Authors: Stephen Coonts
Tags: #Action & Adventure, #Cuba, #Political, #Fiction, #Grafton; Jake (Fictitious character), #Thrillers, #Espionage
appreciate
you executing this affidavit. I look forward to working
with you in the future. Good day.”…Ferrara went.
Vargas read the note. “Any other American
reaction to my speech or their president’s?”
“Yes,
sir.
As we expected, the American pundits generally
support their president, but there are many who feel
the United States has goaded Cuba
into military adventurism with their political
shunning of Castro. This feeling is widespread in
Europe. Around the world there are many who feel that
Cuba has endured much oppression at America’s
hands.”
Vargas nodded. All the world roots for the underdog.
‘The American carrier battle group that
was in Guantanamo is now south of the Isle of
Pines. They have only a few planes aloft.”
“And General Alba? Is he getting troops
into position around the silos?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Make sure the air force is on full alert, the
army, the navy, the antiaircraft missile
batteries, everyone. If the Americans come we will
bloody their nose, perhaps even launch a missile.
One missile will teach them a bitter lesson. They
have never seen anything like that virus: they will have no
stomach for it. The error of their ways is about
to become quite apparent.”
“You do not believe this ‘massive retaliation”
threat?”
“It is laughableea”…he scoffed. “No American
president will ever order the use of weapons of mass
destruction, even in retaliation. The Americans
stopped making war years agothey use force to send
messages to “bad” governments, never to kill
the civilians who support that government. Guilt
is the new American ethic: they would be horrified
at the murder of the hungry.”…He waved his hand
dismissively, then became deadly serious:
“The Yanquis may, however, screw up
the courage to use force against our armed forces. If
so, the Cuban people will rally to the flag and we shall
heroically defend our
national honor. And use the missiles to show them the
error of their ways.”
“Cubans are patriotsea”…Santana agreed.
“After the Bay of Pigs, Castro was president for
life.”
“A man with the right enemies can do anythingea”…Vargas
declared, and smiled.
While Alejo Vargas and Colonel Santana
were conferring in Havana, the Americans opened
fire. Three Spruanceclass destroyers that had
sailed from Mayport soon after sunrise were now
fifty miles off the Florida coast headed south,
well away from the coastal shipping lanes. They
began launching Tomahawk cruise missiles from
the vertical launchers buried in the deck in front
of their bridges. Although each ship carried
forty-eight Tomahawks in their vertical launch
tubes, they only launched twenty missiles
each.
On the bridge of USS
Comte de Grasse
the captain watched with binoculars as his
missiles leveled out from then- launch climb and
disappeared into the sea haze. One of the missiles
dove into the ocean, making a tiny splash.
“There went three million bucksea”…he muttered.
After the launch was complete, he called down
to Combat on the squawk box. “How many
successfully launched?”
“Nineteen, sir.”
“And the other ships?”
“Twenty and eighteen, Captain.”
“What is the time of flight?”
“An hour and twenty minutes, sir.”
“Very well. Report the launch.”
Not bad, the captain thought, and gave orders
to secure from General Quarters.
God help the Cubans, he thought, then turned to the
navigator to discuss the voyage to the Florida
Straits, where
Comte de Grasse
and her sister ships would join the Aegis cruisers
already there.
Aboard USS
United States,
Jake Grafton seated himself in the admiral’s
raised chair in Combat and surveyed the
computer displays. Gil Pascal, the chief of
staff, was also there along with the ship’s air wing commander,
the Combat Control Center officer and the members of his
staff.
Jake leaned over and whispered to Pascal. “See
if you can find me some aspirin, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
He was looking over the plan and watching the display of
commercial traffic going in and out of Jose Marti
International Airport in”…Havana when a chief
petty officer handed him the encrypted satellite
phone.
“Admiral Grafton, sir.”
“This is the president, Admiral. How goes the
war?”
“We already have Tomahawks in the air, sir, but the
Cubans won’t know what’s coming for an hour or
so.”
“We’re sweating the program here in Washingtonea”…the
president continued. “Our feet are getting
frosty. If we chicken out, could the airborne
Tomahawks be intentionally crashed?”
Jake Grafton took a deep breath and exhaled
before he answered. “Yes, sir. That is possible.”
“Let’s hold on to that option. I’m
sitting here with General Totten and the senior
leadership of the Congress. I want your opinion on
this question: Should we postpone this show for a day or two?
Or indefinitely? What are your thoughts?”
Jake Grafton licked his lips. In his mind’s
eye he could see ballistic missiles rising from
their silos on pillars of fire, and sailors, just
like the ones manning the computers here in Combat aboard
United States,
sitting in front of radar scopes and computer
keyboards aboard the Aegis cruisers.
