Allah's Scorpion (33 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion
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U.S. EMBASSY, TUNIS
“Well, the man’s story has merit,” Sterling told CIA Chief of Tunis Station Anthony Ransom.
“He’s a piece of shit, Russ,” Walt Hopper observed. “You said so yourself. So why would we waste resources chasing down some cock-and-bull story?” Hopper was a CIA field officer, and worked directly for Ransom. He’d been in the Middle East for nearly five years and he was on burn-out status. Ready to go back to the CONUS.
“Because if by some odd quirk of fate he’s telling the truth, even a partial truth, we could be facing a serious situation,” the military attaché said. “Rupert Graham was one hell of a sub driver until he went off the deep end. Something about his wife dying in the hospital while he was out on patrol.” Sterling, whose last command had been boss of a Los Angeles Class attack submarine, had a great deal of respect for men of Graham’s capabilities. One submarine with a full load of nuclear warshots could start and finish a world war all by itself. Even an antiquated sub, such as the Foxtrot, could do a lot of damage with the right weapons and the right skipper.
“And that’s another thing, a Westerner working for al-Quaida. I just don’t see it.”
“It’s happened before,” Sterling shot back, a little angry by what he saw as a waste of time. They didn’t have enough solid information at this point to argue.
“Yeah, some pissed-off kid from Chicago who thinks he’s Muhammad’s son reincarnated or something.”
Ransom, who had been seated quietly behind his desk, absently playing with a rubber band, looked up. “Where is the gentleman at this moment?” he asked mildly. He was in his fifties, with a nearly bald, shiny head and a red complexion. But he had deceptively warm eyes.
“I put him in the secure conference room,” Hopper said.
“Is he staying in a hotel?”
“Apparently.”
“Send someone to fetch his things, and then get him set up in quarters here,” Ransom said. “With a babysitter, if you please, we may have him for a few days.”
Hopper shifted in his chair. “You can’t believe this guy. He’s trying to shake us down.” Ever since 9/11, selling al-Quaida stories to the CIA had practically become a cottage industry.
“We can’t afford
not
to believe him, Walter,” Ransom said.
“He’s given us the position he says that he rendezvoused with the sub and his ship was sunk. We can check at least that much,” Sterling said. “I’ll talk to Charlie Breamer and see what his people have in the vicinity.” Captain Breamer was operations officer for the Sixth Fleet based at Gaeta, Italy, which was composed of one-half a carrier battle group with about forty ships. At any given time a significant number of those ships were on maneuvers in the Mediterranean.
“It has to appear routine,” the COS said. “If the Libyans are involved, as your Indonesian captain maintains, they’ll be keen to keep us at arm’s length. Anyway if al-Quaida has gotten their hands on a submarine, I think it’s safe to assume that they’ll stay in the Med. Probably hit Israel. I think I’ll give Moshe the heads-up.” Moshe Begin, a cousin of the former Israeli prime minister, was chief of Mossad operations in Tunisia.
“I’ll give Charlie a call,” Sterling said, getting up. “But you might want to consider that the Foxtrot is capable of crossing the Atlantic. Could play hell along our East Coast.”
“They’d have to get past Gibraltar first,” Hopper pointed out. “That’s a tough nut to crack.”
“Yes, it is,” Sterling agreed. But not impossible for the right sub driver, he thought. It had been done before.
He walked across the hall to his own second-floor office, which looked down on one of the neatly groomed olive groves that were watered from rain catchment systems on the roofs of all the buildings, and placed an encrypted call to Sixth Fleet headquarters in Gaeta.
“Captain Breamer,” the ops officer said when the circuit was secure.
“Hi, Charlie, it’s Russ Sterling.”
“How’s the weather in Tunis?”
“Dry,” Sterling said. “I have a little job for you. Might be tricky, but it could be important.”
Breamer chuckled. “I didn’t think you’d call on this circuit to chat about the Yankees, who, by the way, are doing shit.” They were old friends with a baseball rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox going back to the Academy where they’d been classmates. “What do you have?”
“I want you to find and identify a shipwreck for me, off the coast of Libya. I have the approximate position, but it might not be there, the Libyans might object to our poking around, and this is pretty important but totally unofficial for the moment.”
This time Breamer laughed out loud. “Why don’t you give me something tough?” he asked. He said something away from the phone that Sterling did not catch, then he was back. “Okay, I can send the
Simpson
to take a look. She’s down around the south tip of Sardinia, could be on station in about twenty-four hours.” The
Simpson
was an Oliver Hazard Perry frigate. She carried a pair of Seahawk 60B LAMPS Mark III helicopters, and had been used for just about every mission, including drug interdiction,
boardings and searches, and escort duties. She also carried underwater camera gear for sea bottom search-and-rescue missions.
“I’m not one hundred percent on my source,” Sterling said.
“I can get an Orion AIP out there in under three hours to make a quick pass.” The Orion P-3C land-based maritime ASW and patrol aircraft had been in service with the navy since 1969. In its latest AIP, or Aircraft Improvement Program, version delivered in l998, the airplane had fifty-eight separate improvements, mostly electronic sensors and communications equipment. “If they find something we’ll know where to direct the
Simpson.
If not, it’ll be your call.”
“Fair enough,” Sterling said.
“Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”
Sterling had thought his old friend would ask that very question. Any ops officer asked to deploy resources would demand to know what they were hunting. And rightly so.
“Keep a lid on this, Charlie. But it looks as if al-Quaida might have gotten their hands on a Libyan sub.”
“Son of a bitch. Is that what we’re looking for?”
“We’re looking for a tramp freighter sitting on the bottom. The
Distal Volente,
which we think the Libyans will probably try to pawn off as their sub. I need to know for sure if anything is down there, and what it is.”
Breamer was silent for several moments. “I think I’ll convince Nelson that it’s time to run an ASW exercise in the Strait. Wouldn’t do to let something like that out into the open Atlantic.” Vice Admiral Kenneth Nelson was Sixth Fleet’s CINC.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Sterling said. He liked his job at the embassy, but right now he would give his left nut to be waiting off Gibraltar to bag a Foxtrot.
 
