Barracuda 945

by Patrick Robinson

  The President of Panama was quite prepared to accept Chinese cash and more or less do their bidding over matters concerning the Canal so long as his country received a fair rake-off from the enormous profits. But he did not much envy General Noriega’s present status in a Florida jail, and the thought of an angry United States was apt to strip him of his manhood.

  He was occasionally nervous about the ruthless way the Chinese conducted their business. But he was cold-bloodedly scared of the United States, especially when they had a Republican President surrounded by tough men who could not give a damn for left-wing rhetoric, Third World demands, and the empty rantings of various national leaders who threatened to “fight the United States to the death” but could not possibly match Washington’s military might. At last count, the number of world nations that could perhaps raise even five percent of Washington’s military might added up to one large, fat zero.

  The Panamanian President now had a smooth, teak-tough ex-Harvard law professor on the wire telling him it would be a pity if the President of the United States were to get very cross with Panama, because that might prove unproductive to Panama.

  The Panamanian was not fluent in the English language, but the icy tone of Harcourt Travis left him in no doubt the Chinese were playing with fire, but the first ass that was going to get kicked was his.

  “But, Mr. Travis,” he protested. “You know full well we handed over control of the Canal to the East China and Pacific Shipping, and that we gave them a very free hand to run it efficiently, and as they wished. There is little I can do while that contract is in existence.”

  Harcourt Travis sighed and said softly. “The fact that your predecessor made the unhappy mistake of double-crossing a somewhat witless former President of my country with an illegal agreement with Red China is unlikely to cut much ice with the White House Administration of today. Might I simplify this for you: Mr. President, we want that canal open within two hours, or else.”

  “Or else what?” asked the President haplessly. But the line was already dead. And in the mind of the elected leader of the Panamanian nation, there was but one thought, and it involved 26,000 troops landing and opening fire, American tanks rolling through the streets of Panama City, fighter-bombers screaming overhead, helicopter gunships clattering above the street.

  He’d seen it before, run for his own life before the 1989 U.S. onslaught. “Merde,” breathed the Panamanian leader, in the unmistakable Spanish of south Central America.

  He summoned his Ministers and then put in a call to the Chinese Ambassador on his direct Embassy line in the ritzy Punta Paitilla area of the city.

  The connection took less than three minutes, and the Ambassador was as helpful as the President knew he would be. I understand there is some difficulty at the Miraflores Lock…. Yes, yes, I realize Americans may be displeased…. I am afraid there is nothing I can do…. Canal operates entirely independently of Chinese Government…. Their contract is with you, not China…. Our policy is never to intervene in matters of private companies…. I am simply not authorized to utilize my country’s Embassy in that way…. I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I can’t help.

  By now the Panamanian leader was becoming personally rattled. He knew, like everyone else in Panama, the Chinese Government had plainly decided to close the Canal for big reasons and would continue to stonewall his own government until they were good and ready to open it up.

  Furthermore, he had not been warned, or consulted, or even advised. And there was this terrible bastard Travis on the phone from Washington, threatening God knows what. The Panamanian did not, of course, realize that Travis was one of the mildest-mannered and deftest of diplomats in this Administration. His own terror was nothing to the shuddering, sledgehammer blows currently being experienced in the White House’s West Wing by another Chinese Ambassador, the one sitting opposite Admiral Arnold Morgan.

  “DON’T YOU DARE LIE TO TO ME!

  “I don’t happen to care what your powers are, nor do I give a goddamn what your tin-pot half-assed government thinks…. GET THAT FUCKING CANAL OPEN….

  “TWO DAYS! I SAID TWO HOURS, and right now that’s one hour and forty-two minutes. Time might have stood still in fucking Beijing or wherever the hell you live, but right here, in the U.S. of A., IT KEEPS MARCHING FORWARD, HEAR ME?”

  Kathy O’Brien had never heard Arnold more angry. In fact, she was amazed the Chinese Ambassador had not just stood up and left. It took only a few more seconds to understand why he was still there.

