End Game by Dale Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

Morocco, she regularly sailed these waters, delivering oil from Iranian wells to a number of African customers.
    Or so her logbook declared.
    Below the waterline, she was anything but standard. A large section of the hull almost exactly midship had been taken out and replaced with an underwater docking area for the four midget submarines. The vessels would sail under the tanker, then slowly rise, in effect driving into a garage. The submarines measured 8.4 meters, and the opening in the hull was just over twenty, leaving a decent amount of space for maneuvering.
    The murky image on the forward-view screen suddenly glowed yellow. The camera aperture adjusted, sharpening the image. A set of large spotlights were arranged at the bottom of the hull; as the Parvaneh came closer, another group of colored lights would help guide the sub into the hold.
    â€œIs the tanker moving?” Sattari asked.
    â€œThree knots.”
    The submarines could dock whether the mother ship was moving or not, and as long as it wasn’t going more than four knots, most of the helmsmen felt it was easier to get aboard when the ship was under way. But in this case, the fact that the tanker was moving was a signal that there were other ships in the area. Sattari sat back in his seat, aware that not only was his mission not yet complete, but the success or failure of this final stage was out of his hands.
    Aboard the Abner Read ,
off the coast of Somalia
0208
    â€œT AC , I’ M CLEAR OF THAT FREIGHTER ,” SAID S TARSHIP , FLYING the Werewolf south. “Tanker is two miles off my nose, dead on. I’ll be over it in heartbeat.”
    â€œRoger that.”
    Starship whipped the little aircraft to the right of the poky tanker. He could see two silhouettes at the side of the superstructure near the bridge—crewmen looking at him.
    His throat tightened a notch, and he waited for the launch warning—he had a premonition that one of the people aboard the ship was going to try shoving an SA-7 or even a Stinger up his backside. But his premonition was wrong; he cleared in front of the tanker and circled back, ramping down his speed to get a good look at the deck.
    â€œTake another run,” said Tac as he passed the back end.
    â€œRoger that. Ship’s name is the Mitra ,” added Starship. The name was written at the stern.
    â€œKeep feeding us images.”
    Â 
    S TORM HAD HANDPICKED THE CREW FOR THE SHIP , AND THE men who manned the sonar department were, if not the very best experts in the surface fleet, certainly among the top ten. So the fact that they now had four unknown underwater contacts eight miles away perplexed him considerably. As did their utter failure to match the sound profiles they had picked up with the extensive library in the ship’s computer.
    And now they seemed to be losing contact.
    â€œHas to be some sort of bizarre glitch in the computer because of the shallow depth and the geometry of the sea bottom nearby,” insisted Eyes. “Maybe it’s an echo.”
    â€œThat’s impossible,” said Storm.
    â€œI know.”
    Eyes recognized the tone. It meant—not everything works in the real world the way it’s drawn up on the engineering charts, Captain.
    Still, he was convinced his people were right.
    So what did that mean?
    That either he was looking at four submarines—four very quiet submarines—that no one else in the world had heard before, or that he was being suckered by some sort of camouflaging device.
    Like an underwater robot trailing behind the submarine, throwing up a smoke screen.
    The problem with that was that decoys normally made a lot more noise. These contacts were almost silent.
    â€œWe have mechanical noises in the water,” said Eyes. “We’re having some trouble picking up the sounds, though, because of that tanker.”
    â€œExplosion?”
    â€œNegative.”
    â€œTorpedoes?”
    â€œNegative. He may have some