This would be the final visual fix before they headed into the firing zone, and Lieutenant Mohammed requested a 7-second look through the periscope to take a range and bearing on the towering basalt cliffs of Les Organos, a little over 5 miles to their southwest, and still visible in the late afternoon light, now a little after 1830.
Ben Badr agreed to head for the surface at slow speed, and he did so knowing their target above the coast of La Palma was dead ahead, 41 miles, west nor’west. The periscope of the Barracuda slid onto the azure surface of the water on a calm afternoon. The Admiral was staring at a stopwatch ticking off the seconds. He heard them call out the fix on two points of Gomera’s coastline — Les Organos and the great curved headland north of the village of Agula.
“UP PERISCOPE!”
“All round look…”
“DOWN!”
“UP! Right-hand edge — MARK! DOWN!”
“Two-four-zero.”
“UP PERISCOPE! Left-hand edge — MARK! DOWN!”
“One-eight-zero.”
“UP!”
“Organo anchorage light…two-two-zero…”
“DOWN! How does that look, Captain Mohtaj?”
“Excellent fix, sir. Course for launch position…two-nine-zero…distance 16 miles.”
Admiral Badr heard the comms room accept a signal from the Chinese naval satellite, and then he snapped: “Okay, that’s it, five down…600 feet…Make your speed 7 knots. Make a racetrack pattern when you’re on depth…”
Ben Badr knew there was little point making a three-hour lowspeed run through the night into the launch zone, and then hanging around until daybreak right on the 25-mile line from La Palma’s east coast. The place would be jumping with U.S. warships, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.
Right here, off Gomera, no one was looking quite so intensely. Generally speaking, Ben Badr preferred to run in silently, arriving at first light and setting up his visual fix with the sun rising to the east directly behind him. That way he could come to PD, essentially out of nowhere, and he’d surely be able nail down his fix without detection, 7 seconds at a time.
He called for the satellite message, which he knew was from General Ravi. Ben, the thoughts of both Shakira and myself are with you at this time. If Allah is listening, as He surely must, His humble warriors will be safe. The prayers of all Muslims right now are only for you…to wish you the safest journey home after the Scimitars have done their holy work. Ravi.
Admiral Morgan and President Bedford were gathered with senior Naval Commanders in the Situation Room in the lower floor of the West Wing. A huge, backlit computer screen showed a chart of the Canary Islands, a sharp red cross in a circle signifying the last two sightings that the Navy believed were of the Barracuda. A brighter white cross in a circle showed the spot Adm. Frank Doran on the Norfolk link now believed the Barracuda to be.
He had it already on the 25-mile radius line from the La Palma coast. Which was slightly jumping the gun. Admiral Badr had not yet made his final commitment to the run-in to the launch zone. And would not do so for another half hour. The U.S. Admirals’ estimates were about 16 miles ahead of themselves, which is a fair long way in a remote and deserted ocean.
Admiral Morgan was personally bracing himself to read a report from a hastily convened meeting in London of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. This august gathering meets only about every twelve to fifteen years, explicitly to draw up the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea, more generally known as the Rules of the Road.
Before him was the Convention’s first report of a day without GPS. And the opening instance of disaster, the very first serious wreck, astounded him. A Liberian-registered crude carrier of some 300,000 tons had somehow mistaken the southern shores of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan for the Isla de la Estada, turned sharp right making 20 knots, and driven the tanker straight onto the beach at Punta Delgada.
“Five hundred miles off course! In a calm, nearly landlocked bay, and he thought he was on his way through the roughest goddamned ocean waters in the world, on his way to Cape Horn!
“Jesus Christ!” said Arnold. “Jesus H. Christ.”
The second item did even less to restore his equilibrium. A Panama-registered freighter out of Indonesia had completely missed Japan’s huge southern island of Kyushu, never mind the port of Kagoshima, her final destination.
The freighter headed straight for the tip of the South Korean peninsula, but never made that either, charging straight into the seaport of Seowipo on the lush subtropical island of Jejudo and ramming into the evening ferry from Busan.
Arnold could hardly believe his eyes. The third item was equally appalling. The master of a 200,000-tonner, carrying crude oil to Rotterdam, slammed into the Goodwin Sands at low tide, six miles off the east coast of Kent at the north end of the English Channel, and was still jammed tight in about four feet of water.
There was another huge tanker on the beach in northern Nigeria, a chartered yacht parked 300 miles adrift off the wrong island in the West Indies, and the captain of a large cruise ship out of Naples was wondering why no one was speaking Italian on the island of Corsica.
Lloyds of London was apoplectic. Every fifteen minutes, there was another report from some remote corner of the globe where an expensive ship had lost its way and floundered ashore. Admiral Morgan was just beginning to see a glimmer of humor in all this, but the consequences of massive lawsuits directed at the United States for switching off the GPS prevented him from actually laughing out loud.
“The legal ramifications are clearly a nightmare,” offered Adm. Alan Dickson. “Lloyds might see it as an opportunity to get back at us after all these years — you know, that nutcase U.S. judge who nearly bankrupted them twenty years ago, holding Lloyds responsible for all those asbestos cases that happened years before anyone even dreamed the stuff was a health hazard.”
“They might at that,” said Arnold. “But they’ll have to do it here. And since it was essentially the Military that switched the GPS off for military reasons, we’ll probably refuse to submit to the judgment of civilians.”
“Good idea,” replied Admiral Dickson. “Meanwhile the world’s beaches are filling up with shipwrecks.”
“Driven and piloted by incompetents,” said Arnold. “Guys who should not hold licenses to navigate in open waters. And we gave all shipping corporations ample warnings of a forty-eight-hour break in GPS service. They put monkeys at the helm of their own ships, that’s their goddamned problem, right?”
“Absolutely, sir,” said the CNO. “Guess there’s no change in the eastern Atlantic. No sight nor sound of the submarine, for what? Almost a day?”
“Almost,” replied Arnold. “And right now we’re coming up to midnight. Just a few minutes and it’s October 9. D-day. I just hope the little bastard comes to the surface real soon. George Gillmore’s got the entire area surrounded.”
“Well, the only good thing about not seeing him is that he can’t fire without coming to PD. Just as long as he stays submerged, he ain’t firing. And that pleases me no end.”
“Me too,” said Arnold.
Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, sitting thoughtfully in the corner with his laptop, spoke suddenly. “You know, sir. I wouldn’t be the least surprised if we were way off in our assessment of the Barracuda’s position right now. I can’t imagine why he’d run right up to the most heavily patroled spot in the area and then hang around. If you ask me, he’s still lurking off Gomera. And he won’t close in till he’s good and ready to launch.”