Lion Resurgent (2 page)

McMullen looked around, they had the room to themselves while their shareholders were gorging themselves next door. “Might be he won’t have to be in an old Centurion much longer. I hear the Army’s looking at the Saradara. Big issue now is whether the Army buys them directly from the Indians or whether it gets a license to build them here. We might need to expand our plant if they go for license production. Assuming a good contra-deal can be worked out of course.”

“And the contra-deal would be Boomslangs?” Vermaak was grinning broadly at the thought of the huge Indian Army buying his Mamba missiles. An order that size would mean his plant would need expanding as well.

“Could be, could be.” McMullen contemplated the same idea with satisfaction. “Now, let’s join our shareholders before those vultures eat all the food.”

Blackburn Buccaneer S4H XT-279, North Sea.

There was an old joke about the Buccaneer. Blackburn didn’t build them, they took a block of solid steel and carved them out as one piece. Known affectionately as ‘The Banana’ to its crews, the Buccaneer might not be the fastest naval strike bomber around. It wasn’t the longest ranged and it didn’t carry the largest bomb load but it was undoubtedly the toughest. It was probably also the most stable. Making its attack runs skimming a few feet above the waves meant it had to be. Those were characteristics that were indispensable to use the weapon it carried, Highball had to be dropped at a very specific speed and altitude. The speed was high and the altitude low. Put together they represented a demanding set of requirements. Too demanding in many ways. Highball had been a brilliant idea when it had first been conceived back in the 1950s but times had changed. Devastating it might be, but using it meant that the Bananas had to approach dangerously close to their targets. A new missile was being developed to replace Highball but that wouldn’t be available for years.

Three green lines emerged on the head-up display; two vertical green bars at the side, one a horizontal bar at the base. The art was to keep the bottom line aligned with the horizon while the two green bars moved inwards. When they touched the bow and stern of the target ship, in this case an old A class destroyer, it was time to press the release and drop the two Highballs stowed in the rotary bomb bay under the Banana.

Lieutenant-Commander Ernest Mullback felt more than heard the whine as the bomb bay opened. However, the vibration as the Highball installation spun its two bombs up to speed was very clearly distinguishable from the thumps caused by fast, low-altitude flight and the shaking from the Spey engines. Ahead of him, the target hulk was approaching fast. The green lines on the head-up display edged in towards the old ship’s hull. He kept his hands on his controls, using very precise, delicate movements to shift the target to the center of the display panel. This low, this fast, any violent motions on the controls were a recipe for disaster. Another way of killing oneself was to concentrate on the target display to the exclusion of all else. That happened now and then. Usually, it resulted in a Buccaneer flying straight into the sea.

The green lines touched the bow and stern of the target ship. Mullback thumbed the release. Beneath his aircraft, two spherical Highballs dropped clear. This was the remarkable thing. As the bombs hit the surface of the sea, they skipped, a long flat arc that ended with another impact. Another skip then took them closer still to the old destroyer. By that time, they were far behind the racing Banana. Mullback flashed over the target ship long before the two Highballs slammed into its side. That was when another remarkable thing happened, remarkable to those who’d never seen Highball at work anyway. The bombs had a backspin. When they hit the side of the ship, they rolled down it, to explode under the keel. If the bombs were fully charged, the impact was devastating. The Highballs would snap the ship’s back and send a jet of water clean through her. A ship so hit would go down in minutes.

But, these bombs weren’t fully charged. They just had a small burster and a large amount of red dye. In his mirror, Mullback saw the two bright crimson columns reaching up from the target ship. Both hits were square amidships, right under the single funnel. If they’d been real bombs, that destroyer would be finished. Even now, with reduced charges, her survival was in doubt. She was thirty years old and at the end of her life, her welds had deteriorated, her internal structure decayed.   The Navy had done their best for her; everything possible was welded up and the ship was full of empty 55 gallon oil drums. They’d try to keep her afloat as long as they could. Behind him, Mullback saw his wingman make his run. Two more great crimson columns; two more solid hits. Highball may be an ageing weapon but it was still a deadly threat to any surface ship.

“Time for home, Jerry?” The voice over the radio had a broad Scottish accent. Alasdair Baillie was a clansman through and through and wore his tartan proudly. He even had a SAC-like band of the green and dark blue-gray painted under his cockpit.

