Terror At Dawn c-21

by Keith Douglass

  The door. If it’s not jammed—He shoved, putting all of his weight into it, and the heavy metal door complained and moved up. With a resounding thud barely audible over the noise of the helicopters, it fell back against the body of the truck. He grabbed the sides of the opening and pulled himself up, finding footholds on the dashboard and in the seat. Every muscle in his body was screaming that as bad as the pain was now, it would be worse in the immediate future. He ignored it, grateful for the training that enabled him to do so.

  Moments later, he was free of the truck. The sound of a helicopter was receding slightly. He took a deep breath of fresh air, smelled the distinctive odor of diesel fuel. A new sense of urgency overtook him. He lowered himself carefully from the side of the truck, trying not to damage his body any further, and hobbled off the path. With each step, his muscles eased slightly. While he could no longer move with the easy grace that he was accustomed to, at least he could walk.

  The Carter compound

  2358 local (GMT -7)

  Drake struggled furiously against the bindings, but there was no give to the duct tape that held her hands together and her legs to the chair.

  She could hear her cameraman swearing quietly as he struggled with his own bindings.

  She had covered too many of these sorts of situations overseas not to know what was coming next. Eventually, there would be a takedown, a violent, no-holds-barred approach on the house. And unless the Americans were a good deal more cautious about it than their contemporaries overseas, there was a good chance she would not survive.

  This can’t be happening here. It doesn’t happen in America. Afghanistan, the Middle East, China. Not here.

  She heard a quiet movement out front and froze. Any second now. If only she had some way of calling out a warning, of telling them that she was still inside and that the men they were after were gone.

  The door in front of her slammed back and bounced off the wall behind it. Men dressed in dark colors were outlined in the door frame. She held her breath, waiting for the first bullet.

  The men moved rapidly, spreading out in all directions. One grabbed her chair, dragged it outside, and threw it to the ground. He was fast, so fast — moments later, a knife was sliding along her skin, cutting into the duct tape. He ripped it off her mouth.

  “Where are they?” he asked, wasting no time.

  “Gone. There’s a tunnel.”

  “Do you know where it goes?”

  “No. I was only in it for moment. It looked pretty long.”

  “Medic!” he shouted. He proceeded to unbind her hands and her legs. “They’ll take good care of you.” With that, he disappeared into the open door.

  Two other men approached her, one carrying a small bag. “I’m OK,” she said, trying to stand up.

  Gentle hands held her down. “We’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Pamela,” a familiar voice said. She turned to see Tombstone kneeling next to her. When had he walked up? She must be more shook up than she thought. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, all at once unable to trust her voice. This wasn’t the first time she’d almost died covering a story, but it was the first time she’d felt so completely violated, so helpless.

  “Get her back to the truck,” Tombstone said. “Is there anything you can tell us?”

  “Tunnel. About ten men.” Her voice was shaky. She took a deep breath, alarmed at the shuddering that was spreading throughout her body.

  “Did they say where they were going?”

  She shook her head.

  “Anything else you can tell me?” Tombstone asked again, examining her closely. Clearly, he wasn’t used to seeing her shook up.

  “No.” Pushing away the two medics, she struggled to her feet, assisted by Tombstone’s hand on her elbow. “Thanks. For getting me out.”

  Tombstone kept his hand on her elbow and for just a second, she saw a trace of the man she had once been engaged to, her lover, the man he’d been before he’d lost Tomboy. But it disappeared to be replaced by the new, sterner Tombstone that had emerged over the last several years.

  “All right, then.”

  He turned to head to the house, but she called out to him. “Tombstone. I meant it. Thanks. And — uh — is my cameraman here?”

  “I want live air,” Drake snapped into her cell phone. “I have the whole story — every bit of it. I was there.”

  “I understand, Miss Drake.” the long-suffering evening producer said. “It’s a dynamite story. But we’re on live feed from the Middle East right now.”

