To The Death

At 0400 on this Saturday morning, General Rashood was in the navigation area, talking to the young officer who was plotting the course of Hull No. 901, Lt. Rudi Alaam, a career officer from the eastern Iranian province of Kerman. Both men were leaning over a circular computerized chart that highlighted the central part of the Mediterranean.

It showed the submarine, which was ru

Almost immediately, ru

Right here, 120 miles off the coast of Libya, the ocean floor shelved down even deeper, another three thousand feet. They passed well south of Sicily’s Cape Passero with more than two miles of blue water under the keel. A land soldier rather than a sailor, General Rashood found the whole exercise somewhat creepy.

So far, they had not encountered any U.S. or Royal Navy warships. But headed for the narrow waterway where the tip of Italy’s boot looks likely to kick Sicily straight into Tunis Harbor, the submarine needed to exercise inordinate care. This was an ancient throughway for the Royal Navy. The ocean was much shallower, less than two hundred feet in places, and the carrier battle groups of the U.S. Navy tended to treat the place like Chesapeake Bay.

Detection was something Captain Mohammed Abad wished to avoid, but not at the expense of his speed. If he thought he was being tracked by a U.S. nuclear boat, he would slow and dive. But he doubted the Americans would actually sink him right here in these busy shallows. He knew that once located by the hugely sophisticated U.S. sonars, they could track him with ease and put him on the bottom of the Atlantic as and when they wished, as soon as he ventured into deep ocean water.

But he had as much right to be here as they did, and, like all Iranian politicians and military leaders, he did not think they would dare.

Captain Abad kept going, transmitting as little as possible. He would sneak past the Sicilian port of Marsala, moving more slowly, and then accelerate through this stone-silent ocean, almost on the surface, in the dead of night, moving forward making course nor-nor-west, as swiftly as possible.

Neither he nor General Rashood realized that up ahead of them, a mere two hundred miles, ran the great, jet-black monster Los Angeles-class submarine USS Cheye

No submarine in the world escapes the eagle eye of the United States Navy. The American admirals, without fail, know the whereabouts of every seaworthy underwater boat, nuclear or diesel-electric. Their attention is sharpened when a submarine goes missing from its home base, perhaps having ducked out between passes of the overhead U.S. satellites. Thereafter a swift, penetrating search from i

In the case of Iranian Hull No. 901, the Americans tracked her all the way to St. Petersburg as a matter of pure routine. Six months later, they observed her leaving the Russian shipyards, and tracked her easily through the Gulf of Finland, headed east around the coast of Estonia and through the Baltic. She went deep right there, and the U.S. observers merely switched their sights on the narrow Copenhagen Cha

Captain Abad brought her through right on time, and the Americans watched her run past Norway’s mountainous southern coast, and then into the North Sea opposite the Scottish city of Aberdeen.

It would have been a lot quicker to head down the North Sea and exit the Royal Navy’s home turf through the English Cha

The pla

They had kept a weather eye on her ever since and watched with interest as the Syrian helicopter deposited a passenger on her casing on Tuesday afternoon, July 3. Captain Abad was already ru

They picked her up snorkeling, around midnight on Wednesday, July 4, and kept a loose fix on her all the way to Marsala. The ops room of the Cheye

On this Saturday evening, the U.S. submarine was around fifty miles south of the Sardinian port of Cagliari. Her task was to locate the Kilo and then track her to the gateway to the Mediterranean, the Gibraltar Strait, and then let her head out into the Atlantic where another U.S. nuclear boat would follow her into really deep water.

It had not been definitely decided to sink the Kilo, but opinion in both the White House and the Pentagon was certainly swaying in that direction. There were a couple of firebrands among the Navy top brass who were perfectly happy to take her out in the deepest waters of the Med, but there was something irresistibly local about that area.

Ships from North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and Great Britain, warships, freighters, tankers, and cruise liners ply their trade through here. And in general terms, the American Navy brass were more comfortable opening fire in the vast, bottomless anonymity of the Atlantic, where no prying eyes would ever catch a telltale sign of a submarine split asunder by a Mark 48 torpedo.

Captain Abad was oblivious of the mindset of his enemies, unaware that anyone even knew he had left Beirut, and he was certainly not contemplating the possibility of instant death and the destruction of his newly refurbished submarine.

The Iranian would be well past Marsala before he even found out that the Cheye

Shakira Rashood waited in St. Stephen’s Square for her hired chauffeur to arrive. She had been in the Shelbourne Hotel for three and a half days, which she considered to be quite long enough even for a girl as unobtrusive as Maureen Carson of Michigan, who had died several years previously in Bay City up on the shores of Lake Huron.

Shakira had been furnished with this information when she was given her second forged U.S. passport. God alone knew how the forgers had laid hands on the data, but somehow they had. And so far as the Shelbourne Hotel was concerned, Maureen Carson had just checked out, having scarcely left the premises during her entire stay.