Sea Strike

by James H. Cobb

  A prolonged shuddering shiver racked through Digger, and he held Bubbles closer.

  The Five Sixteen boat and her three sisters rafted together in the shallows just below the point where the Huangpu River entered the estuary. Downstream, a battle storm raged--the lightning of starshells and the distant thunder of guns in the darkness. Closer in, they had heard the faint crackle of small SEA STRIKE 307

  arms fire and had several times seen the meteor trail of rockets lash the shoreline.

  Still they waited. Lieutenant Zhou Shan wasn't sure just what it was he was waiting for. But deep down in his belly, he knew it was coming soon.

  "Radio operator. Any contact with Shanghai Fleet Command yet?"

  "No answer on any naval command frequency, Comrade Lieutenant. No traffic at all except for the river patrol. They are asking for information and orders just as we are."

  "There she goes," Bosun Hoong interjected from his station beside the port torpedo tube. He pointed to the north.

  A pale wake streak gleamed in the darkness, a rakish shadow riding atop it. It swept by out in the deeper channel, heading downstream.

  "They must be going to look into that fight out by the minefield." The bosun looked back into the torpedo boat's cockpit. "We could follow them out, Lieutenant."

  "No," Shan replied flatly. "Not yet."

  The first salvo had dropped long, exploding off the Cunningham's starboard bow. The second dropped off her port quarter, astern. Amanda recognized what was happening: They were starting to walk their shellfire in on her ship, correcting with each salvo until they started dropping rounds right down the exhaust stacks.

  Praise God that they didn't have the minefield channel preregistered.

  Probably no one had ever thought that an enemy would be mad enough to attempt a penetration of fortress Shanghai like this.

  "CIC, how much farther until we're out of these damn mines!"

  "It's got to be soon, Captain," Christine replied. "Another couple hundred yards at most."

  Another blaze of light came from beyond the windscreen as the Reds renewed their illumination pattern. In the glare, she could read the growing fear in the eyes and faces of her bridge crew. Flow noise be damned, she had to get them out of this.

  "Lee helm, increase speed. Make turns for ten knots."

  "Aye, aye, Captain. Making turns for ten knots."

  308 James H. Cobb "Stealth system, fire RBOCs. Full concealment pattern."

  "Stealth acknowledging. Firing full concealment pattern now!"

  Out on the bow and from the forward end of the superstructure, rocket grenades ripple-fired into the sky, bursting like muddy fireworks over the Duke, obliterating the stars.

  The Rapid Blooming Overhead Chaff rockets would not serve any of their purposes this night. There was no radar for their metal foil packets to jam. But the grenades also produced thick clouds of multispectral chemical smoke, enough maybe to throw off the targeting of the coastal batteries' forward observers. Just for the few seconds more they needed.

  "Captain, stop the ship!" Dix Beltrain's voice rang in her headset.

  His demand was so totally unexpected that Amanda mentally fumbled for a moment, trying to put his urgent words into some kind of logical perspective. Her TACCO's next, even more frantic cry, however, blasted her into action.

  "Captain, for Christ's sake! Ring her down!"

  "All engines! Back emergency!"

  On possibly any other ship in the world, it would have been too late.

  However, the Duke's integrated electric drive saved her. In a battle situation like this one, where sudden bursts of speed might be required, her huge Rolls-Royce/GE turbo-generator sets could be held at their maximum output.

  Her actual speed through the water could be controlled through the throttles of her electric motors. With no spooling up lag, she was granted nearly instantaneous access to 100 percent of her power output.

  Likewise, her reversible-pitch propellers allowed her to direct that thrust to go forward or astern with equal swiftness.

  As the lee helmsman shoved his throttles forward to the stops with his left hand, he also yanked the propeller controls hard back with his right.

  The blades of the Duke's contrarotating propellers pivoted in their sockets, and the water under her quarters lifted and boiled under the impact of 80,000 horsepower. The Duke shuddered to a halt in less than half her own length.

  "Stop all engines! Helm, initiate station keeping on SEA STRIKE 309

  auxiliary hydrojets. Don't let her drift! Dix, what in hell is going on?"

