He leaned forward, staring down at the Captain. His black eyes were bright. “It must not fail,” he said, his voice full of menace. “Do you understand that?”
He calmed himself for a moment. “Look,” he said. “You and I are military men. The politicians always think that, because we can march in close formation and our uniforms are pressed, we can make everything happen according to a plan. Military operations are not like this, yes? You have already had two close calls—perfectly reasonable incidents, considering the dangerous operation you are carrying out. Predictable, even. You are probably going to have others before this thing is over. We hope not, but we know better, you and I, eh? Inshallah, yes? As God wills it. But the politicians, they think that this whole adventure will go boom, boom, boom, right by the plan. The mines are simply a way of adding depth to the plan. You may take your best shot at this carrier, and you may even hit it and damage it. But we both know you probably cannot sink it.”
He paused to light another cigarette from the embers of the last one. He pitched the butt into a trash can. The room filled with stinking smoke, blue in the bright sunlight.
“The Colonel demands that the carrier be destroyed. A ship, even an American super-carrier, is not destroyed if it can get to harbor, however badly damaged. We military men would be satisfied with putting it out of action, killing hundreds of their men like they did to us in their little sneak attack. Kill them while they are sleeping, yes? That is justice, and justice is a good enough reason for a mission like this. But Dey Khadafi says ‘destroy’. Tell me if I am wrong: a ship is not destroyed until it is put down beneath the sea, yes? This is the way of it?”
The Captain nodded. He was beginning to see the logic of it. If the Americans drove him off, they would relax; they would have won, after a fashion, they would feel safe. They would never expect mines, not in their own backyard. The Lieutenant Colonel watched him carefully, saw him work it through, accept it, even appreciate it.
“You see it now, don’t you. Mines. Little assassins, lying in wait. You will make your attack, and hopefully tear open his belly with torpedoes. Then you will make your escape, God willing. The carrier will be helped into the nearest port, which is her home base. And then the assassins will finish the job. Come, I want you to see them. Then I must show you some other things, and then you can rest, have a decent bath and a good meal. You may use my cabin for as long as you want. But first, come see.”
They left the cabin and retraced their steps down to the long flat deck between the two superstructures. The air above the tank decks stank of fuel oil. Between the forward and after deckhouses, the midships winch operators were clustered around two pallets, each containing two brown cylindrical shapes. They looked like torpedoes without propellers, each being about eighteen feet in length, almost two feet in diameter, and painted a dull, sandy brown color. The Lieutenant Colonel pointed out some of the mines’ features, while the workmen stood around, waiting to lift them down to the submarine below. The Lieutenant Colonel pointed with pride.
“They are made in France; the French are wonderful people—they never let their alliances or their rhetoric interfere with business, eh? Only the Germans are better. You see the sensors, yes? Pressure, magnetic, and the ear of the ship counter. I am an Army man, but these things have been explained to me. You know all about them, I suppose.”
The Captain nodded. He had been schooled in the Soviet Union, but not on French mines. But a sea mine was a sea mine: the principles were the same the world over. Mines lay in wait on the bottom until they were activated by a prescribed target. They could be set to explode when the magnetic field of a ship’s steel hull passed over them, or when the mine sensed the pressure differential created by a large hull moving through the water over the top of the mine. The counter listened and counted the number of ships, which allowed minesweepers to make several passes over the mine without effect. The mine might be set to activate after ten or fifteen ships had gone overhead, or it could be set on a combination: lie still until ten ships had gone by, and then activate on the next contact which exuded a sufficiently large magnetic and pressure field. The really sophisticated mines activated and became torpedoes, rising off the bottom and pursuing their targets. The thing that caught his attention was the size of these mines: these were very big mines.
“The warhead?” he asked.
“Very special. They have 1800 kilos of gas enhanced Semtex. This should be sufficient to lift even an aircraft carrier, yes? And four of them? I think these assassins will be valuable allies.”
