No matter. The Republican Administration of the early twenty-first century, ignoring the tree huggers, greens, wets, and other romantics of the environment, believed that most Americans think inexpensive and plentiful energy comes with Liberty, and will put up with some damage to the near-deserted wilderness of Alaska in order to get it. Yessir.
If the Administration harbored any doubts, the events of September 11, 2001, dismissed them all, in a major hurry. The prospect of the United States economy operating almost entirely on oil owned by Abdul, Ahmed, and Mustapha was plainly out of the question.
The President, backed by trusted advisers, some of them dyed-in-the-wool oilmen, called immediately for increased energy production. The Democrats did not like it, neither did the Eskimos, nor presumably the migrating deer, but a frenzy of new drilling was unleashed, most of it on government land, which included 86 percent of all oil exploration in Alaska.
By the end of the year 2006, a brand-new pipeline was close to completion, right across Alaska, following for much of its 800-mile journey the route of the old Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). For decades, this has carried crude-oil from the vast, 150,000-acre Prudhoe Bay Field in the north, to the giant Valdez Terminal, in the south, on the shores of Prince William Sound, 120 miles east of Anchorage, as the crow flies.
The new pipeline, the Alaska Bi-Coastal Energy Transfer (ABET) has been built on the same lines, a zigzag formation that allows it to withstand enormous stresses, because the aboveground pipeline contracts and expands as the tundra melts and then freezes. Both lines cross the mountain ranges of the Brooks, the Alaska, and Chugach, plus thirty-four rivers and streams, including the Yukon, Tanana, and Chena rivers.
The pipes are highly visible, crossing tremendous areas of wasteland, each section holding 840,000 gallons of oil, held at bay by the massive strength of the jet black, four-foot-wide, galvanized steel transport system. The two pipelines diverge shortly before reaching Valdez, the new one cutting left, through the south foothills of the Chugach Range, to the new transfer terminal in Yakutat Bay.
There the crude is pumped into the brand-new undersea pipeline system which, from the winter of 2007, ran from the south shore of Alaska down to the Queen Charlotte Islands, 600 nautical miles south just off the coast of British Columbia in relatively shallow water. That was only half of its underwater journey. The rest took it down the coast, past Vancouver Island, and into American waters off the shores of Washington State, and the only deepwater port in that State, that of the ten-mile-long Grays Harbor.
These increasingly busy sea-lanes, 100 miles south of the Canadian border, are now known as the Coastal Super Corridor, the West Coast's newest hub for business and international trade. Grays Harbor represents an outstanding confluence of road, rail, and marine transport routes, northeast to Seattle, south to Portland and California.
Its new status had prompted the Republican White House to force through a bill that allowed the construction, deep in the harbor, of a new refinery to handle the incoming piped crude from Yakutat. It was built, using every possible modern technique, on the south shore, two miles from the sprawling port of Aberdeen, a town of 17,000 citizens, now joined in an urban sprawl to its neighbors, Cosmopolis and Hoquiam.
The oil refinery was making a lot of people very rich. And the VLCCs were coming in line astern to Grays Harbor, loading up with refined crude oil, and then turning south again, down the coast to the Panama Canal and America's giant oil distribution system on the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Perhaps, even more importantly to the new boom towns at the head of Grays Harbor, was the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which brought colossal tankers rolling stock right into the refinery before running south for 900 miles, to yet another massive, new U.S. Government initiative, the biggest electricity-generating power station in the country, Lompoc, California.
This towering construction was christened Superpower West. It is the mighty plant built on the express orders of the President, to end forever the constant power cuts, which had been erratically blacking out parts of California for several years. Superpower West, solely reliant on Alaskan oil, was born to take the pressure off the other fifty main California generating stations. It was born to light up, exclusively, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It was into this multibillion-dollar power grid, stretching from the first snowy American soil halfway across the Pacific, to the very last hot, dusty U.S. acres on the Mexican border, that Ravi Rashood and Ben Badr were now headed.
