The Ghost of Flight 666

by Christopher Anderson

  “The generator went on line before the engine quit,” Jameson told him. He shook his head and replayed the sound of the engine shutting off. “There’s the power coming to idle and there’s the sound of the fuel valve closing—this was a normal shut down—there was nothing wrong.”

  He showed the captain the sonic signature of the freighter over the last ten minutes, pointing out, “There’s no variation, nothing, even when I blow it up. It wasn’t a fried bearing, thrown rod, or broken crankshaft; it was a normal shutdown.”

  “They’re up to something,” the captain said suspiciously. “The bastards have three tons of enriched Uranium on board—of course they’re up to something—but what?”

  “There’s that midget sub,” Jameson said.

  “Where is he in relation to the freighter now?”

  “One klick at the freighter’s eleven O’clock.”

  “If there’s something going on between them then they’re going to have to make contact somehow.”

  A sharp, metallic clang rang through the seawater, bouncing off their hull.

  Once again Seaman First Class Jonah Jameson could only shake his head in amazement, taking his headphones off as he did so. “They’re not subtle, that’s for sure. There’s the signal captain; plain as day!”

  Captain Mars frowned, counting the sharp, metallic sound of hammer blows on a steel hull. The crew heard it and they counted along. Nine clangs followed by a pause. After three more clangs everyone—everyone—knew what was coming. When they were done the captain sighed and looked over his crew.

  His expression was dead serious, and he said, “Nine-Eleven; they’re using Nine-Eleven as their signal. Well gentleman, I think you know that the only way to respond to this is going to be with a torpedo up their ass! The only question is when and where!”

  #

  The sound of the freighter engines chugging to a stop was noted on the Rahman. Then came nine heavy clangs followed by another eleven clangs: the sound of a hammer on the hull. Bashir groaned inwardly. Who couldn’t hear that even without hydrophones? The sailors resting in their bunks below the waterline could hear the signal kilometers away; but no, the fanatics in charge of the mission knew no tactics, no strategy, only their holy war! Holy idiots, all of them!

  “Are we going to answer captain?” the navigator demanded.

  The captain closed his eyes, knowing he had no choice. “You do it,” he said finitely.

  The navigator took out a heavy hammer and rapped on a pipe—hard. The first officer, who was also the engineer, sprang across the narrow deck and grabbed the navigator’s arm.

  “Idiot, what do you want to do; crack the pipe and sink us?”

  “They must hear the signal!”

  “You imbecile everyone in the Straits of Hormuz will hear us! Rap more softly, they will hear it, I assure you!”

  The navigator complied, but the first officer went to Bashir and complained, “He’s served on boats for a year and knows nothing of our job—nothing!”

  The captain held a finger to his lips and whispered, “His father is a very influential Imam in Hayayi’s inner circle; be careful what you say!”

  The first officer swallowed hard, sweating, and said loud enough for everyone one the bridge to hear, “I was only concerned over our sacred mission. The Prophet, Allah bless him, demands all of our skill for his glory and success!”

  “Yes, yes he does,” the captain smiled mirthlessly. He went to the sonar operator. Bending over the man, Bashir wrinkled his nose at the pungent mix of sweat and perfume—common for the boat—extreme for this man.

  “Report, do you have a bearing?”

  “Yes sir, we should proceed at zero-three-nine degrees!”

  “Helm, ahead one quarter zero-three-nine degrees; maintain depth twenty meters!”

  The midget moved forward rising slowly, heavily, noisily. Never quiet, the midget sub was burdened more than usual. Cargo lashed to her foredeck marred the sleek torpedo shape and created turbulence in the water; that meant noise.

  There was nothing the captain could do. Therefore he paid attention to his approach, growing more nervous by the minute. Every minute the freighter repeated the code. Bashir hoped rather than knew it wasn’t being listened to by unfriendly ears. If the Americans could hear it—he shuddered at the thought—then he and his crew would be marked for a deep and watery grave, he had no illusions as to that whatsoever.

  The sonar operator honed in his heading until they were almost upon the freighter and he could hear water slapping against the sides of the stationary ship.

