End Game (10 page)

The Werewolf's searchlights made small circles on the foaming waves near the crippled ship. A small boat had disembarked from the destroyer and was approaching the area. Starship dropped the robot aircraft into a hover, concentrating on illuminating the area near the boat.

The Indian ship radioed to ask that he move toward the bow of the destroyer. It took a few seconds for Starship to understand what the radioman was saying through his accent.

“Roger that. Moving toward bow.”

Large bits of debris floated near the ship. The Werewolf's search lamps caught a twisted pipe sticking out from the side of the ship, an obscene gesture directed back at whoever had attacked it.

Something bobbed at the far right of his screen, just outside the area he was illuminating. He nudged the stick, moving the robot helo toward it and zooming his optical video feed to full magnification.

A head bobbed in his screen.

“
Calcutta
, I have something,” he told the destroyer. “Have the boat follow my beam.”

He waited anxiously, lights trained on the seaman. The boat reacted in slow motion. Starship lost sight of the man for a second and started shouting. “Get over there, damn it! Get over there! Get him before he drowns! Come on!
Come on!
”

As the prow of the rescue boat came into view, the head
bobbed back up. Starship saw someone in the boat reaching with a pole, but the man in the water didn't take it. The boat got closer; one of the sailors leaned out toward the stricken man. Starship kept the Werewolf steady, trying to stay close enough to give them plenty of light but not wipe them out with the wash of the rotors.

The man in the boat grabbed the stricken sailor by the back of the shoulders. He hauled him into the boat.

Starship's eyes were glued to the screen. He saw the head coming out of the water, and then the arms and the top of the man's back—and nothing else.

The man had been severed in two by the explosion.

Bile ran up Starship's throat. He threw his hand over his mouth but it was too late; some of the acid spurted out over his shirt. Eyes tearing, he tried choking it back down, struggling with his other hand to control the Werewolf.

 

S
TORM PACED THE BRIDGE
,
ANXIOUS TO GET HIS SHIP SOUTH
. The
Abner Read
was built for stealth, not speed; still, she could touch forty knots, a good speed for a small craft.

Right now she was doing 38 knots. Even if they held that speed, it would take roughly five hours to reach the destroyer.

“I'm going out for some air,” he told the others. Then he walked out onto the flying bridge at the side.

No more than a platform that could be folded into the superstructure, the design of the flying bridge had been carefully calculated to have minimal impact on the
Abner Read
's radar signature. Not only was it the highest point on the low-slung ship, but it was one of the few dry and flat surfaces outside. The main deck sloped down and was often lapped with waves.

The salty breeze bit Storm's cheeks. The wind was coming up and he felt a chill. But it was a good chill, the sort of wind that reminded him why he'd wanted to join the Navy in the first place.

The aircraft the Werewolf had seen near the oil tanker bothered him. It seemed similar to the ones they'd spotted
the night Port Somalia was struck. If it had been a little bigger, he supposed, it might have launched the torpedo itself.

Maybe it was working with the submarine that made the actual attack. Or maybe the tanker.

There'd been a tanker nearby when he lost the other submarine as well. This was a different ship, but the parallels had to be more than a coincidence.

Didn't they?

The submarine might be the same vessel he had chased the other night, able to hide along the coast because its clever captain knew the waters so well. A Chinese Kilo, maybe.

But then what was the aircraft doing? Was it Chinese as well?

Storm decided the submarine was the key to the mystery. He would find it and then—since he couldn't attack—he'd give the exact location to the captain of the Indian destroyer, who no doubt would be anxious for revenge.

Assuming his ship didn't sink before then.

Storm allowed himself one more deep, luxurious breath of air, then went back inside.

Aboard the
Wisconsin
,
over the Gulf of Aden
2045

D
OG NUDGED THE
M
EGAFORTRESS INTO POSITION TO LAUNCH
the first sonar buoy twenty miles north of the stricken destroyer. The Megafortress would set a large underwater fence around the area, waiting for the sub to make its move.

