Deep Shadow

by Nick Sullivan

  “Well? What do you think?” asked Zougam, anticipation in his voice.

  “I think,” Samarkandi began, looking at a panel of gauges, “that everything is close to nominal. But I need a few more minutes to be sure.” He headed back to the engine room.

  The hijacked narco sub, the Zil, was just below the surface near the southern tip of Bonaire. They had completed the fifty-mile run from the Venezuelan coast at a variety of speeds and depths, Samarkandi carefully evaluating their performance as they went.

  “Mohammed, any boat traffic?” Zougam asked.

  The Venezuelan used a joystick to rotate the periscope, looking at the viewscreen. Though Samarkandi and Popov had been tempted to give the sub an old-style periscope where you pressed your face into it, nowadays it was much cheaper to use a camera lens and corresponding vidscreen. “There is a single cargo ship, far to the north. Heading into port, I think.”

  “Good.”

  Samarkandi returned from the engine room and tossed a roll of yellow duct tape to Sayyid. “There are a few minor leaks back there. Tape them securely, please.” Sayyid headed aft and Rachid followed. The two seemed to do everything together. Fine with me, Samarkandi thought. He checked the GPS screen to reconfirm their location before turning to his leader.

  “Hamid, please tell me we are functional.” Zougam said, an expectant look on his face.

  “The leaks are minor, nothing I haven’t dealt with a hundred times on Soviet submarines. Oil pressure is good, and the closed-circuit diesel system is performing within normal parameters. We were not able to attain my desired underwater top speed of fifteen knots, but fourteen knots is still exceptional for a vessel such as this. Running solely on batteries, we can reach five knots. I was correct that our test depth of three hundred might be a bit ambitious. We should try to stay between one hundred and two hundred feet, though we can go quite a bit lower in the unlikely event that we are detected while at depth. All systems are operating very quietly and only a dedicated anti-submarine unit would be able to locate us—and even then, we could make it very difficult for them. Finally, I have fixed the sonar software glitch—as is often the case, a reboot solved the problem.”

  Zougam grinned broadly. “Excellent. What about our range?”

  “We’ll need to run longer for me to correctly gauge our fuel consumption, but I believe the sub’s range will be as designed. As long as we can run on the surface at night, we will have no problem reaching anywhere in the Caribbean.”

  “How far can we go if we have to remain underwater on battery power alone?”

  Samarkandi chewed on his lip, running a few equations in his head. “It is difficult to say for sure without actually testing the batteries at depth, but I would say, best case, one hundred miles. Worst, fifty.”

  “Very well. Are we ready to make the run to Isla Aves de Sotavento? My men should have secured the lighthouse complex there by now. Do we need to wait for Rachid and Sayyid to finish?”

  “No need. As I said, the leaks are minor.” Samarkandi took the wheel and engaged the engines. He had trained the others in many of the submarine’s systems but he and Popov had designed the submersible in such a way that a single operator could, in a pinch, control everything. He turned the wheel to the right, angling northeast. “I want to bring the Zil in close to the reef system at the southern tip of the island.”

  Zougam looked uncomfortable. “Is that wise?”

  “I need to calibrate the sonar. A continuous structure will provide us the best opportunity. Do not worry, I researched this stretch of reef extensively.” Samarkandi set the sonar range to three hundred feet and engaged the stern planes, beginning a slow descent. After a moment, he initiated a partial purge of the ballast tanks, bringing the sub down to fifty feet. “Mr. Bua, put those headphones on, please?”

  The Trinidadian did so, sitting at a small desk off to the side. “What am I lis’ning for?”

  “Hopefully, not much. There is no boat traffic, but I want to test our passive sonar. It is the most… ‘cobbled together’ of our equipment. I want you to send out an active ping and please let me know if you hear it. Begin.”

  Lenox Bua had been trained to man the sonar station and he pressed the button on the side of his little console. The submarine sent out a sharp, double burst of sound. “I hear it!” Lenox said excitedly.

