by Larry Bond
To the south, the land rose gradually, decked with vineyards and bright yellow sunflowers. His farm, now run by his sons, and those of his neighbors were to the north. Cows grazed placidly in small pastures, cropping the grass beneath fruit trees.
The Liboge farm wasn’t a large place, just a few dozen acres. The farmhouse was two hundred years old, built by his ancestors. He resembled the house, square and gray and a little weather-beaten, but strong and solid. There were thousands of farms like Liboge’s in France, and thousands of farmers as well.
He fished, enjoying the soft, muted light as it crept into the Loire valley. First there were shapes where there had been only darkness, then the shapes had shadows, and finally color blossomed, spilling east with the rising sun.
Liboge sat quietly content. He’d already caught several fine fish. Now all he had to do was decide between staying out on the river while they were biting and rowing back to start his chores. Church bells pealed in the distance. The village priest was summoning his congregation to early morning mass. The old fisherman cocked his head to listen and smiled lazily, knowing his wife would be furious if he missed the service. Then he shrugged. God would understand. After all, had not Saint Peter himself been a fisherman? And had not God made this perfect day and the fish who seemed so eager to strike at his lures?
A sound, something between a roar and a whine, shattered the morning’s peace. He looked up from his rod just in time to see a dark shape race past him, only a few dozen meters above his head. Surprised, he dropped his rod, fumbled for it, and gripped it tightly just as another went by. A third followed the first two only seconds later.
This time his eyes tracked the slender, finned shape as it flew down the length of the valley, neatly turning to follow the winding river as it passed over an old abandoned windmill.
A fourth made the same turn in exactly the same place, and another after that. In all, Liboge counted twelve of the missiles — because that was what they must be. He had seen enough aircraft during the war, and these were simply too small to hold a pilot.
They were flying east, up the river. France was at war again. Were these enemy weapons? If so, at least his own village was safe.
After the last missile disappeared to the east, Liboge put down his tackle and grabbed his small boat’s oars. Rowing quickly, he headed for the dock. He would tell the mayor. Yes, the mayor would surely know what to do.
The Tomahawk cruise missiles flew in single file, hugging the river valley. Landmarks like the ruined windmill were useful checkpoints for each missile’s guidance systems as it matched stored images of the landscape with what it actually saw.
All twelve of these missiles, fired from a single U.S. submarine a hundred miles off the Atlantic coast, followed the same route. Normally they would have been split into smaller groups — flying two or three separate paths to reduce the risk of interception. But the men who had planned this mission in London were swamped. They had only had time to lay out one track for each target.
In this case, it didn’t matter. EurCon radars, even the American-built E-3s in French service, couldn’t pick out the twelve tiny, RAM-coated missiles hugging the river valley. Most of France’s eyes were turned east or north anyway.
When they were seen by farmer Liboge, the first Tomahawk was just four minutes from its target. It continued to use the Loire as a highway, flying just high enough to clear the occasional bridge or other structure on its banks.-
Ten miles from Tours, the cruise missile banked sharply right, then climbed for a moment to fix its position one last time against the landscape. This time, the scene included its target, a Thompson-CSF factory complex. Part of a massive French defense conglomerate, this site was responsible for the manufacture and repair of fighter radars.
Each Tomahawk’s specific aiming point had been picked by an American industrial expert — a man who had years of experience in building and running similar facilities. Asked to select twelve vital locations from satellite photos, he’d marked the production line, parts storage, critical machine-tools sheds, and other areas.
Carrying a thousand-pound warhead, the first missile slammed into the plant’s executive offices. The explosion and fire that followed did not destroy radar components themselves. They wrecked something even more important — the computers containing the factory’s design data and manufacturing records. Their loss would cripple any attempt to resume production.
One after the other, the eleven Tomahawks trailing behind it popped up and then dove into the factory complex. Successive blasts gutted the plant and shattered windows all over Tours.
By the time the twelfth warhead detonated, three of the factory’s five vast buildings were reduced to piles of mangled steel and shattered concrete. The other two were burning. Dozens of highly skilled workers lay dead or badly injured in the rubble. Although it was early morning and a Sunday to boot, three shifts had been working night and day to supply EurCon’s military needs.
Led by Desaix and his cronies, France had already bloodied half of Europe trying to bring it under EurCon control. The United States wanted the French people to know they would pay the price for their government’s aggression.
An American reconnaissance satellite passed overhead later that morning. The images it data-linked down allowed intelligence analysts to report that Thompson-CSF’s Tours facility had been eighty percent destroyed. Reconstruction time was estimated at six months for the first production line alone. Bringing the full plant back into operation would take the French at least three years and cost tens of millions of dollars.
Liboge’s report of the missiles he had sighted reached the French Air Force about the same time that damage assessment photos were laid on the President’s desk in Washington, D.C.
THE NORTH SEA, NEAR WILHELMSHAVEN, GERMANY
In addition to being a major commercial port and shipyard, Wilhelmshaven was Germany’s largest naval base on the North Sea coast. While Germany’s small missile boats functioned well in the Baltic, the wilder, rougher weather of the North Sea demanded bigger, more capable ships. For that reason most of the German Navy’s frigates and destroyers were based there.
