A shimmering pale-yellow sun illuminated an almost perfectly placid and peaceful sea. Torrid high-summer humidity stifled even the tiniest hint of a refreshing breeze. The Arabian Sea’s deep blue water lay undisturbed, glass-like calm, in all directions. Not even an errant gull disturbed the blank scene.
The docile vista he watched through his periscope lens did not fool Commander Ashwinder Vikat. As commanding officer of the submarine INS Argihat SSBN 86, the Indian Navy’s newest ballistic missile-armed nuclear submarine, his instincts told him better. The captain stepped back from the periscope and wiped sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. He paused, pondered for just a second why he would be sweating in the cool, dark control room. Then he glanced around quickly, seeing if any of his crew noticed. And also to make sure his largely inexperienced team was still attentive to their scopes, screens, and gauges. Only then did he step back up to the periscope to once again stare at the vast blue emptiness that stretched out in all directions only fifteen or so meters above the hull of his submersible ship.
It was a thought that often entered Commander Vikat’s mind as he surveyed the sea. How difficult it was to imagine that just over the horizon, his homeland was on the very knife-edge of nuclear war with its neighbor, Pakistan. How could a scene so peaceful and calm exist in the same world in which otherwise sane nations hungered for a nuclear war? The border incursions in the Kashmir were bad enough, but those had been going on for generations. The previous month’s terrorist attacks in Surat and Navi Mumbai—by madmen trained and sheltered in Pakistan—simply could not go unanswered. But again, such barbaric acts were nothing new.
It was Pakistan’s most recent saber rattling and their new open alliance with the Chinese military that were most disturbing. How could any free country stand idle when just across the border their sworn enemies had placed their nuclear forces on high alert? And with the full and open backing of the tiger to their north?
Commander Vikat was all too aware that he was responsible for his country’s most secure nuclear deterrent. If India’s enemies suddenly decided to rain down nuclear death, it was Vikat’s responsibility to retaliate with the eight KL-4 submarine-launched ballistic missiles that the Argihat carried in her missile tubes. That retaliation was the primary reason—maybe the only reason—that an unbelievably deadly atomic war had not already erupted in the region.
Ashwinder Vikat knew his duty, accepted it with his commission, had eaten, worked, and slept with it for almost two decades. But he dreaded its possibility with soul-wrenching angst. How could he possibly carry out an order that would bring horrible, searing death to untold millions of his fellow human beings?
As he stood at the scope and watched the docile waters of the Arabian Sea, Vikat thought of his wife, his children, his friends, his neighbors, his fellow sailors and soldiers. It was a vain attempt to clear out the inevitable unwanted thoughts of fiery destruction.
He had a sworn duty. Should it come to it, he must concentrate on performing that job to the best of his and his crew’s ability. If their adversaries had any suspicion that he might hesitate or fumble, his awesome firepower was no deterrent at all.
“Captain, we have all radio traffic aboard.” The report from the radio room broke Vikat’s reverie.
“Very well,” he snapped. “Watch Officer, make your depth fifty meters.” The commander slapped the periscope training handles up as his assistant smoothly lowered the scope into its housing.
As Vikat stepped toward the control room door he ordered, “Come right to course three-two-zero and head for our next patrol box. Maintain your speed at ahead one-third.” Looking directly at the watch officer, the CO continued. “I want you to maintain a careful sonar search. Be especially vigilant. Report all contacts to me. I really do not like how quiet it has been. It does not leave me with a good feeling.”
Commander Vikat turned and stepped out of the control room, a concerned look on his dark face. He said over his shoulder, “I will be in my stateroom.”
Ψ
As Commander Vikat suspected, the Argihat was not alone in this part of the Arabian Sea. Ten thousand meters astern of the Indian submarine, another submersible ship, a Chinese YUAN Type 39D-class AIP diesel vessel, the Changcheng Wushiwu, ominously lurked. Literally the “Great Wall Number Fifty-Five” but known simply as the Wushiwu, the undersea killer was on its first deployment beyond the First Island Chain.
