H.M.S. Unseen

to make a full recovery.”

“Christ, Scott. Are you guys taking out the two big dams?”

“Yessir. How did you guess?”

“Well, a couple of years ago it was the suggestion of our friend Admiral MacLean.”

“It was a good suggestion, too. Like most of his.”

“Yes. In light of the short time frame you must be using missiles?”

“Yessir. Two sets of cruises. Fired top secret by a submarine. Preprogrammed underwater missile approach from the reservoir side of both dams.”

“One of them’s the Samarra Barrage on the Tigris, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir. The other’s about five times bigger; it’s called the Darband-I-Khan.”

“Ah, yes. I remember now. Well, I don’t know if we’ll be accused of international banditry, but I assume our policy is to say absolutely nothing.”

“Correct, sir,” replied Admiral Morgan. “We’ll just let those bastards understand who they can fuck with and who they can’t. But we cannot allow the flag of this nation to be fired upon by anyone. Not without massive retribution from us.”

“My sentiments entirely. These rogue regimes are gonna learn it the hard way. They either play by the very fair rules laid down by us, or we’ll make them wish they had. By the way, might I judge from the expeditious manner this has been set up that we received help from an…er…unusual source.”

“You may, sir.”

“Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll look forward to the evening news a week Friday.”

021840JUN06. USS Columbia. 28.55N, 49.48E.

Periscope depth. Course 315. Speed 5.

Commander Mike Krause, conscious of the critical nature of his mission, and of the proximity of the sea bottom to his keel, had checked on the underwater telephone. Commander Tom Jackson’s Cheyenne ran quietly 500 yards on his starboard beam, same course, speed, and depth. Both SSNs were on top line to fire. Tubes ready. A hundred checks have been made, the missile men had completed all the prefiring routines and settings. There must be no mistakes, barring missile malfunction or enemy action. The preprogramming was immaculate. The big self-guided Tomahawks were ready to do their catastrophic job.

At 1845 precisely, Commander Krause ordered, “Stand by tubes one to six.”

Then, “TUBE ONE, LAUNCH.” And the first of the specially modified SLCM Tomahawks blew out of the submarine, slid up to the surface, and roared into the black night sky, adjusting course at its cruise altitude of 50 feet above the water, heading north, a fiery tail crackling out behind for the first few seconds of its flight. And then it hit flying speed, and the gas turbines cut in, leaving no telltale trail in the sky. Nothing could stop it. At least nothing in the maritime armories of the Gulf nations.

Within four minutes, the remaining five missiles had screamed onward and upward, all under the control of the launch sequencer. All fired at exact, but different, intervals, each one designed for the specific route of each Tomahawk. No matter what the route variations, the big cruise missiles would arrive on their target, from their separate flight paths, precisely thirty seconds apart.

Next the Tomahawks, in a murderous salvo of destruction, fanned out and hurtled above the dark waters of the Gulf. Though Mike Krause could not tell, they were surprisingly quiet as well as fast. Once they were over land they could scarcely be heard at all before they were already past. Too late. Much too late for the Dar-band-I-Khan dam.

At 185 °Commander Krause heard that Cheyenne had also completed her firing sequence. Commander Jackson had drawn a long-range bead on the Samarra Barrage. Missiles away, the Americans were to get out of the Gulf of Iran. Mike Krause ordered Columbia sharply around to the southeast, coordinating his turn with the other SSN. And the two Black Ops submarines headed off together 500 yards apart.

By dawn, both boats would be creeping softly through the Strait of Hormuz, deep, fast, and in the center of the channel, the safety separation, 100 feet in depth. Soon the Gulf of Oman would shelf away to the unfathomable sandy depths of the Arabian Sea. The Americans would angle to the right there, running south, down the coast of Oman, passing almost directly over the shattered tomb of HMS Unseen.

022015JUNE06. 35.07N, 45.42E.

The guard room, western end of the great wall of the Darband-I-Khan dam.

