Phoenix Sub Zero

Chapter 1 Thursday, 26 December

The Javelin cruise missile blew out of the dark water of the Mediterranean, momentarily frozen in space above an angry cloud of spray until the weapon’s rocket motor ignited in a violent fireball, hurling the missile skyward with an agonizingly bright flame trail.

The crosshairs of the periscope view framed the fiery parabola of the submarine-launched missile’s trajectory as it flew to its peak, 1,500 feet into the clear starlit sky, then arced downward on its way to its ground-hugging approach to its target. Commander Ron Daminski trained the periscope view downward until the missile rocket motor cut out, and the flying automaton vanished into the night. Daminski removed his eye from the periscope optic module for a moment, just long enough to look at the battlestations crew surrounding him in the cramped rigged-for-black control room of the Improved Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Augusta. Satisfied, he returned to his periscope and trained it in a slow circle, a surface search, while the crew prepared to launch the second Javelin warshot missile from the forward vertical launch system.

“Missile two on internal power. Captain. Target is locked in and readbacks are nominal,” the executive officer, Danny Kristman, reported, as emotionlessly as if he were commenting on the weather. “Ready for launch in three zero seconds.”

“Open the muzzle door,” Daminski ordered, training his periscope view forward to see the second launch.

“Door open, tank pressurized … Five seconds, sir.

Three, two, one, mark.”

“Shoot,” Daminski commanded.

“Fire!” Kristman barked, the roar of the missile tube the punctuation to the order.

Daminski watched as the second Javelin cleared the water and lifted off toward the east. When it too had disappeared, he lowered the periscope and turned to executive officer Kristman.

“XO, you have the conn. Secure battle stations, take her deep and continue orbiting at the hold point.”

“Aye, sir.”

The deck took on a down angle as Kristman made the orders, the hull groaning and popping loudly from the sea pressure as the Augusta descended into the depths. From the periscope stand Lieutenant Commander Dan Kristman glanced across at Daminski as the captain yawned, stretched, and tried to fight the sleep he’d evaded for the last three nights.

“Rocket Ron” Daminski, so named for his intensity and white-hot temper, had just turned fifty, unusually old for the job of commanding the submarine Augusta. He was stocky and short, his hair beginning to recede from his lined forehead, yet he still carried himself like the athlete he had once been, in spite of bad knees and several dozen old football injuries.

He spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent and frequently referred to himself as an “ignorant New York Polack,” but he dismissed the fact that he had been a brilliant engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Still, he was a troubled officer, always passed over for promotion, and had no illusions that his career would have any further surprises.

Daminski had been aboard Augusta four months, ever since the previous captain had run aground and been relieved for cause. The investigation had shown that the ship had become sloppy and poorly trained, and the admiral in command of the Atlantic’s submarine forces had sent out the ultimate sub-fixer, some would say ass-kicker. Rocket Ron Daminski, a ten-year veteran of straightening out ill-performing submarines.

At first, the crew had dreaded Daminski’s arrival, with good reason. Once aboard, the man was a hurricane, sweeping through every department, finding fault with every division, every officer, every chief, and most enlisted men. Each flaw, regardless of significance, was treated by Rocket as a treasonous personal affront. Every excruciating day had brought several dozen of his demanding emotional outbursts, but over weeks, the boat had responded. Even the men who professed to hate Rocket Ron began to give him the credit as the ship began to function smoothly, going from the squad ron dog to the squadron’s best, until they were certain to win any exercise. Daminski’s tantrums became less frequent, his inspiring speeches more frequent, until over the last month he had become almost jovial in his praise for the men and officers. The ship was ordered to the Mediterranean to support the war against the United Islamic Front, a cause for celebration, the notice that Augusta had arrived.

Through the entire ordeal of putting Augusta back on track. Rocket Ron Daminski had never revealed much of his personal life to the crew. It was known that he was married to his second wife, a pretty and voluptuous younger woman named Myra; the two of them had three small children.

Daminski had filled his stateroom with pictures of his family, nearly wallpapering an entire bulkhead with their photos.

Kristman had noticed that not one photograph included Daminski himself. He had on a recent occasion noticed Daminski mooning over a letter from his wife, so deeply in thought that it had taken Kristman three tries to get the captain’s attention. Daminski carried the letter with him everywhere— not in his shirt or pants pockets, but against the skin of his chest. In one recent emergency drill, Daminski had rushed to the control room in his boxers and T-shirt— which in an emergency was considered normal— and the letter from Myra had been stuck in the waistband of the boxers beneath Daminski’s T-shirt. Kristman could now see the slight rectangular bulge in Daminski’s submarine coveralls where the letter was stowed as Daminski yawned again and ran his huge misshapen football-injured fingers through his hair.

As the ship pulled out of the dive, the deck again became flat. Daminski stepped off the raised periscope stand aft to the twin chart tables, a cigarette appearing between his lips as he bent over the chart. Across the landmass to the east, the thin orange pencil lines traced the serpentine tracks of the Javelin missiles. The lines terminated at a city just north of the Iranian border, the capital city of the United Islamic Front of God, Ashkhabad, in a country called Turkmenistan.

A country that five years before was barely on the map, a two-bit ex-Soviet republic, but was now the center of a thirty-nation confederation of Muslim states. The uniting of the Islamic states had taken almost five years, yet in that time the Western intelligence agencies seemed caught by surprise that it had happened, believing until it was too late that the Muslims still hated each other even more than the West. In this, the spooks had been as wrong as they had been in the months before the fall of the Shah’s Iran.

And as history proved once more, there was no limit to what a single determined man could do. The twentieth century had seen one dictator after another take the reins of power and threaten the world, but most paled next to Mohammed al-Sihoud, the dictator of the United Islamic Front of God. Sihoud had made Turkmenistan his hub territory, the UIF’s capital the city of Ashkhabad, where the Combined Intelligence Agency, now paying very close attention, indicated he had been for the last two days.

There in a concrete reinforced bunker on the northern city limits of Ashkhabad, General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was about to get a very nasty surprise. The operation’s name, “Early Retirement,” was appropriate. Never before in the century had a world war against a dictatorship been conducted by a concerted attempt to assassinate the dictator. This war was to be different.

Executive officer Kristman joined Daminski at the chart.

Both men studied the tracks of the Javelin cruise missiles for several quiet moments. Kristman spoke first.

“Think this is going to work. Skipper?”

“I don’t know, Danny. Probably depends on the seal team commandos. We’re just insurance.”

“At least we got to shoot something at that bastard.”

Daminski nodded, knowing what Kristman meant. In the last ten months of the war, the work had been done by ground troops of the Army and the Marines while the glory had gone to the Navy and Air Force fighter pilots. Meanwhile the surface and submarine navies had paced the seas restlessly, effectively useless against the massive and deadly combined land forces of the United Islamic Front.

“I’m going to grab some rack,” Daminski said. “Get the section’s officer of the deck on the conn and station yourself as command duty officer. Call me if anything comes in on the ELF circuit.”

“Yes sir.”

Daminski walked forward to the tiny cubbyhole of his stateroom, shut the door, and sank into the narrow bed. He had been awake going on forty hours, since the flash message announcing the kickoff of the operation had come in on the sub broadcast. Daminski was exhausted, but he knew he was much too wired from shooting the cruise missile warshots to fall asleep.

He pulled the letter from Myra from inside his shirt and read it again, the dogeared stationery proclaiming in her loopy handwriting that she loved him but was leaving him anyway.

Daminski put the letter back in his shirt and stared at the dimly lit overhead for a moment, but finally closed his eyes and tried to imagine the Javelins, what they were doing that very instant, gliding through the night at 650 miles per hour, a mere twenty feet above the ground, following the contour of the land, screaming in over the terrain of Turkmenistan enroute to General Sihoud’s hidden bunker.

Commander Jack Morris missed his beard. It had been a ZZ-Top hairy thing, extending down his chest almost to his belly button. He missed his long hair as well, feeling odd every time he turned his head and didn’t feel the old ponytail dragging across his back. His shooters, the men of seal Team Seven, until just months before, had been a ragged-looking band of bikers, the Navy’s finest counterterrorist unit.

The start of the land war against the UIF had changed all that, forcing the Sea/Air/Land commandos, the seals, back into regulation Navy uniforms and grooming standards.

Jack Morris didn’t like that — —it interfered with unit integrity. The seals needed to feel different; there was something healthy about coming onto base looking like a truck driver and getting away with it — —it was a concrete sign that seal Team Seven was different than the rest of the Navy, and therefore better. One last time Morris ran his hands through his weirdly short hair and looked around the cargo compartment of the Air Force KC-10H/A transport jet, the plane illuminated only by a few dim hooded red lights.

Unloaded, the KC-10’s interior was cavernous, but tonight it held two dozen tons of combat equipment and three augmented platoons of Team Seven, each platoon manned by thirty-three of the meanest sons of bitches in all of the U.S. armed forces. Or any armed force. Morris looked around him at the men— — almost without exception, they were all sleeping. In a way, that would be expected, since they’d been flying for what seemed like days, and it was well after midnight local time. But it was also odd, for these men were only hours from the biggest and hottest combat operation the team had seen since the bloody liberation of the USS Tampa two years before. Many of the men were not expected to return from the mission, and some who would return would leave parts of their bodies behind. Still, Morris thought, they would be in better shape than the UIF people in General Sihoud’s bunker complex.

One of the aircrew from the flight deck came back into the cargo cabin and waved ten fingers at Morris— — ten minutes till they were over the drop zone. Morris heard the jet engines suddenly throttle up, their noise rattling his skull.

The plane cabin tilted upward dramatically as the aircraft climbed. Morris unlatched his seat harness and stood, his muscles sore from the long jet ride. He stepped forward, leaning into the incline of the deck, tapping awake his sleeping executive officer, Lieutenant Commander “Black Bart” Bartholomay. As Bart’s eyes opened, Morris shouted “ten minutes” in his face. Bart stood and got the men into action while Morris headed forward. He entered a short narrow corridor at the forward end of the cargo bay, the doors on either wall leading to crew quarters, galley, and the head. At the end of the passageway Morris pushed open the door to the flight deck and squeezed in. The flight crew barely noticed him, the navigator/flight engineer knowing his purpose.

“You sure we’re in the right place?” Morris asked. He’d been disappointed before by the Air Force, once having been dropped fifty miles south of the planned jump point, landing his platoon several miles offshore instead of on the beach.

“We got here somewhat roundabout. Commander — we had a few radar detects. This good enough for you?” The flight-suited crewman pointed out the navigation satellite readout and offered a chart up to Morris’s face. After a moment Morris grunted.

“We’re doing the pop-up now. Commander. About time to get ready with your guys.”

“Any sign of activity?” Morris asked, ignoring the officer’s warning. The Air Force “zoomies” knew what he meant, Morris thought — is anyone getting ready to shoot us out of the sky?

“Nothing now. We’re clear.”

Morris turned and left without a word and hurried aft.

Within two minutes all three platoons of Team Seven were on their feet preparing their gear. The deck of the cargo jet remained inclined as it continued its rapid climb to 45,000 feet.

While at altitude they would be vulnerable, Morris thought, checking his watch, wishing he were already in free fall instead of another piece of cargo in a damned Air Force jet.

Morris pulled on his full face oxygen mask and checked the seal. When the men were ready, he nodded to the airman who opened a panel and depressurized the cabin. Almost immediately the compartment became frigid. Morris shivered and lied to himself that it was from the cold and not from fear. Morris checked his connection to his cargo crate — he and every seal would be tethered to a heavy equipment case during free fall and parachute descent. After an endless five minutes the loading ramp was unlatched and rolled slowly open. Only a few stars in the blackness showed through the gaping hole. Morris connected his Intersat scrambled VHF secure voice tactical radio to the boom microphone in his oxygen mask and spoke to his troops.

“Listen up, assholes,” he said into his mike, “we’ve got damned little time in the drop zone. I want the DPV’s assembled in four minutes tops and we’re on the way. Don’t forget we’re doing this for one thing and only one thing — to bring back the head of one Mohammed al-Sihoud on a stick. Everybody got that? Let’s get off this bus and go.”

Morris stepped to the edge of the ramp first and let his toes hang out over seven miles above the desert floor. Black Bart’s voice crackled in his earpiece.

“Fifteen seconds.”

Morris spent the time going over the mission in his mind, trying to visualize the main bunker compound in ruins, the security forces running in helpless circles, Sihoud in confusion, maybe trying to escape in a truck, the barrel of a seal MAC-10 automatic pistol in his nose.

“Five seconds … two, one, go.”

Morris jumped into the blackness.

From the outside the Main Bunker appeared to be a large mosque, no different from hundreds spread across the Islamic nations of the Arabian peninsula, Asia, and North Africa.

Four high walls shaped the structure, a tall minaret tower rising out of the eastern wall, presiding over a square central courtyard. The western wall, toward the direction of Mecca, contained the sanctuary. Five times during the broiling hot spring day, the faithful of the Main Bunker would emerge into the courtyard in response to the calls to worship from the minaret, perform the ritual prayers, bowing down deeply in the direction of Mecca. Ritual cries of Allahu Akbar rang out over the courtyard, the combined voices directed heavenward proclaiming the greatness of Allah.

Ten meters beneath the courtyard, below three meters of high-strength prestressed reinforced concrete and twenty centimeters of lead shielding, the upper level of the bunker began. The first sublevel contained the quarters for the lower ranking soldiers of the United Islamic Front of God’s Combined Armed Force. The next two levels were the junior and senior officers’ quarters. The third level housed the plush quarters of General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud, although General Sihoud spent little time there, instead commanding his armies from field command posts. The final level, thirty-five meters beneath the rocky terrain of southern Turkmenistan, was the headquarters area with its maps, computers, and communications consoles linked to the antennae arrays hidden in the minaret forty meters above.

In the hushed and dimly lit headquarters deck, the Combined Air Force supreme commander and chief of staff to General Sihoud, Col. Rakish Ahmed, walked to the communications console set against the east wall of the bunker’s fourth sublevel’s tactical control room. Several junior men manning the console jerked to attention in their seats as Ahmed drew close and leaned over to see the displays.

Ahmed scanned the computer screens in search of good news, and finding none, turned toward the Khalib — the Sword of Islam — Mohammed al-Sihoud, who stood in the center of the room with a displeased look on his face, his swirling white silk shesh robe flowing to the computer floor tiles of the command center, a colorful belt holding a remarkable long knife in an ornate scabbard on his hip.

Ahmed saw Sihoud’s knowing glance, and wondered whether Sihoud had already guessed what was to be said. Ahmed had worked as Sihoud’s chief of staff for over a year, and the two men had learned each other’s minds well.

General Sihoud was a striking leader, incredibly tall for one of Bedouin ancestry, with the expected dark skin stretched across startling unexpected Western features, his brilliant violet-colored eyes shining commandingly from his aristocratic face. Ahmed considered the bluish purple eyes for a moment, knowing that Sihoud was almost ashamed of them — they gave away the fact that his Bedouin roots were mixed with the blood of a White Russian. Sihoud’s paternal grandfather, though Russian, had been born in what was then the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, rising to the rank of general in the Red Army. General Tallinn had married a young Muslim girl named Raja Sihoud, had taken a post in Moscow, then returned ten years later with a young son. The general had been killed on the march to Hitler’s Berlin, leaving the son to grow up an anti-Soviet Islamic revolutionary.

Named Yuri Tallinn, he changed his name to All Abba Sihoud, and had only lived to see his thirty-seventh year before being executed for crimes against the Soviet state. Mohammed al-Sihoud had been only seven years old when he watched the kangaroo court sentence his father to death.

Now, thirty years after the Soviet bullet had passed through his father’s brain, Mohammed al-Sihoud found his eyes a liability, a reminder of what had been Russian, but to Ahmed the deep purple eyes made the leader that much more marked by the hand of destiny.

Not that destiny was helping them now: it was beginning to look as if the tide of the war was turning, the offensive brown streaks staining the computer-generated maps on the oversize consoles on the west wall of the headquarters level, the brown symbolizing the armored forces of the Western, Coalition, the West’s three recent invasions into UIF soil.

Their white-faced soldiers might soon march deeper into the heart of the United Islamic Front. There was only one way out of this, one way to stop the bleeding of the Islamic armies in the deserts, and that was to implement Ahmed’s plan, to use his plutonium polymer dispersion weapon, the Scorpion, and bring this war home to the leaders of the Coalition, the Americans. Ahmed wondered if Sihoud would welcome the missile or object to it. Although it would seem odd that the Khalib would spurn such a superweapon. General Sihoud continued to cling to a belief that the Islamic soldiers engaged in their holy jihad could still defeat the overfed soldiers of the Coalition without the marvels of high technology. But in this belief, Sihoud was mistaken. Perhaps it was he. Rakish Ahmed, who had let down the United Islamic Front in his failure to make Sihoud understand. Perhaps now was the time to bring Sihoud to the realization that a head-to-head battle with the Coalition could not be won.

And there was the other matter on Ahmed’s mind, the reports coming in of a Coalition plot to kill Sihoud. Sihoud’s stubborn refusal to command from the bunker made him play into any Western plot to assassinate him — Sihoud’s own bravado might be the factor that got him killed.

“General-and-Khalib, I’m worried about the Coalition invasions,” Ahmed said. “I’ve had a computer simulation run to project the near term outcome. I’ve been optimistic in my assumptions of our troop losses, fuel usage, and supply distribution. I’ve also projected that the Coalition’s supplies are held up and that their troops are poorly deployed. And the computer still shows the Coalition marching into Ashkhabad within the year.”

Sihoud reached into his scabbard for his knife. He pulled the instrument out, a long shining blade below a beautiful pearl handle with at least a dozen precious gems shining even in the dim light of the command center. Sihoud, as he always did when deep in thought, ran his finger slowly along the edge, and there were times when Ahmed was amazed that Sihoud never cut himself.

“A computer simulation,” Sihoud said. “As if an adding machine could capture the fighting spirit of our men. Rakish, you are too much the flying-machine technician, too little the field-soldier warrior.”

Ahmed gestured toward the oversized monitor repeater above the computer console, the map on it showing North Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia, the territories of the United Islamic Front of God, now under attack from the invading forces of the American and European armies. The Coalition had invaded the western shores of Morocco in North Africa. A central invasion force had obtained a foot hold on the Sinai Peninsula and within weeks would target Cairo. A third force had come ashore in the southeast on the southern coast of Iran, the preinvasion bombing so violent that much of southern Iran’s civilian population was wiped out, including Rakish Ahmed’s own town of Chah Bahar.

Rakish Ahmed knew of this war crime personally — —he had been in the town to see to defenses along the coast, and at the Khalib’s invitation had stopped at his home to see his wife and young son. An hour after his arrival, the Coalition bombers had arrived, bombing the town into dust, killing Ahmed’s family, nearly killing him too. The episode had shaken him severely, his sleep filled with nightmares, his days spent fighting off memories.

The Coalition forces would come, Ahmed thought. Their objective was to drive toward Ashkhabad. Toward Sihoud.

“Khalib, we do not have the force for a three-front counterattack. We have material problems. The Japanese tanks and trucks and self-propelled artillery are excellent weapons — if they have fuel. The Firestar fighter jets have engine problems, they throw turbine blades — and what good are the most sophisticated electronics in the air if the airplanes are unable to fly? We have severe supply problems — supplies of every nature are short. We will barely be able to keep the men in the field fed. Our battle deaths cannot be replaced by young recruits. The Coalition is starting to bomb the refineries. The sky is growing black with oil fires. In six months our tanks and planes will begin to run out of fuel.”

Sihoud ran his finger slowly along the knife’s edge.

“So you believe ova jihad — now just begun — is hopeless,” he finally said in his melodious voice. For a moment Ahmed considered not the words but the voice itself, the voice that had mesmerized the leaders and peoples of the nations of the Islamic world, had in spite of their animosities forged them together into a solid formidable confederation. A confederation that had nearly united central Asia, North Africa, and all of Arabia; the consolidation had continued with the invasion and occupation of Chad and Ethiopia, both campaigns taking less then four weeks. But Sihoud’s expansion had stumbled badly in the invasion of India. Chad and Ethiopia had taken the world by surprise, the media confused by propaganda from both nations that the sizable Muslim populations of the two countries had invited Sihoud in. The same illusion could not be maintained for the crossing into India. The Indians had fought bravely and appealed loudly to the West, and the West had finally decided to take a stand. The Indian adventure, rather than expanding the UIF, had instead united the Western Coalition and brought American, British, and German weapons to bear against Sihoud, and there was no way that Sihoud, even with his unique charisma, could stand up against that.

It took Ahmed a moment to realize that General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was looking at him intently, waiting impatiently for an answer.

“I am sorry, I was thinking. What was your question?”

“Rakish, you tell me of the problems of the world and you expect me perhaps to wave this knife and make them all go away.” Sihoud fixed his violet eyes on Ahmed’s for a moment, the dark swirling irises drilling into Ahmed’s, as if looking for a character flaw. “You are a pilot, a scientist who deals with numbers and pieces of metal. I am a foot soldier and I deal with the hearts and souls of men, fighting men. We are here to defend our claim to the continent, not to fret about oil reserves and turbine blades.”

“General, it is never easy to acknowledge that a battle or a war might be lost.” Rakish chose his words carefully, knowing that to anger Sihoud could mean demotion, perhaps even removal from a war he wanted to fight and needed to fight. “But I have a plan involving the use of a new weapon developed in our Mashhad weapon test lab, a weapon I designed but did not tell you about out of fear that it might fail.” Sihoud’s eyes, always so calm, came up to Ahmed’s, his expression naked, malevolent. Ahmed continued. “Imagine for a moment the power of a weapon that would humble a nuclear bomb. A weapon that would not even need to be used to stop the Coalition. A bomb so terrifying that if we just threaten to use it, would cause Washington to withdraw Coalition forces from UIF soil. But I suggest we do not just threaten to use it. I recommend we deploy it as soon as——”

“You told me we did not have the plutonium for a nuclear weapon, in spite of my orders. Colonel Ahmed. Now suddenly there is a super weapon?”

“We started with the airframe of the Mitsubishi Hiroshima missile, the high-altitude supersonic cruise missile we worked so hard to buy from our Japanese advisors.”

Sihoud glared at Ahmed, but seemed to be paying close attention.

“We filled the warhead space with what we call the Scorpion warhead. Its core is a lightweight high explosive. The HX is surrounded by three layers— — a vinyl acetate monomer liquid bladder, a high-pressure bottle of ethylene gas, and a bag of finely ground plutonium particles.” Ahmed checked Sihoud, knowing the general hated overly technical briefings, but there was no other way to explain the system with out the details. “The cruise missile flies at supersonic speed toward its target at an altitude of eighteen kilometers, slowing and diving at the last moments to about a thousand meters above ground zero. The high explosive detonates, blowing the monomer and plutonium dust into the ethylene bottle which then ruptures, and the heat and pressure of the explosion create a sort of reactor system. The monomer and ethylene react to form a liquid polymer emulsion — —glue, if you will, sir — —which suspends the plutonium in a matrix that floats down to the ground below. The glue cements the plutonium onto every surface it contacts— — no wind or rain or decontamination procedure can dislodge the plutonium, and the radioactivity of the plutonium is enough to kill the entire target population within about two kilometers of ground zero, and the deaths are not merciful ones. Radiation poisoning causes a slow and painful death, exactly what the enemy deserve. The target is so contaminated that it must be abandoned forever.”

Sihoud looked at Ahmed and replaced the knife in its scabbard, his face filled with something that had not been there moments before, a look that Ahmed imagined to be some evidence of a newly found hope.

“How many can we make?”

“Three, perhaps four.”

“This weapon, the Scorpion. You put it in the Hiroshima cruise missile … but the Hiroshima only has a range of 3,500 kilometers. That’s not far.”

“We can target Europe from UIF territories but——”

“But that isn’t good enough. We need to target their seat of power.”

“Washington … I have a plan to deliver the warhead there, but it will take some time,” Ahmed gestured at the electronic map showing the advancing armies of the Coalition, “and we must hurry.”

“What is the plan?”

Ahmed glanced at the electronic chart, wondering if this was the time to tell General Sihoud the rest of the bad news, perhaps the worst news of all. He saw Sihoud’s penetrating eyes and decided that Sihoud needed the facts, whether or not he elected to believe them.

“Before I go into the Scorpion deployment plan, I need to tell you about something else, something of an immediate nature—”

“Another assassination plot. Colonel?”

“In a way, sir. I have been seeing intelligence that Coalition forces may plan a decapitation operation. They may try to take you out and we need to respond to that quickly.”

“There will be no decapitation. Rakish. These are the same people who fought Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Hussein. Not one of them was ever assassinated. Colonel.”

“Exactly, sir. That’s why we worry that you will be the first.”

“Your paranoia begins to reflect on you. Rakish. A warrior does not worry about assassination plots. But go ahead. What’s the proof?”

“A large airliner took off from Volgograd several hours ago on the way to Alma-Ata and disappeared over the Aral Sea. It never landed, yet it is not on our radars. It makes me very suspicious. This plane could be bringing paratroopers.”

“An airplane,” Sihoud said skeptically, beginning to lose interest. “An airplane lost on a radar screen. This is not something even worth a discussion. Colonel.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure you’re right, still … At about the same time the mystery jet took off, our geosynch satellite detected three sudden heat blooms in the Arabian Sea off Karachi and two more in the Mediterranean east of Cyprus.”

“Heat blooms …?”

“Infrared scanned heat sources, sudden and very hot.”

“Perhaps gun tests or flare launches. Disposal of defective ordnance, maybe.”

“Or maybe the Coalition is targeting us with cruise missiles. The heat blooms could have been their rocket motor first stages.”

“That’s it?”

“We can’t track cruise missiles from the ground, sir. We don’t know if they are coming. And the aircraft approach is perplexing. As I said, it could hold paratroopers.”

“Enough of this,” Sihoud said. “Two weeks ago you were certain a commando force had landed outside Ashkhabad and was coming for me. We never heard from them. I will not fight this war from the rear, Colonel. We must return to the field.”

Ahmed nodded, feeling equal parts frustration that Sihoud was not hearing him and hope that Sihoud was right.

Augusta’s first-fired Javelin cruise missile hugged the ground, barely twenty feet above the brushland of the Turkmenian plains, flying at 650 miles per hour. As it did every six minutes, the onboard Javcalcor computer commanded a full self-check and the missile’s systems reported in. Fuel was getting low at forty percent; fuel flow rate was within limits. Compressor inlet, combustor discharge, and turbine discharge temperatures were all nominal. The warhead system reported satisfactory interlocks with the detonator train disconnected and open-circuited. The guidance system reported that the rudder and elevator control surfaces were functional. The navigation system was taking continuous fixes on the terrain-following contour-radar set, and the shape of the land below, matched the computer memory; the flatness of the Turkmenian Plain had caused some concern, but a backup star fix showed the terrain navigation to be within limits. The missile was about a half mile ahead of where the clock indicated it should be, and since arrival at the target at a precise moment in time was vital, the computer decided to slow the missile down by twenty feet per second. The amidships fuel flow control valve shut slightly, cutting down on the combustor fuel feed. The combustion chamber’s discharge temperature dropped and the turbine whined down slightly. Nozzle thrust fell a fraction and the missile slowed.

The computer scanned the memory map of the Turkmenian terrain and the approach to the Main Bunker Complex outside of Ashkhabad. The weapon would approach from the north at reduced altitude. At a range of one mile it would execute a pop-up maneuver, climbing almost vertically up to 2,000 feet, then arc over and dive into the bunker from directly overhead.

The computer reminded itself to wait 200 milliseconds after impact before detonating the warhead’s compact high explosive, to ensure the weapon had traveled all the way to the fourth sublevel before exploding — the target was almost 140 feet below the ground floor level of the mosque.

The missile’s only concern was successfully flying the remaining miles to the target and detonating in the proper sequence.

The 200-knot slipstream punched into seal commander Jack Morris’s guts and threatened to send him tumbling in spite of his textbook-correct body position. He bounced through the turbulence, feeling the shock of the cold after the shock of the wind began to die down. He sailed in the thunderous gale winds of free fall at 115 miles per hour, terminal velocity with his flying-squirrel thermal coveralls, wondering what the wind chill was — wind of 115 miles per, starting with air at forty below zero. Whatever it was, it would be cold enough to freeze him into an iceball in another few seconds if not for his electrically heated suit. He fell toward the black desert below, trying to see the luminescent altimeter.

This jump was to be a hop-and-pop, the free-fall portion less than a minute. As expected, he felt a minor jolt as the drogue chute popped out of his back, the altimeter automatically deploying the parachutes of the entire team at the same altitude. The drogue rose overhead and pulled out the silk of the mattress-shaped parasail. Jack Morris felt a hard jerk, as if the gallows trapdoor had opened and sent him dangling, but instead of choking him the harness gave him a stern kick in the crotch.

A half second later the bungee cord attached at one end to his harness and at the other to his heavy equipment crate grew taut as the box continued to fall. Taking the weight of the crate nearly deflated the parasail for a moment; Morris waited and let the chute stall out, knowing that this was the moment that killed most sky divers. A deploying canopy could tangle itself and get in the way of the reserve chute, like Bony Robbins’s had before Christmas. His main chute had become a cigarette, an obscenely tangled streamer flapping uselessly in the wind above him. Bony had struggled to cut away the main, but the reserve’s altimeter had kicked in and pushed out his reserve, which promptly became tangled in the main chute. Bony had hit the frozen cornfield at over 100 miles an hour. But Morris’s main behaved and filled with wind while the equipment crate settled out forty feet below. Morris steered south and looked for the rest of the 100-man force. In the moonless night, he couldn’t see anyone, but he could hear the canopies around him. There was no noise from the KC-lojet. It had already dived back down to terrain-hugging altitude now that the seals were out, most likely streaking home as fast as the coffee-drinking, paper-pushing zoomies could fly.

The jump point had been seventy miles from the UIF main bunker. They had left the jet at 45,000 feet and opened the parachutes after a minimal fall. Morris had counted on flying the parasails twenty miles with the wind. By the time they hit the desert floor, they would still be fifty miles from Sihoud’s living room. With fifteen minutes to assemble the desert patrol vehicles, that gave them an hour and a half to get to the bunker perimeter with a half hour of contingency time. So far the mission had been on-target: the jet hadn’t been gunned down and, assuming the bus drivers knew where the hell they were, the jump had gone off without incident. But every mission screwed up somewhere. The only difference between a successful raid and a miserable rout was the magnitude of the unexpected foul-up. Plenty could still go wrong, he thought as he glanced at the altimeter and compass. The landing could be rough with the equipment crates, perhaps injuring some of the men. The DPVS could be damaged, and without the desert patrol vehicles they would not make the fifty-mile trip in time. They might find company waiting when they landed, or at the bunker perimeter, or anywhere in between. And even once they secured the perimeter, the god damned Javelin cruise missiles might decide to hit the seals, and it would be Jimmy Carter and Iran all over again.

Morris turned up the thermostat on his suit, the fabric filled with electrical heat resistors like an electric blanket.

He continued flying the parasail south, his equipment crate swaying below him while he waited for the trip to end. Finally his altimeter read 1,000 feet, and he jettisoned the cargo crate. His chute seemed to fly up for a moment as his descent eased from the lost weight. Morris strained his ears and heard the sounds of parachutes popping open on a hundred equipment crates as they were released. The digital altimeter reeled off the numerals, until Morris’s toes were only a few hundred feet from the ground. He strained his senses, his eyes on where the horizon would be if it were visible, and tried to feel the ground with his mind. He’d always hated night jumps like these made on moonless nights; night-vision goggles had never worked for him on night drops, since the single combined monocular lens took away depth and caused vertigo. Somehow he had always been able to sense the approach of the ground at the last second, in time to flare out the parasail. Failure to pull its trailing edges down to stall it out meant crashing at up to forty miles per hour, enough kinetic energy to maim a man.

He held his breath and waited, finally hearing more than seeing the ground. He pulled his chute-control cables from the harness straps all the way down to his knees, and the parasail wing-shaped canopy inclined upward into the air flow, tilting up like an airliner flaring out over a runway.