Navy Captain Yon Hun Glo watched as his sonarmen followed the on-screen trace that represented the unsuspecting Indian SSBN. Captain Yon was quite proud of his crew and their new ship. Together, they had already sneaked into the very mouth of the American dragon and photographed the naval base at Diego Garcia, deep in the Indian Ocean. More importantly, they accomplished this feat while completely evading the much-vaunted American sensor systems. Captain Yon’s PLAN masters were very pleased with the Wushiwu and, most importantly, with Captain Yon’s daring exploits.
His current assignment, while not nearly so daring, was even more important to the Chinese strategic plan. He was to trail this Indian SSBN while being ready to destroy it on a moment’s notice. A brace of YU-9 homing torpedoes was nested in their tubes, ready to shoot an instant after the order came.
“Captain, the Indian has changed depth,” the lead sonarman called out. “It appears he has come down from periscope depth to normal patrol depth.”
Yon nodded. The Indian submarine’s captain was nothing if not predictable. Every four hours like clockwork, he came to periscope depth for a few minutes, probably to copy communications and check in with his headquarters, before returning to his patrol depth. Fifty meters. Always fifty meters. After that maneuver, he would start a slow, wide circle, alternating first to the left and then the right. Captain Yon Hun Glo knew it was now time to observe a slow turn to the left.
“Captain,” the sonarman said over his shoulder, “our friend is not turning left this time. Bearing rate shows him turning right.”
Yon watched the trace swing, first rapidly to the right and then slowly pointing to the northwest. The Indian SSBN was doing something different, headed off in a new direction. For just a second, Yon wished that he could eavesdrop on the message the Indian sub had just received. Wished he could know what command headed him off in a new direction. A very dangerous direction.
Yon Hun Glo’s orders were quite explicit and had been in place since he had been assigned to shadow the Indian submarine. If the vessel he tracked came north of twenty degrees north latitude while also being west of sixty-eight degrees east longitude, the standing order was to sink him. Now, with this surprising change in the normal routine, the Indian only needed to traverse a bit over two hundred kilometers to the northwest to sign his own death warrant.
Yon waited for a few minutes as the sonar trace stabilized. The course change was real and intended. He ordered his boat to follow, but to be certain to remain well outside any possible detection range for the Indian. The stakes in this very real game of cat-and-mouse had just ratcheted up considerably.
Ψ
There was yet one more player in the game, though. One even farther from the action but just as vitally involved.
Nearly a thousand miles to the south, the US Naval Ship USNS Impeccable slowly dragged her twin-line TB-29A towed array through the Indian Ocean, searching for signs of submarines that might be swimming in those waters. The Impeccable and her sisters were specifically designed to gather “acoustical data,” Navy speak for “finding submarines.”
These unarmed, civilian-crewed ships constantly but slowly trawled the world’s oceans looking for submerged vessels in an effort to catalog the number and activities of those ships, whether friend or foe. Her extremely sensitive towed arrays, which trailed out miles behind the twin-hulled ship, gathered terabytes of data that was linked back to Naval Ocean Processing Facility (NOPF), Whidbey Island, Washington, half a world away. There, very advanced algorithms and unbelievably fast computer processors parsed the raw data. Once w
heat was separated from chaff, the reports gave expert analysts an amazingly accurate view of the underside of a greater part of the Indian Ocean, the adjacent seas, or any other body of water where the ships worked.
Impeccable had long been aware of and watching the Indian and Chinese submarines as they danced with each other. Her crew and the analysts on Whidbey Island had also noticed the abrupt change in the Indian’s routine and the reactive move by the Chinese sub. But this seemingly small bit of data had raised the interest of someone else, even farther from the warm waters of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.
At the Pentagon, Admiral Tom Donnegan watched in very near real time as the Wushiwu swung around to follow the Argihat to the northwest.
Admiral Donnegan did not need miles of towed array or racks of computer servers or a building full of analysts to tell him what this meant. Something was up out there. And whatever it was did not bode well for anybody anywhere on planet Earth.
