Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Stop. If the plane was so far away that our antiaircraft missiles could not reach it, it must have been very distant.

  How far away was it?”

  “About a hundred kilometers, perhaps slightly more.”

  “A hundred kilometers. And these paratroopers will have a long walk ahead of them. Did your radars show any parachutes?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Colonel, come with me.”

  Sihoud led Ahmed to a partitioned corner of the room and snapped his fingers. An attendant brought two cups of steaming tea. Sihoud sipped the brew and stared through the steam at Ahmed, his eyes now showing some compassion.

  When he spoke his resonant voice was quiet, even gentle.

  “Colonel Ahmed, Rakish, my friend, you are thinking about your wife and son, are you not?”

  “I’ll always think about them, but that has nothing to do with this

  bunker being threatened.”

  “I wonder. Rakish. I wonder whether losing your family and your home has made you think you might lose me too.

  I assure you that will never happen.”

  As Sihoud talked Ahmed’s mind wandered … 200 meters down a utility-access tunnel there was a U-10 truck waiting for him and Sihoud, and four kilometers further south a Firestar fighter was being pulled from a hangar, fueled, and warmed up, all on Ahmed’s orders. As chief of staff he was also responsible for Sihoud’s security, and that part of the job was almost the toughest. Because Sihoud was fearless to the point of foolhardiness. The man really did believe he was invulnerable—a dangerous self-deception. And if Sihoud did not want to be protected, there was little to be done until the worst happened. Perhaps then he would listen.

  Ahmed decided to keep the U-10 truck and the Firestar waiting and ready. While Sihoud continued to talk Ahmed pulled out. a machine pistol in a leather holster and strapped it on over his fatigues. The heavy feeling of the weapon made him feel better, and for a moment he was able to relax. Now Sihoud was asking about the Scorpions.

  “The Scorpions, Colonel. How will we deliver them and how soon?”

  Ahmed had been waiting for the question. He knew Sihoud would not like the answer but then neither did he.

  “Delivery by aircraft will not be possible. The air force fighters are fully occupied here and in any case their range is too limited to cross the Atlantic. Commercial airliners are no good—their parts have all been used to keep our squadrons of fighters in the air, and the mechanics are all at the fronts. I have considered hijacking an airplane and landing it where we could load the missiles but that would betray the operation. The transport of the missiles must be kept absolutely secret.”

  Sihoud suspected that Colonel Ahmed’s plan must be unconventional indeed for Ahmed to brief him this way.

  “Finally, sir, the unit’s launch must not be detected, an other reason air deployment is out of the question. The American air-traffic control system is sophisticated and an unidentified aircraft that drops a piece of cargo that then goes supersonic would be immediately detected—”

  Sihoud nodded as the colonel continued. Ahmed’s American education annoyed him, even at times like these when it would help their purposes. Ahmed had been trained by the U.S. Air Force back in the days of the Shah, and had studied engineering at a so-called prestigious university

  in the American Northeast. Ahmed claimed to have studied his American military counterparts and know their weaknesses.

  Of course, so far that had not helped them avoid the devastation brought about by the Coalition. Sihoud decided to hurry Ahmed along.

  “Fine, Colonel. No air transport or delivery. What is your alternative?”

  “The Hegira, Khalib. We can bring the missiles close to the U.S. coast and fire them from the sea. The Americans will be caught by complete surprise.”

  Morris watched as Lt. Buffalo Sauer sighted in on the U-10 utility truck’s front left tire, a tough shot since the truck was doing about twenty miles per. A moment later the silently fired bullet hit the rubber and blew the tire apart. The U-10 swerved, almost lost control, then slowed and stopped. Two soldiers climbed out and shouldered their weapons while staring at the offending wheel. There was a brief argument until one nodded and walked to the rear of the vehicle for the spare. He bent over to find the tire iron and was dead before he could straighten up. Ensign Dobbs’s blade having sliced his throat open. The other soldier was still looking at the tire when Chief Hansen and his knife dispatched him.

