The only problem was, Phalanx had been designed as a last-ditch, close-defense weapon, its effective range limited to about twenty-one hundred meters, less than a mile and a half.
An Exocet could cover that distance in something like seven seconds.
The missiles came in from Biddle’s stern, ten feet above the water. The heavy thump of her chaff launchers sounded like cannon-fire as they attempted to divert the deadly Exocets. On the frigate’s hangar, the Phalanx tower slewed about sharply on its axis, the six-barreled cannon swinging into line as the target came into range.
The barrels spun, rotating over one another like eggbeater blades, accompanied with a short, sharp, buzzsaw shriek. The flare of light from the muzzle flash lit up Biddle’s afterdeck like a stream of liquid fire.
“Firing phasers!” one sailor yelled, shouting above the screaming weapon, his hands pressed against his ears.
Phalanx fired depleted-uranium rounds, spin-stabilized slivers manufactured from the waste product of various nuclear programs. Neither explosive nor radioactive, each round was two and a half times heavier than steel, 12.75 millimeters thick, and was hurled from the gun at a velocity of 1000 feet per second. With a fire rate of fifty rounds per second, the CIWS was capable of dropping what was in effect a solid wall squarely in a missile’s path. The Phalanx’s J-band pulse-doppler radar simultaneously tracked target and projectiles, correcting the aim for each brief burst.
The CIWS fired again, corrected, then fired once more. A blossom of living light erupted in the darkness of the frigate’s starboard side, illuminating the ink-black sea. The Phalanx slewed again, its computer tracking the second target. Again, the shriek like a living thing … and a second flash lit up the night. Total engagement time: 5.2 seconds. And Biddle would survive to fight again.
2209 hours, 24 March
Tomcat 201
“Tomcat Two-oh-one,” the voice in Tombstone’s headset intoned. “You’re clear for approach. Wind fifteen to eighteen at zero-four-five. Charlie now.”
“Roger, Homeplate,” Tombstone said, acknowledging the call to come in for his trap. He was tired. The weight of his flight helmet seemed intolerable, and the inside of his pressure suit was clammy with old sweat And fatigue.
They’d been summoned back to the carrier almost as soon as it was clear that the IAF aircraft were on the run. The Americans had been the clear victors in that nighttime dogfight, with at least four kills to their credit and no losses. It had been a close-run thing, however. One of the Indian Mig pilots had been a real pro, and only the rapid approach of more Tomcats had convinced the guy to break off and run for home.
Tombstone found himself wondering who that pilot he’d briefly seen was … where he lived, what he thought of the orders that had sent him against the U.S. battle group. That was never a particularly healthy thing to do, not when your life or the lives of others in your squadron might depend on your shooting that other pilot out of the sky, but Tombstone had always found it difficult to think of the enemy as unmanned drones, as lifeless targets to be racked up and taken down.
His thoughts complemented his mood. He’d become involved in a savage dogfight in pitch darkness, guided only by the impersonal flickers of light on his radar screen and the tersely coded guidance of his computer. With that one terrifying exception he’d not even seen the other aircraft in the battle, including the ones he’d chalked up as kills.
Well, such questions were pointless anyway. Tombstone kept his eyes on his instrument displays, especially his VDI where the ILS needles were guiding him through the night toward Jefferson’s deck. The carrier was completely invisible in the darkness, an unseen speck of life somewhere ahead in that black ocean. Of all maneuvers performed by Navy aviators, traps on a carrier’s steel deck at night were unquestionably the most disliked, the most feared. According to the flight surgeons keeping records of such things, a night trap tended to elevate heartbeat, respiration, and blood pressure more than a dogfight.
Tombstone, though, was past caring. The dogfight had left him drained, his reactions as automatic as the navigational guidance information from his Instrument Landing System. They had rendezvoused with a tanker for air-to-air refueling after the battle, and he’d gone through the motions like a machine, had not even remembered the problems he’d had in a similar maneuver … had it only been yesterday?
“Two-oh-one,” Lieutenant Commander Ted “Bumer” Craig, Viper Squadron’s LSO, called. “We have you at three miles out, altitude one-four-double-oh. Looking good.”
“Rog.”
“Hey, Skipper?” Dixie said over the ICS. “You see the bird farm yet? I can’t see diddly in this soup.”
“No sweat,” Tombstone replied. “We’re almost in.”
But he couldn’t see the ship either. During the past hour, a thick layer of clouds had moved in from the northeast, as though the Indian subcontinent itself were conspiring to drive the American ships and planes from her shores. The wind was picking up as well. He imagined that Jefferson would be a bit lively with a fresh breeze blowing across her flight deck.
And then the Tomcat dropped through the cloud deck and Tombstone saw the carrier’s lights. Perspective during a night trap was always a curious and stomach-twisting thing. The flight deck’s center line was lit up, and a vertical strip of lights hanging off Jefferson’s roundoff provided a clue to the vessel’s three-dimensional orientation. From the sky, the lights seemed no brighter than the stars overhead.
“Two-oh-one,” sounded in his ears. “Call the ball.”
