The San Francisco hookup took a day longer. But by Monday morning, March 31, both the big metropolitan areas were up and running again, despite chronic fuel shortages and long lines at the gas pumps.
The President again went on television to explain that for the moment the United States was reliant on foreign oil, and that it would be several months before the Alaskan oil began to flow again. Work to rebuild the refinery at Grays Harbor was already under way, and the two breaches in the south-running undersea pipeline had been repaired. Right now the Energy Department was concentrating on refinery capacity, and routes were being established to run more and more crude oil into America's existing facilities.
'We should,' he told an expectant nation, 'be on top of the situation inside another two weeks. This will be a huge strain on our tanker facilities, but you have my word we're gonna be seeing the price of oil per barrel dropping firmly within a very few days.
'I have requested American tankers from all over the globe to bring crude oil into the Texas facilities on the Gulf of Mexico. No matter the cost, no matter the effect on profits, now is the time for this nation to rally round, and get the fuel oil to the places where we need it.'
Again he took the greatest care to insure no mention was made of the submarine the Pentagon believed had opened fire on the United States.
Meanwhile, deep in the lower-level Situation Room in the West Wing, Admiral Morgan continued to preside over meeting after meeting with Security and Service Chiefs, probing every last inch of the incoming data that might throw some light on the submarine.
Right now the Navy had two more Los Angeles Class submarines, the Boise and the Montpelier, crossing the Caribbean toward the Panama Canal. Once clear of the pilots on the Pacific side, they would head north toward San Diego, at first 200 miles off the coast of Central America, and then as part of the Navy's search line making sweep after sweep along the Mexico/California coast.
But nothing was shaking loose in this baffling jigsaw puzzle, and morale was suffering everywhere, especially in the Pentagon. All day and most of the night, the surveillance officers checked the systems, checked to see whether the Barracuda had left Zhanjiang, checked on every submarine movement in the world, checked satellite pictures from Bandar Abbas to Beijing, and pored over the prints from the eastern reaches of the Pacific.
There was nothing until the morning of April 11, when the Boise, on the surface now and clear of Panama's Chinese pilots, dived and headed for the deeper waters of the Pacific beyond the confines of the Gulf of Panama. At 11:43 her Sonar Room picked up a Russian nuclear boat heading slowly north at twelve knots, periscope depth, eight miles south of the main channel, in the Pacific Extension of the merchant ship Anchorage.
The Boise's CO had received no change to his standard COMSUBPAC rules of engagement — fire only in self- defense. And he knew the consequences of torpedoing a Russian nuclear submarine in Panamanian territorial waters: dire, especially if it turned out to be the wrong one. And, anyway, it was headed direct to the Canal where everyone would see it.
In accordance with his orders, he immediately put a signal on the satellite, which relayed it to Pacific Fleet Headquarters, Pearl Harbor, and to the Base at San Diego simultaneously. From there it was beamed into the Ops Room of the 9,000-ton guided-missile destroyer USS Roosevelt, Arleigh Burke Class, one of the most lethal fighting ships in the world. Heavily gunned, bristling with missiles and torpedoes, she carried on her stern two Lamps-Ill combat helicopters, both equipped with Penguin and Hellfire missiles.
The Roosevelt was headed north, having taken a swing along the northern coast of Colombia, to keep the local drug barons on their mettle. She was now some three hours from the Anchorage, clipping along at thirty knots. Her satellite orders from CINCPAC were clear: Locate Russian nuclear boat Sierra I Barracuda Class Type 945, detected by the submarine USS Boise… believed to be headed into the Panama Canal… track through Canal to Atlantic Anchorage… rendezvous with two escorts… both Los Angeles Class ships, the San Juan and the Key West patrolling six miles northwest of Cristobal Harbor West Breakwater…
The Roosevelt adjusted course to nor'nor'west and headed for the Gulf of Panama. Her commanding officer, Capt. Butch Howarth, ordered flank speed. Meanwhile, Capt. Ben Badr kept moving north toward his rendezvous with the Chinese fast patrol boat, the seventy-eight-foot twin-gunned Gong Bian 4405 (Chinese Border Security Force — Maritime Command). The ships were, loosely, on a collision course.
