Armageddon Mode

CHAPTER 18

Tombstone’s eyes were on the PLAT monitor in CATCC. From his camera-eye’s vantage point, he could watch as the final preparations were made to kick the two Alert Five aircraft into the sky.

He checked the bulkhead clock with mild surprise. Less than five minutes had passed since battle stations had been sounded. The first Indian missile strike had smashed into Jefferson’s defenses and been broken.

Now, though, the stakes were rising. Once Coyote and Shooter were airborne, the launch procedure for the rest of the carrier’s Tomcat defenders would begin. Tombstone could see more F-14s moving up into line behind Coyote’s and Shooter’s planes, and other aircraft were already being lined up on Cats Three and Four.

The Air Boss and his crew would be working flat-out to get the remaining Tomcats up as fast as possible. On the battle board, the Indian aircraft were moving southwest from Kathiawar, an unstoppable wave of machines. Against them were eighteen Tomcats, eight from VF-95, ten from VF-97. Four Vipers were already aloft; the rest would be joining them soon.

They looked slow-moving and clumsy on the deck. Turkeys. Once in the sky, though, it was a different story.

Tombstone studied Coyote’s plane as though trying to memorize each detail, every line and marking. The numerals 204 on the nose were faint, hard to make out against the glare of the morning sun to starboard. Since the early 1980s, the Navy had been using a low-contrast gray-and-gray scheme called low-viz, eliminating the garish paint schemes and squadron markings favored by aviators during the Vietnam era.

Gone were the grinning shark mouths, the stripes and badges and crests.

Even the numbers and nationality emblem were muted to near-invisibility.

It had been discovered during air trials in the late seventies that these bright markings not only made a big difference in sighting an opponent, they actually helped provide the heat contrast necessary for all-aspect heat-seekers to achieve a lock.

The wings on the two ready birds were swung forward into launch position. Green shirts completed the final check of the shuttle links.

White shirts went around the aircraft’s bellies one last time, then signaled the launch director with thumbs up.

The jet-blast deflectors rose on hydraulic pistons from the deck behind the ready aircraft, protecting planes parked to the rear from the exhaust. Both pilots were throttling up now, as the launch officer rapidly spun his upraised fist.

“Deck clear,” the Air Boss’s voice said over the CATCC speaker. “Launch ready aircraft. Now launch ready aircraft.”

The engine nozzles on the two F-14s glowed orange as Shooter and Coyote went to Zone One burner. Tombstone could not hear the shriek of the jets in the noise-muffling soundproofing of CATCC, but he’d been in the cockpit or on the deck through enough launches to imagine the pulsing throb of raw power.

The Safety Officers gave their final all-clear signals. At each cat, the Catapult Officer returned the pilot’s salutes, raised one hand, and looked toward the shooter, the man with his finger on the button.

Silently, Tombstone counted down the seconds. Go, Coyote, he thought fiercely. Go … The officer at Cat One spun his hand and dropped to one knee, his thumb touching the deck. There was a hesitation … and then Coyote’s Tomcat hurtled down the deck, trailing steam from the shuttle slot beneath its belly. A pair of heartbeats later, the Cat Two officer touched the deck, and Shooter’s aircraft followed, leaping toward the carrier’s bows ahead of twin spears of flame.

“Two-oh-four airborne,” the Air Boss’s voice announced. “Two-four-eight airborne. Let’s get it the hell moving down there, people! We’ve got aircraft to launch!”

Tombstone shifted uneasily. He wanted to be out there! In the cockpit of 201, vectoring toward those hostiles!

With burning eyes, Tombstone watched the pair of Tomcats banking starboard off Jefferson’s bow in choreographed unison, his squadron mates, his friends. Damn, he wished he was going with them.

Silently, he cursed Admiral Vaughn, the Navy, and himself.

0746, 26 March Tomcat 216

Batman glanced at his VDI. The radar screen was becoming increasingly fuzzy, and it was difficult to tell the true targets from random smears of light. Somewhere out there, Batman concluded, an enemy electronic Countermeasures aircraft was doing its thing.

