SSN - Tom Clancy [89]
He grabbed a pencil and paper and drafted a quick message.
BASED ON YOUR REPORT, CHINESE FAST ATTACK CRAFT ARE BEARING 279 AND 283 FROM CHEYENNE.
RANGE IS NOW 66,000 YARDS. WILL COMMENCE HARPOON LAUNCHING AS SOON AS PRACTICAL.
"Send this to Gettysburg," he said, "and then have the navigator plot a course to those two Chinese ships." He didn't say anything else. He didn't have to. Cheyenne would worry about the two noisy Romeo submarines later.
Tubes one and two were reloaded with Harpoon missiles and the intercept course to the attack craft was again verified. As soon as Cheyenne was in optimal firing position, at one hundred feet beneath the surface, the Harpoons were ejected from Cheyenne's torpedo tubes on the manual fire-control solution, and they headed toward the surface and then toward Masters 85 and 86. Once their engines ignited, there was no stopping them.
The missiles found their targets within minutes. The data provided via Cheyenne's BSY-1 fire-control system was remarkably accurate, and even had the Chinese craft tried to evade, it would have done them no good. As it was, they were confident that with their own HY-2 missiles tracking toward the American surface group and keeping them occupied, they were out of danger.
Their first clue that they were wrong was also their last. The two Harpoons closed quickly, impacting amidships, just below the waterline, one missile per Hainan.
Minutes later, the sea was once again calm as the remains of the two attack craft slipped below the surface.
"Now," said Mack calmly, "about those two Chinese submarines "
Tubes one and two were reloaded with Mk 48s.
On board the American cruisers Princeton and Gettysburg, an air of tension ran through the control rooms. Their SPY-IB multifunction radars were doing exactly what they were designed to-track the incoming Chinese missiles and calculate optimal intercept locations for the cruisers' SM-2 surface-to-air missiles. The four Chinese missiles were closing in at just under the speed of sound, which left only a few minutes of reaction time.
Less than thirty seconds after the Chinese ships had launched their four HY-2s, the fire-control systems had their data and the two Aegis cruisers began launching their SM-2 SAMs at the incoming missiles. Gettysburg was the first to fire, her fore Mk 41, sixty-one-cell launcher shooting off six missiles one after another. Six more SAMs leapt from the deck of Princeton, all twelve heading straight for the speeding Chinese HY-2s.
Within seconds, the SPG-62 missile illuminators on board the cruisers began directing the American missiles. These illuminators, four of which were on each ship, switched guidance controls from missile to missile, providing minute flight changes so that the missiles would know exactly where to fly in order to intercept the incoming targets.
Approximately ninety meters above the surface of the sea, thirty miles from Benthic Adventure and her escorts, the first SM-2s began to detonate around the incoming Chinese targets.
The first explosions occurred near two of the HY-2s, throwing them off target and then destroying them with shrapnel from the warheads. The remaining two HY-2 missiles were destroyed outright by the American SAMs targeted in their direction.
Three minutes after the launch of the Chinese HY-2 missiles, what was left of all four of them lay scattered on the surface of the sea, floating briefly before slipping beneath the waves.
On board Cheyenne, Mack had no idea how things were progressing above the surface, and no chance to try and find out. Cheyenne outmanned, outgunned, and simply outperformed the two Romeos, but that didn't mean he could afford to treat them lightly.
Mack ordered one Mk 48 targeted at each Romeo. With their antiquated Feniks sonar systems, he doubted that the Romeos would even detect the torpedoes before they had acquired. If one of them were to miss, however, he knew that Cheyenne would still be out of range of the Chinese weapons and could re-attack