Standard missiles fired from the U.S. destroyers were actually being guided to their targets by SARH from the Aegis cruiser, extending her range and deadliness.
And that deadliness was beginning to take its toll. Vaughn had long since lost track of how many Indian aircraft had been destroyed. Eight or ten in the dogfight with the American fighters, certainly, and at least twenty more had fallen victim to the implacable hunger of the Standard missiles as they stalked the radar reflections of their prey and hunted them down.
It was a close-run thing toward the end. Indian aircraft were actually coming in over the horizon, and the Vicksburg’s two five-inch turrets swung about and began slamming shells at the attackers. Vaughn watched the forward turret hammering away on the TV screen in CIC. In the distance, he could see the black specks that he knew were enemy planes, the black smears of triple-A and exploding aircraft, the smoky streak of a plane falling across the sky. A Jaguar howled past, long, black cigar shapes spilling from its belly as the carrier’s point defenses swung to meet the new threat. Splashes rose off Jefferson’s port bow, thunderous avalanches of water. The Jaguar disintegrated in midair; the bombs missed.
In World War II, the face of war was changed forever when ships began striking at each other with carrier aircraft. Fleets maneuvered, came to grips, and sank one another … and the opposing ships never came within sight of each other directly.
Modern war, Vaughn had always been told, was to have taken that separation of the combatants another step. Ships would be struck and sunk by missiles launched by aircraft safely over the horizon. Enemy aircraft would never even appear in the skies over a naval squadron.
The Falklands campaign had proven the fallacy of that prediction, though the presence and terrain of those islands had shaped the battle to a large extent. Here in the Arabian Sea, it was the sheer numbers of the Indian attackers that carried them past the outer defenses and into range of the ship’s guns.
Vaughn watched the struggle unfolding on the television monitor and thought of World War II. The scenes there looked like something out of a fifty-year-old newsreel.
Following the Western design philosophy in arming their first nuclear aircraft carrier, Kreml was not as heavily armed as the Kiev-class cruiser-carrier hybrids. The weapons mix did reflect Soviet concern about antiship missiles, however, for she carried a number of Gatling-type rapid-fire cannons designed to defeat incoming ASMS.
Designed to operate much like the Phalanx, the 30-mm multi-barrel gun designated as AK-630 was housed in a squat, gray turret unlike the white silo of the American CIWS.
The six barrels were housed together in a single rotating tube. The weapon had a theoretical rate of fire of 3000 rounds per minute, but problems caused by overheating and the tendency of the ammunition to jam reduced this to short bursts of one or two hundred rounds apiece.
The missiles entered Kreml’s inner defensive zone, spread out now across a wide stretch of sea and skimming scant meters above the wave tops. Two of Kreml’s AK-630s began firing … then a third, and a fourth, all the point defense turrets that could bear on the tiny, elusive targets now spread across the horizon astern. Splashes on the sea, cascades of white spray, marked where the high-velocity rounds lashed out at the approaching ship-killers.
On the carrier’s deck all was noise and confusion, as officers shouted orders and the CIWS Gatlings shrieked like chain saws. The heavy thumps of chaff launchers mingled with the chaos with a steady, rhythmic beat.
Clouds of chaff surrounded the carrier as the Gatlings continued to track and fire, track and fire and fire and fire … The Sea Eagles were approaching Kreml from almost dead astern. In the last minute of the engagement, Captain Soni made one serious tactical mistake by deciding to maintain his course, rather than maneuvering to give either his port or starboard batteries a clearer field of fire.
When the missiles first came within range, four separate CIWS turrets could bear on them, two to starboard, one aft, and one to port. By deciding to hold the carrier to its northwesterly course, he hoped to provide the CIWS turrets with a less complicated firing solution.
Unfortunately for the Kreml, when the missiles were within five hundred meters of the carrier’s stern, the ship’s hull itself blocked the line of fire for two of the guns.
