Captain Fitzgerald was waiting as several Corpsmen lowered the Stokes from the helo and eased Admiral Vaughn to the carrier’s deck. The admiral found himself puzzling over an odd movement above his face, until he realized that he was lying on his back, looking up through the still-turning rotors of a Navy Sea King helicopter. Had he been asleep?
No matter. Fitzgerald’s creased, anxious face bent low over his own.
“Admiral? How are you?”
“Can’t complain,” Vaughn said, weakly. “Doesn’t do any good.”
“My people’ll get you to sick bay, Admiral. They’re good. They’ll patch you up-“
“Listen, Captain,” Vaughn interrupted. “You’ve got command of the battle group.”
“They told me half an hour ago you were wounded, sir,” he said, nodding.
“As senior officer, I took command then.”
“The … group?”
“We took a pasting. Can’t deny that. Kremlin and Vicksburg are both hit pretty bad. But the Indian air force damn near busted a gut doing that much. We estimate they’ve lost fifty aircraft of all types. They turned tail and started running shortly after Vicksburg took that missile.”
“Good. One … one more order, then.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Complete the mission.”
“Sir?”
“Carry out mission.” The pain in his arm was back, growing steadily worse despite the morphine. “We’ve got to follow through. If we don’t … it’s all been for nothing. Nothing …”
“Admiral, it may not be possible. We’ve got fifteen F-14s flying, period. And they’re going to have to rearm and refuel. We have to guard the battle group.”
“Use … Russians,” Vaughn said.
“They haven’t exactly been cooperative,” Fitzgerald pointed out. “I don’t-“
“Russians … have squadron up. Can’t land. Use them. Somehow …”
Suddenly, it seemed terribly important to Vaughn that their losses not be in vain. A waste.
Fitzgerald grinned suddenly. “Don’t you worry, Admiral. They tell me the Jeff’ll have all four cats back on line in another hour, max. After that … well, like they say. Charlie Mike.” Continue mission.
“Good.”
The blue sky behind Fitzgerald’s head was darkening … darkening.
Admiral Vaughn slipped into oblivion.
0947 hours, 26 March
Flight deck, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Fitzgerald watched as they carried Vaughn off toward the island, then moved back out of the way as a deck officer waved for personnel to stand clear. The Sea King’s pilot began gunning the helo’s rotors. The deck officer lifted his hands in a final all-clear. With a roar, the helo lifted from the deck, then angled across the carrier’s port side and out over the ocean.
On the horizon, he could see the smoky stain where Vicksburg was burning.
He checked his watch, then glanced toward the carrier’s bow. He couldn’t see the damage control parties, of course. They were all below, working on the steam lines that had been damaged by the Exocet hit.
They’d better have them ready in an hour.
Fitzgerald breathed a long, slightly unsteady sigh of relief. Before they’d flown the admiral back aboard, he’d already given the orders to continue readying the strike aircraft for the raid on India. Not that it would have made a lot of difference one way or the other at some later, formal board of inquiry or court-martial. It was just nice to know that he wasn’t entirely alone in his decision.
The joint task force had been hit hard, but they could still carry out the mission. Hit the Indian supply columns. Force them to end their invasion of Pakistan.
Charlie Mike.
CHAPTER 26
1015 hours, 26 March VF-95
Ready Room, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
CAG Marusko stood behind the lectern at the front of the Vipers’ Ready Room, rocking back on his heels as he brought the squadron up to date.
Tombstone sat with the others at the small metal desks with the folding wooden writing surfaces, like schoolboys being lectured by their teacher.
“We’ve hit them hard,” Marusko said. “Damned hard.”
Certainly, Tombstone thought, someone had decided to put the best possible face on things. CAG was running the briefing in the Ready Room in person rather than broadcasting it over closed-circuit TV. It was a way of maintaining contact with the men, for their morale … and probably for his own as well.
CAG continued the rundown, leaning against the lectern now.