  “You make any attempt to leave this place before I say you leave, you’ll be on a one-way ticket to Shanghai this day. DEPORTED…understand?

  “WHADDYA MEAN, I WOULDN’T DARE. STAND UP AND TRY ME!”

  What Kathy O’Brien did not quite grasp was that Arnold Morgan was giving a performance. Terrorizing the Ambassador, no doubt. But preparing for a finale that would rock the visiting diplomat back on his heels.

  It took the Admiral twenty minutes to deliver his punch line, and when he did so, the world of international relations momentarily stood still.

  “Your Excellency,” said Arnold, silkily. “If the Panama Canal remains closed for the rest of this day, the United States of America will retake it by military force. We’ll knock down your Stone Age dockyards at Cristobal and Balboa. We’ll take both cities, and anyone who gets in the way, especially if he happens to be Chinese, will inevitably die.

  “If the canal is damaged during our attack, we’ll fix it, because by then we’ll own it. Perhaps you would be good enough to relay those glad tidings to your crooked government. NOW GET OUT.”

  It is doubtful if any Ambassador in Washington in living memory had ever been spoken to quite like that. Kathy had to give the Chinese diplomat a glass of water before he was able to exit the West Wing.

  After that, she took the boss some fresh coffee.

  “I have never quite understood why you ignored a career in the Diplomatic Corps,” she said, sweetly. “Such a subtle turn of phrase. So quietly persuasive…”

  “Kathy,” he said, “do you know anything about the history of the Panama Canal? And why today it’s finally in the mess I knew it would be nine years ago?”

  “Well, I can’t say I do, really.”

  “And I haven’t got time to enlighten you right now,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this. Carter should never have permitted the Treaty. We should have flexed some muscle and hung on to control. The President should have stopped those bastards in their tracks when the lease was sold on and they as good as handed over control of the waterway to China.”

  “Since it was then Panama’s canal, how could he?” replied Kathy, who had always had a sneaking regard for Bill Clinton.

  “Because as far as I'm concerned it was all illegal. There were terms laid out, and bidding was organized on an international basis, for the right to run the Canal. The United States put in a bid for control that was much, much higher than anyone else’s. But the Chinese, offering a bribe the size of the Forbidden City, were given another chance, and told what the American bid was. A few days later, the Panamanian Government handed it all over.”

  “Wow!”

  “Wow, as it happens, is right. Though I wish you would desist from using the mindless, constipated speech of the young and goofy.”

  Kathy, who ought to have been stung by his rudeness, burst out laughing as she always did when her future husband handed out his customary grief. Let’s face it, she had long ago decided, he talks to everyone like that. And, anyway, it was nothing like so bad as the battering he had just delivered to the Washington Ambassador of the largest country on earth.

  “Well, what could the White House have done about it?”

  “They should have told the Panamanian Government that the United States was going to run the canal. Anyone raises one finger to stop us, that would be regarded as an act of war, to which we would react appropriately.

  “Then I’d have reminded them that the Canal was built with Amer
ican engineering, American money, American muscle, and American brains. And we never denied a ship passage, at least not in time of peace. We should have told them right away, if they think they’re gonna trespass on the goodwill of the United States and hand the damn thing over to a totalitarian Communist country, with a human rights policy that would make Idi Amin look like the Good Fairy, and then give them the right to deny access to any ship they wished…

  “Well, fuck it! They could try, but the United States would stop them with whatever military force it might take. That’s what should have happened.”

  “And if Panama had called America’s bluff?”

  “Them? That half-assed bunch of gauchos? Kathy, I’m talking muscle right here. The same muscle and courage that built the Canal. When the United States wants something that is quite obviously in the interest of the entire world, we should go out and take it, and tell the goddamned Panamanians to go feed their flea-ridden mules.”

  “Nice analogy, Whitman,” she replied. “And by the way, gauchos are from South America.”

  “OK, so I made a one-stop mistake. From Panama, it’s only about three hundred yards to Colombia, right?”

  “Honestly,” Kathy said. “You are the most awful person….”

  “Nothing like so awful as I’m going to be in a couple of hours, if those Chinamen don’t open the Canal.”