  “Is there any blood? Right now, this second, I mean?” Drake demanded.

  “We’re not sure, but it looks like a big strike against some shore stations.”

  “I don’t care what it looks like. You know the rule: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ And right now, Idaho is a whole lot bloodier than a bunch of bombs hitting sand in the Middle East, at least at this very second. And seconds are what count.”

  “Okay, okay. Stand by. We’ll feed you as breaking news in four minutes.”

  “Okay, and I want two minutes,” Drake said.

  “Shit, no. I got bombs falling over there. Thirty seconds.”

  “Ninety.”

  “Done.”

  Drake snapped her cell phone shut and turned to her cameraman. “On in four for ninety.” He just nodded — he’d worked with her often enough to know that as long as he did his part, she’d be letter-perfect with hers.

  Drake shut her eyes, mentally outlining her report. Ninety seconds — thirty better than she’d been willing to settle for, but still not enough time for everything. They’d already uploaded the footage they’d taken from the hill overlooking the Smarts’ and the coverage during her meetings with Carter. There’d be some outside footage of the compound — damn, she needed visuals! Sure, she could stand in front of the camera and talk, but viewers these days went for the visuals, not the talking heads, and there was only so much of the stark landscape around them that they’d want to see.

  Just then, she heard someone shout, “We found them. Ten of them, in the tunnel!”

  “Any survivors?” Tombstone asked.

  “No.”

  Ah. She felt a mixed surge of relief and pity that Abraham Carter and his men had not made it out.

  If it bleeds, it leads. And just what could be more interesting in the Middle East right now than this?

  TWENTY-TWO

  Viking 701

  Sunday, September 16

  0100 local (GMT +3)

  Well to the west and south of the fighters now plunging toward the coast, Commander “Rabies” Grill surveyed the ocean below him. Funny how after enough time spent staring down at water, you can pretty much figure out where you were even without your navigation gear. This nasty, dark body of water below him, for instance. It could never be mistaken for the clear dark blue surface of the Pacific, which seemed so deep and inaccessible. It was, Rabies thought, the most indifferent to human presence of all the bodies of water.

  The Atlantic, now, that was a different matter. Crossing time to Europe was around a week to ten days, depending on how fast the admiral wanted to get there. Just off the coast of the U.S., there were the silty brown coastal waters, then the sudden, clear green path of the Gulf Stream as it made its way north, arced east near Greenland and Iceland, then headed back south along the coast off England and Wales, carrying with it rich nutrients from the East Coast through the Arctic realms. The boundary between the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean was usually fairly clear, occasionally muddied by a few eddies that spun off from the Gulf Stream. Sometimes Rabies could even believe that he felt the line of mountains that ran down through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that almost divided the ocean into two bodies of water. Even with their jagged points well below the surface, they were a major factor in acoustic transmission and submarine detection.

  And then there was the Med, ah, the Med. It wasn’t that Rabies liked the water that
much — it was what it represented. Warm, sun-drenched islands, Italian food, Greek food, every imaginable cuisine brought to the coast of this ancient sea by the inhabitants of Europe and elsewhere.

  While it might be a gourmand’s dream, as the busiest bit of water in the world the Mediterranean was a submariner’s nightmare. It was loud, noisy, and shallow. The water was dark green and brown, occasionally blue in the deeper parts, and in some places you could almost see the bottom. There were other problems with finding submarines in that area as well. The mouth of the Mediterranean was one of the strangest environments for acoustics in the world. Cold water flowed into the Mediterranean along the bottom, while warm water flowed out along the top, creating such turbulence near the mouth that any detections were virtually impossible. The salinity, too, differed widely between the two, as the salt water pouring out of the Med mixed with the salt water from the sea. The oceans were largely homogeneous when it came to salinity, but the Med was the one place that wasn’t, along with the Dead Sea, which was so dense and salty that it was virtually impossible to avoid floating. Not that that mattered to Rabies — there were no submarines in the Dead Sea.

