Barracuda 945 (2003) Page 33

  Swiftly, they kicked down eighteen more feet, and then they undipped the two bombs and set both timers for twenty-two hours. The four-foot-wide pipeline was encased in steel and carried no barnacles in these very cold waters. The first bomb clamped on magnetically with a dull clump sound.

  The second was placed exactly opposite on the other side of the pipe, the timer reversed three minutes and twenty-one seconds, the precise time Lieutenant Azhari's stopwatch measured between the fixes. The bombs would detonate simultaneously, shortly before midnight tomorrow.

  They joined their three colleagues and showed the leader the time on the stopwatch, which showed the start of the twenty-two-hour cycle. Then the second three men broke away and began swimming downhill, following the pipeline back north, into deeper water, down the escarpment of the shoal.

  They kept going for 1,000 yards, and undipped the last two bombs, placing the first one on the steel pipe and taking a total of 17 minutes off the 22-hour setting. Then they clamped the fourth and final bomb on the precise opposite side of the pipe, set the timer for 21 hours, 39 minutes, and 14 seconds, and turned back west.

  They were almost 100 feet deep here, and as they swam back westward, they kicked toward the surface, settling 12 feet below the waves for the final 200 yards, back to the submarine, which was now emitting a slow beeeep every twenty seconds to guide them back.

  When they arrived, Lieutenant Azhari was waiting, the other two frogmen having already boarded through the wet-hatch. Ten minutes later they were all inboard, and the giant U.S. oil pipeline from Yakutat was doomed in this part of the ocean, barring a zillion-to-one fluke.

  Captain Ben Badr turned his ship slowly west, and they headed back out through the Dixon Entrance, into the 12,000-foot-deep waters of the Gulf of Alaska, where they could run 1,000 feet below the surface, and where they would be virtually impossible to find. They were headed due south.

  Noon, Sunday, March 2, 2008

  Ops Room, Valdez Police Department

  Officer Kip Callaghan's telephone never stopped ringing. Local people were literally in line to give information, ask for information, or just to talk about the savage roaring blaze, which still thundered into the smoky skies on two sides of their town.

  It had taken almost twenty hours to stop the flow of crude oil flooding out of the inflow pipe from the north, directly into the terminus, and igniting with the rest of the stored fuel. The electronic control center was still completely out of action, but they had managed to turn off a huge valve on the pipeline, by hand, some two miles north of the city.

  Wearily, Officer Callaghan picked up the ringing phone again. "Valdez Police—Situation Room."

  "Sir, I'm calling from Glennallen with a little information you may want."

  "OK, sir. Just give me your full name and address, and age. Plus the number you are calling from."

  "Cal Foster, P.O. Box 58

  , Glennallen. I'm twenty-one, and I'm calling from 907-555-3677."

  "Thank you, sir. Please tell me your information."

  "Well, I'm really calling about a UFO I saw in the sky on Friday morning around 1:30."

  "A UFO! You mean a kinda flying saucer, sir?"

  "Well, kind of."

  "Sir, this is the Situation Room for the fire catastrophe. You'd probably be better to let the main Police Department know about a flying saucer. Right here, I'm strictly in the combustion area."

  "Officer, I'm in the right department. I may have a connection to the fire."

  "OK, sir. Tell me."

  "Well, me and my buddy, Harry Roberts, had just stopped on the Glenn Highway on our way home, and we were, like taking a leak, facing north, when I saw this missile flying through the sky. Real quick, right above us. I could see a flame coming from the back, and it made a kinda growling noise. It was heading directly south to the mountains and Valdez. . .

  "Then, just about a half minute later, I saw another one, maybe a mile to the east, but going the same way. Just as quick. Identical. I was thinking they could have been missiles—you know, aimed at the oil terminal . . . and maybe they started the fire."

  "Sir, did your buddy also see the objects?"

  "He wasn't in time to see the first one. But I yelled when I saw the second one, and he saw that, all right. Mind you, he didn't really believe it was a missile. He thought it was a low-flying aircraft, and he might have been right. But I don't think so. I ain't never seen anything go so fast through the air, not that low to the ground. That was no aircraft. Nossir."

  "You took a while to let us know. How come?"

  "Well, I never knew about the fire until the middle of the day Friday, and I'd kinda forgotten about the rockets I'd seen. Then I got to thinking about 'em, and last night I suddenly thought there might be a connection."

  "Sir, I'd like to speak to your buddy Harry."

  "Well, right now he's up at the Caribou Cafe."

  "They got a phone?"

  "Sure. It's 822-3656. Don't listen if he tells you it was a 747 or something. It wasn't."

  "Okay, Cal. I'm gonna try to get this corroborated. I'll call you back. . ." Officer Callaghan called the Caribou and asked to speak to a customer named Harry Roberts. Half a minute later, the reluctant spotter of the UFO was on the line.

  "I saw it. Yes sir. I definitely saw it. And Cal was right. It was traveling real quick. And I saw it much later than he did, only seconds, but it was going away from us time I turned around."

  "You didn't see the first one at all?"

