“Down scope!”
He could still fire but it would be suicide. Even if they were lucky enough to score a hit, they would never live to see the Reagan sink.
“Descend to eighty meters, medium rate.”
“Aye, sir,” answered the engineer, his voice quavering.
“Ahead three knots.”
Not too fast. Slow and easy. Just enough to give the planes effectiveness. At less than five knots, running on the electric motors, the Kilo class was virtually noiseless. He wanted nothing more than a silent descent back to the relative safety beneath the thermal layer.
As the Mourmetz’s bow tilted down, Manilov’s mind raced through the possibilities. What had they detected? Just the tip of the periscope. A few sweeps of the radar, an imperceptible trace, then nothing. They would investigate, but if Manilov was quick and careful, they would detect nothing more.
He ordered the planesman to level the sub. The Ilia Mourmetz was running for its life.
Hurry, darkness.
B.J. ran, her heart pounding not so much from the exertion as from pure terror. Keep running, she commanded herself. Keep them behind you.
The sun was below the high ridgeline. In the dwindling light she was having trouble on the rough terrain. Twice she stumbled, once over a rock and then a low shrub, tumbling end over end. Her hands were bleeding. Her elbow ached, and her torn flight suit was flapping loose at the sleeve.
Keep running. Run out the daylight. The black of night was her only hope.
She could hear them crashing through the brush behind her. She heard them stop, bark at each other in Arabic, then come after her again. Overhead the helicopter was crisscrossing her path, losing her, picking up the trail again.
She zigzagged, taking abrupt turns, keeping to the darkened side of the hill. The light was fading, making it more difficult to keep her feet beneath her. She felt the terrain steepening. To her right, the hill dropped down into a murky gloom.
Her breath came in sharp gasps. She felt her heart pounding like a jackhammer. Her pursuers had to be locals. Mountain people. These guys spent their lives breathing thin air, navigating these rocky goat paths.
What would they do when they caught her?
You know.
The image of the F-14 crew flashed through her mind. She felt a new impetus. Run!
The chopper was above and to her left, the pilot apparently unwilling to descend into the darkness below the ridgeline. But the noises behind her seemed nearer. She could hear labored breathing, the steady clump of boots on rock, the metallic clink of weapons.
Thirty yards, she guessed. Maybe closer.
She wondered how they were catching her. Damn it, she was a marathoner, a fitness freak. She was losing the race to these goons in ratty fatigues.
It came to her. With every sharp turn she took, they were cutting across the angle, closing more distance on her. They didn’t have to see her. They could follow the sound of her clunking boots.
She picked up the pace. More than ever she wished that she had her running shoes instead of these goddamn Clydesdale hooves. Her lungs ached. Her legs felt like rubber.
She fought back the panic rising in her. Being hunted by terrorists wasn’t mentioned when she had signed up to be a naval aviator. Why had she thought being a fighter pilot was a great adventure? She would gladly change roles with any briefcase-toting woman professional in America. Let someone else run from these assholes.
Too late, girl. She reached down with her right hand and checked the Beretta. Still there.
Soon, within minutes, she would have to confront them. She could surrender, hope they let her live.
Or shoot it out. Try to kill them, all three —
She tripped.
Something — she never saw it, a stone or a branch — caught her toe, sending her headlong down the slope. She felt herself hurtling through space.
Whump. She hit on her side, rolling with the fall, airborne again.
She landed on her shoulder, ricocheting off the steeply sloping terrain.
End over end, glancing off the earth. Into space again. Tumbling, hitting something hard and gritty, hurting like hell, falling.
Then nothing. No pain, no falling, no awareness. Just the blackness.
In the flag plot compartment aboard the Reagan, one of the admiral’s four phones jangled — the direct line from the duty officer in CIC.
“Fletcher.”
“Admiral, the SPY-one radar operator on the Arkansas just reported a disappearing contact bearing 340 degrees, five miles. That puts it only two or three miles offshore.”
“Disappearing? What kind of contact?”
“Two sweeps, he said, and it was gone. Their computer gave it a thirty percent probability of being a sub.”
“What kind? Whose?”
“It would have to be a diesel/electric, either a Kilo or a Lada boat. In these waters it could be Iranian, maybe Libyan. Might even be Russian, but we don’t show them having any operational Kilos deployed here. We’ve got a request in to SUBLANT for a status update on all Indian Ocean and Gulf fleets.”
Fletcher considered for a moment. What would a Russian-built sub be doing in the Gulf of Aden? Nothing, probably, except being curious. “Thirty percent? What’s the other seventy?”
“The usual stuff, sir. That close inshore they get a lot of those contacts. They give every one a track number and plot it whether it’s real or not.”
Fletcher had once commanded an Aegis cruiser, and he knew about such contacts. At least one of the array of SPY-1s was tweaked to pick out the return of a barely raised periscope. The trouble was, such a vague target could be mimicked by hundreds of natural and manmade objects — small boats, divers, all kinds of flotsam. Sub hunters spent their lives chasing phantoms.
“Okay, maintain a normal screen and have the Arkansas link all their contact plots over to us.”
“Yes, sir, I’ve done that.”
Fletcher went back to his plotting chart. Third-world submarine fleets were more of a nuisance than a threat. Backward countries like Libya and Iran and Iraq bought these obsolete Russian boats; then they went looking for games to play with them. Someday, Fletcher thought, one of those ragleg sub jockeys was going to push his luck and get blown out of the water.
A dull ache. That was all, just a remote pain, like the twinge of a forgotten injury. It wasn’t even her pain, but somehow separate and detached from her body. She was someplace else, a space traveler in a dimensionless void. No gravity, no up, no down. Just this dreamy sensation, afloat in the universe.
Except there were no stars.
She thought for a moment that her eyes were still closed. No, that wasn’t it. Had she lost her sight? She didn’t think so. It was dark, dark as a thousand bungholes.
Then she tried to move. She nearly screamed as the pain seared through her legs, up through her torso, all to her arms. Everything hurt.
She wasn’t a space traveler anymore. What the hell happened?
The details came back to her in fragments, like pieces of a dark mosaic. Running from the terrorists. The helicopter. They caught her — or did they?
She fell. That was the part that didn’t come into focus. She went down the mountainside — and the rest became a blur. Was she hurt? Was she captured? Where was she?
Her legs and torso felt as though they were bound, immobile. Wherever she was, it was cold as hell.
She tried moving her right hand. It was okay. Fingers, wrist, elbow, all intact and functional. The other hand was okay too. She wiggled her toes. They all worked.