That change would have made their present plan impossible; they needed the darkness.
Yet another reason to go for it right now.
Claudia smiled to herself. If this worked, the Russians’ schedule was going to change a day ahead of schedule—and by a great deal.
“Sting ’em, Bumblebee,” came over the radio.
“Will do, Brooklyn.”
The Bumblebee nickname took her back to the desert for a moment, her beloved Arizona desert. She’d show it to Michael someday soon. Show him the most magnificent sunsets on the planet and sunrise vistas that made you feel so alive it was hard to hold them in your memory.
“Let’s do it.”
* * *
Michael swam back out to the boat, old Point Brower. Now it was going to get interesting.
So many times, Delta rehearsed, analyzed, and rehearsed again for a target only to be called off at the last moment. It was always energizing when they received the actual “go” on a mission. It didn’t matter if the planning had spanned hours, days, or months; when it all came together, the feeling of satisfaction that all the preparation was actually going to be used was the same.
The old cutter floated off small Vulf Island—where the helicopters were still parked—about five miles to sea from Baku. Except for the distant city lights, the cloudless night was pitch-dark. The wave chop was low enough that he made good time back to the boat, which was little more than an outline against the stars.
On the afterdeck of the Point Brower, the Azeri officer greeted him with a hug as if they were long-lost brothers and a sloppy kiss on the cheek, and waved a fresh bottle of Xan Premium vodka, which he immediately forced into Michael’s hands.
Michael sucked in a mouthful of vodka and then blew it back into the bottle so that it looked as if he’d taken a huge swallow. The guy was way past minding a little alcohol-sterilized backwash. He didn’t have to pretend to gasp afterward; this stuff was high-test. He handed the bottle back and slapped the guy on the back hard enough to send him staggering into the rubber service boat sitting in its cradle on the ship’s stern.
He found Bill at the helm.
“You had to give him another bottle? Wasn’t he drunk enough yet?”
“No. He was starting to sober up, and we can’t let him figure us out. Also, I heard the ‘go’ message from Claudia, and I had an idea on how to spice it up. We’re actually going to use this guy”—he patted the helm of the cutter—“for something more than towing a submarine out to sea.”
When Bill told him his plan, Michael didn’t even bother to say he approved. It was a great addition.
Then Bill started reciting a message in Azeri for Michael to memorize. Once Bill told him what it meant, Michael gladly began repeating it back phonetically until he had it right.
Bill fed power to the Brower’s big engines, accelerating slowly enough to not strain the towline still attached to the submerged submarine. They headed northeast to the far point of the Absheron Peninsula and out toward the deeper parts of the Caspian.
“You’ll want to broadcast that phrase starting the moment Phase IV is completed. Remember to sound very charged up.”
“Thanks. Real helpful.” Michael mumbled the phrase to himself several more times to anchor it in his mind. Bill went back to nursing along the boat that really should have a crew of eight to run her properly.
Michael went to check over his Phase IV kit once more. The only kit below that included an E and E bag. He sincerely hoped they wouldn’t be trying to do an escape-and-evade across four hundred miles of hostile countryside. Especially not with the state of alert everything would be in if this worked.
It took most of an hour to steam around to the northern tip of Pirallahi Island at the very easternmost tip of the Absheron Peninsula. They were now at the very limit of where Azerbaijan’s land reached out into the Caspian Sea.
On Pirallahi, a couple of smaller pipelines, each a half-dozen feet across, rose out of the ocean and came on land over the northern beaches. The island itself was quite populated, but the northern tip was industrial. The existing pipes led out to the offshore drilling rigs, pumping the oil and gas directly ashore.
There were also some new concrete foundations for unbuilt pipelines that showed up on satellite imaging but weren’t in the news yet, which suited the D-boys’ needs perfectly. Whether or not the new foundations were for the proposed Trans-Caspian line didn’t particularly matter in the overall scheme.
They beached happily snoozing Auxiliary Officer Zadeh in the Point Brower’s rubber utility boat—without oars or gas for the engine. They found him a muddy island just a short swim from land and slipped another two thousand manat into his pocket. It should be enough to buy his silence, if he remembered anything at all.
They also left him with a radio—with dead batteries—set to the emergency radio frequency he had provided while still sober enough to do so.
“Part one of my ace in the hole,” Bill had practically crowed after Michael had swum back from beaching the Azeri officer.
“Now, for part two.” Bill drove the Point Brower so close ashore that he was making Michael nervous.
“You do recall that we’re towing a submarine.”
“Fear not, my friend. Water and I get along just fine.” Bill anchored her close ashore.
Right. Never try to tell a SEAL anything about boats, because they already knew it. So, he’d keep his mouth shut. Besides, he had plenty to worry about.
Michael’s job waited for him after Bill delivered him by submarine to his point of attack. What happened to the boat they’d used to drag the sub into position wasn’t his concern. He trusted Bill to get it right because that’s what you did with your team. Bill had proved his worth long before Claudia Jean Casperson came on the scene.
And he’d trust her with his life. Already was. And his heart too, which had become a problem.
He and Bill both pulled on their scuba gear again and slipped over the side to dive down to the sub.
