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“The Royal Navy Fleet order-of-battle consists of four carrier battle groups and twenty nuclear attack submarines, all of them front line units. Their firepower in heavy cruise missiles and aircraft outnumbers the Red Chinese two-to-one. Once the Reds see the Royal Navy coming, we believe they may put aside their time-on-target plan and preemptively strike at India with every missile in range, but since most of their force will be out of range they’ll fill the gap by shooting their ICBMs from the forty silos in northern Red China, all of them armed with old-fashioned multiple reentry-vehicle hydrogen bombs, doped with cobalt to make them enhanced-radiation high-yield city-killers. These are your grandfather’s nuclear weapons, each one of them Asian Treaty violations. So the coming of the Royal Navy will, in all likelihood, trigger a nuclear war on the Asian continent, and we’re talking radiation clouds and the total destruction of the Shamalan oil fields.

“The Royal Navy won’t stand idly by while their ally gets nuked. The Brits will counterattack both the Red Northern Fleet and Red China itself. The bad news is that the Brits know about the nuclear weapons in the Red ICBMs. London has vowed to attempt to deter the Chinese with their own nuclear threat. While the Brits are on their way to the Indian Ocean, they will be converting their clean plasma warheads-which surgically strike targets with no collateral damage — into ultrahigh-yield hydrogen bombs, the most powerful nuclear warheads ever invented. If that’s not bad enough, the British are pulling their old neutron bombs out of cold storage and flying them to their carrier groups, for the possible use of leveling Red Chinese troop concentrations. Rumor has it that five of them could be targeted at Beijing. A few days into the battle, the Peoples Liberation Army and a considerable number of Chinese civilians will be a scorched pile of bones.”

Patton let the words hang in the air, watching his fleet commanders’ faces grow dark.

“Our objective in this war is twofold. We will be putting weapons on the Red Chinese fleet with the goal of sinking them before they can get in range of Indian targets. We will be targeting their sub force, with the tactical objective of sinking every platform. The second goal in-theater is to neutralize the Royal Navy. In this conflict, their high tempers and radioactive weapons will do nothing but harm. We must get them to withdraw. “Kelly, your East Coast submarines will sail for the choke point Arabian Sea entrance to the western Indian Ocean, the corridor that the Royal Navy battle groups must travel to come in-theater. Your forces will position themselves in attack range of the Royal Navy Fleet. I’m certain that diplomacy will be enough, and that your orders to face the British will be a mere contingency plan, and that you’ll hear from me to turn back and attack the Red Fleet with The Viking. If the worst happens and England won’t listen, that’s when you get your final orders. Orders to blockade the Royal Navy.”

“Blockade? What if a blockade fails? Are you contemplating giving me orders to fire on the Brits?”

Patton sighed. “If it comes to that, yes.”

The Viking’s face had turned red, and Kelly McKee’s eyebrows formed a stormy frown.

“But it won’t. Kelly, the heaviest lifting for your part of the operation will be done by your Pacific squadrons. Together with your unit in the Chinese Bo Hai Bay, your western submarine force will intercept each of the three Red Chinese surface battle groups that are on the way to the Indian Ocean. Kill them before they can do their mischief. And kill them from over the horizon before they can make it in-theater, if you can, and if not, chase them into the Indian Ocean and sink them there. If the gods are with us, your subs will get to them before they can get to The Viking’s battle groups and sink them. Once the Chinese fleet is on the bottom, the strategists think the Reds will break off from the Indians — they don’t have enough missiles deploy able by rail or truck to stop an advance of Indian shock troops, and an attack could start a fight the Reds wouldn’t be able to finish.

“Vie, if Kelly’s submarines are late or defeated, the mission falls to your surface action groups. Your carriers and surface fleets will go it alone against a well-armed Chinese force. It will be up to you to stop them.”

Next Patton had dropped the bombshell about their communications being compromised, and their extraordinary orders about using pad computers and Internet E-mails to communicate. While McKee and Ericcson were trying to recover from that shock, Patton addressed The Viking, telling him more details about his mission. When Ericcson had left, Patton frowned over at McKee.