Authors: Patrick Robinson
Over at Lloyds of London, the insurance market had a collective heart attack, with grotesque visions of the crash of the 1990s standing once more, starkly, before the brokers. Losses in the little city of Valdez would be shuddering, but the breached pipeline
with its colossal overtones of environmental damage, threatened to rival the gigantic claims that erupted after the
Exxon Valdez
catastrophe in Prince William Sound in 1992.
Cocooned in the control room of the
Barracuda,
1,000 feet deep, 100 miles off the coast of California, General Rashood had not an inkling of the havoc he had wrought. He and Shakira, sharing their tiny office/bedroom, felt safe behind the slow, cautious driving of Ben Badr. And the submarine was in excellent shape, moving through the quiet, deep caverns of the oceans, with the minimum of stress on the turbines, the reactor running silkily, watched by a top-class team of newly qualified Iranian Nuclear Engineers.
Captain Badr’s navigator had them on a course of 180 degrees, running directly south through the Pacific, straight down the 128’ W line of longitude. The Dixon Entrance stands just north of the 54th parallel, and their next destination was slightly north of the 42nd. That gave them twelve degrees of latitude to cover, 720 nautical miles. They were making only 120 miles a day at their low speed of five knots, and Ravi and Ben estimated they would arrive on station in the small hours of Friday morning, March 7. They would be, predictably, 180 miles off the coast of the State of Oregon, but, unpredictably, almost 300 miles
south
of their target.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe scarcely slept, spending eighteen hours a day in his office, waiting for a SOSUS heads-up that someone had heard something, somewhere, that there was a Russian submarine on the loose.
But there was only silence. Not a sound from the
Barracuda.
Indeed, on the international stage, the only loud and significant sound came from Admiral Arnold Morgan, personally railing at the Russian Navy Headquarters in Moscow, demanding to speak to the Admiral of the Fleet, Vitaly Rankov.
Admiral Rankov, a seasoned and wily operator, found himself in a tight spot. He had already guessed the
Barracuda
had done its job on the far side of the Pacific, but he had much to protect.
The culprit for these unprovoked atrocities on the American economy was a Russian-built, Russian-owned submarine, now based in the Pacific Fleet at Petropavlovsk.
But Vitaly had his story in disciplined order. He would reveal the submarine had been sold to the Chinese, and was believed to be making its way down to their Southern Fleet Headquarters in Zhenjiang, on the northeast corner of the great tropical island of Hainan. So far as he knew, there were no Russian personnel on board.
His policy was to duck and dive, avoiding a salvo of phone calls from the redoubtable Arnold Morgan, though he realized this would not work for long.
He actually kept it up for thirty-six hours, until noon on Thursday, March 6, by which time Vice Admiral Morgan had yelled down the phone to Moscow at six different aides. Finally, he had the President of the United States call the President of Russia and demand that Rankov speak to the White House immediately.
The instruction from the Great White Chief of all the Russians to his Naval Supreme Commander was succinct:
Admiral Rankov: I have been asked by the U.S. President to ensure you speak to his National Security Adviser on an important matter this day. Please do so.
It was thus with a heavy heart that the Admiral of the Russian Fleet, at three o’clock that afternoon, had his assistant call the White House and connect him to his oldest, and most dangerous nemesis, the most persistent, ill tempered, gratingly powerful opponent in the world.
“Arnold! What a nice surprise to hear you again. It’s been too long.”
“Thirty-six hours too long, insincere Soviet sailor.” Arnold was always delighted with alliteration of that music-hall quality. “You are a devious son of a bitch. And you have deliberately not answered my calls, or my messages. I was just beginning to think you might be avoiding me.”
Admiral Rankov was unable to supress a deep chuckle. Despite his uneasiness with Admiral Morgan, he was always amused by him, and actually liked him very much. They had met on several occasions over the years, even dined together in
Washington, London, and once in Moscow. “I know, I know,” he said. “I was avoiding you. Mainly because I sensed you were going to give me a very hard time, about matters over which I have no control.”
“I presume you are still head of that junkyard Navy of yours?”
At which point the two old Intelligence sparring partners both laughed at the American’s incorrigible rudeness and the fact that the conversation had returned to its usual standard of wit.
“Arnold, look, seriously. I know what you are going to say. You know we made a Fleet Exchange, sending that old
Barracuda
to Petropavlovsk. You also know it left, and headed south. You also know, like we do, there is a large financial claim from a Japanese fishing boat that was snagged by a submarine just a few miles to the north. Same time. Same day. Am I correct?”
“You are.”
“And now you are going to ask me why our submarine dived after making course south, and then did an about-face underwater and went north? Right?”
“Right. There was no other submarine operational within a thousand miles. The goddamned sushi ship was hooked by the
Barracuda.
”
“Arnold, what you do not know—and why should you?—is that we sold the
Barracuda
to the Chinese. It was just too damned expensive for us to run.”
“Well, that’s very interesting, Vitaly. Are there any Russians aboard?”
“None.”
“Well, where the hell’s it going?”
“I was told Zhenjiang. But we have no way of knowing. The ship is no longer our property.”
“Vitaly, my main question is even more serious. And I am asking you to give me a straight answer.”
“If I can.”
“Did you guys ever complete the building of the second
Barracuda,
Hull K-240?”
“Arnold, I was up in the northern yard at Araguba just six months ago, and I saw that ship in its covered dock, with a number
of plates missing from the casing. I believe we used it for spare parts for the
Tula,
the one we just sold. So far as I know, Hull K-240 never went to sea. Why?”
“Is it still there…in Araguba?”
