“No. Who are you? Go away,” the man blurted out. The gun came out. Douglas smashed the shorter man’s head, at the temple, with the butt of the pistol. Once. Twice. Douglas caught the body as the man collapsed. He looked around. No one. With a struggle, Douglas got the body into the car and onto the floor of the backseat. He threw the car into reverse and backed it out onto the street. He realized it was an old Mercedes diesel.
He suddenly wished that he had not taken the gun. If it were still in Soheil’s place, the police might think there had only been the three dead men involved in whatever had happened. Not now. Any thought that he had of making the noon Dubai flight from Imam Khomeini Airport was gone. They would be watching the airport once the police realized the three dead men worked for the Foreign Ministry. And that there had been a fourth man. He turned the car away from Tehran.
And then he heard more sirens behind him.
Jaipur Curry House
The Creek
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
“Do you want another Kingfisher, mister?” the Indian waiter asked. He was anxious to have Rusty either order something more or leave. There were few people left in the restaurant. “Do you have decaffeinated coffee?” Rusty asked. The waiter looked as though MacIntyre had ordered pork. “Well, a Scotch whiskey then, a...what was it... Balvenie, neat?” The waiter smiled and went away.
Russell MacIntyre stared out at the dhows and tourist boats on the Creek. This was old Dubai. With narrow streets, low-rise buildings, a rabbit warren of walkways through the old Gold Souk. Beyond the Creek he could see the spire of the Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, having inched past the last Chinese towering edifice. He felt suddenly alone, powerless. He had been reading The World at Night.
Brian Douglas had not shown up. Nor had he sent him any message. It seemed uncharacteristic. He began to wonder whether it had been foolish for Douglas, a senior SIS officer, to go undercover into Tehran. And unrealistic for him to have thought that he could somehow learn one of Iran’s biggest secrets by wandering around a place he had not been in several years. Maybe Iran’s forces were just exercising, like ours do all the time. Maybe Ahmed bin Rashid’s source had not really penetrated an Iranian operation, or the source had just made something up to please Rashid. Maybe...
As the Scotch came, he felt the BlackBerry vibrate inside his jacket pocket. Maybe it was a message from Sarah, from Somaliland. He clicked open the file. It was from Susan Connor, back at his office, and it was encrypted.
Rusty, the Boss asked me to send this to you. He still can’t make this BlackBerry thing work. He said to tell you that the FBI came by today. Asking about you and your relationship with Senator Robinson. Wanted to know if you had been authorized to brief him on some special compartment. Something about China. Then they asked if you were authorized to meet with terrorists. Was that part of your mission. Rubenstein put them off, but he thinks your friend Secretary Conrad quote has you in his sights unquote. I am not sure what all of that means. I hope you do. It doesn’t sound good. Nothing new here, except the anti-Islamyah propaganda machine is in high gear. Congressional hearings. Ads in the papers. Interviews on certain TV networks. The latest is speculation that there are nuclear warheads for the missiles we found. I have gone over every bit of intel that I have access to and there is no repeat no indication that any nuclear warheads have shown up in Islamyah. But Senator Gundersohn says it’s reason to “go in there and find them and take them out.” Scary stuff if anyone took Gundersohn seriously. Got to go. Be careful out there, Susan.
MacIntyre finished the Scotch in one swig. How could anyone know that he had briefed Senator Robinson about the DIA source in China? It was only a technical violation. Robinson might not have been cleared by DOD to get the information, but he was the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Meeting with terrorists? Ahmed. Jesus, he thought, how the hell do they know I met with Ahmed? He signaled to the waiter for a refill.
The BlackBerry vibrated again. This time it was the phone function. He clicked to accept the call.
“Did you hear the news?” It was Kate Delmarco.
“No, I’ve been sitting here waiting for Brian and he’s a no-show. What news?” Rusty stood up and looked north toward Delmarco’s office in new Dubai.
“A Navy plane is down. They’re saying maybe Islamyah shot it down.” Delmarco sounded breathless. “Russell, they say it was Admiral Brad Adams. He was flying back to Bahrain from some NATO meeting in Turkey. They don’t think anyone survived. They’re searching off Kuwait.”
