by Greg Dinallo
“More than you know,” Larkin interrupted sharply, going on to brief Al-Qasim on Libya’s acquisition of the F-111s and Shepherd’s intention to steal one.
The Libyan was stunned; he sat in silence assessing the implications. “You’re certain?”
Larkin nodded gravely.
“Why should I believe you?” Al-Qasim challenged. “Or any of this, for that matter?”
“Because you’re smart enough to realize you have nothing to gain and everything to lose if you don’t,” Larkin replied pointedly.
Al-Qasim’s face stiffened with concern.
“Well,” he finally declared, brightening slightly at a thought, “he won’t have an easy time of it. The last time I saw Major Shepherd, he was in the custody of the secret police.” He took the phone and dialed SHK headquarters in Tripoli. A brief conversation in Arabic followed; then he hung up and, with relief, announced, “Major Shepherd is the unhappy occupant of a cell in Bab al Azziziya prison.”
Larkin broke into a relaxed smile.
“I assure you, I’ll make sure he stays there.”
“Dies there,” Larkin said in a cold whisper.
38
A DAMP, bone-chilling draft blew through the prison beneath the Bab al Azziziya Barracks on As-Sarim Street in Tripoli.
The maximum-security dungeon was a filthy, windowless hellhole where men and time passed without notice. There were no dawns, no dusks, only the glare of incandescent lights that burned twenty-four hours a day, and the intricate Arabic graffiti that served as epitaphs for its countless victims.
After his encounter with Qaddafi, Shepherd was taken here by the secret police and locked in a fetid cell. He stood in the narrow concrete box and shuddered as the steel bars clanged shut behind him. He had no idea if he was being held for trial, extradition, or, as the crazed Libyan had cruelly hinted, for punishment via some hideous Islamic ritual. He swallowed hard, fighting a nausea brought on by the putrid stench of human waste that came from a hole in the floor. An eternity passed before he could bring himself to sit on the edge of the filthy cot. His emotions ran the gamut from paralyzing fear to seething anger to an overall numbness. Only thoughts of Stephanie and the children sustained him.
Overhead, a bare bulb, enclosed in a wire cage, threw a pattern of harsh shadows across the cell. A gigantic spiderweb, Shepherd thought, deciding it was a more than fitting metaphor.
He lay awake for hours, finally getting some fitful sleep. The sounds of coughing and defecation woke him. He sat up feeling disoriented: this wasn’t an ugly nightmare as he had hoped but a dehumanizing reality. He waited until his bladder was ready to burst before he stepped to the opposite corner, straddled the rancid hole, and urinated.
Moments later, a guard appeared and set a wooden bowl on the floor outside his cell.
“What is this stuff?” Shepherd called after him, eyeing the repulsive contents, which resembled a sponge floating in beige house paint.
The guard ignored him and went about dishing out breakfast to the other prisoners.
“Is bread and camel’s milk,” a voice called out after the guard had gone.
Shepherd looked up to see a young prisoner with wary eyes peering at him from between the bars of a cell across the corridor.
“Thanks.” Shepherd gingerly plucked the chunk of bread from the milk.
“The colonel’s own breakfast regimen, they claim.”
“Figures.”
“You are from U.K.?”
“United States.”
The prisoner’s eyes narrowed in suspicion as he found the only sensible explanation for an American being in a Libyan jail. “A shetan.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Shepherd drawled, sipping some of the bitter-tasting milk.
“How do you say? An espionage?”
“You mean a spy?”
“Yes, spy.”
“No. I’m a pilot.”
“Ah,” the prisoner intoned, thinking he understood now. “One of those shot down bombing.”
“In a manner of speaking.” Shepherd decided it was neither wise nor possible to explain. “Where did you learn English?”
“University.”
“In Libya?”
“Gaza.”
“Israeli?”
“Palestinian,” the prisoner replied sharply; then, deciding the slur was unintended, his expression softened and he asked, “You know of Bir Zeit?”
Shepherd shook his head no.
“I study for political science there. Now I fight to liberate Palestine.”
“PLO?”
