That he had not been told things that would have been useful–well, he had to admit, that was a reasonable security measure … if one accepted the fact that one was not supposed to survive. The realization did not bring a chill along with it. He had accepted that possibility a long time before, and if his distant brother could have fulfilled his mission in Baghdad, then he could fulfill his own in Washington. But he would try to survive if the chance offered itself. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there?
CLEARLY, THEY WERE still figuring this operation out, Kemper told himself. In 1990-91 there had been the luxury of time to decide things, to allocate assets, to set up communications links and all the rest. But not this time. When he’d called for the AWACS, some Air Force puke had replied, “What, you don’t have one? Why didn’t you ask?” The commanding officer of USS Anzio and Task Force 61.1 hadn’t vented his temper at the man. It probably wasn’t his fault anyway, and the good news was that they had one now. The timing was good enough, too. Four fighter aircraft, type unknown, were just rotating off the ground at Basatin, ninety miles away.
“COMEDY, this is Sky-Two, we show four inbounds.” The data link came up on one of the Aegis screens. His own radar couldn’t see that far, because it was well under the horizon. The AWACS showed four blips in two pairs. “Sky, COMEDY, they’re yours. Splash ’em.” “Roger–stand by, four more coming up.”
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“HERE’S WHERE IT gets interesting,” Jackson told them in the Sit Room. “Kemper has a missile trap set up outboard of the main formation. If anybody gets past the -16s, we’ll see if it works.”
A THIRD GROUP of four lifted off a minute later. The twelve fighter aircraft climbed to ten thousand feet, then turned south at high speed.
The flight of F-16s couldn’t risk straying too far from COMEDY, but moved to meet the threat in the center of the Gulf under direction from the AWACS. Both sides switched on their targeting radars, the UIR force controlled by ground-based sets, and the USAF teams guided by the E-3B circling a hundred miles behind them. It wasn’t elegant. The -16s, with their longer-ranging missiles, shot first, and turned away as the southbound Iranian interceptors loosed their own and tried to evade. Then the first group of four dived down for the water. Jamming pods went on, aided by powerful shore-based interference, which the Americans hadn’t expected. Three UIR fighters, still heading in, fell to the missile volley, while the Americans outran the return volley, then turned back to reengage. The American flight split into two-plane elements, racing east, then turned again to conduct an anvil attack. But the speeds involved were high, and one Iranian flight was now within fifty miles of COMEDY. That was when they appeared on Anzio’s radar.
“Cap’n,” the chief on the ESM board said into his microphone, “I am getting acquisition radar signals, bearing three-five-five. These are detection values, sir. They may have us.”
“Very well.” Kemper reached to turn his key. On York-town and Normandy the same thing happened. The former was an older version of the cruiser. In her case, four white-painted SM-2 MR came out of the fore and aft magazines onto the launch rails. For Anzio and Normandy nothing changed visually. Their missiles were in vertical launch cells. The SPY radars were now pumping out six million
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watts of RF energy, and dwelling almost continuously on the inbound fighter-bombers, which were just out of range of the cruisers.
But not out of range for John Paul Jones, ten miles to the north of the main body. In the space of three seconds, her main radar went active, and then the first of eight missiles erupted from her launch cells, rocketing skyward on columns of smoke and flame, then changing direction in skidding turns to level out and burn north.
The fighters hadn’t seen Jones. Her stealthy profile had not shown as a real target on their scopes, and neither had they noticed the fact that a fourth SPY radar was now tracking them. The series of white smoke trails came as an unpleasant surprise when the pilots looked up from their own radar scopes. But two of them triggered off their C-802s just in time.
Four seconds out from their targets, the SM-2 missiles received terminal guidance signals from the SPG-62 illumination radars. It was too sudden, too unexpected for them to jink clear. All four fighters were blotted out on massive clouds of yellow and black, but they’d managed to launch six antiship missiles.
“Vampire, vampire! I show inbound missile seekers, bearing three-five-zero.”
“Okay, here we go.” Kemper turned the key another notch, to the “special-auto” setting. Aegis would now go fully automatic. Topside, the CIWS gatling guns turned to starboard. Everywhere aboard the four warships, sailors listened and tried not to cringe. The merchant crews they guarded simply didn’t know to be scared yet.
Aloft, the F-16s closed on the still-intact flight of four. These were also antiship-missile carriers, but they’d looked in the wrong place, probably for the decoy group. The first group had seen a close gaggle of ships. The second hadn’t yet, and never would. They’d just turned into the signals of the Aegis radars to their west when the sky filled with down-bound smoke trails. The four scattered. Two exploded in midair. Another was damaged and tried to limp back northwest before he lost power and went in, while a fourth, missed entirely, reefed into a left turn, punched burner, and jettisoned his exterior weapons load.
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The four Air Force F-16s had splashed six enemy fighters in under four minutes.
Jones got one of the sea-skimmers on the way by, but none of them had locked into her radar return, and the resulting high-speed crossing targets were too difficult to engage. Three of four computer-launched attempts all failed. That left five. The destroyer’s combat systems recycled and looked for additional targets.
They’d seen Jones’?, smoke and wondered what it was, but the first real warning that something was badly wrong came when the near trio of cruisers started launching.
In Anzio’s CIC, Kemper decided, as O’Bannon had, not to launch his decoy rockets. Three of the inbounds seemed aimed at the after part of the formation, with only two at the lead. His cruiser and Normandy concentrated on those. You could feel the launches. The hull shivered when the first two went out. The radar display was changing every second now, showing inbound and outbound tracks. The “vampires” were eight miles away now. At ten miles per minute, that meant less than fifty seconds to engage and destroy. It would seem like a week.
The system was programmed to adopt a fire-control mode appropriate to the moment. It was now doing shoot-shoot-look. Fire one missile, fire another, and then look to see if the target had survived the first two, and merit a third try. His target was exploded by the first SM-2 and the second SAM self-destructed. Normandy’?, first missile missed, but the second nicked the C-802, tumbling it into the sea with an explosion they felt through the hull a second later.
Yorktown had an advantage and a disadvantage. Her older system allowed launches directly at the inbound missiles instead of forcing the missiles to turn in flight before they could engage. But she could not launch as fast. She had three targets and fifty seconds to destroy them. The first -802 splashed five miles out, killed by a double hit. The second was now at its terminal height of three meters, ten feet over the flat surface. The next outgoing SM-2 missed high, exploding harmless behind it. The following missile missed as well. The next ripple from the forward
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launchers obliterated that one three miles out, filling the air with fragments that confused the guidance of the next pair, causing both to explode in the shredded remains of a dead target. Both of the cruiser’s launchers swiveled fore and aft and vertical to receive the next set of four SAMs. The last -802 passed through the spray and fragments, heading straight into the cruiser. Yorktown got off two more launches, but one faulty missile failed to guide at all, and the other missed. Then the CIWS systems located on the forward and after superstructure turned slightly, as the vampire entered their targeting envelope. Both opened up at eight hundred yards, missing, missing yet again, but then exploding the missile less than two hundred yards off the starboard beam. The five-hundred-pound warhead showered the cruiser with fragments, and parts of the missile body kept coming, striking the ship’s foreright SPY radar panel and ripping into the superstructure, killing six sailors and wounding twenty more.
“WOW,” SECRETARY BRETANO said. All the theoretical stuff he’d learned in the past weeks was suddenly real.