Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [177]
"Conn, sonar."
"Conn, aye."
"New contact, designate Sierra-Five, bearing two-eight-zero, twin-screw diesel surface ship, type unknown. Blade rate indicates about eighteen knots," SM/1c Junior Laval announced.
"No classification?"
"Sounds a little, well, little, Cap'n, not the big boomin' sounds of a large merchantman."
"Very well, we'll run a track. Keep me posted."
"Sonar, aye."
It was just too easy, Sanchez thought. The Enterprise group was probably having a tougher time with their Kongo-class DDGs up north. He was not pressing it, but holding his extended flight of four at three hundred feet above the calm surface, at a speed of just four hundred knots. Each of the four fighter-attack aircraft of Slugger Flight carried four exercise Harpoon missiles, as did the four trailing in Mauler. He checked his heads-up display for location. Data loaded into his computer only an hour before gave him a probable location for the formation, and his GPS navigation system had brought him right to the programmed place. It was time to check to see how accurate their operational intelligence was.
"Mauler, this is lead, popping up—now!" Sanchez pulled back easily on the stick. "Going active—now!" With the second command he flipped on his search radar. There they were, big as hell on the display. Sanchez selected the lead ship in the formation and spun up the seeker heads in the otherwise inert missiles hanging from his wings. He got four ready lights. "This is Slugger-Lead. Launch launch launch! Rippling four vampires."
"Two, launching four."
"Three, launch four."
"Four, launching three, one abort on the rail." About par for the course, Sanchez thought, framing a remark for his wing maintenance officer. In a real attack the aircraft would have angled back down to the surface after firing their missiles so as not to expose themselves. For the purposes of the exercise they descended to two hundred feet and kept heading in to simulate their own missiles. Onboard recorders would take down the radar and tracking data from the Japanese ships in order to evaluate their performance, which so far was not impressive.
Faced with the irksome necessity of allowing women to fly in real combat squadrons off real carriers, the initial compromise had been to put them in electronic-warfare aircraft, hence the Navy's first female squadron commander was Commander Roberta Peach of VAQ-137, "The Rooks." The most senior female carrier aviator, she deemed it her greatest good fortune that another naval aviator, female, already had the call sign "Peaches," which allowed her to settle on "Robber," a name she insisted on in the air.
"Getting signals now, Robber," the lead EWO in the back of her Prowler reported. "Lots of sets lighting off."
"Shut 'em back down," she ordered curtly.
"Sure are a lot of 'em…targeting a Harm on an SPG-51. Tracking and ready."
"Launching now," Robber said. Shooting was her prerogative as aircraft commander. As long as the SPG-51 missile-illumination radar was up and radiating, the Harm antiradar missile was virtually guaranteed to hit.
Sanchez could see the ships now, gray shapes on the visual horizon. An unpleasant screech in his headphones told him that he was being illuminated with both search and fire-control radar, never a happy bit of news even in an exercise, all the more so that the "enemy" in this case had American-designed SM-2 Standard surface-to-air missiles with whose performance he was quite familiar. It looked like a Hatakaze-class. Two SPG-51C missile radars. Only one single-rail launcher. She could guide only two at a time.
His aircraft represented two missiles. The Hornet was a larger target than the Harpoon was, and was not going as low or as fast as the missile did. On the other hand, he had a protective jammer aboard, which evened the equation somewhat. Bud eased his stick to the left. It was against safely rules to fly directly over a ship under circumstances like this, and a few seconds