by Don Brown
"Thank you, Kapitan, " Salman said. "If we are able to rendezvous with the Russian freighter and obtain the fuel, then most of my time left on this earth shall indeed be in the bowels of this ship."
A moment of silence followed between the two men. "All ahead five knots, " the captain ordered.
"Ahead five knots, " the helmsman repeated.
Sadir turned to the young man. "Yes, Salman, you will build a floating hydrogen bomb within the bowels of my ship. But remember this. The place we are headed will be far more beautiful even than this great city of mosques rising above the waters."
"I will do my job, Kapitan, if given the opportunity."
Sadir brought a cigarette to his lips as two other ships – a freighter flying the horizontally striped azure and gold ensign of the Ukraine, and a cargo ship flying the French flag – moved in front of Al Alamein. Both ships sputtered black smoke into a bright blue Turkish sky.
The Ukrainian ship was just now inching its way into the Bosphorus.
Another moment passed. A string of three channel tugs were chugging in a line out of the mouth of the Bosphorus. Off to the side was a Turkish Navy patrol boat headed in the direction of the Al Alamein.
"Kapitan." The radio operator was over on the right side of the bridge, with a telephone cradled under his neck. He was waving his hand in the air, making agitated gestures.
"What is it?" Sadir asked.
"It is the Turks." He was out of breath. "They are boarding ships entering the Bosphorus. They wish to board the Al Alamein."
CHAPTER 11
The Alexander Popovich
The Black Sea
Bring her alongside, " Captain Batsakov ordered from the bridge. "Steady as she goes."
Alexander Popovich inched up behind the stern of the Egyptian freighter. The inscription identifying the ship was painted across the black stern in white Arabic lettering. But the flag, now in full view as it furled and unfurled in the Black Sea breeze, was clearly Egyptian.
The seas were calm. Good. The last thing Batsakov needed was for rolling swells to pitch his five-million-dollar prize overboard during the transfer to the Egyptian.
"Steer five degrees port."
"Five degrees port, aye, Captain."
The helmsman turned the ship's massive wooden wheel an eighth of a rotation to the left. Alexander Popovich angled slightly to the left, giving the slow-moving Russian freighter plenty of time and maneuvering room to avoid ramming the Egyptian freighter from the rear.
"Perhaps their radio isn't working, " Joseph Radin, the Popovich's first officer, said.
Dark-skinned sailors could now be seen milling about on the deck of the Egyptian freighter. Some waved at the Russian freighter.
"Call them again, " Batsakov said.
"Peter the Great! Peter the Great!" Joseph Radin barked into the radio.
Still nothing.
Then static.
Then a burst into the Popovich's radio from the Egyptian. "Engines down!"
Batsakov slung a full glass of vodka across the bridge. Shattering glass was followed by a string of profanity. "We should've known better. We aren't even close to the coordinates Abramakov gave us. We have wasted valuable time!"
"Kapitan, I urge you, remain calm, " Joseph said. "We are but two hours off schedule. We had to investigate. They were Egyptian. It appeared that they had come looking for us."
Batsakov grabbed the open bottle of vodka on the charting table. He brought the bottle to his lips, turning it bottoms up.
"We will sail to the original rendezvous area, Yuri Mikalvich, " Joseph said. "You will lead us there, my kapitan. We will deliver our cargo. Then we will be rich men!"
Batsakov was unsure if the hot vodka was mollifying his anger or fueling it.
"Think about it, Yuri Mikalvich, " the first officer said, patting him on the back. "Two-and-a-half million American dollars in your pocket!" A greedy tone permeated Joseph's voice. "A full million for me and the crew divides the rest! Our lives will never be the same at the end of this voyage, Kapitan."
Batsakov finished the vodka. His first officer was right. Their lives would never be the same. This was no time for temper tantrums. He had to focus. A fortune was on the line. He was a good sea captain. He would find this freighter, deliver the cargo, eliminate the Masha Katovich problem, and drop these bratty orphans off in Ukraine to satisfy the politicians. Then he would sail the Alexander Popovich to the Bahamas, where he would collect his fortune and wait for another assignment. Or perhaps collect his fortune and simply retire.
