Scimitar SL-2 (2004) Read online

  And then he added the inevitable: “We have to stay inshore, along the coast, in noisy water, where there’s massive shoals of fish, rough ocean, island surf, changing depths, and that north-running current. That’s where we’re safe, out there with the commercial traffic—freighters, tankers, and fishing boats, all kicking up a hell of a racket while we creep along 500 feet below the surface.”

  Ravi had been staring at the chart. “You mean right up here, through this Shelikof Strait between Kodiak Island and the mainland coast?”

  “I wish,” said Ben. “And I expect you’ve noticed we’d have 600 feet almost all the way along that island for about 130 miles. However, you’ll see that the Strait ends right at the gateway to the Cook Inlet, which leads up to Anchorage. Afraid that’s not for us. Shakira says it’s bristling with radar, busier traffic than Tehran, and only a couple of hundred feet deep.”

  “That’s not for us,” agreed Ravi. “What do we do? Go outside Kodiak?”

  “Absolutely,” said Ben, staring at the chart. “Even wider than that. We need to get outside the 200-meter line…See? Right here…we’ll get in the Alaska Current and head zero-seven-zero.”

  Ravi looked at the chart. “We stay 50 to 60 miles offshore all the way up that coast, we’ll be in water that’s two miles deep. As far as Prince William Sound. What does Shakira say about U.S. surveillance up there?”

  “She thinks they will have plenty of shore-based radar, which won’t affect us because we’ll be deep. And she thinks there’ll be surface patrols in that big bay beyond the Sound, which also won’t affect us. But she has seen no sign of increased submarine patrols up there.

  “And knowing the huge expense of mobile underwater surveillance, I’d be surprised if they put a couple of nuclear boats in there to protect essentially foreign tankers. Submarines operating in defensive mode in a nonwar area like Alaska really only protect against other submarines. And let’s face it, the chances of a foreign strike submarine getting into those waters with intent to attack are zero.”

  Ravi smiled. “Not even us?” he said.

  “Not even us,” answered Admiral Badr. “We’re just passing through, very quietly, very unobtrusively. There’s no U.S. submarine patrols and a lot of noise. We’ll be fine.”

  And so they set off up the Gulf, steering a northeasterly course, deep. It took them four days to reach the old Russian colony of Kodiak, and they left it 50 miles to port. They moved slowly past the rugged, mountainous island that held more than 2,000 three-quarter-ton Kodiak brown bears—the largest bear on earth, on the largest island in Alaska.

  The frigid waters that surged around Kodiak were home not only to a 2,000-strong fishing fleet, but also to the giant king crab. Vast legions of these iron-shelled 15-pound monsters, which sometimes have a leg-span measuring four feet across, occasionally made the city of Kodiak the top commercial fishing port in the United States.

  And the Alaskans guard their precious stocks assiduously. The biggest U.S. Coast Guard station in the state operates four large cutters, with fully armed crews, out of the old U.S. Naval Base on Kodiak. They patrol these waters night and day, ruthlessly seizing any unauthorized fishing boat. As Shakira Rashood warned her Commanding Officers, “They may not be looking for submarines, but they’d sure as hell blow a very loud whistle if they thought they’d heard one.”

  By midnight on Tuesday, July 28, way below the bears, but several hundred feet above the clunking armor of the King Crabs, the Barracuda was dawdling silently northeast at only six knots. Occasionally they heard the deep overhead rumble of a laden tanker moving west towards Anchorage from the new terminal in Takutat; occasionally, the State ferry, Tustumena, from Seward on the Kenai Peninsula; less often, the growl of the powerful coast-guard diesels.

  Three hours before dawn, Lieutenant Commander Shakira came into the control room and brought Ben and Ravi hot coffee and toast, announcing they were 90 miles southeast of the port of Kodiak, steaming with the Alaskan Current in 550 fathoms, staying west of the shallow Kodiak Seamount.

