“The first one to find and identify a warship will become senior sonar man,” Graham said.
A dark expression came over the Iranian’s face, but Graham turned and stepped back around the corner into the control room.
Ziyax, who’d been studying their plot at the chart table, looked up. Like everyone else aboard he was tired. None of them had gotten any sleep in at least thirty-six hours. “We’re nearing the cape. How’s it look topside?”
“Busy,” Graham said. “I want tubes one and two loaded with Mark fifty-sevens.”
Ziyax straightened up, and al-Abbas at the ballast panel looked over his shoulder.
“What is our target?” the Libyan sub captain asked.
Graham leaned around the corner. “Are there any large civilian contacts on the way through the strait just ahead of us?”
“Yes, sir. Could be a luxury liner, I’m not sure. But she’s very large. Four props. Bearing dead on our bow, on the same heading, but making twenty knots. Designate target as Sierra one-seven.”
“All Ahead Flank,” Graham ordered.
“Aye, Captain. All Ahead Flank,” Chief of Boat al-Hari repeated the order.
“I want a firing solution on Sierra one-seven,” Graham told Ziyax. “Look smartly now, if you please.”
Ziyax wanted to argue, it was plain on his face, but he hesitated for only a moment. He keyed the ship’s intercom. “Torpedo room, con. Load one and two with Mark five-sevens. Weapons will have the presets momentarily.”
The Russian-made MK-57s were very old, free-running HE antiship warshots that under the best of circumstances couldn’t possibly sink a very large modern ship, which Graham figured Sierra 17 to be. But they could inflict enough damage to create a great deal of confusion on the surface, because no one in their right mind would possibly suspect that a civilian ship had been attacked by a submarine.
“You’re not trying to sink her, are you?” Ziyax asked.
“If I had the proper weapons I would,” Graham replied sharply. “Hit her in the stern. I want to take out her steering pods.”
Ziyax gave Graham a blank look of incomprehension.
“Unless I miss my guess she’ll be the Queen Mary II,” Graham explained. “No rudders, two of her four propellers are mounted on moveable pods for steering. Quite ingenious, actually. She was preparing to leave the eastern Med last week. Just our luck.”
“If we miss, and put a hole in her stern, she could sink.”
“More’s the pity if we don’t miss,” Graham said sharply. The Queen was American-owned but British registry, and therefore in his mind more than fair game.
In broad strokes it was the same discussion he’d had with bin Laden two months ago. Al-Quaida had all but languished since 9/11. Western intelligence agencies were doing too good a job of rounding up or killing some key lieutenants and advisers, so that recruiting for the organization was way down. And most of the new freedom fighters were little better than ignorant thugs, in it for the glory and not for the jihad.
“The infidels have been beset by contentious elections, ongoing battles in their Congress, one scandal after the other, and best of all a plague of natural disasters,” bin Laden said.
“The Old Testament in living color,” Graham replied dryly. They were alone, walking on the Syrian Desert northeast of Damascus, during one of bin Laden’s highly orchestrated visits to their training camps.
“I tolerate your blasphemy only because you are a good soldier for the struggle,” bin Laden said conversationally.
“And I tolerate your religious mumbo jumbo only because you provide me with the means to strike back at the bloody bastards,” Graham retorted. He had no fear of the al-Quaida leader, because he had no fear of dying.
“Then we are in symbiosis,” bin Laden said, stopping and turning to face Graham. “For the moment.”
“So long as I continue to kill the infidel for you.”
“Not for me,” bin Laden corrected. “But yes, so long as you continue to kill the infidel—men, women, children, there are no innocents—anywhere at any time, especially when they least suspect that death is coming for them, you will have my support and my blessing.”
“Fail, and I die?”
Bin Laden shrugged, but said nothing.
Bloody well have to catch me first, Graham thought. And that would not be such an easy task.
“If you please, Captain,” Graham told Ziyax. “We’ll shoot on sonar bearings. She’s too big a target even for an inept crew to miss.”