The aero-braking worked, slowing Morris almost to a stop, neatly collapsing the canopy just as his combat boots hit the sand at walking speed. Morris stepped away from the deflating parachute and let it flap in the wind on the sand. He released the tabs on his harness, unzipped and took off his flying squirrel suit, and dumped his oxygen mask on the pile, rolled it all up into a ball, and buried it in the sand. Surrounding him were a hundred seals doing the same. Morris reached into his vest and pulled out his night-vision goggles and strapped them on. The desert came to life around him, men scurrying for the equipment crates, pulling out weapons and ammunition and pieces of the desert patrol vehicles.

Morris walked the sand, watching his men opening the crates, a few men sent to find crates that had landed a few hundred feet outside the drop zone. The contents of the crates were snapped together quickly, the tightly packed crate contents becoming space frame vehicles, with aluminum tubes for the framing, collapsed tires with inflation bottles, unfolding seats made of lightweight and compact foam, the heaviest components the engines, the transmissions, and the machine guns. Not believing in keeping his hands clean, Morris bent to help one heaving group of men tilt an engine assembly up to accept the front portion of one of the DPV frames. The men worked frantically, bolting high-horsepower engines together in the dark, the clumsy night-vision goggles the only aid to sight. Morris stepped back and allowed himself a moment of pride. With a pit crew like this, any Indianapolis racer would be a winner. The moment ended too soon as Morris checked his watch. It had been eight minutes since his boots had hit the desert. Too damned long.

Morris found Black Bart Bartholomay and went over the assault plan one last time while an ensign and a chief assembled their DPV-4. Once completed, the lightweight and queer-looking vehicle resembled the bastard son of a moon buggy and a Baha race car. It held four seals, driver included, had oversized dune tires, two frame-mounted machine guns, and a 300 horsepower supercharged small-block Chevy. The desert burst into loud burbling noises, the drivers gunning their engines. Morris strapped on his motorcycle-style helmet, got the radio boom microphone adjusted, and loaded the clip into his MAC-10 machine gun, the weapon heavy and satisfying in his hand. Bart returned from a tour of their assembly area and reported that all DPVS were running and there had been no injuries on the insertion.

The mission was still on track, if a few minutes late.

Morris checked the DPVS geosatellite navigation system, the navsat receiver no bigger than a loaf of bread, and looked at the map. Heading one seven seven led straight into the main bunker. He climbed into the DPV with Bart driving, the ensign on the rear gun, the chief next to him. He tapped Bart’s thigh, and Bart cautiously accelerated, avoiding getting stuck in the sand, and the hightech dune buggy sped off to the south, two dozen buggies following behind it in a roaring race.

“How will we deliver the Scorpions to Washington? And how soon can we do it?” General Sihoud stared at the electronic chart on the wall and thought about the destiny of the Islamic people, how the Westerners had only gained a foothold on UIF soil so that their eventual withdrawal from Muslim territory would be that much more significant for the UIF.

After all, fourteen centuries ago Mohammed had himself been driven from Mecca to Medina — the holy exile, the hegira, during which Mohammed founded Islam. The Prophet had then fought his way back to Mecca in an astonishing and triumphant battle, winning an immortal glory. By the time he was forty Mohammed and Islam had taken over the Arab world.

Now Sihoud had been given the Scorpion, just as Mohammed had received supernatural power from the archangel Gabriel, and now the war would be won. The infidels would sneak away and hide, and Mohammed al-Sihoud would triumph. Sihoud truly believed that.

Chapter 2 Thursday, 26 December

Sihoud yawned. It was many hours past the time he had hoped to sleep, and there was more to do before dawn than stare at the machine’s screens. He had a war to win, troops to command, armies to move, but first he must deal with his Iranian chief of staff, the worrying technocrat Rakish Ahmed. Still, he reminded himself, Ahmed was more than worth his pay — he had delivered the Scorpion weapon. For that Sihoud could stand to indulge his worldly fears; he just wished Ahmed could comprehend that they were destined to prevail. He believed that.

Colonel Ahmed frowned in low conversation with one of the officers at the tactical command console, who occasionally put one finger in the air and talked into a secure radio-telephone.

Sihoud could see Ahmed’s expression grow darker. Finally he turned from the console and faced Sihoud, a pained look on his face.

“Sir, we need to leave, now. I believe an attack is imminent on this command center.” Ahmed had been trained by the Iranian Air Force to state the conclusion first, the supporting evidence last. It was a habit that irritated Sihoud, but he waited. “An antiaircraft station, the north post, reported radar contact on a large airborne blip. The radar was a height-finding unit, and reported the plane climbed up from zero to fourteen kilometers very rapidly, then dived back down again. At first we didn’t believe it, but the south station just confirmed, they saw the same thing. This correlates to the lost jetliner, sir. It has to be paratroopers.” Ahmed paused to grab a radio handset and barked orders into it, something about a Firestar fighter and a Kawasaki U-10 truck at the south utility tunnel exit.

Sihoud calmly shook his head. There were no paratroopers and there would be no withdrawal through the utility tunnel.

Ahmed had too little faith.

The night before, Sihoud had had a dream, a dream of conquest. Angels from heaven had fought beside him, one telling him he would rule all of Asia and all of Africa, that the infidels were to be cast into the seas. No part of the dream portended any threat. Sihoud felt it down to the marrow of his bones. The only thing that mattered at the moment was deploying and firing the Scorpion plutonium missiles with their cargo of death, the wages of sin, delivered by Allah’s agent on earth. General Sihoud.

Ahmed still stood there with the radio handset plugged into one ear. “We shot missiles at the aircraft. General. None of them hit — the plane was too far away. General, I have a U-10 truck waiting for us and a Firestar at the airstrip—”

“Stop. If the plane was so far away that our antiaircraft missiles could not reach it, it must have been very distant. How far away was it?”

“About a hundred kilometers, perhaps slightly more.”

“A hundred kilometers. And these paratroopers will have a long walk ahead of them. Did your radars show any parachutes?”

“No, sir, but—”

“Colonel, come with me.”

Sihoud led Ahmed to a partitioned corner of the room and snapped his fingers. An attendant brought two cups of steaming tea. Sihoud sipped the brew and stared through the steam at Ahmed, his eyes now showing some compassion.

When he spoke his resonant voice was quiet, even gentle.

“Colonel Ahmed, Rakish, my friend, you are thinking about your wife and son, are you not?”

“I’ll always think about them, but that has nothing to do with this bunker being threatened.”

“I wonder. Rakish. I wonder whether losing your family and your home has made you think you might lose me too. I assure you that will never happen.”

As Sihoud talked Ahmed’s mind wandered … 200 meters down a utility-access tunnel there was a U-10 truck waiting for him and Sihoud, and four kilometers further south a Firestar fighter was being pulled from a hangar, fueled, and warmed up, all on Ahmed’s orders. As chief of staff he was also responsible for Sihoud’s security, and that part of the job was almost the toughest. Because Sihoud was fearless to the point of foolhardiness. The man really did believe he was invulnerable— — a dangerous self-deception. And if Sihoud did not want to be protected, there was little to be done until the worst happened. Perhaps then he would listen.

Ahmed decided to keep the U-10 truck and the Firestar waiting and ready. While Sihoud continued to talk Ahmed pulled out a machine pistol in a leather holster and strapped it on over his fatigues. The heavy feeling of the weapon made him feel better, and for a moment he was able to relax. Now Sihoud was asking about the Scorpions.

“The Scorpions, Colonel. How will we deliver them and how soon?”

Ahmed had been waiting for the question. He knew Sihoud would not like the answer but then neither did he.

“Delivery by aircraft will not be possible. The air force fighters are fully occupied here and in any case their range is too limited to cross the Atlantic. Commercial airliners are no good— — their parts have all been used to keep our squadrons of fighters in the air, and the mechanics are all at the fronts. I have considered hijacking an airplane and landing it where we could load the missiles but that would betray the operation. The transport of the missiles must be kept absolutely secret.”

Sihoud suspected that Colonel Ahmed’s plan must be unconventional indeed for Ahmed to brief him this way.

“Finally, sir, the unit’s launch must not be detected, an other reason air deployment is out of the question. The American air-traffic control system is sophisticated and an unidentified aircraft that drops a piece of cargo that then goes supersonic would be immediately detected—”

Sihoud nodded as the colonel continued. Ahmed’s American education annoyed him, even at times like these when it would help their purposes. Ahmed had been trained by the U.S. Air Force back in the days of the Shah, and had studied engineering at a so-called prestigious university in the American Northeast. Ahmed claimed to have studied his American military counterparts and know their weaknesses.

Of course, so far that had not helped them avoid the devastation brought about by the Coalition. Sihoud decided to hurry Ahmed along.

“Fine, Colonel. No air transport or delivery. What is your alternative?”

“The Hegira, Khalib. We can bring the missiles close to the U.S. coast and fire them from the sea. The Americans will be caught by complete surprise.”

Morris watched as Lt. Buffalo Sauer sighted in on the U-10 utility truck’s front left tire, a tough shot since the truck was doing about twenty miles per. A moment later the silently fired bullet hit the rubber and blew the tire apart. The U-10 swerved, almost lost control, then slowed and stopped. Two soldiers climbed out and shouldered their weapons while staring at the offending wheel. There was a brief argument until one nodded and walked to the rear of the vehicle for the spare. He bent over to find the tire iron and was dead before he could straighten up. Ensign Dobbs’s blade having sliced his throat open. The other soldier was still looking at the tire when Chief Hansen and his knife dispatched him.

Hansen carefully lowered the body to the sand. Neither man had made a sound in dying. Hansen was cleaning his knife blade with a rag from the truck when the truck’s radio clicked to life, the quick syllables of Arabic blasting out of it. Hansen pulled out his MAC-10 machine gun, checked the hush-puppy silencer and fired into the radio console. The unit disintegrated, the desert was again silent.

Morris checked the horizon in each direction for signs of other security troops. The northern perimeter of the tall mosque was open and deserted. The outskirts of the city approached near the southern perimeter, the houses and streets quiet. Morris pointed at Cowpie Clites, who walked to the electrified fence, strapped on heavy rubber gloves, and tested the fence wire with a hand-held meter. It was dead, the western perimeter crew done with the work on the high-voltage transformer. Clites produced a pair of bolt cutters and cut a large hole in the fencing, then stepped back. Morris waved his men in, where they took up positions surrounding the mosque less than 200 yards away.

Morris checked his watch. He had timed their insertion to the second, and so far had been right on schedule. The teams had abandoned the DPVS two miles west of the bunker and had crept silently the final distance, going slowly to eat up the contingency time. The plan called for impact of the Javelin cruise missiles just as the men entered the fence of the compound. If the missiles came too early, survivors, perhaps Sihoud himself, could get away clean. If the Javelins took their time and arrived too late, it would leave the seals exposed, lying on the sand waiting for the cruise missiles to come, their discovery by UIF troops meaning immediate execution.

Or worse, imprisonment and interrogation.

Morris did not trust cruise missiles. They had a nasty tendency to get lost or fall short or get shot down. Sometimes all three at once. If the operation had been Morris’s to plan he would have saved the Javelins for the next war and gone in now, MAC-10s blazing. But some admiral in the Pentagon wanted to share the action with the black-shoe Navy and had ordered the firing of the missiles from hundreds of miles away at sea. Morris bit his lip, knowing that expensive toys were sexy to the brass, but the only thing that won wars was an infantryman with a rifle, the concept taken to its extreme with the seals, where infantryman and rifle were replaced with commando and compact-silenced machine gun.

He strained to hear, wondering if the slight whine was his blood rushing in his head or the noise of the Javelins. The whine grew louder, fuller, the sound of high-speed turbofan engines. Jet engines. He trained his night-vision monocular to the sky and thought he saw the airframe of one of the missiles climbing to the sky, starting its pop-up. Only seconds to go now, he thought.

For a moment Sihoud was stunned. But Ahmed looked calmly at him after saying that the Hegira would bring the missiles to the coast of America and fire them. The Hegira? A submarine? It was so preposterous that it almost made a twisted kind of sense.

The Hegira was Ahmed’s predecessor’s idea, and a silly idea at that. Up until now Sihoud had regretted his decision to support the acquisition, but now he wondered.

Sihoud’s last chief of staff had been the head of the Egyptian navy, Admiral Al Abbad Mansur, who had insisted that they were vulnerable from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It would be ridiculous, Sihoud had insisted, for a mighty land power to fear the sea, and foolish to try to match the seagoing forces of the West with a blue-water navy. Mansur had proposed a different solution, the purchase of three of the Japanese-designed Destiny-class submarines.

At first Sihoud had continued to resist, but at Mansur’s persistence he had listened.

Mansur had pointed out that a small nation armed with submarines could alter the outcome of a war. He pointed to the Falklands War, in which the British submarines had bottled up the Argentine fleet, the Argentinians afraid to risk their surface ships against an unknown submerged threat; and there was the Persian Gulf War, in which unrestricted shipping by the West had allowed them to mass force on the continent. Mansur insisted that littoral warfare using submarines could be the edge that could save the union in a fight, and Sihoud finally had agreed.

The Japanese had designed the Destiny-class submarines for export sale, and in addition to the usual thorough Oriental design, the submarine was relatively inexpensive — for a submarine — only fifty-five billion yen. Three years ago that had not been a grand sum, even though it was the equivalent of an entire squadron of Firestar fighters. The submarine would allow them to patrol the Mediterranean and protect UIF soil from a Western assault from the sea, Mansur insisted, and a second unit in the Indian Ocean would keep them safe from the other side. With perhaps a third guarding them on the Atlantic, no aircraft carrier task group could threaten them. At the time, it had made sense, and while it was a considerable amount of money, it would have given the UIF a three-ocean navy with only three ships. Perhaps Mansur’s vision had been correct, but the acquisition of the ships had been a failure.

The Japanese had had design problems, as the Destiny-class was brand new and would supposedly revolutionize underwater combat. Delivery had been over two years late, and by then the invasions of Chad and Ethiopia were under way. By the time the first submarine was completed, Sihoud had begun the land attack on India, and by then there had still been no threatening moves by Western navies. In the intervening year Mansur had made other equally damaging mistakes — the India invasion had been full of them — and Sihoud had felt he had no choice but to execute Mansur. It had taken six months to train the crew of the first Destiny class submarine, and since its delivery it had been tied up uselessly in Kassab on the Mediterranean. It had spent time at sea, but mostly it had one mechanical problem after an other. Colonel Ahmed had taken over for Mansur— — Sihoud had wanted an air force officer, having had his fill of the navy, and needing advice about using the new aircraft.

Sihoud was himself an expert on the armies, and kept his own counsel on the use and command of the ground troops — —he had heard reports from Western media accounts that called him the equal of the great generals, even comparing — him to such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, even Attila the Hun. When Ahmed had taken the chief of staff position, Sihoud had sent him to Kassab to report on the Destiny-class ship, named Hegira by Admiral Mansur in honor of the Prophet’s holy exile. Ahmed reported it to be a miraculous piece of technology, but a useless one for a land power such as the United Islamic Front of God. Sihoud still recalled Ahmed’s report — —the Americans have a name for such a thing as this: they call it a White Elephant. The air force would do all that the submarine would do, Ahmed con included, and more. Sihoud had agreed, and the submarine had sat unused ever since.

And so it was ironic to hear the submarine mentioned in Ahmed’s plan to deploy the Scorpion missile. He must have had this in mind all along. So strange for an air force officer to abandon his beloved airplanes for an odd ship like the Hegira, but it would offer a secret way to get the missile to its target. Except it would take much too long … “How long to get to within missile range of the U.S.? Of Washington?”

“Sir, I hope you will forgive my action in this matter but I ordered the submarine loaded with the weapon components and it put to sea yesterday. It will take time to manufacture the three warshot weapons, perhaps a week or two. And these will be assembled aboard the Hegira while she is in transit. By the time she arrives at her firing station, the missiles will be ready. Even if we were to fly the weapons to the U.S. we would still have to wait for the units to be assembled. I apologize for the unavoidable delay, sir, but in a matter of weeks this war will be quite different.”

Sihoud nodded slowly, wondering where the next weeks would lead to in this grisly land battle. The approach of the tactical watch officer intmded into his thoughts. The youngster was hollow-cheeked and ill fed to begin with, but the fear in his face made his appearance that much worse.

“Colonel, sir—”

“What is it, Massoud?”

“We’ve lost contact with the perimeter guards. All patrols. We had a strange static on one of the radios, like someone was about to transmit, then nothing. I’ve sent a platoon out to check, but—”

“Take command,” Ahmed ordered. “Send out all the security troops, then seal all portals. The Khalib and I are leaving now for the field. Send for the Seventh Islamic Guard to take protective positions at the bunker until further notice.”

Javelin Unit One, the first-fired missile from Daminski’s Augusta, flew over the flat desert, getting closer by the second to the target. The terrain comparisons were matching the setpoints and the final star fix showed the unit now one point zero five miles from the target — five seconds away if the unit were to continue flying straight on. But now was the time for the pop-up. The winglets rotated while the fuel-flow valve opened wide to full throttle. The combustors’ temperature soared, the turbine spooled up, the nozzle thrust escalated to the full 3,000 pounds-force of push, and the unit climbed for the sky, the desert below growing more and more distant, only the stars above in view. The pressure altimeter unwound as the missile soared over 1,000 feet, then 2,000. Finally the missile, having traded speed for altitude, slowed at the point of its pop-up arc, the winglets now demanding the missile dive.

The Javcalcor computer checked the high explosive’s arming status. The detonator train was ready, waiting only for the spark from the fuse. The weapon rotated in space, beginning its dive, the radar-seeker window now seeing the horizon, then the mosque of the main bunker complex a half mile below. Still on full thrust, the unit accelerated toward the mosque below, picking up speed as the mosque grew in its vision cone until it blocked out all else. The missile passed through the sound barrier and was going Mach 1.1 when the courtyard tiles of the mosque flew up and smashed into the seeker cone.

Sihoud felt Ahmed grab his arm and drag him to the south stair tower, pausing only to take up two automatic rifles.

Sihoud followed him, knowing what Ahmed was thinking, and beginning to wonder if his aide was correct in his caution, although there was still a part of him that resented this move to leave so suddenly. But then, Ahmed was right about the need to be in the field and not in an underground bunker.

The two men rushed up the stairs. Ahmed handed Sihoud a rifle. At the last landing from the door to the courtyard of the mosque above, there was a metal door to the utility tunnel.

Ahmed operated the button combination lock, unbolted it, and pulled Sihoud in. They passed through an untidy storage area to another door. Ahmed unbolted it and pushed Sihoud into the utility tunnel, a cramped pipe of precast concrete, not even two full meters in diameter, filled with water pipes, electrical conduits, phone cables, sewer pipes, and ventilation ducts. There was barely enough room for a man crouching over to move through the tunnel. Sihoud hurried through it, feeling like a damn fool coward. He reconsidered about twenty meters down the tunnel and pulled on Ahmed’s sleeve. Ahmed stopped and heard Sihoud tell him to stop and return to the command center. It was a terrible place to argue with the general, but that was what he had to do.

For Javelin Unit One, the next milliseconds passed quickly, the missile’s mission almost complete. The radar-seeker window was crushed by the impact with the mosque courtyard floor, but behind it an armor-piercing shield of uranium protected the Javcalcor and punched through the mosque floor. The kinetic energy of the missile sliced through the lead shielding, then the reinforced concrete. By then most of the unit’s speed was lost, but it kept enough momentum to blitz through the first and second sublevels, through Sihoud’s quarters, and through the overhead of the tactical control center. The weapon’s timer, started at the moment of impact with the courtyard above, correctly predicted the missile’s arrival at the fourth sublevel, and anticipating this, had ignited the fuse ten meters higher while still smashing through the floor of the senior officers’ quarters. The fuse lit off and ignited the intermediate explosive, which began the detonation of the high explosive just as the unit crashed through into the command center.

The ton of Plasticpac high explosives — a patented, secret high-density mix with over eighteen times the explosive power of an equivalent weight of TNT — released its chemical energy, the explosion reaching outward to the consoles and men in the room. The underground command center was walled with more concrete, held in place by packed sand.

The confined explosion smashed the contents of the room against the reinforced walls, the explosion shock-wave a hammer, the concrete sand-braced walls an anvil. The force of it had nowhere to go but up, blowing the ceiling above it upward, rupturing the decks of the levels above.

Javelin Unit One had been the first missile to arrive in the coordinated attack. Although timed for detonation at the same time, the next four missiles arrived late — late on a scale of milliseconds — but the other four explosions added to the destruction of the first, sending the shredded contents of the bunker skyward in a black and orange mushroom cloud of debris mixed with the remains of what milliseconds before had been men.

Five seconds after the impact of Javelin Unit One against the mosque floor there was little left of the command center but airborne debris and the fires and smoke within the pit in the earth where the bunker had once been.

For over two minutes the debris fell out of the sky and rained down on the sand surrounding the smoke-blackened hole, the impacting chunks of concrete and metal making little sound as they hit the sand; or if they did make sounds they were lost in the roaring of the orange mushroom cloud rising several thousand feet over the desert floor.

Jack Morris felt more than saw the detonations of the cruise missiles. At first the ground trembled a bit as the first missile hit the mosque floor. The explosion shook him as it detonated below, the sound at first muffled by the layers of concrete below the earth, but immediately after missiles two through five hit the bunker there was the roaring noise as the force of the explosions burst out of the hole in the ground.

The minaret tower seemed to disintegrate into a thousand fragments and fly slowly off into the night. A misshapen orange mushroom cloud rose several thousand feet overhead, turning the dark moonless night into a harshly lit midafternoon. Morris hugged the sand as the pieces from the explosion began to hit the ground around them, mostly a rain of sand and grit from what had once been concrete. When the debris shower ended, Morris looked up and whistled, his abused ears unable to hear his own exclamation of incredulity.

The admirals who had sent the Javelins had miscalculated, Morris thought. With the new explosive, the missiles had been overkill. Although difficult to see from the ridge of sand, from where Morris lay, there was nothing left of the bunker to sift through. The idea of survivors was the dream of a Pentagon bureaucrat. Morris stood and signaled the men in, the fires from the explosion calming and dying down, the smoke still billowing out of the crater of what had once been the headquarters bunker of the Combined Armed Forces of the entire god damned UIF. Morris’s radio earpiece crackled with terse reports from the other platoon commanders as the seals surrounded the bunker, the reports confirming Morris’s analysis that there would be no survivors to take alive, no General Sihoud to interrogate. Morris got closer to the hole, peered in, nodded, and gave the orders to begin the extraction.

Ahmed had not yet mouthed his first word to tell Sihoud to continue through the tunnel when the tunnel suddenly turned upside down, the walls burst, and what had been an escape route became an airless tomb.

For the next five minutes the collapsed tunnel was filled with the booming noises of the explosions. Then all was silent.

All this way, Morris thought bitterly, just to watch a bunch of million-dollar missiles overdo the work the seals could have done with precision. He and his commandos left the bunker compound at the same fence holes they had cut and ran at a six-minute-mile pace to the DPVS, cranked the engines, and headed four miles farther northeast. Three of the buggies had failed — sand in the supercharger blowers, Morris figured, making a few of the DPVS heavy with added men. When Morris’s satellite navigation unit blinked, he gave the order and shut down the buggies. The units were parked side by side in three rows of seven, the last man out of each DPV pulling a pin out of an assembly under the seats. The commandos ran a hundred yards to the north and hit the sand. A few seconds later the DPV destruct mechanisms kicked in and blew the buggies into smoldering ruins, the fires from their explosions guiding in the extraction air craft.

Morris waited, frustrated, knowing that the extraction had been planned later, assuming there would be a longer action at the mosque. But he hated waiting on bus drivers, particularly Air Force bus drivers. After what felt like twenty minutes but was closer to five, Morris heard the beating of the rotors. The four V-22 tilt-rotor Ospreys flew overhead, circled, and tilted their rotors to the horizontal, descending vertically and touching down on the sand. Morris and the men climbed into the odd aircraft, half-chopper, half-transport, and buckled in. Morris’s V-22 lifted off and tilted the props, the aircraft now a turboprop high-speed transport. As the plane accelerated south toward occupied southern Iran, Morris took one last look at the burning remains of the mosque.

There was no way anyone could have survived the explosion. Still, Morris had hoped to load Sihoud’s dead body aboard the V-22 with them, the ultimate war trophy. Well, every mission, he told himself, screwed up somehow. This mission’s screw up was just an overabundance of firepower.

Morris leaned back in the seat, and although only a hundred feet over UIF territory and only minutes removed from combat, fell into a deep sleep.

Chah Bahar was a peaceful village on the sea. Ahmed had gone home on leave to see his wife and four-year-old son Nadhar. The sun was warm as he walked the street with his family hours before he had to fly back to Ashkhabad.

Abruptly out of the south, the sound of jet engines, too big and heavy for UIF jets. His ears were filled with the sounds of the Western Coalition Stealth bombers, the whistle of the descending cluster bombs, the oddly muffled cough from his wife as the shrapnel hit her. He felt himself running, Nadhar’s body in his arms. As the first bombs hit, he and Nadhar fell to the dirt, Ahmed on top, the bombs exploding around them. His ears rang from the low pass of a black bomber. He braced himself as the fuel-air explosive canister hit the ground and detonated, the explosion smashing into him. He felt the impact of shrapnel, then the conflagration sucked the air out of the sky, leaving him gasping, certain he was moments from death, but finally the flames faded and he drank in the air. Even before he looked Ahmed sensed his son had been hit by the shrapnel. And Col. Rakish Ahmed, supreme commander of the Combined Air Forces of the United Islamic Front of God and chief of staff to General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was obliged to watch as his son died. The final wave of Stealth bombers flew over then, their bellies full of another round of cluster bombs.

Ahmed was forced to leave Nadhar’s body and run for cover.

His anger and grief would coalesce into a hunger for revenge … his understanding that his own personal loss was shared by thousands his troops had left fatherless never really occurred to him …

In the broken service tunnel of the headquarters bunker, Ahmed’s uniform was soaked in cold sweat. His heart was pounding, his breath wheezed. The vision of the smoking ruins of Chah Bahar vanished in a swirling storm of dots, yellow and red and blue dots.

He shook his head, slowly realizing he had been unconscious, unable to escape the Chah Bahar nightmare even when knocked out by an enemy attack on the bunker. He heard rushing noises, dripping noises … the noise of air as it rushed in and blew out. The sounds grew in volume.

Choking, rasping, retching noises filled the dark space. He tried to move, going nowhere at first, feeling pressure from something lying on top of him. A slick feel against a harder surface. A liquid. Blood or water.

He tried again to move, trying his arm first, surprised when it followed his command. His other arm, then his legs.

He tried to get up but was pinned. He tried to roll, and felt a jagged piece of steel jab into his ribs. He rolled the other way and felt pressure ease up, allowing him to breathe.

There was still no light, but another sound, a spurting, sprinkling noise.

The attack on the bunker had come, as Ahmed had predicted.

The tunnel, their intended escape route, had partially collapsed, its concrete upper half smashed to dust by the fist of the explosions. What had been the floor of the tunnel was littered with smashed pieces of concrete, sand, dirt, wires and cables. No sign of Sihoud.

It hit him then … Sihoud was dead, and with him the hopes of the thirty nations and half billion people of the Union. The United Islamic Front, in minutes, had been doomed. The attack had, as Ahmed feared, been a decapitation.

Because without Mohammed al-Sihoud, everything was lost. Ahmed heard his own voice call out for the Khalib.

Soon his voice was drowned by another sound. What before had been a spritzing sound, a dim noise of rain, now became a sound of rushing force. The water pipe, which had once fed the bunker, had ruptured and was flooding the remains of the utility tunnel. The water had submerged his face, and he twisted into a violent roll. The same piece of steel jabbed into his ribs, and he decided he would rather be stabbed to death by the reinforcing steel in the chunk of concrete that held him down than be drowned by the water line.

The steel cut into him, ripping open the skin at his ribs, cutting into muscle and scraping bone, coming close to puncturing the lung beneath the bone, until his chest was no longer in contact with the metal, only the smooth underside of the concrete chunk. By then the water had risen over Ahmed’s prone body. He continued to twist and felt his back scrape across the concrete block. In a corner of his mind, prepared for death, he realized that he was free. He pumped his legs and pushed with his hands and was able to half-stand.

His head splashed out of the water into the damp darkness of the half-collapsed tunnel, water up to his waist. He had to find Sihoud. He had to shut off the flooding water. He had to get them out of the tunnel. He had to get Sihoud to a place of safety. As he searched in the rising water for Sihoud, he realized it would be no good merely to get the Khalib to another command post, to a field battlefield company.

What had happened would happen again and again until the enemy had achieved their goal of killing Sihoud and decapitating the Union. He had to find the one place on earth where the coalition’s commandos and assassins would be unable to reach him. The water, the rising water in the tunnel, had keyed a dim memory in Ahmed’s mind, but as yet he was uncertain what the connection was. And then it suddenly seemed obvious. Sihoud had to go into exile, much as the Prophet Himself had gone into exile to Medina almost fourteen centuries before. The Prophet’s exile had been called the hegira, and so would Sihoud’s. And like the Prophet Mohammed, Sihoud would return in glory, not with horses and swords but with high-altitude radar-invisible supersonic cruise missiles loaded with radioactive plutonium.

Five steps down the tunnel Ahmed tripped on something.

He reached down into the water, grabbed hold, and pulled with all his strength. Sihoud had been trapped under a piece of metal, but he must have been unconscious because the metal rolled off easily. His head came out of the water. He was not breathing. Ahmed leaned Sihoud’s face back and clamped his lips on the lips of the Khalib and blew.

As the water rose in the tunnel, Ahmed felt the broken concrete tunnel begin to shift, the water undermining footing in the packed sand. He continued to blow into Sihoud’s mouth. The water continued to rise. How long could he try to bring life back to Sihoud before giving up and trying to save himself? But then he thought that no decision was in fact a decision. Without Sihoud there was no hope for the UIF or for Ahmed himself, and with the war lost, Sihoud and Ahmed’s family dead, what was there to live for?

Sihoud suddenly stiffened and expelled water.

It was well past three o’clock in the morning and something was seriously wrong. Airman Abdul Djaliz squinted at the horizon where the smoke and flames were dying out but still discernible over the dim light of the few sodium arc lights illuminating the asphalt at Ashkhabad’s Sunni Air Base.

It had been perhaps forty minutes before that the call had come from the main bunker HQ to pull the most airworthy Firestar fighter from the hangar, warm it up, and load liquid helium into the electronic warfare pod’s tank. That had taken only fifteen minutes. The sleek swept-winged jet sat on the pad, her turbines purring smoothly, the heat haze from the exhaust nozzles causing the strip lights to waver slightly.

The canopy was up and the ladder was pulled up to the cockpit. For the fifth time in a half hour Djaliz climbed to the top of the ladder and peered in at the pilot’s status console, goosing the computer through its fifth checklist. The liquid crystal display recited the aircraft’s latest statistics, flashing graphics and charts and temperature profiles, oil pressures, hydraulic system status. All of it within limits.

Djaliz lowered himself back down to the ground and reexamined the electronic warfare pod slung under the pointed nose of the large jet, the one he’d filled with supercold liquid helium. The ungainly size of the pod marred the sleek streamlined beauty of the aircraft. The pod was new with the latest modification of the Firestar, this particular pod nearly fresh out of the crate from Osaka. Djaliz worried over it for a moment and climbed the ladder again and this time climbed all the way into the cockpit, putting the pilot’s flight helmet aside on the engine control console. He dialed up the menu for the electronic warfare pod and ordered a self-check.

He waited a moment while the computer tested the inputs and readbacks from the pod and tested the circuits to the large transmitters housed inside. The display recited that the pod was ready for combat, ready to fry the electronics of any approaching aircraft that challenged this particular Firestar in a dogfight. Djaliz checked the time, wondering if he should radio back to headquarters that he was wasting the jet fuel, that no one had shown up for whatever mysterious mission HQ had had in mind.

The young airman stood and climbed out of the cockpit, his jaw dropping as the speeding U-10 crashed through the security gate without bothering to scan in. He dropped to the ground and unholstered his pistol, about to command the intruder to halt. The truck drew up to the jet, parking off the side of the starboard wingtip, as if the driver wanted to avoid blocking the jet’s takeoff. Djaliz leveled his automatic pistol at the driver, who seemed unconcerned with him. He called out to the man, who opened his door and walked around to the front of the vehicle.

