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

a bit over two hundred kilometers to the northwest to sign his own death warrant.

Yon waited for a few minutes as the sonar trace stabilized. The course change was real and intended. He ordered his boat to follow, but to be certain to remain well outside any possible detection range for the Indian. The stakes in this very real game of cat-and-mouse had just ratcheted up considerably.

Ψ

There was yet one more player in the game, though. One even farther from the action but just as vitally involved.

Nearly a thousand miles to the south, the US Naval Ship USNS Impeccable slowly dragged her twin-line TB-29A towed array through the Indian Ocean, searching for signs of submarines that might be swimming in those waters. The Impeccable and her sisters were specifically designed to gather “acoustical data,” Navy speak for “finding submarines.”

These unarmed, civilian-crewed ships constantly but slowly trawled the world’s oceans looking for submerged vessels in an effort to catalog the number and activities of those ships, whether friend or foe. Her extremely sensitive towed arrays, which trailed out miles behind the twin-hulled ship, gathered terabytes of data that was linked back to Naval Ocean Processing Facility (NOPF), Whidbey Island, Washington, half a world away. There, very advanced algorithms and unbelievably fast computer processors parsed the raw data. Once wheat was separated from chaff, the reports gave expert analysts an amazingly accurate view of the underside of a greater part of the Indian Ocean, the adjacent seas, or any other body of water where the ships worked.

Impeccable had long been aware of and watching the Indian and Chinese submarines as they danced with each other. Her crew and the analysts on Whidbey Island had also noticed the abrupt change in the Indian’s routine and the reactive move by the Chinese sub. But this seemingly small bit of data had raised the interest of someone else, even farther from the warm waters of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

At the Pentagon, Admiral Tom Donnegan watched in very near real time as the Wushiwu swung around to follow the Argihat to the northwest.

Admiral Donnegan did not need miles of towed array or racks of computer servers or a building full of analysts to tell him what this meant. Something was up out there. And whatever it was did not bode well for anybody anywhere on planet Earth.

2

The blazing sun shone mercilessly down on the bustling shipyard. Sprawling, shiny sheet-metal roofs guarded the huge new facility from spying eyes high in the sky. They served that purpose well but also were very efficient at trapping heat inside the structures. Overhead, a pair of Russian AN-124 Ruslan cargo planes circled nearby Konarak Airport. A third one, wheels down, was already well into its final approach. Meanwhile, a gigantic AN-225 Mriya jet, the world’s largest cargo plane, unloaded at the airport’s new secure cargo facility.

Out in Chabahar Bay, a brace of tugs nudged the Motor Vessel Iliya toward the long pier that jutted out from the new shipyard. The large cargo containers that were stacked high on the Iliya’s deck effectively obscured the Russian flag hanging listlessly from the flagstaff.

Arman Dirbaz half watched all this activity from his office window, impatiently waiting for the phone to connect. He never stopped marveling at the sudden growth and incessant activity in this remote part of Iran’s coast. Until recently, this had been only a shallow, out-of-the-way bay that housed the backwater port of Chabahar. In only three years, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy, NEDAJA, with help and mountains of money from their Russian friends, had built the world’s newest submarine shipyard.

Arman Dirbaz was the engineer in charge of delivering the shipyard’s first product, the NEDAJA’s first ballistic-missile submarine, the Boz-Manand. Arman and his team of designers had successfully married the most modern AIP conventional submarine design in the world with a submarine variant of the Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile. With a range of three thousand kilometers and the capability to carry a nuclear warhead, this weapon would immediately make Iran the undisputed leader of the Muslim world and the real power in the Middle East. Even the hated American devils would necessarily tread lightly.

Arman Dirbaz broke out of his reverie as someone finally picked up the phone at the other end.

“Salam. How are you, my friend?” the familiar voice intoned.

Dirbaz laughed. The heavy Russian accent made Vassily Godonov’s Farsi difficult to understand.

“Vassily, despite all the years you have lived in my homeland, you still speak Farsi like a Moscow washer woman. I admire your attempts, but let’s switch to Russian, da?”

The older Russian engineer’s sigh of relief was clearly audible. Linguistics were not Godonov’s strength, but the man was a master engineer and supreme problem solver.

“Thank you, Arman, my old friend. Your Russian is far better than my Farsi.”

“It certainly should be,” Dirbaz said with a chuckle. “All the years you spent trying to teach me engineering at the Moscow University, it was inevitable that I learn something. Now, did you call with good news, or are you still scratching your behind?”

Godonov grunted in feigned exasperation.

“Is that any way to speak with your old master? Especially when I offer such good news. Our friends at Sevmash have finally solved the overheating problems with the fuel cells. Testing has been very positive. I supervised that full power trial myself. The solution was really very simple. It turns out that we did not have a problem with the new organic hydrogen storage system like we thought. The problem was in the fuel cell all the time. We merely had to change the internal temperature sensors with a tantalum micro-resistive thermal sensor. That showed that the heat exchangers were too small for the power output. I’m afraid that we will need to