“No, Khalib. I only told them to hold on and give us the time. They do not need to know about the Scorpion, not yet. The fewer who know, the less chance of compromising the surprise of this operation. I do not want the Americans waiting for us.”
“The generals are smart and good fighters, but they are not coordinated without me. Rakish. I must return to the field for our defense. I need to—”
“Sir, wherever you are, the eyes of our enemies are watching, and they will continue to send their squads to kill you. If you believe that the armies are lost without you for fourteen days, imagine the war without you forever. This is how they think. General, and they are not stupid. The attack on the main bunker was not just a missile attack.”
Ahmed felt he had to say the next part, not out of pride but to convince the Khalib that the Coalition was after his head. “There were troops, dozens of them, dropped by parachute, probably from the airplane that we detected. We found their mobile vehicles in the desert. They penetrated the bunker perimeter and murdered our security troops. If the missiles didn’t kill you, the assassins would. There is nowhere that you are safe. General, not until the Scorpions are on their way. Until then you will do best by going aboard the Hegira and waiting. And while you wait you will get your strength back and recover from your wounds.”
Ahmed waited for Sihoud to digest his words, worried that the Khalib would veto the plan — for that matter, so would he had he sat in Sihoud’s place.
But there was no answer from the aft seat.
* * *
Lt. Joe Galvin flipped through the tactical attack plan binder, a stenopad-sized flip chart strapped to his thigh, and searched through the alphanumeric codes, knowing that he’d just been screwed.
The letters sierra delta foxtrot had been transmitted by the air boss just a few seconds before, and Galvin knew the code transmission meant their mission was being changed. For the tenth time in this war, Galvin had felt like turning off the radio after his F-14 Tomcat fighter lifted off the deck of the Reagan; at least that way the brass would not be able to redirect his missions in flight. But as soon as the thought had formed Galvin stifled it. What good was a fighter if it couldn’t be redirected in mid-flight — little better than a mindless bullet. And if fighter pilots wanted to be replaced by robotic cruise missiles, they could all keep thinking like Galvin had been before.
Finally the letters sdf stared up at him from the tactical plan page, large block letters defining the code as close on BOGEY, ESTABLISH CONTACT, AND FORCE TO LAND. WEAPON RELEASE PROHIBITED EXCEPT IN RESPONSE TO HOSTILE FIRE.
“Well, Giraffe, looks like a small change in our rules of engagement,” Galvin called.
“Let me guess,” the radar intercept officer called on Galvin’s headset. “Return to the ship and forget about it.”
Galvin was almost able to see the sour look on his RIO’s face. Eugene Fredericks, radio handle Giraffe, was a sarcastic, witty soul, tall and gawky, earning him his less-than-macho moniker; it seemed even worse in contrast to Galvin’s own handle, tailback, taken from his days on the 1988 Army-kicking Annapolis team.
“Worse,” Galvin replied. “We’re ordered to close on the guy and force him to land.”
“Yeah, right. I see what you mean. What keeps the SOB from shooting at us?”
“Absolute fear of the United States Navy?”
“We’re dead.”
“Give me an intercept vector and call it out to Vinny.”
“Roger. We’ll take his seven o’clock, Vinny his five.”
* * *
Ahmed looked to the east, knowing dawn was coming, minutes away. The rendezvous point was less than twenty minutes ahead. He had started to think about the message to the Hegira, wondering if the young airman had gotten the transmission through, and if he did, if the submarine’s captain received it and believed it.
The alarm indicator sounded sudden and shrill in the whisper-quiet cockpit. The central video screen dropped the images of the navigation display and flashed up a tactical view of the Firestar in screen-center with two approaching hostile aircraft astern.
Four flashing screen annunciators proclaimed rear facing N16 missiles armed. The range to the incoming aircraft was fifty kilometers, close but in range of the N16 radar-homing antiair missiles. The computer was seconds away from firing the missiles when Ahmed overrode the command.
There were times when computers were much too simple and linear, he thought.
