Executive orders - Tom Clancy [577]
But not out of range for John Paul Jones, ten miles to the north of the main body. In the space of three seconds, her main RADAR went active, and then the first of eight missiles erupted from her launch cells, rocketing skyward on columns of smoke and flame, then changing direction in skidding turns to level out and burn north.
The fighters hadn't seen Jones. Her stealthy profile had not shown as a real target on their scopes, and neither had they noticed the fact that a fourth SPY RADAR was now tracking them. The series of white smoke trails came as an unpleasant surprise when the pilots looked up from their own RADAR scopes. But two of them triggered off their C-802s just in time.
Four seconds out from their targets, the SM-2 missiles received terminal guidance signals from the SPG-62 illumination RADARs. It was too sudden, too unexpected for them to jink clear. All four fighters were blotted out on massive clouds of yellow and black, but they'd managed to launch six antiship missiles.
Vampire, vampire! I show inbound missile seekers, bearing three-five-zero.
Okay, here we go. Kemper turned the key another notch, to the special-auto setting. Aegis would now go fully automatic. Topside, the CIWS gatling guns turned to starboard. Everywhere aboard the four warships, sailors listened and tried not to cringe. The merchant crews they guarded simply didn't know to be scared yet.
Aloft, the F-16s closed on the still-intact flight of four. These were also antiship-missile carriers, but they'd looked in the wrong place, probably for the decoy group. The first group had seen a close gaggle of ships. The second hadn't yet, and never would. They'd just turned into the signals of the Aegis RADARs to their west when the sky filled with down-bound smoke trails. The four scattered. Two exploded in midair. Another was damaged and tried to limp back northwest before he lost power and went in, while a fourth, missed entirely, reefed into a left turn, punched burner, and jettisoned his exterior weapons load.
The four Air Force F-16s had splashed six enemy fighters in under four minutes.
Jones got one of the sea-skimmers on the way by, but none of them had locked into her RADAR return, and the resulting high-speed crossing targets were too difficult to engage. Three of four computer-launched attempts all failed. That left five. The destroyer's combat systems recycled and looked for additional targets.
They'd seen Jones' smoke and wondered what it was, but the first real warning that something was badly wrong came when the near trio of cruisers started launching.
In Anzio's CIC, Kemper decided, as O'Bannon had, not to launch his decoy rockets. Three of the inbounds seemed aimed at the after part of the formation, with only two at the lead. His cruiser and Normandy concentrated on those. You could feel the launches. The hull shivered when the first two went out. The RADAR display was changing every second now, showing inbound and outbound tracks. The vampires were eight miles away now. At ten miles per minute, that meant less than fifty seconds to engage and destroy. It would seem like a week.
The system was programmed to adopt a fire-control mode appropriate to the moment. It was now doing shoot-shoot-look. Fire one missile, fire another, and then look to see if the target had survived the first two, and merit a third try. His target was exploded by the first SM-2 and the second SAM self-destructed. Normandy's first missile missed, but the second nicked the C-802, tumbling it into the sea with an explosion they felt through the hull a second later.
Yorktown