“Yes, sir. I’m not taking any chances. I can only man turrets one and three, but I have the five inch. That should be enough. You never know when we might need to show a little force ourselves,” Rhodes said.
“Sounds like a good idea to me. I’ve wanted to see these guns shoot since I came aboard,” said Captain Moyseowicz, Hammond’s Chief of Staff.
Hammond chuckled, then thought a moment. “You know, I wonder what they are going to be bombing?”
“They might send out a tug with a sled,” said Moyseowicz.
“Might have one of their own killer tomatoes,” said Rhodes.
Hammond grinned. “Might be interesting. Doug, maybe we should be ready for a gun shoot,” he said.
Moyseowicz stared at Hammond’s shadow. “Okay, you have something on your mind. Can you share it?”
“Just a little message. Once they’re finished, maybe they’ll let us take a whack at it.”
At 0645, a small patrol boat appeared on the radar screens of the allied task force. Moving along at only 15 knots, it meandered through the formation until it reached a predetermined point. On its fantail was a large red balloon. At 0800, the balloon was pushed over the side of the boat and left to drift with the wind and seas. It was almost directly between USS Wasp and USS Iowa at a distance of ten miles. The patrol boat then rapidly left the area and took up a station about five miles ahead of the balloon and waited.
By 0810, the radars began picking up large numbers of aircraft leaving Venezuelan airspace and heading directly toward the target. Aboard the Iowa, the communications watch soon detected and listened to the radio signals between the shore, the aircraft, and the patrol boat. Although everyone was speaking in Spanish, several crewmen were able to translate. Things were not going so well for the Venezuelan Air Force. At first, because of a cloudy sky, they could not locate the patrol boat or the balloon. Then they had some difficulty in establishing an attack pattern since the balloon had been placed between two American fleet units, extra care had been taken to insure the Americans would not be hit. This was complicated by the arrival of a media helicopter which had to be positioned to watch the event. But by 0830, the squadrons of planes had positioned themselves to make their runs parallel to the allied formation.
The Iowa had gone to general quarters at 0730, and her crew stood by their stations waiting, just in case. On the starboard bridge wing, Hammond and Rhodes stood and admired the formations of aircraft making their way through the sky. It was rare when you saw former Soviet Flanker aircraft flying alongside American F-16s. More interesting still was a formation of Karakorum-8 aircraft, normally used as trainers, but now loaded with several small bombs apiece. There were even a scattering of other odd aircraft which normally served in other duties but carrying bombs today. It seemed Venezuela was sending out their whole force.
For several minutes, the planes seemed to loiter in one place. Then the first section of Flankers turned in the sky and made their way in. Forming a straight line, the planes appeared to fly in straight and normal at a height of about three thousand feet. One by one, they released a bomb apiece and then continued on a mile or so before turning to port and returning to the start point for another run.
The results were abysmal. Out of the first section, only one bomb landed within 100 yards of the bobbing balloon. The section of F-16s fared little better. Splashes erupted to the right and left of the target with all either too far ahead or too far behind the target. The best drop of the day came from a lone Aermacchi SF.260. The small turboprop aircraft came in much slower than the rest and had to drop both of its 300 kg bombs at the same time just to keep from flipping over. But the pilot had come in higher and had performed an almost perfect diving run. Both of the bombs had hit within thirty feet of the small ten foot target balloon.
In an hour all bombs had been expended. The ‘killer tomato’ was still floating in the open sea. As the planes made their way home, the small patrol boat turned to go back and sink the balloon. That was when Hammond, himself, picked up the radio headset.
“Venezuelan patrol boat, this is USS Iowa, over,” he said in Spanish over the net.
The response was immediate. “USS Iowa, this is Venezuelan patrol cutter Warao, over.”
“Warao, this is Iowa, have you completed your exercises, over?”
“This is Warao, our exercises are complete. We are making our way to sink our target. Please remain clear, over.”
“Warao, this is Iowa, request you leave the target. We will dispose of it as a courtesy, over,” said Hammond.
“This is Warao, we will leave the target, over.”
“This is Iowa, thank you, please stand clear, as we dispose of the target balloon. Thank you for your courtesy, out.”
The Commander on the Warao looked back at his bridge officers and wondered what the Americans meant by standing clear. He ordered his ship to turn towards home.
Few had noticed that the Iowa had maintained a position between ten and fifteen miles from the balloon. As the media helicopter was passing the ship, the journalists aboard saw the giant guns turn towards the little red, ten foot diameter balloon which was now twelve miles away. The center gun of turret one elevated and as they watched, flame exploded out of the muzzle of the gun.
In Spot One, the fire controlmen watched the red target balloon through the optics of the rangefinder. In about 35 seconds, a splash was observed 100 yards in front of the target and one mil to the left. The information was relayed to the men in Main Battery Plot 15 decks below. Matching this to the information from a small radar located on the turret top, which relayed differences in the initial velocity of the round as it left the barrel, the corrections were entered into the Mark 1 computer. Already, Captain Rhodes had ordered six high capacity warshots loaded into the waiting guns. Unlike the dummy bombs the Venezuelan Air Force had used in their exercise, these would be the real thing. The guns on turrets one and three elevated.
The media helicopter had turned around and was headed back into the area when flames belched from the six, 16-inch guns. Forty five seconds later, the sea erupted as the shells struck almost directly on top of the small balloon. As all rounds struck within 50 yards of the balloon, seawater shot skyward over 200 feet and spray hid the area for several seconds. When the spray cleared, the ‘killer tomato’ was gone. There weren’t even any shards of rubber on the surface to mark its passing.
Aboard the helicopter, the journalists could not believe what they had seen. None had ever witnessed such a thing, first hand, although some had seen video of such shoots. For over a minute, they simply stared at the sea and each other until one of them exclaimed, “My God.”
Flying back over the Iowa, they saw that the ship’s guns had already been returned to their normal positions. “What do we say?” asked one journalist. “We won’t be allowed to report what we just saw.”
Another journalist shrugged his shoulders. “Let the editors worry about it,” he said. Everyone remained quiet the rest of the way home. Where before they were eager to report how close their aircraft had come to such a small target, they could no longer do so when the Americans had obliterated it with one shot from 12 miles away.
Once again, President Parente was furious. He had just seen the video of the exercise and could not believe his people had performed so poorly. It had never dawned on him that bombing accuracy was directly correlated to practice, and he had cut way back on his military training so that he could concentrate on other things. Standing in the briefing room at the Ministry of Defense, he railed at his Air Force generals for a good thirty minutes before nearly collapsing into his seat. When one of the other generals came to their defense, he went after all of them.