by John Hunt
23. The Manner of Destruction
JACK GAIMEY WAS waiting in the helicopter, tapping his hands repeatedly on the control stick. Petur could tell from inside the air terminal building that the man was getting impatient. But his impatience was understandable. He wanted to see the OTEC, just as badly as did Petur.
The whole island was anticipating its arrival, and they planned a celebration for the night when it would begin operations — only two days from now, if all went well. The champagne would flow profusely, assuming the contraption worked.
Petur moved on out of the terminal. To his left, two US Navy planes, which linemen had just parked after a flight, sat together just off the runway. Each of the gray planes had four Allison T-56 turbine engines, with four-bladed Hamilton Standard propellers that were slowly winding down. They had few windows, unlike passenger planes. A couple of the Island’s regular pilots came out to meet the Navy planes.
The helicopter lay to his right, and Petur moved toward it rapidly. He had thrown his small day bag over his shoulder. As soon as the pilot saw him coming, he started going through the last minute pre-flight checks. The rotor was already spinning rapidly, and, although he did not need to, Petur ducked in an effort to stay far below the whirring blades. He climbed into the small Hughes 500-D four-seater, put on his headphones, and within two minutes they pulled away from the ground and flew up above the trees.
Jack Gaimey piloted the helicopter gracefully, but aggressively. Petur was excited to fly with the roguish pilot, who had almost developed into a daredevil. He let out a loud “Yeehaw!” as he made a sudden turn north and almost deafened Petur through the amplified headphones.
It was a beautiful day, which surprised no one.
“Should be about twenty-five minutes before we get there,” the pilot said into his microphone.
Petur turned the volume back up on his headphones in time to catch the last part of Jack Gaimey’s statement.
“Sure is taking you long enough! Can’t this bucket go any faster?”
The pilot pressed something with his foot and moved the control stick. Petur felt his stomach squeeze against his backbone as the little helicopter jumped forward and upward. Jack Gaimey laughed.
At about the same time that Petur felt he could breathe again, the tall shining shape of the silver OTEC, trailing far behind the forty-meter tug, became visible on the horizon. The helicopter seemed to accelerate even further, and they approached quickly.
“Look at that, man!” Petur stared at the monstrous machine, which stood tall in the ocean, strong and confident.
Jack Gaimey replied, “Unbelievable!”
“Circle it, will you?”
The helicopter made a gentle slow turn around the massive cylinder.
“It’s beautiful! And it’s finally here!”
“Yes,” Jack Gaimey replied. “But the first one was almost this close to Paradise when it sank. Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch.”
“Stop being the pessimist. It’s not in your nature.”
They headed back toward the tug and Jack Gaimey hovered directly above her aft deck. The helicopter had no way to set down. Petur knew this and was ready for the challenge.
“Well, Petur, time to get the hell out of my helicopter! Go on! Off with you.”
Petur removed his headphones and climbed around to the rear seating area. Without the ear protection, the noise was deafening. He buckled an orange harness around his waist, between his legs, and over his shoulders. He tugged on it to assure its integrity. He then attached the cable from the helicopter’s winch to the metal ring on his harness. He tapped the shoulder of Jack Gaimey, who gave a thumbs-up, and out the door he went.
The helicopter inclined as his weight shifted over the side, and then again when the cable was holding all of his weight. But it soon steadied, and the pilot pressed a button on his console to signal the electric winch to lower. The winch obeyed. Petur, his blond hair fluttering in the winds, which the rotors caused to blow at typhoon speed, rocked and twisted his way down to the deck. Two pairs of hands reached up to guide him down. As soon as he touched something solid, he yanked the cable’s shackle off his harness, freeing the helicopter from its human anchor. Quickly, he dashed for cover behind a nearby bulkhead.
Jack Gaimey pulled the chopper rapidly up and away, and in a moment, spun toward the OTEC and took one more turn around it. Then he flew off in a beeline for the white cumulus clouds, which almost always hovered far above the Paradise island chain during the day.
As the noise from the helicopter decreased to a distant hum, Petur turned to walk toward the bridge. In front of him stood Jeff Baddori.
