The engineer ordered the tanks balanced while he and another man packed a clamp over the burst pipe and shut off the valves. The leak slowed but it did not stop. The mate reported, “We’ve got a breech in the seam of the pressure hull! Diving is out of the question now!”
“You mean we can’t get out of the hold?” Bashir asked.
“I don’t know until I examine the damage topside. Maybe we can brace it and get ten meters out of her, but nothing more,” he replied.
“Well planned or not, we’re here. Wait for the frogmen to straighten us out.” They waited, working all the time on the leak. Water soaked the deck plates and stations on the port side of the bridge, gurgling into the bilge.
A slap sounded on the conning tower. “Bring us up to one meter — slow!”
“Conning tower free!” the first officer reported.
“Come on; let’s check the damage.” Bashir opened the upper hatch. A fog of smoke and salt spray made his eyes water. He coughed, hacking and wheezing as he clambered out into the conning tower. Rushing to the side, he looked over the bulwark at the damage. It was hard to see without the boat fully surfaced, but there was an ugly dent along the port side. It was nearly ten feet long; Air bubbled out of the crease every time the boat heeled over or submerged the foredeck.
A strident voice assailed Bashir. He heard nothing but the tone of the comment, so he retorted, reminding the commentator, the captain of the freighter as it turned out, that this was not a normal maneuver, that he should try it if he didn’t like it.
Frogmen and deckhands secured the midget sub in the hold of the freighter. Then began the arduous process of swapping the cargo containers. Each weighed two tons, so Captain Bashir had the engineer slowly flood the dive tanks so that the deck was awash. Inflatable collars allowed the deckhands to float the containers just enough to move them around.
As the business of swapping the containers continued a gangway was lowered to the conning tower and Bashir was taken aboard the freighter. The captain met him with a sober but apologetic manner.
“That can’t have been easy; forgive my outburst, the import of our mission must be my excuse,” he said.
Bashir nodded, “That is the only reason I would ever try anything so risky.”
“How extensive is your damage?”
“There is a breech that will prevent our diving deep; however, we are simply transporting the cargo and not going into battle. I don’t foresee anything that would prevent our rendezvous with the—” he stopped when the captain of the freighter put up his hand.
“I have no need to know anything further,” he interrupted. “You had better get the cargo on the way before the Americans decide to come and aide us. They have an overdeveloped sense of rescuing people!”
Captain Bashir nodded and left for his command. A half hour later the midget sub disappeared in the black waters. Shortly thereafter a destroyer passed the Atlas a line and it was secured. At Captain Mustafa’s order the destroyer towed the Atlas toward Abu Dhabi.
CHAPTER 28: Swimming with the Fishes
As midnight struck over the Straits of Hormuz the hardly to be heard hum of a V-22 Osprey approached Bandar Abbas with very reluctant Jeremiah Slade on board.
Feeling far too old to be doing something like this, Slade sat in his wetsuit at the aft end of the Osprey. Slung over his shoulder was a KRISS Super Vector .45 caliber assault rifle and other gear.
Leaning against his right leg was a torpedo shaped underwater sled complete with radar, infra-red cameras and lights as well as munitions. The sled was invaluable when they had miles to cover underwater, but as Killer jokingly told Slade, “It can’t outrun a hungry shark. Sorry buddy.”
“Get ready to drop!” the loadmaster shouted.
The hydraulic squeal of the cargo doors was clearly audible over the muffled engines. Then the airstream drowned them out. The air became cool and damp with a salt tang over the smell of jet fuel, oil and the sickeningly sweet smell of hydraulic fluid.
The loadmaster motioned them up, three men on each side of him. Slade stood up and shuffled to the back door, looking down at the black water. The breakwater of the port was ahead of the aircraft; the dimly illuminated cargo bay faced out to sea.
Standing at the edge of the cargo bay Slade glanced at Killer to his right. He wasn’t afraid of the ten meter jump, but Slade had a very visceral concern over entering a world where he was no longer the top of the food chain, especially at night.
Killer knew this, and shouted, “Time your jump to land between those two big ones! Mind the teeth!”
Slade had no time to retort. The loadmaster slapped him on the shoulder as the small green light illuminated.
“Go!”
Training took over. Slade could not have stopped his jump even if he wanted to. His body was so thoroughly trained to respond to that situation, to that command, that his muscle memory took over. He was a passenger in his own body. Before he knew it the cold, dark water closed around him, filled as it was with hidden, hungry things.
Fighting that momentary urge to panic, Slade exhaled — training again — that cleared the regulator and allowed him to slowly fill his lungs with Oxygen. He hung there, suspended in the darkness for what seemed like five minutes; it was actually as many seconds. That allowed his inner ear to re-establish its equilibrium; it took the extra time because in the dark, zero-gravity environment of the night ocean his sensory inputs aside from the cold of the water were nil.
The sound of the bubbles faded. Slade reached for his helmet and turned on his infra-red lights. There was a small LCD screen above each eye in his mask; the screens were connected to two diode sized cameras on either side of his mask. Looking around he caught sight of the five other divers of the Delta Force team. They were readying their sleds.
“All right boys time to mount up!” Killer said.
Pulling his sled up and levelling it, Jeremiah aimed it as he would a big machine gun. Hitting one button with his thumb powered the sled up. Hitting two more turned on the sled’s more powerful infra-red lights and activated the main screen.
The screen was a multi-purpose display. It automatically displayed what the camera saw; however, the screen also showed the essential mission data required for any military operation: the Zulu time, a chronometer, the compass heading, depth, temperature, and in the lower left corner of the display a navigation display fed by a combination gyro and GPS navigation computer. At the bottom of that display were the latitude and longitude of the sled.
The navigation display showed the outlines of the harbor and the position of the target ship superimposed over the picture of the other divers. The rocks of the breakwater were to his right. They sheltered the old naval harbor of Shahid Bahonor from the sea. That’s where the target ship, the Champion Galaxus, lay in berth — a civilian ship at the navy yard — the first clue that something was very, very wrong. If the cargo for Soekarno was really just sand and nothing more why wasn’t the ship berthed at the more modern civilian port Shahid Rajaee a few miles west?
Slade fell behind Killer, keeping out of his wake but maintaining a few meters behind. He could see nothing but what his sled screen and his helmet camera showed. They ran at eight meters, and at that depth no one, even someone watching for them, would have noted the soft green glow from the sled’s tactical displays.
Their only sensory signature was the soft hum of the sled’s motors and propellers, but even these were drowned out by the distant yet unmuffled growls of the tugs and ships in the harbor.
Like ghosts they made their way along the breakwater before turning right into the outer harbor. It was nearly a kilometer to the berth where they expected to find the target ship, Soekarno’s Champion Galaxus. To get there, the sleds had to navigate the outer harbor and whatever traffic it had. That forced them to descend to fifteen meters, ensuring they passed beneath any transiting ships.