Barracuda 945 (2003)

by Patrick Robinson

  February 11,2008

  They checked the Global Positioning System (GPS) in the early afternoon and found themselves in precisely the right place, 53.45' N 170.30' E, ninety miles west nor'west of the northern shoals of Attu Island. Captain Badr ordered an immediate reduction in speed because they now had no idea which SOSUS arrays were in place, and which weren't.

  Ben erred on the side of caution. He was steaming in more than 9,000 feet of water, and he ordered the Barracuda to 800 feet. . . speed five . . . course one-one zero. The possibility of them being heard at that depth running so slowly was close to zero.

  At this rate it would take them almost a day to cover 100 miles, and Ben Badr wanted to go no faster. It would thus be eight days before they were in the approaches to the Unimak Pass, eight days of stealth, cunning, and restraint. Ravi was especially good at all those things. General Rashood was confident.

  They crept slowly forward, easing their way along the northern route, about five miles offshore. They stayed in minimum depth all the way, and eight times the sun tried to struggle out of the Bering Sea in front of them, and eight times it failed. The weather on the surface remained stormy and rough, but no one saw it. The Barracuda never came to the surface, only to periscope depth for a fast GPS update. They just kept going along, the big reactor running sweetly, providing all the heat, fresh water, fresh air, light, and power they needed. The Hamas terrorists were breaching the outer defenses of the United States in the utmost comfort, given the circumstances.

  They never knew it, but only once in the entire run did they come close to being heard. That was about thirty miles north of the eastern headland of Unalaska Island. A big fishing boat out of nearby Dutch Harbor somewhat unnerved the sonar room when it suddenly hauled full nets noisily, and close, perhaps hurrying to make home port before the weather.

  The Officer of the Deck (OOD) already had the Barracuda cutting the coastline somewhat fine, and he had no wish to get tangled in another fishing net. He desperately wanted to turn away, but this was a bigger problem than it might seem—hard rudder turns are noisy, well capable of giving a four- or five-second transient on U.S. detection equipment. The U.S. operators would not know this was a submarine. In fact, they'd probably blame the trawler suddenly speeding up, and classify it as such.

  But the OOD knew that any detection was bad, and somewhat rashly elected to come to PD (Periscope Depth) to confirm he was well out of the way of the fishermen. Big mistake. The Barracuda's periscope came thrusting out of the icy water, just for a few seconds, and was instantly picked up by shore-based American radar on Akutan Island. Just a fleeting contact, three sweeps on the screen.

  As it happened, they put it down to debris from the trawler's catch. But five minutes later, Ben Badr himself wanted to take a look at the surface picture—and this time the contact was spotted on radar, and logged by the Americans . . . transient. . . insufficient data for positive identification. But it was sufficient to be recorded formally as a possible intruder.

  They waited with new vigilance for it to appear again. But it never did, and the Barracuda continued toward the Unimak Pass. The mighty Los Angeles Class hunter-killer submarine USS Toledo, cruising through the Aleutian Trench, was too far away to detect them.

  The Barracuda was just a few miles short of the seaway through the islands early on the morning of Wednesday, February 20. They took up a position ten miles off the flashing beacon on the northern headland of Akutan Island. They were not able to see it, but the GPS had them accurately placed. Up ahead was the beginning of a "safety fairway," drawn up by the Admiralty in London, for all shipping using the Pass.

  In those lanes, the chart informed them, there was no impediment to safe navigation. Not even man-made . . . no artificial island or structure, fixed or permanent. It added that it was not mandatory to use the "fairway," but recommended.

  "Thanks, old chap," said Ravi, in a sudden spasm of homesickness. "I'm with you all the way."

