Island Warriors

TWENTY-FOUR

Norfolk stared at the screen, swearing quietly. He turned to his TAO. “Dammit, get on the horn to the E-2—they have to keep those fighters out of my airspace. Right now, it’s so clobbered I can’t risk taking a shot.”

The TAO relayed the captain’s orders to the Hawkeye, then listened as the response came. The fighters were all too closely engaged for the E-2 to risk breaking any of them off. Consequently, the Hawkeye was recommending truncating the missile engagement envelope along that bearing.

“United States, this is Lake Champlain,” the captain said on tactical. “Admiral, I can solve this problem if you can get your boys out of the way. This is what I recommend.” Norfolk continued for twenty seconds, explaining his plan, and when he finished, he concluded with, “I’m pretty sure it’ll work, sir. But you’ll have to do your part with the airwing.”

Coyote’s voice came booming back. “You got it, Skipper. Stand by — I’ll give the order in fifteen seconds.” He switched immediately to an airwing call-up. “All flights, this is Coyote. On my mark, disengage, and buster for angels three one. Get as high as you can, boys and girls, and we’ll let the Aegis make your job a little bit easier for you.”

The pilot heard the call, but couldn’t spare any attention to count down the seconds. He turned it over to his RIO as he fought desperately to keep out of the clutches of the MiG on his ass. With his wingman gone, it was becoming increasingly difficult, as the smaller aircraft cut them off with every maneuver. The rest of his flight was engaged with their own bogeys, and the HUD display showed that a second wave was just taking off from the mainland.

“Ten seconds,” his RIO shouted, his voice audible in the cockpit even without the ICS. “Bruce, pay attention — you can’t screw this up.”

But the pilot had just cut hard to the left, hoping to drop back in behind the MiG for a killing shot, when the nimble MiG flipped wing over wing, circled above him, and dropped back in behind him. The pilot cut hard right, saw that bought him a few seconds, then dropped his speed breaks down to peel off airspeed like a ripe banana.

“Five seconds!” the RIO said. “Come on, you can do it.”

The pilot hoped to hell he could. If he couldn’t get out of the way, there was every chance that one of the Aegis missiles would decide that his massive metal airframe was just as good a target as a Chinese Craft. But to break off now and simply head for altitude, even though he could do it more quickly than the MiG, would be to expose his warm and tasty tailpipes to Chinese heat seeker missiles. It would be over quickly, too quickly, and he wouldn’t have to wait for the Aegis missiles to pepper this guy with deadly expanding-rod antiair missiles.

There was a chance, just one chance — they could keep this game up forever until one of them got lucky or the other ran out of gas. But the Aegis plan had just put limitations on that as well.

The words of his military science instructor from ROTC came back to him: “Consider the terrain, the fatal terrain.”

But what terrain? The answer flashed into his mind, wonderful in its brilliant simplicity and elegance.

The terrain here was empty air. Granted, there were different electromagnetic transmission zones. Peppering it like mountain ranges were the fur balls in progress, just as much terrain as a mountain has. If you could just… yes, there was an opportunity. It was a slim chance, but the only one he had.

The pilot cut back hard then kicked in his afterburners. He cut back immediately in the other direction, hoping to tighten his turn enough to come up behind the MiG — or at least force the MiG to conduct the same maneuver that he had on previous occasions.

Every time before, when he tried to circle back on the MiG, the MiG executed a wingover, almost a roll, and came in over him to get back in position. Every time, Bruce had responded with a hard turn to the right to shake the MiG.

But this time it would be different. He started to make his normal maneuver, and punched in the afterburners hard. Instead of coming around to try to close on the MiG again, the Tomcat shot straight up in the air, shoving the pilot and the RIO both back into the seat with a hard slam. Bruce felt his vision start to go gray, and he grunted and tensed his muscles in order to keep blood flowing to his brain.

And there it was, just ahead. A fur ball of two Tomcats and MiGs, both punching chaff and flares into the air like they had unlimited quantities, the Tomcats covering for each other as they broke off and headed for altitude.

Bruce zoomed in behind the MiGs, turning only slightly to stitch the wing assembly of one of them with gunfire and continuing on for altitude.

“Passing through angels thirty,” his RIO announced. “It’s going to be close.”

“Yeah, but not as close as it was before.”

