The Moscow Offensive

Thirty

Regan Air Flight 281 cruised south-southwest through the night sky over Southern California. Flying from its base near Moab, Utah, it approached the border near Mexicali, Mexico.

“Regan Air 281, radar services terminated, contact Tijuana TCA on one-one-niner-point-five, good evening,” the Southern California terminal radar controller radioed.

“One-one-niner-point-five, Regan 281, roger, good evening,” the pilot aboard Regan Air 281 responded.

The controller checked the flight information strip — the flight was dead on time and course, as reported to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He picked up his telephone and hit a button for a direct-connection line.

“CBP, Lewis,” came the reply a moment later, all for the benefit of the digital memory system recording every word.

“Simpson at SOCAL,” the controller replied. “Regan 281 is right on time and course as filed.”

“Copy. Thanks,” and the line went dead. Both operators were off the hook now — Regan Air 281 had flown exactly where and when they said it was going to do, and now it was Mexico’s target. Big, privately chartered cargo jets flying into Mexico at night always raised suspicion, but Regan Air had filed all the proper paperwork with both the U.S. and Mexican authorities and had been exactly where and when they said they’d be, and they were flying away from the United States, so it was someone else’s concern now. It was again suspicious that the flight didn’t land at the first port of entry airport at General Rodríguez International in Tijuana: flights inbound to the U.S. were required to land at the first port of entry after crossing the border and were not permitted to fly past any port of entry. But Mexico was different… and again, it was not CBP’s or SOCAL’s problem any longer.

Regan Air 281 proceeded south to San Felipe and its small nontowered regional airport for its customs inspection. The small detachment of federales and the commandante had already been paid off, so when they boarded the plane they relaxed in the 737’s six-seat passenger section forward of the walled-off cargo section, enjoyed a cigar and some cerveza, waited the proper amount of time that it might take for an inspection, then departed. After refueling, the plane took off and headed back west-northwest, and then entered a timing orbit ninety kilometers from San Felipe — on the other side of the ten-thousand-foot-high Picacho del Diablo, Devil’s Peak.

Inside the cockpit, Colonel Yuri Annenkov and Major Konstantin Uspensky were busy working their way through their attack checklist. “All four rotary launchers are online,” Uspensky said from the copilot’s seat. “They are linked to our attack computer.”

Annenkov nodded. “Activate the Kh-35 satellite navigation systems.”

While waiting for his copilot to finish this step, he took a quick look outside. Off to their left, the whole horizon glowed. From this altitude, even more than 250 kilometers away, the lights of Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, Mexicali, and the sprawling suburbs around those cities were visible — reflecting off the clouds above coastal mountain ranges. Ahead, the sky blazed with stars strewn across an infinite ink-black backdrop. Distant blinking lights showed dozens of other commercial airliners and cargo jets crisscrossing the region at high altitude. The view truly was quite beautiful, he thought dispassionately. And, to the naked eye, enormously peaceful.

But those appearances were deceiving. Far off to the northwest, well out to sea, the Americans had one of their Navy E-2C Hawkeye airborne early-warning planes flying a fuel-saving racetrack pattern while they conducted training for naval reserve crews and kept watch over the approaches to this area. The Russians had detected emissions from its APS-145 radar several minutes ago. Fortunately, their converted 737 was still just outside the range where the American AEW aircraft could spot the Kh-35 cruise missiles they were about to launch. If one of the Navy’s newer E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes had been on station instead, Annenkov knew they would have had to abort this attack. But those planes, with their incredibly powerful solid-state AN/APY-9 radars, were fully committed to service aboard active-duty U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. And fortunately, for the purposes of tonight’s mission, the carriers were far out to sea — safe from attack.

The Russian pilot shrugged. True, getting the chance to sink an American aircraft carrier would have been glorious. On the other hand, if a carrier had been in port, this whole mission would have been effectively impossible in the first place. It was the old military conundrum. High-value targets generally had the strongest possible defenses. In an all-out war, that might not have mattered. But their job tonight was to strike from concealment and live to fight another day.

“Sixteen green lights,” Uspensky said, sounding satisfied. “The cross-check with our own navigation fix is complete. All missiles are receiving accurate GLONASS navigation data.”

