Sakim Tuhami shared the experience of those youthful guardians of long ago.
And, as frequently they must have been on such still and silent evenings, he was bored out of his mind and thoroughly pissed off at the entire universe.
Huddled down behind the low, dry stone walls of the shepherd’s shelter, the Syrian teenager drew his rough woolen cloak closer about him and reviled sheep, his parents, and kismet in general.
He loathed spending his summer vacation in his grandfather’s back country village. However his mother, a professor of history at Damascus University, had insisted, saying that it would “put him in touch with his Arabic heritage.”
Sakim scratched and swore again. To date, all it had done was to put him in touch with a thriving population of fleas. At the moment, all he wanted was a hot bath, his personal computer, and the cordiality of his well-endowed, blonde, Swedish exchange-student girlfriend. Heritage be damned.
Suddenly, stock bells clanked and rattled from the direction of the bed ground, accompanied by a chorus of perturbed bleating. Something was stirring the flock. Sakim rose to his feet and peered out into the darkness.
The sheep were all on their feet uneasily, as if they sensed a threat. Sakim’s hands tightened around his shepherd’s staff, the black shadows suddenly more tangible around him. Nervously he reminded himself that there were no wolves or lions left in his world to be afraid of.
And then he heard the sound, a strange hissing whine like nothing he had ever heard before, a metallic whisper that seemed to crawl over the ground,
And then it was upon him and the future crashed in upon the past.
It was overhead, just for an instant! The moonlight gleamed on a flattened dishlike shape in the sky, so low that it seemed as if Sakim could reach up and touch it. He felt a brush of hot wind on his face as the disk blasted past, and then, as swiftly as it had come, it was gone.
The flock exploded, panicking sheep scattering in all directions. The shepherd ran as well, back for the village, frantic to tell someone that he, Sakim Tuhami, had seen a flying saucer.
Upon hearing his grandson’s breathless report of the phenomenon, Sakim’s grandfather first beat the boy thoroughly for abandoning his flock and then sought out the village imam for advice. That worthy suggested that Sakim be beaten again for disrespect, the telling of a falsehood, and a generalized godlessness.
Miles away and unaware of the havoc it had wreaked in the life of a Damascus high-school student, the flying saucer proceeded about its mission: to seek out a particular set of Global Positioning System coordinates locked into its guidance package and to perform a certain series of actions upon its arrival there.
The coordinates designated a point along a narrow two-lane highway that served as the solitary access to a well-guarded industrial complex in an exceptionally isolated corner of the Syrian desert some sixty miles from the coast.
Inbound, the saucer had been painted repeatedly by defense radars. However, its small size, ground-hugging flight path, and stealth composite structure gave it immunity to the probing beams.
Approaching its target, the flying saucer (or the discoid aeroform reconnaissance drone, if one preferred) went to hover a quarter mile off the roadway. Balancing on its lift fans, its sensors scanned the highway for movement or activity.
There was none. At this moment, as had been projected in the mission planning, the armored-car patrols that routinely prowled the road were out at the far ends of their sweeps.
Guiding in via the invisible infrared impulses of a ground-scan laser radar, the four-foot-wide disk crept closer to the highway. Precisely twenty feet off the pavement, the drone went to hover again, sinking to within a few feet of the ground. The door of a small internal payload bay cycled.
A stone plopped onto the parched and dusty soil.
Roughly the size of a man’s fist, it was literally identical to a thousand other desert-varnished stones within a quarter-mile radius. This stone, however, cost not quite one million dollars.
A layer of thermocouples lined the stone’s artificial shell. By day, they would use the heat of the desert sun to recharge a long-duration battery. This battery in turn would power an instrument originally designed for use aboard a NASA space probe, specifically an area scintillator capable of detecting minute changes in the radiation background count of the local environment. The battery would also power the tiny burst-transmission radio that would beam the recorded data from the instruments up to a National Security Agency ferret satellite in orbit high above the earth.
