Carrabolla made the call. President Oetari was put out.
“You do realize that I have a very important fund raiser tonight,” he reminded her over the speaker phone. “It’s not as if I can cancel this because the Iranians are veering off the script.”
“Mr. President, we’re talking about the security of over three tons of Uranium 235!” General Mertzl said soberly, barely keeping his tone civil.
“The UN’s keeping an eye on it, why do I want to go and trample on their turf?” the president replied. Before a stunned Carrabolla or Mertzl could respond the president cut them off. “Listen, I’m doing the party’s business tonight; that’s the people’s business. Iran has to comply with the UN agreement — they signed it — so as long as they comply I don’t care how they do it. I’ve given the UN my ships to shadow the Iranians; what more do you want me to do? We are not the world’s policeman. As far as I’m concerned the subject is closed — good night!”
The president hung up.
Mertzl was seething. He echoed the president’s comment in disbelief, “His ships; his ships! They are warships of the United States and he’s just handed them over to the United Nations? Did he really just say that?”
For once Ms. Carrabolla was speechless.
An officer approached General Mertzl. She wore the dress whites of the US Navy. She handed Mertzl her iPad, pointing to the message, “From the Los Angeles class attack sub Key West. She’s shadowing the Iranian convoy.”
Her eyes raised and met Carrabolla. They was no gender fraternity there — none.
Mertzl looked at the message and then at Carrabolla. He said nothing.
His silence unnerved the NSA chief enough for her to finally blurt, “What is it?”
“The game has changed,” he told her emphatically, pounding the table with his open hand. The sharp, insistent sound made Carrabolla jump. Everyone in the situation room looked at the general with surprise. The room fell silent. “You need to call the president back and get him here right now!”
CHAPTER 26: Rahman’s End Run
Captain Bashir of the Iranian midget sub Abd-el Rahman paced the cramped deck of the submerged boat. The boat was named after the jihadi general whose rampage through the Iberian Peninsula and southern France left so many dead Christians, that in his words, “Only Allah knows how many are slain!”
Bashir and his crew took pride in that. They had the quote painted on the bulkhead of the bridge.
They ignored the fact that Rahman was himself slain and his onslaught crushed by Frederic “The Hammer” Martel at Poitiers. Martel saved Europe, but the Islamists still celebrated the death and destruction Rahman spread.
The captain was nervous, muttering to himself, “Park the boat blind in the hull of a freighter? These clerics and their loyal lapdogs have no idea of the reality of these things!”
“I’m sure the guidance comes from Allah himself,” his navigator warned him. The younger man’s glance was hard; disapproving of the captain’s lack of faith.
As a German naval captain might diplomatically reply to a junior Gestapo officer, or a Russian captain to his political officer, Bashir smiled thinly and said, “You misconstrue my comment. I speak only of my own shortcomings in guiding the boat blindly to a difficult berth. Allah’s plans may be perfect, but I am not.”
That appeared to placate the navigator for now, but Bashir chastised himself for speaking his doubts out loud. In today’s Iran, especially in the military, that could be dangerous, very dangerous. He knew of many friends who had disappeared for speaking common sense; they disappeared along with their entire families.
The image of dozens, hundreds of bodies swinging slowly from the gallows in the Tehran breeze came unbidden to his mind.
Purging his thoughts of such depressing memories, the captain went back to the periscope and watched the approaching convoy. The Iranian ships were being shadowed by the Americans; that’s what concerned him. If American ships were out there then their submarines couldn’t be far.
“It’s time to take her down to thirty meters — quietly!” he told the first officer.
“Ready sir,” he replied.
The captain looked sternly at the navigator. “Are we in position; exactly in position?” he demanded.
The navigator nodded, and said, “We are in position!”
The captain sighed, and struck back at the navigator, saying sharply, “We’d better be! Allah will not endure mistakes; not now! Take her down!”
Bashir stowed the periscope as the first officer ordered the tanks flooded and the hydroplanes set down. His orders were repeated much too loudly. It made Bashir wince, the Americans, if they were out there, had to be able to hear them; but it couldn’t be helped — shouting was the only way the seamen could hear the orders over the sound of water rushing through the slots in the hull and into the dive tanks.
Three thousand yards from the Rahman, the sonar operator from the Los Angeles class attack sub Key West, Seaman First Class Jonah Jameson winced at the same moment Captain Bashir did.
“Holy Moses they’re loud,” he said. “No doubt about it captain it’s a midget sub. He’s roughly three klicks at heading three-two-seven, right in front of the convoy, and he’s heading down from periscope depth. I can hear the periscope being stowed.”
“What’s his heading?” asked Captain Mars, a short, black haired graduate of Annapolis originally from Wyoming. He walked over to the sonar station and looked at the various sound patterns on Jameson’s displays.
“He’s going straight down captain, there’s nothing from his propellers.”
“Keep me posted on the midget sub,” he said. Then he pointed to a louder sound signature, that of the Iranian freighter. “Our job is to keep track of this guy, but why would a midget sub sit in his path, basically waiting for the convoy to pass overhead?” He paced the deck silently, thinking. After one circuit of the bridge he returned to the sonar station and picked up his thread of thought.
“Those midget subs can’t keep up with the convoy. He’s not shadowing them; still, he’s up to something. Let me know if you hear anything, anything at all Jameson.”
“Aye, aye sir!”
Jameson kept listening. The midget sub wasn’t very stealthy on a good day. The boat was old, rickety and poorly serviced. Everything on it made noise including the crew. They were easy to track. This one, however, was noisier than any he’d ever heard. The sound was strange; something was causing a great disturbance in the water while the midget moved. What it could be he had no idea.
The Key West hung in the water at fifty meters; the midget was at about thirty. He guessed that by the way the sounds propagated through the water.
The freighter chugged along. It was another real noisemaker. Jameson and his sonar buddies had never heard anything quite like it. Then again, it wasn’t made for the open sea. It was a glorified barge set up to carry rocks. Consequently the doors of the hull, battered and bent as they inevitably were, caused disturbances in the water; that meant noise, and a lot of it.
It also made the ship easy to single out. Jameson backed off the volume on the known ships and highlighted the freighter. That way he could identify any small change, any nuance in the freighter’s sound signature. He was defining the signature, breaking it down into its component parts when suddenly it changed.
Something, it sounded like a generator of some kind, started up. There was a low whooshing sound accompanying it. It ran for several moments and then the engine wound down.