The tactical screen had analyzed the incoming radars and shown them to be coming from F-14s, the American fighters called Tomcats. Tomcats were old, the first models designed in the 1970s. The Shah of Iran had bought several dozen for the modernization of his squadrons, and Ahmed, then a captain, had flown the jet for a year before the revolution. It was big and heavy, designed for the demanding duties of carrier landings for the U.S. Navy. As an air force jet it was at best a compromise. Against a computer-controlled Firestar, it was barely a threat — at least against a healthy well-maintained Firestar that didn’t throw turbine blades in the middle of an encounter, blowing itself out of the air before an enemy missile got anywhere close.
The critical fact was that these jets were navy aircraft, not air force Eagles flying out of Cyprus but carrier-based fighters, and the only carrier in the Mediterranean at the moment was the Reagan off Libya, over 2,000 kilometers west. And that made no sense. Ahmed expected the jets to have fired their medium-range air-to-air missiles by now, and the ships of the carrier task force should have fired long-range surface-to-air missiles long ago. Further, the F-14s should have approached from ahead, or from the north or south. For them to come in from behind him was not a missile-attack tactic but a dogfighting tactic. They had wasted valuable time in this maneuver, time they would not have taken if they were intent on downing the Firestar.
Ahmed overrode the computer’s impulse to fire the rear-facing N16 missiles. In the moment before he reached a conclusion he felt a gnawing annoyance that the Firestar had been detected at all by the Americans.
The electronic stealth systems had failed, or the Americans had developed a countermeasure.
But he was certain that there was no countermeasure for the electronic-warfare pod slung under the Firestar’s nose.
The tactical display updated, basing its guesses on intercepted radar signals from the F-14s. The jets were closing steadily, edging forward cautiously instead of screaming in at him. Ahmed considered one last time the idea of attacking the fighters, then dismissed it. More jets would come from the carrier, as well as a score of missiles, and if the Firestar’s detection-avoidance systems had failed, the Americans could find him and blow him out of the sky by the application of overwhelming force and numbers — he and Sihoud were only one jet against an entire carrier full of F-14s. And this close to the rendezvous point, he had no time for taking on the Americans.
The F-14s were now thirty kilometers astern. Ahmed’s engines were throttled down to sixty percent power, his speed lowered from the maximum to time their arrival at the rendezvous point. He could spool up the turbines and outrun the fighters, but that would only delay the confrontation. Delay would help if he could get to the rendezvous point with the F-14s far behind.
But he knew what they were doing. They were going to try to force him and Sihoud down to see who they were, perhaps take them into captivity. It had to be, he saw the overwhelming logic of it. He too would have made such a decision if he had been the American commander. And there would be no way to abandon the Firestar with the F-14s watching. He might make it to the water, but the Hegira would be seen.
So shoot them, he thought. We’re only fifteen minutes from the rendezvous point. A competing voice, a stronger and more rational one, spoke … there are more waiting behind these. Shoot these and five more will come, and ten more, until they have killed the Khalib or have him in chains. The survival of the Union was at stake. Ahmed bit his lip and waited. When the jets were within ten kilometers, he had made a decision.
The e
lectronic-warfare pod. The untested Japanese unit that promised so much but held such great risk. Ahmed wasted no more time and energized the pod’s circuits and waited as the liquid helium refrigeration unit surrounding the superconducting energy storage coil cooled down to operating temperature. The computer reported the successful cool-down and asked to take command of the port jet engine. Ahmed acknowledged the computer request and allowed the machine to take one of the Firestar’s engines off-line, the starboard jet throttling up to compensate. The port jet came up to full power, its turbine no longer providing the jet with thrust but spinning an auxiliary power turbine designed only to supply power to the energy-storage coil of the electronic-warfare pod.
It would take several minutes to charge the pod, agonizing minutes for Ahmed, who still wanted to fire the missiles at the incoming enemies.
If the EW pod worked, the F-14s would be destroyed, their old-fashioned semiconductor chips melted into useless butter. Unfortunately, the unit might also destroy the Firestar, which would then fall into the sea a hundred kilometers short of the rendezvous point, and the Khalib would die or be taken prisoner.
