The Gulf (42 page)

3. (S) Return at highest possible speed. Upon crossing zonal boundary detach HMS
CARDIFF. ADAMS, GALLERY, VAN ZANDT
return to Bahrain as previously directed ref (B).

4. (S) Commanding officers will ensure that all units and personnel are at highest degree of readiness during execution of this order. Maintain Condition II Red against surprise attack until south of 28 degrees latitude.

 

BT

DO NOT DECLASSIFY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF ORIGINATOR

SECRET

 

“Reprisal,” said Dan.

“And about goddamn time,” said Shaker. He took the pen the radioman held out and scribbled his initials. “Officer of the deck! Get Lieutenant Pensker up here. We're going to need to shuffle our ammo around.”

“Aye, sir.”

“All units Sagebrush, this is Bounty Hunter. Message follows. Immediate execute. Break.” Lenson, Firzhak, and Shaker grabbed for pencils as McQueen turned up the Tactical Coordination speaker. “Bravo Tango Two tack zero-four-five. Sierra two niner. Yankee Hotel two. Alfa Charlie niner one. I say again”—the calm voice from
Charles Adams
reread it—“nine one. Standby, execute. Over.”

“Roger that,” shouted Shaker. “OOD, come right to zero-four-five. All ahead flank, kick her up to twenty-seven knots.”

Meanwhile, Dan had grabbed the code book. The intercom beat him as
Van Zandt
heeled to full rudder. “Bridge, Combat: Break last signal as follows: Form line of bearing in order of hull numbers. Prepare for surface and/or air action. Intended target, fixed installation.”

“Concur with Combat's break.” Dan snapped the pub shut and made for the chart table. Sure enough, the next question out of Shaker's mouth was “Navigator, how far to Point Kilo?”

“Twenty-two miles, sir.”

“From there to the Ardeshir field?”

“Wait one … forty-eight miles.”

“Mister Firzhak! What's your course to station?”

“I'm steering by eye, sir, to come in astern of
Gallery.
”

“Okay. Boatswain! Call the mess decks, have them set up for early chow, sandwiches or whatever they got can be fixed quick.”

Shaker busied himself with the intercom. He told Guerra, in main control, to put all pumps on line and bring up another generator. He reviewed weapons and electronic readiness with Al Wise, the TAO. Then he joined Lenson and McQueen over the chart.

Dan, glancing at him, could hardly believe this was the same man he'd found slumped in his chair that morning. Shaker was grinning, eyes lit like strobes. “I'll hold off GQ till the guys eat. Christ, I hope nobody up the line wimps out on that execute. What do you think, XO? Will the buggers come out and fight?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“They've got the ships.
Sahand
and
Sabalan
are inport Bushehr. They could intercept us. And there's a fighter squadron there, too … those stupid bastards!” He battered his fist down on the tan coast of Asia. “That's where we should hit! Not some fucking oil platform; that doesn't do a thing but stir them up! Where the hell is Pensker?”

“Here, sir, behind you.”

Shaker and the black officer went out on the wing. Dan could hear them discussing the proper ammo with which to destroy an oil rig. Then their voices fell, borne away by the fresh wind as
Van Zandt,
rolling as the sea kicked up, sliced her way eastward, toward Iran.

*   *   *

Cardiff
joined ten miles west of the hold point. Dan watched her slide into line ahead, a trim modern frigate in the lighter British battle gray. The White Ensign fluttered at her masthead, matching the cream her stem peeled off of a sea that grew greener with each mile. She fell in astern of
Gallery,
just ahead of
Van Zandt.

The execute order reached them shortly thereafter. At the picket station, Nauman ordered a turn-in-sequence to the east. They corpened around, each warship turning in the swirl left by the previous one's rudder. Under a burning sky, they increased speed gradually as
Adams
brought her boilers on line, and finally steadied at thirty.

The sea was empty. Not a dhow, not a craft of any kind showed on it or on their screens as they crossed the invisible line that marked Iranian-controlled sea. It looked the same on the far side, a sullen green with here and there a drifting slick, its edges refracting the dull sunlight into a thousand muted hues.

Shaker muttered, staring ahead through his binoculars, “Dan, you take CIC for this action. I'll stay here.”

“Aye, sir.”

