Lion Resurgent (48 page)

“Here, Prime Minister? The greatest concern of the forces remaining in the national homeland is that the war will be over by the time they are able to complete their transit to the theater of operations. The second wave of expeditionary forces will be ready to implement its departure shortly.
Courageous
is completing her refit and will be extracting herself from drydock next week. The Navy has been working on assembling a new air group for her exploiting the assets still remaining in this country, accepting that some of them may not represent the peak of our military capability.”

“In other words, the Navy is scrabbling around trying to find enough aircraft to put on her.” Newton sighed. “I thought two airgroups for three carriers was a bad idea. We’ll have to fix that in the future. How goes the other matter?”

“The question of the culpability assignable to Astiz and our ability to implement the required legal action necessary to bring him to the justice many, indeed I would say a majority, of the non-Argentine population of the world in which we have the good fortune to reside believe he so richly deserves?”

“That’s right. When can we sell him to the highest bidder?”

Sir Humphrey Appleday looked appalled. “Prime Minister, I must object. Our decision on to whom we should render Astrid for trial should be taken in full accordance with international law and with due consideration for the strength of the case that can be brought against him and whether the appropriate legal penalties can be imposed under the system of national law prevailing.”

“Humph. Not soon then. Thank you Sir Humphrey. Please make sure I get the news as it comes in.”

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

Flag Bridge, HMS
Glorious,
North East of the Falkland Islands

“We’ve got eight Mirages and a round dozen Buccaneers left.” Captain Wales sounded tired. So far he’d lost half his air group and the enemy carrier was still out there, unhurt. “A lot of the birds are damaged; how some of the Bananas got back is beyond me. The good news is our fires are out and we’ve got the flooding perimeter established. We’re counter-flooding to eliminate the list now. We’ll be able to get twenty-four, possibly twenty-six knots as soon as we’ve sealed up. Flight deck is operational although we’ve got precious little to fly off it right now. We’re down to our missile ships for cover against the next air attack.”

“You can expect it soon enough, Charles. Can you get at least something up as CAP? And throw out another strike? The Argies will be hurting as badly as we are.”

“Worse. The Bananas really did a number on the screen. We’ve got two Seadart and a Seaslug ship left. We don’t think the Argies have anything. They’re wide open.”

“Remember we’re not in this alone.
Furious
is south of us somewhere. She’ll be throwing a full strength strike at the Argies any time now. All twenty Bananas; some of them Highball birds. Charles, don’t worry about getting out another strike. Get everything up on CAP that you can. If we can ride the next strike out, we’ll be through it. Get the Bananas sealed down and inert the fuel system as soon as CAP is up.”

“Sir, report from
Glowworm.
Fires are out and machinery is undamaged but she’s down to her four-inch gun and that’s it. She’s moving on to the threat axis as a bomb sponge.”

“That is exceedingly nice of her.” Lanning looked around his bridge. “Well, it is. Charles, I suggest you invite Captain Foster to your mother’s next garden party.”

“If you insist Sir, but I’d rather do something nice for him.” A chuckle of relieved tension ran around the bridge. It was interrupted by a whine forward as the bow elevator brought a Sea Mirage up to the flight deck. The ballet on the deck started as the aircraft was moved forward to one of the catapults. By the time it was in place, a second Sea Mirage had been brought up. “We’ve loaded them to the max, Sir. Four R-530s and four R-550s. Cut the fuel load back to compensate. Launching now.”

There was a bang and roar as the two Mirages were catapulted off. They dipped slightly on leaving the carrier but recovered and swept upwards. Lanning had his combat air patrol up and felt absurdly pleased at the effort. It was absurd; he knew it. Two aircraft was hardly an adequate air defense against the strikes that were being thrown, but it was all he had and it was much better than nothing. He felt a bit better about it a few seconds later when another pair of Sea Mirages were brought up from below. With four aircraft up,
Glorious
had a fighting chance.

