Lion Resurgent (49 page)

The radio chatter was increasing as wireless discipline broke down. The Sea Mirages were taking a bad beating. They seemed to have knocked down at least three F9Us with their missiles but they’d taken two losses themselves. Even outnumbering the Argentine fighters two-to-one, they were still getting the worst of the dogfight. The Crusaders were just too fast and they slashed at their enemy in dive-and-zoom attacks that gave the Sea Mirage little chance other than to evade and hope. Up ahead, Mullback saw the missile-armed defense suppression aircraft firing off their Martel anti-radar missiles. His own radar warning display was showing very few threat signals from the ships ahead. He devoutly hoped that the sacrifice made by
Glorious’s
air group hadn’t been in vain. If it had, there were enough anti-radar missiles heading in to suppress the defenses. He hoped.

It was time. He lifted his nose slightly and climbed to the recommended Highball drop altitude of sixty feet. The familiar green lines on his head-up display were already beginning to converge as the Blue Parrot radar sent its pulses out to measure the range to the aircraft carrier in front. It was firing its own guns at the Buccaneers. Mullback knew she was supposed to have been refitted with the fast-firing OTO-Melara 76mm guns. The streams of tracer fire confirmed that. Beside him, a Buccaneer with a SAC-like band of green and dark blue-gray tartan painted under its cockpit took a direct hit from a three-inch round. That was more than even the legendary Buccaneer could take. The aircraft disintegrated.
Good bye, Jock. See you in Fiddler’s Green.

The green lines touched the bow and stern of the carrier but Mullback was looking for more than that. He had to drop his Highballs so they would skim the tops of the waves, not get trapped in the troughs between them and sink. He paused slightly to get the pattern of waves right and then dropped the two spherical bombs. Despite his care, one hit the side of the waves and sank almost immediately. The other hit, skipped and was on its way. Accelerating ahead of the bombs, Mullback dropped down to seaskimming altitude again, as he saw the flash of tracers go over his head. The guns on the carrier simply couldn’t depress enough to bear on him. Then he had to lift his nose again as the carrier swelled in front of him.

He passed between the radio antennas lining the flight deck and left the flight deck crews sprawling on the surface. Over the carrier he dropped his aircraft down once more and started his run out.

“Six of us made it, Jerry. Four of us dropped on the carrier and two on a big destroyer. Alasdair bought a farm from flak and that new kid, Freddie Kingsman, went in as well. Fighter got him, I think.” Alex Peters sounded flat and depressed. Then he looked backwards. The aircraft carrier behind them was a twisted, broken wreck. Her bows had been torn clean off and her whole structure sagged. Off to one side, the biggest of the Argentine destroyers had broken in two. Her severed stern was already on its beam ends, going down. “They’ve taken a fine honor guard down with them though.”

Argentine Aircraft Carrier
Veinticinco de Mayo

The British pilots had to be mad. The bombers were skimming so low over the sea that it appeared their bellies were actually cleaving the surface. That was an illusion of course but nobody sane flew that low over the waters of the South Atlantic. One larger-than-normal wave and the aircraft would be engulfed. Lombardo had watched the six fighters of his CAP take on the eight British fighters, knock down five of them for two losses and send the rest scuttling away. The deck-launched intercept had engaged one group of twelve Buccaneers, downing five of them before they’d had to pull away. That left a group of eight heading straight for the
Veinticinco de Mayo.

What Lombardo saw next bewildered him. The British bombers appeared to be dropping their bombs several hundred meters short of his ship. At first, he thought they were torpedoes but they dropped like bombs. There was no doubt of that. Then he was distracted by the bombers passing over his carrier. The anti-aircraft guns had got one of them and possibly damaged another. The rest had hurdled his carrier as if they were daring athletes. He looked down on one of the bombers as it passed in front of the island, below the windows on his flag deck. Another went between the aft end of the island and the radar mast, banking by at least 45 degrees. Two others went further aft, also skimming a few centimeters over the flight deck. To his dying day, Lombardo would swear that he could see streaks of white belly paint left on the deck, scraped off by the Buccaneers as they overflew the carrier and escaped.

