Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5)

by George Wallace

  Lord, he thought, I hope Abdul remembers to get onions on my Big Mac.

  And then he prayed that his partner did not accidentally encounter those dangerous-looking thugs he had just watched get lost among the outcroppings and boulders.

  Ψ

  Joe Glass stood at the forward door to USS Toledo’s Machinery One compartment. It was a mess. The pungent, acrid odor of smoke mixed with the normal amine smell that still hung heavy in the air. The lighting was very dim, the fixtures heavily discolored from the smoke and fire. Temporary lights hanging from the overhead gave the space a surreal look.

  The engineer in Glass’s nature was more than the CO could suppress. His ship was hurt. Injured while they were at sea. Damaged as they were performing an important mission. There was no thought of turning back toward Diego Garcia and the waiting tender that could fix what was broken. No, they would do their best and heal the ship themselves. Fight hurt if they needed to.

  But right now, Glass knew he had to see that his crew had everything they needed to repair her.

  Chief Johannson had set his team of machinist mates to work. Their priorities were clear. The emergency diesel generator was first on the list. Chief Johannson put three of his best people to the task of carefully disassembling and inspecting the big, smoke-streaked machine. The diesel completely filled the center part of Machinery One with only a narrow passage on either side. There was hardly room for the men to work, let alone for anyone else to squeeze past them. Inspection covers had been removed, allowing access to the machine’s deepest innards. The machinists meticulously inspected every component from the injectors to the turbocharger. It was maddeningly slow and dirty work, disassembling, measuring, and then re-assembling the complex contraption.

  Over on the after-port side of the tiny space, Chief Gromkowsky let loose the occasional colorful expletive as his electricians slowly worked to take apart the fire-ravaged CO-H2 burners. Without them, maintaining breathable air inside the big vessel would be difficult. Number one burner was badly charred and appeared to be beyond repair. But at least there was a sliver of hope that they might be able to fix—or at least jury-rig—number two and get it back into operation. But it was going to require time and effort. The complicated electronic controls were in bad shape from the fire, but the seawater used to douse it had done its own special kind of damage, too.

  Voltmeters, oscilloscopes, and pages of schematic drawings littered the small amount of horizontal space. Chief Gromkowsky was reading from an electronic tech manual screen, calling out voltages and wave forms that were supposed to be present at various points within the electronics. One of his electricians, dangling almost upside down and contorted around the piping, succeeded in getting the probes to the right test points, but it took another electrician to read and call out the results.

  A young seaman stepped into Machinery One and approached Glass.

  “Captain, Officer of the Deck sends his respects and reports that sonar has regained contact on Sierra Three-Four on towed array broadband. He requests you come to control.”

  Joe Glass reluctantly nodded, squeezed his way out of the compartment, and hopped up the ladders to the control room. There he burst into another quiet hive of activity. Jerry Perez, the Nav, was standing watch as the officer of the deck and was busily supervising the section tracking party from where he stood on the starboard side of the periscope stand. Master Chief Wallach, the chief of the boat, sat in the diving officer’s chair, calmly sipping on a cup of coffee as he kept an eye on his ship control party. XO Billy Ray Jones was in the aft corner of Toledo’s control room, watching the well-practiced choreography play out as he spoke with Doc Halliday.

  Perez saw Joe Glass walk in and quickly stepped over to where the CO had stopped to flip through the sonar displays on the control room BQQ-10 display. Glass, eyes on the monitor screen, did not even look at him.

  “What you got, Nav?”

  “Captain, on course north, speed twelve. Hold sonar contact Sierra Three-Four, bearing three-zero-seven, drawing left. Classified possible heavy warship. Minimum cross-bearing range is ten thousand yards. Best solution range forty thousand, course two-nine-zero, speed fifteen. I intend to maneuver to course west and then spiral in behind him at best covert speed.”

  Glass nodded and half grinned. This agreed precisely with what he was seeing on the display. Perez had just given him a precise, accurate, and professional report, exactly as he had been trained to do. That was one reason Joe Glass trusted the man with his own life, as he did most of the other members of the submarine’s crew.

