H.M.S. Unseen (1999)

  H.M.S. Unseen (1999)

  By: PATRICK ROBINSON

  - - Synopsis

  Betrayed by his Iraqi paymasters, the deadliest submariner in the world is determined to take his revenge. He defects to Iran and plans a terrible vengeance that will call on his insider's knowledge and his unparalleled skills. Iran, smarting from a falsely administered punishment by America, is only too willing to help. For the terrorist plans to steal a submarine and transform it into a unique new weapon - one that will cause the most shocking air disasters in American history. And, to complete his revenge, he's made sure that the finger will eventually point to Iraq. Only Admiral Arnold Morgan suspects that these terrible 'accidents' are the work of Ben Adnam, the man behind the destruction of the Thomas Jefferson. Everyone believed him dead. Until now..

  PROLOGUE

  January 17, 2006.

  IT WAS A MORNING OF SAVAGE COLD. THE RAW, ravenous January wind hurled snow at the driver’s side of the car as it crunched along a freezing man-made ravine, between drifts plowed 12 feet high. It had been snowing now for more than three months in Newfoundland, as it usually did. But Bart Hamm did not care, and he chuckled at the local radio DJ’s banter as he pressed on through the howling polar blizzard of his homeland, heading resolutely for the big transatlantic air base outside the eastern town of Gander.

  Bart had been working there for ten years, and he was used to the steadiness of the job, the routines, and the regimentation. Unlike most of the coastal population of the island, he never had to worry about the cold. All through the autumn and winter, the weather in Newfoundland is unthinkable, except to a polar bear, or possibly an Eskimo. But Bart was guided by one solitary thought. Whatever the disadvantages may be to this job, whatever the freedoms I have sacrificed, it’s a helluva lot better than being out in a fishing boat.

  Bart was the first male member of his family in five generations not to have gone to sea. The Hamms were from the tiny port of St. Anthony, way up on the northern peninsula. Down the years, since the middle of the nineteenth century, they had treasured their independence, earning a harsh living from the dark, sullen waters that surge around the Labrador coast and the western Atlantic.

  In the past century, the Hamms had been saltbankers, sailing the big schooners out to the Grand Banks for cod; they had fished for turbot from the draggers; trapped deepwater lobsters; hunted seals on the ice at the end of winter. A lot of teak-hard, rock-steady men named Hamm had drowned in this most dangerous of industries, three in one day back in the early eighties, when a fishing boat out of St. Anthony iced up and capsized in a gale east of Grey Islands.

  Bart’s father was lost in that incident, and his only son had never quite recovered from the ordeal of waiting helplessly, with his mother and sister, for six hours in the snow on the little town jetty. Every thirty minutes, in a biting nor’easter, they had walked up to the harbormaster’s shed, and Bart had never forgotten the old man speaking into the radio, repeating over and over, “This is St. Anthony…come in Seabird II …come in Seabird II …PLEASE come in Seabird II.” But there had always been just silence.

  That had been twenty-three years ago, when Bart was thirteen; it was the day when he knew that, whatever else, he was never going to become a fisherman.

  Bart was a typical member of the Hamm family: thoughtful, quiet, accepting, and as strong as a stud bull. He was a good mathematician and won a scholarship to the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, where he earned two degrees, one in mathematics, one in physics.

  He had the perfect temperament for an air traffic control officer, and he settled into a well-paid place in one of the warmest most protected modern buildings in the entire country. Stormswept ATC Gander was where they checked in every incoming transatlantic flight to Canada and the northern U.S.A., the big passenger jets heading back into the world from the huge freezing sky that umbrellas the desolate North Atlantic waters of the 30-degree line of longitude.

  That day, driving through the snow, at 0630 in the morning, headlights cutting through the endless winter darkness, Bart was starting a seven-hour shift with an hour’s break midway. He would begin at the busiest part of the morning, because anytime after seven, they would be talking to a different airliner every three minutes. You had to stay alert, on top of your game, every moment of your shift. The Gander Station was a key ingredient in Atlantic air traffic safety, inevitably the first to know of any problem.

  Bart loved the job. He had excellent powers of concentration, and his rise to supervisor would not be long in coming. His shift began at 0700, which was 1200 or 1300 in western Europe. And he began to talk into his headset almost immediately upon arriving at his station, connected on the HF radio to the great armada of passenger jets trundling westward, identifying themselves in their airline’s code, then reporting their height, speed, and position.

  At 0717 he was talking to the copilot of a Lufthansa Boeing 747, out on 40 West, handing him a weather check, confirming the position of an offshore blizzard to the south, off the coast of Maine.

  Two minutes later he picked up a new call, and his heart, as always, just skipped a beat. This was Concorde, British Airways supersonic star of the North Atlantic, streaking across the sky at 1,330 m.p.h. Bart heard a calm British voice saying, “Good morning, Gander… Speedbird Concorde 001…flight level five-four-zero to New York…MACH-2…. 50 North, 30 West at1219 GMT…ETA 40 West 1241 GMT…. Over.”

  Bart replied carefully, “Roger that, Speedbird 001…we’ll be waiting 1241…. Over.”

