Kilo Option, page 29
“The Israelis could be convinced to take him out. We could look the other way when they did it,” Roswell suggested. It was an exercise in futility and he knew it. But he played the devil’s advocate because he wanted to have a leg to stand on if this operation were to blow up in their faces. His had been the only voice of reason. He glanced at the tape machine in an open desk drawer. It was working.
“They have their own problems as it is with the Palestinians. Something like this would beat them up and they know it.” Townsend shook his head. “That’s out.”
“We could go public with it, Bill. Show and tell, starting with the raid on Bandar-é Emn, the attack on Failaka, and the Nukhayb massacre.”
“That won’t work either and you know it,” Townsend said, disgusted. “Can we prove that Hussein was behind the raid on Iran’s submarines? Can we prove it wasn’t a ruse by the Iranians themselves?”
“No, but that would have to rank as one of the world’s biggest coincidences.”
“It’s happened before,” Townsend said. “But goddamnit, we’ve gone over this. What I want to know is, can Lane pull it off?”
“I think he has a pretty good chance of getting to Hussein and taking him out,” Roswell said. “He has a habit of doing the impossible. The problem will be getting him out alive afterwards.”
Townsend’s eyes looked directly out of the screen, his face set in a blank expression. “That won’t be the primary consideration.”
“I understand,” Roswell said after a beat.
“How are you getting him across the border?”
“Do you want to know?”
Townsend shook his head. “No, I don’t believe I do.”
41
KARACHI, PAKISTAN
At midnight the city was alive with the press of humanity, three and a half million people living on the disease-infested delta formed by the heavily polluted Indus River. Traffic was intense along Fatimah Jinnah and in the city center, and the smells of exhaust and decay permeated the unsettled, crime-ridden city. A man, taller than most Pakistanis but with the same dark coloration and dressed in traditional Hindi garb, stood in the shadows across the street from the Avari Towers Hotel.
Valeri Yernin waited patiently, something he had to relearn since Failaka. He’d followed his control officer for the past twelve hours wanting to make sure they were clean before he made his approach. After the disaster on the island he had become even more careful than usual.
Hussein’s stupid attack on the desert village had helped focus the world’s attention on Iraq. It was anybody’s guess when the Western alliance would finally decide to take the man out. Though current opinion was that Reasoner did not have the guts to face up to an increasingly unified OPEC front, it could happen anytime.
Yernin had been more than happy to respond to Maslennikov’s call to rendezvous tonight at eight o’clock. He was four hours late on purpose.
For five weeks he had languished on the Syrian desert with Hussein’s troops, listening to the man’s grandiose schemes, all the while wondering why Kiev wanted so desperately to ally itself with such a force.
He’d healed quickly under Hussein’s personal physician’s care, and by the second week he was exercising up to eight hours each day.
His shattered mouth had been wired and pinned back together in a series of extremely painful operations under primitive conditions. It would never heal properly. He would have a permanent scowl.
He limped a little, and his shoulder ached, but worst of all was the razor-sharp pain of the false teeth they’d made for him. Even holding his mouth stationary, he was in pain. Talking was agony, and eating was almost impossible.
But he endured, and would endure, so long as Bill Lane was alive. Hate rode with Yernin the way the fame of an Olympic gold medal stuck with an athlete; it was a part of him.
Maslennikov, dressed in dark slacks and a dark pullover, came out of the hotel and handed the parking valet something. The young man took off running down the ramp into the parking garage beneath the hotel.
Yernin stepped a little farther back into the shadows as his control officer looked across the street in his direction.
Maslennikov looked at his watch, lowered his wrist, then lifted it again to recheck the time. He took a cigarette out of a breast pocket, turned out of the wind to light it, then replaced his lighter in the pocket opposite the one he’d taken it from.
Tradecraft signs that everything was okay for the planned rendezvous. They were standard gestures. Maslennikov knew or suspected that Yernin was out there somewhere waiting for the right moment to come in.
