Barracuda 945

by Patrick Robinson

  The oil terminus itself was completed in 1977 at a cost of $9 billion, and the project made Valdez a rich city, its economy glittering behind the huge taxes paid out by the oil companies. Half the town worked in the local oil industry, and everyone knew the value of the Valdez goose, which laid eggs of the purest black gold.

  Within hours of the September 11 catastrophe, in faraway New York, the Valdez city fathers were calling for additional radar, and indeed sonar, for their priceless port. They got them too, double-quick, all aimed, across, above and through the water. But all aimed, essentially south, to the area of potential danger. Nothing was aimed at the desolate, freezing, snowbound mountain range to the north, where human life is just about impossible during the winter months.

  But it was from out of the north that Ravi and Shakira’s missiles were coming, ripping through the night, frightening the life out of one extremely drunk Alaskan, who nonetheless made a mental note that some kind of a spaceship had just flown directly over his pecker.

  The first missile came flashing over Mount Hogan’s western heights at around 1:30 in the morning. It leveled off over the descending ground, and came scything through the icy air, pointing downward at an angle of almost forty-five degrees.

  It hit Tank 18 head-on, with a colossal explosion, which detonated the adjacent Tank 17, which in turn blew Tanks 15 and 16 to smithereens. Almost a million gallons of crude oil were blasted by the incinerating heat, hit flashpoint in under two seconds, and a scarlet-black mushroom of fire rumbled into the air 200 feet high.

  Just then, the second missile came in, slamming home, slightly to the right of the blaze, and blew to high heaven the small gas-refining plant and the entire control section of the terminus.

  Missile Three shrieked through the smoke and devastation and knocked Tank 14 flat, setting fire to Tanks 9, 10, 11, 12, and13. For whatever reason, the fire was less volatile, but was somehow even hotter, and it blew the big main pipeline out to Berth 4, where the Exxon Prince was taking on thousands of gallons of crude being pumped right now into its two for’ard holding tanks.

  The incinerating flame ripped across the jetties like a massive length of detcord, slower but bigger. And before the astonished eyes of the ship’s master, a thunderous explosion, caused by the vast amount of inflammable gas in the tanks, blew the entire bow of the 400,000-ton tanker clean off the front of his ship.

  Nineteen seconds later, Missile Four came spearing through the smoke and devastation of the terminus and crashed into the middle of Tanks 1 to 6, four of which were only half full of crude, but were loaded with volatile gasses, and went up like an atomic bomb. The searing explosion was visible in the night sky for fifteen miles to the south. And the fire lit up the sleeping city of Valdez.

  By some miracle, no one on the burning tanker was injured, mainly because of its size. Every one of the crew was in quarters way back in the stern of the ship, close to the bridge, the oil control room, and the engine room. The explosion up for’ard had taken place almost 400 yards from anyone. The crew would have to abandon ship, fast, but even when the tanker finally settled on the bottom, there would still be the equivalent of a six-story building jutting out of the water.

  Meanwhile, General Rashood’s second salvo of four RADUGAs was well on its way, fanned out two miles apart, whipping through the night skies over central Alaska, again traveling the precise same final track, north to south. Eight minutes after the Exxon Prince had blown up, the final four Russian cruises slammed into the gigantic fuel farm above the city—lines of vast storage tanks which, when full, hold up to nine million barrels of crude oil piped from the North Slope.

  Right now, they were full, and the tanks split assunder, unleashing a burning river of oil onto the hillside. Crude needs ferocious heat to ignite, and those four missiles provided that heat in spades. People in the town, awakened by the gigantic explosions at the main terminus, would later describe a succession of “kinda soft” explosions up the hill. Not the KER-BAM! of a bomb. More a series of WHOOOOSH! sounds, like that from a petrol-sprinkled bonfire when the first light is thrown in.

  The fuel farm fire above the city was terrifying, because people thought it would rage downhill and set fire to the entire town. But the crude was burning at such a rate, and at such heat, it scarcely moved, settling quickly into a contained twenty-acre inferno, roaring and crackling, destroying every last gallon of Alaskan crude on the shores of Prince William Sound.

