Authors: Patrick Robinson
“This precious Iranian seaport is soon going to give China its energy from the heart of the second-largest oil producer on earth. Because it can run tankers in here of virtually unlimited size, and then drive out straight across the Indian Ocean, through the Malacca Strait and into the South China Sea.
“In my view, that’s basically what the trouble is all about. That is precisely why China wants this growing military presence in the region…and precisely why we cannot allow it.
“You just heard the assessments of Harcourt and Bob. Now I want you to tell me how a dozen SEALs can take out that refinery. I say a dozen because the water’s shallow and well patrolled. We’re going to need an SDV, I’m certain of that. And we only have one in the area—the one stowed on the deck of the good old
Shark
. The good news is it does not take a whole lot of high explosives to blow up an oil refinery. Sonsabitches are apt to blow themselves up if you give ’em a head start.”
“Guess you’re referring to the Big Bang in Texas City back in 1947, eh?” said General Scannell. “I had an uncle lived somewhere out near Galveston. He told me when I was just a kid you coulda heard that explosion from one hundred fifty miles away.”
“I was about three years old at the time, and we didn’t live that far from the disaster,” said Arnold. “I remember my daddy told me the ship that blew it exploded with such force its one-and-a-half ton anchor was flung two
miles and embedded itself ten feet into the ground at the Pan American refinery.”
The recollection of the Texas City disaster reminded all three men of the enormous problems involved in taking out a major refinery, with its attendant sites of sprawling petrochemical plants; just about every square foot of such industrial time bombs is filled with highly volatile, flammable materials, including vast pressurized storage tanks for natural gas. And the new Chinese installation at Kuhestak had all that, and more.
Hundreds were killed, thousands injured in Texas City, buildings all over town were blasted beyond recognition. And the devastation was not restricted to the waterfront, or to the refining towers and storage areas. It just about ripped the entire town apart. A radio announcer simply yelled, “Texas City just blew up!” The mushroom cloud rose 2,000 feet into the air. Massive, white-hot steel parts from the French merchant ship SS
Grandcamp
were hurled into the holding tanks hundreds of yards away, setting off secondary explosions, which in turn caused immense damage.
The burning
Grandcamp
with its heavy cargo of ammonium nitrate fertilizer was responsible for what remains the worst industrial catastrophe in U.S. history. At the time, so soon after World War II, there were few modern safety precautions in place. And of course there was none of the grim voyeurism of late-twentieth-century television, with its voracious, insatiable appetite for agony, heartbreak and disaster, which it finds so helpful in its endless, somewhat childlike, quest for drama and action.
Texas City 1947 remains a milestone in U.S. industrial calamity. And Admiral Arnold Morgan, a native-born Texan himself, had no wish to involve civilian casualties in the little Iranian town of Kuhestak, even though he gave not one jot for the lives of the Chinese technicians at the refinery….
You guys wanna fuck around with the free passage of world oil and gas…
guess you should have thought about that real deeply before ordering those mines from Moscow
.
In any event, the Chinese refinery had to go. The remaining questions were how quickly and how to get the SEALs out before the whole shooting match went up in smoke and took our guys with it.
Meanwhile, Admiral Dixon stared at the little numbers on the chart, checking out the water depth, turning over in his mind the equation…Shark
can’t operate in depths of less than one hundred fifty feet…How near can she go before the guys have to leave in the little electric SDV, running until she touches the sand, and then unloading the SEALs to swim in the rest of the way
?
“What d’ya think, Admiral?” Arnold Morgan was stepping aside to allow the CNO some space.
“
Shark
’s gonna need passageway through the minefield…then she’s got a twenty-mile submerged run nor’nor’east up to this point right here…’bout twelve miles off the Iranian coast…. She’ll be in at least one hundred eighty feet of water all the way there, say 26.36N, right on 56.49E.”
“That’s precisely where I had the rendezvous point, Alan…. Great minds, right?”
“Realistic minds, at least, sir…
Shark
wouldn’t want to move inshore any farther. She starts leaving a wake—that’s asking for trouble. Iran’s got a few fast attack craft with ASW mortars. We wanna stay real silent.”
“How many guys does the SDV hold?”
