Scimitar SL-2

boat was worth.

On board were three smiling seamen, jet black in color, with gleaming white teeth, no uniforms, white T- shirts and jeans. They waved cheerfully and tossed for’ard and aft lines across to the Barracuda’s deck crew to make her fast.

“Are we actually going on board this wreck,” whispered Shakira.

“ ’Fraid so,” said Ravi. “At the moment, it’s all we’ve got.”

They stood on the casing in the rain and said their good-byes to Ben Badr, Shakira’s brother Ahmed, and the XO, Capt. Ali Akbar Mohtaj. Everyone had known this was as far as the General and his wife were going, but there was a great deal of sadness in their departure.

Now, however, the task of the Barracuda was strictly operational. The mission was laid out, her course set, her missiles loaded, their tracks preplanned. All that was required was a careful command, dead-slow speeds, if they were close to any other ships, and a steady run into deep getaway waters.

There would be satellite signals in and out of Bandar Abbas. There would be possible adjustments in the orders, but the signals coming back to the submarine would be direct from General Rashood. There was comfort in that for all of the Barracuda’s executives.

And there was an even greater comfort in knowing that if plans needed to be altered in any way, they would be schemed by the General, the Hamas military leader who would now play satellite poker with the Americans in the final stages of the operation to drive them out of the Middle East forever. On board the Barracuda, there was nothing more Ravi could do.

Shakira hugged her brother, kissed Ben Badr on both cheeks, and shook hands with Capt. Ali Akbar. Ravi shook hands with each of them, and then steered his wife towards the gangway. She carried with her a long dark blue seaman’s duffel bag, in which was stored her makeup, shirts, spare jeans, underwear, and Kalashnikov AK- 47.

General Rashood watched her traverse the little bridge holding the rail with one hand, and then he too stepped off the deck of the Barracuda for the first time since they left the Chinese port of Huludao in the Yellow Sea. And he made his way carefully over to the Senegalese Navy’s 52-foot-long Matelot Oumar Ndoye—whatever the hell that meant.

It took all six of the patrol boat’s crew to manhandle the gangway back aboard. The operation was conducted with a great deal of shouting and laughing. Twice it almost went over the side, and by the time they had it safely stowed, the Barracuda was gone, sliding beneath the great ocean that divides the African and American continents.

It was heading west, for the moment, out towards the burly shoulders of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, running effortlessly, 600 feet below the surface, in the gloomy depths of its own netherworld, far away from the prying eyes of the American photographer high in the sky.

Ravi and Shakira sat in a couple of chairs under an ancient awning on the stern, beneath the machine-gun mountings. The Captain, a heavily muscled ex-fisherman, had made a sporting attempt to introduce himself, but he spoke only French in a heavy Wolof vernacular. In the end, they settled for a laugh and a rough understanding that he was Captain Reme, and he’d have them moored in the great port of Dakar within thirty minutes.

So far as he could tell, Captain Reme was restricted to only two speeds — all-stopped and flat-out. Right now they were flat-out, in a ship that shuddered from end to end, as its aged diesels struggled to drive the twin shafts at their maximum possible revs.

Happily the sea was calm all the way, aside from a long Atlantic swell, and the Matelot shuddered along at its top speed of 20 knots, towards the great Muslim city of Dakar, where at least one of the towering white mosques rivals the finest in Istanbul and Tehran. Senegal has always had one foot in the Middle East and one in West Africa, similar to Dakar, which has been called the crossroads in which black Africa, Islam, and Christianity have met for centuries, occasionally clashed, yet ultimately blended. The bedrock of the country’s subsistence economy is peanut oil and not much is left over for Senegal’s Navy budget. The U.S. Government spent more on the Pentagon’s cleaning staff than Senegal spent on its Navy.

