Well, that was Navy life. Good friends and good-byes.
“Hell, what’s this elite garbage?” Tombstone said roughly, covering his feelings. “You look like a damned civilian to me.”
Coyote looked down at his civvies. “Yeah. Didn’t have time to change.
They routed that COD out of Masirah. We had a few hours in Dawwah, but they wouldn’t let us wear our uniforms. The locals are sensitive about American servicemen on their turf.”
They entered the island and removed their helmets. A seaman took Coyote’s life jacket. “Well,” Coyote said. “I’d better get checked in.
Hey, I hear your uncle’s not the Flag anymore. How’s the new guy?”
Tombstone’s lips compressed, then he shrugged. “Still settling in. You hear about our dustup last night?”
“No. What went down?”
“I imagine they’ll fill you in. We had a run-in with the Indian air force.”
“No shit?” Coyote whistled.
“No shit. We knocked down three of theirs.”
“So it’s gone to a shooting war!”
“Just this side of one anyway.”
“Were you in on it?” Coyote grinned. “You get yourself another kill?”
The question bothered Tombstone. “Yeah. I got a kill.”
“Then you can tell me about it. How about lunch?”
“I’ve got the duty down in CATCC. I’ll see you tonight at chow.”
“Roger that.” Coyote flashed a broad grin and was gone.
Heading in a different direction, Tombstone clattered down a ship’s ladder to the 0–3 deck, then made his way past Combat toward CATCC once more. There was a lot more he’d wanted to tell Coyote. His being grounded, for one thing, and the doubts he’d felt the night before when he kept asking for clearance to fire, with no response. Fog of war was one thing, but Tombstone had the feeling that someone at a high level had not been snapping off the decisions in an efficient and military manner.
True, the tactical situation always looked a lot different on the amber radar screens of CIC than it did in the cockpit of an F-14 on BARCAP, but the orders had been coming too little and too late during the evening’s engagement.
Well, that was no longer Tombstone’s concern. He brushed past the curtains that excluded outside light and entered the red-lit semidarkness of CATCC.
CVIC was more than Jefferson’s briefing-room-cum-TV-studio. The acronym was also applied to the carrier’s entire intelligence department, which was the joint domain of the ship’s OS and OZ divisions. OS was made up of the cryptology technicians who encoded and decoded Jefferson’s communications. OZ — the two-letter designation led to the department’s inevitable nickname of “the Emerald City”—was responsible for providing intelligence data to Jefferson’s decision makers. Divided into five interlocking work centers, including Mission Planning and Briefing (MP&B) and Multi-Sensor Interpretation (MSI), OZ was regarded by the rest of Jefferson’s people as a truly magical kingdom that provided the battle group with a day-to-day picture of what was going on around them.
Of course, there was plenty of wry commentary when Intelligence was wrong, jokes about Naval Intelligence being a contradiction in terms, or how they used the Meteorological Division’s blindfold and dart board to come up with their predictions.
The division head was the Carrier Group Intelligence Officer, Commander Richard Patrick Neil. Boston-born and educated, Neil had a slow manner of speech laced with the broad vowels of New England. He stood at the podium before row upon row of folding chairs, facing the senior battle group officers gathered in the room. A projection screen had been unfolded behind him, next to a map of India’s west coast.
The morning’s briefing had been called for all of Jefferson’s division heads, as well as all senior personnel in Jefferson’s Operations Department. CAG Marusko and two of his staff officers were present representing the air wing, though individual squadron skippers were not.
Also in attendance were a number of special guests, visitors from other ships of the battle group. Captain Cunningham of the Vicksburg and several officers from his CIC and tactical staff, were sitting near the front. If a major air or surface engagement with the Indians was in the offing, the squadron would be counting heavily on the Ticonderoga-class CG and her SPY-1B radar.
“Attention on deck,” someone snapped from the back of the room. Admiral Vaughn entered, trailed by his senior staff. The officers in the room rose as a body.
“As you were, as you were,” Vaughn said, making his way to the front-row seats reserved for his party. The others sat down as he did, with a loud rustle and squeaking of chairs. “Let’s get on with it, Neil.”
“Admiral,” he said, nodding. “Gentlemen. Good morning.
“By now, all of you have been informed that CBG-14 is being augmented this afternoon by the arrival of a Commonwealth naval squadron. I’ve been asked to brief all of you on the types and capabilities of the Russian ships, and on the opposing lineup we are likely to face if we’re forced to engage Indian naval forces. Lights, please.”
The room lights dimmed, and a slide projector at the back of the room winked on. Ships appeared on the projection screen, photographed in crisp, colorful detail. The largest vessel was a carrier caught obliquely in early morning light. Her wake was a pale green-blue trail in the dark purple water.
“These came down from MSI this morning,” Neil said, unfolding a telescoping pointer. “SOVINDRON consists of six surface ships and one submarine. We managed to catch these three in a TARPS run at zero-six-fifteen hours. The carrier you see here is the Kreml. Her escorts are a Kresta II-class guided-missile cruiser, the Marshal Timoshenko, and a Kotlin-class destroyer, the Moskovskiy Komsomolets.”
He signaled with his hand and the slide projector chunked. A magnified image of the carrier from a slightly different angle appeared. “Kreml, gentlemen. The Kremlin. Second of the Soviet supercarriers, he was laid down at the Nikolayev south shipyard in December of 1985 and completed in 1991. He is nuclear-powered, with four reactors and a speed of better than thirty knots.”
“She,” Admiral Vaughn interrupted.
“Sir?”
“You said ‘he.’ Ships are female.”
“In our Navy, yes, sir. The Russians refer to ships as ‘he.’ I just thought-“
“You’re briefing Americans, damn it. You can use American terminology.”
“Yes, sir.” Neil turned back to the screen. “She has a displacement of about seventy thousand tons and an overall length of one thousand feet, which puts her in Jefferson’s class.
“Kreml carries a wing of approximately sixty-five to seventy aircraft.
You can see some of them lined up here, starboard side aft. These here, as you can see, are Yak-38MP Forgers. Nothing new there. They appear to be identical to the V/STOL aircraft carried aboard the smaller Kiev-class carriers in both fighter and strike roles. Four wing pylons.
The usual combat configuration is two external tanks and two Aphid missiles. Actually, the Forger has about a twenty-five percent payload advantage over the AV-8B Harrier, but it is generally considered to be an inferior aircraft.” Neil cracked a rare smile. “if it’s any indication, the Indian navy turned down a chance to buy some of these babies a few years ago and bought the Harrier instead.”
The pointer moved to a cluster of aircraft lining the side of the flight deck, wings tightly folded. “These are Russia’s naval version of the Su-27 Flanker. It is highly maneuverable and is probably roughly comparable to the American F-15 Eagle. It has the same track-while-scan radar as the Mig-29, has look-down/shoot-down capability, and can handle all-weather operation. Armament for the fighter version is eight AA-10 Alamo missiles. The Russians are supposed to be working on a strike version, but we have no information on that at this time, and we don’t know whether any might be aboard the Kreml. Originally, the Flanker appeared with a variable-geometry wing like our Tomcat. We have to assume they ran into some problems with it, though, because current production models have been strictly fixed-wing. Next.”