Combat was as ever, cold and blue-lit, but someone had taped a placard over the plotting table. It read:
SO WHAT IF IRANIANS ARE SHORT, DARK, AND SMELLY. SCREW 'EM ALL
.

He circled the room, checking each scope and position, and at last settled into the chair. Al Wise grinned at him. The operations officer looked excited and at the same time scared. Pale and thin, a detail man, he was devoted to his cats; he had three, named after Soviet radars, which he boarded with his fiancée during deployments. “Good times, hey, XO?” he said now.

“Good times?” said Dan. “Sorry, I'm a little slow today.”

“Never mind. You going to play TAO, or you want to second-guess me?”

“I'll do it. You back me up.”

“Got it.” The ops boss screwed his head back into earphones. He was on Air Defense Net Alfa; if speedboats or planes showed up, that was how the OTC would coordinate the SAG's defense.

Dan sat motionless, feeling the tension coil in his stomach, as if his guts had turned to springs. There was nothing to do now but wait.

*   *   *

An hour later, he could make out the field on radar. It looked like a glowing spiderweb. From each platform, glittering lines spun outward, pipelines to satellite wells. And each spider was itself woven, he knew, into the submerged pumping network back to Kh
ā
rk. Pips moved within the web, service boats, probably guard boats, too; the new Boghammers that the Swedes—always happy to coin kroners from neutrality—had sold Khomeini in the face of an international embargo. Not that the Reagan administration could throw stones.… The range closed steadily. Down here he wouldn't see much of the action. If Iran took up their challenge, though, this was where the battle would be fought from.

Nauman slowed the group when they were ten miles away, and sprinted ahead in
Adams.
A loose routine had evolved for platform attacks. The men on them, civilian workers and a few guards with rifles, got ten minutes warning in Farsi, French, and English before the destroyers went in. It seemed to take hours. The men in CIC didn't fidget, didn't move. They were glued to the screens.

At last Nauman's signal came over PRITAC. Follow him in, and commence fire in turn.

Van Zandt
accelerated instantly, heeling to hard rudder. Dan switched to the gunnery circuit as Wise said, “
Adams
has commenced firing.”

“Very well.”

Time crawled by. He stared at the screen. Occasionally, he could see speckles near the spider. Plumes of spray from ricochets and near misses. Wise, from the coordination net, announced who was firing.

At last, the captain's voice came on the line. “Mount thirty-one, load fifty rounds point det to last station screw feeder.”

Terry Pensker, his voice hard and eager: “Fifty rounds PD loaded.”

Shaker: “Stand by … commence fire.”

Too bad they were last, he thought.
Adams
carried two five-inch mounts and was known in the fleet as a shooting ship.
Gallery
and
Cardiff
had taken their turns, too. No way Shaker would give up a chance, though. And the platforms, spiderweb frameworks of steel, were notoriously difficult to damage with shellfire.

The 76 slammed suddenly above them, making the plotting boards shudder. Three slow rounds followed, spotting rounds. He could hear the empty shell cases clang on the deck, and the whoosh of high-pressure air that cleared the bore. Then Pensker ordered rapid continuous and the firing began in earnest, as fast and steady as a good carpenter nails a wall, slam, slam, slam, till the ready magazine was empty.

A moment later the 1MC came on. “On the
Van Zandt:
This is the Captain speaking. For those of you below, we've just completed a firing run on an Iranian oil platform. It's on fire. I count ten hits.… Now the lead ship in our group is hauling around. Looks like we're going to make another pass. Petty officers, break off as many men as possible for a look-see. The fire is orange-red, hundreds of feet high. Loads of smoke, dense and black—”

Shaker went on talking, describing the flashes as the British ship's shells hit, for all the world like a sports announcer. Dan sat motionless in the padded chair, pulling at his earlobe. He thought of going outside, watching the shells tear apart what American or Dutch engineers had built. But it didn't tempt him. Not even Shaker thought this was the answer to the problems that had brought
Van Zandt
to the Gulf, or even a step toward them.

At least it was going smoothly. There'd been two boats near the platform, but they'd retreated eastward after picking up the crew. But if he were the Iranians—

“Tracks two-one-oh-one, two-one-oh-two, two-one-oh-three turning west.”

“Say again,” Dan said instantly to the man who was watching the air picture. “Al, better get on this.”

