Authors: Patrick Robinson
Admiral Morgan vacated the big chair behind his desk and walked across the room to meet the battle-hardened SEAL leader from the Bluegrass State. He told him, as he had told Rusty, that it was an honor finally to talk to him.
“Sir,” said Rick Hunter, “I had no idea you had even heard of me.”
“Rick,” said Arnold Morgan, “for me to refer to you as one of the finest combat commanders our Special Forces ever had would be to damn with faint praise. I
know who you are, and I know what you have done. Please go over and sit in my chair, behind my desk, and allow me to bring you a cup of probably disgusting coffee. It’s the best I can do.”
Everyone laughed. And the big SEAL went and sat in the Admiral’s chair.
“If you only knew, Commander, how many hours I’ve sat right there, wondering about you, and your missions, and whether you could possibly succeed…Well, you ought to feel right at home, right there. That’s my Rick Hunter worry-myself-to-death seat.”
Admiral Morgan poured coffee for everyone, then directed their attention to the electronic chart he had pulled up on a big screen at the end of the room. It showed the southeast coast of Iran and it was highlighted by three dotted lines, close together, joining the Omani coastal town of Ra’s Qabr al Hindi to a point 20 miles east on the Iranian shore. It stretched like a wall across the strait.
“That the minefield, Arnie?” asked Admiral Bergstrom.
“That’s it. And we should have a pretty-good-size seaway through it in a few more days. The Indian sweepers have done well. We’re looking for a cleared gateway of three or four miles.”
“Tankers start moving this week?”
“We’re not that clear.”
“Okay, boss,” said the SEAL chief. “Lay it on me. What do we hit?”
“Up here, John. Twenty-nine miles to the north. See where it says
Kuhestak
? The new Chinese oil and petrochemical refinery is right there, two miles south of that little town. It’s huge.”
“You want it put out of action?”
“Uh-uh. I want it vaporized.”
“Jesus,” said Rick Hunter.
“What’s the water depth inshore?” asked Rusty Bennett.
“Damn shallow,” replied Admiral Morgan. “We got
about five miles under nine feet, the last two miles are under four.”
“Can we get a submarine in close?”
“Probably seventeen miles, then an ASDV into the shallows. The last five miles you have to swim, walk or wallow. Water’s warm. No military presence that we know of. A deserted coastline.”
Commander Hunter nodded. “We got the new ASDV, the one that holds fourteen guys?”
“You have. It’s on board
Shark
right now. Two-man crew, twelve SEALs.”
“Range?”
“Sixteen hours at six knots.”
“Will it wait, using zero power? Or come back for the guys later?”
“It’ll wait.”
Commander Hunter nodded again. He turned to Admiral Bergstrom. “Am I going in, sir?”
“Not this time. You’re leading Mission Two. That’s two weeks later. If you agree. You’ve served your time on active duty, as you well know. I’m not ordering you in. But I’d be grateful if you’d answer in the affirmative.”
“But I don’t know the nature of the attack.”
“It’s on a Chinese Naval base in the Bassein River in Burma,” interjected Arnold Morgan. “It’s going to be dangerous, but highly organized. Failure is unthinkable.”
“Well, sir, I’m not too bad at wiping out Chinese military.”
“You’re also the best team leader the SEALs have had since Vietnam, according to John. Except of course for the now-retired Rusty, here. Quite honestly, Commander, I’d be real unhappy with anyone else in charge.”
“Will it be my last active mission, sir?”
“It will. And it will guarantee you make Admiral in the shortest possible time. Admiral Dixon, here, will give you that personal guarantee…Ask him, John.”
“Commander Hunter, will you accept command of Mission Two, the forthcoming attack on the Chinese base in the Bassein River?”
No hesitation. “Affirmative, sir.”
The three Admirals nodded curtly in the time-honored Naval code of recognizing a big decision, well made. And then they turned back to the screen, where John Bergstrom was pointing at the course
Shark
would steer up to the ops area. Arnold Morgan had already coded in the rendezvous point at 26.36N 56.49E, where the submarine would wait in 180 feet of water, 17 miles southwest of the Chinese refinery.
By now Commander Bennett was assiduously taking notes. Two big blue, yellow-and-white charts had been provided for him and John Bergstrom to take back to Coronado. Rusty had drawn in the lines of the minefield and was now marking water depths.
