End Game. Dale Brown

      Storm allowed himself one more deep, luxurious breath of air, then went back inside.

       Aboard the Wisconsin, over the Gulf of Aden 2045

      Dog nudged the Megafortress into position to launch the first sonar buoy twenty miles north of the stricken destroyer. The Megafortress would set a large underwater fence around the area, waiting for the sub to make its move.

      ‘What’s the destroyer’s situation?’ Dog asked Jazz.

      ‘Nothing new,’ said the copilot. ‘Still fighting the damage. They’ve had a couple of sonar contacts but they seem to have been false alarms.’

      As Dog and Jazz launched the buoys, Dish searched for the submarine’s periscope. A half hour later they had covered every inch of the target area without finding anything.

      ‘Best bet, he’s sitting down about three hundred meters, just about as low as he can go, holding his breath and waiting for the destroyer to limp away,’ said Jazz.

      ‘He’ll be waiting a long time.’

      ‘He won’t get by the buoys without us knowing.’

      Dog wasn’t so sure about that. In theory, the hunters had all the advantages – the buoys could find anything in the water down to about 550 meters or so, and an extended periscope or snorkel could be easily detected at this range.

      But the reality of warfare was never quite as simple as the theory, especially when it involved a submarine. Dog had worked with the Navy on sub hunts before, and they were always complicated and tricky affairs. In NATO exercises, submarines routinely outfoxed their hunters.

      ‘Just a waiting game now, Colonel,’ said the copilot. ‘We’ll get him eventually. We just have to be patient.’

      ‘For some reason, Jazz, being patient has always seemed the hardest thing to do,’ Dog said.

       Approaching Oman on the Saudi Peninsula 2145

      Captain Sattari felt the sweat rolling down his arms and neck. His clothes were so damp it seemed he’d been out in the rain. He was cold, and in truth was afraid, sure that he was being tracked by a powerful American surveillance radar, positive that some unseen fighters were scrambling along behind him to take him down. Every bit of turbulence, every vague eddy of air, sent a new shiver down his spine. He had the engines at maximum power; the airspeed indicator claimed he was doing 389 knots, which if true was at least thirty miles an hour faster than the engineers who made the plane had said was possible. But it was not nearly fast enough.