“Quantity has a quality of its own,” said Freeman in his address to the task force commanders gathered aboard the Marines’ LHD amphibious assault ship the USS Winston Davis. “It’s a Leninist dictum the Russians have embraced ever since the Bolshevik Revolution. Their reasoning is simple: throw enough at the enemy, overwhelm him with numbers of tanks, ships, planes, and men, and some are bound to get through, enough to breach our defenses. Your job, gentlemen, now, and my job when we go ashore, is to stop them. Stop them so effectively that even if a few can get through it won’t be enough to impede us. The attendant danger for us, however, is not the Siberians; it is that in stopping them we will adopt an overly defensive mode. That would be a crucial mistake. Our job is to attack, to take Irkutsk just west of Lake Baikal. Irkutsk is the key, gentlemen! If we take Irkutsk our air force will be able to radiate out into the industrial heart of Siberia. Without Irkutsk our bombers’ fighter escorts would have to have in-air refueling — distances are too great. So our job is to attack the Siberian shield to get far enough in so that our fighters don’t have to refuel in air and become sitting ducks.”
He paused, eyes taking in the collective brass in the ship’s rigged-for-red situation room. “There’s another old adage, gentlemen, as true now as it was for Sherman: Offense is the best defense.” His fist clenched. “Go forward to meet them. Engage at every possible point. The entire Soviet military philosophy rests upon the necessity of the quick victory before their administrative deficiencies — their overcentralization — constipates their lines of supply. In this their navy and air force are no different from their army. They’ll throw everything — everything they’ve got at us, but if you can hold and advance you’ll turn the tide. Attack, gentlemen! Attack! That’s the strategy here.”
Freeman’s message to the noncommissioned officers and men throughout the Seventh Fleet’s task force was much more succinct. “Nothing in history compares with this battle. Siberia, the only country now capable of imposing its will on the rest of the world, is testing our will. Novosibirsk had a chance for peace and chose war instead. Well, we’re going to give it to him — in spades. Now, you navy boys, it’s your job to get us there. And I know you will, and when you do, I promise you we’ll kick ass from Kamchatka to Kiev. God bless you all.”
There was a complaint from one of the female quartermasters in the task force about the exclusion of women in his address. Freeman was taken aback when Norton so advised him.
“What the hell does she mean?” he asked Norton, the latter’s grimace the first sign of seasickness as the two men made their way up from the mess deck to the open air of the 41,000-ton amphibious assault ship Winston Davis. It was one of scores of ships in the task force carrying supplies for Second Army, including the amphibious assault vehicles, attack and transport choppers, and AV-8 Harrier ground support fighters needed for the eighteen hundred marines aboard each ship.
“She noted, General,” explained Norton, “that you didn’t mention women once in your address, whereas you used the expression ‘navy boys’ several times.”
“Oh, for Chrissake, Dick! Navy gals were the ones who flew the lead choppers into Pyongyang.”
“Yes, General, I know, but in the interest of morale… We’ve got over five hundred women in the twenty-thousand-man — I mean ‘person’—assault force.”
“Yes, yes, all right. What’s her name?”
“Quartermaster Sarah Lee.”
“Goddamn cheesecake, isn’t it?”
Norton could taste the bacon he’d had for breakfast. It was threatening to come straight up, and the quicker he got out to the fresh air of the flight deck, away from the combined stink of diesel oil and recycled air, the better.
“All right, relax, Dick. Won’t say anything to offend the—” He paused, “—lady. I suppose if I call them ‘lathes’ I’ll be on a discrimination charge.”
“Will I put a call through, General?”
“Later — when we go below. But Dick?”
“Sir?”
They were passing through the “light lock,” in whose chamber all illumination went out as soon as they began to spin the wheel to open the outer door leading to the deck. Although Norton could not see the general, the latter’s tone had changed to one of dead seriousness. “Aren’t any females in the tank divisions, are there? I told the Pentagon about that. I don’t want any tank crewmen killed trying to figure out how some dame is going to piss in her helmet while everybody looks the other way. Last I heard Siberia’s armored don’t give the enemy time off for rest stops and I—”
“No women in the armored units, General, far as I know. Support, perhaps, but not in the tanks themselves.”
Norton had lied. It had been an ongoing fight between Freeman and the Pentagon since the beginning of the war. There were several women, Norton knew, qualified as gunners, but he wasn’t having the commander of Operation Arctic Front suffer a coronary before any of the first three landings they were going to make on the Kuril Islands, the opening stage of the air-land battle. Freeman was silent for a few minutes as they stood on the flight deck, cold Arctic air whistling about them, the salty tang at once invigorating and freezing, stars showing through intermittent clouds but the sky on their westward heading thickening. The sea was moderate so far, but the latest meteorological report showed the state of sea deteriorating the further westward the task force steamed.