  "Nossir. Cal just caught it as it went over us. I wasn't in time. But I saw the second one. Flying straight for the mountains."

  "Well, your buddy Cal thinks those rockets might have been headed for the oil terminal, and were the cause of the fires."

  "Coulda been . . . coulda been . . ."

  "Do you think they were kinda mysterious? Like not an aircraft, more like a missile?"

  "Well, I haven't given the one I saw much thought. But it was kinda creepy. The thing you'd notice was how fast the bastard was going. And Cal's right—it was a lot too fast for a regular aircraft."

  "One more thing, sir. What time was it when you and Cal saw 'em?"

  "Well, I got home at exactly 1:30 a.m. So Cal musta spotted the first one at around 1:20. It took us about ten minutes to get home from there."

  "OK, sir. That's all. Thanks for your time."

  Kip Callaghan knew the first explosions in the oil terminal were now put at 1:30 a.m. It was ninety miles up to the Glenn Highway

  where Cal and Harry saw the possible missile. If the damn thing was making ten miles a minute, that was around nine minutes flying time.

  The coincidence was too hot for Officer Callaghan. He phoned his boss and gave him the information. Superintendent Ratzberg immediately reported the phone calls to the newly arrived FBI Chief, who passed it on to the Coast Guard, who alerted the appropriate U.S. Navy Department, Pacific Fleet, San Diego.

  Ten minutes later, news of a possible sighting of guided missiles was in the Pentagon, and four minutes after that there was a message on the secure Fort Meade Internet, direct to Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, Personal Assistant to the Director.

  Jimmy, who was on duty that Sunday afternoon, buzzed Rear Admiral Morris, who instantly called Vice Admiral Morgan, encrypted, at home in Chevy Chase. It was late afternoon now, bitterly cold and already growing dark. Arnold was sitting by the fire glowering at the New York Times, the liberal left-wing views of which unfailingly made his tight-cropped steel gray hair stand on end. At least it would have done, had his hair been sufficiently long.

  Meanwhile, he just glowered, and waited for Kathy to bring him some China tea, which he counted as one of his Sunday afternoon luxuries. The interruption of the phone call from Admiral Morris caught him entirely unaware, and he greeted his old friend tersely. "What's up, George?" he said. "I suppose you're on a special mission to ruin what's left of the weekend?"

  "Don't be ridiculous, sir," replied George, "I bring you criti
cal information. The police in Valdez have interviewed two local men who apparently saw two very fast missiles ripping through the sky, due south toward the Valdez terminus at 1:20 on Friday morning, ten minutes before the storage tanks blew up, ninety miles away."

  "Who are the guys . . . sane . . . sound mind . . . et cetera . . . ?"

  "Yes. Apparently. Both twenty-one years old, clearsighted and identical in their observations. One of them saw two missiles or rockets, the other saw only one. Said it was traveling too fast to be a commercial aircraft. Both confirmed a short fiery tail in the stern of the object, and both were struck by its very high speed."

  "Did they want anything out of it?"

  "No. Nothing. The first one meant to report it as a UFO. It was only when he learned about the fires he decided they might be connected."

  "Uh-huh. May we presume that at after one o'clock in the morning these two kids were several sheets to the wind?"

  "I expect so, Arnie. Nonetheless, according to the police, they are both kinda unassuming guys. They agree on the basics, and their time frame is probably accurate within seconds. And they had no way of knowing that, not before one of 'em made the call."

  "I'd say they're correct by the sound of it," said Admiral Morgan. "I now accept that we were probably hit by at least two missiles, fired from an enemy unknown, almost certainly from a submarine, probably Russian. We got a lot of sleuthing to do, George.

  "Meanwhile, we better keep a tight lid on this. We can't tell the populace someone is trying to wipe us out. Make certain no one releases anything, and I'll have the President make a short national broadcast later tonight . . . just expressing his regrets at the terrible accident in Alaska. That way we'll take the sting out of it. The Press won't catch on till someone tells 'em. And no one better do that. Yet.

  "George, be at my office tomorrow morning 0600. Bring Ramshawe. Does he know about the missile sightings?"

  "Sure does. He told me."

  "Fluky little bastard. Tell him not to be late."

  Morgan carefully drafted the text of the President's broadcast, then called the White House to tell the Press Officer how to handle it and what to tell the man in the Oval Office.

  Submitted by anyone else, this would have taken several drafts and a committee of God knows how many people to write and rewrite, suggest and resuggest, criticize and recriticize. The fact that not one of these literary minnows could come within a bull's roar of writing anything one-tenth as good as the original was not considered relevant.

  Even the great Ronald Reagan had a White House plagued by these fourth-raters, trying to look thoughtful, and mostly failing. The wondrous political writer Peggy Noonan, a talent of genuine stature, revealed in her book, When Character Was King, they were known as the Three Blind Mice. She once observed, in hysterical detail, precisely how they would have rewritten Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

  It was as well they were not in residence during the reign of Admiral Arnold Morgan, who had all of the flinty, idealistic, conservative character of President Reagan, the same selfless regard for what was right for the country, and much more capacity to be flagrantly rude to people whenever he felt so inclined.

