Blackmail

64 USS HARRY S. TRUMAN

“This could be a problem.”

“Could be,” Randle agreed.

Captain David Randle stood beside his Operations Officer in the aircraft carrier’s Combat Direction Center, reviewing nearby friendly, hostile, and currently neutral forces. His eyes, along with those of his Operations Officer, Captain Brent Sites, were focused on the Video Wall displays. On one of the large screens, Sites had pulled up the Common Operational Picture, which displayed blue, red, and yellow icons of various designs, each symbol representing the location of a surface, air, or subsurface combatant.

The Truman strike group was loitering in the Indian Ocean, just south of the Arabian Sea. The Ronald Reagan strike group was twenty miles to the west, and the Bush and Eisenhower strike groups were closing fast from the southeast. Once assembled, the American task force would comprise four aircraft carriers, forty cruisers and destroyers, and twenty fast attack submarines — a formidable armada.

In contrast, the Russian Navy in the Arabian Sea fielded only one aircraft carrier and eighteen cruisers, destroyers, and corvettes. Although the Russian combatants were fewer in number, they were more heavily armed than their American counterparts. The aircraft carrier Kuznetsov was a good example. In addition to carrying up to thirty-two fixed wing aircraft and twenty-four helicopters, she was outfitted with a dozen Shipwreck surface attack and 192 Gauntlet anti-air missiles. The other surface ships were similarly outfitted; the Russians loaded weapon systems on their combatants like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

Although there were no hostile symbols ashore, Randle knew there were over a hundred surface-to-air missile batteries hidden on the Iranian coast, ready to engage. The Russians had also deployed four hundred tactical aircraft to Iranian bases, keeping one-fourth aloft at all times. After observing what China did to American air bases at the outbreak of their war, they were keeping a significant portion of their aircraft airborne, rotating them in six-hour shifts.

Even though the Russian Navy was augmented with missile batteries ashore and aircraft at Iranian bases, Randle was reasonably confident the United States would prevail in the air and surface engagement. Russia’s real threat lurked beneath the water: thirty-seven attack and eleven guided missile submarines, with the latter carrying deadly surface attack missiles.

Captain Randle’s assessment of the surrounding forces was interrupted by a flashing message on Captain Sites’s console. Sites pulled up the message. A new OPORD. The four aircraft carriers were being combined into a single task force and had been directed to destroy all Russian units in the Indian Ocean theater of operations — all air, surface, and submerged combatants. More detailed orders would be forthcoming.

Randle picked up the 1-MC microphone and directed all department heads to meet him in the Wardroom. Before he left CDC, he examined the neutral forces in the area, which was the original source of his concern; it would be problematic if they joined the battle on the wrong side. India had two operational aircraft carriers and sixteen surface combatants, with the two carriers normally deployed on opposite sides of the country. However, both carrier strike groups were now operating off India’s west coast, not far from Truman and Reagan. Compounding the matter, India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier, undergoing sea trials, had joined them.

Randle repeated his Operations Officer’s assessment. “This could be a problem.”