The Hunt for Red October - Tom Clancy [78]
"Josh Painter proposes that we keep Kennedy inshore," Admiral Blackburn said. "He wants to run the ASW operation from his carrier, transferring his light attack squadrons to shore and replacing them with S-3s. He wants Invincible out on their seaward flank."
"I don't like it," General Harris said. Neither did Pete Stanford, and they had agreed earlier that the J-3 would launch the counterplan. "Gentlemen, if we 're only going to have one deck to use, we damned well ought to have a carrier and not an oversized ASW platform."
"We're listening, Eddie," Hilton said.
"Let's move Kennedy out here." He moved the counter to a position west of the Azores. "Josh keeps his attack squadrons. We move Invincible inshore to handle the ASW work. It's what the Brits designed her for, right? They're supposed to be good at it. Kennedy is an offensive weapon, her mission is to threaten them. Okay, if we deploy like this, she is the threat. From over here she can range against their surface force from outside their surface-to-surface missile perimeter—"
"Better yet," Stanford interjected, pointing to some vessels on the map, "threaten this service force here. If they lose these oilers, they ain't going home. To meet that threat they'll have to redeploy themselves. For starters, they'll have to move Kiev offshore to give themselves some kind of air defense against Kennedy. We can use the spare S-3s from shore bases. They can still patrol the same areas." He traced a line about five hundred miles off the coast.
"Leaves Invincible kind of naked, though," the CNO, Admiral Foster, noted.
"Josh was asking about some E-3 coverage for the Brits." Blackburn looked at the air force chief of staff, General Claire Barnes.
"You want help, you get help," Barnes said. "We'll have a Sentry operating over Invincible at dawn tomorrow, and if you move her inshore we can maintain that round the clock. I'll throw in a wing of F-16s if you want."
"What do you want in return, Max?" Foster asked. Nobody called him Claire.
"The way I see this, you have Saratoga's air wing sitting around doing nothing. Okay, by Saturday I'll have five hundred tactical fighters deployed from Dover to Loring. My boys don't know much about antiship stuff. They'll have to learn in a hurry. I want you to send your kids to work with mine, and I also want your Tomcats. I like the fighter-missile combination. Let one squadron work out of Iceland, the other out of New England to track the Bears Ivan's starting to send our way. I'll sweeten that. If you want, we'll send some tankers to Lajes to help keep Kennedy's birds flying."
"Blackie?" Foster asked.
"Deal," Blackburn nodded. "The only thing that bothers me is that Invincible doesn't have all that much ASW capacity."
"So we get more," Stanford said. "Admiral, what say we take Tarawa out of Little Creek, team her with New Jersey's group, with a dozen ASW choppers aboard and seven or eight Harriers?"
"I like it," Harris said quickly. "Then we have two baby carriers with a noteworthy striking force right in front of their groups, Kennedy playing stalking tiger to their east, and a few hundred tactical fighters to the west. They have to come into a three-way box. This actually gives us more ASW patrolling capacity than we'd have otherwise."
"Can Kennedy handle her mission alone out there?" Hilton asked.
"Depend on it," Blackburn replied. "We can kill anyone, maybe any two of these four groups in an hour. The ones nearest shore will be your job, Max."
"How long did you two characters rehearse this?" General Maxwell, commandant of the marine corps, asked the operations officer. Everyone chuckled.
The Red October
Chief Engineer Melekhin cleared the reactor compartment before beginning the check for the leak. Ramius and Petrov were there also, plus the engineering duty officers and one of the young lieutenants, Svyadov. Three of the officers carried Geiger counters.
The reactor room was quite large. It had to be to accommodate the massive, barrel-shaped steel vessel. The object was warm to the touch despite being