CARRIER 10: ARSENAL By: Keith Douglass

large-screen display. It showed that the quad launcher was silent and

passive. “Now.”

The launcher shuddered once, then a thick cylinder emerged, its pointed

nose slowly emerging, followed shortly by the seventeen-foot body. As

it popped out, cruciform fins unfolded from both the centerline and the

booster section. It seemed to take forever for the missile to

launch.

As it cleared the launcher, the missile picked up speed. It arced

straight up, cleared the ship within seconds, then tipped over at a

lesser angle.

“One away.” The technician’s voice was jubilant. “Successful launch;

all stations report no damage. Captain.”

“Very well.” He waited for a few more seconds while the missile

remained visible on the remotely controlled television camera, then

shifted his gaze to the large-screen display. The potent SPY-1 radar

had already picked it up as a target, and was tracking it on its

northwesterly course. The SPS-64 surface search radar also held

contact on its intended target, a small coastal command and control

communications ship owned by the Cuban navy.

“I’ll be on the bridge.” The captain unbuckled himself from the seat

and strode quickly forward and up to open air.

He was just in time. A flare of light on the horizon, followed by a

pressure wave of sound, washed over the ship. Fire spiked into the

sky, then quickly died out as the sea ate the remains of both missile

and ship.

“It worked,” the OOD murmured. “Oh, boy, did it work.”

The captain turned a stern eye on him. “You didn’t doubt it would, did

you?” From his superior’s tone of voice, the junior officer could

never have guessed that his captain was just as relieved as he was.

“I’ll be in Combat.” The captain chided himself for his break from

discipline in running out on the bridge to watch the first attack.

Still, it would be his only opportunity the rest of the missiles were

after targets too far away to be observed by the naked eye. Any sense

of achievement would come only after aircraft armed with TARPS overflew

the land sites for battle damage assessment.

The Tomahawks took longer to launch, but six of them still left the

ship in a rapid ripple of noise, fire, and smoke.

The ship shuddered as tube after tube shot out the lighter, land attack

missiles.

Each Tomahawk was of the TLAM-C variety, configured with a conventional

warhead of high explosives. It was capable of achieving speeds in

excess of five hundred knots, and cruised at an altitude of fifty to

one hundred feet above the sea, making it a difficult target to detect

at long range.

It could be launched over two hundred and fifty nautical miles away

from the target, and used a combination of digital sea mapping area

correlator radar along with optical viewing of the target area for

terminal flight. For these missiles, the target package took them on a

slight detour to the east to insure that they cleared the inbound

fighter raids.

“And now we wait.” And if that were news, the captain thought. If

there’s one thing every sailor in every navy learned how to do, it was

hurry up and wait.

0450 Local (+5 GMT) Hawkeye 601

“The atmosphere’s lousy with the shit,” the E-2C radar intercept

officer complained. “They’ve got more radars on that island,

especially on top of that mountain range, than we’ve got on all the

aircraft out here. Just try to get through that stuff.”

“Well, we’re going to have a little help this time. It’s not all up to

the Prowlers,” the other RIO responded. “And here it comes.”

His radar screen lit up with a barrage of sharp green blips tracking

rapidly to the east, then veering in mid-flight back to the west. They

were traveling at four hundred knots at first, then quickly adding

another hundred to reach Mach .75. “Good thing we’re up so high. We’d

never see them otherwise.”

“And the Cubans aren’t going to see them until its too late, either,”

the other RIO said. He leaned back in his chair and stretched his

feet, trying to work a kink out of his neck.

“Nice to have somebody else doing the nasty work for a change.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *