To Hunt a Sub

by Jacqui Murray

  Kali packed a battered duffel bag, dug her passport from the Sentry safe in her closet, and accessed the State Department’s website on international travel.

  “Extreme caution for those visiting Israel. Consider me warned.”

  Many ‘early man’ sites were in hazardous areas—Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania. It was de rigueur for paleoanthropologists to put themselves in danger for science.

  Before tucking in for the night, she logged into her school email account to let Mr. Keregosian know she’d be overseas for a few weeks. She smiled at his answer: I will be your fan and silent supporter till the end, Kalian. Bureaucrats must not overpower your brilliant mind.

  He asked if she required more money.

  It pained Al-Zahrawi to deal so familiarly with a female, to treat her as his equal. After every email, he cleansed himself thoroughly and prayed to Allah for understanding.

  The Prophet’s gift was righteous if not at times circuitous.

  He pulled a report up on his IPad to view the next puzzle piece that had fallen into place. The report lasted only fourteen lines, but gave Al-Zahrawi the power to identify any American Trident in the world, if he could locate it.

  Subs were built of iron. Because the weight and mass of every submarine was different, the size and shape of its ripple through the Earth’s magnetosphere was unique. That ‘magnetic signature’ was top secret and as such, stored on a SIPNet server few could use and no one could copy from.

  Al-Zahrawi knew this because he had attempted it. When it failed, he had been forced to recreate the signatures himself. He found the Trident home ports on a public website available under the Freedom of Information laws. The site helpfully explained how the subs required scheduled and periodic maintenance—a wonderful word in the jihadi vocabulary. Al-Zahrawi purchased an off-the-shelf Magnetic Anomaly Detector—MAD, aimed it at an incoming sub and waited for the wrinkled fluxes to appear. Nothing.

  He realized he needed something more like the MAD devices the Navy hung from helicopters, but customized. Al-Zahrawi found a sufficiently credentialed employee with the morals of a sociopath who provided the manufacturer’s name, only to be told he must be approved by the Department of Defense. After countless failed bribes, contributions, and subterfuge, Al-Zahrawi accepted he would have to build his own. That became a reality, thanks to a retired German mechanical engineer still bitter over the Second World War. Al-Zahrawi rented a hi-rise apartment whose roof offered a line of sight to the Bangor Washington port and instructed his mujahedeen to stay until they succeeded. Days passed, and then weeks, before a sub showed up. They aimed the MAD device at the boat and watched as a ghostly shape appeared that replicated the bend in the Earth’s fluxes caused by the submarine’s presence. This magnetic signature was uploaded to Al-Zahrawi

  With that success, Al-Zahrawi sent workers to every submarine base with orders to collect Trident signatures.

  Now, he required a method to find the submarines at sea. Delamagente’s Israel trip presented an opportunity.

  Chapter 14

  Saturday

  Where was she?

  Spending two weeks with Delamagente would be harder than Rowe had thought. He reminded himself this was research, not a date. Besides, he wouldn’t survive a third strike, if life after Paulette and Amanda could be called surviving. He unbuckled his tool belt with its trowels, brushes, tape measure, cameras, and canteen, and distractedly massaged the chronic ache in his knee, glancing every few seconds at the edge of the hill he had just crested.

  The last few days had been a flurry of inactivity. He settled into his cover as Columbia’s newest research star, kept in contact with Catherine Stockbury and Kalian Delamagente from a distance, checked with James for updates, and mentally prepared for the field work that could prove his theory.

  He flew into Ben Gurion International Friday to meet with the Israeli Antiquities Authority Director-General, and iron out the political and logistic details inherent to every expedition. Over café barad, he described how the excavation’s footprint skirted the holy areas thanks to guidance from local religious leaders. By the time he had the permit, Delamagente and the Land Rover full of grad students had arrived. Everyone wanted to settle in and gossip except Delamagente. She said a five-mile hike in the one-hundred-degree heat, ninety percent humidity, sounded great so off they went.

  He had begun to worry in earnest when her head popped over the ridge. Sweat poured down her face and plastered her short-sleeved cotton blouse to the curves of her body. She limped to a painful halt and doubled over, gasping.

