Dragon Fire

Pentagon City, Virginia, USA

A stream of military personnel moved back and forth along the Eisenhower Corridor on the third floor of the Pentagon building, where the Defense Secretary, Alvin Jebb, was preparing for the White House meeting. His personal staff handled the mass of queries coming into his office in room 3E880. Jebb had alerted the Military Command Center in the Pentagon that he would be going there straight after seeing the President. He asked that the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet him in a secure room known as the Tank, so called because going into it was compared to climbing into a tank.

Jebb had just finished a conversation with the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) in Hawaii, who controlled American forces in the Asia — Pacific, stretching from the American west coast to the Mediterranean. He had found the nub of what he needed to know. The brand new Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan, with forty-three fixed-wing aircraft on board, had just entered the Indian Ocean where it was heading for a port visit to Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. It was travelling with an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, USS Higgins, an Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided-missile frigate, USS Rodney M. Davis, and an Aegis-cruiser, USS Vela Gulf, which was carrying a sea-based theatre missile-defence system, together with support ships and the SSN attack submarines USS Greeneville and USS Toledo.

The carrier group could either continue its journey into the Indian Ocean or double back to the Arabian Sea. Its aircraft gave it a power-projection radius of more than 1,100 kilometres. Its cruise missiles could hit either India or Pakistan from where it was now. It was this carrier group which would provide the core of any American military intervention.

Jebb had already spoken to David Guinness, his counterpart in London, who had informed him about the British-led naval force in the Bay of Bengal. The last thing Jebb wanted was for his forces to get sucked into a nuclear war between two developing nations. He agreed with John Hastings that the United States had become overstretched as the world’s policeman and if two governments wanted to fight, they should be allowed to.

The plan he was drawing up now was for a short, sharp hit at the nuclear facilities of both countries, like taking air-pistols away from kids in the school playground.