As Jimmy was uttering these words, a harbor patrol cruiser, having spotted the open harbor doors at KDDE, headed toward them. A searchlight began to play along the KDDE structures.
The four men ran along the spine of the Allegro Star and jumped down the hatch. “Start her up, Jimmy,” yelled Richard, the last of the four to descend into the craft. Richard paused for a second to look again out over the harbor. The momentary pause was critical. The search beam came into contact with the Allegro Star and illuminated the exotic craft, catching Richard’s face and outstretched arm as he reached for the hatch.
“You there, halt!” came the command in English as Richard ducked into the interior of the ship. At the same moment, Richard could see several other smaller harbor police speedboats change course and head toward them. Further searchlights began to play across the water adjacent to the Allegro Star.
“Jimmy, get the hell out of here,” he yelled. “We’ve been made.”
There was a burst of heavy machine gun fire from the first police boat, and the tink-tink of metal striking the superstructure resonated through the interior of the Allegro Star.
Kumar yelled at Jimmy, “Take her down, now!”
“But the cabin is not fully pressurized,” Jimmy protested.
“The hell with the air pressure. Fill up the ballast tanks and take her down!” The staccato sound of metal against metal punctuated his point, as more bullets struck the ship’s upper deck.
Slowly the Allegro Star moved forward toward the harbor police craft that were drawn to the open doors of KDDE like moths to a flame. One of the more distant Coast Guard ships banked sharply toward starboard and was coming in their direction.
But then, when it appeared certain that the Allegro Star was cornered, she dipped beneath the waves.
“What the hell,” said Zak. “It’s a submarine?”
“To some degree it is,” said Kumar. “It cannot go below forty fathoms, and it can’t stay down for longer than twenty hours, but yes, it can fully submerge and operate for short periods beneath the waves. We were perfecting the design at Pacific Western Submersibles in California when the, the attack . . .” His voice drifted off and he did not finish his sentence.
Richard surveyed the interior of the ship. They were in a navigation center that could have been a mini version of the TTIC control room. Half a dozen large video monitors were curved along the front of the room. A large cluster of controls, levers, and buttons of various sorts protruded from a dashboard beneath the monitors. There were large gauges along the edges of the dashboard, displaying depth, speed, GPS, and other critical information.
One large central monitor provided a 3-D representation of the route ahead of the Allegro Star. The contours of the harbor bottom were modeled on the screen, and the locations of surface vessels were portrayed on another screen. The monitors gave a stunningly clear representation of the water’s surface and subsurface. “Quite a wheelhouse, Jimmy,” said Richard.
There was confusion amongst the occupants of the closest harbor police craft. “Where the hell did they go?” was the dominant question. None of the three men trusted their eyes. Had they seen what they just saw? Did an eighty-foot boat just disappear?
The message was radioed to the Navy ships guarding the mouth of the harbor. The commander of the small fleet, Captain Ghundeep, received the message. He was well connected with the Navy procurement process and aware that KDDE had the capability to manufacture submarines, and, in fact had, sold several to the Navy.
“They’re below the surface,” he said over the ship-to-ship radio frequency. “Everyone, watch your sonar and be ready to drop torpedoes in the water.”
The warships carried a copious supply of Italian A-244S ship-to-sub torpedoes, and Captain Ghundeep would have dropped a dozen into the water the moment any submarine appeared on his sonar screens. None did.
As he was waiting to give the order, the Allegro Star stealthily crept directly beneath the huge Navy cruisers and headed toward the open ocean. Not so much as a blip registered on the sonar screens.
31
The streets of London, England, were heavily guarded, and there was a “no-go” zone established around a circular area extending a good ten blocks in all directions from the Parliament buildings. Beyond the zone were endless parades, protests, and demonstrations. Traffic along the streets of Old London was snarly at the best of times. Now with the G20 meeting, things were a spaghetti tangle of blaring horns, cursing, and diesel fumes. Those with means got out of town.
The American embassy off Grosvenor Square served as a base of operations for the American contingent, which included the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of commerce, and a host of other officials. More than a thousand heavily armed Marines encircled the embassy. The news media—authentic or fake, depending on perspective—was by itself a cast of thousands. The other nations, most notably the Chinese, the Russians, and the Germans, all had similar security arrangements. If one were to aggregate the costs for all the security, accommodations, travel, and incidentals, the price for bringing twenty world leaders together on one stage for two days was equivalent to the gross domestic product of an average third world nation.
There were, of course, the main meetings in conference halls and assembly chambers in the Commons, the House of Lords, and a multitude of annexes. But in gatherings like the G20, the real business of assembling partnerships, trade relationships, currency, and debt meetings took place away from the public eye. Much happened that was not reported on. One such meeting took place in a relatively small boardroom in a nook of the Grosvenor Square annex.
Yousseff Said al-Sabhan remained seated when the door opened, and the American president,
