Armageddon Mode

CHAPTER 24

Tahliani had been able to round up only five other Sea Harriers out of his flight. The others, evidently, had scattered or fled when two of their number had been downed by American Phoenix missiles earlier.

He checked his fuel gauge and winced. It would be a near thing making it back to Viraat now. His earlier maneuvers had spent far too much fuel.

Risking discovery, he brought the Harrier’s nose up and climbed. At ten thousand feet his radar display showed his target, now less than eighty kilometers away but still well over the horizon from the Harrier formation that continued to hug the surface below. He did not chance using his own radar but remained in passive mode, recording the radar emissions of the target rather than sending out signals of his own.

The target plotted, he dropped to wave-top height once more. Carefully, they stalked their enemy, staying unseen below the horizon.

The American E-2Cs were the greatest danger, but those watched northward now, toward the heart of the vast, churning dogfight sprawling from Kathiawar to the fringes of the American fleet. The Harriers still had a chance to strike without being detected.

Tahliani had led his formation far to the south, circling past the Jefferson’s last-known position. At such a low altitude, and with nothing like the American Hawkeye to coordinate the battle, they had to rely on guesswork to find their prey.

“Target ahead,” he said, breaking radio silence now for the first time since he’d decided to make this strike. “Range seventy-nine kilometers.

Arm missiles!”

One by one the others reported their Sea Eagle ship-killers armed and ready for launch. The Sea Eagle had a range of one hundred kilometers.

By narrowing that distance, they would shorten the enemy’s reaction time once the missile had locked on.

If they got much closer, though, the enemy ship’s radar would be certain to see them, if they hadn’t been spotted already by the circling Hawkeyes.

“Blue King Leader to Blue King,” Tahliani said. “Launch! Launch!”

His Sea Harrier lept into the sky as the Sea Eagle dropped free and fired. He could see the reflection of the exhaust on the sea, a dazzling flare of orange and gold. One by one, the other Harriers dropped their deadly packages. In seconds, eleven missile contrails were speeding across the water toward their distant target.

“”If the slayer thinks he slays,’” Tahliani said, his voice a sonorous chant as he quoted from the Katha Upanishad, “‘if the slain thinks he is slain, both these do not understand. He slays not, is not slain … ‘”

A suitable epitaph for the brave men who worked the ship that lay invisibly beyond the horizon. And perhaps it would serve as a plea for forgiveness as well.

It would take nearly five minutes for the Sea Eagles to reach their target. By then, the Harriers would be long gone. With a snap of his wrist he twisted his aircraft skyward, then around toward home.

Vaughn looked away from the LSD he was studying as the Tactical Officer snapped a warning. “Missile launch!” the TO called. “Eleven new bogies, probable ASMS, bearing one-eight-five. Range seventy-five miles. Speed five-niner-four knots.

“Mach point eight-five,” Cunningham said at Vaughn’s side. “Sea Eagles, just like the ones they smacked Jefferson with. Seventy-five miles, though. That’s pretty far for Sea Eagles.”

“Sir,” Harkowicz, the TO, said. “We’re not the target. It’s … Sir, it’s Kreml!”

Vaughn’s eyes widened. “The Kremlin? You’re sure?” He looked across the CIC suite toward the three Russian Officers at their communications center. “Where is she?”

Cunningham pointed to a graphic symbol on the LSD. “About seventy miles southwest of us, sir. Parallel course, west-northwest, eighteen knots.”

“We’d better tell them, sir,” Cunningham said, following the admiral’s stare. “They’re not tapped into our data network.”

Vaughn’s anger at the Russians, at the way they’d been dragging their feet earlier, surfaced again.

But no, Cunningham was right. They did have to be told.

He hurried across the room to tell them himself.

“Urgent message from Vicksburg, Admiral,” the aide said as he handed the message sheet to Dmitriev. “They report several antiship cruise-missiles have been targeted on us from the southeast.”

He took the message and scanned it. It had been signed by Sharov.

Dmitriev knew his Chief of Staff was prone neither to exaggeration nor to sensationalism.

The Russian admiral checked his watch and the information on the sheet.

According to the report, the missiles were a bit over twenty miles away … three minutes at eight tenths the speed of sound. “Is there anything on radar?”

The aide, already at attention, managed to convey a further crisp snap to his posture that came short of clicking his heels. “Negative, Admiral.”

“Hmm.” It could be an American ruse to hurry him in launching his aircraft, but he doubted that. Not that Vaughn wasn’t capable of cheap theatrics, but … “Point defenses on full alert,” he ordered. “And notify Kurasov to check in that direction. We will take no chances.”

Admiral Dmitriev was painfully aware of the crowded state of Kreml’s flight deck, where bombs and incendiaries were still piled high as fueling and arming for the strike continued. He’d thought that the Russian squadron was well enough sheltered by the American task force.

