Overlord (21 page)

On the wall map there was a blotch of red blood smearing the small town in Arizona that would see Vickers free of his dilemma: Chato’s Crawl—the home of the Matchstick Man.

USNS
ALAN SHEPARD

UNITED STATES NAVAL SUPPLY VESSEL

The
Alan Shepard
rose on the twelve-foot swell and then rolled slightly to the starboard beam as her blunt but powerful nose fought free of the foam and sea that had so suddenly sprung to life around her. She went from a five-knot wind and light seas to having to take on ballast to keep her firmly placed in the water. Her captain leaned forward and peered through the wipers that tried in vain to keep her bridge windows clear. The swirling skies above were taking on a shape that the young captain didn’t like at all. He turned and looked toward his executive officer.

“I want damage control to standby near the ammunition lockers. This would be the time we find out that someone went slack on their loading procedures because no one was expecting this an hour ago.”

“Already done.” The exec reached for a control panel just as the
Alan Shepard
rolled again, this time to port. Lightning illuminated the interior of the bridge and many worried looks from her young crew were exchanged at the sudden appearance of the swirling storm.

“Captain, we’re starting to get a severe current slamming us from the starboard side. We’re having a hard time keeping course.”

“Maintain course, bring speed up to fifteen knots. I want to get out of this corkscrew. This is beginning to look like a typhoon.”

“I heard the North Sea was rough, but this is ridiculous,” the exec said as he finally gained control and steadied.

“Captain, you better look at this,” called out one of civilian load handlers. He was looking through binoculars and gesturing in the growing darkness of the raging storm. The captain grabbed a pair of glasses and turned to his second-in-command.

“Get a message off to South Hampton and warn them about this. They have to get word out to those deep-sea oil platforms—this thing could tear them apart. Message the Royal Navy that they may have a situation brewing out here.”

“Aye,” the exec replied and moved off to get the word out.

The captain quickly raised the glasses to his eyes as the
Alan Shepard
went deep into a trough of water that plunged her no less than a hundred feet down a steep waterfall of terror. She corrected and then her bow shot almost straight up. Lightning flashed and eyes flinched as they broke free to the surface once again.

“My God,” the captain said beneath his breath as he eyed the most amazing sight he had ever seen in the natural world—one he knew few had ever seen before. The clouds swirled in a clockwise motion high above them and thirty miles to the south. It looked as if it was a hurricane forming but the captain knew it was swirling far too perfectly. What he was seeing looked almost animated. The colors of blue, purple, green, and reds turned at an amazing speed. The sea directly beneath was churned up into a whirlpool that covered no less than ten miles of the North Sea. A giant wall of water was reaching up to touch the bottom of the tornado of light. The captain flinched and turned away when the windows were blotted out by a thousand streaks of lightning as they broke free of the swirling mass and struck out into the sky in all directions.

“Captain, sea temperature has risen by ten degrees, current winds approaching one hundred miles per hour!” The shout came as the captain regained his sight and once more looked out into the raging hurricane.

“Bring us hard to port—get us the hell out of here! All ahead flank!”

The large supply ship turned hard as the captain saw a sight that froze his blood. Far above and twenty miles away the great tornado of clouds, water, and Lord knew what else, slammed into the sea. The two met with a powerful explosion that sent the sea three miles into the sky, and that still was not enough to hide the terror of the mass of swirling light as it met the ocean. The captain turned away just as the bridge windows exploded in. He looked up and then his heart sank just as five objects of tremendous size exited the twirling tornado. The sound they made even broke through the passion of the raging winds—a deep base tuba that hurt the ears of men twenty miles away. Five times the excruciating noise broke through as the sound of the objects exiting the storm finally diminished and then was gone. The giant round structures then vanished into the eruption on the surface of the North Sea. They disappeared as fast as they had arrived and even then the captain truly wondered if he had seen them at all.

“God!” came a scream of terror as the
Alan Shepard
rolled hard to starboard as the rogue wave slammed into her. Men lost their grips and fell. Cargo meant for the USS
Nimitz
carrier battle group broke free and crushed many below decks, and still the giant supply ship rolled. A tremendous scream rent the air as the ship began her death roll.

Three minutes later the bottom keel broke the surface of the North Sea and the USNS
Alan Shepard
rolled lazily on the now-gentle surface. The sun gleamed off her red-painted underside as men started to bob to the surface of the cold sea one and two at a time. The storm had completely vanished as if it had never been there at all. There was only the debris of a once-proud supply ship that marked the graves of many a sailor.

UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

BIRJAND, IRAN

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looked on angrily from behind the protective three-foot glass wall as technicians raced to put out the fire that blazed at the base of the alien power plant. General Hassan Yazdi was standing beside him and too saw the debacle that the final test had turned out to be. He felt the anger rolling off of Ahmadinejad in waves. The ex-president reached out and struck the intercom button with a closed fist.

“Turn off that cursed alarm,” he said over the intermittent beeping of the fire warning system. He waited as the alarm was finally silenced. He turned to the general. “As if these incompetents couldn’t realize on their own that they had a fire, they had to be warned?” He shook his head as he watched the fire being brought under control. “How does the placement of your men progress?”

“The First Guards Division is entrenched outside of Tehran, and the Third Guards are at this very moment approaching the holy city of Qom. We will have no trouble from the clerics—nor, dare I say, the ayatollahs. The bulk of the men believe they will be preventing a coup, not initiating one. Once the president falls, the religious right will fall in line with the plan, especially since it will be too late to stop it.” He looked into the dark eyes of the smaller man. “That is if this infernal device works correctly and the target actually is struck.”

Ahmadinejad remained stoic as he held the general’s eyes. “That is something we shall see about right now.”