“All clear except two,” the TAO announced, as his assistant counted down the seconds. Coyote nodded, mentally working through the time-distance problem. It would be close, too close. He felt a moment of intense pain as he contemplated the possibility that he might take out his own pilots. Blue on blue engagements — there was no more painful moment for any commander.

“I’m out of choices — we have to get this engagement back on track before the second wave reaches us,” he snapped. “On my mark — mark!”

The TAO relayed the information to the pilots, and watched the two laggards desperately claw for altitude.

“Mark!” Coyote’s voice came across the circuit clearly.

“Full auto,” the captain snapped. “Everything below angels thirty is a target. Now, let’s see if we can even up the odds.”

With the fire control system in full auto, the Aegis cruiser was capable of rippling off missiles in one-second intervals. The next thirty seconds, the deck under their feet rumbled and shook with deadly intensity as the missiles rippled out of their vertical launch cells. On the bridge, the crew turned away, the smoke and fire from the missile launch blinding them and burning their retinas with sharp afterimages.

Then, it was over. The light southern breeze cleared the smoke away from the cruiser. The missiles were still in flight.

“Incoming!” the RIO shouted, twisting around to watch behind them as long white telephone poles invaded the airspace they just left. “Approaching thirty-thousand feet — come on, we can do it. We can do it.”

The pilot felt a strange calm come over him. He had done everything he could, had fought his aircraft to the best of his ability. Now it was up to luck, chance, and whatever god watched over fighter pilots. A few hundred feet would make all the difference in the world to the flurry of missiles behind them. He just hoped that it would be enough.

Lieutenant Ackwurst floated his cursor between the two aircraft that were still within the Aegis firing envelope. He clicked on one, then the other, watching as the altitude figures on each rolled over, more quickly than normal, but far too slow for comfort. No, the missiles wouldn’t intentionally target friendly aircraft, but even smart missiles were pretty dumb. There was every chance that the two aircraft would be damaged in the fireballs or debris as the missiles found their true targets.

The lead aircraft kicked over 30,000 feet, and then only one remained. They watched, the altitude slowly increasing. As the aircraft reached 29,000 feet, the first standard missile found its target. Not that it was a particularly dramatic event by tactical data display — merely a blip, the change to a different symbol to indicate a kill, and a line of text rolling across the monitor: CONFIRMED KILL.

On the raw video and radar consoles, it was at least a bit more dramatic. The discrete green lozenge of the enemy aircraft and sharper image of the missile intersecting. The computer watched it, then re-evaluated its display, and the two sharp images dissolved into a myriad of spatters before the computer decided there was no longer a discrete target there.

A flurry of MiGs were behind the last Tomcat, the reason behind his desperate gyrations as he tried to prevent any one of them from dropping into perfect firing position. But then, modern missiles didn’t need perfect firing conditions. As the team watched, four antiair missiles sprang out from the Chinese horde and headed straight for the hapless American aircraft.

The captain had been holding the mike in his hand, his thumb hoisted over the key. He pressed down hard, and snapped, “Punch out! punch out!” shouting as he did so, knowing that the few microseconds the computer had taken to process data meant that he was already too late.

“Eject! eject!” the RIO shouted, his hand closing over the ejection handle. He’d seen the smoke and fire as the missiles were launched, even from almost a mile away.

But there was a reason the guy in front was a pilot, and that became quickly evident. His reflexes were faster, his motor skills honed to a lightning edge. He reached for the handle, jerked down, and pressed his back into the ejection seat. The canopy blasted off. Then the pilot, followed four seconds later by his RIO, punched out of the aircraft.

They shot out at a 45 degree angle from the doomed airframe, each one to a different side, the flames under their ejection seat from the rocket igniters the smaller cousins of their afterburner fire. The Tomcat spun in the air. It seemed to try to catch itself and continue on upward. But then, as they fell back down through 29,000 feet toward the ocean, three missiles caught the aircraft almost simultaneously.

The air above them exploded into an ugly orange mass, black smoke whirling implacably across the sky. The pilot shouted his protest, anger and frustration but also fear in his voice.

When they were well clear, the ejection seats separated from them, and their parachutes deployed. As the billowing fabric above them caught in the air, the pilot was jerked upward with a strong force. Not actually upward, but such a sudden decrease in his rate of descent that it felt as though he were being lifted up through the air.