If it was not … The lessons of the Battle of Midway were taught at Russian naval academies as well as at Annapolis, and Dmitriev was uncomfortably aware that he might well be about to be cast in the modern-day role of Nagumo.

He checked his watch again. Two minutes …

The air battle was rolling south toward the Vicksburg. The Aegis cruiser had shifted course slightly in order to bring her closer to the Jefferson, now some twenty miles to the east, starboard of the cruiser and slightly astern, but her antiair umbrella extended well beyond the carrier, striking down incoming aircraft with almost clockwork precision and regularity.

Both Vertical Launch Systems were in operation almost continuously, with the Aegis controlling at times as many as a dozen Standard missiles in flight simultaneously. Both the DDG Lawrence Kearny and the destroyer John A. Winslow had pulled in closer to the core of the battle group and begun taking their directions from Vicksburg. Standard missiles fired from the U.S. destroyers were actually being guided to their targets by SARH from the Aegis cruiser, extending her range and deadliness.

And that deadliness was beginning to take its toll. Vaughn had long since lost track of how many Indian aircraft had been destroyed. Eight or ten in the dogfight with the American fighters, certainly, and at least twenty more had fallen victim to the implacable hunger of the Standard missiles as they stalked the radar reflections of their prey and hunted them down.

It was a close-run thing toward the end. Indian aircraft were actually coming in over the horizon, and the Vicksburg’s two five-inch turrets swung about and began slamming shells at the attackers. Vaughn watched the forward turret hammering away on the TV screen in CIC. In the distance, he could see the black specks that he knew were enemy planes, the black smears of triple-A and exploding aircraft, the smoky streak of a plane falling across the sky. A Jaguar howled past, long, black cigar shapes spilling from its belly as the carrier’s point defenses swung to meet the new threat. Splashes rose off Jefferson’s port bow, thunderous avalanches of water. The Jaguar disintegrated in midair; the bombs missed.

In World War II, the face of war was changed forever when ships began striking at each other with carrier aircraft. Fleets maneuvered, came to grips, and sank one another … and the opposing ships never came within sight of each other directly.

Modern war, Vaughn had always been told, was to have taken that separation of the combatants another step. Ships would be struck and sunk by missiles launched by aircraft safely over the horizon. Enemy aircraft would never even appear in the skies over a naval squadron.

The Falklands campaign had proven the fallacy of that prediction, though the presence and terrain of those islands had shaped the battle to a large extent. Here in the Arabian Sea, it was the sheer numbers of the Indian attackers that carried them past the outer defenses and into range of the ship’s guns.

Vaughn watched the struggle unfolding on the television monitor and thought of World War II. The scenes there looked like something out of a fifty-year-old newsreel.

Following the Western design philosophy in arming their first nuclear aircraft carrier, Kreml was not as heavily armed as the Kiev-class cruiser-carrier hybrids. The weapons mix did reflect Soviet concern about antiship missiles, however, for she carried a number of Gatling-type rapid-fire cannons designed to defeat incoming ASMS.

Designed to operate much like the Phalanx, the 30-mm multi-barrel gun designated as AK-630 was housed in a squat, gray turret unlike the white silo of the American CIWS.

The six barrels were housed together in a single rotating tube. The weapon had a theoretical rate of fire of 3000 rounds per minute, but problems caused by overheating and the tendency of the ammunition to jam reduced this to short bursts of one or two hundred rounds apiece.

The missiles entered Kreml’s inner defensive zone, spread out now across a wide stretch of sea and skimming scant meters above the wave tops. Two of Kreml’s AK-630s began firing … then a third, and a fourth, all the point defense turrets that could bear on the tiny, elusive targets now spread across the horizon astern. Splashes on the sea, cascades of white spray, marked where the high-velocity rounds lashed out at the approaching ship-killers.

On the carrier’s deck all was noise and confusion, as officers shouted orders and the CIWS Gatlings shrieked like chain saws. The heavy thumps of chaff launchers mingled with the chaos with a steady, rhythmic beat.

Clouds of chaff surrounded the carrier as the Gatlings continued to track and fire, track and fire and fire and fire … The Sea Eagles were approaching Kreml from almost dead astern. In the last minute of the engagement, Captain Soni made one serious tactical mistake by deciding to maintain his course, rather than maneuvering to give either his port or starboard batteries a clearer field of fire.

When the missiles first came within range, four separate CIWS turrets could bear on them, two to starboard, one aft, and one to port. By deciding to hold the carrier to its northwesterly course, he hoped to provide the CIWS turrets with a less complicated firing solution.

Unfortunately for the Kreml, when the missiles were within five hundred meters of the carrier’s stern, the ship’s hull itself blocked the line of fire for two of the guns.

