Jabarrah looked away, silent for a long moment. "I suppose it comes down to wanting to take as many of the Westerners with me as I possibly can before I am overwhelmed. Vengeance. I want to kill them for what they did to me and my family!"
"My friend, if you cannot trust Allah just yet, then have trust in me, and in your brothers within Maktum. We have resources, and we have knowledge that you don't know about. You will have your vengeance. Believe me. But for now, you must learn trust, and you must learn patience."
Al Qahir was drawing much closer to the submarine now, close enough that the prisoners on her forward deck were easily visible without binoculars. Two of them, he saw with a small start of surprise, were extremely beautiful women wearing skimpy swimsuits. That must have made life interesting on board the submarine.
Crewmen on the Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen were rigging fenders — large tires tied to lengths of mooring line and suspended from deck cleats along the curving side of the submarine's hull. Sailors tossed lines across the narrowing gap of water between the two vessels and, as Al Qahir's pilot briefly reversed engines, then shut them down, they gentled the yacht up to the submarine's side and made her fast. It took a few minutes to rig a brow — a boarding gangplank reaching from the submarine's aft deck to the yacht, an evolution made difficult and dangerous by the surging waves. The task was accomplished at last, however, and an armed, black-bearded man in a Pakistani naval lieutenant's uniform waved them aboard.
"You are Zaki?" the lieutenant asked as he stepped off the pitching and shifting uncertain footing of the gangplank.
"I am."
"Lieutenant Daulat," the man said. "Come with me, sir."
Zaki followed the man to the submarine's forward hatch, bracing himself to descend through the narrow tunnel down through the deck into stygian darkness, then ducking out through a stoop-through into a harshly lit world of green-painted steel, claustrophobic ceilings covered by pipes and bundled wires, and men. Ul Haq was standing by the gleaming column of the periscope tube.
"Hello, Captain."
"A pleasure to see you, sir. Be welcome on board."
"Thank you. I… saw the packages you have for us up there." He pointed at the overhead. "The ones you want us to take off your hands."
Ul Haq's voice dropped to a whisper. "I need them off this vessel, Zaki. They are disrupting morale and harming the efficiency of my command."
"So your report stated. Very well. We can take them back to Small Dragon Island for you, I suppose."
"Excellent. Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen is on her way there now for reprovisioning, but we will be much better off without the prisoners."
Zaki looked bemused. "Your submarine has a speed of… is it twenty knots?"
"Yes."
"And Al Qahir can manage perhaps twelve. You would get the prisoners to safety more quickly if you kept them with you."
"One of the prisoners has already been killed," ul Haq told him. "The conditions in which we must keep them are… not good. I fear morewill die if they stay on board the Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen."
"You show compassion for the weak, the helpless, and even for the infidel. The Prophet would approve, I suppose."
"This is not a matter of compassion, Zaki. It is a command decision I make for the good of my vessel, and for the good of my men. The prisoners all are topside at the moment, bathing and washing out their clothing. I would appreciate it if you could transfer them directly to Al Qahir."
Zaki nodded. "I understand. It will be done." He stopped, blinked, and looked around the close confines of the control room. "In the name of Allah the merciful," Zaki said, his eyes watering, "why does it stink so in here?"
"If you were a submariner," ul Haq replied, "you would know, and understand."
Garrett studied the glowing screen of the chart table, scowling. According to the slowly moving line of green light across the various shades of blue on the map, Virginia was making good time, but as she moved into the Spratly AO, he needed to make some decisions about where to begin the mission.
His orders gave him a fair amount of latitude. He was required to check out Small Dragon Island with the help of the SEAL element on board, and he was supposed to try to track down and investigate an eighty-foot yacht wandering somewhere in all those hundreds of thousands of square miles of atoll-speckled ocean.
There was also the small matter of the renegade submarine causing so much havoc in the Spratly Islands. And beyond.
Kazuko …
But where to begin? The Spratly Area of Operations encompassed something like a quarter of a million square miles of mostly open ocean, an area roughly the size of the state of Texas, made treacherous by submerged reefs, coral atolls, and extensive and largely uncharted shallows.
His first inclination was to head west, probing the region around Spratly Island, and out beyond in the direction of Singapore. The renegade sub was out there somewhere, and he wanted to find that vessel with all the hunger of a desperately starving man.
But it had been over twenty-four hours since Flight 1125 had gone down; a Kilo-class sub could be anywhere within 500 miles of the shoot-down point — a tiny and hard-to-find target lost somewhere within an area of some 780,000 square miles. It would be useless to simply charge in and start looking. Virginia's sonars were the best, most sensitive sub-borne arrays in the world, but the Kilo, when operating submerged and on her batteries, was one of the quietest submarines in the world.
There was an old adage in the service, however. To catch a submarine, you use a submarine. Attack subs like the Virginia were the natural enemy of hostile subs, designed specifically to hunt them down and destroy them. And the point was not only that Virginia had the equipment for that kind of hunt, but that her skipper had that kind of mind.
A hunter's mind. A mind that knew how the enemy sub's skipper thought, and could use that information to hunt down the quarry.
And what Garrett's hunter mind was telling him now was that a Kilo-class submarine on an ocean deployment would most likely be at the far end of her patrol leg if she'd left Small Dragon Island and ended up at the place where Flight 1125 had gone down. Her captain would want to take on more fuel for the boat's diesels, and fresh food for the crew. What were the possibilities?
Not Vietnam, certainly. If the reports were true, this Kilo was knocking off Vietnamese targets in the Spratlys. Vietnam would be the Enemy.
Most likely would be a submarine tender… a large ship equipped to resupply, rearm, refuel, and reprovision a submarine at sea. There were no intelligence reports of such a vessel in the area, however. Further, if that Kilo was trying to maintain a low profile, something as big and as highly visible as a sub tender would be a definite liability.
Which left some other land port or base.
A port in Indonesia was a possibility, but the only destination that made sense was Small Dragon Island, which had featured prominently in the earlier intelligence reports on activities in the region. It was possible that one of the other Chinese-held islands was equipped to restock the Kilo… but the CIA reports on Small Dragon suggested there was a kind of a hangar blasted into coral rock, a garage, if you will, large enough to accommodate a couple of submarines, with channels and approaches deep enough that the subs could enter the base submerged.