The Scorpion's Gate

11

“Open the Ocean Interface, aye.” The seaman repeated the order and then moved the lever on his control panel. Outside, behind the conning tower, the submarine’s hull began to move and the ocean water rushed in. The 12,000-ton ship continued to move ahead at 14 knots, 100 meters below the sea.

“Captain Hiang, Tony, this is where it gets interesting. You might want to sit up here so you can see the display on this screen,” Captain Tom Witkovski urged his Singaporean guest.

“So you don’t have to come to full stop to launch the ASIPs?”

Hiang asked, propping himself up on the observer’s chair. “No, we don’t. The advanced submersible intelligence platforms should be called the ABEAUT, because they are beautiful. Beyond my wildest dreams just a few years ago. They swim out of our hull with just their guidance engine running. Then the propulsion kicks in once they are well clear of the Carter.”

The lieutenant commander standing next to the control panels looked at his skipper. Captain Witkovski nodded at him to begin. “Prepare to launch ASIP-1,” he said to the seaman.

Five minutes later, he gave the seaman the last order in the sequence. “Launch ASIP-3.”

“Launch ASIP-3, aye,” the seaman repeated. “ASIP-3 away.”

The two captains watched as three green icons moved away from the blue icon for the Carter on the screen. They spread out, three abreast, and accelerated.

“Because they have a very small acoustic and sonar signature, there is no chance that the Chinese will think that there are torpedoes coming their way,” Witkovski explained. “They’re fully autonomous. Communicate only in an emergency. They know their missions and they just carry them out. When they get to their designated collection points, the ASIPs will switch over to the guidance propulsion to do place-keeping. And they will wait for their targets and then swim up to meet them and swim along their hulls, port, starboard, and right down the keel. Then back to place-keeping until the Chinese move on. Finally, we will swing around from the side and call them to come home. The Chinese will never know they were swept.”

The image on the screen jumped out to a 50-kilometer radius. Red icons appeared with alphanumeric designators attached to them. “That would be the first carrier battle group. The Zhou Man is the carrier there in the middle. She has two eight-thousand-ton air defense cruisers, one on either side. They carry the HHQ-9 supersonic surface-to-air missile. Highly lethal. Then you can see a leadand-trail frigate, an underway replenishment ship, two oilers, and what’s called a logistics support ship, more like a special cargo ship.”

Captain Hiang stared at the icons and the little green dots that represented the ASIPs moving toward them. “Don’t they have subs with this battle group, Captain?” he asked.

“There’s one with each of the two groups. Their new eightthousand-ton nuclear attack sub, type 93, Keng-class. A copy of the Russian Victor Threes, but noisy as hell. We can hear it a day away. This one’s actually in trail of the carrier. We have a sub, the USS Greenville, on her.”

The green dots slowed and appeared to stop halfway to the Chinese ships. “Well, now they wait,” Witkovski said, hopping off his chair. “And we loop around to the side to get ready to recover them. You look concerned, Tony.”

The Singaporean captain had been studying the screen and the briefing materials that he had been given. He looked up from them. “Captain, your boat, the Carter, is exactly ten times the displacement of each of my four little Swedish boats at Changi. And almost three times as long. So it’s not for me to give you advice, sir.”

“Come on, size doesn’t matter, Tony. You know these waters better than us. You were a standout in the strategy-and-tactics program at Newport. I checked. And three of those little boats of yours are waiting to pick the Chinese up for a while for us when they start through the Malacca. So what’s bothering you?” Witkovski sounded sincere.

“Okay. If I were the Chinese admiral, I would have my sub out front sweeping, or under the Zhou Man, looking for you guys. Are you sure, Tom, the sub the Greenville is following isn’t the lead for the second battle group?” Captain Hiang asked.

