Lieutenant Commander Tahliani was worried about his Sea harrier’s fuel reserves. Harriers gulped enormous quantities of jet fuel, especially when they performed such unorthodox maneuvers as hovering or viffing.
After shooting down the American Tomcat, he’d expected the other U.S. fighters to follow him and had circled back toward the east in an attempt to draw them out.
The F-14s had not taken the bait, circling instead toward the north.
Tahliani could see the battle unfolding on his radar screen and understood the Americans’ caution, They were heavily outnumbered in the air, and the ground-based aircraft from Kathiawar were beginning their move.
This, he decided, might present an opportunity to Viraat’s Sea Harriers.
It seemed that they’d been momentarily forgotten, lost in the surface clutter of the sea, or simply overlooked in the enormous scope of the rapidly escalating battle. There were several targets within easy reach, targets that would let the Harriers prove their special place in the Indian fleet’s aviation arm.
He was leery of launching another Sea Eagle missile at the American carrier. Tahliani was fairly sure his one shot, released solely to decoy the American Tomcat, had hit the ship, but there’d been no indication that he could see of damage, no reduction of power, no pillar of smoke on the horizon. Possibly the antiship missile had been shot down by the carrier’s point defenses at the last second.
Or possibly the U.S.S. Jefferson was simply too large to be badly hurt by ASMS.
But there was another target within the Sea Harriers’ reach, one much smaller than the nuclear carrier, but one that was vitally important to the American naval squadron. Kill it, and the battle might be won for India there and then.
“Blue King Leader to all Blue Kings,” he called. “Close on my position.”
From across the sea the scattered Indian Harriers came, joining Tahliani’s aircraft and circling with him, their numbers growing.
Kontr-Admiral Dmitriev stood on his bridge, looking down through narrow windows at the aircraft arrayed on Kreml’s flight deck. Migs and Suichois crowded one another, competing for every square meter of deck space, strike planes and fighters, men and munitions. The ship’s Captain, Captain First Rank Soni, stood beside him.
“My Operations Department informs me that we will be ready to launch the strike force within the hour, Admiral,” Soni said. He was a small man, with sandy hair and pale, Nordic eyes. “Mig-29s and Su-25s. Their combat load will include cluster bombs and incendiaries, rockets, and both free-fall and laser-guided bombs.”
“Excellent. You have done well, Captain.”
“Admiral, we continue to get rather urgent requests from Captain Sharov aboard the American Aegis cruiser. Their Admiral Vaughn is pressing for us to add to their air defense posture.”
Dmitriev shook his head. “We must get our strike force airborne first.
What kind of CAP do you have up now?”
“Four Yak-39s.”
Dmitriev made a face. He thought little of the V/STOL naval aircraft.
“We need real fighters in the air. How soon can we launch the Forty-third Squadron?”
Soni looked surprised. “They are ready for immediate launch, Admiral.
But they are reserved to fly protection for the strike-“
“Forget that. We need a strong CAP now. A flexible CAP, in case our American friends cannot handle the load. How long will it take?”
“Twelve Mig-29s? Less than thirty minutes, Admiral.”
“Who is commander?”
“Captain Third Rank Kurasov.”
He remembered Ivan Andreivich Kurasov, a young intense man with eyes of blue ice. He nodded. “Very well. Have Captain Kurasov launch at once.
He will be our contribution to this battle until we can get our strike planes in the air.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Kurasov is a good man. His primary responsibility should be the safety of the Russian squadron, of course, but he may use his discretion in aiding the Americans. And after the launch of our strike force, perhaps we can contribute something more.”
“Very well, Admiral. I should mention, sir, that the Tactical Operations Department feels that it is unlikely that the Indians will attack our vessels. The American carrier is their primary target. We are both farther away and less, shall we say, politically expedient.”
Dmitriev grinned. The Indians had balanced on their fence rail of neutrality for years. Today, perhaps, they would fall off once and for all. From New Delhi’s point of view, it would be much wiser to anger the Americans rather than the Russians, who, after all, were much closer to their part of the world. “We will teach them a thing or two about political expediency, Comrade Captain! Give the orders.”
As Soni turned away, Dmitriev’s gaze returned to the Russian warplanes on the flight deck. His orders from Moscow had been as clear as they had been distressing. Pressed on every side by unrest and ethnic violence, by a chaotic economy, and — most significantly — by rising disaffection with the Russian military, the Kremlin desperately needed a stunning coup that would demonstrate to the world, as well as their own generals, that the Commonwealth of Independent States could be a world power.
Russian admirals such as Dmitriev had long admired the Americans’ supercarriers to the point of envy. It had taken the drive, conviction, and the political connections of the immortal Admiral Gorshkov, however, to finally make the Russian carrier program a reality.
The thing was far harder to do than anyone had expected. The Americans, the British, even the French all had naval aviation traditions that extended back to the earliest days of military aircraft. They’d had a core of highly trained, highly experienced pilots to draw on throughout the thirties and forties, as carriers grew larger and more complex, their aircraft faster, heavier, and deadlier.
In the early fifties, when the rise of jets had forced the adoption of such British innovations as catapults and angled flight decks on aircraft carriers, Russia had continued to show scant interest in developing a carrier arm of its own. Back during the Great Patriotic War, of course, the navy had been visualized as an arm primarily geared for coastal defense and the support of amphibious operations. Stalin’s sole interest in naval warfare had extended to submarines, with the result that the technology for undersea warfare had for years been pursued to the virtual exclusion of all else.
Later, as American superiority in naval air had become more and more apparent, the Soviet Union had begun experimenting with the taktiches kye avianostny kreysera, the tactical aircraft-carrying cruisers like the Kiev. These were odd combinations of capital ship and carrier, with an angled flight deck attached to a cruiser’s hull alongside and aft of the superstructure. The design was good only for the various Yak V/STOL aircraft, imitations of the British and American Harrier jump jets that even the Kremlin admitted were not as good as their Western counterparts.
It wasn’t until the eighties that the first true Soviet aircraft carriers had been conceived, designed, and constructed. Even then, there had been critics who’d insisted that the project would never work.
An artificial carrier deck had been constructed on the Black Sea coast, and naval pilots had trained for carrier landings.
Too many had lost their lives attempting something for which there was no tradition and no experience anywhere within the Soviet military. And dozens more had died when the first landings were actually tried at sea, when the flight deck was moving in three different directions at once.
But it had been worth it in the end. Kreml and his brothers represented an entirely new era for the Soviet Navy. Billions of rubles, hundreds of lives had been sacrificed to achieve this sleek and ultra-modern weapon.