“Hello, old friend! Welcome aboard the Elijah Lewis — the finest tug of her kind.”
“Good to see you, Jeff. How are things here?”
Jeff led Petur up the ladder toward the bridge. He called down behind him, “I’ve seen no sign of problems, but then, I am not really expecting much warning.”
“I’ve had only a few contacts from you in the last three months. Can you fill me in on what’s been happening?” Petur inquired.
“Sorry about that, Petur. I’m not accustomed to even having the opportunity to communicate with my bosses. I work alone. Mostly.”
They entered the bridge and found the captain gazing out the windows. He was tall and thin, and his dark eyes were deep-set and experienced. He heard them enter and turned immediately.
“Captain Stouffer, this is Petur Bjarnasson,” said Jeff. “Petur, this is Tom Stouffer.”
“Captain Stouffer. You were XO of the Mary Brewer,” Petur stated. “I am sorry about the men that were lost.”
Stouffer nodded his head slowly. “It is not too often these days that a sailor has served aboard a ship that sank. Not an experience I would like to repeat.”
“I am sure it is not. Have you had a good trip so far?”
“Much better than the last one,” replied the captain, “and in every respect. We’ve had no storms, and no sabotage, either. The OTEC has behaved himself well. Relatively speaking, that makes for a good trip!”
“You referred to the OTEC as male. I haven’t heard that on the ocean before.”
Stouffer smiled and nodded. “The crew did that on their own. Happened last time too. Guess they had trouble thinking of that big phallus-shaped energy generator as a female. Understandable, really.”
Petur agreed. He had not given it much thought before now, but the shining cylinder with its large round head, certainly did stand firm, proud, and erect in the waves behind.
“Jeff, have you had a chance to fill Mr. Bjarnasson in on your concerns?”
“Not yet, but it wasn’t going to be long.” He moved to the small coffee mess in the corner of the bridge and filled a styrofoam cup partway. Nods from both Petur and the captain prompted Jeff to fill two more.
“Let’s go back here,” Jeff requested, guiding them into the small office tucked next to the radio room behind the bridge. He closed the door.
“Petur, I have some notions, none of which I am sure is correct. First, as we suspected, the Mary Brewer did not sink by accident. After questioning everybody I could find, there’s no reason to suspect that there was any excessively combustible material available for an explosion of the size that could cause a ship to sink as quickly as she did. The fuel was nowhere near there either. I think accident can be ruled out entirely.”
“I have to agree. I knew that ship very well. It was not an accident.” Stouffer was quite certain.
Petur nodded. He had kept a glimmer of hope that Jeff might reassure him by finding that the catastrophe was an accident. It would have been much easier than trying to protect against villains who attempted to interfere with the Project.
“So I continued my quest to determine who might want to blow up either the ship or sink the OTEC. At first I thought, perhaps someone planted the bomb before they left Seattle. But with a timer set for seven weeks? That didn’t seem logical. And if they
were trying to sink the OTEC, then had they been one day later, they would have missed it. The OTEC was less than a day from Paradise 1. And, furthermore, it had only been planned as a six-week tow. It is unlikely that the bomb was pre-planted.
“I went through the entire complement of the crew of the Mary Brewer. No one had the motive, as far as I could ascertain. None had any big cash deposits or changed their lifestyle much. I was getting to a dead end. Also, for insurance purposes the security on that ship was somewhat tight, so getting a bomb on board would have been difficult, although not impossible.”
The captain interrupted to reassure Petur, “The Elijah Lewis would have been harder yet to bring a bomb on board. Your man here saw to that. He had my crew and ship locked down tighter than you would believe. My crew calls him ‘the Jailer,’ but they still seem to like him. Why is that, Jeff?”
“‘Cuz I deliver the women! What other possible reason could there be?”
“So, things are pretty safe, then, for the ship and OTEC?” Petur asked, hopefully.
Jeff looked up at the captain for a moment and then turned to Petur. “Well, no, not really. Today is not a particularly safe day to be on the Elijah Lewis.”