  But Ravi's chart showed there was a shallow area, two miles long, in the middle of the fairway, under eighty feet at its worst, and fine for surface ships. But it was not fine for submarines that wished to stay undetected. It was possible, because most of the sandbank was ninety feet deep, but it was not advisable. Without putting a mast up, the Barracuda was fifty-five feet high from the top of its sail to the keel. Ben Badr would want twenty-foot clearance from the seabed, because to hit the bottom would be a crisis of diabolical proportions.

  It was simply begging for trouble to make a slowish run at periscope depth, with the mast jutting out of the water, probably in the slavering teeth of powerful U.S. radar. Ben Badr did not like it, and was actually considering making a fast run for it, on the surface, in the dead of night, and then heading for deep water.

  General Rashood, however, considered this had an edge of hysteria to it, and was quite certain it would have given any ultracautious SAS Commanding Officer a heart attack. He said quietly, "Ben, I have been taught to back off, any time I find myself weighing up a risk that will threaten my 'mission critical.'"

  "So have I," said Ben. "But in this godforsaken place, we must have a ninety percent chance of getting away with a fast surface run, for maybe five minutes. They'd probably think we were a fishing boat, or a freighter."

  "Don't like the odds," said Ravi. "Forget it. Anyway, I think I have a better plan."

  "I should hope so," replied Captain Badr, grinning. "You're in charge."

  "When I was in Araguba, a Russian officer, who I think had drunk a little too much, told me, and he probably shouldn't have, about a Russian submarine—he thought it was a Kilo Class boat—that went right through the Bosporus submerged, and was never detected by heavy Turkish radar."

  "He did? That's incredible," said the CO. "Every submariner knows the Bosporus is impossible, with all that fast freight traffic, and terrible currents, sandbanks, wrecks, and God knows what."

  "I know. But this Russian told me it was done. And you know what? He told me how it was done."

  "He did?" said Ben, eyes wide open.

  "Yes. Dead simple, really. He went through in the wake of a big freighter, right up his backside. The stern wake confused the radar so badly, they never saw the periscope."

  "Is that right?" said Ben Badr, even more incredulously. "But I wonder what would have happened if the surface ship had stopped?"

  "Funny. That's what I asked. But the old Russian just smiled and told me a good submarine captain would be on high alert for that. No problem."

  "Are you saying that's what we should do, Ravi?"

  "Why not? We'll hang around waiting for a big freighter, and follow it through. Much less dangerous here—the channel's wide, and just about deserted. If that Russian could follow a ship through the confined area of the Bosporus, we ought to be able to chase one through a safety fairway, in the middle of a seaway nearly ten miles wide."

  "Yes. I suppose we could. I'm not sure how long we'll have to wait. We'll come to PD every half hour and see what's going on, keep our speed right down, and then get in close."

  The trouble was, throughout the day, there were several small ships moving through the Pass, but no big ones. It was quite late in the afternoon, almost dark up here in those latitudes, when the veteran Kilo CPO, Ali Amiri, Chief of the Boat, called from the periscope:

  "Captain, sir. . . I have a possible . . . three-three-zero . . . twelve thousand yards. . . I'm about thirty on his starboard bow. . . He's got a commercial nav radar. . ."

  "I'm turning toward it for a better look—before the light gives out on us." Captain Badr was all business now.

  "UP PERISCOPE. All-round look."

  Seconds later—"DOWN!"

  "Bearing?"

  "Three-three-five . . . bearing that. Range that . . . on twenty-four meters . . . seven and a half thousand yards, sir . . .Put me twenty-five on his starboard bow . . . target course . . . one-two-zero . . . distance off track three thousand five hundred yards.

  "Co
me right to zero-six-zero . . . down periscope . . . make your speed five knots."

  The Barracuda moved forward in the water, running slowly toward the track of the oncoming freighter. They took another look closer in, and assessed her as a 6,000-tonner, Japan registered, heading straight into the Pass, nicely on a steady relative bearing as it approached.

  For the next ten minutes they hectically worked the periscope up and then down, until finally Captain Badr ordered a gentle starboard turn, falling in hard behind the freighter.

