Barracuda 945 am-6

by Patrick Robinson

  The Barracuda, miraculously in the mind of the ex-Kilo officer Ben Badr, did not have to refuel. But they made two very slow stops, once while the frigate escort took on more diesel from a Russian Naval oiler in a sheltered bay behind the jutting headland of Cape Kamchatka, and once while the CO of the escorting submarine checked a leaky seal, in another bay near the mountain. Both ships could have made it to Petropavlovsk, but warship COs dislike running on empty, and submarine COs are generally allergic to shipping water unless it is unavoidable during a fast getaway from an Ops Area.

  On the first day of September, they left the two-mile-wide south-running shipping lane and made a rendezvous with the Russian Navy pilot sent out to meet them. Because right across the entrance to the wide bay of Avacinskiy lies an extensive minefield, extending ten miles seaward. Fishing and anchoring here are banned. No ship is permitted to enter the bay, because beyond its entrance lies one of the most secretive Naval seaways in the world, Russia's forbidden dockyard, classified, ringed with steel, the port of Petropavlovsk, still harboring the mentality of the Cold War, the glowering eastern outpost of the old Soviet Pacific Fleet.

  They made their right-hand turn around steep Majacny Head and turned into the narrows, heading north up the bay, directly to a covered dock where a shore crew awaited them, maneuvering the Barracuda into position away from the seeing eye of the U.S. satellites. Lieutenant Ramshawe would see the submarine head into the base, from the open ocean. But he would not be able to observe it further, at least not until it broke cover and headed back out into deep water.

  Ahead of the Sino-Iranian crew lay a program of intensive missile testing, mainly concerning the computerized direction-finder in the head of the weapon. The RADUGA was essentially a "fire and forget" type, launched while the ship was submerged and then left to find its own way to its target, relying totally on the preprogrammed route punched into its electronic "brain." This enables it to fly at Mach 0.7, almost five hundred miles an hour, or around eight miles per minute, one mile every seven and a half seconds.

  Even if you saw it, ripping through the skies, two hundred feet above your head, there would not be a whole lot you could do about it. Even if you had some kind of an antimissile device. This Russian-built heavy steel roadrunner of the skies can outthink you, and then outrun anything you throw at it. Unless, of course, you catch it head-on, long before it reaches you. And that's very nearly impossible with a submarine launch from below the surface. The surprise is too radical.

  General Rashood disembarked a much wiser, better educated submarine officer. He was to spend two more days here, and then fly out direct from the military airfield east of Petropavlovsk, in company with Ben Badr — first stop Shanghai, then commercial jet direct to Tehran, where Shakira would meet him.

  In the coming months, Ravi would work on his plan in solitude in Damascus, with occasional visits from Commander Badr. They would study the most detailed charts of Alaska and the safest routes to get there. They would study the new U.S. oil pipeline that runs mostly underwater from the brand-new Alaskan refinery, all the way down the American West Coast. And they would study the grid of electrical power stations that are spread throughout California, especially the ones which faced the Pacific Ocean.

  During these months, there would be much wry laughter. In the old days, when the United States relied totally on Arab oil, such a strike would have been impossible because it would have hurt too many of their own people. But now the United States was beginning to use its own supplies for the first time, and China had entered the picture as a new player and become, in many ways, a savior of the Arab economy. There were, undoubtedly, more adventurous possibilities.

  Ravi had no intention of ever being wanted in the way Osama Bin Laden had been. He had no intention of killing or injuring hundreds or thousands of Americans. Not if he could help it. The aim was simple — havoc, pandemonium, the great superpower humiliated, like a Third World country, right in front of the entire world. There was one terrible, unspoken fear in his mind. It stemmed from that Friday morning in London over a year ago, June 2006—when the Syrian assassin had been unable to put a bullet through the head of Arnold Morgan.

  Aside from that, his considered opinion was that the Barracuda could not, would not, be stopped from its appointed task. And no one would ever know who had perpetrated a crime on this scale. He smiled often at the thought of a bewildered White House and a baffled Pentagon. But it was always tempered by a slight fear of the terrible Admiral who sat at the President's right hand.

