Tombstone knew that the claustrophobia he’d felt about this op ever since its inception three weeks earlier was as much psychological as anything else. With a surface area of over 175,000 square miles, the Black Sea was only twenty percent smaller than the North Sea. In places it was three times deeper; the greatest recorded depth was some 1226 fathoms ? better than 7300 feet, deep enough to be very black at the bottom indeed. There was enough water here for whole fleets of ships; certainly, Tombstone had never felt this hemmed in or restricted during his tours in the North Sea.
But throughout the years of the Cold War ? indeed, since long before America had had any national interests in this part of the world at all, the Black Sea had been, by virtue of its geography, virtually closed off to the Western world, a body of water owned ? dominated, rather, which was much the same thing ? by Russia, whatever Turks, Romanians, or Bulgarians might have had to say about the matter. American ships occasionally passed through those straits for a game of show-the-flag, but in a typical year the number of U.S. naval vessels entering the Black Sea was likely to number fifteen to twenty … while ten or twenty times that many Russian vessels made the passage.
A Russian lake…
That description had been floating about the wardrooms and squadron ready rooms a lot lately, along with other names like “Lakeski Russki” and “Red Sea North.” The Romanians, Tombstone reminded himself, still called it the “Friendly Sea,” as had the ancient Greeks, but those cold gray waters ahead would be anything but friendly for an American battle group.
Stupid… stupid… stupid…
What asinine, pencil-pushing, limp-dicked, shit-for-brains REMF, he wondered bitterly, had thought this bastard of an operation up?
Operation Sustain Hope was what the politicians and the news media were calling this mission Stateside, though the Jefferson’s men and officers had taken to calling it Operation Hopeless unofficially. The brainlessness of sending an aircraft carrier battle group into the Black Sea simply defied imagination.
There were all kinds of arguments against operating a CBG inside the Black Sea, arguments besides the painfully obvious one that, large as it was, the Black Sea was completely landlocked and ringed by hostile or potentially hostile nations. Carriers and their battle groups depended for their survival on mobility and on defense in depth; both of those factors would be severely limited once they were inside the Black Sea operational area.
Normally, in the open ocean, a carrier group was scattered across some forty thousand square miles, or nearly a quarter of the surface area of the entire Black Sea. An example often used to demonstrate the sheer scale of a battle group deployment imagined the carrier, the center of the CBG, located in Washington, D.C. Her escort ships, destroyers and frigates, would be as far afield as Norfolk, Virginia, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania; her combat air patrol defending the CBG’s airspace from enemy attack would be patrolling the skies over Bangor, Maine, and Charleston, South Carolina; while her attack submarines and her S-3 Viking ASW aircraft would be probing the waters ahead somewhere in the vicinity of Cleveland, searching for enemy subs.
And if she’d needed to launch an alpha strike with her A-6 Intruders, she could have delivered sizable force packages ? bombs, in non-Navy speak ? on Chicago or Nashville.
Transposing that one-to-one scale model to the Black Sea gave a rough idea of how crowded things were going to be here. With the Jefferson cruising in the western Black Sea just halfway between the Bosporus and the Crimean Peninsula, her screen of surface ships, at a radius from the carrier of 150 miles, would be entering the Crimean port of Sevastopol to the northeast, just exiting the Bosporus to the southwest, or hard aground on the coasts of Romania to port or Turkey to starboard. Her submarines would be hunting enemy subs in the Dnieper River somewhere near Nikopol, while her CAP orbited above Dnepropetrovsk over two hundred miles north of the Crimea.
And as for that alpha strike, it could be aimed at Kiev or Kharkov, deep inside Ukraine and two-thirds of the way to Moscow.
