many deck division people would have been caught in the fireball as plane after plane ignited, turning Jefferson’s waist into an inferno. Deck crashes were always bad. When they involved more than one plane … He took a deep breath. “CAG?” he said. “I think that one just about did it for me.”
There was a long silence. “Wait before you make any decisions, Stoney.
We’ll talk in my office.”
“Sure.” But Tombstone’s mind was already made up.
Admiral Vaughn leaned over the chart table with other members of his flag staff, studying the grease- penciled markings and time notations that plotted the paths of each of the vessels of Carrier Battle Group 14. Currently, Jefferson was cruising eastward at thirty knots, the hub of a circle spanning two hundred miles. The destroyer John A. Winslow was one hundred twenty miles ahead, the DDG Lawrence Kearny following a hundred miles astern. The frigate Gridley patrolled the CBG’s flank to the south, while Biddle continued searching for the lost sub contact to the north. The group’s Aegis cruiser, U.S.S. Vicksburg, lay thirty miles off Jefferson’s port quarter.
One last member of the carrier group prowled far ahead of the Winslow, two hundred meters beneath the surface. The U.S.S. Galveston was one of the Navy’s newest Los Angeles-class attack submarines. The nuclear- powered SSN had joined the task force only five weeks earlier.
Attack subs often worked closely with carrier battle groups, but CBG-14 had been operating without close sub support so far on this cruise. The Sea of Japan had been too shallow for sub operations, while the Thailand crisis had been resolved before Galveston could rendezvous with the Jefferson. Her usefulness in the Gulf of Thailand would have been limited in any case, but the situation here in the Arabian Sea was different. Here they were surrounded by hundreds of miles of open ocean, and under a potential threat from the world’s eighth largest navy.
It was, then, a far-flung empire that Admiral Vaughn surveyed as he studied the lines and cryptic codings on the chart, a battle group spread across an area of ocean the size of his home state of Missouri.
But it was the silent and unresolved hunt of the Biddle that occupied his mind.
“Henry!” he demanded. “Still nothing from Farrel?” Damn the man, he should have had something by now.
“Nothing, sir,” Captain Bersticer replied, joining the admiral at the plot table. “His last message stated that the contact might be lying low, hiding on the bottom.”
Vaughn reached down and traced the line marking the limits of the continental shelf south of Kutch and Kathiawar. “What’s the depth up there … about fifty fathoms?”
“Yes, sir. That’s probably what’s limiting their sonar.”
“You’d think he could find something as big as a goddamned submarine in water three hundred feet deep,” Vaughn muttered. “How about we send Galveston in to help Biddle with the search, hey?”
Bersticer rubbed his dark beard thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Admiral.
It’d take a day for the Gal to get there, and we don’t know the contact is even still in the area.”
“That’s right.” Vaughn looked up, alarmed. “God! It could’ve given Farrel the slip. Hell, that thing could be heading straight for us at this minute, flank speed.”
“Captain Fitzgerald has informed me that he has two Vikings flying in support of Biddle now. If that Foxtrot is up there, Admiral, I’m sure they’ll run him down.”
“He’d goddamned well better!”
A familiar, scratching pain rasped within Vaughn’s stomach. Almost, he reached for the antacid tablets in his shirt pocket, but he held himself back. As he refused to tolerate weakness in his subordinates, he refused to reveal his own weakness to others. Gently, he massaged his stomach.
“I want a full report for transmission to CINCPAC first thing in the morning,” he said. “I don’t like to say this, but I really don’t think this ship is up to the, ah, challenge of this mission. Damn! Did you see the operations reports today? We nearly had a major smashup right on the flight deck!”
“I saw, sir.”
“Brakes on a Viking failed. Probable cause, faulty maintenance. Faulty goddamned maintenance! Someone wasn’t doing his job, that’s sure. And we all came within an ace of getting fried when a Tomcat nearly hit the Viking on final approach!”
“The pilot, I gather, is one of the best, Admiral. We were lucky there.”
“I dunno.” Vaughn looked away. “That kid is Admiral Magruder’s nephew.
You know that?”
“No, sir! I thought the names were a coincidence!”
“Well, he is. Maybe he owes his billet as much to politics as to skill, hey?”
“It’s possible, sir.”
“Damned straight it’s possible. I don’t like brown-nosing. A man should get where he is on his own steam, right? Not by politics!”
Vaughn caught himself. He’d been about to launch into a diatribe against Navy career politics. It was a sore point with him. Once a man made commander in this man’s navy it was all politics, with careers made or broken by who you knew.
He’d almost been broken, once, but goddamn he’d had the last laugh!
Here he was in command of a carrier battle group again after twelve bitter years.
The one thing that could screw things up for him was failure. Vaughn had a thorough fear of failure, and it seemed to him that whatever gods of the sea had granted him his wish of another CBG command were being capricious with him. Why did the new command have to be Jefferson, at the end of her deployment, her crew so worn down that disaster was an hour-to-hour possibility? It wasn’t fair.
“I’m going to want to tighten up the group, Captain,” he said, still studying the chart. “Bring those guys in closer. Hell, no one’s going to nuke us, for God’s sake. And the individual ships are goddamned sitting ducks scattered all over the ocean like that. Write up the orders. When we hit Turban Station tomorrow, we’ll tighten up.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Next. We’d better start holding exercises. Sharpen up the men. I don’t like being this close to a shooting war with men who could fall asleep at their stations, hey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And signal Biddle. I want that goddamned Foxtrot found, and fast. No excuses!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“An aggressive posture, that’s the ticket, hey?” He studied the mark that showed Biddle’s last position. Where the hell was the Foxtrot now?
“There has been nothing for almost two hours, Captain.”
“It’s possible they’ve left us.” Captain Raju Khandelwal braced himself with one hand against an overhead conduit. “Blow forward ballast.”
“Blow forward ballast, aye.” There was a rumble, and the thin shriek of compressed air forcing water from the submarine’s tanks. The deck shifted beneath Khandelwal’s feet.
“Take us up, Shri Ramesh. Level at twenty meters.”
“Twenty meters, yes, sir.” His Exec took his place behind the planesmen, reading the depth gauge over their heads. An ominous creak sounded through the boat as hull metal flexed. The Kalvari was not the most modern of submarines, nor the most silent. As she stirred and lifted from the bottom and her hull took up the full strain of the vessel once more, her framework creaked protest.
The sounds seemed especially loud. Kalvari had been resting on the bottom for almost five hours, ever since the sharp sonar pinging had warned them that a ship was searching these shallow waters for them.
Now, though, the waters around the Indian sub were silent, had been silent for a long time. The intruder, whatever it was, had no doubt decided to move on. If it had not, then it was certain to hear the submarine’s underwater groanings, but that could not be helped.
