Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5)

by George Wallace

  “Skipper, this is going to take some preparation. I’ll get things going here while you hop up and brief the commodore. That’ll get the squadron weenies thinking water-space management and op plans instead of material inspections.”

  “XO, be nice.” Glass chuckled. “You know they are only here to help.”

  Jones grinned. “Yeah, and if I had a nickel for every time I heard that precise sentiment from some squadron weenie, I’d buy the next round at the O Club.”

  Glass rose and grabbed his ball cap. The one with “USS Toledo” stitched above the bill.

  “But a good idea to brief the commodore,” he called over his shoulder as he stepped out of his stateroom, double-timing for the ladder topside.

  Ψ

  The sun was slipping mercifully below the horizon as Joe Glass descended the long, steep brow connecting the massive submarine tender, Simon Lake, to the Toledo. Another scorching-hot tropical day was abruptly slamming to a close with the typical glorious wash of reds and pinks painted across the western horizon. Soon the stars would seem to usher in a cooling breeze that would bring some relief to the small islands nearby.

  As Glass set foot onboard the Toledo, the topside watch hauled down the absentee pennant, replacing it with the commissioning pennant—the boat’s commanding officer was back aboard—and then announced over the 1MC intercom, “Toledo returning.”

  Looking aft to where the sub’s hull rounded smoothly down to the waterline, Glass spotted Walt Smith, the engineer, in an animated conversation with the tender repair officer. They were too far off for the skipper to make out what was being said, but it was apparent that the engineer had some considerable issue with the other man and was loudly and energetically making his point. Smith held a large hunk of metal, waving it about to make his case.

  Glass strolled aft to where the pair was having their discussion, near the tent that now covered the coffer dam that snaked down over the side into the crystal-clear, turquoise water of the Diego Garcia Lagoon.

  As he approached, Glass could hear the engineer expressing his opinion even more loudly. Hell, they could probably hear him in Tehran!

  “This linkage is just not strong enough! You saw in the video how badly it was flexing. That’s what’s causing the binding. Those C-student engineers back in Philly didn’t design it right. Bottom line!”

  The repair officer closed his eyes as he listened, grimaced, then nodded.

  “Look, you get no argument from me. I agree. But what the hell can we do? I don’t have any approved plans for this.”

  “Plans be damned!” the Eng snapped, frustration heavy in his voice. “All the damn thing needs is a web welded right here to stiffen it enough so it doesn’t flex. You got welders on that oversized yacht of yours, don’t you?”

  “Not that simple,” the repair officer shot back. “The linkage is made out of some exotic unobtanium they came up with for corrosion control. It’s a really complex alloy of titanium, copper, and beryllium, with a very involved heat-treating process. It’s not something we can handle. And especially if we have to weld something to it.”

  “What’s the alternative?” Glass asked, interrupting as he joined the two men. “We have orders for a high-priority, classified mission with an underway within forty-eight hours. We can’t get underway if I can’t back down. And I have a boss who has no interest in excuses, legit or not.”

  The repair officer lifted his ball cap and wiped his sweating brow with a well-used bandanna.

  “Captain, it’s not an excuse. There is nothing I can do with this piece. We got some really skilled guys, but there is no way even they can weld-repair it. And no way to get a new one from CONUS for probably a month or more. You don’t order these things off eBay. We aim to please our customers but I’m at a dead end here.”

  Glass stared out across the water for a moment, lost in thought, then glanced up toward the tender looming over them. He looked sideways at Smith.

  “Eng, didn’t you say that you had a complete set of drawings for the pump drive system?”

  The engineer nodded. “Yes, sir, Skipper. I talked the shipyard out of updated prints for all critical systems right before we left. Just a habit of mine.”

  Glass gazed up at the tender once more.

  “And RO, I assume you got a fancy new 3-D printer up there on the Simon Lake, don’t you? I know it can’t shit out any of this fancy alloy, but it can sure do something simple like Monel, right?”

  The RO looked questioningly at Glass. Monel was a nickel-copper recipe, useful for its high tensile strength and resistance to corrosion.

