DOG NUDGED THE MEGAFORTRESS INTO POSITION TO LAUNCH
the first sonar buoy twenty miles north of the stricken destroyer. The Megafortress would set a large underwater fence around the area, waiting for the sub to make its move.
“What’s the destroyer’s situation?” Dog asked Jazz.
“Nothing new,” said the copilot. “Still fighting the damage. They’ve had a couple of sonar contacts but they seem to have been false alarms.”
As Dog and Jazz launched the buoys, Dish searched for the submarine’s periscope. A half hour later they had covered every inch of the target area without finding anything.
END GAME
91
“Best bet, he’s sitting down about three hundred meters, just about as low as he can go, holding his breath and waiting for the destroyer to limp away,” said Jazz.
“He’ll be waiting a long time.”
“He won’t get by the buoys without us knowing.”
Dog wasn’t so sure about that. In theory, the hunters had all the advantages—the buoys could find anything in the water down to about 550 meters or so, and an extended periscope or snorkel could be easily detected at this range.
But the reality of warfare was never quite as simple as the theory, especially when it involved a submarine. Dog had worked with the Navy on sub hunts before, and they were always complicated and tricky affairs. In NATO exercises, submarines routinely outfoxed their hunters.
“Just a waiting game now, Colonel,” said the copilot.
“We’ll get him eventually. We just have to be patient.”
“For some reason, Jazz, being patient has always seemed the hardest thing to do,” Dog said.
Approaching Oman on the Saudi Peninsula 2145
CAPTAIN SATTARI FELT THE SWEAT ROLLING DOWN HIS ARMS
and neck. His clothes were so damp it seemed he’d been out in the rain. He was cold, and in truth was afraid, sure that he was being tracked by a powerful American surveillance radar, positive that some unseen fighters were scrambling along behind him to take him down. Every bit of turbulence, every vague eddy of air, sent a new shiver down his spine. He had the engines at maximum power; the airspeed indicator claimed he was doing 389 knots, which if true was at least thirty miles an hour faster than the engineers who made the plane had said was possible. But it was not nearly fast enough.
“We’re at the way point,” said his copilot.
“Yes,” said Sattari, and he moved his aircraft to the new course. Oman loomed fifteen miles ahead.
92
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
If I can make it to the twelve-mile limit, he told himself, then I will be OK. In the worst case, if the Americans pressured the emir, they could blend in with the civilian government and escape.
Sattari scolded himself for thinking like a defeatist, like a refugee. He tightened his grip on the plane’s wheel, flying.
The surveillance plane must be far away, or surely it would have tried to contact him by now.
Unless it was vectoring fighters to intercept him. Or planning to alert the authorities on shore.
Oman was not as friendly toward the Americans as it once had been, and was unlikely to cooperate. Still …
“Two minutes to the landing, Captain,” said his copilot finally.
The radar warning receiver switched off. They were no longer being watched—or was it a trick to make him think that?
Even when he saw that the landing area was empty, Sattari was not convinced he wasn’t being followed. He taxied to the dock, then turned the plane around to make it easier for his copilot to get out and handle the refueling.
“Hurry,” he told the copilot as he feathered his propellers. “I wish to take off as soon as possible.”
“Is that wise? Shouldn’t we wait a day or two?”
“No. If we are no longer being followed, it is best to leave right away. And if we are being followed, there is no sense delaying the inevitable.”
Aboard the Abner Read , off the coast of Somalia
9 January 1998
0111
STORM STUDIED THE INDIAN DESTROYER WITH HIS NIGHT
glasses, examining the damaged ship from about a quarter of a mile away. The Calcutta listed six degrees to END GAME
93
starboard—a serious lean, as Airforce put it when he described the situation earlier. But the damage had been contained. The Indian ship no longer appeared in danger of going to the bottom. More than twenty of her men had been killed or were still missing, another thirty or so injured.
With a crew of forty officers and 320 enlisted, the Calcutta displaced 5,400 tons, a good 1,200 less than a member of the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke Block I class, a rough contempo-rary. The Indian ship was a member of the Delhi class, a guided missile destroyer that used both Russian and western components and weapons system. A 100-millimeter gun sat on her forward deck just about where the torpedo had exploded.
The antisubmarine torpedo battery aft of the gun had caught fire immediately after the strike and now sat charred and mangled at the side, a cat’s claw of burnt metal. Storm guessed that the Indians’ own weapons had caused many of the causalities.
“Corpsmen are ready to disembark,” said the crewman in the Abner Read’s fantail “garage.”
“Proceed,” said Storm.
A panel in the well of the ship’s forked tail opened and a rigid-hulled inflatable boat sailed out and sped toward the stricken destroyer, carrying medicine and two corpsmen to help the Indians. Once the men were safely aboard, the Abner Read would head eastward after the Pakistani oil tanker, which was now about fifty miles away.
Unless he could spot the submarine first.
“Eyes, what’s the status of our treasure hunt?”
“Nothing, Storm. Submarine is nowhere to be found.”
“What about Piranha?”
“It’s been in the water two hours now without a contact.”
Impossible, thought Storm. Impossible!
He thought of punching the bulkhead in frustration.
Then, realizing he was only thinking about it, he smiled at himself. He had changed in the past few months.
“Keep on with the search,” he told Eyes. “Tell the Dreamland aircraft controlling Piranha that we’ll be heading for that oil tanker within a few minutes.”
94
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
Las Vegas University of Medicine,
Las Vegas, Nevada
1530
ZEN ROLLED HIMSELF OFF THE ELEVATOR INTO THE LOBBY AND
saw his taxi waiting outside. He was glad: Despite the fact that he’d spent the day doing almost absolutely nothing, he felt exhausted.
The needles were already routine, as were the monitors, scans, and tepid herbal tea offered up by Dr. Vasin’s interns in place of their overheated coffee. The light exercises they gave him to do with dumbbells were a bare shadow of his normal daily routine. So why was he so tired?
Partly because he wasn’t sleeping. He missed Breanna, and found it difficult to sleep without her.
And he continued to have the dream. It distracted and annoyed him, kept him guessing what it was really about.
Better that, though, than worrying about whether the experiments were actually going to do anything. So far, he felt exactly the same.
“I’ll get the door for you, sir,” said a young man, trotting ahead as he came down the hall.
Zen stopped. The kid was just being polite, but his goofy smile irked him. Zen forced a gruff “Thank you” as he rolled past.
Aboard the Islam Oil Princess , in the Arabian Sea
0350
A LIGHT SPRAY OF SEAWATER WET STORM’S FACE AS THE
rigid-hulled inflatable drew close to the Pakistani oil tanker.
The first boat had already deposited most of the shipboard integrated tactical team, and the SITT members were fanning out above.