Captain Gerald Hawkins’s orders were both specific and vague. As part of the ASW screen for CBG-14, he was to precede the battle group toward the Indian-Pakistani border, remaining undetected by either side. All foreign submarines, whether Pakistani or Indian, were to be intercepted before they could approach the combined task force.
The vague aspect of his orders lay in what he was to do with the foreign subs once he’d caught them. A warning, transmitted through the water as a powerful chirp of sonar, might be sufficient to turn them away. But if necessary, he was to destroy potentially hostile subs before they could close with Jefferson or her escorts.
At prearranged times each day, Galveston was to rise to periscope depth. Additional orders and updates of the tactical situation could be passed on to the attack sub then. At 1100 hours on the morning of March 26, Galvestorfs radar mast broke the surface one hundred twenty miles northwest of the U.S.S. Jefferson. The situation update, together with Captain Fitzgerald’s new orders, were passed to the submarine via relay through a circling Hawkeye, and confirmed by satellite from Washington.
Minutes later, the radio mast vanished again, leaving scarcely a ripple to mark its passing.
At precisely 1125 hours, a series of round hatches set into the attack sub’s hull forward of her sail slid open. At a word from her commanding officer, a twenty-foot-long cigar shape
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rose from one of the tubes, expelled by a high-pressure blast of water.
The Tomahawk was a cruise missile developed in two different models, the TLAM (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile) and the TASM (Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile). Originally designed to be fired from a submarine’s torpedo tubes, it was later discovered that each sub’s torpedo-carrying capacity was severely restricted by including Tomahawks on board. Beginning with the U.S.S. Providence, SS-N-719, all Los Angeles-class subs had fifteen vertical launch tubes, designed especially for Tomahawks, mounted within the bow casing between the sub’s inner and outer hulls, allowing them to carry full complements of both torpedoes and cruise missiles.
Triggered by a ten-foot lanyard connecting missile and launch tube, the solid-fuel rocket boost motor ignited in a cloud of gas bubbles and boiling water, driving the missile upward at a fifty-degree angle. The motor burned for seven seconds, long enough to punch through the surface and into the air. Then the booster fell away, wings deployed as the missile nosed over into horizontal flight only meters above the surface, and the missile’s air-breathing gas turbine switched on.
Within seconds, another Tomahawk broke the surface, then another and another. At Mach .7, the cruise missiles arrowed southeast toward their target.
Three hundred miles away, another, much larger submarine was watching the approaches to Bombay. Four hundred seventy feet long and sixty feet through the beam, it was one of a special class of nuclear-powered attack subs known to the West as Oscar.
The Oscar had originally been conceived as a platform for anticarrier operations. Its primary mission was to stalk American aircraft carrier battle groups. In time of war, the Oscars would be directed to participate in long-range missile bombardment of the U.S. carriers, coordinating their strikes with missile launches from surface ships and long-range bombers. The Oscar’s broad girth was made necessary by the cruise-missile launch tubes built into the hull on either side of the long, flat sail. Six square hatches on either side each covered two tubes. The sub carried a total of twenty-four SS-N-19 antiship missiles, high-speed, long-range weapons, that could carry either conventional or nuclear warheads.
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One after another, the sleek ship-killers burst from the waters above the submerged Oscar, discarded their empty boosters, and deployed the swept-back wings. Using information relayed to the Oscar from Soviet reconnaissance satellites orbiting overhead, the SS-N-19s began flying north, homing on the same targets as those already marked by the American Tomahawks.
1148 hours, 26 March
INS Wrart, 160 miles west northwest of Bombay
“Today, Lieutenant, you are a hero for all of India,” Ramesh said. “Your triumph will be remembered always!”
Admiral Ramesh faced the young lieutenant. He was so young, so like Joshi, that for a moment he wanted to reach out and embrace the boy. But professional decorum, and Lieutenant Tahliani’s obvious embarrassment, held him back.