Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5) by George Wallace (different ereaders .txt) 📕

did not leave him winded. The effects of all that bar-stool sitting, boat riding, red snapper fishing, cold-concoction consumption, fried-seafood-eating and post-midnight bedtime hours had been effectively offset by a habitual exercise regimen.

He stepped out of the international arrivals area into the crowd of tour groups and curbside family reunions. The big SEAL paused for a moment, pretending to be looking for a cab or hotel shuttle, but he was simultaneously getting a feel for the environment and watching for the person who was supposed to be waiting for him. Tom Donnegan had told him that a contact would meet him at the doorway from the international arrivals lobby. However, no one in the vicinity seemed to be looking for a beat-up old warrior.

There was a door to a men’s room off to the left. Convenient. That was one particularly urgent problem he could solve rather quickly. It would make thinking and observing much easier, too.

As he approached the entrance, passing a concrete support pillar, an arm reached out from behind the pole to grab him. Beaman immediately went to a defensive stance, ready to fend off a blow or shatter a larynx with a quick chop of the heel of his hand.

“Mr. Beaman, welcome to Pakistan. Would you come with me, please?”

Beaman stepped back, still instinctively wary. The man before him could have been an accountant or banker. Or assassin. But he certainly did not stand out in the crowd. Certainly not as much as the big American did.

The man was dressed in traditional Pashtun perahan tunban, sported a fashionable shadow of a beard, and seemed willing to stand there, hands palms out, a slight smile on his face, as long as it took for Bill Beaman to be convinced he was not about to have his throat slit.

Beaman finally uncoiled.

“Go with whom, may I ask?”

“I am Abdul Yusufzai,” the thin man said. He spoke in a voice that only Beaman could hear over the constant babble of the paging speakers and gypsy hack drivers trying to out-shout each other for fares. “Captain Beaman, you and I have a mutual friend, Admiral Donnegan. The car is waiting outside. Allow me to help you with your bag, sir. We have a short but interesting ride ahead of us. Then much we need to accomplish. And we do not want to be tardy. Please come with me, sir.”

“Since you asked nicely,” Beaman growled, but then smiled at his new friend. “Let’s go.”

8

Joe Glass could feel the blistering tropical sun on his back as he walked across the short brow from the Toledo and onto the diving barge tied up along the after part of the big attack submarine. The towering sides of the submarine tender Simon Lake provided scant shade as the burning orb was almost directly overhead by then. The constant sea breeze brought precious little cooling relief. The noon-day heat was unrelenting, stifling. Glass’s khaki shirt was already drenched in sweat after only a few minutes topside. Months below in the submarine’s artificial atmosphere made the real climate even harder to take.

Glass slowly threaded his way past the maze of hoses and diving gear to where Toledo’s engineer, Lieutenant Commander Walt Smith, stood, looking perplexed. The young officer was staring down a very large pipe that hung over the diving barge’s stern. A sheet metal and plastic “pipe,” almost four feet in diameter, dipped into crystal clear water and then dropped almost vertically to where it broadened and enclosed most of the Toledo’s stern just aft of the rudder. Half a dozen hoses disappeared into the big pipe’s mouth, and a cacophony of noises emerged from it.

Smith glanced up as Glass approached. Shouting to be heard over the racket, he reported, “The cofferdam is holding now. But it took the tiger team and the divers quite a while to seal it. They’re removing the backing doors so they can get to the linkage.”

Being a “nuke” as well as previously serving as a boat’s engineer, Joe Glass jumped directly to the crux of the problem. “So, we’re sure the problem is in the linkages? Life would be a hell of a lot simpler if it turned out to be a software problem.”

“Skipper, we ran all the diagnostics here and had the design yard go over their copy back home, too.” Walt Smith was aware of Glass’s penchant for getting his hands dirty every time there was an engineering problem. “We went over every bit and byte. There were no surprises. The software does exactly what it’s supposed to.”

Glass nodded. Once again, the engineer really did not need his captain’s help. The team had everything well in hand.

“Okay, then I agree. That only leaves the synchros and the linkages. How long you figure it’ll take to get to them and do the troubleshooting?”

“Lots of variables there, Skipper,” Smith answered. “If it’s a simple linkage adjustment, we might be able to button up by tomorrow. If it takes a synchro replacement and alignment, maybe a day more. We have a spare synchro onboard. If we get in there and find anything bent or broken, it’ll take a bit longer. We’re on the tail end of a very long supply train out here on the backside of the world.”

“Roger that,” Glass replied. “I’d better get on the horn and let the commodore know that we’ll be stuck in this tropical paradise for a few more days than we’d hoped.”

“Captain, before you go talk to Commodore Ward, I need to report a problem with the steam generator water level control system that just popped up, too,” Smith went on. “We got some anomalies on the self-diagnostics. I’m not sure what the problem is, but the ETs are up on chat with the lab to