H.M.S. Unseen

no, neither of them could work on it specifically. Best just to keep their ears to the ground and hope the satellites could find something.

Chuck Mitchell sent a signal back confirming he was on the case, requesting a better feel for urgency and/or need for confirmation. He was not optimistic, and his communication reached the desk of the CIA’s Middle East chief, Jeff Austin, shortly before lunch. He read it and ruminated on the endless problem of Iraq. If it was not one thing, it was another. That damned nation had practically caused a world war fifteen years ago, and since then there had been nothing but problems…possible nuclear weapons, possible chemical weapons, possible nerve gas being used on the Kurds again.

Not to mention, of course, the vaporizing of the Thomas Jefferson in the high summer of 2002. This was also plainly the work of Baghdad, and it had hitherto gone unpunished. Now the Iraqis were testing, in secret apparently, new antiaircraft missiles down in the marshes. There were two big questions: Where did they get them? What did they plan to do with them?

Jeff Austin’s antennae were up. And he hit the secure line to Admiral Morgan’s office. The two men talked for about ten minutes without reaching any major conclusions, save to keep a very careful watch on any activities by the Iraqi military in the marshes, and to be extra vigilant with the satellite cover in that area.

“Fucking towelheads,” growled the admiral, as he replaced the telephone. “That’s all we need. The Marsh Arabs with a nuclear deterrent. Holy shit. How about the fucking Incas? What about the Eskimos?”

What the admiral did not know was that the only missile of any significance that had been fired in the Middle East that year, was the big Grumble Rif in the Gulf of Iran a few days previously. But Commander Adnam had chosen his site well, way offshore, hundreds of miles from any city, and fairly close to the Iran/Iraq border. And it was all over in seventy seconds. There might have been the occasional amateur astronomer who thought he saw a flash in the sky. Possibly a group of tribesmen in the hills who thought it might be the end of the world. But no country had reported a downed plane, no one had seen a missile take off. No one had reported anything. Bar Adnam.

Meanwhile back at the Bandar Abbas Naval Base, a team of engineers was working on the new weapons system for HMS Unseen. Commander Adnam intended the system should be fitted as a self-contained unit, possibly as high as the top of the fin, bolted into place in an airtight and waterproof “box” and connected just by wires to the fairly basic control system already installed in the submarine.

It was cumbersome but ingenious, and Ben Adnam had already proved, to himself at least, that it would work to devastating effect. Inside the huge dry dock, the bolt holes were being drilled into the casing and into the stern end of the fin. By late August the missile system would be completely modified for its new and relatively simple task. Not even the Russians had the remotest clue as to what was happening in the dry dock. No one knew what the thick rubber cable connectors were for, as the engineers gunned them into place on the aft section of the deck.

Commander Adnam and Admiral Badr were constant visitors, waiting for the day when the heavy-load-lifting apparatus would hoist the massive “extra fin” into place. That happened on September 14, and when it was completely fixed, five days later, they pumped the water level as high as possible and submerged Unseen to the bottom of the deep dock. The water still only covered the fin by about 8 feet, but it was enough to check over several hours that she was watertight at periscope depth. That was critical, as important as the test results at deeper depths, when the whole system would be pressurized inside.

The seals held perfectly, not a drop of water entered the “box.” Then they deliberately overpressurized it internally, to two atmospheres. No bubbles emerged, and there was a smile on the face of Ben Adnam.

The workshop was quieter. Only the electronics engineers were still working, calmly checking circuits as the system depressurized.

That afternoon, as they walked into the dock, Commander Adnam said softly to Admiral Badr, “Soon, my friend, both your revenge and mine will be complete.”

And he gazed with the utmost satisfaction at the submarine he had personally stolen from the Royal Navy, the submarine that would very soon launch an attack the like of which had never been seen in the entire history of naval warfare.

He did not, however, linger for very long. He had been busy all day, and that night he wanted to pray, and to ask the forgiveness of his God.

5

January 16, 2006.

Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan.

The good-byes were cordial, but no more. The six-man negotiating team from Russia had been noncommittal throughout. The Chinese were polite but remote. And the Iranians wore the complacent smiles of those who hold all the aces and three of the kings. Four visiting Arabian sheikhs, an Al-Sabah from Kuwait, a Salman from Saudi Arabia, Hamdan Al-Maktoum from Dubai, and a representative of the emir of Bahrain, had been, like the others, essentially disinterested in the outcome of the meeting.

Bob Trueman, the six-foot-five-inch Texan leader of the United States delegation, had rarely attempted such an uphill struggle. At 384 pounds, with a tendency to sweat like a wild boar, he gravitated toward flat, even ground, both physically and mentally. Mountainous roads, without his Lincoln Continental, were not his thing. He even made his home in the great flatlands of the eastern shore of Maryland, where once he took his wife Anne for a walk, along the sprawling goose-hunting marshes. “’Bout thirty years ago, I think…before the boys were born anyway. Probably the last real exercise I ever took.”

And Baku, this strange half-Muslim city that sits on the south shore of the great beak-shaped Apsheron Peninsula on the Caspian Sea, had proved to be a pinnacle too far for the mighty Bob Trueman. In his opinion there was no way the United States was going to win the mounting global struggle for the vast oil reserves surrounding the region.

It was all too damned late. That was the trouble. The goddamned White House and Congress had fiddled while Central Asia had, in a sense, burned; right in front of their eyes. And, in Bob Trueman’s opinion, That damned President with the loose zipper ought never to have been elected…just sat there…that sonofabitch…attending to his personal problems while the rest of the industrialized Western world edged closer to the brink…and now look what’s happened.

In Bob’s view, the entire idea of this three-day conference had been nothing less than a Sino-Iranian strategy to humiliate the U.S. The Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians, thrown together now, as never before in the entire history of Asia and the Middle East, formed a lethal oil cartel that had effectively shut the West out of the second largest reserves on earth.

“All we need now is for the Iranians to have another shot at blockading the Gulf with their fucking Russian mines, and there could just as easily be a war,” he muttered. “A real shooting war. Because if we cannot tap into the Caspian reserves, and the Gulf gets closed, even for a month, the whole fucking place is going to grind to a halt…Japan…Europe…and the U.S.”

But these were personal fears. And Bob’s mission in Baku was public. This huge, bearlike, but deceptively cunning American, smiled and shook the hand of his Russian host. And he wished a warm farewell to his old trusted friend Sheikh Hamdan, and to young Mohammed Al-Sabah. To the Iranians he was courteous, wishing profoundly that there was some way, somehow, that the U.S. could participate in the marketing of the Caspian oil. But as he knew only too well, the pipeline across Iran would be financed essentially by China. The only other pipeline was going to China. In brief, the Iranians had gone for the shutout, and they’d made it.

The problem was, how to get back in. And now Bob Trueman faced the smiling head of the Iranian delegation, and the two men shook hands. They both knew there was a price the U.S. might have to pay, and they both knew it would be way too high — like finance a whole pipeline, in return for access to 20 percent of the crude oil. Only Bob Trueman knew that Congress might just have to bite the bullet on that one and pay up. The balance of oil supplies these days was just too delicately poised.

He told the Iranian that he had greatly enjoyed his visit to the old Persian city of Baku, and that the mild winter climate had been more than agreeable. He thanked him for the tour of the historic Muslim part of the city,