The port engine roared at full throttle, all its tremendous power channeled into the EW pod’s energy coil, the voltage building up to unprecedented levels. Ahmed waited, knowing the unit might not wait for his command but might unleash its energy in an unrestrained explosion, the voltage ripping out from a coil leak and blowing the Firestar apart.
The rendezvous point was now five minutes away, short in timespan when still above the sound barrier, but more than 100 kilometers over the horizon, a very long swim. And now the American F-14s drew up on the Firestar’s wingtips as dawn broke over the eastern Mediterranean.
Chapter 4
Thursday, 26 December
EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
Commodore Sharef pressed his eye to the eyepiece of the periscope as the Hegira ascended toward the surface from her cruising depth of 300 meters. As the cold rubber shroud of the eyepiece contacted the skin of his eye, the surrounding control room vanished, replaced with blackness, not a coal blackness but a light twilight darkness, just a shade brighter than midnight, just light enough to see that Sharef thought he could see the crosshairs of the periscope reticle against the dark view. His deep-cushioned lumbar-supported periscope control seat tilted back as the deck of the ship angled upward, climbing toward the danger of the surface. He rotated his periscope view directly upward, searching for the bottom of the waves.
“One hundred meters, Commodore. All hull arrays report surface contacts distant.” The deck officer. Commander Omar Tawkidi, reported from the sensor control area of the room, the aft starboard corner. That corner’s Second Captain video screens displayed the noises, directions, and frequencies detected on the large-area hull arrays — the raw data — as well as the Second Captain’s analyzed guesses about the meanings of the sounds and the relationships of the sound sources to the Hegira. There were at that moment ten surface ships being tracked by the hull array sonars, all of them distant, the closest farther than forty-four miles to the west.
High above, the water began to grow lighter. As it did, Sharef commanded the view to rotate downward so that he peered out at a forty-five-degree angle from the vertical and began rotating the periscope control seat with a silent servomotor.
Soon he could see the waves high above, the large silvery bottom flanks of them showing the calm weather above. As the waves moved closer Sharef rotated the periscope seat faster while turning his view flatter. There were no shadows from hulls not detected by the hull arrays.
Sharef’s view broke through the waves and cleared while the deck beneath him leveled out.
“Commodore, depth twenty-seven meters,” Tawkidi announced.
“Very good. Deck Officer.”
For several minutes Sharef sat at the periscope control seat, rotating it in slow circles, concentrating on the surrounding sea, still wondering what Colonel Ahmed’s message meant. The sea was a deep shimmering blue, the sky streaked with wisps of clouds. The sun had just climbed over the horizon where dark Mediterranean met bleached sky. The “survivors” should be there. Tawkidi, the navigator, had pronounced them within 500 meters of the rendezvous point.
Sharef’s orders were to surface, but surfacing violated every instinct. All a submarine possessed for tactical advantage was the blessed quality of being invisible. To surface meant to relinquish the cover of the depths and emerge where every surface-search radar and airborne patrol craft could see him, where satellite spy-eyes would gobble up imagery of his presence, compromising his mission — a mission he had been told was crucial to the survival of the Islamic Front. And for what? To find a boat cast adrift or a yacht whose survivors would be here supposedly waiting for him.
And yet the orders, orders from the Khalib himself, had been explicit. Surface at dawn. The mission, after all, was the Khalib’s, and the Khalib could order his ship to do any thing it was capable of. And surfacing was possible, if unwise. And the orders, if they were authentic, had not come directly from the Khalib with his usual authentication sentence but had been sent in his name by his chief of staff, an air force officer. Rakish Ahmed. And Sharef knew what Ahmed was capable of doing to win the war his way. But then, if the message had been genuine, sent in the heat of an emergency, by not surfacing Sharef might be endangering a plan vital to Islamic security, hard as that was to imagine.
For some moments Sharef’s instincts did battle with his sense of duty. Duty won out. He looked again at the sea for a sign that indicated he should surface, and saw only the sea and the sky.
“Deck Officer, surface the ship. Stop the engine.”
