Pulling right again, he slowed as he flew down the SSGN's vast side, which rose above him like a curving, smooth-faced cliff.
He noted that the ASDS was mounted in its accustomed spot on Ohio's aft deck. Good. The SEALs had returned, had managed to dock with mother. That meant all they needed to do to get out of this mess was to find a way for the Ohio to sneak past the Iranian ASW forces.
From the sound of things, they didn't have much time.
He flashed past the huge, bulbous nose housing the
Ohio's delicate broadband sonar. "Sorry, guys," he said. "Hold your ears!" He passed across Ohio's bow.
He was tempted to signal and attempt a docking. His Manta was fast failing, the engine overheating again, and alarms flashing warning of a dozen system failures.
The enemy was definitely closing on the Ohio now, coming in from all across the southern horizon, sonar blasting. They must have a very good idea by now of exactly where the huge submarine was. The ASW torpedoes would be flying fast and furious at any moment.
The Manta would not be able to deal with more than one of them… if that.
If only there was a way to jam the enemy sonar, he thought, the way fighter pilots could jam enemy radar. As with sonar, there were two modes in radar, active and passive — sending out signals, and simply collecting signals sent to you by others. Active jamming, he reasoned, generally involved beaming powerful radar signals back at an enemy transmitter, overwhelming it with radio noise.
It was too bad you couldn't overpower the enemy's active sonar transmissions the same way an EA-6B, the Navy's primary Electronic Warfare aircraft, jammed enemy radar.
And then the idea arose, clear, crisp, and perfect. Maybe there was a way after all.
He checked a compartment on his console. Yes… still there.
"O-kay, then," he said to no one in particular. "Let's get it on!"
Accelerating, he touched a control….
"Control Room, Sonar." It was Chief Sommersby. "Sir… we're getting really screwy noises from out there."
"What kind of screwy noises?"
"I don't know. It's… well… "
"Pipe it through, Chief."
A harsh static of sound filled the control room. It was strange, like static, but with garbled bits and pieces of what almost sounded like music. Or a voice. And an insistent, driving thumping.
Stewart listened to the hash of sound for a long moment. He could almost hear words, choppy, broken, and fragmentary… nothing that he could make out. But that beat, that rhythm. Hard. Demanding. Compelling.
"My God!"
"You know what it is, Captain?" Shea asked. "Yes, Wayne, I think I do…. "
And in Ohio's torpedo room, forward and two decks down, TM1 Rodney Moone looked at MM2 Jakowiac, a big grin spreading across his face. "Hey, dig it! That's our boy out there!"
"You mean?… "
"That, my man, is the Hammer goin' down! M.C. Hammer!"
" 'You can't touch this!' "
"Indeed you cannot! That is freakin' righteous, man!"
Accelerating, he touched a control….
"Our flyboy friend," Shea said wonderingly, "is playing M.C. Hammer?"
"I think he is, Mr. Shea. You hear the beat?"
"I, ah, don't listen to rap all that much, sir."
"I think we are hearing the ultimate in driving by with the music cranked up too loud. He's drowning out the Iranians' active sonar!"
"He's also drowning out our sonar, sir."
"Doesn't matter. We'll stay on this course until we work our way into deep water. Maneuvering! Ahead full! Make revolutions for twenty-five knots!"
"Maneuvering, ahead full. Make revs for twenty-five knots, aye aye, sir!"
Captain Damavandi was concerned. The Americans were showing unexpected resilience in this encounter, and were introducing unknown but sophisticated technology. Damavandi did not know what it was he was facing, and that made him nervous.
He refused to back off, however. He was still in the best possible position from which to launch an attack on the American submarine. He still had four tubes ready to go, while the fifth was being reloaded. He would fire four torpedoes, holding the fifth in reserve, just in case.
"Captain, Sonar."
Now what? "Go ahead."
"Sir… I'm getting a funny noise."
"From the target?" Perhaps they'd damaged the American after all.
"I… don't think so, sir."
Damavandi frowned. They'd all heard the explosion moments before, an explosion too soon to be a successful hit on the American submarine. Lieutenant Shirazi had also reported a loud throbbing noise, an underwater vehicle of unknown design, traveling as fast as a torpedo. An unmanned drone, perhaps?
And now this… "funny noise." What was going on?
"Let me hear!"
The sound began thumping from an overhead speaker. Damavandi listened, puzzled. It almost sounded like… music, of a sort. Muffled, broken and fragmentary… but he could almost swear he was hearing words.
But he couldn't understand them.
In any case, he didn't speak English, and he was sure that was what he was hearing.
"Captain, Sonar. Sir, I can't range on the target! I can't even track it!"
"What? Why not?"
"That… sound, sir. It's swamping all of our hydrophones. We're being jammed!" Damavandi groaned. The American had escaped once again.
24
It had taken time for the orders to reach their respective destinations, time to prepare the weapons, to fuel them, to double-check their navigational programming. At 0715 hours, however, the first Iranian missile, a Shahab-2, rose along its vertical launch rail at the back of a Russian-made GAZ truck hidden in a ravine in the Kuh-e Namak, on the coast southeast of Bandar-e Charak, and climbed steadily and with rapidly increasing speed into the brilliant early morning light. The second missile launched seconds later from a trailer outside of Khonz, deep in the fastnesses of the Zagros Mountains.
The launches were duly noted by a U.S. military reconnaissance satellite some 350 miles above the Indian Ocean, and the information flashed back to a processing center in northern Virginia, then to the Pentagon.
The launches were also detected by U.S. assets in the Persian Gulf theater of operations, by two Aegis missile cruisers in the Gulf, and by an Air Force AWACS orbiting above it on sentry duty. Before the missiles reached apogee above the Gulf, the alert had been flashed to commands throughout the Fifth Fleet.
And throughout the region, personnel already on high alert scrambled for their stations.