Commander-In-Chief (59 page)

Hart said, “The frigate is firing the fish to keep the Kilo on the defensive. We’ll be able to launch an ASROC at the same contact in three minutes, but we’re still out of effective range for now.”

Hagen just nodded.

A radio operator just feet away in the CIC spoke loudly into his mike: “All stations, I have one . . . correction, I have
two
undersea missile launches. Popping up on the surface. I say again, two Vampires in the air!”

It was quiet in the CIC for two seconds while this information was processed. The Russian Kilo was not known to have undersea missile launch capability. It only had torpedoes and mines.

The commander spoke calmly over Hart’s shoulder. “What bearing?”

Hart asked the question into his mike. “What’s the bearing on the launch?”

“Bearing zero, three, one.”

Hagen and Hart looked down at the display. The missile launch had come from a completely different bearing from the designated contact.

This could mean only one thing. It was a different sub.

Hart said, “Jesus Christ! What the fuck is over there?”

“Calm down, Weps,” Hagen said, then he spoke over the 1-MC net. “All stations. General Quarters. Condition Zebra. Missiles inbound off the starboard bow. Set Aegis to ready-automatic. CWIS to auto-engage. All hands prepare for impact.”

A confirmation of the orders came over the net a moment later.

Hagen looked up at one of the two big Aegis display screens on the wall. A pair of missiles were in the air, forty miles from the
James Greer
, but only thirteen miles from the Polish frigate that now pinged active sonar. He called over his headset. “EW, this is the captain. Can you ID those Vampires?”

The electronics warfare technician came over the net an instant later. “Captain, EW. Missiles in the air appear to be P-800s. They are not heading for us. Looks like they are going after Friendly Surface Zero Five.”

Hart and Hagen exchanged a glance. Hart said, “That has to be a mistake. The P-800 is the Oniks. The only sub that carries those is the Severodvinsk class, but the Baltic Fleet doesn’t have a—”

Hagen said, “Trust the data in our hands now, Weps. Not the intelligence reports.”

“USWE, Sonar. Passive sonar from friendly Air Zero Nine designates contact at bearing zero, three, one. Initial classification, POSS-SUB high. No cross-fix information. Evaluating acoustics now.”

“USWE, aye,” Hart said, the distraction in his voice noticeable. “We have to get close enough to get a cross fix on that target.”

“USWE, Sonar. Both torpedoes launched by Friendly Surface Zero Five failed to acquire, break. We have solid track on the Kilo.”

“Range to target Enemy Sub Zero One?”

“Range, twenty-four thousand yards.”

Hart spoke softly, not exactly to his captain, not exactly to himself. “That’s just barely in the launch window.” He took a couple of calming breaths and said, “Fire Control, USWE. Launch two ASROCs on Contact-Enemy Sub Zero One.”

A female voice replied instantly. “USWE, Fire Control. Launch two ASROCs on Contact-Enemy Sub Zero One, aye!”

On the deck of the
James Greer
, a hatch sprang open, and a cloud of white smoke billowed out. From within the smoke, a fourteen-foot-long RUM-139 VL-ASROC antisubmarine rocket launched into the cold night air above a pillar of flame.

Two seconds later another missile cell on the deck launched a second weapon, and it chased its teammate up toward the stars.

Inside the housing of each missile was an MK-54 torpedo, but
it did not splash into the water to begin its search immediately. Instead, it lifted high into the sky, pitched over on the heading of the Kilo submarine directly off the ship’s bow, and climbed to a height of 10,000 feet. At the apex of its flight path the missile broke apart and the Mark-54 dropped in free fall toward the water above the submarine contact. Shortly before the Mark-54s hit the water, parachutes deployed from each torpedo, but the devices still hit the water hard enough to descend far below the surface from gravity alone.

Once in the sea, both torpedoes came alive, started up and ran diagnostics of their systems, reported back to the
James Greer
, and began searching for the exact contact they had been sent into the water to seek out.

Hart was up against two enemy submarines at the same time. As soon as he saw good start-up on his weapons targeting the Kilo, he looked back at the Aegis displays on the wall, just as the Polish frigate
Generał Tadeusz Kościuszko
was hit midships with an Oniks. The 550-pound warhead detonated into the side of the 444-foot-long vessel, creating a fireball that lit up the sky twenty miles away from the
James Greer
.

The camera on the top of the
Greer
’s mast broadcast the explosion to the men and women in the CIC, causing them all to stop what they were doing for a moment.

But not for long. Just as the missile hit its target, the radio operator came back over the net. “All stations, I have three missile pop-ups, bearing zero, four, two! More Vampires in the air! I think they are coming for us.”

“God almighty,” Hart said softly.

M
arine Lieutenant Colonel Rich Belanger wiped sweat from his eyes, though it couldn’t have been thirty-five degrees here in the back of the LAV-C2 tracked command-and-control vehicle. He’d opened the hatch to let some cool air in, though the cramped conditions and the incredible stress were causing his perspiration.

He’d lost a lot of men in the past two and a half days, but his battalion had done its job. They hadn’t held any sort of a line—no, the Russian armor had been too strong and the mobile multilaunch missile batteries too accurate for Belanger’s battalion to stick to any fixed point for more than a couple of hours. But by giving ground, moving from one configuration of EARLY SENTINEL positioning points to the next all over the eastern part of Lithuania, his weapons company and his three rifle companies had inflicted a disproportionate level of damage on the Russian invasion.