“Very sure. Wanna know why?” Witkovski said, sidling up to Hiang’s chair. “ ’Cuz the USS Tucson is tailing the Chinese sub that is behind the second battle group. They got two subs and we have one of ours on each one. Makes sense for them to have their subs out back to see if anyone like us is following them. Too bad for them they can’t hear us over their own din.”

Hiang laughed. “I knew I should have kept quiet.”

Forty minutes later, the Carter was running at 5 knots 6 miles east of the Zhou Man. On the display screen the three green dots were circling their targets, the Zhou Man, the destroyer Fei Hung, and the logistics support ship Xiang.

“Two questions, Captain.” Tony Hiang broke the silence in the Special Operations Control Room.

“Shoot,” Witkovksi replied.

“One, if the ASIPs aren’t communicating, how do we know where they are and what they’re doing? And as you say, part deux”— Hiang chuckled at this bit of American humor that he had picked up—“why the logistic ship?”

“Okay, one is easy. We don’t know where they are or what they’re doing really. This display simulates what we think they should be doing about now, based on their programming and the data we have about where the Chinese ships are,” Witkovski admitted.

“Part deux is a little more sensitive. Seaman, close your ears. We won’t be surprised if we get radiation readings from the carrier. They may have a few tac nukes on board for the J-11s, their Flankers. We know they have air-to-surface and air-to-ship missiles for the J-11s. The destroyer carries some antiship and possibly some land attack cruise missiles in vertical tubes. I wouldn’t be bowled over if a few of them had nukes. And we just might know what kind of radiation signal we’re looking for on each of those ships, but I never said that. Now the logy, if we get a signal there, that’s what Washington wants to hear about ASAP.”

Hiang wondered why they were watching the screen so intently if it was only telling them what they had already programmed into it. He stood and stretched.

“Owweee! Fuck me!” the seaman yelled, pulling off his headset. “Sorry, sir, but acoustics just about blew out my eardrums, sir.”

Captain Tom Witkovksi grabbed the headset and held it up near his right ear. “Jesus, what is that?” He dropped the headset and pressed an intercom on the wall. “Exec, what is that on acoustics?”

From the Combat Information Center, the boat’s control room one deck up, the executive officer responded, “We’re processing it through the database, Captain. Here it is… the first sound was ‘Similar to a Kiloclass diving.’ Then the screeching…it just says ‘Presumed Collision.’”

“Shit,” Witkovski swore, driving his fist against the wall. “I’m going up to CIC. Tony, I need you with me.” The American captain was out the bulkhead and climbing the ladder to the Combat Information Center three rungs at a time. “You got towed array out?” he barked at the executive officer as he entered CIC.

“Aye, sir. The hydrophones back there are what picked it up,” the somewhat startled exec replied. The captain flicked a switch and threw the undersea sound on the dashboard speaker. It was an excruciating sound of screeching metal, like steel chalk on a metal blackboard, magnified tenfold.

Witkovski turned down the volume. “What’s the depth there?”

“Two hundred fifty meters, Captain,” a seaman in front of a control panel answered.

“What’s the maximum dive depth of a Kilo-class?” the captain shot back.

“It’s nominally three hundred meters,” Captain Hiang answered from behind Witkovski. “But the Chinese version, the 877EKM, has a classified rating of 375.”

Witkovski spun about. “What else do you know about them? Really, Tony, tell me.”

The short Singaporean officer walked closer to the American captain and almost whispered, “They have a range of six thousand miles. They have a new, special sound-dampening and antisonar coating. They have a low-wave bow sonar that’s hard to detect. And because they can operate on only battery power for a while, they are very, very quiet. Especially against the acoustic background of an aircraft carrier battle group.”

A strange sound came over the speaker. “Ebup, ebup…” The executive officer turned up the volume on the dashboard speaker and hit the analyzer button. “Don’t bother analyzing it. I know what it is,” Captain Witkovski said, shaking his head. “Shit!”

“Sir?” the exec asked.

