Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5)

by George Wallace

  As he approached the entrance, passing a concrete support pillar, an arm reached out from behind the pole to grab him. Beaman immediately went to a defensive stance, ready to fend off a blow or shatter a larynx with a quick chop of the heel of his hand.

  “Mr. Beaman, welcome to Pakistan. Would you come with me, please?”

  Beaman stepped back, still instinctively wary. The man before him could have been an accountant or banker. Or assassin. But he certainly did not stand out in the crowd. Certainly not as much as the big American did.

  The man was dressed in traditional Pashtun perahan tunban, sported a fashionable shadow of a beard, and seemed willing to stand there, hands palms out, a slight smile on his face, as long as it took for Bill Beaman to be convinced he was not about to have his throat slit.

  Beaman finally uncoiled.

  “Go with whom, may I ask?”

  “I am Abdul Yusufzai,” the thin man said. He spoke in a voice that only Beaman could hear over the constant babble of the paging speakers and gypsy hack drivers trying to out-shout each other for fares. “Captain Beaman, you and I have a mutual friend, Admiral Donnegan. The car is waiting outside. Allow me to help you with your bag, sir. We have a short but interesting ride ahead of us. Then much we need to accomplish. And we do not want to be tardy. Please come with me, sir.”

  “Since you asked nicely,” Beaman growled, but then smiled at his new friend. “Let’s go.”

  8

  Joe Glass could feel the blistering tropical sun on his back as he walked across the short brow from the Toledo and onto the diving barge tied up along the after part of the big attack submarine. The towering sides of the submarine tender Simon Lake provided scant shade as the burning orb was almost directly overhead by then. The constant sea breeze brought precious little cooling relief. The noon-day heat was unrelenting, stifling. Glass’s khaki shirt was already drenched in sweat after only a few minutes topside. Months below in the submarine’s artificial atmosphere made the real climate even harder to take.

  Glass slowly threaded his way past the maze of hoses and diving gear to where Toledo’s engineer, Lieutenant Commander Walt Smith, stood, looking perplexed. The young officer was staring down a very large pipe that hung over the diving barge’s stern. A sheet metal and plastic “pipe,” almost four feet in diameter, dipped into crystal clear water and then dropped almost vertically to where it broadened and enclosed most of the Toledo’s stern just aft of the rudder. Half a dozen hoses disappeared into the big pipe’s mouth, and a cacophony of noises emerged from it.

  Smith glanced up as Glass approached. Shouting to be heard over the racket, he reported, “The cofferdam is holding now. But it took the tiger team and the divers quite a while to seal it. They’re removing the backing doors so they can get to the linkage.”

  Being a “nuke” as well as previously serving as a boat’s engineer, Joe Glass jumped directly to the crux of the problem. “So, we’re sure the problem is in the linkages? Life would be a hell of a lot simpler if it turned out to be a software problem.”

  “Skipper, we ran all the diagnostics here and had the design yard go over their copy back home, too.” Walt Smith was aware of Glass’s penchant for getting his hands dirty every time there was an engineering problem. “We went over every bit and byte. There were no surprises. The software does exactly what it’s supposed to.”

  Glass nodded. Once again, the engineer really did not need his captain’s help. The team had everything well in hand.

  “Okay, then I agree. That only leaves the synchros and the linkages. How long you figure it’ll take to get to them and do the troubleshooting?”

  “Lots of variables there, Skipper,” Smith answered. “If it’s a simple linkage adjustment, we might be able to button up by tomorrow. If it takes a synchro replacement and alignment, maybe a day more. We have a spare synchro onboard. If we get in there and find anything bent or broken, it’ll take a bit longer. We’re on the tail end of a very long supply train out here on the backside of the world.”

  “Roger that,” Glass replied. “I’d better get on the horn and let the commodore know that we’ll be stuck in this tropical paradise for a few more days than we’d hoped.”

