Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

90 JEFF EDWARDS
The Sea Darts blasted the forecastle with fiery exhaust as they shot
away into the night.
Kormoran 2 (mid-flight) :
The German missiles were AS-34B Kormoran 2s. Sea-skimmers that
dropped like stones, not leveling out until they were less than two meters
above the wave tops.
Following its mid-course inertial guidance program, the first missile
waited twelve seconds before activating its nose-mounted targeting radar.
When it did, it immediately located two radar contacts: one large and
close, and a second, smaller contact fifty meters beyond. The target
selection algorithm running through the missile’s Thompson-CSF digital
seeker instantly rejected the nearer/larger target. Large/near targets tended
to be chaff decoys. The missile locked on the smaller target, and executed
a short S-turn to the left to avoid the chaff cloud.
Locked firmly on the second contact, it closed in for the kill. At an
optimum range of one-point-three meters from its target, the missile
detonated its warhead. Fifty-five kilograms of hexagon/RDT/aluminum
erupted into a mushrooming shock wave of fire and shrapnel.
HMS York:
The concussion shook the bridge, throwing Sub Lieutenant Kensington
up against the radar repeater hard enough to knock the wind out of
him.“Holy Mother of God!” he gasped. “That was close!” His ears were
still ringing, and the brilliant after-image of the close-aboard explosion
still danced in front of his night-accustomed retinas. He pulled himself
back to his feet. “Why are we seeding chaff so close to the ship?”
No one bothered to answer, but a second after he asked the question, he
dredged up the answer from some half-forgotten training lecture. Missile
manufacturers knew about chaff, and they were programming their
weapons with little tricks to avoid it. Many missiles were now smart
enough not to turn on their radar seekers immediately. If a chaff cloud
was far enough away from the real target, a missile with an inactive seeker
could fly through it without being distracted. The closer the chaff was to
the ship, the better the odds that a missile’s radar would be active and
subject to seduction. By seeding an inner pattern of small chaff clouds and