Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (6 page)

 
          
Jon
Masters looked pretty together when he stepped into the reconnaissance control
room a few minutes later—his wet hair and chest probably meant he had stuck his
head in a freshwater shower to refresh himself. “Looks like we got a tight
bird, Doc,” White told him as he stepped inside. “Skywalker should be on
station in about an hour.”

 
          
Masters
found his chair but did not sit in it. He looked around apprehensively. “Can
you open a window or door?” he asked in a quiet voice, like a boy shyly asking
to use the bathroom. “Man, I need a horizon to align my gyros.”

 
          
“Sorry,
no windows,” White said, “and leaving the hatch open spoils our electronic
security.” White knew that ships, subs, aircraft, or even shore-based
electronic surveillance systems could pick up electromagnetic emissions from
long distances—passive electronic reconnaissance was one of Whites most popular
missions—so the
Mistress's
classified
sections were shielded to foil eavesdroppers; that shielding was useless if
ports or hatches were left open. He had some crew members turn on ventilation
fans. It didn’t seem to help—even in the dimly lit little chamber, everyone
could see that Jon Masters was turning an especially awful shade of green.

 
          
But
Masters seemed to setde down quickly as the drone approached its patrol area
and some interesting images began coming in. The first one was crisp and clean,
with shades of purple and orange providing some contrast and depth. The sensor
operators filled the
two thirty
-inch monitors with a large warship steaming
northward; data blocks under the sensor image displayed the target’s speed,
size, direction of travel, and other characteristics. “Beeaauuu- t-ful! ” Jon
Masters exclaimed.

 
          
Paul
White agreed. It was the joint Chinese-Iranian aircraft carrier
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
fully
loaded and with a full complement of escorts, leaving its port at Chah Bahar
and heading into the Gulf of Oman. White had never thought he’d see anything
like it in his life—
Iran
sailing an aircraft carrier in the
Persian Gulf
region. “I’ll get the report out on the
satellite,” he said, almost breathlessly. “NS A will want to know details.”

 
          
Although
it was not as big as the American supercarriers, it was still a very
impressive-looking warship. It had so many anti-ship missile mounts on its
decks that it looked like a battleship or guided- missile cruiser welded beside
an aircraft carrier. It was a little intimidating to think that the
Khomeini
could bring an awesome array of
surface-warfare weapons to bear on a target, and
then
launch attack aircraft to finish the job. The
Khomeini
looked similar to American
aircraft carriers from the rear, with its slanted landing section, lighted
edges, and four arresting wires; the main difference was in the huge array of
armament set up in the aft section—the cruise- missile canisters and defensive
missile and gun emplacements on both sides. The “island” superstructure looked
like any other, with huge arrays of antennas seemingly piled atop one another
on the superstructure and bn a separate antenna structure aft; there was one
aircraft elevator in front and behind the superstructure. Again, anti-ship
cruise-missile emplacements were everywhere. The really unusual feature of the
Khomeini
was the bow section—instead of
continuing the large, long flat profile of a “flat-top,” the
Khomeinis
bow rapidly sloped upward at
the bow, forming an aircraft “ski jump.”

 
          
White
returned as Skywalker was focused on the carrier’s forward flight deck. “NSA’s
got the word,” he said. “No other instructions for us, so we continue to
monitor the battle group. We should hear something soon.”

 
          
“Man,
look at the planes that thing is carrying,” Masters exclaimed. He started
poking the screen, counting aircraft. “They got at least ten fighters lined up
on deck.”

 
          
“They
what?” White asked. He counted along with Masters, then said, “That’s weird. They
got their attack group up on deck.”

 
          
“What’s
weird about that?”

 
          
“The
Khomeini
is a former Russian carrier,
and the Russians usually wouldn’t park any of their aircraft up on deck, like
the Americans do,” White explained. “They’d keep all the fixed-wing aircraft
belowdecks and leave only a few fling-wings on the roof for rescue and shutde
service between other ships in the group. That’s why they carry only two dozen
fixed-wing jets. An American flat-top carries three times that many—but
one-third of them can be stowed belowdecks at one time.

 
          
“See
this? The deck is so small, they line the helicopters up just forward of the
forward elevator, and all the fixed-wings on the fan- tail behind the aft
elevator,” White continued. “They need all that room because the
Khomeini
doesn’t use catapults like
other carriers. The Russians originally designed the ski jump for
short-takeoff-and- landing jets, like the Yak-38 Forger and the Yak-41
Freestyle, which they canceled, but it works OK—in a manner of speaking—for
conventional jets.” He pointed at the monitor toward the aft section of the
Iranian carrier. “The fighters start way back here, about six hundred feet from
the bow. The fighters are secured with a holdback bar, the pilots turn on the
afterburners, and they let them go. When they leave the ski jump, they get
flung about a hundred feet in the sky—but they
fall
almost seventy feet toward the water as they build up enough
speed to start flying....”

 
          
“You’re
kidding!”
Masters exclaimed.

 
          
“No,
I’m not,” White assured him. “The jets drop so low that they had to build this
little platform here on the bow so that someone with a radio can tell the air
boss and skipper whether or not the jet made it, because no one can see the
fighter from the ‘crow’s nest’ for about fifteen to twenty seconds after
takeoff, and if it crashed the ship would run right over it. The Sukhoi-33s
apparently have a special ejection system wired into the radar altimeter that
will automatically eject the pilot if there’s no weight on the landing gear and
the jet sinks below twenty feet. The auto-ejection system is manually
activated, and apparently a lot of planes have been lost in training because
newbie pilots forget to turn the system off just before landing. They make a
successful carrier approach, swoop over the fantail, then
fwoosh
—they’re gone, punched out a split second before they catch
the wire.” Masters laughed out loud like a little kid—for the moment, his
seasickness was all but forgotten.

