Seaghost

by William H. Lovejoy

  “All but?”

  “They do leave a wake.”

  “Yes, okay. How many do we have?”

  “That was it,” Monahan said.

  “Damn.” Clay flicked his eyes toward Captain Aubrey Nelson, the man in charge of the morning watch in the Operations Center. “What’s the range of those boats, Captain?”

  “As I recall, Admiral, those rotaries are very fuel efficient, even with their turbochargers. With a full fuel load, it seems to me they have a range of nearly four thousand miles.”

  “They can cross the Atlantic?”

  “Easily, sir, at a cruise speed of forty-five knots.”

  “What’s the top end?”

  “Sixty-five knots with a full crew of four and a medium load.”

  Clay shook his head dishearteningly. “Okay, Captain, I want you to set up a search. The area is going to have to be as large as the range at maximum speed at,” he checked his watch, “possibly five hours. Cover the entire Eastern Seaboard and the Atlantic. Be prepared to extend into the Caribbean. Bring in the Coast Guard and start canvassing marinas and ships at sea. We’re going to have to have some visual sightings from witnesses to go on.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Jim, I want you to coordinate all of this and report to me on the hour.”

  “Yes, sir.” Monahan had known that, as Clay’s aide, he would end up with the duty. It would go round-the-clock until the end, and there would be short tempers and jealousies involved. Mona’s would be one of the short tempers. Monahan got along well enough with Aubrey Nelson, but Rear Admiral Matt Andrews got highly irritated anytime he sensed that his channels to Clay were required to go through a lowly commander.

  The phone rang, and Clay flipped the toggle.

  “Bing? Aaron again.”

  “Something new?”

  “And bad,” Stein said.

  “How bad?”

  “Both of those boats were armed. We were conducting trials.”

  “Armed with what?”

  “M61 Vulcan cannon and the new Mini Harpoon surface-to-surface-missiles. There were forty-four on each boat.”

  “Son of a bitch! How difficult are they to operate, Aaron?”

  “You ever watch an eight-year-old at a video arcade? These are easier.”

  Admiral Clay looked over at his subordinates. “Get cracking, gentlemen.”

  *

  0630 hours, 35° 12’ North, 74° 17’ West

  Ibrahim Badr had begun to worry that he had made the wrong decision. There were so many blips on the radar screen, and he was totally unfamiliar with the particular radar set. Yet, when he finally spotted the tanker hull-down on the horizon, he was elated.

  He pushed the throttle forward and felt the boat pick up speed. The readout indicated sixty-two knots, but the noise level was surprisingly low. Or perhaps the insulation was very good. The engines seemed to only produce a heavy, low whine at high speed.

  Very high speed.

  It was amazing.

  He had traversed the 190 kilometers of the Chesapeake Bay to its mouth in slightly more than two hours, staying close to the western edge of the shipping channel. If any of the commercial ships plying the passage had seen him racing south at over ninety kilometers per hour, none of them had sounded an alert. Lookouts stationed aboard freighters, tankers, and cargo ships would probably have only seen the white flash of his bow wave or his wake, anyway.

  Badr had been so intent on his piloting and on avoiding other traffic that he had not learned to use the radios or the radar until long after he had passed under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and headed east into the Atlantic.

  And when he finally activated the radar, he had found the screen cluttered with dozens of targets in the coastal shipping lanes. He had had to rely on the tanker captain having his ship located at the coordinates where he was supposed to be at six-thirty, 160 kilometers off the coast of North Carolina.

  Badr hated relying on anyone except himself. That was because so many of his compatriots were unreliable, while he had absolute faith in himself.

  Hakkar, for instance, had been a man requiring careful watching.

  He was now a martyr to the cause and mercifully joined with Allah. Badr would tell others as much.

  During the torturously slow trek to the west, then up the eastern shore of Carr Bay, he had cut the speed of the rubber boat to less than five knots, to keep the outboard motor quiet. It seemed that infinity passed before he located the right pier, the one mentioned in the newspaper story. Badr had shut off the motor as soon as he saw the watchman stationed aboard a large ship, and he and Hakkar took up paddles for the last several hundred meters into the dock.

