Locked firmly on the second contact, it closed in for the kill. At an optimum range of one-point-three meters from its target, the missile detonated its warhead. Fifty-five kilograms of hexagon/RDT/aluminum erupted into a mushrooming shock wave of fire and shrapnel.
The concussion shook the bridge, throwing Sub Lieutenant Kensington up against the radar repeater hard enough to knock the wind out of him.“Holy Mother of God!” he gasped. “That was close!” His ears were still ringing, and the brilliant after-image of the close-aboard explosion still danced in front of his night-accustomed retinas. He pulled himself back to his feet. “Why are we seeding chaff so close to the ship?”
No one bothered to answer, but a second after he asked the question, he dredged up the answer from some half-forgotten training lecture. Missile manufacturers knew about chaff, and they were programming their weapons with little tricks to avoid it. Many missiles were now smart enough not to turn on their radar seekers immediately. If a chaff cloud was far enough away from the real target, a missile with an inactive seeker could fly through it without being distracted. The closer the chaff was to the ship, the better the odds that a missile’s radar would be active and subject to seduction. By seeding an inner pattern of small chaff clouds and an outer pattern of larger chaff clouds, the ship could even sucker missiles that were programmed to ignore the first targets they spotted.
A fireball blossomed in the distance, as one of the Sea Darts intercepted and destroyed a German sea-skimmer. A few seconds later, a Sea Wolf from the Chatham vaporized another of the German missiles.
The Phalanx Gatling guns continued to spray short bursts of 20mm bullets into the night.
Two hundred meters above the water, Fliegen Oberleutnant Pieter Hulbert torqued his pistol-grip control stick to the left and nudged the rudder pedal, twisting his EF-2000S EuroStrike-Fighter into a tight turn.
Mounting G-forces mashed him back into his seat as the agile jet fighter practically stood on its port wing. Stubby canard-style foreplanes gave the delta-winged aircraft a vicious midair turning radius. Hulbert grunted several times as his plane ripped through the turn, an old fighter pilot’s trick for keeping blood pressure in the upper body when the Gs were stacking up.
He bumped the dorsal airbrake, and a streamlined section of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit folded open, creating a drag-stream that caused his plane to shed speed and altitude rapidly. The maneuver saved his life, as a Sea Wolf missile punched through the section of sky that his aircraft had occupied a millisecond earlier. The G-forces eased off as he rolled out of the turn into level flight less than a hundred meters above the water.
Hulbert scanned his Head Up Display for the targeting reticule. There!
A wire-frame rectangle popped into existence on the HUD, outlining a fat radar blip. With the touch of a button, Hulbert called up an infrared display, superimposing the target’s IR signature over its radar image. The IR signature was black: no significant heat sources. Not enough for a warship, anyway. It was a false target, a chaff cloud.
He sequenced to the next radar target and immediately called up its IR signature. An irregular oblong appeared on the HUD — gray, shot with dapplings of white. Heat sources. Heat from engine exhaust. Heat from ventilation systems. It was a warship. A target.
Hulbert shifted his right thumb up to the top of the control stick and flipped up the hinged plastic cover that protected the arming selector and fire button. He held down the arming selector, giving the missile under his starboard wing its first look at the target. A bright circle appeared on the HUD, signaling the missile’s acknowledgment. He released the arming selector and gave the control stick a tiny jog to the right, improving his alignment on the target, to give the missile the best possible odds of success. His thumb shifted to the fire button.
The Kormoran missile dropped away from the wing, falling for nearly a second before its engine fired in midair. Then it dropped even closer to the water to begin the inertial-guidance portion of its attack on HMS York.
Oberleutnant Hulbert twisted his pistol-grip control stick to the right, peeling his aircraft away from the firing bearing as quickly as possible. It was a good tactic: what any smart fighter pilot would have done in the same situation. But in this case, it was fatal.
The 114mm cannon shell that tore through his port wing wasn’t even aimed at him; he just happened to fly between it and its intended target.
Red tattletales began flashing all over his instrument panel, accompanied by a small choir of alarm bells and warning buzzers. Fly-by-wire was out and shifting to backup. Fuel pressure was dropping rapidly.
The HUD lost power and went dark, and half of his instruments started fluctuating wildly.
The plane began to vibrate, and the control stick bucked crazily in his hand. A quick glance over his left shoulder told him that the carbon-fiber wing was starting to delaminate. He had perhaps ten seconds before the entire aircraft came apart on him.
He reached behind his head and groped for the looped shape of the eject handle. His fingers locked on it.
The second 114mm shell wasn’t aimed at his aircraft either. It punched through the thin skin of the EF-2000S’s fuselage just aft of his seat, about sixteen centimeters left of centerline. The explosion rolled through the tight little cockpit, simultaneously shredding Hulbert’s body and flash-cooking it to cinders. Unable to contain the expanding pressure wave, the aircraft ruptured like an overripe fruit, spilling fire and twisted metal into the night sky.
Oberleutnant Hulbert’s AS-34B flew two meters above the wave tops.
In route to its target, it encountered two fat radar contacts, both of which it discarded as too large. The missile’s target selection algorithm evaluated the third radar contact it detected and decided that the new candidate was of a size and shape appropriate for a valid target. Twice, the missile made mid-course corrections to improve its angle of attack, unaware that the second of these course changes snatched it out of the way of a burst of 20mm rounds from the destroyer’s Phalanx Close-In Weapon System.
The missile kicked into terminal homing mode and accelerated to mach 0.9 for the attack.
The starboard Phalanx mount had expended the last of its ammunition.
It continued to track the incoming missile with unerring accuracy, its six Gatling gun — style barrels spinning impotently.
The missile struck the destroyer starboard side midships, just above the waterline, blowing a huge hole through the old ship’s steel hull. The fireball and shock wave ripped through Engine Room Number One, buckling decks, collapsing bulkheads, shattering pipes, and severing electrical cables. Anything that was even remotely flammable was instantly incinerated — from the insulated lagging that lined the bulkheads, to the six crew members closest to the blast.
The sound wave that accompanied the explosion ruptured the eardrums of the three engineering personnel who survived the initial detonation.
Though the point of impact had been a half-meter or so above the waterline, the hole created by the explosion extended well below the waterline. The sea poured through the ragged hole in a sledgehammer torrent that drove an apprentice engineer to the deck.
Unable to fight the relentless deluge, the young man was swept across the space by the wave front. Deafened by the explosion and half-blinded by the seawater, he flailed about helplessly under the driving cascade as water forced its way up his nose and past his shattered eardrums. He opened his mouth to scream, but the water forced itself down his throat, pumping his lungs full of liquid fire. Still tumbling, his head slammed into a pump housing hard enough to crack his skull. The in-rushing sea tossed him about like a rag doll until it had driven the final spark of life from his limp body.