Scimitar SL-2 (2004)

by Patrick Robinson

  They held a course inshore, some 60 miles off the jutting headlands of Ahizuri, Stiono, and Nojima Beach, the latter of which lies 50 miles south of Tokyo. The seabed rose and fell along here, and the water was famously “noisy,” never less than a mile deep, and full of crisscrossing currents. Captain Mohtaj had the ship where he wanted it, in deep, turbulent sea, full of fish and undersea caverns where the mysterious sounds of the deep echo and re-echo, causing mass confusion to all sonar operators.

  The Barracuda continued to run northeast, 600 feet below the surface, the sonar room constantly on high alert for fishing boats and their deep trawl nets. Right off Nojima Saki, Admiral Badr ordered another course change:

  “Come right 70 degrees, steer course three-six-zero, retain 600 feet…speed 12.”

  They were still 60 miles offshore, 1,440 miles and five days out from Huludao, when they made their turn up towards Japan’s big triangular northern island of Hokkaido, north of the 40th parallel. From here they would begin to edge out to starboard to the east, away from the Russian patrols along the Kurils. Ravi insisted on ensuring a good distance between themselves and the Kamchatka Peninsula, when eventually they reached that far northern outpost of the old Soviet Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

  The first landfall they would record would be the Alaskan Island of Attu, which sits at the very end of the Aleutians, bang in the middle of the North Pacific, dead opposite, and due east of, the Russian Navy Base of Petropavlovsk, less than 500 miles of ocean between them.

  The Aleutians stretch in a narrow 1,000-mile crescent from the seaward tip of the great southwestern panhandle of Alaska, more than halfway across the Pacific, dividing the world’s largest ocean from the Bering Sea, which lies to the north of the islands. The weather, all along the Aleutian chain, is mostly diabolical, a freezing, storm-lashed hell for eight months of the year.

  Not that this worried General Ravi and his men, who would make the journey past the islands in the warm comfort of their underwater hotel, way below the gales and thunderous ocean.

  For 1,500 miles they ran northeast from the Japanese coast south of Tokyo. They stayed deep, leaving the little cluster of Russia’s Komandorskiye Islands 120 miles to the north, off their port beam. These remotest of islands stand 140 miles off Kamchatka, with their southeasterly point only 180 miles from the outer Alaskan Island of Attu.

  The Commanding Officer of Barracuda II elected to take the western side of the freak ocean rise of Stalemate Bank, where the near-bottomless North Pacific steadily rises up from four miles deep to a mere 100 feet—no problem for surface ships; a brick wall for a deep submarine. It only just fell short of being the real outermost island of the Aleutians, and perhaps once had been.

  Admiral Badr knew the Stalemate required a wide berth, but he considered its eastward side too close to Attu Island. To transit the 230-fathom channel between the two would take them far too close to known American ocean surveillance. Attu was a very sensitive listening station for the U.S. Navy, having stood as the first line of defense against ships from Soviet Russia for many, many years.

  In Shakira’s opinion, they needed to make a slow sweep around to the north and then begin their 1,000-mile journey along the island chain. It was Friday, July 16, shortly after noon, and they were moving very slightly north of the 53rd parallel, heading due east across the two-mile-deep Bowers Basin, which lies to the north of Attu.

  There is a long, near-deserted seaway between the Attu group and the next little cluster of Rat Islands, and according to all the data Shakira had amassed, the U.S. Navy surveillance, both radar and sonar, were extremely active all through these waters. She had spoken at some length to Admiral Badr and they agreed they should give Attu a wide berth to the north and to stay out there for 540 miles, deep at 600 feet, making no more than 7 knots.

  That ought to take them past the next major U.S. listening station on Atka Island somewhere to the north of Nazan Bay. Thereafter, the Aleutians comprised the much larger, yet still long, narrow islands, Unmak, Unalaska, and Unimak, all three of which Shakira claimed would have intense U.S. surveillance in place.