“Mr. President, I have also been thinking about the
risks. The only thing I can promise is that we will
do our best.
No one can guarantee results. Still, in my
opinion, considering just the military risks, we should
go now, without delay.”
“Thank you, Admiralea”…the president said.
“Jake, this is Tater Totten.”
“Good evening, sir.”
“Just wanted to say good luckea”…the general said, then the
connection broke.
Jake Grafton handed the handset to the chief.
“Here is your aspirin, Admiralea”…Gil
Pascal said, holding out water and three
white pills.
Four EA-6But Prowlers sat on the ramp at
NAS Key West. Their crews stood lounging
around the aircraft. They had flown in just an hour
ago, and now the fuel trucks were pulling away. The
crews had huddled with the crew of the two C-130
Hercs parked on the ramp, studying charts and checking
frequencies. Now it was time to man up.
As the marines in full conibat gear filed aboard
the Hercs, the crews of the Prowlers strapped in and
started engines. Two of the Prowlers carried three
electronic jamming pods on external stations and
two HARM missiles. HARM stood for
high-speed anti-radiation missile. The other two
Prowlers carried four HARMS and one jamming pod
on the center-line station.
With the engines running, the pilots closed the
Prowlers” canopies and taxied behind the Hercs
toward the duty runway. No one said anything on the
radio.
The flight deck of USS
United States
came alive. A small army of people in brightly
colored shuts swarmed around the airplanes that
packed the deck as the flight crews
manned up and started engines.
Light from the setting sun came in at a low angle
like a bright spotlight, illuminating the towering
cumulus which dotted the surface of the sea, and made
Soon the plane guard rescue helicopter
engaged its rotors and lifted off the deck as the first
airplanes began taxiing toward the bow and waist
catapults.
Aboard USS
Hue City
and USS
Guilford Courthouse,
Straits, the afternoon had been a busy one.
Twenty-five miles of ocean separated the two
ships, but they were linked together electronically as
tightly as if they were wired together at a pier.
As the Hercs and EA-6BS taxied at Key
West, and
United States
prepared to launch her air wing, the weapons officers
aboard the cruisers checked the ships’ inertia!
systems one more time, compared the GPS locations yet
again, then gave the fire order.
The first of the Tomahawk missiles rose
vertically from their launchers on fountains of fire.
The wings of the missiles popped out, then the
missiles began tilting to the south as they accelerated
away into the evening sky.
The first missiles from each ship were still in sight when
the second ones game roaring from the launchers. Each
ship launched sixteen missiles, then turned
to stay in the racetrack pattern they had been using
to hold station.
Sitting in the Combat Control Center aboard
United States,
Jake Grafton felt the thump as the first bow
catapult fired. A second later he felt the
number-three cat on the waist slam a plane
into the air. His eyes went to the monitor, which was showing
a video feed from a camera mounted high in the ship’s
island superstructure. Each catapult stroke was
felt throughout the ship as the planes were thrown into the
sky, one by one.
A half dozen planes were still on deck awaiting
their turn on the catapults when the destroyers in the
carrier’s screen began launching Tomahawk
cruise missiles.
The television cameraman in the ship’s
island swung his camera to catch the fireworks. The
picture captured the attention of the people in Combat,
who paused to watch the.
missiles roar from their launchers on fountains of
reddish yellow fire, almost too brilliant
to look at.
When the last of the missiles was gone, the camera
returned to the launching planes.
Gil Pascal said to Jake, “It’ll go well,
Admiral.”…Jake nodded and took another sip of
water.
The sun seemed to be taking its good ol’ time going
down, Lieutenant Commander Marcus Gillispie
thought.
He was at the controls of an EA-6But Prowler
that had just launched from
United States.
He had worked his way around towering buildups reaching
up to 10,000 feet and was now above them, looking at
the evening sky. The last of the red sunlight played
on the tops of the clouds, but the canyons between them were
purple and gray shading to black. As Gillispie
climbed he delayed the sun’s apparent setting for a
few more minutes. Soon the last of the red and gold
faded from the cloud tops below.
A very high cirrus layer stayed yellow and red for the
longest time as Marcus circled the carrier at
30,000 feet. Two FirstA-18 Hornets
came swimming up from the deepening gloom to join on
him.
“You guys all set”…”…Marcus asked his three
crewmen.
His crewmen counted off in order.
The Prowler was the electronic-warfare version of the
old A-6 Intruder airframe. While the
Prowler bore a superficial resemblance to its
older brother, the electronic suite in the
aircraft could not have been more different: the Prowler was
designed to fight the electronic battle in today’s
skies, not drop bombs.
