Countdown c-6, page 12
part #6 of Carrier Series
Nor were there as many of them. Most of the air-to-air missiles protecting the Russian bomber force were big AA-6 "Acrids," carried by MiG-25 Foxbats and having a lock-on range of about sixty-two miles, and the modern AA-10 "Alamo," with a thirty-mile range.
As the two air armadas closed with one another, more and more of the Russian weapons began coming into play. But if the Russians were beginning to concentrate their forces, so too were the Americans. While the basic unit of naval warfare was the carrier battle group, a common strategy involved combining two or more CBGs into a carrier battle force, or CBF. During the Gulf War of 1991, four separate carrier groups had united in the Persian Gulf, forming a single battle force of unprecedented firepower.
Now, off the northernmost tip of Norway, two carrier battle groups were in the process of joining forces. Though the surface elements of CBG-7 and CBG-14 had not yet merged, the moment orbiting Hawkeyes had spotted the approaching Russian air armada, the Eisenhower had thrown her defensive cordon of Tomcats and Hornets into the sky along Jefferson's threat axis, combining and bolstering the defenses for both carrier groups. Tomcats from the Eisenhower loosed their AIM-54Cs at targets still deep in the Kola Peninsula; Hornets vectored in to provide air protection for Jefferson Tomcats that had already expended their missiles.
Despite the reinforcements, however, the battle was still so scattered that it was in reality a large number of separate, isolated clashes between tiny groups or even individuals, all fighting for their lives.
0719 hours
Tomcat 201
Over the Barents Sea
"Tone! Fox one!"
Their second AMRAAM slid from its launch rail, tracking a Russian bomber that had already passed Tomcat 201's position and was now almost thirty miles ahead, between Coyote and the fleet.
There were more aircraft in the sky now. All of Jefferson's Tomcats were in the air, and more and more of the Hornets from her two F/A-18 squadrons were arriving in the battle zone.
In addition, new Tomcats were vectoring in from the northwest, F-14s launched earlier from the U.S.S. Eisenhower.
Coyote was glad to see the extra talent arrive, but there was scant time for celebration. Seconds after his second AMRAAM struck home, Cat cut in over the ICS.
"Coyote," she said, sounding worried. "I've got a threat tone here."
He glanced down at his own console and saw the glowing light on his threat-warning receiver. A radar-guided missile had just locked onto his aircraft, was tracking them now from astern. "I see it. Do you have it on your TID?"
"Wait one…" She was checking her Tactical Information Display, the round screen centered on her NFO's console. "Yeah! Got it. Bearing zero-nine-five, range four-two and closing… shit, Mach three point five.
Coyote, I think we've just picked up an Amos."
"Stay on it. We'll let it get closer."
"It's close enough for me right now."
"Yeah, but if we break, it'll break with us. Stay frosty."
"I'm so frosty I'm freezing to death."
"Mustang! You there?"
"Right here, Coyote. Loose as a goose on your four." Navy aviators tended to fly in widely spaced, flexible tactical formations, referred to as "loose goose," rather than the tight wing-and-wing approach used by most of their opponents.
"Rog. Let's go ballistic before that thing kicks us in the ass." At this range, the incoming missile might be tracking either of them. There'd be no way to tell until it got a lot closer.
"Affirmative."
"Going to zone five." He rammed his throttle forward.
"Right with you."
At their current altitude of just over twenty-thousand feet, the Tomcats could manage about Mach 2.3. The missile following them, now forty miles away, was traveling at Mach 3.5, which meant that even at their top speed it would continue to overhaul them with a closing rate of almost eight hundred miles per hour.
With luck, the air-to-air missile would run out of fuel before it reached them.
If it didn't, it would catch up to them in another three minutes.
0719 hours
Off North Cape
The CICOs in the American line's E-2Cs reported thirty Amos air-to-air missiles incoming during the first few minutes of the exchange. EA-6B Prowlers, flying in their electronic-warfare/electronic-countermeasures role off both the Jefferson and the Eisenhower, targeted the missiles with intense bursts of radar energy designed to burn out their delicate SARH receivers.
Other AA-9s were decoyed by chaff or knocked out by RIOs using their Tomcats' own ECM assets.