“That’s a darned long way in those shallows,” he said. “Is there any radar down there?”
“Not that we can see. Certainly no Chinese radar. We detect no military presence whatsoever by the Chinese. Nearest radar is down by the missile sites at the end of the minefield. That’s around thirty miles away. If the guys are kicking in along the surface, even in three feet, there’s no way they’d get picked up.”
“It’s the last coupla miles I’m concerned about,” said Rusty. “Water’s just about ankle deep, then a kinda swamp area, then flat rough sandy terrain. No cover.”
“SEALs can move across that in under twelve minutes,” replied Admiral Morgan. “It’s gotta be ten thousand to one against a towelhead with a radar screen picking anyone up thirty miles away while the guys are going in.”
“It wasn’t that I was so much worried about, sir.”
“Sorry, Commander. How do you mean?”
“My guys can get in,” said Rusty. “I’m more worried about getting them out.”
“Okay, Commander. I have given this thought,” said
Admiral Morgan. “Let’s take a worst case. The refinery blows before your guys are clear. Let’s say you did not hit the control tower hard enough, and the nonmilitary guards hit the buttons to their Iranian Navy buddies at Bandar Abbas. That’s nearly fifty miles away. Too far for a patrol boat. Their only shot at catching you is helicopters, and by the time they’ve saddled a couple of them up, that’s twenty minutes. Flight time at one hundred seventy knots is, say, fifteen minutes. By which time you’ve had thirty-five minutes to get into deepish water. It’s pitch-dark, and they gotta find you.
“Right out there I got two guided-missile frigates. Your guys have radios. Those fucking choppers get too close, I’m gonna have them blown right outta the sky and blame the goddamned refinery explosion. Matter of fact, I might blow ’em right out of the sky on takeoff. Fucking towelheads.”
“How about they happen to have a helicopter or two down by the minefield missile sites?”
“Anything moves into the sky anywhere near that minefield, it’s toast,” growled the Admiral. “Remember, right now the U.S. of A is in sole Naval control of the gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Northern Arabian Sea. No one moves there unless we say so.
NO ONE
.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Commander Bennett.
“Anytime, Commander. Glad to be of help.” Arnold Morgan smiled, thinly. He was loving this. Talking to real fighting men. Guys who knew something. Proper people.
He gazed at the SEAL, a veteran of more dangerous situations than most people could even imagine. Rusty stood there, still looking at the chart, still writing in his notebook, his bearing upright, his dark moustache perfectly trimmed, his gaze steady.
Arnold Morgan could have talked to him for a week. And at this moment he suddenly asked the SEAL from the coast of Maine, “Commander, may I ask you a question? A rather personal question?”
“Of course, sir.”
“When you hit the island in the South China Sea, at the head of your team last year, were you ever afraid?”
“Yessir.”
“Did your fear subside once you got into action?”
“Nossir. I was afraid all the time.”
“Did any of your men realize that?”
“Nossir.”
“Were they afraid?”
“Yessir.”
“Did anyone give in to his worst fears?”
“Nossir.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they all wear the trident, sir. We don’t give in to anything.”
Arnold Morgan just nodded and said, “Of course.”
It was plain that the Admiral was quite moved by the short conversation, and John Bergstrom stepped in and said, “Rusty, you will be going on the mission, I believe? Not into combat, but you are going to be there?”
“Yessir. I was unclear before what it entailed. I would like overall command, until they go in. Then I’ll hand over to the Team Leader. I’ll go with them in the submarine as far as the rendezvous point. That way I’ll be close if something should…well…happen. Something…er…unexpected, I mean. I’d like your permission for that, sir.”
“You have it, Commander.”
Admiral Morgan said now that he considered that the insertion of the SEALs, plus the getaway, was clear to everyone and that it was time to take a look at the refinery itself. He clicked off the electronic chart and replaced it with an excellent color transparency, 30 inches by 24, taken by satellite of China’s vast new petrochemical plant on the Iranian coast.
He told them it had cost close to $2 billion to build and would generate product worth more than $10 million a day. It refined petrol, kerosene, jet fuel, heavy fuel oil,
liquefied petroleum gas, tar and sulphur. After just a couple of months operational, it was refining 250,000 barrels a day.
