Sky Masters полностью

“Bullet Three, take a shot and clear,” the controller aboard Ranger said. “Five-two is ready to engage in sixty seconds.” “Five-two” was CG-52, the USS Bunker Hill, an Aegis-class guided-missile cruiser-escort that could detect targets out to 175 miles and track and engage sea-skimming targets out to 40 miles; it carried SM-2 Aegis vertical-launch surface-to-air missiles. In addition, a special system called BGAAWC, or Battle Group Anti-Aircraft Warfare Coordination, allowed the Bunker Hill to remotely control the SM-2 Standard antiaircraft missiles aboard the cruiser Ste- rett and the Sea Sparrow missiles aboard the destroyers Hewitt and Fife, which were the Ranger’s other three escorts.

Kelly’s RIO, Lieutenant “Faker” Markey, sang out immediately, “Got a judy on the missiles, Horn… I got ’em locked up. Shoot away.”

“Good work, Faker.” On the Ranger’s tactical frequency, Kelly radioed, “Bullet Three, copy, fox…”

Suddenly, on the emergency Guard frequency, they heard, “Missiles! Bandits firing missiles! Horn, check six…!”

The AAR-47 infrared warning receiver beeped just then, and several flare cartridges shot off into the night sky as Markey’s left index finger began to madly jab the “Flare” button — the supercoded, electronic “eye” of the infrared warning seeker had detected the motor-ignition flash of a missile less than eight miles behind them. Kelly pulled the throttles to near idle power, rolled inverted, and pulled the nose to the ocean, trying to get his hot tail vertical and away from the missile’s seeker. “Find that missile!” Kelly shouted.

Markey’s response was almost immediate: “I see it! I see it! High above us… it’s passing over us…”

A flash of light caught Kelly’s attention — to his horror, he noticed the flash was one of his own decoy flares. The hot phosphorus blob seemed to float just a few yards alongside the American fighter. It was bright enough to attract the enemy missile. “Stop ejecting flares!” Kelly screamed. “It’ll follow us down…!”

But it was too late.

In his panic, Markey kept on ejecting decoy flares as the Tomcat continued its break and dive, and the trail of flares caused the Chinese Pen Lung-9 heat-seeking missile to snap down in the wake of the Tomcat, where it reacquired the F-14’s hot exhaust and finished its deadly voyage. The PL- 9’s twenty-two-pound high-explosive warhead detonated on contact, shredding both engines instantly and destroying the Tomcat long before the crew had a chance to eject.

The Combat Information Center in an Aegis-class guided missile cruiser was like sitting in a giant big-screen video arcade. Four operators — the embarked group commander of the Ranger battle group and his assistant plus the TAO, or tactical action officer, and his assistant — each sat in front of two 42-inch-square, four-color computer screens that showed the entire Ranger battle group, using computer-generated symbology and digitized coastal maps, creating a “big picture” of the entire battle area and highlighting friendly and enemy vessels and aircraft in relation to the fleet and any nearby political boundaries. The incredible MK-7 Aegis weapon system could track and process over one hundred different targets beyond five hundred miles in range by integrating radar information from other surface, land, or airborne search radars; the SPY-1 phased-array radar on the Bunker Hill itself had a range of almost two hundred miles and could spot a sea-skimming missile on the horizon at a range of over forty miles. Aegis was designed to defend a large carrier battle group from dense and complicated enemy air and sea assault by integrating the entire group’s air-defense network into a single display and control area, and then providing long-range, high-speed decision-making and automatic-weapon employment for not only the Aegis cruiser’s weapon itself, but for all the ships of the battle group — Bunker HilPs Aegis system could control the weapons of all the Ranger's battle group.

It all sounded complicated, very high-tech, and foolproof — but at that moment, staring down the barrel of a gun, it did not seem very foolproof.

The Aegis air-defense system was designed to have the battle group commander and the ship’s commanding officer direct fleet defense from the Tactical Flag Command Center, but with an aircraft carrier in the group and a rather tightly packed deployment of ships, the Ranger battle group commander, Rear Admiral Conner Walheim, was aboard Ranger consulting directly with the carrier’s officers, so his deputy for antiaircraft warfare, Captain Richard Feine- mann, was on the Aegis console. And because the Bunker HilPs skipper preferred to stay on the bridge during such operations, the ship’s Tactical Action Officer was representing him on the Aegis console.