Operation Grand Master - 5 - A glimpse into hell

Major General Sharanya Kreszenz is not having the best of days. For one thing as the Commander of Air Combat Group Atlantic, she has to oversee the still continuing forward deployments of her massive Air fleet. She has command over 57 combat squadrons of Royal Cochin Air Force, almost 700 planes apart from nearly 4 or 5 times as many Auxiliary Support planes. For the 96 or so hours except for a few intermittent hours of sleep snatched during transit, she has been reviewing one of the largest War time deployment of Royal Cochin Air Force since the Second Tahoe War in support of Greater Pacifica. She has had to juggle the basing requirement for the massive air fleet between a limited number of Forward Air Bases, ensure logistical connectivity to the massive Cochin Armada stretched across the South Atlantic Ocean and also check through the Air Neutralization and Air Superiority operations that are being planned out by her command staff.

Apart from all this what has really made her irked up today is the fact that her personal Jadayu Mark 4 had developed a landing gear trouble and has to be grounded for 12 hours. So she has to depend now on one of the larger bombers to do an Aerial Reconnaissance which she has been wanting do for some days. Far from being able to fly and relax herself, now she is destined to be a passenger for the next couple of hours. 

The only consolation is that she is travelling at Mach 2.

The Major General had appropriated for herself a jump seat on an ASPER stealth bomber that was scheduled for coastal ELINT mission. Taking off from FAB St Helena the RS0206 Asper configured for ELINT mission had a programmed track towards Rio de Janeiro 10 NM from which it would angle North East to follow the terrain contours of South America maintaining a distance of 10NM from the coast all the way till Natal from where it could angle South East to return towards St Helena. A routine mission which the Aspers have been doing for the past several days. The Holy American Empire may be a battered nation but there are bound to be some surprises waiting in reserve for the Cochin Expeditionary Force when it makes landfall in a few days and the aim of the Aspers is to reduce the element of surprise . Flying at an altitude of 60,000 ft the Asper expects to be out of the combat envelop of most Surface to Air Missile systems but even if a more capable system engaged it its top speed of Mach 2.5 and active defense measures would enable it to escape unscathed. Besides the Asper has yet to meet a radar system apart from Cochin Air Defense Network which beats its stealth.




As the technicians monitored the readings of the ELINT instruments Major General Sharanya Kreszenz, the daughter of a Tamil father and a Kazakh German Mother, and one of the finest tacticians in Royal Cochin Air Force surveyed over the skies that could spell triumph or death for her Air Warriors in the coming few weeks.