Phoenix Sub Zero

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