The airframe was also longer than the old A-6,
lengthened to accommodate four people and a massive array
of computerized cockpit displays. The people sat in
ejection seats, two in the front, two in the
back. Only one of the crewmen was a pilot, who
sat in the left front seat: the other three were
electronic-warfare specialists. And they were not
CUBA
all men. One of the guys in back tonight was a
woman, a lieutenant (junior grade) on her
first cruise.
Marcus looked at his watch, then keyed his mike.
He waited while his encryption gear timed in with the
ship’s gear, then said, “Strike, this is
Nighthawk One. I have my chicks and am ready
to leave orbit. Request permission to strangle the
parrot.”
“Roger, Nighthawk One. Call feet dry.”
“Wilco.”
Marcus Gillispie rolled the Prowler wings
level heading northwest for the city of Havana. Then
he engaged the autopilot. When he was satisfied
that the autopilot was going to keep the plane straight
and level, he flashed his exterior lights, then
turned them off, leaving only a set of tiny formation
lights illuminated on the sides of Ihe
aircraft above the wing root. Finally he reached
down and turned his radar transponder, his parrot,
off. The Prowler and the two Hornets on her wing were
no longer radiating on any electromagnetic
frequency.
The pilot looked back past his wingtips at the
Hornets. One was on each wing now. Like the
Prowler, their missile racks were loaded
with HARM’S. The Hornets also carried two
Sidewinders, heat-seeking air-to-air
missiles, one on each wingtip, just in case.
Already the displays in the Prowler were alive with
information. The electronic countermeasures officer,
ECMO, in the seat beside the pilot, was really the
tactical commander of the plane. His gear, and that of the
two electronic-warfare officers in the back
cockpit, provided a complete display of the
tactical electronic picture. The information the
computers used was derived from sensors embedded all
over the aircraft in its skin, and from the sensors of
one of the HARM missiles, which was already on line.
The ECMO with Marcus Gillispie was Commander
Schuyler Coleridge, the squadron commanding
officer, who wound up in the right seat of Prowlers because
his eyes
were not quite 20/20 uncorrected when he graduated from
the Naval Academy. The truth of it was, he
thought he had the better job. Pilots, he liked
to say, just drove the bus ECMO’S fought the war.
He had one to fight tonight. The Cubans were going
to get really riled when those Tomahawks started
popping, he thought, and then the fireworks would start.
Just now Coleridge was busy running his
equipment through its built-in tests. Everything was
working, as usual. That routine fact was the greatest
advance of the technological age, in Coleridge’s
opinion. In his younger days he had had a bellyful
of fancy equipment that couldn’t be maintained.
He was sweating just now, even though the cockpit
temperature was positively balmy. And he
knew his fellow crewmen were sweatingthis was the first time
in combat for all of them.
It will go all right,
he thought. After the tension he had suffered through this afternoon
and evening, Schuyler Coleridge actually welcomed
the catapult shot.
Let’s do it and get it over with.
All four of the squadron’s EA-6BS were
aloft just now, and the other three also had pairs of
Hornets attached.
As Coleridge looked at the search radars
sweeping the Cuban skies, he wondered if there were
going to be MiGs.
“Okay, peopleea”…Coleridge told his crew, “let’s
go to work.”
A search radar on the southern coast of Cuba
drew his attention. The signal was being received by the
HARM sensors, which routed the electronic
signal through the plane’s computer and displayed it on
the tactical screen.
Coleridge checked his watch. “Any second
nowea”…he muttered to his crewmen.
The Cubans had their search radars wired
into sector facilities, which performed the functions of
air traffic control (Atc) for civilian
aircraft and early warning and ground
control interception (Gci) for military
aircraft. ATC radars in developed countries
rarely searched for non-transponderequipped
targets, but due to the dual usage of these radars,
such sweeps were routine. Consequently one of the
controllers in the Havana sector was the first
to notice a cloud of skin-paint targets closing
on the Cuban coast from the south.
His call to the supervisor was echoed by a call from a
controller looking at targets headed south toward the
north coast of the island.
The shift supervisor stood frozen, staring over the
operator’s shoulder at the radar screen. He had
wondered if something like this-might not happen after
Alejo Vargas’s television speech, but when he
asked the site manager about the possibility of
Cuba being attacked by the United
States, the man had laughed. “The world has changed
since the Bay of Pigs, Pedro. You are
safehave courage.” The response humiliated
the shift supervisor.
Now the supervisor picked up his telephone,
called the manager in his office. “You’d better come
see thisea”…he said with an edge on his voice. “Come
quickly.”
The manager was looking over the supervisor’s
shoulder when the first Tomahawk crashed into the antenna
of the main search radar on the southern coast. In