Authors: Patrick Robinson
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Lieutenant, if I were you…they’re probably going to conduct a night exercise together…not unusual at one of these international junkets between two navies….”
“Yessir. But I can see a full load of mines on the destroyer….”
“I expect they’ll still be there in the morning, Lieutenant. That’s all.”
Jimmy Ramshawe put the phone down slowly. And the same question he had asked himself a thousand times popped into his mind:
Why had the Chinese plainly ordered an extremely expensive consignment of specialist contact mines from Russia if they weren’t planning to lay out a bloody minefield somewhere
?
He also considered it a slice of blind luck that the Andropov freighter had been spotted taking off from Moscow, and then again at secretive Baykonur. No one ever traced its second refueling stop, and in Lt. Ramshawe’s opinion it was entirely possible there had been a second trans-Asian flight of the giant aircraft. That would have brought the total mines carried to 240, sufficient to fill all four surface ships with their combined quota of 220. He had not given the three Kilos much thought since they had not been seen for a few days. But he could not get those mines out of his mind.
It was all very well Admiral Borden saying it was best to forget the whole thing until something more definite emerged, but, streuth! What if those crazy bastards were out there right now planting a minefield in the middle of the strait? What then?
Lieutenant Ramshawe wandered off in search of a cup of coffee, reasoning to himself that if the satellite pass was made at 0800 over Bandar Abbas, which he knew for certain, then he might see some good pictures of the ships back in harbor sometime after midnight Fort Meade time.
Anyway, he was going nowhere until he had seen those pictures. And he knew this was a state of affairs guaranteed not to thrill his girlfriend, the dark-haired Jane Peacock, daughter of the Australian ambassador to Washington. The Peacocks and the Ramshawes were
lifelong friends, and it was widely assumed that Jimmy and Jane would ultimately marry.
Right now he looked forward to telephoning Jane even less than he dreaded calling his boss.
The pair of them could probably run a contest to see who could give me the hardest bloody time
.
He was right, too. “Jimmy, for crying out loud, why this sudden interest in an Arab Navy?”
“They’re not Arabs,” he corrected her. “They’re Persian. That’s different.”
“
I don’t care if they’re bloody Martians
!” she yelled. “We were supposed to have supper with Julie in Georgetown, and you’re hopeless…. I’m not going by myself.”
“Janie, listen. I believe this is really important. Like maybe a life-and-death matter.”
“Well, there must be more important people than you to deal with it.”
“There isn’t anyone more important than me who even believes it, never mind wants to deal with it.”
“Well, leave it alone, then, until someone instructs you to do something.”
“I can’t, Janie. I have to stay. But I’ll pick you up early tomorrow and we’ll have breakfast before you go to your class—I’m free till eleven-thirty, same time you have to be in Georgetown.”
“Okay,” she grumbled. “Nine at the embassy…but you’re still a bloody nightmare…. Even your own mother thinks that.”
Jimmy chuckled. He adored his beautiful, clever fiancée, and he hated letting her down. But in his own mind, he alone stood between world order and possible world chaos.
Well, something like that. I just don’t trust the bastards. That’s all
.
The night passed slowly. And he spent the hours before midnight reading a book about international terrorism, a fundamentally depressing read, citing samples of
inordinate stupidity by the Intelligence services of various Western governments.
Jesus, a whole lot of this crap could have been avoided if people were just that little bit sharper…. Even at the business end of the Intelligence game there are still people more intent on protecting their own jobs, rather than concentrating on getting it right, at all costs
.
Jimmy Ramshawe was still young enough to own those ideals. Just. But he would not want to work too long for a conservative cynic like David Borden, whose pension beckoned, and who preferred to pass the buck than start a high-profile scare over nothing.
Midnight came and went. It was a half hour since the morning satellite shots had been taken again, high above the harbor of Bandar Abbas.
