The two men sat in silence after that. But to each of them the words possessed unfathomable meaning. Not everyone in Iran agreed with such thoughts, nor with Admiral Badr’s preferred course of action. But there were senior military figures who did share his views, very firmly. Which is why he had been singled out to work with the newly arrived Benjamin Adnam, the world’s most wanted terrorist.
The big Hercules began descending toward the Bandar Abbas airport, slipping down through the hot clear skies. Ben could see from his window the submarine docks in the distance. There would be much activity in there during the week, with the arrival from St. Petersburg of the first replacement Kilo, Russia’s special export model; the 636 AIP,
Ben could imagine her quietly berthed in the submarine pens, the 235-foot-long 3,000-tonner from the Baltic, and as he did so he imagined himself in the control room, as once he had been. Admiral Badr also wore a faraway look, remembering, as he so often did, the black night of August 2, 2002, around the midnight hour…the scene of absolute devastation that had greeted him at the Iranian submarine base. The confusion. The fear. And the desperate, unavailing attempts to save the men on board the two hulls that had been sunk alongside the jetties.
He would soon have his first sight of an operational Kilo in the harbor of Bandar Abbas since that most terrible night. And it gave him heart. For he assumed that under the guidance of this quite brilliant Iraqi officer, with whom he now shared a common goal, they would harness the new Kilo to attack the hated, imperious enemy from the Western hemisphere. Admiral Badr liked it.
A Navy staff car greeted them as they disembarked and drove them immediately to the base. Ben put his few possessions in the house provided for him, next door to the admiral’s residence. Twenty minutes later they were in the Special Ops room, which comprised the entire top floor of a small executive block. Each man had a private office, with secure phone lines. There was a wider conference room between them, which contained drawers full of Navy charts, reference books, architectural plans, a fax machine, a copying machine, and three computers, one containing all of the world’s naval charts, another a myriad of marine engineering and design information. Ben guessed most of his work would be done on the third computer.
There was no sign of any staff or assistance in any form. But there were four armed Iranian Navy guards in the upstairs corridor, beyond the big locked wooden doors. Ben approved that, and checked that the guards would be on duty twenty-four hours a day. Every day. He also requested that the two-man guard on the main entrance be trebled.
“You like security, hah?” said Admiral Badr.
“Admiral, the consequences of a foreign agent breaching our defenses and ascertaining our plans would represent your very worst nightmare. If they happened to work for the CIA, I think you could assume a full-scale U.S. air strike on this port from one of their carriers within forty-eight hours. We, you and I, probably would never know what hit us. But, should we survive, we would be rightly blamed and executed. I don’t care how many guards you deploy—40, 60, 100. The consequences of not having enough of them are utterly unthinkable.”
“You’re right, Ben. You’re usually right, hah?”
“Mostly. Which is why, essentially, I’m still breathing.”
The admiral nodded, gravely. Then he hit his beeper to summon his regular chauffeur, for a tour of the dockyard to inspect the work in progress, in readiness for the Three Strikes against the Great Satan.
The two officers each wore the new summer uniform of white shorts, socks and shoes, dark blue shirts, short-sleeved, with epaulettes and the insignia of rank. They each carried a 2-foot-long officer’s baton. All of which set them apart as they stood on the dusty edge of the massive construction site being dug out of the shoreline on the southeastern corner of the harbor, directly opposite the regular submarine docks, facing inland, with the road and the open waters of the Strait of Hormuz behind them.
There was a fleet of forty trucks moving sand from a hole almost 300 feet long, 150 feet wide, and 120 feet deep. It was separated from the harbor waters by a 50-foot “beach,” and as they hauled away the mountains of sand, more trucks were grinding their way in and emptying tons and tons of hard core and rubble onto the floor of the hole. It would be a mighty foundation.
“Just as you instructed, Ben,” said the admiral. “One reinforced concrete submarine dry dock. Walls 30 feet thick to withstand the impact of a 10,000-pound bomb. The boat will just float in, we’ll pump out the water and get to work.”
“Very impressive,” said Commander Adnam. “Did you decide yet where to build the model room?”
“Right here, Ben. We build it 300 feet long, scaffold and wood. Right now we’re just waiting for them to pour the concrete foundation for both buildings. Maybe a week, then we’ll have it erected inside twenty-one days. You have preliminary plans ready for the model?”
“Almost. By the way, how is your man at the Vickers shipyard in England? I need his details now.”
“I don’t know off the top of my head whether we have them here quite yet, but I’d be surprised if we were not very much on the case. We have men in all of the big submarine bases in Europe. Our man in place at the greatest submarine builders in the world will be very efficient. Let me check later.”
The afternoon was drawing to a close in the brightly lit drawing-office block, out on the edge of the sprawling yards of Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering. Most people there left at five o’clock sharp.
Vickers, whose engineers had built the spectacular Trident missile submarines, was experiencing something of a morale problem. People did not work late there anymore. There was hardly any point. All successive governments ever wanted to do, it seemed, was to cut programs, scrap submarines, and generally run down one of the finest engineering firms in the world. Some thought
Up in the drawing office, desk lights were going out. Young draftsmen were preparing to leave. The big computers, which contained the database for all the submarines built there, were switched off. In the outer offices, where the senior engineering draftsmen worked, only one light was still burning.
John Patel, a tall, sallow-faced man of thirty-eight, with two outstanding degrees from the University of London, was busy, working quietly, as he did, on the leading edge of new submarine design. John was widely regarded as the most important man in the department.
He was a brilliant engineer, with a spectacular career ahead of him, either at Vickers, or possibly in the United States, where such men were valued far more highly than they were in the United Kingdom. For the moment, however, he belonged to Vickers, and that was greatly to their advantage.
Except for one unknown factor. John Patel was not what he seemed, a youngish married man of Pakistani parentage living on the outskirts of Barrow, in the village of Leece. He was an Iranian who, along with his father, had been skillfully inserted into England in the 1970s when John was still a schoolboy.
Both father and son had beaten the immigration system using Pakistani passports. They had lived in the UK for twenty-seven years, the father, an ex — Iranian naval officer, working undercover for the regimes of both the late Shah, and subsequently for the burgeoning Navy of the Ayatollah.
The young John Patel had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, obtaining his job, after graduation, deep inside the Vickers corporation. Taught by his father from an early age, he was one of the shrewdest and most valuable field operatives in Tehran’s worldwide spy network. For his specialty was the one area in which Iran nurtured overwhelming ambition — the formation of a strike submarine fleet that could blockade the Gulf of Iran, their own historic waters.
When John Patel finally returned to his homeland, it would be as a rich man. They had paid him well for the previous six years, during which time he had literally raided the Vickers computerized database, copying for his government high-tech secret documents involving submarines and their systems. That night he would do so again. In the next fifteen minutes he would be the only man left on the floor, as he often was.
The room which housed the database was in darkness and securely locked. No one had access except between the hours of nine and five, when the office was staffed. Six years previously it had taken John Patel approximately fifteen seconds to take an impression of the key in a piece of window putty and have a duplicate made. But such was his eminence in the department, no one would have given it a thought had he been observed working at the computer after hours.
He waited until the cleaning staff had completed its tasks before he made his move, at 6:30 P.M. Then, carrying his own powerful Toshiba laptop computer, he walked softly through the darkened main floor and quietly