  Meanwhile, the Barracuda was making stately progress through the breathtaking excavation of the Gaillard Cut, steering three-two-five now, past the great mudslides that perpetually haunt the Culebra Reach on both banks.

  The tug made another course adjustment fifteen degrees to starboard before running into Cascades Reach, which leads to the Gatún Lake, a 164-square-mile expanse of tropical water, patrolled by glowering crocodiles. The Canal channel runs through the middle of it, still zigzagging, avoiding the islands.

  There are five course changes along the jagged twenty-four-mile route through the lake, past uninhabited rain forest and densely wooded shores. The Gatún Lake is, of course, entirely man-made, created when they built the mighty Gatún Dam across the Chagres River and flooded miles and miles of countryside, submerging twenty-nine villages in order to start construction of the high canal.

  The massive edifice of the Gatún Locks, with its gigantic three-step chambers from sea level to the upper lake, is one of the engineering marvels of the modern world, still regarded by academics as perhaps man’s supreme building achievement.

  General Rashood had told his wife all about it, the great concrete exit to the Atlantic, because he knew they were not going to see it. And just before nine o’clock that evening, still following the lighted beacons and buoys, the Chinese navigators ordered the submarine hard to port, off Pena Blanca Reach, two miles shy of the locks.

  The tug hauled the submarine slowly into the desolate western waters of the lake, which had been closed to tourists, fishermen, and snorkelers for two days, pending the arrival of the Barracuda.

  The temperature was cooling off to around seventy-eight degrees now, and there was a dampness in the sullen, tropical night, perhaps a harbinger of the first heavy rains of the season. In the distance, they could hear howler monkeys not yet settled in the treetops, the occasional shriek of a macaw, and the high staccato clicking of cicadas.

  In twelve fathoms of water, they crept through the darkness. The navigators held big searchlights and demanded a course of first, two-seven-zero, then one-eight-zero, staying in the deepest water down the craggy shore of the lake. They moved by Trinidad Island in almost total silence, and then proceeded south, six more miles into lonely Trinidad Bay, a two-mile-wide dead end, still seven fathoms deep but uninhabited to the eastern side.

  The pilots called the navigation orders expertly, conning the submarine from the bridge behind the tug, until she was moving east. A half mile later, they rounded the jutting headland of Pelican Island, and the Chinese pathfinders ran the Barracuda right inshore, along a dead straight overgrown beach, through a dredged channel running beneath a dense overhang of rain forest.

  With some alarm, Captain Badr called a depth warning, but it was too late. The bow of Barracuda 945 grounded to a near halt in soft mud, right on a yellow marker left by the dredger the previous week. Her sail and casing was covered in tropical foliage, only fifteen feet from the shore. The tug now came alongside and edged the submarine into position, before casting off and vanishing north.

  Almost immediately, a Chinese patrol boat pulled alongside, instantly pushing a gangway between the two vessels in the flat, calm, motionless water. Six engineers who were normally based in the Yellow Sea Submarine Base at Huladao now came aboard, and almost immediately, General Rashood ordered the first twenty of his own crew to gather their possessions and disembark the submarine.

  Everyone else was told to prepare to evacuate in the next two hours. Ravi and Shakira, plus the Captain, would be the last to go, on the second trip, way up to the northeast corner of the lake, close to the airport at Colón.

  The round-trip for the first half of the crew took almost two hours. The patrol boat returned just before midnight, and the remainder of the Hamas mariners began to disembark. Ben Badr had by now ordered open the vents to the main ballast tanks, which had the effect of pushing the ship down, and the Barracuda was slowly sinking lower into the soft mud, settling hard on the bottom. Water was already washing over her upper casing.

  Ben had the hatches open for’ard and aft. Most of the machinery was already shut down, but the emergency diesel motor was running, and the pumps were still working, forcing water to the compensation tanks, neutralizing any suggestion of buoyancy. All seawater lines were open.

  The process of reducing the great underwater warship into a silent hulk would take possibly four more days, and the Chinese engineers would be working in a damp and gruesomely uncomfortable environment. But their orders were stark: No one must ever know that submarine existed…. Sink it into the mud, without trace.