  Yet, when he thought about it, the Red Sea had to rank right up as his least favorite ASW environment. It was deeper than the Med, but the bottom was littered with wrecks and uncharted obstructions, all of which interfered with MAD and sonobuoy detections. The United States had made considerable strides in charting all the obstructions, but there was still a long way to go. Every country in this part of the world seemed to put up oil pipelines overnight, and the new ones were hardly ever annotated on the charts, even though the quartermasters did their best to keep up.

  And then there were the drilling rigs. The ones far offshore — and even the ones near the shore — radiated broadband noise that shot through the entire spectrum, blanking out many useful frequencies. Normally, you could filter some background noise out, but there were so much of it here that you risked losing too much signal along with the interference.

  Oh, well. Tough for him, but even worse for the submariners who tried to work in these waters and the Persian Gulf. For decades, it had been conventional wisdom that no submarine could operate in the Persian Gulf. During Desert Storm and Desert Shield, the United States Navy had proved everyone wrong. While the submariners despised working in shallow waters, they reported their exploits with such smugness that most of the other warfare communities wanted to smack them.

  The latest intelligence reports speculated that the Iranians might have just received a shipment of minisubmarines from North Korea via China. The small ten-man-crewed boats were ideally suited to operating in these constrained waters. They were powered by a battery charged by a closed-circuit diesel engine, and unless they were charging those batteries or on the surface, they were virtually undetectable. They could cover long ranges with their late-generation battery technology, moving slowly but inexorably toward their targets.

  There were two major shortcomings with mini-submarines. First, the accommodations made for the human crew who sailed in them were abysmal. Second, the mini-sub had limited storage capacity for weapons. From what he knew of the Iranian sailors, he doubted that the government placed very much emphasis on the first problem. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that berthing space had been sacrificed for torpedo storage.

  Still, there were worse things, weren’t there? After all, most of their missions lasted no longer than a few days, and while conditions might be unpleasant, the crew could at least survive without decent beds. And really, if you got right down to it, the life expectancy of the crew after firing a missile was short enough that bunk beds weren’t what you might call a necessity of life. He patted his control stick fondly, thinking about the torpedoes and antiship missiles slung under his wings. At least, if he had anything to say about it, their life span would be short. It was like what they said in the Russian Navy — the Soviet Navy back then — with radiation sickness rampant among submariners due to inadequate shielding on the early-generation reactors. It was a standing joke that there was no family tradition of submarine service like there was the United States Navy. Soviet sailors who spent much time at all on board nuclear subs were often sterile.

  “Anything?” he asked over the ICS, although he already knew the answer. If there’d been the slightest hint of a contact, his TACCO and enlisted technicians would have him dancing to their tune by now. Although he was the pilot in command, the TACCO in the back, a few years his senior, was mission commander. Unless a decision involved safety of flight or safety of crew, the TACCO’s word was law.

  Rabies didn’t like it much, but on balance it made little difference. After all, if he wanted to head back to ship, there wasn’t much anybody was going to do to stop him.

  “Nothing yet,” the bored voice of the TACCO replied. “Let’s give this pattern another fifteen minutes, then move it to the south a bit. They may be near the entrance, lurking around that new pipeline down there.”

  “Roger,” Rabies said cheerfully. He glanced at his copilot, a young woman on her first cruise. “It’s always like this, you know. Like watching grass grow.”

  “Could be worse. We could be assigned surface surveillance,” she answered.

  Rabies shuddered. “Bite your tongue.” There were few things that the Viking pilot liked less than flying down near to the surface and buzzing commercial ships looking for identifying characteristics and recording the rigging. For one thing, whoever painted the ships usually had lousy handwriting. And for another, it wasn’t that unusual to find that some nations made frequent military use of their commercial fleets. All too often, there was some raghead hiding behind a couple of containers with a Stinger propped up on his shoulder ready to take out the first American he saw.