Obviously, CBG-14 was going to have to operate on a much smaller scale, pulling her escorting ships and her patrolling aircraft in close and tight. That would increase the group’s ability to maneuver somewhat, but it would sharply cut into its ability to defend in depth. Rather than intercepting a first wave of incoming enemy aircraft at a range of over five hundred miles, they might have to set an outer ring of defenses at, say, three hundred miles … which meant more “leakers” slipping through the outer ring of defenses and a correspondingly higher chance that the carrier’s innermost defenses, her Sea Sparrow missiles and CIWS high-speed guns, would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of incoming targets.
Arguably worse than being pinned down to such a small and landlocked AO was the fact that half of the encircling coastline belonged either to the Russian Federation or to former Soviet countries like Ukraine. Quite frankly, there was no help to be had in there if things got rough, no place to turn to, no source of supply or repair. Of the other three nations bordering the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, only Turkey could be described as anything like an ally… and relations with Ankara had been so strained of late that no one was counting on help from that quarter.
As just one example, a modern carrier like the Jefferson required at-sea replenishment of expendables every two to three weeks. She was nuclear-powered and didn’t require fuel herself, but her aircraft drank millions of gallons of the stuff. In combat, Jefferson’s onboard reserves of over three million gallons of JP-5 aviation gasoline wouldn’t last more than ten days ? less with a heavy flight schedule; a major alpha strike, or an extended, running battle like the one they’d fought months before off North Cape. Her only sources of resupply were the UNREP tankers that followed the battle group like a bride’s train across the sea; if things got tight, if an enemy wanted to pin or incapacitate the carrier short of actually sinking her, an obvious move was to hit the choke point on the Jefferson’s supply line, those two damned narrow slots of waterways, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus.
Hell, the only thing that made this deployment even remotely possible was the fact that the Russians weren’t likely to add Turkey to the list of nations that were mad at them right now. In fact, Russia needed Turkey’s help ? as Turkey needed Russia’s ? in coordinating operations against the Armenian nationalists who operated freely on both sides of the Turkish border. U.S. military intelligence thought that Moscow would be treading carefully around the Turks… and that ruled out provocations like air strikes against supply ships transiting the Hellespont.
They thought.
Tombstone loved it when the intelligence community made a definite and unambiguous statement like that. If the Russians decided they needed to bag a U.S. carrier battle group more than they needed to stop Armenian gun- runners in the Caucasus, well, Jefferson and her escorts were going to be flat damned out of luck.
Commander William Jeffries, the carrier’s ops officer, walked onto the bridge, a computer printout in his hand. “Captain?”
“Whatcha got, Bill?”
“Flash from the Orlando, sir.”
“Shiloh still has a tail, then, I take it?”
“Looks like they’re giving up on the Shiloh, sir, in favor of a fatter target.”
“Us,” Tombstone said.
“That’s about the size of it. But Orlando’s squat in their baffles, and the Russkis don’t even have a clue.”
Brandt grinned. Jeffries handed the printout to him and he glanced over it, then handed it to Tombstone. It was a terse and to-the-point message from Commander Lang, captain of the Los Angeles attack sub Orlando. Most of the message consisted of numbers and code groups, but the gist of the thing was that Orlando was still tracking the Russian sub that she’d picked up shortly after Shiloh had entered the Black Sea late yesterday. The data had been recorded an hour earlier and sent to the surface in a message buoy, which had waited its programmed twenty minutes for the Orlando to get well clear of the area before squirting its coded and compressed digitized warning to the Jefferson by way of one of the Aegis cruiser’s SH-3 helos.
The tail was inevitable, of course, and the discovery of the sub had come as no surprise. Orlando’s orders were to stick tight to the Victor, to report on its position occasionally. If the Victor made a hostile move, such as opening her torpedo tubes, Lang was under orders to kill her.
It was a damned precarious position to be in. The American battle group’s orders from both Washington and the UN officials in charge of Sustain Hope were explicit on at least one point: Under no circumstances were Russian units to be fired upon unless the Russians fired first. Further bloodshed, the politicians thought, would only make the peace process more difficult, and a unilateral, watchful truce by the Americans might convince the Russian factions to back down and let the UN step in with a negotiated settlement.
