Scimitar SL-2 (2004)

by Patrick Robinson

  “I’ve seen an old picture of a locomotive boiler blowing up,” said Jimmy. “It knocked down the entire station, and it was a big railroad terminus. But it would surely have to be an unbelievable force to set off that kind of chain reaction,” mused Jimmy. “One professor said, thankfully, the entire scenario would have to be an act of God, and the Almighty hasn’t bothered with anything that big for centuries.”

  “Hope he’s right,” gritted Arnold, flipping the steaks deftly. “Just don’t trust any Arabs on the goddamned mountain, that’s all. They’re up to no good. They always fucking well are.”

  They sipped their drinks amiably. But there was a tension in the air that summer night. George Morris knew that Arnold was not happy about the arch-terrorist Ray Kerman consorting with the volcano men. And Arnold’s roaming mind was scanning the problem, wondering what to do and what might lie in store for the future.

  The man was out of the White House, essentially a civilian. The cares and worries of high office should have been behind him. He and his new wife ought to have been planning vacations, world trips, visiting friends. And indeed they were. But Arnold Morgan had always treated the problems of the United States as if they were his own, and it was an old habit that was hard to break.

  Kathy was quiet too. She hated it when her husband acted as if he were still the President’s National Security Adviser. But she knew that nothing she could say or do was going to make much of a difference. So she just hoped the mood would pass. She tried to distract him instead, asking solicitously if he felt the wine they were serving was sufficiently close to room temperature.

  It was a question that almost always did the trick. The Admiral hurried inside to taste the rich 1998 Pomerol, Château de Valois, and a few moments later he seemed to have forgotten about Major Kerman, briefing his guests instead on the superb red Bordeaux they were about to drink.

  “Right bank for the 1998s, eh, Jimmy?” said Arnold.

  “What’s that?” said Jimmy.

  “Nineteen ninety-eight was an excellent year for Bordeaux, but was only reliable on one side of the Gironde Estuary.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Oh, where the Gironde and Dordogne Rivers flow out into the Bay of Biscay in western France—and on the left-hand side of that estuary are most of the great French châteaux. On the other side you have the other great Bordeaux vineyards, Saint-Emilion and Pomerol. And in 1998, there was a lot of rain, just before the harvest—swept down off the Pyrenees, up the left-hand shores of the estuary and soaked the Medoc. But somehow it missed Saint-Emilion and Pomerol, which had a wonderful harvest. I’ve opened a couple of bottles for tonight. After George called, I asked your future father-in-law to join us, but I believe the whole family’s out of town?”

  “Yes. They’re with my folks in New York. Pity John’s not here…he’d have loved to try the wine.” Jimmy paused. He could see Morgan’s mind whirring. “Sir, I’m not sure when you last read up on the subject, but I gave it a good go this afternoon,” said Jimmy. “I know the scientists do have dire warnings about La Palma, but in fairness, most of ’em think the big bang is about 100,000 years away…”

  “So they might,” said Admiral Morgan. “But I’d sure as hell prefer it if this Kerman character were dead.”

  0500 (Local), Monday, July 5

  Submarine Jetties, Huludao.

  One month in the huge dry dock at the Chinese Naval Base had the Barracuda’s full complement of North Korean guided missiles in perfect order. The Chinese electronic engineers had tested every system in every missile, and fitted the nuclear warheads into two of them.

  The guidance and navigation “brain” in the nose cone of the most deadly of the Danmo-gang cruises was checked and rechecked. It would blast clear of the water, and then set off on the course plotted and preset by Lt. Comdr. Shakira Kerman.

  All eighteen of the missiles were correctly loaded into the magazine of Barracuda II. The Chinese would now present an outrageous bill for the work to the Iranian Navy, as agents, but not owners—$8 million U.S. No one ever said the Chinese were confused about making a buck. Of course, their expertise was very nearly priceless in this part of the world. And their scruples were few.

  Scimitar SL-2 was ready to roll.

  They had begun pulling the rods the previous evening, and the turbines had been declared ready at 0300 by the chief engineering officer, Commander Abdolrahim, the top nuclear specialist on board. The veteran Iranian submariner had been on duty all night, monitoring the slim Hafnium shafts being withdrawn in groups from the potentially lethal uranium heart of the reactor. Every few minutes, the neutrons were thus given greater freedom to split and cause further fission, heating the system, creating that self-sustaining critical mass, the basis of nuclear energy.

  Commander Abdolrahim was in total control, regulating the heat through the pressurized circuit to its phenomenal operational norm of 2,500 lbs. per square inch—in contrast to the 15 lbs. per square inch that humans are accustomed to living in.

  With the water temperature high enough, the 47,000 hp (horse-power) turbines were ready to run—powered from the colossal energy contained inside the impenetrable stainless-steel cylinder covering the seething uranium-235 core that, when suitably enriched, forms the business end of a nuclear bomb. The dome was essentially sealed inside the reactor room’s 8-inch-thick walls of solid lead. Here, Lt. Comdr. Hamidi Abdolrahim, the chief nuclear engineer, headed a team of fellow Iranian personnel, five strong.

