cast off the dock lines, and with the Pilot already on board, his boat chugging along off their starboard beam, they headed out of the Bay of Avacinskiy, through the minefield, and east into the wide Pacific Ocean.
The Pilot disembarked at the end of the minefield, and Captain Badr stayed on the bridge, watching the surface of the choppy sea for another half hour. Then he swung south, in order to catch the lenses of the American satellite at the earliest possible time. But just before 7:30, out beyond the 500-meter mark, he ordered the Barracuda beneath the waves. Then he ordered her to turn northeast again.
'Conn-Captain… bow down ten… make your depth four hundred… speed fifteen… make your course zero- four-five… '
The Barracuda made its turn 300 feet below the surface, and headed across the wide Gulf of Kronockiy, where the inland shores of the Pacific begin to shelve down to depths of more than 6,000 feet.
Above them the weather worsened, and somewhat to the surprise of the Barracuda's sonar room they picked up engine lines, five, maybe ten miles off their port bow. But it was raining now and the surface picture was confused. Nonetheless, the sound of the oncoming engines grew closer, and while it was definitely not a submarine, neither Russian nor American, Ben Badr ordered the ship to periscope depth to get a fix with the sailor's best friend, Eyeball Mark-One.
Way up ahead, they could just make out the outline of a clear and obvious fishing boat, big warps stretching down on yellow davits from both beams. It did not carry an inordinate amount of antennae, nor was it making any recognizable Naval transmissions, but it was a good size, maybe 1,500 tons.
Captain Badr held the Barracuda at PD and identified the trawler as Japanese. Through the powerful periscope lenses they could just make out her name, Mayajima. And the navigator had made her course 225 degrees, heading, doubtless into the rich fishing grounds of the Gulf of Kronockiy.
Since the submarine was headed northeast and the trawler was headed west southwest, their path of approach was digressing by the minute. Right now they were two miles apart and going very clearly away from each other. Ben Badr ordered his helmsman to hold course and take her deep again… Four hundred feet… make your speed fifteen.
What the Barracuda's CO could not have known was that Capt. Kousei Kuno, master of the trawler Mayajima, had just been given a very strong heads-up from his own sonar operator, pinpointing a huge shoal of fish, far north for this time of the year, and very deep, possibly 2,000 feet.
He ordered the trawl net lower in the water, releasing the warps, to 1,500 feet, and even on a fishing boat of this size, they felt the big otter boards at the head of the net dig into the water, forcing the giant entrance-gap open wide at the top end.
The sonar man called out depth and range of the shoal again. And Captain Kuno pushed his speed up as far as he could, and turned his wheel hard to port, changing his course to due east, in hot pursuit of the precious fish. Right across the path of the oncoming Russian-built nuclear submarine.
After four minutes, he cut his engines, wallowing at only three knots, and turning back west, right above the shoal. Literally, tons of fish floundered into the net, trapped by the baffles, forced into the narrow cod-end in the time-honored tradition of deep-sea commercial fishing.
Except that at that precise moment, Captain Ben Badr's nuclear submarine thundered into the net, coming northeast under the port quarter of the Mayajima and ramming its bow straight into the heaving trawl, powered by engines generating 47,000 horsepower.
The warps stretched and held. Then one snapped in two, sending its ten-foot-wide otter board clattering into the casing of the submarine, making an enormous din inside the hull.
'What the hell's that?' said Ravi, who was standing next to the CO.
'God knows,' said Ben Badr. 'Sounds like something just fell off.
He could not, of course, have known that one of the warps was holding, while the other was hooked around the sail, and the mighty Barracuda was dragging the Mayajima down by the stern, with a single otter board still clattering away against the sail.
'Are we shipping water?' called the CO.
'Negative, sir.'
'Reduction in speed?'
'Maybe four knots, sir.'
Back on the Mayajima, there was pandemonium as Captain Kuno realized they were being dragged down. Water was cascading over the stern, flooding into the hold and sloshing into the navigation area. Despite their propeller being almost at rest, they were making fourteen knots, backward. The strains were enormous, and he hit the emergency levers, which would release the steel-enforced warps that held the trawl net.
Immediately, the Mayajima righted itself, returning to an even keel, with no serious damage. They were stationary in the choppy water, having lost their massive fishing equipment and their valuable catch, and sustained damage to the lower deck interior. The pumps were working overtime to haul the water out of the hold, and there was no point remaining at sea one moment longer.
These ships carry no spare trawl net, mainly because of the expense. The loss of the net ends their voyage and confines them to harbor, until the insurance company, or someone else, stumps up. Captain Kuno turned south, back to the Pacific seaport of Ishinomaki, on the east coast of Honshu. He had suffered losses he would later claim added up to $200,000.
In the submarine, the clattering on the hull ended as abruptly as it had begun. With the release of the second warp, both lines holding the otter boards were slack. There was one final bang as the board whacked the casing for the last time. But it did no harm, and the net, full of cod, slipped easily off the Barracuda's bow, down into the depths. Free and clear of the impediments, the submarine accelerated northeast as if nothing had happened.
'Are we shipping water?' Ben Badr called again.
'Negative, sir.'
The CO turned to Ravi and said, 'We just got entangled in something that was not metal and, therefore, not a ship. It must have been a very large fishing net. Those bangs on the casing were the otter boards. I've never done it before, but I've met submariners who have. It's not dangerous, for us. Because ultimately we're not in the net, we're just dragging it. But it is very dangerous for the fishermen, who must release it, before we drag them down.'
'Do we go to the surface to check up on possible damage?'
'We never go to the surface, Ravi. Not until the day we exit the ship for good.'
'But they might be sinking,' replied Ravi.
'If they are, we shall do nothing to help them.'
One month later, Captain Kuno would claim he saw their periscope, jutting out of the water.
Meanwhile, the Barracuda pushed on. Three hundred fifty miles of open ocean lay before them to the western point of the Aleutian Islands, which stream out in a narrow 1,000-mile crescent from the seaward tip of the Alaska
Peninsula, the great southwestern panhandle of America's largest state.
The Islands, which stretch more than halfway across the Pacific Ocean at that latitude, divide the Bering Sea to the north from the Pacific in the south.
Populated for some 9,000 years, they stand in some of the crudest winter weather on earth, valued principally as a storm-lashed natural outpost for the U.S. Navy, which guards the western approaches to Alaska and the coasts of both Canada and the United States.
In recent years, the level of military surveillance from the Aleutians has been increased tenfold with the rise to global importance of Alaskan oil. The great terminal of Valdez in Prince William Sound, with its huge storage capacity, its convoys of south-running VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carriers), and the new West Coast undersea pipeline, have turned it into a main cogwheel in the American economy. And it requires heavy protection.
With the President's insistence on less reliance on Arab oil, the estimated 16 billion barrels of reserves on Alaska's North Slope represent the very heart of White House policy. The United States owns enough oil on the freezing land south of the Beaufort Sea to replace all Middle East supplies for the next thirty years.
A minor problem has been the oil beneath the protected acres of the sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There has been a certain amount of protest from a tribe of native Indians, who fear new drilling may drive away migrating deer — never mind the irony that they hunt the deer from the back of gas-guzzling snowmobiles, with high-powered rifles.
