CARRIER 5: MAELSTROM By Keith Douglass

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