  She also brought with her a snippet of knowledge to dazzle the two senior officers on board. “Did either of you know that the port of Kodiak was practically leveled as recently as 1964?”

  “Not me,” confessed Ravi.

  “Nor me,” said Ben.

  “The whole downtown area,” she confirmed, “the entire fishing fleet, the processing plants, and 160 houses. The Good Friday Earthquake, they called it, shook the entire island from end to end.”

  “How come an earthquake wrecked the fishing fleet?” asked the ever-probing, practical General Rashood. “Why didn’t they just head out into the bay like every other ship does when an earthquake starts?”

  “Because it wasn’t the earthquake that got them,” said Shakira. “It was the tsunami, the huge tidal wave that developed when half a mountain fell hundreds of feet into the sea…There you are, darling, your very favorite subject, delivered personally.”

  Ravi grinned. “I’m telling you,” he said, “those tidal waves, when they get going, they’re a real killer—”

  “According to my notes on this area,” said Shakira, “this tsunami developed with great speed. When the wave surged into the port of Kodiak, it just picked up all the ships and dumped them from a great height into the streets, flattened every building…turned everything—ships, boat sheds, and shops—into match-wood. Most people luckily had just enough time to get out and drive to high ground. Anyone who didn’t was never heard of again.”

  “Allah,” said Ben Badr. “I suppose that’s the only good thing about a tsunami. It takes just that little bit longer to get organized. There’s warning. And the wave inshore is making only 30 or 40 knots. Probably gives everyone a half hour to get out.”

  “In some cases, much longer,” said Ravi, thoughtfully. “Some of those Pacific surges that started with earthquakes or volcanoes in the Hawaiian Islands took hours to reach very distant shores…where they inflicted their worst damage.”

  “If you want to know about tsunamis, ask my oh-so-clever husband,” laughed Shakira. “He knows everything. Or thinks he does.”

  “Unlike you two, I have been given expert tuition, instruction, and knowledge from a great master,” said Ravi. “Professor Paul Landon, the world’s leading authority on volcanoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves, took me under his wing for a few days,” said the General. “Brought my knowledge right up to scratch.”

  “Excellent,” said Admiral Badr. “Not too long now.”

  They ran on past Kodiak, crossed the sea-lanes leading up to the Cook Inlet and to the port of Anchorage. A day later, they were creeping through 1,200 fathoms of water south of Prince William Sound, 500 feet below the surface.

  Following the big sweep of the Gulf, they changed course there, making a gradual turn to the southeast, staying in the Alaska Current, outside the 200-meter line, tiptoeing warily past the Yakutat Roads, on down to the Dixon Entrance, north of Graham Island. These were waters where both senior Commanders had worked before.

  The sheltered, noisy expanse of the Hecate Strait looked tempting, lying as it did between the 160-mile-long Graham Island and the Canadian mainland. But the depths were treacherous. Right here the ocean runs hard south past the great archipelago of islands—hundreds of them—on the rough, violent coast where the Rocky Mountains sweep down to the sea. It’s noisy, it’s damn near paradise, except for the outstanding opportunities to rip the hull wide open in 30 feet of granite-bottomed seabed.

  “Outside the island, I’m afraid,” said Ben Badr. “It’s deep, and according to Shakira, almost certainly shuddering with SOSUS wires. It’s our usual story—very slow, very careful, right down 800 miles of Canadian coastline, past the Queen Charlotte Islands, past Vancouver Island, then past the great American state of Washington. Should reach our op area on August 6. Then it’s more or less up to Shakira.”

  And no one knew that better than the beautiful Lieutenant Commander, who worked tirelessly at her desk i
n the navigation room. Occasionally, Admiral Badr took the Barracuda to the surface for a satellite fix and to suck messages swiftly off the comms center in the sky, reporting course and position to Bandar Abbas via the Chinese Naval Command Center in Zhanjiang.