  “We’re close!”

  “All stop!” Bashir ordered. “Periscope depth!”

  Air hissed into the dive tanks, displacing the water and making the boat more buoyant. When they came to a stop at three meters, just short of the conning tower breaking the surface in the trough of a wave, Captain Bashir raised the periscope. The freighter wasn’t in front of them!

  “Damn!” he breathed, looking around wildly. He sighed with relief. There it was at eleven O’clock. It wasn’t bad, but it made the approach more difficult. In order for Bashir to surface within the hold of the ship he had to be aligned nearly perfectly.

  Adjusting the course to line the midget sub up was hard enough, but the freighter was now drifting. Having their engines shut off was part of the illusion, but Bashir had tried to tell the Imams and the army commander in charge of the mission, a Colonel Nikahd, that the current would turn even a heavy freighter with its engines shut down. They ignored him.

  Therefore Bashir had to trust to luck and a quick approach to make this happen. He approached the freighter from the front, passed by the port side and then made his final approach from the rear. As the stern of the freighter loomed over him he ordered the midget sub to dive.

  Staying at his periscope, Captain Bashir picked up a light that had been lowered in the front of the freighter’s open hold. The light glimmered in the darkness of the night waters, making the approach possible, allowing him to line up the sub with the ship. It was a waterproof version of what airline pilots used to park their aircraft, unable as they were to see the stopping points beneath the nose of the aircraft.

  When the light flashed red, he ordered, “All stop! Blow tanks; periscope depth!”

  Air hissed into the tanks and the boat began to rise. Bashir scanned all around, trying to ascertain his boat’s position relative to the freighter. It was impossible to tell. The one light told him how far he was from the front of the hold. Beyond that his periscope was met with inky blackness.

  All at once his vision cleared; the periscope popped up above the surface of the water. His first view was of the far side of the hold. He could see men on the catwalk on the side of the hold, pointing at the periscope. The midget sub continued to rise.

  “Hold periscope depth!” he ordered, but the sub struck the side of the hold, rolling hard to the left. Bashir clung to the periscope as his feet stumbled on the rolling deck. Several of his men lost their footing and crashed to the steel floor. A resounding clang sounded throughout the boat.

  The midget sub popped up from under the freighter, swerving to port and rocking like an angry bronco. There were shouts and curses. The horrible sound of water jetting from a burst pipe—a submariner’s nightmare—cut the fetid atmosphere.

  “Stabilize our depth at five meters!” he ordered.

  The engineer ordered the tanks balanced while he and another man packed a clamp over the burst pipe and shut off the valves. The leak slowed but it did not stop. The mate reported, “We’ve got a breech in the seam of the pressure hull! Diving is out of the question now!”

  “You mean we can’t get out of the hold?” Bashir asked.

  “I don’t know until I examine the damage topside. Maybe we can brace it and get ten meters out of her, but nothing more,” he replied.

  “Well planned or not, we’re here. Wait for the frogmen to straighten us out.” They waited, working all the time on the leak. Water
soaked the deck plates and stations on the port side of the bridge, gurgling into the bilge.

  A slap sounded on the conning tower. “Bring us up to one meter—slow!”

  “Conning tower free!” the first officer reported.

  “Come on; let’s check the damage.” Bashir opened the upper hatch. A fog of smoke and salt spray made his eyes water. He coughed, hacking and wheezing as he clambered out into the conning tower. Rushing to the side, he looked over the bulwark at the damage. It was hard to see without the boat fully surfaced, but there was an ugly dent along the port side. It was nearly ten feet long; Air bubbled out of the crease every time the boat heeled over or submerged the foredeck.

  A strident voice assailed Bashir. He heard nothing but the tone of the comment, so he retorted, reminding the commentator, the captain of the freighter as it turned out, that this was not a normal maneuver, that he should try it if he didn’t like it.

