Death Orbit (9 page)

“Battleships…
” the pilot breathed.

“There’s got to be at least a dozen of them,” the radar officer gasped.

The crew of the Seamaster knew that these days battleships could mean only one thing: the Asian Mercenary Cult. It was the only force in the world at present that could float such an armada. But previously the Cult had operated only in the Pacific Rim area. Never had they been spotted this close to the East Coast of America.

But here they were, not five miles ahead of the struggling seaplane, and obviously heading north, toward UA Florida.

The pilot breathed the fears of everyone on board.

“Nazi warplanes, Cult battleships,” he said, almost in a whisper. “What the hell is going on here?”

The moment of astonishment quickly passed. Now the Seamaster crew knew they had to swing into action. It was obvious that their coming upon the huge flotilla was an enormous fluke—from all indications the battleships were running without any air defense radar illuminated, a necessary tactic if surprise was their ultimate goal. The crew of the big seaplane could see them, but as of yet, they had not been seen.

This was an opportunity the Seamaster could not pass up. Battered though it was, it had obviously stumbled upon a golden opportunity.

The pilot didn’t even have to order his crew to combat stations; they were already scrambling to them. The forward gunnery officer was quickly line-sighting a battleship that was riding slightly off flank from the rest of the fleet. The offensive weapons officer had already acquired this same vessel’s bridge and communications deck on his Harpoon missile system’s passive radar. Even the defensive systems officer was searching for something hot at which to send his pair of Sidewinder missiles.

By the time the Seamaster was within two miles of the unsuspecting battleship, all of these weapons were ready to fire.

The pilot had shut down the seaplane’s outboard four engine long ago, but now he needed some kick and the wounded engine would have to come back online. He had the banged-up co-pilot douse the power plant with the built-in fire extinguishers and then they lit it again. It exploded to life with a flare that would have been seen for miles had they not been flying so low. The engine coughed twice, then began providing thrust, though only about half its normal output.

That was okay, though. They only needed the bum engine for a few seconds.

They were now about a mile out. The pilot did one last check of his systems, and everything that was working was performing within tolerable limits. A quick check of the radar told him that the battleship now looming large in the cockpit windshield had no idea what was about to happen. The seajet crew collectively held its breath as the pilot slowed the plane’s speed down to an 80-mph crawl, just barely enough to keep them airborne.

On the count of three, he whispered three words into the plane’s on-board intercom:
“Fire at will
…”

There would be some discussion later as to exactly which weapons got off first. The pair of Harpoons were certainly the first to actually ignite their engines, but the two Sidewinders were probably off their rails before the antiship missiles launched. The quartet of missiles hit the battleship
Somumi
at approximately the same instant. The heat-seeking air-to-airs impacted on the red-hot stack just aft of the superstructure, caving it in and destroying four of the six boilers below. The first Harpoon nailed the double-bridge dead-on, killing everyone on both decks. The second anti-shipper went through mid-mast and down two levels before exploding not 15 feet from the auxiliary magazine. This started a fire that would take exactly 30 seconds to reach the main bomb storage area.

The Seamaster’s forward mini-guns were opened up at 1000 feet out; by this time they were firing into a growing maelstrom of smoke, flame, and exploding shells. The big seaplane went up and over the
Somumi
just as the fire finally touched off the magazine. The concussion from this explosion lifted the Seamaster 200 feet in the air, searing its tail to the point of melting one of the rear turret mini-guns. The pilot recovered only to find himself heading straight for the
Somumi’s
sister ship, the delicately named
Mimosa.
The forward gunnery officer never stopped firing. The rounds from his pair of mini-guns tore up this ship’s bridge and communications mast before the pilot was able to lift the big plane up once again and clear the enemy ship by a matter of inches.

At this point, they saw the crackle of AAA fire start to rise up from nearby ships. But this was automatic, triggered by the attack on the
Somumi,
and as such, poorly aimed and completely ineffective. The Seamaster settled down to 50 feet in altitude once more, its forward guns peppering the battleship
Basami
before elevating a third time and then finally passing over the fleet altogether.

