Scimitar SL-2 (13 page)

“Ninety-five revolutions…speed over the ground 9.2 by GPS…8.6 through the water, sir…”

When they reached the GPS position, 54.15N 165.30W, they no longer needed to be a shadow. They broke away and went deep to 300 feet, heading for a point 60 miles southeast of Sanak Island, where Ben Badr ordered a course change to due east. They had turned away at last from the long sweeping arc of the Aleutians and were making 8 knots along the 54th line of latitude, straight into the Gulf of Alaska.

Down in the navigation area, General Rashood was sharing a pot of coffee with Shakira and Ashtari Mohammed. The Arabian Lieutenant Commander and the Navigator were poring over the big charts, trying, as always, to second-guess the United States’ defenses.

General Ravi was sitting at a high desk with a pile of notes illuminated by an adjustable reading light. In great detail, sectioned off in colors, numbered and bound, they contained details of geological strata, depths of rock, likely weak points in certain areas of the earth’s crust. Lists of volcanic activity. Lists of “modern” volcanoes likely to erupt. There were detailed maps of great mountains that could develop interior lava in the next five years. There were estimates of potential damage, endangered areas, and a special section on inland volcanoes, plus two entire eighteen-page chapters on seaward volcanoes.

Ravi had compiled the document himself; he had typed up, filed, and cataloged every specific section, cross-referenced each and every volcano that might interest him. It was a precious project, representing the very bedrock of his plan to drive the Great Satan out of the Middle East forever.

Every aspect, every detail, was gleaned from the personal knowledge and research of the world’s foremost authority on geophysical hazards—Professor Paul Landon. Ravi Rashood regretted that their friendship in London had been so very brief.

0300, July 23, 2009

53.30N 161.48W, Depth 500

Speed 5, Course 080.

T
HE
BARRACUDA
crept east nor’east across the steep underwater cliff faces at the eastern end of the Aleutian Trench, where the gigantic Pacific “ditch” that guards the southern approaches to the islands finally shelves up, close inshore, into the Gulf of Alaska.

Here, despite the colossal depths of more than two miles, the ocean steadily grew shallower, angling up towards the coastal islands of mainland Alaska. In this, the more friendly U.S. end, enemies are just about unknown, unlike its other side, out towards the western Aleutians towards Russia and China, where American submarine COs stay on top of the game at all times.

Ravi and Ben considered their slow expedition into the quiet section of the Trench not much of a risk; it was simply not a place where the U.S. Navy would be looking for trouble, mainly because of the serious difficulties of getting there…either
straight through the patrolled waters of the Trench (
Out of the question, unless contemplating suicide
); through the Unimak or Samalga Passes (
Impossible under U.S. radar
); or across the Pacific Basin and through the Gulf itself, passing over the lethal, constant electronic trip wires of SOSUS—again suicidal.

Both Ravi and Ben considered the
Barracuda
safe in the eastern waters of the Trench, and at this dead-slow speed they would hear any U.S. submarine a long time before it detected them.

At first, it had seemed logical to cross the 1,000-mile-wide Gulf of Alaska, straight through the middle, in water never much less than two and half miles deep. But Ben Badr was nerve-wracked, thinking about the U.S. Navy’s deadly Sound Surveillance System, and in answer to every one of General Rashood’s questions weighing the possibilities of the much shorter straight-line route, he just said, “Forget it, Ravi. They’ll hear us.”

And then he added the inevitable: “We have to stay inshore, along the coast, in noisy water, where there’s massive shoals of fish, rough ocean, island surf, changing depths, and that north-running current. That’s where we’re safe, out there with the commercial traffic—freighters, tankers, and fishing boats, all kicking up a hell of a racket while we creep along 500 feet below the surface.”

Ravi had been staring at the chart. “You mean right up here, through this Shelikof Strait between Kodiak Island and the mainland coast?”

“I wish,” said Ben. “And I expect you’ve noticed we’d have 600 feet almost all the way along that island for about 130 miles. However, you’ll see that the Strait ends right at the gateway to the Cook Inlet, which leads up to Anchorage. Afraid that’s not for us. Shakira says it’s bristling with radar, busier traffic than Tehran, and only a couple of hundred feet deep.”

“That’s not for us,” agreed Ravi. “What do we do? Go outside Kodiak?”

“Absolutely,” said Ben, staring at the chart. “Even wider than that. We need to get outside the 200-meter line…See? Right here…we’ll get in the Alaska Current and head zero-seven-zero.”

Ravi looked at the chart. “We stay 50 to 60 miles offshore all the way up that coast, we’ll be in water that’s two miles deep. As far as Prince William Sound. What does Shakira say about U.S. surveillance up there?”

“She thinks they will have plenty of shore-based radar, which won’t affect us because we’ll be deep. And she thinks there’ll be surface patrols in that big bay beyond the Sound, which also won’t affect us. But she has seen no sign of increased submarine patrols up there.

