Commander Dennis Ninomiya hurried into the dim, blue-tinted CIC. No one commented on the fact that the cruiser’s normally unflustered and wholly unflappable executive officer looked out of breath. The klaxons blaring in every compartment as Mobile Bay came to Condition I, general quarters signaled this was no ordinary drill. “Status report!” he snapped.
“Missiles inbound, XO!” Brian Thorson, the young lieutenant assigned as tactical action officer for this watch, said, sounding rattled. He pointed to the large screen echoing radar data transmitted by the E2-C Hawkeye offshore. Red icons showed cruise missiles arrowing closer — screaming in just above the rooftops of San Diego’s hilly, densely populated suburbs. The leader was just over one minute out, with thirteen others trailing after it at several second intervals. “By their flight profile, they’re probably Kh-35s.”
“Shit,” Ninomiya cursed. Whoever had smacked Barksdale Air Force Base a few days ago was now coming after them. He took a closer look at the screen. More icons showed civilian aircraft, including passenger jets on approach to San Diego International, all over the local sky. The airport was less than five miles northwest of their berth. Even if they could bring the ship’s antiair missiles online in time, there was no way they could fire. In this cluttered air environment, the odds of knocking down a friendly airliner by accident were far too high. Which left his cruiser and the other ships tied up in port largely dependent on passive defenses. “Activate electronic and passive countermeasures only — no kinetics, repeat, no Sea Sparrows or Sea-Whiz.” “Sea-Whiz,” or Phalanx CIWS, was a radar-guided 20mm cannon designed to protect a vessel from incoming missiles out to a range of about a mile — fractions of a second before impact. “Close-in” was a polite way to put it: “Last prayer” might be a better description. “Tell Lindbergh Tower and SOCAL Approach to clear the Class Bravo airspace now, air defense emergency. As soon as the Class Bravo is clear, activate all defenses and countermeasures. Status of the port defenses?”
“Port defenses activated when we got the warning from the AWACS, sir,” Thorson reported. The port defenses consisted of a variety of electronic jammers that could shut down GPS signals and a missile’s active guidance, but those were a last-ditch effort. Nervously, he shrugged his shoulders. “Missiles still inbound, sir. Five miles.”
Damn, Mobile Bay’s XO thought grimly. Without satellite navigation systems there was no way those missiles could have flown undetected through the mountain ranges east of the port. So why weren’t the high-powered jamming systems the Navy had deployed to spoof GPS and GLONASS receivers working? Had the enemy missiles already shifted to their final radar-homing attack mode? “Where are my…?”
At that instant, the tactical action officer shouted, “Decoys away, decoys away!” Once launched, the Australian-designed Nulka rockets — the very word nulka was an Aboriginal term for “be quick”—could hover in midair. As they slid downrange from their parent ship, they emitted precisely tailored signals that simulated the signature of a larger vessel, seducing radar-guided missiles off target.
“Quails Four, Six, Seven, Nine, and Thirteen departing observed course!” one of the CIC operators said abruptly.
Staring back at the big tactical display, Ninomiya saw five of the fourteen incoming missiles veer away in several different directions. For a few more seconds, they kept flying, streaking low over San Diego’s suburbs at close to the speed of sound. But then, in quick succession, the five Kh-35s disappeared off the screen — replaced by fast-fading radar blooms of smoke, flame, and falling debris.
“Our satnav jammers worked!” Ninomiya said exultantly… and then felt his exultation vanish when he realized what had just happened. Each of the five missiles decoyed off course had plowed into neighborhoods packed with single-family homes, apartment complexes, schools, churches, and shopping centers.
“Permission to release CIWS to automatic mode?” the lieutenant asked.
Appalled, Ninomiya snapped, “Permission denied.” From the ship’s position along the pier, only one of Mobile Bay’s two 20mm Phalanx Close-in Weapons Systems could bear on the nine missiles still racing toward the harbor. But if he allowed the computer-controlled, six-barrel Vulcan cannon to fire, it would be shooting right into the heart of San Diego — spewing hundreds of armor-piercing tungsten penetrator rounds per second toward multistory apartment buildings and houses built on rising ground. The civilian death toll would be horrendous.
On the screen, the inbound Kh-35s were spreading out. Course tracks showed they were targeted on several of the moored ships — including Mobile Bay. They were close now, only a few seconds away. “Oh, Jesus,” Ninomiya muttered, suddenly praying that officers aboard the other ships in port would decide to risk the collateral damage and open fire.
“We’re gonna get hit!” one of the ratings shouted.
Ninomiya’s nerve broke. He swung toward Thorson. “Belay that last order! Release batteri—”
And then it was too late.
The first cruise missile slammed into the cruiser’s port side — ripping an enormous hole as it punched through hull plating and a thin layer of Kevlar armor designed only to protect against fragments and small arms. Its high-explosive shaped charge warhead went off deep inside the ship… right outside the combat information center.
Neither Commander Dennis Ninomiya nor any of the other officers and sailors inside the CIC had time to react before a wave of fire and razor-edged metal washed across the compartment and killed them all.
Peering down at the wrecked and burning ships lining the waterfront, U.S. Navy captain Blair Pollock felt sick. Three missiles had hit Mobile Bay—gutting her from stem to stern. Only the top of her superstructure and triangular mainmast were still visible, poking up out of the oil-stained water. Blackened corpses bobbed alongside the pier. At Pier Four, damage control teams were trying to put out a roaring, fuel-fed fire aboard the San Antonio—class amphibious ship USS New Orleans. More thick black smoke boiled away from the splinter-torn side of USS Dewey, an Arleigh Burke—class destroyer. In all, seven of the nine surviving Kh-35s had slammed into ships moored alongside San Diego’s piers. Hundreds of officers and men were dead or maimed and burned.
Inland, more fires were burning. Huge plumes of smoke soared hundreds of feet in the air, fed by flames consuming homes and businesses in different neighborhoods. Most of the damage came from the five missiles that had lost guidance and crashed well short of the waterfront. But in the last seconds, the tactical action officer aboard another of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, USS Lake Erie, had opened fire with her Phalanx guns. They’d knocked down the two missiles headed her way… but hundreds of stray 20mm rounds had also shredded homes and businesses across a four-block-wide swath of the Paradise Village neighborhood just across the 805 Freeway. Early reports flooding in from hospitals and triage centers suggested civilian casualties could easily be higher than those suffered by the Navy.