Red Storm Rising (1986) (80 page)

“None, Captain. Nothing like a nice sea voyage.”

“True enough.” Morris stuck his head into the pilothouse. “General Quarters, Air Action.”

Morris led the reporter into the Combat Information Center, explaining that the drill he was about to see was to make sure his men could do everything properly even in the dark.

“One of those dispatches give you a warning?”

“No, but in six hours we’ll be outside of land-based fighter cover. That means Ivan is going to come looking for us.”
And it’s going to get awfully lonely out here by ourselves,
Morris thought. He gave his men an hour’s worth of drill. The CIC crew ran a pair of computer simulations. On the second one an enemy missile got through their defenses.

The F-15 fighter rolled to a halt just outside the shelter building. The crew chief set the ladder next to the aircraft, and Major Nakamura climbed down, already looking aft at her scorched airplane. She walked over to examine the damage.

“Don’t look bad, Major,” the sergeant assured her. A fragment from the exploding rocket motor had drilled a hole the size of a beer can right through her left wing, missing a fuel tank by three inches. “I can fix that in a couple of hours.”

“You all right?” the Lockheed engineer asked.

“It blew, fifty feet away, and it just blew the hell up. You were wrong, by the way. When they blow, it’s pretty spectacular. Pieces all over the damned place. I was lucky I only caught one of them.” It had scared the hell out of the pilot, but she’d then had an hour to recover. Now she was just mad.

“Sorry, Major. Wish I could say more than that.”

“Just have to try again,” Buns said, looking up at the sky through the hole. “When’s the next window?”

“Eleven hours, sixteen minutes.”

“That’s it, then.” She walked into the building, then upstairs to the pilots’ lounge. There was carpeting on the walls of the building for noise absorption. It also prevented serious injury to the pilots’ fists.

Unhampered, the Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite continued its orbit, and on its next pass over the North Atlantic found itself looking down on a collection of nearly a hundred ships in even columns. This must be the convoy their intelligence reports had told them about, the Russian analysts decided—and, they noted with satisfaction, it was out in the open, right where they could get at it.

Ninety minutes later, two regiments of missile-armed Backfire bombers, preceded by Bear-D search aircraft, lifted off the four airfields around Kirovsk, topped off their fuel tanks, and headed for the radar gap over Iceland.

“So this is the surprise you have in store for them?” Calloway asked. He tapped some symbols on the main tactical-display scope.

Morris nodded thoughtfully. “So far we’ve sent most of the convoys across under EMCON—that’s emission control—with their radars blacked out to make them hard to find. This time we’re doing something a little different. This is the display from the SPS-49 radar—”

“That black monster atop the pilothouse?”

“Right. These symbols are Tomcats from the carrier
America.
This is a KC-135 tanker, and this baby here is an E-2C Hawkeye radar bird. The Hawkeye’s radar is shut down. When Ivan shows up, he’ll have to close to see what’s here.”

“But he already knows,” Calloway objected.

“No, he knows there’s a convoy around here somewhere. That’s not good enough to launch missiles. All he knows for sure is that there is one operating SPS-49 radar. He’ll have to light off his own radar to see what’s on the water. If Mr. Bear does that, we see him, and we’ll have fighters on his ass so fast he’ll never know what hit him.”

“And if the Backfires don’t come today?”

“Then we’ll see them some other time. The Bears talk to submarines, too, Mr. Calloway. They are still worth killing.”

It was the first time they’d been bored. Edwards and his party had been terrified often enough, but never bored. Now they had been in the same place for four complete days, and still they had no orders to move. They observed, and reported minor Russian activity, but without anything substantive to do, time was heavy on them.

“Lieutenant.” Garcia pointed up. “I got airplanes heading south.”

Edwards got out his binoculars. The sky was dotted with white, fleecy clouds. There were no contrails to be seen today, but—there! he saw a flash, a reflection off something. He strained his eyes to identify it.

“Nichols, what do you think?” He handed the glasses over.

