Satan’s Tail. Dale Brown
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put the binoculars down and folded his arms across his chest. The sea ahead of Abner Read was mottled and gray; the sun had just set, and an unusually thick storm front sent a light mist across his bow, obscuring not just his sailor’s vision, but the long-range infrared sensors that were looking for telltale signs of ships in the distance.
Perfect conditions for pirates. And perfect conditions for hunting them.
‘Two boats,’ said the Abner Read’s captain, Commander Robert Marcum. He was looking over the shoulder of the petty officer manning the integrated imaging system on the bridge to Storm’s left. The screen synthesized data from several different sensors, presenting them in an easy-to-read format. ‘Just closing to five thousand meters.’
‘Adjust our course,’ said Storm. He walked from the window at the front of the bridge to the holographic display, where data from the Tactical Warfare Center – his ship’s version of a combat information center – was projected, showing the Abner Read’s position and that of the oil tanker they had been shadowing. The holographic display presented a real-time view of the ocean created from ship’s sensors, complete with a computerized version of the surrounding geographic features and a rundown of threats within sensor range. The display could show everything from standard chart data to the range and likelihood of one of the Abner Read’s Harpoon missiles hitting a target; it was one of three aboard the ship, allowing the group commander to choose whether to be in the Tactical Warfare Center or on the bridge during the engagement. (It also allowed the Navy to designate a ship’s captain as overall group commander, a plan contemplated for the future.) Storm spent most of his time in Tac, which would have been the ‘traditional’ place for a group warfare commander to station himself; tonight, the lure of the hunt had drawn him here so he might actually see his prey.
Storm studied the three-dimensional image, gauging his location and that of the other ships. The contacts were identified by the sensors as fast patrol boats – small, light ships equipped with a deck gun, grenade launchers, and possibly torpedoes. They were the modern-day equivalent of the PT boats that America had used to help turn the tide in Guadalcanal and other fierce, shallow-water conflicts in the Pacific during World War II.
The question was: Whose boats were they? One of Oman’s or Egypt’s accompanying local merchants, in which case they were friendly? One of four known to be operated by Somalian fanatics turned pirates, in which case they were hostile? Or one of the half dozen belonging to Yemen, in which case they were somewhere in the middle?
The three other vessels in Littoral Surface Action Group XP One were several nautical miles to the south, too far away to help if these turned out to be the pirates he was hunting. This was the Abner Read’s fight to win or lose.
Storm reached to his belt and keyed his mike to talk to Lt Commander Jack ‘Eyes’ Eisenberg, who was in the Tactical Warfare Center one deck below the bridge. His wireless headset and its controller were linked to a shipboard fiber-optics network that could instantly connect him not only with all the sailors on the Abner Read, but the commanders of the vessels in the rest of his task group. With the touch of a button, he could click into one of several preset conferenced channels, allowing all of his war fighters to speak to each other and with him in battle.
‘Eyes, what do we have?’
‘Two boats. Roughly the size of Super Dvoras. They should be our pirates.’
‘If they are, there’ll be at least two more.’
‘We’re looking. Should we go to active radar?’
‘No, let’s hold off. No sense telling them we’re here.’
Past experience told them that the small boats could detect radar; more than likely they would run away, as they had several times before.
The contacts had been found by a towed array equipped with a passive sonar system to listen to the sea around it. Designed for use in the comparatively shallow waters, the system compiled data on surface as well as submarine vessels. Like devices such as the AN/SQR-18A (V) Sonar Tactical Towed Array System – used on the Knox-class frigates from the late 1970s on – the Littoral Towed Array System, or LITAS, was built around a series of hydrophones that listened for different sounds in the water. These were then interpreted and translated into ship contacts.
In theory, LITAS could hear anything within a twelve-mile radius of the ship, even in littoral waters where sounds were plentiful and easily altered by the shallow floor of the ocean. But like much else aboard the Abner Read and its companion vessels, the new technology still needed some adjustments; five miles had proven the average effective range thus far on the voyage, and the presence of a very loud vessel such as the oil tanker tended to mask noises very close to it. The approaching storm would also limit the range.
The four-ship war group Storm headed was as much about testing new technology as she was about catching the pirates. And the Abner Read was the centerpiece of both the task group and the tests. Named for a World War II destroyer that fought bravely in the Pacific until being sunk by kamikazes, the new ship had all the spirit of her predecessor but looked nothing like her. In fact, though she was called a destroyer, she bore little resemblance to other destroyers in the U.S. Navy – or any other navy.
It had often been said that the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke destroyers represented the culmination of nearly one hundred years of warship design. Truly, the Arleigh Burkes were the head of the class, in many ways as powerful as World War II battleships and as self-sufficient. The Abner Read showed what the next one hundred years would bring. Indeed, there were many who hadn’t wanted to call her a destroyer at all; proposals had ranged from ‘littoral warfare ship’ to ‘coastal cruiser.’ The Navy might be ready for a radical new weapon, but a new name seemed too much of a break with tradition, and so she was designated a ‘destroyer, littoral’ – or DD(L) – the first and so far only member of her class.
At 110 meters, she was a good deal shorter than the Arleigh Burke class, closer in size to a frigate or even a corvette. Where the Arleigh Burkes had a bulky silhouette dominated by a massive radar bulkhead, a large mast, and thick stacks, the Abner Read looked like a pyramid on a jackknife. A pair of angled pillboxes sat on the forward section of the deck, which was so low to the water, the gun housings were generally wet. Her stern looked like a flat deck; the section over what would have held the rudder on another ship was open to the ocean, as if the sea wanted to keep a finger on her back. The ship didn’t have one rudder – it had several, located in strategic spots along the tumbleform hull. The rudder and hull design made the Abner Read extremely maneuverable at low and high speed. And while the exotically shaped underside and wet deck took a bit of getting used to, the Abner Read had remarkably good sea-keeping abilities for a small ship. It didn’t so much float across the waves as blow right through them. Stormy ocean crossings were almost comfortable, certainly more so than in a conventional ship of the same size, even though the vessel had been designed primarily for shallow coastal waters.
The screws that propelled the ship were located almost amidships, recessed in a faceted structure that helped reduce their sound. They were powered by gas turbines whose exhausts were cooled before being released through the baffled and radar-protected funnel. The engines could propel the Abner Read to about forty knots in calm water. More important, she could sustain that speed for forty-eight hours without noticeable strain.
The three smaller craft that had accompanied the Abner Read to the Gulf of Aden looked a bit like miniature versions of her. Officially called Littoral Warfare Craft, or LWCs, they were designed from the keel up to work with the DD(L). Not only did their captains receive orders from a commander in the DD(L)’s tactical center, but the ship received sensor data as well – each had an integrated imaging system on her bridge identical to the one on the Abner Read. The vessels were crewed by only fifteen men, and in fact could be taken into combat by as few as five, though the mission had shown that a somewhat larger complement would be more comfortable. About 40 meters long, they were roughly the size of a coastal patrol boat and needed only twelve feet of draft at full load displacement. The vessels had a 25mm gun on the forward deck, a pair of multipurpose