Djaliz stared down his gunsight… at Colonel Ahmed, supreme commander of the Combined Air Force. Djaliz quickly holstered his weapon. Ahmed ignored him in his rush to the passenger door. When he opened it, Djaliz could see the form of the Khalib himself, Mohammed al-Sihoud.

He at least had enough presence of mind to snap to attention, eyes focused on the horizon, but from the corner of his eye he could see that the Khalib was in bad shape.

“Help me with him, airman,” Ahmed ordered.

The two men grabbed the arms of the Khalib, who seemed conscious but weak, dazed.

“Sir, what happened?”

Ahmed shook his head, hauling the general to the ladder.

“Get him in the back seat,” Ahmed said when they had reached the ladder. “General, can you climb?”

“I think so.” The airman helped him up the steep ladder.

Ahmed returned to the U-10, found a clipboard with a scrap of paper and scrawled on it. He looked it over, checked his watch and continued writing, finally folding the paper in two, then again. He hurried over to the jet. Djaliz had gotten Sihoud into the rear seat and was strapping him in, putting on his flight helmet and strapping on the oxygen mask. He stepped back down the ladder and faced Colonel Ahmed.

The colonel looked Djaliz over for a moment, then handed him the piece of paper.

“You know where the Quchara Communication Base is?”

“Twenty kilometers on Highway 2, north, sir.”

“Take the U-10 and get to the base as fast as the truck can go. Have them transmit that immediately on the VLF set— very low frequency. Can you remember that? Very low frequency.”

“But, sir, why will they do that on my say so? I’m an airman—”

Ahmed reached into his tunic and pulled a chain around his neck until it broke. He handed the bar-coded identification card to the airman.

“Give them that. If they have doubts call me on the airborne UHF frequency of the day. Have you got all that?”

Djaliz stood at attention and saluted.

Ahmed was already four steps up the ladder. Djaliz watched as the colonel strapped on the helmet, lowered the canopy and waved down at him. Djaliz ran for the wheel chocks, pulled them both out and ran clear of the jet. As he looked up Ahmed had already taken the turbines to half-thrust and was thundering down the taxiway to the end of the runway. Less than a minute later the jets roared on full afterburner as the colonel kicked the aircraft up to full power. The takeoff run took only seconds, the Firestar’s nose pointed skyward, blasting off the runway, rising nearly vertically into the sky. Soon all Djaliz could see were the twin flames coming from its tailpipes, and then they vanished in the darkness.

Djaliz seemed to wake up from a dream then, the paper soaked with the sweat of his hands. He unfolded it and read the colonel’s hurried scrawl.

Chapter 3 Thursday, 26 December

The predawn darkness shrouded the calm waters of the Mediterranean, the dim starlight barely apt to separate the dark water from the black sky on the horizon. Three hours later the water would be a sapphire blue, shimmering and beautiful and clear, but now the water was black and forbidding.

The water was filled with sound, the central and western basins always busy with commercial traffic, even now that the nations of the northern coast found themselves at war with those on the south. If anything, the war had accelerated the flow of freighters and tankers in and out of Gibraltar, the ships filling the sea for miles with the noises of their cavitating screws. The noise of the hundreds of ships competed with the marine life that inhabited the warm water. Clicking of shrimp, chattering of dolphins, moaning of whales all filled the underwater with sound waves.

There in the wash of noise, under 100 meters of water, a silent ghost passed through a school of shrimp, the startled fish clicking loudly. The shape of the intruder was sleek and long, starting with an elongated elipsoidal nose, a cigar-shaped twelve-meter-diameter cylinder following, the shape seventy-five meters long, tapering to a point. In the middle, a tall fin towered over the cigar body, the rear of the fin angled down to the cigar, the dorsal fin of an exotic fish. At the tapered end of the body was a set of tail fins; the tail planes were attached to the hull at an angle, forming an X-shape. The underwater vessel continued swimming east, gliding silently through the water.

The soundless shape was the Combined Naval Force submarine Hegira. Inside the envelope of smooth outer steel were twenty-one torpedo tubes, a cramped pressure hull, and a large oil-enclosed alternating current motor driving the half-hull-diameter propulsor impeller. The pressure hull was a cylinder half the length of the ship, beginning just forward of the fin and ending five meters forward of the X-tail rudder, the cylinder only thirty-eight meters long, of which only the forward thirteen meters were habitable by men, the remainder taken up by modular machinery compartments. The aft compartment was the battery and diesel module; forward were the reactor module and steam-power module. None of these aft modules could be entered when the ship was submerged. The machinery spun and churned under computer control.

The forward module, designed for the crew, was the command module, three decks high. The lower deck was mostly taken up by the electronic equipment of the Second Captain system but had a row of tight bunks on the port bulkhead. The middle level was split into four staterooms, a messroom, and a small galley and head. The upper deck was occupied by ship-control functions in a large open control room, a computer room, a radio room, and two additional rooms on the forward elliptical head of the pressure vessel. The smaller forward room was the first officer’s stateroom. The second was the captain’s stateroom, an L-shaped space, the corner of the room formed by the head between the captain’s and first officer’s staterooms.

At the head of the conference table in the captain’s state room, a man frowned down at a large spread of ship’s blue prints, the roll of drawings kept flat by plates and glasses.

The man was slim, middle-aged, dark-skinned, gray-haired, with an air of authority. And at this instant, of frustration.

Commander Abbas Alai Sharef tried a bite of his food but found it tasteless as it had been all day. He pushed his plate away, crossed his arms and stared at the ship’s plans. Finally he leaned on the table and stared at the elevation view of the submarine, looking for an answer until his head began to ache. The task before him seemed impossible.

He stretched and glanced around at the room, not seeing it as claustrophobically cramped but as a haven from the demands of the ship. The stateroom’s L-shape was little more than five meters long. The port side was partially unusable because of the curvature of the hull. Where the hull came down in its slow incline there was a cubbyhole containing his bunk and his desk. At the end of the desk was a computer module with dual display screens and a keyboard section with function keys. The module was part of the Second Captain system, a computer that controlled and monitored all functions of the automated submarine, a system that caused Sharef a measure of ambivalence. Next to the Second Captain console a green-shaped lamp on the desk spread a warm light over the papers strewn over its large wooden surface.

The aft wall of the room was covered with a Persian rug, its pattern of an intricacy that could hold a visitor’s glance.

The rug had been a gift from Sharef’s mother, given to him the year she died. Sharef spent a moment looking at it, searching for the intentional flaw sewn in, the flaw inserted to acknowledge that human perfection was an insult to Allah.

But as usual, Sharef was unable to find the flaw. Beneath the rug, the conference table took up much of the room, the table able to seat eight men. At the end of the table on the centerline wall was a stern portrait of Mohammed al-Sihoud. Sharef barely noticed it; the frown on his dark face appeared, then vanished quickly. The forward starboard corner of the room was taken up by the walls surrounding the shared head, doors opening into it from both the captain’s stateroom and the first officer’s.

Sharef returned to the ship’s plans, looking for an answer, returning to the non-answer that the mission was impossible.

He ran his fingers through hair so gray as to be almost silver, most traces of the jet black it had been five years before gone, the gray continuing in the color of his thick mustache.

He was forty-five years old, young to be one of the highest-ranking naval officers in the Combined Naval Force. He was of medium height, although his military carriage and muscled frame gave a taller impression. His cheek and throat bore a long scar, resembling a sabre wound, from his days in the Iranian navy. The wound had opened in his face and neck when the superstructure of the Mark 5 frigate Sahand had exploded a moment after the American missile struck it.

Sharef had met a surgeon in Japan who offered to make the scar disappear, but Sharef had declined, the mark reminding him of lost shipmates and of the innocent days when he had thought himself invincible. The sinking of the Sahand seemed to be a fence across his life, separating his youth from his cynical middle age, which arrived early in his thirty-sixth year.

Sharef was usually a calm man, even in crisis. This, he thought, was perhaps the major reason he had been chosen to command this flagship of the Combined Naval Force. He was a quick study, able to grasp a tactical situation immediately, although he seemed blessed with this ability only in naval matters — when it came to understanding people he felt he was often at a loss. And when it came to women, he was completely adrift. More than once he had wondered if that was the reason he had chosen the life of the sea in his youth.

Not as an adventure or out of love for it, but as an escape from what custom decreed was a normal life with a wife and children.

As he paced the room he allowed his normally disciplined mind to wander back to the women he had known, the years flashing by rapidly until 1978, when he had been at Oxford, before Iran’s revolution. He had felt awkward in England, knowing his dark skin and thick accent had set him apart. But there had been a woman, just a year or two from being a girl, who had made it clear she was attracted to him. So oddly forward, the Western women, and so exciting … He had felt helpless, driven by his own youth and the freedom of a foreign land, the restraints of Islam far away. But when the Ayatollah came and with him the revolution, Sharef had been forced to make a choice between the beautiful British girl — and the new world she had shown him — and his homeland and culture. He had returned home, his perceived sense of duty stronger than his love for Pamela, and although he still felt the decision had been the right thing to do he still felt the void. He had never seen or heard from her after her letter telling him she was married and moving to the United States.

For a moment Sharef lingered over the forward bulkhead with its photographs of his past ships. On the far left was the Iranian navy frigate Alvand, his first ship. That had been before Oxford, before Pamela, before the revolution. Next to it was the picture of the destroyer Damavand. For four years after the revolution he had been her navigator. Under the Ayatollah things had been so uncertain that Damavand rarely left port. Next there had been the Vosper Mark 5-class frigate Sahand, when he had been assigned as first officer at the age of thirty-two. Three years later, in April of 1988, the Sahand was at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, blown to pieces by Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Navy attack that sank half the Iranian fleet. He saw that as an overreaction to the Iranian boarding of the merchant ships bound for the northern Persian Gulf hauling war material to Iraq. The episode had been forgotten by most of the world since it happened at sea far from the television cameras, but Sharef would not forget it. He still wondered if he had any business being alive after what had happened to Sahand.

At age thirty-five he had taken command of the Mark 5-class frigate Alborz, three years that he looked back on with nostalgia. After several years of shore duty on the United Islamic Front combined staff he had decided that shore duty was not for him. The UIF had acquired a Russian-built Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine, the K-102, its image captured in the next photograph. Sharef, a veteran of the surface fleet, had outranked the sub’s captain when he reported aboard as the first officer. He had learned the submarine navy’s ways quickly, and two years later was selected (ahead of K-102’s captain) to command the ex-Russian Victor III nuclear submarine Tabarzin. Tabarzin’s photograph had been shot from high over her drydock, the slim and graceful form marred by scaffolds and gangways and temporary platforms. Sharef had enjoyed that first experience with nuclear power, marveling at how well it suited underwater combat. His command tour had gone so well that he was the Combined Naval Force’s first choice to go to Japan and receive the Destiny-class submarine Hegira.

The picture of Hegira had been taken as the ship ran on the surface at full speed, the bow wave smashing over the leading edge of the fin, the flag of the UIF flying from a tall mast. Sharef himself was recognizable on top of the fin in the bridge, driving his new ship from the shipyard, the sea ahead of him, the year in Japan behind him. And behind him as well the woman he had met there, the nuclear engineer named Yashiko Una, who had been in charge of the crew’s propulsion plant training. And just as duty had called him away from Oxford and Pamela, it now called him away from Yashiko.

A knock came at the door. It would be Abu-i-Wafa, the weapon-test director, wanting the answer to the impossible.

As Sharef stepped to the stateroom door, an idea did occur, an idea that seemed stupid and risky but might answer Abus requirements. And so dangerous that it might cost the UIF the submarine.

The man standing at the door was not Abu, but Sub.-Lt. Omar al-Maari, one of the junior officers, handing Sharef a message clipboard. He read the odd message from Ahmed, Khalib Sihoud’s aide.

What did he mean about rescuing two survivors. Survivors of what? Sharef left his stateroom and walked to the control room, shaking his head.

Admiral Richard Donchez was perhaps only the second Chief of Naval Operations in navy history ever to dirty his hands with the details of combat operations. In the last five years the office of the number-one admiral in the navy had been changed from an administrative command to an operational billet. Which was fortunate for the U.S. Navy, because Dick Donchez would not have taken the post unless it allowed him to be more of a tactician than a paper pusher. It had also been beneficial to the navy and to the course of the war with the United Islamic Front. The most recent example of this was his design of Operation Early Retirement, the mission to assassinate Sihoud and, if successful, end the war early.

Donchez was tall, and although in his sixtieth year, he swore he was losing an inch of height each time he checked the mirror. In fact, the only discernible signs of age were his cueball baldness, the bushiness of his gray brows, and his slightly diminished height. But Donchez’s mind was sharper than it had ever been. He was dressed now in his service dress-blue uniform, the sleeves heavy with gleaming gold, the wide band nearest the end of the sleeve, three slim bands running up almost to his elbow, the sharp pointed star presiding over the stripes. Over his left breast pocket six rows of colored ribbons climbed toward his shoulder, the gold submarine pin above them. The pin resembled an airman’s wings, but on closer examination the wings were scaly fish with curving tails pointed outward, the odd heads facing an old-fashioned diesel submarine plowing through rough seas.

The pin was solid gold, a gift from his old Annapolis room mate’s widow, given him when he had first been promoted to flag rank.

Donchez stood before one of the plot walls of the room, the electronic plot showing the Mediterranean, the colors and lines and dots each signifying the deployment of his forces. Donchez’s right hand was shoved into his coat pocket, his left fist clutching the long Havana cigar, the end glowing, the smoke rising to the overhead where the red no smoking sign was bolted into the wall. Alongside Donchez were a group of senior officers, admirals in charge of the operational groups: Adm. Kenny Mckeigh, the commander in chief of the Atlantic naval forces; Adm. John Traeps, commander in chief of the Mediterranean naval forces; Adm. Dee Watson, the vice C.N.O for operations. Also Donchez’s aide, a plump and rumpled captain from naval intelligence named Fred Rummel.

Donchez puffed the Havana as Rummel continued his briefing. “… about an hour after the explosion of the Javelins a Firestar fighter took off from the Sunni Air Base in Ashkhabad and headed west. Vector analysis shows it heading for the Med. Of course we’ve seen hundreds of Firestar sorties over the last few days but this particular flight, coming so soon after the attack and leaving from Ashkhabad itself, leads us to believe that it may be connected with someone in the command structure.”

“How long ago?” Donchez said.

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“What are we doing about it?”

John Traeps answered for his Med forces. He gestured to the Med plot while he spoke. “Sir, the USS Reagan carrier task force is off of Tripoli, Libya. She scrambled two F-14s about ten minutes ago. They should be intercepting the Firestar in the next half hour, as long as we can keep tracking it. The task force commander has authorized shooting it down.”

“No,” Donchez said quietly, still looking at the tip of his cigar.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Don’t shoot it down. If we do we’ll never know who the hell got out of Ashkhabad.”

“Aye, aye, sir, but how can we—”

“Instead of intercepting, have the fighters tail the Firestar and force it down.”

The briefing broke up. Donchez left the room and walked rapidly to his office suite, Rummel and vice C.N.O for operations Dee Watson following. Watson was, as he himself proclaimed, the ugliest and most obnoxious admiral in the fleet; although he was hard to take, someone Donchez might not have chosen for his number-two man, he was savvy and had a penetrating grasp of tactics and a detailed understanding of special warfare. A former Aegis-class cruiser commander, Watson was the only surface-warfare officer in Donchez’s inner circle, the remainder predominantly aviation types or submariners. No one spoke until they were in the special-compartmented-information-facility portion of the office.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, sir?” Rummel asked Donchez.

Donchez nodded, stubbing out the cigar in the ash tray.

“Sihoud.”

“Son of a bitch got past us,” Watson said.

“We’ll know in the next hour, anyway,” Donchez said, pulling out a fresh Havana and flicking his lighter at its tip.

“I think I’ll go on back to flag plot, see what’s shakin’,” Watson said in his cracker accent. “By your leave, sir.”

“I’ll be down as soon as we have something. Dee.”

Donchez smoked in silence for a moment, then looked at Rummel.

“Think I should call General Barczynski?”

“Are you coming down with something, sir?”

Donchez chuckled. “Just testing.”

“Maybe we should have shot the Firestar down after all, sir.”

“Firestars aren’t up to the task against F-14 Tomcats. The flyboys will bring Sihoud to us, now that the god damned seals screwed up.”

“Ah, hell. Admiral, maybe this Firestar is just some panicky lieutenant trying to get away from our missiles.”

“We can only hope.”

The Firestar had flown without incident for almost an hour, cruising at twelve kilometers altitude at one and a half times the speed of sound. During the trip Ahmed let the computer fly the aircraft, content to monitor the systems, keeping a careful eye on navigation and the electronic sensors that guarded against incoming missiles and radars. Other than the normal surface- and air-search radars at sea in the Med and. in the southern shores of Greece, there had been no unusual activity. Ahmed had even begun to wonder if it was perhaps too quiet. Occasionally he selected his onboard monitor to the rear-facing camera, checking General Sihoud. The Khalib had slept most of the trip, his flight helmet against the canopy. The Firestar had skirted Israeli territories to the north and crossed over Kassab and the dark waters of the Mediterranean before Sihoud awoke.

The general tapped on the top of Ahmed’s seat, trying to get his attention.

“Go ahead and speak into the oxygen mask. General. It has a voice-activated intercom.”

“Where are we?” Sihoud asked, his voice rasping and weak.

“How do you feel, sir? If you’re thirsty there’s an insulated bottle under the right console.”

Sihoud fumbled for the bottle. Ahmed watched the Khalib on his monitor, seeing how tentatively he moved. He wondered if the general would be strong enough to make it to the submarine — the only way other than a high-risk ditching to get to the sub would be to bail out at the lowest speed and altitude the jet could fly, as near the surfaced submarine as possible. And bailing out, taking a parachute’s g-forces, hitting the water and swimming to a submarine were not easily done by sick men. Ahmed bit his lip.

“I think I need to see a doctor. Rakish. As soon as we land.” Sihoud coughed violently.

“General, we will not be landing. This is the last flight for this aircraft. We will be abandoning it over the sea. The Hegira will be waiting for us.”

“What? What are we doing?”

“Sir, for the next two weeks the war will be fought without you. I have already raised Generals lhaffe, Ramadan, and Ben Abbas. They all reported they had explicit instructions from you on the conduct of the campaigns in North Africa, the Sinai, and southern Iran. I told them that the primary objective is not to counterattack but to hold on for the seven to ten days it will take us to assemble the Scorpion missile and deliver it to its target.”

“You told them about the Scorpion on a radio circuit, Ahmed?”

“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 electronic-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

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 circle 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.

The numbers on the screen slowly counted down until they reached zero, and with scarcely a sound the EW pod detached from the Firestar’s nose and plummeted to the sea below. Ahmed took one last look at the instrument console and tightened his grip on the control stick.

Joe Galvin glanced over at the Firestar fighter, a nagging feeling that this had been too easy, that the pilot of the UIF jet should be fighting back. A photograph flashed in his mind, the old Newsweek glossy of the Iraqis lined up by the dozens, surrendering to the U.S. Army three days into the Persian Gulf’s ground war. It seemed the propaganda about the Muslims fighting to the death was often rhetoric. In any case the pilot in the Firestar was like the Iraqis, no doubt a scared second lieutenant flying a piece of machinery he could not really understand. When the Firestar landed at the Nicosia airfield, air force technicians would take it apart to the last bolt, analyze every printed circuit, every line of code written in the hard drive of the computer. The pilots would be detained and questioned, then shipped to a POW compound in Sardinia for the rest of the war. For these Muslim pilots the war was about to end — all they had to do was lower the landing gear, put out the flaps, and touch down on the Coalition airfield.

Galvin’s mind was already envisioning the day of liberty in Nicosia, wondering what the women were like there.

He looked down into the cockpit to check his altitude for the approach vector to Nicosia, and so did not see the pod dropping from the nose of the Firestar.

The pod fell away from the Firestar and counted seconds. It had been fed the initial altitude by the Firestar’s computer and was careful not to fall so far that it hit the surface of the ocean before doing its work. Once the Firestar above and ahead was outside the present minimum distance, the relay contacts closed in the controller of the pod. The contacts completed a circuit that engaged the high-voltage output-breaker, an oil-enclosed heavy-duty casing with two contact hammers, each the size of a human fist. The hammers, loaded by high-tension springs, slammed into the bus bars of the high-voltage direct-current circuit, linking the dormant energy of the helium-cooled superconducting coil to the oscillators and the transmitter antennae. The current flowed from the ultrahigh-voltage coil, changed from a DC current to AC in the heavy-duty oscillators, and cascaded to the transmitters, which broadcast the resulting electromagnetic energy out into space.

The arrangement was simple, the only new element the coil and the ability to store such a huge amount of energy in so small a package, and then to release it all at once to components strong enough to accept it. The pod was no more complicated than a radio transmitter, in fact sharing many of the same submodules, and so similar in function that it could be considered a radio transmitter of a sort. The difference was in its construction — there were no electronics. The workings of the pod were either fiber optics, as in the wiring of the Firestar, or were done with pre-vacuum-tube technology using magamps, large iron cores with copper wire wrapped around primary and secondary transformer ends.

There were no transistors, no semiconductors, no integrated circuits, no microprocessors, not even any magnetic-tape drives. The pod had no conventional electronics because it was designed as an electronics killer.

The transmissions emanating into the atmosphere from the overworked transmitters had been seen by people decades before, but until the Yokashiba Company in Japan had manufactured the pod, the effects could have been produced only by a nuclear warhead. The American military called the transmissions EMP for electromagnetic pulse, the sudden wave of E-M power emitted immediately after a violent nuclear explosion. EMP had long been the fear of electronics designers, and for good reason — after an EMP anything using electronics would fail to function. Defenses were considered, research done, equipment given shields said to “harden” the electronics, to protect them from EMP, but in the end nothing could defend the Pentagon’s machinery against an enemy employing several dozen nuclear warheads in high-altitude air bursts. The final defense against EMP had been the Strategic Defense Initiative — Star Wars. SDI’s multibillion price tag had been sold (and bought) as a civilian missile defense, but its true purpose was to guard trillions in Pentagon war machinery from EMP warheads detonated over the skies of the United States, destroying computers, radars, missiles, aircraft, communications, the vital but vulnerable network that linked and moved and protected the country, all the network’s nodes and connections built with silicon electronics.

The pod’s transmissions continued until the superconducting coil drained its electrical energy, the voltage dropping precipitously until exhausted. The unit shut down and fell into the sea.

The electromagnetic transmissions left the unit in a spherical wave pattern, traveling at the speed of light, taking the merest fractions of a millisecond to reach the three jets flying above.

Lt. Joe Galvin’s stick trembled for a moment. He looked down at his panel and watched every light and indicator wink out, every needle fall to its powered-down position, some failing at the high peg, some at the low peg, some failing in the position at time of failure. Both jet engines flamed out at the same time. The intercom ceased working, which was why he never heard Giraffe’s exclamation of anger when the radar screen winked out as well as the missile status panel.

The latest model of the F-14 was built with hightech electronics and there had been attempts to harden the circuitry against EMP pulses, but the designers had, in effect shrugged, knowing hardening circuits meant adding weight.

The shielding had been penetrated in the first microsecond of the Firestar’s pod’s transmission. As had every electronic module in the jet. Every radar, weapon-control circuit, avionic instrument, radio, and computer. All fried to a crisp after five seconds of the electromagnetic onslaught. The engines, controlled by an onboard computer, their fuel injection regulated by powerful microprocessors, no longer had fuel injection, the chips destroyed. Both spun down, leaving the jet without electrical power — the voltage controllers on the generators gone anyway — and without thrust. The designers had never approved of fly-by-wire technology — the Tomcat’s control surfaces were moved by hydraulics, and the hydraulics were controlled by aircraft-grade cables linked to the hydraulic control valves. So for the first five seconds after the pod transmission, the F-14 Tomcat inhabited by Lt. Joe “Tailback” Galvin and Lt. (jg) Bugene “Giraffe” Fredericks continued to fly, flying deaf and dumb and blind, but flying just the same.

In the sixth second after the pulse transmission, the jet — now a thirty-five-ton glider — began to oscillate in roll, pitch and yaw. The control surfaces, although actuated by the powerful man-controlled hydraulics, were computer stabilized.

Without computer intervention in the control surfaces, the F-14 would crash into the sea seconds after catapult launch. True, the computer’s input was minor, but crucial.

Without it, Galvin’s flying machine began to vibrate, even as he aimed the jet for the sea in a desperate attempt to keep air flowing over the wings now that there was no longer any power.

Galvin attempted to correct the oscillation, reversing the stick to the right as the jet banked left, then as the overcorrection registered he tried to reverse the bank to the left again. At the same time the nose kept trying to rise and Galvin fought it with steady downforce on the stick. The nose put in its request for attention, the jet swinging to the left, requiring right rudder, then swinging to the right.

Galvin was tasting a magnum dose of adrenaline; he was young, in shape, highly trained, and the recipient of millions of dollars of flight time. The simulators at Pensacola had flown a simulation of loss of all electronics, not as hairy as this, but even so it was only done so that the students could see how hopeless it would be to stay in the aircraft. Which brought up the so-called Womb Concept in the background of his mind. Just as some televisions could flash up a small box in the corner of the screen, enabling the viewer to watch two television shows at once, Galvin’s mind played its own sideshow separate from the main track attempting to control the aircraft.

What the hell had happened to cause such a gross failure of the jet — some kind of missile hit? Couldn’t be, the wings and control surfaces still functioned. And what kind of missile flamed out the engines and turned off the power to the avionics? What to do next? The jet had no power, and no attempt at engine restart would work, not without electrical power or electronics. Besides, an attempt to restart the engines would require Galvin to dive for the deck for maximum velocity to windmill the compressors, and that would just kill them sooner. The standard operating procedure for this casualty was to punch out. The plane was obviously uncontrollable. No recovery was possible, and to try to do a water landing with this oscillating control would be suicidal.

So what could he be waiting for? Which was when he thought of the Womb Concept, as described by an appropriate lately grizzled Marine Corps flight instructor who had bailed out of three jets and consequently would never be promoted above the rank of major. Boy, the major had drawled, there’s gonna come a time when you’re gonna know your plane’s a goner, and when it comes you’re gonna cling to that stick like a newborn to his mamma’s tit, and do you know why? That aircraft can be falling apart all around you and you’re gonna want to stay in the bitch because inside, no matter how bad it gets, you feel comfortable and safe there. You control things there. Outside, you’re just a passenger, and more likely some shark’s dinner. Inside you’re used to being in charge, out there you’re a victim. And let me tell you, son, more aviators have died because of the Womb Concept than any other reason. The god damned fools know they’ve gotta punch out, the airplane’s a total, but what do they do? They stay in the cockpit because it’s warm and safe, the womb, and outside it’s cold and hard and dangerous. More pilots die from staying in the womb than any other reason, so when your time comes, and it will, just remember: Get the fuck out.

The major’s lecture seemed to reach something inside. It was either that or he remembered that the hydraulic-control system would be losing pressure any second. Without power to recharge the hydraulic accumulators the hydraulic pressure would eventually decay until Galvin had no control over the aircraft at all and no pushing or pulling on the stick would matter. And with no control, the aircraft would go sideways in the airstream and disintegrate faster than the space shuttle Challenger. As fast as he could, Galvin let go of the stick and pulled the D-ring at his crotch up to his waist and tried to count to twenty — —at this level of adrenaline-induced excitement, counting to twenty might take only two seconds, maybe three, and it would take a full two seconds for the canopy to blow off and the ejection seat to kick in.

As Galvin waited he wondered whether the ejection mechanism could be knocked out by whatever had paralyzed the jet. Not that it would matter, because if the mechanism stalled or failed, the F-14 would disintegrate within another few seconds anyway.

A ring of explosive bolts blew the jet’s canopy off, the cockpit suddenly roaring with turbulence. A few heartbeats later Galvin’s seat kicked him in the ass, pushing his seat up the rails to the airflow above. A lanyard attached to the seat bottom pulled a pin in a rocket motor, launching the seat into the slipstream. Galvin’s eyes were shut tight, but if they had been open he would have seen his F-14 dive toward the sea, tumble out of control, her wings shearing off, the cloud of fuel vapor exploding in a puff, the debris from the jet raining down on the sea.

Galvin tumbled for a moment, his body parting company with the ejection seat. A few moments later his parachute bloomed overhead, the harness tightening over his crotch as the chute inflated. When he opened his eyes, he saw Giraffe’s parachute open a few hundred feet below. Off toward the horizon he saw, then heard the explosion as the second F-14 lost control and crashed into the sea — from the absence of parachutes, Vinny and Sully had obviously succumbed to the Womb Concept. And then he heard something that at first confused, then enraged him. Jet engines. High overhead, a Firestar fighter, the same bastard they’d been escorting to Cyprus, turned and flew off to the west, as if nothing had happened.

Galvin cursed as the water came up and splashed into his nose as he landed. As he released his parachute, he began to hope he wasn’t bleeding and inviting a shark attack.

Ahmed felt the pod detach; he counted off the seconds waiting for it to release its energy, one eye on his central console.

For a moment he wondered if the pulse would send the Firestar in a spin to crash into the sea. At that thought the central console blinked out, the display shrinking to the size of a pencil dot, then fading altogether, the dying panel evidence of the death of the onboard computer. Ahmed waited for his aircraft to shut down but the engines purred on, their control circuits still functional. He pulled up slightly on the stick, to see if the control surfaces were still working, and the Firestar began to climb. It was only then that he noticed the Tomcats were no longer with him. He continued climbing, aware that colliding with one of the F-14s would kill him as swiftly as a missile would, and saw the jet that had been his port wingman spiral in a dive toward the sea, vibrating and oscillating as it descended. As he watched, the canopy blew off and two ejection seats flew out. The F-14 banked violently and went broadside into the airflow. The slipstream blew the wings off, broke the plane in half and ignited the fuel in an orange ball of fire that rapidly dispersed in a black cloud. Two parachutes bloomed. Ahmed leveled the jet and flew a circle, trying to find the other F-14. He searched for it, finally seeing it only as a splash and a brief explosion as it crashed into the sea. There was no sign of the pilots of the second jet.

Ahmed glanced at the sun and turned the aircraft to the west and flew on toward the rendezvous point, hoping the submarine captain had waited for them. He had lost perhaps only five minutes, but sea captains were an impatient lot, an independent lot, and sometimes resented or even ignored their orders.

The computer systems were no longer functional, now that the console screen had died — —that had remained electronic, and so had perished, but the navigation backup system remained up. It was an old-fashioned set of numbers engraved on plastic wheels and rotated by the nav backup system’s calculator from inputs from the geosynchronous navigation satellite over the Mediterranean. By the display readout on the console there was not much more to go to get to the rendezvous point.

Soon he could see the tall fin of the submarine Hegira, the ship stopped, waiting for them. Ahmed circled the ship, now at only a few hundred meters altitude, then climbed into the sky in preparation to abandon the Firestar.

“Khalib? Are you awake?”

“I am …” Sihoud sounded drugged, barely conscious.

Perhaps that was better, Ahmed thought. He had worried that the trauma of ejecting from the Firestar would be too much for the general, but there was nothing else to do.

Ahmed climbed, uncertain of his altitude, flying the aircraft by the seat of his pants now that the computer was gone. He throttled the jet down, losing his forward speed. He had to get the aircraft to be just at stall-point before ejection to lessen the force of the slipstream.

“General, in a few moments we will be ejecting. If you can, try to keep your elbows tucked in tight to your chest and your feet on the footrest. I’ll be ejecting the seat for you. All you have to do is ride the parachute down.”

There was no answer. Ahmed’s mouth felt coppery and his flightsuit felt wet with his sweat. He could not help thinking again that this was a bad idea … the ejection could easily kill the general. He needed immediate medical attention and floating for an hour in the Mediterranean was not a way to get it. Ahmed knew he was out of options— — then pulled the stick steadily back while reaching for the canopy manual-release handle. He rotated the red handle to the arm position, then all the way to the release position. Thirty explosive bolts fired and the canopy vanished, the cold air of the slipstream blasting into the cockpit, threatening to knock off their oxygen masks and flight helmets. The violence of it smashed Ahmed’s helmet against the headrest several times, reminding him to get on with the eject sequence before they were both beaten into comas. Ahmed throttled the engines down to idle and pulled the stick all the way back to his crotch. The jet inclined upward, the forward airspeed decaying. The stick trembled as the jet protested the lack of lift on the wings. At the moment of complete wing-stall, the jet’s kinetic energy at a minimum, Ahmed lifted the protective cover off the switch marked rear seat eject and popped the toggle switch past its detent, then inward at a right angle.

