Barracuda 945 (39 page)

“Admiral Woodward just said, ‘The speed and direction of any enemy ship is irrelevant, because both can change in a matter of seconds.’”

“Jesus. That’s right too,” said Jimmy. “Are you suggesting, sir, the
Barracuda
could have dived, turned around, and headed northeast.”

“Yes, I am. Because it easily could have. And there was no other submarine that could possibly have hit the trawl net. There is no other explanation. And nor can there ever be. If missiles hit Valdez, they must have been fired from that
Barracuda.
One sneaky little bastard, I think we’ll discover.”

Lt. Arash Azhari and his six highly trained members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were making their exit from the submarine, which was positioned thirty feet below the pitch-black surface of the water. One by one they went into the exit chamber, which flooded down, and then opened, allowing them to float out onto the casing of the motionless
Barracuda.

Each man carried black French-made scuba gear, and a frog-man’s suit distingushed by extra-large flippers and a working flashlight set onto the tight-fitting rubber helmet. They were unarmed, save for fighting knives, but four of them carried strapped to their backs below the breathing equipment a powerful “sticky” bomb, magnetized, with a twenty-four-hour timing device.

By 1:15 all six frogmen grouped in the icy water, around twelve feet below the surface, right on the escarpment of the underwater cliff that forms the Overfall Shoal. They were just 300 yards from the south-running pipeline out of Yakutat. And if they swam due east, they must run over it sooner or later. This was the choke point, the narrow waters over the shoal, across which the pipe
must
run, according to the minute calculations of Mrs. Shakira Rashood.

Lieutenant Azhari led the way, checking his wristwatch compass every three minutes. They kicked long, hard, slow strokes with the big flippers, conserving their air, heading for the shallowest part of the shoal. And shortly before 1:30, the beam of Azhari’s flashlight picked out a wide, dark shape on the seabed, more or less where Shakira’s map said it would be, snaking out of the Dixon Entrance and down the Hecate Strait.

All the men could see down through the clear, unpolluted water, and the pipeline still rising toward the surface. Right now it was around eighteen feet below them, and Arazhi gave the signal for two of the men with bombs to join him almost directly below. Like the other four, they were experts in underwater demolition.

Swiftly, they kicked down eighteen more feet, and then they unclipped the two bombs and set both timers for twenty-two hours. The four-foot-wide pipeline was encased in steel and carried no barnacles in these very cold waters. The first bomb clamped on magnetically with a dull
clump
sound.

The second was placed exactly opposite on the other side of the pipe, the timer reversed three minutes and twenty-one seconds, the precise time Lieutenant Azhari’s stopwatch measured between the fixes. The bombs would detonate simultaneously, shortly before midnight tomorrow.

ALASKA AND THE NORTHWEST—THE
BARRACUDA’S
PRINCIPAL TARGET AREA

They joined their three colleagues and showed the leader the time on the stopwatch, which showed the start of the twenty-two-hour cycle. Then the second three men broke away and began swimming downhill, following the pipeline back north, into deeper water, down the escarpment of the shoal.

They kept going for 1,000 yards, and unclipped the last two bombs, placing the first one on the steel pipe and taking a total of 17 minutes off the 22-hour setting. Then they clamped the fourth and final bomb on the precise opposite side of the pipe, set the timer for 21 hours, 39 minutes, and 14 seconds, and turned back west.

They were almost 100 feet deep here, and as they swam back westward, they kicked toward the surface, settling 12 feet below the waves for the final 200 yards, back to the submarine, which was now emitting a slow
beeeep
every twenty seconds to guide them back.

When they arrived, Lieutenant Azhari was waiting, the other two frogmen having already boarded through the wet-hatch. Ten minutes later they were all inboard, and the giant U.S. oil pipeline from Yakutat was doomed in this part of the ocean, barring a zillion-to-one fluke.

Captain Ben Badr turned his ship slowly west, and they headed back out through the Dixon Entrance, into the 12,000-foot-deep waters of the Gulf of Alaska, where they could run 1,000 feet below the surface, and where they would be virtually impossible to find. They were headed due south.

Officer Kip Callaghan’s telephone never stopped ringing. Local people were literally in line to give information, ask for information, or just to talk about the savage roaring blaze, which still thundered into the smoky skies on two sides of their town.

It had taken almost twenty hours to stop the flow of crude oil flooding out of the inflow pipe from the north, directly into the
terminus, and igniting with the rest of the stored fuel. The electronic control center was still completely out of action, but they had managed to turn off a huge valve on the pipeline, by hand, some two miles north of the city.

Wearily, Officer Callaghan picked up the ringing phone again. “Valdez Police—Situation Room.”

“Sir, I’m calling from Glennallen with a little information you may want.”

“OK, sir. Just give me your full name and address, and age. Plus the number you are calling from.”

“Cal Foster, P.O. Box 58, Glennallen. I’m twenty-one, and I’m calling from 907-555-3677.”

“Thank you, sir. Please tell me your information.”

“Well, I’m really calling about a UFO I saw in the sky on Friday morning around 1:30.”

“A UFO! You mean a kinda flying saucer, sir?”

“Well, kind of.”

“Sir, this is the Situation Room for the fire catastrophe. You’d probably be better to let the main Police Department know about a flying saucer. Right here, I’m strictly in the combustion area.”

“Officer, I’m in the right department. I may have a connection to the fire.”