  “Keep an eye on the relative speed in the line-of-sight,” Glass advised. “Unless he is on a broader course than your solution, you’ll have to speed up to close if you are only holding him on the towed array.” Glass glanced at the recommended solution on the fire control system. It looked pretty good. But he well knew that there were an infinite number of solutions that would “look good.” Only one of them would be correct. Choosing the wrong answer could allow the quarry to slip away. Or even worse, turn the hunter into the hunted.

  “Come broad on him at something like two-two-zero. Get a leg and lock in a good solution. Then let’s sprint in until we hold him on the sphere,” Glass directed. “Then it’ll be a whole lot easier to spiral in and track this guy.”

  Perez understood his skipper’s suggestions perfectly.

  As Glass walked aft to the navigation stand, he heard Perez order, “Left full rudder, steady course two-two-zero.” Then the CO felt the big boat heel ever so slightly as the rudder pushed it to the new course.

  Billy Ray Jones looked up from the document that he and Doc Halliday were poring over.

  “Skipper, Doc and I are checking the Atmosphere Control Manual. Until we get a scrubber back on-line, it looks like we’ll need to ventilate at least twice a day to keep everything in spec.” He pointed to a chart in the manual, then shifted a couple of pages to another graph. “Once we have a scrubber back, then we’ll only need to ventilate once daily until we can get a burner working.”

  Glass nodded as he studied the information.

  “That, of course, all hinges on not having any atmosphere problems—no chemical spills, no refrigerant leaks, no burned French fries, no flatulence from the chiefs’ quarters.”

  Jerry Perez stepped over, interrupting.

  “Skipper, we are steady on course two-two-zero. Ten minutes until the array is stable. Sonar reports new contact Sierra Three-Five, bearing one-four-three on the sphere. Sonar classifies submerged contact.”

  Damn. Things were getting interesting. They had no idea what the first contact might be and now the party had been crashed by another vessel, likely a submarine.

  Glass checked the Embedded National Tactical Receiver (ENTR) display, the sophisticated digital receiver that pulled information from satellites orbiting high above. He wanted to see where the intel weenies believed all the other vessels in the area were located. The God’s-eye display showed the Chinese battle group forty miles off to the northwest and a smattering of commercial traffic scattered around the area. The only submarines displayed were a British Astute-class in port in Bahrain, an Indian SSBN in a very large “area of probability” off the Indian coast, and the Chinese Yuan with a very old track down to the south. Nothing around where Toledo floated, according to the best information US taxpayer dollars could buy.

  “Sonar, Captain. Are you sure you have a submarine?”

  Glass regretted his question even as he asked it. If his sonar team said they had a sub, then a sub was out there, no matter what the analysts sitting in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices half a planet away might say.

  “Captain, Sonar, sir, we have engine lines on a ten-cylinder diesel, equates to a Chinese Type 39C Yuan-class submarine.” Glass recognized the strong, clear voice of his new sonarman, Joe Drussel, over the 21MC announcing system.

  The captain looked up just as Master Chief Zillich stuck his head out of the sonar room door t
o further answer his ill-advised question.

  “And it sounds like he needs to clean his injectors,” the legendary sonarman drily reported. Point made.

  Glass ignored the implied reproof. Clearly the intel broadcast was wrong. Glass and his crew would simply have to locate and identify Sierra Three-Five and then report back home.

  “Officer of the Deck, contact of interest is Sierra Three-Five, the probable submarine,” Glass told Perez, loud enough that everyone in the control room could hear him. “Get a tracking solution on Sierra Three-Five. Sierra Three-Four is now the secondary contact. Maintain contact on Sierra Three-Four and generate a tracking solution.”

  Glass stepped back over to the navigation stand. He drew a straight line from where the ENTR said the Yuan should be to his best guess of where the bastard really was. The line pointed directly to where the Chinese battle group was steaming.