  Samarkandi looked at the small sonar readout he had installed at his helm station. There was another at the Trinidadian’s sonar station but the Uzbek wanted to be sure the skipper would be able to see any obstacles himself. The burst of active sonar reached out and touched the reef structure around them and then rebounded, being picked up by the passive sonar when the pulse returned. In moments, the computer drew a rudimentary three-dimensional map of their surroundings. Samarkandi was pleased. The sonar on the narco sub was composed of several elements from civilian navigation equipment—the pulses it could generate weren’t powerful enough to target distant objects the way a true military sonar could, but it would more than suffice to navigate the shallow waters of a bay or a busy port.

  “Again please.”

  A second pulse went out and the details on the digital map seemed to sharpen.

  “Good. Let us proceed.” Samarkandi increased speed and purged the ballast tanks further, slowly heading toward the bottom, which was about a hundred feet below.

  “Wait! I hear someting!” Lenox called out.

  Samarkandi frowned. Maybe a boat had approached. “Does it sound like an engine?” he asked.

  “No, suh. It sound like… metal banging.”

  Shit. Something might have broken loose. He throttled the engines back to six knots and extended his hand to Lenox. “Give me the headphones.”

  The Trinidadian handed them over—Samarkandi had insisted on an extremely long cord that could reach the helm. He put them on and pressed them to his ears. There it was, a series of short metallic sounds. “That’s not coming from us,” he said.

  “What is it?” Zougam asked.

  Samarkandi listened intently but whatever it was had stopped. The sound was familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. “I don’t know, but it’s gone now.” He handed the headphones back to Bua. “Let me know if you hear it again.” He looked to Zougam. “We may proceed to the rendezvous. Can you tell me what our ultimate objective is?”

  Zougam stared at the floor a moment before nodding. “Very well.” He went over to one of several industrial buckets of lithium hydroxide sitting in a corner. Lifting the lid, he dug into the white powder and extracted a roll of maps in a plastic bag before resealing the bucket.

  Well, I suppose you can’t be a successful terrorist leader without a healthy dose of paranoia, Samarkandi thought.

  Zougam opened the bag and selected one of the maps. Unrolling it and placing it on the side of the helm station, he tapped a finger on a spot that was marked with a red “X”.

  “There. Charlotte Amalie, the capital of Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.”

  Samarkandi looked up from the map at Sulayman Zougam, who smiled.

  “The cruise ship piers,” Zougam said. “If all goes according to schedule, we will arrive when there are several in harbor, including one of the largest ever built. That one alone will be packed with over 5,000 passengers, most of them Americans, stuffing their faces with lobster and piña coladas. And with the unwitting Venezuelan Navy helping us, we will stay undetected until we reach our target.”

  “Holy shit holy shit holy shit…” Emily gasped when her head broke the surface and she spit the regulator from her mouth.

  “Em, you okay?” Boone put a little air in his BCD vest and swam over to her.

  “Hells yeah, mate! You?”

  “A little amped, but I’m good. You get some shots?”

  “I think so! Let’s get to shore, yeah?”

  The two of them swam to the edge of t
he ironshore. Boone pitched his fins up onto the beach and did the same with Emily’s. Taking a few steps in, he planted his neoprene booties on a flat outcropping and reached back for her. “M’lady.”

  Emily adopted an aristocratic accent, pitching herself into a warbling falsetto. “Oh, thank you, my good man.” She took his hand in a firm grip and the two of them negotiated the treacherous surface, reaching the beach without incident.

  Swiftly ditching their gear, they hunched over her camera, checking the images. The sun was lower in the sky but still bright, so Boone grabbed one of his fins to give the camera viewscreen some shade, reducing the glare.

  “I can’t believe I needed to signal you,” he said. “Didn’t you hear those high-pitched noises?”

  “I did hear them but I was half under a coral head, lining up the perfect… there, see?”

  On the viewscreen was a beautifully framed juvie drum. On any other dive, that would have been the pic-of-the-day, but another button-press and there it was! There were several decent shots but because they were taken from a distance, they weren’t exactly magazine-quality. Still, it was clear what they were looking at. A submarine.

