Barracuda 945 (2003)

by Patrick Robinson

  For twenty more minutes they waited, until the superstructure of the ship had virtually disappeared. Then they saw the gates at the far end slowly open, and they could hear the revving of the locomotives as they dragged the ship out of the chamber into the narrow waterway toward the next set of gates, the entrance to the middle lock.

  Over in the Control Room, the entire procedure was being watched by four Chinese technicians on the sixty-four-foot-long electronic model, which demonstrates every progression, every step of the way for every ship that moves through the canal. It records the actions of every one of the 1,500 electric motors, and now it showed the Luhu Class destroyer at the beginning of its short run to the second pair of gates it would encounter.

  "H-HOUR! H MINUS SIX!" called Patrick Rougeau. H for HIT, that is.

  Out in the Zodiac, Bill Peavey hit the stopwatch, which would count down the six minutes it would take Patrick and his boys to clear the rooftop, race down the stairway onto the jetty, down the long ladder to the beach, and board the last inflatable waiting to ferry them away.

  Working the radio, Chief O'Riordan immediately summoned the Sea Stallions, which were ready to take off from the carrier. They were scheduled all to arrive at the landing beach together.

  Five minutes passed, by which time Lieutenant Rougeau and his team were clambering into the boat, everyone scared to death the blast from the bombs might send the entire lock skyward, millions of tons of concrete. They fired up the engine, now careless of the noise, and traveling flat out, made 300 yards south, by the time Bill Peavey hit the button.

  The electronic pulse flashed unseen across the dark water, hit the little aerials, and simultaneously detonated all six of the 400-pound bombs. They blew with staggering force, and with a deafening roar, which kicked a twenty-foot wave back into the lake, where the Zodiac carrying Bill, Chris, and the boys was making forty knots, southwest.

  The blast annihilated the great iron hinges and blew both lock gates fifty feet into the night air. At which point a wall of water, with a forward motion of zillions of tons, over sixty feet high, thundered into the empty chamber like the mother of all previously known tidal waves.

  It slammed into the second gates with the kind of force that would have flattened the Pentagon. They gave way as if they were made of cardboard, and the thunderous torrent, now driven by another zillion tons of water surging in from the lake, reached the hapless 9,000-ton Qingdao, ripped it from the chains of the locomotive and hurled it forward.

  The sharp, pointed bow of the Chinese warship cleared the gates of the second chamber some thirty feet higher than it should have been and it was the keel and propellers that splintered the giant lock doors, smashing them off their hinges.

  By now the torrent was gathering strength, and as the new water drove into the old, surging through the narrow reinforced concrete channel, it drove the destroyer's bow upward, sending it through the second chamber at an angle of fifty degrees from the horizontal, the propellers tearing along the concrete bottom.

  It hit the end gates like a gigantic battering ram, never even slowed as it ripped straight through the channel to the last chamber, slammed into those gates, cannoned off the sides, and then smashed its way forward through the last gates and crashed down the final twenty-eight feet into the Caribbean Sea.

  Patrick Rougeau mentioned to his colleagues they had just watched the fastest transit in the entire ninety-four-year history of the Panama Canal, the final two chambers having been negotiated by the Qingdao in a little under forty-five seconds!

  It was by no means over. There was no way of stopping the tidal surge from Gatún Lake. The wall of water just kept coming, cascading through the locks, thundering downward, picking up the Qingdao and hurling it clear of the channel out into deep water, holed, battered, many dead and injured, but still floating.

  Meanwhile, 164 square miles of deep lake water just kept roaring. And it would continue to do so for seven days, until the lake was almost entirely drained.

  The SEALs? They came racing into their landing beach, loaded up the helicopters, with everything except the far too heavy inflatables. These they sent out toward the middle of the lake, tossing a hand grenade into each one as it went. Then they all hit the beach and watched the little boats explode some sixty yards offshore, before scrambling aboard the Sea Stallions and heading back to the Eisenhower.

  Lt. Comdr. Bill Peavey's signal was concise. "Mission accomplished. Panama Canal destroyed. Casualties zero."

  Epilogue

  6:00 p.m., Friday, April 25, 2008

  The Karnak Bar, Damascus

  Ravi and Shakira sat companionably with a couple of cold beers at their favorite corner table overlooking Martyrs' Square. Their short visit to the Librairie Avicenne bookstore had yielded two American film magazines, a copy of the London Sunday Telegraph, and Tuesday's New York Times.

  Shakira was staring at a big cover photo of Troy Ramford, with the Irish writer Edna Casey, clasped in each other's arms, at a private ceremony at the Headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild where Troy finally collected his Oscar for Timeshare.

  The caption read: Troy gets his statue one month after the lights went out. Edna gets her man. Shakira was riveted.

  She knew, of course, that the lights had gone out on the American West Coast. They'd been home now for almost two weeks and the newspapers in the Middle East had been full of the story. But the Iranian Government had prudently forbidden Hamas to claim responsibility.

  It was her own stunning, precision timing that brought a huge smile to the face of Shakira Rashood now basking in the knowledge of her shocking impact on the climax to the 2008 Oscars ceremony. Here was old Troy picking up the statue in a private office, and all because of her.