“First few hours’ll be critical, Dick. As it always is, of course, in an operation of this kind, but particularly here. We need the Kurils for air bases as well as those in Japan if we’re going to make the landing on eastern Siberia proper.”
Two of the three landings, unknown to anyone but battalion-level commanders, were feints, “Persian Gulfs,” so-called because of the Marine feint made off the beaches of Kuwait during the Iraqi war while the Twenty-fourth made their end run around the Republican Guards. Only in this case the marine feints would be to sucker Siberian navy and air-arm elements away from the main landing. Meanwhile Freeman, as supreme commander, had designated the Petropavlovsk sub base on Kamchatka a top-priority air target, the attacks on the sub pens to be launched from Attu Island at the western end of America’s Aleutian chain, which curved like a scythe toward Kamchatka, Siberia’s sparsely populated protective arm.
Steaming out from Vladivostok, with Admiral Baku in command, was the center of the Soviet interdiction force, the sleek, 910-foot-long, 110-foot-wide, 43,000-ton “Kiev” class carrier Murmansk, her deck sprouting vertical/short takeoff Forger A and B fighter bombers together with Ka-25 Hormone and Ka-27 Helix antisubmarine helicopters. The carrier’s four shafts spun effortlessly through the northwestern Pacific under the impetus of the ship’s 210,000 horsepower. At thirty knots the carrier’s speed eastward to meet the American force was aided by prevailing westerlies and the eastward-flowing Kuroshio Current. Murmansk was seven knots slower than her opposite number, the 1,040-foot-long, Nimitz class carrier USS Acheson, under the command of Adm. Charles Burke. Her flight deck 252 feet, her displacement 91,487 tons, she was twice as big as the Murmansk, her two nuclear reactors giving her the 280,000-shaft horsepower with which to move her ninety-four aircraft westward. The aircraft were a “medley,” as Burke referred to them, of F-14 Tomcats, F-15 Strike Eagles, F-4G Wild Weasels, Grumman Intruders, and a pride of two Stealth fighter bombers.
At first glance the core of Baku’s twenty-four-ship Siberian force around the Murmansk—her screen including two guided-missile cruisers, fifteen missile destroyers, and six fast frigates — seemed to be outclassed by the thirty-one-ship American battle group concentrated about the USS Acheson, with its screen of five 9,600-ton Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruisers, five 11,000-ton Virginia class cruisers, and twenty Truxtun and Bainbridge class destroyers. And the Siberians were outclassed — on the surface. This despite the fact that the Murmansk carried something deadly in addition to aircraft — namely four twin surface-to-air launchers, twelve vertical surface-to-air N-9 launchers, and eight surface-to-surface, that is, ship-to-ship N-12—Sandbox, 340-mile-range — missiles with eight reloads.
In addition to the Baku task force, however, the Siberian commander had ordered two nuclear-powered, 24,000-ton Kirov class battle cruisers out of Pacific Fleet headquarters at Petropavlovsk. Speeding eastward at thirty-two knots, the rang korablyna— “first-class rated”—Kirov cruisers carried fifty-two missile launchers each and ten antisubmarine torpedo launch tubes. They sliced through the swells on their way to intercept the Wisconsin and Missouri, which were en route to shell the Kommandorsky Islands air base off Kamchatka, from which Freeman did not want to be harassed on his northern flank. The mission of the two Siberian cruisers was to dispose of the old American battle wagons, thus saving the Kommandorskys — after which the two Siberian cruisers would proceed further south to harass the American task force’s northern flank. And the American advantage in number of ships over the Siberians was about to be drastically redressed by Baku’s use of a piece of equipment that the Soviet admirals, true to the Leninist dictum of quantity producing its own quality, believed would overwhelm more sophisticated weaponry.
Baku, with the formidable backing of his admirals in the Red Banner Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, had got what he wanted: flotillas of over three hundred relatively cheap, high-powered, highly efficient “littoral” craft small missile patrol and torpedo boats for regional defense. These consisted of the Sarancha class (148-foot, 60-knot attack hydrofoils carrying 60-mile-range SS-N-9 and SS-N-4 missiles with a multibarrel, thirty-millimeter gun for close-in work), the hydrofoil Matka class boats (armed with two Styx antiship missiles, a 76.2-millimeter forward gun, and a multibarrel thirty-millimeter), and Nanuchka class Ills. The latter was in effect a thirty-thousand-horsepower-driven guided missile Corvette, which, though only 194 feet, 6 inches long, and with a draft of less than eight feet, carried SS-N-9 Siren antiship missiles in two triple launchers and also a surface-to-air N-4 antiaircraft missile. It was the same class of ship that, sprouting a 76.2-millimeter antiaircraft gun and thirty-millimeter close-in multibarrel, had been the spark that lit the fuse of war when it had attacked Ray Brentwood’s USS Blaine off Korea.