  “XO, Nav, look at this.” Glass explained his idea. On the electronic chart he pointed to the southeast, off the southern Indian coast. “Intel says our friend is down here because that is where they last had contact on him.” Then he pointed to where they now held the Chinese submarine on sonar. “This is where he actually is now. Assume he was lollygagging around down south when he got orders to rush up to meet with his skimmer friends. What would he do?”

  Jones scratched his head for a second. Then his face lit up as if a switch had been thrown.

  “Reckon he’d high-tail it up there at best speed. Same thing we would do. That would also explain him snorkeling. His AIP system wouldn’t give him enough power to move so quick without some air off the surface. But it would have to be something pretty dang important for them to have to get there in that big a hurry. He’s telling us and everybody else in the ocean where he is. Wonder why.”

  “That’s what I intend to find out, XO,” Glass answered. Pointing to a spot in the ocean halfway between the Chinese ships and a couple of miles off the straight line, he went on. “Nav, work your way over here, between the two of them, and just off the track. We’ll slip in behind our friend and eavesdrop on their little party.”

  “And if they take offense at our showing up uninvited at their throw-down?” Jones asked.

  “Let’s just hope they are not so offended that they try to slam the door in our face.” The skipper tapped his lips with a forefinger. “Hate to have to kick it down.”

  18

  “Conn, Radio, all traffic onboard and receipted for. No longer need the OE-538 mast,” the 21MC blared, reverberating throughout George Mason’s control room. “We have new tasking. Sending to the Command Console.”

  Almost immediately the display being watched by Lieutenant (junior grade) Bill Wilson, the sub’s officer of the deck, shifted to gibberish and then to text. The young officer scrolled through the list of messages until he found the new OPORD. He gave it a quick scan and then sent the messenger to fetch the captain and the navigator.

  Jim Shupert, George Mason’s navigator, arrived first, still sleepily rubbing his eyes. He was mumbling about how inconsiderate it was of Fifth Fleet for OP ORDs to always arrive in the middle of the night. That was when Brian Edwards walked in.

  “What we have, Nav?” the CO asked, but he was already looking over Shupert’s shoulder.

  “Looks like our liberty call in Bahrain has just gone down the tubes,” the Nav answered. “Fifth Fleet wants us to head up north so we can keep an eye on Chabahar.”

  Edwards read a little more of the message.

  “Looks that way. Let’s get this plotted out on ECDIS and see what we need to do.” Turning to the OOD, he added, “Mr. Wilson, please ask the XO to join us.”

  The submarine’s executive officer, LCDR Jackson Biddle, arrived a few minutes later, closely followed by the chief of the boat, ETCM Dennis Oshley. Biddle, rather short, stout, and African American, was a polar opposite for the tall, athletic, and decidedly blond Brian Edwards. Both were Naval Academy graduates but totally different in just about everything else. Where Edwards tended to be cautious, to judiciously follow the rules, Jackson Biddle was far more likely to hazard a risk to get them where they needed to be. The benefit was that together, they made a fine team in getting the most from the sophisticated submarine and its crew.

  “XO, take a look at this,” Edwards said, pointing at the new OP ORD. “We need to get up north, off Chabahar, and set up an I-and-W mission. The big kahunas back at Fifth Fleet want to make sure the Iranians don’t pull off any nasty surprises up there and then try to blame it on us.”

  An “indications and warnings mission” was a process used to observe and report enemy activity that might lead to outright hostilities or other worrisome events before they actually occurred.

  “And we just now pulled all the sensors out of there, so the intel guys are flying blind,” Biddle observed. “Why don’t we just send a couple of our little friends back up there? They could re-plant the sensor field and still do the electronic signals monitoring. The UUVs would sure as hell be a whole lot easier and safer.”

  Edwards read a little more before responding to the XO.

  “Well, my best guess is that they don’t want to risk any UUVs being captured and paraded in front of the Al Jazeera cameras. Imperialistic Americans intruding into their part of the world, provocative acts of war. That would make for some bad optics. On the other hand, nobody is going to capture us. Even if we get detected, and we’re going to do all we can not to, all we would do is run like a scalded dog. Even so, they’d have nothing to show on the evening news or to the UN General Assembly.”