Ziyax bridled at the new insult, but went over to the weapons console to see about the firing solution: the bearing, angle of elevation, and speed numbers to be dialed into the two torpedoes.
“Captain,” the Libyan sonar operator called out.
Graham stepped around the corner from the control room. “What is it?” “Distant contact, relative bearing three-five-zero, maybe fifteen kilometers, designate it Sierra one-eight.” Ensign Isomil was pressing his earphones close. He looked up. “There. It’s definitely a warship, sir, her sonar went active again.”
Graham snatched a spare headset and plugged it in the console. At first all he could make out was the tremendous whoosh-whoosh of the QM 2’s four big props, which drowned our everything around them. He was about to ask the young Libyan to filter out as much background noise as possible, when he heard the distinctive ping of a distant warship.
It was British. He was sure of it. Everyone’s sonar signals were distinctive. “I’ve got it,” Graham said. The ship had only pinged once and then had stopped. “How often does he do that?”
“Every fifteen seconds or so,” Shihabi said.
“Can you tell if his range or bearing are changing?”
“Stand by, Captain,” the Libyan sonar man said.
“Captain, your weapons are preset and warm,” Ziyax called from the con.
“Make the tubes ready in all respects,” Graham called out. This consisted of flooding the torpedo tubes and opening the outer doors, which made a lot of noise. But with the QM 2 churning up sea, a noise like four 747s at takeoff, there was no chance that the British warship would hear a thing.
“Yes, sir,” Ziyax responded crisply.
Another ping radiated from somewhere ahead, but this time it sounded much louder to Graham. “Closer?”
“Yes, sir,” Isomil said. “She’s heading directly for us.”
Ziyax was suddenly in the corridor at Graham’s shoulder. “Shall we rig for silent running?” he asked.
Graham held his temper in check. “We shall not,” he said. “Are my weapons ready to fire?”
“I thought it best that we hold off,” Ziyax said. He’d heard the sonar man’s report.
“Why is that, Captain?” Graham asked loudly enough so that everyone in sonar and in the control room could hear him.
“There is an ASW warship out there, obviously looking for us.”
“That’s correct,” Graham said. “What do you suppose their sonar operators are picking up?”
Ziyax opened his mouth to speak, but then glanced at the waterfall display on the Feniks sonar set tracking the QM 2. The signal was overwhelmingly solid. He turned back to Graham. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Sorry about what, Captain?” Graham asked tightly. “Speak up, so everyone can hear you.”
“I was wrong, and you were right. We are invisible behind the big passenger liner.”
“You are relieved of duty, Captain,” Graham ordered. “Wait for me in the wardroom, I’ll be with you shortly.”
Ziyax turned without another word and went aft.
“Assam!” Graham shouted.
“Yes, Captain,” Assam al-Abbas replied.
“Take the con.”
“Yes, sir,” al-Abbas said.
Graham turned back to Isomil. “You’re chief sonar man as of this moment. Don’t let me down.”
“No, sir,” the young Libyan ensign answered crisply.
FIFTY-FIVE
HMS
CUMBERLAND
Fifteen kilometers due west, the Broadsword Class British ASW frigate Cumberland was heading into the Strait of Gibraltar. She was on the alpha leg of her patrol station, which was meant to ensure a heads-up for anything emerging from the Mediterranean that might pose a possible threat to the United Kingdom or NATO. Her area of patrol took her endlessly back and forth through the strait fifty kilometers east of Gibraltar, then back out into the Atlantic fifty kilometers beyond Cape Spartel.
It was, the Cumberland’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Willie Townsend thought, nearly as boring an assignment as he imagined being the captain of a nuclear missile submarine would be. Lying on the bottom of the ocean for weeks on end with nothing to do but play missile drills for a war that would never happen, and with no chance of getting out on deck for an occasional breath of fresh air, had to be nothing short of frustrating.