Batsakov's eyes met his first officer's. "You are right, Joseph. Let us go find the Egyptian!"
"To the Egyptian!" Now Joseph was raising his own glass of vodka. Batsakov held up his bottle and clanked it against Joseph's glass.
"To the Egyptian!" Batsakov repeated the comment, pretending to drink from his now-empty bottle.
"Allah would be pleased!" The first officer laughed, swilling his own vodka.
That comment ignited a volvanic guffaw from within Batsakov's belly, bending him over double. "Yes, Allah would be pleased, " he said, cackling at the notion. The captain regained his composure, stood erect, and issued his next order.
"Resume course two-seven-zero. All engines ahead full!"
The Al Alamein
The Sea of Marmara
Captain Hosni Sadir watched the armed boarding party from the Turkish Navy walk across the main deck of his ship for what seemed like the hundredth time.
The Turks were an inexplicable oddity, Sadir thought. They were 98 percent Muslim. But since the 1940s, they had been allied with the Americans. Many Arab Muslims could not understand this unholy alliance.
But his Muslim brothers in Chechnya understood it.
Fear of the bloodthirsty Russians drove this alliance. The more than a quarter of a million Chechen martyrs who had gone to paradise since 1994 would approve of their Turkish Muslim brothers doing whatever was necessary to halt the expansion of Russia, even if that meant sleeping with the infidel Americans.
Sadir watched as the party, consisting of two officers and three Turkish marines, looked in crates, opened hatches, and poked around in areas where there was nothing significant. It would take weeks for such a small group to search every inch of this ship, and if they stopped every ship trying to get through the Bosphorus, they would effectively shut down one of the world's busiest shipping arteries. The economic superpowers would not let that happen.
As long as the Turks did not go below and discover the lead-walled laboratory and the silver radioactive suits waiting for Salman Dudayev's team, he had no worries. And even if they did, he still had no worries. This was Allah's mission, and he was Allah's servant.
One of the inspectors approached. "I am Lieutenant Baghadur of the Turkish Navy. Our party has completed its inspection. You are free to pass, Captain."
"A pleasure having you on board the Al Alamein." Captain Sadir accepted the Turk's salute, then watched the boarding party climb down the ladders into their patrol boats. When they were safely away at a distance of two hundred yards, he headed down the main deck to the ladder leading back up into the bridge. Thirty minutes later, Al Alamein passed north, steaming at eight knots under the first bridge spanning the Bosphorus.
The USS Honolulu The Aegean Sea
The officer of the deck, Lieutenant Darwin McCaffity, had just completed a final sweep on the scope. It confirmed a dark image of the freighter's hull against the lighter water through the periscope head window. A quick check of the side-scan sonar to confirm the ship's position showed all was ready.
"Captain, the ship is ready to vertically surface." McCaffity's voice came from just a few feet away in the dimly lit control room.
"Very well, Mr. McCaffity, " Pete said. He stood in the center of the darkened control room, watching the ship's control party maintain the seven-thousand-ton submarine completely motionless at 160 feet under the surface of the Aegean Sea.
"Commence ascent."
"Aye, sir, commence ascent."
Good plans were often as good as the paper they were written on, Pete thought, as his crew began blowing air into his sub's ballast tanks to raise her up toward the giant freighter floating just above them.
Good plans often got people killed. Especially during military operations.
Commander Pete Miranda knew of good plans gone awry. He'd attended a dozen military funerals over the years. Most involved accidents from high-risk plans that had never been tried before.
Pete wiped sweat from his forehead as his chief of the boat, Master Chief Jack Sideman, called out changes in the submarine's depth during its ascent. Sideman was serving as the Honolulu's diving officer.
"Passing one hundred feet, Captain.
"Passing ninety-five.
"Passing ninety feet."
Honolulu was executing a stealth procedure never tried or even practiced by another submarine in the history of naval warfare. This was a potential recipe for disaster.