 
ORION AIP P-3C 4457
It was a few minutes after three when the four-engine turboprop ASW aircraft reached its patrol station two hundred kilometers off the Libyan coast, north of Benghazi. Their radar and Elint equipment was painting a strong picture of three Libyan warships seventy kilometers to the south, banging away as if they were in a great rush to find something.
Lieutenant Daniel Martin pulled back on the throttle controls, as he
turned the ship left and dropped to five hundred feet above the placid Mediterranean on the first leg of their search-and-identify mission.
Their preflight briefing at Gaeta had been short and to the point, exactly the way Martin liked them. A tramp freighter had apparently gone down in thirty-five hundred meters of water, and they were supposed to find it, or at least pinpoint any ferrous mass they could find at or near the latitude and longitude they had been given.
The only part Martin didn’t like was the rush job. Lieutenant Commander Jerry Garcia, the squadron ops officer, wanted it done yesterday. It wasn’t Martin’s laid-back style to rush into things. If he’d been of that mindset he would have opted for jets out of the Academy, instead of a lumbering eighteen-wheeler prop job so slow it couldn’t get out of its own way.
“We’re starting our first run, Marsha,” he radioed to his chief sensor operator at her ASW console in back. They were treating this as an antisubmarine-warfare mission and CPO Marsha Littlejohn had the best instincts in the fleet.
“Roger that, Skipper,” she replied tersely. It was another thing Martin liked about her, she always came to the point and she never cried.
Besides the updated ASQ-1 14 computer system that crunched data from the ship’s radar systems, the AIP Orion was equipped with infrared sensors and magnetic anomaly detectors, MAD, that could detect a mass of ferrous metal, but only along a very narrow path one thousand feet out, so it was generally ineffective for anything but pinpoint searches. She was also equipped with the blue-green laser detector, which when conditions were right, could peer down through as much as four thousand meters of seawater.
“ESMs, I want to know the minute the Libyans take an interest in us,” Martin radioed.
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Petty Officer Bill Kowalski responded. “We’ve been briefly illuminated by at least three low-power search radars on the way in, so they know we’re here. But it looks as if they’re more interested in what’s on the bottom than they are in us.”
“That’ll change once they realize we’re doing the same thing.”
“Roger.”
“If they’re looking for the same ship, one of us is in the wrong part of the pond,” Lieutenant J. G Stuart Kaminski said from the right seat.
Martin glanced over at his copilot. “Let’s hope our intel is better than theirs, and we find what we’re looking for before they start asking questions.” He keyed his helmet radio. “Talk to me, Marsha.”
“All sensors are clean.”
“Okay, I’m turning on our next leg,” Martin said. He hauled the big airplane a hard one-eighty to the right on a new course parallel and approximately one thousand feet from their first track. Once they completed ten such legs, covering an area approximately two miles wide and five miles long, they would start a new set of tracks at ninety degrees, to form a grid. If there were anything on the bottom big enough for their sensors to detect they would find it.
All they needed was some patience and a bit of luck.
 
 
SIXTH FLEET OPERATIONS
Charles Breamer looked up from the display on his console as Sixth Fleet CINC Vice Admiral Kenneth Nelson came through the door, and he girded himself for trouble. The admiral did not look happy to be called off the golf course on his only day off in the week. He hadn’t even taken the time to change into a uniform.
The P-3C that Breamer had sent out had found a large ferrous object sitting on the floor of the Mediterranean just where Sterling had said it would be. It would be up to the
Simpson
to find out exactly what was down there, but that wouldn’t happen for another twenty hours or so.
The problem in Breamer’s mind was that the Orion and the frigate were the only resources that the admiral had agreed to commit for the moment on what he thought would probably be nothing more than a “goddamn wild-goose chase.” Nelson had been burned twice by what he had considered faulty CIA intel; once several years ago when he was chief of surface ops for the Seventh Fleet out of Yokosuka when the Agency had warned that the North Koreans had threatened to test a nuclear weapon. The CINC and vice commander were both back in the States, where it was the middle of the night. Nelson had diverted a complete carrier group from a routine training mission to make best speed possible to a point one hundred miles off the North Korean coast. The sudden rapid deployment had scared hell out of the Japanese, and although the shit had hit the fan, Nelson had ultimately been found blameless. Based on the intelligence
he’d been given, his action to send a clear message to the North Koreans had been the correct one. But he’d been put through the wringer, an experience he hadn’t enjoyed.
The second incident had happened just a couple of years ago, when he’d been in command of a carrier group on a mission to rescue a CIA team caught spying on Pakistan’s desert nuclear testing facility. The Agency had not only convinced the White House to send an independent SEAL team—not under Nelson’s command—to do the rescue, it had neglected to inform him that one of the captured CIA officers was the president’s brother. He had been taken out of the loop on a mission that had had the potential to place his command in harm’s way.
Nelson came directly across to Breamer’s console. “I’m here, what have you got?” The admiral was a short, slightly built man, with thinning gray hair and pale, sometimes watery eyes. He looked more like a banker than a professional warrior, but he was as tough as bar steel, and his booming voice was that of a man twice his size.
Breamer got to his feet. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but the Orion found something at the position we were given,” he said. He’d played football for three years at the Academy, and he towered over Nelson.

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