“And if they stay neutral, sir?”
“Then we’ll do our best,” said Wells. “We’ll do our very best. The men have seen it now—that big grey elephant. We’ve been hurt, losing good crews and ships, and seen both our strengths and shortcomings since this thing teed off. Yet the Royal Navy isn’t finished yet, Captain, not by a long shot. We still hold Singapore, by the skin of our teeth, and this base right here, which puts us right in the middle of the stew.”
“About Singapore, sir… Can we hold out there?”
“That was the writing on the wall when we lost Illustrious and all her escorts. In fact, we should have seen the weakness in our frigates even earlier, in the Med.”
“The thing had just lit off, sir,” said Kemp. “Too easy to write off a loss as fortunes of war at that stage.”
“Yes? Well now we know better. We might buck up our frigates here with those Mark 29 launchers, but what we really need are more destroyers. After the losses started off Singapore, I put in a request to Whale Island, and they dispatched Legion and Lance from Gibraltar on the 18th. They’ll be coming with another attack boat to replace Howe, And that lot will reach Cape Town on the 28th of November, but it will take them another five days to reach Victoria in the Seychelles.”
“Better late than never, sir,” said Captain Kemp.
The British fleet had been rejuvenated there at Diego Garcia, refitting those frigates while they waited for the Roosevelt group. Wells took stock of his fleet, now with three carriers, five destroyers (including Argos Fire and a pair of Type 42’s), and nine frigates. He had recouped all the losses sustained in his advance to this point, and then some. The UK had two more Type 31 frigates feverishly fitting out in the Clyde, but beyond that, no other ship would be commissioned into the navy during this war.
With Wells now commanding 17 Ships and three more support vessels, and the Americans contributing ten ships, the Western Alliance now had a substantial fleet for this operation. Then there were another ten US and Australian warships escorting the troop and supply convoy. But as yet unknown to Admiral Wells, there was another small TF entering the scene, and it had come a very long way to get in on the action here
After resting at Sendai for some days, Vladimir Karpov made good on his plan to go south. With the American Navy waiting on convoys sealifting war supplies from San Diego and San Francisco, a long quiet spell settled over the Pacific. Yet no sooner had Karpov returned to his normal routine, when he could feel the lure of combat with the first reports coming in from Singapore. So he had taken Kirov and Kursk south, entering the Celebes Sea on the 18th. Two days later he was in the Java Sea, in a position to either support Singapore, or transit the Strait of Malacca or the Sunda Strait to get into the battle that was forming up in the Indian Ocean. He had ordered a supply ship to come all the way down from Petropavlovsk, laden with more missiles should he need them, and he certainly would.
Yes, Karpov could smell a good fight from over 3000 miles away, and there was no way he was going to miss out on this one.
Chapter 14
Admiral Sun Wei pulled on a pair of spectacles and read the decrypted message he had expected from Beijing. He was immediately pleased to see one of the signatories was Navy Commander Admiral Shen Jinlong, and another was Zhang Wendan, the Navy Chief of Staff. When he read the message, he swelled with pride. He was herewith promoted to Commander in Chief, Indo-Arabian Operations. The message was meant as much to honor him for the victory he had achieved over the Royal Navy, as well as to direct him to a coded plan briefing that he would find in the secure safe aboard his flagship.
He had set his flag aboard DDG Longshen, the Dragon God, the intrepid ship that had come all the way from the Canary Islands, a journey of many thousands of miles. Now he went to the safe to open his coded orders. The PLAN Naval Staff had devised several operational plans for various contingencies. There were three envelopes, and he compared their assigned codes to that received in this signal, selecting the appropriate message.
As I suspected, he mused while reading the order. I am to take my destroyers, and two frigates north to the tip of the Horn of Africa. And this is why no provision is being made to airlift missiles to Djibouti for transport by rail to Mombasa. That port is no longer vital. The enemy move to consolidate at Diego Garcia had been discussed, analyzed, and wargamed many times before the war. It means only one thing in this situation, that they are preparing a bold thrust towards the Arabian Peninsula. Therefore my fleet is needed there to help repel this operation. Once in position, I will assume command of regional forces from Djibouti and Aden, raising my strength to 20 ships again.
I am to coordinate with the newly appointed commander of the Arabian Sea and Bengal Bay Forces, Admiral Hong Buchan. He served in the Med before being ordered to withdraw through Suez. Some say his head is as thick as his neck, but I see him to be a competent and aggressive fighter. Yet he can also be impulsive, so I must hold the reins tightly on this one. He will have another 20 ships, and so we will be stronger now than ever before.
Between our two fleets, sits Oman, and the southeast end of the Arabian Peninsula. The Americans have a small naval presence there, but strong air power. This may mean we would have to fight with an enemy force at our backside, while we face their main thrust, which is not good. So we may have to neutralize these bases in Oman, which will have the further benefit of inhibiting the American effort to land troops there. There is just one drawback… It means we would have to strike Oman. Those attacks would come with the big operation we are expecting on the Arabian Peninsula.
So now the fires of this war will spread to a most volatile region. It will no longer be hidden in the vast emptiness of the oceans, but the sea battle ahead may end up deciding the outcome. Here is the code name the Iraqi’s have chosen: Sayf Alsahra', the Sword of the Desert, yet it will soon begin with fire arrows, and among them, our gift to the Iranians. Now the struggle for control of those vast oil reserves in the Middle East will finally begin.
The strategic situation in the Indo-Arabian sector was complex, to say the least. On the Arabian Peninsula, the House of Saud could count on Bahrain, Qatar and the Gulf States, including Oman, but it had strong enemies in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, all backed by China. Sitting at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman, China and Pakistan were hand in glove, the China-PAK alliance active for many years. To make matters worse, the Gulf of Aden was heavily dominated by the Chinese, with bases in Djibouti and Yemen.
At the same time, Chinese bases on Sri-Lanka at Colombo and Hambantoa were also in unfriendly waters, and the only line of communications to Sri Lanka ran northeast through the Bay of Bengal to Burma, where China had pipeline terminals at Chittagong and Sittwe. The bases on Sri Lanka had been established to stretch that line of communications around the proverbial elephant in the region, the powerhouse lending its name to the vast seas to the south, India.
While they had not openly clashed in decades, China and India maintained guarded and watchful relations, mostly because of China’s cozy relationships with Pakistan. This put the world’s second most populous nation, nuclear armed, and with a strong military and navy, right in the middle of China’s soup kettle. There was no way China would ever dominate a billion people in India, and so the last thing the Chinese wanted was open war with New Delhi.