CARRIER 3: ARMAGEDDON MODE

Unfortunately for the Kreml, when the missiles were within five hundred meters of the carrier’s stern, the ship’s hull itself blocked the line of fire for two of the guns.

Still, the fire was effective. At two miles’ range, one Sea Eagle was struck simultaneously by twin streams of projectiles. Traveling at 1000 meters per second, the heavy rounds chewed through the missile like rocks through tissue, shredding electronics and control surfaces and scattering debris across the water. In the last instant, the remaining fuel on board ignited in an orange fireball.

A second missile exploded an instant later, followed by a third, twin detonations that momentarily flattened the surface of the water with dual shock waves.

ARMAGEDDON HOOE

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The guns kept firing. One missile veered off, and men another. Either their guidance systems had malfunctioned or they’d been decoyed by chaff. Another missile, one fin blasted away by a grazing shot, fell into the sea like a leaping fish and vanished.

The guns of a pair of escorts came into play. The destroyers Vliyatet’nyy and Moskovskiy Komsomolets were cruising within sight of the Kreml, less man two miles away, and both turned their own CIWS on the missiles as they streaked in from the horizon. Without intership coordination such as that provided by Aegis, however, the help was too little and too hue. One more missile exploded half a mile from the carrier. Vliyatel’nyy was tracking another speeding black-and-red missile when it vanished behind KremTs hull, and high-velocity 30-mm rounds slashed into the aircraft carrier’s waterline.

Captain Soni’s tactical error was most apparent for die last couple of seconds. Four missiles remained hi the air, but for the last few tens of meters the ship’s stem blocked three of the guns that had been firing at them. Only the AK-630 mounted on Kreml’& fantail could still bear.

It managed to knock down one of them.

Two missiles slammed into the Kreml from astern, one entering the fantail walkway close alongside the AK-630 mount and tunneling deep into the passageway leading into the bowels of the ship before exploding. The second missed the stem and passed along the ship’s right side, too close to the hull for the starboard CIWS turrets to bear. It struck close to the waterline aft of KremTs island, but the angle was too oblique to cause detonation. The missile slammed off the steel plating and fell into the sea.

The blast from the first Sea Eagle engulfed the ship’s stem, sending smoke and flame belching from the stem, the concussion warping two of KremTs propeller shafts. The earner shuddered, sending men on her deck to their hands and knees. Hies began in a dozen places: the ship’s machine shops, a paint kicker, a jet engine service area. Choking smoke wreathed through the carrier’s bowels as fire alarms shrieked warning.

Damage was bad, but not fatal, not yet. Soviet damage control parties, while not as well-trained or well-coordinated as their American counterparts, were able to seal off the damaged areas in short order and begin flooding the fires with water and foam.

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Ketth Douglass

The third missile, however, was far more deadly than the first. Following well behind the first two, it approached the carrier just as the blast wave erupted from the Soviet carrier’s shattered fantail. Like a stone skipping on water, it was deflected high into the air and sent skimming above the Kremi’s ramp and across her crowded flight deck. The warhead smashed into parked Yak-38MP Forgers and navalized Su-27 Flankers in a close-spaced row along the ship’s starboard side. One hundred fifty kilograms of high explosive detonated among closely spaced aircraft, all fueled and armed for the coining strike against the Indian supply lines ashore.

Hell descended on the Kreml’s flight line in flame and noise and hurtling death as the fireball writhed into the sky. The forward half of a Forger, furiously ablaze, cartwheeled across the deck and landed squarely on a Su-25 Frogfoot loaded with cluster bombs parked alongside the island. Fuel and ordnance went up together with a clattering roar like a Chinese New Year’s celebration, blowing out windows on the carrier’s bridge and Primary Flight Control. The blast sent deck crewmen skittering and tumbling across the deck as though swept away by a gigantic broom. R-60 air-to-air missiles, the AA-8 Aphids slung from Yak-38 wings, ignited, snapping across the deck on streamers of white flame. Explosion followed explosion followed explosion, a chain of interlocking blasts that rocked the carrier and sent.a pall of greasy black smoke two miles into the sky.

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