Disclaimer: I don't own Ultimate Muscle, and I don't claim to.
Prologue: A night on the Bosporus.
Silence reigned over the towering steel and glass pillars of Galata, and permeated between the alert minarets of the old city. Save for the slight twitching and rustlings of the wildlife of the city, nothing dared to breach this unspoken truce.
Below the watchful gaze of the Suleiman mosque, the IWF official yacht, Herculean rested on her anchor cables in quiet contemplation. Her occupants slept deep within the warm grasp of her steel hull, minds freed to wander their subconscious realms at will. Only the distant hum of the generators interrupted the peace of the ship.
However, on the Eastern flank of the old city, another story was emerging. Slinking beneath the smooth surface of the Bosporus was a dark and sleek body. Her weight was pushing the sea above her up into a slight dome, but this was not discernable to the guardsmen at the Topkapi Palace overlooking the Straits.
A-004 was an Alfa class attack submarine, built in 1983 in the bleak shipyards bordering the Soviet Naval Base in Murmansk. From this Arctic wasteland, she had watched the West for years until, in 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, she was laid up in a dockyard in Murmansk, and left to rot.
And so she had done, until just 2 years ago, when a lightly built and immaculately dressed businessman had turned up in Murmansk, and gone into the Naval Commissars office. Exactly what was said eluded common knowledge, but when it had ended, the businessman had acquired A-004. One short week later, and the hulk of the aged vessel was loaded onto a floating dock and whisked away.
The key flaw of the titanium-hulled 44-knot Alfa class is the amount of noise she creates from her clanking nuclear reactor pumps. This had been changed completely, with the reactor, drive system, computers, weapons guidance and numerous other systems ripped out of her hull and replaced with the best technology that money (and good contacts) could obtain. The submarine, hidden under a mountain overlooking a semi-forgotten Norwegian fjord, had become the last word in submarine technology.
And now, she was resting on the bottom of the Bosporus, awaiting her orders. They came a few seconds after she had stopped, as a brief burst over her ULF (ultra-low frequency) antenna of digital data. The captain studied the sheet with immaculate precision, then leant forwards and whispered;
"Conn, release the divers."
"Aye sir."
A minute later, fifteen divers broke out from her escape hatch one after the other and hurried away towards the shoreline. As soon as the noise of their swishing flippers had vanished from his ears, the captain spoke again.
"Conn, take her up to 50 feet, engines at 5 knots and make a nice steady shift into the centre of the channel. We've got a boat to catch."
The submarine handled magnificently, deftly rising from the sandy bed of the Bosporus and then scuttling over towards the middle of the wide channel, her sonar's pricked to the distant rumble of two large Volkswagen diesel engines.
The divers, meanwhile, slipped gently out of the waves, discarded their gear, and darted for the Topkapi palace.
Just three minutes later, the first gunshot of the night rang out over the night air, signalling the end of the first life to be lost.
Now, as ears began to twitch to the warning signs, hundreds of people began to filter out of hotels and youth hostels across the city, and make their way towards telephone exchanges and railway stops and numerous other vital installations.
As they did so, a new vessel rounded the Bosporus and came into view of A-004. It was the President Ataturk, official yacht of the President of Turkey. Hanging off her port quarter was a lone frigate, drifting idly along with her active sonar switched off; the nature of the Bosporus produced very confusing feedback. A-004 drifted a few feet more to one side, then stopped dead.
Steadily, A-004 eased open one of her torpedo tube doors, and carefully ejected a lone torpedo out into the water of the Bosporus. Then, the door slid shut deftly and the sub resumed her sideways scuttle towards the Asian shore.
The torpedo drifted slowly downwards, the timer on her motor ticking silently by without regard to the looming shape of the President Ataturk's hull. It seemed, to the men on the A-004 at least, that the torpedo might not go off.
The sonar operators on the frigate heard nothing of the torpedo, until, suddenly, a burst of noise echoed into their ears as the torpedo's timer ran out and her motor spun into sudden life.
"TORPEDO!" came the imperilled cry from the weapons room – too late for the consort of the frigate.
The torpedo swung straight up, and honed in directly on the loudest noise she could hear, that of the two diesel engines in the hull of the President Ataturk. It entered directly in front of the port side engine, and detonated after the first one and a half feet were inside the hull, with horrifying consequences.
The diesel engine on the port side was physically thrown off its mountings by the sheer force of the blast, which ripped up the double hull like the lid of a sardine can, creating a tear half as long as the yacht in the bottom of the ship. Millions of gallons of seawater flooded in, filling up the bottom of the ship in seconds. As the tear was on the port side, the ship began to develop a heavy list towards that side.
On the surface, the explosion was muffled by its location; nevertheless, many people saw the gush of water emerging from the flank of the ship
The waves emanating from the blast echoed out across the harbour, making the Herculean rock violently at her moorings. Jeager stirred from his sleep, and rolled over onto his back, rubbing one eye idly as he did so. What was…
A loud explosion shook his out from his stupor, and he sat bolt upright in bed.
Operation Drageses Revolution had begun.