“Well, the old ones carried only ten. That’s the one on
Mendel Rivers
…crew of two and eight SEALs. This new one holds fourteen, so we got twelve active SEAL demolition guys. We’re just lucky the SDV is on the deck of
Shark
, otherwise we’d be all over the damned place. Still, I guess we’re due for a bit of luck. Haven’t had much for a while, and I gotta real gut feeling about getting Beijing out of Arabia.”
“You and me. What d’you say, General?”
Tim Scannell looked thoughtful. “I was just thinking:
Something goes wrong, say the submarine gets hit and crippled, any thoughts on backup? You need a carrier in the area to frighten everyone away, or you want me to order up some fighter aircraft we can deploy out of Oman, with the Brits’ help?”
“Good call, General. Anything hits our submarine, I mean a surface ship, we vaporize it, right?”
“Yessir, Arnie. But how about an Iranian or Chinese Kilo-Class submarine in the area? Both nations have ’em, and as you know they’re little bastards under the water.”
Admiral Dixon responded immediately: “I’ll order a coupla LA-Class nuclear boats to ride shotgun on
Shark
while she goes in. They’ll pick up a Kilo if it’s close enough.”
“And then?” Arnold Morgan looked quizzical.
“If it’s under the surface, we sink it. No questions asked.”
“Thank you, CNO. That’s my language you’re talking, right there. You can only fuck around with these towelheads and Orientals for just so long, right?”
“Right, sir.”
“No bullshit,” added Admiral Morgan, by way of emphasis.
“Matter of fact, sir,” said Alan Dixon, “I’d say our biggest worry is getting the guys in, once they leave the SDV…. You see, the twenty-meter depth line is all of five miles offshore…the ten-meter line’s only about a half mile farther in…then they got a coupla miles in about four feet of water on flat sand…. Terrain’s fine, but there is a risk of detection…and it’s a long way back to deep water and safety.”
“A long way for you and me, Alan. But not these guys…they’ll slide through those warm shallows like a shoal of Florida bonefish—fast, sleek, unpredictable and likely to fight like hell.” Arnold Morgan made a curving forward motion with the palm of his left hand…. “
Death to the Chinese oilers, right
?”
“Actually, I’m more worried about pursuit than anything else, Arnie, especially if they keep a fleet of helicopters at the refinery.”
“Alan, if that place goes up the way I think it will, there’s not going to be anything even resembling pursuit. Bergstrom has the charts, and his top instructors will be involved in the planning. I expect Commander Rick Hunter will lead the squad, but I’m not sure if he’ll go into Iran or Burma. Not both.”
“You have real faith in those SEALs, don’t you?”
“Yes. If they can’t do it, it can’t be done. And I know that a group of the most highly trained demolition killers on this planet can blow up a goddamned oil refinery. Gimme a book o’matches, and I’ll blow the fucker up myself.”
Both Alan Dixon and Tim Scannell laughed at the President’s top military adviser: always just the right combination of steel and intellect, respect and contempt, fortitude and laughter. Arnold Morgan really was anyone’s idea of the perfect keeper of America’s front line.
Both the Admiral and General now stood back and watched as Morgan once more stepped up to the chart, this time holding a grainy black-and-white photograph in his left hand while making a tiny drawing on the chart, a small pencil line five miles offshore right on the 20-meter depth line.
“See that?” he said. “That’s the loading dock. Just completed construction. That’s where the big Chinese VLCCs will be landing. The pipeline’s already in, but we have no evidence of trade yet. Pity the sonofabitch is so far from shore, otherwise we could just hit some combustible merchant ship and give ’em Texas City Two. But, as the proprietors of the refinery might put it,
no can do
. So we’ll just have to slam the fucker, bang in the middle of the plant. Then maybe take out the loading dock on the way back, if there’re ships at it.”
“Okay, sir. Sounds good, if a bit tricky. You wanna talk some about the Bassein River hit?”
“Not now, Tim. I’m judging that to be a lot more complicated. We’ll have John Bergstrom in before we finalize. And possibly a couple of his commanders—maybe forty-eight hours. Wednesday morning.”
He saw the two service chiefs out, and then walked slowly back to the chart of the Strait of Hormuz. And he muttered to himself, “They must know that goddamned refinery is vulnerable. They must know there will be some form of retribution if the U.S. finds out they helped lay that minefield. Or maybe they figure we’ll never find out for certain….”
