Usually, these transfers had been conducted with other small vessels. Smuggler speedboats from Dubai or somewhere else on the other side of the Gulf. An occasional passing tanker. Fishing vessels. Once it was a tug.
Sometimes he was tasked with personnel transfers. Those were interesting. Hamid was pretty sure that none of the men and women he transported were Iranian. They always wore masks, and they never spoke to him. Hamid had always gone alone and had kept quiet about what he saw.
Tonight was different, however. Tonight he was not alone. Something about tonight was extra important. Pakvar had made that clear. Hamid was sorry that he had to drag these young men out to help him, but Pakvar had made it mandatory. There was some heavy equipment tonight.
“Hamid!” Youthful excitement in the voice.
Hamid looked down at the main deck and saw his sailors looking out into the dark water. An enormous submarine mast rose up out of the water, twenty-five meters ahead of them. It came almost straight up, froth and swirls of black water reflecting the night sky above as it rolled off the submarine’s hull. It was bigger than any of the Iranian Kilo-class submarines that Hamid had seen at Bandar Abbas.
“Is that what we are here for?”
“Eyes out front. Mouths shut. Do as I say.”
“Yes, Chief,” the men said in unison.
A hatch opened and red light spilled out of it. Then a stream of men climbed out, holding on to grips on the mast and heading down to the platform area on the front of the hull. They all wore dark masks with small eye and mouth holes. Hamid could hear a few of them speak to each other. Chinese, he was pretty sure. The same language that the foreigners in the Grey Building spoke.
A voice called across from the submarine in thickly accented Persian. “We are ready to receive.”
Hamid called back, “Stand by to take lines.”
He took his patrol craft out of idle and inched it forward at one knot of speed. He called to his men, “Throw over the fenders.”
The two sailors threw over the long white rubber cylinders. They splashed in the water and floated, cushioning them as the submarine impacted the patrol craft.
Hamid yelled, “Cast lines.”
Masked men on the hull of the submarine held out their hands, waiting.
Hamid’s two sailors threw bow and stern lines towards the men on the submarine. The men on the submarine wrapped them around some type of cleat and headed over to the patrol craft. The two vessels were joined. For a moment, the groups stood, staring at each other.
A red spotlight shone down from the mast, illuminating Hamid’s patrol craft. He could make out two men standing behind the light. One of them fixed a bulky machine gun to a turret on the mast. The other man, adjusting the red light, shouted orders to his subordinates below. Two of the men on the hull set up a small gangway that allowed the men to walk from the submarine hull to the forward deck of the patrol craft. The submarine sailors quickly moved onto Hamid’s ship and began picking up the supplies.
Hamid pointed to several dozen cases sitting on the aft deck of his vessel. “It’s all here.”
The men didn’t say anything; they just began lining up to transfer them back to the submarine. Before long, they had formed a chain of twenty men. They passed the cases of supplies to one another, hand over hand, moving each box onto, and then into, the submarine. They moved fast.
Hamid looked up at the men behind the red searchlight. They reminded him of prison security men in a guard tower, watching over the yard while the prisoners worked.
Every day since that night is like a prison sentence.
About halfway through the transfer, several of the masked men carried one particular wooden crate that Hamid recognized as important. This was the heavy equipment that Pakvar had emphasized must get aboard the submarine. He had been told that this crate was more critical than any other piece of cargo on board.
DM-B3 Mono Pulse RADAR was stenciled on the outside of the crate.
Hamid didn’t think that the Chinese needed radars like this on their submarines. This radar was used in an Iranian cruise missile. Why they wanted that monstrous piece of equipment underwater, he had no idea. He walked back into his ship’s pilothouse.
The unloading process took about twenty minutes in total. Hamid made sure that his sailors helped where they could and stayed out of the way when needed. They each worked up quite a sweat in the humid Gulf air.
Hamid heard a crackle on his ship-to-ship radio and climbed the ladder back up to the pilothouse. He listened for a moment but didn’t hear anything. He scanned a few of the Iranian military frequencies and heard nothing. He then set the radio back on the bridge-to-bridge radio frequency. Nothing. Then he realized that the volume was almost all the way down. One of his young sailors must have turned it down without Hamid noticing. They should know better than that. He moved the dial up and immediately heard a voice speaking in English.
“Vessel in the vicinity of …” The voice gave a latitude and longitude and then there was nothing but a static hiss. He knew enough English to understand what they were saying, but the transmission cut out before he could make out the latitude and longitude they provided.
He looked at his marine radar. It was an old machine, and one that was notoriously unreliable. He studied the green radar sweeps. Each pass of the radar line highlighted a smudge of green just to the south of their position. That was a surface contact — a ship.
“This is US Navy warship…” More static.
The radar contact was one nautical mile away. Could that be who was calling on the radio? If so, they had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Or was it possible that he was hearing a transmission from far away? Could the contact on his scope just be a bit of trash in the water, thrown overboard by a passing tanker?
The transfer was almost complete when the men behind the red spotlight began yelling in what Hamid assumed to be Chinese. The chain of men scattered like ants. The man holding the machine gun was waving his arms and then yelled something down into the submarine.
One of Hamid’s young sailors called to him. He looked scared. “Chief, what’s going on?”
Hamid said, “Make preparations to get underway.” His heart beat more rapidly.
The man on the sail of the submarine screamed and pointed into the night. Hamid peered in the direction he was pointing, but all he saw was darkness. The Chinese submariners each bounded up the ladder of the sail, trying to get the last of the supplies into their vessel.
Then a bright white light became visible on the southern horizon. When the light changed intensity and illuminated the water between it and the two vessels, Hamid realized what it was. The white light was a high-powered searchlight, mounted to whatever that radar contact had been. It soon illuminated the submarine and Hamid’s patrol craft.
Hamid’s hands went to guard his eyes.
Up on the mast of the sub, the masked men pulled back on the machine gun’s horizontal cocking handle. The chugging sound of a fully automatic weapon erupted through the air. Hamid could see the recoil of the weapon and heard the metallic clang of shells as they hit the hull of the submarine.
The sub shook suddenly, vibrations transferring over to their small patrol craft. This wasn’t the machine gun. This was something much more powerful. White foam rose in the water all around them. He realized that the submarine’s screws were turning. She was moving. Hamid yelled to his sailors, “Get clear! I’ll start up our engines.”
The foreign men had dropped the last of the boxes and were hurtling their bodies back belowdecks into the sub. The two men on the top of the mast packed up their gear, dropped out of sight, and shut the hatch behind them.