Still, the fire was effective. At two miles’ range, one Sea Eagle was struck simultaneously by twin streams of projectiles. Traveling at 1000 meters per second, the heavy rounds chewed through the missile like rocks through tissue, shredding electronics and control surfaces and scattering debris across the water. In the last instant, the remaining fuel on board ignited in an orange fireball.

A second missile exploded an instant later, followed by the third, twin detonations that momentarily flattened the surface of the water with dual shock waves.

The guns kept firing. One missile veered off, and then another. Either their guidance systems had malfunctioned or they’d been decoyed by chaff. Another missile, one fin blasted away by a grazing shot, fell into the sea like a leaping fish and vanished.

The guns of a pair of escorts came into play. The destroyers Vliyatel’nyy and Moskovskiy Komsomolets were cruising within sight of the Kreml, less than two miles away, and both turned their own CIWS on the missiles as they streaked in from the horizon. Without intership coordination such as that provided by Aegis, however, the help was too little and too late. One more missile exploded half a mile from the carrier. Vliyatet’nyy was tracking another speeding black-and-red missile when it vanished behind Kreml’s hull, and high-velocity 30-mm rounds slashed into the aircraft carrier’s waterline.

Captain Soni’s tactical error was most apparent for the last couple of seconds. Four missiles remained in the air, but for the last few tens of meters the ship’s stern blocked three of the guns that had been firing at them. Only the AK-630 mounted on Kreml’s fantail could still bear.

It managed to knock down one of them.

Two missiles slammed into the Kreml from astern, one entering the fantail walkway close alongside the AK-630 mount and tunneling deep into the passageway leading into the bowels of the ship before exploding. The second missed the stern and passed along the ship’s right side, too close to the hull for the starboard CIWS turrets to bear. It struck close to the waterline aft of Kreml’s island, but the angle was too oblique to cause detonation. The missile slammed off the steel plating and fell into the sea.

The blast from the first Sea Eagle engulfed the ship’s stern, sending smoke and flame belching from the stern, the concussion warping two of Kreml’s propeller shafts. The carrier shuddered, sending men on her deck to their hands and knees. Fires began in a dozen places: the ship’s machine shops, a paint locker, a jet engine service area. Choking smoke wreathed through the carrier’s bowels as fire alarms shrieked warning.

Damage was bad, but not fatal, not yet. Soviet damage control parties, while not as well-trained or well-coordinated as their American counterparts, were able to seal off the damaged areas in short order and begin flooding the fires with water and foam.

The third missile, however, was far more deadly than the first.

Following well behind the first two, it approached the carrier just as the blast wave erupted from the Soviet carrier’s shattered fantail. Like a stone skipping on water, it was deflected high into the air and sent skimming above the Kreml’s ramp and across her crowded flight deck. The warhead smashed into parked Yak-38MP Forgers and navalized Su-27 Flankers in a close-spaced row along the ship’s starboard side. One hundred fifty kilograms of high explosive detonated among closely spaced aircraft, all fueled and armed for the coming strike against the Indian supply lines ashore.

Hell descended on the Kreml’s flight line in flame and noise and hurtling death as the fireball writhed into the sky. The forward half of a Forger, furiously ablaze, cart-wheeled across the deck and landed squarely on a Su-25 Frogfoot loaded with cluster bombs parked alongside the island. Fuel and ordnance went up together with a clattering roar like a Chinese New Year’s celebration, blowing out windows on the carrier’s bridge and Primary Flight Control. The blast sent deck crewmen skittering and tumbling across the deck as though swept away by a gigantic broom. R-60 air-to-air missiles, the AA-8 Aphids slung from Yak-38 wings, ignited, snapping across the deck on streamers of white flame. Explosion followed explosion followed explosion, a chain of interlocking blasts that rocked the carrier and sent a pall of greasy black smoke two miles into the sky.

A ship trembled on the edge of death.

“Admiral! Kremlin’s been hit!”

“What? When? Just now?”

“They went off the air for a few minutes, sir. I thought it was a comm failure. Now they’ve started broadcasting an SOS. They must have gotten hit pretty bad.”

Vaughn glanced toward the Russian liaison officers. Captain First Rank Sharov was already hurrying across the compartment, an expression of sharp concern etched into the lines of his face.

“Admiral,” he began.

“I heard, Sharov. I’m sorry.”

“Moskovskiy Komsomolets and Vliyatel’nyy are alongside, Admiral,” the Russian staff officer said. “But they need additional help, and quickly. The fire on the flight deck is out of control.”

Vaughn looked up at one of the LSDS, a display set to show the dispositions of all of the vessels of the fleet. Vicksburg, Jefferson, Kearny, and Winslow were all steaming together in a fairly tight group forty miles across, with the destroyers serving as an antiair screen between the carrier and the coast. Amarillo and the Peoria followed a few miles astern of the Jefferson. Kreml and her two escorting destroyers lay seventy miles to the southwest. The Kresta-II cruiser Marshal Timoshenko was steaming sixty miles northwest of the Russian carrier, which put her nearly ninety miles due west of the Vicksburg.