Nothing arrived until 0040. And the young Lieutenant shuffled the new photos from the National Reconnaissance Office, searching for a shot of the Chinese destroyer. And here it was…fully laden with its mines, just as it had been before the midnight naval exercises in the gulf. The frigates too were back at their Iranian jetties, the tarpaulins that covered their cargo still in place.
There were also the standard daily shots of Chah Behar, and they showed empty spaces where the three Chinese Kilos had been last Saturday night. “Christ knows where they are,” muttered Jimmy.
And he picked up his jacket and made his way out of the office, walking through the main doors of the building and across to the dimly lit parking lot where two Marine guards saluted him.
He climbed into the driver’s seat and drove to the main gates, showed his pass to the duty guards and gunned his 10-year-old black Jaguar out to the exit road and on down to the Washington-Baltimore Parkway. It was a fast ride at this time of night, and he let the speedometer hover around 75 as he cruised down to the Beltway for the 10-mile run to Exit 33, Connecticut Av
enue, which would take him straight into the center of the capital.
He made a right at Dupont Circle, skirted the campus of George Washington University, and ran on down to the Watergate complex where his parents had owned an apartment for the better part of 30 years. Naturally they rarely, if ever, used it, since they lived mostly in New York. Which was excellent news for Jimmy, who thus had a millionaire’s residence for free.
He drove into his underground parking space and turned off the engine. It was almost 2
A.M.
, and he was almost too tired to get out of the car. But he still wished Jane could have been there waiting for him. And he thought again of how much easier life had been when Admiral George Morris had been in charge at the NSA.
The thing about George was, he was damned confident, and he had the ear of the Big Man in the White House. No one was closer to Arnold Morgan than George, and the two of them always consulted. Admiral Morris was thus a fabulous guy to work for. He always listened. He always weighed all the eventualities, and all the possibilities. Never tried to second-guess his staff. He worked on the theory that if one of his chosen men thought something should be investigated, then that was probably correct. Not like this bloody Boredom character.
Jimmy sat there in the driver’s seat for a moment, pondering his dreary task tomorrow when he had to talk to Admiral Borden and admit the Chinese destroyer was still fully laden with her sea mines, as she had been the previous night.
He could hear the world-weary old bastard right now: “Well, Lieutenant, what a great surprise that must be to you…but don’t say I didn’t warn you….”
“Just as long as he doesn’t tempt me to tell him another unlikely truth,” muttered Jimmy to himself. “That the bloody morning mines might be different ones from those we saw last night. He’ll say that’s bollocks. Proba
bly paranoid bollocks. But it isn’t. Because that’s what I’d do myself if I wanted to lay a minefield in the Strait of Hormuz.”
He climbed out of the car and locked it. Wandering over to the elevator, still muttering, “…replace the mines on deck before the zero-eight-hundred satellite pass, right? Put the stupid Americans off the trail.”
On Saturday morning, April 7, at first light, the Chinese warships sailed, apparently, for home. At least two of them did, the
Hangzhou
and the
Shantou
. The other two stayed right where they were at the jetties in Bandar Abbas harbor. Three hours later, shortly before 0950 (local time), the three Chinese Kilos pushed out of Chah Behar into the Hormuz Strait and made their way south toward the Arabian Sea.
The U.S. satellites picked up the entire scenario on bright sunlit waters, and back in Fort Meade, Lieutant Ramshawe wrote a short memorandum to the NSA’s Acting Director, detailing the ship movements.
Two days later a report came in from the Middle Eastern desk at Langley that Iran was moving heavy Sunburn missiles, plus launchers, plus antiaircraft artillery, to a point along their southeastern coast on the Gulf of Oman.
Langley’s man did not know precisely where the hardware was headed, but Fort Meade made a slight adjustment in the satellite’s photographic direction, and from way up in the stratosphere the massive U.S. camera
snapped off two shots of the big Sunburns being maneuvered into position facing out to sea, 29 miles south of the coastal town of Kuhestak.