MacIntyre swallowed hard. He felt the world closing in on him.
“Rusty, we’ll bomb Islamyah if they did this, you know that. We need to get together.”
He thought of what Ahmed bin Rashid had said in that little store in Manama. If the Shura felt pressured, it would reach out for nuclear weapons. And if it did that...
“I’m too...I need to think clearly,” MacIntyre mumbled. “How about I see you for breakfast tomorrow? Where’s good?”
She paused. “Okay, my office, Media City, eight-thirty.”
“Thanks.” He clicked off the phone function. He pulled a wad of dirham notes out of his wallet and threw them on the table. He moved off the porch over the Creek, inside the restaurant, toward the exit.
The Indian waiter chased after him. “Keep the change,” Rusty yelled over his shoulder.
“Yes, sir, but the whiskey?”
MacIntyre took a card from a jacket pocket and gave it to the waiter. “If anyone comes looking for me, give them this telephone number.” Then he took the glass of Scotch and downed it, thinking about the man who had introduced him to Balvenie in a club in London.
11
FEBRUARY 16
Aboard the USS Jimmy Carter, SSN-23
Off Malaysian Coast
South China Sea
“Open the Ocean Interface, aye.” The seaman repeated the order and then moved the lever on his control panel. Outside, behind the conning tower, the submarine’s hull began to move and the ocean water rushed in. The 12,000-ton ship continued to move ahead at 14 knots, 100 meters below the sea.
“Captain Hiang, Tony, this is where it gets interesting. You might want to sit up here so you can see the display on this screen,” Captain Tom Witkovski urged his Singaporean guest.
“So you don’t have to come to full stop to launch the ASIPs?”
Hiang asked, propping himself up on the observer’s chair. “No, we don’t. The advanced submersible intelligence platforms should be called the ABEAUT, because they are beautiful. Beyond my wildest dreams just a few years ago. They swim out of our hull with just their guidance engine running. Then the propulsion kicks in once they are well clear of the Carter.”
The lieutenant commander standing next to the control panels looked at his skipper. Captain Witkovski nodded at him to begin. “Prepare to launch ASIP-1,” he said to the seaman.
Five minutes later, he gave the seaman the last order in the sequence. “Launch ASIP-3.”
“Launch ASIP-3, aye,” the seaman repeated. “ASIP-3 away.”
The two captains watched as three green icons moved away from the blue icon for the Carter on the screen. They spread out, three abreast, and accelerated.
“Because they have a very small acoustic and sonar signature, there is no chance that the Chinese will think that there are torpedoes coming their way,” Witkovski explained. “They’re fully autonomous. Communicate only in an emergency. They know their missions and they just carry them out. When they get to their designated collection points, the ASIPs will switch over to the guidance propulsion to do place-keeping. And they will wait for their targets and then swim up to meet them and swim along their hulls, port, starboard, and right down the keel. Then back to place-keeping until the Chinese move on. Finally, we will swing around from the side and call them to come home. The Chinese will never know they were swept.”
The image on the screen jumped out to a 50-kilometer radius. Red icon
s appeared with alphanumeric designators attached to them. “That would be the first carrier battle group. The Zhou Man is the carrier there in the middle. She has two eight-thousand-ton air defense cruisers, one on either side. They carry the HHQ-9 supersonic surface-to-air missile. Highly lethal. Then you can see a leadand-trail frigate, an underway replenishment ship, two oilers, and what’s called a logistics support ship, more like a special cargo ship.”
Captain Hiang stared at the icons and the little green dots that represented the ASIPs moving toward them. “Don’t they have subs with this battle group, Captain?” he asked.
“There’s one with each of the two groups. Their new eightthousand-ton nuclear attack sub, type 93, Keng-class. A copy of the Russian Victor Threes, but noisy as hell. We can hear it a day away. This one’s actually in trail of the carrier. We have a sub, the USS Greenville, on her.”
