Satan's Tail d-7 Read online

"Good Book." The minister had put it in quotes.

  All the answers, huh? Starship deleted the message. He'd seen what religion could do in Saudi Arabia.

  Immediately, he regretted deleting it. The minister was only trying to be helpful. Not even that: just trying to say better what he had stuttered over earlier. He'd been in that position himself plenty of times.

  He ought to send the guy a note back, say thanks or something.

  Starship turned from the console in the Dreamland Command Trailer's communications area. "Captain Freah?" "What's up?"

  "I deleted an e-mail by accident. Any way to get it back?" "Deleted or just read it?" "Deleted. I wasn't thinking."

  Danny made a face. "Sorry. The techies have it set up so it doesn't write to disk as the default for security. If you delete, you don't get to write it on the disk. There might be some fancy way around it," added the captain.

  "Don't worry about it. Not worth it," said Starship, getting up.

  Plaza Hotel,

  New York City 0900

  Which phone was it?

  Jed grabbed at all of them in succession — satellite, encrypted, cell phone, hot line, hotel phone…

  He didn't have a hot line. It was a dream. Except that a phone really was ringing.

  Jed pushed out from under the covers and grabbed for the phone at the side of the bed. "Jed Barclay."

  "Jed, session vote is set for ten a.m.," said Ambassador Ford. "We'll have a driver in the lobby in five minutes. Room service is on the way up with coffee for you. Get over here, OK?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Jed put the phone down and lay back on the bed for a minute. The Plaza was far and away the fanciest hotel he had ever stayed in. The headboard was upholstered, for crying out loud. And room service…

  There was a knock on the door. Jed jumped out of bed and walked over — he was wearing sweats and an old T-shirt— then remembered that he had to give a tip. "Just a minute," he said, and scrambled over for his wallet on the antique dresser. But when he pulled open the door, the man was gone; there was a full pot of coffee on a table at the side. This wasn't a plastic carafe either — it was a silver pot.

  He pulled on some clothes, shaved quickly, then went down to the lobby. The driver hadn't arrived yet. Jed took out his personal cell phone and called his mom in Kansas.

  "You're not going to believe where I am," he told her as soon as she picked up the phone.

  "New York," she told him. "I saw you last night."

  "You did?"

  "At a press conference. You could use a haircut, Jed."

  "Really?"

  "At least straighten it out a little." "No, I mean you saw me on TV?"

  "The Secretary of State did most of the talking. He's a bit full of himself, that one. But you got a few words in about the ship. And Dreamland."

  "I didn't say anything about Dreamland," said Jed.

  "Your father wanted to tape it, but by the time he found a tape you were gone. There was a girl who's going to the national spelling bee from Lincoln."

  "I'm like in a real fancy hotel here," said Jed.

  "Good for you, honey. Did they have silk sheets?"

  "I'm not sure," said Jed.

  "You did pull down the covers, right?"

  "Well, yeah. I just don't know what silk feels like."

  "You would if you slept on it."

  "Maybe it was," said Jed.

  "Who paid for you to stay there? Not the government."

  "No, Ambassador Ford set it all up."

  "You aren't being paid by lobbyists, are you, Jed? On a junket? You don't want to get in with those lobbyists."

  "No. They're just friends, I think." Ford had made the arrangements. Jed had no idea who was actually paying, just that it wasn't him.

  A tall man in a suit walked into the lobby. He saw Jed and walked over, flashing State Department credentials.

  "Gotta go, Ma."

  "Have a good day, honey. And get a haircut!"

  "I will."

  * * *

  The Secretary of State looked as if he hadn't had any sleep; it was likely that he hadn't. He'd gone back to Ford's penthouse on the East Side, planning to work the phones as long as necessary. Ford, who probably had gotten as little sleep as the Secretary, was just about flying. According to the ambassador, the French had come around; there would be abstentions, but the measure was going to pass and not be vetoed. It was an important day for the U.S. and the world.

  An overstatement, he knew, but his enthusiasm and conviction were contagious. Jed followed them into the Security Council chamber, holding his laptop bag and some newspapers in one arm and a full cup of coffee in the other. The room seemed almost familiar today, and certainly friendlier. Jed sat, propping the bag by his chair and unfolding the newspapers onto his lap. He hadn't had a chance to read them yet.

  He nearly dropped his coffee when he glanced at the cover of the Sunday Daily News.

  It was his cobbled picture of the tanker on fire.

  VII

  Friends and Enemies

  Aboard the Wisconsin,

  over the Gulf of Aden

  1900

  The submarine had barely moved since the last patrol, but now that night was falling, Delaford predicted it would come up to periscope depth, take a look around, then proceed.

  And sure enough, as the Megafortress circled to the north to get a better look at the British ship that had come through the gulf earlier in the day, the Libyan sub began nudging upward.