  Ravi, on the other hand, was equally riveted by the New York Times, which led its front page with the headline:

  IT'S OFFICIAL—THE U.S.A. TAKES OVER

  THE PANAMA CANAL

  Bloodless Coup as Panamanian President

  Signs 1,000-Year Treaty

  What followed was an almost-unheard-of interview with the President's National Security Adviser, Admiral Arnold Morgan, who declared in the third paragraph:

  "The International Seaway of the Panama Canal was built and financed by the United States almost 100 years ago

  or the peaceful use of all the world's shipping. Between them, two Democratic Presidents, Carter and Clinton,

  managed not only to give it away to Panama, but ended up placing it under the control of Red China.

  "So now we had the great pathway between the seas in the hands of a backward Third World Republic and a

  private corporation based on the mainland of a totalitarian Communist State, who between them would find it

  impossible to build even a decent airliner, never mind service and maintain one of the great engineering marvels of

  the modern world.

  "A couple of weeks ago we saw the disastrous consequences of allowing such people to take on a

  responsibility that was plainly too big for them. The giant high lock gates on Gatún Lake gave way after years of

  improper servicing and maintenance. As we all know, the tidal wave that then swept down the outward locks on

  the Atlantic side completely destroyed the structure and indeed drained Gatún Lake.

  "The United States regarded this as a criminal act of negligence, and considered it incumbent upon ourselves to

  step forward to rebuild it in the interests of the International Community. No one else could rebuild it. But we were

  not about to rebuild someone else's canal.

  "We thus sent in a military force of 10,000 United States Marines on a peaceful mission, to advise the Chinese

  personnel that they must now vacate the entire Panama Canal Zone upon which they enjoyed the benefits of an

  illegal lease, and proved themselves inadequate custodians.

  "Marine General Mo Sherman advised the Panamanian President of our vi
ews, and he agreed the Chinese

  must leave his country forthwith. The President understood our very real concern and thanked the United States

  for its generous offer to rebuild and run the Canal.

  "I am delighted to announce the Chinese have now evacuated the area, and that the United States is once

  more in sole control of the entire Canal Zone, including the dockyards situated on both the Atlantic and Pacific

  ends of the waterway. In addition, we have reoccupied the old American Navy base at Rodman, and the railroad

  on the east bank, from the City of Colon all the way to the old Fort Grant causeway outside Balboa on the Pacific.

  "Work will begin rebuilding the high lock gates in one month. We expect to complete the construction by the

  middle of 2009. The United States has offered a royalty contract to the Panamanian Government, payable from the

  tolls, after the cost of rebuilding has been recouped, probably coming into effect in the year 2013.

  "The Panamanians have indicated their intentions to accept those terms. And, mindful of the unstable nature of

  the country, the United States has agreed to keep a small peacekeeping Marine Garrison in Panama 'for the

  foreseeable future.'"

  According to the Times, there were U.S. Army gunships seen circling the Presidential Palace last week, and a total news blackout was imposed throughout Panama City. The Times reporter, trying to operate from twenty miles away, claimed information has been extremely sketchy.

  From the White House, Admiral Morgan would only say, "I have no knowledge of any aggressive acts by the U.S. military in the Republic of Panama."

  General Rashood smiled. "No, Admiral. I suppose not. You unprincipled, vicious bastard."

  Monday Morning, April 28, 2008

  The White House

  Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe sat before the Big Man while he read the latest CIA report of the highly classified U.S. investigation into the ruined Barracuda 945, eventually located in the Gatún Lake, half sunk, its intakes choked with mud, its active days over. Soon the mud would suck it down completely, without trace.

  The CIA report ran to forty-six pages, and the main good news was that the Panamanians had willingly led the Americans by helicopter to carry out their investigations on the shores of Pelican Island. The reason for the delay was the water was now too shallow for a boat and too much like quicksand for a vehicle. The rain forest offered no clearing for a helicopter and they just had to wait for the mud to firm up.

  When it did, the Americans swarmed all over the submarine for a week, finding practically nothing in the now silent hulk. No papers, no documents, no fingerprints, no clothing. There were six missiles left, Ravi and Shakira having fired eighteen of the twenty-four RADUGAs, and the boat contained no other weapons. Arnold guessed they had jettisoned everything out in the Pacific long before they entered the Canal.

  What, of course, they did find was the body of Joe Morris of Wilmington, Delaware, with his two companions, Skip and Ronnie, lying underwater near the base of the periscope, passports and documents still readable, the only papers left in the ship.

  The report of their deaths was concise. Skip and Ronnie had half their heads blown away with bursts from a Russian-built AK-47 automatic. Joe Morris had died in a most unusual way, the skull bone between his eyes, an inch and a half above the bridge of his nose, had been smashed with a plainly round object. The central bone of his nose had been driven with incredible force into his brain.

  Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe had highlighted that with a fluorescent green marker pen. And that was where Arnold Morgan stopped.

  "Christ," he breathed. "It was him, eh, Jimmy? Our old buddy Major Ray Kerman, expert in unarmed combat."

  "Yes, sir. Yes, it was. One SAS NCO, one British Member of Parliament, one unknown American visitor. All killed identically—unmistakable professionalism. Special Forces."

  "And we don't know where the hell he is."

  "No, sir. And we've been using that exact phrase for a damned long time. . . We don't know where he is."

  "I tell you what, though," growled Arnold. "We sure as hell know where he's been."