The green dots slowed and appeared to stop halfway to the Chinese ships. “Well, now they wait,” Witkovski said, hopping off his chair. “And we loop around to the side to get ready to recover them. You look concerned, Tony.”
The Singaporean captain had been studying the screen and the briefing materials that he had been given. He looked up from them. “Captain, your boat, the Carter, is exactly ten times the displacement of each of my four little Swedish boats at Changi. And almost three times as long. So it’s not for me to give you advice, sir.”
“Come on, size doesn’t matter, Tony. You know these waters better than us. You were a standout in the strategy-and-tactics program at Newport. I checked. And three of those little boats of yours are waiting to pick the Chinese up for a while for us when they start through the Malacca. So what’s bothering you?” Witkovski sounded sincere.
“Okay. If I were the Chinese admiral, I would have my sub out front sweeping, or under the Zhou Man, looking for you guys. Are you sure, Tom, the sub the Greenville is following isn’t the lead for the second battle group?” Captain Hiang asked.
“Very sure. Wanna know why?” Witkovski said, sidling up to Hiang’s chair. “ ’Cuz the USS Tucson is tailing the Chinese sub that is behind the second battle group. They got two subs and we have one of ours on each one. Makes sense for them to have their subs out back to see if anyone like us is following them. Too bad for them they can’t hear us over their own din.”
Hiang laughed. “I knew I should have kept quiet.”
Forty minutes later, the Carter was running at 5 knots 6 miles east of the Zhou Man. On the display screen the three green dots were circling their targets, the Zhou Man, the destroyer Fei Hung, and the logistics support ship Xiang.
“Two questions, Captain.” Tony Hiang broke the silence in the Special Operations Control Room.
“Shoot,” Witkovksi replied.
“One, if the ASIPs aren’t communicating, how do we know where they are and what they’re doing? And as you say, part deux”— Hiang chuckled at this bit of American humor that he had picked up—“why the logistic ship?”
“Okay, one is easy. We don’t know where they are or what they’re doing really. This display simulates what we think they should be doing about now, based on their programming and the data we have about where the Chinese ships are,” Witkovski admitted.
“Part deux is a little more sensitive. Seaman, close your ears. We won’t be surprised if we get radiation readings from the carrier. They may have a few tac nukes on board for the J-11s, their Flankers. We know they have air-to-surface and air-to-ship missiles for the J-11s. The destroyer carries some antiship and possibly some land attack cruise missiles in vertical tubes. I wouldn’t be bowled over if a few of them had nukes. And we just might know what kind of radiation signal we’re looking for on each of those ships, but I never said that. Now the logy, if we get a signal there, that’s what Washington wants to hear about ASAP.”
Hiang wondered why they were watching the screen so intently if it was only telling them what they had already programmed into it. He stood and stretched.
“Owweee! Fuck me!” the seaman yelled, pulling off his headset. “Sorry, sir, but acoustics just about blew out my eardrums, sir.”
Captain Tom Witkovksi grabbed the headset and held it up near his right ear. “Jesus, what is that?” He dropped the headset and pressed an intercom on the wall. “Exec, what is that on acoustics?”
From the Combat Information Center, the boat’s control room one deck up, the executive officer responded, “We’re processing it through the database, Captain. Here it is... the first sound was ‘Similar to a Kiloclass diving.’ Then the screeching...it just says ‘Presumed Collision.’”
“Shit,” Witkovski swore, driving his fist against the wall. “I’m going up to CIC. Tony, I need you with me.” The American captain was out the bulkhead and climbing the ladder to the Combat Information Center three rungs at a time. “You got towed array out?” he barked at the executive officer as he entered CIC.
“Aye, sir. The hydrophones back there are what picked it up,” the somewhat startled exec replied. The captain flicked a switch and threw the undersea sound on the dashboard speaker. It was an excruciating sound of screeching metal, like steel chalk on a metal blackboard, magnified tenfold.
Witkovski turned down the volume. “What’s the depth there?”
“Two hundred fifty meters, Captain,” a seaman in front of a control panel answered.