  They were in the risk-reduction business, and their modus operandi did not include providing the slightest glimmer of information, even on Chinese military satellites, to sharp-eyed Fort Meade detectives like Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe. Ravi and Ben wouldn’t know Jimmy’s favorite exclamation—Christ, here’s the ole Shanghai Electrician.

  This somewhat esoteric description had evolved from the more usual phrase of “casting a chink of light” on a problem, and George Morris had found Ramshawe’s linguistic ingenuity so amusing that he spread it all over the eighth floor of OPS-2B. For most people, it contained a touch more panache than a mere “chink of light,” the same kind of espionage flourish as The Tailor of Panama.

  Ravi and Ben were not willing to give one thin amp of credibility to the Shanghai Electrician. They accessed the satellite only every four or even five days, averaging 24 seconds of mast exposure per twenty-four hours. They stayed deep and slow, all the way along their southern voyage, past the Canadian coastline. They slipped down to 600-foot depth as they crossed the unseen frontier, west of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, into North American waters off the coast of Washington State.

  Out where the Barracuda ran, 45 miles offshore, the waters were not officially American, but in the world of international terrorism, those great Pacific swells far off the coast of the Evergreen State were about as American as Fifth Avenue; patrolled ruthlessly by U.S. warships working out of the sprawling Navy Bases of Everett and Bremerton, deep in Puget Sound, which guards the great northwestern city of Seattle.

  Shakira’s view was to stay well clear of the vast seascape that washes onto the shores of Washington State. She regarded it as the most dangerous part of their long journey, a place where there might well be U.S. submarine patrols, and many more highly sensitive surface warships, all carrying state-of-the-art detection and surveillance ASW equipment.

  In her opinion, they should stay deep until they were well south of the fast and lethal predators from the Bremerton and Everett U.S. Navy Bases. Those predators would show not the slightest mercy to an intruder, especially an unannounced Russian-built nuclear they had been puzzling over for several weeks. And there was no doubt, certainly in the mind of General Rashood, that the Americans were most definitely wondering about them.

  Admiral Badr kept in touch with Shakira’s heavily marked charts all the way, unfailingly agreeing with her and her sense of caution. They moved on slowly, the big, lightly used reactor running steadily, all systems operating flawlessly throughout the submarine. Ravi and Shakira would have liked a bigger cabin, but there was no chance of that. They worked and slept exhausted, welded together by the fire of love and revenge upon the Great Satan and its Israeli devils.

  They crossed the 48th parallel, which bisects the northern timberland of Washington State, then the 47th, which took half a day. On August 5, they were due west of the estuary of the mighty Columbia River, the great 1,200-mile-long waterway that rises in a snow-and rain-filled torrent in the mountains of British Columbia, surges south, and then swerves west to form much of the border between Washington State and Oregon.

  The Columbia was the most powerful river in the United States, generating one third of all the hydroelectric energy in the entire country. The Chief Joseph, the Grand Coulee, the John Day, and the Bonneville were the biggest of eleven massive mainstream dams. And the names of the latter two had been marked carefully on Shakira’s charts and circled in red, her personal code for potential danger.

  In Shakira’s view, these two hydro giants, set upstream from Oregon’s commercial hub of Portland, would be heavily protected from terrorist attack, and the chances of high radar sweeping the skies above the dam were excellent. What Shakira wished to avoid especially was a missile detection from U.S. radar defenses, mainly because she considered that to be an unnecessary hazard, and most certainly avoidable.

  The preprogrammed data inside the computer of the Scimitar SL-Mark 1s (plain TNT, not the nuclear warheads of the Mark 2s) would guide the rockets downstream of the big protected dams, crossing the Columbia in lonely, practically deserted countryside.

  But the entire project made her nervous, and she found it difficult to sleep, often pacing the navigation room at all hours of the night, pulling up the charts of coastal Oregon on the screens of the satellite navigation computers.

