moments, her eyes closed in silent gratitude. Coming forward again, she keyed the command mike.
"Acknowledged, Retainers.
Boomer is down. Disengage and return to the ship. I say again, disengage and return to the ship."
"Retainers, wilco."
Amanda toggled across from surface-to-air to intercom.
"Radio Shack, transmit the following to Task Flag ... "
"Admiral, signal from the Cunningham'. ' Stormdragon is dead. Mission accomplished. ASW assets are withdrawing."
" Subdued cheers and a round of applause sounded within the Enterprise's Pri-Fly. Admiral Tall man's fist stabbed the air in a victorious uppercut.
"Congratulations, Jake." Macintyre slapped the Task Force commander on the shoulder.
"Yeah, well, we're still doing ' far, so good,' Eddie Mac. We still got to count ' all home."
Tall man turned to his air boss. "Status on the diversion strike, Commander?"
"The last bird should be making its run now, sir."
"Okay, two minutes more and we can start letting our weight down."
Bubbles Zellerman stared into her targeting screen like a fortune-teller into a crystal ball. Moondog 505 had been preceded by her eleven squadron mates, all of whom had "plowed the farm" quite effectively.
Their target was the Hudong shipyards, the facility that had resurrected the Xia and its hunter-killer escorts. It was a logical target. A strike here would focus Chinese attention SEA STRIKE 285
away from what was taking place a few miles north on the Yangtze. It would also ensure that no more nuclear-powered snakes would issue from this particular hole.
Bubbles was imaging the target through the Sea Raptor's FLIR turret.
However, she could almost have done as well using visual light. Half a dozen major fires were raging within the shipyard boundaries.
Cranes, warehouses, and machine shops had been bomb shattered and left in flames. The water gates of the main yard dry dock had been blown out and the facility flooded, and a Romeo-class conventional submarine had been lifted half out of the water and draped broken-backed across a quay. Burning oil from its ruptured tanks leaked into the Huangpu channel and spread slowly downstream, lighting off the finger piers like a string of birthday candles.
The huge, covered, graving dock was ablaze from the inside out. A score of burnthroughs flamed on its roof, and a multispectral tongue of fire, fully half the width of the river in length, roared out the open ship doors.
That holocaust had to be caused by missile fuel stacks burning off.
There must have been another Chinese boomer moored in the dock. Bubbles hoped for the sake of everyone downwind that the damn fools had kept their warheads unshipped and stowed elsewhere.
"Okay, Bubbles." From up front, Digger's voice sounded totally level, totally controlled, almost uninterested. "Ten miles out from target, four miles from release point. Angle off, point nine. Verify."
"Verified. We are still in the groove."
"GPU rechecks?"
"Checked and checked. Checked and checked. Ordnance is up and safeties are off. Intervelometer setting is point five."
"Looking good, Bub. Two miles out. Enable system to drop."
Bubbles keyed a sequence on her weapons panel, unlocking the ordnance releases and freeing the fighter-bomber's fire-control system to engage the target. Flipping the safety guard up and off the manual bombing trigger on her joystick, she rested her finger against it.
"System enabled."
286 James H. Cobb It became quiet in the cockpit, the only sound being the soft humming whine of the Sea Raptor's twin turbofans.
There was quite a fireworks display going on outside of the canopy, however. The air below Moondog 505 scintillated with tracer streams, while above her the shell bursts of heavy antiair fire danced among the clouds like chain lightning.
Running fast at 16,000 feet, she skimmed deftly between the two threats, too high to be reached by the fire of the lighter flak and too low to be trapped within the proximity fused destruction of the larger guns.
The fighter-bomber was cutting almost directly across the heart of urban Shanghai from south to north, the Huangpu River channel off her right wingtip. The fires of the Hudong shipyards were just coming up on their one-o'clock position.
Digger and Bubbles made no effort to aim their aircraft or their weapons at the target. The bombs themselves would take care of that detail when the time came.
Moondog 505 bucked delicately twice. The light patterns on the weapons panel shifted.
"Bombs away," Bubbles reported quietly.
The weapons released by the Navy strike plane each were named with a tongue-tying acronym: JDAM/CSV (Joint Direct Attack Munitions System/Conformal Stealth Variant).
