Liberty's Last Stand

TWENTY-FIVE

A board the flagship of the Texas Navy, George Ranta, sitting at the sonar console, removed his headset. The boat was at periscope depth amid a large area of drilling and production rigs. “It’s like listening to a mechanical orchestra warm up,” he told Loren Snyder. “Machinery noises transferred into the water, drill strings going up and down, hammering, clanking, sucking, gurgling…”

The photonics mast was out of the water and the video was on the scope. Loren rotated it slowly around the horizon, stopping every few seconds to make a note on the chart he used to back up the computer plots. Paper didn’t crash and forget things. It was a decent day up there above the ocean, with a high thin overcast and enough breeze to give the water a bit of chop.

What Loren was looking for was a destroyer or frigate, a gray warship. He wanted to torpedo it, then leave the gulf and head around Florida for the Atlantic. First, he thought, put the fear in them. No, first you must find a target. The good news was that any submarine or surface warship amid the rigs was as acoustically deaf as he was.

Always look on the bright side, Loren told himself. Be optimistic. That’s one of the rules for successful people. And we are highly successful people, looking for a place to get a little more of it.

He gave orders to Ada Fuentes on the helm. He wished he knew more about drilling rigs: he wondered if they were stabilized with underwater cables that fanned out from the surface to the seabed. Stay between them, he told himself. Don’t get near one.

He looked again at the chart. Texas was off Louisiana’s southwestern coast and proceeding into deeper water on a course just a bit east of south. Over a thousand feet of water below the keel. If he didn’t find a surface warship by the time he reached the southern tip of the area, he thought he should swing more westerly to get into the main channel to Houston and Galveston.

He went back to the monitor. He was looking southwest, almost on the right beam, when something airborne passed quickly from left to right. He tried to focus the image, pan out, and catch it. If it was a patrol plane, they were in trouble. But it had been so small. A chopper servicing rigs?

Whatever it was, it was gone now. Off to the northwest.

“What was that?” Jugs Aranado asked. She was behind him, watching over his shoulder.

“I don’t know.”

“Play it back and freeze-frame it.”

“You do it. You’re better at this.”

He got out of the chair, and she sat and began manipulating the controls. In fifteen seconds she had it on the screen.

“Tomahawk.”

Loren Snyder looked at the chart and gave Fuentes a new course to steer, one twenty degrees to the right of her current course. “Let’s kick it up to about twelve knots, see if we can close on this guy. I’ll keep you away from the rigs. George, those rigs should stand out like sore thumbs on the sonar.”

“They do, but there is so much noise in the water…”

“We’re very shallow for twelve knots,” Fuentes objected. She was worried that an aircraft or satellite scanning the surface with radar or in optical wavelengths might detect the wake.

The problem, Snyder knew, was that the surface ship, if that was what shot the Tomahawk, could simply run away from a sub cruising slowly. Snyder wanted to put a fish into a destroyer or frigate, and to do it he was going to have to take some chances. On the other hand, if a sub had fired the missile, going in there at twelve knots was asking to be smacked, although Snyder doubted an attack sub would be shooting missiles in water this noisy.

“Twelve knots,” he said.

Five minutes later Snyder saw another Tomahawk fly past, just a little to the right, or west, of the sub, on a reciprocal course. It was low, no more than a hundred feet above the ocean. This one seemed to come from almost dead ahead.

He picked up the ICS mike and keyed it. “Folks, I think we should all take our general quarters stations. We have a ship ahead, surface or subsurface, that is punching off Tomahawks heading for Texas. I intend to try and torpedo it.”

Loren lowered the photonics mast and told Ranta to listen carefully. To give the hydrophones a little better angle, he turned another twenty degrees to the west. A half hour later, he had Fuentes go a little deeper and slow to ten knots.

Now Ranta heard the destroyer, or thought he did. It was just a low, deep throb amid the cacophony, one of the echoes bouncing off the bottom. There it was again! Three-three-five degrees, relative. Twenty-five degrees left of the bow.

“There are two destroyers out there,” George Ranta announced. “Both at slow speed, probably launching missiles.”

“Retract the photonics mast,” Loren Snyder said, and to Ada Fuentes on the helm he added, “Take us down to two hundred fifty feet. Maybe the acoustics are better down there.”

