“Then five more. Conning tower blown apart, remaining two SEALs dead. Cargo ship heaves to and takes the narco-sub in tow, back to Columbia. The mission result — the loss of four Navy SEALs and the cartel’s recovery of the drugs and the sub, able to try again later. Mission failure, but again, much worse than your actual mission’s outcome.
“So, scenario four. Bias dialed up to a full one hundred percent. At the point the cargo ship starts driving in to establish its escort operation, Vermont fires a salvo of four Mod nine ADCAP torpedoes at the cargo ship. Cargo ship spectacularly explodes and sinks, killing some four dozen cartel sailors, so none of them could be captured and interrogated. SEALs board the narco-sub and it sinks, but this time two SEALs were trapped aboard when it went down. Loss of two commandos, the cargo ship’s exploding on the front pages of the news files, loss of the narco-sub and cargo, but in deep water. So a similar mission result with respect to the target sub and the drugs, but with fifty souls lost, including two of our own, and a reputational problem if the cargo ship’s exploding and sinking is linked to the U.S. Navy. It would be a scandal.”
“So, Admiral, we seem to have found the sweet spot,” Seagraves said, that tell happening again, Romanov thought. The captain was secretly pleased.
The first glimpse of light seemed come into Catardi’s mood. He pursed his lips, then smiled just slightly, just for a fragment of a moment.
“That’s what I’m going to tell the National Security Advisor, Dana Brady-Hawlings.” Catardi said her name contemptuously as if cursing and spitting. “And now this whole Kakivak fiasco becomes my goddamned idea.” Catardi took his tablet from the table, made a few corrections to a document, clicked the screen and looked up at Seagraves. “Check it, Commander.”
Seagraves looked over at Romanov’s tablet while Quinnivan clicked into his own machine. It was an order, an operation order, an op-order. Dated from five days ago, May 8, the time stamp just before midnight. It ordered Vermont to make haste to Santa Marta and take charge of the narco-sub, and if there were the slightest interference from the cargo ship, to immobilize it with a Kakivak EMP cruise missile. Seagraves looked up at Catardi.
“Thank you, sir.”
Romanov breathed a deep sigh of relief. They were off the hook after all. That bitch of a mission may have failed, but none of the AI could do any better. And now Admiral Catardi had given his imprimatur to their tactics with a backdated order to do exactly what they’d improvised.
“Which brings me to the real purpose of this meeting,” Catardi said, while Styxx lowered a screen at the far end of the narrow room. She clicked her tablet to pair it to the projector, and a view of the earth from overhead Andros Island and the Atlantic Ocean appeared, the deep blue of the sea and emerald green of the land masses making the view seem inviting.
“Just a side comment before we go on,” Catardi said. “Did you note that the difference between eighty percent aggression and a hundred percent aggression is pure undistilled stupidity?”
Romanov nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing.
“Anyway, here we are, Andros Island, Bahamas. I’m ordering you to take a great circle route to the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas and up northward into the Indian Ocean.”
An animated bright dotted line appeared, drawing a curve on the globe from Andros Island and extending south toward the south Atlantic and around South Africa and turning north-northeast up the eastern African coastline toward Saudi Arabia.
“You’ll enter the Gulf of Oman here, off Cape al-Hadd, Oman, and head toward the Strait of Hormuz and loiter off the Iranian Navy base at Bandar Abbas, which has access to the Persian Gulf to the west and the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea to the east. And yes, Madame Navigator,” Catardi said to Romanov, “it would, in fact, be much faster to route you through Gibraltar, the Med, the Suez Canal and around the Saudi peninsula, but surfacing Vermont to transit the Suez Canal in front of a thousand spies would only happen if we wanted the bad guys to know we were coming. For this mission, stealth is important. Vital, in fact. Your run to South Africa and up the Indian Ocean will be a dark transit done at flank speed, with only one excursion to periscope depth per day for a navigation fix. By ‘dark transit,’ I mean no communications in or out. Complete radio silence until the mission is complete. That means no emails, in or out. After you leave the pier here, the next thing I expect to hear from you is your situation report. Your sitrep reporting complete mission success.”
Catardi looked at Romanov again. “This means you’ll be going over seven thousand nautical miles full-out at flank speed, with only daily excursions to periscope depth to grab a NavSat fix. However, once you round the cape and enter the Indian Ocean, no more periscope depth excursions. You’ll be navigating solely using bottom contour and gravity contour the whole way to keep SINS behaving. Bottom contour nav loses accuracy at high speed without you slowing down to explore an area to cross reference the bottom contours, but we’re going to have to live with your fix error circle growing to the size of Connecticut until you approach the Saudi peninsula. Then you’ll downshift main coolant pumps, go to natural circulation, rig for ultra-quiet and sneak into the Gulf of Oman at no more than eight knots, only popping the scope up long enough for a navigation fix.”
Catardi expanded the map, zooming into an area drawn around Bandar Abbas Naval Base.
“You’re authorized entry within the territorial sea of the Republic of Iran as directed by the president. There will be no written directive to penetrate nor will there be a written op-order for this mission. Your radio suite and crypto equipment will be rigged for programmed self-destruct if the unlock codes aren’t input every hour.”
“What is the mission, Admiral?” Seagraves asked, looking at the blown-up chart of the Strait of Hormuz.
Catardi clicked the next slide, showing a submarine inside a huge assembly building, with massive steel bridge cranes overhead, scaffolding surrounding the vessel, which was placed on top of blocks on the factory floor. The submarine looked weathered. It had seen sea duty.
Romanov looked at the photograph closely. “Is that a Kilo-class?” she said.
“Indeed it is,” Catardi said. “Iran has three older Russian-built Kilo-class diesel-electric attack submarines. Enough of a threat to sink shipping in the gulf. But the Iranians and their nuclear ambitions have progressed to the point of initiating ‘Project Panther.’”
Catardi clicked to the next slide. In this photograph, the Kilo diesel submarine had been torched into a forward portion and an after half. The halves had been moved apart by thirty feet.
“Guess what’s going in there?”
“A missile compartment for ballistic missiles?” Romanov asked. “Nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles?”
“Nope,” Catardi said, turning to the next slide. In this photo, a cylindrical can had appeared between the submarine’s halves. In the photo’s center, the inside of the new module could be seen with bright work lights shining on the interior’s equipment.
“That’s a — that’s a reactor,” Quinnivan breathed.
“Exactly,” Catardi said. “The Russians are lending Iran an experimental lead-bismuth liquid metal cooled nuclear fast reactor, the UBK-500 model, the grandson of the reactors that powered the storied Lira Project 705 class, the submarine class we and NATO called ‘Alfa.’ This unit puts out eighty megawatts thermal from a reactor vessel smaller than your water heater at home. The remainder of the module is the steam generator, ship’s service steam turbine and propulsion steam turbine. The propulsion turbine’s output goes to the Kilo-class’ main motor, which can now run on electricity generated by the nuke in addition to the diesel propulsion generator or the batteries.”