In all, only eleven American aircraft were hit, and of those, four were only damaged by the detonation of the AA-9's radar proximity fuze and were able to make it back to their respective carriers.
Against such odds as they were facing now, however, the Americans could not afford to lose a single plane.
0722 hours
Tomcat 201
Over the Barents Sea
"It's coming fast, Coyote! Range five miles-"
"Mustang! When I give the word, break right. I'll go left."
"… four miles…"
"Roger that, Coyote!"
"… three miles…"
"Now! Break!"
Coyote pulled the stick hard to the left and forward, going into a dive to pick up extra, crucial speed. Stealing a look back over his shoulder, he could see the onrushing missile now, a pinpoint trailing an endless thread of white scrawling across the eastern sky. As Mustang slipped off to the right, the missile tracked left.
It was after him and Cat.
He'd dropped out of afterburners to avoid guzzling up his remaining fuel, but he kicked them in once more, fighting for every possible extra measure of speed. The G-forces piled on top of his head and chest and gut, squeezing the air from his lungs, clawing at his eyeballs in their sockets.
"One… uh! mile still uh!… with us!" Cat was having to force each word out, punctuating them with savage grunts to literally force the air out of a diaphragm nearly paralyzed by almost nine Gs.
"Chaff!" Coyote yelled. Rapid-bloom chaff exploded from the Tomcat's tail, myriad slivers of aluminum-coated mylar cut to precise lengths blossoming in an expanding cloud astern. The missile, now a few hundred yards away, automatically tracked for the middle of its radar target as it traveled left to right, aiming at the so-called "centroid of reflected radiation."
When the radar image suddenly smeared into a far larger, longer target, the AA-9's aim shifted to the right…
… and then Coyote snap-rolled the F-14 into a hard, reverse turn, climbing now and breaking out of its turn. The missile flashed into the still-scattering cloud of chaff, its simple-minded proximity fuze decided that it had reached the target, and it detonated with a thunderous roar. Bits of metal pinged and clattered off the Tomcat's hull, but no warning lights winked on in response.
"Coyote, this is Mustang! Are you okay?"
"Copacetic, Mustang. Still here!" Coyote stared up through his canopy at that deep, impossibly blue sky, crisscrossed with the lacy weavings of aircraft and missile contrails. It struck him suddenly that he'd been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the past ten minutes, killing or damaging a probable total of six enemy planes and damned near getting killed himself.
And in all that time, he'd never been close enough to even once see a Russian aircraft.
"Mustang, Coyote," he called. "We're down to two AIM-9s and coming up on bingo fuel. I'd say it's time to RTB."
"RTB" meant "return to base." Time to head back to the Jeff and rearm.
"That's a major roger, Skipper. Lead the way."
Coyote switched his HUD back to NAV MODE and picked up Shiloh's directional beacon. With Jefferson off the air for the moment, he'd have to home on the Shiloh, then when he got in close enough, find the Jeff by Mark-One eyeball.
He was now less than 120 miles from the center of the battle group. He cut back on his throttle to take them down closer to the water and eased onto the new heading.
They should be in shouting distance of the Jefferson in another twelve minutes.
0725 hours
Off North Cape
Russian naval tactics, like their tactics for land warfare, depended on saturating the enemy's defenses, piling on so much raw power in such huge numbers that sooner or later those defenses began to leak. Their bombers, the survivors of the Tomcats' Phoenix assault plus those that managed to get close enough to launch before being shot down, had managed to release a total of ninety-three ship-killers, most of them AS-5 "Keit" and AS-6 "Kingfish" antiship missiles. Over thirty feet long, weighing over five tons apiece, and traveling at better than Mach 3, these missiles hurtled across the Barents Sea at wave-skimming height. Some were programmed to go all the way in at low altitude; others were set to pop up during the last few miles of their approach, attacking the carrier group from almost straight overhead. The mix of approaches was designed, like the dive-bomber/torpedo-plane tactics of World War II, to confuse, divide, and overtax the target's defenses.
0726 hours
Tomcat 201
Over the Barents Sea
"Shit! Where did he come from?"
