Read Online Jack Ryan, Books 7-12 by Tom Clancy - Free Book Online Page B

strike somewhat farther than that if they need to, but even at the minimum distance I demonstrated, they can control a vast area of ocean. Take those carriers away, and they are just another frigate navy. The difficult part of the exercise is taking them away,” the Admiral concluded, using simple language for the industrialists.
    Chandraskatta was correct in assuming that these merchants knew little about military affairs. However, he had underestimated their ability to learn. The Admiral came from a country with a warrior tradition little known outside its own borders. Indians had stopped Alexander the Great, blunted his army, wounded the Macedonian conqueror, perhaps fatally, and put an end to his expansion, an accomplishment the Persians and Egyptians had singularly failed to do. Indian troops had fought alongside Montgomery in the defeat of Rommel—and had crushed the Japanese Army at Imphal, a fact that he had no intention of bringing up, since one of the people at the table had been a private in that army. He wondered what they had in mind, but for the moment was content to enjoy their hospitality and answer their questions, elementary as they were. The tall, handsome flag officer leaned back, wishing for a proper chair and a proper drink. This sake these prissy little merchants served was closer to water than gin, his usual drink of choice.
    “But if you can?” Itagake asked.
    “As I said,” the Admiral replied patiently, “then they are a frigate navy. I grant you, with superb surface ships, but the ‘bubble’ each ship controls is far smaller. You can protect with a frigate, you cannot project power with one.” His choice of words, he saw, stopped the conversation for a moment.
    One of the others handled the linguistic niceties, and Itagake leaned back with a long “Ahhhh,” as though he’d just learned something profound. Chandraskatta regarded the point as exceedingly simple—forgetting for a moment that the profound often was. However, he recognized that something important had just taken place.
    What are you thinking about? He would have shed blood, even his own, to know the answer to that question. Whatever it was, with proper warning, it might even be useful. He would have been surprised to learn that the others around the table were churning over exactly the same thought.
     
     
    “Sure are burning a lot of oil,” the group-operations officer noted as he began his morning brief.
    USS Dwight D. Eisenhower was on a course of zero-nine-eight degrees, east by south, two hundred nautical miles southeast of Felidu Atoll. Fleet speed was eighteen knots, and would increase for the commencement of flight operations. The main tactical display in flag plot had been updated forty minutes earlier from the radar of an E-3C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, and, indeed, the Indian Navy was burning a good deal of Bunker-Charlie, or whatever they used now to drive their ships through the water.
    The display before him could easily have been that of a U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Group. The two Indian carriers, Viraat and Vikrant, were in the center of a circular formation, the pattern for which had been invented by an American named Nimitz almost eighty years earlier. Close-in escorts were Delhi and Mysore, home-built missile destroyers armed with a SAM system about which information was thin—always a worry to aviators. The second ring was composed of the Indian version of the old Russian Kashin-class destroyers, also SAM-equipped. Most interesting, however, were two other factors.
    “Replenishment ships Rajaba Gan Palan and Shakti have rejoined the battle group after a brief stay in Trivandrum—”
    “How long were they in port?” Jackson asked.
    “Less than twenty-four hours,” Commander Ed Harrison, the group-operations officer, replied. “They cycled them pretty fast, sir.”
    “So they just went in for a quick fill-up. How much gas do they carry?”
    “Bunker fuel, about thirteen thousand tons each,