Barracuda 945

by Patrick Robinson

  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.

  1:00 A.M., Friday, March 7, 2008

  42.26’ N, 128.12’ W, The Pacific Ocean

  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.

  And he understood the urgency, because he knew the fourth and final attack depended on split-second timing, and that the General would prefer to burn off time in the hours immediately before that last missile launch, than waste a day here in deep, safe water.

  “I intend to attack immediately,” said the General. “Please order the crew to prayer, and then alert the Missile Launchers. Shakira reports preprogrammed navigation systems complete. Nothing has changed. Two salvos, three missiles each, initial course fifty-five degrees.”

  “Aye, sir. Missile Director to the Control Room.”

  “STAND BY TUBES ONE TO SIX…”

  Captain Badr offered a prayer on behalf of the crew, who, he was convinced, were attacking on behalf of Allah. He mentioned the oppressors who had caused so much hardship to his people, and who were especially cruel and brutal to the Palestinians, who had been unjustly robbed of everything. Except for their beliefs, their courage, and their dignity.

  He prayed that Allah might speed on his missiles, and guide them toward the most heartless of enemies, whose arrogance had given strength to the evil hand of Israel. And who, even now, was supplying the Semites with weapons once more to murder the devout Muslims, who now cowered in their country.

  Allah be praised, for you are great…and please grant us the power to wound the Great Satan.

  “TUBE ONE LAUNCH!” snapped General Rashood.

  And the first of the mighty RADUGAs lifted off, out of the launcher, arrowing up through the black waters, and then howling vertically to around 200 feet and leveling off, its guidance systems swinging it around northeast to 55 degrees.

  The gas turbines cut in, and the deadly missile accelerated to its cruise speed of 600 knots, racing above the water, neit
her losing nor gaining height, cleaving through the cold night air, on its twenty-minute journey to the coast of Oregon. Directly astern, the second missile was under way, and the third was already under the control of the launch sequencer.

  The RADUGAs would not cover identical courses, but they would be similar, and they would cross the U.S. coastline approximately one mile apart, close to Yacquina Head, a great Pacific promontory that lies 120 miles due south of Grays Harbor.

  At this stage, the missiles were headed deep inland, on a 220-mile journey up toward the city of Yakima, still on a fifty-five-degree heading. By the time the opening three-weapon salvo reached the Oregon coast, they were undetected by any ship’s radar and now they streaked in over near-deserted land, still maintaining their height of 200 meters.

  They were propelled through the dark skies, west of the city of Salem, and came rocketing over the border into Washington State, high above the mighty Columbia River, crossing it just west of the massive John Day Dam.

  Straight above the vast Indian Reservation they flew, across some of the most beautiful, desolate land in the United States. The missiles awakened no one in the sleeping river town of Wapato as they screamed into their long left-hand turn out by the Rattlesnake Hills, swerving around the City of Yakima, over the long timber-rich valleys.

  At that point, the missiles had been running for a little more than forty minutes, and Shakira had selected a wild and lonely landscape for the turn, out west of the city. On every map she had studied, this looked about as likely to contain an alert and watchful surveillance system as inland Siberia.

  On a new bearing now, 260 degrees, the missiles headed into the high peaks of the Cascade Mountains, well south of the scarred and sculpted face of the 14,500-foot-high Mount Rainier, but north of the half-as-high Mount St. Helens, and still firmly in the heart of the Evergreen State.

  The missiles had no difficulty with the terrain, despite the steep escarpments. They just kept racing forward, automatically climbing higher with each giant rock face, following Shakira’s preset course. As the land began to fall away, when the Cascades began their sweep down to the coastal plain, those RADUGAs made the descent again on automatic, locked onto the primitive but serviceable brain in the nose cone.

  Their flying height remained constant at 200 meters, their course just south of due west, again coming in the wrong way, from out of American land territory, rather than the ocean—from somewhere out in Idaho, rather than the Pacific.

  Shakira had charted the mission brilliantly. Ravi’s space-age broadside swept smoothly through the skies, above the forests, in the name of Allah, on behalf of the Islamic Fundamentalists, down toward the huge oil conversion station at the sheltered end of Grays Harbor, south shore, seventeen minutes and 170 miles from Yakima.

  Fifty-seven minutes after launch time, Ravi Rashood’s first cruise missile was over the little town of Alder Grove, on its way into one of the refinery’s three massive steel fractional distillation towers. Each of these is capable of colossal combustion, receiving a flow of blisteringly hot crude oil, which has traveled through a “furnace” at around 725°F. The tower’s steel walls contain a combination of gasses and liquids, heavy fuels condensing, lighter fuels like gasoline and kerosene rising into the middle and upper sections, with liquified gas flashing off into the high vapor unit. All millisecond inflammable.

  In the entire world of high-tech incendiary, these towers represent the nearest thing to a leashed tiger. And when Ravi’s first cruise slammed into the first tower, at precisely 2:19 on that Friday morning, March 7, the blast was not only seen and heard six miles along the shore in the slumbering boom city of Aberdeen. It woke up the entire town of Hoquiam, one mile directly opposite on the far side of the harbor.