“I can’t swear to it. But no one has told me it has been scrapped, or sold. If I can find out anything, do you want me to get back to you?”
“That would be good of you. And remember, I just want to know if you sold one
Barracuda,
or two, to the even more devious Chinese.”
“I understand, Arnold. Leave it with me.”
Arnold Morgan quietly said good-bye, and put down the phone. But he sensed a kind of edgy formality in the voice of the Russian Navy boss. Arnold had an actor’s gift for recalling the rhythms and reactions of people and their speech. In his mind, he believed he should have heard something quite different from Admiral Rankov.
Something much more like,
Okay, Arnie. I’ll check it right now. Hull K-240
…
where is it? That’s what you want to know. No problem. I’ll be back to you in ten minutes.
Instead, it was,
IF I can find out anything
…
do you want me to get back to you?
“The actual HEAD of the entire Russian Navy,” growled Arnold. “‘
IF I can find out whether we still own a $500 million nuclear submarine!
’ Vitaly, you bastard, I think you are lying. I think you know full well whether your fucking rattletrap Navy still owns the second
Barracuda.
But, for whatever reason, you are not telling me.”
The Admiral was, however, still very nearly handcuffed by the situation. He could think of no other method by which any enemy could have done this much damage to the United States, except by using a nuclear submarine. A diesel electric must have been detected already because of its need to snorkel and recharge batteries and, ultimately, to refuel. In the electronic minefield of the North Pacific, and the Gulf of Alaska, they could not have avoided being discovered. But a nuclear boat—this was different. It did not need to surface
or refuel. It could stay deep, unseen and unheard. If it was out there now, as Arnold was quite certain it was, that ship could be
anywhere,
lost in thousands of square miles of ocean. It could be on its way to China, or Russia. It could have turned back west, or south. Or it could have just meandered down the West Coast of the United States looking for new targets.
Worse yet, it could hear any searching U.S. surface ship, and then just slow right down, maybe one thousand feet under the surface, And NEVER be detected.
In his worst nightmares, Arnold Morgan had imagined the hopelessness of looking for a nuclear marauder off the U.S. coast, and he had always felt the same terror and frustration everyone feels in dreams of running hard, without moving. Those nightmares had always given him the creeps. And right now he was in one.
To activate the Navy on a massive search-and-destroy mission would have been useless and likely to alert and terrify the populace. But in his heart, Arnold Morgan believed the United States was under similar threat as 9/11—though he did not know how, or why, or what to do. And he paced his office, fists clenched, head down, not for the first time, alone, at the front line of American defense.
He was afraid of what the marauder might do next. But he was powerless to stop him. He knew his best chance was to let his opponent move first, betray his position, or at least betray something, like he was on this side of the Pacific rather than the other. But he knew he must wait, and for a man of Admiral Morgan’s temperament, this was very close to torture.
Meanwhile, in Valdez, the flames were dying. Firefighters had contained the blaze to the operational storage areas only. The terminus was a write-off, as was the giant tanker that had blown up at the bow on the night the missiles came in.
The fires in the storage area above the town had died a day earlier because the destruction of the main control center had cut off any incoming crude to the fuel farm. What was already there burned, in an incinerating heat, but when it was spent, the fires died.
Nonetheless, the area around the town looked like Berlin in the aftermath of the Allied bombing in 1945. A pall of black
smoke hung low over the landscape, helicopters clattered through the skies, searching for clues, searching for an enemy redoubt, searching for anything. FBI Agents swarmed all over town, assisting the police, talking to anyone who might have seen anything. Under strict instructions from the National Security Agency in distant Maryland, not one word was released to the public about the observations of the late-night stargazers Harry Roberts and Cal Foster.
Although the snow made everything in a sense more difficult, it also provided incontrovertible evidence that no enemy or terrorist force could possibly have gathered to the north of the town. The helicopters searched miles of perfect, unmolested snow, across hills and mountains, valleys and fields. They saw the tracks of bears and moose, but not the tracks of any vehicle, way off the beaten track, which could have launched a missile sufficiently powerful to wreak the damage that had been inflicted last Friday night.
Neither did they find any signs of a troop of at least eight people, who must have been scuffing the virgin snow, in an extremely remote area, in order to launch such an attack. And by Thursday night, March 6, there was no doubt in the minds of any of the investigators: Whatever had slammed into the Valdez terminus had come in from the sea. Except that no surveillance system in neither the U.S. Coast Guard nor Navy heard one single squeak on that darkest of nights. The official record of shipping activity in the significant area read a great fat zilch.
The
Barracuda
cruised slowly, 1,000 feet below the surface, a little less than twenty miles southwest of the Jackson Seamount, a boomerang-shaped shoal that rises up from the two-miles-deep ocean floor. Since its highest point is still more than 5,000 feet below the surface, the Jackson is of little significance save as a landmark and a point of navigation.
Ben Badr had placed his ship in firing position, 175 miles off the coast of Oregon, twenty miles north of the California border. Directly east of them was the estuary of the Rogue River, a wide, often frenzied torrent that comes tumbling out of the Coastal Range, into the Pacific at Gold Beach.
General Rashood had specified no firm time for his next attack, except that he intended to carry it out in the dead of night. And the night could not get much more dead than it was right now, out here in the pitch-black, lonely waters of the world’s largest ocean, miles from anywhere, hidden beneath the surface.
“Well, Ravi, do we fire or wait?” Captain Badr was calm but concerned. His crew was tired. The tension of the long journey and the two attacks had placed a strain upon them all. And, given his way, Ben Badr would have recommended a twenty-four-hour rest for everyone. But he guessed, correctly, that Ravi would opt for instant action rather than any waiting around.