  He had been shocked when he saw the door rise, spilling interior light on the surface of the water.

  Hakkar went flat into the bottom of the boat, dragging his pistol from his pocket.

  And then the silhouette of the boat moving toward them.

  Suddenly accelerating.

  Badr grabbed the motor housing and pulled himself over it, launching into a dive that took him out of the path of the oncoming boat. Just before he went under the surface, he heard the sickly crunch as the bow of the boat hit something, very likely Muhammed Hakkar’s head.

  He dove deep, and when he came up, the big boat was gone. He could hear a miniature moan off to the south, quickly abating. Beside him, the Zodiak was hissing, nearly deflated, and already slipping below the surface. One of Hakkar’s arms hung over the gunwale.

  Badr paddled close to check on the man. His face was coated in blood, and his right temple looked mushy. He was breathing, but raggedly. Badr reach up, grabbed the man’s neck, and pulled his head underwater, finding only feeble resistance.

  Casualties were a hindrance to any mission.

  He scanned the shoreline, taking time to stare into the crevices and between buildings. The collision had not raised an alarm, apparently.

  But time was running perilously short. He must get away from there before some patrol came by.

  The Zodiak gurgled and went under, taking Hakkar with it. A stream of bubbles broke the surface, sounding unnaturally loud as they popped.

  Badr looked toward the pier numbered nine, under the partially opened door.

  And there was another of the boats, just as pictured by the newspaper photographer.

  His blood sang in his veins.

  Badr had been certain that he was too late. Someone else had stolen his boat.

  He swam into the building, found the ladder rungs on the right side, and climbed to the dock. His heart was beating fast, and the sense of fear elevated his awareness. Everything inside the structure appeared sharp and clear.

  Badr ran along the concrete dock, the leather soles of his shoes slapping loudly, spattering water.

  It was such a sleek boat, and it took him several seconds to locate the hatchway and open it. Another two minutes were devoted to releasing the mooring lines, then he went aboard and found his way to the controls.

  The instrument panel dismayed him. He had never seen anything like it. The face was flat black plastic, completely smooth except for a few touch-sensitive pads. In the vague light coming through the windshield, he searched it and tried various switches until the panel lights came on, a wild array of red, blue, yellow, and orange lines and letters. Fortunately, each control and readout was neatly labeled in blue. Americans insisted on labels — on their cigarettes, their cereal, their highways. Waiting for the bilge blower to ventilate the engine compartment felt like forever. The engines started so silently that, on the first one, he tried the starter again while the engine was already running. A horrible screeching from the back of the boat caused his heart to leap.

  And then he was moving.

  And four hours later, he was closing on the Kuwaiti-flagged Hormuz, steaming easily and very slowly in the calm blue ocean.

  The tanker was moving at less than seven knots as Badr brought the Sea Spectre — the name was embossed in blue at
the top of the instrument panel — alongside it. He adjusted the speed to match the tanker’s, held the wheel over to keep the boat in place against the rusted steel plates of the oiler’s hull, and tightened the steering lock.

  Pulling himself out of the seat, he ran to the back and opened the narrow door into the cargo compartment. His legs and back were stiff after so many hours at the helm, and he realized that he badly needed to relieve himself.

  He found the switch and flicked the lights on. Studying the hatch controls, he moved the identified toggle switch and looked up to see the doors first rise, then slide downward. Sunlight flooded in.

  And struck all those missiles.

  Badr felt the grin widening his face.

  Allah was so good to him.

  The cargo hatch doors settled into place, and Badr watched as the crewmen scampered down the netting suspended from the tanker’s railings. Quickly, they moved over the Sea Spectre’s decks, slipping and falling on the smooth, sloped surfaces, trying to locate the lifting rings.

  Within five minutes, cables from the ship’s crane had been attached, and the Sea Spectre rose from the sea.

