End Game. Dale Brown
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the order, nor did he curse the Indian ship as it continued to move in the direction of the light. He only urged his men to row harder.
His own arms felt as if they were going to fall off. His head seemed to have tripled in weight, and his eyes ached.
‘Two hundred meters!’ called the coxswain.
A searchlight on the Indian ship, barely a kilometer away, swept the ocean.
‘Stroke!’ yelled Sattari. ‘Stroke!’
And then they were there, clambering over the rail at the stern. The sleek conning toward the bow looked like the swept cabin of a speedboat, and the entire craft was not much longer than a runabout.
‘Get aboard, get aboard,’ said Sattari.
He pulled the raft close to him, then plunged his knife into its side. As it began to deflate, he saw the Indian patrol boat bearing down on them, its lights reaching out in the darkness.
One of the other commandos took the raft and began to pull it down into the hatch.
‘No. Let it go. It will give them something to look at,’ said Sattari. He tossed it off the side, then pulled himself down the hatchway. The submarine’s crewman came down right behind him, securing the hatch.
‘Commander, we are aboard. Dive,’ Sattari said loudly, though the command was clearly unnecessary; he could feel the small vessel gliding forward, already sinking beneath the waves.
Aboard the Abner Read, off the coast of Somalia 0032
‘The Indians have spotted a commando boat about five kilometers from Port Somalia,’ Eyes told Storm. ‘Empty.’
‘Submarine?’
‘Unsure. They don’t carry sonar. That’s a Russian Project 1234 boat. I’m surprised it made it across the Arabian Sea. I don’t envy their sailors.’
Storm studied the hologram. The Abner Read had a world-class passive sonar – the Littoral Towed Array System, or LITAS – which was carried on a submerged raft behind the ship. Built around a series of hydrophones, the system picked up and interpreted different sounds in the water. In theory, LITAS could hear anything within a twelve-mile radius of the ship, even in shallow waters where sounds were plentiful and easily altered by the sea floor. Very loud vessels – such as the Indian ship, which the system identified even though it was thirty-five miles off – could be heard much farther away.
The Abner Read also carried an active sonar developed by DARPA as part of a project known as Distant Thunder. The sonar was designed to find very quiet electric submarines in what the engineers called ‘acoustically challenging’ waters. The Abner Read had used it with great success to find a submarine operating on battery power in the canyonlike Somalian waters to the west. Like all active sonar, however, the device not only alerted the prey that it was being hunted, but told it where the hunter was, an important concession against a wily captain. Storm preferred to hold it in reserve if at all possible.
The northwestern tip of Somalia loomed about fifteen miles ahead. By altering course slightly, Storm could cut off the most likely escape route north and still be in a good position to chase a submarine if it headed west.
What to do when he caught it was a separate problem. Admiral Johnson had not answered his message, and Storm needed his permission before engaging.
Given that Port Somalia was an Indian installation, the submarine might be Pakistani. They had exactly six subs – four French Daphne-class boats well past their prime, and two Augustas, modern boats that could sprint to about 20.5 knots while submerged, and could be extremely hard to find in coastal waters – worthy adversaries for the Abner Read.
Of course, if it was a Pakistani boat, he wouldn’t be allowed to attack at all; the Paks were in theory allies.
The Iranians had Kilos, even more potent submarines, though they hadn’t moved from their ports in months.
‘We’ll move closer to shore, close down the distance with the submarine, if there is one,’ Storm told Eyes. He glanced at the hologram to see where the Werewolf was. ‘Have Airforce check the area where the raft was spotted, look for others.’
‘He’s low on fuel.’
‘Well, tell him to get moving.’
Starship slid over the village five miles inland from Port Somalia, following the road as it wound back toward the coastline. Six small buildings stood next to each other, shouldering together between the road and a nearby cliff.
Nothing.
Nothing on the road either.
The computer gave him a warning tone. He was at ‘bingo,’ his fuel tanks just full enough to get him back to the Abner Read.
‘Werewolf to Tac – I’m bingo, heading homeward.’
‘Negative. We need you to scan the area near the Indian warship.’
Naturally.
‘I can give you five minutes,’ he told Eyes, planning to cut into his reserves. ‘Am I looking for something specific?’
‘They found a raft. See if you can spot anything similar. We believe there may be a submarine in the area, but we haven’t heard it yet.’
Ah, an admission of mortality from the all-powerful Navy, thought Starship as he whipped the Werewolf toward the Indian patrol boat. The ship’s radar remained in scan mode; they saw him but were no longer targeting him.
‘Couldn’t the patrol boat pick him up on sonar?’ Starship asked.
‘A boat that class isn’t always equipped with sonar. And this one is not.’
Starship took the Werewolf a mile and a half north, then turned to the west, sweeping along roughly parallel to the shore for nearly three miles before sweeping back. The flight control computer gave him another beep – he’d used half of his ten minute reserve.
‘Not seeing anything, Tac.’
‘How are you on fuel?’
‘One more pass and then I absolutely have to come home,’ said Starship.
‘Acknowledged.’
Storm stared through the binoculars, watching the Werewolf as it came toward the ship. The helicopter had turned on its landing lights, and it looked like a sea anemone trailing its tentacles through the ocean.
It was a good little machine. It would be even better if it were equipped with a sonar system like the AQS-22 – a suggestion Storm had sent up to the chain of command weeks ago. The idea had yet to be acknowledged as received, let alone considered.
What he needed were a few short circuits up the chain of command, just like the Dreamland people had.
‘We think we have something, Storm,’ said Eyes. ‘Very light contact, has to be a battery-powered propeller, six kilometers west of Port Somalia. At this range, with the Indian patrol boat so loud, it’s hard to tell.’
‘Let’s head down there. I’ll put in another call to Admiral Johnson. Maybe he’ll answer me sometime this century.’
Off the coast of Somalia 0108
The helmsman controlled the midget submarine from a seat at the nose of the craft, working at a board that reminded Captain Sattari of the flight simulator for American F-4 Phantom jets he’d practiced on years before. The craft was steered with a large pistol-grip joystick; once submerged, it relied on an internal navigational system. The vessel was run by two men; the vessel’s captain sat next to the helm, acting as navigator and watching the limited set of sensors.
The