Scimitar SL-2

Barracuda’s CO, and the two men were studying the charts of the eastern Atlantic with Lt. Ashtari Mohammed, the British-born Iranian navigator.

Nothing is real until it faces you, and what had once looked like a simple run into the Canary Islands now looked to be fraught with peril. They both understood that the threat that General Rashood had issued to the Pentagon had been made public. Plainly, the United States was taking major steps to locate and destroy them, and the nearer they crept towards the Canary Islands, the more dangerous the waters became.

Neither officer had the slightest idea what form the U.S. defense would take, but Admiral Badr, a former submarine and surface CO himself, felt confident that they would not resort to a submarine hunt.

“They won’t risk firing at each other, Ahmed,” he said. “I think it is much more likely that the Americans will go for frigates or destroyers with towed arrays. As long as we stay dead slow and deep, we’ll be almost impossible to find. The one worry I do have is the satellites. We need them for guidance of the Scimitars — and the GPS is just about entirely American.

“If they believe we are going to wipe out their East Coast, they may just shut down the whole system. Which would be pretty bad for us. Because that would leave only the European system and I’m not sure we can log on to it. Whereas everyone has access to the U.S. system.”

“Do you think the Americans could persuade the Europeans to shut down at the same time? Well, the Brits would cooperate. But the French might not. My own view is that they will somehow not get both systems to shut down at the same time…”

“But what if they do?” Ahmed was wide-eyed and very worried.

“Then we have no alternative. We’ll go inshore, take a visual range and bearing, and open fire on the Cumbre Vieja. The SL-2 has one advantage…Its nuclear warhead does not need the critical accuracy of the SL-1 non- nuclear. We bang that thing in there within a half-mile, we’ll split that volcano in half. The burning magma will do the rest.”

“How close do we need to be?”

“Around 25 miles. So long as we can see enough through the periscope to get a good visual fix on the volcano.”

“Where do we fire from?”

“We’ll have to see. If the satellites work, we’ll launch from a range of 250 miles…from this point here, about 30 miles south of the most easterly island, Fuerteventura. That would put us in very deep water around 30 miles off the coast of the western Sahara.

“The moment we fire, we turn north and make all speed for the eastern coast of Fuerteventura…right here, see…off the city of Grand Tarajal. That’s going to take us one hour from the point of launch. But the missile will take twenty-five minutes to get there. The main explosion causing the landslide will take an estimated ten minutes, and then the tsunami wave will take another 30 minutes to reach the west coast of our island…not the east coast where we will be sheltering…The wave will go right past us. And we’ll just hang around under the surface until everything calms down.”

“How about they do get the satellites shut off? What do we do then?” Ahmed was fast realizing the enormous risks they were taking.

“Then we would have to come inshore, from the southwest…making for this point here.” Ben Badr pointed to the chart at a spot 20 miles off La Palma, in very deep water, 8,000 feet. “Right here we take our visual fix, we range these two points here on the chart…two lighthouses, Point Fuencaliente, right here on the southermost headland of the island…and then, nine miles to the north, Point de Arenas Blancas. We’ll see them both clearly through the periscope, right?”

“Yes, sir, Admiral.”

“In between those two points is the Cumbre Vieja. We have all the data we need on its precise spot, satellite photographs. We then take a third point, a mountain peak…and we take range and bearing…it’s a regular three- point fix. And even if the satellites are down, we can come back to that exact spot in the ocean, anytime we wish, with just a fast glance through the periscope.

“The next time we come back, we launch the Scimitar SL-2 straight at the volcano, and this missile cannot miss…because it doesn’t have to be accurate…Even allowing for errors caused by wind direction, wind speed, turning circle, height adjustments…it still can’t miss…The warhead is so enormous, even if it is swept a half-mile off course, it will still blow the volcano.”

“Admiral, have you given any thought about how we get away afterwards?”

“Yes. I have. So has your brother-in-law. Somewhere in the South Atlantic, somewhere lonely, we bail out and board an Iranian freighter. The submarine will blow itself to pieces a half hour after we all leave. We have to scuttle her in the deepest water we can find. So she’ll never be discovered. Then we sail home on the freighter, disembarking a few men at a time, at various ports, all the way to Iran.”

“So right now you want to steer a course more easterly?” interrupted Lieutenant Ashtari. “Presumably we’re going to our long-range launch position…to see if we can still get a fix on the overheads?”

“Exactly. But we don’t need to make much of an adjustment…two degrees right rudder. I’ll speak to Ali Zahedi…just so long as he keeps our speed to 5 knots.”

The Barracuda was moving quietly beneath the surface, some 540 miles short of its ops area. Sometime in the next three days, Ben Badr expected to pick up the beat of a U.S. warship. But so far, they had been in deserted waters, way south of the much busier North Atlantic shipping lanes.

On this Saturday morning, the nearest U.S. ship to the Barracuda was Comdr. Joe Wickman’s guided-missile frigate, the Simpson, currently steaming southeast towards the northwest point of the Canaries — La Palma.

Capt. Sean Smith had his frigate, the Elrod, already in the island area, moving east across the Canary current to a position north of Tenerife. There, he was awaited by Capt. Brad Willett’s USS Taylor, which had arrived shortly after midnight.

The Kauffman and the Nicholas, commanded by Capts. Josh Deal and Eric Nielsen, were scheduled to arrive on station sometime in the next two hours, in a holding area 20 miles off Tenerife’s jagged northern headland of Los Roques de Anaga.

The seven-frigate fleet out of Norfolk was proceeding in a long convoy across the Atlantic. They were the last to leave and were not expected on station until Sunday night. The Ronald Reagan Carrier Battle Group was currently approaching Gibraltar and was expected to arrive at her ops area northeast of Lanzarote by Sunday afternoon.

Adm. George Gillmore, on board the electronic wondership the USS Coronado, was already 2,500 miles out from the Norfolk Base, and less than 1,000 miles from his ops area. They were expected to arrive around midnight on Sunday.

The last arrival would be the carrier Harry S. Truman, laden with helicopters, and currently pushing through a storm system out over the Atlantic Ridge, escorted by two destroyers and a nuclear submarine, hull 770, the USS Tucson.

They were all to the north of the Barracuda, unknown to Adm. Ben Badr and his men, who expected trouble but probably not as much as this. You’ll always be safe, if you stay deep and stay slow. The words of his father rang clearly in Ben’s mind. And still, somehow he felt vulnerable without Ravi and Shakira.

This weekend, he was due to open one of the timed safes on board the submarine that held a sealed letter written, but not signed, to him as Commanding Officer from the learned Ayatollah who presently ruled the Islamic Republic of Iran. It had been his father’s idea to give Ben a sense of true purpose. It would provide confirmation that he wielded the curved sword of the Prophet Mohammed when he launched his missiles.

Adm. Mohammed Badr had told his son what the envelope would contain. And he was most anxious to read it. He had tried twice already this morning, but the timing device was still locked, and Ben planned to give it another try in just a few hours.

Meanwhile, back in the Oval Office, Admiral Morgan had received another setback from Paris. A communique from the President had stated that despite a long conversation with his Ambassador in Washington, he remained undecided about the validity of the Hamas threat and the need to turn off the GPS.

The French President said he would like to “sleep on the problem” and would give his decision on Monday morning. He continued, like his Foreign Minister, to believe that the Americans were exaggerating the importance of