The Lieutenant Colonel politely offered tea, and inquired after the Captain’s health and personal well-being in the traditional manner. He was a swarthy, powerfully built man, who looked more like a Turk than a Bedou, which he was. He had been a Major General until the last coup attempt had provoked Khadafi to reduce all ranks to something below full Colonel. He was of Khadafi’s tribe, and therefore to be trusted. He smoked noxious French cigarettes continuously.
The Captain reviewed the events of the transit across the Atlantic, and the first few weeks off the Florida coast. He did not at first describe the broaching incident, but he did give full details of the sinking of the fishing boat. The Colonel’s eyes grew narrow.
“What was the enemy’s reaction to this incident?”
“Nothing that we could tell. We heard a destroyer operating
in the area later the next day, but there were no indications of a real search. They must have concluded that it was an accident. I am convinced that they have no idea we are there.”
“And there were no survivors, correct? You took care that no one was left in the water to tell the tale?”
The Captain swallowed, and sipped some tea to hide his discomfiture. He had still not quite come to terms with what they had done. It offended many precepts of the desert code. In a sense, the sea was not much different from the desert. Even your enemy was given succor if he was helpless on the sands. Later you might kill him, but always the fundamental courtesy of rescue would be extended. To shoot the men in the water had been inescapably necessary, but very much against his instincts.
“Yes, Effendi. There were two survivors, and we machine-gunned them in the water. The sharks took them as we watched.”
“You are confident then that you have not been actually sighted?”
The Captain thought quickly. It was likely that the Colonel would interview the Al Akrab’s political officer when he was done with him. That worthy would surely reveal the broaching incident.
“Yes, we may have been sighted. It was on the second day in the patrol area. The watch officer lost depth control briefly, and we broke the surface momentarily. It is called broaching. There were fishing boats nearby, but it was dark; morning twilight. I doubt that any of them saw us.”
“Was there any Navy reaction?”
“By coincidence there was a destroyer that came out and pinged around the area that day, but they do that all the time. This is their training area. Destroyers, frigates, they are always out there pinging, practicing ASW. We watched him from the shelter of the Gulf Stream, and he went away after a while, going into port that Friday morning as they always do. They are very predictable, these Americans. They come out Monday, they go back Friday by midday. They must be very religious.”
The Colonel, who had been an Attaché in America many years ago, snorted. The Captain obviously had no concept of the American weekend.
“Did you discipline the watch officer who exposed you?”
“I issued a decree that the next such mistake would be punished by death.”
The Lieutenant Colonel’s eyebrows went up. This young officer had steel in him. Killing the surviving witnesses, and now this threat to his own crew. The Colonel had chosen well.
“And there were no more such mistakes?”
“Not until I made the one which resulted in snagging the fishing boat,” he said evenly. Might as well tell the truth, he thought. The older man might actually respect it.
The Lieutenant Colonel looked out the porthole for a long moment. Then he got up and went over to his desk. He retrieved a thin envelope, and handed it over to the Captain.
“This contains the latest intelligence estimate of when the carrier will return to its base. And a new part of the plan.”
“A new part?”
“Yes; we have some additional weapons for you. This is most secret. It is described there, in the instructions. Why don’t you just read them. I will have some food sent in when we are through.”
The Captain opened the envelope and scanned the operations order. He looked up. “Mines?” he asked, incredulously.
The Lieutenant Colonel sat back and smiled at him. “Yes, mines. We are going to take two shots at this carrier. The first will be when you attack him on the approach to the base. The second will come when he actually enters the harbor.”
The Captain’s face flushed. “You mean, if we fail.”
The Lieutenant Colonel looked at him for a long moment. Then he stood up, and began walking around the cabin. The sunlight streamed through the portholes now. The Captain, after weeks in the dim light of the submarine,
found the light to be almost unbearably bright. The Lieutenant Colonel stopped his pacing and faced him.
“Captain, this is an audacious plan. An outrageous mission. To strike back at the American Navy for the crimes they committed against the Jamahiriya,. If it comes to nothing, for whatever reason—they catch you before the carrier comes back, or during your attack—we will have expended a great effort only to be embarrassed again.”
He leaned forward, staring down at the Captain. His black eyes were bright. “It must not fail,” he said, his voice full of menace. “Do you understand that?”
He calmed himself for a moment. “Look,” he said. “You and I are military men. The politicians always think that, because we can march in close formation and our uniforms are pressed, we can make everything happen according to a plan. Military operations are not like this, yes? You have already had two close calls—perfectly reasonable incidents, considering the dangerous operation you are carrying out. Predictable, even. You are probably going to have others before this thing is over. We hope not, but we know better, you and I, eh? Inshallah, yes? As God wills it. But the politicians, they think that this whole adventure will go boom, boom, boom, right by the plan. The mines are simply a way of adding depth to the plan. You may take your best shot at this carrier, and you may even hit it and damage it. But we both know you probably cannot sink it.”
He paused to light another cigarette from the embers of the last one. He pitched the butt into a trash can. The room filled with stinking smoke, blue in the bright sunlight.
“The Colonel demands that the carrier be destroyed. A ship, even an American super-carrier, is not destroyed if it can get to harbor, however badly damaged. We military men would be satisfied with putting it out of action, killing hundreds of their men like they did to us in their little sneak attack. Kill them while they are sleeping, yes? That is justice, and justice is a good enough reason for a mission like this. But Dey Khadafi says ‘destroy’. Tell me if I am wrong: a ship is not destroyed until it is put down beneath the sea, yes? This is the way of it?”
