Ramrod Intercept

“For now. Okay, where are we?”

Brognola checked the large monitor that displayed a tract of the Indian Ocean where the minisub was taking Phoenix Force to the Madagascan shore. Tokaido commented on the visual capacity of the state-of-the-art high-energy X-ray laser tracking beam that was monitoring the minisub and anything else moving in the water from space. Just like an X-ray it outlined the sub, twenty feet below the surface in a hazy gray frame.

“Two more minutes and they’re out the hatch,” Price announced. “They’re right on schedule.”

“The problem is that damn Russian satellite,” Brognola groused. “We’re going to be blind soon, and we won’t have another satellite pass over until they’re wheels up in the Spectre.”

“Five hours before it has to move on,” Kurtzman said. “And we still can’t get any answers from our side or any contacts we have in Moscow why a Russian satellite is up ONI-1’s rear. We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Over the phone.”

“Hal, I know I’m getting a little ahead of the program,” Wethers said, “but I’ve been poring over the sat imagery of the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. At some point I think we need to address it again. I mean, I have a clear and growing military buildup, far exceeding anything the Iranians have done to date. The key islands in the strait, Larak, Henqin, Sirri, Qeshm and the Greater Tunb Islands…well, they’ve moved in an additional sixteen pieces of antiaircraft hardware, including surface-to-air missiles. Now, one-third of the world’s oil supply is tankered through the Strait of Hormuz. I’m not pushing any panic buttons, but we’re looking at some connection between DYSAT, Sudan, the Iranians in Madagascar and the latest renewed military buildup on the islands. Say the Iranians pull the trigger? A 130 mm gun is more than plenty to sink any one of twenty tankers that pass through the strait every day. A wall of fire, a massive oil spill would shut the strait down. I don’t even want to begin to imagine the damage to the economic infrastructures of Europe, Japan, and, of course, the United States.”

And thus phase two.

“The President’s aware, Hunt, of the potential enormity of the problem. Depending on what happens with Phoenix in Madagascar, and if Striker’s able to link a few of the missing pieces together…let’s get Phoenix through Phase One. The Strait of Hormuz situation remains on the back burner.”

Brognola was watching the X-ray beam tracking the minisub when he saw it. It came at the minisub, from the south, moving through the water, on a collision course.

Kurtzman muttered a curse as he recognized it for what it was. “How close are they to shore?”

“Three hundred yards still,” Tokaido said. “Oh, my God.”

Brognola nearly lost his grip on the coffee cup, fingers clenching so hard around the cigar he nearly snapped it in two. “Please, people, someone tell me that’s not what I think I think it is.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It was the dreaded demon, the alpha and the omega, he thought, of any SEAL’s worst nightmare.

It was a white shark, and it was a big one.

Calvin James nearly leaped off the bench, as soon as the thud struck the hull from above, the black ex-SEAL scrambling toward the control console when—

He froze, heart lurching into his throat as he caught sight of the massive tail slowly stroking, fanning the murk, back and forth, out to the port side. Yellow light from the minisub outlined the creature, framed its white underbelly from which it got its name.

The sub’s driver, a blacksuit brought from the Farm, watched until the distant darkness swallowed up the great fish, his eyeballs nearly popping out of his skull.

Gone but hardly forgotten.

“Sir, that was at least a sixteen—”

“No,” James said, “more like an eighteen footer, four, maybe five tons. A submarine with teeth.” The former SEAL turned and read the grim fear on the faces of his comrades in Phoenix Force.

T. J. Hawkins was watching the dark gloom, intent as hell, as if the behemoth might come back for another look at the minisub, or worse—ram its head straight through the reinforced glass bubble. “Cal, I’m thinking they probably never told you what to do about something like that in BUDs.”

“Pray.”

Rafael Encizo, donning his frogman suit like the other commandos, said, “Beyond the Our Fathers and the Hail Marys, what’s the plan?”

David McCarter, the leader of Phoenix Force, stepped up to the control console, reading the depth gauges. “How close can you get us to shore?”

“Another fifty, sixty yards tops, then I’m cutting it close to hitting the bottom.”

And, of course, they were warriors, with a mission on the table. No one, even if the thought fleeted through his mind, was about to say out loud, “Hell, no, I won’t go.”

“So, that leaves us how far a swim?” Gary Manning wanted to know.

