“Shoot on generated bearings!” came the order, and a pair of Spearfish jetted out for the hunt.
“Steady on this course,” he said, wanting to keep his fish on the wire as long as possible. When it seemed that they were running true, he came about in a sedate maneuver, and started slinking away to the west. A minute later they heard two explosions.
The River God was dead….
That sent the entire formation to running full out at 30 knots to the north, as the lone Z-9 on the ASW patrol turned southwest toward the stricken destroyer, flying low over the sea. It stopped, deployed dipping sonar, but had no contacts. Anson was creeping away, not sprinting, wanting to be as quiet as possible. After 20 minutes of patient searching, the Z-9 had found nothing. A lion had downed the wounded wildebeest, and then made a good escape.
It was the second Type 055 heavy destroyer that Drake had sunk, and his 5th kill of the campaign, making him an undersea Ace in anyone’s book. He was second only to Captain Samuel Wood on HMS Trafalgar, and had just edged out HMS Triumph, credited with two kills and two more hits that ended in ship sinkings in the Med. So Drake was well in the running for the top spot as he moved away south, disappearing into the gloom of the Arabian Sea.
Chapter 30
That ‘something’ Captain Simpson had ordered up for the Ras Karma airfield would rise from the sea at 14:15, coming out of the silos of the USS Ohio. A small strike package of 15 TACTOMs was ordered up from a position about 500, miles south of Socotra. There was one KJ-200 there working on a mechanical problem, and ten J-20’s roosting on the tarmacs, but six were scheduled for air cover operations.
Flying unseen to the southern shore of the island, the Tomahawks now maneuvered nap of the earth through the folded mountains south of the airfield. By the time they emerged from the wrinkled valleys and gullies, it was almost too late to stop them with those HQ-9’s. An ammo truck near the runway was flayed by shrapnel from a near miss and exploded. The Avgas tanks were damaged, the KJ-200 AEW plane and three J-20’s were smashed on the tarmac. When the small strike ended, there were fires burning near the one small runway access point, which was deeply cratered. Nothing more was getting off that field until those fires were extinguished and that hole repaired.
At sunset, the CAG reported to Captain Simpson that all planes were rearmed and ready for operations. In addition to those on the Roosevelt, more F-35’s would be available from the two Gators: Solomon Sea and Makin Island. That would double the GBU-53 count from 96 to 182, enough punch to really saturate any group targeted this time. At Thumrait air base in Oman, six more Strike Raptors were lining up for takeoff.
Combat at sea was all about saturation. There were times when Karpov had teased his foes with the speed and range of his Zircons, firing them in ones and twos to test enemy defenses, but if you really wanted to sink ships, you had to defeat a concentrated, highly accurate and lethal SAM defense first. This is why those initial rounds of combat between large fleets were often inconsequential. The defense was just too strong. This time out, Captain Simpson was rolling for all the marbles. He wanted to strike a definitive blow, and put enough harm on the enemy to compel them to withdraw.
The target of his morning strike had turned to rendezvous with an oiler to refuel the frigates, and had now become widely separated from the main body, which was cruising 180 miles to its west, and now passing Socotra Island. That eastern group had come all the way from Colombo and saw River God lightly damaged by a single GBU-53, until Captain Drake on the Anson found that ship and put it at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. The enemy TF had been engaged earlier, and seemed a natural target this time out for the prospect of getting kills.
“I don’t like the heading the main body is on,” said Simpson. “It looks to me like they’re moving towards our preferred port at Salaha. So this group to the east looks inviting. If we take that out, we open a direct route to Muscat, and if we move up there, we interpose ourselves between the main body and the Gulf of Oman. They have a lot of ships out there, and they’ll be needing fuel soon. If we block their route to Gwadar or Karachi in Pakistan, then they’ll have to use Aden or the Red Sea ports. We could bottle them up. So let’s get after that eastern group and see if we can clean their clock.
Twelve F-35’s sang the overture, moving in with GBU-53’s. While their attack had been defeated twice before, with only two minor hits registered, this time they got better results. FF Luzhou was hit three times and badly damaged, her engines compromised to leave the ship dead in the water. The frigate would sink that hour. DDG Feiyun also took three hits, and was soon fighting a bad fire amidships. FF Qingyan took a single hit that was just a scratch aft, and remained operational.
Yet those 96 bombs took the heart out of the collective SAM defense. DDG’s Yangwu was dry, along with the three remaining frigates. They were down to guns and chaff. Only type 52D class destroyers Baomin, Huantai, and the squadron leader, Tianlong had anything left, about 20 HQ-10’s each. In effect, that entire task force had been neutered defensively. While it retained offensive missiles, it had no defensive shield to allow it to get in range to use them. They immediately turned north for Gwadar, but their chances of getting there were slim. They were 750 miles away….
The F-14’s had been circling, awaiting tasking orders as a kind of reserve wildcard. Now they were ordered to fire their Slammers and LRASM’s, and when the air alert alarms rang again on the Chinese ships, the Captain of the Heavenly Dragon knew his squadron was in real trouble. The Slammers came in and pounded the destroyer Yangwu, pummeling it from bow to stern.
Then the twelve LRASM’s began to vector in, catching the already burning Feiyun on the right flank of the formation and blowing it to pieces. Six miles off its starboard side, DDG Anlan was hit next, her hull fatally compromised and the ship listing heavily in minutes. Then the big Fusu Class oiler took multiple hits, and erupted with a volcanic explosion of smoke and fire. The last two missiles retargeted to the frigate Baise, and it was doomed from the moment they locked on.
With those SAM defenses beat down to nothing, it was like bowling, with five of the eleven pins knocked down thus far in the strike—and there was more pain on the way. The six Strike Raptors out of Thumrait AFB in Oman had been standing by for tasking orders, and now they were vectored in to finish this attack. Their expanded weapons bays each carried 24 GBU-53’s, twice the hitting power of an F-35. The first two planes in that flight of six were able to target each of the six surviving ships with 8 bombs each.
Three were hit and burning, but the GBU often needed multiple hits to put enough damage on a ship to sink it. Merciless, the Raptors circled, lined up on the targets a second time, and the next two planes were ordered to fire. The four screening ships were targeted with eight bombs each, and the last 16 were reserved for the Heavenly Dragon.