The one advantage of surface operations was the occasional sight of something really spectacular, such as the magnificent QM 2, which they had passed port-to-port with whistles a half hour ago. The luxury liner, which was two and a half times Cumberland’s 430 feet on deck, had been all ablaze with lights, and although it was well after 2200 hours, Townsend had been certain he’d heard music and laughter coming from the grand lady. She had finished her Mediterranean cruise and was heading back to Liverpool to take on passengers for her Atlantic crossing to New York.
“Bridge, sonar.”
Townsend answered the ship’s intercom. “This is the captain.”
“I’m picking up a definite bogey, sir. Computer says it’s probably a Foxtrot.”
Earlier this evening when they’d first started their inbound track, sonar thought it may have picked up a very weak target on passive coming out of the strait, and Townsend had authorized an active sonar search. By then however the Queen was making so much racket that finding anything was impossible, and they’d secured the search. Once they were past and in clean water, they’d deployed their very sensitive Plessy COMTASS towed array.
“Who the hell is patrolling Foxtrots these days?” Townsend asked his XO, Lieutenant Howard Granger.
“The Libyans, I’d suspect,” Granger replied. He was the intellectual among the officers. The crew wanted him to try out for the American television show Jeopardy! “They still have four of the boats in service.”
“What’s he doing?” Townsend asked the sonar officer.
“He’s turned southwest, Captain, and it sounds as if he’s putting his foot in it.”
“Very well, he’s not our problem. But I want you to keep track of him for as long as possible. If he turns north, I want to know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Should we call this one in?” Granger asked.
“We’d best do it,” Townsend said. “Heaven’s only knows what the Libyans are doing so far from home. But it’s probably not good.”
SIXTH FLEET HEADQUARTERS
Charlie Breamer was just getting set to turn in for the night after a long, contentious day, when his bedside telephone rang. He’d gotten the ROV pictures of the Distal Volente lying on the bottom where the Foxtrot should have been from Bruce Simonetti before dinner, but he’d had to sit on them. The admiral had left for the day, and his instructions had been explicit: He was not to be disturbed for anything other than an all-out emergency. And God help the son of a bitch whose idea of what constituted an emergency was different than the admiral’s.
“Breamer,” he answered, and his wife stirred but didn’t awaken. He glanced at the nightstand clock. It was one minute after midnight.
“Tony Parker, here. Sorry to disturb you at such a filthy hour.” Commander Parker was chief of operations for the British arm of NATO’s STANAVFORLANT—Standing Naval Forces Atlantic. He and Breamer were old friends, having participated in numerous NATO exercises all through the Cold War years.
“Good evening, Tony, what’s keeping you up so late?” Breamer asked. He was sure that whatever the reason for Parker’s call, it wasn’t social.
“I think we’ve found that wreck your people were banging around north of Benghazi looking for.”
“What boat’s that?”
“The Foxtrot that the Libyans are claiming they scuttled.”
“I hadn’t heard that one,” Breamer said. In fact, he’d gotten that bit of information from Russell Sterling in Tunis who’d gotten it from the CIA a full hour before the same message had arrived on his desk.
“I understand that you have to protect your sources and all that, especially the way your boss thinks about Langley. But listen, Charlie, one of our frigates spotted a submerged Foxtrot sneaking out of the strait into the open Atlantic not more than an hour ago.”
Breamer’s grip on the phone tightened. “Are you guys tracking her?”
“Out of our AO. Once she cleared the cape, she headed southwest apparently in a big hurry.” Parker hesitated. “We have no idea what the Libyans are doing out of the Med, but since they’re heading to your side of the pond we thought you’d like the heads-up.”
“You say she’s headed southwest?” Breamer asked.
“Yes, maybe South America,” Parker confirmed. “But that boat does have rudder.”