  By September 8, Captain Vanislav, plus the nucleus of the Barracuda's crew, including all of the Iranian officers and men and all of the Chinese crew, had flown back to Severomorsk. There they settled into a truly clandestine operation, the Sea Trials of the second Barracuda, Hull K-240, conducted in the submarine roads beyond the Gulf of Kolskiy.

  The schedule required them to exit the submarine docks before the U.S. satellite passed at 11:00 each morning. By that time it would need to be submerged, working out beyond the Skolpen Bank, in 600 feet of water. This particular ship, while identical in every way to the hull now under cover in Petropavlovsk, had not been completed until late June and was still having a few wrinkles ironed out, especially in her sonar systems. But her reactor, fitted out in the excellent nuclear engineering plant at Severodvinsk, ran sweetly. The most difficult part was to make absolutely certain no one ever knew she existed.

  Every day she was pulled from her covered dock in Araguba by two tugs, then sent on her way out to sea, at least one hour before America's silent "Big Bird" came drifting past, 22,000 miles overhead in space, probing, photographing, checking, making absolutely certain that nothing on the planet earth moved or changed direction without the express, incontrovertible knowledge of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Once clear of the shallows, Barracuda II dived out of sight at the earliest possible moment. Captain Vanislav was still in overall command, and he had essentially the same team with him as that which took Barracuda I through the Arctic seas to the Kamchatka Peninsula. But only Iran's torpedo and missile crews remained in Petropavlovsk. The men from the desert who now made the ship run and listened to the echoing caverns of the deep were all busy in Russia's cold north.

  Returning the Barracuda to the dockyard after two or three days at sea was a rather simpler process. The United States surveillance program required one look every day at submarine movements in the Barents Sea. In truth, these movements were irregular these days, owing to the monstrous shortage of money. But it was safe for Barracuda II to go home in the evening, lethal for them not to be clear of the land and underwater by 10:30 in the morning.

  Ravi and Ben had drawn up a schedule for more and more Iranians to be indoctrinated into the nuclear submarine program. Twelve at a time, they flew to Petropavlovsk from Bandar Abbas for their initial instruction. Then, after four weeks, they flew on to Severodvinsk to join the Sea Trials of the second Barracuda. In that way, Iran was able to send twelve men back to Petropavlovsk, and they slowly built two crews which with some assistance could operate either of their new Barracudas.

  It was a masterpiece of organization, conducted with speed and thoroughness. Inside a very few months, Iran had become a dangerous nuclear submarine power; prepared to make TWO major journeys, which would absolutely bedevil the West, in underwater warships no one even knew they owned.

  By late January 2008, Barracuda II was ready to make the first of these journeys, its maiden voyage, from Araguba, west into the Atlantic. Three weeks later, Barracuda I would leave from Petropavlovsk, past the minefield and into the Pacific.

  U.S. surveillance would see only one of them leave, because General Rashood wanted one of them to be seen. One would move slowly and secretly, under the command of newly promoted Capt. Ali Akbar Mohtaj. The other, under the command of the senior military leader of Hamas, would make rather better time.

  The most confusing aspect of all, from faraway Jimmy Ramshawe's p
oint of view, was that he only knew of the existence of one of the two ships. And anyway, both were in Russian ports, where they belonged. The only, tiny glitch in the armor of the Sino-Iranians was Ramshawe's slender grasp of a connection between China and Old Razormouth. And if he added up his total knowledge on that subject, on a scale of one to one hundred, it would have trouble making it onto the chart.

  On Thursday morning, January 31, 2008, in the Arctic darkness, around 5:00 a.m. Barracuda II slipped her moorings and ran swiftly down the bay toward the open wastes of the Barents Sea. She turned due north, and dived in 135 fathoms of water. Her crew would not see daylight again for six weeks, as she crept around the globe, striving twenty-four hours a day to remain unseen, undetected, and, ultimately, without Naval identity.