“Very good. Commodore. Ship control—”
“Surfacing now,” the operator at the ship-control station called.
Sharef’s view of the surface expanded as the submarine ascended. Beneath his periscope view the curving fin emerged from the sea in a wash of foam and spray, the cylindrical hull following. The ship slowed from its dead-slow-ahead, crawl and rocked gently, seemingly without purpose, in the waves.
Sharef ordered the ship-control team to the surface-control space on top of the fin, handing the periscope over to the sensor-control officer, then hurried to the ladder to the surface-control space. The hatch was opened, the panels in the fin laid aside, and morning sunlight flashed against the side of the cubbyhole as Sharef climbed into the sea air. He sucked in the smell, glad in spite of the tactical stupidity of surfacing. He looked out over the gentle waves and wondered how long he should wait before abandoning this fool’s errand. A chart of the area appeared in his mind, memorized, and he examined it, thinking of how to clear the area so that his departure course could not be determined by the watching satellites. Perhaps he could pretend a malfunction, begin to head back east toward port at Kassab and after a few moments resubmerge, continue heading east for a few minutes, then back in the cloak of the sea’s depths, turn back to the west and run for Gibraltar. He even began to order one of the officers to get a harness and walk out on the deck as if examining or repairing something, just to look good for the satellites.
He had turned to Tawkidi to make the order when the distant rolling thunder came from the sky. Sharef raised his binoculars and tried to find the sound, but the sky looked empty. He continued to search the sky for the source of the sound. Nothing. He checked his wristwatch and wondered if the ASW forces of the Coalition would soon come to sink the sub, now that they had surrendered their only true advantage — stealth. He told himself he would give Colonel Ahmed an hour. After that he would resubmerge and continue the mission.
The skies were silent, the sea empty. If the mission ended as it started, it would truly be a failure.
* * *
Ahmed looked out his canopy at the F-14 Tomcat fighter on his port wing. In the growing light of the morning the jet’s markings were clear. On the gray fuselage under the high delta wing were block letters spelling navy. At the nose a star was framed in a c
ircle with horizontal stripes on either side. The twin tails were painted black with a white skull over two crossed bones, the letters VF-69 beneath the emblem.
The wings were loaded with missiles. In the Tomcat’s canopy the pilot in the front seat pointed over at Ahmed, then at himself, his intentions unmistakable: follow me.
Ahmed glanced out to the starboard wing and saw an identical Tomcat. As he watched, the second jet slowed and faded back until he was a hundred meters directly behind Ahmed’s Firestar. That maneuver was also understood — one false move and the rear F-14 fires his cannons.
The pilot on the port wing waved again, the gesture the indication that the three-jet formation was to turn. The F-14 banked over into a gentle turn to the left. Ahmed followed until the screen display showed that they were now headed to the east. Toward Cyprus. Undoubtedly to an airfield on the island, where he and Sihoud would be taken prisoner.
Somewhere over the western horizon a nuclear submarine would be surfacing, the captain wondering what had happened to them. On the central status screen the words flashed electronic warfare pod power storage 85 %. One last time Ahmed wondered about fighting the Tomcats, but by then the rear F-14 was too close for the N16 missile to get a hit. Ahmed began to regret his earlier impulse not to fight the American jets — if he had they would be over the Hegira by now. He was committed to using the electronic-warfare pod but there was a better than even chance that the pod would cripple all three jets, tumbling Ahmed and Sihoud into the sea. One thing was certain, that death would be better than capture. Ahmed waited the endless minutes while the planned rendezvous point with the Hegira grew distant behind them, the port jet engine still whining shrilly as it charged the EW pod’s storage coil.
The escorting Tomcat on the port wing began to descend to a lower altitude. Ahmed followed, his altimeter display numerals rolling down as the Firestar dived. Sihoud, quiet up till then, woke up, startled by the closeness of the F-14s and the unexpected position of the sun. The center console flashed background colors rapidly while announcing ew pod ARMED. RELEASE COUNTDOWN SEQUENCE ESTABLISHED: SECONDS — 10.
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