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  The forward module, designed for the crew, was the command module, three decks high. The lower deck was mostly taken up by the electronic equipment of the Second Captain system but had a row of tight bunks on the port bulkhead. The middle level was split into four staterooms, a messroom, and a small galley and head. The upper deck was occupied by ship-control functions in a large open control room, a computer room, a radio room, and two additional rooms on the forward elliptical head of the pressure vessel. The smaller forward room was the first officer’s stateroom. The second was the captain’s stateroom, an L-shaped space, the corner of the room formed by the head between the captain’s and

  first officer’s staterooms.

  At the head of the conference table in the captain’s state room, a man frowned down at a large spread of ship’s blue prints, the roll of drawings kept flat by plates and glasses.

  The man was slim, middle-aged, dark-skinned, gray-haired, with an air of authority. And at this instant, of frustration.

  Commander Abbas Alai Sharef tried a bite of his food but found it tasteless as it had been all day. He pushed his plate away, crossed his arms and stared at the ship’s plans. Finally he leaned on the table and stared at the elevation view of the submarine, looking for an answer until his head began to ache. The task before him seemed impossible.

  He stretched and glanced around at the room, not seeing it as claustrophobically cramped but as a haven from the demands of the ship. The stateroom’s L-shape was little more than five meters long. The port side was partially unusable because of the curvature of the hull. Where the hull came down in its slow incline there was a cubbyhole containing his bunk and his desk. At the end of the desk was a computer module with dual display screens and a keyboard section with function keys. The module was part of the Second Captain system, a computer that controlled and monitored all functions of the automated submarine, a system that caused Sharef a measure of ambivalence. Next to the Second Captain

  console a green-shaped lamp on the desk spread a warm light over the papers strewn over its large wooden surface.

  The aft wall of the room was covered with a Persian rug, its pattern of an intricacy that could hold a visitor’s glance.

  The rug had been a gift from Sharef’s mother, given to him the year she died. Sharef spent a moment looking at it, searching for the intentional flaw sewn in, the flaw inserted to acknowledge that human perfection was an insult to Allah.

  But as usual, Sharef was unable to find the flaw. Beneath the rug, the conference table took up much of the room, the table able to seat eight men. At the end of the table on the centerline wall was a stern portrait of Mohammed al-Sihoud. Sharef barely noticed it; the frown on his dark face appeared, then vanished quickly. The forward starboard corner of the room was taken up by the walls surrounding the shared head, doors opening into it from both the captain’s stateroom and the first officer’s.

  Sharef returned to the ship’s plans, looking for an answer, returning to the nonanswer that the mission was impossible.

  He ran his fingers through hair so gray as to be almost silver, most traces of the jet black it had been five years before gone, the gray

  continuing in the color of his thick mustache.

  He was forty-five years old, young to be one of the highest-ranking naval officers in the Combined Naval Force. He was of medium height, although his military carriage and muscled frame gave a taller impression. His cheek and throat bore a long scar, resembling a sabre wound, from his days in the Iranian navy. The wound had opened in his face and neck when the superstructure of the Mark 5 frigate Sahand had exploded a moment after the American missile struck it.

  Sharef had met a surgeon in Japan who offered to make the scar disappear, but Sharef had declined, the mark reminding him of lost shipmates and of the innocent days when he had thought himself invincible. The sinking of the Sahand seemed to be a fence across his life, separating his youth from his cynical middle age, which arrived early in his thirty-sixth year.

  Sharef was usually a calm man, even in crisis. This, he thought, was perhaps the major reason he had been chosen to command this flagship of the Combined Naval Force. He was a quick study, able to grasp a tactical situation immediately, although he seemed blessed with this ability only in naval matters—when it came to understanding people he felt he was often at a loss. And when it came to women, he was completely adrift. More than once he had wondered if that was the reason he had chosen the life of the sea in his youth.

  Not as an adventure or out of love for it, but as an escape from what custom decreed was a normal life with a wife and children.

  As he paced the room he allowed his normally disciplined mind to wander back to the women he had known, the years flashing by rapidly until 1978, when he had been at Oxford, before Iran’s revolution. He had felt awkward in England, knowing his dark skin and thick accent had set him apart. But there had been a woman, just a year or two from being a girl, who had made it clear she was attracted to him. So oddly forward, the Western women, and so exciting … He had felt helpless, driven by his own youth and the freedom of a foreign land, the restraints of Islam far away. But when the Ayatollah came and with him the revolution, Sharef had been forced to make a choice between the beautiful British girl—and the new world she had shown him—and his homeland and culture. He had returned home, his perceived sense of duty stronger than his love for Pamela, and although he still felt the decision had been the right thing to do he still felt the void. He had never seen or heard from her after her letter telling him she was married and moving to the United States.