The advantage the gidro-samofyot— “skimmer craft”—had, running with or without foil, was that not only did their high mobility mitigate against being bit, but because of their small size, they could weave through the wave clutter that blocked American radar. And their very presence as they attacked the Americans would cause the slower U.S. warships to expend much of their fuel and oblige the U.S. carrier to use up vital fuel in launching sorties to deal with the small, fast attack boats. Thus they would siphon off the U.S. battle group’s main aerial cover, including those planes that would otherwise have been designated “strikers” as a prelude to Freeman’s amphibious landings. One missile from any of these swarms of small, fast boats would be devastating against any of the modern-hulled American ships.
In all Baku had designated 212 boats to the offshore Kuril defense; and 40 to patrol in the vital Kuril Strait. The latter was crucial for the Siberians’ egress out of the Sea of Japan into the Pacific. The remaining forty-eight fast attack boats were assigned to guard the other main egress passage, La Perouse Strait, between Japan and Sakhalin Island in the event that the Japanese defense force turned offensive under U.S. arm-twisting.
But in the heavyweight division, Baku’s major ships were not those like the Kiev carrier, Murmansk, or the two nuclear-powered Kirov class cruisers which, unlike the small hydrofoils, would show up on the Americans’ radar, but his twenty-nine nuclear submarines — thirteen from Vladivostok, sixteen from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula — all converging south, most of them already lying in wait, “on station.” Three of these were the Zoltaya Nyba, or “golden fish,” because of their class — revolutionary Alfa IIs.
The extraordinarily expensive liquid-metal heat exchange system of their reactor plants, superior to using the pressurized water system, allowed the 267-foot-long, 2900-ton Hunter/Killers, with a beam less than thirty-three feet and a titanium hull, to be the best HUKs in the world. At 45 knots submerged they were not only the fastest nuclear submarines in the world but the deepest-diving. The Alfa II ‘s crush depth was four thousand feet, its armament six twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedoes fired from forward tubes and SS-N-15s which, although classified as surface-to-surface missiles, were in effect twenty-one-inch diameter, four-thousand-pound torpedo-launch rocket/depth charges with a nuclear warhead having a range of twenty nautical miles. The depth charge, attached to the solid propellant rocket, and released just above target, was capable of killing an enemy sub to a depth of up to three thousand feet as opposed to the conventional depth charge warhead, which could damage an enemy sub only within a hundred feet of detonation.
Faced with the oncoming American task force and the Americans’ four-thousand-pound SUBROC sub-killing missile, capable of a longer reach than the Alfa — thirty-three miles rather than twenty-four — the Alfa’s safety resided in its ability to be exceptionally silent, thanks to Toshiba Electronics having sold the KGB superior U.S. prop-tooling technology years before.
The Alfa’s dilemma, however, faced by U.S. subs also, was that the sub’s greatest advantage, its silence, was immediately forfeited upon firing any of its torpedoes or missiles. Once an Alfa, or any of the other Russian subs, fired, the American task force, with superior sonar both aboard its surface ships and aboard its submarines, would know precisely where they were.
Ranged against the Siberian sub packs were the American Sea Wolf lis, including Robert Brentwood’s USS Reagan, but as yet the two task forces, while within the 1,600-mile range of the Americans’ Tomahawk cruise missiles, were still beyond the navy’s “outer zone”—more than 420 miles from one another. This zone was the last in which satellite reconnaissance could be relied on, and no task force wanted to strike and betray their exact position. This was especially so while Burke was taking advantage of satellite surveillance, in particular to program his Tomahawk missiles, which needed precise target vector feed-in so long as the task force was over the horizon. And once any missile was fired it, too, showed up on the enemy’s radar and could be “back-tracked” on that radar to pinpoint the position of the ship that had fired the missile, thereby putting its entire battle group at risk.
To head off the two Siberian cruisers coming down from the north, Admiral Burke, in the calming blue light of his TFCC— Tactical Flag Command Center — watched carefully the disposition of his forces coming in from the central battle group commanders to the battle watch station, or T-table. This monitored the large-screen situation display and automatic status board, and through it the old battle wagons Missouri and Wisconsin were ordered to steam due west to intercept the two Siberian cruisers as their first priority and only after — if the battleships survived — to resume course back north to shell the Kommandorskys, under whatever air cover could be provided out of Shemya Air Force Base at the tip of the Aleutians. Despite all the high tech, Burke knew that with everyone on radio silence this phase of the sea battle would essentially be the same as the battle for Midway: who would launch first?