He was still in a state of near-shock when he remembered the bombs dropped by the British bombers. He’d expected to see towering columns of water where they had exploded at the drop site. Instead he caught sight of the first one as it bounced off the surface of the sea and struck the hull plating just below the hangar deck. It disappeared from view. For a split second, Lombardo thought it had suffered a fuse failure.

What happened next was beyond any experience he had ever had. The explosion from that first bomb was devastating enough; it lifted the whole forward section of the ship. The shock wave from the blast hurled him off his feet and into the bulkhead behind. Stunned by the shock, he felt rather than saw the bow of the ship being sucked downwards. Then, a mighty column of water erupted through the forward part of the flight deck, spraying wreckage in a wide arc. Lombardo dragged himself to his feet in time to see the forward section of his ship detaching completely and twist through ninety degrees. The bulkheads formed great cliffs in the water that diminished as the bows began to settle.

That one hit alone would have been enough but there were four more; all aft of the center of the ship. Each blast was terrible. Each did more damage to a ship that was already destroyed beyond any hope of recovery. Lombardo gave his last order as Admiral of this fleet. It was a very simple one. “Abandon Ship!”

Veinticinco de Mayo
was sinking very fast. Lombardo grabbed one of the seamen on the bridge and started to pull him towards the edge. The man had been unlucky. Perhaps he had been standing on a resonance point of the shock waves; perhaps he had been thrown into something. Whatever it was, the angle of his feet and the shape of his legs showed that his ankles and calves had been badly broken. Other men had been thrown into the overhead and were laying dead or unconscious on the deck. Panic stricken messages were coming on over the few internal communications lines that remained working. Internal hatches had been jammed throughout the ship by the Shockwaves from the underwater explosions that had torn her apart. Lombardo knew that most of the crew would be trapped below decks and could not be rescued in the very few minutes that were left while the carrier stayed afloat.

He helped where he could, dragging men to the rafts and pushing them away from the sinking wreck. In doing so, he saw
Cordoba
blown in half by the strange bouncing bombs that had done for his carrier. He knew the same scenes and the same deadly pattern was being repeated over there.
Cervantes
had been hit by more bombs and had already gone down.
Juan de Garay
had been raked by conventional thousand pound bombs and was on her beam ends. Oddly, the British had left the four Gearing DDKs alone. Perhaps they had recognized that they were the only chance of survival the crews from the stricken warships had of surviving the cold of the South Atlantic. As he took the last place in the last raft off the
Veinticinco de Mayo,
Lombardo knew he was a part of the worst naval disaster since the Battle of the Orkneys.

Super-Crusader S-A-211. Over the South Atlantic

Air combat is a brutally Darwinian process. The first combat mission flown by a pilot is by far the most dangerous; novices often do not survive it. The increase in combat skills for the survivors is exponential; veterans of even a two or three missions take the first-mission novices out with comparative ease. Three of the pilots flying Argentine Skyhawks were now two-mission veterans. So were the pilots of two F9U Super-Crusaders who had replaced novices in order to give the small formation at least a fighting chance. The problem was that the four Sea Mirage pilots that faced them were now also two-mission veterans. They had split into two pairs and were coming at the Super-Crusaders from two directions. Their missiles formed a web around the intended targets.

The Argentine fighter pilots had learned much. They were coming in higher and much faster than before, flying their F9Us at the limits of their performance. They didn’t even bother to launch any of the three AIM-7 missiles carried by their aircraft since that would trap them into the narrow cone defined by the scanning arc of their radar. Instead, then dived on the British formations and maneuvered to avoid the incoming missiles. Five of the six made it. The sixth continued to dive, losing parts of its airframe all the way down, until it hit the sea and exploded.

The Sea Mirages were skidding all over the sky in their efforts to out-turn the Crusaders. The Argentine fighters were relying on their simple and reliable AIM-9s to bring down their opponents. It paid off. One pair of Sea Mirages was targeted by three Crusaders, two of which were flown by veterans of the earlier strike. Both British aircraft went down as the Argentine AIM-9s homed in on their engines and shredded their tail surfaces. Their pilots punched out and floated down to the sea that was slowly being covered with shot-down pilots.