  The first part of the journey was unquestionably the most difficult. Four hundred feet beneath the surface, Captain Mohtaj ran slowly toward one of the most sensitive submarine hunting grounds in-all of the earth's oceans — the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, the narrowest part of the North Atlantic. A straight line on a chart with a ruler will demonstrate the precise dimension — start at a point 69.00' N, 35.2' W on the craggy ice shores of Greenland, ninety miles south of Scoresby Sound. Come south-southeast for 250 miles, crossing the Arctic Circle, across the half frozen Denmark Strait to the northern shore of Iceland at Husavik. Cross the island, and then continue your line SSE to the northern coast of Scotland, a distance of 450 miles.

  The last section is the business end of the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap: in Navy parlance, the GRIUK, the seaway through which every Russian submarine for the duration of the entire Cold War had to pass. Still is.

  Ships tend to avoid the Denmark Strait because of its weather, its ice floes, and its terrible reputation. Anytime you're looking for submarines, Russian, British, or American, steer into the eastern section of the GRIUK, between Iceland and Scotland, take care over the Iceland-Faeroe Islands Rise, where the ocean is a little shallow and routinely respected by all submarines.

  All around this Rise is the domain of the sinister, black, underwater killers; prowling, slowly, silently on their softly humming nuclear reactors. And it was to these waters that the rookie Iranian nuclear Commanding Officer Captain Mohtaj was headed in his brand-new Barracuda II, running the gauntlet through the submarine patrols of the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, and above all trying not to set off the hair-trigger alarms of America's ultrasecret Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS).

  SOSUS is the U.S. Navy's fixed undersea acoustic network of passive hydrophone arrays, sensitive listening equipment connected to operational shore sites which collect, analyze, display, and report acoustic data, relayed back from the strings of hydrophones laid in the deep sound channels.

  They are installed in all of the key areas of the Pacific and North Atlantic, crisscrossed over the seabed. They are hot and heavy in the GRIUK Gap. Sailors say if a whale farts in the GRIUK, seventeen shore-based American technicians die happily of sheer excitement.

  You can imagine what happens when SOSUS picks up the steady engine lines of a possibly hostile submarine.

  Captain Mohtaj was treading on eggshells.

  He cut the speed of the Barracuda as they came deep, through the icy waters of coastal Norway, a country that claims the entire northern swathe of the continent of Europe— right around Finland, Sweden, and Lapland, up to the Russian border. Those Norsemen of old were the masters of these Arctic waters. They owned and controlled the Atlantic coastline from the city of Stavanger in the south, to Russia's Kola Peninsula, more than 1,100 miles away, 500 miles up to the Arctic Circle, 600 beyond.

  In summer, the steep fjords and bays of western Norway and the Islands represent some of the most spectacular cruising waters in the world. Bright, lonely, devastatingly beautiful seascapes, where the summer sun never sets, and the waters are blue, and the people friendly.

  Even in late January, the great tidal ocean still flows freely because of the Gulf Stream, and the Barracuda moved slowly past, following the contours of the legendary Lofoten Isles. This windswept 100-mile-long group of islands juts out from the mainland, forcing passing submarines into the 4,000-foot-deep waters of the Voring Plateau.

  From here it took Captain Mohtaj another ten hours to reach the Arctic Circle, running southwest. The Barracuda's sonar room thought they heard another submarine here, but the acoustics were too distant, too faint.

  It was just as well they were, as the 8,000-ton Los Angeles Class patrol submarine USS Cheyenne would doubtless have been fascinated at an unscheduled Russian nuclear boat from right off the charts creeping down the North Atlantic. The Americans might have sunk it, and in any event they would have blown a very loud whistle, summoning ships of the Royal Navy, maybe even an air search, to find out precisely what was going on.

  But neither submarine was close enough to make a firm classification. It was judged by both ships to be just another noise in the ocean, probably a passing trawler.

  The Cheyenne continued its patrol, running north. Captain Mohtaj slowed down some more, to seven knots, and continued southwest. It took him two and a half days to make the next 400 miles, creeping along, still 400 feet beneath truly violent, gale-tossed seas. At 4:30, on the afternoon of February 6, they crossed the unseen line in the ocean, which told them they were in the GRIUK Gap, moving over the Iceland-Faeroe Rise in a little over 850 feet of water; speed: five. Ten degrees west, 61.20' N.

