The P-15’s onboard analogue based electronics were primitive by Western standards and its radar sensor a basic conical scanning device; but the object of the exercise was to produce a large number of practical, working missiles as soon as possible rather than to perfect technologically state of the art weaponry at some indeterminate future date. Early models had been powered by a turbojet — the Styx was, after all no more than a much enhanced, modified homing V-1 type system — made many times more lethal by a decade of advances in electronics and rocketry.
Fuelled with highly acidic liquid propellant which started aggressively corroding the missile fuselage the moment it was loaded, the P-15 had a launch weight of 2,340 kilograms, a maximum speed of just short of the speed of sound and an effective range of about forty kilometres. Because of the rudimentary nature of the mechanisms injecting propellant into the main rocket motor and the booster slung under the P-15’s belly, even operating at extreme range there would always be a significant amount of unburned fuel in the missile when it reached its target. Taking advantage of this incendiary design by-product, the warhead, a half-ton hollow charge located behind the fuel tank in the weapon’s nose, would always detonate with an enhanced fuel-air blast. Activated at approximately eleven kilometres from the target the P-15’s homing system was programmed to descent at a terminal attack angle of between one and two degrees to the horizontal.
The P-15 was not infallible, quite the opposite in fact.
However, employed against a single target that had had no inkling of an imminent attack, that had no operative ECM — Electronic Counter Measures — on line, or working chaff launchers installed with which to fill the atmosphere with alternative radar noise and targets, the known fallibilities of the P-15 would be largely untested.
In the Operations Room of the Cassard the radar repeaters and the constantly updating gunnery director plot showed the two P-15s — launched within less than two minutes of each other — streaking unerringly towards the target.
High on the bridge of the destroyer lookouts saw the first flash of the huge fuel-air detonation on the southern horizon; counted the seconds to the second strike knowing that they had already hit their enemy.
The track of the following P-15 merged with that of the target and disappeared; but there was no visible second explosion.
Following the letter of his orders the commander of the Cassard turned his ship’s bow to the north and demanded full power. Within minutes the two French warships were creaming away into the night while far to the south their victim lay dead in the water.
Most likely sinking.
Chapter 54
The mood overnight had been one of grim resolution. If the news from the Mediterranean that HMS Hampshire had been attacked without warning and seriously damaged with heavy loss of life was bad; the subsequent intelligence confirming that the attack had been carried out by a pair of French destroyers was of a wholly deeper shade of black.
It transpired that the activities of the ‘Ajaccio Squadron’ had been sporadically monitored by high-flying Canberra photo-reconnaissance aircraft operating from Malta, and occasional electronic eavesdropping flights by one of the two Avro Shackleton anti-submarine and maritime reconnaissance turboprop aircraft based at Gibraltar, since the Battle of Malta. These over flights had not been mandated because anybody seriously contemplated that the small French flotilla based on Corsica was any kind of threat; but in response to the Provisional Government of South France’s surprise declaration of a no fly zone over former French territory.
The Prime Minister had been informed that the ‘A’ class submarine HMS Alliance had actually been lurking submerged five miles off Ajaccio, when the Surcouf and the Cassard had slipped their moorings and gone to sea on 31st May. The submarine had been there by chance, her captain having determined to test his crew and his command by operating close inshore for three successive nights, before moving to a patrol area further up the Corsican coast. Although unable to identify either ship by name T-47 class destroyers had distinctive acoustic signatures, enabling Alliance to report that two of the three T-47s based at Ajaccio had put to sea and headed south east at fourteen knots. Alliance had made no attempt to shadow the destroyers; even running at her best speed on the surface she had no chance of keeping up with them, and had continued with her planned evolutions, maintaining a watching brief off Ajaccio Bay.
A hurried analysis of several of the most recent Canberra high-altitude photographs had revealed that at least one of the T-47s was undergoing, or had recently undergone, major modifications to her after superstructure; presumably only to her upper works because it was known that neither of the main dry docks in Ajaccio had been used since the October War. Until then nobody had attached priority to examining what might have been going on in Ajaccio. Expert photographic reconnaissance and naval intelligence analysts were in critically short supply and there was a host of other apparently more immediate ‘threat vectors’ demanding attention.
Or that at least was Peter Christopher’s trenchant explanation as he was cast in the role of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s senior ‘military expert’ on the spot in New Bedford overnight.
The Prime Minister had been somewhat ‘testy’ about the ‘Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean’ having been caught by surprise by ‘latest this outrage’. It had fallen to the twenty-seven year old most junior Captain in the Royal Navy to have to remind Margaret Thatcher that Admiral Cleary, the commander of the United States Sixth Fleet had more ‘electronic countermeasures and surveillance capability in a pair of the USS Independence’s Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft, than Air Marshall French at Malta possessed in the ‘whole Mediterranean’. This was a slight exaggeration but he had already learned that half-measures were wasted on his political mistress. Margaret Thatcher had not been amused to be so rudely acquainted with reality; she had however, albeit with bad grace, bowed to it.
‘Why on earth don’t we have those sort of aircraft?’ She had asked.
“I don’t know,’ Peter had confessed. ‘Perhaps, it is because we spent the money on other things? Or we couldn’t afford it?’
Afterwards, he could have sworn the Angry Widow quirked a momentary smile. It might have been his imagination because within minutes she was dictating vitriolic cables to Oxford demanding answers to questions to which Peter Christopher suspected there were no answers.
More information had trickled in during the small hours of the morning.
The Hampshire’s captain had done the only thing he could have done in the circumstances. He had called for maximum revolutions and thrown the big guided missile destroyer into a violent figure ‘eight’ evasion pattern. That is, turned one circle with the wheel hard over to port and then reversed course to starboard to prescribe another circle, and so on.
It seemed that several men on the destroyer’s upper had had the presence of mind to fire off every emergency and signal flare they could lay their hands on in an attempt to ‘distract’ the incoming missiles.
Of course, none of this helped in the least.
‘Styx,’ he had concluded soon after reading the first reports. ‘This thing was huge. Much bigger than anything we’ve got on the drawing boards or practically everything the Americans brought into service before the war.’