The watch officer had the air boss on one line held up to his right ear, the handler on the phone at his left, and the airborne aircraft howling over tactical about the scene unfolding beneath them. He made his first command decision: He broke the Hornet off tanking and vectored him to bingo at Hickum along with the Tomcats. With as much air power as they were about to be launching, he had no time for taking onboard empty, winchester aircraft. The tanker reported in that he had enough fuel to stay airborne for another cycle, as well as enough in stores to support at least the first wave of fighters.
As they watched, a cloud of dust and fury rose up from the deck of the transformed aircraft carrier. Two of the Harriers, one on each end of the ship, shuddered, tilted in an ungainly fashion, then heaved themselves up into the air. As they fought off gravity, they started sliding forward, quickly gaining speed and altitude as they transitioned from take-off configuration into full flight mode.
“No, no,” Batman said, then toggled the mike to Navy Red on. He cleared his throat, then said, his voice husky, “CinCPac, this is Jefferson. Be advised that you have enemy aircraft inbound.” CinCPac’s reply was muffled by the noise inside TFCC, but everyone could see the horror on the admiral’s face. “Wings dirty, sir. From here, it looks like they’re carrying a full loadout of land attack missiles. I’ve got fighters inbound on them, but they’re in a bad tail chase.”
“The Air Force — ” the watch officer heard, then had to turn his attention back to the tasks at hand.
“If they’re not airborne now, they’ll be too late,” the TAO said quietly. “They’ll catch them on the ground, just like — ” he broke off, clearly unwilling to give voice to the words that were in everyone’s mind.
Just like last time.
“Those SEALs, sir — they’re still on the ground,” the watch officer said. “Do you want me to try to raise them?”
Admiral Wayne shook his head. “Stay focused on getting my airwing loaded out and in the air. If anybody’s got a chance out there, it’s Murdoch and his men. And as for knowing what’s going on — well, I think they’re about to find out. The hard way.”
TWO
Along the waterfront, the piers were crowded with ships making stopovers enroute deployments, ships returning from the Middle East, ships on Pineapple Cruises, the slang name for a cruise to Hawaii. Not all were combatants — each battle group traveled with at least one, and sometimes more, underway replenishment ships. While there’d been some propositions to tether the unrep ships to theaters and treat them as theater resources rather than as part of a battle group, nothing substantive had changed yet in the way they deployed.
Onboard the combatants, in-port officers of the day were just now hearing the horrifying news being spread over the secure Navy Red battle circuit. For many of them, the first notice they had of trouble was air raid sirens groaning to life then lifting up their voices in an eerie wail. At first, most of them thought that it was a routine test of some sort, although a few older veterans immediately turned pale and raced to combat stations.
Each ship had no more than a third of its crew aboard, and in some cases, only one fifth of its crew. In theory, at least, each duty section held enough varieties of ratings and officers to get the ship under way in an emergency.
In theory. The reality was far harsher.
Still, to their credit, the majority of the officers of the day took only a few moments to understand what was happening. They immediately dispatched their operations specialists to Combat, hauled out the keys that would activate the automatic, self-contained close-in-weapons systems, and started bringing up the massive complex of computer systems and firing equipment that would enable them to launch anti-air missiles. Two ships, realizing that neither had sufficient personnel onboard to light off either one, transferred all their engineering personnel to one ship along with their operations specialists, leaving the damage-control ratings onboard.
For the most part, the ships were drawing shore power and their engineering plants were in standby. All were either gas turbine or diesel engine driven, steam plants having long given way to more efficient means of propulsion. The gas turbine ships required only five minutes to light off, while the diesels took slightly longer. Both types of engineers skipped at least eighty percent of the safety measures contained in their light-off instructions.
As the engineering plants came online, each ship was simultaneously lighting off combat systems, drawing on the shore power supplied by massive cables running from a main patch panel to the pier and commercial power. The electrical load quadrupled within the first two minutes, then doubled again. Within the base, the generators screamed in protest. One dumped offline, and the others followed shortly.
But the base power crew was just as motivated as the ships crews themselves. Pearl Harbor itself had no anti-air missiles, no Patriot batteries, no way of defending itself other than the power and might of the ships nestled up to her piers. The shore engineers slammed in battle shorts, ran their generators at 150 percent of rated capacity, and somehow managed to restore the vital flow of electrons to the ships. The break in power lasted only twenty seconds, but it was enough to trip all the ships’ combat systems offline. The light-off procedure had to be started all over.
Four minutes after the air raid siren shattered their world, the first ship, the fast frigate USS Louis B. Puller, pulled away from the pier. The lines were severed by axes by the boatswains mates when they realized that there was no one left on the pier to cast them off. The first fast frigate moved smartly away from the pier, twisting on her bow thrusters as she ran missiles out on her launch rails. Although more nimble than the larger cruisers and destroyers, the FFG carried a much shorter-range missile than the later weapons’ blocks on her larger sisters. Still, twenty-five miles of missile was enough to make a difference.
Lieutenant Brett Carter stood in the center of Puller’s Combat Direction Center, wondering if he’d just made the greatest mistake of his life. As the command duty officer, he certainly had the authority to get the ship under way in an emergency without the captain or the executive officer, but he was quite certain that neither of them had even conceived that it would be required.
He’d had only seconds to decide what to do as the news came blasting over the secure circuits, and in the first few moments the terrifying photos he’d seen of Pearl Harbor after the Japanese attack were all that he could think of. The Navy had learned the hard way that ships in port might as well be counted dead in the event of attack.
Carter had taken almost twenty seconds to make his decision, enough time to hear the first rumble of explosions and see fire on the horizon. Then in a calm voice that did not reflect the panic in his gut, the young lieutenant had gotten his ship under way, declared weapons free, designated the first hostile target, and authorized the launch. Even though his fingers trembled, he turned the key that energized the weapons-release circuits.
Looking behind the ship now, he could see smoke billowing up from the pier at which they’d been moored. He felt a flush of relief — whatever consequences he would face on his return to port, he knew in that second that he’d made the right decision. Had he waited for any of the ship’s senior officers or for permission from another source, his ship would right now be fighting fires onboard — or sinking — rather than powering up to launch weapons in anger.