Barracuda 945 am-6

by Patrick Robinson

  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 Kuno 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 Kuno 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 Kuno 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 crudest 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 represent 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 snowmobiles, 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 aboveground 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 je
t 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.

  There the crude is pumped into the brand-new undersea pipeline system which, from the winter of 2007, ran from the south shore of Alaska down to the Queen Charlotte Islands, 600 nautical miles south just off the coast of British Columbia in relatively shallow water. That was only half of its underwater journey. The rest took it down the coast, past Vancouver Island, and into American waters off the shores of Washington State, and the only deepwater port in that State, that of the ten-mile-long Grays Harbor.

  These increasingly busy sea-lanes, 100 miles south of the Canadian border, are now known as the Coastal Super Corridor, the West Coast's newest hub for business and international trade. Grays Harbor represents an outstanding confluence of road, rail, and marine transport routes, northeast to Seattle, south to Portland and California.

  Its new status had prompted the Republican White House to force through a bill that allowed the construction, deep in the harbor, of a new refinery to handle the incoming piped crude from Yakutat. It was built, using every possible modern technique, on the south shore, two miles from the sprawling port of Aberdeen, a town of 17,000 citizens, now joined in an urban sprawl to its neighbors, Cosmopolis and Hoquiam.

  The oil refinery was making a lot of people very rich. And the VLCCs were coming in line astern to Grays Harbor, loading up with refined crude oil, and then turning south again, down the coast to the Panama Canal and America's giant oil distribution system on the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Perhaps, even more importantly to the new boom towns at the head of Grays Harbor, was the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which brought colossal tankers rolling stock right into the refinery before running south for 900 miles, to yet another massive, new U.S. Government initiative, the biggest electricity-generating power station in the country, Lompoc, California.

  This towering construction was christened Superpower West. It is the mighty plant built on the express orders of the President, to end forever the constant power cuts, which had been erratically blacking out parts of California for several years. Superpower West, solely reliant on Alaskan oil, was born to take the pressure off the other fifty main California generating stations. It was born to light up, exclusively, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  It was into this multibillion-dollar power grid, stretching from the first snowy American soil halfway across the Pacific, to the very last hot, dusty U.S. acres on the Mexican border, that Ravi Rashood and Ben Badr were now headed.

  The Barracuda was out in open water now, running deep, east southeast from the incident with the fishing boat. Captain Badr held her speed at fifteen knots, 500 feet below the surface, heading toward the Kamchatka Basin, where the ocean shelves go down to depths of almost two miles.

  The Commanding Officer was trying to run the ship as if it were a part of someone's Navy, but they still had an unresolved, life-and-death navigation issue — whether to take the shorter route along the south side of the Aleutians, or to take the route north of the islands and try to duck back south through the Unimak Pass at the far eastern end of the chain.

  No modern Navy would dream of allowing the matter to be a subject for discussion during the voyage. All routes and objectives would have been signed, sealed, and delivered in orders long before departure. Even in Special Ops. But this was, in the end, not a Navy. The Barracuda was staffed with professionals and experts, on all decks, but the mission was unorthodox and may need refining, like the Alaskan oil, during its long journey.

  It was Lt. Comdr. Shakira Rashood who was waving a red flag, casting grim and academic doubts on the wisdom of taking the short route south of the islands.

  She was not being dogmatic, or even insistent. But she was saying to the CO, and the Navigation officer, and indeed to her husband, "If I were an American, I would have a patrol submarine, right there, moving along the northern edge of the Aleutian Trench over that very deep water… Right here… Look… Where it's over three miles to the seabed."

  Ben Badr plainly found this an extremely difficult exchange, since he was unused to being questioned in his own ship, particularly by a woman, whose species he had never even seen in a submarine. But Shakira had spent months studying charts of the area, and gleaning information off the Internet from defense papers and Pentagon data.

  Ben knew she would be unlikely to speak out, unless she knew a great deal about the subject. He bit the bullet, smiled, and told Ravi he had a very learned wife, which defused the situation and allowed Ben to avoid a direct confrontation with a lady, 500 feet below the surface.

  Ravi, too, had studied the charts with Shakira. In fairness, he was in two minds about the best route past the Aleutians. However, the chart he and the navigator now studied with the Commanding Officer was not so full of information as Shakira's, whose main concern had been with American surveillance.