“Watch for the Tattletale!” he told his air commander. “Once he spots us, he’ll relay it to Petropavlovsk control, and all our aircraft must launch—’lock-on’—in unison. Then, gentlemen, we’ll quickly have incoming missiles — Soviet style, all at once. Kamikaze. And remember, from different directions.”
Burke also knew that if his own combat patrol scouts, on radio silence but using passive radar, found the oncoming Siberians, the latter would launch their aircraft immediately and, in the aerial melee that would follow, there’d be no way friendly fire from the American task force would fail to take out some of his own men.
“Tattletale yet?” Burke asked, looking up at the plastic/ crayon situation board, an old-fashioned backup should all computer power be lost during an attack. The Tattletale would be the lead Soviet ship, the scout, which, with air cover and on radio silence, would be well out in front of the main task force, probing. Once he’d made contact with the Americans he would abruptly turn about, heading at full speed back toward his own fleet. The ship chosen as the Tattletale was so designed that it could fire the overwhelming number of its missiles from stern launchers. This was not only to engage the enemy with maximum firepower while hightailing it but an insurance against being confused by the oncoming waves of Siberian planes for an advance American ship. Stern salvos at the Americans were the best insurance.
“Sir!” Out of the rain-riven darkness it was the voice of an operator manning one of the battle group’s E-2 Hawkeye advance warning planes, picking up a pulsating amber dot on its AN/APS 150-mile-range radar sweep.
The five crewmen aboard the E-2 Hawkeye were the first to hear radio silence broken in a squall so fierce the copilot could hear the rain that was pelting the plane’s radar rotodome that extended above the fuselage, the contact between the slowly rotating dish and the rain producing halos of steam whipped away into the slipstream. It was near the end of the Hawkeye’s four-hour patrol when the RIO picked up the Tattletale on the infrared scan and almost immediately heard, “Master arm on! Centering the T… centering the T. Bogeys eight miles… eight miles. Centering the dot.” It was an F-14 Tomcat pilot talking to his RIO, the RIO’s voice rising above the fish fry of static, yelling excitedly, “Get the tone! Get the tone!”
“Got it…I’ve got it… ” The Sparrow air-to-air missile was ready, its coffee-grinder growl loud in the pilot’s ear. “Centering the dot — Fox One…” The E-2 Hawkeye radio operator heard a rush and a few seconds later the RIO’s excited voice again. “Splash!”
The bogey was down.
“Good kill! Outstanding!”
They had just shot down another Tomcat, returning from combat patrol in the outer zone. It shouldn’t have happened— there were “investigation friend or foe” procedures — but with so many aircraft flying and men on the razor’s edge, determined not to let the enemy penetrate their defenses, Murphy’s Law stalked the night.
The two downed flyers were to be the first casualties of the impending battle of the Kuril Islands. Worse, though the radar operator aboard the E-2 Hawkeye picked up a chute signal descending, there was nothing they could do this far out.
Aboard the Tattletale, a Kashin class, 3,750-ton destroyer with four single rear-firing Styx launchers, no adjustment in heading was made. Whether or not the Americans had spotted any or all of their “owl screech,” “peel group,” and “basstilt” radars didn’t alter anything. The destroyer’s job was not to run at the first sign of combat but to stay on a steady course until the Americans were sighted. So important was her function that Baku had ordered her helicopter unarmed, jettisoning machine guns and belt feeds so as to accommodate a “Big Bulge” surface-search-and-targeting radar which, with its 255-mile range, was now locating the exact position of the U.S. task group.
The USS Acheson’s flag data display system, or FDDS, in the carrier’s tactical flag command center, began to “fuzz,” the Siberians clearly dropping chaff.
“Your estimate of what’s behind the clutter, Mr. Lean?” Burke asked of his chief electronics warfare officer without taking his eyes for a moment from the blue-white situation display.
“I’d estimate forgers, en masse.”
“Fighter cover?”
“Fulcrums. Top of the line — C’s.”
“I concur. Man battle stations.”
“Man battle stations!” repeated the officer of the deck, and now the rough-throated Klaxon could be heard throughout the giant ship, Prifly launching every aircraft it had, the flight deck a rough ballet of red and whitish blue exhausts, drifting steam from the four catapults, and huge shadows of ordnance men who, having pulled the safety pins from the hard-point bomb racks, were holding the pins and ribbons aloft so the pilot could see all the bombs were armed, ready to go.