  No, hunting submarines was what they were for. But the youngsters had to do their time on surface surveillance and taking tracking — he had put his time in when he was a junior pilot.

  “Rabies, head south,” the TACCO said, his voice a notch higher than it had been before. “You got the mark.” A new symbol appeared on Rabies’s display, indicating a fly-to point from the TACCO.

  “You got something?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Faint indications of a diesel engine — it fits for the one they may have on board, according to the intelligence summary. But it’s real intermittent and long-range — we won’t know until we get closer. It’s worth looking at, though.”

  That final assessment, Rabies knew, came from the enlisted technicians. Although the TACCO was in tactical command and Rabies might be the pilot in charge, all the people on board knew who really held the keys to their success. It was the first-class petty officer seated next to the TACCO, the one with the finely trained eyes and ears who could sniff out the sound patterns made by machinery from among noise, signals from noise, submarines from surface ships, and friend from enemy.

  AW-1 Greenberg, the antisubmarine warfare specialist flying this mission with them, was exceptionally good, even among the elite community of aviation subhunters. He had recently completed a tour with the intelligence staff in San Diego, and was completely familiar with all the intelligence that was too highly classified to ever make it to the fleet. That was probably why the XO had him on this mission, hoping they could pull something out of their ass on this one. Because if there was anything that made a carrier nervous, it was having undetected submarines in the area. What you couldn’t see, you couldn’t kill, and the only thing that worried them more than submarines was chemical or biological weapons.

  “Dropping two,” Rabies said, nodding at the copilot. She dropped a sonobouy at the indicated point, then watched as he navigated from point to point as directed by the TACCO. When he finished, the electronic plot indicated a long line of sonobuoys.

  “All buoys cold and sweet,” Greenberg reported, indicating that each of the new sonobuoys deployed was working properly but not detecting any contacts. “Hold it—got it. Buoy thirty-four, sir
. Buster.” Buster meant bust your ass getting there.

  “Let’s go get them,” Rabies said gleefully. He put the Viking into a sharp turn heading east. They were at the very edge of their assigned area, maybe just a touch closer to the coast than he would like, but well outside of the known Iraqi shore-based missile ranges.

  Known ranges. He wondered if anyone else noticed that little phrase.

  “I’m holding a diesel engine, a couple of pumps, sir,” Greenberg said, his tension evident only in the fact that his voice was a little faster than normal. “Could we make a pass and check out the surface?”

  “You got it,” Rabies said, putting the aircraft into a descent. It was a sanity check of sorts, to take a good look at the surface of the ocean where you thought you had a submarine to make sure there were no ships in the area that corresponded to it. It was an especially necessary precaution in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf, all of which had heavy merchant traffic.

  Hornet 102

  0110 (GMT +3)

  Thor sat ramrod straight in his ejection seat, his head turned so that he could watch the catapult officer. He circled the stick, got a thumbs-up in return, and nodded with grim satisfaction. Of course the Hornet’s control surfaces worked well. They always did. The light, easily maintained fighter was always in perfect condition — at least, the ones that he flew were. The Marine Corps quality-assurance technicians made certain of that.

  On signal, he eased the throttles forward to full military power. They clicked past the detente and into afterburner. The catapult officer stood, snapped off a sharp, proper salute, then crouched down and touched the deck and pressed the pickle. In the space of a microsecond, Thor returned the salute, faced forward, and braced himself.

  As always, the first jolt was hardly impressive. An instant later, what began as a gentle jolt changed into crushing pressure on his chest as the light fighter slammed down the catapult. The Hornet rattled, steam boiling up from the shuttle, clumsy and ungainly while still bound to the carrier by the shuttle, yearning to be away from the steel and in her natural element. Finally, when the noise had built to an almost unbearable level, he felt the sudden, sickening drop and release of pressure that told him he was airborne.