The Palestinian nodded.
“What are you doing in here?” Shepherd asked, unable to imagine why the Libyans would imprison him.
“Exterminating rats,” the Palestinian quipped proudly, going on to boast that he had beaten the Libyans and their torture; the rats had torn his flesh but not his will or belief in Islam, which fortified him even in moments of total despair. Like Qaddafi and Abdel-Hadi, the Palestinian had no way of knowing that CIA had learned the hostages were hidden on the Romeo and he steadfastly refused to reveal their whereabouts. The SHK chief had decided to give him a taste of the good life before torturing him further. His rat bites had been cleansed and bandaged, and he had been removed from solitary confinement.
“What do they want from you?” Shepherd asked.
“The place of hiding for American hostages,” the Palestinian replied matter-of-factly.
Shepherd hadn’t expected that and took a moment to think. “You know where?”
The Palestinian nodded smugly. “But I am not telling to you,” he taunted with a cocky smirk. “I stopped them from being released.”
Shepherd’s eyes narrowed as the ugly truth dawned on him. “You get a perverse kick out of kidnapping and murdering innocent people?”
“No. I fight for my homeland; my people—”
“No. Armies fight for homelands. You’re a terrorist.”
“Yes,” the Palestinian replied, undaunted. “Yes, just like Shamir and Begin. Both were once wanted by Interpol. We have learned from the Zionists that rights won’t be coming to you unless you take them.”
“What rights?”
“To identity as Palestinians.”
“You blew that when you started slaughtering women and children.”
“Why not to kill them?” the Palestinian retorted. “The child will become an enemy soldier; and the woman will bear more.”
“I rest my case.”
“What is ‘rest my case’?” the Palestinian demanded.
“It means, you proved my point. You’re nothing more than animals.”
“We only want what is rightfully ours.”
“You’re sure as hell going about it the wrong way.”
The Palestinian spat at Shepherd’s feet.
“I rest my case,” Shepherd countered pointedly.
They stood there, faces framed by the bars, eyeing each other with hatred, finally deciding to tend to their empty stomachs.
Several hours later, a guard came lumbering down the corridor and charged into the Palestinian’s cell. The guard, who carried the flabby bulk of a once avid weightlifter, yanked the Palestinian from his cot, hooked a massive arm under his chin, and dragged him off like a sack of grain.
Soon a plaintive wail reverberated off the concrete walls. This was no accident. Abdel-Hadi had purposely located the interrogation chamber within the cell block so the inmates could hear what happened to those who didn’t cooperate.
And, indeed, the Palestinian still staunchly refused to give Abdel-Hadi the information he wanted. The cocky terrorist had been stripped naked, his ankles and wrists strapped to a straight-backed chair beneath a blazing spotlight.
“Where are they?” Abdel-Hadi demanded in Arabic, shouting over the high-pitched whine of an electric motor that came from the darkness. “Where?”
The Palestinian stared at him defiantly.
The guard lunged forward threateni
ngly, the whine growing louder in the young terrorist’s ears.
“No,” Abdel-Hadi said sharply, holding the huge man off. “A rat retreats once its hunger is satisfied,” he said to the Palestinian in his gravely voice, “but this animal"—he paused, gesturing to the guard—"he never gets enough. Now, the hostages, where are they?”
“Fucking your mother,” the Palestinian taunted.
The SHK chief’s eyes flared; he turned as if to walk away, but whirled suddenly. The back of his hand connected with the Palestinian’s face with a loud smack. Then he stepped aside and nodded to the guard.
The obese fellow grabbed the prisoner’s hair and brutally yanked his head forward. He waited before commencing the torture, allowing the unnerving whine to heighten his victim’s anxiety.
The young terrorist was trying not to imagine what would happen next when the guard pressed a 2,000-watt hair dryer against the back of his neck. The metal nozzle, modified just for this purpose, produced a disgusting hissing sound as it seared his flesh, sending wisps of smoke curling into the air. The Palestinian writhed in silent agony until the pain and smell overwhelmed him, then he erupted in a blood-curdling yell.
