“That’s why the Navy’s in the Indian Ocean,” Hanson observed confidently.
“True,” Ryan conceded.
“Are we strong enough to deter them from stepping over the line?”
“Yes, Mr. President, at the moment, but I don’t like the way our Navy is being stretched. Every carrier we have right now, except for the two in overhaul status, is either deployed or conducting workups preparatory for deployment. We have no strategic reserve worthy of the name.” Ryan paused before going on, knowing that he was about to go too far, but doing so anyway: “We’ve cut back too much, sir. Our people are strung out very thin.”
“They are simply not as capable as we think they are. That is a thing of the past,” Raizo Yamata said. He was dressed in an elegant silk kimono, and sat on the floor at a traditional low table.
The others around the table looked discreetly at their watches. It was approaching three in the morning, and though this was one of the nicest geisha houses in the city, the hour was late. Raizo Yamata was a captivating host, however. A man of great wealth and sagacity, the others thought. Or most of them.
“They’ve protected us for generations,” one man suggested.
“From what? Ourselves?” Yamata demanded coarsely. That was permitted now. Though all around the table were men of the most exquisite good manners, they were all close acquaintances, if not all actually close friends, and all had consumed their personal limit of alcohol. Under these circumstances, the rules of social intercourse altered somewhat. They could all speak bluntly. Words that would ordinarily be deadly insults would now be accepted calmly, then rebutted harshly, and there would be no lingering ran-cor about it. That, too, was a rule, but as with most rules, it was largely theoretical. Though friendships and relationships would not end because of words here, neither would they be completely forgotten. “How many of us,” Yamata went on, “have been victims of these people?”
Yamata hadn’t said “barbarians,” the other Japanese citizens at the table noted. The reason was the presence of the two other men. One of them, Vice Admiral V. K. Chandraskatta, was a fleet commander of the Indian Navy, currently on leave. The other, Zhang Han San—the name meant “Cold Mountain” and had not been given by his parents—was a senior Chinese diplomat, part of a trade mission to Tokyo. The latter individual was more easily accepted than the former. With his swarthy skin and sharp features, Chandraskatta was regarded by the others with polite contempt. Though an educated and very bright potential ally, he was even more gaijin than the Chinese guest, and the eight zaibatsu around the table each imagined that he could smell the man, despite their previous intake of sake, which usually deadened the senses. For this reason, Chandraskatta occupied the place of honor, at Yamata’s right hand, and the zaibatsu wondered if the Indian grasped that this supposed honor was merely a sophisticated mark of contempt. Probably not. He was a barbarian, after all, though perhaps a useful one.
“They are not as formidable as they once were, I admit, Yamata-san, but I assure you,” Chandraskatta said in his best Dartmouth English, “their navy remains quite formidable. Their two carriers in my ocean are enough to give my navy pause.”
Yamata turned his head. “You could not defeat them, even with your submarines?”
“No,” the Admiral answered honestly, largely unaffected by the evening’s drink, and wondering where all this talk was leading. “You must understand that this question is largely a technical exercise—a science experiment, shall we say?” Chandraskatta adjusted the kimono Yamata had given him, to make him a real member of this group, he’d said. “To defeat an enemy fleet, you must get close enough for your weapons to reach his ships. With their surveillance assets, they can monitor our presence and our movements from long distance. Thus they can maintain a covering presence on us from a range of, oh, something like six hundred kilometers. Since we are unable to maintain a corresponding coverage of their location and course, we cannot maneuver them out of place very easily.”
“And that’s why you haven’t moved on Sri Lanka yet?” Tanzan Itagake asked.
“It is one of the considerations.” The Admiral nodded.
“How many carriers do they now have?” Itagake went on.
“In their Pacific Fleet? Four. Two in our ocean, two based in Hawaii.”
“What of the other two?” Yamata inquired.