“What's the destroyer's situation?” Dog asked Jazz.

“Nothing new,” said the copilot. “Still fighting the damage. They've had a couple of sonar contacts but they seem to have been false alarms.”

As Dog and Jazz launched the buoys, Dish searched for the submarine's periscope. A half hour later they had covered every inch of the target area without finding anything.

“Best bet, he's sitting down about three hundred meters, just about as low as he can go, holding his breath and waiting for the destroyer to limp away,” said Jazz.

“He'll be waiting a long time.”

“He won't get by the buoys without us knowing.”

Dog wasn't so sure about that. In theory, the hunters had all the advantages—the buoys could find anything in the water down to about 550 meters or so, and an extended periscope or snorkel could be easily detected at this range.

But the reality of warfare was never quite as simple as the theory, especially when it involved a submarine. Dog had worked with the Navy on sub hunts before, and they were always complicated and tricky affairs. In NATO exercises, submarines routinely outfoxed their hunters.

“Just a waiting game now, Colonel,” said the copilot. “We'll get him eventually. We just have to be patient.”

“For some reason, Jazz, being patient has always seemed the hardest thing to do,” Dog said.

Approaching Oman on the Saudi Peninsula
2145

C
APTAIN
S
ATTARI FELT THE SWEAT ROLLING DOWN HIS ARMS
and neck. His clothes were so damp it seemed he'd been out in the rain. He was cold, and in truth was afraid, sure that he was being tracked by a powerful American surveillance radar, positive that some unseen fighters were scrambling along behind him to take him down. Every bit of turbulence, every vague eddy of air, sent a new shiver down his spine. He had the engines at maximum power; the airspeed indicator claimed he was doing 389 knots, which if true was at least thirty miles an hour faster than the engineers who made the plane had said was possible. But it was not nearly fast enough.

“We're at the way point,” said his copilot.

“Yes,” said Sattari, and he moved his aircraft to the new course. Oman loomed fifteen miles ahead.

If I can make it to the twelve-mile limit
, he told himself,
then I will be OK.
In the worst case, if the Americans pressured the emir, they could blend in with the civilian government and escape.

Sattari scolded himself for thinking like a defeatist, like a refugee. He tightened his grip on the plane's wheel, flying. The surveillance plane must be far away, or surely it would have tried to contact him by now.

Unless it was vectoring fighters to intercept him. Or planning to alert the authorities on shore.

Oman was not as friendly toward the Americans as it once had been, and was unlikely to cooperate. Still…

“Two minutes to the landing, Captain,” said his copilot finally.

The radar warning receiver switched off. They were no longer being watched—or was it a trick to make him think that?

Even when he saw that the landing area was empty, Sattari was not convinced he wasn't being followed. He taxied to the dock, then turned the plane around to make it easier for his copilot to get out and handle the refueling.

“Hurry,” he told the copilot as he feathered his propellers. “I wish to take off as soon as possible.”

“Is that wise? Shouldn't we wait a day or two?”

“No. If we are no longer being followed, it is best to leave right away. And if we are being followed, there is no sense delaying the inevitable.”

Aboard the
Abner Read
,
off the coast of Somalia
9 January 1998
0111

S
TORM STUDIED THE
I
NDIAN DESTROYER WITH HIS NIGHT
glasses, examining the damaged ship from about a quarter of a mile away. The
Calcutta
listed six degrees to
starboard—a serious lean, as Airforce put it when he described the situation earlier. But the damage had been contained. The Indian ship no longer appeared in danger of going to the bottom. More than twenty of her men had been killed or were still missing, another thirty or so injured.

With a crew of forty officers and 320 enlisted, the
Calcutta
displaced 5,400 tons, a good 1,200 less than a member of the U.S. Navy's Arleigh Burke Block I class, a rough contemporary. The Indian ship was a member of the Delhi class, a guided missile destroyer that used both Russian and western components and weapons system. A 100-millimeter gun sat on her forward deck just about where the torpedo had exploded. The antisubmarine torpedo battery aft of the gun had caught fire immediately after the strike and now sat charred and mangled at the side, a cat's claw of burnt metal. Storm guessed that the Indians' own weapons had caused many of the causalities.