  With her bow right behind the merchantman's prop, range locked on the stern light, the Barracuda matched speed precisely with the leader.

  Eighty-five revolutions . . . speed over the ground 8.8 by GPS . . .8.3 through the water, sir.

  Only 100 yards of choppy, foaming water separated the two ships as they made their way down the narrow safety fairway. No one, obviously, in the Japanese ship had the slightest idea they were being closely tracked by a nuclear submarine. A rogue submarine at that.

  The team in the Barracuda kept station to the nearest few yards, watching the angle between the horizon and the freighter's stern light, knowing if it increased they were too close. If it decreased, they were falling behind, out of the broiling wake that was protecting them from U.S. radar.

  The Japanese ship held a far steadier course than the last one they had encountered, the Mayajima. It set its speed and held course for mile after mile. It probably drew only around twenty feet, so it was not in any way neurotic about ocean-depth, just kept rolling through the Pass, on course to a distant land. "Probably full of computers," said Ravi. "Though I can't imagine where they were coming from up there in the Arctic. Unless it was Prudhoe Bay. . . they've got a lot of electronic kit up there."

  It was twenty-five miles to the shallowest point of the Pass, and it took two and a half hours. And all the way across the shoal, Ben Badr's men kept calling out the depth of water beneath the keel. It only once went under twenty feet— all the way to fourteen feet, which made the CO somewhat nervous. But within fifteen minutes they were hearing the ocean bottom was shelving down again.

  Ninety feet, sir. . . now one hundred. . .

  They were positioned at 54.15' N 165.30' W—and no longer required their Japanese escort. Sixty miles southeast of Sanak Island they made a course change to due east, running deep now, straight along the 54th parallel, away from the great volcanic arc of the Aleutian Islands, into the Gulf of Alaska.

  9

  For five days and five nights the Barracuda ran deep beneath the windswept waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Captain Badr never let her speed rise above six knots, nor her depth above 500 feet. She tiptoed past the menace of the U.S. Navy's SOSUS arrays and stuck to the shallowest water she could find at that depth.

  A lot of very large oil tankers rumbled overhead on the high-octane highway to and from Prince William Sound and the terminal at Valdez. But no one heard the near silent thrum of the Russian turbines, carrying the marauders from the Middle East toward the spectacular archipelago of Alaska's southeastern islands and fiords.

  On Thursday afternoon, February 28, the submarine arrived in 500 feet of water, west of miniscule Forester Island. Ben Badr's log book read 54.47' N 133.45' W. The Barracuda was thirty miles off the coast of Prince of Wales Island, the third-largest in all the Americas, and that includes Hawaii.

  The Commanding Officer put his ship into a slow racetrack pattern, moving at only three knots through the water, now 300 feet below the surface. As it grew dark, there was heightened activity in the missile compartment, as eight big RADUGAs were moved into firing position.

  Two decks above, in the navigation area, Shakira Rashood was locked into her charts, preferring the sprawling Admiralty layouts to the smaller neater versions that appeared on the computer screens. She used dividers, a three-foot-long clear plastic ruler, a protractor, and calculator. Ravi stood next to her, mildly amused at his wife's capacity to turn his own broad outlines and objectives into careful details. She was, he thought, at heart, a natural-born civil servant, which was unusual for a terrorist.

  From the moment he had explained to her his objectives, she had set about turning ideas into concrete plans. She had studied the success/failure rate of the RADUGA and the defenses, both probable and certain, of the targets in the United States. She plotted routes, changed them, suggested positions for the launch platform, and finally presented her work in carefully drawn diagrams, in thin blue lines on her charts.

  As far as Ravi could see, her strategy, and geographic understanding were without flaw. For weeks he had put up with a lot. . . How far is this? . . . What about this? . . . What about that? . . . Too far . . .Too direct . . . No possibility of working. . . Absolutely not. . . There's a U.S. listening station right here. . . You can't take a submarine in there, they'd hear you. . . It's too shallow. . . Too busy . . . Too close to the shore . . . Too far out . . . too near the main tanker lanes . . .too near this Coast Guard patrol area . . .