  "For what it's worth," she said, "I have seen a pattern of more and more precautions being taken by the U.S. Navy. For instance, immediately after September 11, they stepped up security around the Valdez Terminal, and they are still running Naval patrols a mile out of Prince William Sound. I don't know if those patrols include submarines, but it is my opinion, the U.S. Navy would sink any interloper detected in those waters. Just imagine a foreign submarine creeping around in the waters near the very heartbeat of their West Coast economy. Trust me, they would not hesitate to open fire."

  General Rashood looked carefully at the chart, and then said simply, "OK, Lieutenant Commander, why the north route?"

  "Well, if you take Attu Island, the first place we come to, the chart marks an air reconnaissance post just to the east. Remember, this is the very tip of the islands. I would be amazed if there was not a Loran Station, a proper U.S. Naval facility somewhere on that coastline. It may be a straightforward radar station, or even a SOSUS processing unit. Either way, it will look like a cowshed, or reindeer shed, and either way, they could hear us come by. The water's shallow to the south, and noisy, but we don't want to go that way."

  Ben Badr nodded in agreement. "Well," he said, "it's certainly a lot deeper to the north. The seabed falls away right offshore to two miles deep, and it stays that way for a couple of hundred miles." He and Ravi stared at the chart, looking at the distinctive soundings that lay to the south, where the ocean floor shelves steeply down into the Aleutian Trench, which in places is four miles deep.

  "I doubt there's SOSUS, not right down in the trench," said Ben. "And I agree with Shakira. All the signs are there for a U.S. Navy listening station right here—173' E 53' N.

  "And I agree there is a very good chance of a U.S. submarine patrol to the south. Come here, Ravi… and Shakira. Let me show you a slightly bigger scale chart."

  He produced a large white, blue, and yellow chart, which showed the ocean well south of the Aleutians, the sprawling undersea area known as the Great Pacific Basin.

  "This large plateau," he said, "is loaded with U.S. SOSUS surveillance, which means we cannot go anywhere near it. But since we have to move from one end of the Aleutians to the other, we have to go somewhere. Now look at these depths here… All through the Basin, for miles and miles, north, south, east, and west, we're looking at 5,000 meters. The whole place is lethal. Because during the Cold War the Americans were paranoid about Russian submarines crossing that stretch of the Pacific into American waters.

  "And you both know the Americans. When they want something, they make sure they get it. What they got here was an impenetrable area, in which no one could move without U.S. surveillance picking them up instantly. What they could not do was operate the same system to the north, close in to the islands.

  "Here… look at these depths. Heading north from the Basin, we move into a sudden decline, where the seabed reaches a kind of cliff edge and then plunges rapidly down to depths of ove
r 7,000 meters, and stays there for several miles.

  "Then," he continued, "right here, still heading north, over the deepest part, the ocean floor starts to rise steeply… here… 6,000… 5,000… 4,000… 3,000… 2,000… then 1,000… then way under, 500 feet… three hundred off Attu Island. We just crossed a very large ditch, the Aleutian Trench. It's the one place the U.S. Navy cannot operate SOSUS. It's too deep, too steep. The U.S. equipment on the great plateau of the Basin cannot see across the ditch."

  "I know it can't see across, but why can't it?" asked Shakira.

  "The undersea cliffs are too steep. SOSUS does not like looking up walls," replied Ben. "And that's why they almost certainly have a submarine patrol in there. If you've got billions of dollars' worth of equipment guarding your western approaches, you wouldn't begrudge yourself a nuclear submarine to try and make it foolproof, would you?"

  "I guess not," said Shakira.

  "And where does that put us, in your estimation?" asked Ravi.

  "It puts me right with Shakira's original argument, that it would be folly to try to run south of the Islands, because we'd almost certainly get detected by any U.S. submarine that happened to be in the area. They may not catch us, but they'd sound an alarm that would be heard all the way to the Pentagon. And I don't think we'd like that very much."

  "There could even be two submarines in there," said Ravi, thoughtfully.

  "I would not disagree with that either," said Ben. "Because even if they have SOSUS arrays on the ocean floor inshore, from eighty miles all the way to the beach, it's awfully difficult to listen 'uphill,' especially out here."

  "How do you mean?" asked Ravi.

  "Well, in this area, coming from the Basin up to the Trench, there are some huge swells, which have been building for a thousand miles. The weather is bad, force eight-nine gales, pretty big seas. There's a ton of noise from the sea hitting the underwater cliffs. A lot of turbulence, water bouncing around, strong currents sluicing in and out of deep underwater holes.