Phantom

by Ted Bell

  The kind of weaponry in Blackhawke’s arsenal had not been approved by any committees on Capitol Hill or in Whitehall. What she carried were simply the most advanced and effective war-fighting systems available to anyone who could afford them.

  Hawke, who could afford them, knew he was in for a fight.

  And he never went into a fight he didn’t stand at least a ghost of a chance of winning.

  Forty-eight

  Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf

  The sun peeked over the eastern rim of the world. Streaks of flaming red shot across the ruffled sea. Hawke, up at first light, stood on the foredeck of Blackhawke, his mammoth creation, a steaming mug of coffee to hand, loving the feel of warm teak beneath his bare feet. The Saudi harbor at Ad Dammam was already teeming with activity, fishing boats plowing through the building waves toward the harbor mouth, headed seaward.

  Hawke had just completed his morning swim, four miles in open water. This was the time when he felt most keenly alive, his body literally humming with energy. As the desert to the west heated up, a freshening easterly breeze sent white-capped waves marching off toward the horizon. A fifteen-knot breeze, he estimated. It promised to be a good day for a yacht race, especially for a boat as enormous as his new Blackhawke.

  Hawke was going to war, but first he had to do battle with the Saudi king, Abdullah, and his yacht, Kingdom. He had little interest in the outcome of the match itself. He was far more interested in other things. For one, seeing how his new Blackhawke performed under sail in a real blow. The weather during the sea trials on the Bosporus had been insufficient to put her through her paces; light winds punctuated by periods of dead calm had provided endless frustration for the megayacht’s new owner. He had wanted to see her heeled hard over, charging forward into the teeth of the wind.

  And he was still turning over the details of how he would take this leviathan to war, sail her in harm’s way, and get her safely home.

  His captain, Laddie Carstairs, appeared beside him at the rail. He was a tall fellow, all sinewy strength, close-cropped grey hair, and flinty grey eyes. He had the well-tanned hide of a man who’d spent his life at sea, the deeply lined visage of a fellow who’d long been storm tossed by sea, battle, life.

  “Morning, sir,” the coxswain said.

  Hawke replied, “Morning, Cap. Sleep well?”

  “Like a babe in his mother’s arms. Always do, the night before a fight.”

  Carstairs had commanded a light cruiser during the Second Gulf War and was one of the most decorated men in the Royal Navy. Then he’d retired and come to work for Alex Hawke. He’d resided in Istanbul during the entire period of the new yacht’s build-out, from conception through construction. His nautical experience and intellect played a key role in turning Blackhawke from a luxury toy into a fearsome fighting ship. Hawke had felt very lucky to have such a man now signed on as skipper.

  “I saw King Abdullah out doing a bit of tacking to windward yesterday afternoon, sir. Beautiful white yacht, with that enormous golden sword on her transom just below her name. Kingdom. She looks formidable enough, I must say.”

  Hawke said, “Right. Her sloop rig will most likely allow her to sail closer to the wind than us. Close-hauled, she’ll have an edge on us for sure, Laddie. But on the reaches and downwind, she’ll be in our wake, falling farther behind, I’d wager. Not that anyone has ever raced a high-tech three-masted square-rigger against a traditional sloop rig before, so who the hell knows.”

  “You seem fairly sanguine about the whole thing, sir. Not your usual competitive obsession with the finish line.”

  “We’re not headed for the finish line, Laddie.”

  The man’s face fell, surprise and dismay in his eyes.

  “Sorry? We’re not? Where are we headed then, for God’s sake?”

  “Iran.”

  “Iran? With all due respect, sir, may I ask why?”

  “To find and kill a phantom.”

  “A phantom?”

  “Yes. An evil force whose presence you can feel, but cannot see or hear.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “This is a spec-ops CIA–Red Banner mission, Laddie. I was forbidden to tell you about any of this until this moment. An Iranian scientist named Darius Saffari is the target. He’s got a hilltop fortress on the Iranian coast, the Ram Citadel, about fifty miles south of Bandar-e Būshehr. That’s why we’re headed to Iran. We’re going to infiltrate that citadel and kill him. In many ways, he’s a far bigger fish than either Bin Laden or Ghaddafi.”

