Plague Ship

Now that they were sheltered from prying eyes, Juan turned up the intensity of his dive light, its beam forming a white ring circling the curved sides of the conduit that seemed to retreat with the pace of his advance.

A fast shadow suddenly lunged at him. He struck out blindly as a darting shape passed him by. He caught sight of a dorsal fin and the rapier tail of a baby shark before it vanished behind him.

“Good thing we met him now and not in a couple of years,” Eddie quipped.

Cabrillo needed a second for his heart to slow before continuing down the constricting pipe. He was jumpier than he’d thought, and that didn’t bode well.

The conduit fed into a large valve that would be in the closed position if the dry dock was empty, but, in the two days the crew had been watching the facility, they had seen no indication the Iranians had pumped out the sub pen since their navy’s newest Kilo Class diesel-electric boat had been admitted.

The four men squeezed through the butterfly valve and into the monstrous pump that could drain the pen.

The impeller blades were made of bright ferrobronze that had been bolted to the hub.

Juan had come prepared for bolts, and, in case the blades had been welded, he carried a small torch. He pulled an adjustable wrench from a pouch on his thigh and attacked the bolts. The angles were awkward, and the nuts had been screwed in place by a pneumatic gun, so it took all his effort to get each of the twelve bolts started. One in particular had him straining so hard that pinwheels of colors exploded behind his tightly closed eyes. When the seal finally popped, the wrench kicked free, and Cabrillo sliced his hand on the scimitar-shaped blade. A small cloud of blood hung in the glow of his flashlight.

“Trying to get the shark to come back?” Max teased.

“So long as your big butt is between me and him, I’ll be fine.”

“It’s not big, just well padded.”

Juan finished with the bolts and set each of the eighteen-inch impeller blades aside. He had to unsling his scuba tank and wriggle beneath the pump’s hub to make it through. He waited on the other side for the men to join him and slide their tanks back in place.

The pipe continued for another dozen feet before turning ninety degrees. Cabrillo shut off his light, and, after waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust, could make out a pale, watery corona coming from around the bend. He cautiously swam closer, and when he reached the turn he ducked his head around for a quick peek.

They had reached the dry dock. The light was coming from fixtures mounted on the tall ceiling. The low level told him that there was just enough illumination for guards to patrol the pen but not enough for a slew of technicians to be working on the Kilo. As they had anticipated, there wouldn’t be more than a handful of men to subdue.

Cabrillo swam out of the pipe and dove down to stay along the concrete bottom, followed by Max, Linc, and Eddie. They made their way closer to the towering doors, where there was the least chance of there being guards. Juan checked their depth on his dive computer and held the men at ten feet for a minute, to allow the small amount of nitrogen bubbles that had accumulated in their bloodstream to dissolve.

With the patience of crocodiles emerging from a river in pursuit of prey, the four men approached the surface, hovering just below its silvery reflection in order to affix small periscopes to their helmets.

Capable of magnifying starlight so that it shone as light as day, the third-generation optics of the scopes had to be dialed back a bit as they slowly searched every corner of the dry dock from the security of the water.

The dry dock was wide enough for two ships to be serviced side by side, and each edge of the sub pen was flanked with raised cement jetties that ran almost the entire length of the building. They were littered with equipment, barrels of lubricant, piles of gear under tarps, small electric golf carts to make moving around easier, and a trio of forklifts. At the far end was a raised platform that stretched the width of the building. Part of it was glassed in to make an office or observation room, and under it, on each side, were enclosed spaces for secure storage. There was also an overhead crane on rails that could reach any part of the covered dock.

Tied to one side of the pier by thick Manila lines was the ominous black shape of a Kilo Class attack submarine. The twenty-two-hundred-ton vessel had once been the most feared sub in the Soviet arsenal.

When ru

The presence of the Kilos was seen as a provocation, given the fact that Iran had a history of sinking merchant shipping in the Persian Gulf. The United States and her allies had tried every conceivable diplomatic trick to prevent Russia from selling the Kilos to the Iranian Navy, but neither party could be deterred. Usually, the two-hundred-and-twenty-foot subs were stationed at Chah Bahar in the Arabian Sea and not bottled up in the Gulf, but Overholt’s intelligence indicated that this particular Kilo was being outfitted with the newly developed rocket torpedoes.

If the Corporation could prove the Russians illegally sold such a technology to Tehran, it would kill any deal Iran might be cooking up to acquire more subs, something they wanted desperately.

“So, what do you have?” Juan asked, after five quiet minutes of observation.

“I count six,” Linc replied.

“Confirmed,” Eddie said.

“Max?”

“Are you sure that isn’t a guard catching a few z’s on the left there in what looks like a bundle of linens waiting to be put aboard?”

The men silently rechecked the location Max had indicated, straining to make out the shape of a man.

The three breathed in sharply when what they had thought was just a shadow suddenly lurched up, peered around for a second, scratched under his arm, and lay back down.

“Good eyes, my friend,” Juan said. “I won’t tease you about wearing cheaters when you read a report ever again. So we’ve got four guards upstairs on the observation platform and the two over by the perso

The men sank back under the water and swam the length of the dry dock, Max stopping approximately where the one guard was sleeping and hovered just below the edge of the concrete dock in the dark shadow cast by the Kilo’s hull. Eddie and Linc swam along the left side of the pier so they would emerge under a set of metal scissor stairs that rose to the second-floor balcony. For his part, Juan pulled himself from the water behind the cover of a stack of crates, a good hundred yards from the well-lit vestibule where a pair of bored guards watched a set of locked doors.

He silently stripped out of his scuba gear and dry suit. Beneath it, he wore the uniform of a captain in the Syrian Navy, right down to the tie and combat ribbons. The only thing out of place were the rubber dive booties he sported on his feet, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. He buckled on his gun belt and set a cap on his head to cover his blond hair. He waited another minute for his men to get in position before boldly stepping around the containers and started marching toward the guards.