“The trick will be to place them,” mused the Captain, awed by the size of the warheads. They were monsters. And the Semtex was gas-enhanced.
“The channel entrance to the carrier basin at Mayport is only 60 to 70 feet deep,” he continued. “We will have to go in on the surface. And there is the problem of the river; the river currents mingle with the tidal currents at the mouth. The mines may not stay where we place them. I shall have to think about this.”
“Load them to the submarine,” ordered the Lieutenant Colonel, and then he took the Captain by the arm, propelling him back to the forward superstructure. The Captain knew there was something important he was forgetting. They were intercepted on deck by the master of the Ibrahim and the Al Akrab’s weapons officer. The weapons officer spoke first.
“Captain, I did not know about these mines.”
“Neither did I, Lieutenant,” replied the Captain. “But there has been an addition to the plan.”
“Where shall we put them, forward or aft?”
The Captain now knew what had been bothering him. The addition of four mines to their warload presented a problem. They had a full torpedo load onboard, which meant that all ten tubes, six forward and four aft, were loaded, and all the reload slots were also full. They would have to download four torpedoes to accommodate four mines, because mines were deployed from the torpedo tubes. It would mean unstowing four large, warshot torpedoes, assembling the torpedo loading path trays through the submarine, opening the weapons loading hatches, and then carefully extracting four live torpedoes out of the submarine, all from alongside another ship. Each fish would take several hours, at least. The Captain explained the problem to the Lieutenant Colonel.
“You cannot just put them aboard—lash them down somewhere?”
The Lieutenant Colonel had never been aboard a submarine, that much was clear. The Captain shook his head. “That is impossible. They have to be in one torpedo room or the other, and all the stowage bays are filled. My crew sleeps literally on top of the torpedoes, Lieutenant Colonel; it is that crowded.”
The Lieutenant Colonel sighed in exasperation. Somebody had screwed up.
The Lieutenant spoke up. “Captain, if we must take these things onboard, there is a quicker way, although it is wasteful.”
“Yes?”
“We cast off the after part of the boat, and we safe and fire the four torpedoes out of the stern tubes. We then load the mines into the after torpedo room. It will still take several hours, but we will not have to drag out the warshots. It would be the safe way, but, as I said, most wasteful.”
“Do it,” ordered the Lieutenant Colonel. “The mines are essential to the plan.”
The Captain shrugged his shoulders. The Lieutenant Colonel would bear responsibility.
“I will need certain people back in the boat for this,” he said to the Lieutenant Colonel. “I will have to put off your offer of hospitality until this evening, Sir.”
“Cannot your people do this thing by themselves?”
“No, Effendi. I must be present whenever we handle large weapons such as torpedoes or mines. If there is an error or accident, the Ibrahim could go to the bottom along with the boat. And we need to do this thing before the weather turns.”
The Lieutenant Colonel was impressed. “As you wish, Captain. We have some more things to discuss when you are finished with the mines. Can you spare your political officer while you are loading the
mines?”
The Captain had guessed right. He was relieved that he had admitted the broaching incident.
“I will send him aboard at once,” he said.
He longed for a hot bath, but the loading of the mines, and the firing of four torpedoes, demanded his personal supervision. The crew would be unhappy, losing the afternoon.
Half an hour later, with her stern pointed off at an angle of twenty degrees from the side of the Ibrahim, the submarine fired the first of the four torpedoes. The Captain had ordered the arming wires disconnected; the two ton torpedoes, their propulsion systems and warheads disabled, plummeted harmlessly to the bottom 10,000 feet below. The weapons officer had wanted to fire them hot, but the Captain, ever mindful of the possibility of a circle runner, had elected to safe them instead.
