Depth Charge (Jason Trapp Book 4)
Copyright © 2020 by Jack Slater
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Artwork by Onur Aksoy at One Graphica.
Depth Charge
Book Four
Jack Slater
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Epilogue
Author’s Note
1
The boat’s name was the MV Challenger, and she was a deep-sea recovery vessel, constructed only a year earlier in a German shipyard for the astonishing sum of nearly nine hundred million US dollars. She was built in plain sight, and rumors as to the unknown benefactor behind the effort swirled like wildfire in the niche, but highly dedicated amateur ship spotting community.
She even had an Instagram page.
The commonly accepted explanation for her construction, fitting out, and operation was that a wealthy, unknown benefactor wished to locate and raise the USS Yorktown, the US Navy aircraft carrier lost during the Battle of Midway, along with her escort ship, the destroyer USS Hammann.
It was, however, a lie, elaborately constructed and maintained to create an illusion hidden in plain sight. The perfect cover story.
The Challenger was presently located approximately 500 miles north of the US military installation on Wake Island, the site of the famous, and ultimately unsuccessful, US Marine Corps battle with the Japanese during the Second World War.
It was a still, clear January day in the middle of the North Pacific. Perfect conditions for the undertaking that was about to commence. The Challenger was indeed built to raise a naval vessel from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. The target, however, was not an American vessel at all.
It wasn’t even a ship.
It was a submarine.
The boat in question was Chinese, a Type 094 Jin-class missile sub named the Tianjin, and once a key plank of China’s nuclear deterrence capability. She had disappeared nine months earlier, on only her second cruise after leaving the Bohai Shipyard in Huludao, China, and approximately eighteen hours after her last scheduled position report to People’s Liberation Army Navy headquarters. The Chinese were unaware that she was even missing until she missed her next scheduled check-in thirty hours later.
The alarm wasn’t raised until twelve hours after that, by which time with a normal operating speed that was classified, but believed to be in the region of 30 knots, the total potential search radius stretched over 1,550 miles of empty ocean, an area of almost 7.6 million square miles.
It was an impossible area to comb through, though the Chinese desperately attempted to do just that, mounting the largest naval operation in the PLAN’s history. For seven months, dozens of Chinese ships crisscrossed the North Pacific, searching for a vessel that they would never find. The search area was simply too large, the conditions too challenging. The CNS Tianjin was somewhere amidst tens of trillions of gallons of water, perhaps at the bottom of a deep-sea trench that stretched beyond the limits of human technology to explore.
The truth was, unless someone knew exactly where to search, the exercise was hopeless.
Major Amir Nazeri smiled a grim, cold smile as he stood at the bow of the Challenger, the occasional tendril of a warm breeze caressing his face, because he was one of the few men alive who knew exactly where the wreck of the Tianjin had come to rest. He was a slight man, his head shaved almost to the scalp, with eyes so brown they seemed black.
Nazeri had lost no sleep as a result of the deaths of the one hundred and nineteen officers and crew aboard the Chinese submarine. In fact, the sinking of the Tianjin was the crowning achievement of his career. He knew where the wreckage of the drowned boat lay because he had put it there.
He’d spent years studying the patrol patterns of Chinese submarines, how long they spent at sea, how often they contacted home base. Which ports they visited to refit, refuel and rearm. How to jam the emergency radio beacon sent up in case of disaster. And then he’d waited until the Tianjin stumbled into the trap he’d set and killed it. It truly was the greatest intelligence accomplishment not just in his own career, but his entire country’s history.
“Until this one,” he murmured, a warm sense of pride radiating from deep within him as he rested his forearms on the ship’s railings and stared into the ocean’s depths.
It was the kind of operation an intelligence officer waited an entire career to participate in. It was not his plan, of course; he was merely a cog in the machine. An important one, but nonetheless simply one moving part in a far grander scheme. Of course, he would never be able to tell his children or grandchildren what he had done. Perhaps he would blurt it out on his deathbed, no doubt to be discarded as the ramblings of a senile old man.
“Major,” a man behind him said, the voice that of his second in command and protégé, Lieutenant Farid Radan.
Nazeri turned, noting with professional satisfaction that the man’s uniform was neatly turned out, no matter the fact that they were hundreds of miles from the nearest scrap of land, and thousands of miles from anything more substantial than a coral atoll. It was not the uniform of their country, of course. There was nothing aboard the Challenger, beyond the presence of Nazeri and his men, that could link the Islamic Republic to what they were doing.