“It’s the acoustic distress signal from ASIP-2. There’s a Chinese Kilo out there that we missed. It’s on top of the ASIP, driving it to the bottom. The ASIP has a crush depth rating of two hundred meters. It will break up in a few minutes.” Witkovski sighed. Then he turned to look at Captain Hiang. “It seems the Zhou Man did have a sub on point and it’s playing dirty.”

“Sir, we should butt-fuck that Kilo, sir, come up behind it and ping it,” the exec proposed. “They can’t know the ASIP is unmanned. They could be killing our guys.”

“Not today, Tim. No butt-fucking today. We have two other ASIPs out there to recover and download. That’s our mission. Now, let’s do it. Give me a course to ASIP-3. Full quiet on the boat.”

“Full quiet on the boat, aye.” Blue bulbs blinked on throughout the 453-foot length of the USS Jimmy Carter.

Almost two hours later, with the Zhou Man battle group now turned and heading north into the Straits of Malacca, the word came: “Ocean Interface sealed.” The two remaining ASIPs were on board. Captain Witkovski asked Captain Hiang to join him for a meal in his cabin while the technicians downloaded the data from the unmanned mini-subs.

Over Philly cheesesteaks and Diet Pepsis, Witkovski almost apologized. “I should have listened to what you were trying to tell me, Tony.”

“I should have been more direct, Tom. Sometimes we ethnic Chinese have a hard time being direct enough for Americans.” Captain Hiang smiled. “But we know the Chinese, because we are descended from them. We speak their language. We know their history. The little Indonesian city that the Zhou Man is sailing by tonight? Malacca? It was founded by the Chinese navy, six hundred years ago. Besides, what could you have done anyway if you had detected the Kilo sitting under the keel of the Zhou Man?”

There was a rap on the door. “Enter,” the captain replied. It was the executive officer with a draft message on a clipboard. “It’s a summary of the data readout and the automated analysis from the two ASIPs, sir. I have coded it FLASH precedence, sir.”

The captain raised his eyebrows and took the clipboard. FLASH was reserved for messages of extreme priority, such as “Someone is firing at my ship.” Witkovski slipped on his half-glasses and read:

Captain Witkovski initialed the message board and passed it back to his exec. “Well done, Timmy. That ought to spray feces all over their fans back in Washington. This time we’ve found them some WMD. Ain’t no doubt about it.”

MacIntyre drove past the CNN and NBC buildings in the manicured office park that was Media City. His taxi had already passed Internet City and Knowledge City. He wondered if he could persuade them someday to build a Magician City in Dubai. The New York Journal did not have its own building but shared one with several European newspapers.

The Pakistani guest worker guard in the lobby was expecting him. As he entered the third-floor door of the Journal, he saw Kate on the other side of the suite, standing in front of a bank of screens showing news broadcasts in Arabic and English. She had set up a little breakfast buffet on a table below the television panels.

The audio was on for ABC. “…but military sources here at the Pentagon stress that until the wreckage has been examined, there is no way to be sure what happened to the Viking jet that was taking Admiral Adams back to his headquarters in Bahrain from a meeting with Secretary Conrad in Turkey. At the NATO meeting there, the Secretary said that he would take all appropriate steps to respond to any aggression in the oil-rich Gulf region. Martha…” Kate Delmarco hit the mute button and turned to face Rusty MacIntyre.

“I was supposed to meet him in Bahrain tomorrow,” Rusty said, staring up at the screens. “He left me a handwritten note I picked up when I was at the Navy base. Said he would call my cell tonight when he got in to make arrangements. I can’t believe that Islamyah would provoke us by shooting his plane down.”

“Maybe they didn’t. You heard ABC just now. We don’t know yet,” Kate said, holding out a glass. “Bloody Mary?”

“No, thanks, I’ll take a Virgin Mary. Had enough last night. I’m pretty down. I was also supposed to meet our mutual friend Brian Douglas last night and he no-showed.”

