on to them. It was obvious by the way Paul Bedford had spoken with such panache and daring. He said he knew. And he did know.
Pierre St. Martin had no doubt about that. And he also knew of the recall to the White House of Adm. Arnold Morgan. The newspapers and television stations had been full of it.
When he had first read it, every hackle he had rose in alarm. And now his worst dreams were coming true: the United States knew precisely what France had done to help the Saudis.
Pierre St. Martin stared out across the River Seine from one of France’s great offices of state. He realized he may be in his final days in there. The final days of his lifelong dream.
“Damnation upon Arnold Morgan,” he said to the deserted room. “Damnation and blast the man to hell.”
The brand-new Virginia-class hunter-killer
Now the great dark gray hull was back where she belonged, running silently, as quiet as the U.S. Navy’s peerless Seawolf-class ships, betraying no wash on the blue waters of the Gulf of Oman.
In his hand, fresh from the comms room, Captain Stimpson held the critical satellite signal that would soon summon his ship to action stations. It read:
Bat Stimpson knew what his last orders were:
He turned to his executive officer, the veteran L.A.-class navigator Lt. Cdr. Dan Reilly, and said quietly, “This is it, Danny. She’ll be about a hundred miles northwest of us right now. And they were not joking. This is from Admiral Doran himself. How long we got?”
“Probably about five hours, sir. That tanker will speed up soon as she rounds the Musandam Peninsula and starts heading into open waters. She’ll probably be making seventeen knots when we locate her. I’m guessing she’ll be in our preferred range at around fourteen-thirty, maybe a little earlier.”
“Under five miles, right?”
“Uh-huh,” replied the XO. “But we’ll need to go inside a half mile to read the name on her hull. We can’t risk hitting the wrong ship, and we won’t see it much over nine hundred yards.”
“No,” said the CO. “After that we better retreat fifteen miles to our launch area. We don’t want to be any closer. But we don’t want the birds to miss.”
“You think a couple of those sub-Harpoons will do it, sir?”
“Oh, sure. Remember what two French Exocets did for the Brits’
“She was full of bombs and missiles, wasn’t she, sir?”
“Yes. But they didn’t explode for a long time. The
“And these sub-Harpoons can’t miss, can they?”
“No, they can’t. Everything in this ship is damn nearly perfect.”
He referred to the flawless conduct of every working part in this sensational new submarine. The
They would pick up the
“We’ll head for her direct line of approach,” said the CO.
The President of France had been circumspect about the Gamoudis’ money. He was plainly furious at the loss of the family to the CIA, but he recognized that nothing could be done about that. His Foreign Minister was now quite rightly wondering about the $15 million paid to a man France was now obliged to eliminate.
“There is a moral issue here,” said the President. “And I suppose it would be wrong to leave Madame Gamoudi absolutely destitute. After all, she did not ask to be kidnapped by these damn cowboys from Washington.”
“No sir, she did not.”
“My suggestion is that we freeze the money, temporarily, and then retrieve ten million of it, leaving Madame Gamoudi with five million. I think that would be fair compensation for the loss of her husband. We should also make it known to her that she is welcome back to live among her own people in France. She is, after all, innocent.”
St. Martin sounded doubtful. “I agree it would be more comfortable to have her on our side,” he said. “And when the Colonel is gone, we could take steps to bring her home. Just so long as she doesn’t know what happened to her husband,” St. Martin reminded the President.
“Oh, she’ll never know. An accident in a far-off land. Meantime, I should get to work on freezing that money. Ten million U.S. dollars is rather a lot to waste on a dead man,
For the next half hour the Foreign Minister put ten aides onto the task of opening up a bank on a Sunday afternoon. It took only a short while to locate the emergency number of the bank president via the Paris Gendarmes.
But when the call was finally made, the news was not good. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the banker. “But that account was removed from Paris and relocated in Boston, Massachusetts.”
“But when did that happen? And why were we not informed?”
“Sir, this account was set up deliberately fireproof. Only Colonel Gamoudi and his wife could issue instructions by means of a password. The money was removed about four hours ago, with a call from the United States Ambassador to France. The envoy had every necessary detail, and informed us that Mrs. Gamoudi was in the care of the U.S. government, and, if we checked, there was an edict from the President of the United States instructing the Bank of Boston to transfer the money to a different branch.
“Of course, sir, we made the checks. We even phoned back the embassy, and everything was in order…and, sir, it’s not as if the money has disappeared. It’s still in the Bank of Boston, still in the same account. It’s just been moved to a different city.”
“A different planet, I am afraid,” replied St. Martin, wishing the bank chief good afternoon and pondering the sheer futility of phoning a bank in the United States and asking to have access to a $15 million account controlled by two private customers.
“Hopeless,” he muttered. “This operation is becoming more and more impossible, every hour.”
The
One sweep of the radar located a major ship seven miles off their starboard bow. It was a hazy Sunday afternoon, and it was not possible to get a visual. So the submarine went deep again and continued to close, holding course two-seven-six, making seven knots through the water.
Ten minutes later the navigation officer put the oncoming ship at 24.40N, 58.02E, and again the