“OK, sir. Tell me.”

“Well, me and my buddy, Harry Roberts, had just stopped on the Glenn Highway on our way home, and we were, like taking a leak, facing north, when I saw this missile flying through the sky. Real quick, right above us. I could see a flame coming from the back, and it made a kinda growling noise. It was heading directly south to the mountains and Valdez….

“Then, just about a half minute later, I saw another one, maybe a mile to the east, but going the same way. Just as quick. Identical. I was thinking they could have been missiles—you know, aimed at the oil terminal…and maybe they started the fire.”

“Sir, did your buddy also see the objects?”

“He wasn’t in time to see the first one. But I yelled when I saw the second one, and he saw that, all right. Mind you, he didn’t really believe it was a missile. He thought it was a low-flying aircraft,
and he might have been right. But I don’t think so. I ain’t never seen anything go so fast through the air, not that low to the ground. That was no aircraft. Nossir.”

“You took a while to let us know. How come?”

“Well, I never knew about the fire until the middle of the day Friday, and I’d kinda forgotten about the rockets I’d seen. Then I got to thinking about ’em, and last night I suddenly thought there might be a connection.”

“Sir, I’d like to speak to your buddy Harry.”

“Well, right now he’s up at the Caribou Cafe.”

“They got a phone?”

“Sure. It’s 822-3656. Don’t listen if he tells you it was a 747 or something. It wasn’t.”

“Okay, Cal. I’m gonna try to get this corroborated. I’ll call you back….”

Officer Callaghan called the Caribou and asked to speak to a customer named Harry Roberts. Half a minute later, the reluctant spotter of the UFO was on the line.

“I saw it. Yes sir. I definitely saw it. And Cal was right. It was traveling real quick. And I saw it much later than he did, only seconds, but it was going away from us time I turned around.”

“You didn’t see the first one at all?”

“Nossir. Cal just caught it as it went over us. I wasn’t in time. But I saw the second one. Flying straight for the mountains.”

“Well, your buddy Cal thinks those rockets might have been headed for the oil terminal, and were the cause of the fires.”

“Coulda been…coulda been…”

“Do you think they were kinda mysterious? Like not an aircraft, more like a missile?”

“Well, I haven’t given the one I saw much thought. But it was kinda creepy. The thing you’d notice was how fast the bastard was going. And Cal’s right—it was a lot too fast for a regular aircraft.”

“One more thing, sir. What time was it when you and Cal saw ’em?”

“Well, I got home at exactly 1:30
A
.
M
. So Cal musta spotted the first one at around 1:20. It took us about ten minutes to get home from there.”

“OK, sir. That’s all. Thanks for your time.”

Kip Callaghan knew the first explosions in the oil terminal were now put at 1:30
A
.
M
. It was ninety miles up to the Glenn Highway where Cal and Harry saw the possible missile. If the damn thing was making ten miles a minute, that was around nine minutes flying time.

The coincidence was too hot for Officer Callaghan. He phoned his boss and gave him the information. Superintendent Ratzberg immediately reported the phone calls to the newly arrived FBI Chief, who passed it on to the Coast Guard, who alerted the appropriate U.S. Navy Department, Pacific Fleet, San Diego.

Ten minutes later, news of a possible sighting of guided missiles was in the Pentagon, and four minutes after that there was a message on the secure Fort Meade Internet, direct to Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, Personal Assistant to the Director.

Jimmy, who was on duty that Sunday afternoon, buzzed Rear Admiral Morris, who instantly called Vice Admiral Morgan, encrypted, at home in Chevy Chase. It was late afternoon now, bitterly cold and already growing dark. Arnold was sitting by the fire glowering at the
New York Times,
the liberal left-wing views of which unfailingly made his tight-cropped steel gray hair stand on end. At least it would have done, had his hair been sufficiently long.

Meanwhile, he just glowered, and waited for Kathy to bring him some China tea, which he counted as one of his Sunday afternoon luxuries. The interruption of the phone call from Admiral Morris caught him entirely unaware, and he greeted his old friend tersely. “What’s up, George?” he said. “I suppose you’re on a special mission to ruin what’s left of the weekend?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, sir,” replied George, “I bring you critical information. The police in Valdez have interviewed two local men who apparently saw two very fast missiles ripping through the sky, due south toward the Valdez terminus at 1:20 on Friday morning, ten minutes before the storage tanks blew up, ninety miles away.”

“Who are the guys…sane…sound mind…et cetera…?”

“Yes. Apparently. Both twenty-one years old, clear-sighted and
identical in their observations. One of them saw two missiles or rockets, the other saw only one. Said it was traveling too fast to be a commercial aircraft. Both confirmed a short fiery tail in the stern of the object, and both were struck by its very high speed.”

“Did they want anything out of it?”

“No. Nothing. The first one meant to report it as a UFO. It was only when he learned about the fires he decided they might be connected.”

“Uh-huh. May we presume that at after one o’clock in the morning these two kids were several sheets to the wind?”

“I expect so, Arnie. Nonetheless, according to the police, they are both kinda unassuming guys. They agree on the basics, and their time frame is probably accurate within seconds. And they had no way of knowing that, not before one of ’em made the call.”

“I’d say they’re correct by the sound of it,” said Admiral Morgan. “I now accept that we were probably hit by at least two missiles, fired from an enemy unknown, almost certainly from a submarine, probably Russian. We got a lot of sleuthing to do, George.