Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5)

by George Wallace

  Talbot paused to take another drink of his coffee, but also to allow Ward time to digest all that he had just heard. And, most likely, Ward realized, to gauge the American’s reaction to it.

  “That much we had already gathered. We know that there is a certifiable...as you call him...a nut case on the loose. One with more of a following and considerably more financial and military resources than even Osama bin Laden, who managed to create considerable mayhem. Yes, we are aware of the threat. But we are also aware that you and Mossad are aware that we are aware. There must be more than that to get Mossad’s pantyhose all in a knot, to reach out to us and ask us for help.”

  Talbot carefully placed his cup in the small saucer and again looked Ward directly in the eye. Suddenly, it seemed as if they were the only two in the coffee shop.

  “Admiral, we have reason to believe that this...this nut case...is very near to getting access, or at least control of, nuclear weapons, as well as the means to deploy them in a most destructive and deadly manner. And we have no doubt he will use them to do what he feels compelled to do. No matter how many people may die in the process.”

  26

  Arman Dirbaz was sitting at a small table next to the fuel cells in the after part of the cramped engine room on the Iranian Navy submarine Boz-Manand when a sudden thought occurred to him. His beloved boat was, in fact, no longer part of the Iranian Navy. The zealots from the Revolutionary Guard Navy had stolen her. They had also kidnapped him as insurance, just to make sure the untested submarine would function as it was designed. Despite his anger and frustration, the professional engineer did not think of questioning his duty for his country, however distasteful his overlords might be. Such disloyalty was not a part of Dirbaz’s makeup.

  Sea trials had been remarkably trouble-free but for a few nagging issues with temperatures in the fuel cells. He had never seen a boat operate so perfectly on its initial trials. That was a testament to the skill and experience of the Russians, both in design and implementation. However, the idea of heading directly out on a combat patrol in such a sophisticated war machine after so little testing and with the quick repairs accomplished after the attack was ludicrous. So was cruising with such an inexperienced crew. It was foolhardiness bordering on suicidal.

  The engineer was still sitting there, examining a piece of machinery he had replaced before the takeover, checking for any hints of wear and tear and potential failure. He had grease up to his elbows when Colonel Sayyed Abdul-Qadir Gilani, the martinet that the RGN had placed in command of the Boz-Manand, found Dirbaz tucked back in his normal corner.

  “Excellent work, Doktor. I congratulate you. You have built a remarkable submarine. Now I am pleased to inform you that you will remain aboard for the balance of our voyage. You will have the very rare opportunity to help us use this ship in the service of Allah.” Colonel Gilani’s smooth words belied his expression of distaste at the engineer’s greasy coveralls and oily hands. The officer’s uniform was immaculate, freshly pressed. “Your duties here will be very simple. We will stay hidden out here on station until Nabiin tells us that it is time to act. Then we will have the holy honor of ushering in the Yawm al-Qiyamah. Your only duty is to ensure that this submarine is ready at a minute’s notice to fulfill our destiny.”

  The RGN colonel spun on his heel and briskly marched out of the engine room. The engineer stared after him in disbelief.

  For the first time in his long and honorable career, Arman Dirbaz felt a twinge of hesitancy, a sliver of doubt that this time he might not be so willing to do as he was ordered by a superior.

  Ψ

  The George Mason glided through the deep a thousand yards astern of and three hundred feet below the Boz-Manand. Brian Edwards and Jackson Biddle were using every trick they could think of to maintain sonar contact on what had proven to be a very quiet Iranian submarine. Even at this very short range there was just the barest trace of a contact. If they did not know for sure that the Boz-Manand was out there, they could very easily have dismissed what they were seeing as biologics.

  “Damn, that bastard is one quiet canoe,” Biddle mumbled under his breath. “Any quieter and fish would bump into it. Do we dare move any closer?”

  Edwards, standing next to his shorter XO, had hunched over to look at the same screen.

  “We will if we have to. Losing her is not an option. She’s up to no good. I’m pretty sure we have depth separation, as long as that son of a bitch doesn’t suddenly get an urge to go deep.”

