Shadows of Steel Page 4

  Retired Air Force colonel Paul White stood on the aft deck of the Valley Mistress, arms crossed on his chest, watching the dark shapes working all around him. In addition to leading Madcap Magician, White was the senior officer in charge of the thirty-man “technical” crew of the Valley Mistress, which on this leg of their voyage—White’s technical crews changed often, depending on the current mission requirements—consisted of engineers, technicians, and sixteen U.S. Marines, none in uniform.

  All of the concentrated planning and rehearsing had already taken place, so, like Alfred Hitchcock, who had already meticulously plotted out each one of his shots before setting foot on a new movie set, White’s job at this point was simply to observe his team in action, silently monitor their progress via the ship’s intercom through his headset, and stay out of their way. Paul White was a thirty-two-year veteran, but had never been in combat except for brief stints as a communications repairman in Vietnam. His specialty was electronics; he was a “gadget guy,” designing and building sophisticated systems from spare parts—the parts could be leftover transistors, old radios, or old aircraft. White could take the oldest, most broken-down thing and make it better—and, more important, he could teach others to do it, too.

  White’s intercom crackled to life: “Lightfoot, Plot.”

  Without alerting his stance or changing his scan of deck activities, White keyed the talk switch on his headset cord: “Lightfoot, go.”

  “T-minus-ten radar sweep, no air activity, no surface activity within five miles,” the radar operator aboard the Mistress reported.

  “Copy,” White responded. “Report every two minutes, report any surface activity within ten miles, Lightfoot out.” White raised his head and watched as the retractable mast carrying the ship’s SPS-69 X-band surface search radar began to extend. The range of the SPS-69 was limited to about six miles on a normal mast, but could be extended to almost fifteen miles by hoisting the radar to 100 feet—which was done only at night or in an emergency, because it looked very suspicious to have a search radar up so high on a noncombat vessel. Even more suspicious-looking on a “rescue” craft was the radar that was normally restricted into a housing just forward of the helicopter hangar—an SPS-40E B-band two-dimensional air search radar, which could scan for aircraft from sea level up to a 33,000-foot altitude and out to a 100-mile range. The Valley Mistress would probably not enjoy the same relatively unfettered access to most nations’ territorial waters if those countries knew the ship had enough electronic search and communications equipment to control a surface or air battle at sea.

  Over the din of deck activities, White heard another familiar sound, and he turned toward the starboard rail to see a young man wearing a headset leaning over the rail—way over the rail. “Chumming for sharks,” as the crew called it, was pretty rare on the stabilized Valley Mistress in good weather, but this poor guy had had trouble ever since he’d joined the ship. White smiled and keyed his intercom button: “You okay, Jon?”

  The man hurriedly wiped his mouth and face as if surprised someone noticed him, although there were men and women all around him, and he straightened and walked stiffly and unsteadily toward White. Jonathan Colin Masters was thirty-eight years old, but he looked about fifteen. He had short brown hair that looked as if someone—most likely himself—had cut it with hedge clippers; normally a baseball cap worn backward hid his goofy-looking hair, but Masters had lost that hat days ago in one of his frequent visits to the rail. He had disarming green eyes and long, gangly legs and arms—but he also had one of the world’s most finely tuned brains on the end of his thin pencil neck.

  Masters, a Dartmouth graduate at thirteen, an MIT doctor of science at twenty, was the president of Sky Masters, Inc. an Arkansas-based research company that designed, built, and deployed small specialty aircraft and spacecraft. SMI products took the latest aerospace technologies and miniaturized them: he could turn huge Delta space boosters into truck-mounted launch vehicles, or multi-ton communications satellites into bread-basket-sized devices. He was aboard the Valley Mistress to supervise the progress of his latest development.

  “Feeling okay, Jon?” White asked as the boyish-looking engineer stepped toward him. The question was serious: repeated seasickness was just as debilitating as any other serious illness or disease, bad enough to cause problems even for a healthy, normally hydrated person; Masters was as skinny as a beanpole and the temperature and humidity in this part of the world were often both in the mid- to high nineties. “Why don’t you stay inside where it’s air-conditioned?”