  No one had even the first idea what had happened. Nor how it happened. Certainly not why it happened. The 4,000 citizens of Valdez knew only that the great terminus, and all the oil in it, owned and operated by Amoco, BP, and Phillips Petroleum, was gone. The entire place was on fire, and there had been, plainly, a disaster on a monumental scale.

  There had been just a skeleton night staff of three in the oil control area—two of whom were luckily having coffee in a mess room 300 yards away—and all communications from the Terminus were down. But the scale of this blaze was so great you didn’t need a telephone. A passing huskie could have told you the oil port was on fire.

  Dick Saunders, the local stringer for the Anchorage Daily News, was the first reporter on the case, fifteen minutes after the last missile plowed into the fuel farm. He had missed the last edition of the newspaper by a long way, but he nevertheless called the night desk in Anchorage and told a tired, bored-sounding editor that the entire port of Valdez was on fire and right now they were facing the total destruction of the Alaskan economy.

  This definitely stopped the night editor from being bored, and he in turn hit the wire to his brother, who worked the night shift at KBBI, the public radio station over in the little port of Homer on the Cook Inlet. Eight minutes later the story was out, and every late-night radio station in Alaska was on the phone to Valdez, verifying the scale of the disaster. The broadcasters were in full cry by 2:30 A.M. and CNN was out nationally with the drama onscreen by 3 A.M. (Pacific time).

  By 4 A.M. (7 A.M. on the East Coast), the National Security Agency was calling key operatives into the Fort Meade Headquarters, the FBI was dispatching West Coast staff in a private military jet from San Diego to Anchorage, the White House was informed, the President was headed for the Oval Office, and Vice Admiral Arnold Morgan’s driver was hurtling along the Beltway direct to Fort Meade. Rear Admiral George Morris was doing his level best to get there before the Big Man.

  The staff of the Chief of Naval Operations was already in the Pentagon dispatching two frigates directly out of San Diego immediately to Prince William Sound. The Los Angeles Class nuclear boat Toledo was out of the Aleutian Trench and headed at flank speed south of the islands, direct to the deepwater channel inside the Sound itself.

  Meanwhile, Captain Ben Badr had turned away from the datum, and was quietly leaving Forester Island astern to the northwest while he aimed the Barracuda east into the Dixon Entrance, a wide seaway that marks the end of America’s Alaska Territory and the beginning of Canada’s western coastal waters. The Dixon runs north of Canada’s Graham Island and then swings south through the broad Hectate Strait to Queen Charlotte’s Sound, and on to the northerly waters off Vancouver Island.

  This is a well-traveled, sheltered route for tankers heading out of the Gulf of Alaska and on down the west coasts of Canada and the United States. It is also the route of the brand-new coast-hugging underwater pipeline joining the Yakutat Bay transfer terminal, east of Valdez, to the gigantic refinery in faraway Grays Harbor, Washington State.

  General Ravi and Shakira stood next to Ben Badr as he conned the submarine, 500 feet deep, in 200 fathoms of water, quietly south of the great shoal of the Learmonth Bank. The journey of 130 miles to their next area of operations would take them more than a day at their restricted speed of only five knots through these Canadian coastal waters. They did not even have much to talk about, since no one on board the submarine had the slightest idea what had taken place after their two salvos of “fire and forget” RADUGA missiles had blasted off on the
ir journey to the Alaskan coast.

  Shakira was confident. She had read the reports of every test firing there had ever been on the RADUGAs. In her mind there was no doubt they had reached their final destination. The missile’s refined guidance system, stolen from the Americans by the Chinese in the late 1990s and shared with their friends in Moscow, was as reliable as anything being manufactured in the West. And so far as Shakira could tell there was no modern precedent for the missile failing to explode on impact.

  “I believe there is a very large fire burning in the port of Valdez,” she said, clutching the arm of her husband in the Barracuda’s Ops Room. “Almost as big as the one in my heart.” As a terrorist, Shakira Rashood had all of the passions required for the task, and she never lost sight of her avowed hatred for the Americans, whom she believed had armed, financed, and encouraged the Israelis in the most monstrous atrocities against her own people.

