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.”
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.