  “I need windows, Paul,” Masters said weakly. “This damned ship of yours has no windows. I need a horizon to get my bearings.”

  “You must have a few thousand hours’ flying time, Jon,” White said, adding a lighter tone now that he could see that the young man was feeling okay, “but you’ve had trouble every single day since we left Italy. Ever get airsick?”

  “Never.”

  “Are you using the scopolamine patches like the doc said?”

  “I’ve worn enough of those damned patches to make me look like I’ve got a cauliflower growing behind my ears,” Masters said, “and that stuff makes me drowsy and it makes food taste like charcoal. I’d rather eat, then barf, thank you very much.”

  “Maybe if you’d stop eating the burgers and fries like a pig, You Wouldn’t upchuck so easy.” Masters ate junk food and drank soft drinks like a teenager but never gained the weight; it was always the supergeniuses, White thought, who were too busy to worry about unimportant matters such as health and nutrition. All that brain energy he generated must’ve kept him nice and slim.

  “You want to know about the mission preparations or critique my eating habits, Colonel?” Masters asked impatiently. White gave up on the lecturing and motioned for the young scientist to show him the final preparations for the maiden launch of his newest invention.

  Assembled on the aft helicopter deck was a sixty-five-foot-long track elevated about twenty degrees, and aimed off the fantail. Sitting on the front end of the track was an aircraft that greatly resembled a B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, its wingspan a large forty-two feet. The High Endurance Autonomous Reconnaissance System (HEARSE), nicknamed Skywalker, was a long-range, high-altitude flying-wing drone, with long, thin swept-back wings and a bulbous center section that was the aircraft’s only fuselage. Like the B-2A stealth bomber, its engine section was on top of the fuselage, with a low, thin single air intake on the front and a very thin exhaust section in back; it used a single minijet engine, which was now running at idle power and had been for several minutes as White’s technicians did its final checkout. Skywalker wasn’t wasting gas sitting out there idling—it could probably run for three days at idle power. Painted in black radar-absorbent material, the craft looked sinister and unearthly, like a giant air-breathing manta ray. Unlike remotely piloted vehicles steered from the ground, Skywalker was a semi-autonomous drone—it would carry out commands issued to it via satellite up-link by plotting its own best track and speed.

  Skywalker carried 1,000 pounds of sophisticated communications and reconnaissance gear in its fuselage section. The primary reconnaissance sensor was a side-looking synthetic-aperture radar, which broadcast high-resolution digital radar images via microwave datalinks back to the Valley Mistress. The SAR radar, similar to the one in the B-2A stealth bomber but optimized for reconnaissance versus attack and terrain avoidance, was powerful enough to create photographic-like images in total darkness that were clear enough to identify objects as small as a dog, and to electronically measure objects down to a foot in size. It used the same LPI (Low Probability of Intercept) technology as the B-2A as well: very short radar “looks,” the radar imagery digitized so that it could be manipulated, enhanced, and viewed off-line, with the radar turned off.

  “Everything looks like it’s going fine.”

  “Skywalker’s engine has been running fine for exactly ten-point-three minutes, all up-link channels confirm connected and secure—she’s ready for a push anytime,” Masters said confidently, almost boastfully.

  “Good,” White said. Some people might get irritated about Master’s cockiness, but White enjoyed it. Left free to let his imagination soar, Masters was a true idea machine, a man who could get the job done no matter what the circumstances. “I’ve got about T minus eight. I’m heading to the recon center—I’m sure you’ll want to stay out in the open air until your ship gets on station.” Secretly he prayed that Masters wouldn’t blow lunch in the confines of the reconnaissance control room—most of the air conditioning in that space was reserved for the electronics, and it was stuffy and smelly enough without the “chain reaction” scent of vomit.