The other ships of the two squadrons, two American Perry-class frigates and a pair of Soviet ASW frigates, were part of an antisubmarine net thrown out along an arc from the southwest to the east. One of these, Biddle, was in pursuit of the Osas that had slipped through the American screen over an hour earlier.

“Timoshenko is closer than we are,” Vaughn said.

“The Marshal Timoshenko is pursuing a sub contact, Admiral,” Sharov said. “If they abandon the chase …” He left the warning unspoken.

Submarines were a carrier’s deadliest opponent, deadlier by far than any aircraft.

Vaughn pursed his lips. The strongest arm of the Indian navy was without doubt their submarine force: six German Type 1500s, four Russian Kilos, and eight … no, make that seven Foxtrots.

According to the latest satellite reconnaissance, Chakra, the nuclear sub on loan from the Russians, was still, as expected, conspicuously in port, but that still left the Indians with a fleet of seventeen conventional subs. At least ten or twelve of them would be off India’s west coast and capable of striking at the joint task force.

Memories of his 1980 encounter with a Russian sub returned once more.

“I’m sorry, Captain Sharov,” Vaughn said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

He gestured toward the LSD that showed the swarm of radar contacts within thirty-two miles of the Aegis cruiser. “Vicksburg is coordinating the air defense for my entire battle group. It’s just not possible.”

Radio calls crackled back and forth across the comm net in the background, disembodied and distant.

“Get him! Get him!”

“Bring it around, Shooter, I’m on his six. Fox two!”

“This is One-oh-five. Looks like they’re breaking through to the east.

Somebody get over there and …”

“This is Two-two-oh! Two-two-oh! I’m hit! I’m hit! I’m-“

Sharov stared at Vaughn openly for a moment, then let out a breath.

“Understood, Admiral. You can not sacrifice your battle group to save one ship.”

“It’ll come out right,” Vaughn said, feeling the emptiness of his words.

“You’ll see.”

On the television monitor behind him, Vicksburg’s five-inch gun continued to slam away at the approaching aircraft. Amidships, the cruiser’s starboard CIWS Phalanx activated, pivoted, and fired.

The attackers were within two miles of the command ship now.

Colonel Singh held his Jaguar International at wave-top altitude. The sea was a gray blur beneath his plane as he raced toward the south.

The Illyushin-38 naval reconnaissance plane serving as coordinator for the strike had fed him the data he needed. The American target should be less than twenty-five kilometers ahead.

This time he was carrying only a single ASM, a bright-red, deadly-looking missile slung from his centerline stores rack. The AS-37 Martel had been developed in the early 1960s by France’s SA Matra and England’s British Aerospace Dynamics working together in one of the very first instances of European weapons collaboration. Weighing 550 kilos — over half a ton — and carrying a 150 kg warhead, the Martel had only recently been made available for export from France or Britain, and the missile had not been in production since the late seventies. India’s recent and urgent arms buildup, however, had led to secret negotiations with France, and a limited number of AS-37s had been made available to India for “trials” with the HAL-production version of the SEPECAT Jaguar.

The name Martel was derived from Missile AntiRadar Television. Where the AJ-168 version of the Martel used by Britain was guided by a television transmitter mounted in a blunt, glass nose, the French AS-37 was strictly radar-homing. As he approached the target, Singh dialed through a series of frequencies, searching for the particular band used by the American SPY-1 radar. When he heard the distinctive tone, he punched the buttons that locked the signal down in the missile’s memory.

Now, no matter how fast or frequently the hostile radar changed frequencies, so long as it remained within the same preset band, the Martel would track it.

Operating from a low-altitude launch, the Martel had a range of thirty kilometers, a little more than eighteen and a half miles. According to the data from the IL-38, Singh was now well within range. Obviously, the closer he could get before release, the more likely the possibility of a hit. He could hear the radio calls of the other Indian pilots in the sky around him as they attacked the American ships. Dozens of aircraft had been downed already, and missile after missile had been destroyed before they could strike their targets, shot down either by the American antiair missiles or, in the last seconds of their approach, by the deadly breath of their guardian CIWS Gatlings.

Somehow during the past hour, Jamall Rajiv Singh had managed to acquire an almost passive fatalism about this mission, about his chances for success … and for survival. His initial terror had faded as his comrades on either side had fallen away, targeted by enemy missiles, shot down by enemy Tomcats.

Now, nothing remained beyond sea and sky, his aircraft and the load it carried. The enemy he had feared had been reduced by the miles and the continuing violence around him to an abstraction, the target … now twenty kilometers ahead.

With an icy calm he’d never realized he possessed, Singh readied the radar-homing ship-killer for launch.