“And knowing the huge expense of mobile underwater surveillance, I’d be surprised if they put a couple of nuclear boats in there to protect essentially foreign tankers. Submarines operating in defensive mode in a nonwar area like Alaska really only protect against other submarines. And let’s face it, the chances of a foreign strike submarine getting into those waters with intent to attack are zero.”

Ravi smiled. “Not even us?” he said.

“Not even us,” answered Admiral Badr. “We’re just passing through, very quietly, very unobtrusively. There’s no U.S. submarine patrols and a lot of noise. We’ll be fine.”

And so they set off up the Gulf, steering a northeasterly course, deep. It took them four days to reach the old Russian colony of Kodiak, and they left it 50 miles to port. They moved slowly past the rugged, mountainous island that held more than 2,000 three-quarter-ton Kodiak brown bears—the largest bear on earth, on the largest island in Alaska.

The frigid waters that surged around Kodiak were home not only to a 2,000-strong fishing fleet, but also to the giant king crab. Vast legions of these iron-shelled 15-pound monsters, which sometimes have a leg-span measuring four feet across, occasionally made the city of Kodiak the top commercial fishing port in the United States.

And the Alaskans guard their precious stocks assiduously. The biggest U.S. Coast Guard station in the state operates four large cutters, with fully armed crews, out of the old U.S. Naval Base on
Kodiak. They patrol these waters night and day, ruthlessly seizing any unauthorized fishing boat. As Shakira Rashood warned her Commanding Officers, “
They may not be looking for submarines, but they’d sure as hell blow a very loud whistle if they thought they’d heard one
.”

By midnight on Tuesday, July 28, way below the bears, but several hundred feet above the clunking armor of the King Crabs, the
Barracuda
was dawdling silently northeast at only six knots. Occasionally they heard the deep overhead rumble of a laden tanker moving west towards Anchorage from the new terminal in Takutat; occasionally, the State ferry,
Tustumena
, from Seward on the Kenai Peninsula; less often, the growl of the powerful coast-guard diesels.

Three hours before dawn, Lieutenant Commander Shakira came into the control room and brought Ben and Ravi hot coffee and toast, announcing they were 90 miles southeast of the port of Kodiak, steaming with the Alaskan Current in 550 fathoms, staying west of the shallow Kodiak Seamount.

She also brought with her a snippet of knowledge to dazzle the two senior officers on board. “Did either of you know that the port of Kodiak was practically leveled as recently as 1964?”

“Not me,” confessed Ravi.

“Nor me,” said Ben.

“The whole downtown area,” she confirmed, “the entire fishing fleet, the processing plants, and 160 houses. The Good Friday Earthquake, they called it, shook the entire island from end to end.”

“How come an earthquake wrecked the fishing fleet?” asked the ever-probing, practical General Rashood. “Why didn’t they just head out into the bay like every other ship does when an earthquake starts?”

“Because it wasn’t the earthquake that got them,” said Shakira. “It was the tsunami, the huge tidal wave that developed when half a mountain fell hundreds of feet into the sea…There you are, darling, your very favorite subject, delivered personally.”

Ravi grinned. “I’m telling you,” he said, “those tidal waves, when they get going, they’re a real killer—”

“According to my notes on this area,” said Shakira, “this tsunami developed with great speed. When the wave surged into the port of Kodiak, it just picked up all the ships and dumped them from a great height into the streets, flattened every building…turned everything—ships, boat sheds, and shops—into match-wood. Most people luckily had just enough time to get out and drive to high ground. Anyone who didn’t was never heard of again.”

“Allah,” said Ben Badr. “I suppose that’s the only good thing about a tsunami. It takes just that little bit longer to get organized. There’s warning. And the wave inshore is making only 30 or 40 knots. Probably gives everyone a half hour to get out.”

“In some cases, much longer,” said Ravi, thoughtfully. “Some of those Pacific surges that started with earthquakes or volcanoes in the Hawaiian Islands took hours to reach very distant shores…where they inflicted their worst damage.”

“If you want to know about tsunamis, ask my oh-so-clever husband,” laughed Shakira. “He knows everything. Or thinks he does.”

“Unlike you two, I have been given expert tuition, instruction, and knowledge from a great master,” said Ravi. “Professor Paul Landon, the world’s leading authority on volcanoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves, took me under his wing for a few days,” said the General. “Brought my knowledge right up to scratch.”

“Excellent,” said Admiral Badr. “Not too long now.”

They ran on past Kodiak, crossed the sea-lanes leading up to the Cook Inlet and to the port of Anchorage. A day later, they were creeping through 1,200 fathoms of water south of Prince William Sound, 500 feet below the surface.