  “I should have broken my shoes in first.”

  In place of the rejoinder that leaped to mind, he handed her his canteen and politely inquired if she had another pair. She bobbed her head once, lungs wheezing.

  “Anyone who can climb as fast as you and isn’t Special Forces missed a bet.” She grimaced.

  He did a double-take. She couldn’t know. “You’ll get used to it—iodine-flavored water.”

  “As long as it keeps me healthy, it can taste like raw eggs.”

  Rowe grimaced. “How do my troops sound?”

  “Young and enthusiastic. The four I shared the ride with talked nonstop about the Levantine Corridor and the history of the Dead Sea Fault Zone. I tried to keep up and then gave up.”

  One hand firmly planted on her thigh, the other gripping the water bottle as though life itself, Kali watched Rowe out of the corner of her eye. He seemed worried about her at first and then shut it down. She hadn’t seen him since that day at the vending machine. He emailed instructions for what to bring, how to get her tickets, where to meet the driver at the airport, and how to reach him if she needed to.

  She tamped down the queasiness that left her dizzy in his presence. She wasn’t here to find a boyfriend. Early man research had been her passion throughout undergrad, one she put aside to raise Sean. Otto’s focus on Lucy had resurrected that hunger. The AI never acted without purpose and always charted a logical path. If he was monitoring Lucy, she must play an important part in the research.

  In that, Dr. Zeke Rowe could prove useful, assuming his grad students could concentrate. Contrary to what she told him, what they really talked about was I wonder if he’s as cute as his publicity photo. And He’s single does he have a girlfriend? And What are the sleeping arrangements anyone know? When they found out she worked with him, they peppered her with questions she couldn’t answer.

  He swept his hand over a swath of arid featureless land. “Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors followed the Great Rift Valley from the African desert to the abundant lakes of what today is the Dead Sea.”

  How amazing it must have been. Small bands of roving hominids gathering roots and nuts and scavenging the cast-offs of predators. Did they arrive here by following the grazing animals or had that uniquely human trait of wanderlust already evolved?

  “There’s Route 90 from Ben Gurion International.” Rowe traced his finger down a shimmering silver ribbon in the distance. “North are Ubeidiya and Gesher Benot Ya'aqov with their 1.5 million-year-old remains showing evidence of man’s early control over fire.”

  Delamagente tingled as though an antediluvian breeze had parted the haze, exposing an ancient world. “I can see Lucy with Boah and Ump at her side. She’d stop there,” Delamagente indicated the spreading limbs of an aspen, “to rest.”

  “Lucy?”

  “The Homo habilis Otto likes. She’s an efficient survivalist which leaves time for planning and tool-making. And problem-solving. In the months I’ve observed her, I’ve come to respect her decisions.”

  Delamagente felt Lucy’s presence, watching, wondering if the strangers were predator or prey.

  Rowe cocked his head. “You talk about Lucy as though she’s human.”

  “Habilis is the first human species in the genus Homo. Lucy’s eyes hold a sadness that never goes away even when she’s happy. Her internal strength is formidable. She soldiers forward, seemingly resigned to h
er destiny.”

  Kali stopped. She just described herself on a good day. “Not unlike a few people I know.”

  “Must be a useful trait or evolution would eradicate it.” He turned toward the hill they’d scaled. “Time to head back for the official welcome to the troops.”

  As the days passed, Kali lost herself in the organic pungency of this ancient land. She jogged as the sun rose to avoid the heat and then relaxed over a cup of Turkish coffee before beginning the shoveling, chipping, and sifting that was daily work. Just when she thought she couldn’t stand another scorching minute, the cook’s bell clanged, announcing a hearty meal of fresh bread, cheese, melons, vegetables, and juice.

  After breakfast, in the relative cool of the tents, she scrutinized the collected bones and rocks, logged in data and created the meticulous maps part and parcel to every expedition. The day ended with a light meal and passionate, scholarly discussions about why a hominid molar had been found separated from a jaw, or how pig and human skeletal parts came to be buried together.