  They were both looking over the shoulder of the passive broadband sonar operator, ST1(SS) Joshua Hannon. The experienced sonar operator looked up, frowning, and said, “Skipper, respectfully, I can do my job a lot better without you two trying to share my screen with me. This guy is hard enough to track as it is. He gets any quieter, we’re going to have to go active on him if we want to hold contact.”

  Edwards nodded and stepped away, rubbing his chin. He signaled for Biddle to join him at the command console in the center of the control room.

  “Hannon may have something there,” he muttered to his second in command. Biddle started to object, but Edwards held up his hand. There was a time when he might have resented any sign of an opposing viewpoint from his executive officer. Or anyone else. But Edwards had learned much while XO under the mentorship of his previous skipper, Joe Glass.

  “Hear me out, XO. Then let’s noodle the idea for a while. I figure that boat is behaving like a typical boomer...slow, straight, steady, and shallow.” Edwards chuckled. “I kinda like that, ‘The Four S’s.’ ‘Boomer tactics: Follow the four S’s.’ Think I’ll copyright it.”

  The CO bent over to punch some buttons on the command console, ignoring his executive officer’s odd expression. The display immediately changed to show a silhouette of the George Mason and a series of ray traces emanating from the sail.

  “That’s the under-ice sonar,” Biddle observed. “We’re pretty far from needing to surface through the ice.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Edwards shot back. “But it’s an upward looking, high-frequency, low-power active sonar. That’s exactly what we need right now. I’m thinking we mosey down to five hundred feet or so and slip in a little closer. Our last BT showed the water is isothermal around here, so we don’t have to worry about any layer throwing a kink in our game.”

  Water temperature in the area was very consistent. Sharp differences that could deflect the sonar signal in a way that might be heard by the Iranian sub should not be a problem.

  “Makes good sense,” Biddle said with a quick grin. Now he understood. “We stay passive as long as we can, but if we lose passive contact, we hit him with the under-ice in active. Damn good backup if we need it.”

  “Yep, and I’m betting that their active detection system, if they even have one, won’t alarm on the under-ice frequency. If we have to use it and if it works, they’ll be teaching this stuff to the next class at New London.” Edwards winked. “Let’s get the team briefed and the system lined up.”

  Edwards had barely finished when Hannon shouted, “Lost Sierra One-Four-Six. Loss of broadband contact on the Boz-Manand.”

  Edwards turned to the officer of the deck and ordered, “Mr. Jennings, make your depth five hundred feet. Close the last known position of Boz-Manand. Line up the under-ice sonar for active operation, minimum power.”

  The look on the OOD’s face was priceless. Under-ice sonar?

  George Mason’s downward tilt was barely perceptible as the big submarine slipped a hundred feet deeper into the inky darkness and pointed toward where the Iranian submarine had been. Aston Jennings, the officer of the deck, carefully watched the fire-control-generated solution as they closed in.

  “Generated slant range nine hundred yards,” he called out.

  Hannon’s answer was almost instantaneous: “No sonar contact.”

  “Generated slant range eight hundred yards,” Jennings called out.

  “No sonar contact.”

  “Generated
slant range seven hundred yards.”

  “No sonar contact.”

  “Under-ice sonar lined up for active, min power,” Master Chief Oshley reported, his fingers dancing over the keyboard as the under-ice display flickered up on the command monitor screen. It was the first time any of them had seen the data from the specialized sonar system since sea trials and a brief test or two.

  “Go active, single pulse,” Brian Edwards ordered. The modulated FM waveform really could not be called a ping. It was instead a pulse train designed to detect and picture hanging ice keels, obstructions certainly to be avoided when maneuvering beneath the polar ice pack.

  “Going active,” Oshley answered.

  Everyone in the crowded control room held his breath as he watched the pulse train display on the large-screen monitor. Then the return image started to form.

  “Possible return, bearing one-nine-two, slant range eight hundred yards,” Oshley reported. “Return very weak.”