  Badr hurried back inside the cabin to the helm and shut off the engines.

  He returned to the cargo bay, smiled at the missiles, and watched the activity on the tanker’s cluttered decks as the Sea Spectre was brought aboard.

  The hatch cover of the false tank had already been removed and the stealth boat was slowly lowered into the tank. Leaning out, Badr looked down and saw a half-dozen crew members scurrying to adjust the cradle secured in the bottom of the tank to the contours of the boat’s hull. To fit within the tank, the assault boat had to be lowered diagonally into it.

  He watched them carefully, because he did not want the hull damaged after all of his work.

  When the boat finally settled into place, Badr felt a great sense of achievement.

  The boat was now his.

  As were all of those lovely missiles.

  1530 hours, 21Sep86, the Pentagon

  Devlin McCory was a quick man with a temper. He had the scars to prove it — little dashes of hard tissue on his jaw, forehead, cheekbone, shoulder, arms. In earlier days, there weren’t too many saloons he hadn’t loved. And cleaned out.

  He was six feet tall, with a chest like a barrel of Ireland’s own, and he had big gnarled hands and the hard muscles of a man not afraid to do his own work. His hair was the color of weathered orange brick, and his blue eyes could pierce egos. His face always gave him away, though. It went through fifty shades of suffusion in direct proportion to his temper.

  It was medium red as he sat on the other side of the desk from Lieutenant Commander Roosevelt Rosse, who was somewhere in the chain of command of the Navy’s Weapons Procurement Division. Rosse was, by Devlin’s reckoning, far too young and far too low in the chain to be making this decision.

  He handed McCory’s drawings back to him, leaning out across his gray metal desk. “I’m afraid, Mr. McCory, that you’re a bit too late with this. Our specialists looked it over, but the Navy has already undertaken a similar program.”

  “The hell it has! You’ve already got this boat?”

  “Well, no sir. But negotiations with the contractor have been concluded.”

  “What the hell happened to open bidding, Commander? I want to be part of the process.”

  Rosse didn’t respond to that. Instead, he asked, “What are your qualifications, Mr. McCory?”

  “Qualifications! Qualifications! I spent twelve years in your damned Navy. CPO. I’ve got my own marina. I build boats. I’m a master mechanic. I know boats.”

  “But no degrees? As it happens, Mr. McCory, the contractor has a staff of marine architects and marine engineers. The Navy is impressed with their qualifications.”

  If the lieutenant commander’s office had had a window, Devlin would have put the gray steel desk through it, followed shortly by the lieutenant commander. He managed admirably to hang on to his sanity, however, and found his way out of the Pentagon’s C-ring and back to his Ford pickup in the parking lot.

  He counted the money in his wallet and figured he had enough for gas back to Florida, if he didn’t eat much. Pulling out of the parking lot, Devlin McCory finagled his way onto the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway and headed south.

  Feeling fully defeated by his own Navy and his own country.

  And planning the letters he would be writing to anyone holding some kind of power in the Navy.

  *

  0800 hours, 34° 2’ North, 73° 46’ West

  Ted Daimler owned a cabin on the Chesapeake Bay, just below Rose Haven. It was a rustic thing of three rooms used for poker games and weekends away from the hurdy-gurdy of Washington political life and intrigue.

  McCory had let Daimler off on the dock below the cabin at three in the morning. He lodged himself in the hatchway, holding onto the rotting wood of the wharf as Daimler stood on the planks and tested his knee.

  “Tell me again, Ted.”

  “Hey, I’ve got it down, Mac. I tell the deputy I got down here after dark last night, beat from a long day, and went right into the sack. Get up this morning, and see my Scarab’s gone. That’s when I report it.”

  “Good.”

  “But, goddamnit it, Mac! We hit that boat.”

  McCory could still hear and feel the thump when the hull collided with the Zodiak. “Yeah, I know. It shouldn’t have been there.”

  “Like ourselves?”

