Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (49 page)

           
“Bullet Two is engaging,”
Douglas
cried out on the interplane frequency. He
snapped his Tomcat into a steep left rolling dive, pulling on the stick to keep
the fast-moving Chinese attackers on his radarscope. “Bullet Three, release,
clear, and cover to the right.”

           
“Bullet Three’s clearing right.”
Douglas
’ wingman made a hard climbing right turn,
quickly moving up and away from the kill zone and accelerating back toward the
fleet. If
Douglas
missed and the
Phoenix
missiles from Bullet Six and Seven missed,
Bullet Three could make one last shot at the fighters with his Sparrow
radar-guided missiles; it was up to
Ranger's
escorts to get the bandits.

           
Roberts coached his frontseater in
as they completed the turn above and behind the Chinese attackers: “Range
twenty miles . . . seventeen miles . . . holding at seventeen miles . . . good
tone, clear to shoot . .

           
“Fox one, fox one,”
Douglas
called out as he pressed the button to
launch a Sparrow missile.

           
He was preparing to arm a second one
for immediate launch when he saw a dim flash of light ahead of them, then
another, then several more brilliant long tongues of flame slash across the
darkness. Even at their extreme range, there was no mistaking it—eight huge
missiles, with exhaust plumes the size of space-shuttle boosters, were being
launched by the Chinese fighters! “Missile launch! Bandits launching missiles .
. . six . . . seven . . . eight of ’em, big ones!”

           
The plumes reared back and down as
the missiles climbed skyward.
Douglas
thought he could hear the rumble and even feel the power of those huge missiles
as they climbed nearly out of sight. “Can you pick ’em up on radar, Zippo?”
Douglas
screamed. “Can you see those fuckin’
missiles?” “I’m tryin’! Shit! Get your nose up! I’ll try for a lock-on!”
Roberts cried out.
Douglas
hauled back on the stick and hit the
afterburners as Roberts put the AWG-9 radar into range-while-search mode for
maximum range capability against the big, fast-moving missiles. “Contact! Got
’em! Got one at thirty miles! Locked on!”

           
“Fox one, fox one, Bullet Two,”
Douglas
called out on the interplane frequency. The
big Sparrow missile slid off the rails and immediately went straight up, using
its powerful first-stage motor to gain maximum altitude.

           
“It’s not gonna make it,” Roberts
said. He could feel an uncontrollable shiver coursing up and down his back. The
Sparrow was launched near its extreme maximum range and it climbed too high,
too fast, and he could see that the missile’s motor had already burned out. His
AWG-9 radar showed the Chinese missiles already accelerating to six hundred
knots, but the Sparrow was closing at only eight hundred knots because it had
to climb so high to sustain its unpowered glide. “Shit, shit, it’s not gonna
make it . . .” “Bullet Three has a judy on the missiles,”
Douglas
’ wing- man suddenly shouted on the radios.
“I got a lock-on! I’m going after them!”

           
“Bullet Two is clearing off the
missiles,”
Douglas
radioed to the inbound Tomcat fighters as
he pulled into a steep left climb and turned away from the Chinese fighters.
“Bullet Two is clear.” The incoming Tomcat pilots immediately let loose with a
four-missile barrage of
Phoenix
missiles—some designated for the Chinese fighters, others for the
missiles that were now headed for the
Ranger
and her escorts.

           
With their heavy missile loads gone,
however, the Chinese fighters really began to move. Seconds after the missiles
were in the sky, the AWACS reported the Chinese going nearly supersonic and
making a sweeping left turn back to the northeast. “Bullet flight, be advised,
Basket’s got music,” the AWACS radar plane reported—they were picking up
jamming signals from the enemy fighter-bombers. “Bullet Two, bandits at your
ten o’clock
position, twenty miles. Bullet Three,
bandits at your
six o’clock
,
ten miles.” Suddenly a huge explosion, followed by a ripple of orange and
yellow fireballs, erupted in the sky ahead of
Douglas
as one of the
Phoenix
missiles found its target.

           
“Splash one bandit, splash one!
Bullet Two’s got the other one,” Roberts cried out. The last remaining Chinese
fighter had pulled directly into his line of fire as he made his postattack
turn, and even at his present speed the tight turn bled off all his energy,
which made the shot even easier. The steady warbling tone in
Douglas
’ headset was replaced by a high-pitched tone
as the AWG-9 radar switched from range- while-search mode to
pulse-Doppler-single-target-track mode for missile lock-on, and
Douglas
squeezed the trigger and let fly his third
Sparrow missile.

           
But the jamming from the Chinese
attackers was too great—the missile tracked well for only a few seconds before
veering right and beginning a death-spiral to the dark waters below. There was
still one enemy fighter out there.

           
Douglas
found himself in a near-panic. He had only
one Sparrow remaining—his Sidewinders were useless against a target so far
away—and no fuel to continue the chase. He was helpless. If he jammed in the
afterburners to chase down the last fighter, he would run out of fuel long
before reaching
Ranger.

           
The decision was made for him
moments later: “Bullet Two, disengage,” the AWACS controller called. “Bullet
Six flight is at your
six o’clock
, thirty miles. Clear up and starboard and
RTB; I show you four past your bingo.”
Douglas
checked their fuel, and it was worse than
that—they were just a few minutes from emergency fuel—they needed an AK-6
tanker immediately. Douglas and Roberts could do nothing else but head back to
Ranger
and hope they still had a deck to
land on as they listened to the chase unfold. . . .

Aboard Bullet Three

           
“Bullet Three, contact home plate
immediately,” the AWACS controller reported. Lieutenant Commander John “Horn”
Kelly flicked his radios as fast as his shaking fingers could work the buttons.