“Hey, Malibu. You see Army anywhere?”

The two Tomcats of BARCAP One had separated to launch their attacks on the incoming Styx missiles. Now the jamming was so bad it was difficult to see anything beyond a range of a few miles.

“Negative, Batman,” the RIO replied. “I’m getting a lot of fuzz on the scope. Someone’s doing some serious jamming.”

“Yeah,” Batman replied. His VDI showed broken patches of glare that partly obscured the oncoming bogies. “It’s the ECM boys’ war now.”

“Viper Two-one-six, this is Victor Tango One-one,” the Hawkeye called at last. “We have a target for you.”

“Copy, Victor Tango.” A target? The sky was filled with targets, or at least it had been when he could still see!

The Hawkeye air controller began passing on new information. “Come to new heading zero-four-one at angels base plus one-niner.”

“Roger that, Victor Tango. Zero-four-one at base plus one-nine thousand.”

He stood the Tomcat on its tail, grabbing for the sky. The “base” of the controller’s orders had been set during Batman’s preflight briefing that morning: eleven thousand feet. By saying angels base plus nineteen, the Hawkeye was telling Batman to go to thirty thousand feet without giving potentially useful information to an enemy who was almost certainly listening in.

The simple code was used only on combat missions, and then only when there was a real threat to ships or aircraft from what the enemy might learn.

Its use reminded Batman of how serious their situation was.

“Tomcat Two-one-six, Victor Tango One-one,” the Hawkeye controller called. “New target now at your zero-four-two. Range six-eight miles.

Do you have him, over?”

“Nothing, Batman,” Malibu said. “That’s the center of the worst of the ECM.”

“Zap him, Mal.” By pouring more power into the beam, the AWG-9 radar might burn through the enemy radar interference, at least across a narrow area. The disadvantage, of course, was that the added power made their aircraft light up like a Christmas tree on the scope of any watching enemy plane. “Fry the son of a bitch with a goddamn microwave oven if you have to!”

“Okay!” Malibu said. “Pegged him, I think. Hard to read through the clutter.”

“Roger that bogie at zero-four-two,” Batman called, reading the display duplicated off Malibu’s screen. “Range six-eight at angels three-five.”

Using the base code this time could have given it away to the Indians.

“That’s the one. Two-one-six,” the Hawkeye controller replied. “Target is probably Eye-el Thirty-eight, suspected hostile ECM aircraft. Engage with Phoenix and destroy. Over.”

“Copy, Victor Tango.” Well, I’m not going to ask him to dance, he thought. “Commencing run.”

An Illyushin. The Indians used the IL-38, code named “May” by NATO, for reconnaissance. This one must have been outfitted as an ECM and EW aircraft.

He could hear Malibu in the backseat, muttering range and bearing to himself as he readied the Phoenix for launch. The RIO had forgotten to switch off the ICS.

“Take it down nice and cool,” Batman said. “We have time.”

“Rog,” Malibu said. “Okay, we have AWG lock and are tracking.”

“Let ‘er rip!”

“Fox Three!” The radar-homer ignited beneath the Tomcat’s belly and streaked into the sky, climbing to reach the target’s altitude.

Batman checked his VDI. It was difficult to make out anything through the hash on his screen, but he could see that a number of antiship missiles were still on their way northwest, closing on Jefferson. To the north and west, unidentified aircraft were gathering, apparently still milling about at marshaling points as more and more aircraft joined them.

“All I can say, Mal,” he told his RIO. “The goddamned cavalry better hustle. We got a shitload of company that’s fixing to come step on us!”

“Admiral on deck!”

Marine sentries snapped to attention and presented arms, but the rest of the officers and sailors in the Aegis cruiser’s CIC suite remained motionless at their stations as Admiral Vaughn stepped across the knee-knocker and into the room. Captain Cunningham looked up, then waved him over. “Welcome aboard, Admiral,” he said. There was a twinkle in his eye. “I trust you had a pleasant flight.”