A few token AAA shells followed it as it disappeared into the night, but these fell way short of hitting the big seaplane, its two and a half working engines giving it just enough power to escape unscathed.

In its wake, it left one battleship sinking, another taking on water and its crew jumping over the sides, and a third with a growing fire on its bridge and second turret. In all, the seaplane’s attack had lasted twenty seconds.

Turning due west, it would reach safe harbor at Double Shot Rocks less than 30 minutes later.

The air raid sirens began wailing across Key West Naval Air Station at exactly 0015 hours.

The base was well drilled in these things. They were on the frontier of UA territory and had practiced extensively against any number of attack scenarios. Whenever the practice sirens went off, base personnel scrambled to their assigned defensive positions while dependents headed for the bomb shelters. The entire base would be blacked out, all electronics would be shut down, and a series of radio-jammers would be turned on. The nearby civilian settlement of Old Town would go dark and button up, too, with most of the citizens heading for their cellars or the community bomb shelter. The civilians and the base personnel had practiced these procedures so many times, they could do them in their sleep.

But this time it was not a drill. The base radar had picked up the large concentration of attack planes approaching from the southeast. Air raid sirens were now wailing across the entire key. Even as the UA jets scrambled earlier were engaging this oncoming strike force, some of the attackers were breaking away and pressing on toward the air base itself.

NAS Key West had a typical “three-in” defensive system. The base’s scramble jets represented the outer ring. The middle ring was a line of SAM sites—Hawk II batteries, mostly—in place around the runways, as well as on the outskirts of Old Town. The third ring, the inner ring, comprised anti-aircraft batteries, both in static emplacements and mobile guns.

It was these mobile AA guns that represented the joker in the deck. They were made up of twenty-four separate units, three-quarters of which were Ml63 Vulcans, fast APCs armed with six-barrel multifiring guns. The rest consisted of odds and ends, including several German-built Krauss-Maffei “Wildcats” and even a few Russian-designed ZSU-23-4 “Carmens.”

Many of these mobile units were now dashing-through the streets of Old Town, hiding in the backyards and alleyways of the resort area, keeping low and staying quiet. Waiting for the storm…

The first wave of Nazi attack aircraft was spotted off to the south at 0025 hours. The Hawk batteries began launching a few moments later. Hawk missiles were known for their reliability and accuracy, and despite the awesome size of the enemy force, the attackers had no electronic warfare or jamming planes with them. Inside of twenty seconds of the initial Hawk firings, three of the attacking planes fell burning into the sea.

The first wave of enemy planes was now about two miles from Key West. Another line of Hawks went up. Two more planes fell. Then the second enemy wave appeared over the horizon. The UA F-106 interceptors and the A-7K Strikefighters were firing into the rear of this line, knocking down two more Hornets. But now the Delta Darts, just about depleted of weapons stores, had to back off for fear of being hit by the Hawk missiles. The A-7s were running low on both fuel and ammo; they were forced to evacuate the area, too.

At 0032 hours, the first wave of attackers roared over South Beach on Key West. They came in two at a time, engines screeching ferociously. The first bombs hit at 0033. They were MK82 500-pounders, deep-penetration weapons that burrowed into the asphalt of the base’s main runway, blowing out craters six feet deep and 20 feet across. Eighteen of these blockbuster bombs smashed into the main runway, with one stray shot hitting the base water tower. In less than 60 seconds, the first wave had come and gone.

The second wave of enemy airplanes were now a mile off shore. They were F-14s adapted for ground attack, and therein lay a handicap. Tomcats were superb aerial fighters, but close to the ground, they could be sluggish and had a tendency to stick together a little too closely. Even before they came over the beach, the hidden UA mobile AA batteries opened up on them. Though scattered throughout the old city, the AA guns were all pointing in more or less the same direction. They created a wall of anti-aircraft fire that appeared so suddenly, the first line of Nazi F-14s had no choice but to run right through it. Three attackers went down almost immediately, crashing on to the wide South Beach. Another had its right wing perforated, tried to turn, couldn’t, and plowed into the center of Old Town. A fifth overshot the target and crashed into the swamps beyond.

