These were the VGAS (Vertical Gun for Advanced Ships) mounts, 155mm ultra range cannon designed to take advantage of the revolution in precision-guided munitions.
Why go to all the trouble of aiming the gun when one could simply tell the shell where it was supposed to go?
By taking advantage of a fixed mount braced and set within the hull, the big pieces could be autoloaded from their magazine, giving them a hands-off rate of fire of fifteen rounds per minute per barrel. Likewise, the recoil of a fixed mount could be more readily dealt with, permitting propellant and chamber pressures far in excess of a turreted weapon. Today’s mission could be fired with reduced charges and no RAP rocket boosters for the shells. The range was only thirty miles, point-blank for the 110-mile potential reach of the VGAS system.
Directly beneath the Cunningham’s bridge, the gun tube of the axblade stealth turret whined as it elevated. The forward turret mount was a fleet-standard ERGM (Extended Range Guided Munitions) five-inch 64. A little brother to VGAS, it could only hurl a 120mm round to sixty-three miles.
Ken Hiro wondered at how things ran in cycles. In the Navy he’d enlisted in, the guided missile was king and the cannon only a feeble auxiliary. Now he was partaking in the return of something once thought to be extinct, the big gun cruiser.
“Captain, the ship is at all-stop and is station-keeping.”
“Very good, Helm. Stand by to hand off bearing alignment to Fire Control.”
“Captain, the ship is at general quarters. All battle boards read green. All battle stations manned and ready.”
“Very good, Quartermaster.”
“Captain,” a third voice sounded in Hiro’s command headset, “this is Air One. We have just received a Seawolf departure order from Task Force AIRBOSS. Aircraft are spotted and ready in all respects for launch. Request permission to proceed.”
“Carry on, Air One. Launch your aircraft. State the status on our spotter drones.”
“Drones Able and Bravo are responding and functional and are holding at Waypoint Jolly Roger. T minus twelve minutes forty-five seconds to advanced deployment by the time line.”
“Understood.”
As the rotor thunder grew from the helipad aft, Ken crossed to the captain’s chair at the corner of the bridge. Faking the appropriate relaxed demeanor for “the Old Man,” he lifted himself into the chair and dialed up the MC-1 circuit.
“All hands, this is the captain. We will be commencing fire shortly. This shoot is going to be for my old boss, and the Duke’s old skipper. Let’s show the Lady we can do it right.”
Flight Deck, USS Carlson, Corsair Station
35 Miles West of Crab’s Claw Cape
0721 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008
Lieutenant Commander Michael Torvald, the CO of ASW/Support Squadron 24, still looked uneasy as Cobra Richardson leaned in through the cockpit door of the SH-60 and draped his arm over the pilot’s seat.
“I still don’t know about this shit, Co,” he yelled over the moan of his helo’s idling turbines.
“Mike, trust me,” Cobra screamed back with the confidence of a used-car dealer explaining away that mysterious squeak. “We got this wired. I got the ballistic charts and manuals downloaded from the Army Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker. The Special Aviation pukes from the 160th have proved the Hydra pod on the Blackhawk airframe and my ordnance guys have set up the igniter harnesses for you. Piece o’ cake!”
Torvald inhaled deeply to bellow. “But my outfit’s not rated for this kind of thing. We’ve never done anything like this before! No Navy helo outfit’s done this before! Hell, the friggin’ Army hasn’t even done this since the seventies!”
“Details! Just do the drill, Mike. Follow my guys in to the firing line.
Establish a hover on your designated GPU fix. Set your bearing on target, set your aircraft angle by your B charts, and pull the trigger when I give the word! It’s going to be fantastic, my man!”
“I hope you know what you’re talking about, Cobra!” The SH-60 driver tilted his head, listening to a voice in his helmet earphones. “That’s it! We got departure!”
“See you on the firing line. You’re going to love it!”
Cobra slammed the Oceanhawk’s door shut and hunkered out from under the rotor arc. When clear, he stood erect and watched as the four helicopters of Heloron 24, the two SH-60 Oceanhawk subchasers and the pair of CH-60 Cargohawk utility aircraft, lifted sequentially into the sky.
As an adjunct to the task force’s antisurface defenses, Amanda Garrett had insisted that all four of the 24th’s Hawk-series helos be equipped to carry and launch both the Penguin and Hellfire air-to-surface missiles. All four had their antishipping snubwings mounted now, but each carried a weapons load different even from what Amanda Garrett had imagined.
Instead of single Hellfire guided missiles on each hard point of the multi racks, the Hawks now carried a seven-round pod of unguided 2.75-inch Hydra bombardment rockets. Four pods per multi rack, four clusters per aircraft.
When Cobra Richardson had assumed command of the Navy’s reactivated Seawolves, he had recognized the squadron’s links with the old HAL-3 of the Vietnam era, not merely as a matter of sentiment and tradition, but as a possible source of tactics and doctrine as well. He began an in-depth study of Seawolf operations over the Mekong Delta. This, in turn, had grown into a voracious appetite for the entire history of rotor winged warfare in the Southeast Asian conflict.
One of the more fascinating discoveries he had made had involved the single Hellfire of aero-artillery.
Modern gunship-warfare doctrine called for helicopters to be used as a precision, direct-fire weapon on specific targets. Aero-artillery called for their use as a fast, mobile platform for area bombardment, a “flying howitzer” versus a “flying tank.”
To a man of Cobra’s inventive nature, this presented all sorts of interesting possibilities. He’d spent the bulk of his spare time this cruise drawing up an operational outline for the use of aero-artillery within the task force order of battle, and working out the technical problems with his ordnance hands. The chance had come to move from theory to reality faster than he had hoped.
He jogged across the antiskid to where Wolf One awaited him. His crew was aboard, his copilot was already running the preflight, and the pad apes were standing by to roll the Super Huey out of the hangar to its launching spot on the flight deck. The smaller helo carried only two of the quad multirack clusters.
As he harnessed up, his copilot looked up from the checklist to watch the larger aircraft of Heloron 24 form up overhead for their first mission as part of a siege train.
“Co, you sure this rocket artillery shit is going to work?”
“Of course it’s going to work—” Richardson paused for a second, running the scenario over in his mind one more time. “I mean… it should.”
Bridge of the Frigate Sutanto
15 Miles Southeast of Crab’s Claw Cape
0721 Hours, Zone Time: August 25, 2008
MacIntyre looked over as Stone Quillain stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing.
“Got your riggin’ inside, sir,” the Marine said. “Flak vest, a MOLLE harness with a set of radios, and an M-4 carbine. You got half a dozen magazines in the pouches and one in the well. I could get you a spare SABR if you want one.”