  They had of course accepted Shakira’s assessment of the southern route, which she had deemed impossible, since she was stone-cold certain there would be at least one, and possibly two, Los Angeles–class nuclear submarines patrolling the Aleutian Trench 24/7, the long, deep ditch that lay between the sensitive U.S. Navy SOSUS wires to the south and the southern shores of the Aleutian Islands.

  On the previous mission Lieutenant Commander Shakira had claimed she would rather see the whole operation abandoned than risk being fired upon in the Aleutian Trench by a U.S. submarine, which would unleash deadly accurate torpedoes, fatal to any intruder.

  They crept past Attu Island at slow speed, 600 feet below the surface, the great black titanium hull of the Barracuda muffling the revs of its turbines. At the 175th line of longitude east from Greenwich, Ben Badr risked a slight acceleration—not much, just from 5 knots to 8. At that moment, the hydraulic system on the after planes jammed, angled down.

  Immediately the bow went down and the Barracuda headed on a steep trajectory towards the seabed. Alarms in the control room flashed, the depth was increasing, the angle of the entire boat was wrong, and the aft plane refused to move.

  The CPO Ali Zahedi had an instant vision of the submarine heading all the way to the bottom, and shouted…“ALL REVERSE…ALL REVERSE!”

  The 47,000 hp turbines slowed and then churned furiously in the water, pounding the wash over the hull the wrong way and causing the nearest thing to underwater commotion a big, quiet nuclear boat can manage.

  The huge prop thrashed, arresting the forward speed, then hauling the 8,000-tonner backwards. But the angle was still wrong.

  “BLOW FOR’ARD BALLAST TANKS!” There was urgency but no panic in the voice of Chief Zahedi. Ben Badr came hurrying into the control room, just in time to hear the propulsion engineer reporting…“Aft plane still jammed, sir. Hydraulic problem, probably a blown seal…Switching to secondary system right away, sir. Thirty seconds.”

  Everyone heard the for’ard tanks blow their ballast, much more loudly than Admiral Badr would have wished. The submarine righted itself. And moments later the secondary system came on line and the jammed plane moved correctly. There were already two engineers working on the seal change, trying desperately not to make a noise, hanging on carefully to the rubber-coated wrenches, knowing the crash of anything on the metal deck could be heard miles away. Everyone in the boat was aware of the continued, unbreakable rule of silence, the need to tiptoe through the ocean, making certain that no one, anywhere, could hear anything, ever.

  Unfortunately, luck was against them. The U.S. listening and processing station at the easternmost point of Attu picked up the sound, at 45 miles. And it was a strong signal, more than just a fleeting “paint” on the sonar. The young American operator nearly fell off his stool, so stark were the marks of the Barracuda’s turbines being flung into reverse. Then he saw the nearly unmistakable signature of big ballast tanks being blown.

  “Christ!” he snapped. “This is a goddamned submarine…and it sounds like it’s sinking or in collision!”

  The underwater sounds continued on and off for about a minute. The operator summoned his supervisor in time to see the submarine’s ballast. But just as suddenly, everything went quiet again. Making only five knots, the Barracuda vanished, humming through the pitch-black, ice-cold depths of the Bering Sea.

  “That was a transient, sir. Don’t know who the hell it was, but it was a submarine, and not American. We got nothing up here…with luck we’ll hear it again.”

  They did not. The Barracuda, holding its five-knot speed as it moved away from Attu Island, was careful not accelerate.

  Nonetheless, the Americans were suspicious, and they posted the information on the nets…“161750JUL09 Transient contact north of Attu Island station western Aleutians approximately 175.01E 53.51N…Nuclear turbine, possibly Russian Del
ta. Contact included ballast blowing and high engine revs for one minute. Not regained…No submarine correlation on friendly nets.

  The signal was relayed through the normal U.S. Navy channels and would be read that afternoon in the National Security Agency in Maryland. Meanwhile Admiral Badr kept moving slowly east north of the islands towards the mainland of America’s largest state.

