“Sorry, Admiral,” he shouted. “It just came down from the pilot!”
Angrily, Vaughn thrust himself past the crew chief and made his way forward toward the cockpit. The HH-60 Seahawk was relatively new in the Navy’s inventory, having been acquired to replace the older HH-3A Sea Kings in both the ASW roles and for combat search and rescue. The machine he was on was a SAR helo with two pilots, two crewmen, and room for eight passengers.
The ship’s pilot turned as he stepped onto the cramped flight deck.
“Word just came through, Admiral,” the man said. “The Indians have launched missiles at the fleet from about twenty-five or thirty miles out. They don’t know the target yet.”
“Well. find out! No, belay that! Find someone I can talk to!”
“Aye, sir.” As the copilot began speaking on the radio, Vaughn fumed.
What should he do? He’d left the Jefferson five minutes before. It would be minutes yet before they landed on the Vicksburg. Should they return to the Jefferson, or press on?
He could see the Aegis cruiser through the windscreen ahead, long and gray with a knife’s-edge prow, the twin fortress towers fore and aft giving her an ungainly, top-heavy look. The seas were a lot heavier than he’d been aware of back on the stolid and unyielding bulk of the Jefferson. As he watched, a wave broke over the bow in an explosion of white, engulfing her forward five-inch mount and smashing itself against the forward deckhouse. It looked like they’d be in for a rough ride.
Vicksburg’s fantail was clear. It made no sense to turn around. He would be in the cruiser’s command suite in another few minutes.
“Admiral?” the copilot yelled, one hand pressed to his headset.
“Jefferson CIC!”
“Patch me in!” A radio jack was plugged into his helmet, tying him into the comnet. “Jefferson! Jefferson! This is Admiral Vaughn!”
“Commander Barnes, CIC, Admiral. Go ahead.”
“What the hell’s going on, Commander?”
“We have a full battle group alert, sir. We are tracking between twelve and sixteen missiles inbound.”
“From where?”
“Probable launch platforms were four OSA IIS, Admiral. That means SS-N-2s.”
“Target?”
“Safe money would be on the Jefferson, sir.”
“Yes …”
“We’ve launched the Alert Five,” Barnes said. “Captain Fitzgerald has authorized weapons free.”
“Yes,” Vaughn said. “Yes, quite right.” He felt sick. The carrier … his carrier … was under a mass attack.
The SS-N-2 Styx flew more like an aircraft than a missile. Once it was launched from its storage pod with an assist from a solid-fuel booster, cruise propulsion was maintained by a conventional air-gulping turbojet slung under the missile’s belly. The Styx was a direct descendant of the V-1 buzz bombs employed by the Germans in WW II.
As it traveled a few meters above the wave crests, its inertial programming carried it into a specific target area. Once it was within five nautical miles of its projected impact point, two separate on-board terminal guidance systems — an active radar-homing device and an infrared sensor — switched on, identifying and locking onto the largest target within the missile’s electronic field of view.
Sophisticated as it was, the Styx had no defense of its own. The Phoenix missile hurtled in from the north at Mach 5 and exploded as it passed low above the missile’s back. A fraction of a second later, the SS-N-2’s warhead detonated.
The thunderous shock wave raised a geyser of water against the sky.
Before the geyser had collapsed, the sky was alive with the contrails of more missiles, still bearing on the carrier. Phoenix missiles sweeping in from the north connected with the ship-killers, one by one. There were more explosions, and missiles died.
But they weren’t dying fast enough.
“That’s a grand slam! Splash another one!”
Tombstone looked up as Batman’s voice rasped over the CATCC speaker. He could imagine the tension in the cockpit of the F-14 now, as the RIO monitored the horde of airborne targets.
“Tomcat Two-one-six, roger your kill,” a CATCC controller said. But more missiles were coming in fast.
“Two-oh-one,” Army Garrison’s voice added. “Phoenix away.”
Hurt twisted at Tombstone’s gut. Although carrier aviators did not always fly the same aircraft, one plane in the squadron was generally thought of as “theirs.” Further, there were no hard and fast rules to the practice, but tradition reserved the “01” aircraft to the squadron’s leader. As skipper of VF-95, Tombstone generally flew Tomcat 201.
Today, with his XO standing in for him, Army was flying the 201 bird.
He looked across the room at CAG. Marusko had just replaced a telephone handset and was now holding a microphone to his mouth. “Now hear this,” he said, his voice sounding over the bulkhead speakers. “I’ve just had word from Commander Barnes. The admiral is about to touch down on the Vicksburg and will be assuming control of the battle from there momentarily. Meanwhile, he has confirmed weapons free. As of now, the squadron is on full Battle Alert Status. Current ROES are suspended and weapons are free. That is all.”
“BARCAP Two is ready to fire,” a sailor reported. “They’re at extreme range.”
“How long before they get into position?”
“A few minutes, sir.”
“We don’t have a few minutes. How long before the Alert Five gets up?”
Tombstone glanced up at the PLAT camera suspended from the CATCC overhead. The view was forward from the island, toward Cats One and Two on the bow. Deck crewmen were prepping a pair of Tomcats for launch, “Shooter” Rostenkowski in his 248 bird, Coyote in the Tomcat Army usually flew, number 204. The squat, boxy, yellow-painted tractors called mules were hauling the F-14s up to the catapult shuttles.
“Another two-three minutes on the Alert Five,” Tombstone called.
“Closest missile now at twelve miles,” a technician at one of the consoles said. “We now have four positive Phoenix locks, closing.”
“They’re suckering us,” CAG said suddenly, as though the thought had just struck him. “Damn them, they’re suckering us into eating up our outer line!”
Tombstone had already arrived at the same conclusion. Each of the four Tomcats aloft on CAP had been armed with six long-range Phoenix missiles. Two of the F-14s — the planes of Barcap Two — were far to the north, badly positioned to defend against the Osa-launched attack from the southeast.
The Osas carried four Styx ship-killers apiece. Jefferson’s CAP could knock out those first sixteen missiles easily enough, but they would then have just eight AIM-54-Cs left between them if the Indian aircraft launched a major assault. Besides the Alert Five, the carrier was preparing for an emergency launch, hoping to get every Tomcat it could into the air before the attackers could get close enough to fire more ship-killers, but the first wave of Styx missiles would arrive long before all of the carrier’s defenders could get aloft.
And even for missiles not yet launched, it would be a deadly race, and with the numbers arrayed against the CBG, it was a race that the Americans were certain to lose.
Modern naval strategy placed the all-important aircraft carrier at the center of the task force inside a series of concentric rings. Each ring defined a volume of airspace, called a task force air defense zone, extending from sea level to 90,000 feet. The outer ring, reaching out to one hundred nautical miles from the carrier, was designated the aircraft defense zone. The middle ring covered an area out to forty miles from the carrier and was called the missile defense zone. The inner ring, a speck of sea only two miles high and reaching five nautical miles from the carrier, was the point defense zone.