He paused for a full minute. And then he muttered, “Nah, they’re just not that stupid. They must
know
we’ll find out….”
And if that’s the case
, he pondered,
there’s only one question left: What in the name of Christ are they up to
?
072200MAY07
.
Flight Deck, USS
Constellation
. Strait of Hormuz
.
26.30N 56.50E. Speed 30. Course 225
.
She was turned along the southwesterly run of the minefield now, the U.S. Navy’s beloved forty-year-old “
Connie
,” plowing forward into the hot wind of this sweltering Arabian night. Right now she was about five miles north of the field, and the area seemed quiet as the Indian Pondicherrys moved steadily about their hazardous business, cutting the mines free and then blowing them on the surface.
But still the howling F-14D Tomcats, courtesy of U.S. fighter wing VF 2—the fabled Bounty Hunters—gunned their aircraft off
Connie
’s 1,000-foot-long flight deck, up and into the black skies that now blanketed the most lethal stretch of ocean in the entire world.
Each pilot wore on his right sleeve the Bounty Hunters’ triangular emblem, the yellow delta-winged fighter-bomber on red-white-and-blue stripes. Most of
them also sported the jaunty gunslinger patch, the cowboy tomcat leaning on a big
D
, with the new stitched lettering,
Anytime, Pal
.
And they flew right out on the edge of the envelope, banking in hard over the Iranian coastline and then back out to sea. This really was
Anytime, Pal
, because right now the U.S. Navy meant business, and everyone knew it. One squeak out of an Iranian antiaircraft battery, one illumination, one suggestion, and that battery would be obliterated by a phalanx of missiles with an accuracy record of around 100 percent.
Navy pilots are used to being accused of “U.S. bullying.” But they were not bullies tonight, while the whole world awaited the reopening of the gulf to oil tankers.
Tonight the Navy fliers were the fearless White Knights of the Skies, the way they mostly saw themselves anyhow. And they hurled their Tomcats through the high darkness of Islam, the single most threatening airborne cavalry ever assembled, on a mission to shut down the menace of a known aggressor.
Anytime, Pal
. The patches said it all.
Back on
Connie
’s flight deck in the controlled chaos of a hectic night’s flying the 22-ton Tomcats were slamming down in batches, because the carrier has to keep making ground downwind, altering course, between landings and takeoffs. Swarms of flight-deck personnel surrounded each aircraft as it thundered in, a team ever ready to rush forward and ram the Sidewinder safety pins into the pylon firing mechanisms. The hot swirling air, stinking of JP-4, burned rubber, searing hot metal and salt water, assaulted everyone’s senses as the air boss snapped out commands through the 88,000-ton ship’s tannoy system. This was
Connie
’s last tour of duty.
Out on the stern, oblivious to the earsplitting shriek of the incoming jets, the duty arresting gear officer, a lieutenant junior grade, sweating in his big fluorescent yellow jacket, was in contact with the hydraulic operators one deck below. The wires were ready to withstand the
75,000-pound force of the Tomcat hitting the deck at 160 knots, the pilot’s hand still hard on the throttle just in case the hook missed.
The 28-year-old Lieutenant, Bobby Myers from Ohio, could feel his voice rising now as he snapped down commands to the hydraulic men…“
Stand by for Tomcat one-zero-seven…two minutes
.”
He looked back over the stern, 90 feet above the water, straining to catch the lights of the fighter-bomber. He knew the pilot personally, and, as it did every single time, his chest began to tighten, and his heart was racing. Nothing ever dismisses the nerve-twisting tension that grips the arresting gear officer when a fighter-bomber is on its final flight path. Every arresting gear officer who ever lived, that is.
Bobby had him now, five miles out, and he checked the wires again, checked on his radio phone that the huge hydraulic piston was ready to take the strain in the forthcoming controlled collision between deck and plane.
“
GROOVE
!” he shouted into the phone, the code word for “
She’s close, STAND BY
!”
Two miles out now, bucking along in the warm erratic air currents of the gulf, the Tomcat pilot fought to hold her steady, watching the landing lights, always watching the balls of light, an iron grip on the stick. He could see the carrier’s stern rise slightly on the swell, and the precision required for the high-speed landing would be measured in inches rather than feet. Every pilot knows he is a split second from death during every carrier landing he makes. One in five Navy pilots dies in the first nine years of his service.