Blackburn Buccaneer S4H XT-279, HMS
Furious,
North East of the Falkland Islands

Catapult launching was always an interesting experience, especially when it took place in a heavily-loaded Buccaneer. Lieutenant Commander Ernest Mullback positioned himself carefully; his head resting firmly on the padded seatback. His harness straps were as tight as he could pull them, his arms and legs positioned just so. The last thing he wanted now was to screw up his launch and miss what he knew would be the culmination of his career. Training missions were a bore. Hitting ships in harbor was close to shooting fish in a barrel. But a strike against an enemy carrier at sea was what he had trained for. His faithful Banana had her two Highballs in her belly. That was all she could carry; her wing racks were empty. The same wasn’t true of the aircraft waiting behind her. The Highball aircraft were being followed by eight conventional strike birds with eight one-thousand pound bombs each and four missile-armed anti-radar aircraft. They, along with the eight escort Sea Mirages, were still in the hangar. The aft elevator would be bringing them up as the on-deck aircraft were launched. It would take a little time for the strike to form up, but it was worth taking in order to deliver a coordinated punch at the enemy.

The launch control officer dropped his flag. Mullback felt the slam as the steam catapult hurled XT-279 forwards. He heard the odd thwang noise as the bridle catcher retrieved the cables that had secured his aircraft to the catapult. Then, he saw the sea appear in front of him as the Buccaneer nosed down. Then, the Spey engines pushed him upwards and away from the sea. Mullback relaxed; the dangerous part was over now until he and the other Buccaneers would have to punch though the enemy defenses. Then, all that was left was to find his carrier and land on it. Put like that, he wondered why he didn’t find himself another profession.

It took two orbits for the strike to be launched and then to form up properly. The problem they had now was that the position for the Argentine carrier group was already almost an hour old. It would take another 30 minutes to reach them, so they could be anywhere within a 45 mile circle of their reported position. That wouldn’t sound much to a landsman but Mullback was part of a Navy and knew better. A circle with a radius of 45 nautical miles covered a lot of sea and a ship was a small target. In the old days, finding a ship group would have been a matter of chance, but radar changed that. The Sea Mirages were already moving to the front of the formation, their Cyrano V radars searching for the enemy ships. That was the other reason why the fighters ran ahead of the bombers. It wasn’t just to protect them; they had to find the targets as well.

“Targets located.” The message over the radio was terse and to the point. “Bearing three-four-eight. Range eight-five miles; course south-west.” Mullback watched the exhausts on the twin engined Mirages light up as they swept ahead in an effort to get the Argentine fighters before the Argies got through to the bombers.

Argentine Aircraft Carrier
Veinticinco de Mayo

“Strike is off, Sir. We got six Crusaders and nine Skyhawks out.” The Air Group Commander sounded justifiably proud of the effort. He’d not only got the reserve strike out, but his deck crews had managed to refuel and rearm three Skyhawks in time to rejoin them. The same crews had managed to get eight more Crusaders armed and fuelled and they were launching as well. That left four Crusaders and two Skyhawks on the decks. There was no hope of getting them ready. There wasn’t time and, anyway, they were too badly damaged. Lombardo briefly considered pushing them over the side but rejected the thought.
Who knew, the way this aerial slugging match was working out, there might come a time when four damaged fighters and two shot-up bombers were the margin that brought victory.

“Well done. The remaining aircraft, are they safed?” Lombardo meant ‘were the aircraft defueled and their armaments stored?’

“They are, Sir. And we’re inerting the carrier fuel system now.”

“Bandits, Sir.” Air Warfare had sent the message up from the CIC below decks. “At least 30 aircraft coming in from due south. Two formations; a small one leading, much larger formation behind them.”

There was a brief but agonizing pause before the CIC updated the report. “The larger formation is dropping of the radar now. Our fighters are moving in to attack.”

Super-Crusader 3-A-204. Over the South Atlantic

Overhead, the six fighters that had taken off earlier were engaging the British Sea Mirages. Anton Marko twisted around in his seat to see if he could work out what was going on up there but it was a brief effort. His job was to go after the Buccaneers that were already streaming towards his carrier. The long rooster-tail of white spray both revealed their position and masked them. These pilots were more skilled than the ones from the other British carrier, Marko could see that easily. They were flying lower, if that were possible. Their pilots were holding them steadier in what had to be a barrage of turbulence from the sea surface a scant few meters underneath.

