The USS Blaine was in condition five, its top readiness alert. On its radar the swarm of white dots within the white rectangles that had signified unknown surface ships had now become white squares, hostile ships, identified now as three 180-foot-long Nanuchka and fourteen Shershen-class fast-attack torpedo boats armed with four twenty-one-inch torpedoes and four twin thirty-millimeter machine guns. The Shershens, originally moving at thirty-eight knots, were the faster boats but now held back, knowing the U.S. frigate’s more sophisticated electronic defenses could better be penetrated by the Nanuchkas, which were now closing in the rolling fog banks.
“Missile incoming!” shouted the Blaine’s OOD, and the Phalanx Mark-15 close-in radar and weapons system with its twenty-millimeter gun opened up together with the seventy-six-millimeter gun aft of the multiple target radar.
“Hard right five degrees,” ordered Brentwood.
“Hard right five degrees.”
The Blaine was now bow on to the oncoming swarm, attempting to deny the NKA boats a wide broadside target in or out of the fog as she “ghosted,” projecting fake radar images of herself to decoy the attacking boats even while her six-barrel Gatling gun, with a sound like linoleum, was spitting out a hail of depleted uranium bullets at over three thousand rounds a minute. Any one of the bullets, twice as dense as the normal steel-jacketed kind, was capable of deflecting, or causing detonation of, incoming missiles.
“We’ve been locked on,” shouted the electronics warfare officer, indicating one of the Nanuchkas’ “fishbowl” radars had switched to fire control mode. Immediately the Tactical Action Office ordered “chaff” and the torpedo launcher shot out a cloud of fine aluminum chips to hash the incoming missile’s radars. Another high tone from the Blaine’s SLQ-32 radar indicated another missile had been fired at the Blaine. Seconds after Ray Brentwood ordered the four antiship Harpoon missiles fired from the launcher forward of the bridge, he felt a slight tremor from the back-blast and at the same time received confirmation that the Blaine’s two LAMPs — light airborne multipurpose helicopters — had taken off within seconds of each other from the stern pad armed with clusters of air-to-ship rockets. The next minute he heard two thumps that reverberated through the frigate as the Blaine’s two triple-tube torpedo launchers discharged four MK-48s into the swarm now closing at less than two nautical miles.
There was a bright orange flame forward of the starboard beam about three hundred yards into the fog, an enemy missile hit, and a second later the crash of a destroyed Nanuchka came rolling over the ship. At the same time the TAO reported, “Bogey missiles destroyed.” There was a cheer in the combat information center, cut short by the TAO’s command to the radar operators to compensate for clutter caused by the Blaine’s own chaff and the increasing chop caused by the wash of the remaining sixteen NKA boats. A sharp pulse of light on the radar and seconds later the sound of an explosion told them another Nanuchka had been hit, but Brentwood was worrying about the changing positions of the two remaining Nanuchkas. To maintain flank speed would mean entering the swarm sooner, but to slacken off would give him less maneuverability — the fact that the two Nanuchkas were slowing down didn’t abate his fears as they had separated to form the two tips of a bull’s-horn formation. Meanwhile the armored shell of the Blaine’s combat information center being below the bridge, Brentwood and the others were only dimly aware of the cacophony of firing outside as the Shershen attack boats coming at him broadside opened up with thirty-millimeter fire and began launching their torpedoes from staggered overlap tubes, the bull’s-horn-like formation of fast boats now becoming a rough semicircle of a half-mile radius, launching twenty torpedoes at the Blaine.
“Fish incoming!” called one of the radar operators. “Bearing—” The operator stopped.
Brentwood swung around, saw the problem — there were so many, a single bearing wouldn’t help. “Hard left ninety!” he ordered, reducing the sector of the torpedo attack to a quarter instead of a half circle and hoping to outrun the incoming torpedoes now coming at him from abaft the starboard beam but also putting the Blaine broadside to the extreme left half of the semicircle; the lead boat, a Nanuchka, closest to him, he now engaged with another two Harpoon missiles. The blip that was the Nanuchka amid the dancing fuzz of chaff and other clutter suddenly grew very bright on the screen, then disappeared.
“Hard right, ninety degrees!” he shouted, anticipating a cheer or two from the CIC crew, but now everyone was silent, only the hum of the electronics and that tattoolike din outside faintly audible above the radio crackle of the two helicopters, one pilot yelling at the other, “Two o’clock, two o’clock!” and they actually heard the sound of a missile passing one of the helos. In quick succession another three torpedo boats blossomed on the screens and disappeared, taken out by the helos, but now they could hear the scream of the electronics warfare officer aboard one of the choppers as he was hit by machine-gun fire. Seconds later they heard the bang of the helicopter hitting the water, followed by the rattle of machine-gun fire— the attack boats raking the Blaine’s starboard side.
“Fish incoming starboard quarter!”
Brentwood knew he could do nothing, the torpedo-tracking radar and digital sonar now malfunctioning, and knew that either hard right or hard left would expose his stern to the torpedoes racing toward him at over fifty miles an hour. Two torpedoes went past, whitish-gray streaks in the fog, the startled starboard lookout informing the bridge a second later.
A machine-gun burst hit the Blaine’s stack, puncturing it but doing no more damage as the ship’s Gatling gun swung sharply, continuing to fire, causing another missile to explode within a few hundred yards of the ship, but now the Blaine’s Phalanx radar was in danger of “fuzzing up” from overload. The sonar operator, ignoring all else, carefully monitored the sea bottom, alert for the telltale ping of mines, while his colleague on the 225-mile-range air-search radar informed the tactical action officer that the radar’s dish, between the bridge and the satellite communications dome, was out. Brentwood knew that of all the battle group ships on forward screen for the carrier Salt Lake City, the Blaine, like her sister ship the USS Des Moines, forty miles to the east and closing to assist the guided missile frigate, had never been designed to go it alone in such outnumbered circumstances. The frigate’s weapon system had been designed primarily for medium-range escort duty, for what the Pentagon had designated a “low-threat” environment. And the Sea of Japan had been just that — until the NKA had crossed the DMZ.
“Sir!” the surface radar operator began, but then checked his excitement. “Enemy disengaging.”
No one in the CIC or anywhere else on the ship eased off, knowing it could be a sucker ploy. But the operator proved right; after losing six patrol boats and only damaging the American warship, though they had downed one of its helicopters, the NKA naval force, it seemed, had had enough. Still, Brentwood kept everyone at their stations, despite their fatigue and the stench of perspiration thick in the air. Even as the enemy was retreating, he ordered another four Harpoons “onto the rails,” and in the bowels of the ship the loader pressed the button for the automatic feed, quipping, half in relief, half in celebration, “ Four pack to go.” Brentwood made an immediate note to enter into the ship’s log, together with the tape that, like a civilian aircraft’s black box, was set to start recording the moment a U.S. Navy vessel went on “Action Station Alert,” how astonishingly ineffective the Nanuchkas’ missiles had been. Now it seemed all the peacetime speculation was over. The suspicion among the experts that quantity rather than quality was the central theme of the NKA’s, that is, the Russians’, strategy seemed confirmed.