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  In the tactical flag command center aboard the Acheson, Burke was told that the Siberian fleet had apparently stopped and was turning about. No one aboard the Acheson or any of the other American ships thought the Siberians were withdrawing simply because their radars had lit up upon seeing the Ticonderoga’s launch. Perhaps, Admiral Burke told Freeman, they were withdrawing out of the Americans’ killing range. But this would only be true for the shorter-range missiles like the Harpoons; the two Ticonderogas and other American ships had twenty-seven-hundred-pound Tomahawk cruise missiles aboard with a much greater range, and the Siberians surely knew this.

  The Siberian air armada was still on screen, and now the night erupted. Over ninety-three missiles were fired by the American fleet in less than forty seconds, from every kind of mount, including track-swivel “six-packs,” and rows of armored vertical-launch “egg cartons” immediately below each Ticonderoga’s bridge, filling the night with a kaleidoscope of deadly pyrotechnics. So impressive was it that, despite the obvious dangers, petty officers throughout the fleet were obliged to threaten direst punishment — no shore leave — in order to keep some men, a number of cooks among them, below deck.

  Aboard the USS Acheson, as two white dots moved toward one another on the blue screen, became one, then disappeared, the voice came once, twice, four times in fifty seconds: “Aegis evaluates kill!” There was a cheer from combat control.

  “Shut up!” commanded the officer of the deck. “We’ve just started.” From the USS Acheson, the last Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, and F-18 Hornets were being hurled aloft to meet the incoming bandits, but now it was recognized that the Forgers were being overtaken by thirty Fulcrum MiG-29Cs.

  This changed everything. Burke, however, confident in his air commander’s ability, turned his attention to blips now indicating sub-fired SS-N-15s, the thirty-three-mile-range Siberian equivalent of the American SUBROC missiles, beginning their arcs toward the American fleet. Quickly he looked up at the TMS — track management system — that was capable of processing, parsing, and correlating up to fifty-five hundred images per half hour without backlog buildup — when there were no glitches. But readouts were going haywire, and Burke had to reply on the not-so-sophisticated backup “stand-alone” ASIC — at sea independent control — tracking and targeting system. It was enough to give him the sub’s approximate position, the sonar/prop recognition giving a computer image. It was a rough one but nevertheless showed a sub composite with bevelled sail sprouting a “five-stick” cluster: Park Lamp direction-finding loop, high frequency and radome masts, with search and attack periscopes. An Alfa II.

  “Any change in their fleet’s position?” asked Burke, as antisub control, with even its SUBROC having a range of only forty miles at best, fired off two Loral Hycor MK-36 decoys, simultaneously playing out its SLQ-25 Nixie towed torpedo decoy.

  “Change in their fleet position?” demanded Burke again.

  “No, sir.”

  “Range?”

  “Thirty-five miles, sir.”

  It was a strange world, Freeman surmised, where, air-locked against chemical and biological as well as conventional warfare, you sat in the eerie blue combat control center, never actually seeing your enemy except for a computer image. Burke calmly tried to refine overall strategy even as his task force threw missile for missile, the Siberian fleet still retreating, its subs’ positions becoming less and less certain in the din of props churning at flank speed, decoys and chaff adding to the countermeasures, the latter defending the American fleet yet also making it more difficult to locate the exact positions of the deadly Atlas. If these twenty-one-foot-long, ten-mile range, active/passive homing torpedoes, with their 1,250-pound warheads, travelling at forty-five knots, got through, the U.S. task force would be in a lot of trouble.

  “Sir!” announced the OOD.

  “Yes,” acknowledged Burke, his right hand reaching for the message, his eyes not straying from the deceptively calm blue light of the console left of him where he pressed the “Subord” key. He was checking on the status of his CATF— commander amphibious task force — Admiral Leahy, and the CLF — commander landing force — Freeman, aboard the Davis.