“Hold one, Jock. We’ll see how second section does. They’re a pair of Sasenachs you know.”

There was a snort over the radio, Baillie and Mullback frequently exchanged good-natured jabs over their respective ancestry and today was no exception. The two Buccaneers curved around and climbed, partly to get clear of the bombing range and partly so Mullback could watch the other two pilots in his flight make their bomb runs. Paul Carter would be fine, Mullback didn’t doubt that for a moment. Freddie Kingsman was a newbie and on his first bomb run.

It was hard to see the aircraft, the dark gray of the Buccaneers tended to be lost against the waves and ever-present gray haze that dominated the North Sea. That was, of course, why they were painted that color. In the end, it wasn’t the aircraft that he saw first but the white line the concussion waves they generated left on the sea behind them. The two aircraft made their drops, Both Carter’s bombs hit dead midships as expected. Kingsman didn’t do as well. He picked the wrong angle, left his correction too late and had to pull a tight turn to get lined up properly. By then, he was at the wrong distance from his target and the skips wouldn’t align properly. One of his Highballs missed the destroyer, passing in front of her bows. The other actually arced over her and made three or four more skips before finally sinking at the end of its run.

“Sorry, Sir.” Kingsman’s voice came over the radio, subdued and depressed.

“Not as easy as it looks, is it?’ Mullback spoke comfortingly. Everybody had to start somewhere and there were many worse things Kingsman could have done.

“No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”

“Cheer up lad; we all did that at first. Highball’s a tricky beast. Get some more simulator time in and you’ll get the hang of it.” Mullback changed to his internal circuit. “Alex, course for home please.”

“Set up, Jerry. We’re about 10 minutes out. Carrier Controlled Approach is waiting for us to initiate our ran in.” Alex Peters was Mullback’s ‘GIB’ - guy in the back -responsible for navigation and handling the electronic warfare systems. Also for looking backwards and making sure no fighters with evil intent were lurking in the six o’clock spot.

As usual, the air control team on HMS
Furious
were on the ball. They brought the four Buccaneers in perfectly. She was an old ship, almost as old as the destroyer her aircraft had just used as a target but the Royal Navy had looked after her and she’d just finished a major refit. One that had taken four of her eight four inch guns and been given new MOG missiles imported from Australia instead.  If plans went the way they were supposed to, that would hold her until the new carriers were built to replace
Furious
and her two sisters. If they were built, that was. The government was prevaricating over finding the funding again.

XT-279 trapped perfectly, catching the second wire and halting properly positioned for taxiing off the angled deck. Mullback raised his hook, releasing the wire, and started folding his aircraft’s wings. The parking spot behind the island was cramped. The Courageous class carriers were really that bit too small for the aircraft they carried and that meant parking took care. It was always a relief when the Buck was properly in place without hitting anybody or anything.

“How did the new kid do, Jerry?” The bomber squadron commander, Commander Dickie Ravenswood, greeted Mullback as he climbed down the steps from the cockpit.

“Blew it of course. Didn’t we all first time out?” Mullback shook his head with memories of fouled-up Highball attacks. “We running to schedule?”

“Don’t sweat it, Jerry. We’ll have you back in Pompey in time to marry Sam. Assuming she isn’t modeling of course. Does The Sun publish on Saturdays?” Ravenswood tried to look as innocent as possible. The fact that one of the Flight Commanders was about to marry The Sun’s leading Page Three model was a matter of awed disbelief to the entire carrier air group.

“It does, but they shoot the pages well ahead of time. Make the news up in advance as well you know.” Mullback delivered the line deadpan. “Make sure you’re at the ceremony and Sam’ll give you the racing results for the next meet at Epsom. A week in advance, of course.”

Conference Room, White House, Washington D.C.

“I’m afraid, Mister President, that it’s only a question of time before the Argentine armed forces move.”

“You sound very sure of that Seer.” President Reagan drank in the details of the presentation and looked through the satellite imagery with keen interest. “I never realized the detail on these things was so good.”

