Strike Force Alpha (29 page)

It was not a picture of Manhattan or a nuke plant or the Washington Monument. It was not a map of the mid-Atlantic Ocean or the bridges crossing into New York City or Wall Street.

It was a picture of an aircraft carrier.

Near the Strait of Hormuz

The USS
Abraham Lincoln
had entered the upper Gulf of Oman at 0800 hours, just about the time the first airliners were taking off from the el-Salaam Airport in Bahrain.

Twenty-two days before, the aircraft carrier had set sail from San Diego with more than 5,000 U.S. sailors onboard. Twelve ships made up her escort: cruisers, destroyers, frigates, refuelers, supply vessels. The battle group had been scheduled for this deployment for many months. Its intent was to add to the already-substantial U.S. military presence in the Gulf.

The carrier was huge, a real monster afloat. Its flight deck was as long as the Empire State Building was tall. It was 20 stories high from the waterline to its masts and weighed 97,000 tons. It was nuclear-powered. Two reactors provided the energy to turn four massive screws, each with five blades measuring 21 feet across.

There were 85 aircraft onboard:
F-14
Tomcats,
F/A-18
Hornets,
EA-6B
Prowlers,
S-3B
Vikings,
E-2C
Hawkeyes,
SH-60
Sea Hawks, and
C-2
Greyhounds. Twelve squadrons in all, the
Lincoln
alone carried more airplanes than many countries had in their entire Air Force.

Belowdecks were combat rooms, planning rooms, crews’ quarters, officers’ quarters, two huge hangars, four engine rooms, three mess halls, a post office, a ship’s store—2,700 separate compartments, big and small. Two of these were ordnance magazines. One was crammed with thousands of the most high-tech munitions of the day: laser bombs, JRAM bombs, smart bombs, dumb bombs, every conventional type of bomb there was.

The second magazine was filled with nuclear weapons.

The ship entered the Strait of Hormuz just before 0900 hours.

The battle group was now coming to the trickiest part of its journey. At its narrowest, the strait was 34 miles across. However, it was very shallow in many places and dotted with islands, rocks, and other maritime obstructions. Passage had to be made through channels that were just two miles wide, leaving little room to maneuver, especially for a ship that was itself nearly a quarter-mile long. Yet much of the world’s oil passed through the waterway, with supertankers and military vessels alike having to negotiate its crooked elbow shape, in drafts that were sometimes less than 200 feet deep.

These were not very friendly waters for U.S. ships, either. The coast of Iran dominated one side of the strait; Iranian troops held three strategic islands near the waterway’s narrowest and shallowest points. And the waters of the Persian Gulf beyond were perpetually fraught with danger. U.S. Navy ships were always on high alert when passing through the strait.

The
Lincoln
carried Sea Sparrow missiles and CIWS guns for its own onboard protection, but it was the ships around it that were charged with keeping the carrier safe. The Aegis cruisers USS
Bradley
and
Philippine Sea
were always close by, their highly advanced air defense radars always burning hot. The battle group’s air defense destroyers were doing likewise, farther ahead and well behind of the massive ship.

Almost half of the carrier’s F-14s and F/A-18s were aloft as well. These warplanes had a supporting cast of electronic warfare craft, small AWACs and refueling planes. The combined effect was to create an electronic and visual umbrella around the battle group and most especially over the
Lincoln.
Indeed, the number-one priority of the battle group and the air wing was the protection of the carrier. This multilayer strategy of shielding U.S. carriers originated during the Cold War, to ward off an attack by forces of the former Soviet Union. These tactics had been endlessly rehearsed and modified over the years.

But they’d never been tested in a real attack.

By its size alone a supercarrier could inspire awe or defy a foe. But this was also the main criticism of these $5 billion ships. They were
too
big—as in too big of a target. No pinpoint, laser-guided bombs were needed to hit a carrier. Anything thrown at it had a large margin for error, nearly a quarter-mile of leeway in hitting the mark. The Soviets had built some of the earliest cruise missiles in history just for this purpose. They were big, dumb, and crude, but again, that’s all they had to be.

