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

Edwards read a little more of the message.

“Looks that way. Let’s get this plotted out on ECDIS and see what we need to do.” Turning to the OOD, he added, “Mr. Wilson, please ask the XO to join us.”

The submarine’s executive officer, LCDR Jackson Biddle, arrived a few minutes later, closely followed by the chief of the boat, ETCM Dennis Oshley. Biddle, rather short, stout, and African American, was a polar opposite for the tall, athletic, and decidedly blond Brian Edwards. Both were Naval Academy graduates but totally different in just about everything else. Where Edwards tended to be cautious, to judiciously follow the rules, Jackson Biddle was far more likely to hazard a risk to get them where they needed to be. The benefit was that together, they made a fine team in getting the most from the sophisticated submarine and its crew.

“XO, take a look at this,” Edwards said, pointing at the new OP ORD. “We need to get up north, off Chabahar, and set up an I-and-W mission. The big kahunas back at Fifth Fleet want to make sure the Iranians don’t pull off any nasty surprises up there and then try to blame it on us.”

An “indications and warnings mission” was a process used to observe and report enemy activity that might lead to outright hostilities or other worrisome events before they actually occurred.

“And we just now pulled all the sensors out of there, so the intel guys are flying blind,” Biddle observed. “Why don’t we just send a couple of our little friends back up there? They could re-plant the sensor field and still do the electronic signals monitoring. The UUVs would sure as hell be a whole lot easier and safer.”

Edwards read a little more before responding to the XO.

“Well, my best guess is that they don’t want to risk any UUVs being captured and paraded in front of the Al Jazeera cameras. Imperialistic Americans intruding into their part of the world, provocative acts of war. That would make for some bad optics. On the other hand, nobody is going to capture us. Even if we get detected, and we’re going to do all we can not to, all we would do is run like a scalded dog. Even so, they’d have nothing to show on the evening news or to the UN General Assembly.”

Master Chief Oshley, a quartermaster by training, took the new OP ORD and quickly plotted out the intended course track on the ECDIS. Within a few minutes, the electronic display had a bright white line stretching from their current location off to the northwest. The necessary courses and speeds were printed out in a small box in one corner.

Oshley shook his head and smiled.

“Man! I remember when I was a sea pup, that would have taken hours to put together, picking out the right charts, making sure they were updated with all the latest Notices to Mariners, and then manually plotting the tracks and hand-calculating the speeds.” He patted the ECDIS display, stretched, and did a mock yawn. “I just did a hard day’s work and it took me all of five minutes.”

Biddle chuckled. “Now that you’ve put in such a hard day’s work, COB, it is, after all, now Saturday morning.”

Oshley smiled. “Damned if it ain’t. And you know what that means. We got our chores.” He grabbed the 1MC microphone and announced, “Up all hands! Rub-a-dub-dub, all hands clean up the sub! Now commence field day!”

Ψ

The full moon provided some meager illumination for Bill Beaman and Abdul Yusufzai as they made their long and perilous descent down the slopes of Solomon’s Throne and then across the Wyeze Kar, an intermittent stream that, fortunately, was now mostly dry. Other times it could be a torrent as it fed into the Shahbadin Wahai. That would have caused more problems than either warrior wanted to deal with on this particular night.

Playing the inveterate tour guide, Abdul pointed out that the Shahbadin Wahai had some of the finest freshwater fishing in all of Asia. Beaman only grunted at this tidbit of information. He still preferred the bath-water-warm, emerald green waters off the Bahamas where he now spent most of his time since retiring from the Navy two years before. From the front door of the Peace and Plenty Bar, which Beaman now owned and operated—and only when he felt like it—it was precisely seventy-two unhurried paces west to the head of the pier at Dexter’s Bait and Charter. And there was always a boat captain there looking for an extra deck hand. No pay but cold beer stowed on the ice in the fish hold and all the grouper or snapper the big ex-SEAL wanted to carry back to grill or fry for supper.

But at 0300, after eight hours of grueling descent and with an equally taxing climb looming in their immediate future, fishing was not high on Bill Beaman’s list.

The moon had just set behind the slopes to the west when the pair started the near-vertical ascent up the Obasta Tsukai. The sun would not peek over the high ridges to the east for several hours yet. Only the faint alpine glow gave proof that a sun even existed somewhere over there. The forced march was exhausting, even for the retired SEAL and his Pashtun partner. They scrambled over the scree and loose boulders, grabbing a foothold or a handhold to laboriously pull themselves up the mountainside. Gradually, at a snail’s pace, the valley floor receded far below them. However, the mountain’s upper reaches were still hidden by the clouds skirting the peaks much higher up.

Then, just as Bill Beaman was worrying that they would never reach the rendezvous point, his GPS light suddenly flashed. They had arrived at the coordinates that he had recorded the previous night from the other side of the valley, the spot where the helicopter hovered and picked up some of the fighters. The place was