U.S. EMBASSY, TUNIS
It was a few minutes after one in the morning local when Sterling took the call from Gaeta in his office, where he had been looking at the grainy photographs of the DistalVolente he’d received earlier this evening. He’d not been able to sleep worrying about Graham breaking out into the Atlantic with a submarine, and his boss’s refusal to pass a threat assessment along to Langley.
In fact, Ransom had even refused to send the message even after they’d received a twixt from Langley informing all relevant stations that the Libyans had announced they’d scuttled a surplus Foxtrot. Unless it could be conclusively proven otherwise, he wasn’t going out on a limb.
“Good heavens, Russell, do you have any notion what sort of a fright that would cause? Homeland Security would be over the moon.” Ransom had shaken his head. “Before we raise the red flag we will make dead certain we have the facts. All the facts.”
Hopper had been no help, either, and had left early for a party at the Russian embassy where he was working an FSO he suspected was a junior intelligence officer.
“Your Foxtrot’s in the Atlantic,” Breamer said.
“What happened?”
“We got it from a British ASW frigate patrolling the strait. Your Captain Graham followed the QM 2 out, and it wasn’t until the last minute that she was detected. But by then the boat was out of the Brit’s area of operations, so her skipper logged the contact. Fortunately he called it home, and the word was passed along to us a few minutes ago.”
“I thought your people were going to watch out for us?” Sterling asked. In the old days this would have been called a cluster fuck, but then as now these kinds of screwups usually started from the top.
“Nelson wouldn’t budge,” Breamer said. “No proof.”
“I have the same problem here.”
“I’ll send you a hard copy,” Breamer offered. “But it might be a moot point. The Brits said the sub was heading southwest. They figured South America. They’ve put their Atlantic Fleet on low alert, though Christ only knows what they think the Libyan navy might want with the Falklands is beyond understanding.”
“You didn’t tell them about Graham?” Sterling said. “He was one of their own, after all.”
“I’ll be in enough shit if it comes out I called you,” Breamer said. “I’ll leave the rest of it to Washington. Anyway, it’ll take your Foxtrot ten days or more to make it across. So at least time is on our side.”
“Okay, Charlie, thanks for the heads-up. I owe you one.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, yet,” Sterling said. “But I’m not going to sit on it.”
“Good luck,” Breamer said.
“Yeah thanks, you too.”
CIA HEADQUARTERS
Rencke was on the verge of admitting failure. There were only three missing or unaccounted for Kilo submarines, although his preliminary sources were sure that all three boats had been cut up for scrap ten years ago. It was now simply a matter of verification.
Yet he couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong. Something like this had never happened to him. Not even close. And what was so frustrating was that he knew he was right about everything else. Rupert Graham was the star witness in the case for an al-Quaida submarine mission.
He was at his desk in computer country, racking his brains, all of his screens showing pale lavender, when an incoming call on an outside line lit up in the corner of one of his monitors. His caller ID and search program locked onto the number in less than a half second, and he sat up.
He answered on the second ring. “Commander Daniel Monroe, good evening,” he said, careful to keep the excitement out of his voice. “How did the Office of Naval Investigation Middle East get this number?”
Monroe hesitated for just a moment. “It wasn’t easy, Mr. Rencke. But the CIA’s not the only outfit in town with resources.”
“Tell me you’re not calling about Gitmo,” Rencke said.
“Sir?”
“Then it must be Unterseeboot.”
“Sir, I’m not following you—” Monroe said, but then he stopped. “You mean a submarine? Yes, sir.”
“Bingo,” Rencke said softly. “What kind of a submarine? Not a Kilo?”
“No, sir. She’s a Foxtrot. The Libyans reported they’d scuttled one of their boats, but she made it through the Strait of Gibraltar about two hours ago.”
Rencke brought up a search algorithm for the billions of bytes of data that had come into the Building in the past twenty-four hours. Almost immediately he came up with the announcement that the Libyan government had filed with the UN Security Council early this morning.
He had completely blown it.
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