PointOfHonor

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  * * * *

  The target square centered on the nearest of the threeSea Kings . It blinked from red to a solid green square, and a tone audible through the headphones and cockpit of theFalcon sounded.

  “I got tone! I got tone!” he shouted and thumbed the redFire button. The rocket motor on the left wingtip mounted Sidewinder ignited and accelerated from the side of the Falcon at better than three times the speed of sound.

  “Fox Two!”

  * * * *

  Kincaid felt the explosion before he heard it. He scrambled from his position and pulled a set of binoculars up to his face. Things were definitely deteriorating.

  The desert snapped into sharp focus and an angry black cloud mushroomed upwards from the desert floor. Through the shimmer, he could see a large helicopter pumping flares into the sky. They looked like angry aspirin tablets popping out the side of the helicopter and to the right of the craft.

  Kincaid shifted his position and said, “I count one, two—three Jolly Green Giants incoming.” He dropped the binoculars back to his chest. “Did you copy that?” he snapped.

  “You say three?” asked Burns.

  “Three!” Kincaid snapped.

  Burns hefted the RPG-7 rocket propelled grenade. It might not take a helicopter down, but with a little luck, it might even the odds. “I got the RPG. I’m moving for position,” explained Burns.

  “I’m gonna find myself a hole,” said Kincaid.

  * * * *

  Harper glanced up from main console and asked, “You hear that?”

  Hayes tossed the jerry can away. “We got big problems.”

  “Lieutenant, it’s time to leave.” Harper stood and fired a round into the console. The monitor burped back some flames and slid sideways on the table.

  Stillwell glared at him. “Where we going? It’s safer here than up there.” He jerked a thumb upwards.

  Harper shook his head. “Lieutenant, think about it. We’ve got three choppers inbound and a fast mover shooting at them. Those choppers have probably taken evasive action by heading for the desert floor. It’s getting close to the hottest part of the day, so what kind of missile do you think they’re using out there?

  “Radar homing?” Harper shook his head. “Too much ground clutter,” he explained. “They’re using heat-seeking missiles, and if you get close enough to the desert floor, how is the missile going to know whether it’s a hot rock or a hot engine at the terminal moment?”

  Stillwell concentrated on the words. Through his anger, the common sense assessment of their situation began to register.

  “The fast mover may get one of the choppers, but not all three. That’s too much to hope for. Besides, they’re coming to rescue these fine folks from the crazy Americans. We’d better be out of this hole by the time they land, or we’ll be taking up permanent residence.” Harper pulled his gas mask on and motioned Stillwell to do the same.

  Hayes tripped the timer on bombs wired to the HP-9000’s disk drive shelf. “Two minutes, Major.” He slid his mask in place.

  Harper motioned to the three technicians and said through the mask, “You’ve got a choice: you can take your chances with the bomb, or you can go upstairs.”

  They scrambled and hobbled off the raised floor and towards the stairwell. Blood dribbled down legs, and they were beginning to wheeze as the nerve gas began to wrench at their consciousness. Harper waited till they got through the upper stairwell door before abandoning them. The technicians might not pass out, but they certainly would be out of the way for the moment.

  Harper, Hayes, and Stillwell started running for the air vents. The front door would just get too much attention.

  * * * *

  The doomedSea King turned to play chicken with a bullet. The Thiokol Hercules and Bermite Mk 36 Mod 11 rocket motor pushed the Sidewinder missile warhead towards a certain target at speeds approaching Mach three, and with the deadly certainty of an infrared seeker system perfected over the last forty years. It was one hundred ninety pounds of pure death.

  There was no possibility of visually sighting the missile with a five-inch diameter coming out of the sun, so the pilot guessed rather than knew. He jerked the yoke to one side, sending theSea King on a course sixty degrees from his axis of flight. Flares popped off the side of the helicopter as its engines attempted to drag two pilots and fifteen men from the incoming missile.