The screams grew louder and longer as the guard went about blistering more delicate parts of his anatomy. Despite the intense pain, the rough-cut terrorist continued to insist he didn’t know where the hostages were hidden.
“Enough!” Abdel-Hadi finally shouted, yanking the power cord from the socket. More than once, he had warned that the Palestinian must be kept alive, a fact their victim had shrewdly deduced when days of torture lengthened into weeks, encouraging his defiance.
The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had started. An eerie silence fell over the prison.
Shepherd was lying on his cot thinking that they had probably killed him when the guard trudged down the corridor dragging the Palestinian behind him. He shoved the naked terrorist into his cell, throwing his clothing after him. Shepherd recoiled at the sight of the man’s blistered torso, at the perfectly circular burns covering the body that lay on the concrete floor.
The son of a bitch got what he deserved, Shepherd told himself in an effort to suppress his compassion. But as he watched the Palestinian struggle to all fours and crawl onto his cot, as he listened to the plaintive moans, Shepherd knew that—deny it as he might, as he had—he and the Palestinian shared a basic human drive. Despite CIA’s insidious conspiracy, which he attributed to the zeal of misguided patriots, his faith in his homeland remained intact.
Several hours later, Shepherd was lying on his cot, eyes shut tightly against the glare of the incandescents, when he heard the thud of heavy footsteps coming down the corridor. The huge guard stopped just outside the Palestinian’s cell. Had they come for him again? So soon? Shepherd wondered. He was turning onto his side to steal a look at what was going on when he heard the key being pushed into the lock and the metallic creak of the door swinging open. But this time the sounds were sharper and closer. He glimpsed a hulking shadow stretching across the wall above him and broke into a cold sweat.
This time the guard had come for him.
39
ALMOST 36 HOURS had passed since Duryea, Cooperman, and Reyes met with Larkin on the USS America.
Upon returning to the Cavalla, Duryea began hunting for the submarine that contained the hostages. The coordinates of the submarine-gunboat rendezvous had placed it east of the line of underwater hydrophones that stretched from Sicily to Misratah; but it could be in any of the world’s oceans by now. Duryea sent the following cable to SOSUS Control in Norfolk, Virginia, in an attempt to narrow the search area.
REQUEST REVIEW OF MAFIA CONTACTS 14APR TO PRESENT TO DETERMINE IF ROMEO CROSSED NET ON WESTERLY HEADING.
In Norfolk, a SOSUS technician immediately went to work on the Illiac-4 processor used to collate and analyze hydrophone-collected data. A powerful system of sixty-four computers in parallel alignment with a one-billion-bit memory, it made short work of Duryea’s query.
A short time later, the Cavalla’s assistant radio operator delivered the reply to the command center:
NEGATIVE. MAFIA NET NOT CROSSED WESTERLY BY ANY ROMEO WITHIN GIVEN PARAMETERS.
To Duryea’s relief, this eliminated any chance that his target had gone through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. The Suez Canal to the Red Sea was also a possibility; but the 100-mile journey would have to be made on the surface and would become a matter of record. Duryea discounted it, deciding his target was still in the Mediterranean, somewhere east of the SOSUS hydrophone line.
The eastern Mediterranean was a huge basin, an abyssal plain free of deep trenches and uninterrupted by undersea ridges and seamounts. There were few places where a submarine could hide.
“What do you think?” Dureyea challenged McBride. “If you wanted to disappear, just stay dived and on the move and never be found, where would you go?”
“The Aegean,” McBride replied, referring to the sea that bulges northward from the Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey.
Duryea nodded sagely. “Bet your ass; perfect topology, and barely five hundred miles from home.”