“Okay, you want to stay sober. That’s fine,” she said, sitting down at her desk. “So, where is my mysterious Mr. Douglas? He’s got me worried. No, he wouldn’t like that. He’s got me a little concerned.”

“Dunno,” Rusty said, looking into the ice cubes. He did know, or at least he knew where he went, maybe not where he was now. But Brian did not tell Kate and I am not about to, he thought. He had meant to ask Brian when he got back just what his relationship with Kate was.

Trying to change the subject quickly, he said, “You heard what Conrad just said. He will respond. Not the President. Not America. Him.” Rusty took off his coat and sat down at the desk opposite her. “Look, Kate. I’ve been thinking. Conrad is the problem. He’s the one demonizing Islamyah. Scaring them with some big exercise off Egypt. Scaring Washington into thinking the missiles they got from China have nukes on them. He’s gonna get us into a war again out here real soon, and maybe with China, too, by the time he’s done. Unless somebody stops him.”

“Really? Now what’s he doing with China?” Kate said, grabbing her notepad.

MacIntyre placed his hand on top of the pad. “Stop being a reporter for once and work with me here.” Delmarco gave him a foul look. “Okay, Kate, you have to be a reporter? Go get some dirt on Conrad, so he’s not Mr. Clean on a white charger, saving America. It may be the only way we can stop him.”

“You do play dirty, little boy,” Delmarco said, crossing her legs.

“So do they. He’s got FBI agents snooping around about some charge that I told a Senator something he wasn’t cleared for. They may even know about my meeting with Ahmed. Probably charge me with giving classified information to Islamyah.”

“What? Rusty, what are you talking about? How do they know about that, and besides what’s wrong with you meeting with a source in Islamyah? You are an intelligence officer, after all. It’s your job,” Delmarco said in her irate reporter voice.

“No it’s not. I’m head of an analysis unit. I am out here to learn, not to go skulking about, developing agent sources of my own. I am out of my depth, as well as out of my swimming lane.” Rusty sounded tired. “Conrad could intentionally misconstrue it. Sometimes, I think he would do anything to roll over people who disagree with him.”

Kate picked up her notepad again and opened it. “Okay, so what’s the dirt on him?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe al Saud money and his buyout company. Maybe the exiled royals and the Secretary buying support on the Hill. I have a well-placed friend on the Hill who may know more. He wouldn’t tell me everything before, but I think I may know enough now to persuade him to talk to you, persuade him that we need to throw a little sand in the gears.” Rusty got up, walked over to the makeshift bar and added a shot of vodka to his tomato juice. “Maybe throw a little mud.”

“I said I love it when you play dirty,” Delmarco smirked and pointed her pen at him.

“Don’t start,” MacIntyre said emphatically, returning and grabbing the pen away.

“All business. All right,” she replied. “I can leave for Washington late tonight. New York has wanted me back for consultations for a month now. I just hope I don’t miss the action out here while I’m gone.”

“I can’t promise you that.” MacIntyre took a pen and held it up to his jacket. “Bada-bing!” he exclaimed, and the pen appeared to penetrate the jacket, half of it coming out the other side.

“You nut. Why put a hole in your coat?” Kate laughed. He handed her the coat. There was no hole in it. She kept laughing.

“I just thought we needed something to cheer us up, and magic tricks almost always do,” he said, digging in his coat pocket for the vibrating BlackBerry. “Who the hell is calling me?” MacIntyre put the device to his ear and clicked to answer. “Hello?…Well, yes, it’s great to hear from you, but have you been listening to the news?… How?…Here, in Dubai? Lunch at the Four Seasons?…I look forward to meeting you, too.” He put the BlackBerry down and looked blankly at Kate, shaking his head.

“What’s the matter? What was that?” she asked.