“I fly all the way out here to hang from a cable by a harness attached with nails to my scrotum, almost breaking my ankle on the deck, only to find that I should have come another day?” Petur’s humor didn’t even begin to suppress his growing concern.
“I had been trying to sort things out these past few weeks. I remained unsure that I had covered all the bases,” Jeff said. “Then last week, I bumped into one of the engineers in a passageway and knocked a couple of movie videos out of his hand. I stooped down to pick them up, and one of the movies was Sink the Bismarck. It hit me like a ton o’ bricks. I have no idea why I hadn’t thought of it before. Comes from too much world peace, I suppose.”
After too long a pause, Petur prompted him. “What are you saying, Jeff?”
“Well, you see, Petur, one day away from the Paradise Islands, the Mary Brewer was torpedoed.”
The gray Navy P-3 Orion flew low over the Elijah Lewis, causing the men on the vessel to duck reflexively, before it continued over the OTEC. In the cockpit of the plane, Commander Robert “Cleveland” Grover, the crew’s patrol plane commander (PPC), spoke over the InterCom System to his tactical coordinator (TACCO), Lieutenant Commander Tom “Gun-Gun” Thompson and his copilot Lieutenant Michael “Eppster” Epps.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The TACCO, from behind the bulkhead demarcating his station, replied back over the ICS, “That’s because it’s the only one of its kind.”
“Yeah. How do you know that, Gun-Gun?”
“I got a chance to talk to a couple of people this morning while we were having some donuts after the mission brief,” replied the TACCO. “They were pretty excited about it coming. Supposed to be able to generate a whole ton of electricity just by sucking water up from the depth.”
“Sounds pretty nifty. Well, let’s make sure it doesn’t get sunk.” Commander Grover rolled the yoke to begin a gentle turn to the left, and they headed back to the tug. “Chief, don’t let me see something before you do,” he said to the flight engineer.
He received a competent “Aye Aye” in reply from the FE, chief jet engine mech ADC Austin, who, despite sitting between and just aft of the pilot and copilot, somehow always saw surface activity before anyone else did.
Directly over the vessel, Grover said “TACCO, Flight, mark on top,” as he hit the yoke’s mark on top button that placed a point on both the flight and TACCO electronic scopes.
The TACCO replied, “Flight, TC, got it.”
The P-3 then began gradually widening arcs around the tugboat, now and again dropping sonobuoys in the ocean in a predetermined search pattern around the OTEC. These buoys had both passive and active sonar capabilities, and, as directed during the mission brief, they sent out pings almost immediately upon entry into the water. The acoustic sensor operators, enlisted men known as Sensor 1 and Sensor 2, kept a close watch for suspicious sounds as displayed by the onboard computer on each operator’s waterfall displays. This colorful video display gave Sensor 1 and Sensor 2 a detailed view of the discrete frequencies emitted by all surface and subsurface sources, as well as the range and bearing from whatever sonobuoy was detecting it.
“We are actually on the lookout for enemy subs again,” noted Grover. “I think it’s been years since we even had a real contact outside of a drill situation.”
“Well, it would help if DC let us track foreign subs again. Our constant overland tasking in the Middle East and deployments nowhere near potential enemy subs makes for piss-poor preparation.” Lieutenant Epps didn’t shy from revealing his occasional irritation that he had joined the anti-submarine forces about two decades after its prime. In his mind, it wasn’t nearly as fun as it once had been.
“Well, our ASW prowess may not be what it once was, but we still owe it to the folks back home to be better than anyone else. They will likely need our services someday. See, we’re useful even right here and now. As far as I know, this is the first time a P-3 has carried war reserve Mark 46 torpedoes and been given the green light to sink a sub since the Gulf War. And we never found any there. Eppster, we’re making history. And you’ll never see a crew as pumped as this one was while we were being briefed to be ready to sink one of the bad guys.”
“Makes me really want to find this thing.” Lieutenant Epps said, with some excitement.
“Well, let’s shut up and find it, then!” Grover smiled as he spoke.
Petur and Jeff stood on the starboard bridge wing looking toward the west. The sun was setting. The Paradise Islands were still not visible over the horizon, although the gradually dissipating clouds that hovered over them during the day still marked their location. It had been a quiet day. But neither man would sleep tonight.