  Jennings checked the generated fire control solution on the Boz-Manand.

  “Generated bearing one-eight-five, range six hundred,” he called out.

  “Drop ship’s speed to match generated speed,” Edwards ordered. “Master Chief, try another pulse.”

  Jennings ordered, “Pilot, make your speed four knots.”

  The second pulse generated out on the command display and then a second later the return started to form.

  “Definite return!” Master Chief Oshley called out, “Bearing one-nine-two, range eight hundred.”

  “Looks like the plan worked, Skipper,” Biddle said as the two stepped back from the display. “So far no reaction from the contact, either.”

  “Damn good thing.” Edwards wiped beads of sweat from his brow. “I sure didn’t want to lose him. That clearly was not an option. And I sure didn’t want to use the big active sonar. That would have rung his bell even without him having to use his sonar receiver. And that might’ve caused him to do something rash.”

  The skipper turned to his officer of the deck. “Mr. Jennings, conduct an active pulse on the contact every two minutes. Randomize the pulses as much as possible. Put your Weps hat on and work out a lost-contact procedure so that we have a search plan ready to go if that SOB gives us the slip again. And get a sonarman up here to relieve the COB on the under-ice. We will not lose this bastard.”

  Ψ

  Five hundred miles south and west of the George Mason, Joe Glass had maneuvered Toledo to a position three thousand yards aft of the Chinese PLAN submarine. After their little dust-up with this sub, the Toledo was on a war footing. The torpedoes in all tubes were fully ready and the outer doors on tubes one and two were open, set to hurl explosive death in the direction of the other submarine. Glass chalked up the last time to collateral damage; he just happened to be in the way when the crazy Chinese skipper decided to shoot. But Glass was determined that if there was a next time—if the Chinese skipper so much as farted—he would stick an ADCAP up his ass.

  Standing in the forward starboard corner of the control room, Glass could watch both the section tracking party maintaining the fire control solution on Sierra Five-Five—the Chinese sub—as well as the sonar team as they milked every erg of acoustic energy they could gather.

  Master Chief Zillich stepped to the door, shaking his head. He was obviously frustrated.

  “This guy is tough as shoe leather. We’re only getting hints and sniffs on broadband. Thank goodness his housekeeping is a little sloppy. We’re getting transients often enough to keep us on target so far.”

  “Looks like he’s just putzing down the coast,” Glass said with a nod. “As long as he stays on AIP, he’s going to be tough. Let’s hope he keeps up the bad housekeeping.”

  AIP—air independent propulsion—was new, super-quiet propulsion technology that could be employed for brief periods of time by submerged submarines, as long as they kept the power demand low.

  Zillich smiled. “Good thing we have the TB-34 out. We’re tracking a pretty solid fifty-five hertz tonal on narrow band. I’d guess it’s a pump that needs some maintenance on a bearing. Makes a damn fine beacon.”

  Glass suddenly sensed more than heard activity behind him. He turned to see LTjg Bob Ronson working furiously at the fire control station. Zillich disappeared back into the sonar shack and pressed his headphones to his ears.

  “Possible contact zig,” Ronson called out. “Bearing rate falling.” Seconds later he added, “Down shift in received frequency. Zig away.”

  The Chinese vessel was making a course change.

  Jerry Perez, the on-watch officer of the deck, looked over Ronson’s shoulder. “Confirmed contact zig. Zig away. Resume tracking.”

  Perez looked around for a moment, confirming that his team was alert, each man doing what he was supposed to. Then he announced, “Steady course and speed. Let’s get a leg on this guy and see what he’s up to.”

  Perez stood next to Glass but kept his gaze firmly on the fire control solution.

  “What you thinking, OOD?”

  “Skipper, it looks like Sierra Five-Five turned away and slowed. Best solution holds him at course two-two-five, speed two, range three-five hundred. He’s going nowhere fast.”

  Joe Glass flipped through the screens on the control room sonar display to confirm what Perez was saying.

