dark.”
Tombstone smiled politely. That particular joke had been making the
rounds of the wardroom and flight officers’ quarters lately. “We’ll be able
to keep night ops going too, Captain, as long as you can keep the Jeff lined
up with the fjord instead of against it. We can take off and land up and down
the valley.”
“Wind going to be an issue? I won’t be able to maneuver much in here.”
“Seems pretty quiet down here inside these walls. A storm might make us
suspend operations, but I can’t imagine anything less causing a problem.”
“Good.”
The plan was sheer audacity. Thinking about the operation–of actually
hiding the carrier inside a fjord–made Tombstone shake his head in wry
admiration.
Actually, the idea of hiding American aircraft carriers in Norwegian
fjords was not new. During the height of the Cold War various strategies had
been proposed to counter what was viewed as an inevitable Soviet invasion of
Norway in conjunction with the expected thrust across Central Europe.
Always, throughout its history, the Soviet Union had faced one single,
overwhelming disadvantage in its military naval planning: All of its ports
were located behind bottlenecks of land–those on the Black Sea by the
Dardanelles; Vladivostok and the other Siberian ports by the island chain of
Japan and the Kuriles; Leningrad and the other Baltic ports by the narrows
between Denmark and Sweden. Only their far-north ports–Murmansk, Polyamy,
Severomorsk, and others on the Kola Peninsula, and Arkangelsk on the White
Sea–were not landlocked by potentially hostile territory, and even ships from
these ports had to run the gauntlet between northern Norway and the Arctic ice
in any attempt to break out into the Atlantic. During World War II, the mere
threat of German air and naval forces hidden among the fjords of northern
Norway had scattered Murmansk-bound convoys and tied down escort warships.
Control of Norway was vital to any Soviet war in Europe, and NATO had
planned accordingly. Forward defense was the name of the concept, which was
first tested in NATO exercises during the mid-eighties. Normally, an aircraft
carrier’s single greatest advantage was its maneuverability, its ability to
change its position by as much as seven hundred miles in a single day.
Forward defense, however, called for the carrier to trade maneuverability for
concealment. Locating something as large as an aircraft carrier would be
extremely difficult among the cliffs, crags, and islets of a fjord, even in
this age of spy satellites, and the mountains provided protection, natural
castle walls, against air-to-surface missiles.
The concept had first been tested during the Falklands campaign in 1982,
when British amphibious ships slipped into the mountain-ringed shelter of San
Carlos. Water proved far less vulnerable to air attack than had been
expected. Subsequent exercises carried out jointly by the United States,
Great Britain, Norway, and Denmark had further tested and vindicated so-called
“fjord thinking.”
Still, Admiral Tarrant was testing the very limits of the theory. The
idea had always been that several American battle groups would be inserted
into the fjords in times of crises, where they could operate together with
Norwegian and other NATO forces to deny seas and skies to the Soviets once the
shooting began. Worse, most military experts were already questioning the
forward defense policy in the early nineties, when the navies of all of
America’s European allies were being sharply reduced. Once Britain had
dropped out of NATO, the idea had been all but forgotten.
It was risky, then, pushing a single, weakened battle group up against
the Norwegian coast when much of the country had already been overrun.
But to remain at sea posed dangers of its own. The Blackjack attack was
being viewed both in Washington and aboard the Jefferson as a warning from
Moscow: pull out of our exclusion zone or you run the risk of widening the
war. Blackjacks firing antiship AS-15s could as easily strike at the
Eisenhower’s battle group, now well outside the Soviet-claimed Norwegian Sea,
as they could at Jefferson.
Cruise missiles remained the deadliest threat to American surface vessels
in the combat area. They were fast enough and deadly enough that a carrier’s
ability to move three hundred miles in a single night would not be of much