“Never mind that. What the hell’s going on?”

Vicksburg’s captain began outlining the situation. Vaughn was uncomfortably aware of the surge and roll of the ship in the heavy seas and reached out to steady himself on a nearby console top.

“Aye, sir. The Indies fired sixteen missiles from an estimated four patrol craft. Range twenty-seven miles. Jefferson stopped them all. No damage.”

“Thank God!”

“At the same time, they appear to have begun launching a large number of land-based aircraft.” He pointed toward one of the LSDS, which now displayed a portion of the Indian mainland in lines of white light.

Bhuj, south of the salt marshes of the Rann of Kutch. Okha, an Indian air force base on the very western tip of the peninsula called Kathiawar. The airfields outside the major Kathiawar cities of Jamnagar, Rajkot, and Bhanagar. Bombay to the east. At each location, aircraft were still rising into the skies, circling, gathering for the storm.

“Some of them are already skirting the edge of our air defense zone,” Cunningham said. “Jefferson reports she is now launching her remaining F-14s.”

“How … how many enemy planes?” Vaughn asked, his eyes on the scramble of blips on the LSD.

“Unknown,” Cunningham replied. “We estimate fifty to one hundred aircraft aloft so far. Jamming is very heavy.”

“Anything out of the Indian fleet?”

“Nothing yet, Admiral. They could have launched their Sea Harriers, but our Hawkeyes haven’t picked up anything yet. Like I said, the jamming-“

“Has Washington been apprised of the situation yet?”

Cunningham looked surprised. “Uh … no, sir. Unless Jefferson-“

Vaughn slumped. “There hasn’t been time. Okay. My responsibility. Get me a satellite patch. Now.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And bring the goddamned Russians down here. We might as well start working with the bastards.”

Vaughn wasn’t certain where or when the turning point had been, but he was surprised to realize that he was less concerned now about what the Joint Chiefs might say than with the handful of ships and men under his command. Not that he should have been surprised by that, he realized … but for so long his world had revolved around the tight little perimeter of the Washington Beltway. He’d been aware of the outside world, certainly, but his personal world had been that of career and peers, of position and politics.

All of that was lost now, under the hot rising sun of the Arabian Sea, and against the rising swarms of aircraft bent on destroying his command.

So far from home, against such odds, he would take any allies he could find … even if they spoke Russian.

If only there was time.

Lieutenant Commander Ravi Tahliani held his aircraft steady at an altitude of less than fifty meters. Traveling at eleven miles a minute, just below the speed of sound, the Sea Harrier bucked and jumped, the vibrations transmitted to the young Indian pilot through his ejection seat and the control stick between his knees. At so low an altitude, the horizon seemed to be above him on all sides, and sea spray blasted across his windscreen like a stiff rain. He reached out and flicked on a device that he, trained on simpler aircraft like Migs, still found strange in a fighter. Its utility was undeniable, however. The windshield wiper cleared the spray with several quick swipes.

He checked his console clock. He’d been airborne now for six minutes and had already crossed nearly half the distance between the Indian fleet and the American carrier. By now, he was deep inside the enemy’s air defense zone. It was remarkable that they’d come so far without being detected.

Or perhaps not. The Indian Sea Harriers were flying at an extremely low altitude and beneath a solid blanket of friendly jamming. The Americans’ attention would be focused in a different direction, toward the northeast and the Indian mainland. If they were watching the Indian fleet at all, it was with the assumption that Viraat and her consorts were bound for Karachi and the blockade of Pakistan.

The Americans would be in the midst now of launching their carrier-based aircraft. There would be a certain amount of confusion, both on the carrier’s deck and among the pilots in the air as they formed up against the oncoming Indian aircraft. The Sea Harriers would have a good chance to strike a telling — and unexpected — blow.

He glanced again at the clock. Only a few more minutes …

“Missile closing with target,” Malibu said. “Closing … got him!”

On Batman’s VDI, the blip marking the Indian EW aircraft, circling over the Gir Hills of southern Kathiawar, flared and fragmented as the marker for the Phoenix missile connected across nearly sixty miles.

