Barracuda 945 (34 page)

However, no other female had ever joined a ship’s company as the wife of a high-ranking officer. Which ruled out the possibility of any wayward behavior. At least, it would on this ship, because the
Barracuda
was not under the formal command of any Navy. It was under the overall command of a known Special Forces killer, on behalf of a Terrorist Organization, backed up by a known Commanding Officer, whose father held in his hands, the careers of every last man on board. Disrespect to Shakira, on even the most innocent scale, was out of the question.

General Rashood and his wife moved into the Principal Officer’s room, which was extremely spartan. They shared the wardrobe, loading it with a succession of shirts, sweaters, jeans, socks, shoes, and underclothes. No uniforms. They tested the bed and decided it was wide enough for them mostly to sleep in it together, with the aid of the big camping bag. If the incoming Russian Navy sofa was around the same height, it would be an even simpler task.

As it happened, the incoming sofa was one of the worst pieces of furniture ever made. It was the right height, made of plastic and only marginally softer than the floor. However, pushed against the bed, it made a passable extra area for the double sleeping bag, allowing an arm or a leg some extra space, and preventing either Ravi or Shakira falling overboard onto the deck. The danger of this latter occurrence was, however, remote. General Rashood and his wife tended to sleep very closely together.

They spent Friday working their way through the day, Shakira with her charts, Ravi touring the ship with Ben. At 6:30 in the evening, with snow again falling on the jetties, they began to pull the rods in the core of the nuclear reactor. As the sun endeavored to struggle out of the Pacific, the
Barracuda
would be on its way.

There were no good-byes. The Russians had removed the last of their seamen in the small hours of the morning, and were now keeping their distance. All Chinese personnel had returned to Shanghai the previous evening. Ravi and Ben Badr were about to go it alone, in an all-Iranian warship. At 5:48 on Saturday morning, they cast off the dock lines, and with the Pilot already on board, his boat chugging along off their starboard beam, they headed out of the Bay of Avacinskiy, through the minefield, and east into the wide Pacific Ocean.

The Pilot disembarked at the end of the minefield, and Captain Badr stayed on the bridge, watching the surface of the choppy sea for another half hour. Then he swung south, in order to catch the lenses of the American satellite at the earliest possible time. But just before 7:30, out beyond the 500-meter mark, he ordered the
Barracuda
beneath the waves. Then he ordered her to turn northeast again.

“Conn-Captain
…
bow down ten
…
make your depth four hundred
…
speed fifteen
…
make your course zero-four-five
…
.”

The
Barracuda
made its turn 300 feet below the surface, and headed across the wide Gulf of Kronockiy, where the inland shores of the Pacific begin to shelve down to depths of more than 6,000 feet.

Above them the weather worsened, and somewhat to the surprise of the
Barracuda
’s sonar room they picked up engine lines, five, maybe ten miles off their port bow. But it was raining now and the surface picture was confused. Nonetheless, the sound of the oncoming engines grew closer, and while it was definitely not a submarine, neither Russian nor American, Ben Badr ordered the ship to periscope depth to get a fix with the sailor’s best friend, Eyeball Mark-One.

Way up ahead, they could just make out the outline of a clear and obvious fishing boat, big warps stetching down on yellow davits, from both beams. It did not carry an inordinate amount of antennae, nor was it making any recognizable Naval transmissions, but it was a good size, maybe 1,500 tons.

Captain Badr held the
Barracuda
at PD and identified the trawler as Japanese. Through the powerful periscope lenses they could just make out her name,
Mayajima.
And the navigator had made her course 225 degrees, heading, doubtless into the rich fishing grounds of the Gulf of Kronockiy.

Since the submarine was headed northeast and the trawler was headed west southwest, their path of approach was digressing by the minute. Right now they were two miles apart and going very clearly away from each other. Ben Badr ordered his helmsman to hold course and take her deep again…
. Four hundred feet
…
make your speed fifteen.

What the
Barracuda
’s CO could not have known was that Capt. Kousei Kuno, master of the trawler
Mayajima,
had just been given a very strong heads-up from his own sonar operator, pinpointing a huge shoal of fish, far north for this time of the year, and very deep, possibly 2,000 feet.

He ordered the trawl net lower in the water, releasing the
warps, to 1,500 feet, and even on a fishing boat of this size, they felt the big otter boards at the head of the net dig into the water, forcing the giant entrance-gap open wide at the top end.

The sonar man called out depth and range of the shoal again. And Captain Kuno pushed his speed up as far as he could, and turned his wheel hard to port, changing his course to due east, in hot pursuit of the precious fish. Right across the path of the oncoming Russian-built nuclear submarine.

After four minutes, he cut his engines, wallowing at only three knots, and turning back west, right above the shoal. Literally, tons of fish floundered into the net, trapped by the baffles, forced into the narrow cod-end in the time-honored tradition of deep-sea commercial fishing.

Except that at that precise moment, Captain Ben Badr’s nuclear submarine thundered into the net, coming northeast under the port quarter of the
Mayajima
and ramming its bow straight into the heaving trawl, powered by engines generating 47,000 horsepower.

The warps stretched and held. Then one snapped in two, sending its ten-foot-wide otter board clattering into the casing of the submarine, making an enormous din inside the hull.

“What the hell’s that?” said Ravi, who was standing next to the CO.

“God knows,” said Ben Badr. “Sounds like something just fell off.

He could not, of course, have known that one of the warps was holding, while the other was hooked around the sail, and the mighty Barracuda was dragging the
Mayajima
down by the stern, with a single otter board still clattering away against the sail.