The first phase of the Battle of the Arabian Sea seemed tragically one-sided to the men who’d participated in it. Two ships of the combined task force were badly damaged, a carrier and the all-important Aegis command cruiser, and the survival of both was in doubt. In the air, four Tomcats had been shot down — Army, Trapper, and Maverick from VF-95, and an aviator named Wildman Romanski in VF-97. So far, only two of the crews had been recovered from the choppy waters around the Battle Group.
And so far too, there’d been little to show for the blood and suffering of the past hour and a half.
There was another side to the numbers, though. CAG explained. A conservative estimate floating around the VF-95 Ready Room was that fifty Indian aircraft had been shot down, with as many more, possibly, damaged.
Fifty planes shot down, out of an estimated two hundred sent against the two F-14 squadrons. At least twenty of those had been accounted for by the Tomcats, for a kill ratio of five-for-one. Not the ten-for-one ratio of which Top Gun pilots were so justly proud … but then, the air battle had been confused beyond imagining, and one of the downed American planes had been hit before all of the aircraft could be launched.
Besides their air losses, the Indians had been hit on the surface and beneath it as well. The frigate Biddle had managed to cut off the four Osa-IIS as they fled back toward the Indian fleet. From a range of fifty miles she’d launched all four of her Harpoon antiship missiles, firing one after the other in rapid succession from the Mark 13 launcher on her forward deck. Three Osa missile boats had been sunk outright.
The fourth was badly damaged and limping toward the east at reduced speed.
To the northwest, the Marvhal Timoshenko had reported encountering an unidentified sub trying to work its way toward the heart of the task force. The Kresta II-class cruiser had fired a single SS-N-14 missile from one of the massive, awkward-looking quad launchers mounted on either side of the bridge. Called Silex by NATO, the missile carried an antisubmarine torpedo into the vicinity of the suspected sub and dropped it by parachute. At 0936 hours, the Timoshenko sonar operators had picked up the unmistakable crump of an undersea explosion.
There’d been no further submarine alerts since.
If all these reports were true, Tombstone thought, the Indians were probably feeling as badly used as the Americans were at the moment.
The question of the hour, however, was where they were going next. With Vicksburg badly damaged, it seemed all but certain that the battle group would be recalled, probably to either Masirah or Diego Garcia for temporary repairs, then up the Red Sea to the Med. The closest decent ship repair facilities were at Naples.
Nimitz and Eisenhower would arrive at Turban Station within the next few days. They would continue the fight. Tombstone studied the faces of the men around him and knew the same thought was in their minds. He read the anger there. They’d been hit hard and hurt. Now they wanted to hit back.
CAG paused in his narrative, watching the men closely. “Repairs to Cats One and Two have been completed,” he said. “As of ten hundred hours, Jefferson is again fully operational. The deck crew is conducting a final FOD walkdown at this moment.”
There was a stir among the listening aviators. With four cats on line, Jefferson could again launch and recover simultaneously. From CAG’s tone, it sounded as though the battle wasn’t over yet. The FOD — Foreign Object Damage — walkdown was designed to pick up any stray
bits of debris or metal that might get sucked into a jet’s air intakes: It was always conducted just before launch operations, a part of carrier routine.
Perhaps it was the routine that was carrying all of them forward now, despite exhaustion, despite their losses.
Routine and … determination.
CAG rocked forward on the podium, his hands clasped over the edge. He seemed to look at each of the men in the room. “I’ve just had the word from Captain Fitzgerald, acting CO for the battle group. Mongoose is going as planned.” There was an explosion of noise in the ready room, whistles, cheers, and shouts, men pounding the writing surfaces of their desks and stomping on the deck.
“Jefferson …” CAG started to say, then stopped until the noise subsided. “Jefferson,” he continued, “has a job to do. A mission.
Captain Fitzgerald told me himself that we are not going anywhere until that mission is complete.”
CAG turned his gaze on Tombstone, who thought he detected the faintest trace of a grin tugging at the man’s mouth. “Tombstone? You feel up to leading your squadron?”
My squadron. The sense of belonging, of being home, returned, stronger than ever. “Yes, sir!”
