“We’ve hit them hard,** Marusko said. “Damned hard.”
Certainly, Tombstone thought, someone had decided to put the best possible face on things. CAG was running the briefing ta me Ready Room in person rather than broadcasting it over closed-circuit TV. It was a way of maintaining contact with the mea, for their morale . . . and probably for his own as well.
CAG continued the rundown, leaning against the lectern now.
The first phase of the Battle of the Arabian Sea seemed tragically one-sided to the men who’d participated in it Two ships of the combined task force were badly damaged, a carrier and the all-important Aegis command cruiser, and the survival of both was in doubt. In the air, four Tomcats had been shot down—Army, Trapper, and Maverick from VF-95, and an aviator named Wildman Romanski in VF-97. So far, only two of the crews had been recovered from the choppy waters around the Battle Group.
And so far too, there’d been little to show for the blood and suffering of the past hour and a half.
There was another side to the numbers, though. CAG explained. A conservative estimate floating around the VF-95
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Keith Dougiass
Ready Room was that fifty Indian aircraft had been shot down, with as many more, possibly, damaged.
Fifty planes shot down, out of an estimated two hundred sent against the two F-14 squadrons. At least twenty of those had been accounted for by the Tomcats, for a kill ratio of five-for-one. Not the ten-for-one ratio of which Top Gun pilots were so justly proud … but then, the air battle had been confused beyond imagining, and one of the downed American planes had been hit before all of the aircraft could be launched.
Besides their air losses, the Indians had been hit on the surface and beneath it as well. The frigate Biddle had managed to cut off the four Osa-Ils as they fled back toward the Indian fleet. From a range of fifty miles she’d launched all four of her Harpoon antiship missiles, firing one after the other in rapid succession from the Mark 13 launcher on her forward deck. Three Osa missile boats had been sunk outright. The fourth was badly damaged and limping toward the east at reduced speed.
To the northwest, the Marshal Timoshenko had reported encountering an unidentified sub trying to work its way toward the heart of the task force. The Kresta II-class cruiser had fired a single SS-N-14 missile from one of the massive, awkward-looking quad launchers mounted on either side of the bridge. Called SUex by NATO, the missile carried an antisubmarine torpedo into the vicinity of the suspected sub and dropped it by parachute. At 0936 hours, the Timoshenko sonar operators had picked up the unmistakable crump of an undersea explosion.
There’d been no further submarine alerts since.
If all these reports were true, Tombstone thought, the Indians were probably feeling as badly used as the Americans were at the moment.
The question of the hour, however, was where they were going next. With Vicksburg badly damaged, it seemed all but certain that the battle group would be recalled, probably to either Masirah or Diego Garcia for temporary repairs, then up the Red Sea to the Med. The closest decent ship repair facilities were at Naples.
Nimitz and Elsenhower would arrive at Turban Station within the next few days. They would continue the fight. Tombstone studied the faces of the men around him and knew the same thought was in their minds. He read the anger there. They’d been hit hard and hurt. Now they wanted to hit back.
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CAG paused in his narrative, watching the men closely. “Repairs to Cats One and Two have been completed,” he said. “As of ten hundred hours, Jefferson is again fully operational. The deck crew is conducting a final FOD walkdown at this moment”
There was a stir among the listening aviators. With four cats on line, Jefferson could again launch and recover simultaneously. From CAG’s tone, it sounded as though the battle wasn’t over yet The FOD—Foreign Object Damage— walkdown was designed to pick up any stray bits of debris or metal that might get sucked into a jet’s air intakes. It was always conducted just before launch operations, a part of carrier routine.