Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5) George Wallace (the little red hen ebook .TXT) 📖

Without hesitation, they continued on, straight up the center of the Red Sea, precisely as ordered, intent on performing the mission for which they had been programmed.

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The USS Gerald R. Ford, CVN-78, had barely dropped its hook in the anchorage off Port Said when the canal pilot boat pulled alongside the massive aircraft carrier. The canal pilot grunted and cursed under his breath as he climbed the long rope ladder, making his way up to the hangar deck elevator that towered above the little motor launch. Once safely on the hangar deck, the pilot was next escorted up a series of ladders—he twice had to ask that they pause for a moment while he caught his breath—until they finally arrived on the mammoth ship’s bridge. For years the carrier had been the largest warship ever constructed. The winded pilot had no reason to doubt it.

Once on the bridge, he informed the captain that the carrier along with the rest of the strike group would be part of the morning’s southbound convoy. In all, there were fourteen merchant ships, a motley group of steamers, tankers, and container ships, and they would all be steaming along ahead of the strike group. They expected three more merchant ships to arrive in time to follow the group down the narrow channel. The Ford should weigh anchor and be ready to get underway by 0300. The entire mishmash of vessels would enter the canal precisely at 0330 local time.

At 0330 on the dot, the convoy proceeded down the canal. Barring any unexpected events, the hundred-mile transit south would take a little more than twelve hours. At eight knots, the long line of ships was making what appeared to be a leisurely cruise down the waterway. They were abreast the sand-buffeted canal town of Ismailia when a northbound convoy passed them going the other way in the northbound channel.

By noon, the Ford and other ships were entering the Great Bitter Lake. That meant more than half of the transit was behind them. They were making reasonably good time.

But then, one of the merchant tankers ahead of them lost power. During the two-hour delay, the convoy sat motionless while the Canal Authority tugs maneuvered the stricken vessel out of the channel to an anchorage.

By the time the convoy reached Port Tawfiq at the canal’s southern entrance, the sun had long since dropped below the western horizon. The strike group commander decided that, after the long and exhausting canal transit, it would be prudent for his ships to swing at anchor overnight while the crews rested. Then they would be fresh to enter the unfamiliar waters of the Gulf of Suez and, ultimately, the Red Sea beyond.

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The UUVs turned into the Gulf of Suez and continued their swim north. By midnight, the first of them was abreast Adabiya, Egypt. There the Gulf was only six miles wide and a little over a hundred feet deep. The lead UUV sank down and settled into the sand below. There it rested, waiting.

Soon the rest of its brethren had joined it in a rough line that stretched all the way across the bottom of the narrow channel. They, too, sat there, patiently waiting, as if contemplating an ambush.

32

The sun was just clearing the eastern horizon, out over the Sinai Desert, when the USS Sam Nunn, DDG 133, raised its anchor and got underway. The USS Carl Levin, DDG 120, followed a few hundred yards astern. The two new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers headed down channel out of their Port Tawfiq anchorage as the first ready element to go find the elusive Nabiin and his pirated ship.

As soon as they were clear of the crowded harbor, the Nunn and the Levin both spun up to a flank bell. The gray ships’ sterns squatted in response to the twin five-bladed controllable-pitch screws biting into the clear blue waters. A churning white rooster tail erupted astern as the massive ships shot forward.

The two destroyers were making better than thirty knots as they hurried past Ra’s al Adabiya, a sandy headland jutting far out into the deep water at the head of the Gulf of Suez.

The Sam Nunn passed almost directly over where one of Nabiin’s UUVs rested on the sea bottom. The device’s delicate sensors registered the magnetic anomaly from a nearby large steel body, sensed the pressure wave from a ship racing overhead, and heard the churning of its screws. That was adequate data to satisfy its logic circuits.

It released a warhead that floated up and promptly attached itself to the American warship. The warhead’s own logic circuits had directed it toward the vessel’s keel where the two-hundred-kilogram charge dutifully detonated seconds after attachment.

The resulting massive explosion ripped a giant hole straight into the hapless destroyer’s forward engine room and broke the ship’s back, causing a widening crack from the keel to the main deck. Only the reinforced steel deck and a good bit of sheer luck kept the Nunn from breaking in half and sinking right there.

Superheated explosive gases vented into the space, immediately followed by a wall of floodwater. Both of the destroyer’s starboard LM-2500 propulsion gas turbines were ripped off their mounts while fragments of red-hot metal sprayed around the three-level space. The starboard shaft ground to a sudden halt. The still-spinning port shaft twisted the ship around in a tight circle to starboard.

This was a very fortunate turn as it allowed the captain to drive his dying ship up onto the soft sand bottom of the Ra’s al Adabiya shoals. With its hull safely resting on the bottom, the ship was no longer at risk of sinking. The crew could now put all their efforts into damage control and rescuing their injured shipmates. Clearly, it would be a very long time before the Sam Nunn sailed the seas again. But she was not on the bottom of the Gulf and her crew was relatively safe.

When she saw