Executive orders - Tom Clancy [559]
I wonder if they changed their minds about this
YES, OUR FLEET is at sea, the Prime Minister told him.
Have you seen the American ships?
The leader of the Indian government was all alone in her office. Her Foreign Minister had been in earlier, and was on his way back at this moment. This phone call had been anticipated, but not hoped for.
The situation had changed. President Ryan, weak though she still thought him to be-who else but a weak man would have threatened a sovereign country so?-had nonetheless frightened her. What if the plague in America had been initiated by Daryaei? She had no evidence that it had, and she would never seek such information out. Her country could never be associated with such an act. Ryan had asked-what was it, four times? five?-for her word that the Indian navy would not hinder the American fleet movement. But only one time had he said weapons of mass destruction. That was the deadliest code phrase in international exchange. All the more so, her Foreign Minister had told her, because America only possessed one kind of such weapons, and for that reason, America regarded biological weapons and chemical weapons to be nuclear weapons. That led to another calculation. Aircraft fought aircraft. Ships fought ships. Tanks fought tanks. One answered an attack with the same weapon used by one's enemy. Full power and rage, she remembered also. Ryan had overtly suggested that he would take action based on the nature of the supposed attack by the UIR. Nor, finally, did she discount the lunatic attack on his little daughter. She remembered that from the East Room, the reception after the funeral, how Ryan doted on his children. Weak man though he had to be, he was an angry weak man, armed with weapons more dangerous than any others.
Daryaei had been foolish to provoke America in that way. Better just to have launched his attack on Saudi and win with conventional arms on the field of battle, and that would have been that. But, no, he had to try to cripple America at home, to provoke them in a way that was the purest form of lunacy-and now she and her government and her country could be implicated, the P.M. realized.
She hadn't bargained for any of that. Deploying her fleet was chance enough-and the Chinese, what had they done? Launched an exercise, perhaps damaged that airliner-five thousand kilometers away! What risks were they taking? Why, none at all. Daryaei expected much of her country, and with his attack on the very citizens of America, it was too much.
No, she told him, choosing her words carefully. Our fleet units have seen American patrol aircraft, but no ships at all. We have heard, as you perhaps have, that an American ship group is transiting Suez, but only warships and nothing more.
You are sure of this? Daryaei asked.
My friend, neither our ships nor our naval aircraft have spotted any American ships in the Arabian Sea at all. The one overflight had been by land-based MiG-23s of the Indian air force. She hadn't lied to her supposed ally. Quite. The sea is large, she added. But the Americans are not that clever, are they?
Your friendship will not be forgotten, Daryaei promised her.
The Prime Minister replaced the phone, wondering if she'd done the right thing. Well. If the American ships got to the Gulf, she could always say that they hadn't been spotted. That was the truth, wasn't it? Mistakes happened, didn't they?
HEADS UP. I got four aircraft lifting off from Gasr Amu, a captain said aboard the AWACS. The newly-constituted UIR air force had been working up, too, but mainly over what was the central part of the new country, and hard to spot even from the airborne RADAR platform.
Whoever had timed this wasn't doing all that badly. The fourth quartet of inbound airliners had just crossed into Saudi airspace, less than two hundred miles from the UIR fighters doing their climb-out. It had been quiet on the air front to this point. Two fighters had been tracked over the last few