Admiral Badr prayed silently, then he too wiped his face, and indicated that prayers were concluded. He once more confirmed to the helmsman the course of west nor’west and ordered his senior staff to the missile room, where they would begin the task of checking the nuclear warheads on the two great Scimitars.
By this time, Admiral Gillmore was in receipt of the data from all four of the tracking frigates. Their data showed the precise position of the submarine’s periscope, which all four of the U.S. radars had swept, at 0030, 24 miles off the most promiscuous area in the North Atlantic outside of the rutting stags, breeding on Scotland’s Isle of Skye.
U.S. Navy Commanders are accustomed to keeping accurate charts and would cope with the downed world GPS system better than anyone else. And George Gillmore studied his screen carefully…Now this character understands he can’t fire long range…Therefore he’ll turn in toward his target…Maybe west nor’west…Maybe due west back along his old course…But no other direction is any good to him…
He immediately ordered the Elrod and Nicholas to take the west-nor’west track, with the Klakring and the Simpson proceeding more westerly. He also ordered the carrier to alter course, bringing its formidable air power from the northwest coastline of Tenerife westward into the 80-mile-wide open seaway that divides that island from La Palma.
But the Barracuda kept moving forward, slowly, softly, through the dark ocean depths, unseen, unheard, her transmissions shut down. She made no sound through the water. Her great turbines were doing little more than idling, betraying no vibration lines. The Russians had spent years and years building their two state-of-art underwater hunter-killers, and thus far, no one had detected either of the Hamas Barracuda s with any real certainty or accuracy.
Admiral Gillmore thought he knew damn well where the Barracuda was, and so did his four frontline frigate Commanders. At least they did one hour ago. But no one could prove the submarine’s direction, and until the Americans locked on to a new surface radar paint, or obtained an active radar contact, that submarine would remain elusive.
And all through the next fifteen hours it ran on undetected. Despite the constant Seahawk helicopter patrols across every yard of water between the seven islands, despite the probing searches of the ASW specialist S-3B Viking aircraft. Despite the quivering sensitivity of the frigates’ electronic towed arrays, and the high-powered blasts of their active sonars. And despite two serious attempts to trap the submarine between highly alert electronic sonobuoys, dropped into the water from the helos.
Not all the probing of the dipping low-frequency sonars could locate the Barracuda, as it steamed silently west nor’west, way below the thunder of the noise above the surface, where the distinctive howl of the Viking’s GE turbofans were sufficient to waken the dead.
Only twice, towards the end the long journey up to the coast of Gomera, did Ben Badr risk a fleeting five-second thrust of his ESM mast, and both times they picked up radar transmissions from the Vikings that were operating out beyond the 25-mile circle around the volcano. Each time, the ESM computerized accurate bearing and classification. By the time they came into the inshore waters, “behind” the east coast of Gomera, Admiral Badr privately thought that this had rapidly begun to turn into a suicide mission.
Again he called his most trusted men into his office — Mohtaj, Shafii, Ali Zahedi, and Ahmed Sabah.
Did they still have a chance? At getting away, that is, not firing the Scimitars. Answer, probably not. They were driving forward into the very teeth of the U.S. Navy’s steel ring of defense. And right now they each understood that they would need several separate sorties to periscope depth. To try to achieve their mission with just one, or even two, extended visits to the waters right below the surface would be tantamount to blowing their own brains out.
Their only chance of success and escape was to come to PD fleetingly to make their visual setup to get a fix on the land and the high peaks of the Cumbre Vieja mountains. And then to vanish, to return for a final fleeting range check, then to fire the two missiles in quick succession. At no time should they spend more than seven seconds above the surface. Not if they hoped to live.
By 1600 on that Thursday afternoon, they were in relatively shallow water, 2,500 feet, running 600 feet below the surface, four miles off the east coast of Gomera. Captain Mohtaj was in the navigation room assisting Lt. Ashtari Mohammed as he plotted a northerly course to a point 6 miles off Point del Organo. From there it was a straight 16-mile run-in to the proposed launch zone, 25 miles off the volcanic coast of La Palma. Subject to enemy intervention, they aimed to fire from 28.22N 17.28W.
Every man in the ship knew that the U.S. defenses would grow tighter and tighter with every mile they traveled. But no one had ever put a firm fix on the Barracuda, as far as they knew. Its crew was now generally aware of the prospect of imminent death, but they also felt a sense of security in their deepwater environment. They had just journeyed several hundred miles under the brutal surveillance of the U.S. Navy, and no one had located them yet. They still had a chance.
By 1800, it was still broad daylight as they crept along the Gomera coast, and Lieutenant Ashtari advised they now had a clear range in front of them, straight to La Palma. Admiral Badr had already rolled the dice in his own mind. He was determined to accomplish the mission, determined to get a correct fix on the Cumbre Vieja, determined to fire his two missiles straight into the crater, or as near as he possibly could. For the escape, everything was in the hands of Allah. But Admiral Badr knew that the odds heavily favored the Americans.
Lieutenant Ashtari checked the ship’s inertial navigation system (SINS), a device beyond the purse of most commercial shipping lines and, in the end, way beyond the purse of Russia’s cash-strapped Navy. But the Barracuda had one, and it had measured course, speed, and direction every yard of the way since they had left the submarine jetties in Huludao in the northern Yellow Sea three months ago.
The system was developed especially for submarines in the 1950s, and had been progressively refined in the years that followed. It had one objective: to inform navigators precisely where they were in the earth’s oceans, even after not having seen the sun, moon, or stars for weeks on end. Both U.S. nuclear boats, the Nautilus and the Skate, had used the system when they navigated under the polar ice cap in 1958.
The Barracuda’s SINS was vastly improved from those days — and phenomenally accurate — calculating regular accelerations but discarding those caused by gravitational attraction, pitching, and rolling. All the way across the North Pacific, all the way down the endless west coast of Canada and the U.S.A., around South America and up the Atlantic, the SINS had provided a continuous picture of the submarine’s precise position. Given the pinpoint certainty of their start point, the system would be accurate to between 100 and 200 yards at the completion of a round-the-world voyage.
In recent years, the ease and brilliance of the GPS had somewhat overshadowed the old inertial navigation processes, but every submarine navigation officer kept one quietly onstream. Indeed, most senior Navy navigators instinctively checked one against the other at all times.
Lt. Ashtari Mohammed knew precisely where he was, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Air Force in Colorado to confuse the life out of him. The SINS screen now put him at 26.17N 17.12W. They were off the north coast of Gomera in 125 fathoms, still 500 feet below the surface.