H.M.S. Unseen am-3

by Patrick Robinson

  “You’re right, Ben. You’re usually right, hah?”

  “Mostly. Which is why, essentially, I’m still breathing.”

  The admiral nodded, gravely. Then he hit his beeper to summon his regular chauffeur, for a tour of the dockyard to inspect the work in progress, in readiness for the Three Strikes against the Great Satan.

  The two officers each wore the new summer uniform of white shorts, socks and shoes, dark blue shirts, short-sleeved, with epaulettes and the insignia of rank. They each carried a 2-foot-long officer’s baton. All of which set them apart as they stood on the dusty edge of the massive construction site being dug out of the shoreline on the southeastern corner of the harbor, directly opposite the regular submarine docks, facing inland, with the road and the open waters of the Strait of Hormuz behind them.

  There was a fleet of forty trucks moving sand from a hole almost 300 feet long, 150 feet wide, and 120 feet deep. It was separated from the harbor waters by a 50-foot “beach,” and as they hauled away the mountains of sand, more trucks were grinding their way in and emptying tons and tons of hard core and rubble onto the floor of the hole. It would be a mighty foundation.

  “Just as you instructed, Ben,” said the admiral. “One reinforced concrete submarine dry dock. Walls 30 feet thick to withstand the impact of a 10,000-pound bomb. The boat will just float in, we’ll pump out the water and get to work.”

  “Very impressive,” said Commander Adnam. “Did you decide yet where to build the model room?”

  “Right here, Ben. We build it 300 feet long, scaffold and wood. Right now we’re just waiting for them to pour the concrete foundation for both buildings. Maybe a week, then we’ll have it erected inside twenty-one days. You have preliminary plans ready for the model?”

  “Almost. By the way, how is your man at the Vickers shipyard in England? I need his details now.”

  “I don’t know off the top of my head whether we have them here quite yet, but I’d be surprised if we were not very much on the case. We have men in all of the big submarine bases in Europe. Our man in place at the greatest submarine builders in the world will be very efficient. Let me check later.”

  September 17, 2004.

  Barrow-in-Furness, England.

  The afternoon was drawing to a close in the brightly lit drawing-office block, out on the edge of the sprawling yards of Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering. Most people there left at five o’clock sharp.

  Vickers, whose engineers had built the spectacular Trident missile submarines, was experiencing something of a morale problem. People did not work late there anymore. There was hardly any point. All successive governments ever wanted to do, it seemed, was to cut programs, scrap submarines, and generally run down one of the finest engineering firms in the world. Some thought the finest.

  Up in the drawing office, desk lights were going out. Young draftsmen were preparing to leave. The big computers, which contained the database for all the submarines built there, were switched off. In the outer offices, where the senior engineering draftsmen worked, only one light was still burning.

  John Patel, a tall, sallow-faced man of thirty-eight, with two outstanding degrees from the University of London, was busy, working quietly, as he did, on the leading edge of new submarine design. John was widely regarded as the most important man in the department.

  He was a brilliant engineer, with a spectacular career ahead of him, either at Vickers, or possibly in the United States, where such men were valued far more highly than they were in the United Kingdom. For the moment, however, he belonged to Vickers, and that was greatly to their advantage.

  Except for one unknown factor. John Patel was not what he seemed, a youngish married man of Pakistani parentage living on the outskirts of Barrow, in the village of Leece. He was an Iranian who, along with his father, had been skillfully inserted into England in the 1970s when John was still a schoolboy.

  Both father and son had beaten the immigration system using Pakistani passports. They had lived in the UK for twenty-seven years, the father, an ex — Iranian naval officer, working undercover for the regimes of both the late Shah, and subsequently for the burgeoning Navy of the Ayatollah.

  The young John Patel had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, obtaining his job, after graduation, deep inside the Vickers corporation. Taught by his father from an early age, he was one of the shrewdest and most valuable field operatives in Tehran’s worldwide spy network. For his specialty was the one area in which Iran nurtured overwhelming ambition — the formation of a strike submarine fleet that could blockade the Gulf of Iran, their own historic waters.

  When John Patel finally returned to his homeland, it would be as a rich man. They had paid him well for the previous six years, during which time he had literally raided the Vickers computerized database, copying for his government high-tech secret documents involving submarines and their systems. That night he would do so again. In the next fifteen minutes he would be the only man left on the floor, as he often was.

  The room which housed the database was in darkness and securely locked. No one had access except between the hours of nine and five, when the office was staffed. Six years previously it had taken John Patel approximately fifteen seconds to take an impression of the key in a piece of window putty and have a duplicate made. But such was his eminence in the department, no one would have given it a thought had he been observed working at the computer after hours.

  He waited until the cleaning staff had completed its tasks before he made his move, at 6:30 P.M. Then, carrying his own powerful Toshiba laptop computer, he walked softly through the darkened main floor and quietly opened the door to the database room, closing it softly behind him. He turned on the light above the consul and heard the hum of the big corporate computer as it moved slickly into life. He tapped into the database for the section that dealt with the now-extinct Upholder-Class diesel-electric submarine, a program killed off by the government in the 1990s to the fury of the Royal Navy.