  The information was entered on his screen, and at 0738 Bart was waiting. Concorde was usually a couple of minutes early calling in because of the high speed at which she crossed the lines of longitude. To cover the 450 miles between 30 West and 40 West, she required only twenty-two minutes.

  At 0740 he was still waiting, but nothing was coming through from the cockpit of the packed British superstar racing through the skies out on the very edge of space.

  Bart Hamm already had a distinctly uneasy feeling. He watched the digital clock in front of him go to 0741 and knew that Concorde must be well past 40 West. But where the hell was she? At 0743.40 he opened his High Frequency line and went to SELCAL (selective calling), the Concorde’s private voice-frequency channel inside the cockpit. But there was no reply.

  Transmitting directly, he had already caused two warning tones to sound in Concorde’s cockpit to alert the pilots to his signals. Seconds later Bart transmitted a radio signal designed to light up two amber bulbs, right in the pilot’s line of vision.

  “Speedbird 001…this is Gander…how do you read?…Speedbird 001…this is Gander…how do you read?”

  By now Bart Hamm’s heart was pounding. He felt as if he were driving the supersonic jet himself, and he willed the voice of the British pilot to come crackling onto the headset. But there was nothing. “Speedbird 001…this is Gander…how do you read?” Unaccountably frightened now, Bart raised his voice and departed from procedural wording…“Speedbird 001…please come in…PLEASE come in.”

  He checked his own electronic connections, checked every step he was taking. But he could not remove the lump in his throat, and, unaccountably, a new image stood before his mind. The one that still awakened him on stormy nights, the image of that terrible morning on the quayside at St. Anthony, when he stood in the snow, and then in the radio shed, clutching his mother’s hand, praying for news of his lost father, the skipper of the missing fishing boat Seabird II.

  He tried one more time, calling through to the cockpit of Speedbird 001. And his hand was shaking as he finally pressed the switch to summon his supervisor. At 0745 Concorde should have been more than 100 miles beyond 40 West, and continued radio silence could only be the
dread harbinger of disaster because this aircraft was nothing short of a flying high-tech masterpiece, in which electronic backup was layered threefold.

  At that precise time, Gander Air Traffic Control sounded the alarm that a major passenger airliner was almost certainly down in the North Atlantic. They alerted British Airways, plus the international search and rescue wavebands. They also alerted the Canadian and U.S. Navies.

  The drills were routine and precise. Commanding officers were ordered to divert ships into the area where Concorde must have hit the ocean. And as they did so, the haunted face of Bart Hamm was still staring into his screen, listening through his headset.

  And his urgent, despairing voice was still broadcasting, unanswered, on a private frequency, out toward the edge of space “Speedbird 001…this is Gander…this is Gander Oceanic Control…please come in Speedbird…PLEASE answer… Speedbird 001.”

  1

  May 26, 2004.

  T HE LIGHT WAS FADING ALONG HAIFA STREET, AND IT was almost impossible to spot any Westerners in that seething, poor section of Baghdad. Men in djellabas, long loose shirts, occupied much of the dirty sidewalks, sitting cross-legged, smoking water pipes, selling small items of jewelry and copper. On one side of the main thoroughfare, dark narrow streets ran off toward the slow-flowing Tigris River.

  Tiny car workshops were somehow crammed along there between the cramped decaying houses. The stifling smell of oil and axle grease mingled with the dark aromas of thick, black, sweet coffee, incense, charcoal fires, cinnamon, sandalwood, and baking bread. Not many children wore shoes, and the dress was Arab.

  He should have stood out a mile, wearing a smoothly cut, grey Western suit, as he hurried out from the inner canyon of a green-painted garage. The club tie should have given him away; certainly the highly polished shoes. But he turned around as he walked out, and he embraced the elderly, oil-coated mechanic with warmth and affection. And he stared hard into the man’s eyes—an unmistakable Arab gesture, the gesture of a Bedouin.

  No doubt, the man was an Arab, and he caused few heads to turn as he headed back west toward Haifa Street

  , cramming a length of electrical wire into his pocket. He seemed at home there in that crowded, sprawling market, striding past the fruit and vegetable stalls, nodding at the occasional purveyor of spices or the seller of rugs. He held his head high, and the dark, trimmed beard gave him the facial look of an ancient caliph. His name was obscure, foreign-sounding to an Arab. They called him Eilat. But, in the circles that knew his trade, he was formally referred to as Eilat One.

  He made just one more stop, at a dingy hardware store 40 yards before the left turn onto the Ahrar Bridge. When he emerged ten minutes later, he was carrying a white box with a lightbulb pictured on the outside, and a roll of heavy duty, wide, grey plastic tape, the regular kind that holds United Parcel packages together all over the world.

  Eilat kept walking fast, sometimes straying off the sidewalk to avoid stragglers. He was thickset in build, no more than five feet ten inches tall. He crossed the bridge into the Rusafah side of Baghdad and made his way up Rashid Street

  . In his left jacket pocket there was a small leather box containing Iraq’s national Medal of Honor, which had been presented to him personally that morning by the somewhat erratic President of the country. The coveted medal counted, he feared, for little.

