"Good combat ratios are all very admirable," Tarrant said, "but they don't help us in this situation. The Russians, remember, can always ferry in more aircraft. It will be some time before we have that luxury. In other words, this command cannot afford to lose even one aircraft, not even if we trade it for fifteen of the enemy's."
"I should also point out, sir," Tombstone added, "that from now on exhaustion is going to be a factor. Some of my people have been up three times so far this morning. Most have been up twice. With the heavy patrol schedule, I expect that by dawn tomorrow every NFO I have will have been up at least four or five times, and that's going to start wearing them down fast.
Same goes for the deck crews, turning around that many aircraft, round-the-clock refueling and rearming. Those guys're going to be dead on their feet soon. Exhaustion means mistakes, accidents, and downtime when equipment fouls or bits of metal get scattered across a flight deck."
"Understood," Tarrant said. "All I can tell you is that we're going to have to play this one as it's dealt to us. Other questions?"
"Yeah," a tall, gangly commander next to Tarrant said. "Why the Sam Hill'd they do it?"
"Not my department, Dan," Tombstone said with a tired smile. "I'd say the answer's more in your line of work."
The tall commander was Daniel Sykes, and he was Tarrant's chief intelligence officer. It was his responsibility to know what the Russians were doing, and why.
Sykes shook his head. "So far, we just don't have the data to go on.
The Russians lost… call it fifty percent casualties. Plus one hundred fifty cruise missiles, not counting the ones on bombers that got clobbered before they could launch. Nearly all of them shot down or decoyed into the sea."
Only three cruise missiles had made it through the carrier group's defenses, but those three had hurt, Tombstone thought. The Blakely had rolled over and sunk in five minutes, taking 201 of the 205 men aboard with her.
There'd simply been no time for her to lower boats, and no time for helicopters to rescue more than those four before the rest succumbed to hypothermia. In Ike's battle group, besides minor damage to the Gettysburg from an antiradar missile, the frigate John C Pauly had taken a half-ton warhead from a Kingfish amidships, while in CBG14 both the DDG Truesdale and the FFG Dickinson had been badly mauled. All three of those ships were again under way, the fires aboard under control, the wounded air-evaced to the Jefferson, where they were being made ready for a series of medevac flights to Narvik, then Lakenheath, and finally the States. It had been touch-and-go aboard the Dickinson and the Pauly for a while, though.
And of course, Dickinson hadn't been hit by a missile. Friendly fire, obviously, could be no less deadly than hostile fire.
"The point is," Sykes concluded, "that this was one hell of an expensive adventure for them. They wouldn't have started it without a damned good reason."
"Radio intercepts have been talking about a rebel group grabbing control of some of the Kola airfields, an intelligence officer with Morrisey's staff pointed out. "The word from Washington is that Moscow is claiming the attack was mounted either by Blue forces, or by mutinous Reds with anti-American feelings."
"Does anybody seriously believe that?" Tarrant asked. There were no takers, only a number of heads shaking slowly back and forth. "The Reds could be trying to discredit the Blues, of course. But I can't see that what they hoped to win in propaganda points was worth one hundred forty of their front-line aircraft."
"They gambled and they lost," Captain Maxwell, Tarrant's chief of staff suggested. "If they'd managed to sink even one of our carriers…"
"They came damned close to doing just that," Tarrant said. "But-"
There was a knock on the door, and a first class yeoman poked his head in. "Excuse me. Admiral Tarrant?"
"Yes."
"Two priority messages, sir, FLASH URGENT."
"Give 'em here." Tarrant took the dispatch flimsies, which had obviously just come up from Shiloh's decoding shack. He scanned each briefly, then passed them around. "It's just possible, that we have here the reason for the Russian attack."
Tombstone read the messages when they came to him. The first was a repeat of a message from the Galveston, with header information indicating that it had been relayed by satellite to Washington, where it had been re-coded and transmitted to the Shiloh. The body of the message was curt and to the point.
TIME: 0848 HRS, ZULU+2 TO: COCBG14 FROM: COSSN770
PLARB TYPHOON DEPARTED KOLA INLET 0830 HRS. SSN770 IN PURSUIT. REQUEST ORDERS, SCHED-3/ELF.
MONTGOMERY SENDS.
Routing the message through D.C. accounted for the four-hour delay in Shiloh's receiving it. The Joint Chiefs, maybe even the President and his advisors, must still be mulling this one over, because the second message, from the commanding officer of the Atlantic fleet, was even more curt.
TIME: 0515 HRS, ZULU-5 TO: COCBG14 FROM: COMLANT
STAND BY FOR FURTHER ORDERS.
HAMPTON SENDS.
In other words, take no action until you hear from Washington, or your ass is in a sling.
And they had good reason to be thinking this one over carefully.
A Typhoon ballistic-missile sub had put to sea during the height of the air battle over the carrier battle force. The timing was indeed suspicious.
"How was this transmitted?" Tombstone asked, holding up the message from Galveston. Submarines normally refrained from risking any communication that might give their positions away.
The yeoman, still standing by the door, explained that Galveston had extended a UHF antenna above the surface and zip-squealed the message, coded and packed into a compressed digital format that allowed it to be transmitted to a military comsat in a burst less than a hundredth of a second long. There was still the danger that the message would be picked up by Russian eavesdroppers ― or that the antenna would be tagged by their radar for the few seconds it was above the surface, but in this case the risk was acceptable.
Obviously, though, Montgomery wasn't yet aware of the air battle that morning, cut off as he was from routine communications with the outside world.
All he knew was that he had a Russian PLARB by the tail, and he wanted to know what to do with it. His orders were to track them if they appeared, to destroy them if they prepared to launch. They said nothing about how long he was to maintain his covert reconnaissance. "Sched-3/ELF" referred to a timetable for Galveston to receive messages by extremely low-frequency radio.
At 1400 hours, and every six hours after that, she would rise to within a hundred feet of the surface where she could receive ELF communications.
"Thank you, son," Tarrant told the yeoman. "You're dismissed."
After the sailor had left, he turned to the planning staff again. "Well?
Opinions?"
Morrisey frowned. "Possibly the Russians are just taking advantage of the confusion to get their PLARB boats clear of Polyamyy. If there is trouble with rebel forces in the area, they'd want their boomers out of there, and fast."
"But there hasn't been, Admiral," Sykes said. "All of our intelligence indicates that Leonov's Blue forces have taken up positions in the south."
"Still, some dissidents or mutineers-"
"Would be unable to mount an attack of the sort we've witnessed this morning," Tarrant said. "My guess is that the attack was precisely to keep us busy, off balance while they slipped one or more of their boats to sea. The question is, why?"
"Nuclear attack on the United States?" someone asked. There was a deathly hush in the room after that.
"Or nuclear blackmail," another voice added. "Telling us to stay out of their fight, or they nuke New York."