By Dawn's Early Light, page 22
Zahedi was an Iranian naval officer, though 2606 was not an Iranian submarine. He had been on loan for the past three months. The Iranian Supreme Naval Command Authority had agreed to the transfer because the host nation was a friendly government that had helped with military equipment in the past, and Zahedi needed operational experience. No submariner in Iran’s small fleet of four Kilo boats had gone into combat conditions yet. What he had learned in the past ninety days, and what he would learn in the coming months, would be priceless.
“Are we in the clear?” he asked. The tiny sonar compartment contained only two display units: One for the passive/active low frequency sonar unit mounted in the bow, and the second for the array of passive hydrophones mounted along the hull.
Chief Sonar Operator Lt. Lee Samsong looked up and nodded seriously. “I have five targets, Captain, all of which are commercial. The nearest is fifteen thousand meters, bearing zero-eight-zero. The range is increasing.”
“No surprises this time, Lieutenant?” Zahedi asked. Samsong had been on duty when they were spotted by the American research vessel. He had not evaluated the target properly. Which could have been a disaster.
“No, sir. Four of the targets are almost certainly longline fishing boats. But we are well outside of their fishing grounds. The fifth is another very large crude carrier, east of us, and on an easterly heading.”
When Zahedi had first come aboard 2606 some of the men, including young Lieutenant Samsong, had displayed open arrogance. Iranians were ragheads. The only reason they weren’t still driving camels as in the sixteenth century was because of the oil deposits under their deserts and the American and British help they got to retrieve the wealth.
Samsong had been well trained, as were the other fifty-eight officers and men aboard. But none of them had been trained by Dr. Usama Hussain Hassan.
Zahedi smiled inwardly thinking about the absolute hell that man had put him through. There were no failures in Dr. Hassan’s elite submariner officer classes. The pool of qualified Iranian naval officers wasn’t large enough to allow dropouts. Everyone passed, even if the grueling eleven-month course killed them. Which it nearly had on more than one occasion.
But Dr. Hassan was the only Iranian ever to be trained at the British Royal Navy submarine commander’s Perisher school. Every bit as tough as the American PXO and PCO courses, Perisher turned out some of the best submarine drivers in the world. And Dr. Hassan had passed the course third in his class. A fact he never let any of his students forget.
“You may be going head-to-head with the very best submarine officers in the world, aboard the very best boats ever built. American or British, you will consider yourself extraordinarily lucky merely to survive a hostile encouter, unless you know a few skills of your own. Skills that I will teach you.”
Hassan’s words were etched in the soul of every Iranian submarine officer he taught.
“Learn your lessons well, gentlemen. What you learn here may very well save your life, and the lives of your crew someday.”
This operation, Mission al’gamar, the moon, was putting those instructions to the test. Zahedi did not mean to lose this crew, even if they weren’t his own countrymen, or this boat, even though it wasn’t Iranian.
“You have detected no other submarine?” Zahedi asked.
“No, sir,” Samsong replied. “Not within the limits of my equipment,” he added, to cover himself.
“Very well. Keep a very close watch. We will begin now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Zahedi stepped back to the control room. His crew was ready. He wished that he had his own people aboard. But it could not be helped. And they were out here helping brothers and friends in a righteous battle.
He glanced at the boat’s chronometer and the mission clock on the bulkhead beside it. They were approaching local dawn. The American shuttle would be in orbit beside the damaged Jupiter spy satellite. Why he had been ordered to cause even more damage to the satellite before it was repaired and at the same time that Discovery and her crew were in such dangerous proximity was completely beyond his comprehension. He was certain that it was a political decision. One that he could not or would not question.
He turned to his short, stocky, flat-faced XO, Lieutenant Commander Yong Ki, and nodded. “It is time to commence operations.”
“Yes, Captain,” Ki responded crisply. He pulled down a growler phone. “Sonar, conn, are we clear to surface?”
“We are clear,” Samsong responded.