Coyote peered past his fighter's HUD, trying to pick out details against the sun-sparkle off the ultramarine sea. He was at five thousand feet now, but the bandit was below him, skimming at damn-near wave-top height on a direct course for the center of the battle group. His low altitude had provided excellent cover, masking him in the back-scatter from the surface of the sea. He was definitely a "leaker," a Russian bomber that had managed to slip unobserved deep inside the CBG's defenses.
"Range two miles," Cat told him.
"Rog. I'm setting him up."
They were close enough now that Coyote could recognize the back-swept wings, the twin turbojets set close along the fuselage. It was a Tu-16 Badger, almost certainly the Badger-G missile-strike variant. Flying off each wing was a smaller aircraft, indistinguishable at this distance but almost certainly a fighter escort. Coyote edged his stick to port and pushed it forward, nudging the F-14 into a better firing position. The Badger grew rapidly behind the pale computer-graphic symbols and data lines on his HUD.
Its attendants, already breaking from their larger consort and swinging around to face him, were a pair of Sukhoi-21 interceptors, Flagon-Fs painted in a tactical green-and-brown camouflage scheme.
But Coyote glimpsed something else in that blurred instant of approach.
Beneath each wing of the Badger-G was the slim fuselage and pointed nose of an AS-6 "Kingfish" antiship missile. As he watched, locking his target designator onto the hot IR glow of the bomber's twin engines, first one, then the other of those sleek and deadly darts dropped from their hardpoints, igniting tails of orange flame and unraveling contrails of white smoke.
"Launch! Launch!" Coyote yelled into his radio. "Hotspur, Gold Eagle One, I have confirmed launch of two Alfa-Sierra six…"
Two more cruise missiles were now streaking at Mach 3 toward the center of the fleet.
And they were now less than one hundred miles out.
CHAPTER 11
Friday, 13 March
0727 hours (Zulu +2)
Tomcat 201
Over the Barents Sea
"Fox two!" Coyote yelled, and a Sidewinder whooshed off the rail beneath his starboard wing. Unlike Phoenix or AMRAAM, the AIM-9 Sidewinder was IR-guided, homing on the heat given off by the target, especially the heat thrown off by a jet engine.
Too late, he realized he probably should have retargeted on one of the Sukhois. Its warload dropped, the Badger-G was already clumsily turning to port, moving onto a heading that would take it back toward the Kola Peninsula.
The Flagon-Fs, however, were thundering up from the sea, their targeting radars already locking onto Coyote's Tomcat.
Thinking fast, Coyote veered left, dropping his targeting pipper across the closer of the two Flagons. His last missile's IR warhead locked on and he squeezed the trigger. "Fox two!"
Head-on shots with IR-homers were a lot riskier than sending one up the tailpipe; such a shot would have been impossible with earlier models of the Sidewinder, but the AIM-9M was an all-aspect heat-seeker, able to lock on to and track the heat radiated from any part of a target aircraft, front or rear.
With his last missile away, he broke to the left; at the same moment, his first Sidewinder arrowed up the starboard engine exhaust of the Badger and detonated. Ten pounds of high explosive did not make that big of a bang.
There was a puff of white smoke and a scattering of debris, but the Badger continued to fly, still turning gently away from the center of the American fleet.
Coyote, meanwhile, dove for the deck, forcing the two Flagons to break their climb in order to maintain their radar lock.
Standard operating procedure for the Su-21 was to fit it out with two AA-3 "Anab" missiles, loading a heat-seeking version on the port side, a SARH-guided version to starboard. By ripple-firing the two, the pilot better than doubled his chances of a kill. The Sukhoi also carried several smaller AA-8 "Aphids," highly maneuverable dog-fighting missiles for close-in work.
At a range of about a mile now, Coyote decided, the Flagons would probably try to take him with Aphids. By going onto the deck and coming up underneath or behind them, he would keep them from getting a solid lock.
"Warning tone!" Cat yelled. "He's going for a fox one!"
Damn! They'd opted for a radar lock rather than infrared… or else they were going to try to nail them with both.
"Hang on to your lunch!" he warned Cat, and he kicked in the afterburners.