  Ravi too understood the scale of the project they were undertaking, but he was consumed with the minutiae of the target area. He combed through the notes provided by the late Professor Landon and longed each day for the luxury of a satellite communication that would detail the ever-changing situation among the high volcanoes within the mountain ranges of America’s vast northwestern coastal states.

  He had pages of data on Mount St. Helens, the Fuji of the United States, which was almost identical in its symmetrical shape to the legendary Japanese volcano. At least it was before it finally blew with stupendous force on May 18, 1980, sending a shudder across the entire southwestern corner of the state of Washington, and literally shot a tremor straight through the gigantic Cascade Mountains.

  The blast flattened fully grown Douglas fir trees up to 14 miles away from the volcano, and obliterated 400 square miles of prime forest. Fifty-seven people died. Raging mudflows thundered into the rivers. Volcanic ash showered from the darkened skies all the way to Montana, 650 miles to the east.

  The colossal eruption blew the entire snowcapped glory of the summit clean away from one of the most spectacular mountain peaks in the United States. Before May 18, Mount St. Helens rose thousands of feet above every hill and mountain that surrounded it, dominating the landscape. It stood, serenely peaceful, 9,677 feet high. After the blast, it stood less proudly, at only 8,364 feet. Its great shining white crest was entirely missing, like a spent fire-work.

  A broad, tilted circular crater more than two miles across was embedded into the pinnacle of the mountain. From its lower edge, carved into the north side, the crater’s rim was cut into a giant V, through which had thundered the pyroclastic flow. The molten lava was now set into a grotesque black basalt highway down the mountain, splitting into a wide fork as it reached the six-mile-wide base. The western surge had rumbled into the clear and refreshing waters of Spirit Lake. The rest had barreled down the beautiful snowy valley of the Toutle River. It was like an open-cast coal mine set in the garden of Santa’s Workshop.

  Ravi knew the facts verbatim. But the part that captivated him most was one particular detail of the blast. The central “chimney” of Mount St. Helens was blocked with hundreds of tons of lava from the previous eruption, and the surging new magma, climbing into the volcano, had nowhere to go. It ultimately forced its way higher into the north flank, pushing outwards and forming a giant swelling, a dome of rock, volcanic ash, and general debris.

  These great carbuncles are not unique to Mount St. Helens. They happen often with active volcanoes. But shortly before the eruption, this one had developed into a fair size—a mile across and probably 120 feet high. And it was not the rising magma that finally smashed the great bulge asunder, but a relatively small earthquake that completely destabilized the north face of the mountain.

  The dome, cracking on all sides, blew outwards within minutes of the quake, and crashed down the mountainside in a landslide. The mammoth weight of a half-million cubic yards of rock was now removed from the upward flow of the lava, and the gases decompressed instantly, detonating out like a bomb, leveling every tree in sight.

  It was the carbuncle that Ravi now focused on. According to Professor Landon, another one was forming on the same gutted north face of Mount St. Helens, right in the old crater, 46.20N122.18W on the GPS, to be absolutely precise.

  There had been strong, steaming activity inside the volcano for several years, since t
he early 1990s—occasional eruptions of steam and ash, less frequent pyroclastic flows, with intermittent swellings on the northern rock face of the mountain. A much more violent blast of steam and ash on July 1, 1998, had frightened the life out of the locals before it had seemed to subside again. The new mile-long carbuncle had begun to develop in 2006, right in the middle of that massive, sinister crater that scarred the once-beautiful north face.

  As they crossed the 46.20N line of latitude, Shakira knew they were dead-level with their target, dead-level with the four-mile-wide estuary of the Columbia River. They were 200 miles offshore, 600 feet below the surface, steering one-eight-zero, straight down the 127-degree line of longitude. Mount St. Helens lay 75 miles due east of the estuary. Right now, moving slowly, they were exactly 195 miles from their target, a mere formality for the North Korean–built Scimitar SL-1 missiles currently resting malevolently in the magazine room of Barracuda II.