It also made the Germans very protective of this valuable port. Constant fighter and helicopter sweeps above the water were matched by patrolling submarines and minefields below the water.
Germany’s naval staff was confident of Wilhelmshaven’s defenses. A combination of interceptors, SAMs, and antiaircraft guns had already driven off one abortive American air raid against the base, inflicting what were reported as heavy losses on the enemy.
Now ships sheltering inside the protected port would be used to strengthen other areas along the coast. The minelayer Sachsenwald, escorted by two frigates and two minesweepers, had been ordered to lay a new barrier across the Elbe River mouth, near Cuxhaven and the western entrance to the strategically and economically vital Kiel Canal. The canal connected the Baltic with the North Sea. In addition, Germany’s second largest city and most important port, Hamburg, lay only seventy kilometers up the Elbe.
While the shoreline hinted at easy access to the river, the actual shipping channel was long and narrow. Silt filled the rest of the bay, forming shallows barely covered with water. That narrow entrance made it easy to “lock the front door” with a mine barrier.
With an entrance and exit route known only to Germany’s own harbor pilots, a defensive minefield would make any naval attack on Hamburg or the Kiel Canal, by stealth or strength, a risky undertaking.
Defensive minefields are an important, if low-profile, part of naval warfare. Mines, even sophisticated modern ones, are cheap, never sleep, and are very hard to remove. They have been used for over a hundred years. When Farragut damned the torpedoes and ordered full speed at Mobile Bay during the American Civil War, he was actually referring to Confederate-laid mines. Farragut’s Union ships had broken past those primitive mines and captured the port. Germany’s naval commanders doubted the American admiral’s
successors would find it easy to duplicate his feat.
With the sun gleaming on their gray camouflaged superstructures, the five German warships sortied out of the Jadebusen, through the wide mouth of the bay. They were careful to stay not just in the buoyed channel, but in a special passage marked on their charts. Wilhelmshaven had its own large defensive minefield.
The minesweepers led the way. Using ultrahigh-frequency sonars, they swept the channel for enemy mines that might have been laid by submarines or aircraft during the past several days.
Sachsenwald followed, flanked on either side by guided missile frigates. With their sonars and radars energized, they would screen their charge from air, surface, or submarine attack. This was not a job for stealth or concealment. This close to home they could count on a lot of help if they came under attack.
Just to be on the safe side, an antisubmarine helicopter crisscrossed the formation’s path, dipping its sonar into the water for periodic searches. Even the fighter patrols orbiting high overhead followed racetrack patterns that kept them close to the group.
Proceeding at fifteen knots, the formation steamed northeast for four hours, crossing in front of the Weser River mouth and Bremerhaven on their way to the Elbe. The German warships actually had to go out a fair distance into the North Sea to clear the shallows, before they could make the turn back toward Cuxhaven.
Nothing menaced them during the short voyage. Once they rounded the western point of the river’s mouth, the covering force spread out while the minelayer went to work.
Sachsenwald was an old ship, but minelayers don’t need fancy sensors or weapons systems. She was fitted with the latest navigational gear, and her capacious holds carried almost a thousand SAI moored mines. Steering a slow, straight course, her sailors planned to spend the entire day rolling the deadly devices out ports in her stern. Each would be dropped as part of a carefully predetermined pattern, weaving a deadly and nearly impenetrable web.
When the conflict started, the British submarine Ursula had been in port. Acting under orders issued by the admiralty, her crew had worked rapidly to off-load some of her Tigerfish and Spearfish torpedoes and to replace them with a smaller but equally deadly cargo — Stonefish mines.
Ursula had sailed from its Scottish base that same night and arrived off the Elbe four days later — intact and undetected despite a few close brushes with EurCon ASW patrols. The same shallow seas that hampered British and American sub-hunting efforts cut both ways.
Creeping in on her whisper-quiet electric motor, the small submarine had maneuvered in close to the German coast, crowded by the shallows and bucking the currents at the river’s mouth. The same eddies that made it difficult to maneuver, though, helped hide her from enemy sonar. The mix of fresh and salt water where the Elbe met the North Sea further confused the sonar picture.
With her tubes loaded with mines instead of torpedoes, Ursula had moved along a preplanned track — firing them one after another during an hour-long, nerve-racking cruise down the main shipping channel. Then, its mission accomplished, the British submarine had crept out by the same way it had come, with no one the wiser.
One of those Stonefish mines now lay in Sachsenwald’s path.
Other German ships had already come near the mine as it lay half-buried in the mud on the channel floor, but each of them had been rejected as a potential target by the microchip in its brain. Most had been fishing craft or patrolling gunboats. A pressure sensor measured their wake as they passed, and spurned them as too small. Several vessels — mostly freighters and barges — were large enough, but the mine’s acoustic sensor rejected them because they didn’t match the sound signatures loaded in its memory.
One of the ships the Stonefish had ignored was a minesweeper towing a magnetic and acoustic sweep. Although the German vessel’s minehunting sonar passed right over it, the mine lay off to one side, not directly beneath the ship. Its plastic construction and rubberized coating didn’t return much of an echo, and it was missed.
