There’d been no time to consult with the government. In another forty minutes, India’s government would have ceased to exist. But he, and he alone, had been in a position to stop the war.
It was Sundarji who had ordered the IAF to stand down, to clear the skies for aircraft the U.S. already had in the skies above the Thar Desert. By shooting down the Pakistani planes, the President had proven America’s determination to stop the conflict from going nuclear. By grounding his aircraft, Sundarji had shown his good faith. At that, it had been a risky gamble. Sundarji might have insisted on scrambling every interceptor he had in the New Delhi area. But one of those Falcons might have gotten through, and the Indian planes had nothing like Phoenix. They would have had to get close to make a kill, “knife-fighting distance” as Navy aviators liked to phrase it.
Sundarji had been convinced. Stay clear, and let the Tomcats shoot the bogies down. They had.
And with India’s defeat in the Arabian Sea, suddenly there was no further reason to continue the war.
Magruder hoped Sundarji would survive the political turmoil that was certain to follow. A career at the Pentagon would seem peaceful by comparison. But Sundarji combined political professionalism and savvy with a realistic view of things as they were … an unusual and refreshing combination in government, from what Magruder had seen so far.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
Magruder turned to watch his Commander in Chief walk onto the stage, as applause burst from the audience in a thunderous roar.
The President was about to announce the end to a war that had never officially begun.
EPILOGUE
Tombstone leaned against the safety railing on Vulture’s Row, high atop Jefferson’s island, unashamedly straining to see like any rubbernecking tourist. He was not alone. Every sailor and officer who could squeeze onto the narrow walkway beneath the carrier’s billboard-sized radar antennae was there, and thousands more were on the flight deck below.
Ahead, the Hampton Roads Bridge stretched across the horizon, from Hampton on the right to Norfolk on the left. He could see the buildings of Virginia Beach to the south, beyond the gray shape and green wake of the Lawrence Kearny.
The water on every side of the carrier was crowded with small craft, sailboats, cabin cruisers, fireboats, vessels of every size and shape and description out on a glorious April day to welcome America’s most famous nuclear aircraft carrier.
The decision had been made early on to send Jefferson home by the Atlantic route, sparing her jury-rigged hull repairs the uncertainties of a long Pacific crossing. They would be putting into Norfolk’s shipyards for repairs, and the whole crew was looking forward to reunions with families ashore. The Navy had taken care of all of the arrangements for bringing families across the country from California, a logistical evolution as complex as anything in the Indian Ocean.
Of course, sailors with girlfriends or fiancees were out of luck, for the most part. The Navy recognized only legal dependents. But they too would be reunited soon enough.
Jefferson’s Exec had already announced that leave and liberty policy would be fairly relaxed for the next few weeks. It would be a while before Jefferson went to sea again.
A siren sounded across the water, then another. Other sailors and officers on Vulture’s Row on either side of Tombstone began cheering, waving their hats in response to the salutes from the water. The terror, the uncertainties of the Indian Ocean seemed forgotten.
Tombstone wondered if it had been worth it. So many were not coming back from the Arabian Sea. Army Garrison and Dixie. Over two hundred men aboard the Kreml, which had limped back to its Black Sea port two weeks after the battle. Thirty of Vicksburg’s men, including their Captain. Tombstone had attended the memorial services held for them in the Med. The Vickie was still at Naples, where she’d steamed slowly into port under her own power.
That Russian pilot, Captain Ivan Andreivich Kurasov, had been honored by a multinational service at sea. He’d died trying to save the American carrier, in what had to be one of the most ironic twists of the entire history of rivalry between the U.S. and Russian navies.
And Admiral Vaughn. Charles Lee Vaughn had died within an hour after arriving in Jefferson’s sick bay, that morning off the coast of Kathiawar. Tombstone still wasn’t sure what he thought of the man. He’d made some undeniable blunders … but it looked like the Navy Department had already determined that he was the hero of the Arabian Sea, the strategist who single-handedly had fought superior Indian air and naval forces, and won.
Tombstone wondered how many of the established facts of history were like that, battles won through blunders and ignorance, and painted over later by the politicians and diplomats.
The paint job was still going on. The latest word from Geneva was that a formal peace was being hammered out between India and her neighbor.
Tombstone didn’t know how that was going to work out and, in fact, didn’t really care. CBG-14 had done its part to bring them to the peace table, and that was enough. The word in VF-95’s Ready Room was that the Indians had lost heavily in the raid at the Nara Bridge. While not irreplaceable, the supplies destroyed by the Intruders’ bombs, the bridges knocked out by laser-guided missiles and special ordnance, had set back their timetable for an assault on Karachi by at least two weeks.
And after one particular incident in the skies above the Thar Desert, they knew that they did not have two weeks to spare.
Had those four aircraft, identified in satellite photos as Pakistani F-16s, been carrying nukes? The Indians weren’t talking — they’d cordoned off the crash sites — and neither were the Pakistanis. Odds were they had been, and that Tombstone and the survivors of his squadron had saved a large percentage of the six million people living in New Delhi. It was estimated that a ten-kiloton nuclear warhead would have killed at least half a million people in the crowded Indian capital, and made millions homeless.
The whole story might never be known. The world’s leaders were not eager to broadcast how close to tragedy the planet had come. It was interesting, though, that a U.S. Navy supercarrier, long seen in some quarters as a blatant symbol of American militarism, had in fact been responsible for preventing a nuclear war.
And that, of course, had been the understanding implicit in their design all along. With the decline of what had been the Soviet Union as a world power, the world was becoming more dangerous, not less. Iraq, North Korea, Thailand, and now India and Pakistan had all proven that, More and more countries that had been tribal states warring with their neighbors a generation ago were learning how to acquire or build nuclear weapons. Tombstone had heard that there were backroom talks underway now in both Washington and Moscow, talks that might lead to some kind of permanent multinational peacekeeping force organized along the lines of the joint Russian-American task force that had brought peace to the Indian Ocean.
Maybe the world needed a strong-armed policeman for the next decade or two … just until its more boisterous inhabitants grew up.
Whatever happened, Tombstone knew he’d found his place. He reached up to his jacket’s breast pocket and touched the folded letter there that had been delivered by a COD Greyhound in the mid-Atlantic. “My darling Matt! I can’t wait to see you again. I’ll be waiting for you on the dock in Norfolk when you come in.” She was waiting for him.
And Tombstone still didn’t know if he and Pamela had a future together.