  They were not detected again, all along their 720-mile route to the gateway to the Unimak Pass, through which they would try to make safe passage behind a freighter to the southern side of the Aleutians and then turn left into the Gulf of Alaska. The journey to the Pass took them until midnight on Wednesday night, July 21, by which time the surface weather was brutal, with a northeasterly gale and driving rain, plus a blanket of fog that refused to move despite the wind. They took up the same safe position they had occupied the previous year, 10 miles off the flashing beacon on the northern headland of Akutan Island.

  Visibility on the surface was less than 300 yards, and they faced a long and frustrating wait, trying to locate a sufficiently large merchant ship or tanker, astern of which they could follow at periscope depth, their mast obscured by the wake of the leading ship, the typical sneaky submariner’s trick.

  That Wednesday night was quiet. They finally detected two medium-sized freighters moving towards the Pass, but they were not big enough, and they were heavily laden, going slowly, hardly leaving a wake. Ben Badr wanted a major container ship or a giant tanker in a hurry to cross to the Gulf of Alaska.

  But traffic remained light all night. The watches slipped by, sailors slept and ate, and the reactor ran smoothly. Ravi and Shakira retired to their little cabin at 0200, after two fruitless hours of waiting. The General ordered the COB CPO Ali Zahedi to call him instantly if anything was sighted, but nothing was, and the Barracuda continued in a slow racetrack pattern, occasionally coming to PD for a GPS check, observation, then back under the surface.

  The weather, if anything, worsened. The fog had cleared, but the rain was still lashing down, visibility at maybe only a couple of miles. At 0915, sonar reported a likely contact approaching from the northwest. Taking a swift look through the periscope, Ali Zahedi spotted a serious crude oil tanker churning down into the Pass, the great 10-mile-wide seaway between the islands.

  “Here he is, sir,” he called. “A real possible…three-zero-zero…but it’s close…only 3,000 yards…I’m 35 on his starboard bow…”

  “PERISCOPE DOWN!”

  Admiral Badr moved in. “Lemme look, Ali—”

  “PERISCOPE UP!”

  “Three-three-five,” he called.

  “Now bearing that…range that on 24 meters…. What are we, 2,500 yards?…Put me 25 on his starboard bow…target course…one-two-zero.”

  “DOWN PERISCOPE!”

  “Come right to zero-six-zero…dead slow…”

  “Here she comes, sir…”

  “UP PERISCOPE!”

  And for the next three minutes, they worked the mast up and down, finally accelerating in behind the freighter, with a burst of 12-knot speed, before slowing down to the freighter’s nine knots and becoming invisible in her wake.

  “She’s Russian, sir,” called Ali Zahedi. “Siberian crude, I imagine.”

  Over in the U.S. listening station at Cape Sarichef, the seaward northwesterly point of Unimak Island overlooking the approaches to the Pass, the American radar picked up the periscope mast of the accelerating Barracuda, 18 miles away to the west.

  But just as quickly, the “paint” vanished after only three sweeps, leaving behind a mystery. Had they picked up the periscope of a submarine? Or was it just flotsam in the water? And if it was a periscope, did it belong to the same submarine the Attu Station had heard and reported last Friday night?

  In the normal course of events, the Unimak Station would not have reported any of the random radar paints picked up on a commercial thruway like the Pass. But there was something about this contact, the stark clarity of the paint, its sudden appearance from nowhere, and its equally sudden disappearance. Plus the report from Attu last Friday.

  They decided to put the information on the nets…221127JUL09 Possible transient radar contact detected Unimak Station. Five seconds, three sweeps on screen. Further to Attu Station submarine contact 161750JUL09…Unimak detection consistent with slow five-knot submarine progress from Attu to Unimak Pass.

  It was a signal that would, in a very few hours, send off alarm bells inside the head of Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe in Fort Meade. And it would cause his mind to whirl in hopeless search for the missing Barracuda. Though even he would have to admit that he couldn’t say, even within 10,000 miles, where it might be. But it would not be the first time he had wondered about a clandestine submarine passage along the route north of the Aleutian Islands. And right now, he would have given almost anything to know the precise whereabouts of that mysterious underwater ship and who its owners were.

