The sky turned indigo as the Leviathan’s deck rose through the surface of the sea.
“The hatch will open slowly,” he said. “When it does, turn your air tank back on, but keep your eyes on the hatch. Remember, you shoot. I drop.”
“Yes,” Hamdan said as he withdrew the silencer from its watertight bag and screwed it over the barrel of his pistol. Salem attached his silencer but returned his weapon in its pouch.
His world fixated on circular steel. Seconds ticked as lifetimes as he waited. He heard a clunk that stopped his heart, and the hatch cracked an inch.
“Air,” he said in a hoarse voice.
He tasted stale air through his mouthpiece and watched the hatch rise. He tore the pin off his sarin canister, and it belched poison. Moving with speed and clarity, he raced to the hatch, knelt to his side, and jammed the canister toward the Leviathan’s ingress.
The canister caught the hatch’s machined metal, and he pushed the hatch up with his free hand. Whiffs of poison subdued the Israeli sailor under the hatch, and Salem wrestled the heavy but free metal upward and pushed the canister inside the submarine.
Hamdan appeared by his side, helped him lift the hatch over its hinges, and disappeared into the Leviathan. Looking up, Salem saw the soldier on the conning tower gawking back at him. Salem extended his thumb.
The soldier tore the pin off his canister and lifted it with his aluminum pole to the induction mast intake, and it sucked the poison through the Leviathan’s diesel engines and pumped it throughout the ship.
Salem slid down the ladder into the Leviathan and found himself in the sleeping quarters. Stepping over the canister that spewed toxins, he stopped for a vicarious moment to watch a man on the deck shudder and die.
Tearing open another canister, he ran aft through a door into the control center. Hamdan’s first canister had sent sailors toward their shipboard emergency air breathers, but the Hamas soldier stopped each Israeli’s attempt to breathe with a silenced bullet. Salem tossed his canister to the deck to exacerbate the horror show of convulsing fatality.
He lifted his pistol toward a sailor clutching his throat near the control panel. His silenced round sent the man to the deck, and Salem darted to the panel.
He was relieved to find that neither mast capable of external communications had reached full extension, suggesting that no messages of a hijacking had been sent. He flipped two switches downward, returning every mast into the Leviathan except the induction mast that sucked poison into the ship from above.
The two soldiers who had been guarding the after hatch entered the control center. Salem pointed to a door leading to the weapons compartment and raised one finger. He then pointed to a ladder heading down into the electronic equipment space. A soldier raced into each space.
Sensing his improbable success taking shape, Salem swallowed back bile to keep from vomiting. He clenched his teeth and lips around his mouthpiece and inhaled, but he drew half a breath.
Salem heard Hamden’s reloaded weapon chirping behind him as he retraced his steps to the hatch. His lungs burning, he climbed out of the Leviathan. He heaved his chest to the deck, spat his mouthpiece, and inhaled the night air. Scrambling from the poisoned submarine’s innards, he crawled to the conning tower, gasped lungful after lungful, and then vomited.
The soldier from the conning tower descended to the lowest ladder rung and stepped in front of him. The smug, youthful look of bravado became fear as he stared back.
“Hana?” he asked.
Salem wiped his mouth.
“Half the crew is dead but some may still be resisting. Be swift, shoot straight, and get the spare tank to Hamdan.”
“We’re succeeding aren’t we, Hana?”
Quivering with a pounding heart, Salem knew that sarin nerve agent played no part in his reaction. No training could prepare him for his reaction to mass killing.
“Yes, boy,” he said. “We are succeeding all too well.”
CHAPTER 3
When the sonar system aboard the USS Annapolis, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, heard the Leviathan run into netting, Commander Brad Flint grinned.
“Better them than us,” he said. “Let’s get some extra ears listening on sonar for trawlers. I don’t want to join the Leviathan as the catch of the day.”
Flint twisted by the periscope’s cylindrical mass. At six feet, three inches tall, he had developed early warning instincts for avoiding protrusions in submarines, especially those that moved.
His executive officer, Alex Baines, a dark skinned African American with a solid, bulky build, had been a cheerleader at the University of Southern California. Flint, a reserved Oklahoman from the U.S. Naval Academy, spoke with a drawl in contrast to Baines’ perkiness.
“Two off-watch sonar techs are on their way up, sir,” Baines said. “At least now we know what the Israeli fishing net extraction procedure is.”
“I would have done the same thing. Running only adds risk of dragging down the trawler that snagged you. I think coming shallow and trying to drive it loose was all they could do, and waiting until sunset was also prudent.”
“We should draft a message and tell squadron.”
“We’ll wait until they’re under again to transmit so they don’t sniff out our transmission.”
“There’s no hurry, sir. We’ll know soon enough if the Leviathan has been defeated by a fishing net.”
“Right,” Flint said. “Rig the control room for nighttime periscope operations and get our translators into the radio room in case the Israelis broadcast a message.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Baines said.
“When your mission is to spy on an Israeli submarine,” Flint said in response to the cheerful grin forming on Baines’ face, “this is as good as it gets.”
Flint positioned the Annapolis within two miles of the Leviathan, came shallow, and watched the Israeli submarine with night vision through the periscope.
“It’s fuzzy,” he said, “but I can make out people topside. It looks like they’re grouping towards the stern.”
He heard his sonar chief’s voice in a loudspeaker.
“Control, Sonar,” the chief said, “we heard some strange noises.”
“Define strange,” Flint said, his eye pressed against the periscope optics.
“Non-mechanical,” the chief said. “Human-generated, like banging, with possibly raised voices.”
“You mean like a pissed off captain howling at his crew to get the net off his ship?”
“Could be, sir.”
A silhouette of a man on the Leviathan’s bow stood and attracted Flint’s attention. He wondered if he had missed the sailor on the first scan of the submarine’s deck, if he was a Leviathan diver returned from inspecting the submarine’s netting conundrum, or if the man’s sudden appearance was a riddle yet to be solved.
Wearing an Israeli officer’s submarine jumpsuit, Salem crawled from the sea onto the Leviathan’s bow. He had sloshed in the water to cleanse traces of sarin from the garments.
Dripping, he felt lethargic as he stood, but he took comfort in watching the remainder of his team swim to the Leviathan while he waded.
The smallish image of Asad, dressed in a wetsuit, leaned over the hatch. Salem lumbered to him and noticed that his companion seemed in good spirits.