Barracuda 945 am-6

by Patrick Robinson

  These were scare stories way up there on the Richter scale. And there were seismic shocks in every area of public life. Gas was already at $6 a gallon at many West Coast stations, and every newspaper and television screen from San Diego to the Alaskan coast was trumpeting about the fuel oil shortages that must begin to bite immediately.

  The further north the city, the bigger the headlines, as the newspapers cited all of their usual sources of doom for maximum disquiet among the populace. They forecast power stations grinding to a halt… hospital emergency equipment without electricity (people may die)… no gasoline… senior citizens dying of cold and starvation… schools closed… government offices blacked out… no power… no computers… no Social Security pensions… no baseball games… floodlights… traffic lights… strobe lights… neon lights.

  The list was hysterical and endless. Hysterical, and accurate, bang on the money. This was a pending crisis the likes of which no one had ever imagined. Because not only was Grays Harbor, the largest refinery in the country, starved of product and out of action, but there was no fuel oil running south to feed the biggest power station in California, Lompoc, custom built to cope easily and exclusively with the power demands of the gigantic urban sprawls of both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  For once in their lives, the media had it absolutely right, putting two and two together to make a precise and pristine four, rather than five, or eighty-seven.

  What they did not know was a truth more chilling than anything in the imagination of even their most erratic editors. Out there, somewhere in the eastern Pacific, was a seasoned, dazzling Special Forces battle Commander leading a group of highly trained Islamic fanatics in a brilliantly efficient nuclear submarine, which appeared capable of striking the United States at will. And may not be finished yet.

  At 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, Vice Admiral Morgan read with equanimity Jimmy Ramshawe's note about the repairs on the pipeline. Every word confirmed what he already believed, knew. That there was someone out there, packing a serious wallop, with another "X-minus" possible weapons in his magazine. And neither he, Arnold, nor any of the top military brains in the U.S. Armed Forces had the slightest idea how to proceed.

  The Admiral was bewildered, along with the rest of them. He had never felt so vulnerable. In his mind, he knew that their enemy was virtually undetectable. The world was indeed the bastard's oyster; he could do anything.

  All previous run-ins with terrorists paled before this. Even when the massed maniacs of Al-Qaeda had pranced about announcing they would fight to the death, they had at least presented a target somewhere in the remote hills of Afghanistan. It was difficult, but nonetheless tangible, and well within the massive capability of the U.S. military, which proceeded to pulverize their foe.

  "But this," growled the Admiral. "This is fucking preposterous. I don't know if our enemy is Russia, China, or one of the towel-head states. But I do know this is terrorism, the most modern terrorism, and there is NO defense against it, because we don't know where it's coming from… or who is committing it."

  He had, of course, entirely ignored the point that this was also his own favorite type of warfare, to slam an opponent to the ground, kick him to death if necessary, and then act as if it was nothing whatsoever to do with America. Who me? Nah. Sorry, pal, don't know anything about it. Can't help this time. Stay in touch.

  Right now he had never been in such a dilemma. Alan Dickson had the Pacific Fleet on full alert. Two submarines coming in off patrol were watching and listening for any submarine from any nation that might be on the loose. But Arnold held out little hope. If he's out there, and he's as goddamned brilliant as I think he is, the West Coast needs a hard hat and a goddamned lotta luck. I just hope to Christ he doesn't go for the Navy Base in San Diego.

  He knew it would be futile to try to gain any information on the movement of any Chinese warships. The Beijing military were not hostile, but they were not friendly to the United States either. And they seemed to operate independently from their own government.

  Twice in the past few years there had been a major standoff involving U.S. servicemen being held in Chinese military confinement after sorties in the South China Sea. And the recent uproar over Taiwan had done nothing for Sino-U.S. relations.

  Alternately, Russia was saying nothing. And the United States was, of course, unable, as ever, to have any proper rapport with the Islamic States, the atmosphere being altogether too fraught, too untrusting.