  The GPS position that awaited them was 54.15’ N 131.39’ W, a mile north of the 100-fathom line, less than two miles from the notoriously shallow Overfall Shoal, which stretches six miles out from Rose Point, the northeasterly tip of Graham Island. The new pipeline runs straight across the edge of this very large sandbank, at one point only thirty feet from the surface at low tide.

  The hazard is well marked, away from the main shipping lanes to the east, toward the Canadian coast. More significantly, the water is 600 feet deep, less than two miles to the north of the Shoal. Four hundred yards from the Shoal, it is still 200 feet deep. The insertion of Lt. Arash Azhari and his frogmen from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps should not be a problem.

  While Ravi, Shakira, and Ben crept through the dark waters south of Alaska, Adm. Arnold Morgan’s driver, Charlie, gunned the big staff car, engine roaring, headlights blazing, straight at the main entrance of OPS-2B, the huge one-way glass building that houses the eighth-floor lair of the NSA Director.

  The car following them, containing three armed agents, had had trouble keeping up with them all the way from Chevy Chase, and the Big Man was well inside the main doors before his “minders” arrived.

  Armed security guards were awaiting him, and he moved straight up to Admiral Morris’s office in the private elevator, a full four minutes before the Director himself made his entry.

  When he did so, he pushed open the door to his office and was greeted by a voice from behind his own desk, from his own office chair.

  “Where the fucking hell have you been, sailor? Vacation?”

  George Morris understood that when Arnold came visiting, he lost his chair, desk, and seniority in more or less that order.

  He ignored the greeting, and chuckled at his old friend sitting once more behind the big desk. “Hello, sir,” he said as he always did, before slipping back to “Arnie” as befits close friends of over thirty years’ standing. “Has anyone told us what the devil’s going on in Alaska?”

  “Not really,” replied the President’s right-hand man. “I’ve seen only the pictures off the Internet that CNN is showing. But I’ll tell you what. That looks like some kind of fire. You hear if anything’s suspected?”

  “Not a thing. The media don’t have a clue, but I did notice there seem to be two very definite areas of destruction—the second one quite a way from the main terminal. I don’t really know about connections between storage areas, not in a plant as big as Valdez. Maybe there are adjoining pipelines, but if there are no connections, it’s hard to see two massive, simultaneous fires breaking out in the same place, but nearly a half mile apart, within ten minutes of each other, without there being something pretty damn fishy about it.”

  “Hmmmmm,” said Admiral Morgan. “We got a surveillance report in yet? You know, details of local shipping, surface contacts, aircraft movement…anything?”

  “If we have, the newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe’s consolidating it along the corridor in his own office. Couldn’t have him do it in here. That boy makes more mess than any other five people I’ve ever met. Paper! Christ, he can fill a room, every day of his life.”

  Arnold Morgan grinned. “Shall we get him in here, since he is now your personal assistant?”

  “Sir, I wanted to check something with my Chief of Military Intelligence, Captain Wade. But he’s very busy, I’ve been on the phone to him twice before I got here. I’m going down to his office for ten minutes.”

  “OK, George. I’ll go pay a surprise visit to James Ramshawe, check he’s on the case….”

  Both Admirals made for the door. George Morris headed for the elevator, Arnold Morgan for a big office twenty yards down the corridor.

  The sign on the door read LT.COMDR.J.RAMSHAWE,ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR. Arnold did not knock. Arnold did not knock when he entered the Oval Office. He probably would not knock on the Pearly Gates.

  He pushed the door open to find Jimmy Ramshawe in his shirt-sleeves, hunched over a table on the left of his room, puttings sheet of paper in various stacks, and working his computer with his right hand only. “Wait a minute, whoever the hell you are,” he grunted. “Someone’s made a blue here. I’ve gotta fix it before I stand up.”

  “What’s a blue?” asked Admiral Morgan.

  “Australian for balls-up,” replied Ramshawe, still not turning around. “How some people reach the conclusions they do reach, beats the absolute shit outta me.”