  Frogmen and deckhands secured the midget sub in the hold of the freighter. Then began the arduous process of swapping the cargo containers. Each weighed two tons, so Captain Bashir had the engineer slowly flood the dive tanks so that the deck was awash. Inflatable collars allowed the deckhands to float the containers just enough to move them around.

  As the business of swapping the containers continued a gangway was lowered to the conning tower and Bashir was taken aboard the freighter. The captain met him with a sober but apologetic manner.

  “That can’t have been easy; forgive my outburst, the import of our mission must be my excuse,” he said.

  Bashir nodded, “That is the only reason I would ever try anything so risky.”

  “How extensive is your damage?”

  “There is a breech that will prevent our diving deep; however, we are simply transporting the cargo and not going into battle. I don’t foresee anything that would prevent our rendezvous with the—” he stopped when the captain of the freighter put up his hand.

  “I have no need to know anything further,” he interrupted. “You had better get the cargo on the way before the Americans decide to come and aide us. They have an overdeveloped sense of rescuing people!”

  Captain Bashir nodded and left for his command. A half hour later the midget sub disappeared in the black waters. Shortly thereafter a destroyer passed the Atlas a line and it was secured. At Captain Mustafa’s order the destroyer towed the Atlas toward Abu Dhabi.

  CHAPTER 28: Swimming with the Fishes

  As midnight struck over the Straits of Hormuz the hardly to be heard hum of a V-22 Osprey approached Bandar Abbas with very reluctant Jeremiah Slade on board.

  Feeling far too old to be doing something like this, Slade sat in his wetsuit at the aft end of the Osprey. Slung over his shoulder was a KRISS Super Vector .45 caliber assault rifle and other gear.

  Leaning against his right leg was a torpedo shaped underwater sled complete with radar, infra-red cameras and lights as well as munitions. The sled was invaluable when they had miles to cover underwater, but as Killer jokingly told Slade, “It can’t outrun a hungry shark. Sorry buddy.”

  “Get ready to drop!” the loadmaster shouted.

  The hydraulic squeal of the cargo doors was clearly audible over the muffled engines. Then the airstream drowned them out. The air became cool and damp with a salt tang over the smell of jet fuel, oil and the sickeningly sweet smell of hydraulic fluid.

  The loadmaster motioned them up, three men on each side of him. Slade stood up and shuffled to the back door, looking down at the black water. The breakwater of the port was ahead of the aircraft; the dimly illuminated cargo bay faced out to sea.

  Standing at the edge of the cargo bay Slade glanced at Killer to his right. He wasn’t afraid of the ten meter jump, but Slade had a very visceral concern over entering a world where he was no longer the top of the food chain, especially at night.

  Killer knew this, and shouted, “Time your jump to land between those two big ones! Mind the teeth!”

  Slade had no time to retort. The loadmaster slapped him on the shoulder as the small green light illuminated.

  “Go!”

  Training took over. Slade could not have stopped his jump even if he wanted to. His body was so thoroughly trained to respond to that situation, to that command, that his muscle memory took over. He was a passenger in his own body. Before he knew it the cold, dark water closed around him, filled as it was with hidden, hungry things.

  Fighting that momentary urge to panic, Slade exhaled—training again—that cleared the regulator and allowed him to slowly fill his lungs with Oxygen. He hung there, suspended in the darkness for what seemed like five minutes; it was actually as many seconds. That allowed his inner ear to re-establish its equilibrium; it took the extra time because in the dark, zero-gravity environment of the night ocean his sensory inputs aside from the cold of the water were nil.

  The sound of the bubbles faded. Slade reached for his helmet and turned on his infra-red lights. There was a small LCD screen above each eye in his mask; the screens were connected to two diode sized cameras on either side of his mask. Looking around he caught sight of the five other divers of the Delta Force team. They were readying their sleds.

  “All right boys time to mount up!” Killer said.

  Pulling his sled up and levelling it, Jeremiah aimed it as he would a big machine gun. Hitting one button with his thumb powered the sled up. Hitting two more turned on the sled’s more powerful infra-red lights and activated the main screen.