“That’s a Russian Backfire,” Nichols said simply.

“You sure?”

“Quite sure,
Leftenant.
I’ve seen them before often enough.”

“Get a count.” Edwards unpacked his radio.

“I only see four. All heading south, sir.”

“You’re sure they’re Backfires?” Edwards persisted.

“I am bloody sure,
Lef
tenant Edwards!” Nichols answered testily. He watched the officer turn on the radio.

“Beagle calling Doghouse, over.” The communications station was a little slow today. It took three calls before they acknowledged.

“Doghouse, this is Beagle, and I have some information for you. We see Backfire-type bombers southbound over our position.”

“How do you know they’re Backfires?” Doghouse wanted to know.

“Because Sergeant Nichols of the Royal Marines says he’s bloody sure they’re Backfires. Four of them”—Nichols held up five fingers now—“correction five aircraft southbound.”

“Roger, thank you, Beagle. Anything else happening?”

“Negative. How long do you expect us to sit on this hill, over?”

“We’ll let you know. Patience, Beagle. We haven’t forgotten you. Out.”

Bears advanced in an oblique line, their crews scanning the air with their eyes and probing the radar and radio frequencies. Presently the leading Bear detected the emissions of a single American radar, and it took only a minute to identify it as an SPS-49 air-search model of the type used by Perry-class missile frigates. The technicians on board measured the signal’s intensity and, plotting its position, judged that they were far outside the radar’s detection range.

The raid commander riding in the third Bear received the information and compared it with his intelligence data for the convoy. The position was exactly in the middle of the circle he had drawn on his map. He was suspicious of things that were so exact. The convoy was taking a direct route to Europe? Why? Most convoys to date had taken a more evasive course, detouring far south to the Azores in order to force his aircraft to reach farther than they wanted—and thereby forcing the Backfires trailing the scouts to carry only one missile instead of two. Something was strange here. On his order, the patrol line reoriented itself to a north-south disposition and began reducing altitude to keep below the horizon of the American radar.

“How far can you see?” Calloway asked.

“Depends on the altitude and size of the target, and atmospheric conditions,” Morris answered, staring down from his chair to the electronic displays. Two Navy Tomcats were ready for combat. “For the Bear, at thirty thousand feet or so, we can probably spot it about two hundred fifty miles away. But the lower he flies, the closer he can get. Radar can’t see through the horizon.”

“But flying low will cost him fuel.”

Morris looked down at the reporter. “Those damned things carry enough fuel to stay up all week,” he exaggerated.

“Message from LANTFLT, Captain.” The communications officer handed the form over: REPORT POSSIBLE BACKFIRE RAID SOUTHBOUND OVER ICELAND 1017z. Morris handed the message to his tactical action officer, who immediately looked at the chart.

“Good news?” Calloway asked. He had better sense than to ask to see the dispatch.

“We may be seeing Backfire bombers in a little over two hours.”

“Shooting for the convoy?”

“No, probably they’ll want to shoot at us first. They have a good four days to blast the convoy, and getting the escorts out of the way makes that job a lot easier.”

“Are you concerned?”

Morris smiled thinly. “Mr. Calloway, I’m always concerned.”

The captain reflexively checked the various status boards. All his weapons and sensor systems were fully operational—so nice to have a brand-new ship! The threat board showed no known submarine activity in the immediate area, a datum to be taken with a considerable bit of skepticism. He could call General Quarters now, but much of his crew was at lunch. Better to have everyone fed and alert.

The damned waiting,
Morris thought. He watched the displays in silence. The blips indicating friendly aircraft orbited slowly as their pilots waited too.