  “Captain, before you go talk to Commodore Ward, I need to report a problem with the steam generator water level control system that just popped up, too,” Smith went on. “We got some anomalies on the self-diagnostics. I’m not sure what the problem is, but the ETs are up on chat with the lab to try to figure that one out.”

  “You sure you’re not trying to upsell me, Eng?” Glass grinned. “I come in for an oil change and you try to sell me a ring job and a set of tires?”

  “Oh, no!” Smith replied seriously. “Just a couple of things that we…”

  Smith realized his captain was kidding and smiled, too.

  Glass walked away, toward the escape trunk hatch on his submarine. He could only shake his head. Back in his day, there was no such thing as “chat.” If there was a problem onboard at sea, they troubleshot and fixed it onboard. No “call a friend.”

  Then Glass shook his head as he considered the amazingly complicated war machine he now commanded. The systems were a lot more complex than on his previous boats. A hell of a lot more complex. And considering the complicated missions he and his fellow submariners were asked to complete these days, that was a damn good thing.

  Joe Glass dropped down the ladder into the blessed cool air below decks.

  Ψ

  Ben Tahib gazed out the big helicopter’s expansive glass-enclosed cockpit. Five thousand feet below, the Arabian Sea stretched deep blue and empty to the flat horizon. Tahib was getting tired. Tired and very worried. What should have been a ninety-minute flight out from Salalah in southeast Oman to their destination, the research ship Ocean Mystery, had now stretched to more than two and a half hours. The pilot had already voiced his concern about fuel a couple of times. The last time had been emphatic.

  But where was the ship? Tahib checked his notes against the GPS for the hundredth time. The flickering screen matched within a few meters the position where the vessel was supposed to be sitting, awaiting their arrival. It had all been set up by the United Nations, the ship’s operators, and Tahib’s employer, the Al Jazeera News Network. But there was not the slightest sign of a ship anywhere in the huge circle of water that he could see below the chopper. Nor had she responded to their repeated radio calls. She simply was not there.

  “Mr. Tahib,” the pilot said in a clipped English accent. “We really must stop searching and return to Salalah International at once.” Before the reporter could protest, the pilot went on. “We have already used all our reserve fuel. If we encounter any headwind, your nice suit is going to get very wet.”

  The Al Jazeera gig was a sweet one, but Ben Tahib was not about to risk his life just to get an interview with some mid-level UN bureaucrat and a tree-hugging scientist, all for a story that would likely make the tail end of the network’s nightly news hour. It simply was not worth the risk. Tahib was about to motion for the pilot to start back when a thought occurred to him.

  There might still be a story here. Tahib ran the storyline through his head. A missing research ship. A noble vessel apparently disappears from the face of the earth. Uh, the sea. A ship that had been out here conducting valuable research to help save the world’s environment. But then it mysteriously vanishes without a trace.

  He could change the mid-level bureaucrat into a top-level UN official who had been working tirelessly, at great personal sacrifice, to help protect the world’s oceans. And change the tree-hugging scientist into the world’s leading expert on something or other whose revolutionary research was helping to save the world from a dire disaster. Of course, he would have to fill in the details, add color to the tale. Even if the ship turned up later with a simple, boring explanation for why it was not where it was supposed to be, Ben Tahib’s story would have already run at the top of the newscast. The eventual happy ending would ge
t little play at all.

  Yes, this story had legs. The day had not been a complete loss after all.

  Ben Tahib tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Patch me into Al Jazeera’s main line. I have a hot story I need to file right now.”

  Ψ

  The yellow unmanned underwater vehicle nudged its nose into the shallow waters just above a small sea mount. The feature was little more than a mound rising from the sea floor, but its exact position and depth were recorded precisely within the UUV’s data files. The depth readings from the little submersible’s sensors almost matched the reading logged in its data files. Even so, the vessel maneuvered slightly until the evaluations matched within the tolerances that it was programmed to accept. Precision was only one of the device’s strengths.

  Then, satisfied that it was where it was supposed to be, the electronic brain within the sub adjusted its inertial navigation system so that the estimated position—the “EP”—agreed with the bottom contour fix on the sea mount below.

