'So what's vexing you, Jimmy? As if I don't know.'
'That's right, sir. I've checked the boards. I've had Naval Intelligence check every goddamned submarine in the world. And they've found them all. Either the Japanese fishermen are lying, just because they lost their net, or something bloody weird is going on.'
'And then you sat here twisting and turning over what hit the oil tanks, and you couldn't get that phantom submarine out of your mind, correct?'
'Yes, sir.'
Just then a waiter tapped on the door, and entered bearing the coffee and muffins. These were immediately followed by the entry of the Director himself, George Morris, clutching a sheaf of papers, every last one of them containing statements by Alaskan oil execs who were unable to come up with a reason between them as to how the oil fires could possibly have started.
Arnold Morgan himself filled in the details of the discussion for Admiral Morris, who nodded thoughtfully. 'If it was one fire in one place,' he said, 'we'd be pursuing the accident theory. Two fires, in two places, same time, same area, doesn't make any sense. If it wasn't sabotage, someone just hit us. Simple as that.'
'I don't think sabotage is entirely out of the question. Possibly someone in the pay of a terrorist organization… ' Arnold Morgan was pensive.
'Sir, when the bloody fires cool off,' said Jimmy, 'there's gonna be some evidence of some kind of incendiary device. If it's a couple of bombs there should be something for the forensic guys to identify. Missiles are more difficult because they tend to blow themselves into much smaller pieces. Plus the heat from those fires will melt everything — but they'll probably find clues.'
'As far as I am concerned,' said Admiral Morgan, 'we should already, between ourselves, as the senior Military Intelligence academics in this country, be considering the possibility of a military strike against us as an absolute priority. We should also accept that if we were hit, we were hit by missiles fired from an enemy submarine. And that possibility will magnify over the next few days when we discover exactly how far away the nearest foreign warship was.'
'Which makes the word of the Captain of the Mayajima another priority,' added Jimmy. 'I've read a translation of his evidence, and it's pretty convincing. He has produced the broken end of the warp that held the trawl net — snapped about fifty feet from the boat, way underwater, plastic reinforced by steel, almost two inches thick. You couldn't break that stuff with a buzz saw, never mind pull it clean in half.'
'What else does he say?' asked Admiral Morgan.
'Plenty,' replied Jimmy. 'He wants $200,000 compensation. Says he lost his trawl net, and his entire catch, because he had to let go the remaining warp. He says the submarine was dragging them backward at more than twelve knots, pulling the stern of his ship down. He says water was piling in over the stern, flooding some interior areas. He enclosed Polaroid photographs that he took immediately after the ship righted itself.'
'I suppose the other crew members confirm his story?' said George Morris.
'Of course they do, sir. And on the face of it, you'd have to believe them. The question is, what submarine was it? Because a submarine it most certainly was. There's no doubt in my mind.'
'Nor mine,' said Admiral Morgan. 'That was a submarine, all right. It's got all the classic signs of what happens when a big underwater ship hits someone's net. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's pretty well obvious.'
'But according to the Russians, the only submarine within hundreds of miles was their own Barracuda. And that was almost twenty miles from the datum, and definitely headed the wrong way.'
'Just remember one thing, young James… the words of my old friend Admiral Sandy Woodward, the Royal Navy Commander who won the Falklands War for the Brits in 1982. He was giving evidence about the sinking of the General Belgrano, and he faced questions from some half-assed know-nothing politician who was telling him the Belgrano was 180 miles away, and going slowly in the wrong direction, anyway, away from the Royal Navy Fleet.
'Admiral Woodward just said, 'The speed and direction of any enemy ship is irrelevant, because both can change in a matter of seconds.''
'Jesus. That's right too,' said Jimmy. 'Are you suggesting, sir, the Barracuda could have dived, turned around, and headed northeast?'
'Yes, I am. Because it easily could have. And there was no other submarine that could possibly have hit the trawl net. There is no other explanation. And nor can there ever be. If missiles hit Valdez, they must have been fired from that Barracuda. One sneaky little bastard, I think we'll discover.'
Lt. Arash Azhari and his six highly trained members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were making their exit from the submarine, which was positioned thirty feet below the pitch-black surface of the water. One by one they went into the exit chamber, which flooded down, and then opened, allowing them to float out onto the casing of the motionless Barracuda.
Each man carried black French-made scuba gear, and a frogman's suit distingushed by extra-large flippers and a working flashlight set onto the tight-fitting rubber helmet. They were unarmed, save for fighting knives, but four of them carried strapped to their backs below the breathing equipment a powerful 'sticky' bomb, magnetized, with a twenty-four-hour timing device.
By 1:15 all six frogmen grouped in the icy water, around twelve feet below the surface, right on the escarpment of the underwater cliff that forms the Overfall Shoal. They were just 300 yards from the south-running pipeline out of Yakutat. And if they swam due east, they must run over it sooner or later. This was the choke point, the narrow waters over the shoal, across which the pipe must run, according to the minute calculations of Mrs. Shakira Rashood.
Lieutenant Azhari led the way, checking his wristwatch compass every three minutes. They kicked long, hard, slow strokes with the big flippers, conserving their air, heading for the shallowest part of the shoal. And shortly before 1:30, the beam of Azhari's flashlight picked out a wide, dark shape on the seabed, more or less where Shakira's map said it would be, snaking out of the Dixon Entrance and down the Hecate Strait.
All the men could see down through the clear, unpolluted water, and the pipeline still rising toward the surface. Right now it was around eighteen feet below them, and Azhari gave the signal for two of the men with bombs to join him almost directly below. Like the other four, they were experts in underwater demolition.
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.
