Authors: Patrick Robinson
The Admiral was correct about that. The price of oil had tripled, to $76 dollars a barrel, and stayed there. The world’s fuel markets were in an uproar. So were the Dow Jones Industrials, the Footsie, the CAC 40, the Nikkei, the DAX, and the rest.
Stocks collapsed on a global scale. Shares in any public corporation that was dependent on oil or fuel, any transportation, were just about unsalable. The two big California cities, unattached to the main state grid, were bereft of electricity. And the remnants of the power station at Lompoc were still burning. A mass exodus of millions from San Francisco and Los Angeles to outlying districts had caused chaos on the freeways, as drivers struggled to get into an electricity zone.
Every hotel, every motel, was packed with families who had fled the endless dark that surrounded nighttime San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles. Thousands of people moved in with friends and relatives out in Concord, Livermore, and Modesto; Ventura, Santa Clarita, Moreno Valley, and Palm Springs. Many thousands more bought airline tickets at spiraling prices, from airlines with small emergency generators for computers, and battled their way out of the two international airports in the daylight hours. They had to be sharp, before the massive jet-fuel storage areas ran completely dry.
There was no question of key executives trying to commute their way into the city centers. Modern business runs on computers, and great office high-rises cannot function without electricity.
There was no light, no elevators, and no security systems. There was a danger that law and order could break down. Every evening at twilight, gangs of youths roamed the streets. Looting was becoming commonplace. The Los Angeles Police Department, lit by three small generators, struggled to keep these mobs of amateur criminals under control. Emergency fuel was coming in by road in Exxon tankers to gas up the police cruisers.
The military were being called in, to mount street patrols and to guard the downtown buildings. Water supplies to both cities, dependent on electricity plant for purifying systems, were becoming stretched to the limit. Consumption was down, but the greater Los Angeles system still had to cope with the demands of a population cut by two-thirds, but still three million strong.
The Governor was safe in his Sacramento Mansion. But the mighty film studios were closed. All West Coast television transmission was down, which hardly mattered since no one could turn on their sets. If Troy Ramford was going to receive his Oscar, publicly, any time soon, it would have to be somewhere out beyond San Bernardino, where the power was on. His Malibu home was dark, like the rest of the beachfront properties of the film and television talent.
The President, guided and supported by his Energy Secretary, Jack Smith, was putting emergency measures into operation as fast as possible. The San Francisco and Los Angeles electricity-supply companies were being connected to the main California grid, with two massive power line hookups, out in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, and to the west of San Jose, south of San Francisco. Jack Smith estimated power for the cities inside twelve days, which the President considered inordinate.
With the refinery gone at Grays Harbor, there was no further possibility of refined oil running south into the West Coast states of Oregon and California, but there was a definite capability for U.S. tanker fleets to start shipping refined oil through the Panama Canal and north to Los Angeles immediately. The fuel, colossally expensive, was subsequently government-subsidized. And, of course, the huge diesel engines of the tankers themselves were sloshing back fuel that cost almost the same as cheap Scotch whisky.
Tanker fleets from the Midwest were already on the roads, barreling through the night, laden with gasoline from the big Chicago terminals, across Iowa, Nebraska, southern Wyoming, and Nevada, on what was virtually a mercy mission to the American west. Hundreds of fuel trucks were thundering out of Texas, west across the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona toward the stricken city of Los Angeles. Every one of them was laden with refined gasoline, which Los Angeles needed a lot more than it needed Oklahoma sweet crude.
All the while, the East Coast media wanted to know what the hell the President was doing about “this unprecedented crisis in the history of our country.” How was he proposing to solve it, find the culprits, and restore the power and dignity of the United States of America? Generally speaking, it looked a lot easier from the offices of the
Washington Post
than it did from the Oval Office.
Through it all, the U.S. Navy racked its brains, listening for the lonely bleep in the vast Pacific ocean, which would betray the presence of the murderous
Barracuda Type 945,
which Arnold Morgan swore was there.