  Hansen carefully lowered the body to the sand. Neither man had made a

  sound in dying. Hansen was cleaning his knife blade with a rag from the truck when the truck’s radio clicked to life, the quick syllables of Arabic blasting out of it. Hansen pulled out his MAC-10 machine gun, checked the hush-puppy silencer and fired into the radio console. The unit disintegrated, the desert was again silent.

  Morris checked the horizon in each direction for signs of other security troops. The northern perimeter of the tall mosque was open and deserted. The outskirts of the city approached near the southern perimeter, the houses and streets quiet. Morris pointed at Cowpie Clites, who walked to the electrified fence, strapped on heavy rubber gloves, and tested the fence wire with a hand-held meter. It was dead, the western perimeter crew done with the work on the high-voltage transformer. Clites produced a pair of bolt cutters and cut a large hole in the fencing, then stepped back. Morris waved his men in, where they took up positions surrounding the mosque less than 200 yards away.

  Morris checked his watch. He had timed their insertion to the second, and so far had been right on schedule. The teams had abandoned the DPVS two miles west of the bunker and had crept silently the final distance, going slowly to eat up the contingency time. The plan called for impact of the Javelin cruise missiles just as the men entered the fence of the compound. If the missiles came too early, survivors, perhaps Sihoud himself, could get away clean. If the Javelins took their time and arrived too late, it would leave the seals exposed, lying on the sand

  waiting for the cruise missiles to come, their discovery by UIF troops meaning immediate execution.

  Or worse, imprisonment and interrogation.

  Morris did not trust cruise missiles. They had a nasty tendency to get lost or fall short or get shot down. Sometimes all three at once. If the operation had been Morris’s to plan he would have saved the Javelins for the next war and gone in now, MAC-10s blazing. But some admiral in the Pentagon wanted to share the action with the black-shoe Navy and had ordered the firing of the missiles from hundreds of miles away at sea. Morris bit his lip, knowing that expensive toys were sexy to the brass, but the only thing that won wars was an infantryman with a rifle, the concept taken to its extreme with the seals, where infantryman and rifle were replaced with commando and compact-silenced machine gun.

  He strained to hear, wondering if the slight whine was his blood rushing in his head or the noise of the Javelins. The whine grew louder, fuller, the sound of high-speed turbofan engines. Jet engines. He trained his night-vision monocular to the sky and thought he saw the airframe of one of the missiles climbing to the sky, starting its pop-up. Only seconds to go now, he thought.

  For a moment Sihoud was stunned. But Ahmed looked calmly at him after saying that the Hegira would bring the missiles to the coast of America

  and fire them. The Hegira A submarine? It was so preposterous that it almost made a twisted kind of sense.

  The Hegira was Ahmed’s predecessor’s idea, and a silly idea at that. Up until now Sihoud had regretted his decision to support the acquisition, but now he wondered.

  Sihoud’s last chief of staff had been the head of the Egyptian navy. Admiral Al Abbad Mansur, who had insisted that they were vulnerable from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It would be ridiculous, Sihoud had insisted, for a mighty land power to fear the sea, and foolish to try to match the seagoing forces of the West with a blue-water navy. Mansur had proposed a different solution, the purchase of three of the
Japanese-designed Destiny-class submarines.

  At first Sihoud had continued to resist, but at Mansur’s persistence he had listened.

  Mansur had pointed out that a small nation armed with submarines could alter the outcome of a war. He pointed to the Falklands War, in which the British submarines had bottled up the Argentine fleet, the Argentinians afraid to risk their surface ships against an unknown submerged threat; and there was the Persian Gulf War, in which unrestricted shipping by the West had allowed them to mass force on the continent. Mansur insisted that littoral warfare using submarines could

  be the edge that could save the union in a fight, and Sihoud finally had agreed.

