their professionalism. Exhausted, ragged, at the edge of their capabilities, the crew rose to every challenge with superb professionalism.
The missile symbols, both hostile and friendly, were clearly identifiable. Norfolk studied the geometries for a moment. “Come left a bit, ten degrees,” he ordered. That would put the ship bow on to the incoming missile, and thus present a smaller target. It would also clear the forward CIWS stations which might have a shot at taking out the missile if the standard missiles missed it.
“Sea skimmers!” one of the operations specialists shouted as he watched. “Captain, they’ve gone low!”
And as Norfolk watched the screen, the new missile contacts disappeared, indicating they were now flying just feet above the surface of the water. Where the hell was the AWACS picture, and why wasn’t it showing them?
Woods watched in horror as the spiky missile symbols popped up on his screen. Just pixels arranged in a particular pattern, just glowing phosphors on an otherwise clear screen. Innocuous enough, if you didn’t know what they meant to a thin-shelled aircraft.
The massive aircraft twisted in the air around him, the maneuvers more violent than he’d ever felt in an aircraft this size. It was as though the pilot was trying to conduct aerobatics in a nimble jet fighter instead of manhandling a 747 in the air. The deck dropped down hard under his feet as the aircraft dove, leaving Woods straining against his seatbelt. The aircraft went hard over to the right, standing virtually on wingtip as it desperately tried to shed altitude.
“He’s got us! Come on, come on!” the other man shouted, his fear and panic instantly communicating itself to the rest of the flight crew. One part of Woods’s mind, the part that wasn’t devoted to coldly analyzing the situation, registered disapproval at the man’s cowardice. He wasn’t making it any easier for the rest of the crew.
Chaff and flares spewed out of the undercarriage, immediately creating a blanket of fire and radar reflecting strips of metal. The pilot twisted the aircraft again into an impossibly tight turn, straining to get the cloud of countermeasures between his aircraft and the incoming missiles. In the cockpit, the altimeter unwound at an alarming rate as the G-meter registered forces that the aircraft had never been intended to take.
Woods’s weight increased suddenly as the floor of the compartment came hurtling up toward him. They pulled out of the steep dive only a few hundred feet above the wave tops, and the pilot immediately began a slower descent until they were virtually skimming the water like a massive hovercraft.
Chaff and flares weren’t the only weapons of self-defense the aircraft possessed. Deep within its electronics, it possessed certain highly specialized circuits that were coupled to a small radar independent antenna. The circuits analyzed the incoming radar transmissions from the missile seeker head, made a few minor calculations, and then began transmitting a signal intended to mimic a radar return on the same frequency. In principle, the AWACS transmissions would spoof the missile into thinking that the aircraft was not where it was, fifteen feet to the left of where it actually was.
On his screen, Woods saw one missile veer suddenly to the left, increasing its altitude and climbing away from the aircraft. It streaked off into the distance, happily pursuing the illusion of the countermeasures cloud, and then finally detonated, briefly fuzzing his screen in that sector before the gain control circuitry kicked in.
The second missile was not nearly as gullible as its littermate. It blasted past the chaff and the flares, the tone of its seeker head a steady ping at the electronic warfare console and headed straight for the AWACS. At a range of five hundred yards, it turned slightly away, and Waterson had a moment of hope. Its new heading put it directly on course for the sun. Perhaps the heatseeker in its nose had decided that that brilliant heat source was the desired target, a problem many early generation heatseekers had had. Later generation U.S. missiles had discriminators that could distinguish between the sun and the exhaust from a jet engine, but it was possible they were using older models, wasn’t it? In fact, it was more than possible — it was an absolute guarantee, it had to be. Woods knew a moment of hope, then blackness came crashing down on him as the missile immediately made a course correction and bore directly in on them.
The next four seconds of Woods’s life were the longest he had ever known. Time stopped, seconds advancing at the speed of hours, the moments of life defined by a glowing green line on his screen that connected his aircraft with the missile. Figures immediately above and below the line read out the decreasing distance, clicking over at an incredible rate.
Every man and woman on the AWACS was so high on adrenaline, so completely stoked by the body’s countermeasure to fear and panic, that the sudden flash of light and heat seemed like just one more problem to cope with. Each one had a momentary flash of:
The shards of metal from the disintegrating engine penetrated the fuselage, passed through the crew compartment and left shattered flesh and bone in their wakes. Within seconds, the fuselage was no longer recognizable. Nor were the men and women who had inhabited it.
“They’re gone,” Waterson said. In cold, clinical detail, the death of the AWACS and her crew had played out on the screen before him. The sensitive radar had lost track of the missiles as they descended in pursuit of the doomed aircraft, but the abrupt termination of the AWACS data feed and the small blur of static as parts of the wreckage were lofted back into the air at a high enough altitude for the radar to detect spelled out the details.
“We gotta do something,” Vail said, his voice rising hysterically. He started unstrapping himself from his seat. “Get to the deck, launch the boats. We have time, we have time now!”
The retired master sergeant laid one hand on his compadre’s shoulder. “We don’t have time.”
“But we—”
His friend’s objection was terminated by the abrupt implosion of the side of the ship. The frags killed him immediately, but Waterson had time to watch the water pouring in, see the dark and hungry sea reaching for him before he died.
Watching from above, it was like watching a turkey shoot. The massive ship made one futile attempt to maneuver and present a smaller aspect to the incoming missile, but it was more a demonstration of guts than of tactical superiority. The ship never stood a chance.
The missile impacted the hull just above the waterline, and for the merest second it looked like it might have been a dud. But it was designed to penetrate into the ship before detonating, thus ensuring much more damage.
Seconds after it pierced the hull, the steel after deck lifted slightly, a movement so unexpected as to be virtually unrecognizable. Then it lifted again, and large sections of it peeled back from the hull, leaving a fiery interior exposed. The flames spread quickly until fire was gouting out of every orifice of the ship.
Along the forward deck, the survivors swarmed around the self-deploying life boats, chopping through the restraining straps. Those with the presence of mind to do so simply triggered the deployment mechanism and the life rafts fell into the sea. The inflation devices triggered automatically when salt water hit them, and within seconds brilliant international orange inflatables were dotted around the ocean below the S-3. People plunged over the sides, making barely perceptible splashes in the water as they entered it, then struggled to paddle over to the nearest rafts. They faced large swells capped with whitecaps, and the wind was catching the life rafts and driving them away from the survivors. Those that did catch a life raft wielded the small paddles to try to return and help their ship mates, but more than one drowned before they could return to help them.
As the reports from the Viking overhead the flaming wreckage of the