“You guys hit this hard, there’s gonna be a lot of very, very angry Chinamen running around. It’s a big place with a lot of pipes and towers and valves. However, it’s no good just blowing holes in things. Busted pipes and bent towers can be shut off and repaired, with little lasting harm done. And that’s not our objective. We intend to blow this place sky-high, and right here I’m looking for ignition, right? Pure combustion.”
“No bullshit,” said Admiral Dixon, in an undisguised parody of Arnold Morgan’s favorite phrase.
“Precisely, CNO,” confirmed the National Security Chief. “No bullshit.”
He walked back to his desk, picked up his 36-inch-long steel ruler and came back to the screen. “Right,” he said. “I’m going to stand off to the side here so you can all see the area I’m referring to. That way Rusty, here, can use a yellow marker on one of these prints I had done.
“Okay, now I’m assuming you are not all experts on refining, and I’m going to explain what you are looking for. By the way, twenty-four hours ago I knew none of this, but I do now because I had Jack Smith come down and explain it to me.
“I have had notes on this prepared for everyone to take back and study, but I do want to go over it. For a start, we should be clear: a refinery converts crude oil—in this case from Kazakhstan—into a whole range of products. The crude is really just a combination of hydrocarbons that are separated inside the refinery into various groups, or fractions. It’s actually called ‘separation, conversion and chemical treatment.’ The stuff basically gets distilled, but it’s complicated because some fractions vaporize, or boil, at very different temperatures—gasoline at seventy-five Fahrenheit, some heavy fuel oils
at six hundred Fahrenheit. They also condense at different temperatures.
“What happens is the crude gets pumped via pipes, through a furnace, which heats it to maybe seven hundred twenty-five Fahrenheit. The resulting mixture of gas and liquids then passes into a vertical steel cylinder, called a fractioning tower, or a bubbling tower.
“This little bastard is what we’re after. Because inside that tower we got a lot of shit happening—the heavy fuels condense in the lower section, light fractions like gasoline and kerosene condense in the middle and upper sections. The liquids, all highly inflammable, are collected in trays and drawn by pipes along the sides of the tower. Some fractions never even cool enough to condense, and these get passed out through the top of the tower into a vapor recovery unit.
“Right here I’m talking high-test incendiary. One of these towers goes up because of a bomb stuck on its lower casing, can you imagine? It blows the heavy fuel oil into a blizzard of fire that hits gasoline, kerosene and then liquefied gas in the vapor unit. That tower, as far as you’re concerned, is potentially one of the world’s biggest fireworks.”
He rapped the screen with his ruler…. “See this group here at the north end? There’re ten towers…as far as I can see, the biggest maybe a hundred feet high…. We wanna bomb this one…this one…and this one, out here on the right by these holding tanks. According to Jack, they’re full of gasoline. I’d say if the towers blow, they’ll take the storage tanks with ’em. They might even take the entire local landscape, so I’d prefer you guys to be well clear before you detonate.”
He paused for effect. But no one spoke. So he pressed on. “This tall building here,” said Admiral Morgan, “is the control center. It is essential that you hit this. And hit it hard. Because in there they can turn off the flow of oil through literally miles of pipeline. We don’t want that.
We want that stuff flowing in, feeding the fire, keeping it raging.
“And finally we come to this group of holding tanks. Jack says this is where they store thousands of tons of deep-frozen liquefied natural gas. Looks like there’re around thirty of them, and they are strategically well placed from our point of view. They are nowhere near the towers, and far from the control center, so we’re not wasting any of our explosive assets. You can see from this picture the tanks are huge, maybe fifty feet high and forty feet in diameter. I’d guess if we hit five of them, that’d send the rest of them up. It would also give us a triangle of fire and explosions, the towers, the control center and the holding tanks, which will certainly take out this middle storage area that lies between them.”
He looked at his audience and noticed that he still had their attention. “Gentlemen,” he said, “out here on the northwest of the plant you can see yet another large grouping of tanks. Jack thinks this is the chemical area, maybe a lot of ammonium nitrate for fertilizer. I realize that you are going to be shorthanded, only twelve of you can go in…but if you found yourselves with some spare time, with a little spare explosives, you could do a lot of damage out there with the stuff that once blew up Texas City.”