“Victor Tango One-one!” Batman called. “Splash that bandit!”

The radar screen was clear! As though wiped by a cloth, the smears of light and static were gone, leaving the crisp images of moving bogies.

“Copy, Two-one-six,” the Hawkeye controller replied. “Good shooting.”

“I’m not sure I wanted to see the big picture, Batman,” Malibu said. “I think those guys are mad now.”

“Roger that.” He put the Tomcat into a starboard turn, angling back toward the southwest. “Where’s Army? I think we lost him back there.”

“Got him,” Malibu replied. “Range twelve miles, at two-seven-five. Got his IFF.”

“I see him.” He opened the tactical frequency. “Viper Two-oh-one,” he called. “This is Batman. Do you copy? Over.”

“Copy, Batman.”

“What’s the score?” It had been several minutes since he’d last heard from the Jefferson. He was wondering about her fate with so many missiles bearing down on her.

“Homeplate is in the clear,” Army replied. “Alert Five is up and on the way. All … hold it. Wait one.”

“Rog.”

“Shit. Batman, can you get a reading on possible targets, bearing one-nine-zero to one-seven-five? Range … about ten miles.”

“Got ‘em,” Malibu said. “Damn, Batman! Where’d they come from?”

“Roger, Army,” Batman said, replying to Garrison’s question. “We see them. I make it … eight … maybe ten bogies, heading west to west-northwest at five-five-oh.”

“That’s them. Too big to be missiles.”

“My guess would be Sea Harriers, Army.”

“Roger that. Victor Tango One-one, did you copy that, over?”

“Roger, BARCAP One-one. We are monitoring. Come to new heading one-nine-zero and intercept. Over.”

“Roger, Victor Tango. We’re in.”

“BARCAP One-two, come to one-nine-five and intercept. Over.”

“Copy, Victor Tango. The Batman’s in.”

He rammed his throttles to Zone Five burner and thundered toward the south.

Army held his Tomcat level at ten thousand feet, racing south as Dixie plotted the bogies ahead. They seemed to be strung out across the sky.

If they were Sea Harriers off an Indian carrier, they must have simply launched and flown, without waiting to assemble into a larger formation.

“Victor Tango One-one,” he called. “Army Dixie Two-oh-four. We are tracking estimated twelve to sixteen bogies, now at three-five miles.

They’re low, wave-hopping. Two birds on board. Over.”

“Roger that, Two-oh-four. You are clear to fire.”

“Army Dixie Two-oh-four is engaging.”

Two Phoenix missiles against sixteen targets. After that, they’d have nothing going for them but their guns.

“Locking onto Target Alpha,” Dixie informed him. “Solid AWG track. Fox three!”

The Phoenix dropped clear of the Tomcat and ignited. The contrail etched a dazzling white scratch across the blue sky to the south.

“We have lock number two,” Dixie said.

“Launch.”

“Fox three!” The F-14 shuddered. “Okay, Army. We’re empty.”

“Right. Victor Tango, this is Two-oh-four. We’ve popped the last of our six-pack.”

“Copy, Two-oh-four. Come right to two-eight-five and hold, angels base plus five.”

“Rog.”

Army was known as a fastidious dogfighter, preferring to make a kill from long distance, with air-to-air missiles, rather than getting “up close and personal” as the more flamboyant kids in his squadron liked to say.

Most Navy aviators preferred — at least claimed to prefer — the John Wayne approach. “Would John Wayne shoot someone from a hundred miles away?” Coyote Grant had asked him once during a party in the Me Jo quarters.

“Would John Wayne use a goddamn missile?”

That attitude had grown out of the Navy’s Top Gun program. Tombstone, one of Jefferson’s resident Top Gun aces, gave regular training sessions and exercises for the other pilots. He liked to point out that Navy aviators had been getting into deep trouble early in the Vietnam fighting because they relied too heavily on missiles … and had forgotten how to dogfight. That piece of lore was basic to every lecture on ACM and was now drilled into Navy aviators from their first day in the air.