“More CAP coming up,” an officer reported. Another pair of Tomcats, part of the combat air patrol, appeared on the scope.
America
had gotten the same raid warning. The carrier was two hundred miles away, westbound for Norfolk. The same was true of
Independence,
returning from the Azores. The carriers had been at sea since the war began, cruising back and forth to avoid the orbiting Soviet ocean-reconnaissance satellites. They had been able to provide antisubmarine protection for a number of convoys, though only at great hazard to the carriers themselves. Up to now, the American flattops had not been able to act as they were supposed to act. They were not yet offensive weapons. The fate of the
Nimitz
group had come as a bitter lesson. Morris lit another cigarette. Now he remembered why he’d quit in the first place. Too many of them burned his throat, destroyed his sense of taste, and made his eyes water. On the other hand, they did give him something to do while he waited.

The Bears were on a precise north-south line now centered on the position of the frigate’s radar signals. The raid commander ordered them to turn west and reduce altitude. Two aircraft failed to acknowledge the order, and he had to repeat it.

Two hundred miles west of them, aboard the circling E-2C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, a technician’s head went up. He’d just heard someone speaking Russian; in code, but definitely Russian.

Within minutes, every ship in the escort force had the information, and they all came up with the same answer: the Backfires couldn’t be here yet. These were Bears. Everyone wanted to kill the Bears. The carrier
America
started launching her fighters and additional radar aircraft. After all, the Russians could be looking for her.

“He’s gotta be heading right for us,” the tactical action officer said.

“That’s the general idea,” Morris agreed.

“How far?” Calloway asked.

“No way to know that. The Hawkeye copied a voice radio transmission. Probably it’s fairly close, but freak atmospheric conditions can let you hear that sort of thing from half a world away. Mr. Lenner, let’s go to battle stations for air action.”

Five minutes later the frigate was ready.

“Good morning, Mr. Bear.” The Tomcat pilot stared at his TV display tube. The Russian aircraft was about forty miles away, the sun glinting off its massive propellers. Deciding to close without using his radar for the moment, the fighter pilot advanced his throttles to 80-percent power and activated his missile controls. The head-on closure rate was over a thousand miles per hour, seventeen miles per minute.

Then: “Energize!” the pilot ordered, and instantly the radar intercept officer in the rear seat powered up the fighter’s AWG-9 radar.

“We’ve got him,” the RIO reported a moment later.

“Shoot!” Two missiles dropped free and accelerated to over three thousand miles per hour.

The Soviet electronics-warfare technician was trying to isolate the signature characteristics of the frigate’s search radar when a beep sounded on a separate warning receiver. He turned to see what the noise was and went pale.

“Air-attack warning!” he shouted over the intercom.

Reacting at once, the pilot rolled the Bear left and dove for the surface of the ocean, while aft the EW technician activated his protective jamming systems. However, the turn had masked the jammer pods from the incoming missiles.

“What’s happening?” the raid commander demanded over the intercom.

“We have an interceptor radar on us,” the technician replied, scared but cool. “Jamming pods are activated.”

The raid commander turned to his communications man. “Get a warning out: enemy fighter activity this position.”

But there wasn’t time. The Phoenixes covered the distance in less than twenty seconds. The first went wild and missed, but the second locked on the diving bomber and blew its tail off. The Bear fell to the sea with as little grace as a dropped sheet of paper.

The radar showed the Tomcat, and they watched as it launched two missiles that immediately disappeared from sight, and then, silently, as the Tomcat continued east for thirty seconds. Then it turned around and headed back west.

“That, gentlemen, is a kill,” Morris said. “Splash one Bear.”

“How do you know?” Calloway asked.

“You think he would have turned back if he missed? And if it was anything but a Bear, he’d have broken radio silence. ESM, we copy any radio traffic from zero-eight-zero?”

The petty officer in the forward starboard corner of the compartment didn’t look up. “No, Captain, not a peep.”

“Damn,” Morris said. “It works.”

“And if the bugger didn’t get a message out—” Calloway understood.

“We’re the only ones who know. Maybe we can bushwhack the whole attack force.” Morris stepped over to the display screen. The
America’s
fighters were now all in the air, seventy miles south of the convoy. He looked at the bulkhead clock: the Backfires were about forty minutes away. He lifted a phone. “Bridge, Combat. Signal
Battleaxe
to close in.”