  Admiral Morgan paced his office. A new communiqué from the Washington State Environmental Protection Agency suggested the still-leaking pipeline had at least been shut down three miles back from the breach. But sea conditions were so bad it would be several days before they could begin their attempt to raise the fractured section and conduct the repairs.

  In California, the Governor was conducting a daylong, highly classified meeting in Sacramento, the state capital, attended only by those officials who understood the razor's edge upon which their electricity supplies now rested. Jack Smith, the President's Energy Secretary, had flown in on Air Force II from Washington, D.C., and was listening intently as officials from the Lompoc power station outlined the situation at the newest, most efficient electricity plant in the United States.

  Built to take the heat off the rest of California's 1,023 major power stations (one-tenth of a megawatt or larger), Lompoc operated solely on government-subsidized, inexpensive refined fuel oil coming out of Grays Harbor. Transportation to the power station was strictly railroad, straight out of Washington State, down the Union Pacific's permanent way to San Francisco, and then along the valley of the Salinas River to the scenic peninsula, where the railroad starts to hug the coast.

  Lompoc lies six miles inland, right in that triangle-shaped peninsula, 125 miles northwest of Los Angeles, 240 miles south of San Francisco. Its nearest coastline forms the northern shore of the Santa Barbara Channel.

  The Union Pacific Railroad runs all the way around that peninsula on its way down to Los Angeles, but there is a spur line into Lompoc, expanded in the year 2007 to run into the new power station, and form the life-giving artery to virtually all the electric power for San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  According to the best calculations, the Lompoc power station was sufficiently well supplied to keep pumping out electricity for three more weeks, possibly four. The problem was, it was not on a seaward terminus where tankers could bring in emergency supplies, if necessary, from the Gulf of Mexico.

  It was simply not geared for road transportation to bring in refined fuel oil. Lompoc and the railroad were bound together, and right now the last two tanker freight trains were rumbling south, one just north of Monterey, the other west of San Luis Obispo, forty miles north of the power station. Thanks to General Rashood, there would, of course, be no more deliveries in the forseeable future.

  Right now it looked almost impossible to hook up the massive Lompoc outward power lines to the statewide electricity grid. At least it looked impossible to achieve in under four months.

  Lompoc had been built as a separate entity, to function alone, ensuring that the state's two giant commercial centers could keep running, no matter how many blackouts and brownouts afflicted the rest of the state. Equally, Lompoc's very existence considerably reduced the pressure on all of the other California power stations, which had been devoid of shortages for several weeks.

  With no refined fuel oil from Alaska, the only solution had to be road transportation. The state of California could spare hardly anything itself without putting the lights out in several cities, so oil would have to come from the Gulf, through the Panama Canal, and up the West Coast into the great artificial harbor of Los Angeles, a ponderous journey of close to 4,500 miles… assuming no delays in the canal, almost two weeks.

  The Governor's emergency conference in Sacramento was racking its collective brain trying to find solutions. But there were no solutions, only ways to try and paper over the cracks, and to keep the lights on,
more or less constantly, until the Alaska and Grays Harbor catastrophes were repaired. If the power station at Lompoc failed, and the great cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles went dark, it would be a national calamity of gigantic proportions.

  It would certainly bring down the California Governor, and it could threaten the Republican Administration in Washington, where the GOP would be accused of pushing forward with vast moneymaking programs mostly beneficial to big oil companies, with no thought whatsoever to solutions, if the grand schemes failed.

  There had been, of course, many citizens of Lompoc and its environs who had been vehemently opposed to the power station right from the start. The beautiful Lompoc Valley is known as the Valley of Flowers, thanks to its century-old flower seed industry, and the very idea of a power station in the middle of all that floral splendor had caused a political battle that raged for more than a year.