  Launch time had arrived. After clearing the area on radar, White ordered Skywalker on patrol. Masters throttled the turbofan engine up to full power; it would need full throttle only for a few minutes, then throttle back to a miserly twenty-liter-per-hour fuel-consumption rate, good for twelve hours of cruising. Then he released the hold-back bar, and the bird hurled itself down the launch rail. It sailed into the darkness at deck level for less than a hundred feet until it had built up climb speed, then, buoyed by its long, thin, supercritical wings, Skywalker climbed rapidly into the darkness. In less than five minutes it was at 10,000 feet. It made a few orbits over the Valley Mistress as Masters and his technicians checked out its systems, then headed north, toward the Iranian coast.

  Jon Masters looked pretty together when he stepped into the reconnaissance control room a few minutes later—his wet hair and chest probably meant he had stuck his head in a freshwater shower to refresh himself “Looks like we got a tight bird, Doc,” White told him as he stepped inside. “Skywalker should be on station in about an hour.”

  Masters found his chair but did not sit in it. He looked around apprehensively. “Can you open a window or door?” he asked in a quiet voice, like a boy shyly asking to use the bathroom. “Man, I need a horizon to align my gyros.”

  “Sorry, no windows,” White said, “and leaving the hatch open spoils our electronic security.” White knew that ships, subs, aircraft, or even shore-based electronic surveillance systems could pick up electromagnetic emissions from long distances—passive electronic reconnaissance was one of White’s most popular missions—so the Mistress’s classified sections were shielded to foil eaves-droppers; that shielding was useless if ports or hatches were left open. He had some crew members turn on ventilation fans. It didn’t seem to help—even in the dimly lit little chamber, everyone could see that Jon Masters was turning an especially awful shade of green.

  But Masters seemed to settle down quickly as the drone approached its patrol area and some interesting images began coming in. The first one was crisp and clean, with shades of purple and orange providing some contrast and depth. The sensor operators filled the two thirty-inch monitors with a large warship steaming northward; data blocks under the sensor image displayed the target’s speed, size, direction of travel, and other characteristics. “Beeaauuu-t-ful!” Jon Masters exclaimed.

  Paul White agreed. It was the joint Chinese-Iranian aircraft carrier Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fully loaded and with a full complement of escorts, leaving its port at Chah Bahar and heading into the Gulf of Oman. White had never thought he’d see anything like it in his life—Iran sailing an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf region. “I’ll get the report out on the satellite,” he said, almost breathlessly. “NSA will want to know details.”

  Although it was not as big as the American supercarriers, it was still a very impressive-looking warship. It had so many anti-ship missile mounts on its decks that it looked like a battleship or guided-missile cruiser welded beside an aircraft carrier. It was a little intimidating to think that the, Khomeini could bring an awesome array of surface-warfare weapons to bear on a target, and then launch attack aircraft to finish the job. The Khomeini looked similar to American aircraft carriers from the rear, with its slanted landing section, lighted edges, and four arresting wires; the main difference was in the huge array of armament set up in the aft section—the cruise-missile canisters and defensive missile and gun emplacements on both sides. The “island” superstructure looked like any other, with huge arrays of antennas seemingly piled atop one another on the superstructure and on a separate antenna structure aft; there was one aircraft elevator in front and behind the superstructure. Again, anti-ship cruise-missile emplacements were everywhere. The really unusual feature of the Khomeini was the bow section—instead of continuing the large, long flat profile of a “flat-top,” the Khomeini’s bow rapidly sloped upward at the bow, forming an aircraft “ski jump.”

  White returned as Skywalker was focused on the carrier’s forward flight deck. “NSA’s got the word,” he said. “No other instructions for us, so we continue to monitor the battle group. We should hear something soon.”

  “Man, look at the planes that thing is carrying,” Masters exclaimed. He started poking the screen, counting aircraft. “They got at least ten fighters lined up on deck.”