Now Sachsenwald approached. She was on the third leg of her pattern, plowing through the river mouth’s choppy waters at twelve knots. The destroyer-sized pressure wave she created fulfilled the mine’s requirements, and the sounds her diesel engines made matched a set loaded into its memory. The weapon waited. There was still a chance that this enemy ship would not approach within lethal range.
The noise of Sachsenwald’s engines grew and grew. When the acoustic sensor’s calculations said it was close enough to inflict damage on the target, the mine armed itself. But it didn’t detonate yet. Although the German minelayer was only about seventy meters away, the noise level was still increasing as she drew nearer.
Sachsenwald plowed on, her twin mine chutes dropping packages at precise intervals. The mine listened, sensing but not understanding the thrum of the propellers and the clattering of her engines.
She passed ten meters to port and started to open the distance.
The Stonefish’s sensors picked up the drop in noise level and triggered the fuse.
Five hundred kilograms of PBX, half a ton of modern explosive, detonated on the seabed just thirty-two meters away from Sachsenwald’s steel hull.
The violence of the explosion knocked the ship almost all the way onto her port side. A massive column of dirty water shot fifty meters high into the air before cascading down on the heeled-over minelayer with crashing force.
Anyone standing was instantly thrown to the deck, or into a bulkhead. The shock was hard enough to break bone. It also knocked dozens of pieces of machinery and electronic equipment out of commission as it rippled through the hull. The ship’s screws, turned slightly toward the mine, were both shattered, and the propeller shafts were twisted out of true. Worst of all, both diesel engines, massive multiton blocks of steel, were torn off their foundations and slammed into bulkheads.
As the force of the explosion whipped through the minelayer it sprung the seams on several hull plates. Some of her structural members were broken and a spot on the hull nearest the blast was dished in. The ship’s keel was actually bent, wrenched out of alignment. But Sachsenwald was still watertight. Her hull was not breached.
The worst result was fire. Diesel fuel pipes, cracked by the shock and still under pressure, spewed a fine mist into the engineering compartment. The minelayer had righted itself, and was starting a roll in the other direction, when a spark ignited the fuel-air mixture. Another explosion rumbled through the ship, killing every man in engineering instantly.
Those of the bridge crew who could stand were getting up when they heard and felt the thunder aft. A quick glance back confirmed their worst fears. A wide, dark column of black smoke billowed high above their ship. Flames licked red and orange deep in the heart of the smoke.
Sachsenwald’s captain, sitting on the deck with a broken ankle, ordered damage control teams into action on the double. He had already determined to fight for his ship’s life as long as she was above water. He had no choice. If the fire burned out of control, no one abandoning ship could possibly get far enough away in time.
But the fire was already out of control. Ruptured bulkheads had allowed the flames to reach the mine hold aft. Broken in a dozen places, its automatic sprinkler system couldn’t put out enough water to keep the mines cool.
Only a fifth of Sachsenwald’s mines had been laid, so the compartment was still packed to capacity. Heated to near-red heat by the flames roaring through the hold, several of them “cooked off,” detonating and starting a chain reaction. SAI mines were smaller than the British Stonefish, but there were eight hundred of them aboard the minelayer — more than sixty tons of high explosive crammed together in a small space.
Sachsenwald disappeared in a wall of water, fire, smoke, and hurtling debris — shredded by a stuttering series of explosions, each big enough to have wrecked the ship by itself. Separate blasts followed each other so closely that they were almost indistinguishable. It took almost forty-five seconds for all the mines to ex
plode.
Several were blown clear and burst in midair, or in the water after they landed.
The shock wave roaring outward from the fireball and smoke cloud was strong enough to rock the furthest ship, Koln, a Bremen-class frigate nearly three kilometers away. Pieces of Sachsenwald’s shattered hull cascaded onto her deck, smashing radar and radio antennas and killing several sailors caught out in the open. All of the minelayer’s escorts were damaged by flying debris.
There was worse to come.
While racing to the scene, Bayern, the other escorting frigate, fell afoul of another of Ursula’s Stonefish mines. Gutted by the resulting blast, she also sank. Unlike Sachsenwald, though, some of her crewmen survived.
MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, PARIS
Some years ago, the Defense Ministry’s old basement storage areas had been gutted and replaced by a state-of-the-art situation room. Although not a true command center, the room did allow ministry officials, as well as the rest of the French national leadership, to see the big picture while still being close to their offices and the comforts of the capital.
The gleaming facility, filled with floor-to-ceiling color map displays and computer terminals, was the pride of French industry. High-ranking foreign visitors were often taken on tours, to showcase the technology that France might provide to them, for a price.
With most of the Confederation’s Defense Committee there, the room was crowded to capacity. French and German officers of all services filled the space, tensely discussing the unfolding events. Nicolas Desaix, flanked by Admiral Gibierge, sat in one of the elevated seats near the center.
They were watching a battle. Gibierge had alerted his superiors the evening before that the Combined Forces were moving.