“Very good,” Annenkov said, equally pleased. He trusted Filippov’s missile assembly work, but he was also well aware that every new piece of technology added yet another potential failure source to any weapon. Computer cards could malfunction for any number of reasons. Power and data cables might be jarred loose by sloppy handling or even turbulence. And without functioning satellite navigation capability, there was no way any of their missiles could possibly come near tonight’s chosen targets — let alone actually score hits.

“Downloading preprogrammed attack profiles to the missiles,” his copilot continued, selecting new virtual controls on his display. More lights went green. “Attack profiles are locked in.”

Annenkov double-checked him on his own display and then ordered, “Bring all missiles to full readiness.”

Uspensky entered more commands into his computer. He checked off reports as they flowed across his display. “All Kh-35 radar altimeters are online. Their turbofans are ready. All self-destruct systems are live.”

“Confirm that every Gran-KE radar seeker is disabled,” the colonel said.

His copilot brought up another schematic. “All radar homers are disabled,” he reported.

That was perhaps the most ironic part of this planned attack, Annenkov realized. Since their Kh-35s were originally intended for use against enemy ships on the high seas, their advanced onboard radar seekers were optimized for use against moving targets. Which meant relying on them tonight would have been a catastrophic mistake.

Satisfied that their cruise missiles were ready for launch, Annenkov and Uspensky donned their oxygen masks, depressurized the 737’s cargo deck, and transferred flight control to their attack computer.

Turbulence increased as the jet’s forward door slid open. Launcher after launcher rolled into position at the door, ejected its four attached missiles and swung away to make room for the next in line. In less than a minute, all sixteen Kh-35s were safely away — plummeting silently through the night sky toward San Diego.

Ten to fifteen meters above the ground, each cruise missile’s motor ignited. One after another, the sixteen missiles streaked northwest above scattered clumps of cholla and yucca cactus, desert saltbush, and other scrub brush. Their speed increased steadily, peaking at close to a thousand kilometers an hour.

Thirteen minutes after launch, the Kh-35s screamed low over the low hills southwest of Tijuana. Panicked by the shrill howl of their jet engines, thousands of migratory shorebirds fluttered upward in dense, swirling clouds. One Russian cruise missile raced straight through a maddened flock of gulls, slammed head-on into several of the screeching seabirds, and wobbled out the other side in a cloud of scorched feathers and pulverized bits of flesh. Its turbofan motor fell silent. Shedding shattered pieces of fan blades, it veered away just above the surface of the water and then exploded in midair. The rest of the Kh-35s flew on, still heading northwest.

Thirty seconds later, the first missile executed a sharp course change, turning almost due east. One by one, the remaining fourteen followed suit. They were paralleling the rugged slopes of the San Miguel Mountains, which straddled the U.S.-Mexico border. Nearing a narrow canyon between two sheer masses of high ground, the Kh-35s jinked again — swinging back a little to the west-northwest.

Now deep in the jumble of mountains and high-rises of San Diego, the missiles steered an increasingly complicated course. For kilometer after kilometer, they swerved to the east or west around peaks and hilltops, climbing just high enough to clear buildings and hills. Between the radar shadows cast by surrounding elevations and their extremely low altitude, they were still effectively undetectable by the U.S. Navy E-2C Hawkeye orbiting off the coast.

The GLONASS satellite navigation card inside one of the Kh-35s abruptly failed. Although the missile’s inertial guidance system tried to take over, integration drift — the accumulation of small errors by its accelerometers and gyroscopes over the past several minutes of flight — led its tiny onboard computer astray. Thinking itself still several hundred meters behind on the flight plan, the missile flew right through a programmed way point and crashed into the southern flank of the San Miguel Mountains. Twisted shards of burning wreckage sprayed across a wide area, igniting small fires that quickly guttered out among the mountain’s rugged boulder fields and widely scattered tufts of cactus and brush.

The surviving fourteen cruise missiles came on — streaking west toward San Diego at high speed.

“Hey, that’s weird,” U.S. navy lieutenant (junior grade) Carly de Mello said suddenly. The short, perky brunette, only a couple of years out of Annapolis, was the Hawkeye’s radar officer, the most junior of the three equipment operators seated in the crowded compartment behind the turboprop’s cockpit.

Her boss, Lieutenant Tim Layton, frowned. “Show me,” he snapped. As the combat-information-center officer, he occupied the middle crew position — seated squarely between the E2-C’s radar officer and its aircraft control officer.