“Those were taken from one of the new Polar Orbit Manned Orbiting Laboratories. MOLPOL for short. Previously, our coverage was always a bit rough that far south, not least because there was nothing down there to interest us. Using a polar orbit allows us much better coverage. We’ve got three MOLPOLs up now; meaning we do a run over each area at roughly eight hour intervals. When the program is complete, we’ll be reducing that to every four hours.”

“MOLPOL is a NASA program?” The President had been in office for about nine months and was still getting the fine details sorted out. At least one reason for that was his insistence in learning as much as possible about each subject he was expected to make decisions on. It was that hunger for information that The Seer thoroughly enjoyed. After four years under President Carter, who had treated the Friday Follies as a barely tolerable nuisance, having an audience who actually enjoyed learning for its own sake was a serious pleasure. The Friday Follies had dropped to barely ten minutes and the detailed briefing book that went with it was rarely, if ever, opened. In contrast, under Reagan, the briefing and question session went on for two or more hours and the briefing book was returned dog-eared from heavy use and with annotations in the margins where something hadn’t been quite clear enough or where Reagan disagreed with the analysis. They were getting fewer now though. The Seer reflected he’d been getting into bad habits under Carter.

“No, Sir. It belongs to Strategic Aerospace Command. It’s part of our target acquisition and identification system. The B-70s can download information directly from the MOLS and use it to finalize their bomb runs. So can the RB-58s. In theory, at least. Anyway, we haven’t tried out the system yet, not live. Only on exercises.”

“MOLPOL.” President Reagan rolled the world around in his mouth. “I don’t suppose I can go up to one?”

In the background, one of the Secret Service bodyguards spoke quietly to his thumb, listened and then shook his head. The risk was considered too great. Reagan looked immeasurably sad for a moment, he’d dreamed of going up into space for years but now his position made it impossible. His ride in a Valkyrie, something that was almost a standard part of the orientation process for a new President, had been as far as the Secret Service was prepared to go.

“So if the Argentines move on Chile?”

“Given the way the troop concentrations are being handled, it looks like a coup de main to seize the disputed islands in the Tierra del Fuego area, coupled with major air strikes intended to destroy the Chilean Air Force and an overland invasion aimed at Santiago and Valparaiso in the center of Chile, at Colhaique further south and Punta Arenas in the far south.”

“That doesn’t sound like a minor dispute over a few islands to me.” Reagan reread the balance of forces being deployed. “This looks like a full-scale invasion leading to a conquest. I thought we’d made it clear we don’t allow that sort of thing?”

“We did, Sir, once. But that message got blurred over the last few years and it’s only been a question of time before somebody pushed hard enough to test whether the line still held. In many ways, this situation developing is our fault. For many years, we simply ignored South America. Like Northern Europe, it didn’t really count in the world scale of things. We had relatively little to do with them, they had about the same to do with us. Back in the Second World War, Brazil sided with us from around 1945 onwards; even sent a few troops to Russia. A brigade or so if my memory serves me well. Mostly they helped out with ASW work in the Atlantic. Chile’s got a pretty strong democratic tradition but they kept out of the Second World War although they offered us refueling rights if we had to go around the Horn for any reason. Argentina was strongly pro-Axis right through to 1947. They were an Axis-tilting neutral right up to the time we did the lay downs all over Germany. Post-war they’ve been the refuge of choice for Germans who still had sympathies for the Reich. It’s not surprising they’re the ones doing the pushing now.”

“Then we’d better make damned sure that they know it still does.” Reagan paused once again as he re-read the information on the Argentine armed forces. “Can they pull this off?”

The Seer thought carefully and ran the various permutations through his mind. “In fairness, Sir, I don’t think they intend a wholesale annexation. At least, they would be really asking for trouble if they did so. I believe their intention is to seize the disputed islands down south and then use the invasion of the center and mid-south as a sledgehammer to force Chilean acquiescence.” He paused for a second and ran some more details through the equations. “They may have annexation in mind but that’s a hellish big mouthful for a country with serious economic problems. They might pull it off, but it’s more likely they’ll get a bloody nose in the attempt. The Chilean Army is pretty good and the Andes are a natural defensive wall. I’d guess the Chileans are mining the passes like crazy and possibly blowing some of them up. They’ll funnel the Argentines into kill zones and take them down. In the far south, invading those islands will be quite a trick to pull off. The weather down there is foul. So the Argentines may well end up being stalled.