Jacketed in the same radar absorbent material as their carrier aircraft, they had clung remora-like beneath its wings as it had transported them within range of their target. Now, falling free, they set out on the last leg of their journey.
Extending tail fins and glide wings, the airfoil-shaped bomb units peeled off toward their target, steered in by their integral Global Positioning Units. The same essential satellite technology that guided airliners and lost campers around the world now delivered two one-ton charges of high explosives to two specific points--said points being the exact center of the second floor of the central administration building of the Hudong shipyards, precisely fifty feet in from the northern and southern walls.
Moondog 505 was passing the target area now. Bubbles Zellerman kept the FLIR turret locked on the administrations center, recording the images for postmission bomb-damage assessment. "Three ... and two ... and one,"
she murmured.
SEA STRIKE 287
On the screen, the southern wing of the building spewed light and smoke from its windows and collapsed in upon itself. The central bay followed a half instant later.
Not bad bombing, Bubbles thought judgmentally. Not perfect, but not bad.
"Ordnance is in," Digger Graves heard his backseater report.
"Good run! In the pickle barrel."
"Roger. We are outta here!"
Digger rolled his hand controller to starboard and increased pressure on his right rudder pad. Moondog 505 banked away smoothly to the east in response. He came forward on the HOTAS grips as well, kicking the Sea Raptor up into super cruise mode. The g-load of the turn grew and the whisper of the turbofans grew into a rushing roar as the jet accelerated for the sound barrier.
Off the right wingtip, a last lick of firelight glinted off the surface of the Yangtze. In seconds, they would be "feet wet" again, across the Chinese coast and clear.
Combat pilots refer to it as "catching the golden BB." The shell hadn't even been aimed at Moondog 505. It was a 100millimeter round fired blindly into the sky over five miles away. A malfunctioning safety had kept it from detonating as it had reached its peak altitude, and it was actually plunging downward when its trajectory intersected the fighter bomber's flight path. Its fuse cap just barely ticked the trailing edge of the Sea Raptor's portside elevator.
Fortunately, Digger Graves blacked out for on
ly a couple of seconds. He regained awareness in a world gone insane. The wild shifting of the gravity vector told him that Moondog 505 was tumbling wildly. He wrenched at the hand controller, instinctively trying to stabilize the aircraft, only to find that he didn't have any functional control surfaces left.
The few remaining instrument displays were pulsing red or yellow crisis warnings. Orange firelight glared on the canopy, and Graves could hear the moaning and cracking of an air frame breaking up. There was no doubt in hell that their contract to fly this aircraft had just expired.
"Eject!" lie screamed. "Eject, eject, eject!"
288 James H. Cobb Digger reached over his head for the combined blast curtain and ejection-seat trigger, groping for a panic-stricken moment against the g-loading until his fingers closed through the wire and plastic loops. Trying to keep his back straight and his limbs centered over the seat, he yanked the curtain down over his face.
The canopy blew off and a tornado's worth of wind poured into the cockpit, screaming and clawing. Over it, Digger heard the faint ripping thud of Bubble's ejector seat firing, and he felt the flash of heat from its rockets. Then it was his turn, and Digger lost consciousness for the second time.
Downriver, almost at the mine barrier, Vince Arkady stiffened as a piercing sound stabbed at his ears. An electronic blipping sounded in his helmet phones; shrill, penetrating, specifically pitched to be impossible to overlook or ignore.
It was the herald of disaster, the Emergency Locator Beacon of a downed aircrew.
"Gray Lady, Gray Lady," Arkady was speaking over the beacon tone on the air circuit. "I'm getting an ELB out here.
Are you guys reading the same?"
"Roger, we got it," Christine Rendino replied from Raven's Roost. "We have a bearing on it. Triangulating now.
Okay, signal source is to your west. Back upriver."
"Can you confirm that this beacon is one of ours? Have we just lost a strike bird?"
"Stand by, Zero One. We're working it."
From the bridge Amanda had listened to the exchange, tense and silent.
Now she keyed her own microphone. "CIC, try and get a skin track or a transponder burst off of that last strike aircraft. Communications, inform Task Flag that we might have a plane down."
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