“This isn’t good. How many casualties?” he asked.
King tried to stay strong and keep her composure as she responded, “No idea just yet, but it’s going to be high, Sir.”
Captain Adel interrupted them. “Ma’am, I’ve got four F/A-18s that were already on the flight deck before the attack. We can launch them now if you want,” he said.
She nodded, and the CAG ordered the fighters launched. They’d link up with the others that had already been able get airborne and go after whatever Russian ships remained after the Tomahawks did their job.
Admiral Lindal thanked Captain King and then moved over to his action officers. “Have the Tomahawks launched yet?” he asked.
Chief Morris looked up at him. “The Ramage and Cole are launching their missiles now. However, Sir, the Laboon was sunk, and so were the Carney and the Gonzalez.”
“My God, that was sixty percent of our Tomahawk capability,” Admiral Lindal thought. He suddenly realized just how many sailors had perished at sea. He shook himself — there wasn’t time to dwell on it. He could mourn the dead later.
Changing subjects, Lindal ordered, “Give me the battle damage assessment of the fleet.”
A senior chief spoke up. “Sir, the Charles de Gaulle is gone. She was nearly dead in the water when the hypersonic missiles converged on the fleet, so she had no way of being able to maneuver. She took nine direct hits, several to her magazine rooms. Once her missiles and bombs started to go off, she completely blew up. I don’t know how, but both the Italian and Spanish carriers sustained only minor damage from the first cruise missile attack by the Russian subs. They are moving to try and conduct search and rescue operations of the ships that have been sunk.”
Admiral Lindal shook his head. This was not good.
The senior chief continued his report. “The Queen Elizabeth appears to have taken seven hits. I’m honestly not sure if she’s going to make it. She’s almost completely ablaze, though the rain does appear to be helping to tamper down the fires. Who knows, maybe the cruddy weather might actually save the ship by putting out some of the fires. The Kitty Hawk is going down. She hasn’t sunk yet, but she’s burning out of control. I spoke with someone from their CIC a few minutes ago, and he said the captain had given the order to abandon ship. They took a hit to engineering, and they were already having problems with two of their boilers. When the missiles arrived, one of them hit just at the waterline in the engineering section. Aside from the blast tearing the place up, once the icy waters hit the boiler room, everything exploded. It blew the aft and lower section of the ship wide open.”
As if to add emphasis to what he was saying, the senior chief pulled up a camera feed that showed the Kitty Hawk. Admiral Lindal crossed his arms in frustration. Not only was a good portion of the Kitty Hawk on fire, but the aft section of the ship was sinking — nearly the entire bow of the ship was raised out of the water.
“How about the Kennedy?” asked Lindal.
“No damage,” said the senior chief. “I don’t know how, but they didn’t take a single a hit.” He paused a moment. “Sir, I know this doesn’t bring any of our guys back, but the Russians fired 120 of those hypersonic missiles at us. Only 46 of them actually scored hits. Without the Growlers we launched prior to the attack and some seriously fancy shooting by the Gates, the Brits, and French destroyers, this could have been a bloodbath. Plus, none of the troop transports or amphibious assault ships sustained any damage.”
Admiral Lindal grunted and uncrossed his arms. “I suppose that’s one way to look at it, Senior. You guys did a good job through all of this.”
Lindal patted the senior chief on the shoulder, then walked over to the workstation he had been occupying and sat down for a second. He needed to collect his thoughts before he phoned back to higher headquarters to let them know what had happened.
He rested his head on his hands. “It’s going to take a while to scoop up the survivors,” he thought. However, he realized that at the end of the day, despite the loss of ships, they would still be able to carry on with their original mission. This war was going to end, and the troops they were escorting were going to make it happen.
Winter Warfare
Looking outside his office window, Petrov saw that the snowfall that had started out as a light dusting that morning was starting to pick up pace into a full-blown winter storm.
“It’s beautiful watching the snow drift down like this across the city,” he thought, almost nostalgically. He allowed himself a couple of minutes to just let go of the world around him. For a moment he forgot the weight of the war, which was beginning to become like a millstone around his neck.
That burden had become a constant drone in his mind as of late. The Americans had again rejected Minister Kozlov’s latest peace proposal, further limiting Russia’s options to end this war on his terms. This new American president was hellbent on finishing the work his predecessor had started.
The nagging thoughts came back. “We were so certain that the elimination of President Gates would lead to a cooler-headed president,” he groaned to himself. He had been absolutely convinced that Foss would see reason and end the war to stem the threat of a major nuclear conflict. “Well, if the Americans believe I will simply surrender power and my country, they have another thing coming,” he thought as he clenched his fist. Russia still possessed over five thousand nuclear weapons, and he was not afraid to use them given the right conditions.
After looking at the report from yesterday’s naval battle in the Barents Sea, Petrov had begun to think very hard about authorizing the release of a tactical nuclear strike against the Allied naval task force before it reached his shores. The sinking of three Allied aircraft carriers was nothing short of spectacular, but more than half of the new hypersonic missiles were jammed and unable to hit their targets. He was still irate that the engineers had been wrong in their assessment that the new Zircon missiles would not be susceptible to jamming.
“Had all of those missiles hit their targets, the Allied fleet would have been defeated,” he mourned.
His senior leadership had conflicting opinions about what to do next. Admiral Anatoly Petrukhin, the Head of the Navy, had requested permission to hit the Allied fleet with several nuclear weapons before they offloaded their troops, but General Egorkin had objected strongly to this idea, even offering his resignation if he authorized the strike. Egorkin’s logic had been very simple — if the Russians used these weapons against the Allied fleet, the Allies would use them against his ground forces. With no Russian Navy left to speak of, it would be his forces that would bear the retaliation.
“Egorkin does have a point,” Petrov thought as he continued his inner conflict about what to do next. The Russian Army still held on to Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia. If several of their formations were nuked, it could cause the entire front line to collapse.
Knock, knock, knock.
Petrov turned away from the window and the falling snow and saw his aide standing near the doorway, letting him know that it was time to head over to the morning meeting. He grunted slightly as he got up from his chair, beginning to feel every bit his sixty-two years of age.