Indeed, unlike the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean was a roller coaster landscape of seamounts, escarpments, and ridges interconnecting the Greek islands. Nearly a hundred in number, these formations soared from the ocean bottom and punched through the surface like truncated mountaintops, the underwater terrain rising and falling from Spetses to Hydra to Kithnos, Siros, Mykonos, Paros, Crete, Rhodes, ad infinitum throughout the Aegean. This undulating landscape was the perfect place to avoid sonar detection. Though sound travels through water four times faster than air, and can be detected at vast distances from the source in a contiguous body of water, the island-dotted Aegean was anything but contiguous. Here, despite being equipped with the most sophisticated sonar arrays, a submarine on one side of a narrow island wouldn’t be able to detect the presence of a second on the other side. Though just miles apart, neither boat would be aware of the other’s presence. Unless, as Duryea and Larkin had decided, one of those boats took advantage of aerial anti-submarine warfare reconnaissance.
ASW aircraft from the 6th Fleet regularly seeded the Aegean with sonobuoys, keeping track of Redfleet submarines proceeding south through the Dardanelles toward the Mediterranean; and in the 24 hours it took for the Cavalla to reach its present position 100 miles west of Crete, a Viking from the carrier America had been hunting the Romeo.
Flying in an expanding spiral that began near the centrally located island of Naxos, the Lockheed S-3A dropped hundreds of sonobuoys into the choppy waters. The 36-inch-long, 6-inch-diameter cylinders were launched from a 60-cell honeycomb in the plane’s underbelly. Lowered in proper orientation to the sea by a tiny parachute, each sonobuoy sank to operating depth and began collecting sonar data, transmitting the coordinates, depth, and bearing of each contact to the Viking by radio link.
Now in an electronics bay behind the Viking’s cockpit, the tactical coordination officer sat at his console monitoring the sonobuoys he had deployed. He was switching through the various frequencies when his oscilloscope came alive with a sonar pattern. He patched it into the on-board computer, a Univac digital processor that evaluated data as it was collected, and instructed it to run a comparative signal analysis.
At the same time, 350 miles west of the Viking’s position, the Cavalla was approaching the Mediterranean Ridge. This rugged undersea mountain range cupped the mouth of the Aegean in a looping arc from the Greek Peloponnisos to the southwest coast of Turkey, skirting the islands of Crete and Rhodes. The submarine was proceeding slowly just beneath the surface at periscope-antenna depth to keep in voice communication with the Viking.
In the captain’s cabin just aft of the control room, the soft hum of a computer fan came from a terminal that was tied in to the boat’s BC-10. Commander Duryea sat beneath the network of pipes, ducts, and electrical chases that formed the cabin’s ceiling, staring at the monitor. He
was picking at his lunch while reviewing charts that delineated the treacherous terrain ahead when McBride called.
“ASW contact, skipper.”
“On my way,” Duryea fired back. He hurried from the cabin, turkey sandwich in hand, and sprinted up the short companion-way into the control center.
“Commander Duryea here,” he said, taking the phone from McBride. “What do you have?”
“A Romeo, sir,” the Viking’s tactical coordination officer replied.
“Where is he?”
“Just west of the Turkish channel off Kalimnos.” The Tacco recited the coordinates for longitude and latitude, adding, “Course one four zero; depth sixty feet.”
“Not exactly next door,” Duryea observed, knowing the coordinates put the Greek islands and 300 miles of tricky underwater terrain between the Cavalla and the target submarine. “Are you positive it’s a Romeo?”
“Affirmative. Acoustic signature comparison verifies,” the Viking’s Tacco replied, studying two frequency patterns that were now tracing across his oscilloscope: the upper being the sonar contact, the lower the computer library profile. “We’ve seen this guy before, sir. He’s been plying the Aegean for a couple of weeks now. Somebody’s got him on a tight leash. Every day at twenty-one hundred, he dead stops, comes to periscope depth, and puts up a radio mast.”
Duryea’s brows went up. “Every day?”
“Affirmative. Twenty-one hundred.”
Duryea smiled thoughtfully and filed it away. “Okay, good going,” he enthused. “Better get your butts out of there.”
“Roger, willco,” the Viking’s pilot replied, accelerating onto a heading for the America.
McBride already had the chart up on the electronic table when Duryea joined him. “Any chance he’s heading for the Dardanelles?” he asked, indicating the narrow straits that cut through the northwest corner of Turkey to the Bosporous and Black Sea beyond.