'We can trust their antipathy to America. And we can ask them if their fleet has spotted anything. In any case, the Americans can deploy another brigade-sized force. That is all.'
'Kill it anyway!'
'That throws away operational security,' Intelligence pointed out.
'If they don't know we are coming by now, then they are fools,' Air Force objected.
'The Americans have no reason to suspect that we have taken hostile actions against them. To attack their aircraft, if that's what they are, will alert them unnecessarily, not just the Saudis. They are probably concerned about our troop movements in Iraq. So they fly in some small reinforcements. We can deal with them when the time comes,' Intelligence told them.
'I will call India,' Daryaei said, temporizing.
'NAVIGATION RADARS ONLY… make that two air-search, probably from the carriers,' the petty officer said. 'Their course track is zero-niner-zero, speed about sixteen.'
The tactical officer on the Orion, called a tacco, looked down at his chart. The Indian battle group was at the extreme eastern edge of the racetrack pattern they'd been following for the last several days. In less than twenty minutes, they should reverse course to head west. If they turned, things would become exciting. COMEDY was now 120 miles away from the other formation, and his aircraft was feeding constant information to Anzio and Kidd. Under the wings of the four-engine Lockheed turboprop were four Harpoon missiles. White ones, war shots. The aircraft was now under the tactical command of Captain Kemper on Anzio, and on his order they could launch those missiles, two each at the Indian carriers, because they were the long gun of the opposing navy. A few minutes behind would be a swarm of Tomahawks and more Harpoons headed the same way.
'Are they EMCON'D?' the officer wondered. 'With nav sets emitting?' the sailor replied. 'COMEDY must have 'em on their ESM gear by now. Damned sure our guys are lighting up the sky, sir.' COMEDY had essentially two choices. Adopt EMCON—for emissions control—turning off their radars to make the other side expend time and fuel searching for them, or simply light everything off, creating an electronic bubble which the other side could easily see, but the penetration of which would be dangerous. Anzio had gone with the second option.
'Any airplane chatter?' the tacco asked another crewman.
'Negative, sir, none at all.'
'Hmph.' As low as the Orion was flying, its presence was probably not known to the Indians, despite their use of air-search gear. He was sorely tempted to pop up and illuminate himself with his own search radar. What were they up to? Might a few ships have broken away from the group, heading west, say, to launch an off-axis missile attack? He couldn't know what they were saying or thinking. All he had were computer-generated course tracks based on radar signals. The computer knew exactly where aircraft was at all times off the Global Positioning Satellite system. From that the bearing to the radar sources enabled calculation of their location and…
'Course change?'
'Negative, system shows them still leading zero-niner-zero at sixteen knots. They are passing out of the box now, sir. This is farther east than we've seen them in three days. They are now thirty miles east of COMEDY'S course to the Strait.'
'I wonder if they changed their minds about this….'
'YES, OUR FLEET is at sea,' the Prime Minister told him.
'Have you seen the American ships?'
The leader of the Indian government was all alone in her office. Her Foreign Minister had been in earlier, and was on his way back at this moment. This phone call had been anticipated, but not hoped for.
The situation had changed. President Ryan, weak though she still thought him to be—who else but a weak man would have threatened a sovereign country so? — had nonetheless frightened her. What if the plague in America had been initiated by Daryaei? She had no evidence that it had, and she would never seek such information out. Her country could never be associated with such an act. Ryan had asked—what was it, four times? five? — for her word that the Indian navy would not hinder the American fleet movement. But only one time had he said weapons of mass destruction. That was the deadliest code phrase in international exchange. All the more so, her Foreign Minister had told her, because America only possessed one kind of such weapons, and for that reason, America regarded biological weapons and chemical weapons to be nuclear weapons. That led to another calculation. Aircraft fought aircraft. Ships fought ships. Tanks fought tanks. One answered an attack with the same weapon used by one's enemy. Full power and rage, she remembered also. Ryan had overtly suggested that he would take action based on the nature of the supposed attack by the UIR. Nor, finally, did she discount the lunatic attack on his little daughter. She remembered that from the East Room, the reception after the funeral, how Ryan doted on his children. Weak man though he had to be, he was an angry weak man, armed with weapons more dangerous than any others.
Daryaei had been foolish to provoke America in that way. Better just to have launched his attack on Saudi and win with conventional arms on the field of battle, and that would have been that. But, no, he had to try to cripple America at home, to provoke them in a way that was the purest form of lunacy—and now she and her government and her country could be implicated, the P.M. realized.
She hadn't bargained for any of that. Deploying her fleet was chance enough—and the Chinese, what had they done? Launched an exercise, perhaps damaged that airliner—five thousand kilometers away! What risks were they taking? Why, none at all. Daryaei expected much of her country, and with his attack on the very citizens of America, it was too much.
'No,' she told him, choosing her words carefully. 'Our fleet units have seen American patrol aircraft, but no ships at all. We have heard, as you perhaps have, that an American ship group is transiting Suez, but only warships and nothing more.'
'You are sure of this?' Daryaei asked.
'My friend, neither our ships nor our naval aircraft have spotted any American ships in the Arabian Sea at all.' The one overflight had been by land-based MiG-23s of the Indian air force. She hadn't lied to her supposed ally. Quite. 'The sea is large,' she added. 'But the Americans are not that clever, are they?'
'Your friendship will not be forgotten,' Daryaei promised her.
The Prime Minister replaced the phone, wondering if she'd done the right thing. Well. If the American ships got to the Gulf, she could always say that they hadn't been spotted. That was the truth, wasn't it? Mistakes happened, didn't they?
'HEADS UP. I got four aircraft lifting off from Gasr Amu,' a captain said aboard the AWACS. The newly- constituted UIR air force had been working up, too, but mainly over what was the central part of the new country, and hard to spot even from the airborne radar platform.
Whoever had timed this wasn't doing all that badly. The fourth quartet of inbound airliners had just crossed into Saudi airspace, less than two hundred miles from the UIR fighters doing their climb-out. It had been quiet on the air front to this point. Two fighters had been tracked over the last few hours, but those appeared to be check- hops from the mission profiles, probably aircraft that had been fixed for some major or minor defect, then taken up to see if the new widgets worked properly. But this was a flight of four which had taken off in two closely spaced elements. That made them fighters on a mission.
The current air cover for Operation CUSTER in this sector was a flight of four American F-16s, orbiting within twenty miles of the border.
'Kingston Lead, this is Sky-Eye Six, over.'
'Sky, Lead.'
'We have four bandits, zero-three-five your position, angels ten and climbing, course two-niner-zero.' The four American fighters moved west to interpose themselves between the UIR fighters and the inbound airliners.
Aboard the AWACS, a Saudi officer listened in to the radio chatter between the ground radar station controlling the flight of four and the fighters. The UIR fighters, now identified as French-made F-ls, continued to close the border, then turn ten miles short of it, finally tracing only one mile inside. The F-16s did much the same, and the pilots saw each other, and examined one another's aircraft from four thousand yards apart, through the protective visors of their helmets. The air-to-air missiles were clearly visible under the wings of all the aircraft.
'Y'all want to come over and say hello?' the USAF major leading the F-16s said over guard. There was no response. The next installment of Operation CUSTER proceeded unhindered to Dhahran.
O'DAY WAS IN early. His sitter, with no classes to worry about, rather enjoyed the thought of all the money that would come in from this, and the most important bit of news for everyone was that not a single case of the