For supercarriers like the
Lincoln,
size was both its greatest strength and its most glaring flaw. It took a long time for a ship so huge to speed up, slow down, or go into evasive maneuvers, especially in narrow waters.

Sometimes referred to as the Castles of the Sea, supercarriers had also been called the world’s biggest sitting ducks.

Buried deep beneath the
Lincoln
’s superstructure was its combat information center, the CIC. The defense of the carrier was coordinated from here. One wall held a screen called the MRS, for Master Radar Suite. A relatively new add-on, it could show a real-time computer projection of the carrier’s protective bubble, the ship’s air defense as viewed in three dimensions. Its orbiting fighters appeared as icons, green for the Tomcats, yellow for the Hornets. The support aircraft were colored blue. The immediate protective bubble extended out to 60 miles. Should anything unauthorized enter this zone, it would show up on the screen in bright red. If this happened, the procedure was simple: the bogie would be labeled hostile/unknown and treated as such. That is, as a target, until proven otherwise.

This formula worked best in the open seas. It got tricky in places as tight as the Strait of Hormuz. Again, the waterway was very narrow as far as massive ships were concerned. Parts of the carrier’s aerial protection zone spilled over into the airspace of Iran to the east and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the west. The Navy did not want to have its jets caught inside another country’s airspace, especially Iran’s. So the zone of protection had to be pinched, as the waters in front of the carrier became more precarious.

Making this more problematic was something the sailors who worked the MRS called the O’Hare Effect. Once the carrier reached the narrowest part of the channel, all types of aircraft began showing up on the 60-mile-wide carousel swirling around its battle group. Small planes flying across the Omani interior. Airliners taking off from Iran. Commercial planes already in the air. Even air traffic as far up as Saudi Arabia could be picked up and displayed on the big screen. And at times like this, it
could
look like Chicago’s
über
-frenzied airport, which made keeping the carrier’s umbrella intact that much more difficult.

The sailors knew one missed icon, one missed radio call, and the results could be disastrous.

The mysterious blip didn’t show up on the
Lincoln
’s MRS until it was just nine miles from the ship.

When it did appear, it only stayed on the big screen for a few seconds before dropping off again. Its ghostly presence lasted long enough, though, for the MRS to get a reading on its location, its speed, and its bearing. It was coming in from the west, appearing out of the haze of the upper Omani coastline. It was traveling at 110 knots and it was headed right for the carrier. Strangely, it was also just the size of a small bird, or at least that’s what the pumped-up radar said.

This had happened 20 minutes into the passage, with the big carrier soon to begin its massive turn to port, a critical maneuver needed to get around the elbow of the strait’s crooked arm. The battle group immediately went to advanced alert when the red dot popped up. Radio contact was attempted with the bogie but proved futile. The MRS was able to provide a probable prior flight track, which indicated whatever the object was, it had somehow managed to stay off the radar net by using the nape of the coast of Oman to mask its approach and then darting across open water once the carrier appeared in the strait. This, and the fact that the carrier’s bubble was squeezed and there were many civilian planes on it at the moment, had further hidden its movements. For a little while at least, it had managed to penetrate the battle group’s multilayered defense scheme.

This led to only one conclusion: if this was an aircraft of some kind, it probably had stealth capabilities and, no doubt, an extremely talented pilot at the controls.

A pair of Tomcats flying Combat Air Patrol five miles off the tip of Oman were alerted. They immediately went down to the deck, spotting the unidentified aircraft not 30 seconds later. They radioed back that the bogie was in fact a helicopter, an
American
-built Blackhawk helicopter varient. It had no discernible markings—at least not at first—and it didn’t appear to be carrying any weapons. There was only one person aboard.

This made no difference to the pilots. In more peaceful times, every attempt possible would have been made to ID the bogie and somehow force it out of the carrier’s protective zone. Under the prevailing combat conditions in the Persian Gulf, though, the rules had changed. Anything remotely suspected of threatening a U.S. carrier was fair game. So the F-14s were told to intercept the bogie and take appropriate action, carrier-speak for “blow it out of the sky.” This could have been the papal helicopter; the pilots would still have to shoot it down.