Still, the fire was effective. At two miles’ range, one Sea Eagle was struck simultaneously by twin streams of projectiles. Traveling at 1000 meters per second, the heavy rounds chewed through the missile like rocks through tissue, shredding electronics and control surfaces and scattering debris across the water. In the last instant, the remaining fuel on board ignited in an orange fireball.
A second missile exploded an instant later, followed by the third, twin detonations that momentarily flattened the surface of the water with dual shock waves.
The guns kept firing. One missile veered off, and then another. Either their guidance systems had malfunctioned or they’d been decoyed by chaff. Another missile, one fin blasted away by a grazing shot, fell into the sea like a leaping fish and vanished.
The guns of a pair of escorts came into play. The destroyers Vliyatel’nyy and Moskovskiy Komsomolets were cruising within sight of the Kreml, less than two miles away, and both turned their own CIWS on the missiles as they streaked in from the horizon. Without intership coordination such as that provided by Aegis, however, the help was too little and too late. One more missile exploded half a mile from the carrier. Vliyatet’nyy was tracking another speeding black-and-red missile when it vanished behind Kreml’s hull, and high-velocity 30-mm rounds slashed into the aircraft carrier’s waterline.
Captain Soni’s tactical error was most apparent for the last couple of seconds. Four missiles remained in the air, but for the last few tens of meters the ship’s stern blocked three of the guns that had been firing at them. Only the AK-630 mounted on Kreml’s fantail could still bear.
It managed to knock down one of them.
Two missiles slammed into the Kreml from astern, one entering the fantail walkway close alongside the AK- 630 mount and tunneling deep into the passageway leading into the bowels of the ship before exploding. The second missed the stern and passed along the ship’s right side, too close to the hull for the starboard CIWS turrets to bear. It struck close to the waterline aft of Kreml’s island, but the angle was too oblique to cause detonation. The missile slammed off the steel plating and fell into the sea.
The blast from the first Sea Eagle engulfed the ship’s stern, sending smoke and flame belching from the stern, the concussion warping two of Kreml’s propeller shafts. The carrier shuddered, sending men on her deck to their hands and knees. Fires began in a dozen places: the ship’s machine shops, a paint locker, a jet engine service area. Choking smoke wreathed through the carrier’s bowels as fire alarms shrieked warning.
Damage was bad, but not fatal, not yet. Soviet damage control parties, while not as well-trained or well- coordinated as their American counterparts, were able to seal off the damaged areas in short order and begin flooding the fires with water and foam.
The third missile, however, was far more deadly than the first.
Following well behind the first two, it approached the carrier just as the blast wave erupted from the Soviet carrier’s shattered fantail. Like a stone skipping on water, it was deflected high into the air and sent skimming above the Kreml’s ramp and across her crowded flight deck. The warhead smashed into parked Yak-38MP Forgers and navalized Su-27 Flankers in a close-spaced row along the ship’s starboard side. One hundred fifty kilograms of high explosive detonated among closely spaced aircraft, all fueled and armed for the coming strike against the Indian supply lines ashore.
Hell descended on the Kreml’s flight line in flame and noise and hurtling death as the fireball writhed into the sky. The forward half of a Forger, furiously ablaze, cart-wheeled across the deck and landed squarely on a Su-25 Frogfoot loaded with cluster bombs parked alongside the island. Fuel and ordnance went up together with a clattering roar like a Chinese New Year’s celebration, blowing out windows on the carrier’s bridge and Primary Flight Control. The blast sent deck crewmen skittering and tumbling across the deck as though swept away by a gigantic broom. R-60 air-to-air missiles, the AA-8 Aphids slung from Yak-38 wings, ignited, snapping across the deck on streamers of white flame. Explosion followed explosion followed explosion, a chain of interlocking blasts that rocked the carrier and sent a pall of greasy black smoke two miles into the sky.
A ship trembled on the edge of death.