They weren’t doing it alone, of course. The battalion commander realized two factors had worked in his favor in this endeavor. For one, the EARLY SENTINEL program had made it appear to
the Russians that the initial breach of the border was going to be all but uncontested, to the point they’d fired only a very limited amount of rockets and artillery in advance of their movements, hoping to limit the damage to the roads, bridges, and other conveyances to keep their attack moving through the nation. This had proved to be a disaster on the first day of the attack, as the Marines had been in position, ready and waiting, when the armor entered their sectors. In the first four hours of the attack, two dozen Russian tanks were destroyed, both by TOW rockets and air strikes, and this bottlenecked the advance both in the south and in the north. By the time the Russians began heavily assaulting Lithuanian territory with MLRVs, 155-millimeter artillery, and air of their own, the Marines and even most of the Lithuanian Land Force personnel had withdrawn a few miles, and made themselves impossible for the Russian spotters to fix.

The twisted armor blocking the highways just inside the border had created serious logjams for the Russians, logjams that were exploited by American Harriers and F-18s as well as attack helos firing from standoff distance.

After the first two days there was more damage done to the Russians inside Belarus than there had been in Lithuania.

The other component to the battle that had worked in the favor of Belanger and his men was the ferocity of the Lithuanian and Polish forces. He had not seen a single Polish aircraft himself, but his net was alive with reports of Polish F-16s striking well into Kaliningrad behind the other front, disrupting the Russian attack there and taking up more Russian air assets, reducing the threats to Belanger’s front.

And though the Lithuanians had no air to speak of, their ground units had fought heroically with their limited weapons. They’d suffered unspeakable losses, especially in the south near the E28, but
they’d killed a lot of Russian armor, and by attacking into the advance, they’d provided the Marines both time and a better tactical picture of the Russian battle plan.

But the good luck the Marines had been enjoying ran out at the end of the second day, when a storm front brought little rain but black low-hanging clouds into the area, severely limiting U.S. and Polish air assets’ ability to prosecute their counterattack.

The Black Sea Rotational Force had spent the last twelve hours getting pummeled by T-90 tanks that had advanced faster and faster. 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines had repositioned; they’d counterattacked in hit-and-run operations that even included the Headquarters and Service Company calling in mortars and engaging dismounts with their M4s, but it had been nothing but small steps forward in a half-day full of large steps back.

Belanger sat in the back of his command vehicle now, looking at the disposition of his units on the Blue Force Tracker screen and enjoying the smell of pine out the open rear hatch. Outside he could just see a bit of the thick forest around him from the red glow of the lights here in the interior of his vehicle.

He was in a thick wood near a village called Balsiškės, although he knew he wouldn’t be here for long. The Russian tanks were approaching up rural route 5227, just a few miles away, and they’d be on him by dawn if he didn’t pull back yet again.

He didn’t want to give away more ground. Looking at his digital map he recognized he had only two more fallback positions before he’d be in the outskirts of Vilnius itself, and at that point the Russian advance could take any one of dozens of routes to get around him, to cut him off from escape, and then to lock his force into an area small enough to destroy it with ease.

He’d moved his field hospitals back into the suburbs of Vilnius already, but he did not want to move his fighting forces into the
city. No, he wanted to stay out here, mobile and ready to keep chipping away at the enemy.

Just then a noise roared; flashes in the sky and in the forest around him caused Belanger to launch toward the hatch of his command vehicle. Explosions throughout the woods blasted his eardrums, and he recognized the sound of Russian 300-millimeter rockets raining down around him, ripping into the forest and the village next to it.

Eight explosions within less than ten seconds told him a 9A52-4 Tornado multiple rocket launcher vehicle either had a specific fix on his position, or just general orders to flatten the village in advance of the T-90s’ arrival.

Either way, it didn’t matter. He needed to get his men out of here.

He grabbed the latch of the hatch and started to pull it closed, but quickly he looked back into the red glow behind him. He saw three of the four Marines who’d been riding with him. His radio man was out taking a leak.

“Flagger!” he shouted, and the young Marine appeared in the dark, rolled into the command vehicle, and the tracks began turning in the mud. Belanger shut the hatch, ordered his driver to take them south, and ordered all elements on the net to fall back yet again.

This wasn’t any sort of combat he could recognize. Belanger was essentially being chased down by rockets and tanks now. He’d have to get on the roads to stay ahead of the hot pursuit, and the Russians knew how to read road maps. They merely had to pulverize the escape routes back to Vilnius, and then they would kill the retreating Marines.

Belanger knew his force had punched above its weight for two and a half days, but he suspected they wouldn’t make it till dawn unless something stopped the T-90s.

A new sound tore the sky directly above his vehicle, so loud all the men with him ducked down. He turned and looked at his roof-mounted camera, flipped it to infrared, and panned the lens back and forth looking for the source of the noise.

A pair of unusual-looking fighter planes raced by just above treetop level, heading west to east.

“What the fuck, sir?” one of his captains shouted over the noise.

Just then explosions erupted to the northeast, right at the spearhead of advancing Russian armor.

Belanger looked at the image of the aircraft in the distance, then another pair roared right overhead, this time on a slightly different heading. He looked the planes over as they raced by. These two dropped bombs over the Russian spearhead before banking off to the north.

Belanger said, “Those are Saab Gripens.”

His captain asked, “Who flies those weird-looking birds?”

“Sweden. Just Sweden.”

More explosions erupted over the Russians.

“Sweden is in this war?” the radio operator asked.

“Guess so,” the lieutenant colonel said.

“Whose side are they on, sir?”

“Well, they’re blowing shit up to the east, genius. What does that tell you?”

The radio operator looked at his lieutenant colonel. “All hail Sweden?”

Belanger fought a smile, then began ordering an immediate halt to his battalion. He could take advantage of this attack to mount a new defensive line, utilizing the EARLY SENTINEL positions in the area. With a little luck and a lot more Gripens in the air, he realized, he might actually have a shot at holding the Russians out of Vilnius until the weather cleared.