  Only four of them had been built, at Vickers’s Cammell Laird yard in Birkenhead, 50 miles to the south. But they were excellent ships, highly efficient, as good, probably better, than the Russian Kilo-Class, and they were the only diesel-electric submarines the Royal Navy had built since the “O”-Class back in the 1960s. They were called Upholder, Unicorn, Ursula, and Unseen. The government planned to sell all four of the stealthy 2,500-tonners to foreign governments, a course of action most British admirals considered to be somewhat shortsighted.

  John Patel hooked up his Toshiba on the laplink system and hit the copy and start keys. The operation would take possibly four hours, but he would not have to monitor it. The Toshiba, with 4.3 gigabits on the hard drive, would silently absorb every last sentence and diagram of the thousands and thousands of details contained in the computerized library that represented the Upholder-Class submarine.

  Every working part, every system, the propulsion, the weapons, the generators, the location of the switches, the valves, the torpedo tubes, and the air purifiers. The entire blueprint of these miraculous underwater warships would be copied, and it would take up almost the full capacity of the hard drive. It was the biggest request John Patel had ever received, and he wondered what on earth Iran’s Navy could want with such a mammoth collection of data.

  But the note, delivered personally by his father, had contained an air of urgency, highlighted by the rare inclusion of the specific amount of money he would receive—$50,000, payable as usual to his numbered account in Geneva. John thanked Allah for the general weakness of Vickers’s security. For he planned to spend the night in the building rather than risk being searched if he left via the main gate around eleven o’clock. If he spent the night, hidden somewhere in the building, the chances of being discovered were virtually nonexistent. There was only one security guard on duty in the drawing-office building. And he was normally asleep or watching television. His name was Reg, and he was not vigilant. He usually took a walk around at ten-thi
rty, right after the evening news on ITV. It was not a long walk, however. Reg liked to be back in his little office for the late movie at ten-forty-five.

  At nine o’clock John checked the computers, which were still running flawlessly, the little Toshiba siphoning off the priceless data from the database, turned out all of the lights, and locked the door. Then he slipped through the main floor and into his own office, which he also placed in total darkness. Finally, he sat behind his desk, looking out through the door and beyond to the unlighted corridor along which he expected to see Reg advance in ninety minutes.

  It was a boring wait, but at 10:35 the lights went on in the outer corridor. John Patel softly closed his office door and positioned himself directly behind it. He could hear the security man opening and shutting doors swiftly, each one sounding a little closer. When he reached John’s office he opened the door and stepped inside, but he did not bother to turn on the light, and he certainly did not bother to look behind the door. He was gone inside ten seconds, and John heard him check the next office immediately.

  Reg skipped the computer room altogether, but even had he entered he would not have tampered with a running program. His brief was to locate intruders, nothing else. And, anyway, the late movie tonight was an old 1997 comedy called The Full Monty, which he thought was the funniest film he had ever seen.

  John Patel entered the computer room at eleven o’clock, disconnected his laptop, and switched off the main system. Then he retreated to his pitch-dark office, placed the Toshiba in his briefcase, locked it, and spread out on the floor behind his desk, guessing correctly that Reg was done for the night. At eight-fifteen the following morning, he opened his office door, switched on his desk light, and began work. No one would appear before nine. No one ever did at Vickers, not anymore.

  That night he would leave on time with everyone else, and he looked forward to that. In the evening he and Lisa were driving over to his father’s Indian restaurant in Bradford, 80 miles away across the high Pennines in Yorkshire. That was always fun. But while he and his wife drove home, Ranji Patel would journey through the night, 175 miles south down the M1 motorway to London, taking the Toshiba laptop to the Iranian Embassy at 27 Prince’s Gate, Kensington, special delivery to the naval attaché. Old friends would be up, waiting for him there in the small hours. And the little computer would be in the Iranian diplomatic bag on board Syrian Arab Airways’ morning flight from Heathrow to Tehran.

  November 2, 2004.

  Bandar Abbas Naval Base.

  In two months there had been immense progress on two fronts. Commander Adnam had mastered the rudiments of the Farsi language, using every modern computerized technique. And the Iranian contractors had completed the foundation for the concrete dry dock. They also had in place the 30-foot-thick wall on its left-hand side facing the harbor. It towered 60 feet high. The wall on the other side was nearing completion, and the great steel girders of the roof were in place. Against the long left-side wall the 300-foot model room was already under cover, and teams of carpenters were hammering home the sidewalls.

  Beneath the roof concealed by sheets of tarpaulin, a huge, full-scale, cylindrical model of a diesel-electric submarine was being created out of wood and grey plastic. Commander Ben Adnam spent several hours each day in there with Iran’s senior naval architects and submarine experts. The boat could have been a Russian Kilo, but it was not quite so big, and it contained many significant differences, particularly of internal layout. To the expert eye, it was several degrees more sophisticated.

  Commander Adnam had been careful not to reveal the precise type and class of submarine they would use on the mission, other than to Admiral Badr. He had thus slightly irritated the Iranian Navy hierarchy by brushing aside their questions of when, how, and the Special Ops submarine was coming from? Will you require the new Kilo?