  The Three Blind Mice would have lasted about ten minutes with Admiral Morgan on the prowl. On one occasion when the duty Press Officer did venture to tamper with a draft speech the Admiral had penned for the President, Arnold sent for him, tossed the offending sheets of paper into the bin, and growled:

  "When I write something, with all the implications of National Security involved, don't ever again dare to change one word of it. What I write, is what I mean. You don't like it, get another job. Join a fucking poetry society. Just remember, there's a thousand goddamned writers around, but not one of them—NOT ONE, hear me?—NOT ONE understands what to do, like I understand what to do. That's all."

  That particular Press Officer, not the head of the department, was in shock when he left. And his mauling in the lair of the National Security Adviser became legend among the writers. No one had ever wanted to tangle with Admiral Morgan again.

  On this Sunday evening, when he told the Press Officer his requirements, the only words he heard were, "Yes, sir. White House Press Room, 2100. No questions afterward."

  "Correct," said Admiral Morgan, banging down the phone, without saying good-bye.

  Thereafter, his mood mellowed somewhat, despite the circumstances. He and Kathy always had dinner together at home on Sunday night. They started with a couple of glasses of champagne. Then, with their main course, drank the best bottle of wine Admiral Morgan could lay hands on.

  Tonight Kathy had prepared roast beef, and Arnold had opened, warming by the fire, a bottle of superb Burgundy, 1997 Corton Rouge, a Grand Cru from one of France's historic Domaines, the Bonneau du Martray. Eleven years old, from a great vintage, the wine was another recommended by Harcourt Travis, the Secretary of State, connoisseur of the French grape, wine adviser to the National Security Adviser.

  The Admiral poured two glasses and tasted his before he carved the beef. Then he handed one to Kathy and kissed her, asking her, as he did every Sunday evening, if they were to be married this week.

  Her reply varied no more than the question. "Only," said Kathy, "if you resign from the White House and allow us to spend carefree years together without you trying to run the world."

  "Guess we'll have to hold off for another week, then," he said. "Otherwise, there's not going to be a light left on in the country, no oil whatsoever coming out of Alaska, and the goddamned Chinese running off with all the crude in the Middle East."

  For a moment, Kathy O'Brien looked pensive. "Do you really think," she said, "that someone actually hit that oil terminus in Valdez?"

  "Honey, I know full well someone hit it," he replied. "Hit it good and hard, blew up and incinerated Christ knows how many acres of stored fuel, in two places, with guided missiles, which two witnesses saw going in. They were fired from a submarine that somehow crossed one of the narrowest parts of the Pacific Ocean, into either the Gulf of Alaska or the Bering Sea."

  "How come you don't even know which ocean the missiles were fired from?"

  "Because that's the nature of SLCMs," he said unhelpfully.

  "What's an SLCM?" she asked.

  "Submerged launch cruise missile. Flies itself. Steers itself. Finds its own target. All preprogrammed. It's just about the trickiest weapon in the world because it launches suddenly, from out of an ocean. From a launch pad which seemingly does not exist."

  "Well, if it's caught on radar, you'd surely know where it's come from, roughly?" said Kathy.

  "And therein lies the problem," said Vice Admiral Morgan, archly. "Among the many secrets our last Democratic Government somehow allowed the Chinese to get their hands on, was a brilliant preprogrammed flight direction system that allows these missiles to make whatever course you want 'em to make.

  "Let's say you gotta target a thousand miles away to the northeast. You can make one of these missiles go right round it, swinging north a hundred miles early, then heading east, then homing in on its quarry, flying due south, right out of the north. At that point, no one knows where the hell it's come from.

  "The final flight path is irrelevant. It just came from nowhere. So in this case, you can only stick the point of your compasses into Valdez and describe a circle to about 1,200 miles and anywhere there's ocean more than 300 feet deep, inside your circle, is a place a submarine could have launched from. Right here, on this enchanted Sunday evening, we're looking at around a zillion square miles."

  Arnold sipped his Burgundy.

  "Well, my darling," said Kathy, "you don't seem overanxious to send out a posse to find him."

  "No point. You can't search that big an area. All you can do is get your defenses and surveillance systems on high alert, and wait for the son of a bitch to make a mistake. As he will."

  "What about refueling? Won't someone have to come and deliver him some gas?"

  "That, Ms. O'Brien
, is what really worries me. He may not have to."

  "Oh, does the submarine run on fresh air?"

  "No. Water."

  At which time Arnold spent ten minutes explaining to his fiancée the principles of a nuclear submarine, how its reactor just goes on working, how it can stay underwater for years, if necessary. How it's the goddamned sneakiest little son of a bitch ever invented, and every time we run into a major problem, I look for an enemy submarine.

  "Wow," said Kathy. "You mean it's possible there actually could be an enemy submarine, lurking off our coast?"

  "I'm afraid it is. But the little bastard might already be chugging its way back over the Pacific Ocean," he replied.