A brown Chrysler minivan came out of the garage and pulled up in front of Maslennikov. The valet got out and Maslennikov got in behind the wheel. Seconds later nine men, dressed similarly to him, came out of the hotel and crowded into the van, and Maslennikov started down the driveway.
Yernin got on his small motorbike and maneuvered into traffic as the van headed north. He kept several cars back, continuously checking his rearview mirror to make sure that he wasn’t being followed in turn.
The van continued past the Zainab Market and Saddar Bazaar and turned left to the docks on the west wharf across from the container loading complex. The port was busy around the clock. Twice they were stopped by train traffic, backing and filling, connecting with loaded flatcars, and moving empty units to sidings.
There was little in the way of security in the vast facility which was Pakistan’s major port. The crush of traffic was so heavy, it would be impossible.
Maslennikov pulled up near the end of the broad pier that jutted nearly two kilometers into the harbor, where a sixty-meter luxury cruiser, Good Hope, Plymouth, England painted on her stern, was docked.
Yernin parked behind a stack of containers ten meters tall, and watched the men get out of the van and clamber up the yacht’s ladder while Maslennikov again went through the routine of checking his watch twice and lighting a cigarette.
Yernin stepped out of the shadows and approached on foot.
Maslennikov’s left eyebrow rose when he saw the disguise. “The meeting was for eight o’clock at the hotel. Why didn’t you come?”
“After Failaka I wanted to make sure there would be no more mistakes.”
“The mistakes were not of my making, Valeri Fedorovich,” Maslennikov pointed out.
“Bill Lane—”
“You are obsessed with the man,” Maslennikov interrupted sharply. “He beat you twice, there will not be a third time.”
Yernin held his sudden rage in check. “You know where he disappeared to?”
“Yes, I do. But it’s of no consequence at the moment. For now this mission is all that counts. You developed the plan as much as any of us. Now I’m asking, are you capable of carrying it out? Or will you take your stupid fixation with you?”
Yernin glanced up at the yacht. She looked modern and fast, exactly the kind of a vessel he’d called for. No expense had been spared. She was fitted with the latest communications and electronic intelligence-gathering equipment, as well as Magnetic Anomaly Detectors and sonars so sophisticated that the Good Hope’s capabilities rivaled those of any modern antisubmarine warship.
His government wanted Hussein back in Baghdad and the Middle East so destabilized that supplies of oil to the Western alliance would be permanently jeopardized.
On the face of it the plan was simple. A beholden Saddam Hussein back in power would guarantee Ukraine all the oil it needed. But there was more to it than that, Yernin suspected. Blaming the attack on Iran so that the Western allies would shift their attention away from Baghdad was only a part of it.
Maslennikov was studying him.
“My obsession, as you call it, is mine,” Yernin said coldly. “But it will not interfere with this mission except to the extent that Bill Lane knows or suspects a good part of what we are up to. And it was an Iranian SAVAK officer with him in Kuwait, so the Iranians might know what we are up to now as well.”
“But they cannot have guessed the how, nor the ultimate consequences.”
“No,” Yernin said. Nor did any of them know or suspect the consequences, because he was going to change their plans. If the madmen in Kiev thought Ukraine could profit from a destabilized world, he would give it to them.
Maslennikov glanced at the yacht. “They are a good crew. They’ll do as they are told.”
“How much do they know?”
“Nothing to this point, except that the mission will be as unusual as it is dangerous. But they’ve also been told that when it is over they will be well rewarded.”
“Are you coming with us?”
Again Maslennikov studied Yernin looking for signs of weakness. “Are you capable of handling it?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, I will leave it in your hands. Trust them, especially Razhin.
He is a good captain. His men respect and trust him.”
“Do they feel respect and trust for me?” Yernin asked.
Maslennikov laughed. “Only fear, Valeri. Only fear.”