  “They what?” White asked. He counted along with Masters, then said, “That’s weird. They got their attack group up on deck,”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “The Khomeini is a former Russian carrier, and the Russians usually wouldn’t park any of their aircraft up on deck, like the Americans do,” White explained. “They’d keep all the fixed-wing aircraft below-decks and leave only a few fling-wings on the roof for rescue and shuttle service between other ships in the group. That’s why they carry only two dozen fixed-wing jets. An American flat-top carries three times that many—but one-third of them can be stowed below-decks at one time.

  “See this? The deck is so small, they line the helicopters up just forward of the forward elevator, and all the fixed-wings on the fantail behind the aft elevator,” White continued. “They need all that room because the Khomeini doesn’t, use catapults like other carriers. The Russians originally designed the ski jump for short-takeoff-and-landing jets, like the Yak-38 Forger and the Yak-41 Freestyle, which they canceled, but it works OK—in a manner of speaking—for conventional jets.” He pointed at the monitor toward the aft section of the Iranian carrier. “The fighters start way back here, about six hundred feet from the bow. The fighters are secured with a holdback bar, the pilots turn on the afterburners, and they let them go. When they leave the ski jump, they get flung about a hundred feet in the sky—but they fall almost seventy feet toward the water as they build up enough speed to start flying….”

  “You’re kidding!” Masters exclaimed.

  “No, I’m not,” White assured him. “The jets drop so low that they had to build this little platform here on the bow so that someone with a radio can tell the air boss and skipper whether or not the jet made it, because no one can see the fighter from the ‘crow’s nest’ for about fifteen to twenty seconds after takeoff, and if it crashed the ship would run right over it. The Sukhoi-33s apparently have a special election system wired into the radar altimeter that will automatically eject the pilot if there’s no weight on the landing gear and the jet sinks below twenty feet. The auto-ejection system is manually activated, and apparently a lot of planes have been lost in training because newbie pilots forget to turn the system off just before landing. They make a successful carrier approach, swoop over the fantail, then fwoosh—they’re gone, punched out a split second before they catch the wire.” Masters laughed out loud like a little kid—for the moment, his seasickness was all but forgotten.

  “The deck gets very dangerous in operations like this. There’s probably only thirty feet of clearance between a wingtip and a rotor tip when a jet’s heading for the ski jump,” White went on. “Plus, nobody can land because aircraft are lined up on the fantail in the landing zone, which means if a jet has an emergency right after takeoff it’ll take them a long time to clear the deck to recover it….”

  “What’s on your mind, boss?” It was Paul White’s deputy commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Carl Knowlton.

  White shook his head. “Ah, nothin’. It’s just weird for all those planes to be on deck at night.” He studied the monitor a bit more. “And they’ve got the ski jump clear. If they were just emptying out the hangar deck to clean it or set up for a party or reception or basketball game or something, like they do on American carriers, you’d think they’d just tow airplanes out of the way across the entire deck.”

  “You think they’re going flying tonight?”

  “Who the hell knows?” White responded. “The Russians never flew carrier ops at night, and the Khomeini’s only been operational for about a year, so I’d think night flights would be the last thing on their minds. The Iranians would have to be real stupid in a narrow channel, not facing into the wind, with a foul deck for emergency landing. Of course, I’d never accuse the Iranian military brain-trust of a lot of smarts anyway.” He paused, lost in thought. “Could be trouble tonight. I’m real glad we got Skywalker up there right now.”

  They zoomed out Skywalker’s sensor to take pictures of the entire carrier, then zoomed in to maximum magnification to take detail pictures of every section of the ship. Occasionally Skywalker’s threat warning system would beep, indicating that it was being scanned by a nearby radar, but there was never any indication that anyone had locked on to it, and no aircraft ever flew nearby to chase it away. There was an outside possibility that Skywalker’s satellite up-link back to the Valley Mistress had been detected and even intercepted, but no one in the Khomeini group ever attempted to jam or shut down the signal; White and Masters hoped that Iran didn’t yet possess the sophisticated computers needed to unscramble the uplink signals.