“Kitty Hawk and Ranger are in extended overhaul status, and will not be back at sea for one and three years, respectively. Seventh Fleet currently has all the carriers. First Fleet has none. The U.S. Navy has five other carriers in commission. These are assigned to the Second and Sixth fleets, with one entering overhaul status in six weeks.” Chandraskatta smiled. His information was completely up to date, and he wanted his hosts to know that. “I must tell you that as depleted as the U.S. Navy may appear to be, compared to only—what? five years ago? Compared to five years ago, then, they are quite weak, but compared to any other navy in the world, they are still immensely strong. One of their carriers is the equal of every other aircraft carrier in the world.”
“You agree, then, that their aircraft carriers are their most potent weapon?” Yamata asked.
“Of course.” Chandraskatta rearranged the things on the table. In the center he put an empty sake bottle. “Imagine that this is the carrier. Draw a thousand-kilometer circle around it. Nothing exists in that circle without the permission of the carrier air group. In fact, by increasing their operating tempo, that radius extends to fifteen hundred kilometers. They can strike somewhat farther than that if they need to, but even at the minimum distance I demonstrated, they can control a vast area of ocean. Take those carriers away, and they are just another frigate navy. The difficult part of the exercise is taking them away,” the Admiral concluded, using simple language for the industrialists.
Chandraskatta was correct in assuming that these merchants knew little about military affairs. However, he had underestimated their ability to learn. The Admiral came from a country with a warrior tradition little known outside its own borders. Indians had stopped Alexander the Great, blunted his army, wounded the Macedonian conqueror, perhaps fatally, and put an end to his expansion, an accomplishment the Persians and Egyptians had singularly failed to do. Indian troops had fought alongside Montgomery in the defeat of Rommel—and had crushed the Japanese Army at Imphal, a fact that he had no intention of bringing up, since one of the people at the table had been a private in that army. He wondered what they had in mind, but for the moment was content to enjoy their hospitality and answer their questions, elementary as they were. The tall, handsome flag officer leaned back, wishing for a proper chair and a proper drink. This sake these prissy little merchants served was closer to water than gin, his usual drink of choice.
“But if you can?” Itagake asked.
“As I said,” the Admiral replied patiently, “then they are a frigate navy. I grant you, with superb surface ships, but the ‘bubble’ each ship controls is far smaller. You can protect with a frigate, you cannot project power with one.” His choice of words, he saw, stopped the conversation for a moment.
One of the others handled the linguistic niceties, and Itagake leaned back with a long “Ahhhh,” as though he’d just learned something profound. Chandraskatta regarded the point as exceedingly simple—forgetting for a moment that the profound often was. However, he recognized that something important had just taken place.
What are you thinking about? He would have shed blood, even his own, to know the answer to that question. Whatever it was, with proper warning, it might even be useful. He would have been surprised to learn that the others around the table were churning over exactly the same thought.
“Sure are burning a lot of oil,” the group-operations officer noted as he began his morning brief.
USS Dwight D. Eisenhower was on a course of zero-nine-eight degrees, east by south, two hundred nautical miles southeast of Felidu Atoll. Fleet speed was eighteen knots, and would increase for the commencement of fli
ght operations. The main tactical display in flag plot had been updated forty minutes earlier from the radar of an E-3C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, and, indeed, the Indian Navy was burning a good deal of Bunker-Charlie, or whatever they used now to drive their ships through the water.
The display before him could easily have been that of a U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Group. The two Indian carriers, Viraat and Vikrant, were in the center of a circular formation, the pattern for which had been invented by an American named Nimitz almost eighty years earlier. Close-in escorts were Delhi and Mysore, home-built missile destroyers armed with a SAM system about which information was thin—always a worry to aviators. The second ring was composed of the Indian version of the old Russian Kashin-class destroyers, also SAM-equipped. Most interesting, however, were two other factors.
“Replenishment ships Rajaba Gan Palan and Shakti have rejoined the battle group after a brief stay in Trivandrum—”
“How long were they in port?” Jackson asked.