  “Good God, I’ve never even heard of him.”

  “You’re now part of an extremely small circle. I’ve got the Citadel’s precise coordinates, when you’re ready.”

  “I’ll get the navigator right on it, then.”

  “Laddie, forgive me for not bringing you into the loop sooner. I hate to drop all this on you at the last minute. I know this last-minute stuff is tough. But we’re operating strictly black-out under orders from the CIA. Black ops of the utmost secrecy due to ‘political sensitivity,’ as they call it in Washington. Two squads of U.S. Navy SEALs are arriving this afternoon to augment our own assault forces. Also Stokely Jones and Harry Brock, whom you know.”

  “And the race?”

  “A cover story. To explain away our inexplicable presence here in the Gulf. Even though the boat’s got a Maltese registration and Valletta as the hailing port on her transom, this is a high-profile yacht. Her presence in the Persian Gulf has surely not gone unnoticed by Al Jazeera and other media. The Iranians know we’re here. News of the race has been leaked. But they don’t really know why. I needed a pretext to get as close to their shores as possible without arousing suspicion. Thus, a sailing race with the king of Saudi Arabia.”

  “As you well know, the Iranians have got warships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. And heavily armed patrol boats up and down the entire coastline.”

  “Absolutely. I’m counting on it, to be honest. We’ll need to be on our guard constantly. I’ve a dossier for you below in my stateroom. A profile of the commander of the Iranian Frontier Guard in the Eastern Province. He’s the guy whose patrol boat seized four Saudi fishing vessels when they accidentally entered Iranian territorial waters last week. The fishermen are in prison now, or dead. We’ll deal with him, sooner or later, I suspect.”

  “Okay. I’ve got the picture now. Too bad about the race, though. I was looking forward to it. So was the sailing crew I hired.”

  “Looking forward to a bit of racing myself. I’ve got an American friend, America’s Cup winner named Bill Koch. Someone once asked him if this wasn’t a rich man’s sport. Bill said, ‘No it isn’t. There’s one rich man on board and there’s twenty-five poor men on board and they all enjoy it a hell of a lot more than the rich man does.’ ”

  “Something in that, all right.”

  “People say it’s expensive and they’re right. But these huge yachts give a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of jobs. Look what Blackhawke did for the Turks. People call boats like this maxi yachts. I call them ‘Marxi yachts’ because they redistribute the wealth.”

  Carstairs laughed, “Game, set, and match, Alex.”

  “Laddie, a word of caution. What your crew says or does, or even what they say they see on their screens, may have been planted there by the enemy. Trust no one aboard, even me. Follow your gut. Saffari was able to take over an entire Russian submarine. Don’t believe anything you see, hear, feel, or touch without talking to me first. Other than that, full speed ahead.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  Hawke returned his captain’s salute and headed below. He had work to do. The plans for the assault on Saffari’s redoubt were in the final stages. He and the SEAL team commander, Stony Stollenwork, had come up with what they both believed was an ingenious way to breach the impenetrable fortress walls. But Hawke still wasn�
��t satisfied with the plan. As he’d said last evening when the meeting broke up. “It’s not enough that it’s ingenious, Stony, it has to bloody well work!”

  “If it’s to work in this instance, sir, it bloody well better be ingenious,” Stollenwork replied. Hawke smiled. He genuinely liked the man. He was a bit slouchy and craggy faced, and he had a phenomenally deep voice, perfect for command. Wry, dry, and bombastic, sometimes all at once, he was also fiercely intelligent.

  The race signal flag was hoisted and the gun fired. The two yachts entered at either side of the starting line in a traditional America’s Cup match racing start. The course would follow the one used for twelve-meter yachts for years. A windward leg, followed by a downwind leg, another upwind leg followed by a triangular reach, and then a final downwind leg. Hawke, who had the topside helm, knew that with the wind out of the east, he was perfectly positioned for his race across the Gulf to Iran. The other two men in the afterguard, Laddie Carstairs and Steve Hall, agreed. The sun was shining above and the fresh salty air, finally blowing at suitable strength, felt wonderful on his cheeks. He’d always had an innate sense of the wind. It was going to be a good passage.