  The UUV would rely on the inertial navigation system and its EPs for the next several hours for dead reckoning. On this critical leg of the mission, the submersible could not risk coming to the surface to use its GPS receiver and there were no convenient sea mounts for bottom contour navigation.

  The vessel slowly and silently worked its way toward the coastline. The muddy bottom gradually rose to put less and less water beneath the little craft. At the same time, the UUV’s sensors detected currents trying to push it along the coast, away from where it had been ordered to go. Still other sensors detected a ship steaming toward the UUV. The submarine knew exactly what to do. It automatically maneuvered to keep well away from the ship. And it adjusted for a course that would take it precisely where it was supposed to be, even as it compensated for the unexpected currents.

  Finally, the UUV’s inertial navigation EP agreed with the programmed position for “event one.” A small hatch on the submersible’s bottom opened and a sensor package dropped out. The package sank to the muddy bottom where it gently rested in the silt. As the UUV circled and passed by again, a float deployed from the package, rising up until it stopped a couple of fathoms from the surface. Then the device on the bottom emitted one short ping informing the hovering UUV that all was operational. With that confirmation duly noted, the unmanned submarine turned further to the northwest and headed for its next drop point.

  Ten hours later, the yellow UUV completed its first mission and headed back out to deeper water. There it reported home, confirmed its success, and waited patiently for the code that would give the submersible the details of, and send it off on, its next mission.

  Back at the command center, lights blinked on as the stretch of sensors began to come to life, completing a virtual set of tripwires across the Iranian coast. They covered what appeared to be an uninteresting and unimportant stretch of shoreline from Gurdim to Beris, across the backwater Chabahar Bay.

  But to some, this remote arc of sand and seawater constituted some of the most important geography on Planet Earth.

  9

  Jim Ward set the ambush up in a narrow valley just on the Somali side of the Ethiopian border. The location was for tactical advantage. An imaginary line meant nothing out here in this desolate back-forty of nowhere. But this spot was about the best he could hope for. The twisting dirt roadway wound its tortuous route through the wadi, bouncing from side to steep side as it circumvented boulders and particularly deep ruts left from generations of those who had trekked this path through desert wilderness, humans and animals alike. The SEAL team had their firing pits hidden high on opposite walls so that they could cover every square inch of the valley with a deadly crossfire and still have the best chance to hastily slip out the “back door” if need be.

  Getting to this garden spot had not been easy. When Admiral Tom Donnegan called, Ward’s SEAL team was just standing down from their little trip into Sudan to observe the big terrorist hookup. The men were already looking forward to a little R&R on Djibouti’s Moucha Island. Instead, they had to change plans, build the strategy, scrub every detail, and hightail it out to this lovely little bit of sand and rock that would never appear on anybody’s tourist brochure.

  An Air Force CV-22B Osprey dropped them thirty miles from their destination so they would not risk frightening any goats or alerting the locals, under the assumption that any aircraft out here were not welcome. The hike over the acacia scrub-filled sand pile had consumed the better part of two exhausting days and nights. As they marched, Ward quickly determined that they need not have bothered with the high-altitude parachute jump or the taxing hike in. Neither locals nor goats were anywhere to be seen.

  Admiral Donnegan provided Ward’s team with every bit of intelligence that he could gather. Clearly Sheik al-Wasragi was being very protective of his hoard of precious metal. Satellite tracking showed that he now had three more technicals—armed, camouflaged pickup trucks—escorting the Toyota truck that carried the gold. The caravan was traveling only at night, evidently to make it more difficult for anybody to track their progress across the East African wastelands. In the unlikely event anybody else on the planet knew about the meetup and the treasure swap and the extremist’s chosen route home.

  At sunrise each day, al-Wasragi and his caravan holed up in small villages or isolated herder huts out of view from the sky or space. A few times they resorted to the cover of rock outcroppings and slept the day away on gravel and dust. That meant they were averaging just better than two hundred miles a day. And Donnegan and his spook team assumed his destination would be a journey of almost two thousand miles.