Behind him, the remaining Super-Crusaders were burning fuel in an effort to get out as far as possible. That would give the maximum possible time for intercepts. The Argentine pilots already knew that the Buccaneer was hard to hit that close to the sea and the aircraft could take a phenomenal amount of punishment before going down. Every second spent in engagement was essential.
Especially with the missile ships crippled,
Marko thought grimly.
Rivadavia
had already sunk.
Cervantes
was a blazing wreck; not much longer for this world. If the fighters failed, their carrier was wide open.

He picked a Buccaneer and fired off two of his AIM-7 missiles at it. Neither hit since both homed in the spray thrown up by the bomber. The fragmentation from their warheads did nothing more than stipple the surface of the sea. He racked his Crusader around, hearing the structure of the fighter groaning with stresses than pushed it far beyond the limits laid down by the manufacturer. His annunciator was warbling but the tone was intermittent, not steady. That told him the missiles had a partial lock at best. Still, he fired one pair. Sure enough, one missed but the other exploded close behind the Buccaneer. It lurched in mid air, while black smoke erupted from both engines. Incredibly, it kept going.
What did Blackburn build in their English factory
Marko asked himself,
aircraft or tanks?

The British formation was splitting up. One group of four were clearly the anti-radar missile carriers; they were going ahead of the rest, obviously readying to fire their missiles at the anti-aircraft ships.
Well, they‘ll find few pickings this time. The previous wave did their job all too well.
Another group of eight had clean wings and were accelerating ahead of the rest. Lacking the drag of underwing bombs and missiles, they were probably just a critical few knots faster than the others. The other twelve had the expected underwing bomb load. Marko marked them out as the dangerous ones; the heavily-loaded ship-killers. One of them had been the aircraft he had just damaged.

Marko closed in on his prey. The damaged Buccaneer was wallowing, obviously losing engine power and the pilot was having trouble staying airborne. That made him an easier target. Marko came in from high above and raked the aircraft with 20mm fire before buffeting could throw off his aim. A stable gun platform compensated for long range. The Buccaneer went into the sea.

There was still work to be done though and Marko had traded off his height advantage. Now he was following the Buccaneers at more or less sea level. This close to the water, it was the British bombers that had the speed advantage. Marko climbed a little and then pushed down his nose to try and catch up. His first burst of 20mm went wild when buffeting threw off his aim. Before he could fie again, something weird seemed to happen. One of the bombs under the Buccaneer’s wings detached and fell away. A split second later it hit the sea and exploded. Marko realized too late what had happened. The bombardier on the British aircraft had timed the drop beautifully. When the thousand pound retarded bomb exploded, it did so directly in front of Marko’s aircraft. His J-93 gulped at the towering column of water a split second before the sheer impact of the waterspout ripped the wings from his Crusader. The whole aircraft came apart around him. He never even got a chance to resent the idea than an unarmed aircraft had shot him down.

Blackburn Buccaneer S4H XT-279, North East of the Falkland Islands

In theory at least, the Buccaneer could fly underwater. Not literally, of course; but in theory, the compression wave generated by the aircraft would push the sea underneath into a dish-shaped depression. A really ballsy pilot could, in theory, drop his Banana down so that it was actually flying in that depression and thus be technically underwater. The critical words there were ‘in theory.’ Mullback wasn’t prepared to go quite that far but he was nestled down so far that the sea level appeared to flow around his aircraft. The pounding turbulence from the sea surface was murderous but the Banana was designed to fly in this environment. It was just that tiny touch more stable this low down that anything else. That gave them their chance of survival against modern naval air defenses. How low they would go depended on the pilots but the suggestion that people standing in front of a low-flying Buccaneer would be well-advised to duck when it passed over was not a joke. Flying between buildings and under bridges were regarded as elementary tricks for beginners.