Lieutenant Ramshawe marked up his wide chart, 26.23N 57.05E. He automatically glanced across to see the nearest point of land, but there really was nothing. If the missiles were fired westerly at 90 degrees to the coast, they would head straight out to sea. A slightly more southerly course would aim them at the northern headland of the Iranians’ friends, the Omanis.
That headland, the outermost point of the barren Musadam Peninsula, scarcely had a town or a village on it. The only name marked on Jimmy Ramshawe’s chart, way out on the jutting eastern coast, was Ra’s Qabr al Hindi.
“Christ,” he muttered. “What kind of a bloody name’s that? Imagine coming from there, and traveling to the States…
er, Place of residence, sir? Ra’s Qabr al Hindi
. Jeez, they’d probably lock you up on principle…heh heh heh!”
In any event, the Lieutenant drafted a report confirming they now had a firm position for the Iranian missiles. And then he returned to his consistent preoccupation, the two remaining Chinese warships in Bandar Abbas, the
Kangding
and the
Zigong
. The photographs that had just arrived showed both ships now flying Iran’s national flag.
And Jimmy Ramshawe stared at them for a long time.
What if they had laid a secret minefield somewhere out there last week…What if the two frigates had been left behind in readiness to go out and activate the mines
?
He knew that such a theory would be ridiculed by Admiral Borden, who had of course ridiculed his every thought about the mines. And thus far had been proved right. Nonetheless, Lieutenant Ramshawe elected to go and see his leader, and present his worst fears.
The veteran Admiral smiled, with a jaded, indulgent air.
“James,” he said. “May I call you James?”
“Jimmy, sir, actually. No one’s ever called me James. I’d think you were talking to someone else.”
The Admiral blinked at the Australian’s forthrightness, which always caught him off guard.
“Right, Jimmy. Now listen to me…. Do you know why the two frigates are now flying the flag of Iran?”
“Not really, sir. But it could be some kind of a Chinese cover-up, while they’re getting ready either to lay mines or activate them.”
“No, Jimmy,” he said with heavy emphasis. “That is not the reason. They are flying the Iranian flag because Iran has just bought the two Chinese frigates. That was the objective of the big dockyard junket. It was a Chinese sales tour…. You don’t think they’d come all that way for nothing, do you?…Not the Chinese. They like money a lot more than they like anything else.
“It was a goodwill sales visit. No doubt in my mind. They conducted a fleet exercise together, exchanged information, and at the conclusion of the festivities, Iran agreed to purchase the two ships. The first two guided-missile frigates they’ve ever owned.”
“Well, sir, if that’s your opinion…I’ll have to agree.”
“Do you have a different opinion?”
“Well, sir. I have been wondering about the mines. And I’m still not sure the Chinese haven’t made some kind of a devious move with a view to laying them.”
“Ah, that’s your prerogative as an Intelligence officer, Jimmy. But it’s been your prerogative for weeks, months, and nothing has happened, as I told you it wouldn’t.”
“Righto, boss. I’ll buy that. Maybe they did just want to store up some Russian mines for some future mission. Anyway, if you’re right, they just paid for them, with the frigate money. Good on ’em, right?”
The Admiral smiled. “You’re learning, Jimmy. In this business, it’s very easy to spend your life chasing your tail…seeing spooks, plots and schemes around every
corner. Just stay focused, and keep a weather eye out for the really big stuff, when you’ve got real evidence. That’s all.”
The young Lieutenant left, returning to his office, and gazing once more at his wide, marked chart of the Strait of Hormuz. He stared at it for several minutes, and muttered to himself, “I just wonder what’s sitting down there on the seabed, right offshore of those new missile placements.”
Two weeks later. April 24
.
China’s Southern Fleet HQ. Zhanjiang
.
Admiral Zu Jicai, now C-in-C of the entire Navy, was back in his old office, and he opened up the secure line to Beijing, waiting quietly for Zhang Yushu to come to the phone.
When the great man finally spoke on the line from the Chinese capital, the conversation was unusually brief for two such old friends.
“Nothing on any foreign networks re DRAGONFLY.”
