Liberty's Last Stand (50 page)

Aboard
Texas
, the sound of the destroyer's screws was a signal to George Ranta. “Port target is accelerating.”

“Take her down to a thousand feet,” Loren Snyder ordered. Ada Fuentes repeated the order and pushed the control yoke forward to use the planes to help drive her down as Jugs was busy on the panel flooding tanks. “Give me twenty knots.” Fuentes pushed the throttle forward.

“Twenty knots, aye.”

“Launch the decoys,” Snyder ordered. Jugs pushed the buttons and the sound of the decoys being launched could be faintly heard; the panel showed four were launched. Decoys were noise- and bubble-makers, which hopefully would attract any ASROC missiles the destroyer might launch. ASROC, an antisubmarine rocket-propelled torpedo, was launched from a vertical tube. The rocket engine carried the Mk-46 torpedo well away from the ship, where it would plunge into the sea and begin searching for a submarine. The noise of the decoys would attract an acoustic seeker, and the bubbles would create a return for an active, pinging sonar.

“The fiber optic wires are going to break,” Snyder told Jugs. “Go active on the torpedoes.”

In
Harlan Jones
' Combat Control Center, the TAO plotted the probable launching position of the submarine and instructed the man on the ASROC panel where to put the missiles. The TAO decided to launch four. One would hit six miles up the bearing of the torpedo, another at eight, another at ten, and the last one at twelve. Once they were in the water, they would circle and search with active sonar for the submarine.

Then the TAO remembered the oil-production platforms. There was a cluster of them, six or seven, ten degrees right of the bearing line. Would they attract the ASROCs? She shrugged the possibility away and ordered four missiles fired.

But time was up! The torpedo ran under the hull of
Harlan Jones
in front of the bridge and exploded. Water being essentially incompressible, the explosion blew a large hole in the bottom of the ship, breaking the keel, and water began rushing in. The ship shook from the hammer blow.

“All stop,” the captain ordered, which was merely a term that meant the adjustable-pitch screws were to be brought to fine pitch so the ship wouldn't drive headlong into the ocean and increase the possibility of bulkheads giving way. She began drifting to a stop, which would take a while.

Meanwhile the ASROC launchers spit out four missiles, which roared along the bearing the torpedo had followed.

The crew of
Harlan Jones
began trying to save their ship. Fifteen
Harlan Jones
crewmen were dead. Others would probably die if the watertight bulkheads inside the ship weren't shored up against the sea fighting to invade the vessel.
Harlan Jones
had fired thirty-three of the fifty Tomahawks she had been ordered to launch.

The second destroyer, USS
O
'
Hare
, also heard the pinging of the incoming Mk-48 torpedo, and like her sister ship, turned into it so as to present as narrow a profile as possible. She fired her ASROCs up the bearing line of the incoming ship-killer. She had fired off two when the Mk-48 from
Texas
went under her bow and exploded. The explosion literally cut the ship in half, severed the bow from the ship twenty feet aft of the sonar dome. She wasn't going at flank speed, or the sea would have blown out every internal bulkhead and doomed her. As it was, she lost speed as several watertight bulkheads buckled under the pressure and she began going down at the head. The captain let her drift to a halt.

Both destroyers had been at General Quarters when torpedoed, with all watertight hatches dogged down, so the damage was not as extensive as it could have been. Aboard
O
'
Hare
, as in
Jones
, the fight to save the ship began immediately.
O
'
Hare
had launched thirty of the fifty Tomahawks she had been ordered to launch.

Aboard
Texas
, George Ranta and the control room crew heard the whumps of the torpedoes exploding. Snyder had the sound on the loudspeaker. A moment later, they heard the splashes of the antisubmarine torpedoes launched from
O
'
Hare
, followed by the sound of the ASROCs fired by
Harlan Jones
hitting the water.

Loren Snyder looked at the computerized plot. The cluster of oil platforms were to his port side, perhaps two miles away, so he told Ada Fuentes to turn in that direction. Perhaps the sound of the platforms, at least one of which was drilling a well, would attract the torpedoes searching for his boat.

He glanced at the depth meter, which read seven hundred feet. They were still going down.

He had hoped the torpedoes he had fired would catch the destroyers flat-footed, but apparently the crews were well-trained and alert, just in case. Snyder and his small band of fools might well have run flat out of luck.

Rose-Marie McGarrity's F-16 was over Galveston when her radar showed a low target running fast to the northwest; it had to be a Tomahawk.

She rolled her fighter and plunged down, pulling Gs and getting her nose well in front of the missile on a course to intercept. Down through a layer of clouds, down into the gray day underneath, closing on the blip that had to be a cruise missile. It was doing about five hundred knots. Due to the angle at which she was intercepting, she didn't need her afterburner. Yet. She flipped switches, arming the Sidewinders. If she could get a lock-on. . . .

Intercepting at a forty-five-degree angle, still diving into the hot, humid turbulent summer air, Rose-Marie McGarrity found that visibility underneath the goo was no more than four or five miles. She doubted that she would see the missile. This air was like thin soup and she was bouncing in turbulence. She checked to ensure her radar altimeter was set at two hundred feet: it would give her an audible warning if she got within two hundred feet of the surface of the earth.

Then she heard a tone from the Sidewinder, indicating it was locked on a heat source. She was down to five hundred feet above the ground, doing about Mach .9. The target was dead ahead, crossing slowly from right to left.

With the tone in her ears, she punched off a Sidewinder, a heat-seeker.

It left the rail with a blast of fire and shot forward into the haze almost too fast for the eye to follow.

McGarrity was looking through the heads-up display, the HUD, at the target symbol, when she saw the flash. The Sidewinder had scored a kill.

Instantly she was off the juice and soaring upward and right, to point her radar out to sea, just in case.

And, by golly, here came another one. Four or five hundred feet above the earth, scorching along to the northwest. McGarrity got that one with a Sidewinder too. Elation flooded her. This fighter pilot gig was hot shit! Again she soared up and turned southeast, toward the sea.

Two minutes later, she found a third Tomahawk on radar, this one going almost north. Catching it meant a chase, so she engaged the burner and let her fighter accelerate as it again went down toward Mother Earth. She didn't see the Tomahawk until she was about four miles from it—it was a little thing, only visible because the radar told her exactly where to look. She kept the juice on, coming in from an angle, nose well in front to bounce it by sliding up behind it. Gun selected. She kept the missile just below the visible horizon, because to dip below it was to risk flying into the ground. Flying this fast this close to the planet was sublime, a sensory overload.

She was only a mile from it, flying at just above two hundred feet on a course to intercept, closing at Mach 1.2, when she saw something out of the left corner of her eye. Even as the object registered as a radio tower, she hit one of the supporting cables with her left wing.

At that speed, about 1,300 feet per second, the steel cable sliced halfway through the wing as if it were cheese; the spar in the left wing broke and the wing separated from the racing F-16.

There was just no time to react. In a tiny fraction of a second the F-16 rolled hard left, the nose dropped, and the fighter smacked into the ground inverted. The fireball rolled along the land for a thousand yards, dribbling pieces of airplane and Rose-Marie McGarrity. Two houses and one barn caught fire. Smoke mixed with the thick, humid haze.