  The message he was holding told him that a Truxtun CGM— guided-missile cruiser — the USS Prescott, had been hit. There hadn’t been any trace of a Prescott-bound missile either on the carrier’s TFCC board or aboard the Prescott. The CGM lay foundering, holed at the waterline below the forward 127-millimeter gun turret where a twenty-three-foot-long, eight-foot-wide gash was taking water. Through the hole, dying sailors could see the flashes of the aerial battle, tail exhausts seen as winks of light through the cruiser’s plates, peppered as though by a shotgun, on the starboard side. The fiercely burning ship soon lit up the carrier abaft of her where a roaring cacophony of blue flames and bleeding steam catapults indicated the Acheson’s flight deck as the last of the Strike Eagles took wing.

  The Prescott was sinking and fast; the only ones able to leave her were those thrown into the water from the concussion, the sky above them banging, orange-white burst after burst lighting up one of the Ticonderogas like stuttering flashbulbs. The crew of the Sea King rescue chopper, hovering on station a mile off the carrier’s stern for pickup should any of the takeoffs go awry, had been impatient to go help the Prescott’s men in the water but only now, when all planes were aloft, could the chopper move toward the few men she could spot waving on the cruiser’s afterdeck and those yelling in the water in the penumbra of fire.

  Most of the 575 men aboard the Prescott were already dead, the fires aboard her a crematorium. Those not killed by impact or suffocated by the toxic fumes from fires that had “flash-jumped” throughout the ship — twisted and buckled watertight doors offering no sanctuary — were now dying in a flaming oil slick off the starboard quarter. Others were killed as the white-hot tower supporting the air search and G-band navigation radars crumbled into itself like the skeleton of some enormous animal, sending showers of white-hot metal hissing into the sea.

  The enemy aircraft were now closing, U.S. fighters engaging, the background a staccato of victors and vanquished, Fulcrums tangling with Eagles and Tomcats high above the Eagles with the added burden of trying to stop the Forgers. Burke ordered the furball chatter to be taken off PA, so that only the air commander and those immediately concerned could hear it, for fear it would interfere with the concentration of those still watching the enemy fleet. None of the Forgers had yet fired missiles, so the question was, what had gotten close enough, without being picked up either by sonar or radar, to take out the Prescott?

  “Damn it!” said Burke, so softly not even the radar operator nearby heard it. “Patrol boats. Flares all quarters.”

  “Flares all quarters, sir!” responded the OOD, and within seconds they had messages, confirming Burke’s suspicion, streaming in from every part of the fleet. There were swarms of patrol boats — foil-borne — reports of them closing difficult to hear above the cacophony erupting beyond the island of calm that was the USS Acheson’s TFCC — the sound of missiles, massed machine-gun and “pom-pom” AA fire reaching crescendos that drowned the men’s voices.

  “Forty plus,” the OOD reported to Burke, the OOD suddenly thrusting his headset away from him, the crash of a missile hitting one of the American destroyers so loud he was deafened for several seconds and immediately ordered off the bridge, replaced by one Capt. Elias Wilkes, junior, a man whose career, although he had not come up through Annapolis, was about to take off. Realizing they were under close-quarter attack, Wilkes now hypothesized why the Siberian fleet had uncharacteristically “retreated” and why the subs, no doubt lying quiet, props stilled, had thus denied the U.S. passive-mode sonar their position. Suddenly he knew why they hadn’t turned.

  “Mines, sir,” Wilkes told Burke.

  Burke tried to suppress his alarm. Mines in choke points throughout the world — that was standard drill. Egress points, like La Perouse between Sakhalin and Japan, were no doub
t already mined by the Siberians. This was understood. The U.S. and their allies — all the world’s navies — had long prepared their own egress channels for the defense of last resort. But here— hundreds of miles out from the nearest landfall of the Kuril Islands, an area well mapped and frequently patrolled by NATO’s navies? If Wilkes was right — though the small patrol boats couldn’t have done it, given their already-crowded decks-it certainly would explain the turning about of the fleet, suggesting that the mines had just been laid ahead of the Siberians. But no mine layers had been reported by SAT intelligence.

  “The subs have been seeding them,” said Wilkes.

  “What?”

  “Subs laid them, sir. Thousands of AMD one-thousands. The subs can’t lay the AMD five-hundred.” Wilkes’s head inclined quizzically. “Strange that the lighter mine is more difficult for the sub. Probably the shape of its—”

  “How does the AMD work?” Burke shot back. It was no time to pretend you knew everything. “What’s the trigger? Magnetic? Acoustic? Pressure?” He understood why magnetic wouldn’t get the hydrofoils, the latter consisting of plastic composites and the engine would be too far above the air/sea interface to trigger an acoustic mine. That left only pressure. But Wilkes shook his head.