  “Monel? Yeah, we had to do a replacement on the…well, you don’t necessarily need to…but so what? I still can’t approve substituting without NAVSEA approval. And you got to know that’ll take even longer than getting the new linkage.”

  It was Glass’s turn to shake his head.

  “I’m not asking for a substitute. The way I see it, we need a prototype piece to prove it fits and doesn’t flex, a fit and function test. Then, and only then, we ask NAVSEA for an approved new part.”

  The RO nodded that he understood the submarine captain’s logic. And admired his ingenious fix. And practical subterfuge.

  “Okay, I can see that. Saves NAVSEA a lot of time testing.”

  “Good. Now, how fast can you print our prototype? We ain’t got a lot of time to get in front of this one,” Glass pushed.

  “If we give it the highest priority and work all night,” the repair officer answered, “I figure we can have it for you in the morning. In the meantime, I’ll call NAVSEA to find out what testing they need to verify the prototype.”

  Glass nodded as the RO turned and hurried up the brow, disappearing into the cave-like hole in the side of the tender.

  Smith grunted as he watched the man leave.

  “By-the-book pain in the ass is what he is. They don’t seem to understand we have to improvise sometimes. Guys like that could cost us this mission. Or a war someday.” The engineer stopped and thought for a second. “Skipper, how’s this prototype plan going to help anything? Still going to need NAVSEA approval before we get a replacement part, and that is going to take forever.”

  “Eng, we just gave your RO friend deniability. He builds what we want so we can test it. No mention of how we plan to test. I’m thinking a nice long underway will really wring out that prototype.” Glass grinned. “Two birds with one stone. Prove a better design. Get this mission accomplished. Just be ready to get underway the instant you have that new linkage installed.”

  Ψ

  Two tugs puffed clouds of black diesel exhaust smoke and strained hard to push the Boz-Manand in line with the floating drydock at the south end of the bustling, sprawling shipyard. The spanking-new submarine swam very low in the water, the only indication that the ship was now far from seaworthy. It was so low that an errant wave washed a couple of sailors who were working topside overboard. Other workers rushed to throw them lines and haul them back aboard.

  The vessel’s black sail was even darker than usual, stained by smoke from the inboard electrical fires. Thick canvas hoses snaked up through open hatches and then over the side. Torrents of dirty brown water gushed from the hoses as temporary pumps attempted to rid the boat of the floodwaters that had so recently violated the majestic submarine’s pristine interior.

  A small launch motored from the drydock out to the damaged ship, trailing a thick hawser behind it. As the launch came alongside the Boz-Manand, the crew passed the heavy line up to men standing topside on the submarine. They, in turn, connected the line to a clevis attached to other ropes tied to cleats on the submarine’s deck.

  As the launch backed out of the way, a huge capstan at the head of the drydock slowly began to turn. The thick hawser came taut. Water sizzled as it was squeezed out of the fibers by the increased tension. Slowly, the Boz-Manand began to move forward. The two tugs nudged the sub gently to keep it lined up with the drydock centerline. The nearly flooded su
bmarine, extra heavy from all that seawater, passed over the drydock sill with only inches to spare. As she was drawn forward, lines were passed from the port and starboard wing walls to waiting workers on the boat’s deck, a couple still dripping from their unexpected dunk in the sea. They were then alternately pulled and slacked to jockey the boat directly over keel blocks that had been set up on the drydock floor.

  Finally, when all was lined up, giant pumps deep in the floating drydock’s bowels began pumping massive amounts of water out of huge flood tanks. The entire structure then rose out of the water, bringing Boz-Manand higher and higher until finally the drydock floor was above the water and the submarine rested safely on the keel blocks.

  Arman Dirbaz nervously observed this entire complicated dance from the wing wall as the Boz-Manand was docked. Vassily Godonov stood by his side, smoking one cigarette after another. The Iranian engineer stared intently and with great interest at his prize toy as she gradually rose out of the water. Very little on the outside indicated the damage inside the boat. Water still poured from the hoses draped down over the side as pumps continued to remove the dirty brown floodwater.

