She ran without lights and even as she closed on the dock, it was hard to hear her engines, or make out many details. The delay, Jackson had explained to them, had been needed to fit the boat out with the passive side scan sonar McGarvey had requested, along with a lot of ammunition for the two deck-mounted 7.62mm machine guns, six Dräger closed-circuit rebreathers, enough underwater demolitions material to crack the submarine’s hull like an eggshell, and some basic salvage gear.
Terri Jackson was at the helm as the sleek boat eased alongside the dock, the softly grumbling engines at idle. Bill Jackson was on the bridge with her, while MacKeever and Ercoli were on the open stern deck. They did not bother with dock lines.
McGarvey and Dillon tossed their equipment bags across and then scrambled aboard.
The instant they were on deck, Terri gunned the engines and they headed away, making a long looping turn to take them back downriver toward the bay.
“Welcome aboard, gentlemen,” Ercoli said. “Soon as you stow your gear below, FX wants to have a word.” FX was Jackson’s handle, which he’d earned early on in his SEAL career because of the special effects he was fond of using in the field.
“What’s up?” Dillon asked.
“We might have pulled some luck,” Ercoli said. “An Orion patrol about a hundred klicks off the mouth of the bay thought they picked up a MAD target, but when they went back it was gone.” MAD was a Magnetic Anomaly Detector, a device that was able to detect masses of ferrous metal submerged as deep as one thousand feet. “Lots of traffic in the area, so your boy might have detected the overflight, and ducked under one of the surface ships that was in the vicinity.”
“When was this?” Dillon asked.
“Two hours ago,” Ercoli said. “A friend of FX’s gave us a call from Second’s ops center just before we shoved off. They’re classifying it as a stray hit, but the word was out that we wanted anything that came up no matter how thin it was.”
“That’s him,” McGarvey said.
“That’s what we figured,” MacKeever said. He was grinning ear to ear. “Tonight’s the night, and it’s going to be a good one.”
The Foxtrot eased her way to the west toward the center channel into Chesapeake Bay, her keel occasionally scraping the bottom. It was after ten in the evening and there was no shipping traffic for the moment.
The water was very shallow here, even in the middle of the inbound fairway, so that the submarine was only partially submerged. It would be somewhat deeper once they passed the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, but there would not be enough water to completely submerge until they reached the York River.
Graham and Ziyax stood topside on the bridge, the lapping water less than two meters below them, the boat’s hull invisible underwater.
Both missiles were ready to fire now that the gasket on tube two had been replaced. Al-Hari was already beginning to feel the effects of the heavy dose of radiation he’d taken, but he’d been fatalistic about it this morning after he’d vomited for the first time.
“Your story about the shrimper coming to pick us up is a lie,” he’d told Graham in the companionway outside the officer’s head. No one else had been within earshot at the moment.
“The others don’t suspect?”
“No one else cares,” al-Hari said. “Like me they’re willing to die for the jihad.” He coughed up some blood into a rag. “Except for you and Captain Ziyax. You’re the only two aboard who think they have anything to live for other than Paradise.”
“You’ll get your wish,” Graham had replied indifferently.
Al-Hari had nodded. “Once the missiles are away, I will set the explosives on the anthrax canisters, so you had best be gone by then.” Al-Hari grabbed Graham by the arm. “I ask only two favors. Take Ziyax with you, he’s a good man. And leave me a pistol, I’ll need time to disable the escape trunk, and then sabotage the engines in case anyone has a change of heart.”
Religious mumbo jumbo had always been a puzzlement to Graham. And working closely with the al-Quaida, many of their mujahideen willing to martyr themselves for the cause, had brought him no closer to an understanding. “Why are you so willing to die?” he asked.
Al-Hari had smiled. “You wouldn’t understand, English.”
“Try me.”
“It’s simple, my friend. You only have to know God and love Him. The rest is easy.”
Graham raised his binoculars and studied the bridge two miles ahead. There didn’t seem to be any traffic up there either, though it was difficult to tell with much certainty because of the jumble of multicolored lights ashore and on the channel markers in the water.
One of the Libyan technicians had managed to rig red, green, and white lights on the exposed sail and one of the masts so that from a distance the submarine would appear to be a small fishing boat returning from sea. The fiction would hold for anything but a close inspection, and so far in that regard their luck was holding.
“Al-Hari is sick with radiation poisoning now,” Ziyax said. “When it is time to leave what are we going to do with him and my two crewmen who handled the missiles? We cannot take them with us.”
“No, we can’t,” Graham said, continuing to study the bridge. It had been conceived in the brain of a man, not a god. And it had been built by the hand of man, not god. There was proof of man’s design everywhere, but so far as Graham had ever been able to detect, there’d never been any concrete sign of the existence of any god, neither the god of the Muslims, nor the gods of the Jews or Christians.
Yet they were willing to die for something they could not see, feel, hear, touch, or smell. All on faith. It was utterly amazing to him.
“What do you suggest?” Ziyax asked.
Graham lowered his binoculars. “Nothing, actually. They’ll get their wishes before the others.”
“What’s that?”
“To die martyrs for the glorious cause, of course,” Graham said. He picked up the phone. “Come right five degrees.”
“Aye, turning right five degrees to new course three-three-zero,” the new COB replied in a subdued voice.
SIXTY-SIX
The SEAL Special Operations Craft was drifting well out of the channel outside the mouth of the York River, about five miles east of Yorktown and the Highway 17 Bridge.
McGarvey was on the afterdeck with Ercoli and MacKeever, while Dillon had joined Jackson and Terri on the bridge to operate the side-scan sonar.
The water here was still too shallow for a submarine to completely submerge, but they’d hoped that the passive sonar set would pick up the signature sounds of the Foxtrot’s diesel engines.
It was three in the morning. The rain that had threatened had never materialized, but a damp fog had settled in on top of them, making everything wet and reducing visibility to less than fifty yards. Lights ashore were nothing more than very dim halos in the distance, and even the channel markers off the SOC’s starboard side were only vague green and red pastels, some of them blinking.
The door to the bridge was open. Dillon was hunched over the sonar display. “I have engine noises,” he called softly.
Since they’d arrived on station southeast of Gloucester Point just after dark, they’d tracked nine targets coming upriver, all but one of them noncommercial pleasure boats.
“Where?” McGarvey asked, keeping his voice low.
“Bearing zero-eight-zero about nine miles out,” Dillon replied. “Heading upbound, making maybe ten knots.” He looked up from the screen and in the dim red light illuminating his face it was obvious he was impressed. “It’s our boy.”