Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

The minutes passed as the gunboats crossed the twenty miles of ocean between the shore and the ships. The Hornets made more leisurely turns around the ships. The pilots had their engines throttled back to maximum endurance airspeed to save fuel.

Going round and round, watching the boats closing on the tanker… Harry Lampert felt helpless and frustrated. What were the Iranians up to?

In the radar van on the bluff, Habib Sultani glanced at the radar screen, then his watch, and said to the general sitting beside the telephone that connected directly to the airbase, “Launch the fighters.” The general picked up the telephone.

When they were about four miles from the ships, well into international waters, two of the gunboats changed course. The lead kept going toward the laden tanker, but number three turned south for the empty tanker coming up the strait. The second gunboat altered course to intercept the destroyer.

A half minute later the Black Eagle controller said, “War Ace Leader, remind the gunboats of your presence.”

“Roger that,” Harry Lampert said. He continued, “Betsy, stay high as cover. Goose, come with me.”

Goose was Lampert’s wingman, and he gave his lead a mike click in response. Unsaid was the implicit order for Hillbilly Jones, Chicago’s wingman, to stay with his lead.

Lampert reduced throttle and lowered his nose as he completed his turn. This time he would go right over the lead gunboat at fifty feet.

In the lead gunboat, Omar saw the two F/A-18s out of the corner of his eye. They looked funny, so he turned his head to see. They were very low and moving extremely fast. A cone of gray light seemed to trail each airplane. Although he didn’t know it, the Hornets were supersonic, and the gray cone was vapor condensing in the visible shock wave behind each plane.

In only a heartbeat the lead plane went over Omar’s boat, and the shock wave nearly ruptured his eardrums. The shock wave of the second plane, which passed fifty yards in front of his boat, so closely followed the first that it was difficult to distinguish the two. The booms of the Hornets’ passing were the loudest things Omar and his crewmen had ever heard, and they were followed by the howl of four jet engines in afterburner, a howl that rapidly dropped in volume as the two fighters raced away at nearly a thousand feet per second.

Omar had his orders. He stayed on course for the tanker, now about a mile and a half away. Considering the tanker’s speed, he would be alongside in about two minutes. In front of him, the men were shouting at each other and pointing at the fighters. One of them turned and pumped his fist at Omar. He shouted something, something lost on the wind. Then Omar realized what he had said. “God is Great!”

Ah, yes.

Harry Lampert came out of burner and did a four-G, 180-degree turn, then headed back toward the gunboats, which were rapidly closing with the tanker.

Worried that he might panic the tanker’s captain with a masthead pass, he elected to pass the tanker on a parallel heading about a half mile away, which proved to be outside the gunboats. Lampert got on the radio to Black Eagle, which was patching his comments straight through to the admiral in the TFCC, the Tactical Flag Command Center.

The second gunboat was charging directly toward the destroyer, which was doing about half the speed of the boat, on a collision course. Even as Harry looked that way, the gunboat turned at the last possible instant and went roaring down the side of the gray warship into her wake.

The third gunboat was still on course for the tanker to the south, and was still several miles away.

On the bluff overlooking the strait, Habib Sultani watched the action through his binoculars. He saw the low pass by the Hornets, saw the boat charging the destroyer, and he heard the buzzsaw sound of encrypted chatter on the radio. The Americans were getting excited.

“Where are the Sukhois?” he asked.

“They are airborne. Estimated arrival in ten minutes,” was the answer.

“Radio the gunboat leader and tell him to get in against the tanker and shout for it to stop. Have him shoot into the water ahead of it.”

The Hawkeye radar operator picked up the skinpaints of the Sukhoi fighters coming south along the coast from Bandar-e Abbas. They had been running low, partially masked by the peaks of the coastal mountains, but the Black Eagle controller had them now. He informed War Ace Leader of the closing fighters.

Harry Lampert was face-to-face with the tiger, and the news in his headset that Iranian fighters were just minutes away didn’t improve the situation. Suddenly he wanted to be upstairs, facing the fighters. The destroyer could deal with the gunboats near it.

“Chicago, come on down and fly around these boats. If they shoot at the tanker, sink them. We’re coming back upstairs.”

“Wilco,” said Chicago O’Hare and dropped her nose.

Out on her wing, Hillbilly Jones was in an information-overload condition. The radio chatter was coming thick and fast, enemy fighters were inbound, he got only glimpses of the tanker and gunboats below, and Chicago was diving toward the sea. He eased closer to her, now only fifty feet away, and concentrated on staying on her wing; someone else was going to have to run the war.

O’Hare and Jones were descending through two thousand feet when their ECM threat indicators lit up. The inbound Sukhois had turned on their radar and were probing for them.

Oh man, what now? Jones thought.

Harry Lampert couldn’t enter the twelve-mile exclusion zone of Iran’s territorial waters. He was checking his location, Black Eagle was relaying the admiral’s reminder, and his threat indicator was lighting up like a Christmas tree. If all that wasn’t enough, when he glanced down, he saw two waterspouts ahead of the tanker. Hell, that gunboat was firing warning shots!

Harry keyed the mike and relayed that information to Black Eagle, then asked for and received permission to fire a warning shot of his own. O’Hare had heard the transmissions, of course, but to make sure she understood, he said on the radio, “Chicago, put a burst in front of the lead boat.”

“Wilco,” said Betsy O’Hare. She was one tough fighter pilot, a Naval Academy grad, and she didn’t dither. She flipped on her master armament switch, selected guns, then adjusted her flight path so the rounds would impact a hundred yards or so in front of the leading gunboat, which was paralleling the tanker’s course, about a hundred yards to port. The gunboat had throttled back and seemed to be roughly matching the speed of the tanker. She would come in off the gunboat’s port beam, at enough of an angle that her 20 mm cannon shells wouldn’t hit the tanker if they ricocheted off the water.

Being human, she wondered what the Iranians manning those 37 mm guns were going to think about cannon shells in front of them. Since that was an unknown, she kept her speed fairly high, almost four hundred knots, as she closed, still descending. A short burst would be good enough. Let them see the muzzle blast.

Her wingman, Hillbilly Jones, was listening to all of the radio chatter-the Sukhois were coming in supersonic-and the audio from the ECM threat indicator, which was giving him audible cues on every Iranian radar out there, while the blue ocean and hazy sky changed places as Chicago maneuvered. His flying was getting ragged; he was behind the curve. It was all he could do to hang on to his flight lead. The thought that a safe course might be to break off so that he could fly his own airplane while observing this goat rope from a comfortable altitude never even crossed his mind.

He saw Chicago’s gun vomit a burst, but she didn’t pull up immediately, which surprised him. He had anticipated the pull-up, started pulling himself, so now he had to jam his nose down, steepen his descent to get back into position. The Gs and flying sensations had thoroughly disoriented him; the hazy sky without a discernible horizon didn’t help. His only attitude reference was his leader. The radar altimeter sounded a warning, but in the cacophony of sound assaulting his ears, he didn’t even notice.