Dale Brown - Satan’s Tail

‘Thank you,’ said Dog.

Freeman turned away from the screen.

Jed Barclay stepped back into view. ‘Roughly three weeks ago, one of Libya’s Russian-made submarines left its port on the Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘Ordinarily, they go out a few miles, dive, circle, and go home. This one didn’t. I have some graphics for you, but the illustrations are pretty, uh, basic.’

A blurry black and white photo of a submarine replaced Jed’s face. Dog listened as the NSC assistant described the submarine, an old but still potent diesel-powered member of the Project 641 class, code named ‘Foxtrots’ in the west. Roughly three hundred feet long, the Libyan submarine had a snorkel and improved batteries, which allowed it to travel for several days while submerged. Capable of carrying over twenty torpedoes and possibly submarine-launched cruise missiles, the vessel posed a serious enough threat to shipping that NATO had sent additional forces to track it down. An Italian destroyer succeeded in locating it west of Sicily and trailed it as it traveled toward Gibraltar. But the submarine eventually gave it the slip.

Two days later a British antisubmarine warfare group off the Moroccan coast in the Atlantic recorded sounds of a submarine under distress. It failed to surface, and all contact was lost. The boat had not been positively identified, but was thought to have been a Foxtrot. Given the Libyans’ dismal history with the Russian submarines, it seemed likely that the sub had broken up and sunk. An extensive search operation failed to turn up anything.

That closed the matter – until five days ago, when an American submarine in the Indian Ocean off the African coast reported a series of very distant contacts with a submarine it had never encountered before. The American sub was trailing a Russian cruiser at the time and couldn’t do much more than listen passively as the other submarine passed a good distance away. The crew had originally identified the craft as a Kilo Project 636, a very potent diesel-powered submarine manufactured and exported by Russia. Subsequent analysis, however, indicated that was wrong. The analysts were pegging it as a Foxtrot or perhaps a member of the somewhat more refined and larger Tango class.

‘The same sub?’ Dog asked Jed.

Jed said it certainly seemed to be. If so, it was a potentially ominous development. A loose association of pirates were currently operating in the Gulf of Aden. They had patrol boats of various sizes and configurations; they were using them to rob and extort money from ships headed from and toward the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. They were also running guns and ammunition to rebel movements in Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia.

The pirates had been active for several months, their status with the legitimate governments in the region unclear. The Arab League claimed that both Somalia, Yemen, and Ethiopia were working against the pirates, but none of the other countries would agree to work with the UN or NATO to combat them. This was no surprise in Somalia – the government wasn’t much more than a fiction. Sudan and Yemen had their own share of conflicts and troubles, but Ethiopia’s reluctance to cooperate was difficult to explain; they were inland and historically not allied with either country. The only possible explanation had to do with Islamic terror organizations and secret government alliances – a possibility that implied the Libyan submarine might be the first of many.

Things had gotten so bad that two weeks earlier a small contingent of U.S. ships had entered the Gulf of Aden and begun combating them. They were under orders to remain in international waters and attack only with ‘hard evidence’ or if called by a ship under direct attack. Thus far their successes had been limited.

‘A submarine would take the conflict to a whole different level,’ said Jed. ‘It’s a pretty bad time for us – most of the Pacific Fleet is near Taiwan, and what’s not there is spread out around North Korea and India. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Fleet is trying to deal with Yugoslavia and the Russian buildup in the Baltic.’

‘Which is why the pirates are so active,’ suggested Dog.

‘Probably. This is where they’ve been.’

A map of the Gulf of Aden came on the screen. Roughly 550 miles long, the arm of the Indian Ocean sat below the Arabian peninsula, sandwiched between the peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Somalia lay at the bottom, on the horn shape; Yemen was at the top, on the Arabian peninsula. To the left was the entrance to the Red Sea, which led to the Suez Canal at the far north.

Jed had shaded the areas along the coasts of Somalia and Yemen to show where the pirates had been most active – a swath roughly five hundred miles long.

‘The attacks have been mostly in international waters, where the ships try to stay. The pirates then go into the coastal zones where they know they’ll be safe,’ said Jed. ‘If the submarine is going to join them, it’ll come up from this direction here.’

He pointed at the right side of the map, on the horn, where Somalia butted into the Indian Ocean.

‘You don’t think it’s heading for the Persian Gulf?’ asked Dog. The Persian Gulf, which bordered Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, lay farther east, just off Jed’s map. ‘The Libyans have worked with the Iranians before, and the Iranians are the ones to watch in the Middle East, if you ask me.’

‘Um, yes, but they’ve been pretty quiet since Razor’s Edge,’ said Jed, referring to the code name for an operation in Iran concluded some months before. Whiplash had destroyed an Iranian laser similar in design to the American antiair weapon known as Razor. ‘Besides, a NATO squadron is already operating there,’ he added. ‘There’s an American destroyer and two French ships guarding the Strait of Hormuz, and an Italian vessel farther north in the Persian Gulf. If the sub does try to get into the gulf, those ships will find it at Hormuz. The Gulf of Aden is much more problematic. If the submarine is in territorial waters, we can’t touch it, and may even have trouble just tracking it.’

Though Jed didn’t explain, Dog realized that the administration was reluctant to push the territorial waters issue, not so much because it feared foreign reaction, but because of congressional criticism of the Martindale administration for acting unilaterally over the past six or seven months. Even though the administration had twice prevented wars between China and Taiwan and once between China and India, the politicos used the international criticism to bash Martindale. Senate Majority Leader Barbara Finegold had as much as said so in an interview on CNN a few days before, when she promised to hold hearings on President Martindale’s ‘hidden foreign agenda.’

‘Why would the Libyans get involved with pirates?’ Dog asked. ‘Are they getting a cut of the booty or what?’

‘The pirates aren’t just thieves,’ Jed explained. ‘They’re part of a network of Islamic militants. They’re attacking shipping partly for money and partly to help fund an Islamic revolt in North Africa. Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, maybe even Ethiopia and Yemen – they’re all in play. There are organizations in each country, and they’re each affiliated with Al Qaeda, the people who are operating in Afghanistan.’

‘And who funded the takeover in Brunei.’

‘Same people. The Brunei movement probably used some of the money the pirates raised. We don’t have any evidence that they’re involved with the Libyans, or this submarine,’ added Jed. ‘But there have been efforts to get Ethiopia and Yemen as well as Egypt and even Oman to join the conflict. Ethiopia and Yemen both scrambled planes a few days ago.’

‘To attack the pirates?’

‘More like to protect them. But they deny that.’