  There had been something in the manner of the President that he had found disturbing. They did not know each other well, but there had been an uneasy distance between them. The President was known for his almost ecstatic greetings to those who had served him faithfully, but there had been no such display of emotion that morning. Eilat One had been greeted as a stranger and had left as a stranger. He had been escorted in by two guards and was escorted out by the same men. The President had seemed to avoid eye contact.

  And now the forty-four-year-old Intelligence agent experienced the same chill that men of his calling have variously felt over the years in most countries in the world—the icy realization that no matter what their achievements, the past had gone, time had rolled forward. The spy was being sent back out into the cold. Or, put another way, the spy had gone beyond his usefulness to his master. In the case of Eilat One, he might simply have become too important. And there was only one solution for that.

  Eilat believed they were going to kill him. He further believed they were going to kill him that same night. He guessed there was already a surveillance team watching his little house, set in a narrow alley up toward Al-Jamouri Street

  . He would be wary, and he would be calmly self-controlled. There could be only one possible outcome to any attempted assassination.

  Still walking swiftly, he reached the great wide-open expanse of Rusata Square

  . The streetlights were on now, but this square needed no extra illumination. A 50-foot-high portrait of the President was floodlit by more voltage than all the city streetlights put together. Eilat swung right, casting his eyes away from the searing dazzle of his leader, and he pressed on eastward toward the great adjoining Amin Square

  , with its mosques and cheap hotels.

  He walked more slowly, tucking his white box under his arm and staying to the right, hard against the buildings. The traffic was heavy, but he had no need to leave the sidewalk, and unconsciously he slipped into the soft steps of the Bedouin, moving lightly, feeling in the small of his back the handle of the long, stiletto-bladed tribal knife, his constant companion in times of personal threat.

  He followed the late shoppers into Al-Jamouri Street

  and slowed almost to a stop as he reached an alleyway beside a small hotel. Then he quickened again and walked straight past, with only a passing glance into the narrow walkway, with its one dim streetlight about halfway along. He saw that the alley was empty, with two cars parked at the far end. They were empty, too, unless the passengers were curled up on the floor. Eilat had excellent eyesight, and he was good at remembering pictures in his mind.

  He stopped completely, standing, apparently distracted, outside the hotel, looking at his watch, checking the passersby, watching for someone who hesitated, someone who might slow down and stop, just as he had done. Twenty seconds later, he moved into the alley and walked slowly toward the narrow white door that opened through a high stone wall and led across the courtyard into the Baghdad headquarters of Eilat One.

  He heard with satisfaction the rusty grind and squeak of the hinges on the outside gate. He walked past an old bicycle and opened the door to his dark, cool house noiselessly. I wonder if they’ll come in friendship, he wondered to himself. Or will they just come busting in with a Kalashnikov and blow the place apart.

  He turned on the light in the wide downstairs hall and checked the setting on the low laser beam he had installed to inform him whether anyone had entered during his absence. There had been no one. And the white light on the wall panel, which flickered red if anyone opened a window, was steady.

  On reflection, he thought, they will probably try to take me out in the small hours of the morning. Stealth will be their method, and I suspect they will use knives. Messy, but silent. At least, that’s what I’d do, were I a simple paid assassin. I can’t see them risking gunfire, and I can’t imagine them confronting me, even in friendship. Not with my current reputation.

  It was after eight o’clock, and Eilat went to work with two screwdrivers, a large one for driving a bracket into the wall, a small one, for electrical connections. “The key to murder in the dead of night,” he muttered, “is vision. Night vision.”

  When his tasks were completed, he placed a solid wooden chair behind the door, turned out every light, drew the shades across the windows, and there, in the pitch-black, settled down to wait. With his eyes open wide, straining through the dark, he tried to make out shapes, but it took a full twenty minutes before he could distinguish the curved outline of the water pitcher on the table at the end of the hall.

  Midnight came and went. And still Eilat waited calml
y. He hoped there would not be more than three of them…but…if there were…Well, so be it. At 1:00 A.M. he stood up and walked to the pitcher and poured himself a drink, splashing the water into a stone cup without spilling it. Then he walked back to his chair behind the door without crashing into it. His night vision, which was perfect now, he would use to best advantage. The last thing he wanted was equal terms.

  They came for him at precisely nineteen minutes after 2:00 A.M. Eilat heard the gate squeak and the doorknob turn. The first man entered silently, dressed in dark combat gear with desert boots. A second man, sensed rather than observed, followed the first; and Eilat remained by the door, standing with his eyes clenched shut, his hands covering his face, protecting his night vision from the glow of the city outside.

  Suddenly, very suddenly, without opening his eyes, he moved. Raising his right foot, he booted the door shut with a shuddering impact. Then he turned toward the wall again, his eyes still clenched tight.

  The two visitors turned automatically to the slammed door, and, as they did so, the big theater lightbulb set above it came on with blinding brightness, catching them in its ferocious glare. For a split second the two men stood transfixed, like rabbits in a spotlight. Their hands flew to their faces, but it was too late. The bulb had been on for only two seconds, but their night vision was completely lost, at a vital moment for them both. And Eilat still had his.