The drone zigzagged back and forth over the highway, dropping a pattern of other hypertech “rocks.” Plop, a gravimeter that would register the variances in the local gravitational field produced by the passage of traffic on the roadway. Plop, a micro-seismometer sensitive to vehicle generated ground vibration. Plop, an omni-directional microphone pickup capable of registering the sounds of engines and running gear.
The data from this sensor net would permit NSA analysts to identify the type of every vehicle entering or leaving Syria’s largest special weapons research and development facility, its ambient radiation emission, and its approximate payload mass.
Combined with the other data accrued from the NSA’s fleet of orbital intelligence-gathering platforms, it would give the United States a fair notion of just where Syria stood with its covert atomic weapons program.
Its mission accomplished, the drone reversed its course, racing back for the Sea.
Off the Syrian Coast
13.7 Miles South of Jablah
0145 Hours, Zone Time: July 27, 2008
Lieutenant Commander Mahmud Shalakar paced the narrow patch of deck available within the wheelhouse of the Syrian navy’s fast-missile corvette Raqqah. Tonight’s operation should have been routine, a standard offshore security sweep such as he must have performed a hundred times in his career. Yet, this had not turned out to be the case.
This night was … haunted. He could not produce a better term for it than that. Intermittently since nightfall, ghosts had stalked his radar screens. Faint, transitory contacts appeared at varying ranges, only to fade before a plot could be established. At seemingly random intervals, blotches of mysterious interference materialized and then dissolved, looking suspiciously like some form of jamming. Likewise, his electronic-warfare receivers recorded mysterious blips and chuckles in the radio spectrum, but never anything that could provide a definite bearing for a direction finder.
The Raqqah’s systems operators were sweating blood from their captain’s repeated and raging demands for more data. So far, they had not been able to produce anything solid enough to act upon.
The Syrian officer fished a buckled cigarette out of his uniform shirt pocket and kindled it with a quick snap of his lighter. All Shalakar had to work with was the sensation that the events were thickest along this particular stretch of coast. Something was going on out there, right under his nose. He could feel it.
But what? And maybe more importantly, who?
Syria’s strategic naval position in the eastern Mediterranean was far from enviable. They were wedged in tightly between Israel and Turkey, both of whom were regional maritime superpowers. What was worse, Shalakar brooded, the damn Jews and the damn Turks had become thick as thieves over the past decade. They were always up to something.
Beyond that, Syrian fleet intelligence reported that a small American task force was lurking offshore, and Allah alone knew what the Americans were going to do next.
Be that as it may. There was nothing for Shalakar to do but to keep all hands at their battle stations and stand ready to act.
“Helm,” he snapped, “reverse course! Bring us about one hundred and eighty degrees and take us half a kilometer closer inshore.”
“As you command, Captain.”
The brass spokes of the Raqqah’s wheel glinted in the CRT glow as they spun to the new heading and the corvette’s sharp-edged prow raked the wave crests as she made her turn.
Three miles closer shoreward, from a position atop a semisubmerged sandbar that paralleled the Syrian coastline, two watchful pairs of eyes caught the flash of reflected moonlight as the bow of the Tarantul IV-class corvette came around.
“He’s repeating his sweep,” Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey “Steamer” Lane commented from the Queen of the west’s pilot’s station. “That guy knows something’s up.”
“Um-hum,” Amanda Garrett agreed from the copilot’s seat. “We can live with ‘something,’ Steamer. Just as long as he isn’t sure about us.”
Amanda twisted around, looking back at the third occupant of the PGAC (Patrol Gunboat Air Cushion) 02’s cockpit. “How about it, Mr. Selkirk? Anything new to report on our Syrian friend out there?”
Seated at the navigator’s console, the intel glanced up at Amanda’s words, the screen glow glinting off the upraised night-vision visor of his helmet. “There are no situational changes, Captain,” he replied with the scholarly sobriety that was his usual operating mode. “Signal intelligence indicates a series of rapid frequency and power shifts on his radars but no scan-rate changes. He’s hunting, but he isn’t finding anything.”