Pete would prefer to have drilled this procedure with his crew. The efficiency and precision of a submarine in a deadly environment – and every dive into the depths of the ocean could turn deadly with one mistake by one of the hundred crewmen – was crucial. The Navy's response: Practice. Practice. Practice. The urgency of this crisis would not allow for that.
"Easy. Easy. Bring her up slow and easy, Mr. COB, " Pete said.
The procedure that they were attempting was delicate and dangerous.
Hovering underneath the Aegean Sea at a depth of ninety feet, just below the freighter Volga River, Honolulu was blowing incremental amounts of compressed air from her air flasks into her ballast tanks. This tedious process was making the sub just slightly lighter and bringing the top of her sail closer to the bottom of the drifting freighter.
The Honolulu was 360 feet long. The Volga River at 1065 feet long and weighing over sixty tons was a giant in comparison. Because of Volga River's size, an ascent that got out of control had the potential to reek havoc on the submarine, like facing the punch of a heavyweight boxer.
A mistake could sink the submarine.
Pete glanced at the docking schematic devised by Naval engineers back at Newport News. It was mounted on a table next to his position.
The plan was to raise the sub gently through the water, inch by inch, until finally, the top of the submarine's sail surfaced into the mammoth watertight compartment that had been cut into the ship's hull.
One problem was movement by the freighter. The Volga River had disengaged her propellers, but she was not entirely still in the water. All ships, even the mightiest aircraft carriers and the largest oil tankers, were prone to drift in the sea.
The process of docking a 6100-ton submarine with a 40, 000-ton surface ship left no room for error.
If the ascent through the water was off even just a few feet, the submarine's sail could collide with the keel of the freighter. If the ascent was too rapid, a collision could threaten the watertight integrity of his sub. But the danger that Pete feared the most were the huge titanium O-rings that were mounted by Naval engineers under the bow and stern of Volga River.
In theory, if Honolulu could surface into the open space in the bottom of the freighter, the O-rings would then slowly collapse inwardly along a mechanized track until they gently caressed the bow and stern sections of the submarine. Once in place, they would serve as a giant cradle in which the sub would rest on its transit under the freighter through the Bosphorus.
Should the sub miss and strike one of those O rings at too fast of a rate… Well, no skipper wanted a giant underwater hatchet taking a hack at his boat. Such a disaster might just send Honolulu to the bottom.
This was all compounded by the problem of murky visibility. Submarines do not have windows so that captains can look out and simply drive the ship to some point under the water. And even if they did have windows, the darkness in the depths of the sea would leave a submarine skipper like Pete Miranda staring into a black abyss.
Like an airplane flying through thick cloud cover in the middle of the night, submarines operating under the sea rely totally on instruments for navigation. For her eyes, Honolulu used active and passive sonar to determine what objects might be in the water around her. GPS was used to determine the sub's exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates on the earth. Active sonar shot a very loud ping through the sea that could be heard for miles away and could be heard by warships operating in the area.
Detection could not be risked.
Therefore, Pete had ordered that Honolulu turn off her active sonar. The entire ascent operation was being driven by a GPS homing device positioned inside the Volga River that was feeding data to computers in the Honolulu's control room. The idea was to bring the submarine up just under the bottom of that GPS device.
As a human backup to the GPS, a team of Navy SEALs, decked in black scuba gear and oxygen tanks, swarmed outside the submarine. They swam with powerful underwater lights and underwater transmitters. These transmitters provided contact directly to the bridge of the freighter and the control room of the submarine.
If the ascent was off target, the SEALs could press a transmitter on their watches, which would alert the sub to implement an emergency dive through the water to avoid the collision.
That was the plan anyway.
"Eighty-five feet."
"Slow and easy, " Pete said. "Easy does it."
"Eighty feet."
Something felt wrong. The sub seemed to be ascending too fast.
"Seventy-five feet."
"Easy. Reduce the blow a bit." A lower air-rate blown into the ballast should slow things down.
"Seventy feet."