  The Japanese had designed the Destiny-class submarines for export sale, and in addition to the usual thorough Oriental design, the submarine was relatively inexpensive—for a submarine—only fifty-five billion yen. Three years ago that had not been a grand sum, even though it was the equivalent of an entire squadron of Firestar fighters. The submarine would allow them to patrol the Mediterranean and protect UIF soil from a Western assault from the sea, Mansur insisted, and a second unit in the Indian Ocean would keep them safe from the other side. With perhaps a third guarding them on the Atlantic, no aircraft carrier task group could threaten them. At the time, it had made sense, and while it was a considerable amount of money, it would have given the UIF a three-ocean navy with only three ships. Perhaps Mansur’s vision had been correct, but the acquisition of the ships had been a failure.

  The Japanese had had design problems, as the Destiny-class was brand new and would supposedly revolutionize underwater combat. Delivery had been over two years late, and by then the invasions of Chad and Ethiopia were under way. By the time the first submarine was completed, Sihoud had begun the land attack on India, and by then there had still been no threatening moves by Western navies. In the intervening year Mansur had made other equally damaging mistakes—the India invasion had been full of them—and Sihoud had felt he had no choice but to execute Mansur. It

  had taken six months to train the crew of the first Destiny class submarine, and since its delivery it had been tied up uselessly in Kassab on the Mediterranean. It had spent time at sea, but mostly it had one mechanical problem after an other. Colonel Ahmed had taken over for Mansur—Sihoud had wanted an air force officer, having had his fill of the navy, and needing advice about using the new aircraft.

  Sihoud was himself an expert on the armies, and kept his own counsel on the use and command of the ground troops—he had heard reports from Western media accounts that called him the equal of the great generals, even comparing -him to such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, even Attila the Hun. When Ahmed had taken the chief of staff position, Sihoud had sent him to Kassab to report on the Destiny-class ship, named Hegira by Admiral Mansur in honor of the Prophet’s holy exile. Ahmed reported it to be a miraculous piece of technology, but a useless one for a land power such as the United Islamic Front of God. Sihoud still recalled Ahmed’s report—the Americans have a name for such a thing as this: they call it a White Elephant. The air force would do all that the submarine would do, Ahmed con included, and more. Sihoud had agreed, and the submarine had sat unused ever since.

  And so it was ironic to hear the submarine mentioned in Ahmed’s plan to deploy the Scorpion missile. He must have had this in mind all along. So strange for an air force officer to abandon his beloved airplanes for an odd ship like the Hegira, but it would offer a secret way to get the

  missile to its target. Except it would take much too long … “How long to get to within missile range of the U.S.? Of Washington?”

  “Sir, I hope you will forgive my action in this matter but I ordered the submarine loaded with the weapon components and it put to sea yesterday. It will take time to manufacture the three warshot weapons, perhaps a week or two. And these will be assembled aboard the Hegira while she is in transit. By the time she arrives at her firing station, the missiles will be ready. Even if we were to fly the weapons to the U.S. we would still have to wait for the units to be assembled. I apologize for the unavoidable delay, sir, but in a matter of weeks this war will be quite different.”

  Sihoud nodded slowly, wondering where the next weeks would lead to in this grisly land battle. The approach of the tactical watch officer intmded into his thoughts. The youngster was hollow-cheeked and ill fed to begin with, but the fear in his face made his appearance that much worse.

  “Colonel, sir—”

  “What is it, Massoud?”

  “We’ve lost contact with the perimeter guards. All patrols.

  We had a strange static on one of the radios, like someone was about to transmit, then nothing. I’ve sent a platoon out to check, but—”

  “Take command,” Ahmed ordered. “Send out all the security troops, then seal all portals. The Khalib and I are leaving now for the field. Send for the Seventh Islamic Guard to take protective positions at the bunker until further notice.”

  Javelin Unit One, the first-fired missile from Daminski’s Augusta, flew over the flat desert, getting closer by the second to the target. The terrain comparisons were matching the setpoints and the final star fix showed the unit now one point zero five miles from the target—five seconds away if the unit were to continue flying straight on. But now was the time for the pop-up. The winglets rotated while the fuel-flow valve opened wide to full throttle. The combustors’ temperature soared, the turbine spooled up, the nozzle thrust escalated to the full 3,000 pounds-force of push, and the unit climbed for the sky, the desert below growing more and more distant, only the stars above in view. The pressure altimeter unwound as the missile soared over 1,000 feet, then 2,000. Finally the missile, having traded speed for altitude, slowed at the point of its pop-up arc, the winglets now demanding the missile dive.