The President had three times addressed the section of the nation that had working television sets, stressing the speed at which the emergency services were working to reconnect the blacked-out cities. He admitted the likelihood of sabotage, even attack by terrorists, and swore U.S. revenge on the perpetrators of these “wicked and destructive crimes against our nation.”
He did not, however, point out the likelihood of a bunch of maniacs in a modern nuclear submarine creeping up and down the West Coast, bombarding the most important oil installations with heavy Russian-built cruise missiles.
Nor could he envisage doing so, not before the U.S. Navy had detected and either captured or destroyed the enemy, whoever he might be.
The U.S. Diplomatic Corps was working at an unprecedented speed, demanding cooperation from every one of their international trading partners. They threatened the Russians and the Chinese, opened the lines to Tehran, Damascus, Cairo, and
Amman, demanding to know if there was any connection to the West Coast atrocities from any Arab Fundamentalist group.
The CIA called in favors, and bribed, blackmailed, and badgered agents all over the world. But no one knew anything. Especially the Russians, who would only say they had sold the
Barracuda
to the Chinese and knew nothing else.
The Chinese Navy merely asserted the only
Barracuda
they knew anything about was currently visiting the Southern Fleet Headquarters in Zhanjiang. Had been since before the Lompoc attack, and so far as they knew, was still there in a covered dock. No other
Barracuda
had ever docked in a Chinese Naval Base. All true. Nearly.
Meanwhile, the U.S. satellites were adjusted to range along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, from the Gulf of Alaska all the way to the 780-mile-long Mexican peninsula of Baja California. That was a total sea-and-air patrol distance of 3,000 miles, all of it essential, just in case the submarines turned north again, just in case it continued to head south.
CINCPAC reasoned the marauder was surely traveling slowly, otherwise it must surely have been heard, either by a patrolling submarine, which could have picked it up at 100 miles, or by SOSUS, which is deadly sensitive all the way along the West Coast. Only the lowest speed ensures near-total silence.
Which meant, five knots maximum, and at that speed it would take more than eight days to cover 1,000 miles. Thus, in the first week of the hunt, the Pacific branch of the U.S. Navy was faced with a search area of 3,000 miles by 1,000 miles…3 million square miles, an area roughly the size of Australia, with nothing even resembling a submarine choke point.
All U.S. satellites were adjusted to photograph the immense tract of ocean. The most modern observation systems of surface disturbance were activated, all of them peering down through space, seeking the swirling patterns on the water that would betray the presence of a deep-running nuclear ship, unless it was moving at the pace of a basking Pacific turtle.
Everyone knew the task was probably impossible. But the
Navy had to keep going, just in case the submarine made a mistake, and to prevent further embarrassment to the Presidency of the United States.
“The main trouble is,” Arnold Morgan privately raged, “no one has the slightest idea which direction the goddamned ship is moving.”
He still believed it must be making some kind of a southerly course, but that only reduced the search area to 1.5 million square miles, half the size of Brazil.
By Thursday morning, March 27, four days after a hectic nonexistent Easter break, the Navy still reported nothing. By now the
Barracuda
was more than 1,300 miles down the coast of Mexico, beyond the designated search area for the U.S. warships and aircraft, but not beyond the range of the satellites. It still had more than 1,800 miles to go before the Gulf of Panama, but with every turn of its fifteen-foot-high bronze screw, it pushed further away from danger.
In the White House, the President was at a level of frustration that he regarded as intolerable. He remained without comprehension where the Navy was concerned, muttering constantly about the billions of dollars he authorized every year for research and development in military surveillance, only to be told there was an 8,000-ton missile-hurling Russian submarine, fucking around somewhere off Laguna Beach, and no one could find it, never mind zap it.
The situation was somewhat eased when the lights went on again in Los Angeles. On the Saturday afternoon of March 29, three-quarters of the city’s electric power was restored, and though this would mean two-hour brownouts in other parts of Southern California, it was sensationally good news for the residents of the City of Angels.
