Phoenix Sub Zero - Страница 2

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The crosshairs of the periscope view framed the fiery parabola of the submarine-launched missile’s trajectory as it flew to its peak, 1,500 feet into the clear starlit sky, then arced downward on its way to its ground-hugging approach to its target. Commander Ron Daminski trained the periscope view downward until the missile rocket motor cut out, and the flying automaton vanished into the night. Daminski removed his eye from the periscope optic module for a moment, just long enough to look at the battlestations crew surrounding him in the cramped rigged-for-black control room of the Improved Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Augusta. Satisfied, he returned to his periscope and trained it in a slow circle, a surface search, while the crew prepared to launch the second Javelin warshot missile from the forward vertical launch system.

“Missile two on internal power. Captain. Target is locked in and readbacks are nominal,” the executive officer, Danny Kristman, reported, as emotionlessly as if he were commenting on the weather. “Ready for launch in three zero seconds.”

“Open the muzzle door,” Daminski ordered, training his periscope view forward to see the second launch.

“Door open, tank pressurized … Five seconds, sir.

Three, two, one, mark.”

“Shoot,” Daminski commanded.

“Fire!” Kristman barked, the roar of the missile tube the punctuation to the order.

Daminski watched as the second Javelin cleared the water and lifted off toward the east. When it too had disappeared, he lowered the periscope and turned to executive officer Kristman.

“XO, you have the conn. Secure battle stations, take her deep and continue orbiting at the hold point.”

“Aye, sir.”

The deck took on a down angle as Kristman made the orders, the hull groaning and popping loudly from the sea pressure as the Augusta descended into the depths. From the periscope stand Lieutenant Commander Dan Kristman glanced across at Daminski as the captain yawned, stretched, and tried to fight the sleep he’d evaded for the last three nights.

“Rocket Ron” Daminski, so named for his intensity and white-hot temper, had just turned fifty, unusually old for the job of commanding the submarine Augusta. He was stocky and short, his hair beginning to recede from his lined forehead, yet he still carried himself like the athlete he had once been, in spite of bad knees and several dozen old football injuries.

He spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent and frequently referred to himself as an “ignorant New York Polack,” but he dismissed the fact that he had been a brilliant engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Still, he was a troubled officer, always passed over for promotion, and had no illusions that his career would have any further surprises.

Daminski had been aboard Augusta four months, ever since the previous captain had run aground and been relieved for cause. The investigation had shown that the ship had become sloppy and poorly trained, and the admiral in command of the Atlantic’s submarine forces had sent out the ultimate sub-fixer, some would say ass-kicker. Rocket Ron Daminski, a ten-year veteran of straightening out ill-performing submarines.

At first, the crew had dreaded Daminski’s arrival, with good reason. Once aboard, the man was a hurricane, sweeping through every department, finding fault with every division, every officer, every chief, and most enlisted men. Each flaw, regardless of significance, was treated by Rocket as a treasonous personal affront. Every excruciating day had brought several dozen of his demanding emotional outbursts, but over weeks, the boat had responded. Even the men who professed to hate Rocket Ron began to give him the credit as the ship began to function smoothly, going from the squad ron dog to the squadron’s best, until they were certain to win any exercise. Daminski’s tantrums became less frequent, his inspiring speeches more frequent, until over the last month he had become almost jovial in his praise for the men and officers. The ship was ordered to the Mediterranean to support the war against the United Islamic Front, a cause for celebration, the notice that Augusta had arrived.

Through the entire ordeal of putting Augusta back on track. Rocket Ron Daminski had never revealed much of his personal life to the crew. It was known that he was married to his second wife, a pretty and voluptuous younger woman named Myra; the two of them had three small children.

Daminski had filled his stateroom with pictures of his family, nearly wallpapering an entire bulkhead with their photos.

Kristman had noticed that not one photograph included Daminski himself. He had on a recent occasion noticed Daminski mooning over a letter from his wife, so deeply in thought that it had taken Kristman three tries to get the captain’s attention. Daminski carried the letter with him everywhere not in his shirt or pants pockets, but against the skin of his chest. In one recent emergency drill, Daminski had rushed to the control room in his boxers and T-shirt which in an emergency was considered normal and the letter from Myra had been stuck in the waistband of the boxers beneath Daminski’s T-shirt. Kristman could now see the slight rectangular bulge in Daminski’s submarine coveralls where the letter was stowed as Daminski yawned again and ran his huge misshapen football-injured fingers through his hair.