Behind him Sihoud’s ejection-seat rocket motor ignited, spraying Ahmed with heat and flames as the general flew out into the atmosphere. The jet then stalled completely, its nose diving for the sea. Ahmed held on long enough to get the aircraft out of the way of Sihoud’s descent, then armed the switch between his legs for his own ejection seat. Just before hitting the switch he keyed the jet’s turbines to full thrust and felt the acceleration for a moment, then released the stick and snapped the ejection switch.

It happened so fast that Ahmed’s senses were overwhelmed. His spine shuddered as the ejection seat blasted into his posterior, the downward g-forces threatening to black him out. The airflow smashed into him, carrying away his oxygen mask and ripping his thigh pad off his flightsuit.

The world tumbled around him in a vicious spiral, leaving Ahmed feeling like he was being bounced down a blue tunnel. Finally the turbulence ended, leaving only the wind of free fall. The seat parachute deployed, jerking Ahmed upward. He looked for Sihoud’s parachute but couldn’t find it.

He floated down toward the water.

The end of the ride came, the inviting blue water soaking him. He cut away the seat and found the parcel strapped into the seat cushion and pulled it free, then released the pin. The parcel blew up into an inflated raft, big enough for two men, a small compartment of rations and water tucked into one section of it. When the raft steadied, Ahmed climbed into it and began his search for General Sihoud and the submarine.

Chapter 5 Thursday, 26 December

The snow had been falling since nightfall Wednesday and was now, in the early hours of a sleepy Thursday morning, piled almost a foot deep. Adm. Richard Donchez’s staff car rear door opened and the admiral burst out and took the icy steps to the V.I.P entrance two at a time. Captain Rummel met him just inside the door. Donchez barely acknowledged him, ignoring the V.I.P elevator and sprinting up the stairs to the fourth deck. As he hurried he doffed his heavy overcoat and unloaded it on Rummel, his hat next.

Donchez scanned into Flag Plot and entered the room, his first Havana firing up as he joined Admirals Dee Watson and John Traeps at a chart table littered with messages, code publications, and intelligence briefs. At the far wall an enlarged electronic chart glowed dark green, a lighter shade marking the shores of the Mediterranean. Hieroglyphics denoting ships and aircraft and bases cluttered the chart, vectors drawn from some of the symbols, others moving visibly as the chart updated every thirty seconds.

Donchez wasted no time. He stared through the cloud of cigar smoke at vice C.N.O Watson and commander Mediterranean forces Traeps.

“What is it?” he asked curtly.

“Firestar fighter, Admiral.” Watson’s jowls sagged almost all the way to his dirty collar, which was soaked with sweat despite the chill of the room. “Son of a bitch swatted away the escort F-14s like they were flies. Both crashed into the sea. We’ve got no idea why. One crew was recovered. The pilot reported he lost all power and thinks it was something the Firestar did. The SOB kept flying to the west. And that ain’t all. Show him, John.”

Traeps pulled a satellite photograph off the table. His gray hair was in place, his uniform looking like it came from the photo in the Navy Uniform Regulations manual. Traeps’s appearance always annoyed Donchez, he looked like one of those absurdly handsome older men that graced the casts of women’s soap operas or vitamin-supplement commercials.

“Sir, we got a sniff of something odd with the KH-17 spy platform making a Mediterranean pass at dawn over Cyprus.

As soon as we had it the Air Force sent out an RF-4 recon jet to take a closer look.” Traeps laid a second photo on the table next to the first.

Donchez puffed while studying the first photo. The high-altitude satellite shot was a grainy God’s-eye view of the sea taken shortly after sunrise, judging by the elongated shadow of the object shown in the center of the shot. That object was cigar-shaped, bulbous at one end, tapered on the other. The more telling information was the shadow, which formed the shape of a vertical surface. A fin. A submarine conning tower. Donchez dropped the satellite shot and picked up the second photo, a highly enlarged glossy. The black-and-white shot revealed much more detail than the first photo, this one clearly showing in a sidelooking view the shape in the water — the unmistakable shape of a submarine, every detail clear, including the window set into the conning tower, even the men standing in the cubbyhole at the top of the sloping fin. Donchez looked up, anger creasing his features.

“This submarine. Is it the UIF’s acquisition from the Japanese?” “Yes sir,” Rummel said. “Destiny-class, type-two nuclear.”

“Wasn’t this submarine on the target list a week ago? It should have been sunk next to its pier.”

“That’s right, sir, but there was a spot of bad weather and some higher priority targets. The sub was rescheduled to be hit tomorrow. Bad timing, I’m afraid. She … she got underway yesterday.”

“Nice catch for naval intelligence,” Donchez said bitterly.

“I want a report why that little fact escaped our attention yesterday. So what’s this got to do with the Firestar?”

Rummel answered. “The jet crashed into the sea about a mile from the submarine. We’re assuming a connection between the two events. The submarine was probably detailed to pick up the pilots of the Firestar.”

Donchez stared at Rummel. “And who were the men flying in the Firestar?”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“But you have a pretty good guess for me.”

“Conjecture, Admiral.”

“Let me in on it, if you would, Fred.”

“Sihoud, sir.”

“Where did the sub go?”

“Continued heading east toward Kassab, then submerged. We have more photographs if you want to see—”

Donchez shook his head. “What you’re telling me, gentlemen, is that for the last twenty-four hours I’ve been doing my level best to knock out General Sihoud, and the result of the fleet’s effort is his escape to a submarine that is now god-knows-where, and Sihoud is not only gone but we can’t find him. Is that your conclusion?”

“Afraid that’s it. Admiral,” Watson said, “but we’ve got a plan—”

“I’m sure you do. Dee. I’d just love to hear it.”

Watson gestured to the wall chart.

“We’ve got two well-positioned units in the Med to track this Destiny. The carrier air group Reagan off Tripoli is escorted by the Improved Los Angeles-class submarine Phoenix. We can use her to plug the gap at Gibraltar and make sure the Destiny doesn’t make a run for open ocean. Then we’ve got the Augusta off Cyprus in the east. She can scour the Med from east to west. Between the two units we’ll pick up the Destiny. I’m expecting her to make port in Kassab or somewhere in North Africa to unload Sihoud to a field command where he can get back to his ground campaign.”

“Taking Phoenix away from the Reagan is risky,” Donchez said. “Leaves the whole battle group vulnerable in case the Destiny tries something. Let’s not forget, the Destiny may be a third-world export submarine, but it’s built by first-rate designers. Some folks think it’s as good or better than a Centurion. Besides, why the hell would Sihoud run for the Atlantic? That would do nothing for his war effort. He needs to get back into action. Let’s leave Phoenix where she is.”

“Good point, sir,” Traeps said. Donchez glared at him, not liking the ass-kissing.

The vice C.N.O for operations. Admiral Dee Watson, shook his jowls in disagreement. “Admiral, I’m only a skimmer puke,” he said, referring to his own operational days as a surface-warfare officer, the surface ships known derisively as “skimmers” by the submarine force. “But if we keep Phoenix with the battle group, Barczynski’s gonna have more evidence for his ten-billion-dollar-self-licking-ice-cream-cone allegation.”

Donchez thought it over. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Rod Barczyinski, was a vigorous opponent of aircraft-carrier battle groups, noting how often carrier aircraft and carrier group ships seemingly had little purpose except to protect the carrier itself, hence the self-licking-ice-cream-cone epithet. It was a distortion, of course, but in the battle for defense dollars plenty of nasty tricks had been played by one service against another. Watson was on-target in bringing up the political result of a tactical decision, yet to hell with politics when there was a war to win. Except there was more here. Sihoud had escaped in a submarine that nobody knew anything about. Its capabilities were matters of conjecture. There was the priority of killing Sihoud, and the possibility of his escape was unacceptable. When weighing the idea of Sihoud’s escape against any danger to the aircraft-carrier battle group, it seemed clear that the risk was worth the insurance.

Donchez changed his mind. Sihoud must be caught. “Dee, we’ll do it your way. Get Phoenix to patrol the far western basin at Gibraltar. Get every antisubmarine warfare aircraft in the Med in the air, the P-3s out of Sigonella and the Reagan’s Vikings.”

“For now, sir, that leaves most of the Med in the hands of the Augusta. Augusta’s closest by far to the position of the Destiny class. If we catch it, Augusta will be the one to do it.” Watson looked unhappy, as if he wanted more firepower.

“Who’s in command of Augusta?” Donchez asked.

“Rocket Ron Daminski,” Watson said, a smirk making an appearance on his face.

“Jesus, that Destiny doesn’t stand a chance,” Donchez said. “Rocket Ron Daminski … is he still the terror of Squadron Seven?”

“The same,” Traeps said.

“He’s a blunt instrument.” Watson said. “I recommend we use him. Daminski’s orders should tell him to sink the Destiny submarine on initial contact.”

“Tell him to give us a situation report before he puts her on the bottom, just in case. I guess that’s it, gentlemen. Get Augusta and Daminski in trail of the Destiny. If Rocket can find that sub, it’ll be on the bottom fifteen minutes later. Give him some help, John, and get those P-3s and Vikings up in the air looking for the Destiny. Let’s detach one of Reagan’s ASW frigates. I don’t care what it takes, but sink that submarine. Daminski’s authorized all force necessary. And have the watch officer call me at home the minute we’ve got something. You two should get some rest yourselves. You’re no good to me dead on your feet.”

Commodore Sharef frowned down at the deck from the surface-control space on top of the fin, ten meters above the curving hull. Perhaps under different circumstances he would have been less agitated — it was shaping up into a beautiful morning, the sun rising higher in the winter sky, the deep blue water of the Mediterranean so clear that Sharef could see the hull shape underwater from the elliptical bow forward to the X-tail aft. And the air smelled so clean after being locked inside the Hegira for the last twenty-four hours. There was something invigorating about being on the surface, even though the surface was the submariner’s enemy.

As if to remind him of the danger, the sound of distant aircraft engines came whining into his ears. He looked up and saw nothing. Even the binoculars were unable to locate the jet — it must have been a high-altitude transport … he hoped.

Sharef shouted down to the deck, his voice unhurried but clipped.

“On deck! Get those men below! Now!”

The rescue team had just pulled the second man in from the raft. One of the men was younger and healthy, the second bent and weak, needing help just to stay on his feet on the curving deck. The deckhands and the survivors pushed into the hatch set into the port side of the fin and went down the ladder to the control room below. Sharer leaned over and saw that the last man had secured the hatch fairing in the side of the fin. The only men left in the surface-control space were deck officer Omar Tawkidi and Sharef. Sharef glanced at his watch and ordered Tawkidi below. Sharef lifted the panel doors, the cubbyhole at the top of the fin vanishing, the fin again streamlined and continuous. He checked for loose items, binoculars or flashlights, anything that could bounce or rattle around to cause noise, and finding nothing, lowered himself down into the hatchway and shut it. Twenty steps down at the joining of the fin to the outer hull there was a wide space in the vertical tunnel.

Sharef checked the hatch set in the side of the fin and, satisfied it was secure, lowered himself into the command-module access-hatch. When his head was clear he pulled down the hatch to the fin tunnel and spun the hatch wheel, engaging the heavy dogs. He continued down the ladder all the way to the deckplates and operated a hydraulic control lever.

The lower hatch, stowed in the overhead, rotated into position below the upper hatch, engaged its own dogs, and rotated into place. The ship was now rigged for submergence.

Sharef stepped through the doorway into the control room and blinked in its dim light, looking for Tawkidi.

“Deck, are you ready to submerge?”

“Yes sir.”

“Take the ship down to 100 meters, heading east at dead-slow. Continue the heading for ten minutes, then do a computer self-delouse. I want a report on the status of the delouse.”

“Yes sir. Ship control, dead slow ahead, ship’s depth 100 meters.”

“Where are the survivors?”

“Your stateroom, sir. Captain al-Kunis is with them.”

“Any idea who they were?”

Tawkidi took a deep breath.

“You won’t believe it. Commodore. I think you’d better see for yourself.”

Sharef hurried out of the control room, down a narrow passageway between the computer space to starboard and the radio room to port to the door to his stateroom. He opened the door and found himself looking into the face of the Sword of Islam, Gen. Mohammed al-Sihoud. A part of Sharef’s mind realized he should be snapping to attention, but he simply stood there, looking from Sihoud to his first officer al-Kunis, to the second survivor, Rakish Ahmed.

The door opened slowly, the hinges groaning as it came open. The light from the passageway was bright enough to make the eyes ache even under sleep-swollen lids.

“Captain, sir? Noon meal is being served, sir. The officer of the deck thought you might want to go down to the wardroom.”

Commander Ron Daminski tossed aside the sweaty sheet and sat up in his narrow rack. The room seemed to swim around him. The chronometer showed it to be 1125 hours Greenwich mean time. As he ran his blunt fingers through his hair he tried to remember when he’d fallen asleep. Ten hours before. He should have felt refreshed, recharged, but instead felt heavy and tired and old. He squinted up at the mess cook.

“Tell the officers to go ahead without me.” Daminski knew he was breaking with tradition, but somehow it seemed dishonest for him to be joking and talking with the officers at a meal and then reprimanding them for their inattention to duty a half-hour later. For his entire tour aboard, he had rarely eaten in the wardroom although protocol still demanded that he be invited, in case he changed his mind.

He knew inattendance at the meals was taken as a sign of aloofness, perhaps of arrogance, by the junior officers, but that was his style and he was unable and unwilling to change.

“Aye, sir. Would you like me to bring your meal up here for you?”

Daminski yawned, wondering if he looked as bad as he felt. What would Myra think of how he looked, he wondered.

God, Myra’s letter — where was it? He found it on the scrunched bedclothes and tucked it into the waistband of his gray boxers.

“Huh? Oh, no. I’m not hungry. Seaman March.” Just go away, he thought. Let an old man wake up.

The door shut slowly. Daminski stood, his knees popping.

At the thought that a shower would help him wake up, he tossed the boxers in the laundry bag and stepped into the cramped head between his stateroom and the XO’s. There was a small stall, a phone-booth-sized shower and a tiny sink. The whole affair was covered with sheet stainless steel except for the deck. Daminski walked into the shining shower and turned the water on full cold, convulsing as the spray hit him. He turned it back off and lathered up without water— — there were no running water showers on Daminski’s ship, not when each drop had to be distilled from seawater and most of it made for the reactor and steam plants, not for hotel usage. Once soapy, he turned on the water again, mixing in the hot, and rinsed off, the force of the water a vigorous massage. He cut the water, now feeling cold in the steel vertical coffin. He wiped the walls down with a squeegee and toweled off.

In the mirror above the sink was the pale sun-deprived face of a man too far past his prime, the wrinkles now deep in his forehead, a forehead that gained more real estate each year as the hair vanished. His graying hair was too long, almost shaggy. He dried it and brushed it straight back. He considered growing his beard back; in the three weeks left in the patrol he could have a well-filled-in beard that would mask his chin’s growing jowls. He shook his head. Captains should be clean shaven, he’d always maintained. He dragged the razor across his face, brushed his teeth with the baking soda in the tube. Back in his stateroom he put on fresh boxers and T-shirt and a new poopysuit, a black coverall with American flag patches sewn on the shoulders, his name over the left pocket, an embroidered gold dolphin emblem above his name. Then his black Reeboks and he was ready for an other day at sea.

But he’d been wrong that he’d be cheered up by the shower, he thought as he unzipped the poopysuit and slid Myra’s letter against the skin of his chest. The heaviness was still with him, just cleaned of its surface scum but as solid and substantial as ever. There was always one man who could cheer him up — —Terry Betts, the torpedoman chief.

Betts should have finished lunch by then. Daminski left his stateroom and padded down the steps to the torpedo room two levels below, down in the belly of the forward compartment.

He walked into the aft end of The Room— — the crew’s name for the space that was cavernous and open when empty of torpedoes and cramped and tight when the ship was loaded out. On this run, Augusta was carrying a full load.

Daminski walked down the narrow aisle between the weapon racks, running his crooked fingers along the flanks of a Mark 50 torpedo. The weapon was cool and shining in the bright lights of the room, her Astroturf green paint gleaming. Stencilled black letters near the tip read mk 50 mod alpha warshot ser 1178. Back over his shoulder Daminski could hear the sound of a man grunting with exertion as he lifted weights. The torpedo room was one of few spaces available for exercise, though the crew spent much of their spare time in their coffin-sized racks sleeping away the patrol. The more they slept, the shorter the run would seem.

Senior Chief Terry Betts sat on a cushioned bench at the forward bulkhead of the room at the torpedo local-control console. A two-liter bottle of Classic Coke was set in a special holder on the console; Betts sipped the soda from an Augusta coffee mug. He was a huge bear of a man, his gut protruding almost half the way to his knees. His thick fore arms stuck out of the rolled-up sleeves of his poopysuit, a custom-tailored one made to hold his tremendous frame.

Daminski smiled as he approached the grizzled chief.

“Terry. You’re awake. Something wrong?” Daminski’s face was suddenly alive with humor.

“Me? I heard you’d been down ever since the launch, there, Rocket.” Betts took a long pull on his Coke.

“That’s Captain Rocket to you. Senior Chief.” Daminski and Betts went back decades to the USS Dace, an old dinosaur Permit-class submarine when Daminski had been a green ensign torpedo officer and Betts had been the division’s first class petty officer. The two had always played squadron softball in the spring and football in the autumn as long as they were both stationed in Norfolk. Whenever Daminski was bored he liked to relive old games with Betts, bringing back the glory of that one perfect touchdown, or the time the softball had flown what seemed a quarter-mile away.

Daminski sat down next to Belts and let out a whoosh of breath, the feeling of heaviness sneaking into him in spite of Betts’s presence.

“We still looking at going home in three weeks, Cap’n?” Betts asked.

“I guess. Not that there’s much to come home to.”

Betts studied a Mark 50 torpedo on the central rack.

“Myra got another bug up her ass?”

“Worse than usual. This time she—”

A phone at Betts’s side whooped. Betts scooped up the handset, the black telephone dwarfed in his massive fist.

“Torpedo room. Betts … yeah, he’s here. Hold on.” Betts handed Daminski the phone. “Conn for you. Skipper.”

“Captain.”

“Off’sa’deck, sir. Request permission to come to periscope depth, sir.”

“Whatya got?”

The officer of the deck gave the ship’s course, speed, and depth and the distance to the surface-ship contacts being tracked. Satisfied that the ship wouldn’t collide with some rustbucket tanker bound for Naples, Daminski ordered the ship to periscope depth. The submarine would remain submerged, hiding under the cover of the waves, interacting with the world above only, extending the radio mast to listen to the satellite transmission of their radio messages, extending the periscope to avoid a collision. Daminski handed the phone back to Betts. Even as the big torpedoman chief reached over to replace the handset in its cradle, the deck inclined upward to a fifteen-degree angle as the O.O.D drove Augusta up toward the surface 500 feet overhead.

Betts asked again about Myra. Daminski thought about finishing the story, then thought better of it, dismissing the impending breakup of his marriage with a wave of his football-damaged hand.

“Hell with it, Terry. The real reason I came down is that you’re looking kind of wimpy these days. I think the fat’s gotten into your arms there. What do you say? Loser buys the keg.”

Betts stared down his nose at Daminski. Daminski was fond of frequenting the bars on the piers and arm-wrestling anyone who was foolish enough to take him on, but he had always had the intelligence never to challenge Betts.

“Captain, I will break your arm, and then you’ll bust me to third class.”

“Come on.”

Betts picked up the bench and carried it to the starboard weapon rack, to the free space where no weapons were stowed. He bent and brought a tool chest to the opposite side of the corner of the rack, kneeled on his box, brought his huge arm down on the rack and stared at Daminski.

The deck had leveled off and was now rocking gently in the waves near the surface. Two decks above, the O.O.D would be on the periscope while the bigmouth radio antenna reached for the sky, picking up the radio traffic from the orbiting communications satellite. The GPS navigation system would be swallowing a data dump from the navigation satellite, pinpointing their location in the wide ocean to within a few yards.

Daminski kneeled down on the toolbox, his knee protesting from three operations to repair damaged cartilage. He put his elbow on the rack, his ham hand only two-thirds the size of Betts’s. The two men grasped hands, Daminski’s fingers so crooked that his middle finger had to be straight to allow him to clasp his other fingers around Betts’s hand.

“Giving me the finger, huh?” Betts asked, sounding serious.

“That’ll just piss me off and you’ll have a compound fracture.”

Daminski was grinning, his lips pulled back so far every tooth in his mouth showed, a war face he had cultivated since his days on the Dace. It did nothing for Betts, who two decades before had watched Rocket Ron practicing the face in the mirror.

“On three,” Betts said, his face already looking slightly red, his wrist tense, ready to cock when the contest began.

“One, two, three!”

The two arms jumped, the tendons and muscles straining.

Sweat broke out on Betts’s forehead. Daminski’s face muscles trembled. Two, then three men in the compartment silently gathered around.

Betts’s fist had cocked slightly inward, pulling Daminski’s hand in an unnatural twist. Daminski’s arm, however, had not given an inch, still ramrod straight, if anything allowing his hand to twist while still pushing for an angle. But the senior chief had over a hundred pounds on the captain. Both arms began to shake, slightly at first, then more pronounced.

Daminski’s hand began to travel backward toward the rack surface as Betts bore down on him. In one grunt Daminski recovered, almost all the way to the vertical. A shrill rip sounded in the room as Daminski’s poopysuit shoulder seam let go. Daminski grunted as his arm began to force the massive chief’s hand backward, perhaps an inch.

The phone from the control room whooped, making Betts jump slightly. Daminski sensed an opportunity but Betts took a breath, tensed his arm, pushing the smaller Damin ski’s back to the vertical, then farther. Daminski’s hand was slowly sliding down toward the rack.

One of the men in the room picked up the phone. “Captain, it’s for you, sir. Officer of the deck.”

“Tell him to wait.” Betts took advantage of the interruption and pushed Daminski’s hand farther down, now almost at a forty-five-degree angle, halfway down to the rack.

Daminski kept fighting, his breaths wheezing.

“Captain says to wait, sir,” the phone talker said. “Yes sir, wait one.” Then to Daminski, “Captain, O.O.D says there’s a flash radio message for you, personal for the captain. He says he needs you in control. Now, sir.”

Daminski looked up at Betts, who was smiling.

“I’d better go. Chief.”

Betts’s hand kept pushing on Daminski’s, but the effort to get the captain down had cost him. Daminski’s hand was fighting its way back up.

“Yeah, you’d better get up there,” Betts said, taking a gasping breath between each word.

By then Daminski’s fist was almost at the vertical again.

“On the count of three, let go.”

“Okay.” “One,” Daminski said, eyes closed, still struggling against Betts’s bulk. The ship’s deck took on an angle again as the submarine left the danger of the surface and returned to the arms of the deep, beneath the thermal layer, where only an extraordinarily lucky warship would be able to detect them.

“Two,” Daminski wheezed, his fist now cocking against Betts’s, driving the huge arm downward toward the rack.

Betts’s face was red, his eyes clamped shut, his teeth biting into his lip. Daminski’s arm began to move Betts’s down.

Betts began to give out a groaning sound. Daminski took one final breath and forced his arm toward the rack. Betts’s hand shook. After a final moment, Betts let go and Daminski drove the huge fist down to the rack. Betts slipped off the bench box, holding his arm and gasping.

Daminski stood. “Three. You okay, Terry?”

“Screw you,” Betts said from the deck as four torpedomen tried to pull him upright. “Sir.”

Daminski laughed, fingered the rip in his uniform and headed for the stairs to the middle level.

“Next time for sure, right. Senior?”

Betts got to his feet and stared at Daminski. “You won’t survive the next time. Skipper.”

Daminski waved at Betts and moved up the stairs, taking the second flight to the upper level, turning the corner and heading aft to the control room, amazed at how much better he felt, Myra’s letter almost forgotten. Almost.

Officer of the deck Lt. Kevin Skinnard stood on the raised periscope stand, a slim man in his late twenties with traces of acne on his cheeks below his deep-set eyes. His face looked haunted by lack of sleep as he held out a metal clipboard to Daminski, the radio messages printed out from their trip to periscope depth.

Daminski opened the clipboard cover and read the message.

Daminski smiled, signed the message, glanced at the chronometer and jotted down the time. He handed the message board to O.O.D Skinnard and moved down to the chart table, shuffled down in the locker portion for a new chart of the Mediterranean and marked the spot of the Destiny-class’s surfacing with a blue pencil dot. He grabbed a time-distance circular slide rule and spun the wheel several times, then drew a circle in the sea with the compass center on the blue dot. Skinnard checked his calculation and nodded. Daminski pointed to the chart.

“Course two eight five at flank until we’re here, then slow to ten knots and do a large sector search. Notify the ops boss to do his homework on the Destiny-class and tell him we’ll be briefing the officers at 1400.”

“Dive, make your depth eight five four feet. Helm, all ahead flank, right two degrees rudder, steady course two eight five,” Skinnard ordered.

Daminski frowned at Skinnard for a moment. The youth was the sonar officer, and Daminski was about to see how good he was.

“Skinnard, you got a sonar-search plan for the Destiny-class?”

The lieutenant didn’t blink. “I reviewed it myself two days ago. Captain. It’s current. My sonarmen will have it loaded in five minutes. If that sucker’s out there, we’ll snap him up.”

Daminski’s frown didn’t ease but inside he was smiling. The kid had given the right answer, and it was because he was trained right — Daminski-trained.

“I know you will,” Daminski said, his face close to Skinnard’s. He turned and walked to his stateroom, whistling tunelessly. A lousy day had turned out pretty fine, after all.

He rubbed his right shoulder and biceps and grimaced. At least he could shoot the Destiny submarine without it ripping his arm out of the socket. Damned Betts. Next time he’d lift a few weights before challenging his beefy torpedoman.

Chapter 6 Thursday, 26 December

The door to sonar smashed open. The sonar chief turned and stared at Captain Daminski, his hair drawn back, red wraparound glasses shading his round eyes. Chief Bruce Hillsworth, Royal Navy, was on an exchange program, his usual assignment to the HMS Triumph, an attack submarine of the Trafalgar class. After going to BSY-1 BATEARS sonar school in San Diego, Hillsworth had reported aboard Augusta for the temporary assignment to assist the regular sonar supervisor. But the irreverent Brit had proved so adept at his job that, at Daminski’s insistence, the Navy had approved his top-secret clearance and proposed to the British Admiralty that he be allowed to complete a three-year tour.

Daminski slammed shut the door to the sonar shack, violating the rig for patrol quiet that required doors to be shut gently. Hillsworth ripped off his earphones and glared at the captain, then spoke, his South London accent oddly exotic in a navy dominated by descendents of early twentieth-century immigrants and great-grandsons of the Confederacy.

“Sir, if you insist on slamming the door I shall be obliged to ask you to leave my sonar compartment.”

Daminski clapped Hillsworth on the shoulder. “Aw, your queen wears combat boots.”

Hillsworth’s nose tilted toward the overhead. “Is there anything in particular I might be able to help you with, sir?”

Daminski looked around the room and took it in, as if he were seeing it for the first time, or perhaps the last. The space was quiet, the sonar display consoles humming, ventilation ducts purring, the room dimly lit by blue fluorescent lights and the green of the console video screens. A wall speaker played the sound of the selected beam of the spherical sonar array, the volume turned low enough to make the ears strain to hear the sound of the merchant ship’s propeller off in the distance. The faraway whooshing of the screw blades sounded lonely, mournful.

“I want to see the sonar search-plan for the Destiny-class.”

Hillsworth nodded, took off the headphones and led Daminski to the computer in the forward corner of the cramped space. Daminski paged through the software, looking at the expected tonal frequencies predicted from the Japanese-constructed ship. Little was known about her sound signature. When the ship had left the Mitsubishi shipyard in Yokosuka the Improved-Los Angeles-class submarine Louisville had trailed her out, doing an “underhull,” a periscope surveillance of the new ship as it ran on the surface.

The video of that observation had given naval intelligence a more complete picture than if they had gotten a tour of her drydock. When the Destiny-class submerged, the Louisville stayed with her, circling her in what was known as an SPL (for sound pressure level recording). The wideband-width tape recordings were analyzed for weeks at navsea until the resulting sonar search plan was created. That plan noted the various pure tones emanating from the Destiny submarine as a function of distance from the contact and the angle of the ship itself. Sonar detection in the BATEARS BSY-1 suite was done primarily by narrowband detection, listening in a narrow slice of ocean for a particular pure frequency, a tonal. Reducing the space listened to and the frequencies listened for cut down on the near infinite amount of data the sonar computers would otherwise have to process to find the enemy sub. But the plan depended heavily on what tonals the target submarine transmitted.

Daminski frowned. “This SPL is a year old,” he complained.

“Afraid so, Cap’n.”

“This might not sound anything like the Destiny does today.”

“It might.”

“No way. Chief. This data was taken on Destiny’s maiden voyage. God knows our boats sound completely different from sea trials to a year later after we’ve fixed all the shipyard’s screwups and eliminated all the sound shorts. I think we should open up the tonal gates.”

“Sir, you’ll be doubling or tripling the volume of data. It’ll slow us down. Might not scoop up the rascal at all.”

Daminski turned from the computer screen and looked up at the overhead. “I can’t help thinking they’re somehow ahead of us. There’s something we haven’t thought about.”

The phone rang from the conn.

“O.O.D for you, gov’na. Says you’re requested in the officers’ mess for a briefing. Probably about our friend the Destiny.”

“Yeah.” Daminski sighed. “Don’t forget opening those gates. Chief. At least a couple hertz.”

“I’ll consider discussing it with the weapons officer, if you don’t mind, sir.”

Daminski laughed, noting Hillsworth’s rigid insistence on following the chain of command, even knowing that the weapons officer would take his orders from Daminski.

“Keep listening for this asshole. Chief.”

“As ever, sir,” Hillsworth said, strapping his headset back on.

Daminski left sonar, shutting the door gently this time, and walked down the passageway to the amidships ladder, to the middle level. He ducked into the wardroom, which was packed with the ship’s officers, took his place at the head seat at the leather-covered table and waved at the navigator and operations officer. Lieutenant Commander Tim Turner, to begin the briefing.

Turner was of medium height, his most noticeable feature his oddly coifed hair — odd for a thirty-three-year-old — moussed nearly vertically from his forehead in imitation of a current rock star. His face made him look ten years younger than he was, but the baby face and outgoing, amiable personality covered an explosive temper. The only time the Augusta crew had seen evidence of that temper was when Daminski had pushed him too far, yelling in the lieutenant commander’s face over a problem with the routing of the radio messages. Turner had blown up, telling Daminski where he could shove the message board. Surprisingly, Daminski had backed off, apologized, and walked away. It almost seemed Daminski had been deliberately trying to get Turner to lose control, just to see where that boundary was for future reference. Ever since then the two men had gotten along very well.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Turner said. “This briefing is SCI top secret, code name: Early Retirement. Everybody cleared for this, Jamie?”

“Yes sir,” the communications officer said, checking the room’s attendees against his clearance list.

“Okay. A few hours ago we received a flash transmission to intercept the United Islamic Front Destiny-class submarine, reported to be in this area.” Turner pointed to a chart he’d taped to the wall, showing an ellipse drawn in the eastern Mediterranean basin between Cyprus and Crete. “Our mission once we detect and classify the contact is twofold.

First, we transmit a message to the CINC that the Destiny is there. Then,” Turner said, “we sink it.” Turner tapped the chart again. “We’re heading out at flank speed. In another two hours we’ll slow to ten knots to lower our own ship’s noise to do a large area sonar search. The handouts Jamie’s passing to you are the details of the sonar search-plan with the Destiny’s tonals and SPL results. Also in the handout is a print of the Destiny-class nuclear submarine.”

Daminski flipped past the sonar search-plan to the blueprint of the enemy submarine. The ship was odd-looking to an American submariner’s eyes. It looked like a fat torpedo, rounded at the bow, cylindrical over its length with an abrupt tapered stern, the aft end having the strange X-tail rudder/stern plane combination with the even stranger ducted propulsor water turbine instead of a screw. But the strangest part of the ship was the sail, or fin, as the UIF forces called it. The fin height was nearly the same as the diameter of the hull, the structure poking up thirty-five feet.