  The terrorist leader was unaware of one crucial fact. The latest model spy satellites’ high-resolution radar imaging really did not care if it was day or night. The pictures they snapped were equally dramatic and telling.

  This night was almost pitch-black. A waxing gibbous moon had long since disappeared below the western horizon. It would be another hour before the sun began painting the opposite quadrant of sky. The only illumination in this inhospitable part of the Horn of Africa came from millions of stars twinkling overhead in a cloudless sky.

  “Skipper, got company coming.” Master Chief Johnston’s voice was a raspy whisper through Ward’s tiny earbuds. Johnston—nobody but the US Navy knew his real first name so everyone assumed it actually was “Master Chief,” as well as his pay grade—had stationed himself almost a mile up-track. His job was to be on the lookout for al-Wasragi’s little convoy. “Looks like four technicals and I make out sixteen shooters. They’ll be in the kill zone in a couple of minutes. Boss man’s in the second truck. Betting that’s where the cargo is.”

  Ward turned to Jason Hall, the team’s communications expert. “Jase, check the uplink. We need to make real sure that Reaper is ready when we light up Wasragi’s little parade.”

  The big black SEAL, invisible behind some scrub a few meters from where Ward lay, clicked his mike twice. The systems were up and active. The MQ-9 REAPER, an unmanned aerial drone, was waiting for the command to zoom in and brutally put an end to Wasragi’s sojourn.

  The terrorists’ four pickups, each with a heavy machine gun mounted in its bed, came into view, paused at the mouth of the narrow valley, and then, satisfied all was clear, eased slowly downward in the direction of the far end.

  Jim Ward carefully aimed the laser designator on the lead vehicle’s cab roof. He held his breath, anticipating imminent hellfire from above.

  And nothing happened. No flashing streak across the night sky. No blinding explosion. Nothing.

  “Jase, what the hell happened? You still have the link?”

  Hall responded immediately. “Comms are good but the bird ain’t answering. Backup’s on the way. Two minutes out and closing.”

  The group of trucks drove on, unaware they had just received a two-minute reprieve.

  “Roger,” Ward answered. “Guys, keep your heads down, but be ready to engage.”

  “Black Dog, this is I
ron Hammer,” a voice suddenly crackled in Ward’s earbud. “Hold four technicals. Verify you are clear.”

  “Iron Hammer, Black Dog. Roger. Team is clear.”

  “Rolling in hot. Black Dog out.”

  Just then an A-10 Warthog jet aircraft popped up over a line of hills almost two miles away, approaching at over three hundred miles per hour. Ward had just enough time to register the incoming jet before the lead truck below his position disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flames. The jet’s 30mm GAU-8 cannon blasted away at almost four thousand rounds a minute.

  But then, just as suddenly, three missile trails arced up from the trucks. The terrorists had obviously remained ready and retaliated instantly. The missiles made a straight line toward the fast-approaching Air Force jet.

  A tall figure—wearing Arabic robes, odd for the Somali desert—leapt from the passenger seat of the second truck. He stood there as if invincible, pointing at the jet, yelling something Ward could not understand. But he was obviously giving orders to his fighters. As the missiles raced toward the jet, the three remaining 23mm heavy machine guns mounted in the truck beds opened up. Golden-yellow blobs of tracer fire raced the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles in the direction of the Warthog.

  The warplane jogged hard left, ejecting a trail of flares behind it. The first fired missile fell for the ruse and skewed off course toward the flares. The other two were not distracted and continued unerringly toward the jinking, dodging jet. The bullet tracers shifted to close on the aircraft, too.

  The overwhelming speed of the incoming ordnance overcame even the Warthog’s vaunted ability to avoid punishment. The missiles, employing infrared seekers, slammed into the jet’s hot engines while the machine cannon fire shredded its airframe. The plane’s canopy popped off and the pilot ejected, tumbling erratically, hardly a second before the Warthog smashed into the desert floor in a blinding ball of flame.