  Physics, space, and time worked against their effort. AJAX-3 had launched from a distance of less than three miles. The Sidewinder could cover the distance in less than fifteen seconds from a standing start, but the Sidewinder had the benefit of theFalcon’s airspeed to send it on its way. In essence, the Sidewinder was already flying at supersonic speeds when the rocket motor ignited and the seeker cone obtained an infrared signature.

  Technically, the missile never impacted theSea King . Instead, the nine-foot missile’s electronic brain determined that it and the target were within lethal blast proximity. The solid-state brain ignited the twenty-one-pound fragmentation warhead and sent a fatal blast into theSea King’s side.

  The blast toppled theSea King from a twenty-degree slant to something over ninety degrees. The helicopter seemed to jump away from the blast and then turn sideways in the air. The rotors were slicing vertically in the air, dragging the helicopter at an impossible angle towards the ground. Flames danced along the airframe. Some of the Republic Guard soldiers cartwheeled from the open sides of the fuselage.

  After an impossibly long moment, theSea King simply rolled completely over and died. It hit the hard desert floor like a broken toy. It was further flattened as gravity, speed, and mass combined to scattered broken bodies and helicopter pieces.

  * * * *

  Duri stared at the fallen aircraft and swung himself into the cockpit. “How much longer?” he shouted.

  The co-pilot spun in his seat. His eyes told Duri the man was close to the panic level. The Iraqi Air Force had not fared well against the Americans during the Gulf War. Things had not improved since the end of the war. Lack of flight time, training, and the confidence inculcated by anespritde corps produced tentative pilots.

  “How much longer?” shouted Duri.

  The pilot pulled his headphones off and snapped, “One more minute, Colonel. If we’re still alive.”

  Duri nodded. “You still need to strafe the ridges before you set us down.”

  The pilot pushed hard on the throttle and said bitterly, “In case it escaped your notice, one of our helicopters just got blown out of the sky. Now, we're deep inside the no-fly zone and it isn’t going to take that American pilot more than twenty seconds to turn and reacquire us as targets.”

  “Then I suggest you get us there quickly!” spat Duri.

  * * * *

  Burns scrambled to the top of a ridge holding the RPG-7 over his shoulder. He heard rather than saw theSea King . The smoke from the fallen chopper was rising off the desert floor. All too quickly, the downdraft from the secondSea King’s rotors found him.

  He spun to see the enemy. They were the proud remnants of a humiliated army, and for the first time, they had an American soldier in their grasp. The 7.62mm rounds ripped through Burns’ face and hands. The Kevlar vest and helmet absorbed multiple rounds. They slowed penetration, but the direct fusillade turned him into hamburger.

  Burns screamed an agonizing, “No!” and fell backwards off the ridge.

  Their victory was brief. TheSea King pilot never saw the HEAT round. It penetrated the Plexiglass air screen and exploded sometime after decapitating the pilot. A second round followed the first, and fire raged from the interior cockpit. TheSea King nosed forward, skidding down the ridge before landing on its side.

  The rotor blades dug into the rock and sand breaking off. The shattered blades spun into hundreds of metal shards. Captain Kincaid never felt a thing as one of the shards from the rotor sliced through his body armor. The air simply left his lungs and spun his body backwards. Kincaid never found a hole deep enough.
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br />   * * * *

  “EAGLE-7, EAGLE-7. I have launch warning. Repeat. I have launch warning!”

  The captain stared at the radar screen and murmured, “What have we stumbled on to?”

  The radar detector from AJAX-3 was uplinked to an orbiting satellite and bounced back to the computer systems on EAGLE-7.

  “EAGLE-7. I have launch!” The tone from the radar detector droned in the background.

  “Executing countermeasures.”

  The computer examined the wavelength of the captured radar signals, and reported AJAX-3 had come to the attention of a Russian made SA-11, known by its NATO designation ofGadfly .

  “Where’d that come from?” asked the Captain before adding. “They’re not supposed to have any of those.”Another one of Saddam’s surprises.

  The airman typed in a command on his keyboard and displayed the launch point. It lay between Baghdad and theSea King helicopters.