The pilot saw his RIO’s chute, although he couldn’t tell if the man dangling underneath it was injured. And the Tomcats safely at altitude, they’d see the chutes — they’d let the carrier know.

For an aviator, the air around him was filthy. It seemed that every two hundred feet held another MiG. Most of the aircraft swerved away to avoid them, relying instinctively on international principles of military law, leaving them to descend in the clear blue sky alone.

But one didn’t. It circled around him, the jet wash blasting him sideways under the chute. For a moment, the pilot thought that the jet wash would spill the air out of his chute, sending him plummeting down to the sea like a rock. He touched his auxiliary chute, praying that whoever packed it had been damned good.

But whether or not they were, he would never have a chance to find out. The aircraft turned and came back once again, and for just a flash, the Tomcat pilot could see the pilot in the cockpit turning to look at them. Although the man’s face was masked, he felt like they made eye contact. Then the MiG rolled out overhead, came back down, and the American pilot saw a line of tracers spit out from its nose gun. His chute twisted him around to face the other way, but he twisted, shouting and screaming at the heavens, to get back in position. When he made it back, he could see that the RIO’s parachute wasn’t far below him. The man was already falling so fast that in a few moments he would be almost invisible.

And what of his RIO? The pilot started to curse. Had the bullets killed the RIO, or had the MiG pilot intentionally shredded the chute and left the RIO to the living hell of plummeting the remaining 20,000 feet, knowing that any second he would hit the ocean, watching it come up to meet him, the waves growing larger and larger, until he smashed into it like a watermelon dropped from 50 stories onto concrete?

The pilot prayed that his RIO was dead. Dead, or still conscious enough to rip off his oxygen mask and let the lack of oxygen render him unconscious.

The pilot was just swearing vengeance when the MiG came back for him.

The Taiwanese officer was standing against the back bulkhead, a look of horror on his face. “What the hell happened out there?” the admiral demanded of the terrified officer. “What did you say to him?”

“I… I explained your decisions and your position,” the major started, visions of his eventual execution flashing into his mind. He would die for this, of that he was certain.

“Did you tell him to go active?” Coyote demanded. “And did you tell him to break off prosecution of that submarine?”

“I… I…” the major stopped, aware that his silence gave his answer.

Lab Rat stepped forward, his face a grim mask. “Yes. He did.” Coyote had never seen the intelligence officer so coldly furious. “My linguistic team monitored his transmissions.” He held out a sheet of paper. “Here is the transcript.”

“We got them! We got them!” the SAR helo pilot shouted, his voice exultant. “Both of them are breathing and conscious, although I think a pilot might have a broken leg. It looks bad, anyway. We’re headed to the carrier, Cricket. We’ll be back once we drop these guys off.”

“Do not be too long,” the captain said grimly. “Indeed, I hope to finish this game before you can even return.” The captain switched to his own language and said, “Break, Grasshopper One — initial datum three miles west of your current location. Commence search pattern. I will run the path perpendicular, tail wet.”

The helo pilot’s voice came back, distinctive in the whop-whop effect from the vibrations the small helicopter had on his voice. He evidently acknowledged the transmission, and a translator confirmed that, murmuring in the American officer’s ear so as not to disturb the captain.

The captain then directed the second SH-60 to a point just north of that, and she spit out a pattern of sonobuoys as well.

“Captain, sonar,” the translator said. “Initial contact, subsurface contact, classified as possible Chinese diesel submarine.” There was no change in the captain’s expression as he said, “Localize and destroy. Immediately.”

The pilot stared down at the surface of the ocean. Somewhere below him, at approximately 300 feet, was the Chinese diesel submarine. “Cricket, this is Grasshopper One. I’m in firing position. I await your instructions.” He clicked the mike off, then turned to the copilot. “The three of us are all in firing position. It’s up to the captain.”

The copilot sighed. “Our submarine, but he will probably give that kill to the Americans. Perhaps it will make up for what he tried earlier.”

“Perhaps he will. Be ready.” The pilot glanced over and saw the copilot’s finger was poised above his weapons switch.

A booming American voice came through on tactical, effectively ending the discussion. “Captain of Marshall P’eng, this is Admiral Grant. I would be pleased, sir, if your helicopter would eliminate that submarine from this world.”