The first Tomahawks from the navy’s salvo slammed into power plants in the Houston area and knocked out the grid.

JR Hays and Elvin Gentry thought this moment might come, so they had some planes on alert, with the pilots sitting in cockpits. Four planes on alert at Lackland in San Antonio were scrambled and fanned out to the east to look for cruise missiles inbound. They stayed relatively low so their radar would be more effective against the missiles with tiny radar cross-sections, a choice that gave them a high fuel burn.

The fighter pilots were forbidden to cross the coastline. Neither general wished to risk those precious airplanes in attacks on destroyers, which were very capable of defending themselves.

There wasn’t much else they could do. Except give a heads-up to Jack Hays, who had spent a long half hour with Billy Rob Smith, the Texas emergency coordinator. Billy Rob had been busy borrowing National Guard emergency generators and wiring them into nursing homes and hospitals that didn’t have their own. He had even signed a contract with a machine shop in Bryan, Texas, that normally made custom oil-field equipment. Now the fifty machinists employed there were busy manufacturing emergency generators. It would be a week or two before the first ones were ready to be installed, but as Billy Rob told Jack Hays, it was the best he could do. Every generator he could buy, borrow, or steal was being positioned and wired up.

Jack Hays gave him a slap on the back and told him, “Good work!”

The acoustics were indeed better at two hundred fifty feet. Ranta found a cluster of rigs ten degrees to port, and found both destroyers. One was dead ahead, the other ten degrees starboard. They were heading northwest, toward Galveston.

To get the range to the target, Ada Fuentes turned the boat, which was trimmed up and doing about ten knots. After a few minutes, plotting the bearing change, the range was resolved at ten miles to the port target, ten and a half to the starboard one. The targets were moving from left to right, but this would be a fairly simple shot for the Mk-48 torpedoes. They had active sonar seekers and trailed a fiber optic cable behind them, which would allow the submarine crew to ensure they were heading toward the proper targets. If the cables didn’t break. If they did, the pump-jet torpedoes would continue on course at fifty-five knots searching for their targets on passive sonar based on the internal logic of their onboard computers, which were programmed by Jugs Aranado. At the very last moment the torpedoes’ sensors would go active, ping. Nineteen feet long, twenty-one inches in diameter, the weapon would run under the target and a proximity fuse would trigger its 650-pound warhead. The explosion would break the target ship’s back. Time to cover the ten nautical miles to target — eleven minutes.

“Flood Tubes One and Two,” Snyder ordered. Jugs Aranado was on the torpedo control console, programming each torpedo. She worked her way through the checklist quickly.

“Torpedoes ready, Captain,” Jugs sang out.

“Fire One,” Snyder said, and Jugs checked the panel, saw that all lights were green, and pushed the fire button on Tube One. The boat bobbed slightly as the torpedo was ejected by compressed air. On the sonar, Ranta said, “It’s running.”

“Fire Two.” Another little bob as the boat reacted to the loss of the weight of the torpedo and the rush of incoming water to replace it.

“Close outer doors,” Snyder ordered.

Now the data from the torpedoes began coming in. Number One was running almost straight, so the chances of the fiber optic cable breaking were small. Number Two turned to a course to intercept the second destroyer. Both were soon up to fifty-five knots, rising from the depths to just under the surface. Both were now armed, but they weren’t pinging from their seeker heads.

Jugs Aranado was watching their track, waiting. She didn’t want to activate their seeker heads until the last possible moment, because the active pinging would be plainly audible to the destroyers’ sonar operators. Amazingly, the propulsion system, a pump jet, was very quiet, and so the targets of the torpedoes might not hear them until they were very close. Too close. Especially in these noisy waters.

Aboard USS Harlan Jones the cry “Torpedo incoming!” from the sonarman in the Combat Control Center galvanized the watch. They knew Texas might be in the area, but had relied upon the noise from the drilling rigs to shield them from attack. Obviously they had been detected and fired upon. The sonar operator had picked up the telltale sound of the pump-jet engines in the torpedoes. He didn’t know how close the torpedo was. Actually, it was less than a mile away, approaching at fifty-five knots.