  Throughout the day, Rowe wandered through the encampment to review the artifacts, ask questions about a bone or tooth dug up the day before, and prod his researchers to understand connections to the bigger picture. He always joined the evening exchanges, sharing his learned wisdom, urging the group to think deeper and find what was there, not what wasn’t, and forcing them to put aside personal prejudices in favor of authenticity.

  Every night, he retired alone while the rest of the crew arranged themselves into favorite sleeping pods. Most evenings, one of the women would find an excuse to approach his tent and be invited in. It was clear from the silhouettes nothing happened but talk. Kali sensed a sadness to Zeke Rowe. His passion for life stopped with proving his theory. Someone had hurt him and he hadn’t recovered.

  Maybe never would.

  As Kali hacked at the baked earth of grid twelve, she couldn’t help but envy the snake, his needs nothing more than eating every few weeks and sleeping under a shady rock. Her muscles ached from days of crouching and her eyes burned from the sun’s glare off the parched earth. Under the searing Israeli sun, her hat’s built-in sweatband proved as useless as a chocolate teapot. She chipped, scrape chipped, scrapechipped, thoughts revolving around whether she would ever again take a cold shower, one ear on the muted voices around her and one on the lunch bell.

  But if it rang, she didn’t hear it. “Zeke! Over here!”

  Rowe jogged over, face pale from the heat, eyes hooded, shadowed closely by several students.

  “What d’you have, Kali?”

  Zeke had been working as hard as anyone, but had no sweat stains under his arms. She stunk like a pile of dirty socks.

  She smoothed her thumb over a round nub protruding from the hardscrabble. “I think this is human.”

  He knelt, face inches from the artifact. “No, I don’t think so. Too narrow.” Then his eyes moved left, squinted, and widened. “I’m wrong.”

  Kali wiped sweat from her eyes. This heat was killing her. “It is hominid?”

  He indicated a tiny protuberance less than an inch in circumference. “Yes, because that’s a human phalange.” He tilted his head up and bellowed, “Everyone over here!”

  Rowe’s eyes glistened, a dirt smudge on his nose. All signs of fatigue had washed from his body.

  Heat forgotten, the entire crew went to work. The area was sectioned off and mapped, the location numbered. Students gently chipped loose the bones Kali had located and chiseled away the matrix. Some catalogued the start and stop depth, soil color and texture, and what had been removed around each bone. Others screened organic artifacts from dirt and pebbles. By the time the Sun set, they’d unearthed fragments of a Homo habilis, an Australopithecine and a canis, all in a hundred-square-foot area.

  Kali straightened, wincing at the machine gun pop of her vertebra. Time to quit. She was more tired than hungry, so gathered her tools, sketched a wave to Rowe and stumbled to her bedroll. She crawled inside after a quick search revealed no hidden scorpions or other crawly creatures indigenous to the Israeli desert. Everything hurt. Her skin burned, joints throbbed, and she had dozens of sand flea bites and tiny cuts from rocks uncovered while excavating.

  Rowe’s voice filtered through the dreamy haze, happily chattering to a group of students who wanted to talk through every possible outcome of what had happened today. Their voices were a soothing buzz as Kali fell asleep, wondering where Lucy and Boah and Ump were buried.

  Hours later, Rowe sat on an overlook at the edge of the camp. Up here, the night drowned out everything. The moon cast a luminescent glow, the stars remote pinpricks. Far down the nocturnal sky, the branches of an acacia traced blue-black against the horizon.

  He sorted through today’s events as his subconscious rummaged through the sounds and scents of the environ. The thin air reverberated with muted voices, insect chirps, and the occasional canine howl.

  And a car, maybe half a mile out. Who would drive here at this hour? They were literally in the middle of nowhere. Rowe had just decided to check when steps approached. He leaped sideways and spun around as a hulking male jerked back, palms out.

  “Hold on, friend. I did not mean to frighten you! Please, my name is Evan.”

  Rowe tilted his head up. Evan towered over him with frizzled hair backlit by the moon’s glow. He had shoulders like a ledge under a powerful neck, hair trimmed tight to the scalp, and eyes as flat as pebbles. His body had the tight musculature of someone not afraid to be physical. A puckered white scar interrupted his right brow, probably a knife fight. His accent was Russian.

