. Perhaps it was the routine that was carrying all of them forward now, despite exhaustion, despite their losses.
Routine and . . . determination.
CAG rocked forward on the podium, his hands clasped over :• |he edge. He seemed to look at each of the men in the room. “*Tve just had the word from Captain Fitzgerald, acting CO for the battle group. Mongoose is going as planned.”
There was an explosion of noise in the ready rqom, whistles, cheers, and shouts, men pounding the writing surfaces of their desks and stomping on die deck.
“Jefferson . . .” CAG started to say, then stopped until the noise subsided. “Jefferson,” he continued, “has a job to do. A mission. Captain Fitzgerald told me himself that we are not going anywhere until that mission is complete.”
CAG turned his gaze on Tombstone, who thought he detected the faintest trace of a grin tugging at the man’s mouth. ^Tombstone? You feel up to leading your squadron?”
My squadron. The sense of belonging, of being home, returned, stronger than ever. “Yes, sir!”
“Good. We’re making some minor changes. VF-95 will take the strike planes all the way in to the target. One Hornet squadron, VFA-173, will also be flying in the interdiction role, as planned. VF-97 will head for the rendezvous at Point Juliet and clear it until the strike assembles, then assist in the escort home. Yes . . . question?”
“What about CAP for the Jeff, CAG?” Coyote wanted to know. “We’re leaving her kind of exposed, aren’t we?”
“Well, the Intelligence boys all seem to think the Indies will have a lot more to worry about when they see the bunch of you
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coming after them than attacking our ships. Air defense over the land is expected to be heavy . . . but this soon after their heavy raid, they should be scattered and disorganized.” CAG’s grin became open, as though he was enjoying some humorous secret. “Just to be on the safe side, though, we have some newbies coming in to help you out. Actually, they’re up there now, have been for the last hour.”
Tombstone was tired, and couldn’t understand at first what Marusko was getting at. Newbies? The only newbies aboard were the replacements who’d flown aboard on the COD aircraft two days ago.
From the reaction of the rest of the squadron, they didn’t get it either.
“Don’t worry about it,” Marusko continued. “We’ve got it covered. Yes, Wayne.”
“Is there any threat to the squadron from the Indian fleet?” Batman wanted to know. “It’d be kind of a shame to go all the way in, all the way back, and find you all on the bottom after tangling with half the Indian navy.”
A subdued chuckle ran through the room.
CAG nodded. “Hey, the Captain thinks of everything. Don’t worry, people, it’s all in the bag.”
1100 hours, 26 March The Arabian Sea
Beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean lay a canyon.
Called the Indus Canyon, it was a sheer-walled gouge through the rock of the continental shelf, a valley scoured out by the uncounted millions of tons of sand and sediment washed down over millennia from the Himalayas and carried by the river’s current far to the south. For the first one hundred fifty miles beyond the mouths of the Indus, the canyon meandered through a plateau only a few hundred feet beneath the surface. Beyond that, however, the Indus currents broke from the channel in the continental shelf and plunged down . . . down into an eternal blackness nine thousand feet beneath the war and the sunlit waters of the surface.
At the edge of this blackness, a sea monster stirred, moving slowly from the valley’s depths toward the light. Three
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hundred sixty feet long, thirty-three feet broad, and displacing nearly seven thousand tons submerged, the U.S.S. Galveston was one of the latest American Los Angeles-class attack submarines.
For the past twenty-four hours, Galveston had been listening, coasting slowly through the dark waters of the Indus Canyon, her sonar ears alert to any sound beyond the normal chirping, creaking, clacking cacophony of sea life around her. Twice, the far-off pings of sonobuoys had reached across miles and touched her, but too distant, too weak to reveal her location in the sheltering confines of the undersea valley. Once, her chief sonar operator had detected the chugging throb of propellers, a sound Galveston’?, acoustic library had identified as a Gearing-class destroyer, undoubtedly one of the six World War H-era DDs sold to Pakistan in the late seventies.