It was time to stop flying the needles and bring his ship in. Tombstone glanced at the meatball, saw that he was a little low, and corrected automatically. “Tomcat Two-oh-one, ball,” he said. “Four point two.”
The F-14 slid down out of the sky, the nearly black mass of the carrier deck expanding to meet it. At the last moment, Tombstone saw the green cut lights go on by the ball, the nighttime signal that he was clear to land. There was a momentary illusion that he was flying into a hole outlined by lights … that the deck was winging up into a vertical wall dead ahead. Then the Tomcat slammed into the deck at one hundred thirty knots, the arrestor hook snagging the number-three wire in a perfect night trap as Tombstone first rammed the throttles forward, then brought them back to idle.
“That’s an OK,” Tombstone heard the LSO say over the net. “Two-oh-one down.”
Ahead of the Tomcat, deck crewmen moved in nearly total darkness, their hand signals revealed by colored light wands eerily visible suspended against the black. Carefully, Tombstone followed a pair of wagging yellow wands across the flight deck,
“Commander Magruder, this is the Boss,” Dick Wheeler’s voice said over the radio. “CAG wants a word with you as soon as you unstrap your turkey.” Turkey was popular carrier slang for the Tomcat.
“Copy that,” Tombstone replied. He glanced up toward the rounded, glassed-in protrusion from high up on the island, Pri-Fly, where the Air Boss reigned supreme.
There was no sense asking the man further questions, for he’d be concentrating already on Batman’s 216 bird due in forty seconds behind Tombstone’s. He was expecting to be debriefed, certainly. Aviators were always grilled after a combat engagement. But this sounded like something more.
Perhaps, Tombstone thought, the real fight was still to come.
CHAPTER 9
2258 hours, 24 March
CAG’s office, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
“Off the line!” The words struck Tombstone like a smash to the solar plexus. “God, CAG! You’re putting me in hack! What did I do?”
CAG Marusko leaned forward in his swivel chair, hands spread helplessly on the desk in front of him. “I don’t make ‘em, Stoney. I just read ‘em. The word I got was that you’re off the flight line until they can pull a full investigation of the battle. There … may be some problem with your interpretation of the ROES. May be, I said.”
Tombstone knew that they meant Admiral Vaughn. “Court-martial?�
�
“I don’t think it’ll come to that, Stoney.”
It was very quiet in the office. Despite the fact that each department in a supercarrier was manned and fully operational around the clock, it was always quieter in the admin and other office spaces during the late hours. Indeed, Tombstone knew that many men went back to their offices in the evening to read, to strum guitars, or just to be alone and escape the crowding and noise of their quarters. For a long moment, the only sounds Tombstone heard were the whir from the air vent high up on the bulkhead and the never-ceasing, usually forgotten throb of the ship’s engines through the deck.
Court-martial. Tombstone thought back to the chain of decisions he’d made that night over the ocean and knew that there was nothing he would change now. But he’d also been in the Navy long enough to know that the wisdom of any decision or order can be picked apart by some higher authority.
“I’m assigning you to Air Ops, Stoney,” Marusko said, breaking the silence. “We’re getting some new aviators in tomorrow, and we’ll need some experienced hands looking over their shoulders up in CATCC.”
There were always several aviators assigned to the Carrier Air Traffic Control Center. Sometimes they could read impressions or emotions in a squadron mate’s words as they came in over the speaker that the men manning the consoles would miss. More often than not, though, the Air Ops watch standers were Me Jo types, the ensigns and newer lieutenants jokingly referred to as marginally effective junior officers. By watching operations in CATCC and Ops, new flight officers could get the feel of the electronic network that would be backing them up once they were in the air.
“So I’m a Me Jo now, huh?” Tombstone felt the growing anger, tried to keep it out of his voice … and failed. “Do they trust me with that much responsibility?”
“Getting a damned attitude isn’t going to help, Stoney,” CAG said.
“We’re both stuck with this, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.
Not now anyway.”
Tombstone looked around the tiny room. It was cluttered with bits and pieces of Steve Marusko’s life: a photograph of his family, a plastic model from the ship’s store of an F/A-18 Hornet, books from the ship’s library. Tacked to a bulletin board was a crudely rendered crayon drawing of an aircraft carrier with huge stars scrawled on the wings of each misshapen airplane. As much as he wanted to lash out at someone, Tombstone found it impossible to be angry at CAG. The decision had not been his.
“Right, CAG.” He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. “I’ll accept this as a paid vacation.”
“That’s the stuff. Now haul ass out of here.”
As Tombstone stepped into the deserted passageway outside CAG’s office, he wondered if his getting grounded might not actually be a twisted kind of blessing. It would give him a chance to think about his role as a career fighter pilot, about his decision to quit the Navy.
He glanced at his watch. He could still get a bite to eat at the Dirty Shirt Mess. He turned and started down the passageway, endlessly alive.
How much did he really love carrier flying? These next few days might tell him.
1315 hours EST (2345 hours India time), 24 March
Oval Office, the White House, Washington, D.C.
“Thank you for coming, Admiral.” The President gestured to the upholstered chair in front of the desk. “Please, have a seat.” The Oval Office was brilliantly lit by the early afternoon light streaming through the Rose Garden window.