Ki switched to the 1MC. “All hands, all hands, man your battle stations, laser. All hands, all hands, man your battle stations, laser. Close all watertight comparments.”
A muted bell sounded throughout the boat as the watertight doors were closed and dogged.
Ki switched channels. “Engineering, conn. What is the status of our laser power unit?”
“Eighty percent and climbing,” Viktor Stalnov, their chief engineer, replied. “Are we headed up?”
“Momentarily,” Ki said. They spoke English aboard.
“You will have one hundred percent by the time we reach transmission depth.”
Ki replaced the phone with precision, like everything he did. He considered himself a battle-seasoned submarine veteran by now. It was an illusion that Zahedi meant to disabuse his XO of once they got back to port.
“Diving officer, make your depth one-five meters,” Ki ordered.
“Aye, aye, XO, make my depth fifteen meters,” the diving officer responded. He began issuing the necessary orders.
“Make your speed all ahead slow, course one-two-five,” Ki ordered.
The diving officer repeated the order, and Ki turned next to the weapons officer, Lt. Kim Nam, who happened to be his brother-in-law. “Report when you are at one hundred percent power, and have acquired your target.”
“Aye, aye, XO,” Nam replied.
Not bad, Zahedi thought, watching and listening from his position beside the periscopes. It was from here that he fought his battles. Maybe this mission would go without a hitch, unlike the previous one. He hoped so. Killing innocent civilians or dealing with survivors was distasteful to him. Battles were supposed to be pure. Even if the civilians were American.
The flash traffic they received last week was thankfully wrong. No American warships had shown up, especially not the American submarine that military intelligence had warned him about.
Zahedi smiled. Even the eggheads made mistakes sometime. But then they never had to come out here to do battle in the real world.
6
2337 GMT
DISCOVERY
Don Wirtanen was tethered above the cargo carrier Leonardo in the payload bay. The earth was above him. The RMA was 75 percent extended, its end effector within a couple meters of the slowly tumbling satellite.
Jupiter looked immense up close: unapproachable and unstoppable. It seemed to be as big as a small house. Anything tangling with it would definitely get hurt.
“Ready for the first power up,” Conners’s voice came through Wirtanen’s headset.
“Roger, you’re go for first power up,” Houston concurred.
The nitrogen jet stream from Conners’s MMU immediately froze into ice crystals. The satellite’s tumble began to slow down.
Conners, braced against the lower bay of the satellite, fired a second short burst of his maneuvering jets. Jupiter slowed and came to a complete halt along its lateral axis.
Its rotation end-over-end was very slow.
Conners shifted position, his movements slow and exact. To be thrown off the satellite even with its present very low rotational speed could mean that he might not be able to make it back to the shuttle on his own.
“Ready for horizontal axis power up.”
“Roger, you’re go for horizontal power up,” Houston replied.
It only took one short burst for Jupiter to slow and stop.
“The beast is tamed,” Conners reported.
“Copy that, Rod,” the controller in Houston said. “Good job.”
The arm slowly powered back to the payload bay, where Wirtanen maneuvered two file-cabinet-sized guidance packages into place and attached them to the arm. Untethered from Discovery he moved into position on the RMA’s end strut and slipped his bulky booted feet into the restraints.
“Take me for a ride, Mouse,” he radioed.
“Happy to oblige,” Susan Wright came back.
The RMA inched its way back to the now-stable satellite. Wirtanen started to sing an off-key rendition of “Daisy Bell” better known as “A Bicycle Built for Two” that had become something of a tradition among American astronauts.
Conners had already moved to the guidance system bays located amidships between the two flimsy-looking solar arrays. They had to take care not to touch the panels. If they were damaged in any way, the panels would not produce enough electricity to power the satellite’s systems. Jupiter would end up a very large, very heavy, very expensive piece of orbiting junk that would eventually spiral back into earth’s atmosphere and burn up. The only alternative would be another expensive mission to retrieve her and bring her back to earth for repairs.
