“I confirm that. We are on attack heading. Range to target thirty-four miles. Digger, either you get out of the Navy, or you flat out tell your wife that you’re going to stay, and take whatever happens.”
“Yeah.” Digger Graves shifted in his parachute harness and settled deeper into Moondog 505’s ejector seat.
The flames of Shanghai grew closer.
“Let’s not take all night about this, Gus. This guy has got to be out here somewhere.”
“So is just about every other piece of shit sunk since the Ming fucking Dynasty. The floor of this goddamn river has got to look like the bottom of a goddamn garbage can!”
“Just find us the piece that’s still alive, man.”
It was black magic time again in the rear cockpit of Retainer Zero One. Gus Grestovitch totally fixated on the rippling waves of green light that danced across the oscilloscope display. Half a dozen times, he had almost called out a contact.
But each time something, some undefinable sense of wrongness, had stayed him. The MAD pod said maybe; his instincts said no.
Instinct, in the end, was what it was all about in this the most totally human of all endeavors. It was an edge man would always maintain over even the most sophisticated of technologies. It was why man would always remain a player, and not just a spectator, in this great game called war.
Another broad jag rolled down the oscilloscope line. Identical in appearance to the half a dozen others that had gone before … except for how it felt down in Gus Grestovitch’s guts.
“MAD man! MAD man! Solid contact! We have a solid contact!”
“Going to hover!” The Sea Comanche check reined like a good cow pony. “What d’you have, Gus?”
“Major contact, Lieutenant. Lookin’ solid. Right underneath us.”
“Check it out,” Arkady ordered. “We’re getting tight on time.”
“Aye, aye.”
Swiftly, Grestovitch reconfigured the cockpit workstation, sliding the MAD pod readout onto a secondary telescreen and calling up the primary dunking sonar display.
“Dunking sonar is up. Ready to drop dome.”
“Roger D. Maintaining hover. Depth by the chart is forty meters. Down dome to thirty.”
“Doin’ it. The dome is down.”
A thin Kevlar coaxial cable began to peel off the internal reel of the lightweight SQR/A1 sonar pod slung beneath the helicopter’s portside snub wing. Swiftly, the sound head of the system dropped through the rotor-wash-riffled surface of the estuary.
In the rear cockpit of the helo, Grestovitch sat poised with his earphone gains turned up, ready to begin a passive audio search the second the dome reached depth. Accordingly, he nearly jumped out of his skin when a tremendous echoing crash exploded in his ears. Then, beyond the ringing, he could hear everything.
There was the humming throb of a multitude of pumps and motors. There was the clang and clatter of numerous metallic transitories. There was even the unintelligible but unmistakable murmur of human voices.
“Gus, is this guy down there?”
“I’ll tell the world, sir! We just dropped our sound head right onto the sucker’s deck!”
“Gray Lady, we have located the target!” The radio call electrified the Combat Information Center. “We have positive lock and positive ID!”
“Bridge, this is the Combat Information Center,” Ken Hiro began to report. “Retainer Zero One has—”
“We were monitoring it, Ken,” Amanda Garrett’s filtered voice interrupted. “Commence your engagement sequence.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. All stations, secure EMCON. Aegis systems manager, bring up your radars. Mister Beltrain, take him out.”
“Yes, sir.”
This was Dix’s moment, his and Weapons Division. They had drilled through this a score of times as a computer simulation. Now it was time to expend the hardware.
“V-ROC and SLAM controllers, bring up your initial flights. V-ROCs, start your firing sequence.”
Beltrain keyed into the air-operations circuit. “Retainer Zero One, Retainer Zero One, Vince, this is Dix on line.
We’re setting the datum point now. Give us a short count on your IFF.”
“Gotcha, Dix. Radar beacon is up for a short count.
Three … two … one … “
On the Alpha screen, an active radar display was overlaid on the graphics map of the Yangtze estuary and the surrounding coast. Now, well up the southern estuary channel, a target hack materialized. The Identification-Friend-or-Foe transponder aboard Arkady’s Sea Comanche was interreacting with the destroyer’s radar sweep.
“We have the datum point!” the Aegis systems manager announced. The Duke had fixed her enemy’s position. Now all that was left was the final killing spring.
“Yeah! V-ROC systems, verify we have a full pattern set of VROC’s.”
“Full pattern set, Mr. Beltrain. Hot birds on the rails!”
“Integrate your datum point. Stand by to fire. Vince, get your ass out of there!”
Twelve miles to the west, over the river, Arkady called back over his shoulder. “You heard the man, Gus. Up dome.”
“Dome coming up, sir. This guy sounds like he’s powering up to get under way.”
“We’re not going to let that happen. Retainer Zero Two, do you copy?”
“We copy, Zero One.”
“Secure search and disengage to the east. Expedite!”
“Roger.”
The Sea Comanche bobbled in hover as the sound head clicked up into its carrying mount in the sonar pod.
“Dome up, Lieutenant.”
“Right.”
Arkady pedal-turned the helo around the axis of its rotor head and came forward on the pitch and collective, gaining way. Retainer Zero Two blazed past a few moments later, heading for safety outside of the target zone.
“Gray Lady, Gray Lady, the Elvis has left the building. You are clear to engage!”
“V-ROCs, fire!”
Spaced at one-second intervals, four Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Rockets blazed out of the Cunningham’s VLS arrays, their boosters flickering balls of orange light arcing away toward their distant objective.
The face of sub hunting had changed radically during the past decades. At one time, the foe had been the great pelagic hunter-killers of the Soviet nuclear submarine force. Now, though, the threat had moved closer inshore.
Third-world states were turning to the modern diesel electric submarine as the fast, cheap road to sea power. Sophisticated and silent, these “mobile minefields” were the stingray to the nuclear submarine’s shark.
A new generation of weapons had been needed to deal with this new shallow-water threat. The V-ROC L (Littoral) was one of them.
Instead of the Mark 50 torpedo carried by the standard weapon, the V-ROC L carried a throwback to an earlier age of ASW, a scatterpack of miniature depth bombs similar in design and intent to those of the World War II Hedgehog.
With their boosters burned out, each V-ROC came over the peak of their parabolic trajectory. Plunging in toward their target, a laser proximity fuse gauged each round’s distance from the surface of the water. At the appropriate instant, the scatterpack’s bursting charge fired, dispersing the ten shaped-charge bomblets carried by the warhead bus. Ten bomblets per round, forty bomblets in all, striking the water in an interlocking pattern. A net to trap the biggest fish in the world.
East of the target area, the two Retainers had returned to a hover, reversing again to observe the weapon impact. Through the night-vision visor, Arkady watched as the wave of impact splashes swept across the target zone. Then came the long breath-locked moment as the bomblets sank. The submunitions were each magnetically fused to fire only on contact with a submarine hull.