Amanda nodded thoughtfully. Lieutenant Gerald Selkirk was one of Christine Rendino’s pups, hand-raised in the raven’s roost of the Cunningham, Amanda’s old command. If she couldn’t have Chris at her side this night, Selkirk was a strong second best.
“Anything on his communications bands?”
“Nothing detected beyond his standard half-hour radio checks.”
Amanda nodded once more, her eyes narrowing. The Syrian was uneasy, but not yet so uneasy that he was calling for help. They still had time, she judged, at least a little.
“How long do we have until recovery?”
Selkirk checked the time line display hack on his panels. “Seven minutes and forty-five seconds until unit recovery, three minutes and forty-five seconds until we get the boundary warning and approach call.”
Lane chuckled in the semidark of the cockpit. “You have a great deal of confidence in that glorified Frisbee, Ger.”
“There’s no reason not to, Commander,” Selkirk replied stiffly. “We received the deployment verification prompt, right on the dot, and the NSA reports they have good signals from the ground sensors. The Cipher will recover as per the ops plan.”
The intel made it sound as if he would see to the errant machine personally if it failed to measure up.
Lane chuckled again. “We’ll see…. Yo, Scrounge!”
“Yes, sir?” Chief Petty Officer Sandra “Scrounger” Caitlin stuck her attractive brown-haired head up through the ladderway access into the main hull.
“Pass the word to button up and look alive. We’re blowing this pop stand. Initiate main engine-start sequence! Stand by to answer bells!”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The Queen’s chief of the boat dropped out of sight.
“Loud and straight up the middle, Steamer?” Amanda inquired, calling up the copilot’s checklist on her console screens.
“That’s how I’d suggest doing it, ma’am. Sure as hell, we’re going to attract attention when we take Ger’s dingbat back aboard, either from the beach or from that spooky Syrian missile boat. I’d rather have us moving than sitting when we break stealth. Besides, that thing recovers better when we have some wind over the deck.”
“I concur on all points, Mr. Lane. Light us up and get us under way.”
One of the most critical secrets Amanda Garrett had learned during her career was to know when to pass the baton of command to a subordinate. She might be the TACBOSS of the Sea Fighter Task Force as a whole, but Steamer Lane was master of both the USS Queen of the West and of Patrol Gunboat Air Cushion Squadron 1. No officer in the Navy knew more about the capabilities and limitations of the deadly Sea Fighter hovercraft than did the sandy-haired California surfer who sat to her left.
The light patterns shifted on the power panels, yellow to green, as the turbine techs brought the Queen’s four massive Avco Lycoming TF 40C fanjet power plants to the edge of life. They’d crept in to ground on this sandbar, running on the Queen’s silent electric auxiliary propulsors. They would blast out to sea again on the eleven-foot ducted airscrews of the primary drive.
Amanda called up the tactical command channel on her helmet lip mike. “Frenchman, Rebel, Possum One, this is the Lady. Royalty is preparing to execute recovery and departure. We are on the time line. Report status?”
“Rebel to Lady. On station. Boards green. Ready to cover.”
Lieutenant Tony Marlin’s hard-edged voice replied from over the horizon. There, the PGAC 04 USS Manassas drifted, standing by to act in support of her squadron leader.
“Frenchman to Lady. Same here. We’re good too.”
The response was milder, easier going, the voice of Lieutenant Sigmund Clark of the PGAC 03 USS Carondelet, the third hull of the Sea Fighter squadron.
“Possum One is standing by. ECM aerostat streamed. All drones on station. Ready to initiate coverage jamming.”
Amanda could not put a face to this voice. It was one of the watch standers in the Combat Information Center of their mother ship, the USS Evans F. Carlson. This was the task force’s first deployment aboard the San Antonio-class LPD and she was still learning this mammoth new addition to her command.
“Lady acknowledges. All elements stand by.”
At the navigator’s station, Selkirk leaned into his screens. “We have the boundary acquisition signal,” he announced.
“Good ’nuff,” Lane responded.
