As the Tornado climbed through 120 feet, the systems operator powered up his own surface-search radar. Establishing a targeting lock, he gave his Exocets a look at their prey. As the "Missile Ready" lights went green on his ordnance panel, he called a launch warning to his pilot and pressed the release keys.
The first four-and-a-half-meter-long missile unshackled and fell away from beneath the wing. Ten feet beneath the aircraft, a braided wire lanyard snapped out the last safety pin and the Exocet's rocket engine ignited with a flair of orange flame. At one-second intervals, the other three missiles carried by the flight dropped and fired. Trailing streamers of milky smoke, they blazed away into the distance.
Within the CIC, the tracking teams called it out.
"Contact Delta is executing a pop-up maneuver… Tornado fire-control radars lighting off…. Active seeker heads! We have active seeker heads!… Missile launch!… Confirm multiple Exocet launch!… Missiles closing the range!… Impact in twenty-eight seconds… twenty-seven… twenty-six…"
Amanda Garrett's voice rang sharply clear over it all.
"Initiate full-spectrum stealth and ECM! All weapons systems commence firing!"
Throughout the CIC hands slammed down on actuators, unleashing the Duke's arsenal of physical and electronic firepower.
Dixon Beltrain had been standing by, poised over the armed firing triggers of his Main Tac Ops console. At his captain's word, he hit the launch sequence of the first ESSM flight.
Up on the Cunningham's foredeck, the slender, eleven-foot length of the first missile lanced into the air, hurled out of its storage cell by the gas charge of the Vertical Launch Array's coldfire system. Clear of the weather deck, its motor ignited, hurling it on its way in a boosted high-g arc to the north. With machine-gun rapidity, the three other rounds in the quad-pack canister followed.
The ESSM (Enhanced Sea Sparrow Missile) was a descendant of the original NATO Sea Sparrow surface-to-air interceptor system, crossbred with technology taken from the U.S. Air Force's AMRAAM (Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile). Like its predecessor, it was compact, reliable, and lethal.
The Argentine Tornadoes had reversed course instantly after releasing their ordnance, sweeping their wings back and lighting off their afterburners in a desperate supersonic dash back to the horizon and safety. They activated their internal ECM jammers and spewed chaff and anti-IR flares into their wakes to throw off the swarm of Mach-4 killers overtaking them. The element leader succeeded; the wing-man failed.
Steered into position by the gathering beams of the Duke's fire-control system, the ESSMs pitched over and dove. Seconds later, the trailing Panavia caught the sledgehammer blow of a missile hit. Its upper fuselage shattered, the big fighter-bomber plowed into the sea, its high speed and minimal altitude not granting even the fragment of time necessary for a clawing hand to reach an ejector seat handle.
Even as the Tornado was destroyed, a second battle was being joined — what Winston Churchill had once referred to as "the wizard war": the death struggle of the black boxes.
The Cunningham's Wetball system came fully active. Derived from the Ironball stealth paint developed by the United States Air Force, the Duke's exotic polymer hull coating held billions of microscopic iron spheres in suspension. By shifting the polarization of these metal particles at ultrahigh frequencies and in irregular patterns, incoming radar waves could be distorted and dispersed.
Aboard the departing Aeronaval Atlantique patrol plane, systems operators watched in amazement as the Cunningham's return faded off their scopes like a snuffed candle flame.
Other defensive systems engaged as well. Decoy launchers, like old-style K guns, hurled foxer pods off the destroyer's stern quarters. Some of these burst open upon striking the ocean's surface, ejecting a fast-inflating mylar balloon that carried a false radar target into the sky. Others bobbed upright in the wave troughs and extended waterproof antenna, broadcasting impulses that might be mistaken for the electromagnetic signature of a Cunningham-class destroyer by a simpleminded guided missile.
The Duke's own defensive radars jittered wildly up and down their frequency spectrum, shifting operating channels a score of times a second to throw off homing antiradar guidance. Scanners hunted down the Argentines' operational radio and radar channels, and linked cascade jammers flooded them with electronic white noise. Seduction jammers spawned a flotilla of false radar targets around the Cunningham's true position, blending them with the chaff clouds and flare clusters being scattered by the RBOC launchers.
The advanced-model Exocets responded in kind with counter-counter measures. Burning in at transonic velocity, a bare ten feet above the wave tops, their guidance packages cycled rapidly between active radar, passive radar homing, and infrared modes, cross-referencing the data inputs to try to penetrate the clutter and seek out the real target.
Despite their sophistication, two of the four missiles were overwhelmed in seconds, staggering away in cybernetic confusion. One of the remaining pair, by sheer chance, chose to fixate on the faint, true, ghost image of the Cunningham amid all of the ECM chaos. The last locked on the thermal flare of sunlight reflecting off the Duke's bridge windscreen. Stubbornly, they continued to close the range.
Dix Beltrain watched the sparks of light crawling across his tactical display. They looked just like the symbols he had battle managed in a thousand combat simulations. There was a difference, though. These were no computer-generated simulacra. These were the actual weapons boring in to kill his ship and his shipmates… to kill him. He tried to control the tremor of his fingers as he dialed up the second ESSM flight.
He drew the date wand and prepared to designate the next set of targets. He found his eyes being drawn back to the track of the Exocets, now only inches away from the Cunningham's position hack. Abruptly, he stabbed downward with the glowing tip of the wand, encapsulating the incoming missiles in targeting boxes. He slapped the firing keys again, not recognizing until a heartbeat later the catastrophic error he had committed.
A second flight of Enhanced Sea Sparrows blazed out of their launch cell. However, before these rounds had even reached the peak of their booster climb, the Exocets were cutting underneath the interceptor missiles. The ESSMs pitched over at an ever-increasing angle, vainly attempting to acquire their targets. They failed, and the salvo plunged, wasted, into the sea.
The secondary lines of defense engaged. The RBOC launchers shifted from decoy to concealment mode, trying to bury the ship in the heart of a concealing chaff cloud. Fore and aft, the two Oto Melara "Super Rapid" mounts opened fire, spewing out their streams of 76mm shells at a rate of a round per second, seeking to blanket the incoming Exocets with proximity-fused airbursts.
Amidships, atop the superstructure, the portside Phalanx Close-in Weapons System came on-line. An advanced Mark II model of the original General Dynamics "Sea Whizz," the single Vulcan 20mm Galling gun of the first-generation weapon had been replaced by a battery of four 25mm rotary-breech cannon and augmented with quad clusters of RAM light surface-to-air missiles mounted on either flank of the squat, stealth-sheathed turret. A fully autonomous robotic system, it required no human input beyond its activation.
Now, as it perceived the incoming threats with its millimeter-wave radar and infrared trackers, its artificial-intelligence circuits coldly assessed the possibilities. Opting for missile engagement, it salvoed four RAMs at the closest Exocet.
Two miles out, the heat-seeker rounds bracketed and killed their target, whipsawing the lead AM-44 with a shotgun blast of fragmentation and tumbling it into the sea in a flurry of spray.