Phoenix Sub Zero

“However, Colonel, while you may give me orders and change my mission at any time, the way I carry out that mission is not your business. I retain command of this vessel, and only I direct when and how weapons are launched, how enemy ships are engaged. If you or General Sihoud attempt to give me rudder orders on this run you will find me quite dead. Can you and the general accept that?”

Ahmed was quiet for some moments. When he spoke, he seemed like a man trying to remain calm.

“I will put the matter to General Sihoud.” Ahmed hurried out, shutting the door quietly behind him, as instructed when he and Sihoud first came aboard.

Sharef turned to al-Kunis and smiled.

“You and your fellow Iranian do not seem to see eye to eye,” al-Kunis said, reaching for his tea, the skin at his eyes crinkling as he sipped the brew.

Sharef considered that. Captain Abdullah Latif al-Kunis was thirty-seven, slightly taller than Sharef, almost as thin, with dark skin and a thick but tightly trimmed beard. His eyes were remarkably large. He rarely spoke without considering each word. At first Sharef had thought he would be a liability in combat, or any real-time situation; introspective people rarely seemed to have the quick reaction needed for military duty. But al-Kunis had surprised him with his ability to act decisively in tight situations, giving clipped but quiet orders from the periscope platform. He was a Libyan from Tripoli and had been a submariner on Foxtrot-class diesel boats all his career, commanding the Libyan Foxtrot sub Al Khyber for two years just before the Treaty of Algiers had united the Islamic states. He had been selected to be a staff officer in Ashkhabad for several years, where he had first met Sharef. When plans were made to acquire a Destiny-class submarine, Sharef had asked for al-Kunis, raising eyebrows at fleet headquarters that he did not pick another Iranian Navy officer. As far as Sharef was concerned, al-Kunis was the best man for the job, an able seaman and a good, innovative officer. Like Sharef, he had never married, although at the ship’s recent port call at Tripoli there had been a woman there to see al-Kunis off. She could have been a girlfriend, fiancee, or sister. Sharef hadn’t asked, and al-Kunis hadn’t volunteered.

Sharef turned his thoughts back to Ahmed. “Ahmed is a smart man but he is a pilot and sees things differently. To a flyer, soaring over the earth, everything is easy. To a submariner, confined to a steel prison with no windows, nothing but the Second Captain computers to tell us what is outside, nothing is easy. But give him a year underwater and he might not make a bad officer.”

“You heard he lost people in the bombing of Chah Ba-har.” “I was sorry to hear it,” Sharef said, bending over the Mediterranean chart. “So, where are the American submarines?”

Captain al-Kunis joined Sharef at the chart and jabbed his finger at the west point of Sicily, where it pointed toward Cape Bon, Tunisia, near Tunis on the North African coast.

The gap, the Strait of Sicily, was only 150 kilometers across, the submerged navigable channel only thirty kilometers wide.

“Here at the Strait of Sicily. A few boats patrolling north and south here would pick us up. They may have patrol planes here as well. If they have the submarines to station a choke-point patrol… Maybe they weren’t prepared. What if we transit through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the boot?”

“Too shallow,” al-Kunis shook his head. “The strait is filled with ferry boats, the channel is too tight. Running aground or colliding with a ferry boat isn’t worth the risk. I’d take the Sicily-Tunis choke point.”

“If we make it through, then what?”

“Gibraltar. If it were up to me, I’d station a fleet there to catch us on the way out.”

“But they don’t know we’re leaving the Mediterranean.”

“You must hope that. Commodore.”

Sharef nodded, shut his eyes, and stretched. “I’ll be in control. Write a procedure for the ballast tank work on the Hiroshima missiles. When you’re done see to it that the navigator has our intended track plotted and laid into the computer. And check the sensor computers every hour and make sure our younger officers are vigilant. I do not want to be detected by an American submarine without warning. After control I’ll be going down for a couple of hours. Both of us should be in the control room when we pass through the strait.”

USS AUGUSTA

The deck trembled slightly with an insistent vibration, the power of the ship’s propulsion shaking the submarine as it plowed through the Mediterranean at flank speed, the electromagnetic speed indicator reading thirty-nine knots on the airplane-style console of the helmsman’s panel. Augusta had been running at flank for over thirty hours, ever since the flash message had come in at noon the day before. The sprint put her sixty nautical miles short of the Strait of Sicily.