  “Isn’t that over the route the choppers took?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We got anything else close?”

  The airman shook his head, “Everything is at least five minutes away.”

  “AJAX-3, this is EAGLE-7. Break off attack. Repeat. Break off attack.”

  “What’s the speed and distance on that thing?”

  The airman popped a window up and a secondary display. “According to the book, range is somewhere around thirty-five klicks. Speed is anybody’s guess.”

  “Route him into Saudi territory and get a tanker to rendezvous with him. He’ll be running on empty by the time that missile runs out of gas.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * * *

  As the Harvest Flight missile climbed into the air over the Data Center, the countdown timer attached to the last two bombs inside the Data Center reached zero. Both explosive charges ignited above and below the racks of disk drives. The temperature at the explosion’s epicenter exceeded two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The plastic clamshell disk drive covers vaporized, and the harder polymer drive cases melted.

  The disk drive heads slammed into the drive platters, creating irreparable gouges on the media surface. The media platters, where so many secrets were kept, warped and sagged in the instant before it was ripped apart by the concussive effects of plastic explosives and petroleum vapors.

  The weakest point in the computer room was the ceiling. The floor rested on solid rock and walls made of reinforced concrete. The blast naturally funneled straight up into the Data Center’s office area. Cubical walls, terminals, and a great deal of paper provided the necessary fuel to complete the job.

  There were secondary explosions as the desktop PC screens began to cook off. All safety systems failed to perform their missions as a catastrophic system failure engulfed the Data Center, and important people throughout Iraq began to wonder why their database queries were taking so long today.

  A thick, greasy, black smoke began to filter throughout the upper level and find the exhaust vents. The HALON system finally activated, and flushed the oxygen from the lower level, but it was too late to save the charred and useless chassis skeletons. The damage was massive and complete.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Persian Gulf

  Monday, November 17, 1997

  3:00 P.M. (+3.00 GMT)

  TheSpringfield slid through the shallow depths towards the shatteredHan Class boat. Attached to the escape trunk was a forty-nine-foot steel pipe that looked like a torpedo on steroids.

  It was the DSRV-1Mystic (Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle) newly arrived in the Gulf from the United States Naval Support Facility on Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia is a horseshoe-shaped archipelago located in the British Indian Ocean Territory. It serves as the last link in the logistical supply chain that stretches around the world and connects the east and west coasts of the United States.

  It is the largest of fifty-two islands forming the Chagos Archipelago in the heart of the Indian Ocean. It was originally discovered and subsequently lost by the Portuguese during the early 1500s. It was claimed by France in the early 1700s, and remained a French possession until the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo when it became a spoil of war, in 1814 passing to the British Empire. Over the next one-hundred-seventy years, it remained a quiet and profitable copra oil plantation.

  The pressures of the Cold War, the dangers of the Indian bomb tests in the early 1970s, and the growing importance of the Gulf Oil States prompted a convenient agreement between the United States and Great Britain to use the island as a forward outpost. However, the true importance did not become obvious until the Shah fell from power in 1979. The ever so vital listening posts in Iran used to eavesdrop on the message traffic in the old Soviet Empire went the way of diplomatic sovereignty and the Carter administration.

  A massive effort to replace the lost intelligence assets was launched. In addition, the Cold War agreement between Ronald Reagan and the Red Chinese was implemented to place listening posts in northwest China. The Diego Garcia listening posts became the eyes and ears to keep tabs on a disintegrating Soviet Empire, an increasing hostile Indian subcontinent, and the ever troublesome Gulf Region. It also proved to be an excellent staging area for search and rescue, and naval support facilities. Thus, one of two of the Navy’s Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles came to a permanent base in the heart of the Indian Ocean.

  The DSRV was created in response to theUSS Thresher accident. TheThresher was lost with all hands in 1963 due to the application of diesel submarine standards to nuclear submarine requirements. The result was a catastrophic failure and the loss of a multimillion-dollar submarine. The Navy simply had no rescue capability to dive deep enough. Hence, theMystic and theAvalon were born.