“And right on the mark, too, sir,” Selkirk concluded, aiming his comment at the back of Steamer’s head.
“I’ll buy the dingbat a beer next time we hit Haifa, Ger. Crank ’em up, Captain!”
“Engine start sequence.” Amanda keyed the row of engine initiators with a single press of her fingertips. Blue flame danced behind the blurring blades of the gas turbines, and the still Mediterranean night was cut by the rising kerosene-fired scream of the compressors.
“Cranking … cranking … cranking …” Amanda chanted, watching the tachometer and pyrometer bars. “Ignition! Four green lights. Clean starts. We have power!”
“Put her on the pad!” Lane acknowledged with a new command.
Amanda came forward on the lift throttles. Moan segued in with scream as the lift fans pressurized the plenum chamber beneath the Queen’s flattened, boatlike hull. The Kevlar chamber skirts inflated and, with a flurry of spray and sand, the ninety-foot length of the Sea Fighter lifted off the semisubmerged coastal bank, riding on a thin friction-free surface of compressed air. An armed derivative of the Navy’s LCAC air-cushion landing craft, she had been built to take advantage of waters like these.
“On the pad, Steamer.”
“Acknowledged. We’re movin’ out.” Lane rolled the propeller controls and drive throttles ahead. Twin penta-bladed airscrews dug in and the Queen was under way, slipping off her grounding point and accelerating into the night.
The shadowed smear of the Syrian coast with its scattering of shore light began to fall away at the end of the Queen’s scant wake.
“Steer three-double-oh, Steamer. Let’s get a little range from that Tarantul. Mr. Selkirk, bring our little friend home.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. Initiating recovery,” Selkirk reported, excitement growing in his voice as the automated sequences checked off on his display. “Recall and docking transponder now active…. Drone is responding…. We have good data links!”
Lane’s eyes shifted from his console instrumentation to the night beyond the windscreen and back again in an instinctively repetitive cycle. “Verify the docking speed you want, Ger.”
“Twenty-five knots, sir.”
“Right. Captain, what’s our wind out there?”
Amanda glanced at the meteorology display. “Four knots. Quartering out of the northwest. Holding steady. We are inside the gates for auto recovery.”
She returned her focus to the t
hreat board and the tactical display. Up until this moment on the mission time line, they had been able to rely on unobtrusiveness for survival. All of the Queen’s weapons systems had been retracted inside the stealth envelope of her RAM-jacketed hull, reducing her radar cross section to that of a floating log. She had also been running EMCON with only passive sensors in use and with communications limited to the briefest of transmissions on low-probability-of-intercept jitter frequency channels.
Now, however, the Queen must radiate a beacon signal to toll her recon drone home, a signal that could be detected by Syrian ELINT monitors as well as by the Navy robot aeroform. It was a systems limitation that must be worked around, as with the limited range of the Cipher drone that mandated the tight inshore launch and recovery.
“There she is!” Selkirk called. “Coming right up the slot!”
The laser lock warning on Amanda’s threat board started to flicker intermittently, reacting to the pulse of the drone’s navigation Ladar. She activated a secondary screen on her console, accessing the imaging from the mast-mounted sighting system.
Selkirk had the low-light television cameras atop the sea fighter’s snub mast trained aft, looking out over the stern antenna bar and the airscrew ducts. The Cipher drone materialized out of the horizon shadow, creeping in, its onboard artificial intelligence matching the speed and bearing of its mother ship.
The Queen’s quadruple air rudders flexed as Steamer Lane held her steady against the intermittent brush of a wave crest. A trio of docking probes deployed downward from the rim of the drone, ready to mate with the three sockets set into the hovercraft’s upper deck.
“Easy …” Selkirk murmured. “A little more … you’re lining up … lining up …”
Amanda held her breath as the little robot edged into position over the Sea Fighter’s weatherdeck. It wasn’t alive, but damn it, it was still part of her command.
The Cipher dropped abruptly. There was a thud from back aft and a series of sharp clicking bangs.
Target Lock Page 4