Barracuda 945 (2003)

by Patrick Robinson

  "Here we go," he said. "Page 240. There's a whole section on 'em, right before the bloody sharks."

  He scanned the pages and swiftly found out he was right.

  Barracudas do not venture into cold water, and the illustrations were beautiful. He decided to read a little from the opening paragraph, and found out that this fish has a diabolical set of teeth, two lines of a razor-sharp gnashers, and, wrote A. J., the disposition of a cornered wolf. . . its bite can be poison. . . the mere sight of it can nearly induce cardiac arrest.

  So, indeed, could the subtle prose of Mr. McLane. Almost. Because the next paragraph, right there on page 240, halfway down the text, contained the sentence . . . yet in shallow water, old razormouth has the speed of a rocket. And that very nearly did send the young Intelligence Officer directly into cardiac arrest.

  OLD RAZORMOUTH! When did he last hear that? Jimmy's mind raced, but his heart stopped. It always did when he thought he was on to something. He took a deep slug of coffee, and exited the barracuda section of Game Fish. He hit the keys for his secret file, logged into the index.

  Christ! It was nearly a year ago. September 2006.

  Here we are. . .OLD RAZORMOUTH 600 AFFIRMATIVE. Signal sucked off the Chinese Navy satellite—original source: U. S. SIGINT listening station in the underground bunker at Kunia, Hawaii. Rock solid.

  Lieutenant Ramshawe considered the unlikely possibility that some Chinese Admiral had landed six hundred barracudas, as forecast. Six hundred. Affirmative. That last word implied a clear suggestion that the subject had been mentioned before. Otherwise, thought Jimmy, old Admiral Tai Mai Hook would have sent a signal that read: "Holy shit! I've just caught half the world's population of barracudas."

  No. Affirmative meant something that had been expected. Or half expected. And it was not a netful of fish. Old Razormouth, the barracuda, on a Navy satellite, had to be code for Russia's most dangerous attack submarine. But what about 600? The Russians only have one operational. I suppose the number could refer to anything—depth beneath the surface . . . hours running time . . . a radio band . . . stockpiles of torpedoes . . . miles from home base . . . missile range . . . or even dollars . . . maybe the Chinese have bought the bloody thing.

  Lieutenant Ramshawe decided he had better things to do than try to connect a year-old, four-word Chinese satellite signal with a perfectly innocent-looking Russian Naval Fleet Transfer along the Siberian coast.

  "Nonetheless," he muttered. "I'll be keeping a weather eye on those four little bastards creeping through the frosties. 'Specially Old Razormouth."

  August 14, 2007

  73' N 138' E

  South of the New Siberian Islands

  They were at the eastern end of the Laptev Sea now, still hugging the coast, having already passed the 5,600-square-mile delta of the River Lena, which, like the Ob', flows clean across Siberia from the center of Asia. Ahead of them was the fifty-mile-wide strait between the northern headland and the southernmost island, the gateway to the East Siberian Sea.

  Out in the lead, the Ural was still making on average 200 miles a day. Both submarines remained on the surface holding a regular speed of nine knots, a constant watch kept from the bridge for smaller ice floes, which could damage a submarine if hit hard enough head-on. The fact that it was only dark for an hour each day made this task somewhat easier.

  Ravi Rashood had spent much of his time with the Commanding Officer and Ben Badr. But he had served regular four-hour watches in the navigation area, the sonar room, and the radar room. He joined the two other Iranian officers, plus an interpreter, talking with the planesmen. He spent two entire days with CPO Ali Zahedi in the propulsion area. This coupled with a day in the reactor room with Lt. Comdr. Mohtaj gave General Rashood a hard grounding in the way a nuclear submarine moves through the oceans.

  He knew the screens to watch, the dials to check, the location of the electronic circuits and their breakers. He was now well versed in all emergency procedures, and he used all of his spare time talking with Ben Badr. In this particular nuclear submarine, dealing with any kind of problem, any possible kind of hitch or failure, there was an excellent chance that these two disparate military characters, from opposite cultures, religions, and upbringing, would arrive at the correct solution.

  All that remained for both of them to study was a crash course in firing procedures for the big RADUGA cruise missiles. Commander Badr was probably 50 percent proficient. Another Lieutenant Commander from Bandar Abbas had been working almost exclusively for nine months right through the system's overhaul in Araguba. And an outstanding Chief Petty Officer from Ravi's home province of Kerman had completed a degree course, with an interpreter, in cruise-missile technology and guidance systems.

  Ravi had some catching up to do. And he would spend much of the fall in Petropavlovsk attaining the level of mastery in the subject any submarine Commander must have.