  "Watchdog, Captain." Beltrain's voice was as bleak as the tolling of a funeral bell. "Right in the middle of the channel."

  "Are you sure, Dix?"

  "We don't have enough definition on the SQQ to be certain, Captain. It could be somebody's old hot-water tank, for all I know. But we do have an object on the bottom in the center of the channel. It's the right size for a pressure mine, and it's sure as hell in the right place for one."

  The same bleakness that had been in Dix Beltrain's voice settled around Amanda's soul. Consider a minefield as a wall that you must occasionally pass through. You must leave a passage--a doorway, as it were. And to keep the enemy from using your doorway, you needed a door.

  You used a watchdog, a sophisticated naval "smart" mine fused to detonate whenever it detected the pressure changes caused by a ship's hull displacing water nearby. You deploy the watchdog in your passage channel, then you connect it by underwater cable to a land station, permitting you to arm or de-arm the mine. The door can then be opened, or shut, at your desire.

  Since it had appeared that the Chinese had not used any high-tech mines anywhere else within their defensive line, Amanda had gambled that they wouldn't have one to use here. She had been wrong. The Cunningham was trapped.

  "Zero Two, ordnance check."

  "Two Hellfires. Two Hydras," Nancy Delany replied.

  "Two and four here. This is going to be tight. Watch your round placement. Make ' count."

  "Roger."

  The two Sea Comanches swung wide over the river to the north, moving around to flank the oncoming gunboat before it could reach the area of the two Moondog aviators.

  "Gus, bring up your laser targeting. Bore-sight the FLIR and give me a screen display."

  "Doin' it, sir."

  Arkady shifted vision systems again, flipping the low-light goggles up on his helmet and focusing his attention on the 310 James H. Cobb image that snapped up on the central panel telescreen: a pale negative-image ship on a darkened river, a swirl of thermal wake trailing behind it in both the sea and air.

  "Autocannon mounts forward, aft, and amidships," Arkady murmured.

  "Single small deck house. Freestanding mast. No stack."

  "Looks like another one of those Shanghai gunboats, sir."

  "No, Gus. No, the scale's wrong. It's too big. Way too big. That's a Hainan-class. Twice the size, twice the firepower, and about four times harder to kill."

  "Oh, thank you, God. Thank you ever so fucking much!

  Lieutenant, maybe we need to call the ship in on this one."

  "The Lady's busy, Gus. She doesn't need us tugging on her shirtsleeve just now. Zero Two, follow me in! Point fire procedures! Take out the bridge and the main gun mounts!"

  Amanda kept her voice low and controlled. She could not, she dare not, exhibit an instant of panic or confusion now.

  "Lee helm, all engines astern, dead slow."

  "All engines backing astern, dead slow, ma'am."

  She measured the helmsmen's voices the way a pharmacist might measure the components of a critically needed drug.

  Was any tremor there that might foretell a catastrophic failure under load?

  "We won't have much rudder control backing at this speed, so you'll have to hold her in the center of the channel with the engines. Helm, stay on the hydrojet controls. Lateral thrust. Same orders. Keep us centered."

  "Aye, aye, Captain."
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  "Will do, ma'am."

  They both were steady. Nobody was breaking yet.

  Another wavering howl. Another shell cluster impacted.

  Closer. The bridge deck plates rang. That had to be dealt with next.

  "Tactical Officer. Initiate counterbattery fire. Oto Melara and Sea SLAM. Stealth systems, keep that smoke coming!"

  "Aye, aye, ma'am. Aegis systems have shell tracks to active hostile batteries."

  Up forward, she could hear the bow 76mm turret begin to traverse.

  "Ken, this is the plan. I'm going to reverse us back up SEA STRIKE 31 I channel. I don't think we've got enough swing room to turn."

  "Then what, Captain?"

  "That depends. Tactical Officer, could we detonate the watchdog mine with a command-guided Mark 50 torpedo?"

  "I've never heard of it being tried, Captain."

  "I don't give a damn whether it's been tried or not. Can it be done?"

  The forward Oto Melara began to rage during the moment that Dix Beltrain paused, the high-angled gun barrel slamming abrupt three-round bursts into the sky.

  "I can't see any reason that it can't."

  "How much room will we need?"