The pilot glanced over at the copilot, a rare smile stretching across his face. Almost immediately, they heard their captain’s response. “Acknowledged, Admiral. It will be our pleasure.” The captain’s voice switched to their own language, and said, “Do it now. Both weapons — let there be no need for a second engagement.”

“Yes, Captain. Immediately.” Even as the pilot spoke, the copilot was toggling off both torpedoes.

The hard, shimmering ping of the active sonar cut through the still compartment like a knife. The captain sucked in a hard breath, and his face turned pale. Every man on the ship knew it immediately — the most deadly foe of a submarine was a dipping helo. Two of them working together, or one working with a surface ship, was the most fearful adversary any of them ever faced.

A second active sonar shimmered in the water, this one higher pitched and more insistent. The captain’s guts felt as though they were about to explode. An active sonobuoy, operating on a different bearing from the dipping sonar. With those two sources, the helos undoubtedly had them localized.

“All forward flank, hard right rudder. Make your depth six hundred feet.” With that maneuver, he hoped to create a mass of air bubbles in the water that would distract the torpedoes that must surely be ready to launch. Six hundred feet was near the maximum of the ancient diesel’s capabilities, but there was no choice now. Even more dangerous, operating at that depth would make escaping the submarine, should they be hit, virtually impossible.

In theory, at least, the submarine would create a second target in the water that would distract the torpedoes, giving the submarine a chance to disappear in the thermocline. Then, if the sonars were unable to relocate them, the submarine would creep away stealthily, putting distance between itself and the attackers, before resuming transit speed.

In theory, at least. As a practical matter, both the dipping sonar and the sonobuoys were capable of being set at different depths, and both pilots would undoubtedly attempt that. Additionally, the depth of the Taiwanese frigate’s towed array could be varied, and it could be repositioned in deeper water, although it would take longer to settle down and generate stable bearings.

Even with those disadvantages, the situation was absolutely critical. Escaping a dipping sonar was no mean feat, and the captain had done it only a couple times in the simulator.

A third active sonobuoy joined into the cacophony. The submarine’s hull was bombarded with acoustic energy, each sonar refining the submarine’s location further until it was practically a pinpoint in the ocean.

The deck heeled underneath them as the submarine made its hard turn. Any could tell without looking at the sonar display that they were generating massive amounts of acoustic energy on their own. “Decoys, noise makers,” he ordered, dumping the countermeasures into the water around his air bubble.

The deck tilted down as she dove at her top speed for the bottom of the ocean. The old hull creaked and groaned around them, and just for one fearful moment he wondered if that would be their fate rather than a torpedo. The noise around them was increasing, almost deafening them, and he could see the stark terror on everyone’s face.

Suddenly, every noise stopped. The water around them was silent, punctuated only by the noise of their decoys and their own propeller. A young helmsman, on his first cruise aboard a submarine, let out a stifled yelp of joy. He turned to his captain, his eyes shining, relief on his face. The relief turned to puzzlement when no one else joined in. Stark fear crept back in.

In those final moments, the captain did not have the heart to tell the young man that the reason the noise had stopped was to avoid distracting the torpedoes that were surely on their way into the water now.

Staring at the young man’s face, the captain made an instant, irrevocable decision. “Emergency blow — emergency blow!”

The officer of the deck hit the valve that would immediately blast compressed air into every ballast tank. The captain felt the momentum change immediately, as the deck seemed to rise up under him. They lost the depth they’d just gained in seconds and rocketed up toward the surface of the water.

He could hear them now, the hard, grinding whine of the small torpedo propellers as they bore in on his boat. At least if they were hit now, perhaps they would have enough momentum to reach the surface and give the crew a chance to survive. And at that moment, that was all the captain cared about — not politics, not Taiwan, not the court-martial or certain disgrace and instant execution that would await him if he returned home. All he cared about was that his crew would have a chance to live.

The first torpedo encountered the noise makers and the mass of air bubbles simultaneously, and its tiny electronic brain froze in a moment of indecision. It ran nose-first into one of the noise makers, fatally jarring a critical component. It continued on, executing a wide turn to the right, until it ran out of fuel.

