Excerpt, Volume 2:
One of the hardest of his own orders that Admiral Mann had to stand by, was that of rescuing survivors. His warships
and helicopters reported dozens in the water. Those downwind of the chemical
warheads would have no chance, but the remainder waved, shouted and blew
whistles in order to gain attention.
USS Peel’s
crew were fighting to shore up bulkheads, but the only safe course of action
for her was to turn her stern to the seas and put her engines astern, making
for the Azores in that slow fashion, if a torpedo did not find her first.
Conrad Mann would not compromise his
warships integrity by allowing seals to be broken in order for crewmen to go
topside and carry out rescues. He could not allow his ships to break formation,
and he could not afford to weaken his defensive screen by detaching another
vessel. The same went for his rotary wing assets, he needed them hunting rather
than performing SAR.
All requests to heave-to or to delay
ASW operations were refused, and the winking beacons on survival rafts and
immersion suits fell astern, disappearing into the cold, black Atlantic night.
Twenty-one minutes later a UH-60B from
the USS Gerald Ford firmed up very
quickly on a contact that was coming on too fast for caution. Within another
three minutes a further two helicopters began to prosecute separate contacts,
but before any could drop on the hulls they rose to launch depth and the next
attack began.
The soviet hunter-killers had used well
the time the helicopters had been absent, and all seven began launching within
minutes of each other.
SS-N-7 anti-ship missiles burst out of
the black depths in welters of spray, their solid rocket motors providing the
thrust that would send them at high subsonic speed towards their victims.
Gerald Ford’s TAO saw at a glance that his remaining
F-14s and F/A-18s would be of no use, their attackers were within forty miles
of the nearest US ship, and the aircraft were too far away to engage in time.
Standard 2 missiles roared from
vertical launch tubes, tipping over as their ships guidance systems fed them
data on the incoming attack.
High above the ships, the radar
operators aboard the early warning Hawkeye watched the attackers come on,
locked down their firing positions to within six feet, and fed mid-course
corrections to the Standard 2s. Whilst they were doing all this they saw twenty
new tracks appear two hundred and ninety-six miles out.
Placing a cursor on the lead inbound
the operator was surprised, he had thought that he could judge speed pretty
well, and he’d have guessed that these newcomers were coming in at mach one,
give or take. However the speed was Mach 2.7, and these inbounds were climbing.
Selecting the Gerald Ford’s CIC on his frequency selector he spoke quickly and
clearly.
“Vampires, Vampires, Vampires…Lunch
Bunch this is Eye Spy Zero Two, I have two zero Vampires, bearing 350’, Angels
two five and climbing, range now at two hundred fifty-five miles!”
The TAOs reply was immediate.
“Roger, Eye Spy, we have them on the board.”
A moment later the TAO came on again, this time on an air wing frequency.
“Long Knife Zero One, Lunch Bunch?”
The F-14 squadron commanders’ reply was
short, and to the point.
“Go.”
The TAO told them where, how high, and
a one word instruction that meant they were to hustle.
“Long Knives steer 349’, make Angels Twenty and buster!”
“Roger, the Knives are in the elevator with burners on, our heading is
now three four nine.”
“Roger Knives, you have the fast moving vampires which are now levelling
at Angels Thirty.”
“Rog.”
Long Knife Zero One had only four other
aircraft with him, the remainder having already emptied their hard-points in
the previous attack. Between the five of them they had eight AIM-54 Phoenix,
and fifteen AMRAAMs. Sat in back the RIOs assigned weapons to targets, and
fifteen seconds later the first AIM-54 left its hard-point.
Unlike the weapons released by the
attack hulls, the newcomers were not configured to single out ships; they had
sets of coordinates to aim for.
In the USS Gerald Ford’s CIC, Admiral Mann knew without asking that this was
the soviets big effort, their last chance at stopping desperately needed
reinforcements and supplies from reaching Europe.
The twenty fast approaching missiles
were heading for the protected zone within the twin rings of warships, and they
all had to be nukes.
“Make to all ships, brace for nuclear
strike…tell the inner pickets to make for the outer screens at flank.”
The plot showed all his airborne
assets, and some were too damn close to them.
“Get the helo’s down, those that
can do so in the next three minutes, it’ll take too long to secure them beyond
that time…tell the rest, with the exception of Eye Spy and the Long Knives to
beat feet.”
The young officer at his elbow turned
to give the orders and then paused.
“Beat feet to where, sir?”
Conrad half smiled
“Anywhere but here,
son.”
The Alfa Potyemkin left its charge to clear datum whilst the Alfa itself
descended to 1200 feet and sprinted north at 30 knots. Once there sonars
registered the unmistakable signature of a nuclear event he would send his
detailed report, declaring that the army no longer had anything to fear in
Europe
The first AIM-54 was a clear miss,
detonating in the wake of the lead missile, but the second scored on it. It
was not a spectacular explosion, the complex mechanisms necessary to enable a
nuclear reaction to take place, were simply destroyed. Nuclear weapons do not
have impact fuses, and they don’t even go off if an aircraft that should be
carrying them should fly into a mountain. They just are not that sort of
explosive device.
