To the Death

The progression from this myriad of Naval Intelligence leads to one stark truth — if a submarine hits another with a torpedo, no one knows it’s happened. The stricken ship will sink to the floor of the ocean, sometimes without a trace. The first clue to its disappearance will be a missed call home via the satellite. And this might very easily be twenty hours after the hit.

And one missed call is not usually a five-alarmer, because the problem could have been electronic, or maybe even carelessness. Certainly one single missed call-in does not signify the ultimate horror of a submarine lost with all hands. And so to the second missed call, the following night. What does this mean? And what to do?

It might be forty-four hours since the submarine was sunk. And an enemy could very easily have been traveling at twenty knots, speeding away from the scene of the crime. That’s 880 nautical miles! In any direction!

Which leaves some hapless home base with a search area of thousands and thousands of square miles in waters perhaps one or two miles deep. Chances of crew survival: zero. Chances of location: close to zero. Situation: hopeless. What to do: probably nothing.

The victim’s navy will most certainly not admit what might have happened. The perpetrator will, naturally, not know what anyone is talking about. And the entire incident may never be disclosed. By anyone. Has it ever happened? Of course. But the oceans guard their secrets darkly. Who knows how many iron coffins rest in the weird, lost canyons of the seven seas? All it takes is one well-aimed torpedo, with a big warhead, and no one will be any the wiser.

Which was why Admiral Arnold Morgan had, on several occasions, advised President Bedford to hit that Iranian Kilo-

class submarine—before the sonofabitch hits us or the Israelis. The submarine to which he referred was, of course, the very one that now carried General Rashood, commander in chief of Hamas, on his mission to assassinate Admiral Morgan himself — a poetic malevolence worthy of the Devil.

At 0400 on this Saturday morning, General Rashood was in the navigation area, talking to the young officer who was plotting the course of Hull No. 901, Lt. Rudi Alaam, a career officer from the eastern Iranian province of Kerman. Both men were leaning over a circular computerized chart that highlighted the central part of the Mediterranean.

It showed the submarine, which was running hard, snorkeling at periscope depth, moving west through the channel north of the island of Malta and its tiny offspring Gozo, both of which lie in the broad waters that separate Sicily and Tunisia. The Med goes shallower through here, and it was the first time the navigation officer had had to attend to the depth of the water.

Almost immediately, running west away from the coast of Lebanon, the Kilo had run into vast ocean depths, nine thousand feet, lonely waters, the Greek island of Rhodes 240 miles off their starboard beam. The GPS read 34.00 North, 22.30 East when they were southwest of Crete.

Right here, 120 miles off the coast of Libya, the ocean floor shelved down even deeper, another three thousand feet. They passed well south of Sicily’s Cape Passero with more than two miles of blue water under the keel. A land soldier rather than a sailor, General Rashood found the whole exercise somewhat creepy.

So far, they had not encountered any U.S. or Royal Navy warships. But headed for the narrow waterway where the tip of Italy’s boot looks likely to kick Sicily straight into Tunis Harbor, the submarine needed to exercise inordinate care. This was an ancient throughway for the Royal Navy. The ocean was much shallower, less than two hundred feet in places, and the carrier battle groups of the U.S. Navy tended to treat the place like Chesapeake Bay.

Detection was something Captain Mohammed Abad wished to avoid, but not at the expense of his speed. If he thought he was being tracked by a U.S. nuclear boat, he would slow and dive. But he doubted the Americans would actually sink him right here in these busy shallows. He knew that once located by the hugely sophisticated U.S. sonars, they could track him with ease and put him on the bottom of the Atlantic as and when they wished, as soon as he ventured into deep ocean water.

But he had as much right to be here as they did, and, like all Iranian politicians and military leaders, he did not think they would dare.

Captain Abad kept going, transmitting as little as possible. He would sneak past the Sicilian port of Marsala, moving more slowly, and then accelerate through this stone-silent ocean, almost on the surface, in the dead of night, moving forward making course nor-nor-west, as swiftly as possible.