  Shakira was tireless. Thorough, intelligent, and cautious. But still tireless. Grand strategy was not her game. It was the minutiae that absorbed her. And long ago, Ravi had considered that minutiae might keep them safe from discovery and attack.

  She had no personal ambition to be seen as brilliant. Indeed, she checked with her beloved Ravi every step of the way. Shakira's ambition was to help produce a perfectly executed operation, eliminating mistakes, catching miscalculations, listing snags, drawbacks, and dangers.

  Ravi had never met a better executive working in a confined area like maps and missiles. And during that long Thursday evening he watched her, working with the Missile Director, the two of them checking the distances, the flight trajectories, and courses. And he thanked God for the long weeks his missile team had spent in Petropavlovsk, mastering the big cruises that would now strike a blow for Allah deep in the heart of the Great Satan's Power base.

  Even if all failed, and they should be caught and eliminated by the U.S. Navy, nothing could now prevent the strike. The power grid of the West Coast of the United States was at their mercy.

  At ten o'clock that evening, Ravi ordered the Barracuda to alter course to ninety degrees, to face east, toward Mecca, across the great frozen prairies of Canada to the Atlantic. And then he took the ship's broadcast system and asked every man to spend a few moments in prayer. Those who could, knelt in the Muslim fashion.

  He reminded them their immediate actions may bring about the coming turmoil, and that they would hear the Angels sound the trumpet three times. And that when God read the Angel's reports, the righteous would cross the bridge, into Paradise. And that surely all of His children now dwelling in this great weapon, built to carry out Allah's will, would be among the righteous.

  "I have turned my face," said Ravi, "only toward the Supreme Being who has created the skies and the earth, and I am not one of those who ascribes a partner to God. To you be glory, and with this praise I begin this prayer. Yours is the most auspicious name. You are exalted and none other than you is worthy of worship."

  He prayed for guidance in their great adventure and he ended with these lines from the Koran. . .

  . . .from thee alone do we ask help.

  Guide us on the straight path,

  The path of those upon whom is thy favor.

  . . .Light upon light,

  God guides whom He will, to His light. . .

  At which point he ordered the ship back around to the west, and he summoned the Missile Director to the control room, checking one last time the prefiring routines and settings. The program was immaculate. Only missile malfunction or unexpected enemy action could stop them now. The big RADUGAs, the guidance programs preset, were ready to go, straight along the route Shakira Rashood had masterminded.

  At eleven o'clock, Ravi gave the order. "STAND BY TUBES ONE TO EIGHT."

  Then, seconds later. . . 'TUBE ONE LAUNCH!"

  The first of the opening salvo of four nine-foot-long steel guided missiles blew out of th
e launcher, arrowed up to the surface, and ripped out of the water as its engine ignited.

  It roared upward into the black night sky, with a fiery trail crackling out behind it. At 200 meters above the surface, its cruise altitude, the missile adjusted course to 290 degrees and hit flying speed of 600 knots. The gas turbines cut in, eliminating the telltale trail in the sky. And the RADUGA was on its way.

  Right behind it, the second one was in the launch process, out of the tube and on its way to the surface. The third was only seconds from ignition, and the fourth was already under the control of the launch sequencer.

  There would be variations in each of the four designated indirect routes to Valdez, but they would arrive on target twenty seconds apart, no matter what. And now they fanned out, streaking above the night waves of the Gulf of Alaska, growling surprisingly softly as they sliced through the wind and scattered low clouds.

  The initial 860 miles took the salvo ninety minutes, and it took them more than 200 miles past the natural right turn up into Prince William Sound on longitude 146.20' W. It also took them far south of the U.S. Navy radar that sweeps the Sound night and day.