Their second Sidewinder slammed into one of the Flagons; from Coyote's viewpoint, it looked as though the nine-foot missile had smashed straight through the Sukhoi's cockpit and detonated in a shattering cascade of glittering fragments. At almost the same moment, first one, then another missile blasted clear of the second Sukhoi, tracking on the hurtling Tomcat.
The Badger had been circling to the left during those past few seconds, smoke streaming from its damaged starboard engine. Coyote had been cutting to the left as well and was now dropping toward the Badger on a collision course.
There'd been no conscious planning on Coyote's part, only the instinctive and near-instantaneous reactions of a Top Gun-trained aviator in combat. As the two Anab air-to-air missiles circled around toward the fleeing F-14, Coyote slammed the Tomcat past the Badger so close he felt the airframe shuddering as it carved through the bomber's slipstream. For a split second, he could look up and to the right, seeing every detail of the Tu-16 ― the greenhouse-type canopies over cockpit and nose, the deadly probe of a 23mm cannon extending from the starboard side of its fuselage forward, the back-swept wings each tagged by a bright, red star. Almost, he imagined, he could see the startled faces of its pilot and crew.
Then he was beneath the Tupolev and past it, still shrieking toward the sea. The Badger was firing at him with its twin 23mm tail guns ― he could see them twinkling ― but without effect.
A moment later, the bomber exploded in a ball of flame.
"My God!" Cat said, and there was something like awe in her voice. "You… you suckered that SARH into the Badger!"
Coyote twisted in his seat, looking back over his right shoulder. The Badger was falling toward the sea, its fuselage a mass of flame that was picked up and reflected by the water as a brilliant orange glow. Fire and glow rushed to meet one another.
"If the Flagon had a radar lock on us," he said, "we broke it by slipping into the Badger's shadow. The SARH lock transferred to the Badger and the Flagon driver didn't have a chance to break it… or else he didn't realize he'd started tracking the Badger."
"You make it sound like you didn't know what was going to happen," Cat said. "But I know better! That was sheer genius!"
"Coyote, this is Mustang!" a voice called over his headset. "Did you see that Flagon score an own goal?"
"Rog," Coyote replied.
"Looks like that last Flagon's called it quits. He's running."
"What about those cruise missiles?" Cat asked.
"Nothing we can do about them now. That'll be Shiloh's headache."
"Coyote, this is Mustang. Listen, Skipper, I'm down to fumes. Let's head for the farm. I think we're gonna need to find a Texaco before we start hunting for the Jeff."
"I'm with you, pal. Let's do it!" The two Tomcats vectored back toward the fleet.
0730 hours
Off North Cape
The battle group's cruisers, destroyers, and frigates had but a single purpose in life: to protect the CBG's carrier. To accomplish this, the surrounding area was divided into three distinct defensive zones.
The outermost zone, between one hundred and three hundred miles from the carrier, was patrolled by the air wing's interceptors ― F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets ― which with their look-down, shoot-down radar capability could take on any target from a Backfire bomber to a sea-skimming cruise missile. The middle zone, from ten to one hundred miles out, was covered by the frigates and destroyers, firing Standard missiles designed to lock on to incoming cruise missiles and take them down. The inner zone, out to ten miles from the carrier, was protected by surface ships firing both Standard missiles and short-ranged AIM-7 Sea Sparrows.
Of course, with so many aircraft and missiles in the sky all at once, confusion ― even deadly mistakes ― was always possible. Key to handling so many ships scattered across so much empty water was the Aegis cruiser and its remarkable SPY-1 radar.
0732 hours
Combat Information Center
U.S.S. Shiloh
Admiral Tarrant sat in the Aegis cruiser's Combat Information Center, surrounded by the subdued green glow of a dozen large radar screens and electronic displays. From his post at one of four huge multi-colored consoles, the unfolding course of the battle could be followed on those screens, which separated sea from land and pinpointed both the IFF-tagged blips of friendly ships and aircraft and the far larger number of approaching hostiles. The SPY-1 radar had a reach of 250 miles, nearly to the limit of the carrier group's defensive patrol range, but it could also take data fed through an electronic data link from E-2Cs or other far-ranging eyes of the fleet, extending its personal space even farther, tracking everything on and over the sea. The system was called Aegis after the magical shield of Zeus in Greek mythology.