  Meanwhile, Admiral Badr had his ship perfectly ranged behind the Russian tanker, the whole operation one of geometry rather than navigation. They were separated by about 100 yards of swirling white water, and they had a beam ranged on the mast light of the merchant ship.

  The correct angle was around 13 degrees. If it decreased, they were falling behind, out of the wake that protected them from the U.S. radar. If the angle increased, it meant they were getting too close. And the tanker, blissful in its ignorance of the nuclear arsenal following in its wake, kept steaming forwards. Captain Mohtaj, the XO, personally took the helm during this most intricate part of their journey, and steered them dead astern of their leader.

  “Ninety-five revolutions…speed over the ground 9.2 by GPS…8.6 through the water, sir…”

  When they reached the GPS position, 54.15N 165.30W, they no longer needed to be a shadow. They broke away and went deep to 300 feet, heading for a point 60 miles southeast of Sanak Island, where Ben Badr ordered a course change to due east. They had turned away at last from the long sweeping arc of the Aleutians and were making 8 knots along the 54th line of latitude, straight into the Gulf of Alaska.

  Down in the navigation area, General Rashood was sharing a pot of coffee with Shakira and Ashtari Mohammed. The Arabian Lieutenant Commander and the Navigator were poring over the big charts, trying, as always, to second-guess the United States’ defenses.

  General Ravi was sitting at a high desk with a pile of notes illuminated by an adjustable reading light. In great detail, sectioned off in colors, numbered and bound, they contained details of geological strata, depths of rock, likely weak points in certain areas of the earth’s crust. Lists of volcanic activity. Lists of “modern” volcanoes likely to erupt. There were detailed maps of great mountains that could develop interior lava in the next five years. There were estimates of potential damage, endangered areas, and a special section on inland volcanoes, plus two entire eighteen-page chapters on seaward volcanoes.

  Ravi had compiled the document himself; he had typed up, filed, and cataloged every specific section, cross-referenced each and every volcano that might interest him. It was a precious project, representing the very bedrock of his plan to drive the Great Satan out of the Middle East forever.

  Every aspect, every detail, was gleaned from the personal knowledge and research of the world’s foremost authority on geophysical hazards—Professor Paul Landon. Ravi Rashood regretted that their friendship in London had been so very brief.

  4

  0300, July 23, 2009

  53.30N 161.48W, Depth 500

  Speed 5, Course 080.

  THE BARRACUDA crept east nor’east across the steep underwater cliff faces at the eastern end of the Aleutian Trench, where the gigantic Pacific “ditch” that guards the southern approaches to the islands finally shelves up, close inshore, into the Gulf of Alaska.

  Here, despite the colossal depths of more than two miles, the ocean steadily grew shallower, angling up towards the coastal islands of mainland Alaska. In this, the more friendly U.S. end
, enemies are just about unknown, unlike its other side, out towards the western Aleutians towards Russia and China, where American submarine COs stay on top of the game at all times.

  Ravi and Ben considered their slow expedition into the quiet section of the Trench not much of a risk; it was simply not a place where the U.S. Navy would be looking for trouble, mainly because of the serious difficulties of getting there…either straight through the patrolled waters of the Trench (Out of the question, unless contemplating suicide); through the Unimak or Samalga Passes (Impossible under U.S. radar); or across the Pacific Basin and through the Gulf itself, passing over the lethal, constant electronic trip wires of SOSUS—again suicidal.

  Both Ravi and Ben considered the Barracuda safe in the eastern waters of the Trench, and at this dead-slow speed they would hear any U.S. submarine a long time before it detected them.

  At first, it had seemed logical to cross the 1,000-mile-wide Gulf of Alaska, straight through the middle, in water never much less than two and half miles deep. But Ben Badr was nerve-wracked, thinking about the U.S. Navy’s deadly Sound Surveillance System, and in answer to every one of General Rashood’s questions weighing the possibilities of the much shorter straight-line route, he just said, “Forget it, Ravi. They’ll hear us.”