  “Look, Ted, all we can do is watch the newspapers.”

  Daimler’s face was haggard in the light from the corridor behind McCory. “I suppose so.”

  “If it gets too tense, Ted, you spill it all. Name me.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Just do it.”

  “I’m not going to give you up, Mac. We go back too far.” He didn’t mention the almost brotherly relationship that had developed over two decades, the things they had done for each other.

  “This is me and Devlin, Ted. I don’t want your ass in a sling because of us. They’re not going to find me, anyway, not until I want them to.”

  “Ah…”

  “Sorry about the knee and the boat. I really am. More about the knee, though.”

  “I’ll bill you.”

  “Do that.”

  “Kevin.”

  “What?”

  “Somewhere down the line, you’re going to need an attorney. I want you to keep me up-to-date on what you’re doing.”

  “Ted, I don’t think I’ll…”

  “You are going to negotiate?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  “Do it through me,” the lawyer said.

  McCory looked up at his friend. ‘I’ll let you know.”

  “Go on. Get the hell out of here before my backyard fills up with submarines and battleships.”

  McCory backed inside, closed the hatch, and made his way to the helm. Three minutes later, the dock, with Daimler still standing on it, disappeared into the gloom.

  He had taken the SeaGhost down the bay at full bore, which amounted to fifty-seven knots. He assumed the weight of the spare engines and the missile launcher were taking a toll on the maximum speed.

  By eight o’clock, he was 225 miles off the coast, headed south at a leisurely forty knots, and the radar didn’t show another vessel within forty miles of him.

  McCory had figured out a few things. The navigation system was keyed into the NavStar Global Positioning Satellite System and precisely plotted his position for him. The automatic pilot was linked into the same system. After a few trials at different speeds, the computer had calculated his rates of fuel consumption. He didn’t yet know how big the fuel bladders were but guessed they were large. A fill-up would wipe out his VISA card. The readout told him he had three-quarters of a fuel load left.

  The radar was exceptional. At thirty miles of range, it picked up tiny things that he suspected were flotsam, but he could squelch them out. It looked t
o him as if the maximum range was about two hundred miles, which meant that an over-the-horizon set of electronics kicked in, bouncing their signals off the ionosphere. The radar was normally operated from the center seat, but one of two small screens behind the plastic face in the helmsman’s panel repeated the signal. The cathode ray tubes in the pilot’s panel could also be switched to show fore and aft views from video cameras mounted in the bow and the stern. The video had low-light and infrared capacity. Besides repeating the radar image, the CRTs also repeated the information found on the sonar set, which was operated from the left-hand seat.

  Either of the CRTs could also serve as the display device for the on-board computer. The small numerical keypad was mounted to the right of the instrument panel, but so far, McCory had only learned how to tap into the fuel consumption program.

  Below the instrument panel bulkhead, in front of the radarman’s chair, was a hatch into the bow, accessed on hands and knees. McCory had taken a look, finding electronics bays on either side. The radar antenna was mounted on the port side, with clearance enough for a 180-degree sweep. Very likely, there was a similar antenna in the stern, covering the rearward 180-degrees. He figured that the radio antennae, or most of them, were inlaid into the fiberglass of the deck. Directly in front, in separate insulated compartments, he found the video camera mounted behind a transparent panel in the hull, and to his amazement, a six-barreled Gatling-type gun. He thought it was probably twenty millimeter, an M-61, and when he pounded on the side of the fiberglass magazine, it sounded full. The magazine and the gun were apparently accessed for service from a hatch in the deck above. Except for a variable up-and-down arc, it was solidly mounted and, like a fighter aircraft, had to be aimed by steering the boat.

  There wasn’t any food in the galley, and he went back to the cross-passage and retrieved his vinyl bag. There were two grenades left, and he put them in the desk drawer on the starboard side. Somewhere in the middle of his rage had been the idea to blow up the boat if he couldn’t appropriate it. Probably, he should have dropped the grenades in the second boat in Pier Nine, but he had forgotten about it.