help. Sooner or later, Soviet spy satellites or reconnaissance aircraft would
peg Jefferson’s location long enough to launch a massed strike, and then the
cruise missiles would begin arriving in such huge numbers that no antimissile
defense could possibly hope to cope with them all. American strategy in such
a situation was to degrade the incoming missile waves in a series of
successive steps, using Tomcat-launched Phoenixes in an outer defensive ring,
ship-launched Standard missiles in the middle, and finally Phalanx CIWS for
last-ditch, close-in defense. Soviet strategy would be to overwhelm this
layered defense with so many missiles that there simply weren’t enough
Phoenixes, Standards, and CIWS units to get them all.
With CBG-14 down to five ships, it was easy to guess which strategy would
be more effective in the long run. The Soviets could launch a lot of cruise
missiles.
The second greatest danger facing the Americans in the area was that of
submarines. The Russians had the largest attack submarine fleet in the world,
and the majority of them were based from ice-free Kola ports like Polyamy.
Half of these were diesel subs, noisy, easy to track, and relatively
vulnerable to American ASW sweeps. The rest, however, were nuclear-powered
and silent. Some were fitted with SS-N-21s, the torpedo tube-launched version
of the AS-15, which gave them an antiship capability across a range of sixteen
hundred miles.
Long before Jefferson approached Romsdalfjord, the deep, dark expanse of
water had been thoroughly probed for lurking subs, first by SH-60 helos off
the Jefferson using dipping sonar, then by the frigates Decatur and Stavanger
working together. Finally, the U.S.S. Galveston had penetrated the cold
waters of the fjord, bringing her high-tech array of sub-hunting sonar to the
task of searching the bottom for hidden Soviet subs, while the frigates
mounted guard at the fjord’s mouth.
By moving into the fjord, Jefferson vastly simplified the task of
defending herself against enemy subs. The mountains screened her from
sub-launched cruise missiles as effectively as they did from air attack, and
torpedo-armed subs had only a single approach they could use–past the line of
frigates and ASW helicopters mounting guard outside the fjord in the waters
around Otroy.
Tombstone knew all of these arguments, and he accepted them. Still, the
cliffs closing in on either side of the carrier as she slowly made her way
deeper into the fjord were claustrophobic. An aircraft carrier was a creature
of the open ocean; moving her inland felt like a violation of the fundamental
laws of nature.
His feelings must have shown on his face. Brandt laughed as he held a
lighter to the bowl of his pipe. “What’s the matter, CAG? Feeling penned
in?”
Tombstone grinned. “Hard to get used to the lack of sea room, Captain.”
He glanced up involuntarily at the overhead. “And I can’t help wondering how
easily a Russian spy satellite might see us.”
Brandt nodded, pulling at the pipe. Blue smoke wafted toward the open
window by his left elbow. “They’ve been busy with their satellites, that’s
for damned sure. Washington says they started repositioning their spy sats
three weeks ago so they could keep a constant watch on everything from the
Barents Sea to Scotland. The thing you have to remember, CAG, is that even
the best satellite imagery has to be gone over meticulously, square centimeter
by square centimeter. The more enlarged the image is, the more of it there is
to look at.”
Tombstone nodded. “With all these islands, twists and turns, I can see
how they’d have trouble picking us out.”
“There’s a fair-sized shipyard at Romsdal,” Brandt said. “Manufactures
oil rigs, ore barges, stuff like that. We’ll be staying clear of the ports,
of course, but there’s always a hell of a lot of big, metal structures
cluttering up the waterways here.”
“So it’ll be like finding one tree in a forest.”
“Right,” Brandt agreed. “More than that, though, we’re gambling on the
way the Russians think. You see, we figure they’ll think moving an aircraft
carrier inland is a crazy idea, so crazy they’ll spend more time hunting for
us out at sea.”
“Makes sense.”
“Admiral Tarrant’s also counting on the well-known Russian paranoia.