With radio linkups secured among assault forces, amphibious ships, those who would be the beach masters, choppers, naval gunfire support, and the forward air control officer, Douglas Freeman and Dick Norton waited aboard the USS Winston Davis.
“How far are we from the Kurils, Dick?”
“Fifteen, twenty hours, sir, depending on the weather.”
“Worst part — the waiting,” said the general, his outline now dimly recognizable by Norton as they stood in the chilly, buffeting wind of the LHD’s flight deck. Norton’s face, had Freeman been able to see, was tinged a light green as the Davis thumped repeatedly against equally stubborn swells. “Give me the old terra firma any day,” said Norton. It was getting cold on deck, even in their thermal battle fatigues, but to go back into the closed, rolling ship — to be assailed by a noxious combination of cooking odors and recycled air — was more than Norton could contemplate. He jogged feebly to get bis blood warmer, but the motion, allied with the peculiar yaw and pitch of the big “flat mother,” as the marines called the assault ship, only made him more nauseated.
“Well, Dick, Siberia’ll be all the terra firma you’ll want.” The general paused for a moment or two, listening to the heavy slushing of the ship’s wake, and nearby, though he could only see the phosphorescent tails of their wakes, the occasional sound of the other ships plowing through a heavy swell, throwing an incandescent spray of phytoplankton high above the bow that swept back in the darkness and disappeared. “Been sleeping well?” he asked Norton.
“Not too much, sir. You?”
“Yes, but I’m haunted, Dick, by dreams of Siberia. Maps of Siberia — all different scales. Recon photos as well. All keep crowding in on me. I feel—” His voice took on the tone of a father who, though reasonably sure he had done all he could to secure his children’s safety, was yet dissatisfied, even fearful— as much as Freeman could be — that he had unwittingly ignored some aspect in the planning. Left something out. “I feel as if there’s something missing…”
“Siberians, I hope,” said Norton.
Though he couldn’t see the general, Norton knew that Freeman either hadn’t heard him or was simply brushing his aide’s attempt at levity aside, too preoccupied by all the concerns that assail a commander in the hours before a landing. Amphibious assaults — well, they were right up there with pilots on night carrier landings when it came to the number of things that could go wrong. He was chagrined to remember how his own designation of Ratmanov Island as “Rat,” in an effort to raise morale, had also been responsible for a logistics officer in San Diego having sent several Hercules-hauled palettes of ammunition to the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain instead of Alaska.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about the dreams, General,” said Norton.”Rubbish heap for nonsense, my dad used to say.”
“Did he?” asked the general.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Norton, your father was wrong. You ignore the subconscious at your peril. Remember Patton. He had Third Army poised for the final thrust into Eastern Europe, and he knew the Krauts were on their knees. Intelligence didn’t — but Patton knew. You remember why?”
All Norton could think of was being stupid enough to have had a cup of coffee before coming on deck, wondering about his chances of keeping it down.
“The carts!” said Freeman. “Dream was full of goddamned carts.”
Norton could sense the tension in Freeman’s tone then heard the general’s field holster bumping the rail. “Nazis were out of gas, Dick. They were using carts to take away their wounded. The dream told him, Dick. It was in the dream.”
Norton heard Freeman’s radio crackle. The general was wanted on the bridge.
As Freeman headed through the darkness toward the bridge he heard a roaring so powerful he could feel its vibration. Then he saw fiery tail of a missile, quickly followed by another, spewing up from one of the Ticonderogas’ fifty-six cell-box launchers, in seven rows of eight directly forward of the guided-missile cruiser’s bridge. Both he and Norton were surprised by just how close the other ships in the carrier’s screen were. They watched the bright yellow V of the gas-propelled blast-offs fading into a side-venting column of white flame that soon turned to a dry-ice-like fog that covered the cruiser’s deck. Now another missile erupted from the deck, forming the third arc of the triple launch, the arcs shooting heavenward, the heat momentarily creating the illusion of a summer wind. The naval battle that would last for six hours was already joined as Freeman reached the bridge of the Winston Davis.
Momentarily blinded by the dim red light of the ship’s bridge, he was unable for an instant to pick up the radar relay trace of the Ticonderoga’s three eighty-mile Mk 41 missiles whose one-thousand-pound warheads were now streaking across the night sky like fiery comets toward the Siberian task force over fifty miles away. Six minutes later as the yellow arrowhead on the Ticonderoga’s Aegis screen and its target advanced toward one another on the middle vector of the triangular cone, the calm, unemotional voice of the Ticonderoga’s EWO announced, “Aegis evaluates kill.”