The Captain nodded. He was beginning to see the logic of it. If the Americans drove him off, they would relax; they would have won, after a fashion, they would feel safe. They would never expect mines, not in their own backyard. The Lieutenant Colonel watched him carefully, saw him work it through, accept it, even appreciate it.
“You see it now, don’t you. Mines. Little assassins, lying in wait. You will make your attack, and hopefully tear open his belly with torpedoes. Then you will make your escape, God willing. The carrier will be helped into the nearest port, which is her home base. And then the assassins will finish the job. Come, I want you to see them. Then I must show you some other things, and then you can rest, have a decent bath and a good meal. You may use my cabin for as long as you want. But first, come see.”
They left the cabin and retraced their steps down to the long flat deck between the two superstructures. The air above the tank decks stank of fuel oil. Between the forward and after deckhouses, the midships winch operators were clustered around two pallets, each containing two brown cylindrical shapes. They looked like torpedoes without propellers, each being about eighteen feet in length, almost two feet in diameter, and painted a dull, sandy brown color. The Lieutenant Colonel pointed out some of the mines’ features, while the workmen stood around, waiting to lift them down to the submarine below. The Lieutenant Colonel pointed with pride.
“They are made in France; the French are wonderful people—they never let their alliances or their rhetoric interfere with business, eh? Only the Germans are better. You see the sensors, yes? Pressure, magnetic, and the ear of the ship counter. I am an Army man, but these things have been explained to me. You know all about them, I suppose.”
The Captain nodded. He had been schooled in the Soviet Union, but not on French mines. But a sea mine was a sea mine: the principles were the same the world over. Mines lay in wait on the bottom until they were activated by a prescribed target. They could be set to explode when the
magnetic field of a ship’s steel hull passed over them, or when the mine sensed the pressure differential created by a large hull moving through the water over the top of the mine. The counter listened and counted the number of ships, which allowed minesweepers to make several passes over the mine without effect. The mine might be set to activate after ten or fifteen ships had gone overhead, or it could be set on a combination: lie still until ten ships had gone by, and then activate on the next contact which exuded a sufficiently large magnetic and pressure field. The really sophisticated mines activated and became torpedoes, rising off the bottom and pursuing their targets. The thing that caught his attention was the size of these mines: these were very big mines.
“The warhead?” he asked.
“Very special. They have 1800 kilos of gas enhanced Semtex. This should be sufficient to lift even an aircraft carrier, yes? And four of them? I think these assassins will be valuable allies.”
“The trick will be to place them,” mused the Captain, awed by the size of the warheads. They were monsters. And the Semtex was gas-enhanced.
“The channel entrance to the carrier basin at Mayport is only 60 to 70 feet deep,” he continued. “We will have to go in on the surface. And there is the problem of the river; the river currents mingle with the tidal currents at the mouth. The mines may not stay where we place them. I shall have to think about this.”
“Load them to the submarine,” ordered the Lieutenant Colonel, and then he took the Captain by the arm, propelling him back to the forward superstructure. The Captain knew there was something important he was forgetting. They were intercepted on deck by the master of the Ibrahim and the Al Akrab’s weapons officer. The weapons officer spoke first.
“Captain, I did not know about these mines.”
“Neither did I, Lieutenant,” replied the Captain. “But there has been an addition to the plan.”
“Where shall we put them, forward or aft?”
The Captain now knew what had been bothering him. The addition of four mines to their warload presented a problem. They had a full torpedo load onboard, which meant that all ten tubes, six forward and four aft, were loaded, and all the reload slots were also full. They would have to download four torpedoes to accommodate four mines, because mines were deployed from the torpedo tubes. It would mean unstowing four large, warshot torpedoes, assembling the torpedo loading path trays through the submarine, opening the weapons loading hatches, and then carefully extracting four live torpedoes out of the submarine, all from alongside another ship. Each fish would take several hours, at least. The Captain explained the problem to the Lieutenant Colonel.
“You cannot just put them aboard—lash them down somewhere?”
The Lieutenant Colonel had never been aboard a submarine, that much was clear. The Captain shook his head. “That is impossible. They have to be in one torpedo room or the other, and all the stowage bays are filled. My crew sleeps literally on top of the torpedoes, Lieutenant Colonel; it is that crowded.”
The Lieutenant Colonel sighed in exasperation. Somebody had screwed up.
The Lieutenant spoke up. “Captain, if we must take these things onboard, there is a quicker way, although it is wasteful.”
“Yes?”
“We cast off the after part of the boat, and we safe and fire the four torpedoes out of the stern tubes. We then load the mines into the after torpedo room. It will still take several hours, but we will not have to drag out the warshots. It would be the safe way, but, as I said, most wasteful.”
“Do it,” ordered the Lieutenant Colonel. “The mines are essential to the plan.”
The Captain shrugged his shoulders. The Lieutenant Colonel would bear responsibility.
“I will need certain people back in the boat for this,” he
said to the Lieutenant Colonel. “I will have to put off your offer of hospitality until this evening, Sir.”
“Cannot your people do this thing by themselves?”
“No, Effendi. I must be present whenever we handle large weapons such as torpedoes or mines. If there is an error or accident, the Ibrahim could go to the bottom along with the boat. And we need to do this thing before the weather turns.”
The Lieutenant Colonel was impressed. “As you wish, Captain. We have some more things to discuss when you are finished with the mines. Can you spare your political officer while you are loading the mines?”
The Captain had guessed right. He was relieved that he had admitted the broaching incident.