The flight deck of USS United States came alive. A small army of people in brightly colored shirts swarmed around the airplanes that packed the deck as the flight crews manned up and started engines.
Light from the setting sun came in at a low angle like a bright spotlight, illuminating,the towering cumulus which dotted the surface of the sea, and made everyone facing west squint or shade their eyes.
Soon the plane guard rescue helicopter engaged its rotors and lifted off the deck as the first airplanes began taxiing toward the bow and waist catapults.
Aboard USS Hue City and USS Guilford Courthouse, the two Aegis cruisers on station in the Florida Straits, the afternoon had been a busy one. Twenty-five miles of ocean separated the two ships, but they were linked together electronically as tightly as if they were wired together at a pier.
As the Hercs and EA-6Bs taxied at Key West, and United States prepared to launch her air wing, the weapons officers aboard the cruisers checked the ships’ inertial systems one more time, compared the GPS locations yet again, then gave the fire order.
The first of the Tomahawk missiles rose vertically from their launchers on fountains of fire. The wings of the missiles popped out, then the missiles began tilting to the south as they accelerated away into the evening sky.
The first missiles from each ship were still in sight when the second ones came roaring from the launchers. Each ship launched sixteen missiles, then turned to stay in the race-track pattern they had been using to hold station.
Sitting in the Combat Control Center aboard United States, Jake Grafton felt the thump as the first bow catapult fired. A second later he felt the number-three cat on the waist slam a plane into the air. His eyes went to the monitor, which was showing a video feed from a camera mounted high in the ship’s island superstructure. Each catapult stroke was felt throughout the ship as the planes were thrown into the sky, one by one.
A half dozen planes were still on deck awaiting their turn on the catapults when the destroyers in the carrier’s screen began launching Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The television cameraman in the ship’s island swung his camera to catch the fireworks. The picture captured the attention of the people in Combat, who paused to watch the missiles roar from their launchers on fountains of reddish yellow fire, almost too brilliant to look at.
When the last of the missiles was gone, the camera returned to the launching planes.
Gil Pascal said to Jake, “It’ll go well, Admiral.”
Jake nodded and took another sip of water.
The sun seemed to be taking its good ol’ time going down, Lieutenant Commander Marcus Gillispie thought.
He was at the controls of an EA-6B Prowler that had just launched from United States. He had worked his way around towering buildups reaching up to 10,000 feet and was now above them, looking at the evening sky. The last of the red sunlight played on the tops of the clouds, but the canyons between them were purple and gray shading to black. As Gillispie climbed he delayed the sun’s apparent setting for a few more minutes. Soon the last of the red and gold faded from the cloud tops below.
A very high cirrus layer stayed yellow and red for the longest time as Marcus circled the carrier at 30,000 feet. Two F/A-18 Hornets came swimming up from the deepening gloom to join on him.
“You guys all set?” Marcus asked his three crewmen.
His crewmen counted off in order.
The Prowler was the electronic-warfare version of the old A-6 Intruder airframe. While the Prowler bore a superficial resemblance to its older brother, the electronic suite in the aircraft could not have been more different: the Prowler was designed to fight the electronic battle in today’s skies, not drop bombs.
The airframe was also longer than the old A-6, lengthened to accommodate four people and a massive array of computerized cockpit displays. The people sat in ejection seats, two in the front, two in the back. Only one of the crewmen was a pilot, who sat in the left front seat: the other three were electronic-warfare specialists. And they were not all men. One of the guys in back tonight was a woman, a lieutenant (junior grade) on her first cruise.
Marcus looked at his watch, then keyed his mike. He waited while his encryption gear timed in with the ship’s gear, then said, “Strike, this is Nighthawk One. I have my chicks and am ready to leave orbit. Request permission to strangle the parrot.”
“Roger, Nighthawk One. Call feet dry.”
“Wilco.”
Marcus Gillispie rolled the Prowler wings level heading northwest for the city of Havana. Then he engaged the autopilot. When he was satisfied that the autopilot was going to keep the plane straight and level, he flashed his exterior lights, then turned them off, leaving only a set of tiny formation lights illuminated on the sides of the aircraft above the wing root. Finally he reached down and turned his radar transponder, his parrot, off. The Prowler and the two Hornets on her wing were no longer radiating on any electromagnetic frequency.
The pilot looked back past his wingtips at the Hornets. One was on each wing now. Like the Prowler, their missile racks were loaded with HARMs. The Hornets also carried two Sidewinders, heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, one on each wingtip, just in case.
Already the displays in the Prowler were alive with information. The electronic countermeasures officer, ECMO, in the seat beside the pilot, was really the tactical commander of the plane. His gear, and that of the two electronic-warfare officers in the back cockpit, provided a complete display of the tactical electronic picture. The information the computers used was derived from sensors embedded all over the aircraft in its skin, and from the sensors of one of the HARM missiles, which was already on line.
The ECMO with Marcus Gillispie was Commander Schuyler Coleridge, the squadron commanding officer, who wound up in the right seat of Prowlers because his eyes were not quite 20/20 uncorrected when he graduated from the Naval Academy. The truth of it was, he thought he had the better job. Pilots, he liked to say, just drove the bus — ECMOs fought the war.
He had one to fight tonight. The Cubans were going to get really riled when those Tomahawks started popping, he thought, and then the fireworks would start.
Just now Coleridge was busy running his equipment through its built-in tests. Everything was working, as usual. That routine fact was the greatest advance of the technological age, in Coleridge’s opinion. In his younger days he had had a bellyful of fancy equipment that couldn’t be maintained.
He was sweating just now, even though the cockpit temperature was positively balmy. And he knew his fellow crewmen were sweating — this was the first time in combat for all of them.
It will go all right, he thought. After the tension he had suffered through this afternoon and evening, Schuyler Coleridge actually welcomed the catapult shot. Let’s do it and get it over with.
All four of the squadron’s EA-6Bs were aloft just now, and the other three also had pairs of Hornets attached.
As Coleridge looked at the search radars sweeping the Cuban skies, he wondered if there were going to be MiGs.
“Okay, people,” Coleridge told his crew, “let’s go to work.”
A search radar on the southern coast of Cuba drew his attention. The signal was being received by the HARM sensors, which routed the electronic signal through the plane’s computer and displayed it on the tactical screen.
Coleridge checked his watch. “Any second now,” he muttered to his crewmen.