  Master Chief Oshley, a quartermaster by training, took the new OP ORD and quickly plotted out the intended course track on the ECDIS. Within a few minutes, the electronic display had a bright white line stretching from their current location off to the northwest. The necessary courses and speeds were printed out in a small box in one corner.

  Oshley shook his head and smiled.

  “Man! I remember when I was a sea pup, that would have taken hours to put together, picking out the right charts, making sure they were updated with all the latest Notices to Mariners, and then manually plotting the tracks and hand-calculating the speeds.” He patted the ECDIS display, stretched, and did a mock yawn. “I just did a hard day’s work and it took me all of five minutes.”

  Biddle chuckled. “Now that you’ve put in such a hard day’s work, COB, it is, after all, now Saturday morning.”

  Oshley smiled. “Damned if it ain’t. And you know what that means. We got our chores.” He grabbed the 1MC microphone and announced, “Up all hands! Rub-a-dub-dub, all hands clean up the sub! Now commence field day!”

  Ψ

  The full moon provided some meager illumination for Bill Beaman and Abdul Yusufzai as they made their long and perilous descent down the slopes of Solomon’s Throne and then across the Wyeze Kar, an intermittent stream that, fortunately, was now mostly dry. Other times it could be a torrent as it fed into the Shahbadin Wahai. That would have caused more problems than either warrior wanted to deal with on this particular night.

  Playing the inveterate tour guide, Abdul pointed out that the Shahbadin Wahai had some of the finest freshwater fishing in all of Asia. Beaman only grunted at this tidbit of information. He still preferred the bath-water-warm, emerald green waters off the Bahamas where he now spent most of his time since retiring from the Navy two years before. From the front door of the Peace and Plenty Bar, which Beaman now owned and operated—and only when he felt like it—it was precisely seventy-two unhurried paces west to the head of the pier at Dexter’s Bait and Charter. And there was always a boat captain there looking for an extra deck hand. No pay but cold beer stowed on the ice in the fish hold and all the grouper or snapper the big ex-SEAL wanted to carry back to grill or fry for supper.

  But at 0300, after eight hours of grueling descent and with an equally taxing climb looming in their immediate future, fishing was not high on Bill Beaman’s list.

  The moon had just set behind
the slopes to the west when the pair started the near-vertical ascent up the Obasta Tsukai. The sun would not peek over the high ridges to the east for several hours yet. Only the faint alpine glow gave proof that a sun even existed somewhere over there. The forced march was exhausting, even for the retired SEAL and his Pashtun partner. They scrambled over the scree and loose boulders, grabbing a foothold or a handhold to laboriously pull themselves up the mountainside. Gradually, at a snail’s pace, the valley floor receded far below them. However, the mountain’s upper reaches were still hidden by the clouds skirting the peaks much higher up.

  Then, just as Bill Beaman was worrying that they would never reach the rendezvous point, his GPS light suddenly flashed. They had arrived at the coordinates that he had recorded the previous night from the other side of the valley, the spot where the helicopter hovered and picked up some of the fighters. The place was singularly indistinguishable from anywhere else on the mountainside. Then he spotted the wrapper from a piece of Amrus candy, the traditional Pakistani sweet, snagged by a crevice. A human being had been at this spot. And when he looked up, he could just make out a very narrow trail winding further up the mountain. To an experienced tracker, the trail revealed barely visible signs of recent use. A rock kicked over. A shrub with a tiny broken branch. Just a hint of a boot print in a dusting of sand.

  The pair followed the paltry trail ever higher and farther around the mountainside. The morning changed to afternoon as they doggedly continued their climb, taking their time, doing all they could do to remain concealed and watching for any surveillance devices.

  And then, by evening, they were high enough that breathing was becoming more and more difficult. The sun sank with a crash beyond the high ridge to the west, plunging them once again into darkness. It was a mixed blessing.

  The trail remained barely visible in the moonlight. Beaman and Abdul were forced to slow and were on the verge of stopping, figuring this barely discernible path really led nowhere after all. Had they been so determined to make this climb pay off that they were by now only imagining a trail to follow in the near darkness?