  “Pressure mine self-releases when the water column above it changes, but these hydrofoils probably don’t spread their weight over a wide enough area,” proffered Wilkes.

  Wilkes’s guess was wrong. He’d told the truth in part — that the pressure from the hydrofoil wouldn’t set some of them off, though three of the fast-weaving attack boats had been sunk by others in the flotilla in the melee of the wake-streaked sea. Few men had a chance to notice the phytoplankton lit up even more beautifully by the intertwining tracer, flare light, missile explosions, and exhaust glare.

  What had actually happened was that the foil-borne craft had sped through a protective channel, no more than half a mile wide, ahead of their fleet and the Tattletale, then spread out in a trumpet-shaped fountain, like angry wasps emerging from the safe, narrow channel left by the mine-laying subs. Meanwhile the subs waited in their silence should the American task force find the channel by sheer luck. The Siberians and Burke knew the chance of doing this was one in a million.

  “Turn about!” Burke ordered. He had no choice, though he knew the enemy would later make great capital from the fact that the American Seventh Fleet, for the first time in its history, had turned tail and run. But to stop would imperil his ships even more, making them stationary targets for the missiles already being fired by five Forgers who had dived through under cover of an arrowhead formation of Fulcrums.

  * * *

  In running Burke had bought himself valuable time and fought off the foil-borne attack craft, sinking twenty-three. Another two of them were victims of their own missile fire; another was blown out of the water by an American Adams class destroyer. Even so, one of the U.S.’s Wasp class LHAs, an amphibious landing helicopter assault ship a quarter-mile to the right of Freeman’s, was hit. Despite the pumps working overtime, the forty-two-thousand-ton vessel was reduced to three knots, with Marines and seamen working like navvies, the smell of their sweat mixing with the burning odors of battle as they strove to shift cargo from port to starboard to even the ship’s trim before the pumps, already overheating because of “spare uniform” clogged intakes, gave up the ghost.

  Watching the scene through his infrared field glasses aboard the Davis, Freeman said nothing. This was the navy’s department, and he was too astute a commander not to know when to keep quiet. But Norton could tell the general was worried — as worried as he’d ever seen him. If the Siberians tried hard enough to stop the American force here, how much worse would it be when you tried to land on their soil and with the element of naval surprise completely lost? Two Forgers appeared, white shimmers in the rolling green sea of infrared.

  “Inside!” yelled Freeman. “Quickly!”

  Freeman saw one Forger disintegrate, the flash of a Tomcat— or was it a Strike Eagle? — streaking by, the Forger dropping toward the Davis, its “ODD Rods”—friend or foe identification antennae forward of the armored glass windscreen — glinting momentarily in the darkness, its Tumansky turbojet screaming in a seventeen-thousand-pound reverse thrust, its twin-barreled cannon spitting red tracer, before it crashed into the sea, the slap followed by a soft explosion of phosphorescent seawater that now fell like rain. But in diverting the U.S. task force away from the Kuril landing sites, the Siberian fleet only succeeded in forcing Freeman to shift the axis of his invasion force away from the Kurils south to the Sea of Japan for the main landing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Khabarovsk

  Beneath the picture of the scantily clad Georgian beauty in the Khabarovsk reading room the standby Klaxon blared. The Siberian pilots, including Sergei Marchenko, looked up at the computer screen and saw a cluster of X’s — enemy fighters and bombers rising up from Wakkanai out of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido, 370 miles east-southeast. Too far for their Fulcrums to intercept and have enough fuel to return safely. The fighters out of Cape Krilon on Sakhalin Island’s southernmost tip would have to engage, but if the enemy got across the Tatarskiy Strait between Sakhalin and the mainland, the Khabarovsk wing would have to go up.