  “And me,” said the Admiral. At which point the young Lieutenant Commander sensed something familiar about the rasping tone of the voice, and just found time to mutter, “Oh, Christ,” before leaping to his feet and apologizing profusely for his rudeness.

  Admiral Morgan chuckled and offered a handshake. They had not seen each other for several months, not since a very difficult operation in the Strait of Hormuz, which had led to the National Security Adviser literally telling George Morris to elevate Ramshawe to his present exalted position.

  “Well, the Alaska catastrophe’s almost four hours old. I’m counting on you to have a theory, cause and effect, guilt or innocence, fact or fiction.”

  Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe loved Admiral Morgan, and he was one of the few people not completely fazed by his disconcertingly tough manner.

  “Sir, right now I have not seen much more than anyone else. But I’ve noticed the definite evidence pointing to two separate areas of explosion and fire, damn nearly half a mile apart. I have not been able to connect them, mainly because all the phone lines to the oil terminal are down.

  “I have been through to the Police Department, and I’ve got a computer hooked up to a local radio station, which is interviewing a lot of Amoco people. The fuel farm and the actual terminus went up in flames separately, about ten minutes apart. No doubt about that.

  “Almost all of the key operatives from the plant were in the town asleep, thank Christ, or they’d all be dead. Several of them have been on the radio, and they are all expressing total bewilderment at the fact that two quite separate, totally devastating fires broke out. I’ve heard three different oil execs say that a flash fire was impossible. Every last barrel in Valdez was crude, and it quite often doesn’t burn at all. Not unless something makes it very, very hot, some kind of an explosion, a bloody bomb or something.”

  “You’ve seen the Coast Guard surveillance reports?”

  “Only the prelim. There’s no record of any ship movement anywhere in Prince William Sound any time after 2300 the previous night…. And that takes care of a lot of ocean…. The bloody placeis one hundred miles long, out to the one hundred-meter line.”

  “Air traffic?”

  “Not even a private aircraft after 2100.”

  “Nonetheless, the oil guys must be thinking someone blew the holding tanks up?”

  “They’re not saying that, sir. At least not yet. But they must be thinking it. Let’s face it, crude oil doesn’t suddenly go off bang by itself, does it? And that bloody fuel farm has nothing anywhere near that would cause even a spark, never mind a twenty-acre inferno.”

  “Hmmmm,�
�� said the Admiral. “No ships, no aircraft, no suspects, no apparent motive, no clues. Not much of a start to an investigation, eh, Jimmy?”

  “No, sir. Not much at all.”

  “Who was it said, When you have eliminated the impossible, only the truth remains?”

  “Sherlock Holmes, sir. Front and center.”

  Admiral Morgan laughed. “What do you have to do around here to get a cup of coffee?”

  “Oh, Christ. Sorry, sir. I’ll fix it. The usual…black with buckshot?”

  No one ever forgot Arnold Morgan’s coffee requirements, honed during his years in nuclear submarines. No cream, just two or three little white sweetener pills. Buckshot, he called them.

  “Right. Better get some coffee for the boss too. He’ll be back in a moment. But before that I want to talk to you, so hurry up.”

  Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe picked up the phone and ordered coffee for three, with hot English muffins, since it was now after eight in the morning and the two Admirals had been up half the night.

  He replaced the receiver, then turned back to the President’s National Security Adviser. “Lay it on me, sir. What do you need?”

  “Jimmy, in the absence of any further evidence to the contrary, we’d better face up to the fact that some bastard just blew up the biggest oil terminus in the United States.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The total impossibility of an attack by sea or air means that whoever did it must have escaped by land. That means the range of mountains right behind Valdez, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. The Coast Guard will be combing the area with three helicopters by first light in about one hour. I’ve already spoken to them.”

  “Do you think it likely that a bunch of crazed terrorists crept through the snow and ice, down Mount Hogan, and put a few bombs in the oil storage area?”

  “No, sir. And even if they did, they’d get caught pretty sharpish this morning. The place is gonna be alive with helicopters, and anyone making a getaway will be leaving footprints in the snow all over the bloody wilderness, right, sir?”