  “What’s up?” Rowe kept his voice casual, but inside, he thrummed.

  “My car stalled. I saw lights and came to see about getting some help.”

  He pointed toward the headlights. Rowe instinctively turned toward Evan’s finger, but some primal instinct pulled him back. He caught Evan’s fist with his palm and squeezed until the fingers caved in. Evan started to say something, but Rowe had stopped listening. He hammered an elbow into the man’s knee moments before it reached Rowe’s crotch and then slammed a solid, fast punch into the giant’s nose. Cartilage crunched and Evan’s head whipped back as far as his neck would allow, then forward where it connected with Rowe’s head-butt. He howled as Rowe pounded him to the ground and stomped on his good fingers. Bones popped like dry twigs and the man curled into a fetal ball, whimpering.

  “What do you want, Evan—”

  A volley of bullets drove Rowe to cover. By the time they stopped, Evan and the car were roaring away. Rowe inched out of the crevice he’d wedged himself into, did a quick sensory run-through of the area for danger, and then watched the taillights until they vanished behind a tangle of shadows.

  “Hey, Dr. Rowe. Is everything OK?” One of the students.

  “Just a car backfiring,” Rowe answered without looking. “Go on back to sleep.”

  The student grunted and left. Rowe quieted his mind and body until all he heard were crickets and a soft desert wind. He scanned the terrain, the horizon, the scrub limned against the night sky, but all was normal. Was the target Rowe? Or the camp? He doubted they were after the ancient bones. Only satellite phones worked out here so they wouldn’t know about today’s discovery. If it was related to James’ case, why here rather than New York? Or was it something to do with Delamagente’s computer—Otto?

  He shook his head. None of those made sense. No, this was a message, but about what?

  He called James on the sat phone. “I just had company,” and he gave a rundown of the last fifteen minutes. Rowe had been out of Special Forces for years and was pleasantly surprised his skills remained intact.

  “Have you seen this Evan before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you get the make of the car, a license plate, description of the driver?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anyone suspicious in your group?”

  “N—” and Rowe paused. He had no idea. “I’ll check
.”

  As they talked, he paced off the area, flashlight scanning in neat rows. As he was about to say goodbye, he found something.

  “I’m sending you a map Evan dropped. The excavation site is circled in red with GPS coordinates.”

  As James waited, he asked, “Remember Carston Devore from DARPA? He hasn’t answered my call. I think he’s kidnapped, or dead. This is more dangerous than we thought.”

  Delamagente’s presentation was a catalyst. Rowe hung up and punched a number in his phone.

  “Your so-called gimp almost killed me!”

  “What happened?” The voice carried a hint of disgust.

  “I surprised him, but it didn’t matter. He fights like Spetznaz. I would have died if Aleksei hadn’t shot at him.”

  “Did you get Delamagente’s computer?”

  “I got nothing but a headache.”

  Chapter 15

  “Otto can make the connection!” Delamagente said, rushing into Rowe’s tent as the sun peeked one timid ray over the horizon, and then stopped short. “Sorry. I didn’t know you had company.”

  Last night, Rowe and James agreed Evan’s handler would send a bigger crew to accomplish whatever it was Evan had failed to do. Rowe’s first call after he and James hung up was to Duck Peters. Though they hadn’t talked in a year, it might as well have been yesterday. No small talk, no catching up, just what did Rowe need. In minutes, Duck lined up two retired SEALs who would be there at dawn. He would join them as soon as possible.

  Rowe had slept poorly, dreams haunted by subs disappearing, warheads raining down on the US, and Delamagente screaming. When he finally gave up sleeping, Duck’s friends were crouched outside his tent, waiting. Both were former SEALs who now did protection details for referrals. Their sturdy, compact builds, intelligent eyes, lean hungry faces threw Rowe back to another world. The perfectly rolled shirtsleeves, faded Levis, heavy boots, and loose jackets in 85-degree heat screamed authority, not disheveled researchers. They needed a different cover.