On deck, the crew had unbolted the weapons handling hatch on the submarine’s deck aft of the conning tower. The winch operators on the Ibrahim had lowered all four of the mines down to the deck. Once the crew had the torpedo handling slide assembled, and the submarine was back alongside, the winch operator picked up the sling on the first mine, and dangled it, nose tipped down, at the upper lip of the slide. With six men pushing and shoving, the mine was landed on the slide and started down into the after torpedo room. There was no stowage for reloads in the after room, so each mine was loaded directly into a torpedo tube. By sunset, all four were in tubes, and the crew began the task of disassembling the weapons loading slide and re-bolting the hatches opened through the pressure hull to permit the operation.
In the after torpedo room, the weapons officer and the chief electronics technician sweated over the technical manual, which was written in French. They had to back each mine partially out of the tube to make the activation settings, one for magnetic field strength, one for pressure, and then the counter. In each case, they set the field strengths for the maximum setting, on the theory that an aircraft carrier, at nearly 100,000 tons, would create the biggest field the mine would see. They set the counter to zero, which meant that the mine would activate and explode upon first sensing a field of pressure and magnetic flux equal to or greater than its minimum settings. To make sure, they set an “and” gate on each mine’s computer, which meant that it had to sense both maximum pressure and maximum magnetic flux.
They successfully set up three of the mines, but the fourth would not accept the combination settings. They called the Captain, who came aft to take a look. The after torpedo room was the next to the last compartment in the submarine, with only the steering machinery room behind it. The overhead curved down at the back end to match the hull contours. The compartment was hot, being right behind the motor compartment. With tube doors being opened and closed, there was some oily seawater in the bilge, and the tiny space was extremely humid. The overhead was full of piping and electrical cables; three men could barely fit in the room.
The torpedo tube inner doors, glistening in chrome and brass, filled the after bulkhead. During an attack action, one man was stationed in after torpedo; he could manually fire each tube once if the remote firing mechanism, controlled from the weapons direction console in the control room, failed to work. Four high pressure air flasks, with piping capable of holding 3000 pounds per square inch pressure, bulged out of the bulkhead over each tube door. A firing signal released the compressed air in the flasks into the back of the tube, blowing the projectile out into the sea. In the case of a torpedo, the arming lever on the torpedo was attached to a hook in the torpedo tube by a short length of tungsten wire called the arming wire. When the fish was expelled, the wire tightened and tripped the lever on the back of the torpedo, allowing the torpedo’s propulsion system to fire and its gyro to spin up to control speed. In the case of a mine, the wire simply activated the mine’s battery and computer. The mine itself would travel about fifty feet aft of the submarine before settling to the bottom, arming itself on the way down.
“What’s the problem?” asked the Captain, bent over to avoid hitting his head. His uniform wilted at once in the extreme humidity.
The weapons officer and the Chief were stripped down to shorts and their hats. The temperature in the cramped compartment was nearly 100 degrees. The pages of the technical manual were curling up in the wet heat.
“This pig-fucker will not take settings,” complained the weapons officer. “It remains on default settings, which is counter zero, and pressure or magnaflux of the minimum setting.”
He squatted down on his haunches.
“If we put this bitch in the river mouth, it would arm immediately and get the first good sized fishing boat that came along, if not us in the process.”
The Captain nodded. “We’ve already got one of those,” he mused. The Chief grinned; he had no particular scruples about killing Americans, civilian or otherwise.
“I recommend we safe it and shoot it; get rid of it. I don’t trust it, especially with a faulty computer,” said the weapons officer.
The Captain thought about it for a minute. Perhaps there would be a use for this final mine. He hated not having any torpedoes in the after tubes. A brace of fish into the face of a pursuing enemy destroyer was always a good diversionary tactic for an evading submarine. Everything they were going to do would be in shallow waters. A hair-triggered mine fired in front of a pursuing destroyer might be just the thing. If the submarine was able to get far enough away from it. That much Semtex would blow the front half of a destroyer right off, but it might also smash a submarine’s propellers and rudder if it went off within a few hundred yards. A stinger in his tail, albeit a very dangerous one, but one befitting a scorpion.
“No,” he decided aloud. “We will keep it. Load it at default settings, and mark the tube door for manual firing only. I don’t want that one capable of being fired from the console.”