“Good. We’re making some minor changes. VF-95 will take the strike planes all the way in to the target. One Hornet squadron, VFA-173, will also be flying in the interdiction role, as planned. VF-97 will head for the rendezvous at Point Juliet and clear it until the strike assembles, then assist in the escort home. Yes … question?”
“What about CAP for the Jeff, CAG?” Coyote wanted to know. “We’re leaving her kind of exposed, aren’t we?”
“Well, the Intelligence boys all seem to think the Indies will have a lot more to worry about when they see the bunch of you coming after them than attacking our ships. Air defense over the land is expected to be heavy … but this soon after their heavy raid, they should be scattered and disorganized.” CAG’s grin became open, as though he was enjoying some humorous secret. “Just to be on the safe side, though, we have some newbies coming in to help you out. Actually, they’re up there now, have been for the last hour.”
Tombstone was tired, and couldn’t understand at first what Marusko was getting at. Newbies? The only newbies aboard were the replacements who’d flown aboard on the COD aircraft two days ago.
From the reaction of the rest of the squadron, they didn’t get it either.
“Don’t worry about it,” Marusko continued. “We’ve got it covered. Yes, Wayne.”
“Is there any threat to the squadron from the Indian fleet?” Batman wanted to know. “It’d be kind of a shame to go all the way in, all the way back, and find you all on the bottom after tangling with half the Indian navy.”
A subdued chuckle ran through the room.
CAG nodded. “Hey, the Captain thinks of everything. Don’t worry, people, it’s all in the bag.”
1100 hours, 26 March
The Arabian Sea
Beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean lay a canyon. Called the Indus Canyon, it was a sheer-walled gouge through the rock of the continental shelf, a valley scoured out by the uncounted millions of tons of sand and sediment washed down over millennia from the Himalayas and carried by the river’s current far to the south. For the first one hundred fifty miles beyond the mouths of the Indus, the canyon meandered through a plateau only a few hundred feet beneath the surface. Beyond that, however, the Indus currents broke from the channel in the continental shelf and plunged down … down into an eternal blackness nine thousand feet beneath the war and the sunlit waters of the surface.
At the edge of this blackness, a sea monster stirred, moving slowly from the valley’s depths toward the light. Three hundred sixty feet long, thirty-three feet broad, and displacing nearly seven thousand tons submerged, the U.S.S. Galveston was one of the latest American Los Angeles-class attack submarines.
For the past twenty-four hours, Galveston had been listening, coasting slowly through the dark waters of the Indus Canyon, her sonar ears alert to any sound beyond the normal chirping, creaking, clacking cacophony of sea life around her. Twice, the far-off pings of sonobuoys had reached across miles and touched her, but too distant, too weak to reveal her location in the sheltering confines of the undersea valley. Once, her chief sonar operator had detected the chugging throb of propellers, a sound Galveston’s acoustic library had identified as a Gearing-class destroyer, undoubtedly one of the six World War II-era DDS sold to Pakistan in the late seventies.
Captain Gerald Hawkins’s orders were both specific and vague. As part of the ASW screen for CBG-14, he was to precede the battle group toward the Indian-Pakistani border, remaining undetected by either side. All foreign submarines, whether Pakistani or Indian, were to be intercepted before they could approach the combined task force.
The vague aspect of his orders lay in what he was to do with the foreign subs once he’d caught them. A warning, transmitted through the water as a powerful chirp of sonar, might be sufficient to turn them away. But if necessary, he was to destroy potentially hostile subs before they could close with Jefferson or her escorts.
At prearranged times each day, Galveston was to rise to periscope depth.
Additional orders and updates of the tactical situation could be passed on to the attack sub then. At 1100 hours on the morning of March 26, Galveston’s radar mast broke the surface one hundred twenty miles northwest of the U.S.S. Jefferson. The situation update, together with Captain Fitzgerald’s new orders, were passed to the submarine via relay through a circling Hawkeye, and confirmed by satellite from Washington.
Minutes later, the radio mast vanished again, leaving scarcely a ripple to mark its passing.
