Phoenix Sub Zero

For several minutes Sharef sat at the periscope control seat, rotating it in slow circles, concentrating on the surrounding sea, still wondering what Colonel Ahmed’s message meant. The sea was a deep shimmering blue, the sky streaked with wisps of clouds. The sun had just climbed over the horizon where dark Mediterranean met bleached sky. The “survivors” should be there. Tawkidi, the navigator, had pronounced them within 500 meters of the rendezvous point.

Sharef’s orders were to surface, but surfacing violated every instinct. All a submarine possessed for tactical advantage was the blessed quality of being invisible. To surface meant to relinquish the cover of the depths and emerge where every surface-search radar and airborne patrol craft could see him, where satellite spy-eyes would gobble up imagery of

his presence, compromising his mission—a mission he had been told was crucial to the survival of the Islamic Front. And for what? To find a boat cast adrift or a yacht whose survivors would be here supposedly waiting for him.

And yet the orders, orders from the Khalib himself, had been explicit. Surface at dawn. The mission, after all, was the Khalib’s, and the Khalib could order his ship to do any thing it was capable of. And surfacing was possible, if unwise. And the orders, if they were authentic, had not come directly from the Khalib with his usual authentication sentence but had been sent in his name by his chief of staff, an air force officer. Rakish Ahmed. And Sharef knew what Ahmed was capable of doing to win the war his way. But then, if the message had been genuine, sent in the heat of an emergency, by not surfacing Sharef might be endangering a plan vital to Islamic security, hard as that was to imagine.

For some moments Sharef’s instincts did battle with his sense of duty. Duty won out. He looked again at the sea for a sign that indicated he should surface, and saw only the sea and the sky.

“Deck Officer, surface the ship. Stop the engine.”

“Very good. Commodore. Ship control—”

“Surfacing now,” the operator at the ship-control station called.

Sharef’s view of the surface expanded as the submarine ascended. Beneath his periscope view the curving fin emerged from the sea in a wash of foam and spray, the cylindrical hull following. The ship slowed from its dead-slow-ahead, crawl and rocked gently, seemingly without purpose, in the waves.

Sharef ordered the ship-control team to the surface-control space on top of the fin, handing the periscope over to the sensor-control officer, then hurried to the ladder to the surface-control space. The hatch was opened, the panels in the fin laid aside, and morning sunlight flashed against the side of the cubbyhole as Sharef climbed into the sea air. He sucked in the smell, glad in spite of the tactical stupidity of surfacing. He looked out over the gentle waves and wondered how long he should wait before abandoning this fool’s errand. A chart of the area appeared in his mind, memorized, and he examined it, thinking of how to clear the area so that his departure course could not be determined by the watching satellites. Perhaps he could pretend a malfunction, begin to head back east toward port at Kassab and after a few moments resubmerge, continue heading east for a few minutes, then back in the cloak of the sea’s depths, turn back to the west and run for Gibraltar. He even began to order one of the officers to get a harness and walk out on the deck as if examining or repairing something, just to look good for the satellites.

He had turned to Tawkidi to make the order when the distant rolling thunder came from the sky. Sharef raised his binoculars and tried to find the sound, but the sky looked empty. He continued to search the sky for the source of the sound. Nothing. He checked his wristwatch and wondered if the ASW forces of the Coalition would soon come to sink the sub, now that they had surrendered their only true advantage — stealth. He told himself he would give Colonel Ahmed an hour. After that he would resubmerge and continue the mission.

The skies were silent, the sea empty. If the mission ended as it started, it would truly be a failure.

Ahmed looked out his canopy at the F-14 Tomcat fighter on his port wing. In the growing light of the morning the jet’s markings were clear. On the gray fuselage under the high delta wing were block letters spelling navy. At the nose a star was framed in a circle with horizontal stripes on either side. The twin tails were painted black with a white skull over two crossed bones, the letters VF-69 beneath the emblem.

The wings were loaded with missiles. In the Tomcat’s canopy the pilot in the front seat pointed over at Ahmed, then at himself, his intentions unmistakable: follow me.