The other pair of Sea Mirages did better. They were faced by novices and they managed to avoid the sub-optimal shots fired by their opponents. As one of the Crusaders started his zoom skywards, the heat flare from his engine drifted into the acquisition arc of a British fighter. Two R550 missiles took the whole rear of his aircraft apart.

By then, the Skyhawks were clear of the CAP fighters. The four surviving F9Us climbed away, setting course for Stanley base in the Malvinas. Their pilots knew all too well that their carrier was finished and the airfield at Stanley was their only hope. Even getting there would need very careful fuel management, but the only other choice was crashing in the sea.

Forward Bridge HMS
Glowworm

“They’re not falling for it.” Baxter watched the inbound Skyhawks fanning out to break through the air defense screen. They had already started to fire their Bullpups while
Grafton
and
Greyhound
had opened fire with their Seadarts. In doing so, they had revealed that
Glowworm
had been left toothless. The pattern of inbound missiles showed that the Argentine attack pilots had realized the implications of her silence and were simply ignoring her.

Of the nine Shyhawks, three had peeled off to attack
Greyhound
and another three to deal with
Grafton.
The other three were heading straight for
Glorious
and they had little opposition in their way.
Eclipse
was firing her Seaslug and MOG missiles but neither were having much effect.
Greyhound
was on her game though. Baxter watched the plot as she neatly knocked down all three Skyhawks heading for her. She then switched fire and sent missiles off in tail-chases after the Skyhawks that had attacked
Glorious.
It was a hopeless gesture, even if the missiles hadn’t gone ballistic shortly after launch.

Grafton
had done less well. She knocked down two Skyhawks but the track of the third overflew her position. She joined the three Skyhawks that had attacked
Glorious
and headed out to sea. From their course, it was obvious they were heading for the Falklands. “Damage reports?”

The reluctance with which the reply came back was proof of Baxter’s worst fears.
“Grafton
took three near misses that opened up her side. She’s rolling over. Abandon ship order has been given.
Greyhound
took a Bullpup in the bridge. She’s reporting she’s lost forward missile control but otherwise she’s all right.”

“What about
Glorious?”

The message came back with even more gloom and reluctance. “Five direct hits; three near misses. Two Bullpup hits as well. One of the hits failed to explode but another took out the bridge. Admiral Lanning is dead. Captain Wales is missing.
Glorious
is being conned from her emergency station.” The speaker hesitated, then plunged on. “She’s got fires on the hangar deck, her machinery is damaged and she’s not under control.
Eclipse
had to get out of the way pretty sharpish.”

“Captain Wales is missing?” Baxter felt the stab deep inside him. It had been a long, long time since an heir to the British throne had died on a battlefield. The butcher’s bill for this operation was mounting with terrifying speed and the actual invasion of the islands was still to come. Baxter only hoped that by the time this battle was over, there would be enough ships left afloat to stage it.

Savoy Hotel, London

“That’s a bit much,” Achillea was looking at the pile of transmitters and wires on the table. She and Henry McCarty had carefully searched Igrat’s room and come up with five bugs that had been planted there. “We’re here to help them after all.”

“Our room was clean,” McCarty looked around to make sure that this conversation at least was in private. He privately gave thanks that years of practice had made sure that they were all very careful what they said, even in presumed privacy. “So the target of this bugging was Igrat.”

Igrat’s mind was suddenly filled with a picture of a mysterious darkened room with her tied to a chair in the middle of it. A fist coming out of the darkness and the crunch as her nose had been broken. There had been the sickening fear that she would be disfigured and then the time it had taken for her to recover from the beating she had received. Although she wasn’t aware of it, she went white and started to shake. She did know her heart was pounding and she started to breathe deeply to slow it down. Slowly, the panic attack passed. “I could take that personally, you know.”

“We are assuming that this is political.” McCarty had noted Igrat’s reaction and moved the conversation to ground where she would be more comfortable. It had taken a long time for her to get her self-confidence back after Geneva. Even now, he knew that flashbacks still hit her hard. “Might be that somebody took a liking to you in the bar and wanted to know a bit more about you.”