As the two men watched a large glass doorway parted and the lead physicist stepped out. The giant, round, mostly glass and strange steel power plant was still and dark behind him as other technicians scrambled on and over it. The man used a white towel to wipe his hands. He angrily removed the white lab coat he was wearing and tossed it aside. He rummaged in his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of American cigarettes. He caught himself just before he lit up and looked at the dark eyes staring at him. He cleared his throat and apologized, then placed both cigarette and lighter back into his pocket.

“Well, what happened to the test?” Ahmadinejad asked, still eyeing the bald man.

“We had a power spike from the blasted power plant itself.”

The two men just stared at the physicist.

“The power we were supplying it was too much; the damn thing seems to be correcting its output on its own. The technical advancement of this engine is so far beyond our understanding. It’s like it is healing itself after being inactive for so long. It’s actually correcting the adjustments we had made to it.”

“Talk straight, man,” Ahmadinejad said angrily.

“It has made an adjustment entirely on its own that actually made it more efficient. It went out of control momentarily and didn’t target anything on this planet. There was no ground strike, it just dissipated into space … we assume.”

“Will the machine work in the manner we need it to?” Yazdi asked. “I have half a million men with their lives hanging in the balance if it doesn’t work, you fool.”

“Oh, yes, yes, very much so,” the man said, wishing for a cigarette in the worst way. “We now know what to look for and will prevent the power plant from spiking. We’ll adjust our input of power to compensate for what the engine provides.”

“Will it work?” Ahmadinejad asked as he leaned forward into the scientist’s face.

“Yes, the targeting will be accurate to the foot.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad finally dipped his head. He turned and faced the general. “Make final preparations to eliminate the key government personnel we have selected—seal the capital off, General.”

The taller man came to attention as the once and now future president of Iran turned to the shaking physicist.

“Correct your machine and make it operational within the hour. No more delays.”

“Yes, sir,” the man shakily answered.

“A complete strike package will be delivered to you in one hour. Target: Tel Aviv.”

SSN
SUFFREN

NORTH SEA

The boat was new. She was on her third shakedown cruise deep in the North Sea as the French navy unveiled its latest attack submarine: the Barracuda-class
Suffren.
Her design and construction had been done in secret and the French people had been shocked when news leaked of the Barracuda class of boats. Protests from Paris to Toulon took up every available minute of news time on television. The anger stemmed from the program’s prohibitive cost, for the six new boats of the Barracuda class would cost the people of France eight billion Euros—roughly twelve billion dollars. The citizens could not grasp the need for such an expensive weapons platform when the world—so it was thought—was drawing down from the war on terror. It seemed to the French nation that military spending was on the rise just as it was in other countries. Every western nation along with China was trying to quietly bring on new and expensive weapons platforms for no apparent reason or perceived threat. Riots in every western nation soon followed the discovery of new weapons programs that no nation on earth could possibly afford after the costly war on terror. The anger stemmed from not having a justification for the buildup.

Captain Jean Arnaud, a veteran of every class of submarine the French navy had produced since the end of the Cold War, sat at his elevated station just above the navigation console. Arnaud was close to his retirement from the sea and was preparing to drive a desk after the
Suffren
had been thoroughly put through the ringer on this, the last of her shakedown cruises.

As he looked around the silent control room he wondered if the protests back home would eventually shut the most expensive naval program in the history of France down before the second boat, the
Duguay-Trouin,
could be launched early next year. He shook his head in wonder at the way civilians thought. He knew the program was needed, but he had to admit that in this day and age it was hard to justify the expense of such a massive weapons system when the terrorists of the world were on the run and the old Soviet Union didn’t exist. As far as the Chinese went, they had been silent for the past four years on anything concerning their military. Rumors of a massive Chinese buildup could be the force factor in the West’s rearming.

At the moment the
Suffren
was running a standard station-keeping drill in the thermal cline a thousand feet below the surface of the roiling North Sea. If the new boat could keep still at the thermal cline—which was a layer of current that separated deep water from shallow and had varying degrees of current and temperature—her shakedown would be complete. Thus far the
Suffren
had not moved three feet in either direction. Her thrusters kept her nearly motionless in the dark waters as the rough current tried to push her first one way, and then the other.

“Very nice. Enter the specs into the computer along with the time and note it. Gentlemen, let’s bring her up to five hundred feet at a bearing of 237 … let’s take her home.”

He saw the relief on the faces of the young French sailors as the order was given and the shakedown was officially closed. The
Suffren
had passed all of her tests. Even his officers were relieved to learn they were headed back to L’Ile Longue submarine base.

“Sonar, do you have anything in the vicinity?”

“Conn, sonar, no close-aboard surface contacts and nothing below.”

The captain nodded his head and then started to relax.

“Five hundred feet and zero bubble, Captain.”

Arnaud heard the chief and smiled. “Gentlemen, push the fish out of the way and let’s get back home with our newest fleet boat. Watch commander, all head two-thirds.”

“All ahead, two-thirds, aye, Captain.”

The
Suffren
and her new power plant pushed her silently and efficiently through the frigid waters of the North Sea.

HMS
AMBUSH

TWENTY-SEVEN NAUTICAL MILES EAST OF
SUFFREN

The French navy was not the only nation in Europe with the latest in attack submarines. The Royal Navy was in the middle of producing its own—the Astute-class submarines would lead the empire into a future of subsurface warfare that was on a par with the United States and her Virginia-class line of superboats. The
Ambush
was the second keel to have been laid down at the shipyard and her crew was well aware that theirs was the leading class of attack boat in the entirety of the Royal Navy.

“It looks as if our French friends may be satisfied. It seems they are headed home, Captain.”