“I may be picking up bogeys out in the mountains east of San Diego, south of Los Alpine and I-8,” de Mello said. With deft fingers, she used keyboard commands and her trackball to “hook,” or select, the new contacts on her big center display. “But they keep disappearing on me.”

Following along on his own display, Layton saw a succession of dots blink briefly into existence during a radar sweep and then vanish again. His eyes narrowed in concentration as he invoked his radar-masking tool. Immediately sections of the map layered below their radar imagery showed areas where terrain would block their APS-145 radar. More contacts appeared during the next sweep… and disappeared as soon as they crossed into those terrain-masked places. A text box showed their estimated course, speed, and altitude.

Without hesitating, he mashed his transmit button and said excitedly, “Broadsword, Broadsword, Sun King Three-One, quail, quail, quail! Multiple high-speed targets inbound bearing zero-eight-two, one-three miles, speed five hundred, on the deck!”

“What the hell, Layton?” the pilot shouted on the intercom. “This is a training mission! You just radioed an actual hostile missile report to the damned command post!”

“That’s because I’ve got actual missiles in the air, heading right for the Navy piers!”

“Oh shit,” de Mello muttered. “This is so not good.”

Silently, Layton agreed with her. While everything the Hawkeye’s radar saw was being simultaneously fed through the Cooperative Engagement Capability data link to all Navy ships and installations in the region, the speed of those incoming missiles gave the defenders less than two minutes to react. That wouldn’t have been an insurmountable problem if the fleet were at sea — able to employ every component of its layered defenses from Standard medium- and long-range antiair missiles to its Phalanx Close-In Weapon System 20mm automatic cannons and Nulka missile decoys. Unfortunately, though, a substantial number of the Pacific Fleet’s warships, including several Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke—class destroyers, were tied up along the piers… held at anchor by President Barbeau’s direct orders.

Commander Dennis Ninomiya hurried into the dim, blue-tinted CIC. No one commented on the fact that the cruiser’s normally unflustered and wholly unflappable executive officer looked out of breath. The klaxons blaring in every compartment as Mobile Bay came to Condition I, general quarters signaled this was no ordinary drill. “Status report!” he snapped.

“Missiles inbound, XO!” Brian Thorson, the young lieutenant assigned as tactical action officer for this watch, said, sounding rattled. He pointed to the large screen echoing radar data transmitted by the E2-C Hawkeye offshore. Red icons showed cruise missiles arrowing closer — screaming in just above the rooftops of San Diego’s hilly, densely populated suburbs. The leader was just over one minute out, with thirteen others trailing after it at several second intervals. “By their flight profile, they’re probably Kh-35s.”

“Shit,” Ninomiya cursed. Whoever had smacked Barksdale Air Force Base a few days ago was now coming after them. He took a closer look at the screen. More icons showed civilian aircraft, including passenger jets on approach to San Diego International, all over the local sky. The airport was less than five miles northwest of their berth. Even if they could bring the ship’s antiair missiles online in time, there was no way they could fire. In this cluttered air environment, the odds of knocking down a friendly airliner by accident were far too high. Which left his cruiser and the other ships tied up in port largely dependent on passive defenses. “Activate electronic and passive countermeasures only — no kinetics, repeat, no Sea Sparrows or Sea-Whiz.” “Sea-Whiz,” or Phalanx CIWS, was a radar-guided 20mm cannon designed to protect a vessel from incoming missiles out to a range of about a mile — fractions of a second before impact. “Close-in” was a polite way to put it: “Last prayer” might be a better description. “Tell Lindbergh Tower and SOCAL Approach to clear the Class Bravo airspace now, air defense emergency. As soon as the Class Bravo is clear, activate all defenses and countermeasures. Status of the port defenses?”

“Port defenses activated when we got the warning from the AWACS, sir,” Thorson reported. The port defenses consisted of a variety of electronic jammers that could shut down GPS signals and a missile’s active guidance, but those were a last-ditch effort. Nervously, he shrugged his shoulders. “Missiles still inbound, sir. Five miles.”

Damn, Mobile Bay’s XO thought grimly. Without satellite navigation systems there was no way those missiles could have flown undetected through the mountain ranges east of the port. So why weren’t the high-powered jamming systems the Navy had deployed to spoof GPS and GLONASS receivers working? Had the enemy missiles already shifted to their final radar-homing attack mode? “Where are my…?”

