Satan's Tail

“The picture,” Jed told him.

“Which one?” asked Hartman. He nodded at someone ahead, and Jed said nothing until they were alone again.

“The one on the cover of the Sunday News. ”

“I’m not sure I saw it.”

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“This one,” said Jed, pulling out the newspaper.

The Secretary of State stopped. “That wasn’t in the presentation.”

“It was just—as I put it together, I made it.”

“Ah, don’t worry about forgetting it. The presentation was fine without it. You can’t do any better than we did today, Jed. Don’t worry. We got the vote. We got it. This is the way things should go—persuasion and consensus. I know you’re more a force guy, but this is the future. Coalitions. You’ll look back on this and be proud.”

“No, I mean the photo shouldn’t been part of the presentation. Or printed.”

“Was it classified, Jed?” Once sleek, Hartman’s face was now a series of puffy lines drawn close together.

“No. I put it together from two different pictures. It’s not a real picture.”

“What? You put it together?”

Two delegates were walking down the hall. The Secretary nodded at them, then gestured for Jed to step to the side with him. Jed felt as if he were shrinking as the others passed through the hall.

“What happened?” asked Hartman. The lines had formed massive blots at the sides of his face.

“I was just fooling around. I don’t know how it could have gotten on the disk I gave Jake. I must’ve left it in the folder of the jpgs that were part of the presentation. When I dumped the folder onto the disk, it must’ve come with the others. It was just a number; I didn’t have a thumbnail or anything.”

“You have the original?”

“There is no original. I just fiddled with the shot of the tanker.”

“Fiddled? Give me your laptop.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“It’s against security procedures. I—”

“Jed.” The Secretary held out his hand.

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“OK,” said Jed. “Yeah. You’re a cabinet officer. Right.” He handed it over.

“You should say nothing about this until I tell you what to say. Go back to D.C. Talk to no one. Go. Now.”

“Yes, sir.”

SINCE IT WAS SUNDAY, THE TRAFFIC TO LAGUARDIA AIRPORT

was relatively light. The car whisked over the Triburough Bridge, bounding over the metal work plates so roughly that Jed was jostled against the door. As they passed from the bridge to the Grand Central Parkway, he glanced at the elevated tracks above the road; a set of red subway cars were just arriving. He felt envious of the people who’d be getting aboard—whatever their day held, it was bound to be better than his.

Not that he had set out to deceive anyone. On the contrary.

But obviously, inadvertently, he had. And in a big way—a big, potentially embarrassing and scandalous way.

Jed saw the picture on the front page of the newspaper at a stand as he walked inside the airport. At first he quickened his pace; then he went back and bought a copy. He bought the Daily News and another local paper as well, Long IslandNewsday.

He found a spot in the terminal to sit and read through the story in both papers. Newsday, a more sedate tabloid than the Daily News, didn’t have a picture at all. The News story was more sensational, but if it weren’t for the photo, it would have been accurate.

A big if, admittedly.

The caption to the picture said merely that the attack was the work of pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The ship was not identified, nor was the attack dated.

Well, there had been attacks on ships, and at least two had been sunk that Jed knew of. Another had exploded and killed men aboard the Abner Read. So it wasn’t that wrong.

Except for the fact that it was completely made up.

Jed looked at the picture. Between his fiddling and the SATAN’S TAIL

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newspaper’s reproduction, it was barely possible to tell that it was a ship. There was no way of getting any identifiable details from it, no name or even enough of a silhouette to ID

it with.

“Pretty wild, huh? Pirates on the high seas in 1997?”

Jed looked up. A man had sat down next to him and was pointing at the newspaper. He appeared to be in his forties.

“Yeah,” said Jed.

“You think that really goes on?”

“They wouldn’t make it up, would they?”

“The government does that all the time. But I guess they couldn’t make up pictures, right?”

“No,” said Jed, his voice hoarse. “No, they couldn’t.”

Gulf of Aden

2200

FATIGUE HOUNDED ALI’S EVERY STEP AS HE CLIMBED DOWN

the ladder of the submarine. He’d had terrible dreams when he tried to sleep, dreams that kept him awake: Abu Qaed as a babe sucking at his mother’s breast; Abu Qaed following him down a street as a young man in Cairo; Abu Qaed with him in Mecca.

The dreams all ended the same way—his son faded into a milky oblivion, and Ali lay wide awake for the rest of the night, sweating profusely.

To sleep once and for all, to lie in oblivion—that would be his paradise. To join his son, his cousin Mabrukah, countless others—that would be reward beyond all measure.

“Captain!” shouted the Libyan commander who had brought the submarine to the base. He told Ali in Arabic that he was honored to be a soldier of God.

“As are we all,” said Ali.

The commander began showing Ali around the submarine, a Project 641 ship known as a “Foxtrot” in the NATO reporting system. The craft’s basic design was dated; the type had 276

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first joined the Russian fleet at the very end of the 1950s, though this particular submarine had slipped into the ocean in 1966. Just a few inches shy of three hundred feet, the sub displaced 2,475 tons once submerged; she could dive to at least 985 feet and make about fifteen knots while submerged. She could run submerged for as many as five days, though her range was extremely limited beneath the water—at two knots, she could go perhaps three hundred miles before her batteries gave out completely. Her range on the surface, however, was an impressive twenty thousand miles, a good distance for a diesel-powered submarine. The craft also had snorkeling gear, which allowed it to run its engines while submerged; the captain referred to it as a “low observable” mode.

The captain showed Ali to the sonar room, boasting that the submarine had been updated with a full range of Russian equipment, including gear found in much newer boats. The batteries were the same as those used in the improved version of the class, the Project 641B, and a variety of tech-niques were employed to decrease its sound, from an improved propeller system to the sound-deadening material that covered nearly every visible surface.

Ali paused at the steering station of the submarine. To the uninitiated, which included him, the control area was a jumble of boxes and controls, wheels, levers, and dials seemingly arranged in an incoherent jumble. But that was nothing compared to the jungle of wheels nearby that controlled the valves for the high pressure air and trim manifolds. These controls were necessary for stabilizing the submarine, allowing it to dive or surface. The blue and red valve handles looked like intertwined spider nests.

“The small size of our crew gave us some difficulty on the voyage,” said the captain. “If we could have two dozen more men to train—”

“How many men do you have?”

“We made the sail with thirty-eight. It was very difficult at times. Ordinarily, seventy-eight men take the craft into battle. We can do with a few less, but—”

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“If you made it all that way with only thirty-eight men, you will be able to do the same here. Besides, there is no time to train them. By this time tomorrow you will be under way. The cruise will not require a relief crew, I assure you.”