The board on Gerald Ford’s CIC recorded the hits and misses, and there were more
of the latter than of the former as thirteen still remained.
With all there ordnance expended the
F-14s turned northeast, clearing the way for the warships not yet involved with
the sea-skimmers.
Far below, the battle raged on.
West of the carrier, the frigate USS Hallemville fell out of line, with what
remained of her superstructure ablaze and flames roaring through rents in her hull.
Her sister ship the USS Gallishere
was one moment forging through heavy seas with spray fogging the air above her
bows and her Phalanx gun hammering to the north, and then was engulfed from
view by smoke flecked with fire. When the wind swept the smoke clear moments
later she was gone, with only the still falling debris to confirm that she had
ever having existed.
Being more sporadic, and coming from
far wider spaced firing points, a greater number of warships had been able to
engage this attack than the previous one.
USS Normandy
had only expended half of her re-filled magazine during this attack, and now
she began launching in a different direction.
Although this current turn of events
had been allowed for, Conrad could see that there was more than a fair chance
that one or more were going to get through.
“Do you know how to pipe ‘Up Spirits’
young man?” he said to the young officer without turning.
The ensign frowned, unsure as to
whether he had heard the admiral correctly.
“Sir?”
Admiral Mann turned his head and
smiled.
“Never mind, wrong navy…and even they don’t do that anymore.”
Five of the soviet weapons escaped the Normandy’s best efforts, to tip over and
descend. Two were five miles apart, and a few seconds ahead of the remainder,
achieving three times the speed of sound in their descent toward the ocean.
Milliseconds separated the pair as they
reached 10,000 feet, and their onboard systems completed the tasks they had
been programmed for.
Orbiting at 26,000 feet the E-2C
Hawkeye was the first casualty.
EMP, the electro-magnetic pulse
produced by nuclear events, fried electrical circuits, and then the weapons
thermal output lifted the twin-engine aircraft to 39,000 feet, well above its
maximum ceiling. Before the super thermal had carried them to that altitude the
Allison T56-A-427 turboprops sputtered and faltered, starved not of fuel, but
of air. The little AWAC aircraft was then caught by the blast wave, and swiped
from existence.
Admiral Mann did not know it, but they
had gotten off lightly. Only two of the five missiles had detonated, and in
doing so they destroyed the remainder that followed behind them.
On USS Gerald Ford’s starboard side, her external sensors burnt out, and in so doing triggered alarms
throughout the vessel. The same went for all the surviving surface warships,
whatever their position the part of the vessel facing ground zero had optical
and sensor equipment frazzled by the unbearable light that heralded the
detonations. EMP also did its worst on those electrical systems not shut down
and shielded. Communications and radar were lost throughout the fleet and until
the back-up systems came online, they were deaf and blind.
In the carriers CIC the board had gone
blank and the officers in charge of the various departments harangued their
technicians to boot up the back-up systems and get the show back on the road.
Being inside the double rings of
warships, though close to the northern perimeter, USS Gerald Ford was closer to ground zero than any other surface ship,
but still 30 miles from it. Her starboard side’s paintwork had been bleached
several shades lighter than the rest of the ship, by the thermal pulse.
The blast wave took all of three
minutes to reach the carrier, but still had the strength to heel her 104,000
ton bulk over by twenty degrees.
The TAO braced himself against a
bulkhead until the ship righted itself, and then barked at the personnel in
CIC.
“Come on people, no one’s sailed through the after effects of one a
nuclear strike before, it could get pretty damn stormy pretty damn quick, and
we’re still blind………get those systems back up, NOW!”
His words were prophetic, as the huge
warship heeled over once more with the assault of an 80 foot wave moving at as
many miles an hour.
Captain Sonderland had remained on the
bridge, despite the heavy lead lined blast shutters that prevent anyone looking
out of the screens. Gripping the arms of his chair he had trouble recollecting
whether he had been on a ship as large as this before, in what seemed an equal
to the worst storms of his long career. They were sailing blind and he did not
like that one tiny bit, the bridge radar repeater remained blank despite five
minutes of promises from technicians, and so he ordered the bridge lighting
extinguished and the shutters hand cranked open.
For all he could see, once that had
been accomplished, they could as well have been left in place for all the good
it did.
Massive quantities of water had been
vaporised by the air-bursts and what greeted him outside was the thickest fog
he had ever encountered.
Leaving his chair he stood beside the
helmsman, squinting his eyes in an effort to penetrate the murk, and decided
that until radar had been restored he needed a lookout on the bow. He was
weighing up the dangers to such a lookout, should the easterly wind change and
blow fallout across the vessel when he saw something ahead. A faint orange
glow, much defused by the thick blanket of fog, which had altered the otherwise
uniform vision of nothingness.
He had time only to mutter to himself.
“What in hells name is that?” before the Gerald
Ford slammed into the burning hulk of the USS Hallemville.
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