  “We should have hit Japan with H-bombs on day one,” Marchenko’s wingman said. He knew he was talking rubbish — any nuclear exchange would be suicidal — the irony being that both sides had to fight the biggest conventional war in history. But the wingman was afraid. The American air force, though it could never win the war by itself against an enormous power like Siberia, over ten times the size of Iraq, had nevertheless already penetrated Siberia’s outer, Kuril/Sakhalin defenses. The best Siberia could hope for in the air was to slow them down, knowing that the truly decisive battles would be on the ground-across the vastness of Siberian mountains, taiga, and tundra.

  There was another alarm: more American planes rising from a carrier 130 miles east of the Far Eastern TVD’s port of Nakhodka, just over fifty miles due east of Vladivostok. An air corridor fives miles wide and a hundred miles long from Svetlaya on the coast westward toward Khabarovsk was being blasted out by the largest air bombardment since the Iraqi war, the number of sorties in the first twelve hours — launched from air bases from Otaru to Wakkanai on Japan’s Hokkaido — surpassing by 508 the 2,000 flown by the USAF in the first twenty-four hours of the Iraqi war. The fighter-protected American bombers were dropping everything from Smart bombs on the reinforced early-warning coastal radar stations to FAEs and in particular runway-destroying cluster bombs.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  As the USS Winston Davis rolled slightly in the swell, Norton looking the worse for wear, Freeman searched for his glasses, couldn’t find them, and instead used the telescopic pointer, which he normally eschewed, to illustrate his project. Saying nothing yet to his divisional commanders gathered in the crowded helo maintenance deck, he stabbed at the lower left of Siberia on the steppes between the southernmost extremity of the Urals and the Aral Sea; the pointer then slid eastward along the fiftieth parallel, south of Novosibirsk, on through the mountainous region west of Lake Baikal, only a hundred miles now from the Mongolian border, then further east to the big 350-mile-wide horseshoe bend in the Amur River that formed the border with China. From there the tip moved abruptly up to the far northeast of the map in a right hook that took in the Pacific mountain barriers of Siberia’s eastern shield. He ignored the vast central Siberian plateau and river-veined west Siberian plain that was taiga, as well as the wide crescent of treeless tundra that was northern Siberia. “Eastern Siberia, gentlemen,” he told his audience, “is all we’re interested in — at the moment.”

  He moved the pointer up and down the long Pacific flank. “Think of it as a hockey stick, the handle being the eastern mountain chain. At the bottom of the stick, in the groove, as it were, lies Khabarovsk, the gate to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. The Siberians know the taiga i
s the best place for armor — ours as well as theirs. But first they have to stop us getting through this eastern shield to Khabarovsk — two hundred miles in from the coast.”

  Freeman’s knuckles tapped out an impatient tattoo over the coastal range of the Sikhote-Alin. “Now a lot of these mountains are five thousand feet and up and we’d be nuts to try running armor through deep snow in those ravines. Next to no roads anyhow. One Siberian section with antitank rockets could hold us up for a week. What we have to do, gentlemen, is attack Khabarovsk from the south — here — from Rudnaya Pristan on the coast. Move a hundred and twenty miles inland then swing north for a hundred and twenty miles through the Malinovka River valley road to Dalnerechensk.” It was men the impatience of his dreams of endless snow and ice became manifest. “Don’t worry about bridges being blown — drive straight over the frozen rivers. They’re your roads in Siberia. Then, gentlemen, a two-hundred-mile run north, adjacent to the Ussuri River — on the left flank, the Chinese-Soviet border — to here.” His fist banged against Khabarovsk where the Ussuri met the Amur in the lowland forests and snow-covered meadows. “From there it’s west, young man. Along the Trans-Siberian rail route to Baikal and Irkutsk.”

  Norton moved uneasily in his seat. When it was all added up, Lake Baikal was over a thousand miles to the west, and despite the valleys that formed the Trans-Siberian route, the last two hundred and fifty miles would be through high country like the Khamar Daban Range. But Freeman, as if reading Norton’s mind, had anticipated his aide’s question. “ATO,” (air task order), said Freeman, “will be to secure total air superiority from our beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan to Irkutsk forty-five miles from Baikal’s western shore.” Freeman turned to Miller, general of the air forces in Japan. “Bill, can your boys handle that? Or are they too fat from eating all that damn sushi in Tokyo?”