Cauldron

over its mangled fuselage. Tangled shrouds and a ripped parachute canopy trailed backward from the aircraft’s submerged cockpit. Its ejection system must have gone off on impact.

Calhoun swung the Seahawk’s FLIR up to cover the sinking merchant ship. He found the burning hulk and steadied the black-and-white image in the center of the screen.

They both gasped. The container ship’s clean lines were gone.

Tartu’s deck was twisted and torn open in places. Fires burned everywhere, flashing to superheated steam as seawater hit them. A huge hole gaped in her side, just as though some sea monster had taken a bite out of her. The freighter was down by the stern and listing heavily to port — visibly rolling further and further over as the Kattegat poured in through her shattered hull.

“Jesus, Tom. She’s going down real soon,” Alvarez volunteered. They roared low over the doomed merchantman, bucketing up and down in the hot air currents rising from her fires. He spun the Seahawk around in a tight turn, headed back west.

Calhoun nodded. “Let’s make one more pass to see if anyone’s still on board. After that, we’ll do an expanding search…”

Suddenly a brilliant, searing white flash filled the whole right side of the cockpit window. For half a second, Alvarez thought they had been hit by something, but the helicopter’s engine sound didn’t waver.

Momentarily blinded, he heard Calhoun yell, “It’s Simpson!”

Simpson had been struck by three missiles, the first an ARMAT antiradar missile, one of four fired at the frigate. Detonating a hundred feet directly overhead, it had sprayed the ship with high- velocity fragments, shredding her radars and killing or wounding the few crewmen on her weather decks.

The second wave of aircraft had fired antiship missiles. While Simpson was not the primary target of the attack, pressure on her increased the chances of the other attackers getting through. Four ANL supersonic missiles, hugging the water, streaked toward the frigate. The crippled ship, unable to launch her surface-to-air missiles without her fire control radar, had fired a cloud of shells from her 76mm gun at them, but none of the shell bursts came close enough to knock the ANLs and their armored warheads into the sea.

In the last seconds, chaff blossomed from launchers on either side of the ship. Only the bursting charges were visible in the darkness, but to guidance radars the air over the ship was suddenly filled with bright, reflective targets, larger and more attractive than the ship below them.

With the incoming missiles only hundreds of meters away, Simpson’s Phalanx radar-guided rotary cannon had fired one tearing burst, then another, and a third, finally clipping one of the ANLs. In an eyeblink, the missile spiraled into the sea and exploded — close enough to shower the ship with seawater.

The other three missiles were too close for the Phalanx to engage. One, seduced by the chaff, flew harmlessly past, searching for the ephemeral target created by the silvered plastic.

But the two remaining missiles, already locked onto Simpson by the time the chaff deployed, had stayed on target. Moving at just under the speed of sound, both slammed into the frigate, one forward of her bridge near the Standard missile launcher, the other in the middle of her superstructure, right above engineering.

The sheer force of the two missiles’ impact had heeled her over, throwing everyone aboard to the deck. Their warheads, delay-fused so that they would only explode after they penetrated the skin of the ship, went off together. Each carried 360 pounds of explosive, surrounded by a shell of incendiary zirconium. This metal case, shattered and then ignited by the detonation, turned into hundreds of lethal fragments, driving through the ship. Wherever a fragment passed, it left a trail of flame. Only a few of the frigate’s vital compartments, protected by Kevlar armor, were proof against the deadly projectiles. Elsewhere, scores of men were killed by the blast, by secondary fragments, or in the fires that followed.

Simpson’s captain had known his ship was doomed the instant the fireballs blossomed. Even as choking, toxic smoke filled the bridge, he ordered Abandon Ship, then did his best to get anyone he could find over the side.

By the time Alvarez and Calhoun arrived at Tartu, only thirty or so of their shipmates had received the order and recovered enough to go over the side. Even the bitterly cold waters of the Baltic were a welcome relief from the blazing inferno that was once a warship. They struggled and swam away as best they could, their onetime home now an enemy.

Simpson’s end came suddenly and violently when the fires on board the stricken frigate finally reached her missile and gun magazines. She disintegrated in the blink of an eye — torn apart by a rippling series of smaller explosions too close together in time and space to be distinguished as separate blasts. When the frigate’s shattered hulk slid beneath the Kattegat minutes later, she carried more than three-quarters of her 215-man crew with her.

JUNE 4 — USS LEYTE GULF

Ward watched the half-circles creep closer and closer to what was left of his formation. The little computer- displayed symbols, each with a line pointing straight at his ship, represented F-14 Tomcats from George Washington.

To Jack Ward, they might as well have been angels.

Even though the Aegis cruiser could only make twenty knots, a night’s travel had brought them 150 miles closer to the powerful carrier.

He grimaced. He’d have to call this battle a draw. EurCon had sunk two of his four ships and damaged a third, but they’d been trying for a knockout blow — trying to make the most of their early advantage in catching Task Force 22 strung out across the Baltic. Their own losses had been heavy. He knew there were a lot of French and German aircraft that hadn’t made it home.

Ward thought about all the sea battles he’d read about and studied. He’d fought before, in the Persian Gulf, and he and his colleagues had greedily devoured the lessons to be learned from it and every other modern conflict. But the Gulf had been nothing like this.

Nothing could have prepared him for the speed, the violence, and the confusion of last night’s battle. He’d been scared, so scared that he’d almost been afraid to act, lest he do something wrong. He’d seen the same look on the officers and men as well, and only the fear of letting them down had kept him thinking, and fighting, until his fears had been drowned by his actions.

He coughed, a long, dry spasm that left him gasping for air. The smoke had gotten pretty thick last night. He was sure some of that junk was still in his lungs. Add fatigue, no food, and the pain caused by losing both Simpson and Tartu, and he became very grateful for the support provided by his command chair.

He hated to admit it, but if the Tomcats hadn’t arrived when they did, he and the rest of his force could very easily have been on the bottom of the Baltic. As it was, Leyte Gulf was hurt. A missile hit close to her bridge had rocked the CIC, damaged one face of the SPY-1 radar, and wrecked her forward missile launcher. Ward silently thanked God the launcher had been nearly empty when they took the hit.

The second missile had been even worse, starting a fire in Leyte’s engineering spaces that killed twelve men and damn near finished her. Only good damage control had stopped the flames from spreading.

So here they were. He was short on missiles, running on half engines, and overcrowded with his own wounded and a few, badly burned survivors plucked from the water near where Simpson and the Tartu had gone down. One of his helicopters, another survivor from the frigate, was camping out on Dallas Star’s helipad. He was still two hundred miles from the relative safety of George Washington’s formation. Beyond that, he knew, Leyte Gulf had a longer trip to the yards for badly needed repairs.

In the meantime, though, she was still a fleet unit. Most of her weapons systems still worked, and the all- important SPY-1 radar and Aegis computers were back on the line. She could still fight.

“We’re ready, Admiral.”

Captain Ralph Gunston, Leyte Gulf’s skipper, had taken over as Ward’s chief of staff. Jerry Shapiro was in sick bay with a broken leg and a chest full of missile fragments. Gunston looked more like a marine than a ship’s captain, stocky with a blond crew cut.

“No signs of damage?”

“We found a few rattled circuit boards, but everything’s been checked, and we’ve reloaded all the target