'They'll let us know,' McCafferty said.
And then, with the chatter of the message from Northwood, they did know.
They would launch at 1602 Zulu Time.
'Up scope.' McCafferty spun the instrument around. A rainstorm overhead drove four-foot waves.
'Looks clear to me,' the XO said, watching the TV display.
The captain slapped the handles up on the scope. It headed down into its well. 'ESM?'
'Lots of radar stuff, Cap'n,' the technician replied. 'I show ten different transmitters in operation.'
McCafferty inspected the Tomahawk weapons status board on the starboard side of the attack center. His torpedo tubes were loaded with two Mark-48s and two Harpoon missiles. The clock ticked away toward 1602.
'Commence launch sequence.'
Toggle switches were thrown, and the weapons status lights blinked red; the captain and the weapons officer inserted their keys in the panel, and turned them; the petty officer on the weapons board turned the firing handle to the left-and the arming process was complete. Forward, in the bow of the submarine, the guidance systems of twelve Tomahawk cruise missiles were fully activated. On-board computers were told where their flight would begin. They already knew where it was supposed to end.
'Initiate launch,' McCafferty ordered.
Ametist was not part of the regular Soviet Navy. Principally concerned with security operations, this Grisha- class patrol frigate was manned by a KGB crew, and her captain had spent the last twelve hours sprinting and drifting, dipping his helicopter-type sonar and listening in the American fashion rather than the Russian. With her diesel engines shut down, she made no noise at all, and her short profile was hard to spot from more than a mile away. She had not heard the American submarines approach.
The first Tomahawk broke the surface of the Barents Sea at 16:01:58, two thousand yards from the Russian frigate. The lookout took a second or two to react. As he saw the cylindrical shape rise on its solid-rocket booster and arc southwest, an icy lead ball materialized in his stomach.
'Captain! Missile launch to starboard!'
The captain raced out onto the bridge wing and looked on in amazement as a second missile broke the surface, then he leaped back into the pilothouse.
'Battle stations! Radio room, call Fleet HQ, tell them enemy missiles launching from grid square 451/679- now! All ahead full! Rudder right!'
The frigate's diesel engines roared into life.
'What in hell is that?' the sonar chief asked. His submarine shuddered every four seconds with the missile launches, but- 'Conn, sonar, we have a contact bearing zero-nine-eight. Diesel-surface ship, sounds like a Grisha, and he's close, sir!'
'Up scope!' McCafferty whirled the periscope around and snapped the handle to full power. He saw the Russian frigate turning hard. 'Snap shot! Set it up! Surface target bearing zero-nine-seven, range'-he worked the stademeter control-'one six hundred, course, shit! he's turning away. Call it zero-nine-zero, speed twenty.' Too close for a missile shot, they had to engage with torpedoes. 'Down scope!'
The fire-control man tapped the numbers into the computer. The computer needed eleven seconds to digest the information. 'Set! Ready for tubes one and three.'
'Flooding tubes, outer doors open-ready!' the XO said.
'Match generated bearings and shoot!'
'Fire one, fire three.' The executive officer struggled with his emotions and won. Where had that Geisha come from? 'Reload with 48s!'
'Last bird away!' the missile technician announced. 'Securing from launch.'
'Left full rudder!''
Ametist never saw the missiles launching behind her. The men were too busy racing to stations, while her captain rang up full power and the ship's weapons officer ran up in his shorts to work the rocket launchers. They didn't need sonar for this; they could see all too well where the submarine was-firing missiles at the Motherland!
'Fire when ready!' the captain yelled.
The lieutenant's thumb came down on the firing key. Twelve antisubmarine rockets arched through the air.
'Ametist,' the radio squawked. 'Repeat your message-what missiles? What kind of missiles!'
Providence discharged her last missile just as the frigate fired at her. The captain ordered flank speed and a radical turn even as the rockets tipped over and began to fall toward his submarine. They fell in a wide circular pattern designed to cover the maximum possible area, two exploding within one hundred yards, close enough to startle but not to damage. The last one hit the water directly over the submarine's sail. A second later, the forty- six-pound warhead exploded.
Ametist's captain ignored the radio while he tried to decide if his first salvo had hit the target or not. The last rocket had exploded faster than the others. He was about to give the order to fire again when the sonar officer reported two objects approaching from aft, and he shouted rudder orders. The ship was already at full speed as the radio speaker continued to scream at him.
'Both fish have acquired the target!'
'Up scope!' McCafferty let it go all the way up before pulling the handles down. At full magnification the Grisha nearly filled the lens, and then both fish hit her port side and the thousand-ton patrol frigate disintegrated before his eyes. He turned completely around, sweeping the horizon to check for additional enemy ships. 'Okay, it's clear.'
'That won't last very long. He was shooting at Providence, sir.'
'Sonar, what do you have on zero-nine-zero?' McCafferty asked.
'Lotsa noise from the fish, sir, but I think we have blowing air at zero-nine-eight.'
'Get us over there.' McCafferty kept the periscope up as the XO conned the sub toward Providence. The Grisha was well and truly destroyed. Together the torpedoes carried nearly fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives. He saw two life rafts that had inflated automatically on hitting the water, but no men.
'Boston is calling on the gertrude, skipper. They want to know what the hell happened.'
'Tell 'em.' The captain adjusted the periscope slightly. 'Okay, there she is, she's surfacing-holy shit!'
The submarine's sail was wrecked, the after third of it completely gone, and the rest shredded. One diving plane hung down like the wing of a crippled bird, and the Periscopes and masts housed in the structure were bent into the shape of a modernistic sculpture.
'Try to raise Providence on the gertrude.'
Sixty Tomahawk missiles were now in the air. On leaving the water, solid-fuel rockets had boosted them to an altitude of one thousand feet, where their wings and jet-engine air inlets had deployed. As soon as their jet engines had begun to function, the Tomahawks began a shallow descent that ended thirty feet above the ground. On-board radar systems scanned ahead to keep the missiles close to the ground, and to match the terrain with map coordinates stored in their computer memories. Six separate Soviet radars detected the missiles' boost phase, then lost them as they went low.
The Russian technicians whose job it was to watch for a possible nuclear attack against their homeland were every bit as tense as their Western counterparts, and the weeks of sustained conventional conflict, coupled with continuous maxirnum-alert status, had frayed nerves to the breaking point. As soon as the Tomahawks had been detected rising from the sea, a ballistic-missile attack warning had flashed to Moscow. Ametist's visual missile warning arrived at naval headquarters in Severomorsk almost as fast, and a THUNDERBOLT alert sent immediately, the code-word prefix guaranteeing instant passage to the Ministry of Defense. Launch authority for the antiballistic missiles deployed around Moscow was automatically released to the battery commanders, and though it was several minutes before radar officers were able to confirm to Moscow's satisfaction that the missiles had dropped off their scopes and were not on ballistic trajectories, defense units stayed on alert, and all over northern Russia
