for a while, though.
And of course, Dickinson hadn’t been hit by a missile. Friendly fire,
obviously, could be no less deadly than hostile fire.
“The point is,” Sykes concluded, “that this was one hell of an expensive
adventure for them. They wouldn’t have started it without a damned good
reason.”
“Radio intercepts have been talking about a rebel group grabbing control
of some of the Kola airfields, an intelligence officer with Morrisey’s
staff pointed out. “The word from Washington is that Moscow is claiming
the attack was mounted either by Blue forces, or by mutinous Reds with
anti-American feelings.”
“Does anybody seriously believe that?” Tarrant asked. There were no
takers, only a number of heads shaking slowly back and forth. “The Reds
could be trying to discredit the Blues, of course. But I can’t see that
what they hoped to win in propaganda points was worth one hundred forty
of their front-line aircraft.”
“They gambled and they lost,” Captain Maxwell, Tarrant’s chief of staff
suggested. “If they’d managed to sink even one of our carriers …”
“They came damned close to doing just that,” Tarrant said. “But-”
There was a knock on the door, and a first class yeoman poked his head
in. “Excuse me. Admiral Tarrant?”
“Yes.”
“Two priority messages, sir, FLASH URGENT.”
“Give ’em here.” Tarrant took the dispatch flimsies, which had obviously
just come up from Shiloh’s decoding shack. He scanned each briefly,
then passed them around. “It’s just possible, that we have here the
reason for the Russian attack.”
Tombstone read the messages when they came to him. The first was a
repeat of a message from the Galveston, with header information
indicating that it had been relayed by satellite to Washington, where it
had been re-coded and transmitted to the Shiloh. The body of the
message was curt and to the point.
TIME: 0848 HRS, ZULU+2 TO: COCBG14 FROM: COSSN770
PLARB TYPHOON DEPARTED KOLA INLET 0830 HRS. SSN770 IN PURSUIT. REQUEST
ORDERS, SCHED-3/ELF.
MONTGOMERY SENDS.
Routing the message through D.C. accounted for the four-hour delay in
Shiloh’s receiving it. The Joint Chiefs, maybe even the President and
his advisors, must still be mulling this one over, because the second
message, from the commanding officer of the Atlantic fleet, was even
more curt.
TIME: 0515 HRS, ZULU-5 TO: COCBG14 FROM: COMLANT
STAND BY FOR FURTHER ORDERS.
HAMPTON SENDS.
In other words, take no action until you hear from Washington, or your
ass is in a sling.
And they had good reason to be thinking this one over carefully.
A Typhoon ballistic-missile sub had put to sea during the height of the
air battle over the carrier battle force. The timing was indeed
suspicious.
“How was this transmitted?” Tombstone asked, holding up the message from
Galveston. Submarines normally refrained from risking any communication
that might give their positions away.
The yeoman, still standing by the door, explained that Galveston had
extended a UHF antenna above the surface and zip-squealed the message,
coded and packed into a compressed digital format that allowed it to be
transmitted to a military comsat in a burst less than a hundredth of a
second long. There was still the danger that the message would be
picked up by Russian eavesdroppers–or that the antenna would be tagged
by their radar for the few seconds it was above the surface, but in this
case the risk was acceptable.
Obviously, though, Montgomery wasn’t yet aware of the air battle that
morning, cut off as he was from routine communications with the outside
world.
All he knew was that he had a Russian PLARB by the tail, and he wanted
to know what to do with it. His orders were to track them if they
appeared, to destroy them if they prepared to launch. They said nothing
about how long he was to maintain his covert reconnaissance.
“Sched-3/ELF” referred to a timetable for Galveston to receive messages
by extremely low-frequency radio.
At 1400 hours, and every six hours after that, she would rise to within
a hundred feet of the surface where she could receive ELF
communications.
“Thank you, son,” Tarrant told the yeoman. “You’re dismissed.”
After the sailor had left, he turned to the planning staff again.