But he wondered if it was not already too late. On the screen, new bogies were appearing, separating as if by magic from the larger blips marking the unknowns.
“It’s goin’ down!” Harkowicz shouted. “Missile launch! Missile launch!”
CHAPTER 16
Senior Lieutenant Javed Chaudry was a fatalistic man, but that didn’t stop him from slamming his fist against the bridge console and biting off a savage curse as the two Styx missiles roared off into the northwest, dazzling pinpoints of light drawing white contrails across the sky. INS Pratap, Patrol Boat K93, wallowed in the heavy seas to starboard, her two forward SS-N-2 canisters open and empty, the cloud of smoke from the double launch still boiling across the water’s surface.
He’d hoped to get closer before launching, much closer. The American carrier was barely in range of the giant missiles now, and the launch would alert the U.S. squadron that it was under attack.
Control reasserted itself. Whatever Pratap’s problem — equipment failure or accident in the rough seas, over-eagerness on the part of her weapons officer — what was done was done. He would have to make the best of it.
“Captain!” he barked. “Stand by to launch!”
“Sir!” Lieutenant Shahani, Pralaya’s commanding officer, snapped out in his best academy officer-on-parade voice. Afraid of crossing the tiny flotilla’s CO, Chaudry decided. The thought made him grin.
“We might as well hit them with everything we’ve got!”
“Sir!” Shahani began giving the orders to his weapons officer. The missiles’ inertial programming was already complete — it could have been a fault in Pratap’s inertial circuitry that had caused the premature launch, Chaudry thought — and all that remained was to release the safeties and fire. The SS-N-2s self-armed after launch.
Chaudry was aware that the Osa squadron’s part in Operation Python was a small one, a means of dividing the Americans’ defensive forces and forcing them to use up valuable anti-missiles, time, and fuel. Still, the thought that one of those sleek monsters now warming in their slatted tubes to port and starboard might be the one to strike the U.S. carrier and end the Yankees’ dreams of dominating India’s seas … “Pass the word to all boats,” he ordered. “Full launch, all craft.
Stand by!”
“Missiles one, two, three, and four ready,” Shahani replied.
“Very well.” He looked about the bridge, realizing that every eye was on him. “Signal the squadron. Fire.” He locked eyes with Shahani.
“Captain, you may launch.”
He’d been waiting for the order. “Missile one, fire!”
The narrow gray confines of Pralaya’s bridge were blasted by a deafening white sound, a waterfall of raw noise as flame and smoke engulfed the starboard bridge windows. Chaudry covered his ears with his hands.
While he’d been through training exercises often enough, this was the first time he’d ever fired an SS-N-2 for real. The sound was like nothing he’d ever imagined.
“Missile two … fire!” The weapons officer was shouting to be heard above the roar. “Missile three … fire!”
Pralaya rocked wildly as the blunt-nosed, two-and-a-half-ton missiles blasted away, first from one side, then the other. Chaudry realized with some surprise that his high-peaked cap had been knocked from his head and was lying on the deck by his feet.
“Missile four … fire!”
Other missiles were rising on flaming contrails from the other vessels in the squadron. The sky to the northwest was aflame with pinpoints of dazzling brilliance.
The Battle of the Arabian Sea had just begun in earnest.
Tombstone was in the 04 deck corridor just outside Jefferson’s CATCC when the GQ alarm sounded, the harsh clangor of the gong mingling with the metallic rattle of hundreds of feet hitting passageways and deck ladders.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” the 1-MC on the bulkhead brayed.
“General quarters, general quarters. All hands man your battle stations. Set Condition Alpha throughout the ship.”
He stepped through the door into the red-lit CATCC, brushing past the heavy curtains that kept light from the passageway from leaking through and ruining the night vision of the sailors manning the ranks of radar displays in the room. CAG was sitting on the leather-backed throne that gave him an unobstructed view of the principal displays and status boards.
Tombstone walked over to where several other squadron officers were looking on. He stood next to Lieutenant j.g. Pete Costello, another Navy aviator who was serving a stretch as VF-97’s CATCC liaison.
“Hey, Hitman,” Tombstone whispered, addressing the j.g. by his running name. “What’s the gouge?”
“Flash just came in from the Vickie,” Hitman replied. He nodded toward the forward bulkhead. Forty feet beyond it was the ship’s CIC, where white blips freckled a huge amber radar display. “Surface targets. Word is they’re Osa IIS and they’ve just popped their missiles!”
Osas. Tombstone knew what those were. The name was the NATO designation, osa being the Russian word for “wasp.” Over 128 feet long and displacing 215 tons, the Osa was a larger version of the American patrol torpedo boats of WW II. Instead of torpedos, however, they mounted four large, ribbed canisters, two to port, two to starboard. A twin 30-mm rapid-fire cannon was mounted forward, and another astern.
Light, handy, and powerful, an Osa II could make thirty-five knots and had a range of 750 miles at a cruising speed of twenty-five knots. The Indians were known to have eight of the machines, purchased in 1976.
A substantial body of opinion and debate had been hung from the threat of small, powerful missile boats like the Osas. Critics of the modern Navy, especially critics of the big nuclear carriers, repeatedly and vociferously insisted that the large surface vessel had gone the way of the dinosaur. Why, after all, spend billions of dollars on an enormous and relatively slow target that could be destroyed by a million-dollar missile fired from a boat small enough and cheap enough to be built by the hundreds?
The missile carried by Osas was a proven ship-killer. With a warhead weighing over half a ton and packed with 880 pounds of high explosive, it could do grievous damage to any modern warship. Three SS-N-2 missiles fired from Egyptian patrol boats in Alexandria Harbor had sunk the Israeli destroyer Elath in 1967. Others had sunk a number of Pakistani ships during the 1971 war, including the destroyer Khaiber.
It would take a large number of SS-N-2s to sink a carrier as large as Jefferson, or great luck, or both … but there were sixteen of the ship-killers out there now. And a hit by only one in the right place could cripple the aircraft carrier and make further launch and recovery operations impossible.
“Range twenty-six miles,” a voice said from a bulkhead speaker. Someone had set the CATCC intercom to pick up the voices from CIC. The only aircraft Jefferson had up at the moment were four Tomcats on BARCAP, a Prowler on ECM, and one of the ever-circling Hawkeyes. “Twelve missiles … correction. Fourteen missiles in the air, closing at six hundred knots.
Mach.9, Tombstone thought, calculating in his head. At that speed, the missiles would cover twenty-six miles in two and a half minutes. He glanced at a clock on the wall, a twenty-four-hour clock with a bright red sweep second hand. It was now 0740.
“Who’s got CAP?” CAG asked suddenly.
Tombstone glanced across at the flight status board and read the names grease-penciled onto the clear acrylic. “Garrison and Wayne are BARCAP One, CAG,” he said. “Marinaro and Kingsly are BARCAP Two. Grant and Rostenkowski are on Alert Five.”
He felt a bitter, growing frustration. His place was with his friends, with Batman and Coyote, not down here