           
“Bullet Three, go.”

           
“Bullet Three, take a shot and
clear,” the controller aboard
Ranger
said. “Five-two is ready to engage in sixty seconds.” “Five-two” was CG-52, the
USS
Bunker Hill,
an Aegis-class
guided-missile cruiser-escort that could detect targets out to 175 miles and
track and engage sea-skimming targets out to 40 miles; it carried SM-2 Aegis
vertical-launch surface-to-air missiles. In addition, a special system called
BGAAWC, or Battle Group Anti-Aircraft Warfare Coordination, allowed the
Bunker Hill
to remotely control the SM-2
Standard antiaircraft missiles aboard the cruiser
Ste- rett
and the Sea Sparrow missiles aboard the destroyers
Hewitt
and
Fife,
which were the
Ranger’s
other three escorts.

           
Kelly’s
RIO
, Lieutenant “Faker” Markey, sang out
immediately, “Got a judy on the missiles, Horn ... I got ’em locked up. Shoot
away.”

           
“Good work, Faker.” On the
Ranger’s
tactical frequency, Kelly
radioed, “Bullet Three, copy, fox . . .”

           
Suddenly, on the emergency Guard
frequency, they heard, “Missiles! Bandits firing missiles! Horn, check six ...
!”

           
The AAR-47 infrared warning receiver
beeped just then, and several flare cartridges shot off into the night sky as
Markey’s left index finger began to madly jab the “Flare” button—the
supercoded, electronic “eye” of the infrared warning seeker had detected the
motor-ignition flash of a missile less than eight miles behind them. Kelly
pulled the throttles to near idle power, rolled inverted, and pulled the nose
to the ocean, trying to get his hot tail vertical and away from the missile’s
seeker. “Find that missile!” Kelly shouted.

           
Markey’s response was almost
immediate: “I see it! I see it! High above us . . . it’s passing over us . . .”

           
A flash of light caught Kelly’s
attention—to his horror, he noticed the flash was one of his own decoy flares.
The hot phosphorus blob seemed to float just a few yards alongside the American
fighter. It was bright enough to attract the enemy missile. “Stop ejecting
flares!” Kelly screamed. “It’ll follow us down . . . !”

           
But it was too late.

           
In his panic, Markey kept on
ejecting decoy flares as the Tomcat continued its break and dive, and the trail
of flares caused the Chinese Pen Lung-9 heat-seeking missile to snap down in
the wake of the Tomcat, where it reacquired the F-14’s hot exhaust and finished
its deadly voyage. The PL- 9’s twenty-two-pound high-explosive warhead
detonated on contact, shredding both engines instantly and destroying the
Tomcat long before the crew had a chance to eject.

Aboard the Ticonderoga-class
cruiser USS BUNKER HILL

           
The
Combat
Information
Center
in an Aegis-class guided missile cruiser
was like sitting in a giant big-screen video arcade. Four operators—the
embarked group commander of the
Ranger
battle group and his assistant plus the TAO, or tactical action officer, and
his assistant—each sat in front of two 42-inch-square, four-color computer
screens that showed the entire
Ranger
battle group, using computer-generated symbology and digitized coastal maps,
creating a “big picture” of the entire battle area and highlighting friendly
and enemy vessels and aircraft in relation to the fleet and any nearby
political boundaries. The incredible MK-7 Aegis weapon system could track and
process over one hundred different targets beyond five hundred miles in range
by integrating radar information from other surface, land, or airborne search
radars; the SPY-1 phased-array radar on the
Bunker
Hill
itself had a range of almost two hundred miles and could spot a
sea-skimming missile on the horizon at a range of over forty miles. Aegis was
designed to defend a large carrier battle group from dense and complicated enemy
air and sea assault by integrating the entire group’s air-defense network into
a single display and control area, and then providing long-range, high-speed
decision-making and automatic-weapon employment for not only the Aegis
cruiser’s weapon itself, but for all the ships of the battle group
—Bunker HilP
s Aegis system could control
the weapons of all the
Ranger's
battle group.

           
It all sounded complicated, very
high-tech, and foolproof—but at that moment, staring down the barrel of a gun,
it did not seem very foolproof.

           
The Aegis air-defense system was
designed to have the battle group commander and the ship’s commanding officer
direct fleet defense from the Tactical Flag Command Center, but with an
aircraft carrier in the group and a rather tightly packed deployment of ships,
the
Ranger
battle group commander,
Rear Admiral Conner Walheim, was aboard
Ranger
consulting directly with the carrier’s officers, so his deputy for antiaircraft
warfare, Captain Richard Feine- mann, was on the Aegis console. And because the
Bunker HilP
s skipper preferred to
stay on the bridge during such operations, the ship’s Tactical Action Officer
was representing him on the Aegis console.

           
Lieutenant Commander Paul Hart was
the
Bunker HilP
s TAC, and the Aegis
system was his pride and joy—while the captain preferred to stay on the bridge
during these engagements and monitor them on his ASTAB automated status board
monitors, Hart was in his element in the dark, rather claustrophobic confines
on the CIC. Feinemann was a lot like Hart’s skipper—he was a boat driver who
had little patience for the dazzling and sometimes confusing array of
electronic gadgets deep within the heart of a warship. He was an ex-destroyer
skipper and antisubmarine-warfare action group commander who had spent a length
of time on shore studying newer antiair radar integration systems such as
Aegis, but had little actual experience of it. Although Hart was the Aegis
expert, Feinemann was still in overall command of antiair fleet defense and
would command all antiair assets in the group from
Bunker
Hill