  A drydock crane had set down a metal brow connecting the wingwall to the submarine’s rounded deck.

  “Mohandes Doktor,” one of the workers shouted at Dirbaz above the industrial din. “You may now come aboard.”

  The engineer frowned, looking angry, and turned to the Russian.

  “Come, Vassily. Now we can see just what those damned Americans have done to our beautiful ship.”

  Arman Dirbaz charged across the brow and then dropped down the wounded submarine’s hatch. The more elderly and far more portly Russian struggled to keep up.

  As Dirbaz assessed the damage, his anger only intensified. The destruction below decks was appalling. Soot, water, and streaks of blood were everywhere. The control room and all the vital and very expensive electronics were almost certainly a total loss.

  The two men climbed down the forward ladder, deeper into the ship, to the second deck and into the crew’s mess, their eyes just now adjusting to the semi-darkness. They could then make out medical personnel, dressed in white Tyvek suits, rubber gloves, and face masks, removing the last of the human remains. Dirbaz promptly gagged and struggled to keep his lunch down as a worker nearby dropped a severed human hand into a bucket. Vassily Godonov’s constitution was not so sound. He just managed to stick his head into a handy nearby pail.

  Dirbaz leaned against something solid to regain his composure. Then he noticed light streaming through a hole in the thick steel of the outboard bulkhead. Then another. Two small holes, each maybe twenty millimeters in diameter.

  “Here! Here is where the cowardly Americans’ weapon struck,” he growled as he stepped over to examine the penetration more closely.

  Godonov, pale-faced and wiping his chin with his sleeve, moved over to examine the small wounds in the submarine’s skin.

  “Wait a minute,” he quietly muttered as he fingered the metal splinters left by the projectile. “Something is strange here, Arman.”

  The engineer leaned in to see what the Russian was talking about.

  “The only strange thing is that the Americans were bold enough to attack a vessel in territorial waters on sea trials,” Dirbaz sneered. “Cowards!”

  But Godonov peered even more intently at one of the new sub’s entry wounds, feeling the bits of metal that had been brutally shoved out of the way by some very powerful force.

  “No. Look closely at this damage. See how the pressure hull steel is actually melted through. No explosives. Only something small moving incredibly fast.” The Russian eased back, leaning heavily on something solid nearby. He closed his eyes, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. He looked again at the hole in the submarine’s hull as if observing an evil specter. “No weapon I know—American or otherwise—made this hole through three centimeters of solid steel.”

  “But the Ayatollah has told us it is the Americans and the Israelis who…”

  Godonov held up his hand.

  “For once, my friend, we must not consider the opinions of the state or guidance from the afterlife. We must objectively determine whose weapon it was that attempted to sink this vessel and murder its crew.” Godonov suddenly slid down and sat on the deck as if his legs could no longer support him. He put his head in his hands, beads of sweat prominent on his bald spot. “Until we do, none of our ships or crews, your Iranian ones or our Russian ones, will ever be safe.”

  14

  The USS George Mason moved silently through the night. The photonics mast’s electronic eyeball slowly rotated, revealing the starlit night seascape on a large-screen command display in the submarine’s control room. Advanced algorithms ignored the impressive astral show as they automatically detected, identified, highlighted, and tracked every contact within the visual horizon.

  Brian Edwards, the submarine’s skipper, watched the screen for a few minutes. He felt a fleeting bit of nostalgia for the old days, for the old boats, where it would be he alone, staring through the periscope at the ship lights, trying to mentally calculate all the information that the algorithm so easily displayed. On a more visceral level, he missed the tantalizing excitement of a pitch-black control room and peering out at the real beauty of the night sky. Instead he was standing in his boat’s control room staring at the pixelated representation on the big screen, all covered with numbers, tracks, and assorted data, as if he were playing some advanced video game.