  Meanwhile, they pushed on through the southern strait of the New Siberian Islands, and the wind began to back around to the south, bringing a soft warmth to the air. There were few discernible signs left of the terrible Siberian winter, but snow still marked the dark and distant summer shores of Russia's vast, sleeping land.

  It was a 1,000-mile five-day run down to the Chukchi Sea and then into the Bering Strait, where the little convoy would steam within a half mile of U.S. waters. All the way down to the Strait, they would hug the inshore waters, and Captain Vanislav ordered the required course change to east-south-east as they entered the East Siberian Sea, right in the wake of the Ural. He called the swing to starboard—Conn-Captain . . . steer one-one-two. . . advise Ural immediately.

  Still running through smooth water, they pushed ever more southward, away from the deep thrust of the permanent ice field that lurked back over the port side horizon, flat lethal solid all the way from the North Pole and at this point within 100 miles of the Siberian coast.

  However, it had been a mild summer in this northeasterly corner of Russia and their passage was relatively simple. They saw no ice floes, and they kept the speed down to nine knots, night and day, cleaving through the dark blue waters watching the surface up ahead.

  All this time, the Iranians became more and more efficient. General Rashood himself was not, of course, ready to take command of the ship in the high-tech manner of a seasoned nuclear Captain. But Commander Badr most certainly was, and he was building an extremely capable afterguard to sail with him. General Rashood had already shown himself to be the ideal Special Ops Commander, and the long days of study in the submarine meant he was well able to conduct any mission he wished, with this ship's company and, particularly, in this ship.

  If Commander Badr had dropped dead, General Rashood, with his Iranian officers and crew, could have successfully avoided capture and brought the ship home. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that this SAS-trained officer was a man they could follow to gain any objective. Even without Ben Badr, Ravi could probably manage. With Ben Badr, they would form a competent combination.

  The five-day run down to the headland of Cape Uelen that guards the Russian side of the Strait was completed in solitude. They passed the high cliffs and the little trading post on the Dezhneva Peninsula sighted about twenty-five miles inshore, and in the distance they did see some local activity, small fishing boats, and a barge. But they never saw an oceangoing ship from anyone's Navy, and the only eyes watching them belonged to faraway Jimmy Ramshawe, who was checking out the satellite shots every couple of days from 7,000 miles away, still wondering why the hell Old Razormouth was any concern of the Chinese.

  They steamed out of the Chukchi Sea and into the Bering Strait in a cold gusting wind, right on the Arctic Circle. The seas were getting up now, the temperature had returned to zero, and long Pacific swells caused the Barracuda to ride up slowly and then pitch into the trough. Captain Vanislav ordered them to periscope depth, which made the journey a little more comfortable, but not much. He would have preferred to take her down 100 feet out of t
he weather, but the waters of the Strait are notoriously shallow and, all submarine captains believe, badly charted.

  They pushed on, with snow dusting the surface and the swells still making the big underwater ship rise and fall. Captain Vanislav ordered a course change to the southwest right off Lavrentiya Point, straight along the dividing line in the ocean that separates Russia from the United States, west of St. Lawrence Island, forty miles off the most easterly stretch of Siberian coast. Where the Barracuda ran, it was around 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 21. Three miles to port, across the international date line, it was still Monday, same time. Ramshawe was looking at photographs before they were taken. In a way.

  Ravi continued his studies, spending time in the reactor control room, and especially with the sonar officer, an English-speaking Chinese officer, who had worked on the PLAN'S Kilo program. Ravi had a natural affinity for the precise yet creative thinking required in the Sonar Room, and this was also true of Ben Badr. As always they had much to discuss.

  On across the 300-mile-wide entrance to the Anadyrskiy Sea they ventured, with its steep gray cliffs and circular summer currents. The tides were still flowing here in late August, but in a few short months these northern parts of the Bering Sea would freeze over completely.

  Two days later, they began the long voyage down the Koryakskoye Nagorye, a wild, desolate Eastern Siberian landscape containing a vast mountain range stretching for 500 miles, north to south: great snowcapped peaks visible from the ocean, sheer rock faces reaching right down to the sea. With the weather still rough, the ship's company in the Barracuda could, of course, see nothing, and for three more days, they never saw daylight, as they ran south at periscope depth, along one of the most remote coastlines in the world.

  Eventually the land begins to narrow and at the Gulf of Karaginskij it develops into a thin isthmus, which joins to the Siberian mainland the 500-mile-long, shillelagh-shaped Kamchatka Peninsula. The mountains go straight through the isthmus and cleave through the center of the peninsula, Russia's Rocky Mountains. Their most spectacular peak is the volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka, at 15,500 feet, the highest mountain in Siberia, fifty miles inland, and 120 miles north of Petropavlovsk.

  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.