“As it should be.”
42
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
Thirteen hours later and ten time zones to the west a five-bell indicator chimed on one of the satellite monitors indicating that a flagged program was receiving something that the photo interpretive computer was evaluating as important.
Anthony Longo, chief photo interp officer on the graveyard shift, slid over from the console where he was playing two-handed solitaire against the computer. He knew exactly what it was the moment he looked at the monitor.
He transferred the real-time images coming from one of their KH-14 satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the Middle East onto the main viewing screen covering the back wall, enhanced the image, and started the printout sequence that would snapshot frozen time images. He selected a five-second interval.
The images were so sharp that he could recognize the uniforms and count the shoulder board pips on the two officers standing on the bridge. The angle was too high for him to read the sail number, but there was no mistaking what he was seeing.
He picked up the direct line to the situation room on the opposite side of the Fort Meade complex. His friend Ed Coney was OD this morning.
“Do you know what time it is over here, Tony?” Coney asked.
“Same time as it is here, three in the basic A.M., so quit your bellyaching,” Longo, a youngish thirty-year-old with long sand blond hair, shot back. “I have an incoming hit on your GO-one-seven-one program.”
“Stand by,” Coney said. He was back three seconds later all business. “Okay, that’s a hot one. But I’m surprised that you’re coming up with anything. My screen is showing a cold front moving into the Persian Gulf. Thick overcast.”
Longo looked up at the screen. The images coming down from the satellite were starting to fuzz out. “It’s starting to affect us now. But I got some good shots of a Kilo-class submarine leaving the pens at Bandar-é Emn.”
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“Get a sail number?”
“No, the angle is too high from this bird, but if the weather gives us a break I can redirect number three.”
“It won’t, the front’s a big one. Meteorology says it’ll stick around several days.”
“We got lucky this time.”
“Yeah,” Coney said. “Retransmit to me and to Pacific Fleet, and I’ll kick the rest upstairs.”
“Are the MEGAP users out of the loop on this one too?”
“So far as I know, Tony. But as soon as I see what you’ve got for me, I’ll start waking people up.”
“I just hate when that happens.”
“So do they.”
THE PERSIAN GULF
The Los Angeles–class attack submarine SSN 721 Chicago was submerged one hundred feet beneath the surface, on her assigned station in the narrow Strait of Hormuz more than five hundred nautical miles southeast of Bandar-é Emn. Her nuclear reactor was at 5 percent and her geared turbine propulsion drives were idle, allowing her to drift with the current while making almost no noise.
Her job was to monitor and identify the heavy traffic through the bottleneck. Her primary mission was to watch for Iranian submarines trying to break out of the Gulf. Once a submarine got to the open sea, she would be almost impossible to find again unless her skipper made a mistake.
Called Operation JUST WATCH, the Chicago was ten days into this thirty-day section of her mission. She alternated month by month with the Honolulu, now patrolling the open Atlantic as far south as Somalia and the Gulf of Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea. After six months, another pair of submarines from the Seventh Fleet based at Yokosuka would replace them.
Captain Glen Coburn, a slim man with thick eyebrows and a black mustache, glanced at the pair of clocks above the nav station at the rear of the control room. It was 1000 zulu, which made it 2:00 P.M. local time, 1:30 P.M. in Tehran, because the Iranians wanted to keep different time than the rest of the world. The boat’s bell chimed four times.
Already in the second hour of the second day watch, sonar had tracked seven targets on the surface, designating them Sierra, for sonar contact, and a number followed by a D for downbound, or U for upbound. Of the four upbound ships, two were classified as oil tankers, one was a small freighter, and the other was a warship which they identified as an Indian gunboat sneaking into the Gulf.
In the past twenty-eight hours they had detected and identified more than three hundred boats through the strait, everything from crude oil transports to Iranian patrol ships, and a dozen unknowns classified simply as motor vessels of varying sizes from 100 feet to as large as 280 feet. Some of them were probably the private yachts of the oil sheikhs. The Persian Gulf was a very busy place.
