speak–on Chicago or Nashville.
Transposing that one-to-one scale model to the Black Sea gave a rough
idea of how crowded things were going to be here. With the Jefferson
cruising in the western Black Sea just halfway between the Bosporus and
the Crimean Peninsula, her screen of surface ships, at a radius from the
carrier of 150 miles, would be entering the Crimean port of Sevastopol
to the northeast, just exiting the Bosporus to the southwest, or hard
aground on the coasts of Romania to port or Turkey to starboard. Her
submarines would be hunting enemy subs in the Dnieper River somewhere
near Nikopol, while her CAP orbited above Dnepropetrovsk over two
hundred miles north of the Crimea.
And as for that alpha strike, it could be aimed at Kiev or Kharkov, deep
inside Ukraine and two-thirds of the way to Moscow.
Obviously, CBG-14 was going to have to operate on a much smaller scale,
pulling her escorting ships and her patrolling aircraft in close and
tight. That would increase the group’s ability to maneuver somewhat, but
it would sharply cut into its ability to defend in depth. Rather than
intercepting a first wave of incoming enemy aircraft at a range of over
five hundred miles, they might have to set an outer ring of defenses at,
say, three hundred miles … which meant more “leakers” slipping through
the outer ring of defenses and a correspondingly higher chance that the
carrier’s innermost defenses, her Sea Sparrow missiles and CIWS
high-speed guns, would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of incoming
targets.
Arguably worse than being pinned down to such a small and landlocked AO
was the fact that half of the encircling coastline belonged either to
the Russian Federation or to former Soviet countries like Ukraine. Quite
frankly, there was no help to be had in there if things got rough, no
place to turn to, no source of supply or repair. Of the other three
nations bordering the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, only
Turkey could be described as anything like an ally. .. and relations
with Ankara had been so strained of late that no one was counting on
help from that quarter.
As just one example, a modern carrier like the Jefferson required at-sea
replenishment of expendables every two to three weeks. She was
nuclear-powered and didn’t require fuel herself, but her aircraft drank
millions of gallons of the stuff. In combat, Jefferson’s onboard
reserves of over three million gallons of JP-5 aviation gasoline
wouldn’t last more than ten days–less with a heavy flight schedule; a
major alpha strike, or an extended, running battle like the one they’d
fought months before off North Cape. Her only sources of resupply were
the UNREP tankers that followed the battle group like a bride’s train
across the sea; if things got tight, if an enemy wanted to pin or
incapacitate the carrier short of actually sinking her, an obvious move
was to hit the choke point on the Jefferson’s supply line, those two
damned narrow slots of waterways, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus.
Hell, the only thing that made this deployment even remotely possible
was the fact that the Russians weren’t likely to add Turkey to the list
of nations that were mad at them right now. In fact, Russia needed
Turkey’s help–as Turkey needed Russia’s–in coordinating operations
against the Armenian nationalists who operated freely on both sides of
the Turkish border. U.S. military intelligence thought that Moscow would
be treading carefully around the Turks. .. and that ruled out
provocations like air strikes against supply ships transiting the
Hellespont.
They thought.
Tombstone loved it when the intelligence community made a definite and
unambiguous statement like that. If the Russians decided they needed to
bag a U.S. carrier battle group more than they needed to stop Armenian
gun-runners in the Caucasus, well, Jefferson and her escorts were going
to be flat damned out of luck.
Commander William Jeffries, the carrier’s ops officer, walked onto the
bridge, a computer printout in his hand. “Captain?”
“Whatcha got, Bill?”
“Flash from the Orlando, sir.”
“Shiloh still has a tail, then, I take it?”
“Looks like they’re giving up on the Shiloh, sir, in favor of a fatter