Six F-14s made it through though, and now they bore down on the operations buildings attached to the base. They were carrying one MK84 2000-pound bomb each, massive weapons with four times the destructive power of the runway busters. The first of these bombs came down right on the main aircraft maintenance hangar and obliterated the huge structure. Another skipped across the main parking lot and into the base fixed-ops building, destroying it in an incredible explosion. A third boomer took out the control tower and the radar house next door. A fourth hit the main fuel depot. When that went up, it looked like nothing less than the end of the world. A huge bluish-orange flame rose high into the sky, shaping itself into a monstrous mushroom cloud which spread out and covered the entire key. More than 20,000 gallons of aviation fuel went up in the explosion.

As the second wave of attackers scattered, the third wave arrived. They were a combined wing of Tomcats and Hornets, but beneath their wings were neither 500-pound runway bombs or 2000-pound boomers. These airplanes were carrying more sinister weapons. Strung out so thick on their underwings that the planes were forced to fly incredibly low and incredibly slow were hundreds of pounds of napalm.

Napalm was essentially jellied gasoline in a can. When dropped from an airplane, the canister explodes and a flood of sticky, searing flame is dispersed over an area the size of a football field, immolating everything within. This kind of weapon was so insidious, the pre-Big War armies of the sixties and seventies actually stopped using it. Napalm really wasn’t a military weapon at all; it was used strictly as a terrorizing agent. Its objective was to burn everything it touched: buildings, landscapes, human beings. Even in the savage conflicts that had raged in the post-Big War years, napalm use had been kept to a minimum by all parties.

But now, here were a dozen attacking planes loaded down with so much of the stuff, their pilots were practically begging the defensive forces to shoot them down.

Most of these fire-bombers came right in over the settlement of Old Town itself. Canister after canister of the jelly gas began falling on the quaint seaside homes and cottages, obliterating them in waves of blue and green flame. There were no real explosions from these bombs; instead, they produced a horrific
whooshing
sound whenever they hit, followed by the sickening loud crackle of flames consuming everything in their path. In less than a minute, more than a hundred napalm canisters had fallen on both Old Town and the devastated air base. This conflagration rose up into a single nightmarish flame. It would be later reported that the glow from this gigantic fire could be seen in Miami, some 150 miles away.

All the while the mobile guns were firing at the slowly attacking Tomcats, even as their pilots were doing their fire-bombing runs. One F-14 was caught by a triple barrage right on its tail, blowing it in two and sending fiery pieces of wreckage into the air base’s chow hall and chapel. Another ’Cat was caught by a ZSU-23-4 barrage just as its pilot was pulling up from bomb release. The AA shells went right through the cockpit, killing both the pilot and the rear seat weapons officer. The F-14 spiraled wildly as the pilot’s dead body fell heavy on the control stick. The plane pitched up, then down, then up again, before finally turning over and crashing into the east beach. Two more attackers were hit even before they reached their bomb release points. They exploded in mid-air, further lighting up the skies with tremendous flashes of napalm-induced flames.

Once the fire-bombing aircraft departed, only a trailing wave of follow-up attackers—two Hornets and a single F-14—remained. The pair of Hornets roared in side-by-side, each carrying a 500-pound bomb. But whether they mistook their drop point or they got nervous or confused with all the flak and fire flying around them, both planes overshot the runway and wound up releasing their payloads over the swamps beyond, where they exploded harmlessly. A Ml63 Vulcan gun caught both these planes right after they dropped, shredding their tails and immediately igniting them. Already shaken, the pilots panicked on cue, turned as one, and being too low to eject, lowered the wheels, and
landed
on the right side auxiliary runway, touching down and skidding into the soft earth beyond.

Strangely, the lone trailing F/A-18 practically duplicated the Tomcats’ actions, dropping its bombs way out beyond the landing strip, before getting his ass shot up and coming in for an ugly but successful touchdown on the heavily cratered main landing strip.