The more things change the more they remain the same. Those World War II British flat tops were tough nuts to crack. He had seen the Victorious’s sister ship, HMS Formidable, burning off Formosa in May 1945. The Kamikazes had not known they were wasting their time crashing into the armoured decks of the British flat tops; once the Brits had put out the fires and hammered the dents out of the flight deck they carried straight on launching and recovering their birds as if nothing had happened.
Two fleet oilers had sailed from Gibraltar three days ago. They would be positioned half-way between Lampedusa and Malta, waiting to top off the bunkers of every ship in the Task Force.
As he smoked his cigarette, the Captain of the USS Iowa inwardly digested the latest situation reports from Malta. Operation Grantham, the huge combined operation to eject Red Dawn from Cyprus and to secure the island as a base for ongoing operations had thus far gone without a hitch. Other than a handful of attempts to penetrate the fringes of the Malta Air Defence Zone by former Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 bombers — probably operating in a dedicated reconnaissance role — there had been no contact with the enemy. The intelligence community was still pedalling the line that ‘Red Dawn discipline and control have broken down in areas nominally under its control’; throughout Eastern Turkey, Northern Greece and pockets of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. Supposedly, there was ‘minimal naval activity in the Aegean Basin’ at this time, although a footnote to the report conceded that ‘aerial surveillance of areas of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Dardanelles has been hampered by poor weather conditions in the last seven days’.
Schmidt remembered a conversation with an old friend who had become a CIA contractor when he retired after two decades in naval aviation, that ‘one day soon we’ll be able to spy on the surface of the whole planet from space’. Before the October War all things had seemed possible. Schmidt still did not know what to make of that crazy speech the President had made about putting an American on the Moon back in November, but whatever it was about it was not going to suddenly reverse the mothballing of the whole space program in the spring of last year. Whichever way one looked at it the ‘intelligence picture’ it was as spotty as Hell and the fact Operation Grantham was apparently proceeding with the smooth precision of an expensive Swiss watch, signified precisely diddly-squat in the humble opinion of Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt. Those Red Dawn fanatics had loosed off nukes, they had over run thousands of square miles of real estate and given the second best navy in the World one Helluva bloody nose in February. He did not need the rumbling pain of his ulcers to tell him that those guys had not just gone away overnight. If recent history taught a man anything, the cynic in him said, it might simply be that the bastards had been planning something nasty all along and that far from going away, Red Dawn was simply bidding its time.
One last drag on his cigarette.
If he had had another month he could have actually got ‘The Big Stick’ into some kind of state to really go to war. Two days ago he had allowed the turret crews to fire off most of the Iowa’s practice rounds. He had almost forgotten how good it felt in that moment the ship seemed to stop dead in the water for a split second when the big guns loosed off a broadside. The sound and fury of the main battery had briefly allowed him to forget that he still had over a hundred civilian contractors onboard, mostly working in the Fire Rooms, that there were seemingly intractable electrical problems in Number Two main battery turret, that the ship’s internal communications system was a mess and that the port side secondary dual-purpose five inch battery was only operable in local control. Moreover, having so many old battlewagon hands on board was not turning out to be an unmitigated blessing. The old timers were infuriatingly set in their ways, constantly reminding their divisional officers of ’the way things were done’ on the Missouri, or the New Jersey, or the Wisconsin, and a significant minority clearly viewed the Iowa as a pale shadow of their ‘own’ former ships.
It was fortunate that Captain Schmidt was a man who was convinced that his cup was always half-full, not half-empty. The one thing a Navy man could rely on was that things could always be worse.
“Surface contacts bearing zero-two-zero!”
Anderson Schmidt waited for more.
“Range forty plus miles. Contact keeps dropping out.”
The hulls of the contacts were probably still below the horizon. They might be fifty, not forty miles out.
“Radar signature?” Schmidt asked coolly.
“Unknown, sir.”
The Independence would have had the contacts on her plot ever since Task Force 21.1 had ‘shot’ the straits. At any one time she always had one of the four brand new twin turboprop Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye all-weather tactical early warning aircraft — flown out from the States a fortnight ago — in the air. The E-2s gave the carrier a bird’s eye view of the surrounding sea and land out to one to two hundred miles in every direction. If anything happened to the Independence the air defence controller sitting in the ‘duty’ E-2 would automatically ‘manage’ the battlefield. It all seemed like something out of a Buck Rogers movie to Anderson Schmidt, which was one of the reasons he had known when the time had come to retire from the Navy. Several of the escorts had ‘real time’ communications links to the Independence and to the orbiting E-2 Hawkeye, constantly updating their tactical plots. The Iowa had none of that new kit. An early version of the electronics suite carried by some of the smaller escorts had been installed in the battleship in the mid-fifties; only to be removed during the mothballing refit in 1958.
“Have we got scrambled TBS with the Berkeley and the John King?” Anderson Schmidt asked in his sage, old-fashioned, no nonsense way. The two modern four thousand ton Charles F. Adams class guided missile destroyers were pacing the Iowa, the Berkeley two miles to the north, the John King on station to the south.
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Keep the connection to both ships live please.” The Berkeley and the John King were armed with Tartar surface-to-air missiles, ASROC anti-submarine rockets and a five-inch main battery slaved to state of the art gunnery control radars. Schmidt did not know if they were also connected in real time to the Independence’s E-2 Hawkeyes. Establishing ‘secure up links’, whatever the Hell that was in plain English was apparently a ‘fiddly business’ and there might not have been time to complete it prior to shooting the Straits of Gibraltar. It did not matter, both escorts had modern sensor and electronic warfare suites and the Iowa, did not. The Berkeley, patrolling on the battlewagon’s port flank would have detected the unidentified surface contacts long before the Iowa.
“Berkeley is on the horn, sir.”
Captain Schmidt took the handset.
“Iowa,” he acknowledged. The Captain of a United States Navy ship was that ship.
“CV-62’s Hawkeye is painting two bogeys at four-nine miles from your position, sir,” the commanding officer of the escorting destroyer drawled in a New England accent. “CV-62 requests Berkeley and John King spool up our Tartar systems and await further orders.”
Schmidt absorbed this.
“Affirmative. If the John King needs to clear the range she may independently manuever ASTERN of Iowa at her own discretion.”
The last thing he wanted was some damned fool destroyer jockey trying to cross his bows to clear the range for his Tartar twin missile-launcher. He handed back the handset to the middle-aged bridge talker.
“Independence is launching birds, sir,” the bridge talker called, relaying the message from the radar room.