  “Look at this thick rope running along the hull here,” Boone said, pointing at a spot on the viewscreen. “That’s not exactly something you’d expect on some sleek military sub.”

  “Doesn’t Aruba have a tourist submarine?”

  “Yeah, an Atlantis sub. I rode one in Cozumel. But this ain’t that, those Atlantis subs have a bunch of windows on the side and they’re really slow. This thing was booking. Plus, Aruba is over a hundred miles away—I doubt a tourism sub could go more than a few miles. And those high pings—that must’ve been sonar.”

  Emily zoomed in on an image. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like it’s painted in camouflage.”

  Boone looked closely. “Yeah. Light blue, dark blue. Maybe some green and brown.” He straightened up and looked to the south. He couldn’t see Venezuela from Bonaire, but he knew it was just fifty miles away, its lengthy coastline stretching far to the east and west. “I think I know what this is.”

  “A narco sub?” Emily asked. They were traveling back to town in the jeep, eyes on the lookout for donkeys as Emily pushed the speed limit. Boone had asked for a few minutes to think as they gathered up their gear from the beach and once they were rolling he told Emily his hunch. She glanced over at him. “What the heck is a narco sub?”

  “A submarine for smuggling narcotics,” he replied. “I read about them in a news story online. Cartels have been using semi-submersibles to sneak drugs around the Caribbean for a while—usually just flat boats with most of their hull underwater—but recently, they found a full-fledged submarine in a jungle river. The cartels have a lot of money and Venezuela has a lot of jungle rivers. Makes sense that’s what we saw.”

  “Wow. Okay, so, do we call the Coast Guard?”

  “No, the police. The Coast Guard is based in Curaçao. We could call on the VHF back at the dive shop, but I think the police may want to handle it.”

  Twenty minutes later they pulled into the politiebureau, the police station, next to the Kralendijk Stadium. The desk sergeant on duty at the front desk seemed confused when they explained what they had seen.

  “So… you want to report a submarine?”

  “We think maybe it’s a drug smuggling submarine,” Boone said.

  “A narco sub!” Emily added. She held up her camera, viewscreen facing the man.

  The policeman stared. “Umm… I’m not sure what to fill out…” He turned to the back of the office. “Henry! Get up here.”

  A portly detective joined him and after the sergeant related Boone and Emily’s account, they spoke in low tones. Finally, Henry took out his cellphone and took a photo of the image on Emily’s camera. “I’m gonna call the DCCG. Where you say you see this?”

  “Off the southern tip of the island. Willemstoren Lighthouse. Pretty close in to the reef. About seventy feet deep, going deeper as it went to the east.”

  The detective scribbled on a Post-it as Boone talked. “All right. Wait here, please.” He headed back to his office to call the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard.

  The desk sergeant was about to sit back down but he suddenly spoke. “Wait a minute. I know you. You the karate man who helped out old Martin.”

  Boone smiled and shrugged. “I think Martin could’ve handled that guy—I just figured I’d give him a hand so he could get back to cooking.”

  “The man had a knife. My cousin say you dropped him with one kick.”

  “The guy was pretty drunk… I just helped him find the floor.”

  The man had actually been blasted out of his mind on something far more potent than booze and raving incoherently at a girl he was with. He had shoved Martin Petersen to the ground when the old man tried to intervene in the dispute in front of his Washington Snackbaai “snack”. Boone had been a few feet away and when the knife came out he took a couple ginga steps to close the distance, drawing the attacker’s attention. The fluid, bouncing movements confused the enraged man and the moment he thrust his knife at Boone, the young divemaster dodged to the side and struck, planting an anchoring hand on the ground and spinning a textbook Meia-Lua de compasso kick into the man’s head. The compass half-moon kick was considered the “king of kicks” in capoeira, and the heel of Boone’s foot slammed against the attacker’s temple, knocking him out instantly. The knife fell into the dust of the dirt road, and the man crashed onto a plastic table in front of the snack. A police patrol car from Kralendijk had arrived twenty minutes later and everyone present gave their statements. Martin made it very clear that Boone had prevented bloodshed, and the policemen took the unconscious man to the hospital. Boone drank for free that night.