  The thunderous KER—BAAAAM! was much more an explosion than the pure fire of the Valdez destruction. And for the sleeping residents of Hoquiam, the searing white flash, which reached them before the sound, illuminated bedrooms, lit up the streets, and floodlit the entire town. Indeed, that particular flash was seen by the bosun of a supertanker off Point Chehalis, thirteen miles away near the gateway to the long harbor.

  The security staff at the quiet refinery, all of whom had been on a coffee break for the past couple of hours, came rushing out of the long, low building in which they made their headquarters, to investigate. They were just in time to see a second tower erupt like a volcano, not 600 yards away, as Ravi’s second cruise blitzed its way into the most volatile section of the entire refinery.

  They stood in awe of the monstrous explosion, gazing in horror at the wreckage, the flames, the black smoke, and gushing spirals of sparks crackling up into the sky. There was no human death toll, but the scene was nevertheless oddly reminiscent of those pockets of early witnesses, shown on television, staring at the World Trade Center Towers on that shattering September morning six years previously.

  But before anyone could mutter an expletive, much less issue a comment, Ravi’s missile number three was in, narrowly missing the third fractioning tower, but roaring on into first one, then a second storage tank, both of which were filled to the brim with thousands of gallons of refined power-station oil.

  Worse yet, they headed up the pipeline that joins the storage system to the nearby railhead station, where lines of freight tanker cars wait to be loaded. When the third missile blew the two storage tanks, it also blew the other twenty. And the gigantic explosion blasted into the short pipeline, incinerated an entire forty-car train, and knocked down the station.

  By some miracle, no one was killed, mainly because at 2:30 A.M. no one was working. The train was not scheduled to complete its loading until six o’clock, and the storage tank guards were essentially part of the same squad that was on its collective coffee break. And now they stood, all eight of them, dumb-founded by the magnitude of the explosion. No one knew what to do, except get back to the jeeps, and get on the cell phones, fire, police, and ambulance, and then get into the as yet unthreatened control and monitoring building and start switching off anything that might be releasing oil in any of its forms.

  All three decisions were luckily made several seconds too late. General Rashood’s second salvo of three RADUGA missiles was incoming fast. The first obliterated the control and monitoring building, killing the duty night operator, plus the night security guard who never left the building, and who at the time was watching television. The outer wall of the building crashed and crushed all four of the security jeeps.

  The other two plowed into the fuel farm where the incoming crude from the Alaskan pipeline was stored in great holding tanks, forty of them on a hill behind the refinery on the eastern side. These burst into flames in precisely the same way as those in Valdez, burning fiercely without the massive explosion that accompanies the ignition of refined gasoline or fuel oil.

  There was, however, one final, unforgettable blast to come. The heat of the fires finally began to melt the steel of the one remaining fractioning tower, which, seven minutes after the arrival of the first missile, exploded like a nuclear bomb, detonating upward, entirely differently from the other two towers that had been flattened upon impact, and exploded outward.

  Tower Three blew ferociously into the sky, steel, concrete, debris, pipes, gantries, stairways, roaring liquid gas, hundreds of feet, straight up into a billowing mushroom cloud of flames and swirling smoke. Never mind comparisons with an atomic bomb, they could very nearly have seen this in Hiroshima.

  The astonishing thing was, none of it was identifiable as a missile hit. To the eight refinery security guards, it was impossible to distinguish the missiles in a low sky that was already ablaze by the time they came charging out of the mess room. Each cruise flew its final half mile in three seconds, mainly through black smoke, and the security men were down-range, on the west side of the refinery.

  They could not even see the short fiery tail of the RADUGA as it speared into its target. Only if they had been somehow waiting for the first one, staring with
binoculars directly into its approach path, could they possibly have suspected a guided missile.

  No one did. It just seemed like the end of the world, everything exploding, bursting into flames. The eight men on the ground, still four hundred yards from the nearest fires, made their next decision in double-quick time. The heat was bearing down on them, and growing hotter. Sweat poured down their faces, and like a slower, but just as determined start to an Olympic 100-meters, they turned tail and bolted out of the blocks, eight undertrained U.S. sprinters, going for their lives, arms pumping, legs pounding, along the road to South Arbor, away from the burning air.

  Meantime, over in Hoquiam, the Fire Department was mobilizing, though most of the men, staring out across the gleaming silver-and-orange harbor waters to the blazing refinery, had no idea how to tackle such a task. The fire chief was yelling at them to activate all equipment and to be prepared to hold back the inferno from the city of Aberdeen.

  The firemen were instructed to drench the entire area in water, especially backyards of clapboard houses containing trees and bushes. They would also instruct all residents to move their automobiles out of the area. There was, plainly, quite sufficient burning gas for one night.

  The trouble was, the three little cities surrounding the head of Grays Harbor were joined together by a natural urban sprawl, and the homes of western Aberdeen were meandering along the road toward the refinery. Chief McFadden could not allow the fire to spread and take ahold in that area, not in the gusty prevailing west wind off the Pacific, and if the heat would permit them, his men would make that prevention an absolute priority.

  Right now McFadden was on the telephone to the Aberdeen Police Department, and they had already relayed news of the catastrophe to Washington State Police in Seattle. By 3 A.M. every late radio station in the state was alert to the disaster, and news of the fire was on the interstate network to Washington, D.C., where FBI investigators were already on the case.