“Lieutenant.” Nazeri nodded agreeably.
“How goes the recovery effort?”
“The grapples are secure,” Nazeri replied. “Three of them, as we planned. We shall not make the mistake the Americans did.” He wrinkled his nose with disgust. “Fools.”
The mistake he was referring to was the attempt made by the Great Satan’s CIA to recover the Soviet submarine K-129 in the highly classified Project Azorian effort almost 50 years earlier. A purpose-built recovery vessel, the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer was constructed at a staggering cost to retrieve a Soviet missile boat from the depths of the ocean floor. At over 16,000 feet deep, that attempt was a far
greater technical challenge than this.
The CIA operation was designed to retrieve not just the Soviet boat and the nuclear missiles contained within, but far more vitally, her codebooks. Like the Challenger, she had been built in plain sight and hidden with an elaborate cover story.
Like the Challenger, she had located her target, secured a grappling line to the sunken vessel, and successfully raised the broken submarine from the depths of the ocean.
Almost.
For during the long journey up, much of the submarine broke away, including the all-important codes, never to be retrieved again.
Nazeri had studied every publicly available scrap of information about the failed effort and vowed that he would not make the same mistake. The Challenger had sent down three lines, mounted at the bow, aft and midsection of the Tianjin, and securely fastened. There would be no failure.
“When do we begin the lift?” Radan asked.
“Tonight,” Nazeri replied, a mirthless smile stretching across his face. “Two hours before sunset. We have a nine-hour window during which the American satellites cannot see us.”
“You think they are watching?” Radan wondered in a worried tone.
“Are you afraid, Lieutenant?”
Radan shook his head emphatically, subconsciously straightening his posture as he turned toward his mentor. “No sir. But we–you–have invested too much in this operation to let them find out.”
Nazeri relaxed, mollified by his underling’s response.
“Indeed I have,” he murmured, stroking his neatly shaven chin.
He was unused to life without a beard, but had gladly shaved it for the duration of their operation, as had all the men under his command. It was a little thing, but the Great Satan’s Navy treated these seas as their own, as they did all the world’s oceans. They had no reason to board the Challenger, but if they did, Nazeri intended to give them no cause for suspicion.
“No, Lieutenant Radan,” he continued at length, “I have no reason to believe the Americans have any idea what we’re doing. Still, there is no sense in taking risks, is there?”
“No, sir,” came the immediate reply.
“Are the men prepared for their”–Nazeri chewed his lip as he worked out how to phrase the question—“for their other task?”
If Lieutenant Radan felt any revulsion for his role in what was to come, he did not show it. The young officer nodded instantly, his expression resolute and unchanged. “Yes, Major. They know their duty.”
“Good.” Nazeri smiled. “Once we have the boat, you know what needs to be done.”
2
The thing about the Middle East, Trapp thought ruefully, that most civilians simply did not understand was that it wasn’t always baking hot outside. Sometimes, like this present moment, it was positively damn frosty, so cold that his spine threatened to chatter, not just his teeth.
Trapp was currently twenty miles west of the Iraqi city of Ramadi, a city that he was no stranger to, a city that had been bitterly fought over during the insurgency that followed the ill-fated invasion in 2003. Thankfully, this time the enemy didn’t know he was here.
Or so he hoped.
He’d spent the previous two nights hiking to his current position, a dust-blown gully that as far as he could tell was in the middle of fuck nowhere. Two days of hiding beneath the cold desert sun, eating freezing MREs and crapping into the foil pouches when he was done. Of boot-packing during the dark of night, carrying a fifty-pound ruck on his back, urinating into plastic sacks, and adding those to his load, too.
“Boston, it’s Hangman,” Trapp murmured into his throat-mic. “How copy?”
To conserve power, he only activated the encrypted radio every three hours. The nearest friendlies were fifty miles away, on a mission support site – a fancy name for a patrol base – stranded in the vastness of the Iraqi desert. They were a company of Army Rangers, a brotherhood to whom Trapp himself had once belonged and would never forget. They were some of the best fighters in the entire Army, men who would stop at nothing to answer the call. And if he got himself into trouble, they were too far away to do a damn thing to help.
You’re on your own, kid.