But it wouldn’t be easy. Whoever was flying the copter was managing to stay so low to the water, its struts were kicking up clouds of spray. The F-14 Tomcat was a long-range interceptor; it was more difficult for it to get a clear shot at a low-altitude target than a high-altitude one. Plus, the copter was already in among the support ships, all but ruling out a missile shot. It was flying so insanely low, the Tomcats would have to try to bring it down using their cannons.

The F-14 flight leader went down to the deck leaving his wingman up at 1,200 feet. He steered through the gaggle of ships, some of which were firing at the rogue copter. The sudden appearance of the Tomcat cut off all this fire immediately—no one wanted to hit the F-14 by mistake. The Navy pilot pulled back on his throttles, causing his variable wings to extend automatically. This slowed his speed but also gave him less maneuverability. He managed to get on the tail of the helicopter momentarily, but the chopper pilot was shrewdly flying so close to the support ships, any cannon barrage from the F-14 would most likely impact on one of them as well. The F-14 had to pull up and turn away.

The bogie was now just five miles out from the carrier. Its pilot was jinking madly anytime he couldn’t fly close to one of the Navy ships. Someone on the destroyer USS
John Hancock
let go with a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile; it missed the copter by just 20 feet before nosediving into the sea. As the copter zipped by the combat stores ship, the USS
Westchester,
the crew fired on it with their 20mm cannons. They managed to get some hits up around the tail rotor, but still the copter flew on.

By this time, the Tomcat had turned itself over and was now coming toward the copter at a right angle. The helicopter ran the length of the Aegis cruiser
Normandy
but then had no more cover for about two miles. The Tomcat closed in, cannon ready. The fighter pilot slid the copter into his gimbals, his finger poised above his trigger. But that’s when he saw the huge American flag plastered on one side of the copter, its colors worn and faded but visible nevertheless. He also couldn’t help but notice what terrible shape the copter was in. How could this thing be a stealth ship? It was cored out inside and wasn’t carrying such basics as navigation lights, antennas, or even glass in its door windows. All this gave the F-14 driver pause just long enough for the Blackhawk to zig once again, climbing sharply before nearly crashing back down toward the water. In that split second of hesitation, the Tomcat pilot gave up his best shot.

The helicopter was now just a mile away from the carrier. That’s when the Tomcat backed away completely. He was too close to be dispensing any kind of ordnance that might hit something other than the target. The copter was probably being piloted by an American anyway, the F-14 pilot figured, someone who wanted to get to the carrier for reasons unknown. But it was out of his control now.

The carrier’s Gatling guns would have to deal with it.

The
Lincoln
’s CIWS weapons opened up on the helicopter at 2,500 feet.

The role of these modernized Gatling guns was to fill a predefined area with so many projectiles, up to 600 a second, that practically nothing could get through. Two of the carrier’s six CIWS had the copter locked in their sights.

But the copter pilot continued showing extraordinary skill. He did not take a direct route to the ship. Instead he began weaving back and forth, up and down, almost going inverted for a few moments. The CIWS guns were automatically aimed, automatically fired. Their real targets were incoming antiship missiles, projectiles that held steady to a course. By throwing his aircraft all over the sky, the copter pilot was confusing the guns’ firing systems to a degree. Instead of sending out long streams of deadly rounds, the guns was stuttering, reaiming, stuttering again, and reaiming again.

But the copter could not avoid the Gatling guns forever. About five hundred feet out from the carrier, a barrage from the forward port CIWS hit it head-on. The helicopter seemed to come apart in the air. The tail section snapped off. The fuselage was blown in two. Trailing flames and thick black smoke, the copter, or what was left of it, took the brunt of another barrage about two hundred feet out. There was a tremendous explosion as the copter’s fuel tank went up, certainly the
coup de grâce
. But those watching from the carrier deck were astonished to see the copter’s forward fuselage emerge from the flames, its main rotor still spinning somehow.

Seconds later, this piece of flying wreckage slammed onto the carrier’s deck.

Aboard
Ocean Voyager
forty miles away