  “Looks about right. Let’s stay broad to him and deep in his baffles for a few more minutes. Let the range generate out a bit while you firm up the solution, but do not lose contact. You are over-leading him right now, so you have a max cross-bearing range. Use that.”

  Perez studied the line-of-sight picture and nodded.

  “Yep, see that. I’d say we’ll need to maneuver in about ten minutes. I’ll come back around to a lagging line-of-sight. That will give me a cross-bearing minimum range to play with.”

  Glass smiled. It was always nice to see training in practice. The Toledo had just begun a complicated new dance with her “partner,” and it was important that the other submarine did not even suspect that the waltz was taking place.

  “Good. I’m going down to the wardroom for a cup of coffee. Call me if anything comes up. I can’t wait to see what this joker is up to.”

  27

  The Chinese battlegroup steamed through the pitch-black night in their typical loose diamond formation, clearly confident there was no threat imminent but certain that if anything should pop up out there, they were prepared to defeat it. The Hohhot, a Luyang III air warfare destroyer, sailed in the lead, a good two thousand meters ahead of the group’s flag ship, the spanking-new landing helicopter dock ship Sin Tzu. The Renhai, a brand-new guided missile cruiser, steamed about the same distance astern of the Sin Tzu. The Zaozhuang, one of two Jiankau II-class frigates, was on station to the starboard while her sister, the Nantong, was to the port, each also about two thousand meters away. The fast combat store ship Chagan Lake stayed close to the flag ship.

  The night was peaceful, but the morning promised much action, mostly delivered by the battlegroup and with little or no retaliation expected. It would be time for revenge. Time to extract a measure of blood for the insult and injury that these savage goatherds had caused with their foolish attacks on assets of the People’s Republic of China. Finally, after much show, it was time to demonstrate the awful raw power available to the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The planning was complete. The thirty CJ-10 land attack cruise missiles were nestled snuggly in the Renhai’s VLS launchers, just waiting for their targets and launch orders. Fifteen Shenyang FC-31 stealth fighters, looking suspiciously similar to the USA’s F-35B planes, sat on the Sin Tzu’s flight deck, fully fueled and heavy with bombs, bullets, and missiles. The proper amount of information and indoctrination had been shared with each crewmember on every one of the vessels, all to ensure attention to detail and the proper amount of patriotic fervor. Everything was in place to deliver a devastating attack.

  The mid-watch radar operator monitoring the Dragon Eye phased-arr
ay radar on the Type 52D destroyer Hohhot was the first to see the odd smudges suddenly muddy the edge of his display. He, however, had no idea what he was looking at. He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. It had been a long, boring, uneventful watch. His relief was probably only minutes away. But the pixelated blotch was still there. The operator frowned. It was now a wavy dark line, depicting something low down on the horizon, partially hidden in the backscatter and ground clutter from Socotra Island, which lay a few dozen kilometers to their southeast. The flickering return stretched across several kilometers but seemed to be less than a meter tall. And it was moving, but slowly. Doppler showed the line was flowing toward them at about sixty kilometers per hour. But the range was twenty kilometers.

  The operator scratched his chin as he tried to deduce what he was seeing. Birds? A sandstorm? A swarm of locusts? Or simply a system fault? He just did not know. And at this point, he was hesitant to notify anyone and be reprimanded for distracting from preparations for their upcoming mission.

  A quick check on the system diagnostics drop-down menu showed everything was nominal with the sophisticated equipment. A couple of dozen S-band transceivers were out of service, as was typical, but the array had several thousand more on each face. Target recognition algorithms were functioning normally, but they were coming up blank.

  And so was the young operator. This blotch on his display was unlike any contact he had ever seen.

  It took him a full five minutes to finally get up the nerve to alert his supervisor. Then the supervisor spent another two minutes yelling at the young radar operator while trying to figure out for himself what was happening. And deciding if he would risk taking it higher up the chain of command. By the time the Hohhot’s captain was awakened, the line of whatever it was had approached to about ten kilometers out. Now it had resolved into individual targets. Thousands of them. Still low down. Still hugging the wavetops.