“Just like he did at Mount St. Helens,” replied the Lieutenant Commander, thoughtfully.
“Exactly so,” said Admiral Morgan.
“Which brings us back to the business of time,” said General Scannell. “Does everyone think we should stage some kind of an unobtrusive departure from the bases in the Gulf?”
“I don’t think we can, not so long as President McBride thinks we’re all crazy.” General Boyce, the Supreme NATO Allied Commander, was visibly unhappy. He shook his head and said twice, “I just don’t know.”
General Tim Scannell was braver. “Bart,” he said, “I think I mentioned it before. On this one, we may just have to go without him.”
And the eight men sitting around the big table in the CJC’s conference room felt the chill of a potential mutiny, led, unthinkably, by the Highest Command of the United States Military.
7
Adm. Ben Badr held the Barracuda steady on course, two-seven-zero, 25 miles south of Cape Horn, beneath rough, turbulent seas swept by a force-eight gale out of the Antarctic. They were moving through the Drake Passage in 2,500 fathoms of water, having finally concluded their southward journey down past the hundreds of islands and fiords that guard mainland Chile from the thundering Pacific breakers.
They had made good speed across the southeast Pacific Basin, and the Mornington Abyssal Plain, and were now headed east, running north of the South Shetland Islands in the cold, treacherous waters where the Antarctic Peninsula comes lancing out of the southern ice floes.
Ben Badr was making for the near end of the awesome underwater cliffs of the Scotia Ridge. At the same time, he was staying in the eastern flows of the powerful Falkland Islands current. His next course adjustment would take him past the notoriously shallow Burdwood Bank, and well east of the Falkland Islands themselves.
These were lonely waters, scarcely patrolled by the Argentinian Navy, and even more rarely by the Royal Navy, which was still obliged to guard the approaches to the islands for which 253 British servicemen had fought and died in 1982.
It was midwinter this far south, and despite not having seen daylight for almost two months, Ben Badr assured the crew that they did not want to break the habit right now. Not with an Antarctic blizzard raging above them, and a mighty southern ocean demonstrating once more that Cape Horn’s murderous reputation was well earned.
Submarines dislike the surface of the water under almost any conditions. They are not built to roll around with the ocean’s swells. But 300 feet below the waves, the Barracuda was in its correct element, moving swiftly and easily through the depths, a smooth, malevolent jet-black tube of pending destruction, but the soul of comfort for all who sailed with her.
That 47,500 hp nuclear system had been running sweetly for eight weeks now, which was not massively demanding for a power source that would run, if necessary, for eight years. The Russian-built VM-5 Pressurized Water Reactor would provide every vestige of the submarine’s propulsion, heat, fresh water, and electronics on an indefinite basis. Barring accident, the only factor that could drive the Barracuda to the surface was if they ran out of food.
Their VM-5 reactor was identical to the one the Russians used on their gigantic Typhoon-class ballistic missile boats. The world’s biggest underwater warships, which displace 26,000 tons of water submerged, required two of them, but the reactors were the same state-of-the-art nuclear pressurized water systems.
The Barracuda, with its titanium hull, was a submariner’s dream. It could strike with missiles unexpectedly, from an unknown position. It was incredibly quiet — as quiet as the U.S. Navy’s latest Los Angeles — class boats, silent under seven knots, undetectable, barring a mistake by her commanding officer. A true phantom of deep water.
General Rashood and Ben Badr stared at the charts that marked the long northward journey ahead of them. It was more than 4,000 miles up to the equator, and they knocked off three parts of that with a brisk, constant 15 knots through the cold, lonely southern seas, devoid of U.S. underwater surveillance and largely devoid of the warships of any nation.
They remained 1,000 miles offshore, running 500 feet below the surface up the long Argentinian coast, across the great South American Basin until they were level with the vast 140-mile-wide estuary of the River Plate.
This is the confluence of the Rivers Parana and Uruguay, and the enormous estuary contains some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, steaming along the merchant ship roads, into the ports of Buenos Aires on the Argentinian side and Montevideo on the Uruguayan.
Ben Badr stayed well offshore here, keeping right of the shallow Rio Grande Rise, and pushing on north, up towards Ascension Island. And long before they arrived in those waters, he cut the speed of his submarine, running through the confused seas above the craggy cliffs of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge on his starboard side, as he made his way silently past the U.S. military base on this British-owned moonscape of an island.
This was probably the only spot in the entire Mid-and South Atlantic they might be detected. And they ran past with the utmost care, slowly, slowly, only six knots, deeper than usual, at 700 feet. The Barracuda was deathly quiet on all decks. Lieutenant Commander Shakira huddled in the navigation room; Admiral Badr and the Hamas General were in the control room, listening to the regular pings of the passive sonar.
On Friday, September 18, the Barracuda crossed the equator, the unseen divider of north and south in the center of the earth’s navigational grid. This was the zero-degree line that slices in, off the Atlantic and through Brazil, a few miles north of the Amazon Delta.
Ahead of the Hamas warship was another 1,000 miles through which they made good speed, covering the distance in a little under three days. By midday on Monday, September 21, they were at their rendezvous point, running slowly at periscope depth, eight miles off the port of Dakar in the former French colony of Senegal, right on the outermost seaward bulge of northern Africa.
Arnold Morgan was entertaining an old friend, the new Israeli Ambassador to Washington, sixty-two-year-old General David Gavron, former head of the most feared international Intelligence agency in the world, the Mossad.
The two men had met and cooperated at the time David Gavron had served as military attaché at the Israeli Embassy seven years previously. They had, by necessity, stayed in touch during Admiral Morgan’s tenure in the White House, when the General had headed up the Mossad.
Today’s was an unorthodox meeting. David Gavron, like every other high-ranking military Intelligence officer in the world, knew the Admiral was no longer on the White House staff. But this certainly had not diminished his towering reputation, nor his encyclopedic knowledge of the ebb and flow of the world’s power struggles.
General Gavron guessed, correctly, that the U.S.A. had a serious problem. He had for years been a close friend and confidant not only of Ariel Sharon but also of the former Yom Kippur War tank-division commander Maj. Gen. Avraham “Bren” Adan. General Gavron was possibly the most trusted man in Israel.
He was a pure Israeli of the blood, a true Sabra, born a few miles southwest of the Sea of Galilee near Nazareth. On October 6, 1973, the first day of the Yom Kippur War, as a battalion tank commander, he had driven out into the Sinai right alongside “Bren” Adan himself. On that most terrible day, hundreds of young Israelis, stunned by the suddenness of the onslaught by Egypt’s Second Army, fought and died in the desert.