Ziyax opened his mouth to speak, but then glanced at the waterfall display on the Feniks sonar set tracking the QM 2. The signal was overwhelmingly solid. He turned back to Graham. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Sorry about what, Captain?” Graham asked tightly. “Speak up, so everyone can hear you.”
“I was wrong, and you were right. We are invisible behind the big passenger liner.”
“You are relieved of duty, Captain,” Graham ordered. “Wait for me in the wardroom, I’ll be with you shortly.”
Ziyax turned without another word and went aft.
“Assam!” Graham shouted.
“Yes, Captain,” Assam al-Abbas replied.
“Take the con.”
“Yes, sir,” al-Abbas said.
Graham turned back to Isomil. “You’re chief sonar man as of this moment. Don’t let me down.”
“No, sir,” the young Libyan ensign answered crisply.
FIFTY-FIVE
Fifteen kilometers due west, the Broadsword Class British ASW frigate Cumberland was heading into the Strait of Gibraltar. She was on the alpha leg of her patrol station, which was meant to ensure a heads-up for anything emerging from the Mediterranean that might pose a possible threat to the United Kingdom or NATO. Her area of patrol took her endlessly back and forth through the strait fifty kilometers east of Gibraltar, then back out into the Atlantic fifty kilometers beyond Cape Spartel.
It was, the Cumberland’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Willie Townsend thought, nearly as boring an assignment as he imagined being the captain of a nuclear missile submarine would be. Lying on the bottom of the ocean for weeks on end with nothing to do but play missile drills for a war that would never happen, and with no chance of getting out on deck for an occasional breath of fresh air, had to be nothing short of frustrating.
The one advantage of surface operations was the occasional sight of something really spectacular, such as the magnificent QM 2, which they had passed port-to-port with whistles a half hour ago. The luxury liner, which was two and a half times Cumberland’s 430 feet on deck, had been all ablaze with lights, and although it was well after 2200 hours, Townsend had been certain he’d heard music and laughter coming from the grand lady. She had finished her Mediterranean cruise and was heading back to Liverpool to take on passengers for her Atlantic crossing to New York.
“Bridge, sonar.”
Townsend answered the ship’s intercom. “This is the captain.”
“I’m picking up a definite bogey, sir. Computer says it’s probably a Foxtrot.”
Earlier this evening when they’d first started their inbound track, sonar thought it may have picked up a very weak target on passive coming out of the strait, and Townsend had authorized an active sonar search. By then however the Queen was making so much racket that finding anything was impossible, and they’d secured the search. Once they were past and in clean water, they’d deployed their very sensitive Plessy COMTASS towed array.
“Who the hell is patrolling Foxtrots these days?” Townsend asked his XO, Lieutenant Howard Granger.
“The Libyans, I’d suspect,” Granger replied. He was the intellectual among the officers. The crew wanted him to try out for the American television show Jeopardy! “They still have four of the boats in service.”
“What’s he doing?” Townsend asked the sonar officer.
“He’s turned southwest, Captain, and it sounds as if he’s putting his foot in it.”
“Very well, he’s not our problem. But I want you to keep track of him for as long as possible. If he turns north, I want to know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Should we call this one in?” Granger asked.
“We’d best do it,” Townsend said. “Heaven’s only knows what the Libyans are doing so far from home. But it’s probably not good.”
Charlie Breamer was just getting set to turn in for the night after a long, contentious day, when his bedside telephone rang. He’d gotten the ROV pictures of the Distal Volente lying on the bottom where the Foxtrot should have been from Bruce Simonetti before dinner, but he’d had to sit on them. The admiral had left for the day, and his instructions had been explicit: He was not to be disturbed for anything other than an all-out emergency. And God help the son of a bitch whose idea of what constituted an emergency was different than the admiral’s.
“Breamer,” he answered, and his wife stirred but didn’t awaken. He glanced at the nightstand clock. It was one minute after midnight.
“Tony Parker, here. Sorry to disturb you at such a filthy hour.” Commander Parker was chief of operations for the British arm of NATO’s STANAVFORLANT — Standing Naval Forces Atlantic. He and Breamer were old friends, having participated in numerous NATO exercises all through the Cold War years.
“Good evening, Tony, what’s keeping you up so late?” Breamer asked. He was sure that whatever the reason for Parker’s call, it wasn’t social.
“I think we’ve found that wreck your people were banging around north of Benghazi looking for.”
“What boat’s that?”
“The Foxtrot that the Libyans are claiming they scuttled.”
“I hadn’t heard that one,” Breamer said. In fact, he’d gotten that bit of information from Russell Sterling in Tunis who’d gotten it from the CIA a full hour before the same message had arrived on his desk.
“I understand that you have to protect your sources and all that, especially the way your boss thinks about Langley. But listen, Charlie, one of our frigates spotted a submerged Foxtrot sneaking out of the strait into the open Atlantic not more than an hour ago.”
Breamer’s grip on the phone tightened. “Are you guys tracking her?”
“Out of our AO. Once she cleared the cape, she headed southwest apparently in a big hurry.” Parker hesitated. “We have no idea what the Libyans are doing out of the Med, but since they’re heading to your side of the pond we thought you’d like the heads-up.”
“You say she’s headed southwest?” Breamer asked.
“Yes, maybe South America,” Parker confirmed. “But that boat does have rudder.”
It was a few minutes after one in the morning local when Sterling took the call from Gaeta in his office, where he had been looking at the grainy photographs of the DistalVolente he’d received earlier this evening. He’d not been able to sleep worrying about Graham breaking out into the Atlantic with a submarine, and his boss’s refusal to pass a threat assessment along to Langley.
In fact, Ransom had even refused to send the message even after they’d received a twixt from Langley informing all relevant stations that the Libyans had announced they’d scuttled a surplus Foxtrot. Unless it could be conclusively proven otherwise, he wasn’t going out on a limb.
“Good heavens, Russell, do you have any notion what sort of a fright that would cause? Homeland Security would be over the moon.” Ransom had shaken his head. “Before we raise the red flag we will make dead certain we have the facts. All the facts.”
Hopper had been no help, either, and had left early for a party at the Russian embassy where he was working an FSO he suspected was a junior intelligence officer.
“Your Foxtrot’s in the Atlantic,” Breamer said.
“What happened?”
“We got it from a British ASW frigate patrolling the strait. Your Captain Graham followed the QM 2 out, and it wasn’t until the last minute that she was detected. But by then the boat was out of the Brit’s area of operations, so her skipper logged the contact. Fortunately he called it home, and the word was passed along to us a few minutes ago.”