This was Coburn’s last cruise. At forty-one he was on fast track for his first star in June, and it had been loosely hinted that he’d be promoted to executive officer for submarine operations in Yokosuka. He was ready for it. These last three years of sea duty had been particularly difficult on Sandy and the kids. They might not want to be uprooted from Norfolk, where they maintained a home, but being together, even in Japan, was preferable to being a world apart.
The control room was manned by two other officers and six enlisted men. Coburn straightened up from the plotting table where he’d been studying one of the charts, eased his back, and headed to the officers’ wardroom one deck down.
“I’ll be in the wardroom,” he told Lieutenant Brent Johansen, officer of the deck this morning.
“Aye, aye, Skipper. I have the conn,” Johansen, a heavyset blond from Minnesota, said.
Coburn had to smile. The Swede was a pretty good officer and submariner, but he was a little uptight. Coburn had called him on it once, and the man was sincerely trying to change. Maybe trying too hard, the captain thought, taking the ladder down one deck.
Lieutenant Commander Mike Friend, his executive officer, was pouring a cup of coffee. “Good morning, Captain. Busy up there?”
“It hasn’t let up,” Coburn said, slipping in behind the table.
Friend handed him the coffee and poured a second cup for himself. He sat down and lit a cigarette. “If someone wanted to raise hell, this’d be the place for it.”
“I guess so,” Coburn agreed. He liked his XO, who’d graduated from Annapolis six years behind him, and was the eternal optimist.
Last year at Christmas the enlisted crew had put on a skit parodying the officers. Coburn was portrayed as a laid-back hippy from the sixties, who kept saying “No sweat” to every crisis he had to deal with. Friend called to battle stations, on the other hand, was depicted putting on a button-up sweater and tennis shoes while smiling vapidly and singing Mister Rogers’s theme: “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”
The crew and officers were close enough that no one took offense. But there’d been a grain of truth in their portrayals, Coburn thought. Mike Friend was a Mister Rogers right down to the smile, the sloped shoulders, and the pleasant attitude.
“So we’re bean counters. I can think of worse things to do with our time,” Friend offered. The captain was bored and everyone knew it.
“Skipper, conn,” the wardroom loudspeaker blared.
Coburn picked up the growler phone. “This is the captain.”
“Comms advises that we’re receiving an ELF message.”
“I’m on my way up,” Coburn said. He put down the phone. “We’ve got some mail.”
“ELF?” Friend asked.
The skipper nodded and they went up to the control room. ELF, or extremely low frequency, was a radio system by which submarines as deep as one thousand feet could be contacted. But it was slow, taking up to fifteen minutes to transmit a single three-letter code group.
“Just one group,” Johansen said, handing Coburn the narrow strip of paper.
The group was TTT, which meant that the Chicago was supposed to come to periscope depth for an important message.
Coburn picked up the telephone. “Sonar, conn, what’s it look like on the surface?”
“Conn, I show three targets, designated Sierra eighteen Uncle, eight thousand yards and opening, bearing two-six-five; Sierra nineteen Uncle, eighteen thousand yards and opening, bearing two-five-zero; and Sierra twenty Uncle, thirty thousand yards and closing, bearing one-five-five.”
“Keep a sharp eye, we’re heading up.” Coburn put the phone down. “Diving officer, bring the boat to periscope depth.”
“Aye, aye, Captain, I’m bringing the boat to periscope depth,” Chief Warrant Officer Randy Doucette replied sharply. “Increase speed to five knots, turn left to two-zero-zero degrees,” he told his helmsman softly. “Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.”
Coburn called the comms shack.
“This is the captain. We’re on the way up, and I don’t want to stay very long. As soon as you get the end-of-message indicator, acknowledge receipt and let me know so we can get out of here.”