“A little less than a hundred yards.”

“Fire the torpedo,” McCarter told the blacksuit. “All right, mates, everybody has a knife. We swim in a staggered formation. Slow and easy. Give yourselves six feet apart, I’m thinking, breaststroke it in, blade in one hand.”

Space enough between them, which meant they wouldn’t accidentally cut each other with their knives while stroking.

“Gary and I will watch the flanks and the rear. It shows up and wants a late-night snack, go for the eyes.”

“I suggest we swim to the bottom, hug the deck all the way in,” James said. “When they strike, they usually come up from below.”

“Understood. Keep the headlights on us to light the way in,” McCarter told the submariner. “All right, mates, let’s saddle up and hit the hatch. No fish is going to keep us from going to the dance.”

BROGNOLA RAISED McCarter just as Phoenix Force was fully suited up, lined up and set to go out the hatch. He gritted his teeth until the blood pressure throbbed in his eardrums, the mere thought of what waited for them outside the minisub cutting a primal terror through the Justice man, the ungodly likes of which he hadn’t known in some time. A part of him wanting like hell to tell McCarter to scrub the mission for the time being, they’d find another way.

“I don’t like it, David,” Brognola said, checking the sat imagery from the X-ray eyes in the sky. “It’s either left the area or gone too deep to pick up on our end. We’ll be out of touch until you reach shore. You don’t even have a weapon—except a commando dagger.”

“We’re here and the troops are tired of sitting around, cooped up on a sub, Chief, thumbs up the old sphincter. We’re gone. I’ll phone home as soon as we hit the beach.”

“Good luck, and godspeed,” Brognola muttered, but he was talking to dead air.

“Torpedo just went ashore,” Akira Tokaido announced, but no one in the Computer Room looked hardly relieved by that minuscule piece of good news.

Brognola watched the monitor as, one by one, the five white ghostly shapes of Phoenix Force left the hatch and started swimming for the bottom. A hundred yards, he thought, the length of a football field. It might as well be a hundred miles.

THE END OF THE LINE, of course, for each and every man or woman was death. The journey along the way shaped, forged and revealed a man’s character before the Grim One rolled the dice and the man crapped out, ticket yanked.

No problem, as long as a man was somewhat in control of the journey, and could die on his feet, in battle, with honor intact, he thought. Thomas Jackson Hawkins, as a warrior, never had a problem with the concept of his own death. He never dwelled, much less brooded, on the idea of a world without him tomorrow. He was in the business of death, after all, preferably dispensing it, but he knew someday, somewhere he would go down and not rise up. As a warrior, dying in combat was accepted going in, part of the high-stakes game of being a balls-to-the-wall commando. Combat to him was as natural as breathing.

The problem he had, as he breaststroked ahead, knife in hand, was being chomped in two by a creature three times his length and fifteen to twenty times his weight. Something as old as the earth itself, which knew no fear, and had no known enemies.

Something that had put the fear of God into him, and any human being, he imagined, who had ever laid eyes on it. It always galled him, he thought, when some skipper and National Geographic types hit the waters off Australia or South Africa, in search of man’s greatest fear, camera ready, Budweisers in hand. Spouting off—in nervous laughing voices from the safety of their deck—how white sharks were misunderstood, weren’t really the ferocious man-eaters the uneducated believed them to be. All of it just myth, you see, fabricated by folks with too much time and imagination on their hands. So, why, then, he wondered, did they always go down into the water in titanium-reinforced cages?

Call it twenty, twenty-five yards tops of visibility on the flanks, with James and Encizo beside him, Manning and McCarter on the far outsides, the big Canadian and the former SAS commando lagging a little behind, doing a slow circle to watch their rear.

Ten inches of steel against a submarine with teeth. Man alive, he thought, they had to be crazy.

It was a straight plunge of roughly thirty feet to the ocean’s bottom, the halo of yellow light from the minisub losing its glowing shield the more distance he put from the craft…and closer to shore. Could the monster home in on the hammering of his heart? Could it smell the undeniable and understandable fear, leaking out in great streams of sweat beneath his wet suit?

Don’t think about it. He knew he wasn’t alone.

Small comfort, to be damn sure.

The sandy bottom began to run off on a gradual downward slant, and he was thinking another fifty yards or so.