“Nothing yet, Skipper,” Fabrini shook his head in apology.
“She’s been on the stack for over twelve hours now, Skipper,” Graves pointed out. “I doubt she’d hear a tractor-trailer drive by.”
Brodie exhaled tiredly and rubbed his blood-shot eyes. “Pull her off, Mister Fabrini,” he ordered and stepped back out into the passageway.
Graves followed Brodie and held the door open for Kristen, who worked her way through the cramped space. Stepping into the passageway, she offered Graves a weak smile.
“Yes, sir?” she asked Brodie.
“Anything yet?”
She could only shake her head.
Brodie leaned against the far bulkhead and closed his eyes. Graves knew his old friend was racking his brains trying to come up with any idea where the Borei might be hiding. But lack of sleep was affecting all of them, reducing their mental capacity.
“What do you think, Jason?” he asked. “If you were a Boomer skipper, where would you hide?”
Graves thought for a moment, considering the oceanographic characteristics of the Persian Gulf. Compared to the open ocean, the Gulf was a very narrow waterway with only one exit, so the Borei’s potential hiding spots were equally limited.
“Are we absolutely certain it was the Gagarin we destroyed and not the Borei, Captain?” Kristen asked.
She had a good point. Both subs were supposedly using identical power plants, so their noise signature would be near identical. But Brodie shook his shaggy head. “It was the Gagarin,” he said as if there could be no doubt. “If it had been the Borei, then their skipper never would have fired on us. He would’ve stayed hidden and let us go on about our business. Boomer skippers are all about finding a nice quiet piece of ocean and disappearing. The guy who shot at us was an attack boat skipper,” Brodie concluded, confident in his conclusion.
Graves knew Brodie was probably right. No one knew submarines and tactics as well as his friend, and Graves trusted his judgment.
“So, you’re now captain of the Borei,” Brodie posed his query again. “Where would you hide?”
“In Iranian waters,” Graves said but couldn’t be certain. “I’d be in close where land-based planes could keep sub-hunting aircraft away from me, and where foreign attack subs would hesitate to go. Plus, there are all kinds of background noises along the coast to help mask my acoustic signature.”
Brodie nodded, apparently pleased with his line of thought. Then he looked at Kristen. “Lieutenant, what would you do?”
She looked to be far beyond the capacity for rational thought. Sheer exhaustion didn’t come close to describing the way she appeared. She was all but dead on her feet. “I think the XO might be right, sir,” she agreed. “But that’s still a lot of water to search.”
“So where?” Brodie asked.
She ran her hands through her disheveled hair and answered, “If I were driving the Borei, I would hide near one of the oil rigs. The transients coming off the rigs, especially any drilling rig, would mask a submarine from underwater detection. Plus, any aircraft we have looking for them would have to stay clear of the oil rigs as a flight hazard. Even if an aircraft did overfly the area, it is doubtful their magnetic anomaly detectors would pick up a submarine with all the metal on the oil rigs.”
She stifled a yawn while Brodie and Graves exchanged looks. Graves could see Brodie agreed with her. It was the perfect place to hide in the shallow Persian Gulf, and Graves thought her reasoning was logical despite her lack of rest.
“All right, Jason,” Brodie ordered, “let’s start with the platforms in Iranian waters. Have Ryan prepare a search pattern. If necessary, we’ll go from rig to rig until we find them.”
Graves concurred and then spoke to Kristen, “Why don’t you get some sleep, Lieutenant? You’re no use to us fumbling and bumbling. Go get some rest and then come back fresh.”
She shook her head and jerked her hand back toward the sonar shack. “I’m okay,” she lied. “I just needed to stretch my legs and get some fresh air.”
Charles Horner appeared in the hatchway carrying a message in his hand. “Captain?” he called out to get Brodie’s attention.
“Whatcha got, Charlie?”
“We just received this on the VLF net. It’s from CENTCOM.”
Brodie looked it over. Graves could see his friend’s exhaustion turn to disgust.
“What now?” Graves asked. “More prodding to find the Borei?”
“Worse,” Brodie admitted. “The National Command Authority has decided they can’t wait any longer. H-Hour for the start of the air campaign is in just under twenty-three hours.”
“What if we haven’t found the Borei yet?” Kristen asked. “If she’s equipped with even one nuclear missile, she’ll fire as soon as we begin taking out the Republic’s nuclear arsenal.”
“Get me Weps,” Brodie said to Horner and then turned back to Kristen. “Then we’d better find them,” he said, as if it were as simple as that.
“They want us to launch our Tomahawks as part of the opening attack,” Graves read out loud as he studied the Seawolf’s target package. Because the Seawolf was in so close to the Islamic Republic, CENTCOM believed they could hit their assigned cruise missile targets before the Iranian defenses would have a chance to react.
“You need to see me, Captain?” Andy Stahl asked as he arrived.
“Target package for our TLAMs,” Brodie explained as Graves handed Stahl the message.
“You’re kidding!” Stahl replied as he studied the message. “What if we haven’t found the Borei by then?” Clearly Stahl understood the need to remove this significant threat, which begged the question: why didn’t CENTCOM?
“H-Hour for the attack is set; the JCS, the NCA, and NATO have all signed off on it,” Brodie answered tiredly.
Firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at the start of an air offensive wasn’t unusual for American submarines. It was the fact that CENTCOM wanted the Seawolf to participate when the sub was in the middle of a completely incompatible mission to find the Borei that irked them. The hunt for the Borei required stealth, whereas launching a series of Tomahawk missiles would be like shooting up a flare. Wherever the Borei was lurking in the Persian Gulf, they would detect the launch and know precisely where the Seawolf was seconds after firing the first cruise missile.
Chapter Thirty
The Seawolf moved northward through the Persian Gulf, staying in shallow water. Their course took them through a seeming endless maze of oil platforms as they searched for any hint of another submarine. Fabrini stayed in the sonar shack, monitoring his sleepy sonar operators. He’d been able to get Martinez, Hicks, Greenberg, and Goldman some sleep, but Kristen had stayed. How she stayed awake he wasn’t sure. The mental exhaustion created by maintaining complete concentration for hours on end was the reason they had multiple teams of sonar operators and why the teams rotated frequently.
Fabrini had kept a close eye on her ever since her brief break seven hours earlier when she’d met with Graves and Brodie in the passageway. Following that short meeting, she’d been relatively alert initially, but soon her head had begun to bob every few minutes, and he knew he had to force her to come off the analyzer and get some real sleep.