The comforting hum of the Navy P-3s loitering over the area gave the men on the Elijah Lewis a bit more confidence that they would survive the night. Most of the men on this vessel had served on the Mary Brewer, and many had been aboard her the day she sank. Nobody wished to go through that experience again.
“What else can we do, Jeff?”
“Nothing now. No submarine is going to get through the Navy. This is what they do best.”
“So there is no chance of us getting torpedoed?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What if the sub is just sitting out there, with all its power off, knowing we are coming?”
“The Navy is using active sonar. Even if there were a submarine quietly lying in wait for us, active sonar would find it. Commander Grover reported nothing suspicious for over a hundred miles around.”
“But what if they miss it?”
“Well, then they’ll find it when the first torpedo gets fired. And they’ll sink the sub then.”
“Won’t that be too late?”
“Yes.”
The wide globe of the sun settled below the waves in a beautiful burst of red light, leaving the sky pink for minutes after. As always, darkness came fast in the tropics. There were stars tonight. Tomorrow night there might not be, for a storm was coming.
24. Arrival and Assault
IT WAS MORNING, and Akheem Azid walked along the beach while gazing over the open ocean. The waves gently and rhythmically slid up the sand, foamed at their peak, and quietly returned to the sea. It was highly relaxing. He needed to relax.
Khamil was back in the resort hotel room, watching a cartoon perhaps. His friend and partner led an exciting but nonetheless empty life. Khamil found enough joy in the little things that Azid presumed his friend was happy enough. He certainly could smile and tell jokes readily. Indeed, sometimes he laughed too much. Killing people prompted Khamil to joke the most. Azid used to think the jokes were a defense mechanism to avoid unwanted guilt about killing, but he learned that Khamil had no feelings about it at all.
Azid wa
s different. His feelings were mixed and always had been. On the one hand, he felt discomfort at killing people who were not military, who had invited no battle. On the other hand, all Westerners, if for no other reason than that they tacitly approved of their long-standing trade embargo against his home country during Saddam’s rule, were guilty of causing the Iraqi population untold suffering. They had interfered with Iraq’s access through Kuwait to the shipping channels of the Persian Gulf. They had used their military might to deny the Iraqi people what was rightfully theirs and had long been their property, many years ago when Azid was a young officer in the Republican Guard. And, led by the United States, these people had later invaded and occupied Iraq, sending Saddam, his friend and leader, first into hiding and then to death.
New leaders arose now — not, perhaps, with Saddam’s skills or motivation, but their confidence would grow. Azid had always been proud of Saddam. Hussein would stand up in the face of great opposition — stand up for what was right. He would not be intimidated. The great military might of the self-righteous United States could overpower a smaller army but was no match for the sheer will and determination of the man who would pay any price and accept any cost to forever prevent the West from imposing evil controls upon him and his people. He would sacrifice his army, his machines, and his men, women, and children in any effort that might anger or impede the enemies of Iraq.
And Saddam’s forethought — he recognized the value of planning for the future — inspired Azid and committed him to his former leader, for they shared the trait of forethought. Forethought, so many years ago, had prompted Saddam to send him on missions to seek and destroy any threat to Middle Eastern oil. Saddam had been convinced that the oil — all of it — would belong to Iraq someday. The mission didn’t stop once Saddam was executed. Azid had no doubt that Iraq’s power in the region would grow rapidly again. With America now believing that it was Iraq’s ally, it provided enormous economic support, and Iraq was rapidly regaining its muscle. This time, Iraq would be armed with US military weapons and training, which would allow Iraq to become a dominant player in the region once again. And the Mideast oil was the critical power center that must not be weakened. It was a careful political process to manipulate American fears so that their military and diplomats would work to weaken Iraq’s enemies, but not go so far as to compel the Americans to entirely take over the oil supplies of the Mideast with their military might. Step by step, Azid continued to accomplish his mission. In the past year, he had been in no place, except for that blasted submarine, for more than a few weeks. And each place he visited suffered some disaster.