At that instant, the tactical action officer shouted, “Decoys away, decoys away!” Once launched, the Australian-designed Nulka rockets — the very word nulka was an Aboriginal term for “be quick”—could hover in midair. As they slid downrange from their parent ship, they emitted precisely tailored signals that simulated the signature of a larger vessel, seducing radar-guided missiles off target.

“Quails Four, Six, Seven, Nine, and Thirteen departing observed course!” one of the CIC operators said abruptly.

Staring back at the big tactical display, Ninomiya saw five of the fourteen incoming missiles veer away in several different directions. For a few more seconds, they kept flying, streaking low over San Diego’s suburbs at close to the speed of sound. But then, in quick succession, the five Kh-35s disappeared off the screen — replaced by fast-fading radar blooms of smoke, flame, and falling debris.

“Our satnav jammers worked!” Ninomiya said exultantly… and then felt his exultation vanish when he realized what had just happened. Each of the five missiles decoyed off course had plowed into neighborhoods packed with single-family homes, apartment complexes, schools, churches, and shopping centers.

“Permission to release CIWS to automatic mode?” the lieutenant asked.

Appalled, Ninomiya snapped, “Permission denied.” From the ship’s position along the pier, only one of Mobile Bay’s two 20mm Phalanx Close-in Weapons Systems could bear on the nine missiles still racing toward the harbor. But if he allowed the computer-controlled, six-barrel Vulcan cannon to fire, it would be shooting right into the heart of San Diego — spewing hundreds of armor-piercing tungsten penetrator rounds per second toward multistory apartment buildings and houses built on rising ground. The civilian death toll would be horrendous.

On the screen, the inbound Kh-35s were spreading out. Course tracks showed they were targeted on several of the moored ships — including Mobile Bay. They were close now, only a few seconds away. “Oh, Jesus,” Ninomiya muttered, suddenly praying that officers aboard the other ships in port would decide to risk the collateral damage and open fire.

“We’re gonna get hit!” one of the ratings shouted.

Ninomiya’s nerve broke. He swung toward Thorson. “Belay that last order! Release batteri—”

And then it was too late.

The first cruise missile slammed into the cruiser’s port side — ripping an enormous hole as it punched through hull plating and a thin layer of Kevlar armor designed only to protect against fragments and small arms. Its high-explosive shaped charge warhead went off deep inside the ship… right outside the combat information center.

Neither Commander Dennis Ninomiya nor any of the other officers and sailors inside the CIC had time to react before a wave of fire and razor-edged metal washed across the compartment and killed them all.

Peering down at the wrecked and burning ships lining the waterfront, U.S. Navy captain Blair Pollock felt sick. Three missiles had hit Mobile Bay—gutting her from stem to stern. Only the top of her superstructure and triangular mainmast were still visible, poking up out of the oil-stained water. Blackened corpses bobbed alongside the pier. At Pier Four, damage control teams were trying to put out a roaring, fuel-fed fire aboard the San Antonio—class amphibious ship USS New Orleans. More thick black smoke boiled away from the splinter-torn side of USS Dewey, an Arleigh Burke—class destroyer. In all, seven of the nine surviving Kh-35s had slammed into ships moored alongside San Diego’s piers. Hundreds of officers and men were dead or maimed and burned.

Inland, more fires were burning. Huge plumes of smoke soared hundreds of feet in the air, fed by flames consuming homes and businesses in different neighborhoods. Most of the damage came from the five missiles that had lost guidance and crashed well short of the waterfront. But in the last seconds, the tactical action officer aboard another of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, USS Lake Erie, had opened fire with her Phalanx guns. They’d knocked down the two missiles headed her way… but hundreds of stray 20mm rounds had also shredded homes and businesses across a four-block-wide swath of the Paradise Village neighborhood just across the 805 Freeway. Early reports flooding in from hospitals and triage centers suggested civilian casualties could easily be higher than those suffered by the Navy.

Intellectually, Pollock knew this wasn’t as bad as Pearl Harbor. The vast majority of the Pacific Fleet’s surface warfare ships were still afloat and undamaged. Nor had any serious damage been inflicted on its vital shore installations. But the knowledge was cold comfort in the face of so much death and suffering.