Sea of Greed Read online

  Ben-Avi focused his attention back on the path, they’d come to the steepest section. When they reached the top, he would be able to see the ocean. “If there is a God, then either He doesn’t care what we do or He’s grown so disgusted with us that He’s given up on His creation. And who could really blame Him?”

  Cheval nodded. “You are troubled, my friend. If it’s not God you’re worried about, then what?”

  “I’m concerned with the power we’ve unleashed,” Ben-Avi said. “Every invention of man, every discovery ever made, has ultimately been used in war. This will be no different. Mark my words.”

  “Then why continue the work?” Cheval asked, suddenly sharper in his tone. “Why wait until we’ve finally succeeded to question our acts?”

  Ben-Avi had asked himself that question a hundred times. He had a pat answer waiting. “Because the world is a harsh and unforgiving place and Israel must do what it needs to survive. With or without God’s help.”

  “So, it’s every country for itself,” Cheval said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “It has to be,” Ben-Avi said.

  Ben-Avi was breathing hard as he climbed the last section, too hard to keep pontificating. He made it to the top of the bluff and looked out over a sheltered bay. The sea was calm, the sunset glinting upon it, the long arm of the breakwater protecting the small harbor as it had since the Romans built it. But the harbor was not empty as it should have been. A long, thin, sinister-looking vessel lay at anchor inside the bay, a surfaced submarine. Its bow pointed to the heart of the island like a dagger.

  Ben-Avi turned around and saw that Cheval was holding a pistol on him.

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Cheval explained. “It is every nation for itself. If we didn’t act, your government would. And that we cannot allow.”

  The sound of muted gunfire reached them from farther back down the hill. A fight had broken out—not a battle-on war, but a burst here and a burst there.

  Ben-Avi took a step toward the camp.

  “Don’t,” Cheval warned. The Frenchman’s face was grim as if performing a task he would have rather avoided. “I’m sorry. But if we had not acted, your country would have. The power you’ve unleashed with your genetics can reshape the world we live in more easily than a dozen armies. It’s a weapon already. And it’s a threat to France in particular. We cannot allow it to end up in foreign hands.”

  “No,” Ben-Avi said. “It’s a deterrent. No different from your atomic bombs. It would never be used.”

  “I’m afraid my country cannot take that chance,” Cheval said.

  The sound of additional gunfire reached them from the camp.

  “So, you’re killing us?” Ben-Avi said.

  “No one was supposed to be hurt,” Cheval replied. “Someone must have resisted.”

  Ben-Avi didn’t doubt that. Though he suspected the French commandos might have hoped to encounter resistance. “And what about me?” he asked, his voice filled with disgust for his former friend. “Do I suddenly fall off the edge or are you going to shoot me first and then throw me in?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Cheval said. He nodded toward the submarine. “You’ll be coming with us.”

  2

  FRENCH SUBMARINE MINERVE, APPROXIMATELY TWENTY-FIVE MILES FROM TOULON

  EIGHT DAYS after leaving the island of Jaros, the French submarine Minerve was nearing her home port of Toulon. It was operating forty feet below the surface, running at eight knots and using the diesel engines, which gulped air through a long metal tube known as a snorkel. They’d been running in this configuration almost continuously since leaving Jaros and André Cheval could not wait for them to surface.

  The claustrophobia of being trapped underwater was bad enough. That the Minerve was carrying extra cargo, plus the equipment, supplies and samples from the laboratory, made it worse. That the submarine was overpopulated and carrying nearly twice the number of people it was supposed to house—thanks to the presence of Cheval, the other French scientists and the ten French commandos who’d conducted the raid—made the situation nearly unbearable.

  The gnawing guilt that the commandos had killed all the Israelis except Ben-Avi did not help and Cheval had taken to drinking each night to put himself to sleep.

  Still, they were in French waters now and almost home. By this time tomorrow, Cheval would be sitting in a café in Paris, forgetting his sorrows in the fresh air with a bottle of fine wine.

  Until then, he stood in the submarine’s cramped control room, watching everything that went on. Across from him, the Minerve’s captain leaned on the periscope handles with his face pressed into the viewer. Every few seconds he turned to scan a new section of the surface—dancing with the gray lady, as the sailors sometimes called it.

  Finally, he flipped the handles closed and stepped back. “No vessels in sight,” he said. “Periscope down.”

  As the periscope descended into its well, the captain turned to the radio officer. “Advise, Command. Weather deteriorating. Eight-foot swells and chop. We will remain at snorkel depth until we reach the channel.”

  This news was like a kick in the gut to Cheval.

  And he wasn’t the only one.

  A man named Lukas stood nearby, hovering over the navigation charts. Lukas was the head of the commando team, a member of the SDECE, the French external intelligence apparatus. He was a harsh man in his mid-fifties.

  “Must we crawl into port like this?” Lukas said. “We’ve achieved a great success. We should arrive with dignity, if not fanfare.”

  The Minerve’s captain was a lifelong sailor. Like many in the regular military, he distrusted secret operatives, with their hidden agendas and lack of oversight. His reply was blunt. “Do you really want to surface the boat and become a target at this point?”