“As you can see, this vessel is radically different from our own designs, and a major departure from Russian designs as well.” Turner was lecturing now and obviously enjoying it.

“Unlike our own philosophy, there is no spherical or bow sonar array. The bow is taken up with torpedo tubes like a World War II boat. The tubes are actually outside the pressure hull, containing canned weapons. So the tubes are one-shot deals and there’s no reloading and no reload machinery — makes the ship simpler and lighter with fewer pressure-hull penetrations. It’s got thirteen large-bore hundred-centimeter tubes and eight small-bore fifty-three centimeter tubes. Even with no reload Destiny can kill you twenty-one times over.

“This ship is a double-hull vessel, great for taking torpedo hits without getting hurt. Plus, the inner hull is a simple cylindrical elliptical-headed pressure vessel. They’ve minimized hull diameter, the main drawback to a double-hull ship, by making ballast spaces fore and aft of the pressure hull. And get this, gents: the pressure hull with its four compartments has only one of them manned. The reactor and steam plants are so automated that they run everything from the control room up front under the fin. There’s no shaft penetration to the hull because the propulsor is turned by an oil-enclosed AC motor — only electrical cables penetrate the hull. The motor is damned quiet, as is the low-speed propulsor.

The reactor is liquid metal cooled with MHD pumps— whisper quiet, and there’s no reduction gearing since it’s electric drive. The turbine generators are reported to be screamers at a dual frequency at about 155 hertz. For sensors the ship has huge hull sonar arrays, damn near covering the whole hull. Her ears are a lot bigger than ours, which sort of makes up for the lack of a spherical array up forward.”

Jamie Fernandez, the communications officer, raised his hand. Turner recognized the young ensign.

“Sir, the Destiny-class — do we know the actual name of this particular ship? The Moslems don’t call it the Destiny, do they? And what do we know about the ship’s captain? How will he react when we approach him? What does the intelligence say?”

“We don’t have data that specific—”

“Those are bullshit questions, Fernandez,” Daminski’s voice boomed. “The answer is it doesn’t matter who the hell the captain is or what the hell they call their damned ship. Our job is to put it on the bottom.” Daminski looked at the officers. “Come on, let’s get our stuff together here. Go on, please, Mr. Turner.”

Turner continued, finishing with the intelligence they did have about the ship — submerged tonnage, speed, depth capability.

After another quarter-hour Turner finished and looked at Daminski.

“Anything to add, sir?”

“Just a couple things, Mr. Turner.” Daminski stretched and snapped his fingers for a cup of coffee. The engineer, tall lanky Mark Berghoffer, the Pennsylvania Dutch farmboy with the foghorn voice, leaped up, grabbed an Augusta coffee mug from the rack, splashed the hot brew into it and placed it before the captain. Daminski slurped loudly, then: “Here’s how I see it, guys. Feel free to jump in if I’m wrong. I think we can take this dude by sneaking up on him. Those big hull arrays will leave a hell of a baffle area in his stern, and the surface flow will be noisy from the propulsor. The ship itself is damned good, but I’m betting the crew is unfamiliar with their platform and they’re poorly trained. We’ve been at sea a hell of a lot more in the last six months than these people. Once we get a sniff of this guy we’re ordered to do a situation report. I’ll preload the damned thing in a radio buoy and poop it out the signal ejector so I don’t have to go to periscope depth in the middle of the approach. Then I’ll put out a horizontal salvo of four Mark 50s, wait for the detonations, then we go on to Naples for a night of beer, Italian food, and Italian women. Any questions?”

There were none. The briefing broke up. Daminski sat in the end seat for some time, finishing his coffee, staring at the intelligence profile of the Destiny-class, and thinking about fernandez’s questions: who was the Destiny’s captain?

And what the hell did they call the ship? And what would Destiny’s captain do if he detected their approach? Questions for which Daminski had no answers, and felt he should have.

Admiral Donchez glared at the air force security guard at the fortified entrance to the joint-staff headquarters. Even the navy’s number one admiral had to produce his ID card, his Pentagon bar-coded SCIF-access card, and have the photo-images on the cards compared to his face by two on-watch sentries before he could gain access. At last the sentries admitted Donchez into the maze of corridors leading to a large briefing room. Before Congress had mandated this joint service fever, this room had been the War Room, the information presentation facility for presidents and cabinet members and congressmen and generals. Now that the post-cold-war world’s threats were different, the joint staff had gutted and remodeled the room, making it look more like a movie set than the old functional war room. The joint staff briefing room was large but so packed with computer consoles as to seem cramped except for the table in the center of the room. The black table was ten feet wide and sixty feet long, the surface illuminated by a hanging contraption in the shape of a large racetrack shining fluorescent light down on the slick marble surface. The room’s north and south walls were electronic wall charts, their images driven by the computer consoles on the east and west walls. Off to the side of the large briefing table was a smaller table, seating only twelve, where the chairman of the Joint Chiefs liked to have his meetings. The entire facility was a SCIF, special compartmented information facility, built to elaborate specifications that attempted to prevent eavesdropping. These included the prohibition against windows or ventilation ducts leading to the rest of the building; the computer consoles were networked only with each other and to a barrier computer. Only the barrier computer was allowed to communicate with the outside world through sanitized phone lines and data cables. The barrier then scanned incoming data to ensure that it was virus-free. A second computer system was devoted solely to monitoring the barrier, making sure its integrity was maintained. Every phone in the room was a secure-voice unit, all passing through the modules of the barrier computer.

All this seemed fine for tactical or war-fighting strategy meetings, but JCS chairman General Rod Barczynski also favored the room for administrative meetings. Thirty-five years of living and fighting in tanks had made the general uncomfortable with rooms with windows and curtains and wood tables. Donchez could understand but still felt odd discussing, say, the latest uniform change in the war-fighting environment of the joint-briefing facility. Except, of course, this morning’s briefing was no administrative function.

Barczynski wanted answers. Dick Donchez’s career had been filled with sessions like these. To Donchez, success was not a matter of avoiding failure but of making the right decisions and taking the correct action when staring failure in the face.

Behind Donchez were his commanders-in-chief — John Traeps, the CINC naval forces Mediterranean, and Kenny Mckeigh, the CINC naval forces Atlantic — as well as his aide Fred Rummel. Vice C.N.O Watson was minding the store in Flag Plot. Donchez sat at the table across from the general and his staff, Donchez’s CINCS seating themselves beside him. He looked up at Barczynski.

“Afternoon, General,” Donchez said. “Having a good vacation?”

Donchez referred to Barczynski’s penchant for getting outdoors away from D.C. on weekends and holidays.

Being at work on the Christmas holidays, war or no war, was not his style.

“I’ve had a lot better, Dick,” the general said.

The general’s physical appearance made him seem an unlikely character to be in command of the nation’s military.

He was a large man, his barrel chest presiding over an equally broad paunch, but somehow Barczynski didn’t seem fat, just big. Someone seeing him at the grocery store would think him a boilermaker or a longshoreman. He had a habit of taking off his uniform jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, and when he did his thick forearms bulged from the shirt. Barczynski had a way of looking a man in the eyes with disarming directness, especially when asking — rarely ordering — that an action be taken, his eyes smiling, the laugh lines coming, as if to say I know you can do this, will you help me out? Those eyes also had the ability to get the truth from subordinates trying to cover their trails, and tails. They could also mesmerize bosses, disarming opponents.

And they worked wonders with the press, who loved him. There were rumors that when he retired he could win a presidential nomination. He was one of few officers able to weld a caring attitude for his men with a relentless commitment to the mission at hand. Officers and enlisted men alike would do things for Barczynski that they would never agree to do for anyone else, taking the unglamorous missions, hardship tours, the army’s dirty jobs. As a way to reward the men who worked hard for him, he was fond of building esprit de corps by throwing keg parties; wherever he had been assigned in his career he could always be found after hours in the officers’ club, usually with a Heineken in each giant fist, surrounded by younger officers. But his physical appearance and beer diplomacy masked a penetrating insight and a tactician’s mind unrivaled by most military academicians.

Donchez himself had enormous professional and personal respect for Barczynski as well as liking him as a friend and fellow officer, the two senior officers friends for the past several years. But even so, Donchez was wary of the army officer because he felt he was short on understanding of navy operations. Barczynski’s working knowledge of the fleet had come from joint-command operations during which he’d come back with a distaste for carrier battle groups, the navy’s starting offense. Over the last few years Donchez had convinced Barczynski of the utility of submarines, the usefulness of seal team commandos, the gunboat diplomacy of Aegis cruisers, the punch of an amphibious assault by a bat talion of Marines, and the value of sea-launched Javelin cruise missiles, but the general still balked at Donchez’s insistence that carrier air wings were worth their price tag, the general more comfortable with land-based air force fighters and bombers, which he’d been familiar with since his West Point graduation. Donchez had continued to press, and Barczynski had grudgingly gone along with the navy chief’s tactical recommendations, but as far as carrier battle groups were concerned, they were something that Barczynski tolerated rather than supported.

Barczynski looked at Donchez now and started in abruptly. “Dick, what’s this I hear about Sihoud getting away? I thought your seals were there to stop that. Do you know how tough it was to get Dawson to buy in on this assassination thing? We promised him results. So far we’ve got nothing.”

“Sir, I’m not sure what you might have heard from your sources. The missile attack did fail and the seals missed Sihoud’s departure from the bunker— — he must have taken off before the Javelins hit, because the seals verified that nothing was left. We believe Sihoud made an escape on a Firestar fighter that flew out over the Med and dropped him off at a submarine. The UIF’s Destiny-class submarine.”

Donchez showed him the photos.

“This Destiny sub. It’s a diesel boat, right? Your guys can find it and kill it?”

“I’m afraid it’s a nuke, sir. Japanese built, state of the art, although it’s just an export-level unit— — God help us if the Japanese ever decided to make their own wars with their own hardware.”

Barczynski was not amused. “Go on. Admiral.”

“The ship is run by Egyptians, Iranians, Iraqis and Libyans. We believe they are not very well trained, not operating as a smooth team—”

“You’ve got a bunch of your subs in the Med to get this guy, right?”

“We’ve got two front-line units, both Los Angeles-class attack submarines, one guarding Gibraltar at the mouth of the Med, the other sweeping the eastern basin to the west looking for the Destiny sub. We’ve got a few dozen antisub marine patrol aircraft in the air, some of them from the Reagan battle group. We’ll get him.”

“Where’s he going? What’s he doing?”

“We think he’s hiding from us for a while, then he’ll re deploy with one of his theater commanders, probably North Africa. But we’ll get him … Sihoud’s a dead man.”

“I hope so, Dick. The president wanted to know what happens after Sihoud is gone. Sihoud’s got three damned good field generals, the theater commanders. Even with him gone Bobby Kent at CIA thinks the generals can still run a pretty good war.”

Donchez handed over a file, the cover of it busy with classification stamps and banners.

“That’s Operation Early Retirement Phase Two, General. We’ll take out each of the theater commanders. CIA agrees with my staff that once the lower echelon generals are out of the picture——”

General Felix Clough, U.S. Air Force, walked in. Air Force chief of staff Clough was young to be a general, even in the Air Force. Most of his academy classmates were still colonels, some majors. Clough had a round face, made academic-looking by his wire-rimmed glasses. Like Barczynski, he was a broad-framed man, though taller than the JCS chief, but on Clough the paunch looked more like fat than Barczynski’s muscle. Clough had come up the Air Force’s ranks first as a nuclear missile silo commander, then as a scientist. He had met Barczysnki twenty years before at a seminar and the two had for some reason hit it off, the Air Force allowing Clough to be Barczynski’s liaison officer for several assignments. Donchez had nothing against Clough personally, but at the Pentagon Clough was his worst nightmare, an Air Force general officer with a doctorate who thought he knew all there was to know about military systems.

For Clough, life was simple: Trident submarines were wasteful and easily replaced by Air Force silos and B-2 bombers. Carrier air power existed only because of pork-barrel politics and was clearly inferior to long-range, stealthy, fast and lethal Air Force fighters. The Marine Corps was redundant, its functions easily replaced by the Army, the Air Force and the Navy doing its unglamorous but utilitarian function of transporting troops to the battlefields. Donchez suspected it was Clough who had coined the “self-licking-ice-cream-cone” term concerning aircraft carrier battle groups, “missile silos lost at sea” for Trident submarines and “the Navy’s army” for the Marines. Unfortunately Clough had Barczynski’s ear.

Donchez continued as Clough sat down. “The lower-echelon generals,” Donchez said, glancing pointedly at Clough, “once killed, will drain the UIF Combined Armed Forces of so much talent that defeat should be nearly immediate.

The battlefields will be chaos—”

“They usually are,” Barczynski said. But the point wasn’t lost on Donchez — the Army general had been in battlefields before, in Vietnam and Iraq, risking his life, while Donchez … though not by his choice … had not.

“Sir, once the Navy’s seals knock out Generals Ben Abbas, Ramadan, and lhaffe this war will be a mop-up.”

Clough smiled at Donchez.

“Well, at least your people will get to do something over there.”

Screw you, Donchez thought as he returned Clough’s smile.

“Dick, that should be it. Let me know about Sihoud.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Donchez said, standing.

“Oh, one thing,” Clough said to Barczynski while waving Donchez to a seat. “Didn’t you want to ask Admiral Donchez about the testing of the Vortex missile? I heard that the Navy’s doing a live fire with two submarines tomorrow.”

Donchez took a deep breath, sitting back down, wondering what business of Clough’s the Vortex missile could be, except that it had a track record of failure that Clough could use against the Navy.

“I thought this was a war briefing. General Barczynski, or I would have brought the videos and charts and graphs of the Vortex program.”

Barczynski put both hands up, as if to separate Donchez and Clough. “Hold on, hold on. Dick, what’s the deal with this live firing exercise? This Vortex is going to kill someone if I read these reports right.”

Donchez’s jaw clenched. He already had had to answer for the failed operation to kill Sihoud, and now Clough was kicking him when down, dragging out the Vortex program.

It would have been easier to tolerate if the Vortex had been someone else’s brainchild, but it was Donchez’s personal dream, his legacy to the Navy. And so far the program had been one problem after another. Donchez opened his brief case and took out a folder, thinking back over the last two years and the long road to the Vortex’s operational test.

“General, here’s the short course on the Vortex missile program. After we had that unfortunate incident under the polar icecap a few years ago when we lost the Devilfish, we wanted to develop an antisubmarine weapon that would be as effective as the old Russian Magnum, the big 100-centimeter nuclear-tipped torpedo. We were somewhat disappointed in the Mark 50, frankly, although it did well against the Chinese fleet during Operation Jailbreak back when Seawolf liberated the Tampa. But those were surface ships we were firing at, not submarines. The ASW standoff weapon, the Ow-sow, also used against the Chinese, was a big break, but it turned out to be a surface ship killer, not that effective against a sub. In the meantime the opposition submarines were getting faster. The Japanese Destiny-class, for example, can do damned near forty-seven knots and the mark 50 only about fifty. On a good day, the Destiny submarine can run long enough in a tail-chase so that a Mark 50 runs out of fuel, effectively outrunning our torpedo.”

“Does that mean we won’t be able to sink the Destiny?”

“No, sir. We have a tactical advantage against the Destiny. He can’t run from a torpedo he doesn’t know has been launched.”

“This Vortex— — it was your invention, wasn’t it, Dick?” Clough asked.

Donchez understood Clough wanted to equate the Vortex test failures with Donchez personally.

“The concept was mine, yes. The weapon that eventually was named ‘Vortex’ introduces a new era in torpedoes. General Barczynski. It is a hybrid weapon, half-torpedo, half-missile, a solid-fueled missile that travels underwater for its entire run to the target. It goes 300 knots. It cannot be outrun. And its warhead is five times the size of the Mark 50’s, over seven tons of Plasticpac explosive. The yield comes close to the kiloton TNT level with conventional explosives. It’s the ultimate submarine-versus-submarine weapon system.”

“Except that it blows up when you try to launch it,” Clough added.

“Felix,” Barczynski said tonelessly. “Go ahead, Dick.”

“The early weapon tests were, I grant you, troubling. We found the rocket fuel had to be hot-launched — ignited inside the launching tube — otherwise the missile lost stability, but in-tube ignition means the tubes have to be incredibly strong. Also, the solid fuel is more volatile than typical rocket fuel and we had problems slowing the combustion rate. On launch the pressure transient in the tubes exceeded the design pressure and led to a longitudinal stress failure—” “

What does that mean?” Barczynski asked.

“It means the launching tubes blew up,” Donchez said, “in nine out of twelve static launches. We completed a detailed study of the failure mode and did a total weapon redesign. The new missile was named the Mod Bravo, and in its two static tests it has performed perfectly. Tomorrow’s Mod Bravo test will be a sea-launch from the USS Piranha, a decommissioned 637-class attack submarine, against the old Bonefish, which is a diesel sub set up to be a test drone.”

“You’re launching this Vortex from an old attack sub? Is that wise, with all the tube explosions? Couldn’t that sink the boat?”

“That won’t happen, sir. Besides, the firing ship will be unmanned. It’s fully instrumented. If something were to go wrong, we’d be able to determine why without the problem hurting anyone.”

“Setting up two drone submarines is rather expensive, isn’t it. Admiral?” Clough flipped through papers. “I think I have some budgetary figures here—”

Donchez stood and addressed Barczynski.

“If there’s nothing else, sir, I’ll be following Operation Early Retirement in Flag Plot.”

He had scanned out of the room before Clough could say anything else.

Chapter 7 Friday, 27 December

Captain Michael Pacino stepped down the tight ladder to its landing in the gyro control space, jogging left to the door to the torpedo room. In his early forties, slim to the point of gauntness, and tall, Pacino’s six-foot-two height made him duck as he cleared the stair landing. His hair, once black, was streaked with early shades of gray at the temples. His eyes were a penetrating blue-green, the skin around them wrinkled from years of squinting out periscopes. He wore cotton khakis, the only insignia the eagles on his collars, the submariner’s dolphin pin over his left pocket and a round brass capital-ship command pin beneath the pocket button.

His jaw clenched as he walked into the room, making him appear angry or intensely determined.

Pacino looked at the room, fighting back a sense of deja vu, the voices of the past loud in his ears. The USS Piranha was identical to his former command, the Devilfish, every detail matching the memories he had tried hard to forget— the layout, the paint colors, the cramped interior, the poorly arranged control room, even the smell, that odd moisture of oil and diesel exhaust and ozone and sweat, edged with battery acid. Pacino couldn’t help wondering what his Devilfish looked like at that moment — had the old girl imploded from the depths, or had she flooded completely through the open bridge hatch as she sank in 11,000 feet of freezing Arctic Ocean seawater? Had she come to rest on the ocean bottom keel down, or heeled over miserably, or was she perhaps vertical, her tail impaling the sandy bottom like a spear stuck in the ground? The questions were always ringing in his mind, but never more insistently than now that he was in Devilfish’s sister ship, the submarine class leader and prototype, the Piranha, Richard Donchez’s old command from the early seventies.

Somehow it was appropriate to test Donchez’s Vortex missile from the ship that he had once commanded so long ago, back when Pacino’s father — —Donchez’s friend and academy roommate— — was alive and in command of the Stingray one pier over. The present intruded on Pacino’s thoughts when his tour guide, a tanned lieutenant commander, introduced the weapon-test director.

“Dr. Rebman, this is Captain Michael Pacino, the skipper of the Seawolf, the submarine that will be doing the next Vortex test with a manned submarine when this test is complete. Dr. Rebman is from the Dahlgren weapons lab, he’s the Vortex program manager.”

Rebman was a dark chubby man wearing an expensive gray suit, the clothes seeming out of place in the surroundings of machinery and equipment. He had a mustache and goatee, perhaps an attempt to minimize his fleshy lower face but which made him look rather devilish and ridiculous all at once. When told Pacino commanded the Seawolf, Rebman’s face lit up with delight.

“Captain! Wonderful to make your acquaintance! I was just asking about you and the Seawolf. How is the Vortex tube installation going?”

Pacino shook the limp sweating hand. He did not smile.

“The shipyard is behind schedule,” Pacino said, his voice toneless. “The Vortex tubes have some problems.”

Rebman frowned. “Maybe I should come over after the test firing and take a look. Would you show it to me?”

“I suppose,” Pacino said, looking around the torpedo room at the port side where the Vortex missile tube had been installed. The tube had replaced both port torpedo tubes and extended aft from the forward bulkhead to the rear bulkhead of the room and beyond, the laundry space ripped out to accommodate the massive weapon. The sheer size of the missile was one reason Pacino and the crew of the Seawolf disliked the system — just one Vortex tube on the Piranha had taken over the lower level. On Seawolf, the three-tube launching system had hogged most of the starboard torpedo room, taking up space that could have stored twenty-five weapons. Seawolf’s normal fifty-weapon loadout had been cut in half, only to make space for three weapons that tended to blow up their launching tubes.

Pacino shook his head, then looked at Rebman, who for the last minute had been giving a passionate lecture on the Mod Bravo and how it would be different and how it would revolutionize submarine, warfare.

“Don’t you agree. Captain, that just one 300-knot underwater missile would be all you’d need to sink an underwater adversary?”

“Dr. Rebman, if you’re really interested in what I think, here it is. We rarely kill a bad guy with just one shot. Combat isn’t like that. And it would be nice, if it’s not asking too much, if the missile could be launched without blowing up the launching platform.” Rebman’s face tightened. “Well, I’m going back to the Diamond. Good luck, Dr. Rebman.”

Pacino leaned on the wooden handrail of the Diamond and stared out at the shimmering blue-green sea; with the sun rising over the Bahamas to the east, the sleeping Andros Island behind him to the west, the scene could have been pictured in a travel agent’s vacation brochure. The Tongue of the Ocean AUTEC submarine test range was one of the few submarine facilities in the world with such splendor, but it had been chosen for advantages unrelated to the beaches and the transparent Bahamian waters. The facility had been chosen because it was a bathtub of deep water surrounded by a ledge of shallows and islands — the shallows ensured that no prowling opposition submarines could spy on the tests, yet the tongue, the bathtub of deep water, was sufficiently broad that sub-versus-sub exercises could be held without fear of running out of room. The entire bathtub was instrumented with a three-dimensional sonar system linked to a Dynacorp Frame 90 supercomputer capable of immense data storage and rapid processing.

Nearby Andros Island was worthless as a resort because, except for Andros Town, it was a rock resembling the surface of the moon, if the moon had scrubby undergrowth. On the shore facing east toward Tongue of the Ocean, Dynacorp’s Sound Surveillance Systems subsidiary had set up a compound, a small town housing the technicians, naval officers, engineers, scientists, and salvage divers needed to run the test facility. Other than a weekly plane from Palm Beach, the island was isolated from the world, which the Navy saw as another benefit. Pacino had spent two nights on the Dynacorp compound with nothing to do but drink in the prefab building used as an officers’ club. He was glad to see the test finally get underway; it was time to get back to the Seawolf. There was much to do and little time to do it, including getting the ship out of the drydock and ready for the first manned live firing of the Vortex missiles.

And to turn over command of the ship to her next captain, he reminded himself, a thought he did not want to face. Giving up Seawolf would feel like giving up his son …

“Captain Pacino,” Dr. Rebman’s voice called, “you might want to see this from inside.”

In a covered deck space behind the pilothouse a command center had been rigged in what had been the crew’s mess. Behind Pacino, through several large windows installed in the bulkhead, a dozen men could be seen peering into eight oversized video monitors. Pacino walked into the space, almost immediately breaking into a sweat, the air conditioning inadequate to keep up with the men and the video screens and the heat of the Caribbean sun. On the forward bulkhead, four of the monitors showed the interior of the gutted target submarine Bonefish, one camera in the rear of the boat pointing forward, another forward pointing aft, one showing the topside deck looking aft toward the conning tower, one below the deck level; the only thing discernible inside the empty boat were the strings of temporary lights and the pallet of batteries that powered them. Every bulkhead, console, valve, pipe, and cable had been removed from the old boat so that the hull could be seen. Bonefish had no engines but did have a rudimentary depth-control system. Her forward motion would be controlled by a tug with a cable to Bonefish’s bow, the tugboat expendable and under command from the Diamond. The video signals from the cameras were obtained remotely in the Diamond’s control space using telemetry.

The camera’s video data was transmitted along fiber-optic lines to a telemetry module inside the remote-controlled tugboat. The cameras would roll aboard the Bonefish even after missile detonation and the sub was on her way to the bottom.

The scientists intended to study how the ship sank, what the hole looked like, how the ship died when the Vortex hit it, all in an attempt to judge the effectiveness of the warhead.

The remains of the hull would be salvaged and evaluated by materials experts. The 3D sonar data would be evaluated and presented, showing the path of the weapon, whether the unit had been stable after launch, whether its trajectory to the target had been straight and controlled or serpentine and reckless.

Not all the data was coming from the target. The firing ship was also under the eyeballs of the Dynacorp technicians.

Two of the screens showed flickering images of the interior of the Piranha, viewing the fat and long steel Vortex launching cylinder from several angles. The tube was covered with strain gauges and what looked like miles of wires, trying to find out how the tube behaved under the stress of the missile launch. The visual and electronic data would be conveyed to the outside world by means of cables leaving the submarine at the aft end of her sail to a data buoy floating on the surface, which would transmit the images and tube-strain information to the Diamond via data link. The buoy had a long reel of cable with a tension spring, so that no matter where in the bathtub the transmitting sub went, the Diamond would continue to receive data. The data buoy also received control signals to the Piranha’s maneuvering system from the Diamond’s control space; at the aft end of the hot room a control console had been placed with room for two technicians. These men drove the Piranha, changing her speed, depth, and course from the wraparound console.

In the past, data would have been collected from the weapon as well, the warhead replaced with a data recorder, a black box, that would tell the researchers what the torpedo had seen at each second of its trip to the target and the ensuing pursuit and “explosion,” the final detonation replaced with a tumaway maneuver. But in this test, the missile’s tremendous kinetic energy at 300 knots was so extreme that after it passed the target, it would continue on — there was no way to shut down a solid-fueled rocket — and in continuing it would smash into the far sheer wall of the bathtub, taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars of sonar sensors. The weapon-test scientists had elected to allow the Vortex to detonate its warhead to study the effects on the target, but also to act as a missile self-destruct system to preserve the bath tub’s sonar array.

Pacino watched as the control crew orchestrated the test, the snatches of conversation blending into each other, rising into a slow crescendo as the launch time approached. Over the next hour the Bonefish left the surface, sinking into the clear Tongue water under the control of the towing control tugboat. At the command of the technicians at the Piranha control console, the firing ship submerged and slowly cruised toward the launch point. The morning test preparations continued until the sun was high in the cloud-streaked sky. At last the missile firing was on its final countdown.

Pacino, his summer-weight khaki shirt now soaked with sweat, took a position at the oversized windows facing the Tongue and waited. Dr. Rebman joined him, the suit coat now replaced with a starched white lab coat. The countdown was initiated, and as it reached zero Pacino watched the sea where the tugboat towed the target. At the count of zero, launch point, the room grew silent, all eyes but Pacino’s watching the video monitors.

He saw a slight rush of foam at the distant point where he had imagined the firing ship to be, then moments later the sea at the target bearing erupted in a column of water that blasted upward in an odd spherical shape, barbs of spray coming out of the curving dome of the explosion. The water continued to rise, forming a mushroom cloud that dwarfed the Diamond, the cloud spreading and rising into the air, then raining down on the sea below. Then the sound came from the distant explosion, the roaring power of it rattling the glass of the windows, slamming Pacino’s eardrums, the full bass of the detonation pounding him. Pacino smiled, unable to contain the exhilaration of it, already bringing his hands up to clap, and turned to the men in the room, expecting the crew to be as exuberant at the success of the test.

Instead he saw long, incredulous faces staring at two video monitors as a tape player replayed the scene. Rebman was bent over a control console, shouting into a headset. The video scene rolled, the Vortex tube of the Piranha in the center of the picture, until Pacino could see the tube burst open in slow motion, then the explosion as the missile’s flaming exhaust filled the torpedo room. The camera apparently died at that point, the picture turning to snow. On the screens on the right videos played in a closed loop as the target ship’s cameras recorded the death of the ship— apparently the missile had sunk the Bonefish. But it had also put the Piranha on the bottom. Another tube rupture.

Rebman slammed the headset down and rejoined Pacino at the window. Without a word Pacino walked out to the weather deck and leaned on the wooden railing, staring out to sea where the tugboat floated, no longer towing anything but a frayed-ended cable. Rebman followed him out.

“At least it sank the target,” Pacino said.

Rebman said nothing for several minutes.

Finally the scientist said, so quietly Pacino had to strain to hear him, “This is the end of the program, we’ve tried everything. The Vortex program is canceled.”

But was it really dead? Knowing Donchez, Pacino had to wonder …

After a few minutes the Diamond turned and headed back to the Dynacorp compound’s piers.

Two hours later Pacino was on a Navy DC-9 flying for Palm Beach, wondering how long it would take the shipyard to tear out the Vortex system from Seawolf. It would probably take three or more months to return the ship to her pre-Vortex condition, and by then he would no longer be captain. True, he would be going on to a plum assignment — who could take issue with promotion to rear admiral and the job as commander submarines, Atlantic Fleet? But still, he would have liked to take Seawolf out to sea just one last time as her commander. This business with the Vortex had taken that from him. Driving submarines was a young man’s job, Pacino finally concluded, and now forty-two years old, it was time to move on, and the sooner he accepted that the sooner he’d adjust to driving a desk. It was time to give up playing with toys, he tried to tell himself. And didn’t really believe it.

At Palm Beach International, on the way to the commercial jet to take him to Norfolk, he was intercepted by an ensign in service dress blues.

“Admiral Pacino?”

“Captain, son, just captain.”

“Message says ‘admiral,’ sir. But anyway. Admiral Donchez sends his regards and requests your presence at the Pentagon. There’s a Falcon jet waiting for you, sir.”

“Do you know what this is about?”

“Something about a weapon test, sir. That’s all I know.”

The jet’s approach to National Airport in Washington was spectacular, the flight path taking Pacino over the Pentagon.

He looked down on the odd building, wondering what Donchez had on his mind about “a weapon test” that couldn’t wait one more day.

Chapter 8 Friday, 27 December

“General, let me go over our discussions so far so that I can make sure Captain al-Kunis and I fully understand our mission,” Commodore Sharef was saying.

Colonel Ahmed waved him on, nodding.

“You do not intend to return to the battlefields. Instead you are leaving the war to your field generals and staying aboard while we transit the Atlantic to within strike range of Washington, D.C. While enroute we assemble the three Scorpion warheads into three sea-launched Hiroshima cruise missiles. Once in position we launch the Hiroshima/Scorpions at Washington, then withdraw back to UIF soil, where you will reestablish yourself while Western Coalition forces withdraw. This is all correct?”

Sihoud looked at Ahmed, who nodded and answered for the general, who was still suffering from broken ribs, a punctured lung and a laceration along his lower back.

“That is correct. Commodore.”

“Then let me point out a few difficulties, if I may. Number one, we may never make it out of the Mediterranean. The sea is filled with coalition naval forces, including an American aircraft carrier battle group.”

“A few torpedoes and we’re out,” Ahmed said.

“American carrier battle groups always sail with one, sometimes two nuclear submarines. Attack submarines. Hunter killer subs. Subs designed to kill other subs, like ours.”

“You have torpedoes aboard?” Sihoud asked, speaking up for the first time, his resonant voice filling the room.

“Yes, General,” Sharef said. “And if I am against one submarine, I might be able to evade an attacker, if I know he is there. If his sensors are better than mine, and if his engines are quieter than the sea around him, he could possibly attack us before we could respond. It is a horse race, General. Anyone who claims to predict the outcome of a naval battle of evenly matched forces is a liar.”

“You are afraid?”

“There is risk, here. General Sihoud,” Sharef said. “Where there is risk there must be rational decisions. Only you can make those decisions. If I minimize the problems and the risk, as your aide here does, I do you a disservice.”

Finally Sihoud’s face broke into a wide smile. “You are right, Commodore. We will all listen until all problems have a satisfactory conclusion. Please go on.”