  “Martin was always a good friend to my father, God rest his soul,” the desk sergeant continued. “Thank you for helping him.”

  “Hey, without Martin, who would make me my breakfast pastechis?”

  The sergeant laughed. “That man can cook the krioyo, that’s for sure. He puts something in his funchi that makes it the best on the island.”

  Boone couldn’t agree more. Funchi was a cornmeal mush, kind of like polenta, and was a ubiquitous side dish on the island, often quite plain. Martin threw in some extra spices and finely diced peppers and onions that made it a meal in itself.

  While they waited for Henry to return, Boone noticed Emily looking at him intently. “What?”

  “You went after a guy with a knife? Why didn’t I hear about this?”

  Boone shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Not really something to brag about.”

  “Are you kidding, that’s badass!”

  “I fractured his skull.”

  Emily’s grin melted off her face. “Oh.”

  “I could’ve dealt with him a dozen other ways, but I just… I don’t know, I saw the knife and went for the most brutal…” he trailed off.

  Emily placed a hand against his chest. “Boone. Hey… you probably saved somebody’s life. It’s not your fault that guy went all stabby.”

  Boone nodded. He knew that of course, but he had nearly killed the man. A disarming armlock could have been an option but in the moment, he had acted with… rage. Self-control was something Boone strived for, but when old Martin had hit the ground, he had lost it.

  “Boone?” Emily was looking up at him. “Are you hearing me?”

  “I spoke to the Coast Guard,” the detective said, returning to the front of the station. “They were certainly impressed by the photo and will pass it up the chain, but since the ‘submarine’, if that’s what it was, was heading east, then by now it’s probably in Venezuelan waters. That makes it Venezuela’s problem.”

  “Don’t they have a patrol boat or an aircraft or something that could go take a look?”

  The detective sighed. “Look, they’ve go
t two or three patrol boats over there in Curaçao at the Parera Naval Base in Willemstad. And yes, they have maritime enforcement aircraft. But none of them are equipped to find a submarine. And even if they were, they have their hands full right now with refugees and scores of boats smuggling drugs above the water. Besides, with what’s going on down south, they are not going to risk trespassing in Venezuela’s waters. If you say it was going east, then it would be long gone before the Coast Guard got anything over here—it’s less than twenty miles to the boundary.”

  Boone nodded. “Makes sense, I guess. Are they going to contact the Venezuelan Coast Guard or Navy?”

  Henry sucked his teeth, a low wattage sign of disgust. “Oh, they’ll let them know. But the cartels are in bed with the government. My guess, that sub is one of theirs.”

  Isla Aves de Sotavento—or “Sotavento Island”—was the most westward of Venezuela’s leeward islands and the closest Venezuelan territory to Bonaire. The southern part of a small atoll, the island consisted of beaches, shallow saltwater lagoons, and a dense stretch of mangroves. Sotavento Island was uninhabited except for a group of four National Guardsmen who manned the tiny complex of huts and sheds that surrounded the thirty-nine-foot lighthouse at the western tip. Those men were dead now.

  The Zil surfaced in the deeper waters to the south of the island. The lighthouse complex had a small dock in the shallow waters to the north and a lookout in the lighthouse spotted the submarine and called down to a man below.

  Tarik Janjalani heard the shrill whistle from the terrorist cell’s sniper, stationed in the lighthouse above. He looked up and saw the lookout pointing to the southwest before giving a thumbs-up. They’re here. Tarik was a Filipino, a former member of a Moro separatist group in Mindanao, a large island in the southern Philippines. He was now part of the Islamist group Abu Sayyaf, “on loan” to this mission because he spoke Philippine Spanish, a variant that had much in common with Mexican Spanish. Tarik jogged to the cinderblock hut that was serving as their command post. “The submarine is here. All appears to be well.”