MacIntyre didn’t answer right away, still stunned by the call. Then he picked up her notepad and handed it to her. “Well, I guess you would say that was an exclusive for the New York Journal. How ’bout something like ‘Admiral Bradley Adams, Commander of the Fifth Fleet, arrived this morning at Dubai International Airport on a commercial flight from Turkey. It was earlier thought that Adams was on board a Navy aircraft that crashed off Kuwait, but it has now been learned that Adams sent the aircraft on without him when he received a last-minute invitation to visit the Turkish navy. The admiral learned of his reported demise upon landing in Dubai.’ ”

“Wow!” Kate yelled. “And we’re going to meet him for lunch?”

“No. I am. You are going to get ready to go back to the States tonight, remember?” He looked up at the eight channels of news on the screens above. “We have a helluva lot of work to do if we’re going to stop Conrad from doing something that could set the whole Arabian peninsula alight.”

We get so many people from Monash University at this time of the year, Professor,” the ticket agent said. “Here we go. Seat 4B. It’s a window, as requested. We try to accommodate all the requests from the Melbourne travel agency, since we do so much business with them now. Any luggage?”

“Well, we have quite the exchange program with Kish University. No, the luggage was shipped ahead, since I will be there the entire semester. Quite a lot to carry. May I say that your English is most excellent. Thank you so much,” Professor Sam Wallingford said, taking the ticket for the Kish Air flight from the little airport outside of Tehran to the resort island in the Gulf.

They were boarding when he got to the gate, the only gate. It was an ancient thirty-seat Fokker 50, gaily decked out in the colorful Kish Air livery. Since it was an internal flight to the island of Kish, the security man had barely looked at the Australian passport with Iranian visa and entry stamp before waving him along. If he even had a “wanted” list of passports, he didn’t check it. It was nothing like what would have happened at Imam Khomeini International, but in a nod to capitalism, Kish Air had moved its flights to the less crowded, less expensive Tappeh. Tappeh had been an air force base and then closed altogether for a year before reopening for internal flights by smaller airlines.

Sitting in the Fokker waiting to take off, Brian Douglas as Sam Wallingford replayed the tapes of the morning in his head. What had happened to Soheil? Despite his assurance that he was not under suspicion, he must have known that he was. The unplugged phone, the radio, the drapes, the rifle. And he had met with Douglas anyway. Given him the gold. It was Soheil’s own ministry security people who suspected something. Maybe they had caught on to the fact that he had downloaded the documents off the ministry intranet. They had sent only two officers to question Soheil. And Soheil had been ready for them, with the hunting rifle. After shooting both, he had taken one of their pistols and killed himself. And now the other officer’s pistol was at the bottom of a storm drain, not at Soheil’s. He hadn’t really needed it; he should have left it at the house. If he had used his hand to hit the Mercedes man, rather than the gun, the man might be unconscious instead of dead in the boot of his own car in a yard down the road from the little airport. He had never killed an innocent man before. He had struck too hard, from the heartpumping rush of fleeing. It was a rookie move. He hated himself for it.

The Fokker began to taxi. It would be over two hours to Kish Island. Two hours in which the police might be notified of the missing man with the Mercedes. Might find the Mercedes, despite where it was parked, despite the mud on the tag number. Might realize that the little airport down the road now had flights to the Kish Island resort in the Gulf. Might call ahead to the Customs or VEVAK at Kish.

He looked down at the slight tear in the lining of the old suit jacket. He had thought it had been a risk to put the Australian identity in the lining, silly to have alternative ways to get out of the country. But Pamela had been right, as always. He hoped she was right about the next bit, too.

As the plane lifted off, he thought of what Bowers would be doing: taking Simon Manley’s things out of the hotel room. Paying for Manley as well as himself at the checkout. Flying out on the Joburg run about now. Would their database at Khomeini Airport Customs link Bowers’s visa to Manley’s? Where is Mr. Manley? Traveling up to Shiraz for a day.