Following the big sweep of the Gulf, they changed course there, making a gradual turn to the southeast, staying in the Alaska Current, outside the 200-meter line, tiptoeing warily past the Yakutat Roads, on down to the Dixon Entrance, north of
Graham Island. These were waters where both senior Commanders had worked before.

The sheltered, noisy expanse of the Hecate Strait looked tempting, lying as it did between the 160-mile-long Graham Island and the Canadian mainland. But the depths were treacherous. Right here the ocean runs hard south past the great archipelago of islands—hundreds of them—on the rough, violent coast where the Rocky Mountains sweep down to the sea. It’s noisy, it’s damn near paradise, except for the outstanding opportunities to rip the hull wide open in 30 feet of granite-bottomed seabed.

“Outside the island, I’m afraid,” said Ben Badr. “It’s deep, and according to Shakira, almost certainly shuddering with SOSUS wires. It’s our usual story—very slow, very careful, right down 800 miles of Canadian coastline, past the Queen Charlotte Islands, past Vancouver Island, then past the great American state of Washington. Should reach our op area on August 6. Then it’s more or less up to Shakira.”

And no one knew that better than the beautiful Lieutenant Commander, who worked tirelessly at her desk in the navigation room. Occasionally, Admiral Badr took the
Barracuda
to the surface for a satellite fix and to suck messages swiftly off the comms center in the sky, reporting course and position to Bandar Abbas via the Chinese Naval Command Center in Zhanjiang.

They were in the risk-reduction business, and their modus operandi did not include providing the slightest glimmer of information, even on Chinese military satellites, to sharp-eyed Fort Meade detectives like Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe. Ravi and Ben wouldn’t know Jimmy’s favorite exclamation—
Christ, here’s the ole Shanghai Electrician.

This somewhat esoteric description had evolved from the more usual phrase of “casting a chink of light” on a problem, and George Morris had found Ramshawe’s linguistic ingenuity so amusing that he spread it all over the eighth floor of OPS-2B. For most people, it contained a touch more panache than a mere “chink of light,” the same kind of espionage flourish as
The Tailor of Panama
.

Ravi and Ben were not willing to give one thin amp of credibility to the Shanghai Electrician. They accessed the satellite only every four or even five days, averaging 24 seconds of mast exposure per twenty-four hours. They stayed deep and slow, all the way along their southern voyage, past the Canadian coastline. They slipped down to 600-foot depth as they crossed the unseen frontier, west of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, into North American waters off the coast of Washington State.

Out where the
Barracuda
ran, 45 miles offshore, the waters were not officially American, but in the world of international terrorism, those great Pacific swells far off the coast of the Evergreen State were about as American as Fifth Avenue; patrolled ruthlessly by U.S. warships working out of the sprawling Navy Bases of Everett and Bremerton, deep in Puget Sound, which guards the great northwestern city of Seattle.

Shakira’s view was to stay well clear of the vast seascape that washes onto the shores of Washington State. She regarded it as the most dangerous part of their long journey, a place where there might well be U.S. submarine patrols, and many more highly sensitive surface warships, all carrying state-of-the-art detection and surveillance ASW equipment.

In her opinion, they should stay deep until they were well south of the fast and lethal predators from the Bremerton and Everett U.S. Navy Bases. Those predators would show not the slightest mercy to an intruder, especially an unannounced Russian-built nuclear they had been puzzling over for several weeks. And there was no doubt, certainly in the mind of General Rashood, that the Americans were most definitely wondering about them.

Admiral Badr kept in touch with Shakira’s heavily marked charts all the way, unfailingly agreeing with her and her sense of caution. They moved on slowly, the big, lightly used reactor running steadily, all systems operating flawlessly throughout the submarine. Ravi and Shakira would have liked a bigger cabin, but there was no chance of that. They worked and slept exhausted,
welded together by the fire of love and revenge upon the Great Satan and its Israeli devils.

They crossed the 48th parallel, which bisects the northern timberland of Washington State, then the 47th, which took half a day. On August 5, they were due west of the estuary of the mighty Columbia River, the great 1,200-mile-long waterway that rises in a snow-and rain-filled torrent in the mountains of British Columbia, surges south, and then swerves west to form much of the border between Washington State and Oregon.

The Columbia was the most powerful river in the United States, generating one third of all the hydroelectric energy in the entire country. The Chief Joseph, the Grand Coulee, the John Day, and the Bonneville were the biggest of eleven massive mainstream dams. And the names of the latter two had been marked carefully on Shakira’s charts and circled in red, her personal code for potential danger.

In Shakira’s view, these two hydro giants, set upstream from Oregon’s commercial hub of Portland, would be heavily protected from terrorist attack, and the chances of high radar sweeping the skies above the dam were excellent. What Shakira wished to avoid especially was a missile detection from U.S. radar defenses, mainly because she considered that to be an unnecessary hazard, and most certainly avoidable.