The tactical action officer, the TAO, a lieutenant commander, ordered decoys fired and used the squawk box to notify the bridge. “Torpedo inbound starboard side.”

On the bridge, the captain didn’t waste a second. He shouted, “All ahead flank. Full right rudder. Give me a ninety-degree turn to starboard.”

A destroyer is a large ship, and accelerating it takes time, time the captain didn’t have. He was only making eight knots to give the Tomahawk missiles a stable platform to launch from. Now, even with full right rudder, it would take time to turn the ship, and time was what he didn’t have. Still, he could feel the four turbines answer the engine telegraph. The ship seemed to squat as the twin screws bit deep into the water and her bow slowly began to swing.

Aboard Texas, the sound of the destroyer’s screws was a signal to George Ranta. “Port target is accelerating.”

“Take her down to a thousand feet,” Loren Snyder ordered. Ada Fuentes repeated the order and pushed the control yoke forward to use the planes to help drive her down as Jugs was busy on the panel flooding tanks. “Give me twenty knots.” Fuentes pushed the throttle forward.

“Twenty knots, aye.”

“Launch the decoys,” Snyder ordered. Jugs pushed the buttons and the sound of the decoys being launched could be faintly heard; the panel showed four were launched. Decoys were noise- and bubble-makers, which hopefully would attract any ASROC missiles the destroyer might launch. ASROC, an antisubmarine rocket-propelled torpedo, was launched from a vertical tube. The rocket engine carried the Mk-46 torpedo well away from the ship, where it would plunge into the sea and begin searching for a submarine. The noise of the decoys would attract an acoustic seeker, and the bubbles would create a return for an active, pinging sonar.

“The fiber optic wires are going to break,” Snyder told Jugs. “Go active on the torpedoes.”

In Harlan Jones’ Combat Control Center, the TAO plotted the probable launching position of the submarine and instructed the man on the ASROC panel where to put the missiles. The TAO decided to launch four. One would hit six miles up the bearing of the torpedo, another at eight, another at ten, and the last one at twelve. Once they were in the water, they would circle and search with active sonar for the submarine.

Then the TAO remembered the oil-production platforms. There was a cluster of them, six or seven, ten degrees right of the bearing line. Would they attract the ASROCs? She shrugged the possibility away and ordered four missiles fired.

But time was up! The torpedo ran under the hull of Harlan Jones in front of the bridge and exploded. Water being essentially incompressible, the explosion blew a large hole in the bottom of the ship, breaking the keel, and water began rushing in. The ship shook from the hammer blow.

“All stop,” the captain ordered, which was merely a term that meant the adjustable-pitch screws were to be brought to fine pitch so the ship wouldn’t drive headlong into the ocean and increase the possibility of bulkheads giving way. She began drifting to a stop, which would take a while.

Meanwhile the ASROC launchers spit out four missiles, which roared along the bearing the torpedo had followed.

The crew of Harlan Jones began trying to save their ship. Fifteen Harlan Jones crewmen were dead. Others would probably die if the watertight bulkheads inside the ship weren’t shored up against the sea fighting to invade the vessel. Harlan Jones had fired thirty-three of the fifty Tomahawks she had been ordered to launch.

The second destroyer, USS O’Hare, also heard the pinging of the incoming Mk-48 torpedo, and like her sister ship, turned into it so as to present as narrow a profile as possible. She fired her ASROCs up the bearing line of the incoming ship-killer. She had fired off two when the Mk-48 from Texas went under her bow and exploded. The explosion literally cut the ship in half, severed the bow from the ship twenty feet aft of the sonar dome. She wasn’t going at flank speed, or the sea would have blown out every internal bulkhead and doomed her. As it was, she lost speed as several watertight bulkheads buckled under the pressure and she began going down at the head. The captain let her drift to a halt.

Both destroyers had been at General Quarters when torpedoed, with all watertight hatches dogged down, so the damage was not as extensive as it could have been. Aboard O’Hare, as in Jones, the fight to save the ship began immediately. O’Hare had launched thirty of the fifty Tomahawks she had been ordered to launch.