At precisely 1125 hours, a series of round hatches set into the attack sub’s hull forward of her sail slid open. At a word from her commanding officer, a twenty-foot-long cigar shape rose from one of the tubes, expelled by a high-pressure blast of water.
The Tomahawk was a cruise missile developed in two different models, the TLAM (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile) and the TASM (Tomahawk AntiShip Missile). Originally designed to be fired from a submarine’s torpedo tubes, it was later discovered that each sub’s torpedo-carrying capacity was severely restricted by including Tomahawks on board. Beginning with the U.S.S. Providence, SS-N-719, all Los Angeles-class subs had fifteen vertical launch tubes, designed especially for Tomahawks, mounted within the bow casing between the sub’s inner and outer hulls, allowing them to carry full complements of both torpedoes and cruise missiles.
Triggered by a ten-foot lanyard connecting missile and launch tube, the solid-fuel rocket boost motor ignited in a cloud of gas bubbles and boiling water, driving the missile upward at a fifty-degree angle. The motor burned for seven seconds, long enough to punch through the surface and into the air. Then the booster fell away, wings deployed as the missile nosed over into horizontal flight only meters above the surface, and the missile’s air-breathing gas turbine switched on.
Within seconds, another Tomahawk broke the surface, then another and another. At Mach.7, the cruise missiles arrowed southeast toward their target.
Three hundred miles away, another, much larger submarine was watching the approaches to Bombay. Four hundred seventy feet long and sixty feet through the beam, it was one of a special class of nuclear-powered attack subs known to the West as Oscar.
The Oscar had originally been conceived as a platform for anticarrier operations. Its primary mission was to stalk American aircraft carrier battle groups. In time of war, the Oscars would be directed to participate in long-range missile bombardment of the U.S. carriers, coordinating their strikes with missile launches from surface ships and long-range bombers. The Oscar’s broad girth was made necessary by the cruise-missile launch tubes built into the hull on either side of the long, flat sail. Six square hatches on either side each covered two tubes. The sub carried a total of twenty-four SS-N-19 antiship missiles, high-speed, long-range weapons that could carry either conventional or nuclear w
arheads.
One after another, the sleek ship-killers burst from the waters above the submerged Oscar, discarded their empty boosters, and deployed the swept-back wings. Using information relayed to the Oscar from Soviet reconnaissance satellites orbiting overhead, the SS-N-19s began flying north, homing on the same targets as those already marked by the American Tomahawks.
1148 hours, 26 March
INS Viraat, 160 miles west northwest of Bombay
“Today, Lieutenant, you are a hero for all of India,” Ramesh said. “Your triumph will be remembered always!”
Admiral Ramesh faced the young lieutenant. He was so young, so like Joshi, that for a moment he wanted to reach out and embrace the boy. But professional decorum, and Lieutenant Tahliani’s obvious embarrassment, held him back.
“I did my duty, Admiral,” the boy said. “We all only did our duty.”
Admiral Ramesh shook his head. “You’ve done more than your duty, Lieutenant,” he said softly. “You may well have won for us the victory we needed.”
Tahliani’s flight had been the stuff of legends, of the ancient Hindu epic legends. Decoying an American F-14 with one of his Sea Eagles, he’d then shot it down with a Magic AAM. He could have launched the rest of his antiship missiles then and fled, but the boy had known that the alerted American defenses would probably knock down the Sea Eagles long before they reached their targets.
Instead, he’d rounded up a few companions and set out on his long and fuel-costly detour around the American fleet, avoiding several U.S. pickets along the way. In a triumph of long-distance navigation and flying skill, he’d reached a point from which he and his men could launch their remaining missiles. Radio traffic between the Soviet and American vessels monitored from the shore indicated that the Russian carrier was now burning, incapacitated by at least one serious missile hit.
That strike, together with the damage done to an American command cruiser, had spelled victory for the Indian navy. Now there remained only one more task, The remaining carrier, the Americans’ Jefferson, was launching aircraft. It seemed likely that they were a strike force, that their targets were the airstrips and military bases that had launched the attack on the combined squadron.
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