In response the Ottichnyy, a Sovremennyy class guided-missile destroyer, fired two solid-fuel SS-N-22, Mach 2.5 antiship missiles, killing range sixty-five miles. Launched from the Otlichnyy’s starboard quad, the missiles were more than twice as fast as the American Standard Missile salvos but were nevertheless taken out, intercepted by two five-hundred-pound-warhead Harpoons in an orange slash that could be seen by the attacking Ticonderoga’s starboard lookout and by the only radar still operational on the sinking Siberian ship — the Top Steer/Top Plate combination radar mesh atop the forward mast.
One American missile hit the destroyer between the bridge and well decks, and the Siberians’ thirty-millimeter Gatling guns completely disappeared, a smoking crater in their place. The other U.S. Standard struck the Otlichnyy’s port side midships just aft of the front dome radars, immediately knocking out most circuits and creating a fire that pinpointed the Siberian fleet’s position for the American pilots about to engage a mass of Yak-38 Forger V/STOL fighter bombers. Each of the Forger A’s were carrying 3,000 pounds of ordnance on four underwing hard points, including air-to-air Aphid missiles and 2,600-pound Kerry air-to-surface-7 missiles, as well as the much lighter, 550-pound, ten-mile-range AS-14.
But there was never any doubt of the outcome in the air, for even with over sixty Forgers plotted by the Acheson swarming toward the American task force, the F-14 pilots alone knew they would “eat them alive.” The Tomcats, at Mach 2.34, were twice as fast, their service ceiling fifty thousand feet, a good ten thousand higher than what the Forgers could pull. And as if this wasn’t enough, whereas the Forgers had a 150-mile-lo-lo-lo radius with maximum weapon load, the Tomcats’ 1500-mile range gave the American fighters that much extra time in the air, a crucial element in the titanic battle between the carriers. But the Siberians, Admiral Burke knew, were not so naive as to believe for a second that they would all permeate the American defenses. It was the Leninist strategy again: if only ten Forgers got through, they would play havoc with the American task force — their targets not the American warships but the amphibious transports. All the American naval firepower in the world could not make a landing without live marines.
In the tactical flag command center aboard the Acheson, Burke was told that the Siberian fleet had apparently stopped and was turning about. No one aboard the Acheson or any of the other American ships thought the Siberians were withdrawing simply because their radars had lit up upon seeing the Ticonderoga’s launch. Perhaps, Admiral Burke told Freeman, they were withdrawing out of the Americans’ killing range. But this would only be true for the shorter-range missiles like the Harpoons; the two Ticonderogas and other American ships had twenty-seven-hundred-pound Tomahawk cruise missiles aboard with a much greater range, and the Siberians surely knew this.
The Siberian air armada was still on screen, and now the night erupted. Over ninety-three missiles were fired by the American fleet in less than forty seconds, from every kind of mount, including track-swivel “six-packs,” and rows of armored vertical-launch “egg cartons” immediately below each Ticonderoga’s bridge, filling the night with a kaleidoscope of deadly pyrotechnics. So impressive was it that, despite the obvious dangers, petty officers throughout the fleet were obliged to threaten direst punishment — no shore leave — in order to keep some men, a number of cooks among them, below deck.
Aboard the USS Acheson, as two white dots moved toward one another on the blue screen, became one, then disappeared, the voice came once, twice, four times in fifty seconds: “Aegis evaluates kill!” There was a cheer from combat control.
“Shut up!” commanded the officer of the deck. “We’ve just started.” From the USS Acheson, the last Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, and F-18 Hornets were being hurled aloft to meet the incoming bandits, but now it was recognized that the Forgers were being overtaken by thirty Fulcrum MiG-29Cs.
This changed everything. Burke, however, confident in his air commander’s ability, turned his attention to blips now indicating sub-fired SS-N-15s, the thirty-three-mile-range Siberian equivalent of the American SUBROC missiles, beginning their arcs toward the American fleet. Quickly he looked up at the TMS — track management system — that was capable of processing, parsing, and correlating up to fifty-five hundred images per half hour without backlog buildup — when there were no glitches. But readouts were going haywire, and Burke had to reply on the not-so-sophisticated backup “stand-alone” ASIC — at sea independent control — tracking and targeting system. It was enough to give him the sub’s approximate position, the sonar/prop recognition giving a computer image. It was a rough one but nevertheless showed a sub composite with bevelled sail sprouting a “five-stick” cluster: Park Lamp direction-finding loop, high frequency and radome masts, with search and attack periscopes. An Alfa II.