Corporal Tariq Nayif, at the age of twenty-one, was the duty soldier charged with walking out along the wall to the halfway point and back every half hour during his four-hour watch. The eastern half of the wall was patrolled from the guard room on the other side.

Tariq’s immediate superior, Staff Sergeant Ali Hasan, a veteran Iraqi combat soldier in charge of the western guardhouse, was resting until midnight. The officer on duty, Second Lieutenant Rashid Ghazi, was reading, which left Tariq out on the wall on his own. Armed with his standard-issue Russian Kalashnikov, but nonetheless alone. To his right there was low wall, and a yawning 500-foot drop to the River Diyala, to his left the still dark waters of the reservoir. The wall was well lit all the way across, and swept by a personnel surveillance radar and infrared detectors at all times. There was a television picture showing their end of the wall in Tariq’s guardhouse.

Like every night, it was cool, silent, and peaceful up there in the mountains. Tariq wore a greatcoat, hat, and gloves, as he walked slowly toward the east, his steel-tipped boots making an unusually loud noise above the gusting wind that blew directly into his face. Tariq was not a Kurd, and it was beyond his understanding why anyone should want to live up here in the cold, barren peaks of northeastern Iraq.

There were other things beyond his understanding on this night, principally the fact that less than 150 yards away, already 70 feet below the surface, a big American-built cruise missile, with a thumping 500kg warhead, was quietly making its final approach to the front of the wall, to a detonation point down at the base of the dam. It was still making 10 knots through the water, and would explode with shuddering impact, 100 feet below where Tariq stood.

It hit at 2018, detonating with a massive underwater explosion, which strangely made little sound in the air. And hardly a ripple disturbed the calm water immediately beside the dam. But the force of the underwater blast shook the giant structure to its foundations, as cracks like lightning bolts ripped 40 feet into the concrete. But it held firm, and as the waters subsided there was complete silence again, save for the pounding feet of Tariq Rashid, running back to the safety of the western guardhouse to report what little he had seen or heard.

By then Staff Sergeant Ali Hasan was on his feet outside the building yelling, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Tariq could not help much there, and as he struggled to explain the dull, muted thunder, his words were cut short by a second stunning impact on the wall, well below the surface. Both men felt the reverberations of the thud on the soles of their boots. And then, again, there was silence. No attacking fighter- bombers screamed through the sky. There had been no sense of a rocket attack, or any attack. The area was undisturbed, and the lapping of the wavelets on the shore was lost against the low gusting of the wind.

Then the third SLCM nosed into the dam wall, right into the gaping hole on the north side, before it blew. And again the force of the exploding warhead lasered those lightning-bolt cracks deep into the structure, right through this time. The two Iraqi soldiers, backing away from the obvious tremor along the great wall, could not see, but one giant jagged crack ran 100 feet diagonally down the south-facing wall…the one that now held back 3 cubic miles of water.

Staff Sergeant Hasan, joined now by Second Lieutenant Rashid Ghazi, was just saying that there seemed to be no military explanation, that there must be some kind of an earthquake, when Mike Krause’s fourth cruise missile blasted into the underwater cavern on the north side of the dam. It blew, with spectacular impact, a gigantic breach in the dam, 150 yards across. Millions of tons of concrete finally gave way to billions of tons of water. The 100- foot-high wave surged through the gap with unimaginable force, then began to crash down in slow motion, 500 feet, to the quietly flowing river below. And, of course, it kept coming, one of the biggest reservoirs in the world, followed by an entire lake, the waters rushing in behind, from a deep mountain lake bed more than 6 miles long.

On both sides, the great wall held firm for a span of around 50 yards. It was the middle that was missing, and the 3 Iraqi soldiers stared toward the east, in terror at the clear wrath of Allah. And they turned to the direction of Mecca, knelt before their God, and prayed for guidance.

Below them, the friendly River Diyala had become a raging, cascading torrent, 40 feet higher than normal, roaring down its course, southeast, toward the Tigris 100 miles away. Toward the fertile southern farmlands south