Phoenix Sub Zero

Morris did not trust cruise missiles. They had a nasty tendency to get lost or fall short or get shot down. Sometimes all three at once. If the operation had been Morris’s to plan he would have saved the Javelins for the next war and gone in now, MAC-10s blazing. But some admiral in the Pentagon wanted to share the action with the black-shoe Navy and had ordered the firing of the missiles from hundreds of miles away at sea. Morris bit his lip, knowing that expensive toys were sexy to the brass, but the only thing that won wars was an infantryman with a rifle, the concept taken to its extreme with the seals, where infantryman and rifle were replaced with commando and compact-silenced machine gun.

He strained to hear, wondering if the slight whine was his blood rushing in his head or the noise of the Javelins. The whine grew louder, fuller, the sound of high-speed turbofan engines. Jet engines. He trained his night-vision monocular to the sky and thought he saw the airframe of one of the missiles climbing to the sky, starting its pop-up. Only seconds to go now, he thought.

* * *

For a moment Sihoud was stunned. But Ahmed looked calmly at him after saying that the Hegira would bring the missiles to the coast of America and fire them. The Hegira A submarine? It was so preposterous that it almost made a twisted kind of sense.

The Hegira was Ahmed’s predecessor’s idea, and a silly idea at that. Up until now Sihoud had regretted his decision to support the acquisition, but now he wondered.

Sihoud’s last chief of staff had been the head of the Egyptian navy. Admiral Al Abbad Mansur, who had insisted that they were vulnerable from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It would be ridiculous, Sihoud had insisted, for a mighty land power to fear the sea, and foolish to try to match the seagoing forces of the West with a blue-water navy. Mansur had proposed a different solution, the purchase of three of the Japanese-designed Destiny-class submarines.

At first Sihoud had continued to resist, but at Mansur’s persistence he had listened.

Mansur had pointed out that a small nation armed with submarines could alter the outcome of a war. He pointed to the Falklands War, in which the British submarines had bottled up the Argentine fleet, the Argentinians afraid to risk their surface ships against an unknown submerged threat; and there was the Persian Gulf War, in which unrestricted shipping by the West had allowed them to mass force on the continent. Mansur insisted that littoral warfare using submarines could be the edge that could save the union in a fight, and Sihoud finally had agreed.

The Japanese had designed the Destiny-class submarines for export sale, and in addition to the usual thorough Oriental design, the submarine was relatively inexpensive — for a submarine — only fifty-five billion yen. Three years ago that had not been a grand sum, even though it was the equivalent of an entire squadron of Firestar fighters. The submarine would allow them to patrol the Mediterranean and protect UIF soil from a Western assault from the sea, Mansur insisted, and a second unit in the Indian Ocean would keep them safe from the other side. With perhaps a third guarding them on the Atlantic, no aircraft carrier task group could threaten them. At the time, it had made sense, and while it was a considerable amount of money, it would have given the UIF a three-ocean navy with only three ships. Perhaps Mansur’s vision had been correct, but the acquisition of the ships had been a failure.

The Japanese had had design problems, as the Destiny-class was brand new and would supposedly revolutionize underwater combat. Delivery had been over two years late, and by then the invasions of Chad and Ethiopia were under way. By the time the first submarine was completed, Sihoud had begun the land attack on India, and by then there had still been no threatening moves by Western navies. In the intervening year Mansur had made other equally damaging mistakes — the India invasion had been full of them — and Sihoud had felt he had no choice but to execute Mansur. It had taken six months to train the crew of the first Destiny class submarine, and since its delivery it had been tied up uselessly in Kassab on the Mediterranean. It had spent time at sea, but mostly it had one mechanical problem after an other. Colonel Ahmed had taken over for Mansur—Sihoud had wanted an air force officer, having had his fill of the navy, and needing advice about using the new aircraft.