His crew in Combat was inexperienced, aside from a senior weapons technician chief petty officer. Men and women were filling two positions each, and the bridge crew was similarly shorthanded. Yet even operating at a dead run with a pick-up crew composed only of the on-duty watch section, the officers and crew operated as they were trained to do. Six minutes after the air raid siren, the first missiles leaped off her rails headed for the air radar contact that the USS Jefferson had designated as hostile in the LINK.
The missile arced out across the bay, searching for the target designated by the computers, talking with the ship in a quick rattle of digital positions and vectors, corrected its course slightly and bore in on the lead aircraft. It was virtually a head-to-head shot, and the targeting required the utmost in precision. The young third-class petty officer who’d actually fired the missile from the ship had never done so alone, apart from a few training simulators. He watched his screen, saw his missile — his missile — acquire the target on its own seeker head and streak across the video terminal. His foot danced out a nervous rhythm on the deck, and he never even realized that it seemed much more like the video games he’d been playing just two nights ago than actual combat.
In the two minutes it’d taken to get the missile off the rails, the lieutenant OOD had had time to get scared. As luck would have it, he was the junior-most OOD among the ships in port, and already the more senior OOD’s were howling over tactical, each trying to clear his ship of the traffic and avoid a collision while still launching missiles. Fortunately for the FFG, she was well clear of the channel, and her OOD had made the wise decision to run like hell while firing and get the hell out of the way of the cruisers.
Commercial shipping and fishing vessels crowded the port and channels, and except for those who’d heard the air raid sirens, they were mostly unaware of what was happening. From their viewpoint, the Navy had simply gone insane, trying to get that many ships under way at once without warning the other natural denizens of the waterways that they were conducting some sort of drill. Most of the civilian masters were howling to the Coast Guard and Port Control authorities, demanding explanations, protesting the interference with their rights of way. By the time the first missile was launched, however, the Coast Guard, which monitored Navy Red, knew what was happening. The civilian ships were told to clear the channel. Immediately. Ground their vessels if necessary, but under no circumstances would the Navy yield the right of way to any other vessel.
Two Aegis cruisers were the next ones to work their way out of the pierside tangle, and they entered the main channel with missiles already gouting out of their decks. The vertical launch system, combined with a computer system capable of targeting almost three hundred enemy aircraft simultaneously, was the most potent anti-air system ever developed for a military service. Under normal circumstances, the two cruisers alone should have been able to eliminate every enemy aircraft onboard the disguised Chinese aircraft carrier.
Under normal circumstances.
Unfortunately, recent decisions within the Navy had put into place stringent protections to prevent U.S. Navy ships from firing on friendly units. These included certain geographic block-out areas that were programmed to not accept firing solutions within those geographic boundaries, as well as increased minimum firing ranges for the missiles each ship carried. By the time the cruisers rippled off the first wave of missiles, the Chinese aircraft were already within minimums. One missile rammed into an aircraft, but the others would not detonate.
Twenty-nine of the thirty Chinese jump jets survived. Another was picked off by the frigate. Twenty-eight arrived overhead in Pearl Harbor.
As soon as the last aircraft lifted off the deck, the Chinese carrier cut hard to the north, headed straight in for the coastline. Behind her, the amphibious assault vessel was launching its own contingent of aircraft, as well as a tanker. They remained overhead, loaded out with air-to-air missiles, as protection against the fighters from the aircraft carrier.
They need not have worried, at least not right away. The Jefferson’s assets were concentrated on the enemy aircraft heading for the coast. The battle group had seen the aircraft carrier empty her decks.
Well below the waterline, Chinese sonar technicians had heard the ghostly, drawn-out voices over Gertrude, and had managed to triangulate the transmissions from the submarine. A linguist was perched on a high stool next to the console, holding on to the metal desk beside him to keep from slipping across the steeply canted deck as the aircraft carrier turned. He listened to the transmissions, then quickly translated the words that came over the unclassified circuit.
The final firing solution was not particularly refined. The submarine knew the danger of using Gertrude, and had transmitted only the briefest acknowledgement of her new orders. Still, that blip of sound was enough to narrow down the sonarman’s search, and he selected the higher frequency active transmissions that would let him pinpoint the submarine’s location.
Of course, going active was a risk as well. The American submarine would be able to hear the sonar pings at a greater range than the carrier would be able to hear the returns from her hull. Additionally, the high speed of the carrier was producing a massive amount of noise, further degrading the Chinese ASW ability. But the carrier was counting on being able to find and attack the submarine with a barrage of weapons and at least hold her at bay until the ship popped out its final surprise.
On the weatherdecks, Ishi Zhaolong struggled across the deck, moving as quickly as he could to the port SVTT tube. The first return from the active sonar had just squeaked across the sonarman’s headphones, providing enough data for a bearing-only launch. Ishi had been sure that the submarine would be to their right, and he was slightly alarmed to find that he’d guessed wrong. Still, the other team would be loading up the port SVTT. He wasn’t critically needed there, but as the senior torpedoman onboard, he wanted to watch the evolution. With the deck now clear of both aircraft and disguises, darting back and forth between the four sets of launchers, two to the port, two on starboards, was much less of a problem than routine maintenance had been.
He arrived at the port launcher just as the tube reached one thousand pounds of pressure. The other torpedomen had hearing protectors clamped down over their ears and were stepping back from the pressurized tube. If anything went wrong now, the men would be peppered with shrapnel.
Ishi stepped forward and double-checked the settings himself. The torpedo was set to run shallow for a surface target. Its seeker head combined advanced wakehoming technology along with a relatively rudimentary acoustic discriminator. It also housed a command destruct secondary charge that could be used if the torpedo insisted on acquiring its own aircraft carrier as a target.
He nodded to the man crouched down beside the SVTT tube, then stepped back into the doubtful protection of a stanchion. He couldn’t resist peering around the metal support to watch the actual firing.
There was a surprisingly smooth blast of noise, only slightly louder than the test firings they’d practiced back in the Yellow Sea and then enroute Hawaii. A metal cylinder four feet long and a foot in diameter shot out of the tube, remained airborne for thirty feet, then slid smoothly into the ocean with only a small splash and some expanding ripples that the ocean swells quickly smoothed out. Before the last ripples had faded away, the crew was manhandling another torpedo into the tube.
“Torpedo inbound,” a voice snapped over Ishi’s headset. He shouted at the crew to move faster, now desperate to get as many torpedoes in the water as he possibly could. What had seemed so thrilling, so very daring when it involved disrobing the carrier and launching aircraft now seemed all too deadly and personal.