Free Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy

quietly.
    That was what everyone wanted to know. The Indian battle group—that was what they called it, because that's exactly what it was—had been at sea for eight days now, cruising off the south coast of
    
    
     Sri Lanka
    
    
    . The putative mission for the group was support for the Indian Army's peace-keeping team, whose job was to ameliorate the problem with the Tamil Tigers. Except for one thing: the Tamil Tigers were cosseted on the northern part of the island nation, and the Indian
    fleet was to the south. The Indian two-carrier force was maneuvering constantly to avoid merchant traffic, beyond sight of land, but within air range. Staying clear of the Sri Lankan Navy was an easy task. The largest vessel that country owned might have made a nice motor yacht for a nouveau-riche private citizen, but was no more formidable than that. In short, the Indian Navy was conducting a covert-presence operation far from where it was supposed to be. The presence of fleet-replenishment ships meant that they planned to be there for a while, and also that the Indians were gaining considerable at-sea time to conduct workups. The plain truth was that the Indian Navy was operating exactly as the U.S. Navy had done for generations. Except that the
    
    
     United States
    
    
     didn't have any ambitions with
    
    
     Sri Lanka
    
    
    .
    “Exercising every day?” Robby asked.
    “They're being right diligent, sir,”
    
     Harrison
    
     confirmed. “You can expect a pair of Harriers to form up with our Hornets, real friendly, like.”
    “I don't like it,” Dubro observed. “Tell him about last week.”
    “That was a fun one to watch.”
    
     Harrison
    
     called up the computerized records, which ran at faster-than-normal speed. “Start time for the exercise is about now, sir.”
    On the playback, Robby watched a destroyer squadron break off the main formation and head southwest, which had happened to be directly toward the
    
    
    
     Lincoln
    
    
    
     group at the time, causing a lot of attention in the group-operations department. On cue, the Indian destroyers had started moving randomly, then commenced a high-speed run due north. Their radars and radios blacked out, the team had then headed east, moving quickly.
    “The DesRon commander knows his stuff. The carrier group evidently expected him to head east and duck under this stationary front. As you can see, their air assets headed that way.” That miscue had allowed the destroyers to dart within missile-launch range before the Indian Harriers had leaped from their decks to attack the closing surface group.
    In the ten minutes required to watch the computerized playback, Robby knew that he'd just seen a simulated attack on an enemy carrier group, launched by a destroyer team whose willingness to sacrifice their ships and their lives for this hazardous mission had been demonstrated to perfection. More disturbingly, the attack had been successfully carried out. Though the tin cans would probably have been sunk, their missiles, some of them anyway, would have penetrated the carriers' point defenses and crippled their targets. Large, robust ships though aircraft carriers were, it didn't require all that much damage to prevent them from carrying out flight operations. And that was as good as a kill. The Indians had the only carriers in this ocean, except for the Americans, whose presence, Robby knew, was a source of annoyance for them. The purpose of the exercise wasn't to take out their own carriers.
    “Get the feeling they don't want us here?” Dubro asked with a wry smile.
    “I get the feeling we need better intelligence information on their intentions. We don't have dick at the moment, Mike.”
    “Why doesn't that surprise me,” Dubro observed. “What about their intentions toward
    
    
     Ceylon
    
    
    ?” The older name for the nation was more easily remembered.
    “Nothing that I know about.” As deputy J-3, the planning directorate for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Robby had