“Hangman, we copy,” came the immediate reply from MSS Boston. “What’s your status?”
“I’m dug in,” Trapp said in a low tone, aware that his voice could carry in strange ways across the flat, barren terrain. “Waiting for company.”
“They’re on their way,” Boston replied. “We’ve got a Predator tracking the convoy. Too far away to be noticed. They’ll be with you in twenty mikes.”
“Copy that,” Trapp said. “I’m going dark. I’ll check in when this is over.”
“Understood, Hangman. Good luck.”
Trapp clicked his radio off without acknowledging their last. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but every soldier had his foibles, and why tempt fate?
His hide was damn near invisible in the dark. He’d built it the previous night and checked over his work at first light with a critical eye that would have matched any drill instructor. The adjacent terrain was flat, though spotted by several low mounds, boulders covered by a thick coat of blown dust swept from the surrounding flatland. He nestled himself into one of these, digging himself into the dirt and topping it with dried desert grass. It was almost impossible to make out in full sunlight. Now that that chariot had passed over the horizon, he was a ghost.
The vehicles arrived right on schedule, a procession of half a dozen white Toyota SUVs, their haunches dusty from the off-road final section of the journey to the meeting point, their low-beam headlights throwing a glowing pyre in front of them through Trapp’s night vision equipment.
Adrenaline spiked inside him. Though he was not the kind of man who allowed himself to be waylaid by the siren song of drugs, if Jason Trapp was addicted to anything, it was a hormone produced by his own body. Like so many in the special forces community, he was an adrenaline junkie. It was, after all, difficult to willingly throw yourself out of the back of an unpressurized Air Force transport plane at 30,000 feet, go head to head with drug runners in the Colombian jungle or storm a defended beach in the face of a hail of gunfire without receiving some reward in return.
And the paltry salaries on offer in the military did not count…
But in his present condition, adrenaline was the last thing that Trapp needed. His job was to sit tight and simply observe this meeting, purportedly between a high-level handler in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a coalition of local Iraqi militia groups.
And although the barrel of a McMillan TAC-338 sniper rifle, a weapon favored by both Delta and Team 6, was hidden by camouflage netting and desert plants in his hide, alongside a Heckler and Koch HK 416 assault rifle, his real weapon was the high-spec Japanese SLR camera mounted on a tripod next to it. This particular model was encased in a rubberized, drop-resistant shell, as was its long-range lens, which was presently focused on the circle now being formed by the Iranian convoy.
Trapp dropped his eyes to the camera lens and snapped several pictures as the vehicle skidded to a stop, focusing on their license plates. After he hiked out of here, that information would be uploaded to a joint database shared by US Special Operations Command, CIA, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet soup. The plate info would probably prove useless, but there was no harm in capturing it anyway.
The real reason Trapp was there that night was – as was so often the case – politics. President Nash had invited the new Iranian president, a moderate supported by the country’s newly politically enfranchised youth and growing middle class, to speak at the NATO summit the United States was hosting in just under two weeks’ time in New York City.
Nash wanted to bring the decades of animosity between the two countries to a close, and President Khorasani in turn was hoping to break the stranglehold of the Islamist leaders on his country’s politics. It was a delicate dance, and Nash was unwilling to leave anything to chance.
N
aturally, the hardliners in Tehran were unhappy about the prospect of losing their grip on power. And there was no organization more hardline than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, particularly the feared Quds Force – a unit dedicated to unconventional, extraterritorial warfare and intelligence activities. In short, the Quds Force’s sole mission was to advance the aims not just of Iran, but of the hardline Islamist nuts who ran it.
A series of mechanical thuds rang out across the quiet desert as doors on either side of about half the vehicles sprang open to disgorge armed men, their boots scraping on the rocky terrain of the dusty desert floor.
Trapp stopped snapping pictures with the camera and shifted his focus to the low-light scope of the McMillan sniper rifle. Though he was pretty certain that a combination of the two hundred yard buffer from the meeting point, the sickly light thrown from a half-moon, and his hide meant that he was undetectable, he moved with infinite patience, knowing that the human eye is drawn to movement and unwilling to give his opponents any unforced advantage.
Trapp’s eyes were accustomed to the darkness now, though he kept the left one closed, just in case a stray headlight beam should shoot across the desert and ruin his hard-fought night vision. He rested his chin on the rifle and studied the scene in front of him.