Brian Douglas closed his eyes, but could not sleep on the bumpy flight over the mountains. His heart was still pumping. His mind was still racing. Poor man in the Mercedes. Nothing justified it. But what he had on the flash drive in his sock was at least worth Douglas’s risking his own life by running about in the field, solo, overage, undercover. No one else could have gotten it. Soheil and his father would not have trusted anyone else. What if the father had not been at the newsstand? Douglas would have come home empty-handed and looked the fool. But the father had been there, and so far it was working. Very messy, but working. Thank God Pamela had insisted on an emergency egress plan being in place.

The jolt of the landing woke him. So he had gotten some rest. His bones ached. The terminal was bigger than he would have expected and far more modern. He tried to remember the diagram from Pamela’s briefings. There was the men’s room. His watch said 11:40. They were ten minutes early. Would the Omani be there yet?

He went to the last stall and pushed on the door. “Oh, so sorry, it wasn’t locked, you see, I…” The Omani, with his pants around his ankles, jabbered back at him in Arabic. The Omani had been there early and had the papers in his hand. The exchange of papers had taken place in three seconds. Brian Douglas went in to the next stall. The papers looked good. A New Zealand passport, with a Kish exit stamp. Ticket on Hormuz Airlines, boarding in a few minutes for Sharjah. Someone had taken some baksheesh along the way, but that was never a problem in Iran.

Nor would you have found another airport in Iran where international arriving passengers could mix with those about to leave the country, but this was Kish. Tehran had allowed it to be a free trade zone, an international tourist destination. The new high-rise hotels on the beach made it look like Dubai. Everything was a little bit more lax here. China had Hong Kong. Iran had Kish, a permeable membrane, a place where needed commerce was permitted, a place where people looked the other way.

He got in line to board. It was some sort of Ilyushin that looked as though it might have been sold off from Aeroflot. He was two people away from going through the gate when he heard the public address system in Farsi: “Valnford, Professor Valnford. Please see a police or customs officer.” His stomach contracted. Had the Omani bungled? But he was not Samuel Wallingford. Not now. He was the New Zealander Avery Dalton. Smile at the ticket taker. Climb the stair up into the old Ilyushin.

The plane had no sooner taken off than it was landing. He feared it had turned around and gone back to Kish at the call of the police or customs officer. But no, this was a smaller airport and this was not an island. Bump. Landing like a ton of bricks. No this was not Iran again, this was Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. And so the sign said over the customs and immigration booths. Welcome to the United Arab Emirates.

“You will have to come with me, Mr. Avery,” the immigration officer was saying. He had run the passport under an optical scanner.

“What? It’s Dalton. Mr. Dalton. Avery is the first name, you see,” he stuttered.

“We have no record of this entry visa having been issued. It is not in the database. It will just be a moment. This way, please.”

The door had one-way glass and a sign that said “Police” in English and Arabic. Inside, however, it was bright and comfortable. “Please have a seat, sir.”

“Might I use the phone for a local call? Maybe I can clear this up. Thank you so much.” He froze for a moment, trying to recall the number. Then it came to him.

“British Consulate, Dubai,” the woman seemed to sing in a rising lilt on the other end.

“Exchanges Office, please,” Avery/Wallingford/Dalton/Manley/ Simon managed to get out.

“Exchanges Office. May I help you?” the South London — accented man grunted.

“It’s Brian Douglas. I am from Bath,” he said using the station’s own clear code for Require Assistance. “I am with the customs or the immigration police at the Sharjah Airport. Some problem with my papers.”

There was a brief pause on the other end as the officer recalled what being from Bath meant, and then as he realized that the head of station for the entire Gulf was not in Bahrain but twenty minutes down the highway from Dubai, being held. “We will be right there to pick you up, sir, and will call the local service boys in parallel.”

It was Avery or someone who had called, but Brian Douglas who hung up the phone. He turned to the young immigration official and said in Arabic, “Might I have a cup of hot tea?”