The San Francisco hookup took a day longer. But by Monday morning, March 31, both the big metropolitan areas were up and running again, despite chronic fuel shortages and long lines at the gas pumps.
The President again went on television to explain that for the moment the United States was reliant on foreign oil, and that it
would be several months before the Alaskan oil began to flow again. Work to rebuild the refinery at Grays Harbor was already under way, and the two breaches in the south-running undersea pipeline had been repaired. Right now the Energy Department was concentrating on refinery capacity, and routes were being established to run more and more crude oil into America’s existing facilities.
“We should,” he told an expectant nation, “be on top of the situation inside another two weeks. This will be a huge strain on our tanker facilities, but you have my word we’re gonna be seeing the price of oil per barrel dropping firmly within a very few days.
“I have requested American tankers from all over the globe to bring crude oil into the Texas facilities on the Gulf of Mexico. No matter the cost, no matter the effect on profits, now is the time for this nation to rally round, and get the fuel oil to the places where we need it.”
Again he took the greatest care to insure no mention was made of the submarine the Pentagon believed had opened fire on the United States.
Meanwhile, deep in the lower-level Situation Room in the West Wing, Admiral Morgan continued to preside over meeting after meeting with Security and Service Chiefs, probing every last inch of the incoming data that might throw some light on the submarine.
Right now the Navy had two more Los Angeles Class submarines, the
Boise
and the
Montpelier,
crossing the Caribbean toward the Panama Canal. Once clear of the pilots on the Pacific side, they would head north toward San Diego, at first 200 miles off the coast of Central America, and then as part of the Navy’s search line making sweep after sweep along the Mexico/California coast.
But nothing was shaking loose in this baffling jigsaw puzzle, and morale was suffering everywhere, especially in the Pentagon. All day and most of the night, the surveillance officers checked the systems, checked to see whether the
Barracuda
had left Zhanjiang, checked on every submarine movement in the world, checked satellite pictures from Bandar Abbas to Beijing, and
pored over the prints from the eastern reaches of the Pacific.
There was nothing until the morning of April 11, when the
Boise,
on the surface now and clear of Panama’s Chinese pilots, dived and headed for the deeper waters of the Pacific beyond the confines of the Gulf of Panama. At 11:43 her Sonar Room picked up a Russian nuclear boat heading slowly north at twelve knots, periscope depth, eight miles south of the main channel, in the Pacific Extension of the merchant ship
Anchorage.
The
Boise
’s CO had received no change to his standard COMSUBPAC rules of engagement—fire only in self-defense. And he knew the consequences of torpedoing a Russian nuclear submarine in Panamanian territorial waters: dire, especially if it turned out to be the wrong one. And, anyway, it was headed direct to the Canal where everyone would see it.
In accordance with his orders, he immediately put a signal on the satellite, which relayed it to Pacific Fleet Headquarters, Pearl Harbor, and to the Base at San Diego simultaneously. From there it was beamed into the Ops Room of the 9,000-ton guided-missile destroyer USS
Roosevelt,
Arleigh Burke Class, one of the most lethal fighting ships in the world. Heavily gunned, bristling with missiles and torpedoes, she carried on her stern two Lamps-III combat helicopters, both equipped with Penguin and Hellfire missiles.
The
Roosevelt
was headed north, having taken a swing along the northern coast of Colombia, to keep the local drug barons on their mettle. She was now some three hours from the
Anchorage,
clipping along at thirty knots. Her satellite orders from CINCPAC were clear:
Locate Russian nuclear boat Sierra I
Barracuda Class Type 945,
detected by the submarine USS
Boise…
believed to be headed into the Panama Canal
…
track through Canal to Atlantic Anchorage
…
rendezvous with two escorts
…
both Los Angeles Class ships, the
San Juan
and the
Key West
patrolling six miles northwest of Cristobal Harbor West Breakwater
…