Ahead, in the distance, a band of reddish-gold light began to encircle the earth from pole to pole, as Discovery-Jupiter approached the dawn over the Bay of Bengal.
7
2338 GMT
SEAWOLF
The BSY-2 display came alive.
Zimenski adjusted a few controls, then made a grease pencil mark on the screen. The Kilo was on the move.
“Conn, sonar. Sierra three is on the way up,” he reported.
Dillon appeared in the doorway almost instantaneously. He donned a pair of headsets. It took a moment or two until he could distinguish that he was hearing propeller turns and hull decompression noises. “Good job, Ski. Now don’t let him go.”
“I’m on it, Cap’n.”
“Can you confirm that she’s a Kilo boat?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got that much, but the computer can’t ID her yet.” Zimenski adjusted filters by hand, washing the sounds electronically, separating the various frequencies and mixes of frequencies that his acoustical equipment was picking up.
“What’s her rate of ascent?”
“Fifty feet per minute.”
“Gives us twelve minutes,” Dillon said. “Soon as you find out who she belongs to let me know. We can’t finish this without that.”
“She’s not Iranian or Pakistani, I can tell you that much,” Zimenski said. “She’s a newer model, different blade characteristics than their boats.”
“Keep on it, Ski,” Dillon said. He took off the earphones and went back to the control room. He did not hurry. The crew expected him to remain relaxed no matter what. And he thought better when he was calm. It was a trick that he’d learned hunting squirrels with his dad in Ohio.
“Okay, we’re on it,” he told his crew.
Master Chief Young as COB was at his position at the ballast panel. Alvarez as diving officer stood directly behind the planesman and helmsman strapped into their seats. Brown was at the nav tables, and his XO Charlie Bateman was overseeing the TMA and weapons control panel that was Jablonski’s sanctum sanctorum.
“Sonar, conn,” he said into the growler phone. “Is sierra three’s rate of ascent holding?”
“Aye, Cap’n. Fifty feet per minute. She’s passing five hundred fifty feet. Relative bearing zero-two-zero. She’s making turns for two knots, on a course of one-two-five.”
“Stand by,” Dillon ordered. He looked at the multifunction display. They were dead in the water, hovering at six hundred feet, their bow pointed fifteen degrees west of due north.
Dillon switched channels. “ECMs, are you ready back there?”
“Aye, aye, skipper,” the electronic countermeasures operator replied.
“Mr. Alvarez, make your speed two knots, come right to course zero-three-five.”
“Aye, make my speed two knots, come right to new course zero-three-five,” Alvarez repeated.
Brown plotted their new course and speed.
“Master Chief, bring us up to periscope depth. Make your rate of ascent six zero feet per minute.”
“Aye, come to periscope depth, make my ROA six zero feet,” the Chief of Boat repeated. Seawolf started up.
“Skipper, suggest that we shape a course and rate of ascent to get in behind sierra three,” Brown called out. “Once we’re in her baffles there’s no chance she’d hear us. We could flood our tubes and open the outer doors.”
“Thank you, Mr. Brown,” Dillon said. He did not give the order. He switched back to sonar. “Any changes, Ski?”
“Sierra three is steady on her course, speed and rate of ascent. But, Cap’n, I’m picking up something weird. It’s a high-pitched whine. At first I thought that they were having some sort of a malfunction in their active sonar equipment. But now I don’t know.”
Dillon had an idea. “Pipe it over to the weaps console,” he said. He turned to Jablonski. “Ski’s picking up something strange from sierra three. He doesn’t know what it is. See if you can make it out.”
Jablonski pressed his headset against his ears and listened for several seconds. He looked up, an evil smirk on his face. “It’s a charging circuit. But real big. Maybe a giant capacitor.”
“A high-energy laser power supply?” Dillon suggested.
“I don’t know what else it could be aboard a submarine, skipper.”
