The USS New Jersey
It took some getting used to, Commodore Zachary Eaton reflected. When his flagship was built, he was sailing boats in a bathtub. Back then the Russians were allies, but allies of convenience, who shared a common enemy instead of a common goal. Like the Chinese today, he judged. The enemy then had been the Germans and the Japanese. In his twenty-six-year career, he had been to both countries many times, and his first command, a destroyer, had been home-ported at Yokoshuka. It was a strange world.
There were several nice things about his flagship. Big as she was, her movement on the ten-foot seas was just enough to remind him that he was at sea, not at a desk. Visibility was about ten miles, and somewhere out there, about eight hundred miles away, was the Russian fleet. His battleship was going to meet them just like in the old days, as if the aircraft carrier had never come along. The destroyers Caron and Stump were in sight, five miles off either bow. Further forward, the cruisers Biddle and Wainwright were doing radar picket duty. The surface action group was marking time instead of proceeding forward as he would have preferred. Off the New Jersey coast, the helicopter assault ship Tarawa and two frigates were racing to join up, bringing ten AV-8B Harrier attack fighters and fourteen ASW helicopters to supplement his air strength. This was useful, but not of critical concern to Eaton. The Saratoga’s air wing was now operating out of Maine, along with a goodly collection of air force birds working hard to learn the maritime strike business. HMS Invincible was two hundred miles to his east, conducting aggressive ASW patrols, and eight hundred miles east of that force was the Kennedy, hiding under a weather front off the Azores. It slightly irked the commodore that the Brits were helping out. Since when did the U.S. Navy need help defending the American coast? Not that they didn’t owe us the favor, though.
The Russians had split into three groups, with the carrier Kiev easternmost to face the Kennedy’s battle group. His expected responsibility was the Moskva group, with the Invincible handling the Kirov’s. Data on all three was being fed to him continuously and digested by his operations staff down in flag plot. What were the Soviets up to? he wondered.
He knew the story that they were searching for a lost sub, but Eaton believed that as much as if they’d explained that they had a bridge they wanted to sell. Probably, he thought, they want to demonstrate that they can trail their coats down our coast whenever they want, to show that they have a seagoing fleet and to establish a precedent for doing this again.
Eaton did not like that.
He did not much care for his assigned mission either. He had two tasks that were not fully compatible. Keeping an eye on their submarine activity would be difficult enough. The Saratoga’s Vikings were not working his area, despite his request, and most of the Orions were working farther out, closer to the Invincible. His own ASW assets were barely adequate for local defense, much less active sub hunting. The Tarawa would change that, but also change his screening requirements. His other mission was to establish and maintain sensor contact with the Moskva group and to report at once any unusual activity to CINCLANTFLT, the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet. This made sense, sort of. If their surface ships did anything untoward, Eaton had the means to deal with them. It was being decided now how closely he should shadow them.
The problem was whether he should be nearby or far away. Near meant twenty miles — gun range. The Moskva had ten escorts, none of which could possibly survive more than two of his sixteen-inch projectiles. At twenty miles he had the choice of using full-sized or subcaliber rounds, the latter guided to their targets by a laser designator installed atop the main director tower. Tests the previous year had determined that he could maintain a steady firing rate of one round every twenty seconds, with the laser shifting fire from one target to another until there were no more. But this would expose the New Jersey and her escorts to torpedo and missile fire from the Russian ships.
Backing farther off, he could still fire sabot rounds from fifty miles, and they could be directed to the target by a laser designator aboard the battlewagon’s helicopter. This would expose the chopper to surface-to-air missile fire and to Soviet helicopters suspected of having air-to-air missile capability. To help out with this, the Tarawa was bringing a pair of Apache attack helicopters, which carried lasers, air-to-air missiles, and their own air-to-surface missiles; they were antitank weapons expected to work well against small warships.
His ships would be exposed to missile fire, but he didn’t fear for his flagship. Unless the Russians were carrying nuclear warheads, their antiship missiles would not be able to damage his ship gravely — the New Jersey had upwards of a foot of class B armor plate. They would, however, play hell with his radar and communications gear, and worse, they would be lethal to his thin-hulled escorts. His ships carried their own antiship missiles, Harpoons and Tomahawks, though not as many as he would have liked.
And what about a Russian sub hunting them? Eaton had been told of none, but you never knew where one might be hiding. Oh well — he couldn’t worry about everything. A submarine could sink the New Jersey, but she would have to work at it. If the Russians were really up to something nasty, they’d get the first shot, but Eaton would have enough warning to launch his own missiles and get off a few rounds of gunfire while calling for air support — none of which would happen, he was sure.
He decided that the Russians were on some sort of fishing expedition. His job was to show them that the fish in these waters were dangerous.
Naval Air Station, North Island, California
The oversized tractor-trailer crept at two miles per hour into the cargo bay of the C-5 A Galaxy transport under the watchful eyes of the aircraft’s loadmaster, two flight officers, and six naval officers. Oddly, only the latter, none of whom wore aviator’s wings, were fully versed in the procedure. The vehicle’s center of gravity was precisely marked, and they watched the mark approach a particular number engraved on the cargo bay floor. The work had to be done exactly. Any mistake could fatally impair the aircraft’s trim and imperil the lives of the flight crew and passengers.
“Okay, freeze it right there,” the senior officer called. The driver was only too glad to stop. He left the keys in the ignition, set all the brakes, and put the truck in gear before getting out. Someone else would drive it out of the aircraft on the other side of the country. The loadmaster and six airmen immediately went to work, snaking steel cables to eyebolts on the track and trailer to secure the heavy load. Shifting cargo was something else an aircraft rarely survived, and the C-5A did not have ejection seats.
The loadmaster saw to it that his ground crewmen were properly at work before walking over to the pilot. He was a twenty-five-year sergeant who loved the C-5s despite their blemished history.
“Cap’n, what the hell is this thing?”
“It’s called a DSRV, Sarge, deep submergence rescue vehicle.”
“Says Avalon on the back, sir,” the sergeant pointed out.
“Yeah, so it has a name. It’s a sort of a lifeboat for submarines. Goes down to get the crew out if something screws up.”
“Oh.” The sergeant considered that. He’d flown tanks, helicopters, general cargo, once a whole battalion of troops on his — he thought of the aircraft as his — Galaxy before. This was the first time he had ever flown a ship. If it had a name, he reasoned, it was a ship. Damn, the Galaxy could do anything! “Where we takin’ it, sir?”
“Norfolk Naval Air Station, and I’ve never been there either.” The pilot watched the securing process closely. Already a dozen cables were attached. When a dozen more were in place, they’d put tension on the cables to prevent the minutest shift. “We figure a trip of five hours, forty minutes, all on internal fuel. We got the jet stream on our side today. Weather’s supposed to be okay until we hit the coast. We lay over for a day, then come back Monday morning.”
“Your boys work pretty fast,” said the senior naval officer, Lieutenant Ames, coming over.
“Yes, Lieutenant, another twenty minutes.” The pilot checked his watch. “We ought to be taking off on the hour.”
“No hurry, Captain. If this thing shifts in flight, I guess it would ruin our whole day. Where do I send my people?”