The only difference was that this was his job. And he was good at it.
Morris checked his watch again. 0249. He pointed to the surface and pumped his fins, taking his men shallow. The missiles should be impacting in the next few moments unless they veered off course or were shot down. He reached out, felt the steel of Tampa’s tapering aft-section under her screw and followed the curvature upward to the rudder, then continued forward to the top of the hull, still submerged. He put his fins on the top of the hull and swam the remaining few feet to the surface. The pier was lit with floodlights, as were the destroyer decks. The Tampa’s deck was lit only dimly by the wash of light from the neighboring ships. He caught sight of a guard hurrying into the forward escape-trunk hatch, a surprised look on his face.
Morris brought his watch up. 0250. He would have to wait another ten minutes before hitting the submarine’s deck. That or the missiles would have to arrive.
He ducked his head back below the surface and checked his men. All signaled okay.
For the next few moments Morris worked on a plan to hijack one of the smaller vessels, the seaward parked frigate, and drive it out of the bay, or at least to a point that he could meet Seawolf. But that would be putting a few SEALs in an unfamiliar Chinese frigate against the whole P.L.A Navy. Well, at least he could try his hand at driving a ship. He checked his watch one last time. In four minutes they would be committed.
Morris rose the four feet to the surface to take another look. As the water cleared from his mask, he took in a scene beyond his imaginings.
Javelin cruise missile Unit Two approached the piers of Xingang from the south, the water of the Go Hai Bay flashing by beneath the fuselage. The missile’s navigation system updated from a star fix and confirmed the reading with a radar look at the coastline ahead. The unit adjusted the course for the final leg of the run before detonation. The warhead was armed, waiting only for the four-g’s of deceleration required prior to receiving the signal to explode.
The radar-seeker scanned the pie-shaped wedge of earth in front of the missile, the high-frequency waves able to make out the difference between the structure of a crane and the mast of a ship. The unit flew on, nearing the supertanker-pier at the seaward end of the terminal. As the missile approached the pier, the point of its launch, its radar-seeker saw the ships of the People’s Liberation Army at the pier. The seeker distinguished the frigates at either end and discarded the targets as too small. The middle radar-return was the correct size. The central processor compared the radar return with the programmed silhouette of the Luda-class and checked off the similarities—
Double funnel. Check.
Double mast, forward mast higher. Check.
Topside missile batteries and surface gun. Check.
Boxy superstructure forward, ahead of the mainmast. Check.
Smaller structure aft of the second mast. Check.
The ship was confirmed as the target. The missile lowered its nose just slightly so as to strike the hull of the ship just below the deck line.
At six hundred and fifty miles per hour the nose cone of the missile smashed through the steel of the hull, destroying the radar seeker and the navigation equipment. The central processor survived, its detached thought-process recording the four-g deceleration as the steel of the hull slowed the weapon down.
In the next ten milliseconds the weapon continued another eight feet into the ship, the tail of the missile disappearing into the small hole it had made in the hull above the waterline.
By that time the warhead received its signal to detonate and the fuse flashed into incandescence, lighting off an intermediate explosive set in the center of the main explosive, which erupted into a white-hot segment that detonated the high-explosive cylinder of the unit in the nose cone aft of the seeker and navigation modules forward of the central processor. The explosive burst into a sphere of energy, blowing the aft superstructure of the destroyer into the sky, vaporizing much of the aluminum framing and bulkheads above. The fireball also blew the aft stack apart, and with it the number-two boiler, which caused a steam explosion from the idling highpressure steam drum.
The explosion of the Javelin blew downward, breaking the back of the ship, blowing the number-two boiler off its foundation, rupturing a fuel-oil tank. The force of the explosion carried away the main structure of the amidships-mounted HY-2 missile-launcher, blowing the remnants of the missiles into the forward superstructure. The units crashed through the gaping black wreckage of the superstructure, the remains of the officers’ quarters and the ship’s bridge. The missiles’ explosives came to rest against an interior bulkhead in what was once a passageway and ladder way to the upper decks, bleeding jet fuel on the tile of the deck.
The fire caused by the missile engulfed the ship from the fire room of the number-one boiler to the number-one turbine-room. Men ran out of their bunks in an attempt to bring the fire under control but the fire pumps were destroyed, as was much of the firewater piping. None of the battle-communication lines functioned as the ship rapidly filled with toxic smoke from the fire. Within ten minutes all of the crewmen who had not been able to jump overboard were killed by the smoke, the fire or the secondary explosion.
The missiles lying in the forward section of the superstructure were bathed in jet fuel, and when the flames leaped up the ladder from the number-one boiler’s fire room the jet fuel ignited in a rush of flames, the missiles’ explosives detonating and blowing the remainder of the superstructure into the air and onto the foredeck. Now the ship began to take on a starboard list, leaning toward its captive submarine, the break in the keel causing it to settle into the water of the bay.
As the water level rose over the deck amidships, the ship began to buckle, the broken framework of the vessel rupturing its hull at the keel, the water pouring in unchecked. Some men did manage to swim away from the dying ship in the oil slick of the fuel tank. After another ten minutes of flooding and flames, the ship broke in half and settled into the water. All that remained visible forward was the bow mounted gun and the scorched point of the bow. The aft portion was submerged except for an identical gun and the twisted black steel of the ship’s mast, the flag of the northern fleet still flying from the masthead, the banner burned and charred but otherwise intact.
The fireball of what had been Javelin Unit Two was rising into an orange-and-black mushroom cloud spreading over the superstructure of the Luda when Javelin Unit One, coming in from the north, found the Udaloy destroyer and confirmed the target. The missile aimed for the main superstructure directly beneath the bridge, but instead of penetrating the hull, the missile impacted the stern section of the starboard SS-N-14 Silex quad missile-launcher. The nose of the Javelin passed through the canisters of SS-N-14s and continued on through the other side to the bulkhead of the superstructure. The missile’s airframe barely made it into the hole in the bulkhead before the rocket fuel of the SS-N-14s detonated. Before the resulting explosion, the SS-N-14s had been rocket launched torpedoes used in antisubmarine warfare.
Now their rocket fuel’s ignition made them as deadly to the ship as the Javelin launched by the Seawolf. The rocket fuel exploded in a sloppy fireball, first blowing outward before the force of the uneven explosion blew the torpedoes into the forward gun mount. The explosion from the torpedo warheads was even more violent than the initial rocket-fuel ignition, blowing a hole in the ship’s deck in the former location of the number-two 100-mm gun. At roughly the same time as the detonation of the SS-N-14 torpedo warheads, the warhead of the Javelin exploded, vaporizing most of the interior of the forward superstructure and blowing the forward funnel into a crushed lump of metal.