Barracuda 945 (2003)

by Patrick Robinson

  In time, it became clear what had really happened. Panama had effectively handed over control of the Canal, plus its former U.S. Navy and Army installations, to President Clinton's Most Favored Nation, Communist China.

  The Panamanians had sold a fifty-year "leasehold" contract for the Cristobal and Balboa dockyards to a multinational corporation, which ended up with the Rodman Naval Station, a portion of the U.S. Air Station Albrook, Diablo and Balboa on the Pacific, Cristobal Dockyard on the Atlantic, and the island of Telfers. In the year 2006, this leasehold was sold on to a mainland China corporation called East China and Pacific Shipping out of Shanghai, which had run the canal ever since.

  The second contract included "rights" to operate piloting and tugboat services for the Canal, out of Cristobal and Balboa, and to deny access to ports and entrances to any ships deemed to be interfering with East China and Pacific Shipping's business. This latter clause, secretly written into Panama's Law Number Five, was plainly in direct violation of Carter's Panama Canal Treaty. It allowed East China and Pacific Shipping to determine which ships may enter the channel, and has effectively made Communist China the gatekeeper of the Canal, thus enjoying total control of the great U.S.-built waterway, at both ends.

  The Panamanian contract with the Chinese could plainly have been severely obstructed, and then slammed into oblivion, had there been a proper Republican President in the White House, rather than a self-serving left-winger, who will always be remembered as the ideal President for China's ambitions. President Clinton was a man open to their attempts at bribery, tolerant of their transfer of weapons to questionable areas, helpful in modernizing China's military, and oblivious to a weakening of the U.S. military, spread thin because of his own reckless humanitarian peacekeeping missions all over the globe.

  Panama highlighted another side of that particular Democratic President, that of the weak and vacillating negotiator, utterly reluctant to follow through with hardheaded American threats, or even to act decisively, except against those powerless to resist. The snafu in Panama was precisely the kind of international disaster that invariably happens when a major power votes into office a President who dislikes the military, as Clinton, to his country's very great cost, most certainly did.

  General Ravi Rashood, as a former serving commander in the SAS, knew the entire background to the Panama situation, and he had been able to explain to Ben Badr why they would be safe in the former Canal Zone.

  "The Chinese can open and close the channels from either end, at will," he said. "My guess is that once we're in, they'll shut it off to all shipping on some pretext or other. And it's pretty clear we'll be flying home from somewhere in Panama. The United States will probably catch sight of us, but by then it will be too late. The Chinese will just slam those lock gates shut. And that's one hell of a barrier, those doors weigh eight hundred tons each. It's the one fact I remember about the canal."

  "But what about my ship, Ravi? What happens to that?"

  "I don't know, but I understand all final instructions will be given when the Chinese pilot boards at Balboa before we move into the Canal."

  "Did you make any recommendations before we left? It was your project in the first place."

  "Yes, I did. I told them the submarine would have to be dumped, in a place where it would never be found and from where it would tell no tales."

  "What?! This beautiful ship that can strike against the Great Satan at will?"

  "Ben, this ship is now poisonous. Its very presence is a threat not only to us, but to Russia and China, and world order. It certainly does not suit our purposes for China and the United States to be at war. Because that way everyone would be caught up in the fallout.

  "It would be in our best interests for this ship to vanish, leaving the Americans uncertain of what happened, the Chinese with their heads down, and the Russians denying anything and everything. That way we would have taken some very large steps toward an American exit from the Middle East, and made some very large profits for the Gulf States in the oil industry. Some of which will find its way into the coffers of Hamas."

  "I see that, Ravi. But tell me one thing. How do you dump a nuclear submarine of this size without spilling radiation all over the place and alerting everyone on the planet to the submarine's location?"

  "Not easily. I have recommended we shut the reactor down and just let the Barracuda sink into the mud in some totally inaccessible, uninhabited place with heavy rainforest cover. Seal it off and then abandon it. The Chinese could camouflage the sail, if it was still showing, and in a few months it would be completely gone."

  "Someone would probably find it in the end," said Ben.

  "Yes. But that might take fifty years. And who the hell cares?"

  "Not I," said Ben. "But I regret we have only managed one operation in this superb ship."

  "I, too. But, remember, we do have another one."

  The late March temperature in the West Wing of the White House was hovering near the red zone. The President was absolutely furious, unable to comprehend the impotence of the U.S. Navy in finding the rogue submarine.

  No amount of words by the CNO, no amount of logic from God knows how many admirals could convince him of the sheer impossibility of locating a nuclear submarine traveling at a very slow speed, in an unknown direction, in a million square miles of ocean.

  Admiral Morgan, tired of the President's ranting and raving, ended up taking him aside and privately telling him to "try to get a goddamned grip of yourself."

  "You got the best Navy brains in the country right here in the White House," he growled. "They are wrestling with the problem night and day. If it could be done, we'da done it, so get ahold of yourself. And do some listening."