As the ship pulled out of the dive, the deck again became flat. Daminski stepped off the raised periscope stand aft to the twin chart tables, a cigarette appearing between his lips as he bent over the chart. Across the landmass to the east, the thin orange pencil lines traced the serpentine tracks of the Javelin missiles. The lines terminated at a city just north of the Iranian border, the capital city of the United Islamic Front of God, Ashkhabad, in a country called Turkmenistan.

A country that five years before was barely on the map, a two-bit ex-Soviet republic, but was now the center of a thirty-nation confederation of Muslim states. The uniting of the Islamic states had taken almost five years, yet in that time the Western intelligence agencies seemed caught by surprise that it had happened, believing until it was too late that the Muslims still hated each other even more than the West. In this, the spooks had been as wrong as they had been in the months before the fall of the Shah’s Iran.

And as history proved once more, there was no limit to what a single determined man could do. The twentieth century had seen one dictator after another take the reins of power and threaten the world, but most paled next to Mohammed al-Sihoud, the dictator of the United Islamic Front of God. Sihoud had made Turkmenistan his hub territory, the UIF’s capital the city of Ashkhabad, where the Combined Intelligence Agency, now paying very close attention, indicated he had been for the last two days.

There in a concrete reinforced bunker on the northern city limits of Ashkhabad, General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was about to get a very nasty surprise. The operation’s name, “Early Retirement,” was appropriate. Never before in the century had a world war against a dictatorship been conducted by a concerted attempt to assassinate the dictator. This war was to be different.

Executive officer Kristman joined Daminski at the chart.

Both men studied the tracks of the Javelin cruise missiles for several quiet moments. Kristman spoke first.

“Think this is going to work. Skipper?”

“I don’t know, Danny. Probably depends on the seal team commandos. We’re just insurance.”

“At least we got to shoot something at that bastard.”

Daminski nodded, knowing what Kristman meant. In the last ten months of the war, the work had been done by ground troops of the Army and the Marines while the glory had gone to the Navy and Air Force fighter pilots. Meanwhile the surface and submarine navies had paced the seas restlessly, effectively useless against the massive and deadly combined land forces of the United Islamic Front.

“I’m going to grab some rack,” Daminski said. “Get the section’s officer of the deck on the conn and station yourself as command duty officer. Call me if anything comes in on the ELF circuit.”

“Yes sir.”

Daminski walked forward to the tiny cubbyhole of his stateroom, shut the door, and sank into the narrow bed. He had been awake going on forty hours, since the flash message announcing the kickoff of the operation had come in on the sub broadcast. Daminski was exhausted, but he knew he was much too wired from shooting the cruise missile warshots to fall asleep.

He pulled the letter from Myra from inside his shirt and read it again, the dogeared stationery proclaiming in her loopy handwriting that she loved him but was leaving him anyway.

...

You are just too intense to live with … I can’t watch you run this house like you run one of your submarines.

The children cry when you come home and laugh when you leave, and I can’t bear to see that anymore. Please get yourself some help, and when you are at peace, come back to us. But until then, don’t come home …

Daminski put the letter back in his shirt and stared at the dimly lit overhead for a moment, but finally closed his eyes and tried to imagine the Javelins, what they were doing that very instant, gliding through the night at 650 miles per hour, a mere twenty feet above the ground, following the contour of the land, screaming in over the terrain of Turkmenistan enroute to General Sihoud’s hidden bunker.

TURKMENIAN PLAIN

SEVENTY-FIVE MILES WEST-NORTHWEST OF ASHKHABAD

Commander Jack Morris missed his beard. It had been a ZZ-Top hairy thing, extending down his chest almost to his belly button. He missed his long hair as well, feeling odd every time he turned his head and didn’t feel the old ponytail dragging across his back. His shooters, the men of seal Team Seven, until just months before, had been a ragged-looking band of bikers, the Navy’s finest counterterrorist unit.