  "Here we go, Colonel," said Delaford, monitoring it with the Piranha.

  "Good. Zen, you hear that?"

  "Flighthawk leader," said Zen, acknowledging.

  Dog was about to hook into the Abner Read when the Dreamland communications channel buzzed with an incoming Eyes Only message. Dog gave his verbal password, then tapped the keypad at the right side of the screen, clearing the transmission in. Major Catsman's face came on the screen.

  "Colonel, the UN has just authorized the pursuit of pirates in territorial waters in the Gulf of Aden."

  Good, thought Dog.

  And bad.

  "Thank you, Major. I'll talk to Captain Gale."

  Aboard the Abner Read,

  Gulf of Aden

  1905

  "Go ahead," the Dreamland techie told Storm. "It'sa channel on your com system. You're always connected now."

  Storm looked down and pressed the button on the box on his belt. "Captain Gale."

  "The UN is approving the resolution allowing us to attack in territorial waters," Dog told him. "We should get the official word in a few hours. I thought you'd like a heads-up."

  A peace offering? Between that and sending the world's most beautiful woman to his ship, Bastian might yet prove human.

  "Good. We'll move in and get this bastard," said Storm. "No. Too soon."

  "Why do you have to disagree with everything I say, Bastian?"

  "I don't disagree with everything you say. Just things that need to be disagreed with."

  "Explain yourself," said Storm tightly.

  "If we attack now, we just get the submarine, and the patrol boat," continued Dog. "You want their base. Nothing's changed — except that in a few hours we'll be able to do something about them, once and for all."

  "We have some places we think are likely candidates," said Storm. "We can hit them one by one, after we take out the sub."

  "Or we can follow it to the candidate," said Dog. "And, as an extra bonus, if we wait, we can do it right. By tomorrow night we can have two Megafortresses, each with two Flighthawks. And more important, rested crews. We can bring my Whiplash people up during the day, and they can spearhead the land attack, along with your shipboard tactical teams."

  "The SITT people are good to go now," said Storm, using the abbreviation for the specially trained teams of sailors who specialized in boarding ships and dealing with difficult situations on land. The letters stood for Shipboard Integrated Tactical Team. "But I don't have enough of t
hem. I'm bringing in Marines."

  "All the better."

  Storm looked down at the deck. Once again Bastian was right. Attacking now might be bold, but it was also likely to be rash. Wait twenty-four hours, and they'd have more firepower. More important, they'd have a coherent plan, rather than reacting ad hoc.

  Of course. That was the decision he would have made himself once he'd thought it out. He was resisting only because it was Bastian who'd suggested it.

  "Be ready to act if something changes," Storm told him.

  "I always am."

  * * *

  Jennifer watched Storm as he ended the conversation with Dog. His whole manner had changed as soon as he started talking with the colonel. She had seen the type before: fine, even supportive, when dealing with subordinates who didn't threaten them by questioning their decisions; but come on too strong, and they reacted like an elephant protecting its place in the herd.

  She picked up a headset and plugged into the circuit.

  "Dog?"

  "Hey, Jen."

  "We're set to try connecting into the Megafortress's radar system. But I'm worried that we'll throw you off if something goes wrong here."

  "So what do we do?"

  "It might be best to run it when Wisconsin is coming off patrol. We can isolate it to that system, then bring it up. Worst case then, we just blind one aircraft."

  "Means you're going to have to wait another four or five hours there."

  "There's plenty to do. I still have the Werewolves to get ready. I'm training a new pilot."

  "You are?"

  "Storm wants one of his crew handling them." "I warned you. How's Danny?"

  "He's fine. The Marines that have been chopped to Xray Pop are the same ones who were at Khamis Mushait, so he's having a good time."

  "Oh?"

  If she didn't know Danny was married, she would say he had a serious crush on Lieutenant Klacker, aka Dancer. But this wasn't the place for gossip.

  "All right," said Dog when she didn't answer. "We'll contact you when we're ready. Take care."

  "Love you."

  As always, he hesitated before responding. "Me too."

  New York

  1100

  Under any other circumstances the UN session would have been a highlight of Jed's life. It certainly was a success: The council voted to authorize the use of force against "international outlaw pirates" in the Gulf of Aden, "wherever they may be found." A coalition team was authorized to stop the pirates before more civilians were harmed.

  "Coalition" was a face-saving way for the others to admit that the U.S. was going to bail them out again.

  But Jed didn't feel all that triumphant as the American delegation left the chamber and headed for the press conference. In fact, he felt exactly the opposite. As Ford and the others moved quickly down the hall, he found himself alone with Secretary of State Hartman.

  "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."

  "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.

  "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 Island Newsday.

  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 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 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 techniques 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—"