by Tom Clancy
This was an altogether sensible strategy, but one that could not be tested under realistic conditions, and, unfortunately, one that was largely useless at the moment. With all of the Soviet Alfas and Victors already on the coast, and the last of the Charlies, Echoes, and Novembers just arriving on their stations, the master screen Commander Quentin was staring at was no longer filled with discrete little red dots but rather with large circles. Each dot or circle designated the position of a Soviet submarine. A circle respresented an estimated position, calculated from the speed with which a sub could move without giving off enough noise to be localized by the many sensors being employed. Some circles were ten miles across, some as much as fifty; an area anywhere from seventy-eight to two thousand square miles had to be searched if the submarine were again to be pinned down. And there were just too damned many of the boats.
Hunting the submarines was principally the job of the P-3C Orion. Each Orion carried sonobuoys, air-deployable active and passive sonar sets that were dropped from the belly of the aircraft. On detecting something, a sonobuoy reported to its mother aircraft and then automatically sank lest it fall into unfriendly hands. The sonobuoys had limited electrical power and thus limited range. Worse, their supply was finite. The sonobuoy inventory was already being depleted alarmingly, and soon they would have to cut back on expenditures. Additionally, each P-3C carried FLIRs, forward-looking infrared scanners, to identify the heat signature of a nuclear sub, and MADs, magnetic anomaly detectors that located the disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field caused by a large chunk of ferrous metal like a submarine. MAD gear could only detect a magnetic disturbance six hundred yards to the left and right of an aircraft’s course track, and to do this the aircraft had to fly low, consuming fuel and limiting the crew’s visual search range. FLIR had roughly the same limitation.
Thus the technology used to localize a target first detected by SOSUS, or to “delouse” a discrete piece of ocean preparatory to the passage of a convoy, simply was not up to a random search of the deep ocean.
Quentin leaned forward. A circle had just changed to a dot. A P-3C had just dropped an explosive sounding charge and localized an Echo-class attack sub five hundred miles south of the Grand Banks. For an hour they had a near-certain shooting solution on that Echo; her name was written on the Orion’s Mark 46 ASW torpedoes.
Quentin sipped at his coffee. His stomach rebelled at the additional caffeine, remembering the abuse of four months of hellish chemotherapy. If there were to be a war, this was one way it might start. All at once, their submarines would stop, perhaps just like this. Not sneaking to kill convoys in midocean but attacking them closer to shore, the way the Germans had done…and all the American sensors would be in the wrong place. Once stopped the dots would grow to circles, ever wider, making the task of finding the subs all the more difficult. Their engines quiet, the boats would be invisible traps for the passing merchant vessels and warships racing to bring life-saving supplies to the men in Europe. Submarines were like cancer. Just like the disease that he had only barely defeated. The invisible, malignant vessels would find a place, stop to infect it, and on his screen the malignancies would grow until they were attacked by the aircraft he controlled from this room. But he could not attack them now. Only watch.
“PK EST 1 HOUR—RUN,” he typed into his computer console.
“23,” the computer answered at once.
Quentin grunted. Twenty-four hours earlier the PK, probability of a kill, had been forty—forty probable kills in the first hour after getting a shooting authorization. Now it was barely half that, and this number had to be taken with a large grain of salt, since it assumed that everything would work, a happy state of affairs found only in fiction. Soon, he judged, the number would be under ten. This did not include kills from friendly submarines that were trailing the Russians under strict orders not to reveal their positions. His sometime allies in the Sturgeons, Permits, and Los Angeleses were playing their own ASW game by their own set of rules. A different breed. He tried to think of them as friends, but it never quite worked. In his twenty years of naval service submarines had always been the enemy. In war they would be useful enemies, but in a war it was widely recognized that there was no such thing as a friendly submarine.
A B-52
The bomber crew knew exactly where the Russians were. Navy Orions and air force Sentries had been shadowing them for days now, and the day before, he’d been told, the Soviets had sent an armed fighter from the Kiev to the nearest Sentry. Possibly an attack mission, probably not, it had in any case been a provocation.
Four hours earlier the squadron of fourteen had flown out of Plattsburg, New York, at 0330, leaving behind black trails of exhaust smoke hidden in the predawn gloom. Each aircraft carried a full load of fuel and twelve missiles whose total weight was far less than the -52’s design bombload. This made for good, long range.
Which was exactly what they needed. Knowing where the Russians were was only half the battle. Hitting them was the other. The mission profile was simple in concept, rather more difficult in execution. As had been learned in missions over Hanoi—in which the B-52 had participated and sustained SAM (surface-to-air missile) damage—the best method of attacking a heavily defended target was to converge from all points of the compass at once, “like the enveloping arms of an angry bear,” the squadron commander had put it at the briefing, indulging his poetic nature. This gave half the squadron relatively direct courses to their target; the other half had to curve around, careful to keep well beyond effective radar coverage; all had to turn exactly on cue.
The B-52s had turned ten minutes earlier, on command from the Sentry quarterbacking the mission. The pilot had added a twist. His course to the Soviet formation took his bomber right down a commercial air route. On making his turn, he had switched his IFF transponder from its normal setting to international. He was fifty miles behind a commercial 747, thirty miles ahead of another, and on Soviet radar all three Boeing products would look exactly alike—harmless.