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Admiral Magruder took the offered chair and watched the man behind the desk with a guarded expression. George Hall, who had brought him from his new basement office, had told him nothing about the reason for the summons. The White House Chief of Staff took a seat across the room but said nothing. Something was bothering Hall, but Magruder didn’t know what.
“Things are hotting up over there,” the President said. He looked drawn and tired, as though he’d been up the entire night before. Magruder noticed that a large map of western India had been mounted on an easel set up in front of the Oval Office’s north wall. There were a number of new marks and notations off the coast near Bombay, and a heavy red line threading south through the Red Sea, then turning sharply toward the northeast, bearing on Turban Station. From where he sat, Magruder could not make out the cryptic notations next to the line.
The President cleared his throat. “Tom, as usual, this is all confidential.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Three hours ago, the Jefferson battle group was attacked off Bombay. It seems evident that the Indians were trying to punish us for sinking their sub by launching a strike at Biddle, the frigate involved in that incident. It was also intended as a clear warning. An ultimatum, if you will.” The President swiveled his chair until he was facing the Rose Garden window. He was silent for a long moment. Magruder waited.
“The Indian ambassador was in here again this morning,” the President said at last. “They’re pushing their version of the IOZP, and they want us to comply. Now.”
The tangle of international politics that laid conflicting claims to the various oceans, straits, and sea lanes of the world was a basic part of every admiral’s formal education. The Indian Ocean Zone of Peace concept had been presented to the UN by Sri Lanka — at India’s urging — in the early seventies. It called for the exclusion of all extra-regional powers from the Indian Ocean, a measure aimed principally at the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain.
Most of the nations around the Indian Ocean basin supported the IOZP, though the usual interpretation called for a reduction of all naval forces in the region, including India’s. But of all of the regional maritime powers, India had by far the most powerful navy and was the country best able to project her military power from Bombay to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Gulf of Oman to the west coast of Australia.
India was determined to become a truly global power by the twenty-first century. Her detonation of a nuclear device in 1974, her launch of communications and military satellites, her race to build up her air force, army, and navy had all been carried out with that single goal in mind.
By comparison, Great Britain had largely dismantled her presence in the Indian Ocean during the seventies, leaving her base at Diego Garcia to the Americans. Australia, once a significant naval power in the region, had largely turned her back on the sea. The Labor Party government elected in 1983 had stricken Australia’s one carrier, the Melbourne, canceled the construction of another, and transferred all fixed-wing naval assets to the RAAF. By the early nineties, Australia’s entire navy consisted of six submarines, three U.S.-built guided-missile destroyers launched in the early sixties, and ten frigates, plus a handful of coastal patrol boats, mine-warfare ships, and survey vessels.
If India succeeded in excluding outside forces from the region, she would be the logical nation to fill the power vacuum.
And that brought New Delhi squarely into conflict with the United States. Freedom of the seas, free access to international waters. Those principles had always been high among the missions tasked to the U.S. Navy. More than that, though, defense of the West’s sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world lay almost entirely with the U.S. The tanker routes from the Gulf were vital to the U.S., to Europe, to Japan, and no Western policymaker was ready to concede their control — or the responsibility for their defense — to New Delhi.
Magruder understood what the President was saying. The missiles exchanged in the Arabian Sea so far had less to do with mistaken perceptions or tit-for-tat retaliation than with a clash of mutually opposed national policies. The excuse for the attack on CBG-14 might well be the sinking of an Indian submarine; the reality was less well defined but far more vast.
“They want us out of the Indian Ocean then,” Magruder said simply.
“That’s it. They’re phrasing it oh-so-politely … but it amounts to an ultimatum. All foreign naval forces are to clear out of their War E
xclusion Zone at once. Foreign national military vessels or squadrons still in the Arabian Sea, or not clearly on a course leading out of the WEZ, will be subject to attack after noon tomorrow, our time.”
“God.”
“Other military squadrons, those not within the Exclusion Zone, are, ah, ‘strongly urged’ to honor the IOZP declaration by leaving the Indian Ocean entirely. The question of Diego Garcia is to be settled at a future conference either here or in New Delhi within the next six weeks.
The ambassador informed me that they will be presenting a motion to this effect before the United Nations this afternoon.”
Magruder digested this. “What are you planning to do about it, Mr. President?”
The man behind the desk sighed, his shoulders slumping. “There’s not a hell of a lot of choice, is there? Our whole national foreign policy is wedded to the Persian Gulf and the traffic there. Our entire history has been dedicated to freedom of the seas. I can’t back down on this … and they damn well know it.”
“Then they want a war with us?”
“I doubt it. My guess is they’re hoping to broker some sort of agreement where they become responsible for shipping in and out of the Gulf, maybe with us as junior partners. For the moment, though, they just want foreigners out of the Arabian Sea so they can prosecute their war with Pakistan.”
“The war.” Magruder gave a grim smile. “I’d just about forgotten about that.”
“Hell, the Pakistan war is what this is all about, Tom. India has always distrusted our relationship with Pakistan and probably thinks we’ll back Islamabad against them. If they can get us out of the way, they can blockade Karachi and not have to watch their backs.”
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