“Any change in their fleet’s position?” asked Burke, as antisub control, with even its SUBROC having a range of only forty miles at best, fired off two Loral Hycor MK-36 decoys, simultaneously playing out its SLQ-25 Nixie towed torpedo decoy.
“Change in their fleet position?” demanded Burke again.
“No, sir.”
“Range?”
“Thirty-five miles, sir.”
It was a strange world, Freeman surmised, where, air-locked against chemical and biological as well as conventional warfare, you sat in the eerie blue combat control center, never actually seeing your enemy except for a computer image. Burke calmly tried to refine overall strategy even as his task force threw missile for missile, the Siberian fleet still retreating, its subs’ positions becoming less and less certain in the din of props churning at flank speed, decoys and chaff adding to the countermeasures, the latter defending the American fleet yet also making it more difficult to locate the exact positions of the deadly Atlas. If these twenty-one-foot-long, ten-mile range, active/passive homing torpedoes, with their 1,250-pound warheads, travelling at forty-five knots, got through, the U.S. task force would be in a lot of trouble.
“Sir!” announced the OOD.
“Yes,” acknowledged Burke, his right hand reaching for the message, his eyes not straying from the deceptively calm blue light of the console left of him where he pressed the “Subord” key. He was checking on the status of his CATF— commander amphibious task force — Admiral Leahy, and the CLF — commander landing force — Freeman, aboard the Davis.
The message he was holding told him that a Truxtun CGM— guided-missile cruiser — the USS Prescott, had been hit. There hadn’t been any trace of a Prescott-bound missile either on the carrier’s TFCC board or aboard the Prescott. The CGM lay foundering, holed at the waterline below the forward 127-millimeter gun turret where a twenty-three-foot-long, eight-foot-wide gash was taking water. Through the hole, dying sailors could see the flashes of the aerial battle, tail exhausts seen as winks of light through the cruiser’s plates, peppered as though by a shotgun, on the starboard side. The fiercely burning ship soon lit up the carrier abaft of her where a roaring cacophony of blue flames and bleeding steam catapults indicated the Acheson’s flight deck as the last of the Strike Eagles took wing.
The Prescott was sinking and fast; the only ones able to leave her were those thrown into the water from the concussion, the sky above them banging, orange-white burst after burst lighting up one of the Ticonderogas like stuttering flashbulbs. The crew of the Sea King rescue chopper, hovering on station a mile off the carrier’s stern for pickup should any of the takeoffs go awry, had been impatient to go help the Prescott’s men in the water but only now, when all planes were aloft, could the chopper move toward the few men she could spot waving on the cruiser’s afterdeck and those yelling in the water in the penumbra of fire.
Most of the 575 men aboard the Prescott were already dead, the fires aboard her a crematorium. Those not killed by impact or suffocated by the toxic fumes from fires that had “flash-jumped” throughout the ship — twisted and buckled watertight doors offering no sanctuary — were now dying in a flaming oil slick off the starboard quarter. Others were killed as the white-hot tower supporting the air search and G-band navigation radars crumbled into itself like the skeleton of some enormous animal, sending showers of white-hot metal hissing into the sea.
The enemy aircraft were now closing, U.S. fighters engaging, the background a staccato of victors and vanquished, Fulcrums tangling with Eagles and Tomcats high above the Eagles with the added burden of trying to stop the Forgers. Burke ordered the furball chatter to be taken off PA, so that only the air commander and those immediately concerned could hear it, for fear it would interfere with the concentration of those still watching the enemy fleet. None of the Forgers had yet fired missiles, so the question was, what had gotten close enough, without being picked up either by sonar or radar, to take out the Prescott?
“Damn it!” said Burke, so softly not even the radar operator nearby heard it. “Patrol boats. Flares all quarters.”
“Flares all quarters, sir!” responded the OOD, and within seconds they had messages, confirming Burke’s suspicion, streaming in from every part of the fleet. There were swarms of patrol boats — foil-borne — reports of them closing difficult to hear above the cacophony erupting beyond the island of calm that was the USS Acheson’s TFCC — the sound of missiles, massed machine-gun and “pom-pom” AA fire reaching crescendos that drowned the men’s voices.
“Forty plus,” the OOD reported to Burke, the OOD suddenly thrusting his headset away from him, the crash of a missile hitting one of the American destroyers so loud he was deafened for several seconds and immediately ordered off the bridge, replaced by one Capt. Elias Wilkes, junior, a man whose career, although he had not come up through Annapolis, was about to take off. Realizing they were under close-quarter attack, Wilkes now hypothesized why the Siberian fleet had uncharacteristically “retreated” and why the subs, no doubt lying quiet, props stilled, had thus denied the U.S. passive-mode sonar their position. Suddenly he knew why they hadn’t turned.