It was still dark down on the surface. There was no indication that the Russians were alerted yet. Their fighters were only supposed to be VFR (visual flight rules) capable, and the pilot imagined that taking off and landing on a carrier in the dark was pretty risky business, doubly so in bad weather.
“Skipper,” the electronic warfare officer called on the intercom, “we’re getting L-and S-band emissions. They’re right where they’re supposed to be.”
“Roger. Enough for a return off us?”
“That’s affirm, but they probably think we’re flying Pan Am. No fire control stuff yet, just routine air search.”
“Range to target?”
“One-three-zero miles.”
It was almost time. The mission profile was such that all would hit the 125-mile circle at the same moment.
“Everything ready?”
“That’s a roge.”
The pilot relaxed for another minute, waiting for the signal from the entry.
“FLASHLIGHT, FLASHLIGHT, FLASHLIGHT.” The signal came over the digital radio channel.
“That’s it! Let ’em know we’re here,” the aircraft commander ordered.
“Right.” The electronic warfare officer flipped the clear plastic cover off his set of toggle switches and dials controlling the aircraft’s jamming systems. First he powered up his systems. This took a few seconds. The -52’s electronics were all old seventies-vintage equipment, else the squadron would not be part of the junior varsity. Good learning tools, though, and the lieutenant was hoping to move up to the new B-1Bs now beginning to come off the Rockwell assembly line in California. For the past ten minutes the ESM pods on the bomber’s nose and wingtips had been recording the Soviet radar signals, classifying their exact frequencies, pulse repetition rates, power, and the individual signature characteristics of the transmitters. The lieutenant was brand new to this game. He was a recent graduate of electronic warfare school, first in his class. He considered what h
e should do first, then selected a jamming mode, not his best, from a range of memorized options.
The Nikolayev
One hundred twenty-five miles away on the Kara-class cruiser Nikolayev, a radar michman was examining some blips that seemed to be in a circle around his formation. In an instant his screen was covered with twenty ghostly splotches tracing crazily in various directions. He shouted the alarm, echoed a second later by a brother operator. The officer of the watch hurried over to check the screen.
By the time he got there the jamming mode had changed and six lines like the spokes of a wheel were rotating slowly around a central axis.
“Plot the strobes,” the officer ordered.
Now there were blotches, lines, and sparkles.
“More than one aircraft, Comrade.” The michman tried flipping through his frequency settings.
“Attack warning!” another michman shouted. His ESM receiver had just reported the signals of aircraft search-radar sets of the type used to acquire targets for air-to-surface missiles.
The B-52
“We got hard targets,” the weapons officer on the -52 reported. “I got a lock on the first three birds.”
“Roger that,” the pilot acknowledged. “Hold for ten more seconds.”
“Ten seconds,” the officer replied. “Cutting switches…now.”
“Okay, kill the jamming.”
“ECM systems off.”
The Nikolayev
“Missile acquisition radars have ceased,” the combat information center officer reported to the cruiser’s captain, just now arrived from the bridge. Around them the Nikolayev’s crew was racing to battle stations. “Jamming has also ceased.”
“What is out there?” the captain asked. Out of a clear sky his beautiful clipper-bowed cruiser had been threatened—and now all was well?
“At least eight enemy aircraft in a circle around us.”
The captain examined the now normal S-band air search screen. There were numerous blips, mainly civilian aircraft. The half circle of others had to be hostile, though.
“Could they have fired missiles?”
“No, Comrade Captain, we would have detected it. They jammed our search radars for thirty seconds and illuminated us with their own search systems for twenty. Then everything stopped.”
“So, they provoke us and now pretend nothing has happened?” the captain growled. “When will they be within SAM range?”
“This one and these two will be within range in four minutes if they do not change course.”
“Illuminate them with our missile control systems. Teach the bastards a lesson.”
The officer gave the necessary instructions, wondering who was being taught what. Two thousand feet above one of the B-52’s was an EC-135 whose computerized electronic sensors were recording all signals from the Soviet cruiser and taking them apart, the better to know how to jam them. It was the first good look at the new SA-N-8 missile system.
Two F-14 Tomcats
The double-zero code number on its fuselage marked the Tomcat as the squadron commander’s personal bird; the black ace of spades on the twin-rudder tail indicated his squadron, Fighting 41, “The Black Aces.” The pilot was Commander Robby Jackson, and his radio call sign was Spade 1.
Jackson was leading a two-plane section under the direction of one of the Kennedy’s E-2C Hawkeyes, the navy’s more diminutive version of the air force’s AWACS and close brother to the COD, a twin-prop aircraft whose radome makes it look like an airplane being terrorized by a UFO. The weather was bad—depressingly normal for the North Atlantic in December—but was supposed to improve as they headed west. Jackson and his wingman, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bud Sanchez, were flying through nearly solid clouds, and they had eased their formation out somewhat. In the limited visibility both remembered that each Tomcat had a crew of two and a prise of over thirty million dollars.
