“I guess that’s it. Yes, the ropes are on.”
“Thank you. Stand by.”
The pilot waved his hand, and two deckhands on the skiff pried the mooring line turn by turn over the top of the capstan until it fell into the water.
A lookout high on the Zafar caught Salem’s eye. His lips moved in front of a bridge-to-bridge radio, and Salem heard the voice again from the box.
“We’re taking up slack on the tow line.”
To Salem’s dislike, he noticed that the weight-bearing capstan that would tow the Leviathan had been installed ten meters above the waterline. Any observer could see it and speculate that the Zafar was towing something behind it.
He pressed the button for talking.
“Is there no other mooring point? That capstan is very high.”
“It’s all we could do with the ship’s design.”
“Who are you?”
“The captain. Who are you?”
“The captain,” Salem said.
“You can take this communication box with you through your hatch. It is an ultra-thin design and should work even while compressed through a watertight seal. It will let us speak.”
“An excellent idea, if it works.”
“You’ll have wrapping wires coming in the first box from the skiff. Draw figure eights around the cleats with the wire and clamp them down over the hooks.”
“It will be done.”
“Hana, come on!” Asad said. “Fresh food.”
He turned and saw the skiff, un-mated but pressed alongside the submarine, with deckhands dangling boxes on the ends of pole arms.
“No, not food yet. Have the soldiers open the first boxes and take the wrapping wires to the cleats. Figure eights for securing the hooks.”
“Yes, I know what they mean. I will see to it.”
Salem sent his linguist below to call on other men to retrieve the next boxes, filled with food, and to enjoy the fresh air he promised.
The Zafar’s captain spoke, his voice ringing from the box with clarity.
“I’m going to restart my engines and begin towing you. You can secure the hooks while I do so. The wire is merely to assure the hooks don’t slide off the cleats at deep angles. We control the tension here with the capstan, and it’s an automated and reliable design.”
“An excellent decision to move onward. I thank you for the job well done and the provisions.”
“And I thank you for what you will soon accomplish.”
North of Libya in the Mediterranean Sea, the Trigger stood on the bridge of the supertanker beside the captain. With the report of a successful mating between the Zafar and the Leviathan, he felt relief, excitement, and the persistent stab of sadness that reminded him of his connection with mass death. It hit deeply, and he winced, but he fathomed no other existence.
“This is impressive,” he said.
“Yes,” the captain said. “Now if that whore professor can produce equally impressive results, I sense the odds turning in our favor.”
“I am told that Salem visited the professor and the captain of the Aegis ship,” the Trigger said. “He believes she is devious enough and him foolish enough to accomplish our task.”
The Trigger looked through the window to the ship’s moonlit deck for inspiration.
“Three armed missiles with destinies that will be masked and protected by seventeen decoy missiles,” he said. “And now the possibility of finding and removing our greatest obstacle, the Aegis destroyer. How far behind us is the Leviathan?”
“Less than a day.”
“Thus far,” the Trigger said, “the plan is unfolding per design.”
“Outboard engines?” Flint asked, his eye pressed against the periscope’s eyepiece.
“That’s what they might be,” Baines said. “There’s probably just some high-speed pleasure craft on the same bearing. Heck, the guys in the sonar room barely heard it. It could be miles away and have nothing to do with the Leviathan.”
“This is screwed up. The Leviathan disappears, then surfaces, and then disappears again. And now you say we might have heard outboard engines.”
“Just the blades. High-speed screws. Outboard engines are loud as heck, but the sound hardly penetrates the surface. I saw that in counter-narcotics ops as a junior officer.”
The Annapolis rolled.
“Right. I stand corrected. You don’t see anything on the monitor? No Leviathan? No cigar boats? No drug runners, Titanic, or Flying Dutchman?”
“No, sir. It’s dark and lonely up there. I suggest that we lower the scope and begin a spiraling outward search for the Leviathan from its last known datum.”
“After we get a note to squadron. Draft one telling them about high-speed screws after the Leviathan surfaced and we lost contact with it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“What about that merchant we regained on the bearing of the Leviathan.”
“I don’t know sir. We had it solved at a range of twelve miles. Given that it turned up on the same bearing as the Leviathan, it’s probably even farther than that, or moving a heck of lot slower than fifteen knots.”
Flint sighed.
“We’re going to need everyone from this watch section involved in reconstructing what we think we know.”
“Even while we search for the Leviathan?”
“Yes. The next watch section can manage the search. There are answers in front of us we aren’t seeing that I want everyone rethinking.”
“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll take care of it.”
Flint pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Shit, XO. This is getting tough. I’m not sure who’s in charge of a highly capable submarine that we just lost track of less than four miles away. I don’t know if I’m tracking, trailing, or hunting, and I’m waiting for some bureaucrat in Washington to at least give me permission to decide for myself.”
“We’ll be fine, sir. The Leviathan’s bound to make noise. We’ve always picked them up again within a couple of hours. You’ll feel better after we regain it.”
“I hope you’re right, but I got a feeling you ain’t.”
CHAPTER 12
Olivia McDonald yawned and stretched her arms behind her chair. She leaned forward and lifted a cappuccino off her desk. The foamy froth and strong taste woke her senses.
She flipped open the dossier of Farah Ghaffari. A doctoral thesis comprised the bulk of it, and her history before entering Tehran’s university system spanned two paragraphs of conjecture. Beyond the two-page summary of the NCIS investigation into her unusual husband-chasing behavior, Google could have provided the entirety of her history.
Ghaffari’s headshot — taken from the Old Dominion faculty directory — showed a woman whose smile concealed a sinister secret and formed a semi-sneer. The eyes radiated with intelligence and anger. She was attractive with sharp features but intimidating and haunting, Olivia thought.
From Iran’s Khuzestan province on the Iraqi border, she was raised bilingual in Persian and Arabic. She also had been a young girl witnessing the brunt of atrocity and destruction during the Iran-Iraq War. Either orphaned or sent away for her protection — the dossier falling short on the distinction — she moved in with her uncle in the safer Tehran province at the age of sixteen.
She scored in the top five percent of students on her admissions tests to the University of Tehran and finished equally high in her undergraduate class. In her post-graduate work, she achieved no special honors while earning her doctoral degree in psychology.