  The President had never been spoken to, not quite like that, by anyone, except the unimpeachable, unsackable, Arnold Morgan. He did not much enjoy the experience. But a walkout by his revered National Security Adviser at a time like this would finish him, particularly as that might precipitate a further walkout by his Chiefs of Staff. Or even an unthinkable military takeover by the Generals and Admirals, who might judge him incompetent to lead the nation in a time of crisis, and obvious emergency.

  Stranger things have happened. Commander-in-Chief the President might be, but that always presupposes the goodwill of the Armed Service Chiefs toward the White House. That goodwill had never been seriously tested, not even with Clinton. But equally there had never been a serious military threat to the U.S. mainland, not by a foreign invader. Ever. But there was one now, and the military was edging into the inner circle of government, and the Chief Executive had to tread warily.

  "Arnie, I'm sorry," the President said. "But to a layman like myself, it's unthinkable that the Navy of the United States cannot find a submarine that has been attacking our shores."

  "Sir, no one can find a nuclear boat that is traveling at five knots or under, three hundred feet below the surface. Not without tripping over the damn thing by accident. No terrorist has ever used a nuclear boat before, and we have to find out whose fingerprints are on it. Sooner or later he'll make a mistake, and we'll be waiting. Meanwhile, we've got a lot to think about."

  The Admiral was correct about that. The price of oil had tripled, to $76 dollars a barrel, and stayed there. The world's fuel markets were in an uproar. So were the Dow Jones Industrials, the Footsie, the CAC 40, the Nikkei, the DAX, and the rest.

  Stocks collapsed on a global scale. Shares in any public corporation that was dependent on oil or fuel, any transportation, were just about unsalable. The two big California cities, unattached to the main state grid, were bereft of electricity. And the remnants of the power station at Lompoc were still burning. A mass exodus of millions from San Francisco and Los Angeles to outlying districts had caused chaos on the freeways, as drivers struggled to get into an electricity zone.

  Every hotel, every motel, was packed with families who had fled the endless dark that surrounded nighttime San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles.
Thousands of people moved in with friends and relatives out in Concord, Liver-more, and Modesto; Ventura, Santa Clarita, Moreno Valley, and Palm Springs. Many thousands more bought airline tickets at spiraling prices, from airlines with small emergency generators for computers, and battled their way out of the two international airports in the daylight hours. They had to be sharp, before the massive jet-fuel storage areas ran completely dry.

  There was no question of key executives trying to commute their way into the city centers. Modern business runs on computers, and great office high-rises cannot function without electricity. There was no light, no elevators, and no security systems. There was a danger that law and order could break down. Every evening at twilight, gangs of youths roamed the streets. Looting was becoming commonplace. The Los Angeles Police Department, lit by three small generators, struggled to keep these mobs of amateur criminals under control. Emergency fuel was coming in by road in Exxon tankers to gas up the police cruisers.

  The military were being called in, to mount street patrols and to guard the downtown buildings. Water supplies to both cities, dependent on electricity plant for purifying systems, were becoming stretched to the limit. Consumption was down, but the greater Los Angeles system still had to cope with the demands of a population cut by two-thirds, but still three million strong.

  The Governor was safe in his Sacramento Mansion. But the mighty film studios were closed. All West Coast television transmission was down, which hardly mattered since no one could turn on their sets. If Troy Ramford was going to receive his Oscar, publicly, any time soon, it would have to be somewhere out beyond San Bernardino, where the power was on. His Malibu home was dark, like the rest of the beachfront properties of the film and television talent.

  The President, guided and supported by his Energy Secretary, Jack Smith, was putting emergency measures into operation as fast as possible. The San Francisco and Los Angeles electricity-supply companies were being connected to the main California grid, with two massive power line hookups, out in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, and to the west of San Jose, south of San Francisco. Jack Smith estimated power for the cities inside twelve days, which the President considered inordinate.

  With the refinery gone at Grays Harbor, there was no further possibility of refined oil running south into the West Coast states of Oregon and California, but there was a definite capability for U.S. tanker fleets to start shipping refined oil through the Panama Canal and north to Los Angeles immediately. The fuel, colossally expensive, was subsequently government-subsidized. And, of course, the huge diesel engines of the tankers themselves were sloshing back fuel that cost almost the same as cheap Scotch whisky.

  Tanker fleets from the Midwest were already on the roads, barreling through the night, laden with gasoline from the big Chicago terminals, across Iowa, Nebraska, southern Wyoming, and Nevada, on what was virtually a mercy mission to the American west. Hundreds of fuel trucks were thundering out of Texas, west across the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona toward the stricken city of Los Angeles. Every one of them was laden with refined gasoline, which Los Angeles needed a lot more than it needed Oklahoma sweet crude.