Aboard Texas, George Ranta and the control room crew heard the whumps of the torpedoes exploding. Snyder had the sound on the loudspeaker. A moment later, they heard the splashes of the antisubmarine torpedoes launched from O’Hare, followed by the sound of the ASROCs fired by Harlan Jones hitting the water.

Loren Snyder looked at the computerized plot. The cluster of oil platforms were to his port side, perhaps two miles away, so he told Ada Fuentes to turn in that direction. Perhaps the sound of the platforms, at least one of which was drilling a well, would attract the torpedoes searching for his boat.

He glanced at the depth meter, which read seven hundred feet. They were still going down.

He had hoped the torpedoes he had fired would catch the destroyers flat-footed, but apparently the crews were well-trained and alert, just in case. Snyder and his small band of fools might well have run flat out of luck.

Rose-Marie McGarrity’s F-16 was over Galveston when her radar showed a low target running fast to the northwest; it had to be a Tomahawk.

She rolled her fighter and plunged down, pulling Gs and getting her nose well in front of the missile on a course to intercept. Down through a layer of clouds, down into the gray day underneath, closing on the blip that had to be a cruise missile. It was doing about five hundred knots. Due to the angle at which she was intercepting, she didn’t need her afterburner. Yet. She flipped switches, arming the Sidewinders. If she could get a lock-on…

Intercepting at a forty-five-degree angle, still diving into the hot, humid turbulent summer air, Rose-Marie McGarrity found that visibility underneath the goo was no more than four or five miles. She doubted that she would see the missile. This air was like thin soup and she was bouncing in turbulence. She checked to ensure her radar altimeter was set at two hundred feet: it would give her an audible warning if she got within two hundred feet of the surface of the earth.

Then she heard a tone from the Sidewinder, indicating it was locked on a heat source. She was down to five hundred feet above the ground, doing about Mach.9. The target was dead ahead, crossing slowly from right to left.

With the tone in her ears, she punched off a Sidewinder, a heat-seeker.

It left the rail with a blast of fire and shot forward into the haze almost too fast for the eye to follow.

McGarrity was looking through the heads-up display, the HUD, at the target symbol, when she saw the flash. The Sidewinder had scored a kill.

Instantly she was off the juice and soaring upward and right, to point her radar out to sea, just in case.

And, by golly, here came another one. Four or five hundred feet above the earth, scorching along to the northwest. McGarrity got that one with a Sidewinder too. Elation flooded her. This fighter pilot gig was hot shit! Again she soared up and turned southeast, toward the sea.

Two minutes later, she found a third Tomahawk on radar, this one going almost north. Catching it meant a chase, so she engaged the burner and let her fighter accelerate as it again went down toward Mother Earth. She didn’t see the Tomahawk until she was about four miles from it — it was a little thing, only visible because the radar told her exactly where to look. She kept the juice on, coming in from an angle, nose well in front to bounce it by sliding up behind it. Gun selected. She kept the missile just below the visible horizon, because to dip below it was to risk flying into the ground. Flying this fast this close to the planet was sublime, a sensory overload.

She was only a mile from it, flying at just above two hundred feet on a course to intercept, closing at Mach 1.2, when she saw something out of the left corner of her eye. Even as the object registered as a radio tower, she hit one of the supporting cables with her left wing.

At that speed, about 1,300 feet per second, the steel cable sliced halfway through the wing as if it were cheese; the spar in the left wing broke and the wing separated from the racing F-16.

There was just no time to react. In a tiny fraction of a second the F-16 rolled hard left, the nose dropped, and the fighter smacked into the ground inverted. The fireball rolled along the land for a thousand yards, dribbling pieces of airplane and Rose-Marie McGarrity. Two houses and one barn caught fire. Smoke mixed with the thick, humid haze.

No one spoke in the control room of Texas. They knew that passive antisubmarine torpedoes were hunting them. And the pundits said the age of robots was still in the future!

“Put out some more decoys,” Loren Snyder said. Jugs Aranado went to the control panel and launched four.

“Where’s the bottom?” Loren asked.

“Two thousand feet down.”

“Take us to fifteen hundred,” he said to Ada Fuentes.

The sub continued its descent as water poured into the ballast tanks. Snyder was worried. Virginia-class submarines were the quietest ever made, and the antisubmarine torpedoes weren’t designed to find subs this quiet. But…

The tension mounted. They could be dead in a moment. Each breath could be their last, each heartbeat.