By one o'clock, the Barracuda was on the surface, with the Roosevelt still making all speed sixty miles to the southeast. Up ahead, silhouetted against the bright blue water, Ben Badr could see the buoy that marked the start of the dead-straight, six-mile dredged channel up to Balboa Harbor, and the gateway to the canal. The Chinese gateway.
There was often a small holding area 1,000 yards northeast of the buoy where ships, mostly merchantmen and tankers, lined up to make the journey through to the Atlantic. Today, there appeared to be no traffic, though Captain Badr could see three stationary tankers a mile away on the edge of the Anchorage.
The Gong Bian was waiting, and her captain pulled her alongside the Barracuda, offered a greeting and a welcome, then instructed the submarine to track the Chinese patrol slowly down the channel, red buoys to the right, and then to follow them into the harbor where the Chinese pilot would come on board to see her safely through the narrow waterway.
Captain Badr, joined now by General Rashood and Lieutenant Commander Shakira, issued commands to his helmsman and navigator from the bridge. And together, the three most wanted terrorists in the world stood and breathed their first fresh air, in the first warm sunlight, any of them had seen for sixty-two days, since they left the freezing Russian Naval Base of Petropavlovsk. The Barracuda had almost 7,000 miles under its keel since then, and its commanders had not yet made a mistake.
Behind a light bow wave, and before a mild headwind, the jet black 8,000-ton outlaw of the eastern Pacific moved gently northwest, steering three-two-two, in the wake of the Gong Bian, leaving the treacherous San Jose rock to starboard. Four hundred yards further, at the end of a two-mile-long causeway from Balboa, they passed the cluster of islands — Flamenco, Perico, Paos, and Culebra — where the Panama Canal Railway, all the way through the jungle from the Atlantic coast, finally ends.
The Americans constructed that as well, back in the mid-nineteenth century. The causeway itself was also American built, in 1912, when the United States established the fabled Fort Grant complex on all four islands. It was the most powerful military defensive fortress in the world, guarding the Pacific entrance to the Canal, and once housing two massive fourteen-inch guns with a thirty-mile range, which could be swiftly transported through the jungle on their own railroad cars, in case of trouble at the Atlantic end.
All this crumbled history, has today come under the control of the Chinese, with the historic old railroad joining China's two great Panamanian dockyards at either end of the Canal. All because of a President who never much cared for America's achievements, especially the military ones, or indeed for what America ought to stand for, in an often inferior world.
Two miles beyond the island railhead, the imposing span of the Thatcher Ferry Bridge sweeps the Inter- American Highway straight over the Canal from Panama City and on to Mexico. The Barracuda chugged slowly beneath the bridge and on to the Balboa pilot station, where Ravi and Ben would hand over command of the submarine to the elite corps of Chinese canal navigators.
The Panama Canal is the only place in the world where military Commanders are required to hand over navigational control of warships to a foreign operator.
The Chinese pilot came on board and took over, issuing instructions in English to the Islamic terrorists. Three and a half miles later, they arrived at the towering Miraflores Locks, the first of the three on the Pacific side.
The waterway divides here, so the 1,000-foot-long lock chambers can operate independently to both incoming and outgoing traffic, quite often with one lock lowering and the other raising 80,000-ton ships only yards apart, with 50 million gallons of water emptying and flooding every time.
The Miraflores Locks comprises two sets of chambers that raise or lower ships in two steps fifty-four feet to or from sea level. And as the Barracuda approached the first 800-ton lock gates, locomotives were attached to haul the submarine through. These engineering stalwarts represent another coup for the Orient. They cost $2 million each and are all made by Mitsubishi, and they help make millions and millions of dollars each year.
It took Captain Badr's ship a half hour to make this first ascent up to the short mile-and-a-half-long Miraflores Lake, which runs to the final, Pacific-side lock, the Pedro Miguel. And as the submarine eased its way through the narrow, flat waters, the Roosevelt came thundering into the Merchant Ship Anchorage, almost ten miles in arrears and fifty-four feet lower.
Captain Howarth was ordered to halt out alongside the three tankers that Ravi and Ben had seen and to wait
