Aboard the USS Acheson, as two white dots moved toward one another on the blue screen, became one, then disappeared, the voice came once, twice, four times in fifty seconds: “Aegis evaluates kill!” There was a cheer from combat control.
“Shut up!” commanded the officer of the deck. “We’ve just started.” From the USS Acheson, the last Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, and F-18 Hornets were being hurled aloft to meet the incoming bandits, but now it was recognized that the Forgers were being overtaken by thirty Fulcrum MiG-29Cs.
This changed everything. Burke, however, confident in his air commander’s ability, turned his attention to blips now indicating sub-fired SS-N-15s, the thirty-three-mile-range Siberian equivalent of the American SUBROC missiles, beginning their arcs toward the American fleet. Quickly he looked up at the TMS — track management system — that was capable of processing, parsing, and correlating up to fifty-five hundred images per half hour without backlog buildup — when there were no glitches. But readouts were going haywire, and Burke had to reply on the not-so-sophisticated backup “stand-alone” ASIC — at sea independent control — tracking and targeting system. It was enough to give him the sub’s approximate position, the sonar/prop recognition giving a computer image. It was a rough one but nevertheless showed a sub composite with bevelled sail sprouting a “five-stick” cluster: Park Lamp direction-finding loop, high frequency and radome masts, with search and attack periscopes. An Alfa II.
“Any change in their fleet’s position?” asked Burke, as antisub control, with even its SUBROC having a range of only forty miles at best, fired off two Loral Hycor MK-36 decoys, simultaneously playing out its SLQ-25 Nixie towed torpedo decoy.
“Change in their fleet position?” demanded Burke again.
“No, sir.”
“Range?”
“Thirty-five miles, sir.”
It was a strange world, Freeman surmised, where, air-locked against chemical and biological as well as conventional warfare, you sat in the eerie blue combat control center, never actually seeing your enemy except for a computer image. Burke calmly tried to refine overall strategy even as his task force threw missile for missile, the Siberian fleet still retreating, its subs’ positions becoming less and less certain in the din of props churning at flank speed, decoys and chaff adding to the countermeasures, the latter defending the American fleet yet also making it more difficult to locate the exact positions of the deadly Atlas. If these twenty-one-foot-long, ten-mile range, active/passive homing torpedoes, with their 1,250-pound warheads, travelling at forty-five knots, got through, the U.S. task force would be in a lot of trouble.
“Sir!” announced the OOD.
“Yes,” acknowledged Burke, his right hand reaching for the message, his eyes not straying from the deceptively calm blue light of the console left of him where he pressed the “Subord” key. He was checking on the status of his CATF— commander amphibious task force — Admiral Leahy, and the CLF — commander landing force — Freeman, aboard the Davis.
The message he was holding told him that a Truxtun CGM— guided-missile cruiser — the USS Prescott, had been hit. There hadn’t been any trace of a Prescott-bound missile either on the carrier’s TFCC board or aboard the Prescott. The CGM lay foundering, holed at the waterline below the forward 127-millimeter gun turret where a twenty-three-foot-long, eight-foot-wide gash was taking water. Through the hole, dying sailors could see the flashes of the aerial battle, tail exhausts seen as winks of light through the cruiser’s plates, peppered as though by a shotgun, on the starboard side. The fiercely burning ship soon lit up the carrier abaft of her where a roaring cacophony of blue flames and bleeding steam catapults indicated the Acheson’s flight deck as the last of the Strike Eagles took wing.
The Prescott was sinking and fast; the only ones able to leave her were those thrown into the water from the concussion, the sky above them banging, orange-white burst after burst lighting up one of the Ticonderogas like stuttering flashbulbs. The crew of the Sea King rescue chopper, hovering on station a mile off the carrier’s stern for pickup should any of the takeoffs go awry, had been impatient to go help the Prescott’s men in the water but only now, when all planes were aloft, could the chopper move toward the few men she could spot waving on the cruiser’s afterdeck and those yelling in the water in the penumbra of fire.
Most of the 575 men aboard the Prescott were already dead, the fires aboard her a crematorium. Those not killed by impact or suffocated by the toxic fumes from fires that had “flash-jumped” throughout the ship — twisted and buckled watertight doors offering no sanctuary — were now dying in a flaming oil slick off the starboard quarter. Others were killed as the white-hot tower supporting the air search and G-band navigation radars crumbled into itself like the skeleton of some enormous animal, sending showers of white-hot metal hissing into the sea.
The enemy aircraft were now closing, U.S. fighters engaging, the background a staccato of victors and vanquished, Fulcrums tangling with Eagles and Tomcats high above the Eagles with the added burden of trying to stop the Forgers. Burke ordered the furball chatter to be taken off PA, so that only the air commander and those immediately concerned could hear it, for fear it would interfere with the concentration of those still watching the enemy fleet. None of the Forgers had yet fired missiles, so the question was, what had gotten close enough, without being picked up either by sonar or radar, to take out the Prescott?
“Damn it!” said Burke, so softly not even the radar operator nearby heard it. “Patrol boats. Flares all quarters.”
“Flares all quarters, sir!” responded the OOD, and within seconds they had messages, confirming Burke’s suspicion, streaming in from every part of the fleet. There were swarms of patrol boats — foil-borne — reports of them closing difficult to hear above the cacophony erupting beyond the island of calm that was the USS Acheson’s TFCC — the sound of missiles, massed machine-gun and “pom-pom” AA fire reaching crescendos that drowned the men’s voices.
“Forty plus,” the OOD reported to Burke, the OOD suddenly thrusting his headset away from him, the crash of a missile hitting one of the American destroyers so loud he was deafened for several seconds and immediately ordered off the bridge, replaced by one Capt. Elias Wilkes, junior, a man whose career, although he had not come up through Annapolis, was about to take off. Realizing they were under close-quarter attack, Wilkes now hypothesized why the Siberian fleet had uncharacteristically “retreated” and why the subs, no doubt lying quiet, props stilled, had thus denied the U.S. passive-mode sonar their position. Suddenly he knew why they hadn’t turned.
“Mines, sir,” Wilkes told Burke.
Burke tried to suppress his alarm. Mines in choke points throughout the world — that was standard drill. Egress points, like La Perouse between Sakhalin and Japan, were no doubt already mined by the Siberians. This was understood. The U.S. and their allies — all the world’s navies — had long prepared their own egress channels for the defense of last resort. But here— hundreds of miles out from the nearest landfall of the Kuril Islands, an area well mapped and frequently patrolled by NATO’s navies? If Wilkes was right — though the small patrol boats couldn’t have done it, given their already-crowded decks-it certainly would explain the turning about of the fleet, suggesting that the mines had just been laid ahead of the Siberians. But no mine layers had been reported by SAT intelligence.