Two slender columns of water jetted up from the disturbed surface of the river.
“Yeah! Gus, down dome and see if we put a hole in this guy. Gray Lady! Gray Lady! We have weapon impact and detonation! Two hits out of the pattern. We are trying to verify the kill.”
“Acknowledged, Zero One,” Amanda’s voice came back.
Any triumph she might be feeling was being tightly locked down. “Hold on station. If you’ve hit him, he’s going to try and surface.”
Gus Grestovitch cut in abruptly. “Lieutenant, massive transitory on the target bearing! Submarine blowing ballast!”
“Gray Lady! We got him! He’s coming up!”
Out in the center of the target zone, a submarine’s conning tower broke water. Silt-enslimed from its long concealment on the estuary floor, the Xia lifted its head sluggishly above the surface like some long-entombed dinosaur.
“There she blows! Gray Lady, we have visual confirmation of the target! We’ve got the boomer! I say again, we have got the boomer!”
On the Cunningham’s bridge, the exclamations of victory were more restrained: a fist lightly thumped on the chart table, the whispered release of a contained breath.
Amanda leaned forward in the captain’s chair, holding her headset mike close to her lips. “Zero One, current status on the target?”
“On the surface and holding stable. We’ve hurt him, but we haven’t killed him.”
“Stand by, Zero One.”
They’d put the barbs into their whale and they’d run it down. Now they had to drive the lance into its lungs.
“Tactical Officer.”
“TACCO, aye.”
“Finish the job, Dix. You know the drill. You can’t miss on this one!”
“Final-phase safeties are off. All prelaunch systems are green, sir.”
Dix Beltrain leaned in over the Sea SLAM operator’s shoulder. “Don’t commit the round. Keep the missile under manual control all the way in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And remember, forward of the sail! Target only forward of the sail. If you can’t drop it in right, abort the round.”
“I know, sir,” the systems operator replied with as much laconic forbearance as a gunner’s mate first could afford with a full lieutenant.
“Okay. Shoot.”
Among the arsenal of “smart weaponry” proliferating in the twenty-first century, the Sea SLAM was without doubt one of the most brilliant, because a human mind could guide it to its target.
Hurled out of its launch cell, the modified Harpoon Missile extended its cruciform fins and followed in the trajectory of the V-ROCs. Coming over the peak of the arc, the infrared imager in its nose activated, beaming a supra-eagle’s-eye view of the Yangtze River environs back to its mother station aboard the Cunningham.
The Sea SLAM operator entered the loop. His fingers curled around a joystick and he sent steering commands back up through the datalink to the missile, guiding it to its target in exactly the same way a hobbyist might fly a radio controlled model airplane. Only, this “model plane” carried a quarter of a ton of high explosives at the velocity of a .45-caliber bullet.
There was a further complication as well. There was a zero tolerance for failure. The SLAM round would have to be brought in on the forehull of the Chinese submarine, far enough back to smash the missile-control center and sink the boat, yet far enough forward not to directly involve any of the IRBM silos in the Xia’s central launching bay.
If one of the boomer’s armed Ju Lang II rounds was hit, the worst that could be expected would be a limited-yield nuclear explosion. The best would be that particles of hyper radioactive plutonium would be sprayed throughout the Yangtze estuary, contaminating the river’s mouth for the next fifty thousand years. The fate of one of the great port cities of the world lay in the hands of a twenty-year-old American seaman from Meade, Kansas.
In the crosshairs of the SLAM guidance screen, the target grew from a dark pencil stub afloat in a pale-green creek to a cigar, to a toy, to a looming black hulk all in the space of half a dozen heartbeats. With his joystick, the systems operator rode the nose of his missile down, keeping it fixed on the one exact point he had chosen just beneath the submarine’s sail.
The screen flared and went to static.
Upriver in the estuary, the Sea SLAM gave no warning of its arrival, its turbojet power plant leaving no flame trail behind it.
The river rose up under the forward end of the Xia’s hull, lifting the boomer’s blunt nose into the air. Almost in slow motion, the submarine’s bow cap and conning tower tore away, electrical arcs dancing around the opening wounds.
Then the boomer’s main hull settled back, wallowing sluggishly like a waterlogged tree trunk. A moment more and it was gone, sinking in its shallow water grave, the eternal Yangtze pouring in through its breached bulkheads.
“Yes!” Vince Arkady’s voice rang out of the bridge speakers. “Good shot! Boomer is down! All the way, the boomer is down!”
Somewhere behind Amanda, a hand slapped down on the chart table and the sound-activated intercom links sputtered for a moment as someone down in the CIC whooped.
Amanda tilted her helmeted head back for a few moments, her eyes closed in silent gratitude. Coming forward again, she keyed the command mike. “Acknowledged, Retainers. Boomer is down. Disengage and return to the ship. I say again, disengage and return to the ship.”
“Retainers, wilco.”
Amanda toggled across from surface-to-air to intercom.
“Radio Shack, transmit the following to Task Flag … ”
“Admiral, signal from the Cunningham. Stormdragon is dead. Mission accomplished. ASW assets are withdrawing.”
Subdued cheers and a round of applause sounded within the Enterprise’s Pri-Fly. Admiral Tallman’s fist stabbed the air in a victorious uppercut.
“Congratulations, Jake.” Macintyre slapped the Task Force commander on the shoulder.
“Yeah, well, we’re still doing ‘far, so good,’ Eddie Mac. We still got to count ‘all home’.”
Tallman turned to his air boss. “Status on the diversion strike, Commander?”
“The last bird should be making its run now, sir.”
“Okay, two minutes more and we can start letting our weight down.”
Bubbles Zellerman stared into her targeting screen like a fortune-teller into a crystal ball. Moondog 505 had been preceded by her eleven squadron mates, all of whom had “plowed the farm” quite effectively.
Their target was the Hudong shipyards, the facility that had resurrected the Xia and its hunter-killer escorts. It was a logical target. A strike here would focus Chinese attention away from what was taking place a few miles north on the Yangtze. It would also ensure that no more nuclear-powered snakes would issue from this particular hole.
Bubbles was imaging the target through the Sea Raptor’s FLIR turret. However, she could almost have done as well using visual light. Half a dozen major fires were raging within the shipyard boundaries.
Cranes, warehouses, and machine shops had been bomb shattered and left in flames. The water gates of the main yard dry dock had been blown out and the facility flooded, and a Romeo-class conventional submarine had been lifted half out of the water and draped broken-backed across a quay. Burning oil from its ruptured tanks leaked into the Huangpu channel and spread slowly downstream, lighting off the finger piers like a string of birthday candles.
The huge, covered, graving dock was ablaze from the inside out. A score of burnthroughs flamed on its roof, and a multispectral tongue of fire, fully half the width of the river in length, roared out the open ship doors.