“I’m not one hundred percent on my source,” Sterling said.
“I can get an Orion AIP out there in under three hours to make a quick pass.” The Orion P-3C land-based maritime ASW and patrol aircraft had been in service with the navy since 1969. In its latest AIP, or Aircraft Improvement Program, version delivered in l998, the airplane had fifty-eight separate improvements, mostly electronic sensors and communications equipment. “If they find something we’ll know where to direct the Simpson. If not, it’ll be your call.”
“Fair enough,” Sterling said.
“Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”
Sterling had thought his old friend would ask that very question. Any ops officer asked to deploy resources would demand to know what they were hunting. And rightly so.
“Keep a lid on this, Charlie. But it looks as if al-Quaida might have gotten their hands on a Libyan sub.”
“Son of a bitch. Is that what we’re looking for?”
“We’re looking for a tramp freighter sitting on the bottom. The Distal Volente, which we think the Libyans will probably try to pawn off as their sub. I need to know for sure if anything is down there, and what it is.”
Breamer was silent for several moments. “I think I’ll convince Nelson that it’s time to run an ASW exercise in the Strait. Wouldn’t do to let something like that out into the open Atlantic.” Vice Admiral Kenneth Nelson was Sixth Fleet’s CINC.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Sterling said. He liked his job at the embassy, but right now he would give his left nut to be waiting off Gibraltar to bag a Foxtrot.
It was a few minutes after three when the four-engine turboprop ASW aircraft reached its patrol station two hundred kilometers off the Libyan coast, north of Benghazi. Their radar and Elint equipment was painting a strong picture of three Libyan warships seventy kilometers to the south, banging away as if they were in a great rush to find something.
Lieutenant Daniel Martin pulled back on the throttle controls, as he turned the ship left and dropped to five hundred feet above the placid Mediterranean on the first leg of their search-and-identify mission.
Their preflight briefing at Gaeta had been short and to the point, exactly the way Martin liked them. A tramp freighter had apparently gone down in thirty-five hundred meters of water, and they were supposed to find it, or at least pinpoint any ferrous mass they could find at or near the latitude and longitude they had been given.
The only part Martin didn’t like was the rush job. Lieutenant Commander Jerry Garcia, the squadron ops officer, wanted it done yesterday. It wasn’t Martin’s laid-back style to rush into things. If he’d been of that mindset he would have opted for jets out of the Academy, instead of a lumbering eighteen-wheeler prop job so slow it couldn’t get out of its own way.
“We’re starting our first run, Marsha,” he radioed to his chief sensor operator at her ASW console in back. They were treating this as an antisubmarine-warfare mission and CPO Marsha Littlejohn had the best instincts in the fleet.
“Roger that, Skipper,” she replied tersely. It was another thing Martin liked about her, she always came to the point and she never cried.
Besides the updated ASQ-1 14 computer system that crunched data from the ship’s radar systems, the AIP Orion was equipped with infrared sensors and magnetic anomaly detectors, MAD, that could detect a mass of ferrous metal, but only along a very narrow path one thousand feet out, so it was generally ineffective for anything but pinpoint searches. She was also equipped with the blue-green laser detector, which when conditions were right, could peer down through as much as four thousand meters of seawater.
“ESMs, I want to know the minute the Libyans take an interest in us,” Martin radioed.
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Petty Officer Bill Kowalski responded. “We’ve been briefly illuminated by at least three low-power search radars on the way in, so they know we’re here. But it looks as if they’re more interested in what’s on the bottom than they are in us.”
“That’ll change once they realize we’re doing the same thing.”
“Roger.”
“If they’re looking for the same ship, one of us is in the wrong part of the pond,” Lieutenant J. G Stuart Kaminski said from the right seat.
Martin glanced over at his copilot. “Let’s hope our intel is better than theirs, and we find what we’re looking for before they start asking questions.” He keyed his helmet radio. “Talk to me, Marsha.”
“All sensors are clean.”
“Okay, I’m turning on our next leg,” Martin said. He hauled the big airplane a hard one-eighty to the right on a new course parallel and approximately one thousand feet from their first track. Once they completed ten such legs, covering an area approximately two miles wide and five miles long, they would start a new set of tracks at ninety degrees, to form a grid. If there were anything on the bottom big enough for their sensors to detect they would find it.
All they needed was some patience and a bit of luck.
Charles Breamer looked up from the display on his console as Sixth Fleet CINC Vice Admiral Kenneth Nelson came through the door, and he girded himself for trouble. The admiral did not look happy to be called off the golf course on his only day off in the week. He hadn’t even taken the time to change into a uniform.
The P-3C that Breamer had sent out had found a large ferrous object sitting on the floor of the Mediterranean just where Sterling had said it would be. It would be up to the Simpson to find out exactly what was down there, but that wouldn’t happen for another twenty hours or so.
The problem in Breamer’s mind was that the Orion and the frigate were the only resources that the admiral had agreed to commit for the moment on what he thought would probably be nothing more than a “goddamn wild-goose chase.” Nelson had been burned twice by what he had considered faulty CIA intel; once several years ago when he was chief of surface ops for the Seventh Fleet out of Yokosuka when the Agency had warned that the North Koreans had threatened to test a nuclear weapon. The CINC and vice commander were both back in the States, where it was the middle of the night. Nelson had diverted a complete carrier group from a routine training mission to make best speed possible to a point one hundred miles off the North Korean coast. The sudden rapid deployment had scared hell out of the Japanese, and although the shit had hit the fan, Nelson had ultimately been found blameless. Based on the intelligence he’d been given, his action to send a clear message to the North Koreans had been the correct one. But he’d been put through the wringer, an experience he hadn’t enjoyed.
The second incident had happened just a couple of years ago, when he’d been in command of a carrier group on a mission to rescue a CIA team caught spying on Pakistan’s desert nuclear testing facility. The Agency had not only convinced the White House to send an independent SEAL team — not under Nelson’s command — to do the rescue, it had neglected to inform him that one of the captured CIA officers was the president’s brother. He had been taken out of the loop on a mission that had had the potential to place his command in harm’s way.
Nelson came directly across to Breamer’s console. “I’m here, what have you got?” The admiral was a short, slightly built man, with thinning gray hair and pale, sometimes watery eyes. He looked more like a banker than a professional warrior, but he was as tough as bar steel, and his booming voice was that of a man twice his size.