Captain Reme was as good as his word. They pulled alongside in exactly thirty minutes. The elderly diesels had not shaken the ramshackle craft to pieces, and Ravi and Shakira stepped ashore into a working Naval dockyard. Much of the quayside was stacked with fishing gear and shrimp nets, which made it a somewhat more relaxed operation than the one they left ten weeks ago on the shores of China’s Yellow Sea.

But it was a dockyard, no doubt about that. On two adjoining keys, there was a 450-ton French-built Navy patrol craft, twenty-six years old, lightly gunned, named Njambuur. Next to it was a Navy coastal patrol craft, a Canadian-built Interceptor-class gun-boat, thirty years old. No engines were running. It was plain to Ravi that the Senegalese Navy was not planning to go to war with anyone in the near future.

They were greeted by the head of the Navy, a broad-shouldered black officer, age around forty, Captain Camara, whose teeth were as white as his short-sleeved uniform shirt. He saluted and said, in impeccable English, how pleased he was to welcome them to his humble headquarters. He had spoken to his friend Admiral Badr in Iran only that morning, and everything was ready, as planned.

He would, he said, be driving them personally out to the airport, a short distance of just three miles. But first he was sure they would like some tea. Their aircraft expected them at 1800, so they had half an hour to kill.

Thus, in the now hot late-afternoon sun, General and Mrs. Rashood were ashore at last, strolling along the peaceful African waterfront, through the very heart of the sleepy Senegalese Navy — just a couple of weeks before they were scheduled to eliminate the entire East Coast of the United States of America. The contrast was not lost on either of them.

Tea with Captain Camara was a cheerful interlude. They sat outside and watched little boats crossing the harbor, sipping English tea with sugar but no milk, from tall glasses in silver holders. The Captain asked no questions about the long voyage of the Barracuda, though he plainly understood that there was a dark, subversive edge to its mission.

He knew his guests were important, and he knew they had arrived in a submarine, which had then vanished. But he did not think it was his place to pry into the business of his fellow Muslims, who would shortly be flying home across the vast wilderness of the Sahara Desert, which lies to the northeast of Dakar.

He had visited this remote burning landscape only once, and had recoiled from it, as most black Africans do. But he understood that those endless sands represent the very fabric of the Muslim world. He understood, remotely, that his own tiny coastal community was somehow joined by the swirling dunes of the Arabian desert, to the great Islamic nations of Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf States. And he knew it was timeless. And that it mattered. And he respected his visitors from the far ends of the Muslim kingdoms.

The Captain observed that General Rashood had an extremely pronounced English accent, and asked if, like himself, the General had attended school in the British Isles.

Ravi, who was desperately tired after a 20,000-mile voyage from communist China, could think of a thousand reasons not to tell anyone of his background. But he smiled and opted for mass confusion. “No, Captain, I did not,” he said. “I went to a school in Switzerland. They taught me to speak like this.”

“I see,” he replied. “But I expect you noticed that I too speak like you, and I did go to school in England. Charterhouse. And from there I went to Oxford University…studied engineering at St. Edmund Hall, but my main achievement was to play golf for the University against Cambridge. Twice. Once as Captain.”

Ravi, who was almost nodding off in the hazy African heat after the rain, jolted himself back into the conversation and offered, “You’re a Carthusian, and you got a Blue for golf? That’s impressive.”

“I did,” said Camara, who was momentarily bewildered by his guest’s instant grasp of his elite education, especially the fact that Ravi knew, esoterically, that “Old Boys” of Charterhouse are known as Carthusians.

But he continued, “They taught me to play at school, and when I arrived at Oxford I turned out to be one of the best players. I really enjoyed it…very jolly people. It was funny, but they could never get a firm grip on my full name, which is Habib Abdu Camara, and when the team list was posted each week, they used to write me in as ‘The Black Man.’ ”

“Christ, if they did that these days they’d all be in the slammer,” said Ravi, smiling.

Captain Camara laughed. “I suppose so, but they meant no harm. And even I thought it was funny. All of them have stayed my good friends.”

“You still see them?” asked Ravi.