They were doing what the Tomcat does best. An all-weather interceptor, the F-14 has transoceanic range, Mach 2 speed, and a radar computer fire control system that can lock onto and attack six separate targets with long-range Phoenix air-to-air missiles. Each fighter was now carrying two of those along with a pair each of AIM-9M Sidewinder heat-seekers. Their prey was a flight of YAK-36 Forgers, the bastard V/STOL fighters that operated from the carrier Kiev. After harassing the Sentry the previous day, Ivan had decided to close with the Kennedy force, no doubt guided in with data from a reconnaissance satellite. The Soviet aircraft had come up short, their range being fifty miles less than they needed to sight the Kennedy. Washington decided that Ivan was getting a little too obnoxious on this side of the ocean. Admiral Painter had been given permission to return the favor, in a friendly sort of way.
Jackson figured that he and Sanchez could handle this, even outnumbered. No Soviet aircraft, least of all the Forger, was equal to the Tomcat—certainly not while I’m flying it, Jackson thought.
“Spade 1, your target is at your twelve o’clock and level, distance now twenty miles,” reported the voice of Hummer 1, the Hawkeye a hundred miles aft. Jackson did not acknowledge.
“Got anything, Chris?” he asked his radar intercept officer, Lieutenant Commander Christiansen.
“An occasional flash, but nothing I can use.” They were tracking the Forgers with passive systems only, in this case an infrared sensor.
Jackson considered illuminating their targets with his powerful fire control radar. The Forgers’ ESM pods would sense this at once, reporting to their pilots that their death warrant had been written but not yet signed. “How about Kiev?”
“Nothing. The Kiev group is under total EMCON.”
“Cute,” Jackson commented. He guessed that the SAC raid on the Kirov-Nikolayev group had taught them to be more careful. It was not generally known that warships often made no use whatever of their radar systems, a protective measure called EMCON, for emission control. The reason was that a radar beam could be detected at several times the distance at which it generated a return signal to its transmitter and could thus tell an enemy more than it told its operators. “You suppose these guys can find their way home without help?”
“If they don’t, you know who’s gonna get blamed.” Christiansen chuckled.
“That’s a roge,” Jackson agreed.
“Okay, I got infrared acquisition. Clouds must be thinning out some.” Christiansen was concentrating on his instruments, oblivious of the view out of the canopy.
“Spade 1, this is Hummer 1, your target is twelve o’clock, at your level, range now ten miles.” The report came over the secure radio circuit.
Not bad, picking up the Forgers’ heat signature through this slop, Jackson thought, especially since they had small, inefficient engines.
“Radar coming on, Skipper,” Christiansen advised. “Kiev has an S-band air search just come on. They have us for sure.”
“Right.” Jackson thumbed his mike switch. “Spade 2, illuminate targets—now.”
“Roger, lead,” Sanchez acknowledged. No point hiding now.
Both fighters activated their powerful AN/AWG-9 radars. It was now two minutes to intercept.
The radar signals, received by the ESM threat-receivers on the Forgers’ tail fins, set off a musical tone in the pilot headsets which had to be turned off manually, and lit up a red warning light on each control panel.
The Kingfisher Flight
“Kingfisher flight, this is Kiev,” called the carrier’s air operations officer. “We show two American fighters closing you at high speed from the rear.”
“Acknowledged.” The Russian flight leader checked his mirror. He’d hoped to avoid this, though he hadn’t expected to. His orders were to take no action unless fired upon. They had just broken into the clear. Too bad, he’d have felt safer in the clouds.
The pilot of Kingfisher 3, Lieutenant Shavrov, reached down to arm his four Atolls. Not this time, Yankee, he thought.
The Tomcats
“One minute, Spade 1, you ought to have visual any t
ime,” Hummer 1 called in.
“Roger…Tallyho!” Jackson and Sanchez broke into the clear. The Forgers were a few miles ahead, and the Tomcats’ 250-knot speed advantage was eating that distance up rapidly. The Russian pilots are keeping a nice, tight formation, Jackson thought, but anybody can drive a bus.
“Spade 2, let’s go to burners on my mark. Three, two, one—mark!”
Both pilots advanced their engine controls and engaged their afterburners, which dumped raw fuel into the tail pipes of their new F-110 engines. The fighters lept forward with a sudden double thrust and went quickly through Mach 1.
The Kingfisher Flight
“Kingfisher, warning, warning, the Amerikantsi have increased speed,” Kiev cautioned.
Kingfisher 4 turned in his seat. He saw the Tomcats a mile aft, twin dart-like shapes racing before trails of black smoke. Sunlight glinted off one canopy, and it almost looked like the flashes of a—
“They’re attacking!”
“What?” The flight leader checked his mirror again. “Negative, negative—hold formation!”
The Tomcats screeched fifty feet overhead, the sonic booms they trailed sounding just like explosions. Shavrov acted entirely on his combat-trained instincts. He jerked back on his stick and triggered his four missiles at the departing American fighters.
“Three, what did you do?” the Russian flight leader demanded.
“They were attacking us, didn’t you hear?” Shavrov protested.
The Tomcats
“Oh shit! Spade Flight, you have four Atolls after you,” the voice of the Hawkeye’s controller said.
