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

electromagnetic emission, regardless of its wavelength. Nothing moved for many miles around the submarine without the George Mason’s crew knowing about it.

But the real power lay in the instantaneous integration of information arriving from so many different sources. More than sixty thousand feet above the water in which the big sub swam, an MQ-4 Triton unmanned aircraft gazed down without blinking on a vast area that included the Gulf of Oman and far into the Iranian interior.

Even higher, more than eighty thousand feet up, the super-secret, solar-powered High-Altitude Pseudo Satellite—HAPS—drone made large, slow circles over the Iranian coastline. All but invisible to even the most sensitive air search radars, the gossamer-light craft maintained an unblinking eye over most of the Middle East. And it sent its information through several commands until it ultimately showed on the large tactical display screen in the George Mason’s control room.

The information on the screen mixed all that outside intelligence information with the submarine’s own sonar and electronic warfare sensors to give Brian Edwards a visualization of everything moving within several hundred miles of his boat.

The Mason’s CO rubbed the days-old stubble on his chin as he idly studied the mishmash of symbology on the very cluttered screen. Icons for passenger aircraft, fighter jets, oil tankers, fishing boats, warships, and even a Chinese submarine almost a thousand miles to the south pocked the display. This part of the globe was not only very dangerous, it was also very crowded.

Edwards played with a control on a console to narrow the field down to only the slice of planet Earth that lay between him and Chabahar, the Iranian port city on the Gulf of Oman. That adjustment did not reduce the clutter on the screen much at all. It helped, though, when he narrowed the search further until he was only looking at ship traffic.

Jim Shubert, Mason’s navigator, stepped up next to the captain and studied the screen for a few seconds. He slowly shook his head and pursed his lips.

“Sure a lot of traffic up there,” he mumbled, pointing toward the smear of pixels that was Chabahar. “Helluva lot more than what intel said we should expect.”

“Yep,” Edwards confirmed with a nod. “Admiral Donnegan said something about a hornet’s nest getting kicked over and it sure looks like those SOBs are still mad. I’m just glad we aren’t going up there. This is a perfect job for our little friends.” He motioned toward the payload modules aft of the control room. “You seen Weps lately?”

“He strolled through a few minutes ago,” the Nav replied. “Said he wants to make a final check on our little friends before we send them out for a swim.”

“Conn, ESM,” the 21MC blared unexpectedly. “Captain, we’re getting comms intercepts that correlate to all that traffic up by Chabahar. Decrypting and translating now if you want to take a look.”

Edwards keyed the microphone and answered, “Captain. On my way.”

Turning to Shubert, he directed, “Nav, get everything set to launch the UUVs. As soon as I find out what ESM has, I want to drop down to a hundred and fifty feet to launch them. The sooner we get them moving, the sooner we get Admiral Donnegan off our back.”

The skipper disappeared out the control room’s back door and entered the cypher-locked, cramped submarine radio room. The small team of crypto-tech “spooks” huddled around the BLQ-10 comms display, completely absorbed by the data neatly lined up on the screen.

The lead spook looked up as Edwards stepped into the cramped space.

“Skipper, you want to see this.” He looked like a kid who had just found a cheat in Resident Evil 2. But this was no game. He handed Edwards an electronic tablet. “This is a decrypt and translation of what we copied. Most is what we suspected, talking about mine-hunting in the shallow waters. The really interesting thing, though? It’s in both Farsi and Russian.”

Edwards took the tablet and quickly read the translations. He followed a dialogue between Iranians and their Russian technical experts, mostly complaining about all the “mine-like” trash littering the Gulf of Oman. He chuckled as he pictured them trying to sort through several thousand years’ worth of metal debris. Hell, they had just discovered the wreck of explorer Vasco da Gama’s ship in these waters in 2006. And that hulk had only been there since 1503. Not to mention all the other junk deposited there even before that notable bit of historic rubble.

Talk about a needle in a haystack!

Ψ

The two unmanned underwater vehicles uneventfully completed their ten-hour swim into the shallow waters at the mouth of Chabahar Bay. Retrieving the covertly laid sensors was a pretty simple evolution for these sophisticated fish and would only take a couple of hours once they were in the vicinity of their quarry. When the UUV’s navigations system said that it was near a sensor’s location, the device pinged a special low-amplitude acoustic pulse. The hidden sensor responded with a similar low-amplitude pulse. Within a few minutes, the UUV was hovering over the sensor. A robotic arm retrieved the sensor, carefully stowed it, and then the UUV moved off to its next rendezvous. During the entire operation, the only trace that it was even happening was a fleeting track on one of the Iranian side-scan sonars. And the engineers who designed the small submarine-like device were certain that any such detection would quickly be analyzed and determined to be nothing more than an acoustic anomaly.

Ψ

The brand-new Iranian minesweeper Naranjee Sayyad had been on station off the Chabahar Bay for over a week now. The small ship still smelled of fresh paint. The crew were in the process of learning just how the complex systems on their vessel really worked. Homeported in Bandar Abbas, the sprawling Iranian naval base that guarded the Strait of Hormuz, they had just successfully finished an arduous week of sea trials when their new orders suddenly arrived. They were to immediately take Naranjee Sayyad and join all her