raised a foot and stomped down on the latter man’s head once, twice. Felt the surrendering snap of bone. The gagging sounds stopped.
Tombstone looked at Lobo. “Guess I’ll have to report you for a grooming violation,” he said, trying to keep the quiver out of his voice. “That haircut’s awful.”
Lobo bent down and unholstered the second guard’s side-arm. “Are you kidding? People in Paris pay a fortune to have their hair look like this.”
“Then maybe Parisian barbers should start cutting with wood slivers.” Tombstone gathered up a couple of the blankets and threw one to her. Then he grabbed the AK-47 off the floor. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The Phalanx CIWS was a carrier’s last-ditch line of defense. There were two Phalanx installations on
A Phalanx system was designed to detect an incoming airborne threat with its radar and pass this data on to the carriage’s motors, which immediately swung the Gatling gun toward the threat. The gun then spewed ammo at the rate of 4,500 rounds per minute, creating a curtain of metal through which virtually nothing could pass intact. Everything happened with breathtaking speed, the 13,600-pound Phalanx unit bobbing and twisting as nimbly as a flyweight boxer.
At least, it sounded good on paper. But even though the Phalanx system had surpassed its performance specifications in all tests, it was still not much trusted by sailors. How could you really put your faith in something almost untested in actual combat? Especially since to activate the system, an incoming missile or enemy aircraft had to first make it safely through the other defenses of the fleet, including the cruisers and frigates with their ship-to-air missiles, Hawkeyes and their radar net, and numerous fighters flying BARCAP. This was something that simply did not happen.
Until now.
A total of fifteen missiles raced toward
The other missiles in the salvo were AT-4 anti-tank missiles, also fired from hand-held, expendable launchers. But the AT-4 was designed for one purpose only: to destroy armored land vehicles. It had a range of only a thousand yards, which it reached in less two seconds; then, at the moment of impact, an 84mm HEAT shaped- charge warhead would go off, flash-melting a hole in even rolled homogenous armor plating of up to 400mm thickness. The rest of the warhead’s energy would turn the interior of the vehicle into a fiery cauldron.
Even an AT-40’s guidance system was optimized for striking at large, slow-moving targets: It had none. AT- 4s were aimed by eye, like a gun; and their missiles, like bullets, could not be redirected after being sent on their way.
The fifteen missiles came at
Of the remaining eleven missiles, seven were met by the the Phalanx weapons, which detected them, targeted them, then spewed masses of slugs out at them. When the missiles met the barrage they exploded, sending sparkling debris streaking through the gloom. For a few seconds,
But the Phalanx system was subject to the same physical laws as any other piece of machinery. Nimble as they were, neither unit could aim at two simultaneously, nor reverse direction faster than momentum would allow.
Two missiles got untouched through the barrage. One was a Stinger, fired late but from almost dead astern; the other, an AT-4 aimed from the deckhouse of a junk on
The moment the Stinger lofted out of its fiberglass launching tube, its infrared-sensing head sought a heat signature. Although no aircraft were currently launching from
The Tomcat’s fuel tank was almost empty — but fumes, not fuel itself, is what burns. The rear half of the Tomcat disintegrated in a blinding flare, instantly killing three nearby brown shirts and blowing their blazing corpses into the ocean. Simultaneously, the front half of the jet obeyed Newton’s Third Law of Motion by lunging away from the impact like a giant piston, crashing into the adjacent nose-tail-nose mosaic of parked aircraft. There was a rapid propagation of crumpling metal as wheels broke loose from tie-down chains, landing gear struts collapsed, knife- edged wings swung wildly. Aluminum skins ruptured. Jet fuel poured out onto the non-skid. Flames raised a roaring, yellow-and-black wall. In an instant, seven aircraft sat cooking wildly in the rain.
The missile fired from the junk, the AT-4, had been intended to strike the “island,” the heart of the carrier that included Pri-Fly, the bridge, and all the major communication and tracking equipment of the ship — and therefore the entire battle group. But even at point-blank range,
Instead, it struck the underside of the protruding flight deck, just above the closed door to the aft elevator. Its conical warhead, a shaped charge designed to concentrate virtually all its explosive energy on a single spot, liquified the steel plate of
In the hangar bay itself, the results were even worse. Flaming debris rained down on the parked aircraft and the hundreds of men and women working on the planes. Sections of catwalk scaffolding collapsed. There was a wild scramble for cover under fuselages and half-folded wings. Smoke filled the air, permeated by sirens, claxons, and screaming.
Outside, the bow Phalanx immediately swung through ninety degrees in an attempt to acquire the last missile in the air, a Stinger that had been fired from almost directly off the bow. The horizontal blizzard of Phalanx projectiles reached the missile just as it made an abrupt vertical juke to follow a cloud of exploding jet fuel. The slugs nipped the missile’s tail, shearing it off and sending the rest of the missile into an uncontrolled cartwheel. It broke into pieces from the centrifugal force, and in that condition almost accomplished the job for which one of the AT-4s had been intended: Although the seeker head arched a hundred feet into the air and vaulted
In less than thirty seconds, the USS