  From the start line to Bandar-e Būshehr was roughly a hundred miles. In this boat, Hawke could cover that much water in four hours. That would put him off the point where Saffari’s compound stood at dusk. The SEAL commander, Stollenwork, had requested 1800 hours for the insertion of the assault team. Hawke would make sure his request was granted.

  The two megayachts approached the half-mile-long starting line surging directly toward each other. Hawke drew starboard and had the opportunity to control the king’s yacht. Kingdom quickly bore down and moved away from the starting line. Hawke, at the helm, recognized the classical tactic instantly. Kingdom’s skipper wanted to be at full speed when he hit the line, but timing was everything in this game. Should his opponent arrive even a fraction too early, he’d be forced to restart.

  Hawke remained patient; he wanted to hit the line on a starboard reach, Blackhawke’s best point of sail. He kept one eye on Kingdom and the other on the compass.

  “You’re dead on it, skipper,” the tactician said. “Maintain your course.”

  Hawke’s hired gun, Steve Hall, who would be calling tactics, had an impressive sailing résumé. In addition to his Olympic Gold in sailing, Hall had a pair of Ph.D. degrees from MIT, hydrodynamics and electronic engineering. He’d spent years in a quest to discover why boats go fast and how to predict performance before the starting gun fires.

  When Hawke offered Hall the chance to join his crew in the “race,” he’d jumped at it. Although the massive clipper ship had never been designed for racing, she’d certainly been designed to go fast, and Hall was fascinated to see firsthand what she could do against a traditionally sloop-rigged boat. So far, he was impressed.

  The starting flag was hoisted and the gun fired.

  Kingdom was surging forward at twenty knots. Her destroyer bow knifed through the water, sending a foaming bow wave down her topsides. Her white hull shined and reflected the water as though it were made of glass. Hawke was on a reach at twenty-three knots. All he had to do was swing the helm to starboard and he’d be off on a perfectly timed start. Kingdom was already trailing by ten seconds, blanketed in the dirty air created by Blackhawke’s towering sails. The tactic had worked.

  “She’s slowing!” Hall shouted. “Kingdom’s slowing!”

  Hawke glanced back at her and saw he had the lead, for the moment at any rate.

  Laddie Carstairs smiled broadly and clipped Hawke’s shoulder. “Good start, skipper.”

  “I rather liked it myself,” Hawke replied, grinning as he eased the helm over two degrees. “Now we find out if we can hold them off in a tacking duel. Any second now she’ll—”

  “She’s tacking now!” Laddie shouted suddenly, and Hawke whipped his head around to see Kingdom go on to port tack.

  Hall, in a deathly calm voice, called, “Ready about!” alerting the crew that they, too, would be tacking momentarily. His stopwatch ticking off the seconds, he waited precisely forty-five seconds from the moment the opponent had tacked and then shouted to the crew, “Tacking!”

  The helm went over slowly as Hawke timed the turn and the sails. He and his architect had designed the sails to retract into the masts at the moment they might have the effect of slowing the yacht and then extend as soon as the tack was completed. This remarkable feat of engineering allowed the sails to remain full of air throughout most of the turn. Hawke and Laddie were all smiles as Blackhawke slowed only slightly during the tack and then suddenly accelerated, the huge bow wave coursing back along her gleaming jet-black hull. It was clear to both men that her radical hull design gave her the ability to go to weather (into the wind) despite her enormous beam.

  “Good God, Alex,” Hall said. “She’s ferociously quick, isn’t she?”

  “This is the moment I’ve been waiting five long years for, Steve. I’m glad I’m sharing it with you.”

  The hired sailing crew on deck cheered loudly, astonished by the boat’s performance as well. All battle-tested veterans of maxi yacht races around the world, they had wrongly assumed this big beast would come to a dead stop in a tack like that, dead in the water, unable to regain momentum. Shouts of surprise and enthusiasm also could be heard from many of the spectator boats that were lining this first leg of the race.