  Only the intervention of the military, at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base, had finally pushed the power plant through. Vandenberg was the first missile base of the U.S. Air Force. The immediate closing of the West Shuttle Program after the Challenger crash at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had caused a major recession in Lompoc. But now, in 2008, more than twenty years later, they were preparing for the California Spaceport, and there were major advantages to having a huge power station close by, not the least of which was the sharing of a big refined fuel terminal right on the Union Pacific Railroad.

  The environtmental lobby still opposed it — all of it — and continued to hurl invectives at "money-grubbing industrialists and politicians" hell-bent on profits at all costs, never mind the destruction of the Valley of Flowers.

  Their objections had a plaintive ring of truth to them, but none of them were true, or justified. The President's entire Energy Program, masterminded by Jack Smith and his staff, was in fact a work of great brilliance, dispelling at a stroke America's reliance on Arab oil.

  The unpalatable truth was, and is, a huge industrialized Western country like the United States happens to be vulnerable to grand-scale, State-sponsored terrorism. The Senators in Washington did not yet know it, but they had much to be thankful for — namely that General Rashood did not approve of mass killing and would not indulge in it. However, the Senators did not know of the existence of General Rashood or the steely determination with which the Hamas military chief intended to drive the United States, and the State of Israel, from the Middle East forever.

  By Thursday morning, March 13, General Rashood and Captain Badr were creeping down the pristine central coast waters off some of the loneliest beaches in California. They were just beginning to move out into deeper water 130 miles off Los Angeles and were making a quiet five-knot course to the southwest.

  The Barracuda, now a month out of Petropavlovsk, was running perfectly, the reactor ticking along at low pressure, the turbines at cruising speed. The only discordant note in the entire submarine mechanism was the slightly arched converstaion between General Rashood and Lt. Comdr. Shakira Rashood.

  The world's first lady submarine officer was quite certain they should continue with the policy of sending in missiles on a roundabout route to the American mainland, disguising at all costs the true direction and launch point of the RADUGAs. Shakira's point was simple. It has worked well for us so far, no one has come after us, and no one knows we're here. We should continue with a successful policy.

  General Rashood held no such illusions. And he told his wife so in the gentlest possible terms.

  "Shakira," he said, "the Americans will have been momemtarily baffled by our opening attack in Prince William Sound. But someone will have seen something, and the Pentagon will by now know the oil terminus was hit by an incoming cruise missile. They will also have known we were very close indeed to the spot where the oil pipeline was breached on the Overfall Shoal.

  "When we hit the refinery in Grays Harbor — if indeed we did hit the refinery — they will know of our existence. The big military brains will have worked out the missiles were most certainly fired from a submarine because there was nowhere else they could have come from.

  "I would be surprised if they had not found out this Barracuda was missing from the Russian Naval Base. They will know that someone dragged the fishing net off that Japanese trawler and it must have been the Barracuda… "

  "Yes, but what about the Chinese diversionary plan to help us?" she asked.

  "Forget it. Because nothing will happen until tomorrow, and that's not important, anyway. What is important is that the Americans will know for sure and certain that the total destruction of the refinery at Grays Harbor was the work of a terrorist firing missiles from a nuclear boat… "

  "But how will… " she interrupted.

  "Trust me, my darling," he said. "We are playing a game of cat and mouse with some of the biggest brains in the world, particularly the U.S. President's National Security Adviser. Believe me, they know what's happening. And it won't make one lick of difference whether the missiles come howling in to Lompoc from out of the San Rafael Mountains or straight down the freeway from Santa Maria. It doesn't matter what we do, they'll know."

  "But surely they'd be better coming in from the east, the unexpected route… like the others?"

  "Negative. Everywhere's unexpected. Our only advantage, and it's a big one, is that they have no idea within, say, five hundred miles where we are. My orders will be to fire a salvo of four RADUGAs' straight at the Lompoc power station, straight out of the ocean, direct at the furnace and the turbines, from about two hundred miles out, a twenty-minute missile run, then hightail it south before the missiles even reach their target."