  The Javcalcor computer checked the high explosive’s arming status. The detonator train was ready, waiting only for the spark from the fuse. The

  weapon rotated in space, beginning its dive, the radar-seeker window now seeing the horizon, then the mosque of the main bunker complex a half mile below. Still on full thrust, the unit accelerated toward the mosque below, picking up speed as the mosque grew in its vision cone until it blocked out all else. The missile passed through the sound barrier and was going Mach 1.1 when the courtyard tiles of the mosque flew up and smashed into the seeker cone.

  Sihoud felt Ahmed grab his arm and drag him to the south stair tower, pausing only to take up two automatic rifles.

  Sihoud followed him, knowing what Ahmed was thinking, and beginning to wonder if his aide was correct in his caution, although there was still a part of him that resented this move to leave so suddenly. But then, Ahmed was right about the need to be in the field and not in an underground bunker.

  The two men rushed up the stairs. Ahmed handed Sihoud a rifle. At the last landing from the door to the courtyard of the mosque above, there was a metal door to the utility tunnel.

  Ahmed operated the button combination lock, unbolted it, and pulled Sihoud in. They passed through an untidy storage area to another door. Ahmed unbolted it and pushed Sihoud into the utility tunnel, a cramped pipe of precast concrete, not even two full meters in diameter, filled

  with water pipes, electrical conduits, phone cables, sewer pipes, and ventilation ducts. There was barely enough room for a man crouching over to move through the tunnel. Sihoud hurried through it, feeling like a damn fool coward. He reconsidered about twenty meters down the tunnel and pulled on Ahmed’s sleeve. Ahmed stopped and heard Sihoud tell him to stop and return to the command center. It was a terrible place to argue with the general, but that was what he had to do.

  For Javelin Unit One, the next milliseconds passed quickly, the missile’s mission almost complete. The radar-seeker window was crushed by the impact with the mosque courtyard floor, but behind it an armor-piercing shield of uranium protected the Javcalcor and punched through the mosque floor. The kinetic energy of the missile sliced through the lead shielding, then th
e reinforced concrete. By then most of the unit’s speed was lost, but it kept enough momentum to blitz through the first and second sublevels, through Sihoud’s quarters, and through the overhead of the tactical control center. The weapon’s timer, started at the moment of impact with the courtyard above, correctly predicted the missile’s arrival at the fourth sublevel, and anticipating this, had ignited the fuse ten meters higher while still smashing through the floor of the senior officers’ quarters. The fuse lit off and ignited the intermediate explosive, which began the detonation of the high explosive just as the unit crashed through into the command center.

  The ton of Plasticpac high explosives—a patented, secret high-density

  mix with over eighteen times the explosive power of an equivalent weight of TNT—released its chemical energy, the explosion reaching outward to the consoles and men in the room. The underground command center was walled with more concrete, held in place by packed sand.

  The confined explosion smashed the contents of the room against the reinforced walls, the explosion shock-wave a hammer, the concrete sand-braced walls an anvil. The force of it had nowhere to go but up, blowing the ceiling above it upward, rupturing the decks of the levels above.

  Javelin Unit One had been the first missile to arrive in the coordinated attack. Although timed for detonation at the same time, the next four missiles arrived late—late on a scale of milliseconds—but the other four explosions added to the destruction of the first, sending the shredded contents of the bunker skyward in a black and orange mushroom cloud of debris mixed with the remains of what milliseconds before had been men.

  Five seconds after the impact of Javelin Unit One against the mosque floor there was little left of the command center but airborne debris and the fires and smoke within the pit in the earth where the bunker had once been.

  For over two minutes the debris fell out of the sky and rained down on

  the sand surrounding the smoke-blackened hole, the impacting chunks of concrete and metal making little sound as they hit the sand; or if they did make sounds they were lost in the roaring of the orange mushroom cloud rising several thousand feet over the desert floor.