“Do you hear the torpedoes?” Loren asked George Ranta.

“Too much noise,” he whispered. “I hear pinging but I can’t get a direction.”

Boom. The explosion rocked the boat. One of the torpedoes had found a decoy.

And another boom.

“More pinging,” Ranta said.

Where had the other torpedoes gone?

“We’ve got to turn,” Ada said. “That production platform is dead ahead.”

“Right ninety degrees.” The boat was still going down. Fourteen hundred feet and sinking.

But they were still alive.

They heard two more explosions. Well away.

“The torpedoes went for a platform,” Ranta said.

A wave of relief swept over the little crew of Texas.

“There are more of them out there,” Ranta said. “I can hear at least one. Maybe circling.” They turned the boat toward the noise and waited. Finally the noise from the torpedo’s engine faded.

Snyder said to Fuentes and Aranado, “Go back up, so we can use the photonics mast.” To Ranta he said, “You must keep us clear of those platforms.”

“I can hear them.”

So they rose slowly from the depths. When the photonics mast was raised, it revealed the injured destroyers lying dead in the water at least six miles to the west. The damaged production platform still stood, but no doubt the crew on it was on their radio reporting the torpedoed destroyers and the torpedoes that struck the platform. And trying desperately to prevent a major oil spill.

Loren Snyder was exhausted. He’d slept six hours in three days. “Let’s get the hell out of the gulf,” he said. “Jugs, lay a course for the Straits of Florida. When we are clear of these platforms, take us back down to a thousand feet so the P-3s can’t find us. I’m going to sleep.”

He staggered along to the tiny captain’s cabin and collapsed into the bunk.

Fifty-five of the sixty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles launched by USS O’Hare and Harlan Jones actually impacted Texas power plants. The resulting explosions took seventeen power plants off the grid instantly. Subsequent inspections revealed that at least nine of them could be repaired, and they began producing electricity, at least at a reduced level, within a week or two. The remaining eight were damaged beyond salvage.

The Texas government kept the amount of damage a closely held secret, although within a day or two satellite reconnaissance would allow analysts in Washington to make reasonably accurate assessments.

No doubt more Tomahawks were in Texas’ future.

A few minutes before three that Friday afternoon, six Secret Service agents climbed from an SUV in front of the main entrance of the Pentagon and went inside. They were escorted to the E-Ring, where they arrested Admiral Sugar Ray, the army chief of staff, and the air force chief of staff. They put all three men in handcuffs and took them to the ground level of the building and into the interior courtyard. The sun was shining and the temperature was already in the low nineties.

Each man was handcuffed to a small tree with his hands behind his back. Admiral Ray knew what was coming. He cursed himself for waiting so long. We should have done it yesterday, he thought bitterly.

The senior agent drew his weapon and shot each of them in the head. Sugar Ray just happened to be last. “Rot in Hell,” Ray told the agent, who then pulled the trigger.

The agents left the bodies handcuffed to the trees, walked back through the Pentagon, past those horrified officers and enlisted who had actually managed to get to work today, and out the main entrance to their waiting car.

Al Grantham was worried. He had visions of squads of armed troops coming into the White House and arresting the president and everyone around him, taking them to some dungeon and chaining them to the wall. Shooting three senior officers at the Pentagon was an in-your-face insult the armed services couldn’t ignore.

He broached the subject to the president, who sneered. “They’ll do nothing,” he said. “They are bureaucrats, paper-pushers, and they achieved their high ranks by not making waves.” The president lit a cigarette and puffed on it contentedly. “We have nothing to fear from the generals. They have taken orders since their first day in uniform. Nothing in their experience has prepared them for the day when their superiors might use violence to make them behave.”

“They aren’t cowards.”

“Oh,” said Soetoro with a hint of derision in his voice, “but they are. They believe in nothing but the holy flag, keeping the boss happy, and collecting their pensions in the good by and by. The man who believes in something and will use any means to get it will leave them at a loss.”

Grantham’s face reflected his doubt.

“Relax,” Barry Soetoro said. “Whatever they are, they are not gamblers. When have you ever known one of them to take a risk?”