2
The blazing sun shone mercilessly down on the bustling shipyard. Sprawling, shiny sheet-metal roofs guarded the huge new facility from spying eyes high in the sky. They served that purpose well but also were very efficient at trapping heat inside the structures. Overhead, a pair of Russian AN-124 Ruslan cargo planes circled nearby Konarak Airport. A third one, wheels down, was already well into its final approach. Meanwhile, a gigantic AN-225 Mriya jet, the world’s largest cargo plane, unloaded at the airport’s new secure cargo facility.
Out in Chabahar Bay, a brace of tugs nudged the Motor Vessel Iliya toward the long pier that jutted out from the new shipyard. The large cargo containers that were stacked high on the Iliya’s deck effectively obscured the Russian flag hanging listlessly from the flagstaff.
Arman Dirbaz half watched all this activity from his office window, impatiently waiting for the phone to connect. He never stopped marveling at the sudden growth and incessant activity in this remote part of Iran’s coast. Until recently, this had been only a shallow, out-of-the-way bay that housed the backwater port of Chabahar. In only three years, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy, NEDAJA, with help and mountains of money from their Russian friends, had built the world’s newest submarine shipyard.
Arman Dirbaz was the engineer in charge of delivering the shipyard’s first product, the NEDAJA’s first ballistic-missile submarine, the Boz-Manand. Arman and his team of designers had successfully married the most modern AIP conventional submarine design in the world with a submarine variant of the Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile. With a range of three thousand kilometers and the capability to carry a nuclear warhead, this weapon would immediately make Iran the undisputed leader of the Muslim world and the real power in the Middle East. Even the hated American devils would necessarily tread lightly.
Arman Dirbaz broke out of his reverie as someone finally picked up the phone at the other end.
“Salam. How are you, my friend?” the familiar voice intoned.
Dirbaz laughed. The heavy Russian accent made Vassily Godonov’s Farsi difficult to understand.
“Vassily, despite all the years you have lived in my homeland, you still speak Farsi like a Moscow washer woman. I admire your attempts, but let’s switch to Russian, da?”
The older Russian engineer’s sigh of relief was clearly audible. Linguistics were not Godonov’s strength, but the man was a master engineer and supreme problem solver.
“Thank you, Arman, my old friend. Your Russian is far better than my Farsi.”
“It certainly should be,” Dirbaz said with a chuckle. “All the years you spent trying to teach me engineering at the Moscow University, it was inevitable that I learn something. Now, did you call with good news, or are you still scratching your behind?”
Godonov grunted in feigned exasperation.
“Is that any way to speak with your old master? Especially when I offer such good news. Our friends at Sevmash have finally solved the overheating problems with the fuel cells. Testing has been very positive. I supervised that full power trial myself. The solution was really very simple. It turns out that we did not have a problem with the new organic hydrogen storage system like we thought. The problem was in the fuel cell all the time. We merely had to change the internal temperature sensors with a tantalum micro-resistive thermal sensor. That showed that the heat exchangers were too small for the power output. I’m afraid that we will need to reduce maximum power by ten percent to make this all work.”
Dirbaz sighed with relief. “That is very good news indeed, and not a minute too soon. A ten percent drop in power is not important. We can worry about that later. The Boz-Manand is scheduled for sea trials within a month. When will I receive the new cells?”
“Arman, my impatient young friend,” the old Russian engineer responded. “Did you not see a flight of cargo jets landing today? They are delivering your new cells, ready for installation. I will fly down from Moscow in the morning to help you with the installation. I expect a hot cup of coffee with vodka. Khoda hafez for now, my friend.”
“Safar be kheir, my friend,” Dirbaz responded. “I will see you in the morning. And the coffee will be hot.”
Now alone, the Iranian engineer scratched behind his ear for a few seconds and did some rough calculations. Maybe his old friend was right and the solution really was that simple, but he kept his healthy skepticism of new Russian “wonder” technologies.
