“Very well, Sonar.” Jeffrey studied his tactical plot; there were no threats. “Chief of the Watch, secure from battle stations.”
“Secure from battle stations, aye.” COB passed the order through the phone talker.
It was in the wee hours of Friday morning, local time. Allowing an adequate interval for Felix to reach Istanbul, do his thing there, and then — God willing — make the long trip back with Peapod and his gear, Jeffrey expected them sometime between dusk and midnight on Saturday.
As per the plan, for ultimate stealth,
“XO,” he said to Bell, “the best thing we can hope for now is nothing. That we hear nothing for the next day and a half.”
Chapter 33
Hours later, submerged beneath the daylight of midafternoon, Felix expectantly watched a blank monitor screen. The tactical plot was crowded and uncertain. The water was not very deep, and the busy inlet was less than one mile wide. There was little room for the minisub to maneuver, to avoid being run down while at periscope depth. For Felix and the others in the control compartment, the pucker factor was high. Sonar propagation was bad and signal to noise was high, and the inertial navigation system by now had drifted into too much error for their purposes — pinpoint positioning would be crucial for what came next.
Lieutenant Meltzer began to raise the minisub’s periscope mast above the surface. As the navigation plot indicated, they were through the Sea of Marmara now and had turned left into the Golden Horn, a long and tapering body of water off of the start of the Bosporus Strait. The Golden Horn split the western part of Istanbul in half. The Old City sat along its southern bank, on a hilly peninsula that ended at Seraglio Point, on the Bosporus. The New City sprawled beyond the Golden Horn’s north bank. The remainder of Istanbul, on the eastern — Asian — side of the Bosporus, had a few Byzantine- or Ottoman-era monuments and decrepit castles, but was mostly a series of bedroom communities.
Bridges spanned the Golden Horn, and also spanned the Bosporus farther north, toward the Black Sea. Ferries shuttled along different routes, threading between sightseeing boats and larger merchant ships. Some of the merchies moved in and out of the Bosporus, aiming for the Black Sea or going the opposite way, toward the Med. Others of these big ships came into the Golden Horn — part of which formed Istanbul’s major industrial port.
The one thing Meltzer didn’t need to worry much about — every submariner’s dread — was an undetected sailboat on an imminent collision course, gliding silently on the surface by using the wind. Briefing papers said there would be very few pleasure craft in the Golden Horn. Felix soon saw why.
The periscope photonics head gingerly broke the surface. It took a while for the oil and scum to drain off enough for a clear full-color image to show on the monitor. The sun was bright, the sky overhead was clear, but the Golden Horn was anything but golden. It was terribly polluted. Chief Porto took over and panned the periscope head rapidly in a circle: Nothing big was coming at the mini.
Felix got his first, dizzying, live view of Istanbul through that video feed.
“Wind northwest, eight knots,” Meltzer read off a panel. “Air temperature sixty-six Fahrenheit.”
“Pilot, proceed to the drop-off point,” Felix ordered.
Meltzer acknowledged. The waters roiled by passing ships would help disguise the raised periscope. Based on the amount of flotsam and jetsam Felix saw floating around, the photonics sensor head shouldn’t stand out as the mini slowly moved. But this was a double-edged sword, since all that crap up there could foul or break the sensor head. They needed real-time visual cues to see something coming too close — Meltzer and Porto would have to dip the head underwater and turn the mini out of the way. One added hazard, transiting a semi-enclosed working harbor, was a bobbing steel cargo container that had broken loose somewhere and fallen overboard — Felix knew that around the world this happened thousands of times every year. They’d be as silent as sailboats, perhaps with nothing showing on the surface, and the sharp corner of a heavy container might pierce the minisub’s hull.
“Time to get geared up,” Felix said. “I’m going aft.”
Felix went into the passenger compartment. On the way he passed Chief Costa, doing tests and eyeing a checklist to get ready to use the lock-out chamber.
The entire SEAL team had boarded the mini already wearing black wetsuits. These were made of a breathable, quick-drying layered material, so they were comfortable to wear for lengthy periods out of the water. The team’s equipment was all stowed now in waterproof bags that included adjustable floatation bladders; they wouldn’t pop to the surface prematurely, or get lost on the murky, muddy bottom either.
The men finished taking turns using the head, one last time, at the stern of the passenger compartment. Soon they all did dive-buddy checks. Felix made extra sure Salih’s dive gear was in good order and that he wasn’t getting panicky. But Salih seemed to be enjoying himself.
The Turko-German tested his Draeger re-breather scuba mouthpiece with confidence, then manfully slapped the titanium dive knife in a scabbard fastened to one of his thighs. “The CIA trained me in all sorts of useful things,” he said to Felix. “I didn’t even know how to swim when I first ran into Captain Fuller. Isn’t that right, Mr. Parker?”
Parker nodded, very reserved. Salih gave Felix a wink. Felix got the impression that all further details were classified.
Parker and Meltzer shook hands with the team and wished everybody good luck. The mini would stay still for now in the Golden Horn and hide, submerged in hotel mode — running only its environmental control systems, to preserve the precious fuel supply. Late tonight it was to begin moving back and forth between the north and south banks, at predetermined places, and listen for a high-frequency homing beacon the SEALs would deploy.
Everyone squashed into the lock-out chamber, trying not to step on each others’ big combat swim fins. They made sure all hatches were fully dogged. By intercom, Felix told Meltzer they were ready. The air pressure started to rise; Felix felt his ears crackle. He and the others held their noses with one gloved hand, kept their mouths closed, and shoved air up from their lungs. Their cheeks swelled. They did this until the air pressure steadied; their sinuses and ear canals stayed clear this way. Meltzer confirmed that the hyperbaric chamber was equalized to the outside water pressure at the level of the bottom hatch, twenty feet of seawater. Costa knelt and undogged the hatch. It dropped down on its hydraulically damped hinges. Through the hatch coaming was a pool of dark and smelly water. A feeling of expectation, a thrill, passed through the grouped men almost physically. This got Felix over his last-minute nerves.
The team pulled on their dive masks, put their regulators into their mouths, and performed a final buddy check. Their closed-circuit re-breathers gave off no bubbles, for stealth, but also had longer endurance than older compressed-air scuba — and had become popular even with recreational divers, so being seen in them on the surface would not raise suspicion. One by one they sat on the edge of the hatch coaming, rolled forward into the water, and disappeared. Felix went last.
Deciding where to leave the water had needed careful thought. The rushed nature of the mission forced the minisub to arrive at Istanbul in broad daylight. The size of Istanbul’s developed waterfront precluded sneaking onto land in a wilderness area — too much distance to cover to the German consulate.
Felix popped his head above the tepid saltwater, not being the least bit subtle or furtive about it. Meltzer had done an excellent navigation and piloting job; Felix saw what he expected — and needed — to see. On the Golden Horn’s northern, New City edge, only a few feet in front of him, were an acre’s worth of big concrete water-aerating tanks, several gas burn-off towers that flared periodically, an office and a garage building in the mid-distance, and a convenient ladder for getting ashore. The alien setting and the danger gave Felix a wonderful rush.
He smiled, and tugged twice on the lanyard connecting him to Chief Porto, his dive buddy. Porto looked