“All we can do against an enemy submarine is stay as vigilant as possible and maintain absolute ship silence. That means no working on the weapons systems until we are clear in open ocean.”

“Agreed,” Ahmed said.

“Number two,” Sharef went on, “the Scorpion warheads must be assembled, involving highly radioactive components and high explosives. I am counting on Abu-i-Wafa to use sufficient controls so that we do not irradiate the crew or blow the things up. Number three, these warheads might not work. There is nothing I can do about the functions of the weapon, so for this I will assume the missiles will function perfectly. And that brings us to problem number four — how do we get these missiles loaded into the tubes, given that the tubes do not penetrate the pressure hull and are encapsulated one-shot designs?”

Sharef gestured to al-Kunis, the Libyan first officer, to spread out the ship’s blueprints.

“The solution Captain al-Kunis and I propose is to blow the water out of the forward ballast tank and weapon area free-flood, and cut open the tube caps on three Hiroshima missile tubes. We’ll set up a rig to maneuver the missiles out, where we’ll open them up and install the new warheads, then reinstall them in the tubes and weld the end caps back on.”

“Sounds easy enough,” said.

“Think again,” Sharef said. “Working in a ballast tank is no holiday, particularly when the ship is at-depth. The tank is open to the sea at the bottom of the ship. Anything could send the water rushing in, a small leak in a vent gasket, a sudden maneuver. The ship will be at maximum speed to keep sufficient water flow over the bowplanes to keep the ship submerged in spite of the buoyancy of the ballast tank, so any slight turns could bring water in. There are no work platforms, no lights, no ventilation. It will be dangerous. And in the end it might not work— — the tube may fail at launch from being inexpertly welded. General, this is a gamble.”

“Yes, Commodore, all important things in war are. Any thing else?”

“Yes sir. Problem five. Even if we conquer all the other obstacles to this point, there will be the American fleet awaiting us on the far side of the Atlantic.”

“But how will they know we are there? Can’t we stay in visible?” Abu said.

“Abu, we surfaced to pick up the general. They saw us then. They know we are somewhere in the Mediterranean, and they probably suspect the general and Colonel Ahmed are with us now. The subs attached to the carrier battle group will be coming after us, and if we survive the inevitable encounter with them, they will still know we are no longer in the Mediterranean, if only because we will not be surfacing there in the next one or two weeks. That leaves the Americans wondering, and soon they will put up a fenceline of ASW ships and subs and airplanes to catch us coming in. If they sink us, not only do they stop the launch of the Scorpions, they score a hit on General Sihoud …”

“Commodore, there must be something you can do to lessen this risk,” Sihoud said.

“There is. I propose we avoid the east coast of America. Mr. First, the North Atlantic chart, please.”

Al-Kunis pulled out the chart of the North Atlantic, the projection showing the arctic circle and the lower rim of the Arctic Ocean.

“The range of the Hiroshima missile will allow us to shoot well before we reach the coast. If we have the weapons ready we could launch in mid-Atlantic. Since I expect that preparing the missiles will take longer even than our pessimistic projections, I suggest we follow the great circle route to the southern tip of Greenland in the Labrador Sea. Captain al-Kunis has marked our proposed track in black tape. As you can see, we come in missile range of Washington here well south of Greenland, and if we follow the track shown up the Labrador Sea to Baffin Bay, we stay in range until we reach Godhavn, Greenland. That leaves us the excellent escape route north into the Arctic Ocean, back around Greenland, and south to Gibraltar. At this time of year the polar icecap extends south all the way to Baffin Island, with drift ice down into the Labrador Sea. No surface fleet will be able to pursue us there. By the time we emerge east of Greenland, they will have called off the search, Washington will be a radioactive nightmare, the Western Coalition will be in retreat, and we will return having accomplished the mission. Of course the possibility is high that attack submarines will be sent after us, most likely post launch. But I am confident we can defeat their ships if we encounter them singly, and if we detect them before they detect us.”

“Then we are decided,” Sihoud said, rising. “If there is nothing else I will retire for the evening.”

“Good night, sir. And, General, I wonder if I and my first officer might have a word with Colonel Ahmed.”

Sihoud waved and left the room. Ahmed turned to Sharef.

“Colonel, I have other concerns that I wanted to address with you.”

“Go ahead. Commodore,” Ahmed said.

“I wanted to see you first on this, but if your response isn’t what I’m looking for, I’ll take it to the general,” Sharef said slowly.

Ahmed frowned. “I’m sure we can work out whatever’s on your mind.”

“I’ll be direct with you, then, Colonel. You and General Sihoud have unlimited access aboard the ship. You can go where you please, talk to the men, even be in the ballast tank while the Scorpion insertion is done if you want. You can look at the navigation plots, hear the radio messages, ask any questions you please. The mission is yours to command, and this ship is completely at your disposal.”

“Thank you. Commodore.”

“However, Colonel, while you may give me orders and change my mission at any time, the way I carry out that mission is not your business. I retain command of this vessel, and only I direct when and how weapons are launched, how enemy ships are engaged. If you or General Sihoud attempt to give me rudder orders on this run you will find me quite dead. Can you and the general accept that?”

Ahmed was quiet for some moments. When he spoke, he seemed like a man trying to remain calm.

“I will put the matter to General Sihoud.” Ahmed hurried out, shutting the door quietly behind him, as instructed when he and Sihoud first came aboard.

Sharef turned to al-Kunis and smiled.

“You and your fellow Iranian do not seem to see eye to eye,” al-Kunis said, reaching for his tea, the skin at his eyes crinkling as he sipped the brew.

Sharef considered that. Captain Abdullah Latif al-Kunis was thirty-seven, slightly taller than Sharef, almost as thin, with dark skin and a thick but tightly trimmed beard. His eyes were remarkably large. He rarely spoke without considering each word. At first Sharef had thought he would be a liability in combat, or any real-time situation; introspective people rarely seemed to have the quick reaction needed for military duty. But al-Kunis had surprised him with his ability to act decisively in tight situations, giving clipped but quiet orders from the periscope platform. He was a Libyan from Tripoli and had been a submariner on Foxtrot-class diesel boats all his career, commanding the Libyan Foxtrot sub Al Khyber for two years just before the Treaty of Algiers had united the Islamic states. He had been selected to be a staff officer in Ashkhabad for several years, where he had first met Sharef. When plans were made to acquire a Destiny-class submarine, Sharef had asked for al-Kunis, raising eyebrows at fleet headquarters that he did not pick another Iranian Navy officer. As far as Sharef was concerned, al-Kunis was the best man for the job, an able seaman and a good, innovative officer. Like Sharef, he had never married, although at the ship’s recent port call at Tripoli there had been a woman there to see al-Kunis off. She could have been a girlfriend, fiancee, or sister. Sharef hadn’t asked, and al-Kunis hadn’t volunteered.

Sharef turned his thoughts back to Ahmed. “Ahmed is a smart man but he is a pilot and sees things differently. To a flyer, soaring over the earth, everything is easy. To a submariner, confined to a steel prison with no windows, nothing but the Second Captain computers to tell us what is outside, nothing is easy. But give him a year underwater and he might not make a bad officer.”

“You heard he lost people in the bombing of Chah Ba-har.” “I was sorry to hear it,” Sharef said, bending over the Mediterranean chart. “So, where are the American submarines?”

Captain al-Kunis joined Sharef at the chart and jabbed his finger at the west point of Sicily, where it pointed toward Cape Bon, Tunisia, near Tunis on the North African coast.

The gap, the Strait of Sicily, was only 150 kilometers across, the submerged navigable channel only thirty kilometers wide.

“Here at the Strait of Sicily. A few boats patrolling north and south here would pick us up. They may have patrol planes here as well. If they have the submarines to station a choke-point patrol… Maybe they weren’t prepared. What if we transit through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the boot?”

“Too shallow,” al-Kunis shook his head. “The strait is filled with ferry boats, the channel is too tight. Running aground or colliding with a ferry boat isn’t worth the risk. I’d take the Sicily-Tunis choke point.”

“If we make it through, then what?”

“Gibraltar. If it were up to me, I’d station a fleet there to catch us on the way out.”

“But they don’t know we’re leaving the Mediterranean.”

“You must hope that. Commodore.”

Sharef nodded, shut his eyes, and stretched. “I’ll be in control. Write a procedure for the ballast tank work on the Hiroshima missiles. When you’re done see to it that the navigator has our intended track plotted and laid into the computer. And check the sensor computers every hour and make sure our younger officers are vigilant. I do not want to be detected by an American submarine without warning. After control I’ll be going down for a couple of hours. Both of us should be in the control room when we pass through the strait.”

The deck trembled slightly with an insistent vibration, the power of the ship’s propulsion shaking the submarine as it plowed through the Mediterranean at flank speed, the electromagnetic speed indicator reading thirty-nine knots on the airplane-style console of the helmsman’s panel. Augusta had been running at flank for over thirty hours, ever since the flash message had come in at noon the day before. The sprint put her sixty nautical miles short of the Strait of Sicily.

Commander Ron Daminski leaned over the chart table aft of the periscope stand in the control room. A pencil was clutched between his teeth, his broken fingers stabbing the buttons of a calculator, missing several times, causing the captain to curse under his breath. Above him on the periscope stand Lt. Kevin Skinnard leaned on the handrails and watched. The captain took the dividers, measured out a distance on the nautical mile scale, and walked them across the chart, drawing several pencil marks at the narrowed water between Sicily and Tunisia. Finally Daminski stood erect and squinted at the chart.

“What do you think. Skipper?” Skinnard asked.

“I’m half-tempted to set up a barrier search in the strait. I have the feeling he’ll be coming through it.”

“I don’t know. Why does anyone think this guy is transiting from the east basin through the strait? What’s there for him in the west basin? I’m beginning to think we humped the pooch coming this far west.”

Daminski looked up at Skinnard and grinned. When he’d come aboard, Skinnard had been a shy quiet officer, almost a yes-man. After a few months of Rocket Ron he had developed the same intimidating style Rocket employed, whether learned by imitation or more likely from knowing the captain would accept no yes-men.

“Okay. You’re the Khalib. What do you do?”

“Submerge here off Crete, wander east, maybe hang out in the southern seas of the eastern basin, and when the heat’s off, come ashore in Egypt or eastern Libya.”

“You’re thinking he’s going back to the Cairo front.”

Skinnard nodded.

“I don’t think so,” Daminski said. “This guy’s headed for the western front in Morocco. If he were headed for Cairo he’d be there by now. Plus the jet wouldn’t have gone so far into the Med to find the sub. So he gets his butt to Morocco, hoping by the time he gets there we’ve forgotten about him.”

“I still wonder why he’s in a sub in the first place. He knows we’re out here.”

“He’s hiding. Biding his time. He’d pop up in Marrakech and surprise the hell out of everyone if we weren’t on his tail.”

“So why the Strait of Sicily? This boy can go forty-seven knots.” Skinnard took up a time-distance circular slide rule.

“That’s twenty-six hours’ transit from his dive point, which put him in the strait at lunchtime today. That was six hours ago. If he was going through the strait, he’s long gone.”

“Skinnard, you’re a sub skipper hiding a V.I.P government official aboard, with orders to hide and make your way to Morocco. What speed do you order up so you don’t get caught, you don’t make too much noise? Flank speed, forty-seven knots?”

“Um, no, sir. Probably ten or fifteen knots, take it easy and keep the noise down.”

“Right. Which means we’ll get to the strait at least a few hours before the Destiny.”

“But, sir … you never mentioned this in your briefing.”

Daminski paused, knowing he was caught but not betraying it. “No, Skinnard,” he said, acid in his voice. “Do I have to tell you my every thought?”

“No, sir.” Skinnard smiled, knowing Daminski was putting him on. “So, sir, you want a barrier search?”

“Damn straight. Southwest to northwest bowtie pattern right here.” Daminski sketched a bowtie shape on the chart straddling the deep channel of the Strait of Sicily. “In another hour slow down to four knots, rig ship for ultraquiet, and stream the thin-wire towed array. And station the section tracking team a half-hour before you’re there. We’ll set a nice trap for this son of a bitch.”

“Yes sir,” Skinnard said, watching as the captain half-limped out of the control room, wondering how the hell they would catch a lone submarine in the wide Mediterranean if the boat chose to stay in the eastern basin. If Daminski was wrong it would be a long dry patrol. And if he was right, and the Destiny-class was as good as the intelligence seemed to suggest, it would be a short patrol. A very short patrol.

Skinnard took the microphone hanging above the periscope platform by its spiral wound cord.

“Sonar, Conn,” he barked, “report all contacts.”

Since Pacino could remember. Admiral Donchez’s offices had always been fairly ornate but the splendor of the C.N.O suite was too much to take in with a glance, especially since the admiral had been all over him since he walked in, plastering him with questions about his health, his ship, his family, everything except the reason he had summoned him to Washington. Pacino puffed on the Havana cigar Donchez had pulled from the humidor, the smoke filling the room with a mellow haze. An aide brought steaming coffee.

“Like the coffee, Mikey? It’s imported special from Colombia.”

“It’s great. Admiral,” Pacino said, looking at Donchez, noticing that age had finally seemed to be catching up to his father’s old Academy roommate although his enthusiasm seemed undampened.

“How’s it feel to be Admiral Pacino?”

“I’m still a captain, sir. I’ve got a few months before I’m confirmed. If I’m confirmed.”

“A few more months and you’ll be working on your second star. Aren’t many admirals these days wearing the Navy Cross. Which reminds me, you’re out of uniform without it.”

Pacino glanced at his chest, the rows of ribbons four tall, the gold submariners’ dolphins presiding above the ribbons, the capital-ship command pin beneath, the ribbon for his Navy Cross absent. Although Donchez would disagree, Pacino had always considered the medal something of a consolation prize for surviving the sinking of the Devilfish.

“You know. Admiral, I think I’d trade the star for a chance to keep command of Seawolf for another year. I don’t suppose you could arrange that …”

“Navy’s got other plans for you, Mikey. Besides, commanding the Atlantic Fleet’s sub force will make you forget about the Seawolf. Besides, your replacement — —Joe Cosworth, right?— — will do okay and it’s time someone else got to drive the finest sub in the force. You can’t hog it for ever.”

“I suppose so.” Pacino looked at the older man, wanting to ask him how the war was going but, imagining the answer to be painful, restrained himself.

“Well, on to business. I heard Dr. Rebman packed it in. You saw the Vortex test? What did you think?”

“Well, sir, on the positive side, there was nothing left of the target after the missile hit it. The explosion made a mushroom cloud— — I felt like I was on Bikini Atoll watching a nuclear test. There would be nothing left of an enemy sub after getting chopped up by a Vortex.”

“I knew it. The torpedo is obsolete. The Vortex can blow a bad guy to hell before he even knows he’s been shot at. This will make the Russian Magnum torpedo look crude.”

“Yes sir.”

“Anything else?”

“I assume you heard, sir. The Piranha sank. The Vortex blew up the launching tube on the way out.”

“I know. And I also know you’ve thought of how to fix that problem.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“That’s why I sent you down there. You’re a PhD. mechanical engineer. You probably scratched a couple of equations on an envelope and figured this whole thing out.”

“Sorry, sir, but I just rubbernecked at the test like everyone else.”

“Come on, Mikey. I know you hate the Vortex. It takes up damn near all your torpedo room and it’s too volatile, like sleeping with a grenade.”

Pacino looked into Donchez’s eyes. His exact words had been “sleeping with a grenade with the pin pulled,” but Donchez had been close enough.

“Mikey, with this weapon you don’t need a room full of fifty torpedoes. One shot does it. With six Vortex missiles you can kill six submarines, every time. In the old days you’d shoot horizontal and vertical salvos and hope like hell the target drove into the search cone. This thing doesn’t have a search cone— — the whole ocean is the search cone. Now tell me how to make the thing work.”

“Equalize the tubes …” Pacino had, of course, thought about his answer ever since the test, figuring he might have such a confrontation with Donchez. He still hated the damn thing, though.

“What?”

“You’ve been launching a solid rocket in a closed-ended cylinder with tons of water at the muzzle end. The tubes are blowing up just like a gun barrel would if the bullet had too much gunpowder. Relieve the pressure at the aft end by piping the thing to sea pressure. When the rocket fuel ignites, instead of a pressure wave that ruptures the tubes, it blows steam out the relief piping and blasts out of the tube. Tube pressure stays within stress limits. It’s pretty obvious, I figured your design team had rejected it for some good reason.”

“That’s all? Just open vent piping at the breech end?”

“Well, it’s more than that. I did do a few calculations—” Pacino looked at Donchez, who smiled. “The vent piping would need to be fullbore, the diameter of the entire tube. Instead of a launching tube you need a launching duct with the missile in the forward end. On missile launch the exhaust gases pass out of the aft end of the duct and out the pressure hull, and rocket thrust carries the missile out the duct.”

Donchez leaned back. “The Vortex program is saved—”

“Not exactly. Admiral. The tubes already take up half the torpedo room. The duct tube extensions would take up an other thirty feet of length, with three-foot inner diameters. That’s a hell of a lot of space. There’s no room aboard. You’ll have to design a whole new class of submarine to hold these pigs, because on the LA-class, with the duct work there won’t be room for reactors or people or electronics. The Vortex is just too damned big.”

“Or we could put the tubes outside,” Donchez said.

“Yeah, and take the hit in speed and sound emissions. We spent hundreds of millions making Seawolf the quietest sub marine that technology could build, and now you’re going to put a bunch of tubes and pipes and supports and valves top side to put out flow-induced resonances. For the fleet of submarines we have, it just doesn’t make sense.”

“I suppose you’re right, Mikey. I’m sorry we called you out over the holiday,” the old man said heavily.

“Sir, the Vortex is still a damn good weapon system,” Pacino said figuring he could afford to be generous. “The problems can be fixed, but it’ll take the next generation of submarine to do it. You’re just ahead of the current technology.”

Donchez waved him off, his face a mask.

“Thanks for coming, Mikey.”

An hour later Donchez’s Falcon jet lifted off National’s southwest runway and headed for Norfolk Naval Air Station. Pacino poured himself a Jack Daniel’s over ice and shut his eyes. He felt badly for Donchez. A man who had been his father’s closest friend and who had played a big part in his own career, a man who had brought him back from deep black despair three years ago after Devilfish went down and put him in command of the Navy’s top-of-the-line attack submarine, the Seawolf.

The whiskey was good, but not good enough to make Pacino feel much better.

Chapter 9 Friday, 27 December

The ship was rigged for ultraquiet.

The fluorescent-light fixtures throughout the forward half of the ship were switched to red to remind the crew to tread lightly and maintain ship silence. The port side of the steam plant was shut down, including one main engine and the turbine generator as well as a half-dozen pumps serving that half of the propulsion plant. Reactor main coolant pump were running in superslow speed, reduced frequency, barely moving the water through the reactor core. The screw turned at bare steerage way, a mere thirty rpm, giving the ship just enough forward propulsion to maintain submerged depth control.

The watchstanders on duty were wearing headsets, all plugged into ship control phone circuits, while the ship wide PA system was locked out, its use having the adverse potential of being heard outside the hull. Hard-soled shoes were prohibited. The galley was shut down. A tray of cold cuts and a plate of white bread had served for evening rations, although the coffee machines still brewed at full power. Showers were secured. The evaporator, maker of pure water from seawater, was shut down. The ventilation system fans were on slow, the normal bass booming sounds of the ship almost silenced.

Behind the ship the TB-3 thin-wire advanced towed array of the AN/BSY-1 Busy One sonar system trailed on a cable a mile-and-a-half long, the noise from the Augusta ahead distant and faint. The towed array’s electronic ears strained for noise, listening for the specific tonal frequencies expected to be emitted from the Destiny-class submarine predicted by Daminski to transit the gap of the strait at any moment.

While the towed array searched for tonals, the spherical array in the ship’s nose cone, a steel ball fifteen feet in diameter covered with hydrophones, listened to the noise of the ocean, hearing broadband noise just as a human ear would. Backing up the spherical array were six hull arrays, large sets of hydrophones arranged on the skin of the ship, each somewhat disadvantaged by the interference of own-ship’s noise from within the pressure hull but useful all the same.

On the chart table in the cramped control room, the strait took up half of the large table, the illuminated crosshair of light, the “bug,” shining upward onto the chart surface, driven by the table’s servomotors in scale to the ship’s actual motion through the sea. For the last hour the bug had traced a bowtie pattern across the strait, a barrier search. Any shipping coming through the strait would be detected. For the Destiny submarine, the question was not whether it would be heard but whether Augusta would hear Destiny before Destiny heard Augusta — if the Destiny were heading west as Daminski maintained.

In the control room Lieutenant Commander Mark Berghoffer, ship’s engineer, presided as officer of the deck.

He paced the deck of the control room, stopping every few minutes at the chart table to ensure the ship held to the bowtie search pattern, then at the sonar repeater screen above the Position One console of the attack center’s firecontrol system, finally leaning over Ensign Jamie Fernandez’s Pos Two screen, a god’s-eye-view of the strait with Augusta in screen center.

Commander Ron Daminski, never one to sit on the sidelines, had been camped out in sonar ever since arrival at the strait. Sonar chief Bruce Hillsworth, clad in his Royal Navy sweater with the embroidered submarine dolphins on the breast, had grimaced in disgust, finally putting the intruder to work. Daminski sat at the forward console of the four panels, wearing a set of headphones, his hands resting near a touch keypad. Hillsworth, also wearing headphones, hovered over him, directing Daminski to flip through the computer displays, occasionally having Daminski adjust the cursor ball to a particular bearing to listen to the broadband noise. The other three display consoles of the BSY-1 sonar system showed graphs of noise intensity versus frequency, searching through the frequency gates for the expected tonals of the Destiny-class target. Chief Hillsworth scanned the frequency buckets, allowing each frequency search to integrate over five minutes, more if there were a spiking frequency, but so far every tonal gate had shown nothing but random noise.

The ocean around them was empty.

Daminski looked at the broadband display as a bright line traced its way down the short-time screen. He squinted at the trace, moving his hand over the cursor ball, moving the spherical array beam to the bearing of the trace. When the cursor line was superimposed over the trace, Daminski shut his eyes and listened.

All he could hear was the frantic sound of the snapping of shrimp. He turned and looked at Hillsworth, face wrinkled in frustration.

“Just a bunch of fish getting it on.”

“Don’t worry, Cap’n. He’ll come. And when he does, we’ll hear him.”

“Let’s hope we hear him before he hears us,” Daminski said, returning to his sonar search.

The normally open control room was jammed with the majority of the ship’s officers. The room was dominated by the circular periscope platform with the observation seat that could rotate on a circular track during periscope exposure.

Now at depth, the control seat was folded down into a compact box with a cushion on top, the box serving as the captain’s command seat.

Commodore Sharef had called battle stations for the passage through the strait, bringing twelve men into the packed room. He stood at the computer chart display table. He was the battle stations attack officer, as tradition demanded. First officer al-Kunis stood next to him, acting as the battle coordinator, responsible for the functioning of the entire team.

On the periscope stand was Commander Omar Tawkidi, the navigator and third in command, who was stationed as deck officer. Lieutenant Commander Aby Haddad, the ship’s senior watch officer, was the junior deck officer. Reporting to the four senior officers were the main functions of weapons control, ship control, reactor control, and sensor control. At each of the stations two officers sat at the Second Captain console displays, except at sensor control, where four officers scanned the computer analyzed data coming in from the large hull arrays and the gyrostabilized linear towed array.

As the ship approached the mouth of the strait Commodore Sharef ordered the ship to dead slow ahead, just enough velocity to keep the towed array from dragging. He and al-Kunis took up positions in the sensor-control corner, watching the displays of the sonar system.

“Anything?” Sharef asked Sublieutenant al-Maari, the sensor-control officer at one of the displays. The sublieutenant turned toward Sharef, the young man’s earphones half-removed from his right ear. He shook his head and returned to his display.

“Deck officer, put in a Second Captain delouse.”

“Yes, sir,” Tawkidi said, turning to the ship-control console.

“Ship control, ten clicks and prepare for a delouse. Reactor control?”

“Reactor is ready,” the mechanical officer reported.

“Ten clicks,” the ship-control officer reported.

“Engine stop. Reactor control, commence delouse,” Tawkidi called.

The term delouse was handed down from old Soviet tactics, which the UIP’s Combined Naval Force had inherited with the Victor III submarine acquisitions. It referred to the Russian tactic of an attack submarine escorting a ballistic-missile submarine out of port. To ensure that no lurking American attack submarines were trailing the ballistic-missile ship, the Russian attack-escort sub would perform a detailed antisubmarine search of the sea in the vicinity of the ballistic-missile ship, an attempt to “delouse” her. The tactic had lived on in the Destiny-class, in which the Yokogawa Second Captain computer was able to perform a self-delouse by shutting down the entire propulsion plant, allowing the sonar systems to hear unimpeded by own-ship’s noise.

At the reactor-control console the mechanical officer inserted the command shutting down the reactor, dropping control rods into the liquid metal cooled core until the unit went subcritical and ceased heating the circulating liquid metal. The magnetohydrodynamic coolant pumps cut off, halting the liquid sodium flow, the conductive sodium acting as an emergency cooling system, keeping the core from melting from its residual heat. In the next compartment aft, the turbine generators spun down, their steam from the boilers now lost. Large automatic cutoff valves then shut, isolating the steam headers. The condensate and feed pumps in the lower level shut down next. The electrical power grid, responding to the loss of power input from the turbine generators, began drawing current from the battery in the farthest aft compartment until the ship was running on battery power alone. The Hegira’s main machinery silent, the ship coasted submerged, her computer system straining to hear the sounds of the ocean, the signal-to-noise ratio now dramatically improved as the submarine drifted in the strait 400 meters deep.

All but the smallest thousandth of a percent of the ocean’s noise was meaningless, random noise or biologies — fish.

And what nonrandom noise the computers did hear was inevitably merchant shipping. The merchant ships outnumbered the warships five hundred to one. There was the occasional warship, detected at long range from a bottom bounce, but rarely a submarine, since submarines accounted for less than one of every fifty of the world’s warships. Most submarines were short-range diesel boats designed for coastal defense. It would be odd to find a nuclear submarine as the first detection of the patrol, if this strange mission could be called that.

Sharef inserted several keystrokes, a new trace coming up on the screen in white, this trace the anticipated noise of a Los Angeles-class American attack submarine. The traces on the five-and ten-minute histories, with own-ship’s noise subtracted out, were fairly similar to the expected white curve. The curves would never completely coincide, but just the slightest similarity was usually enough to classify the target. In this case the data was evident.

“Definite contact. Commodore,” Tawkidi reported from one of the display consoles farther forward. “Seven-bladed screw, no cavitation, high-pressure, high-flow pumps, electrical turbine tonal at sixty-one cycles. The contact is submerged, bearing three one zero. Range is distant. The detection may be a surface bounce — —we’ve got a good sound channel down to 700 meters.”

Sharef glanced at the ship’s chronometer. It had taken twelve minutes to integrate the sonar data to find the submarine waiting for them. The one disadvantage of the Hegira’s power module was its small battery. With the tremendous load of the Yokogawa Second Captain supercomputer and minimum ventilation loads, the battery could only last for a twenty-minute delouse.

“Battery power, reactor control?” Sharef asked.

“Twenty percent remaining, sir.”

Sharef frowned. “How long?”

“Maybe another five minutes, sir,” the mechanical officer reported. “Then we’ll have to bring the reactor back up.”

“Deck officer, can you keep the contact once we restart the plant?”

Tawkidi frowned over the sensor consoles, the other four watchstanders there concentrating on the screens, al-Kunis and Sharef’s presence making the area crowded.

“Yes, I believe so. Commodore. The computer has a definite trace now. The contact, as distant as he is, will stay within a few degrees of the bearing of initial contact. We can work with that, sir.”

“Very good. Restart the reactor and maneuver the ship for a range on the target, then prepare for torpedo attack.”

Within a few moments, the reactor plant systems were back on line, the computers were able to stay locked onto the target’s sonar emission.

Sharef drove Hegira across the line-of-sight to the target submarine and established a parallax range of ninety-two kilometers, an extremely long-range detection at the very limits of sonar reception.

“How close do you want to come before we shoot, sir?” al-Kunis asked.

“Close enough so that we do not miss. Be patient, Mr. First. We will get to a range of forty kilometers, then launch.”

Sharef and al-Kunis moved to the chart table, watching the bearing to the target plot out on the chart, the flashing dot indicating the target over ninety kilometers away at the northwest mouth of the strait. Sharef ran his hands through his hair, wondering how many more submarines he would have to find before he could make good the escape from the Mediterranean.

“Status of the weapons?” Sharef called to the deck officer.

“Large-bore tubes two through six are equalized to sea pressure, bow cap doors open, Nagasaki torpedoes spinning up now,” Tawkidi reported, glancing at the weapons status display. “We’ll be ready to launch in less than one minute.”

“Very good. Equalize and open bow cap doors to tube eleven and spin up the Dash Five.”

“Tawkidi gave the orders to the officers seated at the weapon panels, then looked at Sharef. “You think we should use our only evasion device?”

At that moment Ahmed and General Sihoud walked into the room.

“Warm up the Dash Five evasion unit,” Sharef said, looking at the visitors. “We need it.”

Daminski concentrated on bearing one one zero, the selected spherical array broadband beam. The sounds of white noise were piped into his earphones, the sounds of the ocean a slushy mix of rushing sounds from the waves, distant schools of dolphins, hissing from shrimp, the rumble of ocean floor and perhaps Daminski’s inner ear itself, the noise from the sea much like the inside of a conch shell held to the skull. He was about to rip the earphones off for a few moments when his shoulder was tapped.

The radioman of the watch stood behind Daminski’s high-backed seat holding a clipboard. “Your draft contact message, Captain. O.O.D said you wanted to load a message into a slot buoy.” slot was shorthand for submarine-launched one-way transmitter, a baseball-bat-sized buoy that could be put out of a signal ejector, float to the surface and transmit a UHF message to the satellite without requiring the sub to come up to periscope depth.

Daminski knew this was cheating but so be it. He had been ordered to send a detailed contact report when he detected the Destiny. Before the encounter the Pentagon wanted to know that Destiny’s location had been pinpointed and reported so that if anything went wrong, they would know where to send the next unit to sink the UIF submarine.

Orders to transmit were an incredible burden on a submarine trying to sneak up on an adversarial contact. Transmitting a contact report meant going up to periscope depth in the middle of a shipping lane, putting up the bigmouth antenna, and transmitting a message that might take five minutes to write, confirming the position of contact and all the other bullshit data the sidelines officers wanted: signal-to-noise ratio, first detected frequency, target bearing and range, target course and speed, on and on. The ship would take needless minutes and make unnecessary noise ascending to periscope depth, transmitting, and descending again before the attack could be started.

But then, orders were orders, which was why Daminski had decided to cheat, writing a contact report in advance, anticipating contact and preloading the message in a slot buoy that he could launch from test depth with no more interruption of the attack business than the push of a button, then get on with sinking the UIF submarine. After all, the only thing the topside sailors really needed was the information that Augusta had contact at the approximate position and that the attack was underway. Anything else they could find out when it was over.

Daminski scratched a few lines on the clipboard:

Daminski reread the message. He especially liked “commencing attack.”

“Show it to the officer of the deck, then code it into the slot buoy. I want that buoy loaded in the signal ejector in five minutes.”

“Aye, sir.” The radioman took the clipboard and vanished.

Daminski strapped his earphones back on and turned to the console. He was interrupted again, this time by Chief Hillsworth.

“Captain, I think you’d better check this,” he said, punching keys on Daminski’s touch pad. The lower waterfall display of the broadband spectrum blinked out, replaced by several graphs of sound intensity against frequency. The graph with 154 hertz in the center looked like a child’s sketch of twin peaks.

“A doublet,” Daminski said, “right where the old SPL said it would be, minus one cycle. Good thing we opened the gates, right. Chief?”

“We’d have found it anyway, Cap’n.”

As the men watched, the twin hills on the graph grew in height, the hills becoming mountains, then columns, then spikes. No fish or natural phenomena made frequencies that pure. The tonals were manmade. It was a machine. A submarine.

“Nice nipple erections on that freak bucket, eh. Chief?” Daminski asked, not averse to bugging the proper Hillsworth. “Can I make the report?” Hillsworth nodded. Daminski pulled the boom microphone to his mouth.

