Hunter Killer

“Guess so. You had a chat with the Big Man yet?”

“Uh-huh. Had dinner with him and Kathy last night.”

“And what does he say?”

“He thinks the wholesale devastation in Saudi Arabia could have been achieved only with submarines, SEALs, high explosives, and, in the end, missiles to hit the land targets.”

“That is the only way,” said the former Commander of a U.S. Carrier Battle Group. “Unless you bombed them, which plainly no one did. And you could not pull off something like that with amateurs planting bombs in the night.”

“Well, sir,” said Ramshawe, “since we both believe Admiral Morgan is right about ninety-eight percent of the time, maybe we should check out the submarine theory.”

“We most certainly should,” replied Admiral Morris. “Get Admiral Dickson at the Pentagon. Send him my best and ask him to check the boards for all world submarines for the past month. And perhaps he could do it real fast. I don’t want Arnold on the line wondering if we checked before we have.”

The Lt. Commander was glad his boss was back. He grinned and said, “Right away, sir. He’ll have SUBLANT send ’em over on the link, I expect. I’ll come along to your office soon as we get ’em.”

It took only a half hour. The Lt. Commander downloaded the sheets right away and headed back along the corridor to the Director’s office.

He was not required to knock. Admiral Morris, a genial, wily international operator, held no secrets from his assistant. He was on the phone when Ramshawe came in and sat down in front of the huge desk, once occupied by Admiral Morgan himself.

“Okay, sir,” he said when George Morris had completed his conversation. “I’ll run through the no-hopers first. Ignoring the China seas, the Russians had a couple of Kilos in sea trials north of Murmansk, and a nuclear boat exiting the GIUK gap heading south down the Atlantic. That was on March second, and the satellites caught it entering the Baltic, then the Navy yards in St. Petersburg, where it still is.

“The Brits have a Trident in the North Atlantic, south of Greenland, and two SSNs in the Barents Sea, close to the ice cap. Nothing in the Channel or to the south. The other European nations with submarines — that’s Italy, Spain, Germany, and Sweden — do not have one at sea between them. As you know, the U.S. has two L.A.-class SSNs with CVBGs in the Gulf, the northern Arabian Sea and south of Diego Garcia.

“The French have a Triomphant-class SSBN out of Brest, the Vigilant, in the Atlantic, north of the Azores, but here’s the key information: this month they sent two Rubis Amethyste — class SSNs through the Med to Port Said, and on through Suez into the Red Sea.”

“Same day, Jimmy?”

“Nossir. The Perle went through Port Said just before midday on March fourth, and the Amethyste went through last Thursday afternoon, around fourteen hundred hours.”

“Did they come back…into the Med, I mean?”

“Nossir. In fact no one’s seen them since.”

“You mean they went deep in the Red Sea?”

“Apparently so, sir. We have a satellite pass over the canal and the Gulf of Suez at around nineteen hundred, and by then they’d gone, both ships, on March fourth and eighteenth.”

“How about the southern end, through the Strait, into the Gulf of Aden…what’s it called?…the Bab el Mandeb, right?”

“Yessir. And that’s a spot we watch very carefully. Every ship entering and exiting the Red Sea is monitored by us, using satellites, surface ships, and shore radar. Neither the Perle nor the Amethyste has left the Red Sea.”

“At least not on the surface?”

“Correct, sir. And neither of them has gone back through the canal to Port Said.”

“They could, however, have made the transit dived.”

“You sure about that, sir?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. There’s a wide seaway out of the Red Sea, and it’s mostly two or three hundred feet deep. I think most submarine COs do come to the surface. There are a few islands down there, and you need to be careful to stay in the defined north — south lanes, and it can be quite busy. It’s easier to make the transit on the surface; the water’s usually pretty flat.

“But I know U.S. commanders who have made that transit dived, and they’ve done it more than once. The entrance to the Gulf of Aden is an interesting crossroad. Once you’re through, and sub-surface, no one knows where the hell you’re going — north, south or east. It’s a great spot to get lost in.”

“Well, the Perle and the Amethyste are certainly lost, sir. There’s no sight or sound of either of ’em. And there are no other submarines in all the world anywhere near the Red Sea or the Gulf in the past month. Unless a couple of U.S. Commanders went berserk and decided to slam the towelheads with a few cruise missiles.”

“Unlikely, Jimmy, wouldn’t you say?”

“Impossible, sir. If the oil stuff was hit by sub-surface missiles, they came from either the Perle or the Amethyste, on the basis that there were no other submarines for thousands of miles.”

“The snag of course, Jim, is we don’t know where either the Perle or the Amethyste is, within thousands of miles.”

“Five gets you twenty if one of ’em’s not still in the Gulf of Iran,” said Ramshawe. “And five gets you fifty if the other one’s not still in the Red Sea.”

“No, thanks,” said the Admiral.

“What now?” said his assistant.

“Ask Admiral Dickson if SUBLANT can find out whether any French submarine in the past five years has apparently exited the Red Sea underwater.”

“Right away, sir. That’d be interesting.”

“Not proof, of course. But a little food for thought, eh?”

Lt. Commander Ramshawe headed back to his staggeringly untidy office and put in a call to the Pentagon, to Admiral Dickson, Chief of Naval Operations.

“I can’t promise absolute one hundred percent accuracy on that one, Lt. Commander,” said the CNO. “We watch that area carefully and we watch all submarines in and out of the Red Sea. We’ll have computerized records of all French SSNs and any Triomphant-Class. I’ll have SUBLANT give you a pretty good picture of French practices going into the Gulf of Aden.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

“’Bout an hour,” said the CNO. “By the way, is this for the Big Man?”

“No, sir. It’s for Admiral Morris.”

“Same thing,” said Alan Dickson. “Give him my best.”

The giant shadow of Arnold Morgan, which had hung over the United States Defense Department for so many years, had not receded. And every senior naval officer in the country knew of Morgan’s continued obsession with submarines and their activities.

The smallest inquiry from the National Security Agency involving submarines — anyone’s submarines — usually prompted the question “This for the Big Man?” even though Arnold had been retired for several months. Even though he had not sat in the big chair at Fort Meade for several years. He had never quite left. And a lot of very senior people, including the President, wished to hell he’d come back.

One hour later, SUBLANT put Jimmy Ramshawe’s information on the Net to Fort Meade. The French sent submarines through Suez and into the Red Sea about four times every six months. Four in ten returned the way they had arrived, back through the canal and on to either the Toulouse Navy yards, in the Mediterranean, or Submarine Fleet Headquarters, in Brest.

The other six always headed out into the Gulf of Aden and usually went south, to the French base at La Reunion. Occasionally a French underwater ship headed up into the Gulf of Iran, but not often.

The United States Navy had no record of any French submarine exiting Bab el Mandeb sub-surface. According to the analysts at SUBLANT, no one particularly liked making that voyage below the surface. And in five years, U.S.