The Barracuda was out in open water now, running deep, east southeast from the incident with the fishing boat. Captain Badr held her speed at fifteen knots, 500 feet below the surface, heading toward the Kamchatka Basin, where the ocean shelves go down to depths of almost two miles.
The Commanding Officer was trying to run the ship as if it were a part of someone's Navy, but they still had an unresolved, life-and-death navigation issue — whether to take the shorter route along the south side of the Aleutians, or to take the route north of the islands and try to duck back south through the Unimak Pass at the far eastern end of the chain.
No modern Navy would dream of allowing the matter to be a subject for discussion during the voyage. All routes and objectives would have been signed, sealed, and delivered in orders long before departure. Even in Special Ops. But this was, in the end, not a Navy. The Barracuda was staffed with professionals and experts, on all decks, but the mission was unorthodox and may need refining, like the Alaskan oil, during its long journey.
It was Lt. Comdr. Shakira Rashood who was waving a red flag, casting grim and academic doubts on the wisdom of taking the short route south of the islands.
She was not being dogmatic, or even insistent. But she was saying to the CO, and the Navigation officer, and indeed to her husband, 'If I were an American, I would have a patrol submarine, right there, moving along the northern edge of the Aleutian Trench over that very deep water… Right here… Look… Where it's over three miles to the seabed.'
Ben Badr plainly found this an extremely difficult exchange, since he was unused to being questioned in his own ship, particularly by a woman, whose species he had never even seen in a submarine. But Shakira had spent months studying charts of the area, and gleaning information off the Internet from defense papers and Pentagon data.
Ben knew she would be unlikely to speak out, unless she knew a great deal about the subject. He bit the bullet, smiled, and told Ravi he had a very learned wife, which defused the situation and allowed Ben to avoid a direct confrontation with a lady, 500 feet below the surface.
Ravi, too, had studied the charts with Shakira. In fairness, he was in two minds about the best route past the Aleutians. However, the chart he and the navigator now studied with the Commanding Officer was not so full of information as Shakira's, whose main concern had been with American surveillance.
'For what it's worth,' she said, 'I have seen a pattern of more and more precautions being taken by the U.S. Navy. For instance, immediately after September 11, they stepped up security around the Valdez Terminal, and they are still running Naval patrols a mile out of Prince William Sound. I don't know if those patrols include submarines, but it is my opinion, the U.S. Navy would sink any interloper detected in those waters. Just imagine a foreign submarine creeping around in the waters near the very heartbeat of their West Coast economy. Trust me, they would not hesitate to open fire.'
General Rashood looked carefully at the chart, and then said simply, 'OK, Lieutenant Commander, why the north route?'
'Well, if you take Attu Island, the first place we come to, the chart marks an air reconnaissance post just to the east. Remember, this is the very tip of the islands. I would be amazed if there was not a Loran Station, a proper U.S. Naval facility somewhere on that coastline. It may be a straightforward radar station, or even a SOSUS processing unit. Either way, it will look like a cowshed, or reindeer shed, and either way, they could hear us come by. The water's shallow to the south, and noisy, but we don't want to go that way.'
Ben Badr nodded in agreement. 'Well,' he said, 'it's certainly a lot deeper to the north. The seabed falls away right offshore to two miles deep, and it stays that way for a couple of hundred miles.' He and Ravi stared at the chart, looking at the distinctive soundings that lay to the south, where the ocean floor shelves steeply down into the Aleutian Trench, which in places is four miles deep.
'I doubt there's SOSUS, not right down in the trench,' said Ben. 'And I agree with Shakira. All the signs are there for a U.S. Navy listening station right here—173' E 53' N.
'And I agree there is a very good chance of a U.S. submarine patrol to the south. Come here, Ravi… and Shakira. Let me show you a slightly bigger scale chart.'
