Read Online H.M.S. Unseen by Patrick Robinson - Free Book Online

figures who did share his views, very firmly. Which is why he had been singled out to work with the newly arrived Benjamin Adnam, the world’s most wanted terrorist.
    The big Hercules began descending toward the Bandar Abbas airport, slipping down through the hot clear skies. Ben could see from his window the submarine docks in the distance. There would be much activity in there during the week, with the arrival from St. Petersburg of the first replacement Kilo, Russia’s special export model; the 636 AIP, Yunes-4 (Jonah-4, named for the prophet who was swallowed by a whale but saved by God).
    Ben could imagine her quietly berthed in the submarine pens, the 235-foot-long 3,000-tonner from the Baltic, and as he did so he imagined himself in the control room, as once he had been. Admiral Badr also wore a faraway look, remembering, as he so often did, the black night of August 2, 2002, around the midnight hour…the scene of absolute devastation that had greeted him at the Iranian submarine base. The confusion. The fear. And the desperate, unavailing attempts to save the men on board the two hulls that had been sunk alongside the jetties.
    He would soon have his first sight of an operational Kilo in the harbor of Bandar Abbas since that most terrible night. And it gave him heart. For he assumed that under the guidance of this quite brilliant Iraqi officer, with whom he now shared a common goal, they would harness the new Kilo to attack the hated, imperious enemy from the Western hemisphere. Admiral Badr liked it.
     
    A Navy staff car greeted them as they disembarked and drove them immediately to the base. Ben put his few possessions in the house provided for him, next door to the admiral’s residence. Twenty minutes later they were in the Special Ops room, which comprised the entire top floor of a small executive block. Each man had a private office, with secure phone lines. There was a wider conference room between them, which contained drawers full of Navy charts, reference books, architectural plans, a fax machine, a copying machine, and three computers, one containing all of the world’s naval charts, another a myriad of marine engineering and design information. Ben guessed most of his work would be done on the third computer.
    There was no sign of any staff or assistance in any form. But there were four armed Iranian Navy guards in the upstairs corridor, beyond the big locked wooden doors. Ben approved that, and checked that the guards would be on duty twenty-four hours a day. Every day. He also requested that the two-man guard on the main entrance be trebled.
    “You like security, hah?” said Admiral Badr.
    “Admiral, the consequences of a foreign agent breaching our defenses and ascertaining our plans would represent your very worst nightmare. If they happened to work for the CIA, I think you could assume a full-scale U.S. air strike on this port from one of their carriers within forty-eight hours. We, you and I, probably would never know what hit us. But, should we survive, we would be rightly blamed and executed. I don’t care how many guards you deploy—40, 60, 100. The consequences of not having enough of them are utterly unthinkable.”
    “You’re right, Ben. You’re usually right, hah?”
    “Mostly. Which is why, essentially, I’m still breathing.”
    The admiral nodded, gravely. Then he hit his beeper to summon his regular chauffeur, for a tour of the dockyard to inspect the work in progress, in readiness for the Three Strikes against the Great Satan.
    The two officers each wore the new summer uniform of white shorts, socks and shoes, dark blue shirts, short-sleeved, with epaulettes and the insignia of rank. They each carried a 2-foot-long officer’s baton. All of which set them apart as they stood on the dusty edge of the massive construction site being dug out of the shoreline on the southeastern corner of the harbor, directly opposite the regular submarine docks, facing inland, with the road and