Ahmed appeared suddenly in the doorway. “You will both be lucky to live after I tell General Sihoud what I have just heard.”
The door closed. Tawkidi stared at it. “You think he’s bluffing?”
“About telling Sihoud? No, but Sihoud will do nothing. He still needs us after the launch. He knows we can drive this ship far better than the Second Captain can. He needs us if he expects to reemerge on the African continent.” Sharef’s voice was remarkably calm, a man resigned to his fate, Tawkidi thought.
“I wish I had your … courage. Commodore.”
“It is not courage, Omar. Remember, I have already died once. Now get back to the control room.”
Tawkidi came to attention. “Yes, sir. Good evening. Commodore.”
Chapter 30
Saturday, 4 January
The left clock of the side-by-side chronometers read 0405, the one set for zulu time, GMT. The right clock read five minutes after midnight, the local time at the ship’s present position. Friday had turned to Saturday. In another four hours Pacino expected to be somewhere in sensor range of the Destiny submarine, assuming the Phoenix had gotten its position right and the UIF sub continued north at its present speed.
Pacino knew he should be asleep, getting his rest before he stationed battle watches throughout the ship, but sleep had eluded him.
He shook his head and got back in his rack to try again.
The officer of the deck would be buzzing him in three hours to man battle stations …
Comdr. Ibn Quzwini crawled the last two meters up to the hatch to the command module, the cold of the ballast tank making his hands fail to grasp the handholds. A man in the hatchway above pulled him up and into the warmth of the pressure hull. Quzwini had been the last man in the tank.
He didn’t look back. He crawled away from the hatch while Lieutenant Ishak and Sublieutenant Rhazes began the work of positioning the heavy steel plate over the hatchway and tack-welding it in place, preparing it for the multiple root passes that would reweld it into the pressure hull. In the cold and exhaustion, time seemed to slip by. The hatch moved into place with the jerkiness of a silent movie, the tack welding done in what seemed a few minutes, the circular passes of the root welding zipping around the circumference of what had been a gaping hole. For the next four hours Quzwini slept where he had collapsed near a stall of the head at the forward end of the command-module middle level.
One deck above, in the control room. Commodore Sharef made his first appearance since the torpedo explosion that had incapacitated him. Two of the rolling seats at the weapon-control consoles were occupied by Sihoud and Ahmed. Sharef leaned on his makeshift cane, made from the piece of pipe, and looked hard with his good eye at the two who presumed to set up camp in his control room.
“The missile is finished, Commodore,” Ahmed said. “I suggest you bring the ship around to the south and clear some of these drifting icebergs.”
“Very well. Deck officer, turn the ship to the south. How long till we are ready to launch?”
“We are still checking the Scorpion-warhead electronic modules. So far all is in order. The Hiroshima missile airframe, engine and guidance system has already checked out satisfactorily. The Scorpion checks should be done in another thirty minutes.”
Sharef leaned over the remains of the plot table, but its glass was caved in, the tube shattered, some of its glass now embedded in his eye. The navigation plot was now displayed on one of the smaller screens of the sensor-control consoles, the sea of the Davis Strait and the Labrador Basin a wide corridor of ocean, its left bank extending from the southeast point of Canada to its furthest northward tip near the pole, the right bank formed by the nearly northward running west coast of Greenland. A touch of a function key, and a mist appeared to represent the ice cover, the mist light at the southern mouth, denser halfway up, and solid ice north of the arctic circle. The flashing indicator of their present position showed them in a thick ice cover, perhaps a coverage of eighty percent. That seemed borne out by the slight creaking noises heard outside the hull, so faint that they were barely discernible. The creaking and moaning sounds were ice floes colliding and rubbing against each other, even the complete ice cover composed of separate cells of ice that constantly shouldered each other aside. There was something foreign to this sea, this cold, this ice that made Sharef long for open water, for the warmth of the Mediterranean. He wondered if he would ever see Kassab again, but pushed the thought aside while leaning over Ahmed’s console to see how the Scorpion-warhead checks were progressing.
If one of the checks failed it would mean going back into the ballast tank and opening the tube again to get to the warhead.
Sharef doubted the tube could stand up to the stress of a missile launch after two tube cuts. Perhaps even the initial cut into the tube had weakened it beyond the ability to sustain the missile launch. And a tube reentry would mean more than just tube problems, it would mean added time, time for Coalition naval forces to find them. Sharef tried to feel the urgency of the matter but with his conflicted feelings couldn’t muster it. If Coalition navy ships and aircraft came, he would fight for the ship to the best of his ability. That, after all, was his true mission.
The phone next to Pacino’s rack had buzzed an hour before the planned battle stations time at 0300 local time. He climbed from the rack, trying to shake the bone-deep fatigue.
The shower water was still ice-cold when he stepped in. He turned the spray to hot, then back to cold, then turned it off to conserve water while he soaped up, rinsing in cold.
A few moments later, clad in a black poopysuit and cross-training sneakers, he made his way to the galley on the deck above for a cup of coffee. The crew’s mess was deserted.
One of the mess cooks had put a CD on the stereo. The Doors pouring out of the subdued speakers.
Pacino sat in one of the dinettes and drank the coffee. He was alert when he put the cup in the wash bin and walked aft to the ladder to the middle level. He lingered a moment on the stairway landing, long enough to see that the new switch he had installed now had an out-of-commission yellow tag on it. He smiled — someone had noticed it and found that it did nothing. He flipped the switch to “off’ and continued around the dogleg of the passageway to the radio room, hit the buttons for the door combination lock and went in. The room was empty. On the clipboard hanging from a handhold was his last outgoing message to Admiral Steinman telling him to get the Phoenix out of the area of the Destiny submarine by 0500 local time. There was a good chance that Phoenix would not get the message and would continue trailing the Destiny, an event that would likely spell disaster for her. In other circumstances Pacino would never fire a volley of torpedoes with Phoenix in the line of fire, but with Donchez’s theory that the Destiny had a doomsday-missile aboard, he would have no choice. The Mark 50 torpedoes would be launched regardless of Phoenix’s position.
Pacino knew he might have only one chance, one shot. He intended that it be a good one.
He opened a locker in the wall and pulled out four oblong boxes, each slightly larger than a baseball bat, a small case resembling a notebook computer, then shut the locker and walked down the passageway to his stateroom. He put the boxes and the case on the conference table and opened them.