“Less than twenty-four hours,” Commander Ed Harrison, the group-operations officer, replied. “They cycled them pretty fast, sir.”
“So they just went in for a quick fill-up. How much gas do they carry?”
“Bunker fuel, about thirteen thousand tons each, another fifteen hundred each of JP. Sister ship Deepak has detached from the battle group and is heading northwest, probably for Trivandrum as well, after conducting un-rep operations yesterday.”
“So they’re working extra hard to keep their bunkers topped off. Interesting. Go on,” Jackson ordered.
“Four submarines are believed to be accompanying the group. We have rough positions on one, and we’ve lost two roughly here.” Harrison’s hand drew a rough circle on the display. “The location of number four is unknown, sir. We’ll be working on that today.”
“Our subs out there?” Jackson asked the group commander.
“Santa Fe in close and Greeneville holding between us and them. Cheyenne is in closer to the battle group as gatekeeper,” Rear Admiral Mike Dubro replied, sipping his morning coffee.
“Plan for the day, sir,” Harrison went on, “is to launch four F/A-18 Echoes with tankers to head east to this point, designated POINT BAUXITE, from which they will turn northwest, approach to within thirty miles of the Indian battle group, loiter for thirty minutes, then return to BAUXITE to tank again and recover after a flight time of four hours, forty-five minutes.” For the four aircraft to do this, eight were needed to provide midair refueling support. One each on the way out and the return leg as well. That accounted for most of Ike’s tanker assets.
“So we want them to think we’re still over that way.” Jackson nodded and smiled, without commenting on the wear-and-tear on the air crews that such a mission profile made necessary. “Still tricky, I see, Mike.”
“They haven’t gotten a line on us yet. We’re going to keep it that way, too,” Dubro added.
“How are the Bugs loaded?” Robby asked, using the service nickname for the F/A-18 Hornet, “Plastic Bug.”
“Four Harpoons each. White ones,” Dubro added. In the Navy, exercise missiles were color-coded blue. Warshots were generally painted white. The Harpoons were air-to-surface missiles. Jackson didn’t have to ask about the Sidewinder and AMRAAM air-to-air missiles that were part of the Hornet’s basic load. “What I want to know is, what the hell are they up to?” the battle-group commander observed quietly.
That was what everyone wanted to know. The Indian battle group—that was what they called it, because that’s exactly what it was—had been at sea for eight days now, cruising off the south coast of Sri Lanka. The putative mission for the group was support for the Indian Army’s peace-keeping team, whose job was to ameliorate the problem with the Tamil Tigers. Except for one thing: the Tamil Tigers were cosseted on the northern part of the island nation, and the Indian fleet was to the south. The Indian two-carrier force was maneuvering constantly to avoid merchant traffic, beyond sight of land, but within air range. Staying clear of the Sri Lankan Navy was an easy task. The largest vessel that country owned might have made a nice motor yacht for a nouveau-riche private citizen, but was no more formidable than that. In short, the Indian Navy was conducting a covert-presence operation far from where it was supposed to be. The presence of fleet-replenishment ships meant that they planned to be there for a while, and also that the Indians were gaining considerable at-sea time to conduct workups. The plain truth was that the Indian Navy was operating exactly as the U.S. Navy had done for generations. Except that the United States didn’t have any ambitions with Sri Lanka.
“Exercising every day?” Robby asked.
“They’re being right diligent, sir,” Harrison confirmed. “You can expect a pair of Harriers to form up with our Hornets, real friendly, like.”
“I don’t like it,” Dubro observed. “Tell him about last week.”
“That was a fun one to watch.” Harrison called up the computerized records, which ran at faster-than-normal speed. “Start time for the exercise is about now, sir.”