  Lukas pointed at the chart and a red line, approximately four hundred miles behind them, that indicated the nearest possible approach of Israeli ships. “There are no Israeli ships within twelve hours of our position. They cannot possibly catch us.”

  “They have aircraft, too, Monsieur Lukas.”

  “None with this range. And nothing our Mirage fighters could not handle.”

  “You might be right,” the captain said. “Regardless, we shall remain submerged until the very last moment. And you shall remain silent while a guest on my boat.”

  Lukas fumed at the reprimand, turning his back on the captain and heading aft to join his men.

  Cheval looked at his watch, fighting the claustrophobia. It was early morning on the twenty-seventh of January. They’d left the island on the evening of the nineteenth. They were almost home. Once they were back on land, he would report Lukas for what he considered war crimes.

  Even though he could do nothing about those who’d already been killed, he told himself he’d would find a way to keep Ben-Avi from vanishing into an unmarked grave.

  Three hours. He just needed to hold it together for three more hours.

  * * *

  • • •

  “THE Minerve will reach port in three hours.”

  The words came from a grim-faced man, standing in a darkened control room very similar to the one on the Minerve. His name was Gideon. He was the executive officer of the INS Dakar, an Israeli submarine recently purchased from the British.

  His face sported two weeks of patchy beard. Scars on his jawline cut across it like furrows in a field. He was tall for a submariner and spoke with his head ducked down to keep it beneath the pipes that ran overhead.

  “The French have stolen something precious from Israel,” he told them. “We’re the only ones in position to prevent them from succeeding in this latest treachery.”

  The Dakar had been two days out of Southampton en route to Haifa when an ultra-coded signal from the Israeli high command had interrupted their shakedown cruise.
They’d been ordered to proceed to the southern coast of France at top speed and lie in wait, while the high command entered false position reports into the record and prepared cover stories and obituaries should their high-risk mission fail.

  For the better part of two days, Gideon and his men had been waiting and planning. After finally picking up a sonar contact, and confirming it was the Minerve, they’d allowed it to pass and had moved in behind it.

  They’d quickly closed to within a hundred yards. So close that they could hear the Minerve’s screw turning without using their hydrophones.

  The next task seemed impossible to accomplish. Gideon and his men were not commandos, most weren’t even experienced sailors, but every single one of them was ready to fight and die for his country.

  Gideon explained. “In the ancient times sea battles were not won by sailors but by soldiers. The Romans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks—they rammed their enemies and stormed on board, where the fighting and killing was done by hand.”

  The men looked on without blinking. Their smooth faces belied their desire to right a terrible wrong. They didn’t know exactly what was at stake, but they knew the French had betrayed them yet again.

  After enacting an arms embargo on Israel during the Six-Day War. After keeping a squadron of Mirage aircraft and a small fleet of patrol boats that Israel had already paid for. After suddenly cozying up to Israel’s Arab enemies. The French had now crossed a line that could not be tolerated. They’d killed Israeli citizens and taken something the Israeli high command was willing to risk war over.

  “This will not be easy,” Gideon insisted. “There hasn’t been a ship boarded and captured in these waters for many centuries. One is damned well going to be boarded and captured today!”

  The men cheered. They had only a few submachine guns and pistols as weapons, but they most certainly had surprise on their side. They were tucked in so close behind the Minerve that the French submarine could not possibly hear them over its own engine noise.

  As the men readied themselves to go topside and storm the Minerve, a radioman several feet away sat with a hand pressing a headphone to his ear. “Intercepted transmission,” he said glumly. “The Minerve is remaining submerged until they reach the channel.”

  This was unwelcome news.

  “We can’t board them in sight of the coast,” one officer pointed out. “We’ll have the French Air Force down on us before we can even find the materials.”

  “We could put a fish in their side and be done with it,” the tactical officer suggested.

  The captain shook his head. “Our orders are to get the stolen materials back at all costs. Those orders come directly from the Knesset and the Prime Minister. We’re to sink the Minerve only if we’re in danger of being destroyed ourselves.”

  “But we can’t board a ship that’s submerged,” the tactical officer said.

  Gideon took it from there. He’d been considering the problem for a while. “Then we’ll have to force them to the surface.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ABOARD the Minerve, Cheval drummed his fingers on the chart table, remaining where he’d been during the argument with Lukas. Every few minutes he checked the clock and the boat’s position. Both seemed to be crawling.

  “How long until we reach the channel?” he asked.

  The captain looked his way and then turned as the sound of wrenching metal ran through the boat.

  What had to have been an impact was followed instantly by a suction wave that pulled air from the cabin, causing ears to pop and sinuses to ache. Yellow and red indicators lit up on a control panel and the suction grew worse.

  “It’s the snorkel,” the dive officer said. “Valves are shut. Complete malfunction.”

  The snorkel was designed with an emergency cutoff that sealed the breathing tube if water overtopped the airway. With the snorkel closed off, the churning diesel engines were forced to suck air from the only place they could get it—the inner hull of the submarine.