  To every question, the commander answered the same. “I am not yet ready to reveal the whereabouts of the submarine we will use. But you may trust me implicitly. The entire plan depends on it — and at the correct time I will inform you how I propose to acquire it.”

  “But Ben,” they had protested, “we must know how. Do you intend to rent one, borrow one, or even buy one? If so, from whom? We must be told the costs and who the provider might be. There may be great political ramifications.”

  “Not yet,” the commander would reply curtly. “When the time comes I will, of course, present you with a detailed plan and report. At that time you will be free to accept or decline, as you wish. Bear in mind I do not anticipate your declining, because that would cost me $2,750,000, which I consider to be an unacceptable consequence.”

  Out beyond the model room, work continued under the wilting rays of the sun by day and under lights at night. Security was phenomenal. It was impossible to reach the buildings without crossing a cordon of armed guards, placed 200 yards from the new dock. Miles of barbed wire protected all approaches to the site. Every worker wore a plastic identification badge. Every man on the site was photographed and fingerprinted, checked, and searched both incoming and outgoing. A simple sign on the main gate along the road to the base read:

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT.

  Three drivers who had arrived without their badges had been incarcerated in the Navy jail for a week as suspected spies. Special patrol craft crisscrossed the waters of the inner harbor with unprecedented frequency. A frigate remained on permanent patrol outside the harbor entrance, ready to intercept and, if necessary, sink an unauthorized visitor.

  By the year 2004, the Iranian Navy was 40,000 strong, 20,000 regular personnel, and a further 20,000 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, special forces loosely modeled on the U.S. Navy SEALs, or the British SAS. They managed some heavy practice during the war with Iraq, but had never achieved the sophistication of the Americans, and the British would probably have been amused by their efforts. Nonetheless, the young Iranian Naval commandos were tough, fit, and quite incredibly brave, believing as they did, that in the end they were fighting for Allah and that he would protect them and lead them to glory.

  From the ranks of these men, Commander Adnam would handpick two hit men for his mission. The other eighteen would be recruited directly from the submarine service — men who had been essentially without ships since the U.S. attack two years before.

  He spent long hours in consultation with the commanding officers of the IRGC, poring over the records and finally selecting five outstanding veterans for interview, of whom he would reject three. He spent, of course, even longer with the submarine commanders, looking for the men who would one day man the watches on a long submarine journey.

  When he was not involved in selection, Ben spent many hours alone in the Black Ops inner office, studying the superb data on the little Toshiba computer that had come from Barrow-in-Furness. Then he would consult his designers and go to the model room, to help build and perfect another corner of the phantom submarine he had masterminded.

  By early December the model was almost complete, and the commander had selected his personnel. In company with Admiral Badr he had made his way out to the building site to meet the busload of twenty young men with whom he would soon go on a mission of justice for their country.

  Both officers stood and watched as the select few disembarked and formed two lines of 10 men in each. The admiral and the commander walked carefully along each line, addressing each man by name and rank, talking for perhaps two minutes with each of them. They then ordered everyone into the air-conditioned conference room, set beyond the stern end of the 200-foot-long model.

  And there the world’s most notorious terrorist outlined their duties for them. Most of the men had some Arabic, but Ben spoke mostly in Farsi, using phrases he had learned especially for this talk. “Most of you,” he began, “are already familiar with the workings of a Kilo-Class submarine, and you will understand that I have deliberately selected officers who have worked in specialist
areas — I mean, of course, those who have been in charge of propulsion, electronics, generators, sonar, hydrology, communications, navigation, and hydraulic systems.

  “The submarine I shall acquire for our mission will be one with which you are not familiar, and in anticipation of that, we have constructed here this full-scale model. In the coming three weeks I want each of you to familiarize himself with the workings of this submarine. Every switch, valve, and keyboard. And when I say familiarize I mean that I would expect you to go on board the real submarine in the pitch dark, find your area of operation, and work your systems without error, and possibly without light.

  “It is likely that during the course of the next four weeks some of you will not measure up, and we may have to replace you. That, however, will be up to you. This is a time of extensive study, note taking, and memorizing. Pure concentration. I have selected each one of you because I know you have the precise characteristics this mission demands.

  “It will not be without its dangers, but I am confident in our skills, and I am confident in the abilities of each one of you. Now perhaps we should go and make a tour of the model.”

  January 6, 2005.

  Office of the National Security Advisor.

  The White House, Washington, DC.

  The national security advisor himself, Admiral Arnold Morgan, was in deep conference, studying satellite photographs with Admiral George Morris, director of the National Security Agency, located in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  “What the hell’s that, goddammit?”

  “Er, a building, sir. A large building.”

  “I can see that, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a building is it? Looks like a fucking indoor football stadium. What the hell’s it doing in a Navy dockyard? Eh?” Then warming to his theme, as he was always prone to do, the admiral added, “Fucking Arabs taking up football? Nah, bullshit…they ain’t big enough. Betcha you couldn’t find a halfway decent lineman in the whole Middle East. Come on George, what kind of a building is it?”