Sea of Greed

Maneuvering past the last of the torpedoes, he found an area of smoothly deposited silt. As the drone’s thrusters began to disturb it, the outline of a boot became visible. No foot. No bone. Just a boot.

Kurt knew from studying previous wrecks that marine life consumed almost everything organic within a few decades of a sinking. Still, the presence of the boot reminded him that this was a grave. He continued the quest soberly until he’d examined the entire forward section and come up against the damaged forward bulkhead. There was nothing beyond that except the sand and the sea.

He glanced at the chronometer. They’d been on the bottom nearly four hours. With the hour it had taken them to descend and the time required to surface, they were nearing a full day.

“Nothing in the forward section,” he called out over the radio. “Any luck in the engine room or aft quarters?”

“We’re finishing up now,” Gamay said. “Nothing to report.”

“Time to head up,” he said. “Otherwise, Rudi will be screaming about the overtime. Recall your drone and get ready to surface.”

As Paul and Gamay confirmed the order, Kurt maneuvered the drone back to where he’d found the boot. He allowed it to descend until it was almost touching the sand. As the sediment swirled, other parts of a uniform were exposed. This was someone’s last resting place.

Opening a compartment in the nose, he extended a tiny arm from the drone. The arm held a small round stone that Kurt released, allowing it to fall onto the silt beside the uniform.

A small gesture of respect.

That done, Kurt retracted the arm. He was about to bring the drone out of the hull when he noticed a small metallic object sitting upright in the silt. It was a brass pin. A decoration given to sailors for completing a special type of mission.

As Kurt focused on the pin, he realized he’d seen that type of pin before, not on an Israeli sailor but on the uniform of a friend who was a longtime French submariner.

Without pause, Kurt plucked the decoration off the sediment and stowed it away. He then retrieved the drones and joined Gamay for the nearly hour-long trip to the surface.

All the way up, he mulled over a single question. What was a French naval insignia doing in the wreck of an Israeli submarine that was supposedly sent to the bottom by the French Air Force?

54

BEN GURION INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

RUDI GUNN stood on the curb outside the main terminal at Ben Gurion International. Despite a lightweight linen jacket and a hat to keep the sun off his head, he was sweating in the August heat the moment he stepped out of the air-conditioned building.

Fortunately, a white Lincoln was already pulling up in front of him.

“Mr. Gunn?” the driver asked.

Rudi nodded and took off his jacket and climbed into the car. “How quickly can you get me downtown?”

“There should be no delays whatsoever,” the driver insisted. “Traffic has been getting lighter every day. Where are you going? The message didn’t say.”

“The General Staff Building at the Kirya,” Rudi replied.

The Kirya was an area in Tel Aviv where the Israeli Defense Force headquarters were located. In essence, it was the Israeli version of the Pentagon.

Rudi had been there several times, the trip from the airport usually started out smoothly and then got bogged down in traffic, but on this run the only traffic Rudi saw was a long collection of cars and trucks waiting to fuel up at a single gas station. “Have they started rationing gasoline?”

“Not officially,” the driver said, “but many of the stations are closed. A large, new tax has been imposed on any vehicle that isn’t a hybrid or electric. It’s calculated based on mileage, so no one drives if they don’t have to. It’s my living, so I don’t have a choice.”

Rudi sat back. He’d seen lines at the gas stations in Washington before he left. The price of oil was going through the roof, just as the President said it would. Traders were riding the wave with glee, while regular people were acting the way they often did before a hurricane rolled through, filling up everything in sight in case there was no gas available next week.

Rumors of gas stations closing and oil companies withholding deliveries made it all worse.

Then, in an attempt to calm the public, the President had gone on television to assure everyone that there was enough oil in the strategic reserve and coming in from unaffected sources for the nation to function normally without grinding to a halt. The effect of that speech was panic.

Unfortunately, Rudi thought, a presidential denial of a problem served only to confirm in the minds of many that the problem was real. Silently, he wondered how far America was from mileage taxes, forced carpooling or people checking their license plates to see if they ended in odd or even numbers as they’d done during rationing in the seventies.