  “I ordered plus three meters on the surface,” the captain said, referring to how high the snorkel was supposed to be riding above the waves.

  “We’re running at that depth,” the dive officer insisted.

  Either the weather had gotten suddenly worse and the waves larger or something in the snorkel had failed.

  Every man in the control room looked upward, counting the seconds and hoping the snorkel would clear.

  Cheval felt a wave of nausea, partly from fear, partly from the decrease in pressure. He looked at the clock, this time watching the second hand. Thirty seconds went by, then forty. The situation did not correct itself.

  “Water in the periscope tunnel,” one of the NCOs called out. “Upper seals must be cracked.”

  Cheval could think of nothing more fearful than water leaking into a submerged vessel. Even if it was just a trickle. He considered the sound of the wrenching metal, the shudder in the control room. “We must have hit something,” he said. “We need to surface.”

  To Cheval’s surprise, the captain agreed with him. “Floating debris perhaps,” he said. “Take us up. Surface the boat.”

  The dive control officer blew the tanks and changed the angle on the planes. The Minerve began to rise, bow first. Cheval noticed water trickling down the periscope tube. He looked to the depth gauge, saw that they were rising and sighed with relief as he felt the submarine break the surface and level off.

  A second loud bang sounded and the suction vanished, causing Cheval’s ears to pop again. “Main vents open,” one of the men said. “Engines breathing outside air.”

  “Ahead one quarter,” the captain ordered. “I’m going up to see what kind of damage we’ve taken.”

  With the first officer at the helm, the captain led a damage control party up into the conning tower, opening the inner and then outer hatches.

  Daylight poured in. Gray and monochrome but beautiful. As the last man’s legs went up through the hatch, Cheval stared jealously at the opening. Without thinking or asking permission, he stepped to the ladder and began to climb.

  He reached the top, poked his head out and paused in shock.

  The periscope and the snorkel were bent to the side at a thirty-degree angle. The steel was mangled and deformed from the impact. The antenna housing had been sheared off.

  Stranger still, the captain and the damage control party were not studying the damage to make repairs, they were being held at gunpoint.

  Black-clad men with submachine guns had forced them to their knees. Two motorized inflatable boats were peeling off behind them, heading toward the bow of another submarine.

  Before he could process the scene and react, Cheval was yanked upward and thrown against the bulkhead of the conning tower. A large man with scruffy beard jammed the point of a machine gun into his chest. “Not a sound, if you want to live.”

  Cheval nodded his compliance. He knew instinctively who these men were, who they had to be. “You’re Israeli.”

  “My name is Gideon,” the bearded man said, nodding as he spoke. “Judging from the lack of uniform, you must be one of the French scientists. Which means you know what we’re after.”

  Cheval hesitated, not out of defiance but from pure shock. “I know what you want,” he then said.

  “Good,” Gideon replied. “Go down the ladder first. Do anything foolish and you’ll die first as well.”

  Cheval led them back into the submarine, climbing down the ladder as calmly as possible. Halfway down, Gideon kicked him and sent him tumbling. The fall acted as a distraction and the crew in the command center were watching him when Gideon and another commando jumped down and landed on the deck.

  With the machine guns drawn and the crew flatfooted, there was no way to resist.

  “We have your captain,” Gideon told them. “We’re here to take back what
you stole from us. No one will be harmed if you cooperate.”

  As the Minerve wallowed in the swells, additional commandos came down the ladder. Leaving two men to guard the control room, Gideon forced Cheval to lead them deeper into the submarine. They took more captives in each compartment, surprising most of the men in their cabins. The French commandos were rounded up as well. All except Lukas.

  “Keep the others under guard,” Gideon ordered. “Send two men to find this Lukas. Shoot him on sight.”

  As the men moved off, Cheval took Gideon to Ben-Avi’s quarters and released him. “We’ve come to bring you back to Israel,” Gideon told Ben-Avi. “But not without the materials.”

  “I don’t know where they are,” Ben-Avi said.

  Gideon turned to Cheval. “Where are the bacterial cultures?”

  “In the mess hall.”

  Cheval led them to the mess hall, with Gideon, Ben-Avi and another of the Israelis right behind him. They entered the hall, where several stainless steel cylinders with black bands around each end stood.

  Gideon ordered Cheval to the side and sent Ben-Avi to check the equipment.

  “This is the primary strain,” Ben-Avi said, checking the first drum. “And this is—”

  Before he finished his thought, the hammering of an automatic weapon rang out. Ben-Avi went down in a hail of bullets. Ricochets bounced around the mess hall and everyone dove for cover.

  “Right corner, by the freezers,” the other commando yelled.

  Cheval was on the ground, scrambling for cover, as Gideon opened up with his weapon. By the time Cheval looked up, Lukas was dead, lying prone on the deck in a pool of his own blood. A few feet away, Ben-Avi was faring little better.

  Cheval rushed to him and tried to check or stop the flow of the bleeding. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is all my fault. Please forgive me.”

  Ben-Avi looked past Cheval as if he wasn’t there. He moved his mouth to say something but never spoke a word.

  * * *