  "I'd like about a thousand yards."

  "How much will we need?"

  "Three hundred and fifty."

  Out on the long reach of the foredeck, the car-length cylinder of the first Sea SLAM counterround sprang out of its launching cell. Its booster rocket blazed, illuminating from within the smoke cloud that engulfed the Cunningham.

  "Okay, Dix, set it up. Quartermaster, back us upchannel three hundred and fifty yards by the GPUs."

  Caught in the heart of her own firestorm, the Duke began to gain way astern.

  At this moment, Vince Arkady's world consisted of the green tunnel of vision drilled through the darkness by the FLIR sights. With turbines fire walled and with their airspeed peaking out at a 190-plus miles per hour, he and his wingwoman went for the gunboat's flank.

  Tracer fire flickered past outside the canopy, tentacles of deadly light reaching up from the river to enmesh the two diving helicopters. The Reds were chronically short of state of-the-art technology, but they had been able to equip at least one of their gunboats with night-vision sights.

  The rub was that to merely hit the target, they didn't need to work in this close. Their laser-guided Hellfire missiles had a ten-mile range, more then enough to stand out of the reach of the autocannon.

  Unfortunately, the Hellfire was also designed to kill a fifty ton main battle tank, not a four-hundred-ton surface 312 James H. Cobb combatant.

  It was not enough to simply hit the gunboat. To take it down, they would have to precision-strike at specific points aboard it.

  On his own targeting screen, a glowing cross-hair spider crawled around the image of the Chinese gunboat. Gus Grestovitch was lying in the beam of the laser designator.

  "Get the bridge ... Get the bridge ... Get the bridge ... "

  Arkady chanted softly.

  The crosshairs fixed on the gunboat's wheelhouse.

  "Illuminating ... got designation. Missile's hot!"

  "Taking the shot," Arkady keyed the radio. "Zero One ... missile away!"

  He squeezed the initiator, fixing his eyes on the instrumentation so he wouldn't be blinded by the Hellfire's exhaust flare.

  Riding the dials, Arkady started his turn away, anti-IR flares kicking out into Zero One's wake. He heard Nancy Delany call her own round away, then another sharp cry.

  "We're hit! Zero One, we are hit!"

  "Ah, shit!"

  Arkady racked the helo through the remainder of the turn.

  Aimed north again, and skimming twenty feet over the river's surface, he took a split second to look out into the night again.

  ' ', try and pick up on Zero Two. Did you see a fireball out there?"

  "Negative, negative. I'm not seem' nothin'!"

  "Zero Two, Zero Two, talk to me! Nancy, state your status?"

  "We're still in the air, Zero One," a weak return came back. "We are hit. I think a single twenty-five-millimeter round. Smoke in the cockpit and all kinds of systems failures.

  Nothing left but basic cockpit and engine instrumentation.

  Nothing will reboot. I think that one of the subsystems bays was blown right out of the aircraft."

  "Can you stay in the air?"

  "I have flight and engine control, and the airframe appears intact. I have no fire control and no night vision except for my low-light goggles."

  "Then get out, Nancy! There's nothing more you can do here. The Duke is engaged. Head for the Task Force. You

  SEA STRIKE 313

  should be able to stretch your fuel far enough to reach the missile trap cruiser. If you can't, ditch as far off the coast as possible. They'll pick you up."

  "Zero One, I--"

  "Zero Two, the only thing you can do is to leave me one less thing to worry about! Goddamn it, Nancy, take departure now!"

  "Zero Two, taking departure. My round hit, sir. I'm sorry I can't do more."

  "I know, Nancy. Thanks for doing what you have."

  Arkady flared Zero One around again.

  "Okay, once more into the breach, of' buddy. Let's see what we've done to this guy."

  "We got a hit on him too, Lieutenant."

  The image on the targeting screen panned around as the Sea Comanche completed its turn, picking up the Chinese gunboat once more. Fires were burning amidships and astern.

  The aft 57mm mount was clearly destroyed and its mainmast canted off center, but the 190-foot war vessel still stood resolutely downstream.

  It had closed to within a mile of the two drifting Moondog aviators.

  "This guy is going to take a little more discouragement, Gus."

