Of course, in the middle of a war, no one knew what was happening. No news agency had reported on the Jodhpur missile, making him wonder if the Indians had even detected it. So far, there’d been no official notice.
He sucked a breath. Maybe, just maybe, the Indians hadn’t detected it. If so, and it was a signal, intercepting it had been exactly the wrong thing to do. If one side thought it had sent a warning, and the other didn’t respond, what was the natural conclusion? That the warning had been brushed aside.
He shivered at the most chilling thought yet: that Savo’s presence, and his attempt to protect innocents, might lead to escalation.
But that was speculation. The one clear fact was that Indian armor had achieved a massive breakthrough. Eight battle groups, over a thousand tanks, had penetrated the Pakistani lines in both the north and the south, and the remaining Pak army was being enveloped. The Indians had speeded up their advances toward Multan and Sukkur. The BBC, which still had reporters in Karachi, reported a government source as saying the Indians’ lead elements were across the Indus and racing for the capital.
He wanted to put his head back, catch a few seconds’ rest, but instead called up a geo of Pakistan. He was no master of ground strategy, but this looked familiar. Two breakthroughs, near the country’s narrow waist. Once they reached the river, the forces could wheel toward each other. When they met, they’d seal the remnants of Pakistan’s forces between them and isolate the capital. Islamabad would have to sue for peace.
Cheryl was in the TAO seat, giving Mills and Branscombe a break. Dan knuckled his eyes, wishing he could massage his brain. Or put his head on a pillow. But if he was responsible, he wanted to be physically in the seat. He sighed and called up his traffic.
Routine, routine. One requested further data on his Iranians, and recommended that he isolate all three, instead of just Shah. He hesitated — the others hadn’t given the slightest trouble — then forwarded the message to Chief Toan, asking him to take the others into custody as well. It wouldn’t mean any additional manpower; they had to keep a guard on the breaker anyway. He had to get rid of them. Innocent, guilty, whatever, they had no business aboard. He scratched furiously at what felt like bugs burrowing under his scalp. And he hadn’t taken anything stronger than caffeine.
At 0900 GCCS came back up, all at once, pouring data over the leftmost LSD. “Freeze it and save, in case it goes down again,” Dan told the exec. Her manicured nails tapped keys as he studied it. Two great salients pointed west. The southernmost had almost reached the river. Another Indian air strike was returning from a Pak air base west of Sukkur. In ruins now, no doubt, runway cratered, hangars demolished, fuel burning, aircraft wrecked and shot up. He glanced to where Singhe sat, headphones to her ears, running a scenario for her strike team. The screenlight lit a downturned scowl.
He zoomed out, looking for anything from the ASW tracking and fire control system. The closest subs were a French unit in the Arabian Sea… and, sending his eyebrows up, two Chinese nuclear attack boats transiting the Malacca Strait westbound.
But what struck the eye was a vacancy. Most shipping, particularly tanker traffic to and from the oil-rich Gulf, stuck to a hundred-mile-wide bottleneck at nine degrees latitude, north of the Maldives and south of Cardamom, before going on to round the southern tip of India and then Sri Lanka. The whole time they’d been in the IO, ships had been spaced along this route. A few were still headed east, but only two now lay between the Lakshadweep Islands and Socotra, and six off the Horn of Africa. But when he looked at the course/speed readouts, two of those were headed south, not west — diverted to other destinations. The sole remaining vessels headed east were all Chinese-flagged.
“Sea-lanes are emptying,” Cheryl muttered, beside him. “In response to the Indo-Pak conflict?”
Dan reared back, speaking to the black-painted overhead. “That shouldn’t stop international energy traffic. And I don’t like the looks of those subs coming through Malacca. That’s one of the redlines the Indians always drew: a Chinese nuke in the IO, they go to full alert.” He rubbed his face. “Uh, I’ve had my head in this for the last twenty-four. How’s our crew doing? And we’re getting desperate on fuel. I don’t want to have to hoist our bedsheets and sail back, like that sub in the twenties. Never mind, I gotta get with CHENG on that. But how are we holding up otherwise?”
Staurulakis shook her head. “We’re keeping stations manned, but we’re losing our edge. People were tired going into condition three. Half of ’em are still recovering from the crud, then we dumped all those man-hours for steam-cleaning on them. We’re tasking the watchstanders, the ETs, and the Engineering people hard, and we can’t keep Red Hawk up four on and four off for long.”
“Right, Stafer’s got maintenance issues too.”
Staurulakis muttered, “I’m concerned about you, too, sir.”
“I’m all right. Never mind about me. Stick to the crew.”
“Well, then, they’re in a steep decline in operational readiness. And we still haven’t heard back if we’re actually still supposed to be here.” The exec picked at her lip, frowning; the skin around her eyes looked translucent, almost green. “You never saw anything about our taking down the Jodhpur strike?”
“The Indians didn’t release that there was a strike. And I haven’t seen anything responding to our shoot-down report.”
Dan got on the Hydra for a discussion with Danenhower. The chief engineer reported soberly that they were already below 30 percent fuel. “We’re squeezing her tits down here, but the bridge keeps upping turns. What’s with that?”
“Probably just maintaining steerageway, Bart. Below five knots, every one of these heavy seas pushes the bow downwind. And we’re powering only one screw. That makes it even harder. Nothing else we can do? Shut down housekeeping?”
The CHENG said glumly that it wouldn’t make much difference. “Most of that comes off the waste heat boilers anyway. If we shut down the radars, though—”
“Not possible, Bart.”
“Then there’s not much more I can do. My question is, at what point do we turn and run for Al Hadd?”
Dan swapped quizzical glances with the exec. “Al Hadd… what’s Al Hadd?”
“The closest possible fuel point,” Danenhower said patiently. “There’s a commercial airfield there. They’ll have jet A1. It’s not milspec, but we can burn it. Four hundred and twenty nautical miles. If we leave now, we might make it before we suck the last tank dry.”
Dan clicked to acknowledge, catching Staurulakis’s pointed glance too. He hadn’t realized they were that close to bingo fuel. Which triggered a thought: “How about our helo gas? We can burn JP-5 in the LM-2500s, can’t we?”
Danenhower said sure, JP-5 was just an eight-cent-a-gallon-more-expensive version of Navy distillate, with a lower flash point. “But there’s not that much left of that, either. Maybe a day’s worth. After that, we’re gonna have to hang off the stern and kick our feet.”
Dan signed off. He was twisting his neck when a half-familiar voice said, “Is that giving you pain?”
“Hello, Doc. Old injury.”
Leo Schell squatted at his side, bringing his face close to Dan’s left elbow. In that position, with his voice lowered, it was impossible anyone else could hear the major’s murmur. “How’re you doing, Captain?”
“Still here, Doctor.”
“What I’m hearing makes me wonder.”