End Game. Dale Brown
Читать онлайн книгу.
to military use had taken several months, but was not particularly difficult; the work primarily included measures to make the craft quieter. The acrylic bulbous nose and viewing portals had been replaced and the deck area topside stripped bare, but at heart the little boats were still the same submarines that appeared in the manufacturer’s pricey four-color catalog. They could dive to three hundred meters and sail underwater for roughly twenty-eight hours. In an emergency, the subs could remain submerged for ninety-six hours. A small diesel engine propelled the boats on the surface, where the top speed was roughly ten knots, slower if the batteries were being charged. The midgets were strictly transport vessels, and it would be laughable to compare them to frontline submarines used by the American or Russian navies. But they were perfect as far as Sattari was concerned.
He called them Parvanehs: Butterflies.
The captain glanced back at the rest of the team, strapped into the boats. Among the interior items that had been retained as delivered were the deep-cushioned seats, which helped absorb and dampen interior sounds. Three of the men were making good use of them now, sleeping after their mission.
Sattari turned to the submarine commander.
‘Another hour, Captain Sattari,’ the man said without prompting. ‘You can rest if you wish. I’ll wake you when we’re close.’
‘Thank you. But I don’t believe I could sleep. Are you sure we’re not being followed?’
‘We would hear the propellers of a nearby ship with the hydrophone. As I said, the Indian ship has very limited capabilities. We are in the clear.’
Sattari sat back against his seat. His father the general would be proud. More important, his men would respect him.
‘Not bad for a broken-down fighter pilot, blacklisted and passed up for promotion,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Not bad, Captain Sattari. Thirty-nine is not old at all.’
Aboard the Abner Read, off the coast of Somalia 0128
‘What kind of submarine? A Pakistani submarine?’
‘I’m not close enough to tell yet, Admiral,’ Storm told Johnson over the secure video-communications network. ‘We’re still at least twenty miles north of it. There are two surface ships between us and the submarine, and another oil tanker beyond it. They may be masking the boat’s sound somewhat. I’ll know more about it in an hour.’
‘You have evidence that it picked up the saboteurs?’
‘No, I don’t,’ admitted Storm.
Johnson’s face puckered. ‘Pakistan, at least in theory, is our ally. India is not.’
Storm didn’t answer.
‘And there are no known submarines in this area?’ said Johnson.
‘We’ve checked with fleet twice,’ said Storm, referring to the command charged with keeping track of submarine movements through the oceans.
‘I find it hard to believe that a submarine could have slipped by them,’ said Johnson.
‘Which is why I found this submarine so interesting,’ said Storm. While it was a rare boat that slipped by the forces – and sensors – assigned to watch them, it was not impossible. And Storm’s intel officer had a candidate – a Pak sub reported about seven hundred miles due east in the Indian Ocean twenty-eight hours ago. It was an Augusta-class boat.
All right, Storm. You have a point. See what you can determine. Do not – repeat, do not – fire on him.’
‘Unless he fires on me.’
‘See that he doesn’t.’
Off the coast of Somalia 0158
Sattari leaned over and took the headset from the submarine captain, cupping his hands over his ears as he pushed them over his head. He heard a loud rushing sound, more like the steady static of a mistuned radio than the noise he would associate with a ship.
‘This is the Mitra?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Captain. We’re right on course, within two kilometers. You’ll be able to see the lights at the bottom of the tanker in a few minutes. I believe we’re the first in line.’
Sattari handed the headphones back, shifting to look over the helmsman’s shoulder. A small video camera in the nose of the midget submarine showed the murky ocean ahead.
From the waterline up, the Mitra appeared to be a standard oil tanker. Old, slow, but freshly painted and with a willing crew, she was one of the vast army of blue-collar tankers the world relied on for its energy needs. Registered to a company based in Morocco, she regularly sailed these waters, delivering oil from Iranian wells to a number of African customers.
Or so her logbook declared.
Below the waterline, she was anything but standard. A large section of the hull almost exactly midship had been taken out and replaced with an underwater docking area for the four midget submarines. The vessels would sail under the tanker, then slowly rise, in effect driving into a garage. The submarines measured 8.4 meters, and the opening in the hull was just over twenty, leaving a decent amount of space for maneuvering.
The murky image on the forward-view screen suddenly glowed yellow. The camera aperture adjusted, sharpening the image. A set of large spotlights were arranged at the bottom of the hull; as the Parvaneh came closer, another group of colored lights would help guide the sub into the hold.
‘Is the tanker moving?’ Sattari asked.
‘Three knots.’
The submarines could dock whether the mother ship was moving or not, and as long as it wasn’t going more than four knots, most of the helmsmen felt it was easier to get aboard when the ship was under way. But in this case, the fact that the tanker was moving was a signal that there were other ships in the area. Sattari sat back in his seat, aware that not only was his mission not yet complete, but the success or failure of this final stage was out of his hands.
Aboard the Abner Read, off the coast of Somalia 0208
‘Tac, I’m clear of that freighter,’ said Starship, flying the Werewolf south. ‘Tanker is two miles off my nose, dead on. I’ll be over it in a heartbeat.’
‘Roger that.’
Starship whipped the little aircraft to the right of the poky tanker. He could see two silhouettes at the side of the superstructure near the bridge – crewmen looking at him.
His throat tightened a notch, and he waited for the launch warning – he had a premonition that one of the people aboard the ship was going to try shoving an SA-7 or even a Stinger up his backside. But his premonition was wrong; he cleared in front of the tanker and circled back, ramping down his speed to get a good look at the deck.
‘Take another run,’ said Tac as he passed the back end.
‘Roger that. Ship’s name is the Mitra,’ added Starship. The name was written at the stern.
‘Keep feeding us images.’
Storm had handpicked the crew for the ship, and the men who manned the sonar department were, if not the very best experts in the surface fleet, certainly among the top ten. So the fact that they now had four unknown underwater contacts eight miles away perplexed him considerably. As did their utter failure to match the sound profiles they had picked up with the extensive library in the ship’s computer.
And now they seemed to be losing contact.
‘Has to be some sort of bizarre glitch in the computer because of the shallow depth and the geometry of the sea bottom nearby,’ insisted Eyes. ‘Maybe