  "I guess so, sir. How you want to work this?"

  "We try for the wheelhouse again. Only, this time we follow the Hellfire in. We close to point-blank range, then we shove the last four Hydras right down his throat."

  "Oh, man!"

  "The shock effect of the Hellfire hit will throw them off long enough for us to close the range. Set us up. We're going in!"

  The Sea Comanche skated in across the river, the surface glittering like hot dark oil beneath her belly. The Hainan's forward mount challenged again. Tracers arced over the canopy, descending as the Chinese gunners sought for the range.

  "Illuminate!"

  "Illuminating target ... We got laser lock!"

  "Taking him out!"

  Arkady's finger closed on the actuator. There was a faint lurch. But there was no hot flame in the night.

  "Shit, Gus, we got a misfire! Reset!" Arkady yelled, fu 3!4 James H.

  Cobb tilely crushing down on the actuator trigger again.

  "Negative! She's gone! The fucker dropped off the rail!

  She didn't ignite!" Grestovitch's voice lifted an octave.

  "Lieutenant, pitch out! This isn't going to work!"

  "It's got to!"

  Arkady fought the rudder pedals and the collective lever, playing death tag with the twinned fire streams lashing at them, attempting to sidle out of the way while still maintaining his headlong charge toward the enemy. All he had left were the Hydra rockets. They were superb antipersonnel weapons, but they were no damn good for ship killing. Not unless you got so close that you could shove them right through the side of the hull.

  They were hit.

  A flash of light, a crash like they'd been broadsided by a pickup truck, and a pattern of cracks on the right side of the canopy. The Sea Comanche roared out of the far side of it, still a viable aircraft.

  Arkady could feel a change in the flight dynamics, but he didn't have time to sort it out now.

  The image of the gunboat filled the targeting screen, overfilling it, scurrying figures of crewmen throwing themselves on the deck as a screaming, rotor-winged hunterbird dove on them. Arkady fought off the weird, deadly mindlock of target fixation and sent the Hydras on their way. Th
e fire trails of the four 2.75-inch rockets momentarily linked the helicopter to the gunboat before vanishing within the hull. Arkady rocked hard back on the collective and sought sky.

  The rockets exploded within the gunboat's engine room.

  Diesel oil is normally not a particularly volatile substance.

  But shred the tanks and fuel lines that contain it, aerosol it through the atmosphere with multiple hypervelocity impacts, ignite it by exposure to the star-temperature flame of high explosives, and it can be.

  A massive chunk of the Hainan's midships weather deck blew off its framing, a massive, incandescent wound bleeding fire into the night.

  "Yeah! We are living!"

  "I'll take your word for it, Lieutenant."

  Arkady backed off the power and circled to get back over the estuary.

  Twisting in his seat harness, he tried for a dam SEA STRIKE 315

  age inspection. "We caught something back there. How bad are we hit?"

  "The MAD pod's gone. I think the right wingtip, too."

  "We're okay, Gus. I think we're okay. I got green boards."

  "We gonna have to do that again, Lieutenant?"

  "Hell, old buddy. We can't. The cupboard's bare."

  Another voice abruptly intervened over the CSAR link.

  "Retainer, Retainer, this is Moondog, do you copy?"

  "Roger, Moondog, we're still out here. Just having words with a Red gunboat."

  "So I see, Retainer. Thanks, guys. But we got another little problem here."

  Oh, shit. "Go, Moondog. Whatcha got?"

  "We're getting small-arms fire from the beach again. Not too close yet, but we need you to lay a little more nasty on these guys." Oh shit! "Roger, Moondog. We're on our way."

  Both pilot and systems operator tuned out the darkness beyond their cockpit and refocused themselves on their job and their instrumentation.

  As a result, neither of them noticed the faint, chromatic blurring begin on the outside of the canopy.

  The rotor wash was whipping an almost microscopic spray of oily fluid through the air. The transmission pressure warning alarm would not trip for several minutes yet.

  Like an enraged mountain cat, the Cunningham clawed back at her attackers. Her SPY-2A radars traced the incoming artillery rounds to their points of origin, and her Aegis battle management system apportioned death and destruction among the guns of the Chinese battery.