“Did you catch that, Ski?” Dillon said into the phone.
“Yes, sir. But if that’s what it is, then they’re about ready to go active. The charger is winding down.”
“Do you have an ID on her yet?”
“Negative, Cap’n. She’s gotta be a new boat. She’s not in my computer.”
“Swell,” Dillon thought. His job had just been made a hundred times more difficult. Their primary mission goal behind stopping another laser strike was to find out who was behind the attacks.
As his dad used to say: There’s more than one way to defur a feline. If they couldn’t ID the Kilo here, they would follow it back to the barn. And woe betide the sonofabitch who got in their way.
8
2342 GMT
KILO 2606
“Conn, sonar!” an excited Lt. Samsong called.
Zahedi snatched the growler phone. “This is the captain.”
“Sir, I have a new target, designated sierra six. I evaluate it as a submarine, but I cannot say the type yet.”
Zahedi crashed the phone back in its cradle and stepped around the corner to the sonar compartment.
Samsong was busy at his console, one hand on the controls, the other holding one side of his earphones against his head.
He looked up. His eyes were wide. “It came out of nowhere, Captain,” he said. “One minute the sea around us was empty and the next he was there.”
Zahedi donned a pair of headphones and listened. He couldn’t hear anything that made sense, and he was about to ask the young lieutenant if this was a joke, when Samsong raised his hand.
“There. Very soft. Sounds like a British Trafalgar. A pump jet.”
Then Zahedi picked up the low, rythmic pulsing noise from the mush. It was like someone ruffling a bedspread or perhaps fluffing a pillow; but it was more regular than that. Definitely a mechanical noise. The sounds had been described to him by Dr. Hassan. But the British wouldn’t be here. That made no sense.
“What are they doing?” he asked.
“He’s on his way up,” Samsong said. He adjusted a control. “Relative bearing one-zero-zero, just aft of our starboard flank. Rising at about fifteen meters per minute. Just a little faster than us.”
“What’s her range?”
Samsong adjusted another control. “Nine thousand meters and closing very slowly.”
Zahedi took off his headset and laid a hand on Samsong’s shoulder. “Good job, Lieutenant. But now the real work begins. Stay alert.”
Samsong puffed up with the unexpected praise. “Yes, sir,” he said sharply.
Back in the control room, Zahedi looked at his crew. They knew that they had company. Now it was up to this Iranian submarine captain to show his mettle. They waited.
“Mr. Ki, come to battle stations torpedo,” he ordered. “It seems as if we have a job of work to do before we surface to make our laser strike.”
“Very well, Captain,” his XO said. He made the announcement throughout the boat.
Zahedi walked over to the weapons console, where Lieutenant Nam had already started a TMA on sierra six based on the inputs the sonar sensors were supplying him.
“Are we ready to fire?”
“We have a good fix on the target, Captain,” Nam assured him.
Lieutenant Samsong had correctly evaluated the strange noise as the sounds of a pump jet drive. But he was mistaken in thinking that it was a British Trafalgar submarine stalking them. On the contrary, it was the American Seawolf that he had been warned about. Which was better. The British might fire first and ask questions later. But the Americans would never do such a thing. Even the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and the reprisals in nearby Afghanistan and Iraq, had not appreciably loosened their trigger fingers. Americans were basically cowards.
Zahedi smiled inwardly. Well, it was too bad for them, because their submarine school was very good. But this was the moment he had been waiting for.
“Preset torpedoes one and two,” Zahedi told his weapons officer. “I want a very tight spread. Put both weapons forward of amidships, in the area of the control room.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Nam said. He made the proper inputs to his console, and less than thirty seconds later the line of indicators showing the status of each weapon turned green except for the bottom three lights. The tubes had not been flooded, the outer doors were still closed, and the weapons were still safetied.
“Stand by,” Zahedi told his crew. He turned to his XO. “Flood tubes one and two, open the outer doors and report when you’re ready to fire. Look smart now.”