“Mines, sir,” Wilkes told Burke.
Burke tried to suppress his alarm. Mines in choke points throughout the world — that was standard drill. Egress points, like La Perouse between Sakhalin and Japan, were no doubt already mined by the Siberians. This was understood. The U.S. and their allies — all the world’s navies — had long prepared their own egress channels for the defense of last resort. But here— hundreds of miles out from the nearest landfall of the Kuril Islands, an area well mapped and frequently patrolled by NATO’s navies? If Wilkes was right — though the small patrol boats couldn’t have done it, given their already-crowded decks-it certainly would explain the turning about of the fleet, suggesting that the mines had just been laid ahead of the Siberians. But no mine layers had been reported by SAT intelligence.
“The subs have been seeding them,” said Wilkes.
“What?”
“Subs laid them, sir. Thousands of AMD one-thousands. The subs can’t lay the AMD five-hundred.” Wilkes’s head inclined quizzically. “Strange that the lighter mine is more difficult for the sub. Probably the shape of its—”
“How does the AMD work?” Burke shot back. It was no time to pretend you knew everything. “What’s the trigger? Magnetic? Acoustic? Pressure?” He understood why magnetic wouldn’t get the hydrofoils, the latter consisting of plastic composites and the engine would be too far above the air/sea interface to trigger an acoustic mine. That left only pressure. But Wilkes shook his head.
“Pressure mine self-releases when the water column above it changes, but these hydrofoils probably don’t spread their weight over a wide enough area,” proffered Wilkes.
Wilkes’s guess was wrong. He’d told the truth in part — that the pressure from the hydrofoil wouldn’t set some of them off, though three of the fast-weaving attack boats had been sunk by others in the flotilla in the melee of the wake-streaked sea. Few men had a chance to notice the phytoplankton lit up even more beautifully by the intertwining tracer, flare light, missile explosions, and exhaust glare.
What had actually happened was that the foil-borne craft had sped through a protective channel, no more than half a mile wide, ahead of their fleet and the Tattletale, then spread out in a trumpet-shaped fountain, like angry wasps emerging from the safe, narrow channel left by the mine-laying subs. Meanwhile the subs waited in their silence should the American task force find the channel by sheer luck. The Siberians and Burke knew the chance of doing this was one in a million.
“Turn about!” Burke ordered. He had no choice, though he knew the enemy would later make great capital from the fact that the American Seventh Fleet, for the first time in its history, had turned tail and run. But to stop would imperil his ships even more, making them stationary targets for the missiles already being fired by five Forgers who had dived through under cover of an arrowhead formation of Fulcrums.
In running Burke had bought himself valuable time and fought off the foil-borne attack craft, sinking twenty-three. Another two of them were victims of their own missile fire; another was blown out of the water by an American Adams class destroyer. Even so, one of the U.S.’s Wasp class LHAs, an amphibious landing helicopter assault ship a quarter-mile to the right of Freeman’s, was hit. Despite the pumps working overtime, the forty-two-thousand-ton vessel was reduced to three knots, with Marines and seamen working like navvies, the smell of their sweat mixing with the burning odors of battle as they strove to shift cargo from port to starboard to even the ship’s trim before the pumps, already overheating because of “spare uniform” clogged intakes, gave up the ghost.
Watching the scene through his infrared field glasses aboard the Davis, Freeman said nothing. This was the navy’s department, and he was too astute a commander not to know when to keep quiet. But Norton could tell the general was worried — as worried as he’d ever seen him. If the Siberians tried hard enough to stop the American force here, how much worse would it be when you tried to land on their soil and with the element of naval surprise completely lost? Two Forgers appeared, white shimmers in the rolling green sea of infrared.
“Inside!” yelled Freeman. “Quickly!”
Freeman saw one Forger disintegrate, the flash of a Tomcat— or was it a Strike Eagle? — streaking by, the Forger dropping toward the Davis, its “ODD Rods”—friend or foe identification antennae forward of the armored glass windscreen — glinting momentarily in the darkness, its Tumansky turbojet screaming in a seventeen-thousand-pound reverse thrust, its twin-barreled cannon spitting red tracer, before it crashed into the sea, the slap followed by a soft explosion of phosphorescent seawater that now fell like rain. But in diverting the U.S. task force away from the Kuril landing sites, the Siberian fleet only succeeded in forcing Freeman to shift the axis of his invasion force away from the Kurils south to the Sea of Japan for the main landing.