But he knew what they were doing. They were going to try to force him and Sihoud down to see who they were, perhaps take them into captivity. It had to be, he saw the overwhelming logic of it. He too would have made such a decision if he had been the American commander. And there would be no way to abandon the Firestar with the F-14s watching. He might make it to the water, but the Hegira would be seen.
So shoot them, he thought. We’re only fifteen minutes from the rendezvous point. A competing voice, a stronger and more rational one, spoke … there are more waiting behind these. Shoot these and five more will come, and ten more, until they have killed the Khalib or have him in chains. The survival of the Union was at stake. Ahmed bit his lip and waited. When the jets were within ten kilometers, he had made a decision.
The electronic-warfare pod. The untested Japanese unit that promised so much but held such great risk. Ahmed wasted no more time and energized the pod’s circuits and waited as the liquid helium refrigeration unit surrounding the superconducting energy storage coil cooled down to operating temperature. The computer reported the successful cool-down and asked to take command of the port jet engine. Ahmed acknowledged the computer request and allowed the machine to take one of the Firestar’s engines off-line, the starboard jet throttling up to compensate. The port jet came up to full power, its turbine no longer providing the jet with thrust but spinning an auxiliary power turbine designed only to supply power to the energy-storage coil of the electronic-warfare pod.
It would take several minutes to charge the pod, agonizing minutes for Ahmed, who still wanted to fire the missiles at the incoming enemies.
If the EW pod worked, the F-14s would be destroyed, their old-fashioned semiconductor chips melted into useless butter. Unfortunately, the unit might also destroy the Firestar, which would then fall into the sea a hundred kilometers short of the rendezvous point, and the Khalib would die or be taken prisoner.
The port engine roared at full throttle, all its tremendous power channeled into the EW pod’s energy coil, the voltage building up to unprecedented levels. Ahmed waited, knowing the unit might not wait for his command but might unleash its energy in an unrestrained explosion, the voltage ripping out from a coil leak and blowing the Firestar apart.
The rendezvous point was now five minutes away, short in timespan when still above the sound barrier, but more than 100 kilometers over the horizon, a very long swim. And now the American F-14s drew up on the Firestar’s wingtips as dawn broke over the eastern Mediterranean.
Chapter 4
Thursday, 26 December
Commodore Sharef pressed his eye to the eyepiece of the periscope as the Hegira ascended toward the surface from her cruising depth of 300 meters. As the cold rubber shroud of the eyepiece contacted the skin of his eye, the surrounding control room vanished, replaced with blackness, not a coal blackness but a light twilight darkness, just a shade brighter than midnight, just light enough to see that Sharef thought he could see the crosshairs of the periscope reticle against the dark view. His deep-cushioned lumbar-supported periscope control seat tilted back as the deck of the ship angled upward, climbing toward the danger of the surface. He rotated his periscope view directly upward, searching for the bottom of the waves.
“One hundred meters, Commodore. All hull arrays report surface contacts distant.” The deck officer. Commander Omar Tawkidi, reported from the sensor control area of the room, the aft starboard corner. That corner’s Second Captain video screens displayed the noises, directions, and frequencies detected on the large-area hull arrays — the raw data — as well as the Second Captain’s analyzed guesses about the meanings of the sounds and the relationships of the sound sources to the Hegira. There were at that moment ten surface ships being tracked by the hull array sonars, all of them distant, the closest farther than forty-four miles to the west.
High above, the water began to grow lighter. As it did, Sharef commanded the view to rotate downward so that he peered out at a forty-five-degree angle from the vertical and began rotating the periscope control seat with a silent servomotor.
Soon he could see the waves high above, the large silvery bottom flanks of them showing the calm weather above. As the waves moved closer Sharef rotated the periscope seat faster while turning his view flatter. There were no shadows from hulls not detected by the hull arrays.
Sharef’s view broke through the waves and cleared while the deck beneath him leveled out.
“Commodore, depth twenty-seven meters,” Tawkidi announced.
“Very good. Deck Officer.”
For several minutes Sharef sat at the periscope control seat, rotating it in slow circles, concentrating on the surrounding sea, still wondering what Colonel Ahmed’s message meant. The sea was a deep shimmering blue, the sky streaked with wisps of clouds. The sun had just climbed over the horizon where dark Mediterranean met bleached sky. The “survivors” should be there. Tawkidi, the navigator, had pronounced them within 500 meters of the rendezvous point.
Sharef’s orders were to surface, but surfacing violated every instinct. All a submarine possessed for tactical advantage was the blessed quality of being invisible. To surface meant to relinquish the cover of the depths and emerge where every surface-search radar and airborne patrol craft could see him, where satellite spy-eyes would gobble up imagery of his presence, compromising his mission — a mission he had been told was crucial to the survival of the Islamic Front. And for what? To find a boat cast adrift or a yacht whose survivors would be here supposedly waiting for him.
And yet the orders, orders from the Khalib himself, had been explicit. Surface at dawn. The mission, after all, was the Khalib’s, and the Khalib could order his ship to do any thing it was capable of. And surfacing was possible, if unwise. And the orders, if they were authentic, had not come directly from the Khalib with his usual authentication sentence but had been sent in his name by his chief of staff, an air force officer. Rakish Ahmed. And Sharef knew what Ahmed was capable of doing to win the war his way. But then, if the message had been genuine, sent in the heat of an emergency, by not surfacing Sharef might be endangering a plan vital to Islamic security, hard as that was to imagine.
For some moments Sharef’s instincts did battle with his sense of duty. Duty won out. He looked again at the sea for a sign that indicated he should surface, and saw only the sea and the sky.
“Deck Officer, surface the ship. Stop the engine.”
“Very good. Commodore. Ship control—”
“Surfacing now,” the operator at the ship-control station called.
Sharef’s view of the surface expanded as the submarine ascended. Beneath his periscope view the curving fin emerged from the sea in a wash of foam and spray, the cylindrical hull following. The ship slowed from its dead-slow-ahead, crawl and rocked gently, seemingly without purpose, in the waves.
Sharef ordered the ship-control team to the surface-control space on top of the fin, handing the periscope over to the sensor-control officer, then hurried to the ladder to the surface-control space. The hatch was opened, the panels in the fin laid aside, and morning sunlight flashed against the side of the cubbyhole as Sharef climbed into the sea air. He sucked in the smell, glad in spite of the tactical stupidity of surfacing. He looked out over the gentle waves and wondered how long he should wait before abandoning this fool’s errand. A chart of the area appeared in his mind, memorized, and he examined it, thinking of how to clear the area so that his departure course could not be determined by the watching satellites. Perhaps he could pretend a malfunction, begin to head back east toward port at Kassab and after a few moments resubmerge, continue heading east for a few minutes, then back in the cloak of the sea’s depths, turn back to the west and run for Gibraltar. He even began to order one of the officers to get a harness and walk out on the deck as if examining or repairing something, just to look good for the satellites.