  "You mean fast?"

  "Oh no, never fast. Just quietly offshore, in a million square miles of ocean, one thousand feet below the surface, chugging our way to safety. When the first of those missiles hits, every major military brain in the Pentagon is going to know what we've done. I just hope to spread enough confusion to allow us a clean getaway."

  "You mean my missile deception program is obsolete as of now?"

  "Absolutely. This is our last throw, Shakira. And it's a punch that will come in straight and hard, at two of the most sensitive areas any great power has. Its competence and its pride. And the United States has a ton of both."

  "So have I. And I sense you have just fired me. Would you like me to leave?"

  "No. But I might ask you to take off your uniform," chuckled Ravi. "Once we find somewhere private."

  Shakira punched her Commanding Officer playfully on the arm. "That's my punch," she said, laughing. "Straight and hard. Did I ever mention how inappropriate you are?"

  "I believe so. But right now I'd like you to be my wife rather than my missile planner. Hop below and organize a couple of cups of tea and some toast, would you? I've been here since two o'clock this morning."

  "My last humiliation. From Lieutenant Commander to steward. Right here in the middle of the Pacific. Demotion for the great mind that suggested Lompoc in the first place."

  General Rashood smiled and watched his wife turn out of the control room. "Just another couple of days," he said. "And we're on our way home."

  The Barracuda continued slowly westward into deep, silent waters, way off the coast of California, her great turbines moving her 8,000-ton weight effortlessly, under the deft guidance of Captain Ben Badr.

  Meanwhile, California went about its business. Aside from the endless tensions in the Governor's Mansion, and the near panic gripping the electric industry, life continued as normal.

  The only other pressure spot was around the junction of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in northwest Los Angeles, where streets were being closed and blocked off in preparation for the movie world's annual extravaganza on Sunday evening — the 80th Academy Awards ceremony, with its modest little worldwide audience of about a billion people. Shakira Rashood would have given almost anything to be there, dressed to kill, on the arm of her handsome, iron man husband. Though, in a rather different sens
e, she would be. So would her iron man husband.

  For weeks now, they had been preparing the spectacular $100 million Kodak Theatre, the world's largest television studio, smack-dab in the middle of one of the grandest new shopping malls on earth.

  Right here in Hollywood, in the permanent twenty-first-century home of the Oscars, there were more electricians per square mile than would-be actors. The bustling Hollywood Boulevard was actually closed down for five days. On the night, they would block off Highland Avenue, Orange Drive, Franklin Avenue, and a dozen other streets.

  The fabulous shopping complex of the five-level Hollywood and Highland Mall contains seventy upmarket retailers, restaurants, nightclubs, and the new 640-room Renaissance Hollywood Hotel. On this Thursday afternoon, anything open was seething with sightseers, flocking into the custom-built H&H train stop, directly off a fifteen-minute ride on Metro Rail's Red Line from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

  The actual Kodak Theatre, resplendent at the top of forty wide, marble steps, is situated to the east of the six-screen, ornate Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The Kodak stands at the head of Award Walk with its elegant plaques, mounted on pillars, commemorating eighty years of acting brilliance, an exclusive little garrison for the living and dead immortals of the screen.

  Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Sidney Poitier, Gene Hackman, John Wayne, Paul Newman, Al Pa-cino, Jack Nicholson and Tom Hanks; Susan Hayward, Kate Hepburn, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, and the rest. Their momentous achievements will once more pervade the complex on Sunday night, when this year's nominated make the 500-foot Sunday-night strut along a red carpet, five boulevard traffic lanes wide, to the electronic wonderland of the Kodak Theatre.

  There the 3,300 guests will assemble beneath the massive silver-leafed tiara of a ceiling, based on Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. More than one hundred television cameras, inside and out, earthbound and raised, on gantries and bridges, tucked into alcoves, would be zooming in on the main stage and the audience, striving for the best pictures.