  The screen was a multi-purpose display. It automatically displayed what the camera saw; however, the screen also showed the essential mission data required for any military operation: the Zulu time, a chronometer, the compass heading, depth, temperature, and in the lower left corner of the display a navigation display fed by a combination gyro and GPS navigation computer. At the bottom of that display were the latitude and longitude of the sled.

  The navigation display showed the outlines of the harbor and the position of the target ship superimposed over the picture of the other divers. The rocks of the breakwater were to his right. They sheltered the old naval harbor of Shahid Bahonor from the sea. That’s where the target ship, the Champion Galaxus, lay in berth—a civilian ship at the navy yard—the first clue that something was very, very wrong. If the cargo for Soekarno was really just sand and nothing more why wasn’t the ship berthed at the more modern civilian port Shahid Rajaee a few miles west?

  Slade fell behind Killer, keeping out of his wake but maintaining a few meters behind. He could see nothing but what his sled screen and his helmet camera showed. They ran at eight meters, and at that depth no one, even someone watching for them, would have noted the soft green glow from the sled’s tactical displays.

  Their only sensory signature was the soft hum of the sled’s motors and propellers, but even these were drowned out by the distant yet unmuffled growls of the tugs and ships in the harbor.

  Like ghosts they made their way along the breakwater before turning right into the outer harbor. It was nearly a kilometer to the berth where they expected to find the target ship, Soekarno’s Champion Galaxus. To get there, the sleds had to navigate the outer harbor and whatever traffic it had. That forced them to descend to fifteen meters, ensuring they passed beneath any transiting ships.

  The water here was cold and necessarily dark. The sounds of the harbor were many and varied. Engines chugged, propellers whirred, somewhere in the harbor a man was hammering on a steel plate; the resulting blows turned the hull into a huge bell, making the whole harbor ring. Slade got a new appreciation for just how difficult submariners had it when forced to run silent. At one point they passed beneath an anchored ship and Slade swore he could hear singing, very bad singing.

  The water changed as they approached the inner harbor. Slicks and globules of oil choked the water. The bottom rose up, strewn with garbage and debris: chains, boots, rags, barrels, anything and everything you might find in a harbor and all slick with sludge and oil. Motoring just over
the bottom Slade stuck out a hand. He dragged it across the surface, curious, and came up with a sticky black goo. The harbor waters of Bandar Abbas were disgusting.

  “There it is,” Killer said through his helmet. The keel of a freighter appeared on the screen behind Killer’s sled. The Delta Force steered toward the rear of the ship. Their first goal was the rudder.

  Reaching it, Killer searched the large piece of steel for the registration number. It was the quickest way to confirm the identity of the ship. Checking the number against his database confirmed that they’d found the Champion Galaxus.

  Moving along the hull to a point amidships, the Deltas ditched the sleds on the bottom, mooring them with a simple cable and stake shoved into the goo of the seabed.

  Swimming up to just under the surface, Slade and four of the Deltas hung there in the darkness while Killer found the ladder. When he did, he came back and led them to it.

  “Secure fins!”

  Slade took his fins off and secured them to his vest. Then he swung he KRISS around front and unplugging the barrel. He checked that the silencer was secure and then prepared to follow Killer up the ladder. Killer went first while Slade covered him from below, turning on the reticulated sight, a dim red circle with a glowing dot in the center.

  As Killer climbed the welded rebar rungs, Slade scanned the ship’s rail, looking for anyone to pop their head over the side.

  Pausing at the top, Killer waited before slipping over the side. “All clear, come on up!”

  Slade slung the KRISS on his back again, swiftly climbing the ladder. The ladder was not meant for ease of climbing. The rungs were rather too close to the hull, making it easy to rap your knuckles on the steel side. It was sixty feet up the side for Slade, a much longer climb than it would have been ten years ago. He got to the top. The climb warmed him up. Now, peering over the side, he saw Killer crouched in the shadows of a hatch.

  The top deck was well illuminated. The dockyard lights shone with a harsh white light. However, this also created sharp shadows of stygian night. Slade rolled over the steel bulwark and into the shadow of the massive hatch next to Killer.