An alarm buzzer sounded on the control panel. One of the Navy SEALs swimming outside the submarine had pressed his emergency transmission button. The SEALs had spotted trouble in the ascent.
"Sound collision alarm!"
The alarm siren blared throughout the submarine. The siren started with a very low pitch and continued to a high shrill, then repeated itself.
"Collision alarm! Collision alarm! Rig ship for impact!" Alarms rang all over the ship. Like firemen rushing into action at the news of a blazing structure, men's feet trampled all over the steel grated decks, rushing to their stations for a collision.
"Execute emergency deep!" Pete's order rung over the 1MC, over the sound of the claxons, trampling feet, and ringing bells.
"Emergency deep. Aye, Captain."
"Sixty-five feet."
"Wrong way!" Pete snapped. "We're continuing to rise. Emergency deep! Flood ballast tanks! Now!"
"Sixty feet."
"Execute emergency deep! Now!" Pete slammed his fist against the railing in the control room. Like a fast-moving elevator, the boat kept rising. This was taking too long. Time was running out.
"Fifty-five feet."
"Emergency deep!" The chief-of-the-watch's voice rang throughout the ship over the 1MC.
"Ahead full!" Pete ordered. The cavitation bell rang three times, alerting the throttle man in the aft of the engine room to bring the ship to full power.
"Fifty feet!"
"Rig for impact!"
Water flooded the main ballast tanks. In an instant Honolulu's nose dipped dramatically. Clipboards, coffee mugs, and anything else not buckled down slung across the control room. The sub dropped, angled nose-first, like a cart on a roller coaster. Pete grabbed the mast in the center of the control room, hanging on and praying as his boat plunged to a depth of four hundred feet.
Incirlik Air Base Adana, Turkey
Captain A. J. Riddle, United States Air Force, throttled the F-15E Eagle slightly forward, to the number one waiting position at the end of the three-thousand-meter runway.
Riddle had just reported for duty last week from Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. His transfer to the U.S. Air Base at Incirlik, strategically located less than fifty miles from the aqua-blue waters of the Mediterranean and less than one hu
ndred miles from the northeastern border of Syria, provided the best opportunity for aerial combat, he had figured.
Captain Riddle was itching for some action. He had expected to tangle with the Syrians or the Iranians. He had not expected this.
Riddle unrolled his navigational chart for a last glance at his flight plan.
This flight plan would take him on a northeasterly route, directly into Georgian airspace.
Georgia was a tiny border country. Barely one hundred miles of it separated the Turkish and Chechen borders – the distance of a millisecond, or so it seemed to a supersonic jet fighter.
Riddle knew what loomed on the northern side of the Georgian border. Formidable Russian MiG-29 jets, all intent on defending what they considered their territory, filled the Chechen airspace. This would be like lighting a sparkler while pumping your gas.
A sparkle against a fume – and poof.
If the president wanted U.S. warplanes patrolling Georgian airspace, and if those orders included a "weapons free" to fire if fired upon, then so be it. Captain Riddle was trained to take on and defeat any fighter pilot from any air force in the world. But the Russians? The Cold War was supposed to be over. Wasn't it?
A. J. Riddle had supreme confidence in his abilities to engage and defeat a MiG-29. But if he shot one down, then what?
If he shot down an Iranian jet, what were the Iranians going to do about it? Invade San Francisco? Shoot down a Russian jet, and the problem was escalation. What if one of his Sidewinders ignited World War III?
From the ready position at the end of the runway, Riddle looked up. Another giant C-17 Loadstar from the States glided in for a landing. The 82nd Airborne Division was staging at Incirlik. Within the next few days, the division would be ferried by helicopter to points in northeastern Turkey.
"Eagle One. Incirlik Tower. You are clear for takeoff. Runway five-nine. Eagle One, you may proceed."
"Incirlik Tower. Eagle One, roger that."
Captain Riddle pushed full throttle. The Eagle's engines screamed, pushing him down the runway in a great roar, gathering tremendous speed. The F-15 rocketed skyward.