Gator, if I ever get out of the Navy, I’m going to invent a fuel line that spools out from the carrier and runs straight up to those bastards.
Thirsty little motherfuckers you can’t even run a strike without giving them time to suck down the fuel.”
“Lightweights,” Gator agreed. “Can’t even carry enough bombs to do any serious damage. But that’s what we’re here for. Anyway, you wanna get the rest of us headed in? The Tomcats are a little slower we can start and the Hornets will catch up.”
“Roger.” Bird Dog flipped the communications switch to tactical.
“Okay, people, let’s make it happen.” He heard Gator moan in the background. He’d catch hell back at the carrier later for his lack of circuit discipline, but for the moment, he didn’t care. It was his plan, his mission, and he was about to see it work. One disgruntled captain hell, even a pissed-off admiral!couldn’t change that.
Behind him, the Tomcats broke up into groups of two, flying a close formation in tight station-keeping circles.
Once they left the sponge, the area where an attack force clustered to meet unexpected threats or to wait for ingress onto a target, they’d break into high-low pairs, one taking station at altitude to back up the lead down lower. It was a method of aerial combat that the Americans had perfected as no one else in the world had.
Finally, the last gas-sucking Hornet was ready. “Better get inbound before they have to go again,” Bird Dog grumbled. He gave the signal over tactical.
Twenty minutes until feet dry, the transition from flying over water to flying over ground. But before that happened, it all went according to plan “Got the first one,” Gator said suddenly. “Solid radar contact on contact breaking off from USS Arsenal.”
“Good blackshoe,” Bird Dog said approvingly. “Take your shot we’re next.”
In addition to its vertical launch system for Tomahawks and antiaircraft missiles, the USS Arsenal had two four-missile Harpoon assemblies on either side of the ship. The longrange antiaircraft missiles, originally developed for launch against surface Echo 2-class Soviet missile submarines, were thick cylinders tapering into a pointed nose, wind and control surfaces folded during its storage in the selfcontained launch box and popping out after it was ejected with pressurized air. It was controlled from Combat using the Harpoon shipboard command and launch control set (HSCLCS, pronounced “sickles”). It was a fire-and-forget missile, and a potent anti ship threat.
“We’ve never fired one, except in tests,” the captain remarked to no one in particular. No one answered. This was the first of many first launches for the Arsenal, and proving the operational capabilities of the Harpoon from it was almost as important as validating its land attack capabilities.
The captain watched the small camera screen mounted to the left of the 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.
“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.
Especially when it’s not the Air Force.”
“Especially not the Air Force,” the first RIO echoed.
Dealing with the Wild Weasel missions and anti radiation strikes by the Air Force always proved to be a complicated matter of coordinating communications and commands. Not that they were incompetent, mind you just different.
“Deep dive,” the first RIO announced. “And we should see … ah, yes.