The second torpedo was luckier. It entered the water well to the north of the noise makers and cavitation and began its search circle. Almost immediately, it acquired the enticing sounds of the submarine heading away from it. It changed course, locked on, and bore in steadily.

Another round of noise makers failed to distract it. It simply brushed passed them, driving unwaveringly toward the delectable sounds of the submarine’s machinery.

As the submarine heard it approaching, bearing constant and range decreasing, her captain tried one last series of desperate measures. He threw the submarine into another tight turn — tight at least by submarine standards — hoping desperately to generate another knuckle in the water. But as he did so, the torpedo adjusted its course, and impacted the submarine just aft of the control room.

The immediate force of the explosion buckled the old hull and frigid seawater came pouring in. The submarine was at two hundred feet, still rising, and it took several moments for the incoming rush of water to overcome her negative buoyancy.

The water blasted through the compartment with the force of a sledgehammer, pulverizing three crewman against the bullhead. The watertight door between the passageway and a control room buckled almost immediately. The first few streams of water were ice pick-hard as they hammered into the control room, finding their targets in the electronics panel and immediately shorting out electrical power. The submarine plunged into blackness for a moment, and then battery-operated emergency red lights came on. In a way, it would have been better if they had not.

The captain shouted out orders, urging the crew toward the emergency egress hatch, but panic and confusion ruled. Most knew what to do for emergency escape, and they grabbed emergency escape breathing devices and tried to wade through the increasingly deep water to the escape trunk. Three made it up the ladder into the tower safely, but the rising flow of water caught the rest of them.

Ten seconds after the hatch buckled, it gave way completely. Seawater flooded through, a solid tidal wave immediately capturing those few who were still struggling for the ladder. The three men inside the escape hatch had time to pull it shut, gazing down on the stricken faces below them as they were swept away, and dog it shut. They donned their breathing devices, listening to the awful screaming beneath them. They could feel the submarine already starting to settle lower in the water, heading back down for the depths. They opened the valves full, to flood the compartment as quickly as possible.

The minutes ticked over, and each one knew despair. Finally, the trunk was flooded sufficiently to equalize the pressure and allow them to leave the dying submarine. By that time, the bottom of the hull was approaching four hundred feet in depth.

The three left, and the buoyancy of their breathing devices pulled them toward the surface. As they ascended, they exhaled continuously, trying desperately to keep the change in pressure from rupturing their lungs. The other denizens of the sea happening by stared at them in mild astonishment, then turned to follow them up.

Below them, the remaining crew members’ deaths were just as terrible, if far less graphic. The middle section of the submarine was immediately flooded and then the forward one-third. But the aft section retained, through some miracle of engineering, its watertight integrity. The submarine was bow down so hard that the forward bulkheads became the deck, and crippled and wounded men piled up there like rag dolls. Several were still able to move, and tried desperately to reach the aft egress trunk against the force of gravity, with no success. That did not keep them from trying, even as the submarine sank deeper into the water.

In the meantime, the bank of batteries broke free and ruptured. One smashed into a sailor, crushing him instantly. The others came in contact with water, generating chlorine gas, killing the men before they could drown.

The submarine headed for the bottom quickly now, and reached it three minutes later. Along the way, the remainder of the compartments flooded, forcing the deadly gas out into the sea.

Above the crushed hull that held their shipmates, the three men in the water waited in silent horror as they stared at the circling fins.

“They… they shot them out of the air!” the pilot shouted, his voice stark with horror. “I had two chutes, then the MiG — damn them all, kill them all!”

Coyote stared at the screen, horror on his face. Every aviator in the room could feel his blood turn to ice as well. To punch out, to take that risk, watch the aircraft that had been so much a part of you destroyed, looking frantically for your wingman, and praying he would survive the ejection and eventually be picked up… well, that was hard enough without facing the possibility of being strafed.

In quiet moments, they had all had discussions, had made those quiet decisions about what they would do. Most, when they would speak at all about it, agreed that the preferred course of action would be to strip off one’s oxygen mask and pass out from hypoxia on the way down. But there was always the chance that at lower altitude the oxygen might revive you, and what would that be like, to wake to the sensation of falling?

No, this action was completely indefensible. Coyote would make sure the Chinese paid for it, and paid dearly.

“I want them destroyed,” he said evenly, his voice a deadly threat. “Destroyed completely.”