  By midnight, only the sail remained in view, and by the time Ben had flooded the Reactor Room, the Barracuda was inching even lower into the hole the Chinese dredger had dug for her. It was just a matter of time. Modern military camouflage, and a couple of DANGER signs with an “explosive” motif, posted by the Chinese Navy, would keep the Barracuda, and her secrets, safe for decades.

  Thus far, the plan was going forward without a hitch, until from out of the dark Shakira spotted a light, a bright searchlight flanked by a red and a green, an unmistakable motor launch, attracted by their own lights and coming directly toward them. Fast.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Ravi. “Who the hell’s this?”

  Instantly his old SAS take-charge right-now mentality kicked in. He called out to the helmsman of the Chinese patrol boat, “Cast off and pull away, regular speed, no panic. Hang around for a half hour, then come back.”

  As one boat left, the other came slowly forward, a light bow wave phosphorescent in the dark water as it pulled alongside. It was a thirty-one-foot Boston Whaler, and Ravi was astonished to hear an American voice.

  “Hey, guys, Joe Morris from Delaware. Can you give us a hand here? We lost the goddamned chart. Been camping down the bay for two or three days…beautiful fishing. Are we headed up to the locks? Everything looks kinda the same around here….”

  General Rashood answered in his best English officer’s accent. “Oh, good evening, Joe. We’re British, actually, organizing a World Wildlife meet here for next week. But you are right, keep heading north and you’ll come right up to the locks on your port side.”

  He realized he and Ben must have looked absolutely ridiculous, standing on the bridge of a submerged Russian Navy submarine, jutting out of the water, but he hoped to God the American wouldn’t notice, not in the pitch dark with only a flashlight.

  But the American did notice. “Hey, what the hell’s that you’re standing on? Looks like a goddamned submarine. You guys smugglers or something?”

  “Certainly not,” said the Hamas Gen
eral. “This is the World Wildlife underwater vessel. We use it all over Central America, studying rare fish and stuff. Very useful little toy…”

  “Sure as hell looks like a submarine to me,” said Joe. “And I used to be in the U.S. Navy…. Norfolk, Virginia. I seen a lot of submarines, believe me.”

  “Not one quite like this,” replied Ravi. “We’ve got a glass bottom. Pretty amazing some of the things we see under the water…”

  “Jeez. Sounds good. Hey, wait a minute. I wanna get a photograph. Just lemme find the flash. Wanna show it to some Navy buddies back home. They’ll be real interested.”

  The flashlight, which belonged to Joe Morris of Delaware, popped dazzlingly in the jungle light.

  “Would you like to come aboard and I’ll show you the underwater lights? Some of those big crocodiles come right up close when we switch them on. Bring your camera.”

  “Hey, that’d be great. Can my two buddies come over…just Skip and Ronnie? We’re all from Wilmington.”

  “Certainly. Come around to the rope ladder on the other side of the bridge. We just hung it out. And watch how you go—those crocodiles are mean little bastards. Don’t want you to get eaten alive…”

  Ravi had a very quick word with Shakira, who left and went below. Five minutes later, all three visitors were standing on the bridge of the Barracuda, and Ravi led the way down to the upper deck. He noticed Joe Morris had an automatic pistol jammed in his belt. The other two appeared to be unarmed.

  The area below the steel stairway was, mercifully, still dry, and Joe Morris and his pals arrived cheerfully. When they were all gathered at the base of the stairwell, Ravi introduced himself for the first time. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I’m Captain Mark Smyley, Irish Guards, working with the World Wildlife Commission, personal envoy of the Duke of Edinburgh….”

  “Hey! How about that, guys? Stick with me, right? Never know who you’re gonna meet!” He smiled cheerfully, and was actually still smiling when Ravi slammed the head of a twelve-inch screwdriver —bang— into the space between his eyebrows and then crashed the butt of his right hand with terrific force into the base of his nose, ramming the bone deep into the brain. Joe died instantly.