Phoenix Sub Zero

The man was slim, middle-aged, dark-skinned, gray-haired, with an air of authority. And at this instant, of frustration.

Commander Abbas Alai Sharef tried a bite of his food but found it tasteless as it had been all day. He pushed his plate away, crossed his arms and stared at the ship’s plans. Finally he leaned on the table and stared at the elevation view of the submarine, looking for an answer until his head began to ache. The task before him seemed impossible.

He stretched and glanced around at the room, not seeing it as claustrophobically cramped but as a haven from the demands of the ship. The stateroom’s L-shape was little more than five meters long. The port side was partially unusable because of the curvature of the hull. Where the hull came down in its slow incline there was a cubbyhole containing his bunk and his desk. At the end of the desk was a computer module with dual display screens and a keyboard section with function keys. The module was part of the Second Captain system, a computer that controlled and monitored all functions of the automated submarine, a system that caused Sharef a measure of ambivalence. Next to the Second Captain console a green-shaped lamp on the desk spread a warm light over the papers strewn over its large wooden surface.

The aft wall of the room was covered with a Persian rug, its pattern of an intricacy that could hold a visitor’s glance.

The rug had been a gift from Sharef’s mother, given to him the year she died. Sharef spent a moment looking at it, searching for the intentional flaw sewn in, the flaw inserted to acknowledge that human perfection was an insult to Allah.

But as usual, Sharef was unable to find the flaw. Beneath the rug, the conference table took up much of the room, the table able to seat eight men. At the end of the table on the centerline wall was a stern portrait of Mohammed al-Sihoud. Sharef barely noticed it; the frown on his dark face appeared, then vanished quickly. The forward starboard corner of the room was taken up by the walls surrounding the shared head, doors opening into it from both the captain’s stateroom and the first officer’s.

Sharef returned to the ship’s plans, looking for an answer, returning to the nonanswer that the mission was impossible.

He ran his fingers through hair so gray as to be almost silver, most traces of the jet black it had been five years before gone, the gray continuing in the color of his thick mustache.

He was forty-five years old, young to be one of the highest-ranking naval officers in the Combined Naval Force. He was of medium height, although his military carriage and muscled frame gave a taller impression. His cheek and throat bore a long scar, resembling a sabre wound, from his days in the Iranian navy. The wound had opened in his face and neck when the superstructure of the Mark 5 frigate Sahand had exploded a moment after the American missile struck it.

Sharef had met a surgeon in Japan who offered to make the scar disappear, but Sharef had declined, the mark reminding him of lost shipmates and of the innocent days when he had thought himself invincible. The sinking of the Sahand seemed to be a fence across his life, separating his youth from his cynical middle age, which arrived early in his thirty-sixth year.

Sharef was usually a calm man, even in crisis. This, he thought, was perhaps the major reason he had been chosen to command this flagship of the Combined Naval Force. He was a quick study, able to grasp a tactical situation immediately, although he seemed blessed with this ability only in naval matters — when it came to understanding people he felt he was often at a loss. And when it came to women, he was completely adrift. More than once he had wondered if that was the reason he had chosen the life of the sea in his youth.

Not as an adventure or out of love for it, but as an escape from what custom decreed was a normal life with a wife and children.

As he paced the room he allowed his normally disciplined mind to wander back to the women he had known, the years flashing by rapidly until 1978, when he had been at Oxford, before Iran’s revolution. He had felt awkward in England, knowing his dark skin and thick accent had set him apart. But there had been a woman, just a year or two from being a girl, who had made it clear she was attracted to him. So oddly forward, the Western women, and so exciting … He had felt helpless, driven by his own youth and the freedom of a foreign land, the restraints of Islam far away. But when the Ayatollah came and with him the revolution, Sharef had been forced to make a choice between the beautiful British girl — and the new world she had shown him — and his homeland and culture. He had returned home, his perceived sense of duty stronger than his love for Pamela, and although he still felt the decision had been the right thing to do he still felt the void. He had never seen or heard from her after her letter telling him she was married and moving to the United States.