“No suspicion anywhere?”
“None. Shall I activate the field in the next two days?”
“Affirmative.”
“Good-bye, sir.”
“Good-bye, Jicai.”
Three days later. April 27
.
The Strait of Hormuz
.
Hardly a ripple disturbed the flat blue calm of the southern waters of the strait. It was one of those sultry Arabian mornings, in which the livid heat of the desert sun makes life on land almost unbearable, and life on board any ship not a whole lot better.
Six miles northeast of the Musandam Peninsula, the
waters were almost oily to look at, as the tide began to turn inward from the Arabian Sea. There was no ocean swell, no little eddying cats’ paws on the surface, no movement in the hot, still air.
But ripples were on the way. Giant ripples, from the big white bow wave of the 80,000-ton black-hulled gas carrier
Global Bronco
, making a stately 18 knots, southeasterly through the water. The 900-foot carrier was laden down with 135,000 cubic meters of liquefied natural gas, frozen to
minus
160 degrees centigrade. In more comprehensive stats, that’s 3,645,000 cubic feet, or, a 100-foot-high building, 200 feet long by 200 feet wide. Which is a lot of frozen gas, and it forms, by general consensus, the most potentially lethal cargo on all the world’s oceans.
Unlike crude oil, which does not instantly combust, liquid natural gas is hugely volatile, compressed as it is 600 times from normal gas. Tanker corporations are near-paranoid about safety regulations for its transportation around the world. Layer upon layer of fail-safe backup systems are built into every LNG carrier. They are not the biggest tankers on the ocean, but then, neither is the nuclear-headed torpedo the biggest bomb. In any event, the worldwide industry of transporting liquid gas has never once suffered a fire, never mind an explosion.
Up on the bridge, almost 100 feet above the water, the obsessively careful Commodore Don McGhee stared out over the four bronze-colored holding domes, which each rose 60 feet above the scarlet-painted deck. The bow of the
Global Bronco
was nearly 300 yards in front of him, and the veteran Master from the southeast Texas gulf port of Houston had a view straight down the massive gantry that ran as a steel catwalk clean across the top of each dome, all the way down to the foredeck.
Right now the ship was making its way well outside the Omani inshore traffic zone, with the local Navy’s firing practice area 10 miles astern. Ahead of them was the
narrowest part of the Hormuz Strait, and in this clear weather they would see plainly the Omani headlands of Jazirat Musandam, and two miles farther south, Ra’s Qabr al Hindi. They were too far away to catch a glimpse on the horizon of the glowering shores of Iran on the eastern side of the crescent-shaped 30-mile-wide seaway.
Commodore McGhee was in conference with Chief Engineer Andre Waugh. And up ahead of them they could still see a Liberian-registered British tanker, a 300,000-ton VLCC bound for the North Atlantic. They had been catching her slowly all the way down from the new gas-loading terminal off Qatar, right around the Emirates peninsula, past Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and now they were less than 50 miles from the open waters of the Arabian Sea. All tanker captains were glad to get out of the gulf, and McGhee was no exception.
There was always a menace about patrolling Iranian warships, a menace compounded in the past few months by yet another Iranian militant threat to lay a minefield directly off its coast at the choke point of the entrance.
Both tanker officers knew there had been for several weeks a worldwide unease about China’s warships currently moored in the Ayatollah’s Navy base at Bandar Abbas. And they knew also of the tensions caused by the opening of the brand-new Sino-Iranian refinery at the end of the Chinese-built pipeline, which ran 1,000 miles, out of the Kazakhstan oil fields, across Turkmenistan, and clean through the sweltering Iranian Plateaux to the coast. Everyone in the Western oil business knew this pipeline gave China something close to a “lock” on the second-largest easy-access oil deposits on earth.
One more threat by Iran’s increasingly noisy anti-West politicians to bottle up the entrance to the gulf would probably send the Pentagon into a collective dance of death. It was all politics, threat and counterthreat, but to men like Commodore McGhee, masters of the big crude-oil and gas carriers working the north
end of the Arabian Sea, those politics had an edge of grim reality.