  At one hundred nautical miles off the Iranian coast, the submarine was well out in international waters, but her sensors reached out far into the night, ignoring political boundaries. Her super-sensitive BQQ-10 sonar systems detected, classified, and tracked every sound source within twenty miles, while her BLQ-10 electronic warfare system swept the skies to gobble up every electromagnetic emission, regardless of its wavelength. Nothing moved for many miles around the submarine without the George Mason’s crew knowing about it.

  But the real power lay in the instantaneous integration of information arriving from so many different sources. More than sixty thousand feet above the water in which the big sub swam, an MQ-4 Triton unmanned aircraft gazed down without blinking on a vast area that included the Gulf of Oman and far into the Iranian interior.

  Even higher, more than eighty thousand feet up, the super-secret, solar-powered High-Altitude Pseudo Satellite—HAPS—drone made large, slow circles over the Iranian coastline. All but invisible to even the most sensitive air search radars, the gossamer-light craft maintained an unblinking eye over most of the Middle East. And it sent its information through several commands until it ultimately showed on the large tactical display screen in the George Mason’s control room.

  The information on the screen mixed all that outside intelligence information with the submarine’s own sonar and electronic warfare sensors to give Brian Edwards a visualization of everything moving within several hundred miles of his boat.

  The Mason’s CO rubbed the days-old stubble on his chin as he idly studied the mishmash of symbology on the very cluttered screen. Icons for passenger aircraft, fighter jets, oil tankers, fishing boats, warships, and even a Chinese submarine almost a thousand miles to the south pocked the display. This part of the globe was not only very dangerous, it was also very crowded.

  Edwards played with a control on a console to narrow the field down to only the slice of planet Earth that lay between him and Chabahar, the Iranian port city on the Gulf of Oman. That adjustment did not reduce the clutter on the screen much at all. It helped, though, when he narrowed the search further until he was only looking at ship traffic.

  Jim Shubert, Mason’s navigator, stepped up next to the captain and studied the screen for a few seconds. He slowly shook his head and pursed his lips.

  “Sure a lot of traffic up there,” he mumbled, pointing toward the smear of pixels that was Chabahar. “Helluva lot more than what intel said we should expect.”

  �
��Yep,” Edwards confirmed with a nod. “Admiral Donnegan said something about a hornet’s nest getting kicked over and it sure looks like those SOBs are still mad. I’m just glad we aren’t going up there. This is a perfect job for our little friends.” He motioned toward the payload modules aft of the control room. “You seen Weps lately?”

  “He strolled through a few minutes ago,” the Nav replied. “Said he wants to make a final check on our little friends before we send them out for a swim.”

  “Conn, ESM,” the 21MC blared unexpectedly. “Captain, we’re getting comms intercepts that correlate to all that traffic up by Chabahar. Decrypting and translating now if you want to take a look.”

  Edwards keyed the microphone and answered, “Captain. On my way.”

  Turning to Shubert, he directed, “Nav, get everything set to launch the UUVs. As soon as I find out what ESM has, I want to drop down to a hundred and fifty feet to launch them. The sooner we get them moving, the sooner we get Admiral Donnegan off our back.”

  The skipper disappeared out the control room’s back door and entered the cypher-locked, cramped submarine radio room. The small team of crypto-tech “spooks” huddled around the BLQ-10 comms display, completely absorbed by the data neatly lined up on the screen.

  The lead spook looked up as Edwards stepped into the cramped space.

  “Skipper, you want to see this.” He looked like a kid who had just found a cheat in Resident Evil 2. But this was no game. He handed Edwards an electronic tablet. “This is a decrypt and translation of what we copied. Most is what we suspected, talking about mine-hunting in the shallow waters. The really interesting thing, though? It’s in both Farsi and Russian.”

  Edwards took the tablet and quickly read the translations. He followed a dialogue between Iranians and their Russian technical experts, mostly complaining about all the “mine-like” trash littering the Gulf of Oman. He chuckled as he pictured them trying to sort through several thousand years’ worth of metal debris. Hell, they had just discovered the wreck of explorer Vasco da Gama’s ship in these waters in 2006. And that hulk had only been there since 1503. Not to mention all the other junk deposited there even before that notable bit of historic rubble.