John R. Monteith
Rogue Crusader
CHAPTER 1
A bead of sweat dripped from Hana al-Salem’s jaw as the sonar display counted down distance to the Israeli submarine overhead.
As the reading inched towards zero, a thud echoed throughout the submersible Jammal. Salem cringed.
“Careful!” he said.
Haitham al-Asad, the ex-naval officer seated before him, grabbed joysticks to level the tiny submarine.
“Leveling out,” Asad said.
“Did we just announce ourselves to the Leviathan?”
“Doubtful,” Asad said in a tone that impressed Salem with its calmness. “The rubberized tiles on our hull silenced the impact.”
Salem tried to straighten his six-foot frame within the control center, but his dark hair brushed the overhead piping. He crouched again over Asad’s shoulder and watched the digital display.
“Bazzi reports that we have only thirty minutes of battery energy remaining at this speed,” Asad said.
“I know,” Salem said. “I heard him.”
“Sorry, Hana. I’m nervous.”
“I understand, Haitham. Work through your fear.”
The display ticked with glacial lethargy while Asad and Mahmoud Latakia, the retired Syrian Navy warrant officer seated beside him, lifted the Jammal to the Leviathan again.
As the sonar reading approached zero meters, Salem looked to monitors showing footage from external cameras. One showed a world eclipsed by the Leviathan’s keel, and the other showed the dual-arced panels of suction units atop the Jammal’s twin hull.
“Lower the after camera,” he said.
“Right,” Asad said.
Salem felt the Jammal’s ascent stop against the Leviathan’s underbelly. He held his breath as Asad flipped a trigger guard and pressed a button. Humming echoed from the Jammal’s overhead superstructure as a pump drained water and created vacuums within the suction couplings.
“We’re on, I think,” Asad said. “The midsection suction units are holding.”
“Up! Drive into them,” Salem said. “Just to be sure.”
Asad and Latakia exchanged a quick verbal volley and jostled joysticks. As the ship pressed against the Leviathan, Asad depressed buttons, and again Salem heard pumps whirring.
“Are we holding?” Salem asked.
“We’ve already cut back our thrusters,” Asad said. “The Leviathan is pulling us.”
The Jammal rocked, and Salem braced himself against one of the hull’s circular metal ribs.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Asad said. “We’re rocking with the Leviathan. They must have passed into deeper water.”
“We didn’t rock like this in training.”
“We trained on an old submarine that was being towed in calmer waters.”
“Is this a problem?” Salem asked.
“There’s flexibility — rocker arms — built into the suction panels,” Asad said. “We can only trust the design.”
Salem looked at a digital speed display.
“Ten knots,” he said. “We’re attached well enough to be towed faster than our top speed. This is good.”
“Latakia is using minimal thrusters and stabilizers,” Asad said. “Our battery is good for two hours now.”
“Look,” Salem said, nodding at analog gauges. “Number three starboard suction unit is losing vacuum. So is number ten port.”
Asad leaned to Latakia.
“Line up to pump from starboard midline unit three.”
Asad energized the pump. By Salem’s left ear, from the Jammal’s superstructure atop its parallel twin hulls, a whir rose and fell. Pressure in the suction unit dropped.
“Line up to pump from port midline unit ten,” Asad said.
Again the pump whirred and ceased, but pressure in the suction unit steadied.
“Poor mating,” Asad said. “Perhaps barnacles are in the way. We’ll let its pressure rise and try again after it equalizes. We don’t need all of the suction units. We are well mated with the ones that are working.”
Salem felt relief to be a limpet on the Israeli submarine, but doubt started to eat through his mind. Grabbing hold of a submarine was one thing. Breaking into it and taking control of it was another.
Fifteen months before Salem’s mission, retired brigadier general Aaron Simon chuckled as he watched the missile leave the rail and begin its fifty-mile trip towards the White House.
“To the president, with love,” he said.
After retiring from the United States Air Force, Simon had become a vice president of product development for Raytheon. With a lifetime of wise investments, Air Force retirement pay, and a severance package from Raytheon, the seventy-three-year-old multimillionaire found a life of leisure intolerable. To fill the void, he had become politically active.
He had spoken out against defense policies, gained support among a small but powerful group of retired flag officers, and became the figurehead of a push to tighten security against air threats on America’s coastlines. He demanded automated air batteries at sensitive locations, and an inroad to the Armed Services Committee caused the concept to reach the floor for a vote. But when the bill stalled in Congress, Simon had taken a stronger approach.
He gathered investors, created a company, and made his own land-attack cruise missile. The first prototype traveled ten miles across a friend’s ranch in New Mexico, and the second flew fifty. The third prototype had just traced a low-altitude contrail across the Virginia shoreline as Simon walked into the pilot house of his yacht.
He pulled plastic ear muffs over a full head of graying hair and yanked foam plugs out of his ears. He dialed an emergency channel and picked up a radio hand set.
“This is pleasure craft Lord Simon,” he said. “Come in Coast Guard Station, Washington. Over.”
“This is Coast Guard Station, Washington. What is your emergency, Lord Simon. Over.”
“Coast Guard Station, Washington, this is the Lord Simon. I can’t tell you what I just did, because you would warn someone, and that would be cheating. So just trust me that you need to apprehend me. I’ll send you my location and wait for one of your crews to board me. Out.”
He sat in his captain’s chair and watched two monitors. One showed missile telemetry — the other, Cable News Network from his satellite television.
Five minutes after launch, the tracking software showed the subsonic missile approaching Washington, DC on a photographic overlay of the city. CNN showed the floor of the New York Stock exchange as a heavy day of trading approached its finale.
Telemetry showed Simon that the missile dipped as it targeted the White House. Simon felt conflicted as his missile flew with flawless accuracy, seconds from mission accomplishment, and as the country he once served was revealing its weakness.
The missile zoomed over the White House, turned south, and continued over the Potomac River. It slowed, dipped, and crashed into the water.
He heard a Coast Guard vessel hailing him with orders to await their arrival. He swiveled his chair and silenced the radio, and when he turned back to the television, he saw breaking news on CNN about an unidentified object landing in the Potomac River.
“At least somebody knows how to react like they mean it,” he said to himself. “Too bad it’s not the people who count.”
Three months after Simon’s cruise missile display, the Trigger stood on the bridge of an Iranian supertanker.