Ψ
The Research Vessel Ocean Mystery carefully backed away from the dilapidated pier and started a slow turn to head out into the deep waters of the Gulf of Oman. The Ocean Conservation Movement’s familiar green-and-blue flag hung limply from the flagstaff. Three-foot-high white letters adorning either side of the blue ship urged anyone who saw them to “Save Our Oceans Through Knowledge.”
The tiny, dusty Yemeni port of Nishtun slept quietly, just as it had for the last thousand years, and mostly ignored the departing vessel. The RV Ocean Mystery had slipped into the port to pick up some fresh vegetables—most of the crew proclaimed themselves to be vegan—as well as a passenger. Nishtun was certainly one of the most out-of-the-way, inconspicuous places for the research vessel to make a quick, quiet stop, with little notice, even for such an interesting ship.
As a Small Wetted Area Twin Hulled (SWATH) ship, the RV Ocean Mystery was an ideal platform to conduct deep-water oceanographic research. The distinctive twin hulls made for a very stable ship, even in relatively large sea states, while the extended platform between the two hulls allowed room for staging large equipment and for an oversized helicopter landing pad. And because of the twin-hulled design, the Ocean Mystery drew very little water for a ship of her size. Getting in and out of such small ports as Nishtun was possible where a normal ship would need to go to a large, well-dredged harbor. And large anchorages in this part of the world always had an abundance of prying eyes.
The downside of the Ocean Mystery’s SWATH design was that she was slow. Her twin PA-5 SEMT Pielstick diesels just didn’t send enough horsepower to the twin Rolls Royce waterjet propulsors. The crew kidded that she was so sluggish, she couldn’t get out of her own way. No matter. She was not built for speed. She was perfect for her announced purpose, doing research into the warming of the world’s oceans. And perfect for other uses, too, which were not so widely ballyhooed.
Captain Yves Monagnad sat high up on the bridge wing as the ship slowly backed away from the pier. As the vessel cleared the short seawall at the harbor’s mouth, Captain Monagnad pushed the port engine ahead, leaving the starboard engine going astern. The Ocean Mystery twisted around in her own length before steadying up on course one-three-five, the heading back to their well-publicized research grounds.
Monagnad turned to his first officer, Clyde McClellan, and ordered, “Clyde, head us back to the rendezvous location at best speed. I’d better go down and look over our cargo before I stop in the wardroom to meet our guest.”
Monagnad slid down the ladder to the main deck, three decks below the bridge, and walked aft to th
e equipment staging area. A stack of sixteen CONEX boxes, painted a wide variety of muted colors and bearing the names of numerous shipping companies, but each exactly forty-eight feet by 9.5 feet by 8.5 feet, completely covered the area. There was just room to slip past and get to the large yellow davit crane that perched high over the stern between the two hulls.
Captain Monagnad unlocked and opened the outermost, lowest CONEX box on the port side, a dull red one that proclaimed itself as property of the Maersk line. He gazed inside and saw a miniature submarine almost completely filling the storage container. He saw no obvious signs of damage. The monitoring panel showed that all was well with this metallic fish.
As Monagnad moved on, he did some quick calculations in his head. At the Ocean Mystery’s best economical speed of four knots, they would arrive at their designated rendezvous in about one week. Figure two nights to launch this group of fish, another two nights to pick up the last bunch, which were now out there working, completing their mission. They should be back in Djibouti in a month or so, not secretively but perfectly willing to be observed. And just in time for the resupply shipments to have made it from their storage locations in Scotland.
Monagnad glanced at his Rolex. He had better get moving. His new passenger, the United Nations Director for Ocean Conservation, waited in the wardroom, and these UN bigwigs had notably high opinions of themselves as well as notoriously short fuses. It would not be nice to bite the hand that ostensibly helped feed them. While providing them such believable cover.
The captain whistled tunelessly as he made his way to the wardroom.
3
Commander Joe Glass took a deep whiff. The sunblock’s heavy coconut aroma transported him back to fun-filled days on the beach at home. But he quickly shook his head and willed his attention back to the current moment and place, both of which were a hell of a long way from a nice summer day on a towel on Virginia Beach.
Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5) Page 2