Chapter 27
Claudia and Trisha had debated Bill’s final cryptic message as they continued to sit on the beach of Vulf Island awaiting the start of Phase IV.
Bill had said, “Shoot the Brower from over the 21631. You’ll know when. Into water. Four.”
They’d agreed to send no messages in the clear despite the encrypted radio. It was overkill, but that was the right mental image for this whole mission. But there was “not in the clear” and there was cryptic.
The 21631 was the model number of the Russian’s Buyan-M missile corvette—two hundred feet of a brand-new and very nasty breed of fighting ship. This one was presently cruising along the Azeri shore. They didn’t know which specific ship he was—the Russians always called their ships by the male pronoun—and Claudia didn’t care. All that mattered for their purposes was that it was the newer missile model and not the older 21630 gunship.
“Is your husband always so clear about what he wants?” Claudia kicked one of the pedals of her still parked and silent helicopter.
“Into water. Four. At least that part is easy.” Trisha slouched lower, which was a hard thing to do in the tight Little Bird seats. “At least we know they’re now off the cutter and boarding the sub.”
“Phase IV has now begun,” Claudia agreed.
“Past the point of no return.” Trisha made her voice spooky, which Claudia really didn’t need.
Their next signal should come from Moretti. Sure enough, the screen that was set to the Gray Eagle’s data feed showed the small submarine moving away from the anchored Point Brower Coast Guard boat.
“As to the rest of his message…” Trisha waggled her hand back and forth. “Billy seems to think that we can somehow communicate without actually speaking. Usually he’s right, but I think he sees it as a kind of game.”
“I don’t have time for ga
mes.” Claudia knew she was snarling at the wrong half of this couple, but couldn’t help it. Her attitude didn’t appear to faze Trisha in the slightest.
“Oh, I don’t know, Captain. That was a pretty damned hot kiss I just saw. Better than he ever gave—Shit! Sorry, Claudia. Didn’t mean to say that. Just being envious because Bill wasn’t here to give me one just like it.”
Claudia left Trisha to squirm, not that she did it for more than a few seconds before continuing.
“Anyway. His message is that when they shoot the primary target, we should be hovering over the missile boat and fire at the poor old Brower. I’m guessing he wants to make it look like a two-shot attack by the bad guys.”
Claudia considered it. “So…he figures the Russians will be too busy trying to figure out what’s going on. They won’t spot our stealth bird in the confusion, and we can make it look like a double-shot attack, making it even clearer that they are the guilty party.”
“Uh-huh.” But Trisha didn’t sound any more certain than Claudia felt.
It seemed like a lot of trouble and risk for not much gain. Not Bill or Michael’s style. Well, even if she didn’t quite know why, she at least knew what to do.
They watched as the submarine disappeared into the depths and out of the Tosca’s sensor range. Now she wished she had ordered the ASW package for the Gray Eagle just so they could track the sub, but she couldn’t think of what she’d have sacrificed from the payload they’d loaded aboard. No point in second-guessing herself now.
If the Russian ship stayed on track, it would pass five kilometers off the point of the Azeri peninsula. That was what had so upset the Iranians originally.
There were constant disagreements among the five nations bordering the Caspian. They hotly debated the borders for surface rights such as fishing versus sub-benthic rights for minerals such as oil and gas. The collapse of the Soviet Union had turned the discussions into a real nightmare because now there were five countries where there had only been two. Proposals had been made and goodwill squandered with almost nothing solved.
The proposed Trans-Caspian pipeline would bypass Iran and Russia, at either end of the Caspian, and cut both countries off from the lucrative transport share. The only thing the two countries wanted more than having the resources routed through their own country was not having the other country receive a hundred percent of the traffic.
Russia had recently become very aggressive in its unwillingness to allow a pipeline to run through Iran or across the Caspian, although neither route encroached on their own resources or territory. The nightly circling patrol by their newest missile warships—deep in territorial waters, down the Azeri coast and back up the Turkmen coast where the other end of the line would begin—was an obvious threat that had worried Iran no end.
No one had been willing to risk confronting the Russians. Finally, Iranian President Madani had asked the U.S. President’s wife for help in stopping Russia, even if the price was Iran losing the passage of the pipeline through their own territory.
Claudia would very much like to know someday what was on the other end of that equation. With this mission, the United States was doing a huge favor for the new Iranian president. Maybe that was payoff enough, strengthening the position of a friendly politician. Or maybe it was that all of that gas would be piped directly to U.S.-friendly Azerbaijan.
Looking at the drone image of the old Point Brower anchored offshore from Pirallahi still had Claudia perplexed. She wished she knew what her team had been thinking, but that was her answer right there. Her team. These were the best handpicked people she could find. Her job was to stop worrying and make sure the shot happened.
“I’ll take the shot,” she told Trisha. “You be ready to meet them at the RV.” The prearranged rendezvous was a simple set of GPS coordinates another five miles out into the Caspian Sea.
“You get all the fun jobs.” Trisha punched her arm. Then she sobered up. “I’m just glad it’s not me running this show. I would have long since cracked.”