  Two hours before dawn, the Hamas underwater boat had been towed out of the covered dock behind two Chinese tugs. The ships’ entire company was either ex–Iranian Navy or Hamas professional, trained in Bandar Abbas, China, and/or Russia.

  They had cleared the outer breakwater now and were operating under their own steam. The Executive Officer, Capt. Ali Akbar Mohtaj, had the ship, and CPO Ardeshir Tikku was standing behind his principal operators in the separate reactor control room.

  They watched as the Barracuda accelerated to eight knots—staring at the three critical computer panels: propulsion, reactor, and auxiliary.

  The Chief of Boat (COB), CPO Ali Zahedi, was with Captain Mohtaj, and the Navigation area was occupied by Lieutenant Ashtari Mohammed, a British-born Iraqi whose family had fled the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. Ashtari was a revolutionary at heart, and he in turn had fled the UK to join Hamas and ended up at staff college in Bandar Abbas.

  His skills in the navigation room in a nuclear submarine had been honed at the Chinese Naval training college at Qingdao, 230 miles to the south along the western shore of the Yellow Sea. He had worked on the Barracuda I mission and had been commissioned for this operation because of his outstanding work in the past.

  Up on the Barracuda’s bridge, as they ran fair down the channel in dredged but close to alarmingly shallow water, Admiral Ben Badr stood with General Rashood and Lieutenant Commander Shakira. Dead ahead, the eastern sky was colored a deep rosy pink, as the rising sun tried to fight its way over the horizon. The sea was flat, oily, with a distant ruby-red cast in the early minutes of the dawn.

  The Chinese tugs, escorting the 8,000-ton nuclear boat out into the Yellow Sea, slowed and turned away to starboard, their officers giving a friendly wave of farewell. The Barracuda was entirely alone now. But the men on board had faced danger together before, and each was confident in the task that lay ahead. Only Shakira, clutching Ravi’s arm in the warm morning air, shuddered involuntarily, as they steered an easterly course, making 12 knots on the surface of waters that were only about 50 feet deep.

  They were in the strictly prohibited area of Liaodong Bay, an 80-mile-long by 60-mile-wide cordoned-off zone stringently patrolled by Chinese Navy ships, way up on the northwest corner of the Yellow Sea.

  Shortly before 0730, Admiral Badr went below and ordered a course change to the south, back down towards the choke point 120 miles away. It was too shallow to even go to periscope depth out here. And they were constantly under the
observation of their protectors in the Chinese Navy.

  But the North Sea Fleet of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy were not the only eyes upon them. At 0745, almost immediately after they made their turn, Big Bird, the U.S. military satellite, snapped off several shots of the Barracuda, noting at once its speed and direction. It was almost six o’clock the previous evening in Washington. The photographs from the National Surveillance Office would be on Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe’s desk by eight o’clock his time.

  By then, of course, the Barracuda would be well into the Bohai Haixia, the Chinese obstacle course that guards the business end of the Yellow Sea. And from there she would dive, running free, just below the surface in depths of around 150 feet, not quite invisible, but close.

  Meanwhile, Ravi and Shakira stayed on the bridge as the day grew warmer. Ahmed Sabah brought them coffee, while the rest of the crew carried out their customary daily equipment checks. Admiral Badr huddled in the navigation area with Ashtari Mohammed, poring over the sprawling Navy charts, plotting their way through the myriad islands around the southeast coastline of Japan, their route to the North Pacific.

  0800 (Local), Monday, July 5

  Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe stared at the photographs of Barracuda II running south down the Yellow Sea. “And where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he muttered to no one in particular.

  He was looking at a map reference of 40.42N 121.20E. The NSO had helpfully identified the submarine as the only Barracuda-class boat in existence, exiting the Chinese Naval Base.

  This is unbelievable, said Jimmy to himself. We still don’t know who actually owns this damn thing. The Russians refuse to admit selling it to the Chinese, on account of it’s none of our damn business. And the Chinese decline to say anything, presumably for the same reason.

  He pulled up a chart of the Yellow Sea and Japan on his computer and gazed at the screen. Sometime in the next couple of days, that bloody ship is going to go deep once she’s clear of the Bo Hai Strait, and we’re not going to see her again for Christ knows how long.

  She could run north up through the Korean Strait and into the Sea of Japan. She could run right around the east of Japan and into the Pacific, where she could run north, south, or east. Or she could continue and dive back to Zhanjiang where she came from—that would begin to look suspiciously like China was the owner. She could do anything, and we will not know for sure until she resurfaces, which could be six months. Fuck.

  Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe did not like dead ends. His dislikes especially included the Yellow Sea and everything to do with it. And here was the Barracuda in the West’s least accessible waters, running cheerfully along the sunlit surface, plainly with Chinese help and protection, if not actual crew.

  He requested blowups of the very clearly focused pictures, and an hour later, he could see three figures on the bridge. But all of them wore hats, and the photographs were shot mainly from directly overhead, making it impossible to identify any of them, even with regard to rank or nationality.

  There’s nothing we can bloody do, he grumbled. I better show them to the boss, but I can’t progress this any further except to keep watching the satellite shots until she dives…but I still have a feeling that China bought this damn submarine for someone else…Middle East, Pakistan, North Korea? Who the hell knows?