“Conn, Sonar. New narrowband contact, designate Sierra Four, showing a double frequency at one five four hertz, approximate bearing one three zero. Contact is a submerged warship.”

“Sonar, Conn, aye. Captain to control.”

“On the way,” Daminski replied to his boom mike. “Meanwhile designate Sierra Four as Target One. Launch the contact message radio buoy and man silent battle stations, spin up all four Mark 50s and open two torpedo tube outer doors.”

“Captain, Conn, aye.”

Daminski handed Hillsworth the earphones, stood up and clapped the chief on the shoulder, then left the sonar room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Chapter 10 Friday, 27 December

The baseball-bat-sized slot buoy rested inside a tight tube on the flank of the forward part of the ship. It had not waited long when the tube’s insides filled with seawater, the pressure increasing until it matched the outside sea pressure of the Mediterranean. A few seconds later the muzzle door opened; there was no more light in the tube than there had been before. Another moment, and the lower end of the tube pressurized with flowing seawater at a higher pressure than the seawater outside. The slot buoy was launched from the tube, the force of the ejection and its own buoyancy carrying it to the surface over 500 feet above. For several minutes the buoy rose in the dark seawater, the pressure around it easing as it drifted upward. The buoy breached the surface, the upper few inches of the unit drying out in the sea air, open-circuiting a sensor that eventually caused a whip antenna to flip up into the moonlit sky. The transmitter inside began sending Daminski’s contact message to the UHF communications satellite above, repeating the message over and over until an hour later the battery was exhausted and the buoy shut down, flooded, and sank back into the depths of the sea.

High overhead, in a geosynchronous orbit, the Navy’s Commstar communications satellite received the message the first time it was transmitted, logged in the time, and seeing the message priority as flash, interrupted its other tasks and retransmitted the message to the commsat in orbit in mid-Atlantic, which then relayed the message to the U.S. Navy communications facility deep inside the Pentagon. There in the special compartmented communications center, an annunciator alarm went off on a computer console, alerting the watchstander of the flash message. Immediately after the message printed out the senior chief radioman made a call on a top-secret cleared phone to the office of the commander in chief of naval forces Mediterranean, Admiral John Traeps. Traeps’s aide, a lieutenant commander, ordered the message taken to Flag Plot, where Traeps was conferring with the C.N.O. The printout was hand-carried to Admiral Traeps and Admiral Richard Donchez in Flag Plot. Traeps read it, initialed it, passed it to Donchez, who commanded the position be plotted on the electronic wall chart. Within thirty seconds a flashing blue dot appeared on the chart’s Strait of Sicily, the dot labeled uss augusta ssn—763 submerged operations; beside it a flashing orange dot’s label announced uif destiny unit one.

Traeps had called a radioman over to take a message.

Traeps handed him the message from the Augusta, with orders to copy the message to the VSST Fhoenix, now on station guarding Gibraltar and the entrance to the Atlantic, to the Reagan’s ASW Viking jets, and to the Sigonella Orion ASW patrol turboprops.

Donchez looked up at the chart and nodded. Within the hour he should be calling Barczynski to tell him the good news.

In the control room, officer of the deck Mark Berghoffer looked expectantly at Daminski, who had just shouldered his way into control from the door to sonar. Daminski began giving orders faster than they could be acknowledged.

“Off’sa’deck, I have the conn. Helm, all ahead one third, turn for five knots, left ten degrees rudder, steady course two four zero. Dive, make your depth 1,000 feet. Give me tube status, off’sa’deck …”

The deck inclined downward as the helmsman pushed the control yoke for the stern planes to the full-dive position. As the deck leveled off, the room began to fill with men, all four consoles of the attack center manning up with officers on headsets, phone talkers backing up the ship-control station, plotters working manual plot tables to back up the computers, executive officer Danny Kristman arriving as firecontrol coordinator, Tim Turner taking over as battle stations officer of the deck, Kevin Skinnard manning the attack center’s Position Two, Jamie Fernandez beside him at Pos One, the weapons officer Ron Hackle at the firing panel.

Daminski checked his watch — battle stations had been fully manned within two minutes of his arrival at the conn. Not bad.

As the watchstanders settled in, information began its flow to put a torpedo on the contact. Three minutes after Daminski’s maneuver to the west, Skinnard dialed in a trial range and speed of the target. His estimate of target course was good, assuming the Destiny was heading through the strait going outbound, making it going northwest.

“XO,” Skinnard called on his boom mike to Kristman, the battle stations firecontrol coordinator, “I have a curve and a fair solution based on narrowband TMA. Range 43,000 yards, target speed eighteen knots.”

Kristman appeared over Skinnard’s shoulder and looked at the dot stack, then turned to Daminski.

“Captain, based on narrowband TMA, we have a firing solution.”

“Sonar, Captain,” Daminski called, “any broadband detects yet?”

“Conn, Sonar, no,” Hillsworth replied.

Daminski turned to Kristman. “I hate to shoot on a narrowband solution.”

“I recommend we shoot a horizontal salvo now, sir. We don’t know what this guy’s detection threshold is. He could counterdetect any second.”

“Yeah, but if we shoot early and he hears the fish or the launch transient, he’ll turn tail and run and we miss our chance. For Early Retirement.”

“If we don’t shoot and he gets off a shot first, we’ll be the ones running.”

Daminski glanced across at the Pos One geographic plot, made a decision. “Attention in the firecontrol team,” he said, his football-huddle voice grabbing the attention of every watchstander in the room. “We have a narrowband solution to Target One and I’m putting out a horizontal salvo of Mark 50s down the strait. The range is distant, so to conserve weapon-fuel usage we’ll use a slow transit speed with a shallow depth run to enable. That will also keep the torpedoes quiet as they do their run. Everybody got that? Be ready for a counterfire if this guy sees us first. Carry on.”

Daminski turned to Kristman again. “Torpedo presets, XO— offset the torpedoes by one degree, run to enable 25,000 yards, low-to-medium active snake. Give me a readback.”

Daminski watched the firing panel until the torpedoes were programmed, then took a last look at Skinnard’s dot stack. The solution was tracking. It was time to shoot.

“Attention in the firecontrol team. Firing point procedures, tubes one and two. Target One, horizontal salvo, one degree offset, one minute firing interval.”

“Ship ready,” officer of the deck Tim Turner reported.

“Weapons ready,” firing panel operator Ron Hackle called.

“Solution ready,” Skinnard said from Pos Two.

Daminski looked around one last time. In another five seconds he would have ordnance in the water aimed at an other submarine. This wasn’t an exercise, this was the real thing. Daminski called out the start of the launching litany.

“Tube one, shoot on generated bearing.”

“Set.” Skinnard on Pos Two, sending the firecontrol computer’s estimate of the target position, course and speed into the torpedo.

“Standby.” Hackle on the firing panel, rotating the trigger to nine o’clock.

“Shoot!” Daminski from the conn.

“Fire.” Hackle, taking the trigger to the three-o’clock position marked fire.

The air in the room seemed to detonate in a reverberating blast, smashing Daminski’s ears as the high-pressure air from the piston ram vented inboard, the air sent to pressurize the water tanks surrounding the torpedo tube, which then flushed the torpedo out of the tube. The watchstanders yawned in unison, clearing their ear passages from the pressure pulse.

“Conn, Sonar,” Hillsworth’s British accent declared on the firecontrol phone circuit, “own-ship’s unit, normal launch.”

“Firing panel lined up for tube two, sir,” Hackle reported.

“Tube two, shoot on generated bearing,” Daminski repeated.

“Set.”

“Standby.”

“Shoot!”

“Fire!”

The deck jumped beneath Daminski’s feet and his ears slammed again.

“Conn, Sonar, second-fired unit, normal launch.”

“Weps, cut the wires on units one and two and shut the outer doors.”

“Aye, sir, wires cut on one and two … outer doors shut on one and two.”

“Open muzzle doors tubes three and four,” Daminski said impatiently, cursing that it was taking so long to get out the salvo, but the tube banks could line up only one tube from each side at a time.

“Three and four open, presets loaded, ready for launch.”

“Firing point procedures, tubes three and four. Target One,” from Daminski.

“Ship ready.”

“Weapons ready.”

“Solution ready.”

“Shoot on generated—”

Hillsworth’s worried voice cut through Daminski’s order: “Conn, Sonar, loss of Target One!”

“Sonar, Captain, say again.”

“Sir, we’ve lost Target One. He’s vanished.”

Ahmed walked slowly into the control room, glancing uneasily at Sihoud as he noticed how crowded the room was, almost the entire crew seated at the consoles or standing over the seated men. As crowded as the room was, it was eerily quiet, the only sounds a slight high-pitched whine from the three dozen computer consoles in the room. Something was definitely wrong. Ahmed’s voice was hushed as he addressed Sharef.

“Commodore, what—”

Sharef impatiently waved Ahmed to silence while bending over a video display. Ahmed studied it, unable to make out anything useful in spite of being trained in the latest fighter cockpit computer weapons systems.

One of the ship’s more senior officers, a commander with Tawkidi written on his breast pocket, appeared next to Ahmed, as if it were his duty to brief Sihoud and Ahmed. He spoke in a hushed tone, “We’ve detected a hostile coalition submarine in the narrows up ahead. Probably an American Los Angeles-class. He’s blocking our exit. He probably does not know we are here.”

Sihoud said nothing, just stood frowning at the computer screens and the officers’ backs. Ahmed tried to find the general’s eyes but Sihoud didn’t acknowledge him.

“What are we going to do?”

“We aren’t close enough yet. In a few minutes, when we are closer, we’ll be launching a Nagasaki torpedo salvo at the coalition sub.”

Ahmed frowned. “Why can’t we fire the torpedo now?”

“We can, but the captain does not wish to give away our position by firing —torpedoes are noisy. If we launch from too great a distance, the target may hear and turn to run. A torpedo in a tail chase sometimes catches up, but sometimes it runs out of fuel before it can go into attack mode, and the sub escapes.”

“Then chase him and fire again.” “We might not detect him again,” Tawkidi said.

“Why not? You have this time,” Ahmed said, his voice rising.

Sharef turned and glared at him. Ahmed felt his face flush.

“The sea does funny things with sound,” Tawkidi said. “Detecting him now may be easy, but detecting him six hours from now may be impossible when the sun heats the water near the surface and changes the temperature profile and makes the biologies become active.”

Ahmed shook his head. It was like being told his aircraft radar only worked on good days.

“… torpedo launch transient …” an officer at one of the panels said quietly to Sharef, his earphone removed from one ear. “Incoming torpedo from the target, sir.”

Sharef picked up a set of headphones and listened while staring at another display panel, the patterns on it different but still meaningless to Ahmed.

“Prepare to insert a computer delouse,” Sharef commanded. “Select the Dash Five in tube eleven. Ship control, engine stop.”

“Ready, sir.”

“Engine stopped.”

“Insert the delouse!” Sharef ordered.

“Shutting down now,” the mechanical officer called to Sharef from the aft starboard corner of the room. “Reactor is — shut down. Battery life is thirty percent.”

The ventilation fans spun to a halt in the room and the heat of the computers and men immediately caused the temperature to soar. Sweat broke out on Ahmed’s forehead, a drop forming on the end of his nose, his armpits wet.

Conversations in the room stopped. Nothing seemed to be happening, except the officers continued to stare at the computer videos.

“Tawkidi, what the hell is going on?” Ahmed asked, careful to keep his voice down.

“The coalition sub launched a torpedo at us. We were wrong about him not hearing us,” Tawkidi himself stared at the video screens, never looking at Ahmed or Sihoud.

“And? Why did you shut down the reactor? Won’t the torpedo hit us?”

“It might.” Tawkidi held his finger over his lips, silencing Ahmed. Ahmed finally saw Sihoud turn and look at him.

“Status of the Dash Five?” Sharef glanced at the bulkhead chronometer.

“Unit is warm, sir, bow cap open, emissions set at ninety decibels. Commodore, this is the only unit. If he shoots again, we have no more.”

Sharef nodded, outwardly certain-looking, inwardly doubting one Dash Five on a journey like this would be enough.

“Shoot tube eleven.”

“Fire eleven … tube indicates normal shot.”

“Turn the Dash Five to course one zero zero, increase the emission to 120 decibels.”

“Turn inserted, sir, passing north, passing east, steady on one zero zero, emitted noise at 120 dee bee.”

Another prolonged silence in the room. The ship was airless, hot and incredibly humid. Ahmed’s face and hair were soaked, the sweat filling his eyes. Suddenly he was acutely aware that there was a half-kilometer of seawater between him and the sky above.

“Turn the Dash Five to one four zero and increase to 130 decibels,” Sharef ordered. The officer on the panel acknowledged, played with the computer, and reported his results.

“Second torpedo launch from the target. Commodore.”

“Commander,” Ahmed said to Tawkidi, “please tell us what’s going on without my having to beg you, if you please.”

“The commodore launched an evasion device programmed to sound like this ship — the Dash Five — louder than this ship but otherwise identical. Meanwhile the propulsion plant is shut down and quiet and we drift silently while the Dash Five confuses the torpedoes.”

“Aren’t you going to shoot back?”

“First things first. Once the incoming weapons are fooled, we’ll shoot. Otherwise the enemy sub could steer the torpedoes and hit us. The commodore invented this tactic. It is brilliant, if untested.”

Ahmed traded a glance with Sihoud. Sharef was using a combat tactic not invented by the Japanese — how good could it be?

“Bearing rate to the incoming weapons?”

“Constant bearing, sir,” al-Kunis reported, frowning.

“That means the weapons are still coming for us. They haven’t picked up the decoy yet,” Tawkidi whispered.

Ahmed felt a wave of nausea rise in his stomach and continue upward until a band tightened around his forehead. We’re dead, Ahmed thought.

Daminski ripped off his one-earphoned headset and dropped it on the deck as he shouldered past the attack center consoles to the forward starboard corner of the control room. He grabbed the accordion door curtain separating control from sonar and pulled it open, the door ripped half off its track.

“What the hell is going on?” his voice loud and razor sharp.

“Nothing, sir. Afraid that’s the problem,” Hillsworth said to the sonar display screen. “Target One dipped below threshold signal-to-noise ratio. We’ve lost him.”

“What about the one-fifty-four doublet?”

“Gone. Maybe he turned to an aspect that shields the turbine generators. Bloke might be running, giving us his screw. The propulsor might interfere with the tonal reception.”

“If he’s running you’d hear him on broadband.”

“With a conventional screw, maybe. With this ducted water turbine, who knows? Why don’t you chase him down the bearing line? He might turn up.”

“Okay, I’ll drive southeast.” Daminski turned to leave, then faced Hillsworth at the door, pointing his crooked finger in the Brit’s face. “Get on it. Chief. I want that son of a bitch back on this screen. Make damned sure you listen up for units one and two — they might pick up the target before we do.”

Back in control, XO Danny Kristman handed Daminski his headset without a word. Daminski strapped it on.

“Attention in control,” he snapped, “check fire tubes three and four. We’ve lost the contact because he’s running from the units. We are pursuing him out the strait. When we regain contact we’ll launch the second two units. Carry on. Helm, all ahead full, left two degrees rudder, steady course one four zero.”

Daminski crossed his arms across his chest, waiting for sonar to redetect the contact. And waiting was not something Rocket Ron did well.

“Battery’s low. Commodore.”

By now the sweat pouring off Ahmed’s face had soaked the chest of the coverall he’d been issued by al-Kunis. He tried to tell himself it was the oppressive wet heat in the crowded tomb of the control room, but he was honest enough with himself to accept that fear accounted for much of the sweat. A fear made worse, far worse, by his inability to save himself with his own action. He tried to avoid Sihoud’s eyes; their violet irises contained no comfort, only mirrors of his own anxiety.

“How much longer?” Sharef asked.

“I’m showing zero. We’ve got to restart the power unit now or I won’t even have enough current to pull the control rods out of the reactor core.” The mechanical officer, Quzwini, was on the opposite corner of the room from Sharef and spoke in a hushed voice, almost a whisper, but his report cut through the room.

“Sir, incoming torpedoes are speeding up,” al-Maari called from the sensor console beside Sharef.

“Give me another minute,” Sharef said over his shoulder to Quzwini while concentrating on a screen.

“Computer’s going down in twenty seconds, sir.”

“Bearing rate?” Sharef asked al-Maari.

“Zero, constant bearing, still driving toward us …” al-Maari said, straining to hear in his headset, his face suddenly vexed. “I’ve got a ping, sir. Both weapons are pinging.”

“Commodore, I’ve got to restart the plant, now!”

“Wait, Quzwini.”

“The Dash Five has detected the pings … and is pinging back with the enhancer.”

“Shutting down the computers now. Commodore.”

“I said wait,” Sharef said sharply.

“Sir—”

“I’m getting severe cavitation from the torpedo screws,” al-Maari interrupted. “They’ve gone to maximum speed. Now I have a right bearing drift, increasing, sir. The torpedoes are drawing right. They’re going after the Dash Five decoy, both of them!”

“Restart the reactor!”

Ahmed felt a sigh of relief whooshing out of him — until the computer screens died and the lights went out and the remaining fans wound down. Five hundred meters underwater, the ship lost power.

Chapter 11 Friday, 27 December

“Conn, Sonar, own-ship’s units one and two are active and homing.” Hillsworth’s report was calm, controlled. “We have return pings from the target bearing one four four. Unit range gates are narrow.”

Daminski smiled, raising his hands as if he’d just made the saving tackle.

“Attention in the firecontrol team. We’re not waiting for a solution. I’m putting two Mark 50s down the bearing line to the target, high-speed transit, run to enable 10,000 yards, active snake search. Firing point procedures, tubes three and four. Target One, horizontal salvo, one-half degree offset.”

Daminski received the readiness reports and ordered the tubes fired. Hackle took the trigger to the firing position twice; twice the deck shuddered and the atmosphere in the room blasted its pressure pulse painfully into the ears of the watchstanders. Once the weapons were launched Daminski slowed the ship to five knots, hoping to hear the contact better in case it evaded again. But Hillsworth had it nailed, both from the ping returns from torpedoes one and two and from broadband and narrowband contact. The UIF Destiny-class submarine was doomed.

Daminski wondered for a moment if he should reload the tubes, all four now empty. Loading would create noise that could lead to the target hearing them well enough to put a counterfired torpedo down the bearing line. Leaving them empty, however, meant that he had nothing in his tubes to shoot a surprise contact, a second hostile submarine coming out of nowhere.

The UIF had only one Destiny submarine. Their Victor IIIs were bottled up in port and were either broken down or louder than was good for them. And there was no way this enemy ship would counterdetect the Augusta.

This was why they paid him command pay, Daminski thought, and made a command decision — leave the tubes dry and reload later.

Battle lanterns, large flashlights in waterproof boxes, came on, barely holding back the thick darkness in the control room. Ahmed felt the evening meal trying to rise in his throat. He forced it back down, the taste bitter.

“Ship control,” Sharef said, his voice commanding and sharp from the forward starboard corner of the control room, “have you got depth control?”

The ship control officers at the console stared at a row of old-fashioned electrical instruments illuminated by the battle lantern behind them. How the instruments worked, Ahmed could only guess; perhaps they had their own battery pack behind the panel. Ahmed considered Sharef’s question in the dim room surrounded by helpless navy officers and blank screens. A loss of depth control would mean that they were … sinking.

“Hydraulic backups are functional, Commodore,” a very young officer said from the left seat of the two. “Depth 510 meters, negative depth rate. Air bottles are fully charged.”

“Keep the ship above 800 meters with air bubbled to the negative tanks, but minimize air use. Keep the angle zero within seven degrees.”

“Yes sir.”

Sharef checked his chronometer in the light of a battle lantern.

Ahmed considered asking what was going to happen but thought better of it when he saw Sharef glaring at him in the dark airless space. Sharef leaned over the dead chart table and drummed his fingers on the horizontal videoscreen glass.

Ahmed checked his own watch, wondering how long the ship would float in the sea, powerless, while the coalition submarine and its torpedoes were out there, searching for them.

Daminski frowned at the report from sonar, his eyes meeting Kristman’s. Ron Hackle, the weapons officer at the firing panel, turned around and joined in the silent conference of consternation.

“Say again, Sonar,” Daminski said slowly, trying to think.

“Captain, Sonar, the first two own-ship units are at the bearing to Target One, active pinging range gates so narrow that the torpedoes are within a hundred yards of the target. But that situation continues. The torpedoes sound like they’re in reattack.”

“Ron, what’s that mean to you?” Daminski asked the weapons officer.

“The units are on top of the target, sir. They should be detonating. Instead they’re going into reattack.”

“Why the hell would two units go into reattack?”

Daminski leaned over the firing panel to look at the Pos Four display of data from units three and four, which were still attached by thin electronic wires to the torpedo tubes and from there to the firecontrol computer. It was unfortunate that he had had to cut the wires on units one and two in order to line up the tube banks to shoot three and four; the data from one and two would likely solve this problem.

“What do the units say?”

“Still on the run to enable,” Hackle said.

Daminski turned to the conn and mumbled to himself.

“Units one and two on top of the target and going into reattack mode. Reattack mode. Which means they lost the target and are turning to find it again. But they keep pinging, so they reacquire the target, but then lose it and go into reattack again.”

Daminski paused and looked at Kristman. “Why would a unit go into reattack?”

“Bad proximity sensor,” Kristman said slowly. “The unit hears the target, homes on it, but can’t detect an iron hull or doesn’t hit the hull directly, so it swings back around for an other approach. Goes into reattack.”

“One unit with a bad proximity sensor, okay. Two weapons? I don’t think so. What if the sensor is good? Why would it go into reattack?”

“Blip enhancer? Or active countermeasures?”

“What?”

“The target could broadcast an active sonar ping that matches the incoming sonar pulse, with a frequency shift, timed to fool the torpedo’s range gate.”

“Like sending a return back early so the weapon thinks he’s closer than he is.”

“It’s possible.”

“Take a hell of a computer and a sonar system to do that,” Daminski said. “And a damned quiet boat. Even then, it might work against one weapon, but against two? Or four?”

“What if we switched off the active on units three and four? That way they can’t get confused.”

“Do we have the signal-to-noise ratio we need to switch them to passive sonar mode?”

“Hillsworth’ll know.”

“Sonar, Captain, have we got enough SNR to switch units three and four to passive search mode?”

“Captain, Sonar, yes.”

“Do it.”

Hackle’s fingers flashed over the panel, stabbing variable function keys, changing the display to a new menu showing torpedo presets. In the menu he changed the search mode from active to passive, programming the second-fired units to search for the target by listening only rather than pinging active and listening for the return.

The men in the room were quiet, waiting for the second pair of torpedoes to enable, to begin their search for the target.

The wait took several minutes. Daminski stood behind Hackle and Kristman, wondering what the hell he’d do if the second units went into reattack.

Sharef had stared at his wristwatch on and off for the last ten minutes. Every time he did Ahmed watched him, waiting for the commander to do something. But nothing happened.

Sharef’s thoughts would have confused Ahmed. Sharef was thinking about the Persian rug in his stateroom, about its intentional imperfection. The imperfection that had been woven into it as a symbol of mankind’s humility before Allah, who was insulted by the thought of human perfection.

And to Sharef, the imperfection of the Hegira was her battery, a battery much too small to allow the ship to hide under the acoustic curtain of a delouse maneuver. But unlike the rug, the submarine’s imperfection would have consequences.

It might end up killing them all. Maybe that would please Allah, Sharef thought, a bitterness edging his thoughts. He looked at his watch and up to see Ahmed staring at him. He flashed the air force officer a humorless smile. Ahmed frowned.

The deck sloped ominously downward, the ship in a dive.

Sharef had ordered the man at the ship controls to let the ship dangle and not fix the angle unless it threatened to exceed seven degrees, but even a quarter degree was detectable to Ahmed, and one degree set off alarms in his mind that the ship was sinking. Five degrees felt like a ramp. With the deck at a five-degree dive, the forward end of the room was a half-meter lower than the aft end.

Finally Sharef moved behind the ship control consoles and spoke to the youngster in the left seat. The order made little sense to Ahmed: “Bubble one and three, bring it up at point five per second, start your flood at a hundred, maintain thirty to twenty-five meters.”

“Yes, sir. Bubbling one and three now.”

A muffled sound of rushing air could be heard for a few seconds.

“Quzwini, lay below to the auxiliary diesel panel and prepare to snort.”

The mechanical officer turned over the power plant consoles to a lieutenant and hurried out of the room. Ahmed searched the patches of dark and glare for Commander Tawkidi, finding him at the sensor console area leaning on one of the stations.

“Now what. Commander?”

“We’re coming up to periscope depth to restart the reactor.”

“Why don’t we do that deep?”

“Battery’s dead. We need electricity. Once we get near the surface we’ll put up the snort mast and let the diesel engine breathe. The diesel generator will give us enough current on the grid to restart the reactor plant.”

“Oh. But it will be loud, won’t it? Will the enemy hear us?”

“Yes. But that is the commodore’s decision.”

The deck leveled off, then began inclining the opposite direction, the aft end sinking. The boat drifted upward, the deck continuing its slow oscillations. Ahmed felt his frustration intensify at how ridiculous it was to have lost power and drift in the sea at the most critical moment, when they were under attack by an enemy submarine. If they survived this madness he intended to ask Sihoud to have Sharef fired.

Two decks below, in the aftmost bulkhead of the command module in the equipment room. Commander Ibn Quzwini took a seat at the auxiliary diesel console, his battle lantern lighting the dead gauges. His walkie-talkie radio on his belt squawked.

“Quzwini, raise the snort mast.”

Quzwini took the cover off a hydraulic control valve, careful to keep any leakage inside the cover from spilling on the deck. He grabbed the knob of the valve lever and pushed it up and to the right, then locked it into position. A hiss and a thunk sounded from the overhead as the high-pressure hydraulic oil forced the snort mast out of the fin and extended it high over the hull.

Ten meters above the command module, the submarine’s fin neared the surface in an attempt to reach the air, to bring it into the ship to feed the hungry diesel. The snort mast, a pipe with a water-sensing valve at the top, pointed to the waves, finally broaching the surface and extending toward the night sky.

“Control, Quzwini, snort mast is up.”

“Depth is two seven meters.”

“Mast is broached. Draining the induction manifold.”

Quzwini manipulated several more hydraulic controllers that operated large shutoff valves in the piping from the snort mast to the diesel engine induction. He was careful, since flooding the diesel with seawater would ruin their chances of restarting his reactor in the next minutes. He lifted a metal cover from a high-pressure air station and operated a valve that would blow out the water from the exhaust piping. Finally the engine was ready. He hit an air valve that rolled the massive engine, ensuring the bearings were lubricated with oil before he started the diesel. He reached below the panel and pulled a plastic cover off an electrical knife switch, the circuit connected to several car batteries housed inside the console, the electricity that would energize the field coils of the generator and allow it to produce power. He rotated the knife switch, flashing the field, then smashed his palm against the start button set in the air-control valve manifold.

Immediately the high-pressure air flowed loudly into the diesel intake manifold and turned the machine, the heavy engine accelerating slowly until it was at speed. Quzwini, going more by feel than any operating procedure, stabbed another air-control valve, commencing diesel engine fuel injection, hoping the engine would continue to roll. Its own compression would have cylinder temperatures high enough for ignition. Reaching again by feel, he cut off the high-pressure starting air just as he heard the engine roar to life, the sound loud even though the beast was three compartments aft. The deck trembled as the machine came up to speed, the sound violent and painful. He watched the output voltage meter, coaxing the machine under his breath, watching the needle rise from the zero peg and climb steadily until it stopped at 250 volts. Quzwini wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The diesel had made it up. Normally he would nurse the engine, giving it twenty minutes to heat up and stabilize the bearing oil temperatures and jacket water outlet, but this was no training exercise.

He popped a cover off a large electrical breaker and punched the red button marked close, then watched the battery bus voltage meter needle zip up to 250 volts. Up on the main panel he checked the engine speed and diesel voltage.

The engine had held now that it was loaded with the current drain of the dead battery. He stood and walked forward along the panels of the Yokogawa Second Captain supercomputer until he reached the 400-hertz motor generator control cubicle, one of the power generators for the computers.

He shut its breaker and shone his flashlight on its voltage and current meters. The motor generator set came up to speed in the steam module compartment, supplying the computers with their odd 400-cycle AC power. He stepped to the 120-volt 60-cycle panel and performed the same function for the computer’s 60-cycle power generator. When it came up to speed he shut a breaker and reported to the control room that they could restart the Second Captain. He took a walk back to look at the diesel panel, scanning its instruments one last time. Time to get back to the control room and restart the reactor.

He grabbed his battle lantern and started the walk. By the time he reached the stairs, the overhead lights had come back on. He hurried back to the control room’s aft starboard corner, acknowledging Sharef’s smile, then sat in the control seat. The reactor core display took some time coming up on the console, but finally the Second Captain had warmed up and the display showed core status. Quzwini selected the electrical distribution network on an adjacent console and pointed to his subordinate to energize the main ship service AC motor generator set. Lieutenant Kutaiba, the propulsion officer, brought the machine up, energizing the high-voltage AC bus network. Quzwini now had power to his control rod drive motors, and he stabbed the soft response key that was configured to commence reactor startup.

Two modules aft, in the reactor bay, the rod drive motors began pulling control rods out of the uranium core, the power module that had once been eyed by Sihoud as raw material for his desired nuclear weapon, but the fuel would have taken over a year to reprocess with an entire reprocessing plant to isolate the uranium — the reprocessing plant itself would have taken over a year to build, so Sihoud had left the Japanese-constructed core alone and searched for nuclear weapon material elsewhere.

Within three minutes the core was in the power range, the steam headers were warm, and Quzwini had begun spinning up the turbine generators. As soon as he brought the first electrical turbine onto the grid he shot orders at Kutaiba to secure the snorting operation. The diesel engine aft shut down, the absence of its reassuring roar making the ship unnaturally quiet. There was a clunking noise as he lowered the snort mast. Quzwini continued bringing the power module up, finally putting the propulsion turbine generators online.

He turned to Sharef.

“Sir, the plant is back, propulsion AC motor is ready.”

“Dead slow ahead, dive to 500 meters,” Sharef ordered.

He left his spot behind Quzwini and turned to al-Kunis in the sensor area. “Find the submarine as soon as you can. Weapons officer, reapply power to the Nagasaki torpedoes in tubes one through five.”

Hillsworth shook his head as he held his headset’s earphone to his skull.

“Conn, Sonar, Target One has shut down, last bearing one three eight. I still have four units between bearings one three five and one four zero, all four in reattack mode. And sir, I’m getting diesel engine noises from astern, edge of the starboard baffles.”

In the control room Daminski stared at the firing panel.

The weapons that still had their wires connected had acquired on the target, gotten close enough to go to final warhead arming, then lost the target and gone into reattack. Not one detonation. And now sonar reported a loss of the target and a diesel engine noise from astern. From behind them.

Daminski turned to look at Kristman, ideas forming themselves in his mind, all of them colliding and sparking as they swooped through his head.

The torpedoes went into reattack close to the target. Both passive and active homers. Reattack. Couldn’t find the target. Target shuts down. Diesel engine startup from the baffles.

“Cut the wires tubes three and four, shut the outer doors, drain the tubes and reload one through four!” Daminski shouted to Hackle, his voice oddly loud, as if he had become half-deaf. “Helm, right five degrees rudder, all ahead one third!”

“What is it, sir?”

“Fucker fooled us with a god damned decoy, that’s what. That’s why the units kept going into reattack. They can’t get a proximity signal on a decoy. Now that asshole is snorkeling from his launch position — must have shut down his reactor to run silent and something went wrong, tripped a battery breaker. Hackle, get those torpedoes loaded and open the outer doors, tubes one and two. Helm, steady course one four five. Attention in the firecontrol team. The diesel engine is redesignated Target Two. Target One is a decoy and will be dropped from firecontrol. Give me a two-minute leg to Target Two before we maneuver, then we’ll shoot another salvo at him. Carry on.”

“Conn, Sonar,” Hillsworth’s voice shouted, “diesel engine transients designated Target Two have shut down. Loss of Target Two, last bearing, three one five.”

“Status of the tubes. Hackle!”

“Sir, we’ve drained down and are loading a Mark 50 into tube one now, it’ll be another three minutes before we’re connected and spun up.”