  For a moment Sharef lingered over the forward bulkhead with its photographs of his past ships. On the far left was the Iranian navy frigate Alvand, his first ship. That had been before Oxford, before Pamela, before the revolution. Next to it was the picture of the destroyer Damavand. For four years after the revolution he had been her

  navigator. Under the Ayatollah things had been so uncertain that Damavand rarely left port. Next there had been the Vosper Mark 5-class frigate Sahand, when he had been assigned as first officer at the age of thirty-two. Three years later, in April of 1988, the Sahand was at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, blown to pieces by Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Navy attack that sank half the Iranian fleet. He saw that as an overreaction to the Iranian boarding of the merchant ships bound for the northern Persian Gulf hauling war material to Iraq. The episode had been forgotten by most of the world since it happened at sea far from the television cameras, but Sharef would not forget it. He still wondered if he had any business being alive after what had happened to Sahand.

  At age thirty-five he had taken command of the Mark 5-class frigate Alborz, three years that he looked back on with nostalgia. After several years of shore duty on the United Islamic Front combined staff he had decided that shore duty was not for him. The UIF had acquired a Russian-built Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine, the K-102, its image captured in the next photograph. Sharef, a veteran of the surface fleet, had outranked the sub’s captain when he reported aboard as the first officer. He had learned the submarine navy’s ways quickly, and two years later was selected (ahead of K-102’s captain) to command the ex-Russian Victor III nuclear submarine Tabarzin. Tabarzin’s photograph had been shot from high over her drydock, the slim and graceful form marred by scaffolds and gangways and temporary platforms. Sharef had enjoyed that first experience with nuclear power, marveling at how well it suited

  underwater combat. His command tour had gone so well that he was the Combined Naval Force’s first choice to go to Japan and receive the Destiny-class submarine Hegira.

  The picture of Hegira had been taken as the ship ran on the surface at full speed, the bow wave smashing over the leading edge of the fin, the flag of the UIF flying from a tall mast. Sharef himself was recognizable on top of the fin in the bridge, driving his new ship from the shipyard, the sea ahead of him, the year in Japan behind him. And behind him as well the woman he had met there, the nuclear engineer n
amed Yashiko Una, who had been in charge of the crew’s propulsion plant training. And just as duty had called him away from Oxford and Pamela, it now called him away from Yashiko.

  A knock came at the door. It would be Abu-i-Wafa, the weapon-test director, wanting the answer to the impossible.

  As Sharef stepped to the stateroom door, an idea did occur, an idea that seemed stupid and risky but might answer Abus requirements. And so dangerous that it might cost the UIF the submarine.

  The man standing at the door was not Abu, but Sub.-Lt.

  Omar al-Maari, one of the junior officers, handing Sharef a message clipboard. He read the odd message from Ahmed, Khalib Sihoud’s aide.

  What did he mean about rescuing two survivors. Survivors of whafl Sharef left his stateroom and walked to the control room, shaking his head.

  arlington, virginia pentagon e-ring U.S. navy flag plot Admiral Richard Donchez was perhaps only the second Chief of Naval Operations in navy history ever to dirty his hands with the details of combat operations. In the last five years the office of the number-one admiral in the navy had been changed from an administrative command to an operational billet. Which was fortunate for the U.S. Navy, because Dick Donchez would not have taken the post unless it allowed him to be more of a tactician than a paper pusher. It had also been beneficial to the navy and to the course of the war with the United Islamic Front. The most recent example of this was his design of Operation Early Retirement, the mission to assassinate Sihoud and, if successful, end the war early.

  Donchez was tall, and although in his sixtieth year, he swore he was losing an inch of height each time he checked the mirror. In fact, the only discernible signs of age were his cueball baldness, the bushiness of his gray brows, and his slightly diminished height. But Donchez’s mind was sharper than it had ever been. He was dressed now in his service dress-blue uniform, the sleeves heavy with gleaming gold, the wide band nearest the end of the sleeve, three slim bands running up almost to his elbow, the sharp pointed star presiding over the stripes. Over his left breast pocket six rows of colored ribbons climbed toward his shoulder, the gold submarine pin above them. The pin resembled an

  airman’s wings, but on closer examination the wings were scaly fish with curving tails pointed outward, the odd heads facing an old-fashioned diesel submarine plowing through rough seas.

  The pin was solid gold, a gift from his old Annapolis room mate’s widow, given him when he had first been promoted to flag rank.

  Donchez stood before one of the plot walls of the room, the electronic plot showing the Mediterranean, the colors and lines and dots each signifying the deployment of his forces. Donchez’s right hand was shoved into his coat pocket, his left fist clutching the long Havana cigar, the end glowing, the smoke rising to the overhead where the red no smoking sign was bolted into the wall. Alongside Donchez were a group of senior officers, admirals in charge of the operational groups: Adm. Kenny Mckeigh, the commander in chief of the Atlantic naval forces; Adm. John Traeps, commander in chief of the Mediterranean naval forces; Adm.

  Dee Watson, the vice C.N.O for operations. Also Donchez’s aide, a plump and rumpled captain from naval intelligence named Fred Rummel.

  Donchez puffed the Havana as Rummel continued his briefing. “… about an hour after the explosion of the Javelins a Firestar fighter took off from the Sunni Air Base in Ashkha bad and headed west. Vector analysis shows it heading for the Med. Of course we’ve seen hundreds of Firestar sorties over the last few days but this particular flight, coming so

  soon after the attack and leaving from Ashkhabad itself, leads us to believe that it may be connected with someone in the command structure.” “How long ago?” Donchez said.