He saw the concern on his weapons officer’s face.
“Consider,” he said. “We have jettisoned the stern shot torpedoes. With this we regain a stinger in our tail. You are correct that we cannot use it for the carrier attack. But against a pursuing destroyer?”
He saw the comprehension in their eyes.
“It will be done,” said the weapons officer.
The Chief was not so sure. How far would such a weapon go before arming itself, and was that far enough to keep the submarine safe? But he held his silence.
TWENTY-TWO
Aboard the mothership Ibrahim Abdullah, Tuesday; 1700
The Captain lay back in the luxuriant warmth of a hot bath. The Lieutenant Colonel’s cabin actually had a bathtub; merchant tankers, unconstrained in volume above deck, had cabins that were much larger and more comfortable than most cruise ships. The cabins were built in proportion to the superstructure, which in turn was sized in proportion to the ship’s 25,000 ton capacity hull. He relaxed in the hot water, letting the strain of the past five weeks soak away. He could hear the taped sounds of an Arabic language radio station being played over the outside announcing system for the benefit of his crew, who were lounging about on the tank deck, enjoying the sunset.
The sea remained flat calm, which was exceedingly fortunate. The big ship moved very slowly, hardly disturbing the ugly, black object lying alongside. He drifted, partly listening to the tape of the radio outside, and partly dreaming of home. A noise in the cabin bedroom intruded.
“Who is there?” he called.
“Jenan, Effendi,” answered a soft voice. “I am the Lieutenant Colonel’s masseuse.”
The Captain did not know what to say to this, so he said nothing, a habit which had helped him become a Captain. The Lieutenant Colonel’s masseuse. He looked down at his long, lean body, wavering in the ripples. A massage. That would be very pleasant, as long as she wasn’t one of those Turkish 200 pounders who enjoyed tenderizing their clients. If she was, he would dismiss her.
“I’m coming out,” he called through the bathroom door. There was no reply. He wondered if she was still there. He rose from the tub, stepped out, and slipped into a full
length, towel-like bathrobe hanging on the bathroom door. He dried his short, wiry hair vigorously, and then stepped out into the bedroom of the cabin.
Jenan was not a 200 pounder. She was very young, dark skinned and black eyed, and slender. She was dressed in a one-piece, white cotton gown which draped all the way to the floor. She did not look directly at him, but kept her gaze demurely downward. She stood to one side of the wide bed, next to a small, wheeled table, which contained small vials of oils. There were towels spread on the bed. She was not beautiful, but she was not plain either. He thought he saw the barest trace of a smile on her face, and then he realized she was waiting for him to lie down on the bed. What to do with the robe? He had not wrapped a towel around his middle before putting on the robe. Fearing embarrassment more than nudity, he finally walked over to the bed, turned his back to her, and took off the robe, and then lay face down on the towels. She immediately draped a towel across his buttocks, and then knelt on the bed alongside of him, and began to rub his back.
His muscles were tense and tight, partly from nervousness about being on a bed and alone in a room with a strange woman. She probably had other skills besides massage, but he was apprehensive. He had stopped seeing the prostitutes near the submarine base two years ago, not for any moral reason but because of this new, American disease. His abstinence had been vindicated: two middle grade officers at the submarine base had been removed suddenly to the military hospital in the past year, where they had reportedly died of mysterious pneumonia complications. The Americans made much noise about the Colonel’s chemical weapons program, but, according to the Soviet advisors, this new virus borne disease had reportedly escaped from one of the Americans’ own biological weapons laboratories. They spoke of thousands of deaths in the United States.
The girl’s probing fingers, replenished with warm oils, worked their magic down his back. She was obviously a professional masseuse. She worked whole groups of his muscles, going from one to the next along connections he had not known existed. She performed her ministrations in such a way as to not excite him sexually, for which he was grateful. She also did not speak, which was a wonder in itself. He did not need any more complications in his life just now. He drifted off to sleep.
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