Claudia didn’t feel shaky. What she felt was terror, but showing that wasn’t going to help anybody, least of all her.
The next step that was most dangerous, and her lover was going to be out there alone when he did it without even Bill to help him.
Chapter 28
Michael double-checked as Bill took a final set of readings and then bottomed the submarine. They now lay a hundred feet down and five miles off the Azeri coast. The dim instrument lights on the small panel were the only things to look at while they waited.
The Triton-2M could carry up to six divers. It was a wet sub, but it allowed for pressure retention. So, inside the sub, Michael and Bill were only exposed to shallow water pressure and could rise without having to stop for decompression.
At a hundred feet down, they were too deep to receive any signals from the surface. The reason they were here was that they would look like nothing more than a rock on the bottom of the sea to the Buyan missile corvette as it passed overhead. The Russians were unlikely to also be watching astern, since the brand-new missile boat had no fear of attack in these waters. That was why the sub was the perfect solution. Even a small rubber Zodiac would stand a much higher risk of being detected in such a close approach.
For forty-five minutes, they sat on the bottom and waited. The timing was critical. The Buyan was moving at a leisurely pace since its whole purpose here was intimidation. But a missile corvette’s leisurely pace was only a little slower than the submarine’s top speed. They had to come up close enough behind to catch the Russian warship.
It was 1:00 a.m. when Michael heard the first sound of propellers turning at low speed. Bill floated in the seat beside him in the two-man cockpit of the sub, both of them using breathers hooked into the sub’s air system. The air tasted of old fish and crude oil no matter how many times they spit out the mouthpieces and rinsed them in the salt water. A soft red light emanated from the simple instruments of the sub’s control panel. Heading, speed, depth, and battery condition: the three-decade-old sub was not a complex craft.
The propeller and motor noise from the Buyan missile corvette up on the surface was growing louder, transmitted through water, the sub’s hull, and the water filling the compartment.
He looked at Bill, but the man remained with his hands quietly in his lap. He’d been a SEAL for seven years before Michael had recruited him, so he’d know far more about the sound of a ship’s passing than Michael.
So he waited.
Just a moment before Michael couldn’t stand it any longer, Bill reached out to take the controls. Battery connected. Motors started at low rpms. Compressed air released into ballast tanks changing their buoyancy, and they began driving up and forward.
Michael released his seat belt and checked his gear for the third time. For Phase IV, he would be traveling very fast and light.
Fifty feet up, fifty to go. It felt like he was climbing a tree with a trunk that would never end. He wished he knew what to say to Claudia. Wished he’d said it. Instead he’d kissed her and simply let the fire that she was ignite inside him until it burned away all his words.
Well, need wasn’t enough. Not if he wanted to keep her safe.
Fifteen feet. He shifted until he was crouched on the seat and his hands were on the release wheel for the overhead diver’s hatch. The sound of the Buyan’s screws was louder. Loud enough that Michael wondered if they were going to rise right into them, damaging both the sub and the ship and aborting their mission and perhaps their lives.
Ten feet.
Rising.
Five.
Rising.
The four hand-wide round portholes that surrounded the cockpit broke free of the water. Bill leveled the sub so that it didn’t fully surface but remained high enough to enable them to see ahead. And, exactly per plan, they were looking at the broad, flat stern of the Russian ship Gra
d Sviyazhsk less than a hundred feet ahead.
Michael shot the wheel on the hatch and climbed up into the air. He left behind his face mask and breather. Bill brought the sub up another foot and drove it ahead at full speed.
Michael stripped open a waterproof bag and pulled on the dark-blue work shirt of a Russian navy machinist. He’d worn synthetic poly-blend pants that would still be wet but wouldn’t obviously look so without close inspection. He pulled his bandolier of tools on to hold the shirt in place and felt naked without more weapons. He had an old AK-47 dangling over his shoulder and an outdated Marakov PM pistol, both filled with handloads that he’d done himself. Both weapons shot perfectly even after immersion in salt water, and both were silenced.
Bill was winning the race. The moment before he would have nudged the Grad Sviyazhsk, Michael ran the three steps to the raised vertical bow fin of the sub, placed his foot on the top, and leaped for the rail. He hung there from the stern rail of the Russian warship until Bill had safely slipped back beneath the waves behind him.
* * *
Claudia had seen the small sub surface once more on the Gray Eagle’s screen. It was so close behind the Russian ship that it looked like they were the same boat.
Kara zoomed the Gray Eagle’s display in for a close-up just in time for Michael to make his jump.
Claudia choked. She slapped her hands over her mouth to stop any sound, but then couldn’t remove them.
Trisha placed a comforting hand on her shoulder as they watched the submarine disappear astern and a figure climb up and over the stern rail. Trisha shook her slightly as Michael began creeping along the afterdeck and climbed up between the two turreted 30 mm cannons.
Then she jerked Claudia’s hands down and kissed her on the tip of the nose. The surprise was enough to jerk Claudia back to reality.
“What the hell, Trisha?” She pushed the woman away and rubbed the arm of her flight suit over her nose.
Bring On the Dusk Page 28
