Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [351]
"Yes, they are, Sergey Nikolay'ch," Ryan whispered, flipping open the second folder the courier had brought down. "Yes, they are."
Here goes nothing, thought Sanchez.
AirPac was a vice admiral, and in as foul a mood as every other officer at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Responsible for every naval aircraft and flight deck from Nevada west, his ought to have been the point command for the war that had begun only a few days earlier, but not only could he not tell his two active carriers in the Indian Ocean what he wanted, he could see his other two carriers, sitting side by side in dry docks. And likely to remain there for months, as a CNN camera crew was now making clear to viewers across the entire world.
"So what is it?" he asked his visitors.
"Do we have plans for visiting WestPac?" Sanchez asked.
"Not anytime soon."
"I can be ready to move in less than ten days," Johnnie Reb's CO announced.
"Is that a fact?" AirPac inquired acidly.
"Number-one shaft's okay. If we fix number four, I can do twenty-nine, maybe thirty knots. Probably more. The trials on two shafts had the wheels attached. Eliminate the drag from those, maybe thirty-two."
"Keep going," the Admiral said.
"Okay, the first mission has to be to eliminate their airplanes, right?"
Sanchez said. "For that I don't need Hoovers and 'Truders. Johnnie Reb can handle four squadrons of Toms and four more of Plastic Bugs, Robber's det of Queers to do the jamming, plus an extra det of Hummers. And guess what?"
AirPac nodded. "That almost equals their fighter strength on the islands. " It was dicey. One carrier deck against two major island bases wasn't exactly…but the islands were pretty far apart, weren't they? Japan had other ships out there, and submarines, which is what he feared in particular.
"It's a start, maybe."
"We need some other elements," Sanchez agreed. "Anybody going to say no when we ask?"
"Not at this end," the Admiral said after a moment's thought.
The CNN reporter had made her first live feed from atop the edge of the dry dock, and it showed the two nuclear-powered carriers sitting on their blocks, not unlike twin babies in side-by-side cradles. Somebody in CINCPAC's office must have paid a price for letting her in, Ryan thought, because the second feed was from much farther away, the flattops across the harbor but still clearly visible behind her back, as she said much the same things, adding that she had learned from informed sources that it could be as much as six months before Stennis and Enterprise could again put to sea.
Isn't that just great, Jack grumbled to himself. Her estimate was as good as the one sitting on his desk with Top Secret written on the folder in red lettering. Maybe it was even better, since her source was probably a yard worker with real experience in that largest of body and fender shops. She was followed by a learned commentator—this one a retired admiral working at a Washington think-tank—who said that taking the Marianas back would be extremely difficult at best.
The problem with a free press was that it gave out information to everyone, and over the past two decades it had become so good a source of information that his country's own intelligence services used it for all manner of time-critical data. For its part, the public had grown more sophisticated in its demands for news, and the networks had responded by improving both its collection and analysis. Of course, the press had its weaknesses. For real insider information it depended too much on leaks and not enough on shoe-leather, especially in Washington, and for analysis it often selected people motivated less by facts than by an agenda. But for things that one could see, the press