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.