“Got them. Three aircraft over the coast. Turning our way.”

“Range?”

“Seventy miles, closing.”

He leaned over the petty officer's chair. There they were, three hostile-designated contacts, detaching themselves from the Bushehr peninsula. They weren't showing on radar yet. This data was digital, transmitted from the AWACs.

“Type?”

“F-4s, I think, sir,” called the EW operator.

Lenson watched them for a long moment. Phantoms. U.S.-made, supplied when Iran was the bulwark of the Nixon doctrine. Integral machine guns and cannon, and they could carry rockets, iron bombs, or TV-guided Mavericks.

They were making for Ardeshir, all right. They'd be overhead in ten minutes. It was almost like the encounter at Hormuz. Only this time there was no doubt as to what they were.

“Lieutenant Pensker. Your target: three bogeys at one-two-seven. Designate to STIR. Load Standard to the rail. Next round same.” He pressed the intercom. “Captain, CIC. Three fighters heading our way from the mainland.”

“Take good care of them, Dan. Does Nauman know about 'em?”

“He should, they're coming over NTDS.”

“Call him, make sure. Keep me posted.”

“Aye, sir.” He snapped off and looked at Wise. The ops boss nodded, already relaying the alert to the flagship.

Now, as the TAO brought designation and tracking up, Dan backed off from the situation, forced himself to relax and think. Nauman would most likely designate the incoming aircraft to one of the frigates. Their missile systems and radars were newer than the 1960-era
Adams.
But
Gallery
was off to starboard. Sure enough, the speaker said then, “Comanche, this is Bounty Hunter. Your target, aircraft, track two-one-oh-one, oh-two, oh-three, bearing one-one-zero, range fifty miles.”

“Comanche” was
Van Zandt.
“Illuminate,” said Dan. Pensker, at the weapons console, acknowledged and called back: “Illuminating.… lock-on! Solid track, good solution on leading bogey.”

“Designate to Standard. This will be a three-round engagement with setup for immediate refire.”

“Designated.”

“Missile on.”

“First round, standing by to fire.”

“Bridge, Combat: To the captain: Group of three tight bogeys have been designated our target. We're locked on, awaiting release authority for three-round engagement.”

Shaker, tersely: “You have my permission to fire when OTC orders.”

“Roger that … Sound fire-warning bell,” he told Pensker. No one was supposed to be near the launcher during GQ, but they might as well take the precaution.

Now he returned his attention to the screen. Turn back, he thought, trying to will the oncoming pilots to break off, to heed the warning the Mark 92 lock-on would be droning in their headphones. He remembered another man, far away and years ago, a man he'd had to kill with his bare hands. He didn't like to kill. But he didn't want his men to die, either.
Turn back. Don't make me fire.

The pips jumped another mile forward. “Altitude?” he asked crisply.

“Ten thousand.”

“Confirm IFF hostile.” Unlikely they'd be anything else, out of Bushehr in a V formation, but it was another check.

“Squawking mode two. They're ragheads, all right, and military,” said Pensker.

“Standard commands and responses, Lieutenant.” He voiced the rebuke automatically. His mind was running independently now, like one of the computers around him. The range and altitude were within the missile envelope. They ought to fire soon, to allow for a second salvo in case the first missed.

He remembered another day when he'd waited for aircraft to come in, just like this. A stormy day in the Mediterranean. That time all he'd had were three-inch popguns, too slow to follow jets around, much less hit them. Now he had missiles, 76mm, Phalanx, multilayered defense. He had to admit, it felt a hell of a lot better.

“Thirty miles.”

“Hard paint,” said Pensker tightly. “We ought to fire now. Sir! We ought to—”

“Take it easy, Terry.”

“Comanche, Bounty Hunter: weapons free,” said the speaker. Dan paused for just a second. The moment he'd hoped would never come again was here.

He said, his voice devoid of all emotion, “Shoot.”

The deck plates vibrated to the bellow of a rocket engine. It receded, and he visualized the second round, thrust up too fast for eye to follow out of its magazine onto the rail, twin probes locking in for the data feed, then the launcher swinging it down at the same time it trained, fast as a striking viper. Another howl dwindled off. One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Four thousand. A third. “Missiles away,” shouted Pensker, his voice charged, happy.