  Hawke eased the helm gently to port and spoke softly to the sail trimmers.

  “Okay, lads, let’s see just how high we can go. Trim in slowly as I bring her bow up into the wind.”

  The closer to the teeth of the wind a yacht sails, the faster she goes.

  He moved the wheel a fraction to the right as the hydraulic winches pulled the sails toward the centerline of the massive yacht. The compass remained centered at 120 degrees, just 30 degrees off the wind. In a true race boat that figure would have been closer to 18 degrees, but Blackhawke had not been designed to race. Tons of electronics, furniture, not to mention radar systems, weaponry, and ammunition, lay beneath her deck.

  All was quiet in the cockpit for a few minutes. And then Hawke noticed the compass move to the left half a degree.

  He now whispered, as though afraid to break the fragile bond between yacht, wind, and water: “Lads, another small trim, please.”

  The giant masts turned a fraction to the left. The sails moved closer to the wind. Blackhawke had gained another half a degree to windward. All three men held their breath as the yacht gained still another degree to windward. And they stood in awe as they watched Blackhawke parallel Kingdom’s heading. She could sail just as close to the wind as the sloop-rigged boat!

  Suddenly, Kingdom tacked back to starboard. Now, a crossing situation between these two colossal yachts was about to unfold. The slightest misjudgment by anyone on board either boat, or even a wind shift, would result in a catastrophic collision. Hawke, like every competitive sailor, loved those times when two yachts, sailing at maximum speed, crossed each other’s paths with mere inches to spare.

  Kingdom now had the privileged position as she was on starboard tack. But Blackhawke was ahead by three boat lengths. Hawke had a decision to make. He had to cross his opponent’s line now. If he didn’t, and Kingdom had to alter her course to avoid a collision, an infraction would be assigned to his boat, a 360-degree penalty turn that would cost him significant time and distance.

  As the boats closed it was clear that Blackhawke was ahead and the proper tactic would be to cross and then almost immediately tack onto starboard and have the dirty air in the wake of his sails slow down Kingdom. Precision was the key. Tacking too early could cause a penalty for interfering with Kingdom’s heading. Tacking too late would allow Kingdom to have clear air.

  Sadly enough, it didn’t matter anymore.

  “Boys, we’ll have to fall off and go below the king,” he shouted. “We must
be in a lull. At any rate, we can’t cross now. Too late.”

  Kingdom slid by, looking magnificent in the afternoon sunlight.

  The sails were eased and Hawke put the helm hard over to port. Blackhawke crossed, well behind Kingdom. Three minutes later he tacked onto starboard, leaving the race course to Kingdom, and headed directly for the Iranian coastline. His blood was up—he wanted like hell to win, to beat this damn boat to the finish line—but he was at least content to know that he could beat her.

  He picked up the VHF radio transmitter’s microphone.

  “Kingdom, Kingdom, Kingdom, this is the yacht Blackhawke. We have suffered a catastrophic hydraulic rigging failure and will be unable to continue to compete. I repeat, we are officially withdrawing from the race. Our captain will notify the Race Committee that we have conceded. I will update you with further information. At this point we need no assistance. Blackhawke over, standing by on Channel 16.”

  He went to standby and replaced the transmitter.

  “Blackhawke, Blackhawke, this is Kingdom. Sorry to hear about your misfortunes. The king wishes to convey his sympathies and regrets to Lord Hawke. Please notify us if we can be of any assistance. Over.”

  Hawke logged his heading for the mission insertion point into the GPS navigation system. He stood for a moment at the helm, watching his adversary gradually become a mere speck on the horizon. Then he turned the helm over to the boat’s captain, Carstairs, and got ready to inform the frustrated sailing crew why they were abandoning the fight. He was not looking forward to that conversation.

  Before he went to talk to his men, he put his binoculars to his eyes and looked at the plains of Iran stretching down to meet the Gulf. The color was a delicate light brown, like the velvety coat of a young gazelle. On the hills, copses of poplars swayed in the wind. Dhows, single-masted vessels of another age, stood out to sea. It looked positively inviting.