  “Twenty-five minutes.”

  “What are we doing about it?”

  John Traeps answered for his Med forces. He gestured to the Med plot while he spoke. “Sir, the USS Reagan carrier task force is off of Tripoli, Libya. She scrambled two F-14s about ten minutes ago. They should be intercepting the Firestar in the next half hour, as long as we can keep tracking it. The task force commander has authorized shooting it down.” “No,” Donchez said quietly, still looking at the tip of his cigar.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Don’t shoot it down. If we do we’ll never know who the hell got out of Ashkhabad.”

  “Aye, aye, sir, but how can we—”

  “Instead of intercepting, have the fighters tail the Firestar and force it down.”

  The briefing broke up. Donchez left the room and walked rapidly to his office suite, Rummel and vice C.N.O for operations Dee Watson following. Watson was, as he himself proclaimed, the ugliest and most obnoxious admiral in the fleet; although he was hard to take, someone Donchez might not have chosen for his number-two man, he was savvy and had a penetrating grasp of tactics and a detailed understanding of special warfare. A former Aegis-class cruiser commander, Watson was the only surface-warfare officer in Donchez’s inner circle, the remainder predominantly aviation types or submariners. No one spoke until they were in the special-compartmented-information-facility portion of the office.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, sir?” Rummel asked Donchez.

  Donchez nodded, stubbing out the cigar in the ash tray.

  “Sihoud.”

  “Son of a bitch got past us,” Watson said.

  “We’ll know in the next hour, anyway,” Donchez said, pulling out a fresh Havana and flicking his lighter at its tip.

  “I think I’ll go on back to flag plot, see what’s shakin’,” Watson said

  in his cracker accent. “By your leave, sir.”

  “I’ll be down as soon as we have something. Dee.”

  Donchez smoked in silence for a moment, then looked at Rummel.

  “Think I should call General Barczynski?”

  “Are you coming down with something, sir?”

  Donchez chuckled. “Just testing.”

  “Maybe we should have shot the Firestar down after all, sir.”

  “Firestars aren’t up to the task against F-14 Tomcats. The flyboys will bring Sihoud to us, now that the god damned seals screwed up.”

  “Ah, hell. Admiral, maybe this Firestar is just some panicky lieutenant trying to get away from our missiles.”

  “We can only hope.”

  eastern Mediterranean The Firestar had flown without incident for almost an hour, cruising at twelve kilometers altitude at one and a half times the speed of sound. During the trip Ahmed let the computer fly the

  aircraft, content to monitor the systems, keeping a careful eye on navigation and the electronic sensors that guarded against incoming missiles and radars. Other than the normal surface-and air-search radars at sea in the Med and. in the southern shores of Greece, there had been no unusual activity. Ahmed had even begun to wonder if it was perhaps too quiet. Occasionally he selected his onboard monitor to the rear-facing camera, checking General Sihoud. The Khalib had slept most of the trip, his flight helmet against the canopy. The Firestar had skirted Israeli territories to the north and crossed over Kassab and the dark waters of the Mediterranean before Sihoud awoke.

  The general tapped on the top of Ahmed’s seat, trying to get his attention.

  “Go ahead and speak into the oxygen mask. General. It has a voice-activated intercom.” “Where are we?” Sihoud asked, his voice rasping and weak.

  “How do you feel, sir? If you’re thirsty there’s an insulated bottle under the right console.”

  Sihoud fumbled for the bottle. Ahmed watched the Khalib on his monitor, seeing how tentatively he moved. He wondered if the general would be strong enough to make it to the submarine—the only way other than a high-risk ditching to get to the sub would be to bail out at the lowest

  speed and altitude the jet could fly, as near the surfaced submarine as possible. And bailing out, taking a parachute’s g-forces, hitting the water and swimming to a submarine were not easily done by sick men. Ahmed bit his lip.

  “I think I
need to see a doctor. Rakish. As soon as we land.” Sihoud coughed violently.

  “General, we will not be landing. This is the last flight for this aircraft. We will be abandoning it over the sea. The Hegira will be waiting for us.”

  “What? What are we doing?”

  “Sir, for the next two weeks the war will be fought without you. I have already raised Generals lhaffe, Ramadan, and Ben Abbas. They all reported they had explicit instructions from you on the conduct of the campaigns in North Africa, the Sinai, and southern Iran. I told them that the primary objective is not to counterattack but to hold on for the seven to ten days it will take us to assemble the Scorpion missile and deliver it to its target.” “You told them about the Scorpion on a radio circuit, Ahmed?” “No, Khalib. I only told them to hold on and give us the time. They do not need to know about the Scorpion, not yet.

  The fewer who know, the less chance of compromising the surprise of this

  operation. I do not want the Americans waiting for us.”

  “The generals are smart and good fighters, but they are not coordinated without me. Rakish. I must return to the field for our defense. I need to—”

  “Sir, wherever you are, the eyes of our enemies are watching, and they will continue to send their squads to kill you. If you believe that the armies are lost without you for fourteen days, imagine the war without you forever.

  This is how they think. General, and they are not stupid.