“This darned place always gives me the creeps,” he said. “I’ll just be glad to make the open ocean.”
“I know what you mean,” replied Chief Andre Waugh. “So do the British by the look of it…that’s a Royal Navy helicopter up ahead, checking that big tanker out of the area. Right now they’re checking every British ship in and out of the gulf. Guess they don’t like the political situation, right?”
No ships in the entire history of navigation have been more political than the big tankers, upon whose safe passage half the world depends in order to keep moving. The fate and prosperity of nations literally hang in the balance as these great leviathans carry the principal source of world energy from where it is to where it is needed.
Commodore McGhee, a tanker man for thirty years, had never once entered Iranian waters, always keeping well over on the Omani side. Back home in Texas, in the Houston control room, on the thirty-second floor of the Travis Street headquarters of Texas Global Ships, Inc., Robert J. Heseltine III, the president, had issued specific instructions: Stay well clear of the Ayatollahs and their Navy. Don McGhee did not need reminding.
Texas Global ran six ships, but
Global Bronco
was the only LNG carrier. Heseltine was right proud of his Texan roots, and he had named the other five ships
Global Star, Global Rose, Global Brand, Global Steer
and
Global Range
. They were all 300,000-ton VLCCs, which normally plied among the Gulf of Iran, southern Africa, the northeast tanker ports of the USA, and Europe.
Bronco
usually worked in the east, steaming between the gas-rich gulf ports of Qatar and Abu Dhabi, and Tokyo Bay, where Japanese Electric unloads millions of cubic meters of natural gas every week. This particular voyage, however, was shorter—just as far as the southern Taiwan port of Yung-An. The massive liquid-gas
cargo would be used almost exclusively for electric power generation.
Robert J. Heseltine III had not laid eyes on one of his ships for three years, and probably wouldn’t for another three years. Giant tankers cost $100,000 a day to operate and they have to keep working, roaming the world picking up cargo and unloading it. There never was a reason for any of the ships to return to home base in Texas, and both crew and supplies were ferried out to them, by commercial airlines, and then by helicopter, while the great energy ships kept right on moving, thousands of miles from home. No merchantmen since the days of sail, indeed since the clipper ships, had ever undertaken such vast and endless transworld journeys.
Commodore McGhee was now traveling a couple of knots faster than the VLCC up ahead, and he positioned himself accordingly, preparing to run past, a half mile off the tanker’s port beam, a couple of hours from now.
The sun beat down on the scarlet deck as the
Global Bronco
crossed the 26.20-degree line of latitude right on 56.38 north. They were eight miles off Ra’s Qabr al Hindi, and the captain could just make out the headland through his glasses. He ordered a steward to bring him up a cup of coffee, and a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and the 80,000-tonner ran on due south for another mile.
It was 12.10
P.M.
precisely, in glaring sunshine on a still-calm sea, when the
Global Bronco
nudged into Admiral Zhang Yushu’s Russian PLT-3 contact mine. The one-ton steel container of compressed high explosives, riding high on its anchor line, detonated with savage force. The massive forward inertia of the ship carried her on for just a few yards before the echoing underwater blast blew a huge hole in her hull, starboard side of the keel, right behind the bow.
All the for’ard plates along the starboard side buckled back with a tearing of metal showering a hailstorm of sparks inside the hull. The for’ard liquid gas tank,
reinforced aluminum, held, then ruptured, and nearly 20,000 tons of one of the world’s most volatile liquid gasses, its content bolstered by both methane and propane, began to flood out of its refrigerated environment. It hit an atmosphere almost 200 degrees centigrade warmer, and it flashed instantly into vaporized gas, exploding with a near-deafening
WHOOOOOOOSSSSH
! Consider the sound made by a cupful of gasoline on a bonfire just before you toss a lighted match into it—and then multiply that sound by around 40 million. That’s loud.