Читать книгу End Game - Dale Brown - Страница 34

The torpedo was not a good fit. At 4.7 meters long – roughly fourteen feet – it just barely fit beneath the smooth round belly of the Sparrow. More importantly, at roughly seven hundred kilograms – a touch over fifteen hundred pounds – it represented nearly twice the aircraft’s rated payload, making the plane too heavy to take off with full fuel tanks.

But the limitations of the small, Russian-made seaplane were almost assets. For the Sparrow could ‘fly’ across the waves at a hundred knots on a calm night like this, approaching its target at two or three times the speed of a conventional torpedo boat or small patrol boat, while being quite a bit harder to detect than a conventional aircraft. When in range, about ten kilometers, it could fire the weapon, and then, considerably lighter, take to the sky and get away.

Which was the plan.

‘Target is now fifty kilometers away,’ said the copilot. Their target, an oil tanker bound for India, was being tracked by the largest aircraft under Sattari’s command, an ancient but serviceable A-40 Beriev seaplane sold as surplus by the Russians some years before. The aircraft had just passed overhead at eighteen thousand feet, flying a course generally taken by a transport to India from Greece.

‘Begin turn to target in ten seconds.’

Captain Sattari grunted. He was still angry over the meeting with the oil minister and his father earlier – so mad, in fact, that he had bumped the pilot from the mission and taken it himself. Not because he felt he needed to prove his courage or ability, but to help him master his rage.

Flying had always helped him in this way. It had nothing to do with the romance of the wind lifting you into the sky. No, what settled Sattari was the need for concentration, the utter surrender of your mind and senses to the job at hand. Planning the mission, checking the plan, then flying it as precisely as possible – the process freed him, chasing the demons of anger and envy and frustration from his back, where they hovered.

‘The A-40 reports that there is a warship south of the tanker,’ reported the copilot. ‘Heading northward – three miles south of him. An Indian destroyer.’

A destroyer?

‘Are they sure it’s Indian?’

‘They’ve overheard transmissions.’

The tanker was a more important target, but if the black robes wanted to provoke a war, striking a destroyer would certainly make them angrier.

And no one could call him a coward then.

‘Compute a new course,’ said Sattari. ‘See if it’s possible to strike the destroyer if we use the tanker as a screen. We can always drop back to our original prey.’