  They stayed well west of the notorious Bill Bailey Banks, two underwater mountains that rise up to only 250 feet below the surface, and they barely increased speed for another 150 miles until they reached the great abyss of the Iceland Basin, where the Atlantic suddenly shelves down to a depth of nearly two miles.

  Captain Mohtaj knew this was time he must go slower, because SOSUS is always watching in deep water. He felt vulnerable in these cavernous depths, but he risked a little more speed, asking the Barracuda's turbines for nine knots, and making a course change… come left… steer one-eight-zero.

  The Barracuda maintained speed for the next four hours, then made a swing toward the Rockall Trough, 100 miles west of the Irish coast, bang over the tremblingly sensitive American hydrophones. SOSUS picked them up, no ifs, ands, or buts.

  Cocooned inside the brutishly classified U.S. listening station on the windswept granite shores of Pembrokeshire in South Wales, staring out across the gray and choppy Irish Sea, two U.S. operators had picked up the Barracuda simultaneously and had been listening for twenty minutes.

  "Submarine, sir. It's Russian. I'm checking, but right here I've got initial classification, a Russian nuclear. Probability area large."

  "Degree of certainty on that classification?"

  "Thirty percent, sir. Still checking… "

  Back in the Russian ship, there had been a problem. The Chief Engineer was in the process of having a heart attack, having just found a toolbox carelessly leaned against the side of one of the turbo alternators and left there for the biggest part of three hours. It was rattling quite sufficiently to cause a serious noise-shout, and the Chief was raging around the engine room deck trying to find the culprit.

  "Allah be praised!" he ranted, seizing the toolbox. "This is fucking unbelievable." He stopped the rattle instantly, and he was very quick, but not quite quick enough. The Americans had not only picked up the shout of the toolbox, but SOSUS had already given the heads-up.

  Back in Pembrokeshire, the operator knew his quarry had suddenly gone quiet, but he did not know why. "Contact disappeared, sir. Still checking. It looks like a Russian turbo alternator at fifty-hertz, not sixty like ours."

  "How big's the probability area? "

  "We're looking at a square, ten-miles-by-ten-miles."

  "Nearest U.S. submarine?"

  "The Cheyenne's last known eighty miles east of Iceland, about six hundred fifty miles north of the datum. Almost twenty-four hours away."

  "Contact regained?"

  "No, sir. Nothing. I guess she must have shut it
down."

  Both men knew that was much, much worse than simply hearing her again. Because it meant the Russian crew was being deliberately clandestine, evasive. And there was no reason for that. The Cold War was long over. Russia was not normally perceived as a threat. She had every right to be running a patrol down the middle of the North Atlantic, as did the Americans.

  She could have been training crew, testing systems on a long-distance run. She could even have turned around and headed home. Maybe SOSUS had just picked up acceleration noise as she made her turn. But, if she had been going home, why was she not making proper speed north? And how come Cheyenne had not heard anything as she came south?

  Submarines traditionally pose a lot of questions. But the U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander in Pembrokeshire did not like his information so far, and he drafted an immediate signal to Fort Meade:

  Pembroke Facility picked up a twenty-minute contact on very quiet vessel 07I935FEB08. Insufficient data for certain classification—50-hertz line, indicating Soviet turbo-alternator. Abrupt stop. Possibly submarine. Nothing on Russian networks correlates… 100-square-mile probability area, checking longitude 15.00' W, south end of Rockall Trough, off Irish coast.

  The Navy's Atlantic desk in the National Surveillance Office drafted a request to Moscow to clarify the situation. But two days later, there had been no reply, neither had anyone heard a squeak from the Barracuda, which was creeping south at low speeds, tiptoeing over the SOSUS undersea wires. Not quite undetected, but almost.

  It was February 8, a Friday afternoon, when Lieutenant Ramshawe took an hour off and scrolled through the pages on the NSA Internet system. He'd been looking and reading absentmindedly for more than forty-five minutes when he caught the word "submarine" in a transmitted message.