 
          
“The
deck gets very dangerous in operations like this. There’s probably only thirty
feet of clearance between a wingtip and a rotor tip when a jet’s heading for
the ski jump,” White went on. “Plus, nobody can land because aircraft are lined
up on the fantail in the landing zone, which means if a jet has an emergency
right after takeoff it’ll take them a long time to clear the deck to recover
it. ...”

 
          
“What’s
on your mind, boss?” It was Paul White’s deputy commander, Air Force Lieutenant
Colonel Carl Knowlton.

 
          
White
shook his head. “Ah, nothin’. It’s just weird for all those planes to be on
deck at night.” He studied the monitor a bit more. “And they’ve got the ski
jump clear. If they were just emptying out the hangar deck to clean it or set
up for a party or reception or basketball game or something, like they do on
American carriers, you’d think they’d just tow airplanes out of the way across
the entire deck.” “You think they’re going flying tonight?”

 
          
“Who
the hell knows?” White responded. “The Russians never flew carrier ops at
night, and the
Khomeini
s only been
operational for about a year, so I’d think night flights would be the last
thing on their minds. The Iranians would have to be real stupid to fly planes off
a carrier at night, in a narrow channel, not facing into the wind, with a foul
deck for emergency landing. Of course, I’d never accuse the Iranian military
braintrust of a lot of smarts anyway.” He paused, lost in thought. “Could be
trouble tonight. I’m real glad we got Skywalker up there right now.”

 
          
They
zoomed out Skywalker’s sensor to take pictures of the entire carrier, then
zoomed in to maximum magnification to take detail pictures of every section of
the ship. Occasionally Skywalker’s threat warning system would beep, indicating
that it was being scanned by a nearby radar, but there was never any indication
that anyone had locked on to it, and no aircraft ever flew nearby to chase it
away. There was an outside possibility that Skywalker’s satellite uplink back
to the
Valley Mistress
had been
detected and even intercepted, but no one in the
Khomeini
group ever attempted to jam or shut down the signal; White
and Masters hoped that
Iran
didn’t yet possess the sophisticated
computers needed to unscramble the uplink signals.

 
          
“Here’s
the other stuff I wanted to look at,” White said excitedly as the Skywalker
drone moved northward again, after orbiting over the
Khomeini
for nearly an hour. The drone had locked its sensor on a
ship almost as large as the aircraft carrier, its center superstructure higher
and clustered with twice the antenna arrays. “The Chinese destroyer
Zhanjiang
,
the pride of the Chinese navy,” White said.
“Supposedly out here to house the Chinese officers and troops training on the
Khomeini,
but I think it’s out here to
protect the carrier and to add a little extra firepower to
Iran
’s carrier escort fleet. It’s got a full
complement of non-nuclear weapons—long-range anti-ship and antiaircraft
missiles, cruise missiles, rocket-powered torpedoes, big dual-purpose guns,
three sub-hunter helicopters, the works. This one ship has more firepower than
the entire Iranian air force, before they started buying up surplus Russian
planes.”

 
          
“So
basically the Chinese are escorting an Iranian aircraft carrier battle group,”
Masters observed. “If anyone takes a shot at them,
China
gets involved in the fight.”

 
          
“No
one knows what
China
would do if the group was attacked—or, more likely, what the Chinese
would do if the Iranians
attacked
someone,” White said. “But Iran and China are pretty closely allied,
economically if not ideologically—China’s been pumping billions of dollars’
worth of military hardware into Iran every year at bargain-basement prices, in
exchange for cheap oil. It’s a win- win deal for both of them, and I’d think
they’d try very hard to maintain their relationship.”

 
          
“But
what for?” Masters asked. “What does
Iran
need with an aircraft carrier and a
guided-missile destroyer?”

 
          
“They’re
the big boys on the block now, Jon,” White replied. “You got a carrier, or a
nuke, and you’re the top dog.
Iran
maneuvers itself as the leader of the
Muslim world by sailing five billion dollars’ worth of warships around the
Gulf, daring anyone to take a shot at them.”

 
          
“Who’d
be stupid enough to do that?”

 
          
“I’m
not saying that’s their strategy,” White said, “but it’s a pretty big threat,
and they’ve got a lot of firepower to back it up.”

 
          
“Like
big chips on their shoulders,” Masters summarized. “More like bricks. I guess
they’re out of the terrorist game then, huh?”

 
          
“I
wouldn’t say that at all,” White said. “They’ve mastered the art of terrorism
over the years. It didn’t earn them any respect, except with other fanatical
fringe groups. But now, with a powerful navy and air force, they’ve got
respect—at least, everyone’s wary of them now. The
U.S.
definitely is.”

 
          
Skywalker
continued its patrol after orbiting
Zhanjiang
for almost an hour—still no sign of
detection, even after more than two hours over the Iranian battle group. The
operation had been a complete success so far. They decided they’d recall
Skywalker after the battle group had headed south around the
Musandam
Peninsula
and entered the
Gulf
of
Oman
. They programmed the drone to fly about twenty
miles west of the warships instead of directly over them. Using the drones
sideways-looking radars, they kept track of the ships as they sailed southward
into the sea lanes.