SIEGE OF SUPERPORT

Imagine a gigantic superport city named Oceanus anchored off California, an oil depository where five superships at once could unload their numberless barrels and have them pumped underwater to the shore. Now imagine a stir-crazy convict in San Quentin dreaming up the perfect heist of the superport, then carrying it out. Say that he kidnaps the wife of the captain whose small ship hauls fresh food out to the superport, then takes over that ship. Say that he and his convict pals hold up the superport for $300 million by fastening a 55-gallon drum of nitroglycerine to a wall of the superport and threatening to blow it up, along with a US senator and an oil company vice-president. What's more, say that he's successful and that when the 16 suitcases full of cash are delivered to the superport (he's been killing a number of people all along, just to show he's in good faith and quite fearless about sending the whole works up in a firestorm), well, say that he has also devised the perfect getaway. Where do you go in the Pacific with $300 million in 16 suitcases? A truly smart operator would have an elderly U-boat commander with a still operational U-boat hidden away in South America and have it show up just on time to lend the final hornblast of incredulity to an otherwise crude and unconvincing melodrama which has even less sense of being anchored in an ocean than it has of being anchored inhuman nature.