“Keep on those subs!” the captain yelled.
“Bridge — Operations Room. Bogies have locked on us with fire control radar!”
“Damn it!” the captain shouted. “Lock on the lead aircraft!”
Staring out the window, Sub Lieutenant Kensington spotted it first: an orange-white flare in the darkness, followed instantly by five more. Just as his brain was coming to grips with what he was seeing, he heard the Operations Room Officer’s voice.
“Inbound! We have six inbound missiles!”
“Flank speed!” the captain shouted. “Hard left rudder! Guns and missiles free! Engage all targets!”
The deck pitched sharply to the right. Kensington grabbed the crossbar mount of the radar repeater to keep his footing as the ship heeled over into the turn.
Two brilliant flashes of light from the forecastle and twin rumbles, like freight trains passing a half-meter away, announced the launch of HMS
The forward chaff launchers fired six times in rapid succession. Six egg-shaped chaff projectiles arced away from the ship, four of them exploding at predetermined distances, spewing clouds of aluminum dust and metallic confetti into the sky to confuse the enemy missiles with false radar targets. The remaining two chaff rounds ignited like roman candles.
They were torch rounds: magnesium flares designed to seduce heat-seeking infrared guided missiles.
The
The starboard Phalanx fired a short burst of 20mm rounds, and was rewarded a second later by a distant explosion as the hardened tungsten bullets shredded an incoming missile. The high-tech Gatling gun swung around toward another incoming missile and fired again.
The port Phalanx mount remained silent, waiting for suitable targets to enter its arc of fire.
Out on the forecastle, a second pair of Sea Dart missiles slid up the loading rails to the launcher.
“Bogies are firing again!” the Operations Room Officer shouted over the speaker. And another half-dozen missiles leapt into the fray.
The Sea Darts blasted the forecastle with fiery exhaust as they shot away into the night.
The German missiles were AS-34B Kormoran 2s. Sea-skimmers that dropped like stones, not leveling out until they were less than two meters above the wave tops.
Following its mid-course inertial guidance program, the first missile waited twelve seconds before activating its nose-mounted targeting radar.
When it did, it immediately located two radar contacts: one large and close, and a second, smaller contact fifty meters beyond. The target selection algorithm running through the missile’s Thompson-CSF digital seeker instantly rejected the nearer/larger target. Large/near targets tended to be chaff decoys. The missile locked on the smaller target, and executed a short S-turn to the left to avoid the chaff cloud.
Locked firmly on the second contact, it closed in for the kill. At an optimum range of one-point-three meters from its target, the missile detonated its warhead. Fifty-five kilograms of hexagon/RDT/aluminum erupted into a mushrooming shock wave of fire and shrapnel.
The concussion shook the bridge, throwing Sub Lieutenant Kensington up against the radar repeater hard enough to knock the wind out of him.“Holy Mother of God!” he gasped. “That was close!” His ears were still ringing, and the brilliant after-image of the close-aboard explosion still danced in front of his night-accustomed retinas. He pulled himself back to his feet. “Why are we seeding chaff so close to the ship?”
No one bothered to answer, but a second after he asked the question, he dredged up the answer from some half-forgotten training lecture. Missile manufacturers knew about chaff, and they were programming their weapons with little tricks to avoid it. Many missiles were now smart enough not to turn on their radar seekers immediately. If a chaff cloud was far enough away from the real target, a missile with an inactive seeker could fly through it without being distracted. The closer the chaff was to the ship, the better the odds that a missile’s radar would be active and subject to seduction. By seeding an inner pattern of small chaff clouds and an outer pattern of larger chaff clouds, the ship could even sucker missiles that were programmed to ignore the first targets they spotted.
A fireball blossomed in the distance, as one of the Sea Darts intercepted and destroyed a German sea- skimmer. A few seconds later, a Sea Wolf from the
The Phalanx Gatling guns continued to spray short bursts of 20mm bullets into the night.
Two hundred meters above the water, Fliegen Oberleutnant Pieter Hulbert torqued his pistol-grip control stick to the left and nudged the rudder pedal, twisting his EF-2000S EuroStrike-Fighter into a tight turn.
Mounting G-forces mashed him back into his seat as the agile jet fighter practically stood on its port wing. Stubby canard-style foreplanes gave the delta-winged aircraft a vicious midair turning radius. Hulbert grunted several times as his plane ripped through the turn, an old fighter pilot’s trick for keeping blood pressure in the upper body when the Gs were stacking up.
He bumped the dorsal airbrake, and a streamlined section of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit folded open, creating a drag-stream that caused his plane to shed speed and altitude rapidly. The maneuver saved his life, as a Sea Wolf missile punched through the section of sky that his aircraft had occupied a millisecond earlier. The G- forces eased off as he rolled out of the turn into level flight less than a hundred meters above the water.
Hulbert scanned his Head Up Display for the targeting reticule. There!
A wire-frame rectangle popped into existence on the HUD, outlining a fat radar blip. With the touch of a button, Hulbert called up an infrared display, superimposing the target’s IR signature over its radar image. The IR signature was black: no significant heat sources. Not enough for a warship, anyway. It was a false target, a chaff cloud.
He sequenced to the next radar target and immediately called up its IR signature. An irregular oblong appeared on the HUD — gray, shot with dapplings of white. Heat sources. Heat from engine exhaust. Heat from ventilation systems. It was a warship. A target.
Hulbert shifted his right thumb up to the top of the control stick and flipped up the hinged plastic cover that protected the arming selector and fire button. He held down the arming selector, giving the missile under his starboard wing its first look at the target. A bright circle appeared on the HUD, signaling the missile’s acknowledgment. He released the arming selector and gave the control stick a tiny jog to the right, improving his alignment on the target, to give the missile the best possible odds of success. His thumb shifted to the fire button.
The Kormoran missile dropped away from the wing, falling for nearly a second before its engine fired in midair. Then it dropped even closer to the water to begin the inertial-guidance portion of its attack on HMS
Oberleutnant Hulbert twisted his pistol-grip control stick to the right, peeling his aircraft away from the firing bearing as quickly as possible. It was a good tactic: what any smart fighter pilot would have done in the same situation. But in this case, it was fatal.
The 114mm cannon shell that tore through his port wing wasn’t even aimed at him; he just happened to fly between it and its intended target.
Red tattletales began flashing all over his instrument panel, accompanied by a small choir of alarm bells and warning buzzers. Fly-by-wire was out and shifting to backup. Fuel pressure was dropping rapidly.
The HUD lost power and went dark, and half of his instruments started fluctuating wildly.
The plane began to vibrate, and the control stick bucked crazily in his hand. A quick glance over his left shoulder told him that the carbon-fiber wing was starting to delaminate. He had perhaps ten seconds before the