On the playback, Robby watched a destroyer squadron break off the main formation and head southwest, which had happened to be directly toward the Lincoln group at the time, causing a lot of attention in the group-operations department. On cue, the Indian destroyers had started moving randomly, then commenced a high-speed run due north. Their radars and radios blacked out, the team had then headed east, moving quickly.
“The DesRon commander knows his stuff. The carrier group evidently expected him to head east and duck under this stationary front. As you can see, their air assets headed that way.” That miscue had allowed the destroyers to dart within missile-launch range before the Indian Harriers had leaped from their decks to attack the closing surface group.
In the ten minutes required to watch the computerized playback, Robby knew that he’d just seen a simulated attack on an enemy carrier group, launched by a destroyer team whose willingness to sacrifice their ships and their lives for this hazardous mission had been demonstrated to perfection. More disturbingly, the attack had been successfully carried out. Though the tin cans would probably have been sunk, their missiles, some of them anyway, would have penetrated the carriers’ point defenses and crippled their targets. Large, robust ships though aircraft carriers were, it didn’t require all that much damage to prevent them from carrying out flight operations. And that was as good as a kill. The Indians had the only carriers in this ocean, except for the Americans, whose presence, Robby knew, was a source of annoyance for them. The purpose of the exercise wasn’t to take out their own carriers.
“Get the feeling they don’t want us here?” Dubro asked with a wry smile.
“I get the feeling we need better intelligence information on their intentions. We don’t have dick at the moment, Mike.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Dubro observed. “What about their intentions toward Ceylon?” The older name for the nation was more easily remembered.
“Nothing that I know about.” As deputy J-3, the planning directorate for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Robby had access to literally everything generated by the U.S. intelligence community. “But what you just showed me says a lot.”
All you had to do was look at the display, where the water was, where the land was, where the ships were. The Indian Navy was cruising in such a way as to position itself between Sri Lanka and anyone who might approach from the south to come to Sri Lanka. Like the U.S. Navy, for example. It had practiced an attack on such a force. To that end, it was clearly prepared to remain at sea for a long time. If it was an exercise, it was an expensive one. If not? Well, you just couldn’t tell, could you?
“Where are their amphibs?”
“Not close,” Dubro answered. “Aside from that, I don’t know. I don’t have the assets to check, and I don’t have any intel on them. They have a total of sixteen LSTs, and I figure twelve of them can probably operate as a group. Figure they can move a heavy brigade with them, combat-loaded a
nd ready to hit a beach somewhere. There’s a few choice sites on the north coast of that island. We can’t reach them from here, at least not very well. I need more assets, Robby.”
“There aren’t more assets to give, Mike.”
“Two subs. I’m not being greedy. You can see that.” The two SSNs would move to cover the Gulf of Mannar, and that was the most likely invasion area. “I need more intelligence support, too, Rob. You can see why.”
“Yep.” Jackson nodded. “I’ll do what I can. When do I leave?”
“Two hours.” He’d be flying off on an S-3 Viking antisubmarine aircraft. The “Hoover,” as it was known, had good range. That was important. He’d be flying to Singapore, the better to give the impression that Dubro’s battle group was southeast of Sri Lanka, not southwest. Jackson reflected that he would have flown twenty-four thousand miles for what was essentially a half hour’s worth of briefing and the look in the eyes of an experienced carrier aviator. Jackson slid his chair back on the tiled floor as Harrison keyed the display to a smaller scale. It now showed Abraham Lincoln heading northeast from Diego Garcia, adding an additional air wing to Dubro’s command. He’d need it. The operational tempo required to cover the Indians—especially to do so deceptively—was putting an incredible strain on men and aircraft. There was just too much ocean in the world for eight working aircraft carriers to handle, and nobody back in Washington understood that. Enterprise and Stennis were working up to relieve Ike and Abe in a few months, and even that meant there would be a time when U.S. presence in this area would be short. The Indians would know that, too. You just couldn’t conceal the return time of the battle groups from the families. The word would get out, and the Indians would hear it, and what would they be doing then?