  All the while, the East Coast media wanted to know what the hell the President was doing about "this unprecedented crisis in the history of our country." How was he proposing to solve it, find the culprits, and restore the power and dignity of the United States of America? Generally speaking, it looked a lot easier from the offices of the Washington Post than it did from the Oval Office.

  Through it all, the U.S. Navy racked its brains, listening for the lonely bleep in the vast Pacific ocean, which would betray the presence of the murderous Barracuda Type 945, which Arnold Morgan swore was there.

  The President had three times addressed the section of the nation that had working television sets, stressing the speed at which the emergency services were working to reconnect the blacked-out cities. He admitted the likelihood of sabotage, even attack by terrorists, and swore U.S. revenge on the perpetrators of these "wicked and destructive crimes against our nation."

  He did not, however, point out the likelihood of a bunch of maniacs in a modern nuclear submarine creeping up and down the West Coast, bombarding the most important oil installations with heavy Russian-built cruise missiles.

  Nor could he envisage doing so, not before the U.S. Navy had detected and either captured or destroyed the enemy, whoever he might be.

  The U.S. Diplomatic Corps was working at an unprecedented speed, demanding cooperation from every one of their international trading partners. They threatened the Russians and the Chinese, opened the lines to Tehran, Damascus, Cairo, and Amman, demanding to know if there was any connection to the West Coast atrocities from any Arab Fundamentalist group.

  The CIA called in favors, and bribed, blackmailed, and badgered agents all over the world. But no one knew anything. Especially the Russians, who would only say they had sold the Barracuda to the Chinese and knew nothing else.

  The Chinese Navy merely asserted the only Barracuda they knew anything about was currently visiting the Southern Fleet Headquarters in Zhanjiang. Had been since before the Lompoc attack, and so far as they knew, was still there in a covered dock. No other Barracuda had ever docked in a Chinese Naval Base. All true. Nearly.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. satellites were adjusted to range along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, from the Gulf of Alaska all the way to the 780-mile-long Mexican peninsula of Baja California. That was a total sea-and-air patrol distance of 3,000 miles, all of it essential, just in case the submarine turned north again, just in case it continued to head south.

  CINCPAC reasoned the marauder was surely traveling slowly, otherwise it must surely have been heard, either by a patrolling submarine, which could have picked it up at 100 miles, or by SOSUS, which is deadly sensitive all the way along the West Coast. Only the lowest speed ensures near-total silence.

  Which meant, five knots maximum, and at that speed it would take more than eight days to cover 1,000 miles. Thus, in the first week of the hunt, the Pacific branch of the U.S. Navy was faced with a search area of 3,000 miles by 1,000 miles . . . 3 million square miles, an area roughly the size of Australia, with nothing even resembling a submarine choke point.

  All U.S. satellites were adjusted to photograph the immense tract of ocean. The most modern observation systems of surface disturbance were activated, all of them peering down through space, seeking the swirling patterns on the water that would betray the presence of a deep-running nuclear ship, unless it was moving at the pace of a basking Pacific turtle.

  Everyone knew the task was probably impossible. But the Navy had to keep going, just in case the submarine made a mistake, and to prevent further embarrassment to the Presidency of the United States.

  "The main trouble is," Arnold Morgan privately raged, "no one has the slightest idea which direction the goddamned ship is moving."

  He still believed it must be making some kind of a southerly course, but that only reduced the search area to 1.5 million square miles, half the size of Brazil.

  By Thursday morning, March 27, four days after a hectic nonexistent Easter break, the Navy still reported nothing. By now the Barracuda was more than 1,300 miles down the coast of Mexico, beyond the designated search area for the U.S. warships and aircraft, but not beyond the range of the satellites. It still had more than 1,800 miles to go before the Gulf of Panama, but with every turn of its fifteen-foot-high bronze screw, it pushed further away from danger.

  In the White House, the President was at a level of frustration that he regarded as intolerable. He remained without comprehension where the Navy was concerned, muttering constantly about the billions of dollars he authorized every year for research and development in military surveillance, only to be told there was an 8,000-ton missile-hurling Russian submarine, fucking around somewhere off Laguna Beach, and no one could find it, never mind zap it.

  The situation was somewhat eased when the lights went on ag
ain in Los Angeles. On the Saturday afternoon of March 29, three-quarters of the city's electric power was restored, and though this would mean two-hour brownouts in other parts of Southern California, it was sensationally good news for the residents of the City of Angels.

  The San Francisco hookup took a day longer. But by Monday morning, March 31, both the big metropolitan areas were up and running again, despite chronic fuel shortages and long lines at the gas pumps.

  The President again went on television to explain that for the moment the United States was reliant on foreign oil, and that it would be several months before the Alaskan oil began to flow again. Work to rebuild the refinery at Grays Harbor was already under way, and the two breaches in the south-running undersea pipeline had been repaired. Right now the Energy Department was concentrating on refinery capacity, and routes were being established to run more and more crude oil into America's existing facilities.