“Goddamn it. Get those fish loaded.”

Daminski was furious at himself for leaving the tubes unloaded.

It would take five minutes to warm up the weapon gyros and shoot them, if he had a firecontrol solution, which he didn’t with Target Two shutting down.

“Sonar, Conn, what’s the status of Target Two?”

“Still nothing, sir.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Regained contact on the Coalition sub, Commodore. He’s maneuvering. Towed array range is crude but workable at eight kilometers. We have the target bearing and range set into the torpedoes in one through five.”

“Status of the weapons?” Sharef asked.

“Nagasaki torpedoes warmed up, bow caps open, target solution programmed, sir.”

Sharef nodded. “Shoot tubes one through five.”

“Firing one …”

The deck trembled with the power of the tube launch.

Four more times the deckplates vibrated. Finally, Ahmed thought, Sharef was fighting back.

“Tube launches complete, tubes two through five and seven,” al-Kunis reported. “All weapons running normally.”

“Ship control, turn to three four zero, ahead sixty percent, maintain depth 500 meters.”

“Yes sir, turning to three four zero, sixty percent.”

“Shut the bow caps on one through five, warm up six and seven and flood the tubes.”

Ahmed watched, approving.

The first Nagasaki torpedo left the tube under the pressure of a gas generator at the breech end. Some moments before it had been divorced from the electrical power from the mother ship. The tube had fed in the target’s data as well as the run speed and search pattern to be used on the target. The expanding gases at the base of the tube pushed on the aft end of the weapon, hard, pushing it into the cool curtain of the Mediterranean water. As the elliptical head of the torpedo left the envelope of the submarine’s bow, the water flowed into a duct set low in the weapon’s nose, spinning a small water turbine on jeweled bearings. The turbine generated a minute current in a generator that energized a small electromagnet in a relay; the magnet shut the relay contact in the engine start logic circuit, providing the computer with a signal to start the weapon’s engine.

The pressurized peroxide fuel flowed out of the opened fuel solenoid valve into the combustion chamber, expanding into vapors as it entered the annular-shaped chamber with the ring of spark plugs. The plugs arced from the high-voltage current of the onboard battery, igniting the peroxide vapors, which soared in temperature at the inlet vanes of the axial turbine in the aft end of the torpedo. The gases spun the turbine and passed out the flapper exhaust valve into the surrounding sea. The spinning turbine turned a shaft connected to a ducted water jet propulsor, similar to the larger unit of the Hegira. The torpedo accelerated to its shallow depth cruising speed on the intercept course to the target, its sonar ears listening hard for the sounds of a gear-driven screw.

“Conn, Sonar! Torpedo in the water, bearing three one nine! Second launch, two torpedoes — no three — Conn, Sonar, we have multiple torpedoes in the water, all screws cavitating!”

“Helm, all ahead flank! Maneuvering cavitate!” Daminski shouted. “Dive, make your depth one three hundred feet. Off’sa’deck, load Mark 21 evasion devices in fore and aft signal ejectors. Helm, right half degree rudder, steady course one three zero.”

Daminski watched the control room crew follow his orders until the ship was on course, running from the incoming torpedoes. This was a moment he had dreaded — at the business end of an enemy torpedo with nothing to do but run and hope they ran out of fuel. His stomach filled with acid.

“Conn, Sonar, how many torpedoes?”

“Sir, five torpedoes. Bearing rate zero. They’re getting louder. Captain.”

Daminski, in spite of trying to keep his mind from the memory, had been in this position before, but always in the attack simulators in Norfolk and Groton, rooms set up to look exactly like 688-class control rooms, with the same attack-center consoles and plots, a room adjacent to the simulator the sonar display room. If the overhead lights were blacked out, a crew could almost believe they were in an actual control room fighting the targets that appeared as diamond symbols on the firecontrol consoles. In the simulators, the computer “target” frequently fired torpedoes at the at tacking submarine, turning hunter into prey, testing the approach officer’s wits to see how well he could evade the torpedo—put the incoming weapon in the baffles due astern, or on the baffle edge if he wanted to be fancy and track it on broadband sonar and run at flank speed.

The reason Daminski hoped to forget was compelling. He had been shot at by the computer over twenty times in the last five years. In those twenty times, his ship had never survived. The computer’s torpedoes always killed him. In the postattack mop-ups he had always wanted to know why the counterattacks were so lethal … “Maybe you’re getting too close to the guy. Commander,” a firecontrol chief had told him. “Shoot him from a longer range and if he shoots back the torpedoes might run out of fuel.”

“Yeah, and he’ll hear mine and evade. I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself, sir.”

“Does anyone else survive being shot at? Any of these other 688-jockeys on the Norfolk piers? Guys who shoot further out?”

“You want to know the truth, sir?”

“Give it to me straight. Chief,” Daminski had asked, wondering if his own tactics were truly flawed. “Commander, nobody survives. Unless the torpedo coming at you is so far off your bearing that it goes the wrong way, or so grossly flawed that it won’t detonate, or a long way away when you first hear it, that’s it. A sixty-knot long-range torpedo coming down your bearing line will almost always nab a forty-knot submarine. Of course, you might be up against a slower running torpedo. But I doubt it.”

“Thanks a load. Chief,” Daminski had said.

Nobody survives.

Screw him, Daminski thought. When Augusta pulled back into Norfolk he’d look that chief up and demand a beer. Several beers. And an apology.

Chapter 12 Friday, 27 December

“Torpedoes are closing, all five in the baffles.”

The deck shook as Augusta ran from the weapons.

Daminski looked at the speed indicator, wondering how he could go faster.

“Off’sa’deck, status of the signal ejectors?”

“Mark 21s loaded, ejectors ready.”

“Launch fore and aft.”

“Aye, sir.”

The two signal ejectors pushed out baseball-bat-sized noisemakers, one of them set to blow a large cloud of bubbles to confuse active sonar, the second programmed to make loud broadband noise, much like that made by the ship’s screw as she plowed through the water at maximum speed.

“Get me the engineering officer of the watch on the JA,” he said to Kristman. Kristman grabbed a phone handset and barked into it, then held it to Daminski. “EOOW, unload the turbine generators and pick up the loads from the battery. Take the mode selector to battleshort, then open the throttles to 150 percent power, you hear me? And take T-ave to five twenty, that’s right. Repeat that back … and listen, be damned sure you don’t lose an AC bus — the last thing I need is to lose a main coolant pump. Do it.”

He handed the phone back to Kristman, who nodded approvingly.

Daminski glared at the speed indicator, which slowly climbed from thirty-eight knots to forty-two. Daminski had given orders that might breach the fuel elements and melt the core, and all he had gotten from it was four lousy knots.

Parasitic drag, he thought abstractly. Daminski climbed the periscope platform and grabbed a sheet of paper from the navigator’s pad, scribbling on it for a few seconds, then pausing. For a few moments he put his hand into his coverall suit and fingered the letter from Myra, then shook his head and finished writing. He looked for Kristman and called the executive officer to the conn periscope platform, away from the men at the attack-center consoles. He pulled the XO close.

“Danny, send for a radioman with a slot buoy. Have him code this in quickly. Load it forward.” Kristman reached for a phone, intercepted the radioman entering control and gave him the paper without reading it. The young radioman left in a hurry.

The next item on his mind was the tubes. He still might be able to get off a counterfire, even without a solution on the target.

“Weps, what’s the status?”

“Sir,” Hackle’s voice seemed higher than usual, with just a suggestion of a tremble. “One and two are dryloaded. Mark 50 power is on, self-checks still in progress. Recommend flooding tubes and opening outer doors.”

“Flood one and two and open the outer doors.” “Sir,” Kristman said, touching Daminski on his shoulder, “we’ll have to slow to shoot the units. Twenty knots, maybe twenty-five.”

“Do you really think they’ll have a problem?” Augusta’s tubes were located far aft of the bow and were canted outward ten degrees, making the torpedoes leave the ship at an angle. At forty-two knots of forward velocity the weapons would get so much side force from the slipstream that they might bend or break. The standard operating procedure declared nonemergency launches be made under twenty knots — like a warshot torpedo launch was ever routine … “You heard about the flank-bell launch from Trepang, didn’t you? One torpedo broke in half. The second one did fine. But those were exercise shots without warheads. You bust a warshot in half, it’ll blow the compartment wide open.”

“Our Arab friends might already have taken care of that. I’m more worried about the health of the torpedoes. A broken Mark 50 won’t kill a target very well.” Daminski faced the attack center. “Weps, what’s the god damned status?”

“Outer doors open one and two, self-checks complete, ready to fire. Except for the solution, sir.”

Daminski leaned over the Pos Two panel and changed the mode from the dot-stacker to line-of-sight, an odd configuration showing two rowboats, one at the bottom representing own-ship, the one at the top the target. Daminski put the bearing of the target due astern at bearing 520, with a range of 20,000 yards, course northwest heading out of the strait.

“There, now you’ve got a solution. Keep that in.”

“Conn, Sonar, we’re getting active sonar from one of the torpedoes.”

“What’s the range gate look like?” The range of a torpedo could be guessed by how often it pinged active sonar. Long ping intervals meant the receiver had to wait to get a return ping over a large distance, rapid pings meant the torpedo needed to wait only seconds for the ping return and was close. The more rapid the pings, the closer the weapon.

“Ping interval is prolonged. Range is probably two thousand to three thousand yards.”

A nautical mile, Daminski thought. He was a mile to a mile and a half ahead of the weapons. He was going forty-two knots. Allowing for a fifty-knot torpedo — no, he’d give it fifty-five knots — that meant he had between four and seven minutes till the torpedoes caught up.

“Listen up,” he said to the watchstanders, “we’ll be launching the counterattack now, then launching a radio buoy in the signal ejector telling the boss we’ve been attacked and to watch out for the Destiny’s shutdown-and-hide tactics. I’m going to order us to slow to twenty knots to launch, then we’ll throttle right back up and keep running. Ready? Helm, all back two-thirds, mark speed two one!”

The helmsman rang up the order on the engine telegraph.

Back aft in the maneuvering room the throttleman answered the bell, shut the forward turbine throttles and opened up the astern turbines. The ship shook hard, as if rattled by the hand of a god. A bookcase above the chart table dumped its contents to the deck, one of the volumes hitting the plotting officer in the head on its way down.

“Speed two one, sir,” the helmsman called.

“All stop! Snapshot tube one!”

“Set,” Skinnard called.

“Standby and fire,” Hackle said, rotating the trigger. The blast of the tube firing sounded more violent than the previous four.

“Snapshot tube two.”

“Standby and fire.” The second tube fired. Daminski shouted over the second blast, “All ahead flank, maneuvering cavitate, 150-percent reactor power, T-ave five twenty!”

The deck trembled again with the power of the screaming main engines. The speed indicator needle climbed slowly, too slowly, to forty-two knots.

“Conn, Sonar, both own-ship units, normal launch.”

“Sonar, Captain, what’s the pulse interval?”

“Sir, active sonar from the torpedo has shut down.”

“Jeez, what the hell does that mean?” Daminski mumbled to Kristman. “Danny, have we got that radio buoy loaded?”

Kristman nodded. “Loaded forward, tube flooded, muzzle door open.”

“Shoot the forward signal ejector.”

Daminski looked around the room at the watchstanders, trying to maintain his war face. There was nothing more he could do. He had shot back at the enemy submarine. He had warned cincnavporcemed that they were on the business end of five UIF torpedoes. He had launched evasion devices, for whatever good they would do. And he had taken the reactor far over the redline, overpowering it as far as he dared without melting the core or breaching the steam piping or blowing open a turbine casing.

He had Augusta running for her life.

He had always wondered whether he would want to know in advance if he were going to die. He had decided he would want five minutes warning, no more. Not enough time to worry about it, just time to think about the children and perhaps make peace with the angry Catholic Church God of his youth. Maybe say goodbye to the good things in life, tip back a Coors or down a shot of Wild Turkey. He tried to remember the last time he had made love to Myra but it was a blur. He fingered the letter from her, imagined her face. He had a momentary memory, sharp as a new razor, of the faces of his three little children, then one of his father, his dad angry even in this reflective memory—

“Conn, Sonar, active sonar from one of the torpedoes.”

“Range gate?”

“Sorry, Cap’n, the unit is pinging a ramp wave in continuous.”

Daminski shared a look with Kristman. The incoming torpedoes were so close that one of them was transmitting a continuous waveform, getting a precise fix on Augusta’s location.

There was only one thing he could do, Daminski thought. If he did an emergency surface, he might get above the ceiling setting of the weapon, or perhaps it would blow its warhead at the bubbles the ballast tanks left behind. And even if they got hit, maybe if they made it to the surface he could save some of the men, maybe not all, but some.

“Chief of the watch, emergency blow fore and aft! Diving officer, take her up, twenty degree up-bubble!”

The COW slammed two large stainless-steel levers into the overhead while the diving officer ordered the ship up.

The room filled with the blasting noise of high-pressure air as the bottles emptied the air into the ballast tanks, pushing out the seawater and making the ship lighter. The deck tilted up, the helmsman overreacting, the ship coming up in a thirty-degree angle before the diving officer could push the control yoke forward to get the bubble back to twenty degrees.

The depth indicator numerals spun as the ship climbed out of the depths, heading for the surface, her speed aided by the buoyancy in the tanks, the speed indicator reading forty-five knots, then forty-six. Augusta was screaming for the surface.

But even over the noise of the roaring emergency blow system, Daminski could hear the wailing sonar system of the lead torpedo in pursuit. The depth indicator unwound, 500 feet, 400, 350, but the screaming siren of the torpedo sonar system grew louder. Daminski could hear the torpedo’s screw itself, a whooshing sound just outside the hull. He turned away from the depth indicator on the ship control panel. It had spun to sixty feet as the bow of the ship blew out of the water, climbing at her tremendous velocity until the sail came out, then the long length of black hull, her underside painted a dull anticorrosion red, until gravity dragged her back, the deck already coming back to level as the ship fell back into the sea, the splash raising a cloud of water vapor in a 300-foot diameter around her. Her downward momentum then carried her under again, the hull vanishing from the surface, only the upper half of the sail breaking through the waves.

It was at that moment that the first Nagasaki torpedo detonated, the weapon having followed the target as it went shallow, as if the torpedo had expected it. The explosion was centered below the reactor compartment, the explosive force directed upward, breaching the hull and rupturing a steam generator and its main coolant piping, the seawater smashing into the compartment. The second Nagasaki detonated farther aft, beneath the turbine generators of the aft compartment, the hull breaching there too, the water filling the space. The third torpedo was a dud, the detonation from the second knocking the detonation train off, the preexplosive failing to detonate the high explosive and the unit disintegrated.

The fourth torpedo impacted the aft section of the forward compartment, blowing a twenty-foot gash in the lower level, the blast smashing through two decks and tearing apart the navigation space aft of control before the water came flooding in. Daminski had a quarter-second to turn and see the deckplates flying upward in slow motion as the blast disintegrated the aft part of the room. The last torpedo detonated at the flank of the forward compartment, forward of the control room. The wall of water from the aft of control had washed its way to the plot tables by the time of the last explosion and its unmerciful water came blasting in from the forward end.

The lights went out as the plot table came off its mountings and smashed into Daminski, who would have hit the deck but instead splashed into seawater. He expected the impact of the table to kill him, but he was still conscious as the darkness came, not from death but from the seawater shorting out the battle lanterns.

Five feet to port, Dan Kristman was knocked into Tim Turner by the force of the invading wall of water, the force of their collision breaking bones, Kristman’s ribs and Turner’s arm and collarbone. The two officers flew forward into the ship control seats, knocking Turner out, snapping Kristman’s neck, the bodies collapsing into the rising water.

Kevin Skinnard, sitting at Pos Two, was carried through the door to sonar and into a sonar-display console, the glass screen spider-webbed by the impact of his head. He was stunned but conscious when the unit blew sparks all around him as its power supply shorted out in seawater, an arc flashing in front of his face before the water filled the room, the battle lanterns in sonar surviving and illuminating the submerged room with a dim smoky light. Skinner tried to move, to swim, the water forcing its way into his lungs paralyzing him with shock. He had a fraction of a second to recall childhood nightmares of drowning, seeing ships sinking in deep water, wetting his bed after seeing a movie about the Titanic, upset too because his teddy bear was soaked. His father had preached confronting his fears, and as an adult he had, going into submarines in part to show himself that the fear of deep water — which he’d never told any of the sublant shrinks about — had been overcome. Now he knew that fear had finally come for him. Eventually the pressure of the increasing depth burst his lungs, the bubbles rising sideways toward a bulkhead instead of up toward the overhead.

The ship must be rolled nearly horizontal, he thought.

It was his last thought.

In the control room Daminski felt himself pinned beneath the plot table and what he guessed was the deck beneath the attack center. The pressure around him increased, squeezing on his chest until his lungs gave out, breath forced out of him, water filling his body. In a part of his mind that still functioned he remembered how deep the sea was beneath him, the memory of the last fathometer report from Turner-over 900 feet there at the mouth of the strait. He had time to wonder whether he’d still be alive when the hull hit the sea floor before that thought and all others slowly faded …

The broken hull of the Augusta hit the rocky bottom of the Strait of Sicily at terminal velocity, seventy knots, going bow down. Two of her Mark 50 torpedoes detonated from the shock of the crash with the bottom. The impact split her into three pieces, the damage already done by the four torpedo detonations. For several minutes the reactor core spewed steam in protest against its loss of cooling, but soon the seawater brought the fuel temperature down, and the reactor merely put out hot water. The rush of bubbles from the hull took more than an hour to stop, the sea finally calm at the wreckage site, the water again quiet.

Nine hundred feet above, a slot radio buoy finished its last transmission, flooded and sank, coming to rest on the ocean floor a mile northwest of the wreckage.

Fifteen nautical miles to the northwest, aboard the UIF submarine Hegira, the report was received that the target had gone down. Several junior officers and Rakish Ahmed smiled until Commodore Sharef fixed them with a burning glare.

The two torpedoes launched from the target sub before it was hit had gone far off-course, eventually running out of fuel and sinking, and when they did, the last pieces of the Augusta came to rest on the ocean floor.

Chapter 13 Friday, 27 December

Donchez pulled at his starched collar, cursing the bow tie of his dinner dress blue uniform, and asked the bartender for a Canadian on the rocks. Alone for the first time in the last half-hour, he took a moment to look at the house too grand — pretentious, perhaps — to be a mere house. General Clough called it his “lake cottage,” a reference to the fact that he owned at least four residences, his old money put to work for him tonight as he entertained the entire Joint Staff from the chief petty officers and master sergeants all the way to General Barczynski himself. Clough stood in a far corner of the high-ceilinged living room, near one of the four couch arrangements, talking to two of Donchez’s admirals, John Traeps and the visitor Roy Steinman up from Norfolk, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarines.

There were times, Donchez had to admit, when Clough’s political skills were impressive; he might even have liked the man had the general not decided to attach his service’s survival on the decline of the Navy — or perhaps his war was declared not on the Navy but on Donchez himself, as the ring of admirals around Clough would suggest. In the end, it didn’t matter. All jobs, even chief of naval operations or chief of staff of the Air Force, were temporary.

Of course, even if he and Clough had a hot war between them instead of just broken diplomatic relations, Donchez would still be at the party, not out of obligation or ambition, not with any sort of duplicity or hypocrisy, but because of the odd military multiple-personality each of them had.

Many times the military had reminded Donchez of an old cartoon that began with a sheepdog and coyote punching in a time clock, exchanging pleasantries until the work began, then each going through a day of murderous conflict, the coyote attacking the dog to get the sheep, the sheepdog defending, and after a dozen explosions of TNT and mishaps with crossbows and boulders on pulleys, the end-of-shift whistle blew, the combatants punching out the time clock, each hoping the other had a nice evening and planning their bowling outing. So many times in Donchez’s career that had applied, his old executive officer on the Thresher literally shouting in his face at 1600, only to invite him for a beer at the club at 1730. The odd schizophrenia had repeated itself in his own leadership, when he had been XO of Dace and had to get the attention of one of the talented but inexperienced junior officers, finally raising his voice in a younger man’s face — as he frequently had to Ronny Daminski — then continuing the man’s training after-hours in the officers’ club, laughing about the incident over a beer, and then beginning the same routine the next day when Daminski had messed up again. Even now, he and Clough and Barczynski could have their differences, even acidic conflicts, and still check their jobs at the door. They were, after all, in the same game, brethren of the same system, at the moment united against the Muslims on the other side of the globe and against all other enemies.

Barczynski walked up now, his collar unbuttoned, his hairy throat poking through, a Heineken dwarfed by his paw, a grin on his face. The two men chatted for several minutes.

Barczynski finished an old tank story before Fred Rummel caught Donchez’s eye from the end of the room, waving urgently.

Donchez excused himself and walked with Rummel to the lakeside patio. Rummel shut the French doors behind them, a light snow falling in the mid-evening and beginning to accumulate on the cleared stones of the patio. Rummel looked around, then pulled a crumpled piece of paper stamped top secret, with the code words Early Retirement under the TS stamp. Donchez initialed the sheet with Rummel’s pen, then read the last message from the Augusta.

Donchez looked up at Rummel, his face pale.

“Who knows about this?”

“Message center crews, cincmed and sublant watch officers. They sent it on the SCI fax in your staff car. It’s only been seven minutes since it was first transmitted.”

Donchez read it again. “Get Traeps and Roy Steinman out here.”

Rummel returned with the admirals. By then Donchez had read the message from Daminski twice more. When the admirals arrived, Donchez handed the message over for them to read. Steinman, the slow-talking New Orleans submariner with the young face, spoke first.

“Daminski could be going down right now while we’re reading this. We need to find out what happened to him. Then we need to sink this SOB.”

“Phoenix is at Gibraltar,” Traeps said. “We could bring her up and ask if she heard anything.”

“Get a DSRV to Daminski’s last position,” Donchez ordered, wondering where the nearest deep submergence rescue vehicle was. “If Augusta went down, we might get someone out.”

Steinman shook his head while Rummel hurried back to the staff car. “I know you’re right, we’ve got to do that, sir, but if Daminski was on the wrong end of five Nagasaki torpedoes he didn’t stand a chance. We just completed an intel estimate we got from an insider at Toshiba. The Nagasaki can do seventy knots on a high-speed axial turbine and has a range of seventy-five nautical miles. It’s a big sucker, three feet in diameter and fifty feet long. Most of that is warhead. If it’s launched against you … well, I recommend we copy this message to the Phoenix so she knows about this playing-possum tactic. She might have to get out of the way if this sucker is as good as Rocket Ron thinks.” Or, he added silently, like he thought.

“Let’s wait on the death certificate until we hear more, Roy,” Donchez said. “John, get on a secure line to your watch officer and have him call Phoenix up to periscope depth and get a report from her on anything she heard from the bearing to the Strait of Sicily. Go ahead and copy Phoenix on this message but have it marked personal for commanding officer.”

Admiral Traeps left through the house to the front, where Donchez’s staff car waited. Steinman reread the message. He looked up at Donchez, the moon reflecting off the teardrop-shaped lenses of his glasses.

“Did you note that line about telling the truth?” Steinman looked out over the lake, swallowing hard.

“I agree with Rocket Ron. If we lost Augusta, I want to tell the families immediately.”

“How are we gonna do that, sir, let the world know a third-world sub put one of our best on the bottom?”

“I’m hoping your Phoenix can take care of the Destiny.”

“At least Sugar Kane knows more than Rocket Ron did about this guy’s tactics.”

“Kane?”

“David Kane, captain of the Phoenix. Crew calls him Sugar, a title I regret to say I thought up. Kane was a junior officer of mine back on the Archerfish.”

“Small world,” Donchez said. He’d never heard of David Kane. “Your man Kane. Is he good?”

“He knows his stuff,” Steinman said cautiously, knowing Kane wasn’t Donchez’s blood-and-guts kind of sailor. Kane was a politician, ever tuned to his own advancement — he’d always looked like he belonged on Wall Street wearing a $2,000 business suit rather than oily-smelling khakis on a nuclear submarine. But his squadron commanders and crew seemed to love him. Kane was a crowd-pleaser, adept at saying what his bosses and juniors wanted to hear. He was a new generation of captain, and Steinman wisely kept that to himself, knowing a single misinterpreted remark to the C.N.O could torpedo a career. Besides, Kane was good, he was just good in a self-serving kind of way.

Traeps and Rummel returned by the stairs to the patio from the lawn by the lake. They were covered with snow.

“You’d better check this out. Admiral.”

Donchez held the faxed message Rummel handed him up to the porch light and read. It was from the Phoenix. The meat of the message dashed his hopes.

Donchez held out the message to Steinman.

“Let’s get Barczynski,” he said. “We’ll have to come up with a story on this. I don’t want this UIF thing brought out, not till we kill him. Roy, I guess lost-sub cover stories are your responsibility. Sorry.”

“I know, sir. We’ll have a statement ready for the morning. We’d better get going on the notifications. I guess I’d best visit Daminski’s wife myself.”

“I’ll do that, Roy,” Donchez said. “He’ was one of my boys from the Dace. Maybe you could see to his XO and wardroom.”

Steinman nodded, trudging back into the house.

Donchez walked around to the front, where his staff car was parked, following the path made by Traeps and Rummel. The car’s engine was idling, the big black Lincoln bristling with antennae. The front door of Clough’s house opened and Barczynski came out, his overcoat thrown over his shoulders. After asking Donchez what was up, the look in Donchez’s eyes telling him the matter was grave, he read the messages, Daminski’s and Kane’s.

“General, we’ve got this message going out to the second sub in the western Med. He knows how the enemy fight their ship and he’ll be ready. Sihoud and the Destiny will be on the bottom—”

“Dick, I’d like to believe that. But I heard the skipper of Augusta was a damn good man. An expert at getting top performance out of a crew.”

“He was one of the best,” Donchez said, thinking he ought to be, I trained him myself. “His professionalism shows in his last message, sir. He knew he was a dead man but he took the time to tell us how to beat the Destiny.”

Donchez looked hard at Barczynski. “I want to declassify that Augusta sank. General. Tonight. We couldn’t keep a lid on it too long anyway, she’s due back in a couple weeks. It’ll give us a black eye if we let the next of kin celebrate New Year’s and wait on the pier and we tell them then she’s been gone since December. We sat on sinking news back when Stingray went down in ‘73 and the press and the families beat the hell out of us. And rightly so.”

“Dick, we can’t be saying anything about the Destiny sub—”

“We won’t. Steinman’s working on a story now. Augusta sank because of a faulty torpedo or a flooded main seawater system or any of a thousand things that can sink a submarine. It’s known to be a dangerous business. We’ve lost three nukes in the past, sir, we’ve done this before, I’m sorry to say.”

“I don’t want any salvage divers coming up next week saying we lied.”

“We won’t say where she sank. Besides, she’s down in 900 feet of water. It’ll take a while. By the time any salvage vultures are down there, we’ll have the Destiny on the bottom. Then they can dive for Sihoud’s bones.” He had to believe that.

“Okay, Dick. Do it your way.”

Donchez got into the car, Rummel at the door ready to shut it.

“And, Dick—”

“Yes, General?”

“I’m very sorry.”

“So am I, sir. So am I.”

Myra Daminski blew out a breath of exhaustion as she sat at the kitchen table, the kids finally, after a long fight, in bed and quiet. She sipped at the coffee, the milk she’d dumped in it making it a chocolate-brown color. The sudden glint of a policeman’s cruiser lights from outside the dining room window didn’t surprise her — it was the Friday night between Christmas and New Year’s, and the neighborhood parties were in full gear, the music blaring from the house across the street. Someone had probably complained. She flipped through a book, finally finding the page, the one all about comfort in confusion over a trying, or dying, marriage.

The doorbell rang. Annoyed, she marked the page, put the book down, and walked through the hallway while straightening out her thick black hair.

She opened the door, expecting to see people who’d come to the wrong house for the party, but stared into the pressed uniform of a Virginia state police trooper, behind him two men in dark uniforms, the driveway blocked by a large black car behind the trooper’s cruiser. She turned on the outside light and immediately saw that the men in black uniforms were navy officers.

“Mrs. Daminski? I’m Admiral Dick Donchez. Could we come in?”

She opened the door wider, the men came in.

“I just made a pot of coffee, come on into the den, have a seat.” She ran into the kitchen, reaching for the coffeepot.

“Ma’am, I think you’d first better listen to the admiral,” Fred Rummel said.

Myra Daminski looked up, her hands on the island countertop.

“It’s about the Augusta,” Donchez said, his voice deep, gravelly. “Two hours ago the ship went down in the Mediterranean during an exercise with another submarine. We have reason to believe the entire crew was lost. I’m sorry …”

Myra’s eyes glazed over. Donchez wondered if she was registering the news.

“We headed down from D.C. as soon as we could. I’m the Chief of Naval Operations. Ron was an old hand on my former submarine Dace. He was a fine officer and a good friend of mine. I can’t tell you …”

The words seemed to rush over her. A lump formed in her throat as she wondered if the letter she had written him had gotten to the ship before it sailed from Sardinia. She hoped it hadn’t and would be returned to her.

“What happened?”

“We’re not sure yet. We’re doing everything possible to find the crew. If any survived we’ll know in a few hours. We’ll be taking a deep submergence vehicle down tonight. But I don’t want you to get your hopes up, Mrs. Daminski. The other sub in the exercise radioed that it heard hull breakup noises on sonar.”

Myra looked up to see her son Joe in his pajamas, standing in the foyer at the base of the stairs.

Later, in the staff car, Donchez looked out the window at the dark trees, thinking about Myra Daminski’s reaction — or lack of reaction — and the tears of the boy. Mrs. Daminski had been rocking him in a big chair in the den when they had left. Myra’s face was, well, set. Stoic? perhaps.

For the next half-hour Donchez himself was lost in memories.

Daminski arm-wrestling in the wardroom, Daminski drinking beer at a ship’s softball game, Daminski arguing with the burly torpedoman Betts, Daminski teaching the younger officers the torpedo-tube interlocks. The first time he heard Betts call him Rocket Ron, and the way the crew took up the name, Donchez trying to put a stop to it, the nickname a violation of military discipline but finally giving up as the moniker stuck. The day Lieutenant Daminski showed up in Donchez’s XO stateroom to ask for emergency leave to see his dying father, the tough macho lieutenant suddenly seeming vulnerable, almost stuttering.

Daminski’s wedding to his first wife, an event for all the ship’s officers, the wardroom ganging up on the strutting Daminski and carrying him kicking and fighting to the pool and dumping him in, Daminski sputtering to the surface, a grin on his face as he climbed out and ran after his attackers, his once starched service dress whites soaked. The weeks of shock Daminski went through when the marriage foundered the next year, the junior officer burying himself in his work.

When Donchez was done remembering, he turned his thoughts to what he had to do. Somewhere in the Med the UIF Destiny submarine lurked, a ship quiet enough to escape the detection of an Improved-Los Angeles-class sub’s BSY-1 sonar system, so quiet when its reactor was shut down that it didn’t register over the own-ship noise of the LA-class. The Destiny had the acoustic advantage, a nasty situation in which the opposition sub was quieter than the U.S. boat. That situation had never arisen in the old days, even with the Russians — American subs had always been quieter, stealthier — until the Russians had built the Omega-class attack submarine, the one Donchez had spent so many nights worrying about until he had sent Devilfish to find it.

And its then commander Pacino hadn’t been able to hear the Omega until he was directly beneath it, the Omega surfaced at the polar icecap.

There was only one American submarine quieter than an Improved-Los Angeles-class, and that was the Seawolf.

And there was perhaps only one submarine captain who was in the same league as Rocket Ron Daminski, and that was Captain Michael Pacino, Seawolf’s captain. Pacino was due to rotate off, accept his first star and replace Roy Steinman as COMSUBLANT. And Seawolf lay in a shipyard drydock as the Vortex tube installation finished, the yard just now getting a high-priced work order to reverse course and rip the tubes out after the failure of the system in the Bahamas.

“Fred, get me Pacino on scrambled satellite voice. He should be home in Sandbridge Beach. Then get me Stevens.”

“Stevens, the NNSY shipyard commander?”

“Yes.” He waited.

“Pacino.” Pacino’s voice was distorted through the scrambled voice circuit.

“Mikey? It’s Dick. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”