“Corpsmen are ready to disembark,” said the crewman in the
Abner Read
's fantail “garage.”

“Proceed,” said Storm.

A panel in the well of the ship's forked tail opened and a rigid-hulled inflatable boat sailed out and sped toward the stricken destroyer, carrying medicine and two corpsmen to help the Indians. Once the men were safely aboard, the
Abner Read
would head eastward after the Pakistani oil tanker, which was now about fifty miles away.

Unless he could spot the submarine first.

“Eyes, what's the status of our treasure hunt?”

“Nothing, Storm. Submarine is nowhere to be found.”

“What about Piranha?”

“It's been in the water two hours now without a contact.”

Impossible, thought Storm.
Impossible!

He thought of punching the bulkhead in frustration. Then, realizing he was only thinking about it, he smiled at himself. He had changed in the past few months.

“Keep on with the search,” he told Eyes. “Tell the Dreamland aircraft controlling Piranha that we'll be heading for that oil tanker within a few minutes.”

Las Vegas University of Medicine,
Las Vegas, Nevada
1530

Z
EN ROLLED HIMSELF OFF THE ELEVATOR INTO THE LOBBY AND
saw his taxi waiting outside. He was glad: Despite the fact that he'd spent the day doing almost absolutely nothing, he felt exhausted.

The needles were already routine, as were the monitors, scans, and tepid herbal tea offered up by Dr. Vasin's interns in place of their overheated coffee. The light exercises they gave him to do with dumbbells were a bare shadow of his normal daily routine. So why was he so tired?

Partly because he wasn't sleeping. He missed Breanna, and found it difficult to sleep without her.

And he continued to have the dream. It distracted and annoyed him, kept him guessing what it was really about. Better that, though, than worrying about whether the experiments were actually going to do anything. So far, he felt exactly the same.

“I'll get the door for you, sir,” said a young man, trotting ahead as he came down the hall.

Zen stopped. The kid was just being polite, but his goofy smile irked him. Zen forced a gruff “Thank you” as he rolled past.

Aboard the
Islam Oil Princess
,
in the Arabian Sea
0350

A
LIGHT SPRAY OF SEAWATER WET
S
TORM
'
S FACE AS THE
rigid-hulled inflatable drew close to the Pakistani oil tanker. The first boat had already deposited most of the shipboard integrated tactical team, and the SITT members were fanning out above.

The tanker's crew and its captain were cooperating, but
Storm wasn't taking any chances. The Werewolf, with Starship at the controls, hovered overhead. The aircraft's floodlights made it look like one of the riders of the Apocalypse, the gun at its nose a black sword as it circled menacingly around the forecastle.

Storm had decided he would go aboard personally, partly as a gesture of respect to the other captain, and partly to show him how seriously they were taking the matter.

“Secure, sir,” said the ensign in charge of the landing team, speaking over their short-range communications system.

“Very good,” said Storm. He'd exchanged his shipboard headset for a tactical unit, which had an earset and a mike clipped to his collar. He didn't bother with the helmet most of the boarding party wore, though he did have a flak vest on. “I'll be aboard shortly.”

Storm checked back with Eyes as he waited for the boat to draw alongside the tanker.

“No sign of the submarine at all,” Eyes said. “Piranha has gone to silent mode, just waiting. If it's nearby, she'll hear it when it moves out.”

“Keep me informed. Storm out.”

The petty officer who headed the boarding team in Storm's boat leapt at the chain ladder on the side of the tanker as they drew near. He pulled himself up two rungs at a time, leading his team to the deck.

This is the way my crew operates, Storm thought, following. A seaman from the
Abner Read
met him at the rail and helped him over, then led him up to the tanker's captain, waiting with Storm's ensign on the bridge.

At nearly seven feet tall, the captain towered over Storm. A rail of a man, he gripped Storm's hand firmly when they were introduced.