SSN - Tom Clancy [32]
After exchanging greetings with the captain of McKee and CTF 74, Mack and his officers quietly took their seats in the front row as the briefing officer dimmed the lights for his presentation of the bomb damage assessment at Cuarteron Reef.
The satellite photography provided clear evidence that each TLAM-C and TLAM-D, which had been launched from Cheyenne's vertical-launch tubes at a comfortable uncontested datum]nortft or the apratiy isiana cnam, nau[reached a mark. Not necessarily the intended mark, but at least damage enough to put the Chinese submarine base out of business for a while.
Mack had seen the smoke and fire from the explosions through the high-power, 16X magnification of the Type 18 periscope, but, because the Chinese submarine base was beyond the horizon of the periscope's height of eye, he hadn't been able to discern the actual targets that were hit. He listened carefully as the briefing officer said that the main repair facility and weapons stowage buildings had been hit as planned, with 1,000 pounds of explosives per Tomahawk.
The national command authority and the USCINC-PAC target staff had done a nice rush job in providing both the terrain contour matching (TERCOM) data for the entire length of the Philippine Island of Palawan, and the final, more accurate, digital scene-matching area correlation (DSMAC) data, especially since Palawan was not previously a high-priority digital terrain-data-collection effort. With the Tomahawk Block III Global Positioning System (GPS) providing updates to the missiles, the three hundred-nautical-mile flight from the last DSMAC update on the southwest tip of Palawan had not degraded the targeting accuracy.
As the briefing officer went over this, Mack found himself thinking that the last-minute sighting of missiles arriving at Cuarteron Reef from the east must have been totally confusing to the Chinese. Moments later, the briefing officer confirmed that guess. If the Chinese had known Cheyenne^ position, they would have sent some of their assets after her. But that hadn't happened. Although the base infrastructure was essentially out of commission, satellite imagery showed that a number of Chinese submarines and a few surface ships remained in port, still moored to only slightly damaged piers.
Mack knew that the Chinese would be able to make some guesses about Cheyenne's position. Because the missiles had not arrived from the west, the Chinese remaining in port would assume that Cheyenne was lingering in the safety of deep water to the north of the Spratlys. And they'd be right but only to a point.
Cheyenne had indeed launched from the north, but she was not fingering in the area, having entered the Sulu Sea from the north via the Mindoro Strait. Mack knew that the delay in the Chinese exodus from Cuarteron Reef should give Cheyenne the opportunity to reposition from her safe haven alongside McKee in the Sulu Sea. They should end up in their prime location west of Cuarteron Reef before the Chinese decided to deploy their submarines and surface ships to the safety of the sea. Attacks from Cheyenne off Cuarteron Reef also might make the Chinese believe they had more than Cheyenne with which to contend, a ploy which the submarine force had used in previous conflicts.
The briefing officer continued with the latest status of the location of the USS Independence Battle Group and background on the Battle Group transit into the South China Sea. Prior to Mack's rendezvous and reporting in as the SSN(DS), Independence had steamed to the southern coast of Borneo, having passed through the Lombok Strait with her AO (oiler) and AE (ammunition ship), while several of her surface ships, including the two Ticonderoga class cruisers Gettysburg and Princeton, had slipped through the Sunda Strait to the west under the cover of darkness the night before.
The CVBG admiral had wisely split his forces to ensure that all his eggs were not in the same basket should the Chinese have sympathizers, or even their own soldiers, on Java, Sumatra, or Bali. Both the Lombok