  He stood up and walked to the door, stepping out into the corridor, which led along to the Director’s office on the eighth floor of the OPS-2B building, with its massive one-way glass walls and twenty-four-hour heavily armed guard patrols.

  “I just hope,” he murmured, as he walked, “that we haven’t inadvertently shot another photograph of Major Ray fucking Kerman, right out there, large as life, on the bridge of the damned Barracuda. Because if we have, that’s big trouble right around the corner, and this new President’s going to hate us worse than he does already.”

  1400, Wednesday, July 7

  32.50N 125.28E, Yellow Sea (South)

  Speed 12, Course 112.

  They were due southeast of Jejudo, the big holiday island off the southernmost tip of South Korea. The Barracuda was about to run into deeper water, 400 feet in the rough, wide reaches where the Yellow Sea meets China’s East Sea. Right here they would dive, making a hard southeast course, straight towards the scattered islands that stretch hundreds of miles off the end of the Japanese mainland at Kyushu.

  It was somewhat tricky coming through the archipelago, but there were wide deep-water routes that would permit the Barracuda to stay well out of reach of the American satellites. Once those islands had been negotiated, it was a straight run into the two-mile-deep western Pacific, where they would become invisible.

  Selection of this particular route had occupied hours of their time in the week before departure. General Ravi had very much wanted to swerve northeast and up through the tight, shallow Korea Strait into the almost landlocked Sea of Japan. His broad plan was to exit the Sea 600 miles later through La Perouse Strait, then head up through Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, and make a dash through the Kuril Islands into the open waters of the Pacific. Sheltered, protected water all the way.

  But Ben Badr had objected, strenuously, on about ten different fronts. Worse, Shakira agreed with him. So did Captain Mohtaj.

  The crux of the matter was that Ben Badr had become a very serious submarine officer in the past couple of years, constantly operating under the same sense of danger that affects all submarine commanding officers.

  “Just look at this Sea of Japan,” he said. “I know it’s big, and I know it’s 480 miles wide and 1,000 miles long, and I know it’s very deep right across the Yamato Basin. But it’s a death trap. If we got in there and ran into an American warship, we simply could not use our speed to get away. They’d pick us up and we’d be like rats in a trap, because we could not get into open ocean. We’d either have to turn around and get back to the Korea Strait, or head for La Perouse, a classic choke point, way north of Sapporo at the end of Hokkaido Island.

  “Ravi, they’d sink us. And if we tried to sink them, they’d send more ships from their base at Okinawa, and we still could not get away. We really do not want to go in there.”

  “Well, I understand the remote possibility of being detected by the U.S.A.,” said the General. “But if we did creep through quietly and made La Perouse Strait, we could move quietly into the Sea of Okhotsk, which is huge, and slide through one of those gaps between the Kuril Islands on the right, and into open ocean.”

  “Ravi, I actually regard the Sea of Okhotsk with even more dread than the Sea of Japan, mostly because it’s considered by the Russians as their private ocean. And it’s full of their warships and submarines. I don’t know if the Americans are in there or not, but if they are, and they pick us up, we’d be in an ocean bounded by land, Russian, on three sides, with a line of Russian islands barring our only escape route into the Pacific.

  “If the Americans are watching anywhere in this part of the world, it’s got to be the passes between the Kuril Islands. In my view, it would be potential suicide to try and escape that way. It’s a bit longer, but we have time, and I say we head straight for the Pacific. Forget the Sea of Japan, and Okhotsk. Let’s just get clear of these communist nutcases, into open ocean, and make our own way to our destinations. We’re in a very fast boat, and I just hate to see us squander that advantage in landlocked oceans.”

  General Rashood saw the sense of the argument but continued to believe that Ben Badr was being somewhat overly cautious. Shakira was equally adamant, though.

  “Don’t we have enough risk?” she said. “What’s the point of taking more when we don’t need to. Also, I would not want our operational Commanding Officer to be making an underwater journey entirely against his will. I know my husband is in overall command, but surely we don’t want to put more pressure on Ben. After all, if we do get caught, he’s the one who has to get us out.”

  “I think the inland seas
would be a big mistake, Ravi,” emphasized Admiral Badr. “But I accept that the final word is yours. And I will abide by your decision.”

  The General smiled and said, “Let’s go, Ben, all ahead…”

  “Which way, sir?”

  “Straight into the North Pacific.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  And so they accelerated to the southeast, taking a route south of the bigger islands of Yaku-shima and Tanega-shima. They crossed the line that marks the Japan Current and held their depth at 150 feet. They left the ocean rises of Gaja-shima and Yakana-shima to starboard, twice coming to periscope depth, just short of the 130 degree line of longitude. They picked up the flashing light on Gaja and then the more southerly warning off Yakana.

  And after that it was much simpler. The ocean shelved down to depths of more than two miles, and there was relief in the voice of Admiral Badr when he made his course change.

  “Come left 40 degrees, steer course zero-seven-zero…bow down 10 and make your depth 600. Make your speed 12…”