“What’s the maximum dive depth of a Kilo-class?” the captain shot back.
“It’s nominally three hundred meters,” Captain Hiang answered from behind Witkovski. “But the Chinese version, the 877EKM, has a classified rating of 375.”
Witkovski spun about. “What else do you know about them? Really, Tony, tell me.”
The short Singaporean officer walked closer to the American captain and almost whispered, “They have a range of six thousand miles. They have a new, special sound-dampening and antisonar coating. They have a low-wave bow sonar that’s hard to detect. And because they can operate on only battery power for a while, they are very, very quiet. Especially against the acoustic background of an aircraft carrier battle group.”
A strange sound came over the speaker. “Ebup, ebup...” The executive officer turned up the volume on the dashboard speaker and hit the analyzer button. “Don’t bother analyzing it. I know what it is,” Captain Witkovski said, shaking his head. “Shit!”
“Sir?” the exec asked.
“It’s the acoustic distress signal from ASIP-2. There’s a Chinese Kilo out there that we missed. It’s on top of the ASIP, driving it to the bottom. The ASIP has a crush depth rating of two hundred meters. It will break up in a few minutes.” Witkovski sighed. Then he turned to look at Captain Hiang. “It seems the Zhou Man did have a sub on point and it’s playing dirty.”
“Sir, we should butt-fuck that Kilo, sir, come up behind it and ping it,” the exec proposed. “They can’t know the ASIP is unmanned. They could be killing our guys.”
“Not today, Tim. No butt-fucking today. We have two other ASIPs out there to recover and download. That’s our mission. Now, let’s do it. Give me a course to ASIP-3. Full quiet on the boat.”
“Full quiet on the boat, aye.” Blue bulbs blinked on throughout the 453-foot length of the USS Jimmy Carter.
Almost two hours later, with the Zhou Man battle group now turned and heading north into the Straits of Malacca, the word came: “Ocean Interface sealed.” The two remaining ASIPs were on board. Captain Witkovski asked Captain Hiang to join him for a meal in his cabin while the technicians downloaded the data from the unmanned mini-subs.
Over Philly cheesesteaks and Diet Pepsis, Witkovski almost apologized. “I should have listened to what you were trying to tell me, Tony.”
“I should have been more direct, Tom. Sometimes we ethnic Chinese have a hard time being direct enough for Americans.” Captain Hiang smiled. “But we know the Chinese, because we are descended from them. We speak their language. We know their history. The little Indonesian city that the Zhou Man is sailing by to
night? Malacca? It was founded by the Chinese navy, six hundred years ago. Besides, what could you have done anyway if you had detected the Kilo sitting under the keel of the Zhou Man?”
There was a rap on the door. “Enter,” the captain replied. It was the executive officer with a draft message on a clipboard. “It’s a summary of the data readout and the automated analysis from the two ASIPs, sir. I have coded it FLASH precedence, sir.”
The captain raised his eyebrows and took the clipboard. FLASH was reserved for messages of extreme priority, such as “Someone is firing at my ship.” Witkovski slipped on his half-glasses and read:
To: CinCPAC, Honolulu FLASH
JCS/J-3 FLASH
DIA, DT-1 FLASH
FM: SSN-23
SUBJECT: Probable Nuclear Weapons on Board Zhou Man Battle Group (TS)
Analysis of telemetry from ASIP inspection of PLAN Special Logistics Ship Xiang (C-SA-3) indicates neutron and gamma readings consistent with six warheads in bow bulk container area and six in aft bulk container area. Analysis program indicates all warheads have similar size, estimated between 10 and 30 kilotons. Analysis program suggests tentative typing as CSS-27 intermediate-range ballistic missile payload. No readings detected aboard accompanying destroyer. Surveillance of the carrier Zhou Man was not performed (details sepchan).
EOT
Captain Witkovski initialed the message board and passed it back to his exec. “Well done, Timmy. That ought to spray feces all over their fans back in Washington. This time we’ve found them some WMD. Ain’t no doubt about it.”
New York Journal Bureau
Media City
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
The Scorpion's Gate Page 19