  TheMystic is equipped with modern electronics, microprocessors, and fiber optic links to the pressure enclosed cameras. TheMystic is capable of diving to five thousand feet. It is powered by electric motors using silver/zinc batteries, and can manage four knots. It was precisely therescue tool needed to examine the wreckage on the bottom of the gulf.

  With little fanfare, theMystic drifted away from the larger, deadlierSpringfield. A bank of super bright halogen lamps snapped on, cutting the gloom at five hundred feet. The single shaft whirred into life, pushing the thirty-eight ton super hardened submarine towards the prize. Once clear of theSpringfield’s conning tower, she banked sharply and dove towards the dead Chinese submarine.

  TheHan was broken in half. The bow showed evidence of a single blast where the forward ballast tanks were ripped angrily outwards. The entire titanium frame seemed twisted like so many threads on a screw. The conning tower appeared to have splintered dumping pipes, wire, and antennae over the ocean floor. It looked a like a child’s Tinkertoy set scattered after a tantrum. The silence of death still lingered on the site, and the violent gouges on the bottom were silent reminders of theHan’s death spiral.

  So far, the fish remained distant from the newly arrived feature. It still held the dull, black, rubberized sheen of a functioning warship. The bright lights danced across unscathed patches on the hull. Here and there, a hint of orange or yellow beckoned towards the open water, but the four ADCAP torpedoes had secured this gravesite to its final resting place on the bottom. There were no lights, or electronic hum, or machine noises.

  Nothing penetrated the gloomy silence where the404 came to rest on its final voyage. No letters home or final messages—the404 had followed others under the sea, and this time the sea claimed its due. The deadly game of cat and mouse resulted in one less mouse.

  Andy Hawkins brought theMystic towards the open torpedo hatches on the bow. Behind him, a bank of video recorders captured everything. The cameras were enclosed in pressurized capsules and mounted above and below the halogen light rack. A passive sonar array and radar system mapped the remains of the404 . An intelligence bonanza lay on the bottom, but speed was important. Items like codebooks, missile keys, launch systems, and electronic gear needed to be salvaged quickly.

  Lucy Rabin slid b
ack in her chair and started tapping on one of several computer keyboards located inside theMystic’s hull. While the DSRV was officially a Navy boat, Andy and Lucy worked directly for Louis Edwards. Diego Garcia was as much an intelligence listening post as it was a Navy Support Facility. The world had become a much more devious place with the fall of the Soviet Empire, and the proliferation of additional blue water navies made the possibility of additional naval accidents greater. Louis Edwards was a man who argued probabilities, and the404’s unfortunate demise vindicated the expense of training Andy and Lucy.

  The nuclear reactor had not ruptured. There was some additional radiation, and in the coming months, it would become a problem, but for the moment, the hardenedMystic would protect its crew against the hazardous atom.

  “Would you look at that?”

  Lucy turned to the color monitor canted down above the pilot’s seat. Andy fished a fiber optic video probe through the ruptured torpedo tube causing it to slither through the outer and inner hatches. There on the racks were three Chinese torpedoes still secure to their racks. The fourth, having been fired, was missing.

  “The weapon techs are going to love this. See any manuals?”

  Andy wiggled the joystick on the console, revealing the crushed remains of two crewmen. They must have forgotten to close the outer hatch once they fired the torpedo. It appeared the inner hatch ruptured and a pillar of seawater smashed into the cramped weapons room as solid as forged steel. “At least, it was quick,” whispered Andy.

  Andy pulled the probe away from the macabre scene and spooled the wire back into its housing. He pulled the mission folder they had received and reviewed en route to the site.

  “Any idea where the other half of the boat is?”

  Lucy examined the magnetometer. “According to the sonar tape we listened to, it sounded like they were attempting to blow ballast tanks just prior to the first explosion.”

  “Yeah, the sonar guy didn’t think the first torpedo actually hit the boat,” said Andy. It was hard to believe anything had missed, considering the mess before them.