“
Are we shipping water?
” called the CO.

“Negative, sir.”

“Reduction in speed?”

“Maybe four knots, sir.”

Back on the
Mayajima,
there was pandemonium as Captain Kumo realized they were being dragged down. Water was cascading over the stern, flooding into the hold and sloshing into the
navigation area. Despite their propeller being almost at rest, they were making fourteen knots, backward. The strains were enormous, and he hit the emergency levers, which would release the steel-enforced warps that held the trawl net.

Immediately, the
Mayajima
righted itself, returning to an even keel, with no serious damage. They were stationary in the choppy water, having lost their massive fishing equipment and their valuable catch, and sustained damage to the lower deck interior. The pumps were working overtime to haul the water out of the hold, and there was no point remaining at sea one moment longer.

These ships carry no spare trawl net, mainly because of the expense. The loss of the net ends their voyage and confines them to harbor, until the insurance company, or someone else, stumps up. Captain Kumo turned south, back to the Pacific seaport of Ishinomaki, on the east coast of Honshu. He had suffered losses he would later claim added up to $200,000.

In the submarine, the clattering on the hull ended as abruptly as it had begun. With the release of the second warp, both lines holding the otter boards were slack. There was one final bang as the board whacked the casing for the last time. But it did no harm, and the net, full of cod, slipped easily off the
Barracuda
’s bow, down into the depths. Free and clear of the impediments, the submarine accelerated northeast as if nothing had happened.

“
Are we shipping water?
” Ben Badr called again.

“Negative, sir.”

The CO turned to Ravi and said, “We just got entangled in something that was not metal and, therefore, not a ship. It must have been a very large fishing net. Those bangs on the casing were the otter boards. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve met submariners who have. It’s not dangerous, for us. Because ultimately we’re not in the net, we’re just dragging it. But it is very dangerous for the fishermen, who must release it, before we drag them down.”

“Do we go to the surface to check up on possible damage?”

“We never go to the surface, Ravi. Not until the day we exit the ship for good.”

“But they might be sinking,” replied Ravi.

“If they are, we shall do nothing to help them.”

One month later, Captain Kumo would claim he saw their periscope, jutting out of the water.

Meanwhile, the
Barracuda
pushed on. Three hundred fifty miles of open ocean lay before them to the western point of the Aleutian Islands, which stream out in a narrow 1,000-mile crescent from the seaward tip of the Alaska Peninsula, the great southwestern panhandle of America’s largest state.

The Islands, which stretch more than halfway across the Pacific Ocean at that latitude, divide the Bering Sea to the north from the Pacific in the south.

Populated for some 9,000 years, they stand in some of the cruelest winter weather on earth, valued principally as a storm-lashed natural outpost for the U.S. Navy, which guards the western approaches to Alaska and the coasts of both Canada and the United States.

In recent years, the level of military surveillance from the Aleutians has been increased tenfold with the rise to global importance of Alaskan oil. The great terminal of Valdez in Prince William Sound, with its huge storage capacity, its convoys of south-running VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carriers), and the new West Coast undersea pipeline, have turned it into a main cogwheel in the American economy. And it requires heavy protection.

With the President’s insistence on less reliance on Arab oil, the estimated 16 billion barrels of reserves on Alaska’s North Slope represents the very heart of White House policy. The United States owns enough oil on the freezing land south of the Beaufort Sea to replace all Middle East supplies for the next thirty years.

A minor problem has been the oil beneath the protected acres of the sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There has been a certain amount of protest from a tribe of native Indians, who fear new drilling may drive away migrating deer—never mind the irony that they hunt the deer from the back of gas-guzzling snow-mobiles, with high-powered rifles.

No matter. The Republican Administration of the early twenty-first century, ignoring the tree huggers, greens, wets, and other romantics of the environment, believed that most Americans
think inexpensive and plentiful energy comes with Liberty, and will put up with some damage to the near-deserted wilderness of Alaska, in order to get it. Yessir.

If the Administration harbored any doubts, the events of September 11, 2001, dismissed them all, in a major hurry. The prospect of the United States economy operating almost entirely on oil owned by Abdul, Ahmed, and Mustapha was plainly out of the question.

The President, backed by trusted advisers, some of them dyed-in-the-wool oilmen, called immediately for increased energy production. The Democrats did not like it, neither did the Eskimos, nor presumably the migrating deer, but a frenzy of new drilling was unleashed, most of it on government land, which included 86 percent of all oil exploration in Alaska.

By the end of the year 2006, a brand-new pipeline was close to completion, right across Alaska, following for much of its 800-mile journey the route of the old Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). For decades, this has carried crude-oil from the vast, 150,000-acre Prudhoe Bay Field in the north, to the giant Valdez Terminal, in the south, on the shores of Prince William Sound, 120 miles east of Anchorage, as the crow flies.

The new pipeline, the Alaska Bi-Coastal Energy Transfer (ABET) has been built on the same lines, a zigzag formation that allows it to withstand enormous stresses, because the above-ground pipeline contracts and expands as the tundra melts and then freezes. Both lines cross the mountain ranges of the Brooks, the Alaska, and Chugach, plus thirty-four rivers and streams, including the Yukon, Tanana, and Chena rivers.

The pipes are highly visible, crossing tremendous areas of wasteland, each section holding 840,000 gallons of oil, held at bay by the massive strength of the jet black, four-foot-wide, galvanized steel transport system. The two pipelines diverge shortly before reaching Valdez, the new one cutting left, through the south foothills of the Chugach Range, to the new transfer terminal in Yakutat Bay.