“Banjo, One-One, good magnum hit, I see secondaries,” Furness radioed.
“Oh, man, oh, man,” Fogelman breathed. He dropped his oxygen mask with a flick of his wrist, as if he couldn’t draw enough air through it. “Goddamn, we actually hit something. We hit a real live fucking ship.”
“C’mon, Mark,” Furness said. “Stay focused.”
“Becky, it’s just that I… hell, I never thought I’d actually fire one of these for real.” He fastened his oxygen mask to his face, took a deep breath, and began checking the TEREC threat indications again. “Okay, it looks like the F-band is off the air … okay, the S-band search radar on the cruiser is back up and hitting us right in the face. He could be taking over the air intercept for the Russian AWACS if he’s being jammed. That’s the one we want.”
“One-Two, give us some music,” Furness radioed to Norton.
“One-Two, pump,” Norton replied as Aldridge ejected two more TALD glider decoys.
Fogelman selected the antiradar missile on the number-six pylon, then continued to check his sensors. “Still got a lock on the S-band air search … shit, the SA-N-6 just came up! I’m selecting the missile on four … dammit, c’mon, man, take it, take it … got it! I got a fix on both the Grumble and the S-band. Command bars are on the target.”
“Turning,” Furness replied, and began a steep 60-degree turn toward the Russian cruiser. The HARM missile had to be aimed within 5 degrees of its intended target before it could lock on. She keyed the mike: “Banjo, One-One …”
“Missile launch!” Fogelman cried out.
At that, they could see first one missile, then another, then four more missiles rise vertically from the horizon, drawing bright lines of fire in the sky. The lines began to curl a bit — the first one or two missiles were obviously going for decoys, but the cruiser had rapid-fired enough missiles for all of them.
“Missiles away!” Fogelman cried out, and hit the launch button. When the HARM missiles were away and well clear of the Vampire, Fogelman depressed the four jammer switchlights on the front instrument panel, and the forward XMIT light came on immediately — the SA-N-6 Grumble was locked on to them solidly. “Grumble at twelve o’clock,” he said. “I lost sight of the missiles … I can’t see them!”
“Set one hundred feet on the LARA bug!” she shouted, and began a rapid descent to one hundred feet above the sea without changing heading. Their smallest radar cross-section was head-on, and if they turned they would be exposing more of themselves to the Russian missile guidance radar. “Gimme chaff.” Furness began a short-frequency up-and-down oscillation, no more than a hundred feet, trying to impart a rolling motion to the missiles that might throw them off.
“I see the missiles! Still headed right for us!” Furness called out. She began a slow side-to-side rolling action. The Grumble didn’t seem to be going for it. On the command radio, she shouted, “One-Two, give me a couple more.”
“Copy,” Norton replied. “Decoys away.”
The extra decoys worked. Just as the flare of the missile’s motor winked out, Furness could see that the SA-N-6 missile was beginning to climb higher and higher until it was far overhead, tracking the decoys that were hundreds of times better targets than the Vampires. A moment later, Fogelman shouted, “Got it! Shit hot, we got both the air search and the Grumble missile emitter! We nailed ’em!”
It was confirmed by an entire series of explosions just about twelve miles off on the horizon as the hundred-pound warheads from the two HARMs fired thousands of tungsten alloy cubes in a deadly cloud of metal all across the center and aft sections of the Russian guided missile cruiser, setting off several SS-N-12 “Sandbox” antiship missiles sitting in exposed angled launch canisters on deck.
Just when it appeared the secondary explosions had subsided, a tremendous explosion erupted on deck, illuminating the sea around the Marshal Ustinov for miles in all directions. They could even see a helicopter afire on the aft landing pad.
“We might have a kill!” Furness said in delight on interphone. “We might’ve gotten the cruiser!” She keyed the command radio mike button: “One-Two, did you see that? Banjo, this is One-One, I think we got the cruiser.”
“One-One, Banjo, give me an ident.” Fogelman briefly shut off the Mode 4 transponder, then turned it back on again. “Received, One-One,” the controller said in a low, somber voice. “One-Two is faded at this time. Turn right heading one-one-zero and say what state magnum.”
It was as if both Furness and Fogelman had been hit in the stomach with baseball bats. The NATO radar plane no longer had contact with Norton and Aldridge. One of the SA-N-6 missiles that they thought was going after a decoy must have hit them instead.
Just like that, in the blink of an eye, two fellow crewmembers were gone.
The radar warning receiver blared to life, and an “N” symbol appeared on the scope. “Mark?” Furness said. No reply — Fogelman was staring at the TEREC sensor, but he was as still as a rock. “Mark, come on. That must be the lone destroyer out there. Let’s get this puppy and get the hell out of here.”
“God … it can’t be …” he said, mulling over the deaths of Norton and Aldridge.
“Mark, dammit, run this shot.” On the command net, she radioed, “Banjo, One-One has one HARM left. Stand by. We’re pressing on the easterly destroyer.”
“Copy, Thunder. You have bandits at eleven o’clock, fifty miles, may be converging on you. The destroyer is at your ten o’clock, sixty miles. You’ve got chicks engaged at twelve o’clock, one-two-zero miles.”
“Roger.” She reached over and shook Fogelman’s left shoulder. “C’mon, Mark. Maybe they got out. Maybe they’re in the water. We can’t do anything for them. Let’s burn this last guy.”
But without the TALD decoys to induce the Russians to turn on their radars, the destroyer Rezkiy, which was patrolling alone between the guided missile cruiser and the aviation cruiser, wasn’t going to get sucked in quite as easy. Fogelman even tried turning on his attack radar to attract attention from the ship — nothing. But it did attract the attention of the fighters nearby: “One-One, bandits on you, twelve o’clock, forty miles. Range to the destroyer, fifty miles.”
“We’ll give it a few more seconds,” Furness said. “We’re still outside his SA-N-3 missile range.” Once they got within range of the SA-N-3, Furness tried climbing slightly — the Goblet had a minimum effective altitude of three hundred feet, so she tried climbing to five hundred feet to get the destroyer to commit. Still nothing. This was the one problem with carrying all antiradar weapons and nothing else — if the radars didn’t come up, the missiles were nothing but deadweight.
The destroyer’s radar didn’t come up because, with the AWACS feeding radar information to them, it wasn’t needed. The Russian AWACS was proving to be a real problem. They had a plan to deal with it — hopefully that plan was coming together right about now.