Lieutenant Commander Ashley Mitchell sat on the edge of her seat and pressed her face to the windscreen to look up at the brilliant stars twinkling overhead. It was hard to believe so much chaos could be happening around them. They had been on station for the duration of the operation to monitor Chinese naval activity — including the fishing vessels that had moved south in force — but things seemed to be spiraling out of control. It wouldn’t be long before they needed to do more than just monitor.
“Ma’am, the HQ-9 is targeting Dusty One,” Lieutenant Turner said over the intercom.
She reached for the rocker switch on the yoke, toggling it down to reply. “Fire control?”
“Not yet. But chatter indicates an imminent intercept.”
She glanced down at the navigation display that showed their position relative to the Chinese surface-to-air missile battery located on Woody Island, then pressed the autopilot disengage button on the yoke to take command of the modified Boeing 737–800. She gripped the controls and banked the plane left to point their nose into the missile engagement zone.
“Scar Nine Nine, Wizard three two three,” she said.
“Go ahead, Wizard.”
“Electronic surveillance indicates missile battery designated one alpha targeting Dusty One. How copy?”
There was a pause as the task force personnel manning the TOC at Clark Air Base correlated their report with information received from other assets in the area. Ashley wasn’t privy to what other ships and aircraft were participating in the operation, but she knew of at least one MQ-4C Triton drone flying high-altitude surveillance twenty thousand feet above them.
“Good copy, Wizard.”
Her tactical coordinator spoke over the intercom again. “Ma’am, they’re activating their fire control radar.”
“Roger that,” she replied, then turned to look at her copilot.
“What are you thinking?” Logan asked.
For as capable as the P-8A Poseidon was, they didn’t have many options for targeting a surface-to-air missile system. Their internal bay included five hard points for carrying the Mark 54 torpedo and the HAAWC, or High-Altitude Anti-Submarine Warfare Weapon Capability, air launch accessory that allowed them to employ a torpedo from as high as thirty thousand feet.
But they did have one trick up their sleeve.
She pressed down on the rocker switch again. “Ed, load the HQ-9 coordinates into the SLAM-ER.”
Logan’s eyes widened in surprise. “Shouldn’t we ask—”
“We don’t have time,” she snapped.
“The SLAM-ER, ma’am?” Lieutenant Turner asked, obviously sharing Logan’s sentiment that employing the AGM-84K Standoff Land Attack Missile — Expanded Response without authorization would, at best, land them in hot water.
“You heard me,” she said. “Let me know when it’s ready. I’m maneuvering us into position.” She reached over and pushed the thrust levers forward, increasing the output of the Poseidon’s twin turbofans to their maximum.
The tension in Charlie’s shoulders turned into solid knots and ached, but he practiced his box-breathing technique to push through his anxiety and focus on the one thing he could control — flying the helicopter to the best of his ability.
“Scarborough Shoal in sight,” Roger said.
“Pedro One is loitering north of South Rock,” the Marine Osprey pilot responded.
In the distance, Charlie saw the triangular-shaped chain of reefs and rocks encircling a large central lagoon and angled their approach to the right, where he knew the highest elevation was located just short of a single inlet. The terrain of South Rock was supposed to be almost six feet above sea level at high tide, but he didn’t know if it was flat or wide enough to allow a safe landing.
Not that it mattered. The chorus of flashing red lights from the Chinese surface-to-air missile and imminent fuel starvation meant he had no choice. They were going to put down as close to South Rock as possible, even if it meant they got wet in the process.
“Dusty One is making our approach to South Rock now,” Charlie said.
“A quarter mile to feet dry,” Roger said, letting him know the distance to their intended touchdown point.
“Let’s hope it’s dry,” Charlie replied, the tension in his shoulders intruding on his voice.
Roger ignored the comment. “Fifty feet over the water, come forward four hundred.”
With one more glance at the fuel gauges now reading empty, Charlie focused his attention on the looming landmass that appeared like little more than a slightly less dark patch of water. He slowed their approach and descended closer to the surface, paralleling the shallows at the southwestern corner of the atoll.
“Forty feet over the water… thirty…”
Charlie heard Roger’s calls but had tuned everything else out. He even ignored the klaxon sound of the radar warning receiver that indicated the HQ-9 had activated its fire control radar to guide the Mach 4 surface-to-air missile. None of it mattered now. Everything but the shoal on their left side and the water beneath them was a distraction from what he needed to do.
“Missile launch!” Roger shouted.
But Charlie ignored him.
Just one hundred feet more.
47
Ashley knew she was pushing the limits of their engines and endurance, but she wasn’t about to sit idle while a Chinese surface-to-air missile shot down an American helicopter. “What’s our status, Ed?”
“Just finished loading it,” he replied.
“Fire,” she commanded.
If her tactical coordinator had any reservations about launching the three-million-dollar weapon, he didn’t show it. The fifteen-hundred-pound missile dropped free from its external hard point before the turbojet engine propelled it toward the target.
“Op away,” Ed said.
Ashley immediately banked away from the target, turning to put the disputed Chinese territory at their six o’clock. When she had gone through one hundred and eighty degrees, she reached up and turned on the autopilot, letting the Boeing jet fly itself away from hostile waters.
“You have the aircraft,” Ashley said to Logan, not waiting for the required response before unstrapping and climbing out of her seat to walk aft from the flight deck.
Lieutenant Ed Turner was standing behind Petty Officer Delgado at his console on the port side of the plane when Ashley walked up. Both men were focused intently on the screens that displayed telemetry data for the SLAM-ER missile as it made its way along a preprogrammed nap-of-the-earth profile bound for Woody Island.
“How much longer?” she asked.
“We should start receiving datalinked images in…”
A flicker on the screen cut off Tony’s response, and three sets of eyes stared at what looked like a grainy black-and-white movie of the ocean surface taken from a shaking cameraman. Tony immediately grabbed the control stick next to his station and made a subtle adjustment to the crosshairs. After a slight delay, the camera shifted and centered on the new target.
“Good control,” he said.
The AGM-84K SLAM-ER was known as the Frankenstein of weapons. Based on the Harpoon missile platform, the SLAM-ER added an infrared seeker from the AGM-65F Maverick and a modified Walleye datalink. Though it could fly autonomously using GPS and infrared terminal guidance, the datalink allowed for a “man in the loop” feature that gave the operator the ability to fine-tune its guidance.
In this case, Tony used the joystick at his console to adjust the crosshairs in the last few seconds of flight to ensure it hit the desired target.