Army didn’t disagree with the concept, but he was a technical pilot, flying by the book and making his decisions by the book. No hot-dogging or seat-of-the-pants flying for him! If an aviator had a million-dollar high-tech missile with which to blow an enemy out of the sky before that enemy even knew he was being tracked, so much the better. As Patton had once put it, “The idea is not to die for your country, but to make some other poor bastard die for his.” Combat, whatever the kids with their aviator’s sunglasses and fighter jock jackets said or thought, was not a game, not a courtly joust between gentlemen, not a test of chivalry. It was fire, pain, and sudden death. “Chivalry,” he’d said during more than one Ready Room bull session, “gets you dead.”

“Grand slam!” Dixie called. “Splash one bogie!”

On his VDI, his second Phoenix closed relentlessly on another target. On the radar screen, he could see the bogie twisting away toward the south, trying to outrun its Mach 5 nemesis …

Lieutenant Commander Ravi Tahliani pulled back on his stick, urging the Sea Harrier to climb above the waves. Smoke still boiled into the sky a mile ahead where Lieutenant Venkateraman’s Harrier had vanished in orange flame and fragments.

“Viraat! Viraat!” he called. “Blue King Leader! We are under attack!

Blue King Three is hit!”

“Roger, Blue King Leader. Overwatch reports several enemy fighters north of your position, range thirty to forty miles.”

“Blue King Leader, Blue Five!” another voice interrupted. “They’ve got a lock on me!”

Tahliani twisted his head, trying to see. Blue Five had been nearly four miles behind him and to the right. “Break left, Blue Five!” Gods!

How could the Americans kill over such a distance?

He snapped his Harrier into a hard right turn, his eyes still scanning the eastern sky, looking for Blue Five. The pilot was Lieutenant Rani Gupta, son of an old family friend, and one of Tahliani’s proteges.

There! He could just make out Rani’s Harrier, a speck just above the water, streaking south. In the sky to the north, a white contrail was plunging toward the fleeing plane.

“Chaff, Rani!” he yelled into his helmet mike. “Chaff!”

There was no answer, but the speck was rising now, fighting for altitude, a standard maneuver for trying to disengage from a radar-homing missile after strewing clouds of chaff in its path.

It didn’t seem to make any difference. The contrail continued to plunge from the sky. Faster than Tahliani’s eye could follow, it stopped, merging with Rani’s plane.

A puff of flame and black smoke smeared the sky, followed by a much brighter flash as Rani’s fuel and weapons detonated. Flaming wreckage continued to climb straight into the sky, paused a moment, then fell back toward the sea. If the young Indian flyer had managed to eject, there was no sign.

“Viraat, this is Blue Leader. Blue Five has been destroyed.”

“Roger, Blue King Leader. Continue the mission.”

Continue the mission. Tahliani’s face settled into a hard scowl behind his dark visor. His primary mission had been to engage the American fighter cover protecting their carrier, opening the way for ground-based strike aircraft. Only after the ground-based aircraft were engaged were the Sea Harriers to turn their attention to the American and Soviet ships. For that purpose, Blue King’s aircraft each carried two Sea King missiles slung beneath their down-canted wings.

But for air-to-air combat, all they had were four R-550 Magic air-to-air missiles and their cannons. Magic was comparable to the American Sidewinder, IR-seekers with a range of perhaps two miles. He had nothing, nothing with which to counter an enemy still thirty-five miles away!

How was he supposed to carry out his mission when he could not even get close enough to the enemy to fire?

But possibly there was a chance. He had his Sea Harrier in a steady climb now, gaining altitude to extend the range of his Ferranti Blue Fox radar. Maximum range for an aircraft-sized target was about thirty-five miles for the system. Perhaps … There it was, a lone aircraft at the very limit of his radar’s range, traveling toward the northwest. If it was an American Tomcat, it had a top speed of better than Mach 2 and could easily out-pace his Harrier.

But perhaps there was another way …