The Shark Mutiny

by Patrick Robinson

  Danny

  He folded the letter and sealed the envelope. Then he walked out to the front desk and asked the security guard to mail it. It was only a short walk over to the submarine jetties where the Shark awaited him.

  Same morning. Monday, April 30.

  Southern Fleet HQ. Zhanjiang.

  “Yushu, you are very disappointed. I can see that.”

  “Well, Jicai, you would have thought the Western press would have been much more alert to the consequences of two shattered oil tankers within a few miles of each other in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz.”

  “Yes, I agree. But the time difference made it awkward.”

  “How?”

  “Well, the Washington Post ran a piece on Saturday morning covering the big fire in the liquid-gas tanker. So did several other American newspapers, but no pictures. I suppose the cameras were just too far away. But when the second tanker was damaged, it was too late for their editions. And it was a much smaller story…just an oil spill in the gulf.”

  “You’ve studied the media more than I, Jicai. Has anyone made a connection?”

  “Only the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News in Texas. They have an interview with the owner of the Global Bronco, and right underneath it, they run a story about the oil spill. But they’re not making a major point about the closeness of the two ‘accidents.’”

  “Then, my Jicai, we will quickly have to persuade them otherwise.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that will prove too much of a problem…we are extremely well organized.”

  0900 (local). Same morning.

  Washington, D.C.

  Arnold Morgan had just issued a severe roasting to the Acting Director of the National Security Agency. And Admiral David Borden, frankly afraid now for his future, had gone straight to the office of Lt. Ramshawe, full of quasi-indignation that he had not been kept up to speed on the Hormuz investigation.

  Jimmy Ramshawe debated the possibility of telling his boss to knock before he barged in, but decided against it. Nonetheless he detected that the Acting Director had been on the wrong end of the Big Man’s wrath, and that was not a great place to be.

  “It is essential you keep me up to date,” he told the Lieutenant. “I am the person who must answer to Admiral Morgan, and it is most inconvenient when he knows more than I do.”

  Again Lt. Ramshawe exercised discretion, resisting the overpowering temptation to tell Borden that everyone knew more than he did.

  Instead he said simply, “Sir, I was under the impression that you wanted the whole subject ignored until there was hard evidence. That’s what you told me.”

  “Correct. But when the second tanker was damaged, surely you knew I must be informed of your investigation, the fact that the ships were so close.”

  “Sir, I wrote up my report and handed it to your duty officer on Saturday morning. I came in especially.”

  “Well, it did not reach me. Which put me at a tremendous disadvantage, because Arnold Morgan had worked it out precisely as you did.”

  The Ramshawe discretion vanished. “Sir, it is beyond my imagination that anyone could work it out any other way. The bloody towelheads and the Chinks have mined the bloody strait. I’ve been telling you that for a month. We even know where the bastards got the mines. I’ve also been telling you that for weeks. And if you still want my advice, I’m also telling you there’s more to come on this.”

  Admiral Borden retreated, saying as he left, “Just make sure I’m kept up to speed on this. It is essential that I’m on precisely the same knowledge level as Admiral Morgan.”

  David Borden shut the door noisily, missing Jimmy Ramshawe’s “That’ll be the bloody day.”

  More importantly he had forgotten to ask what further developments there were, even though he could see the pile of satellite photographs on the young surveillance officer’s desk.

  Big mistake. Jimmy Ramshawe had pictures of four tankers, three Iranian, one Chinese, making passage out of the gulf on the Iran side of Hormuz. They had all crossed the line of the minefield, exiting through an area less than three miles wide, four and a half miles offshore at the nearest point.

  “That’s it,” he murmured. “They’re still transporting Iranian crude, and Chinese refined oil from Kazakhstan, right through that gap, while the rest of the world sits and waits for clearance from the Omanis to continue on. And they’re not going to get it. The strait is going to become a giant tanker park, while the Ayatollahs and the Chinese get rich.”

  He picked up the secure telephone and dialed the main White House switchboard, from where he was put straight through to Admiral Morgan, as instructed. “It’s between fifty-six-fifty-six and fifty-six-fifty-nine-east, sir,” he said. “Four ships so far, three Iran, one China.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy. Go tell your boss, while I tell mine.”

  The afternoon newspapers came up, and still no one was making any kind of speculation that something was drastically wrong in the Strait of Hormuz. Arnold Morgan paced his office, wracking his brains, waiting for the inevitable. Jimmy Ramshawe stayed at his desk long after his shift was over, staring at the satellite photographs, occasionally talking to the CIA’s Middle Eastern desk at Langley. But there was nothing. Just the shattering coincidence of two ships damaged in the same stretch of water in the strait.

  The President had listened to Admiral Morgan’s suspicions with equanimity. The relationship between the two men was at a very low point. Eight months previously Arnold Morgan had threatened to quit, and to take the President with him. Everyone knew he could have done so. The grotesque scandal and cover-up over the incident last year in the South China Sea were like a loaded revolver at the Chief Executive’s head. John Clarke would sit out his final months in the Oval Office, courtesy of his National Security Adviser.

  And he was not a man to relish this. Thus he treated any warning from his supposed right-hand man with suspicion and a negative turn of mind. He had been receptive to the idea of moving heavy Naval muscle up into the strait, because he recognized the lethal consequences of being wrong. He stated curtly that such matters were what the Admiral was paid to do, and to proceed as he thought fit.

  He later sent a memorandum to Admiral Morgan outlining the gist of their conversation, and absolving himself of any blame whatsoever if this thing blew up in everyone’s face, with the entire Navy on the move at huge expense, for nothing.

  Arnold Morgan screwed up the memo and tossed it, dismissing its contents as the ramblings of a disarranged mind, if not those of a “total asshole.”

  1900 (local). April 30.

  The Strait of Hormuz.

  The American-owned crude carrier Galveston Star was, without question, the biggest VLCC currently operating in the Gulf. She had a deadweight of 420,000 tons, and her six cargo tanks were fully laden with 450,000 cubic meters of oil, loaded from the man-made steel island at Mina al Ahmadi off the Kuwaiti coast. She was bound for the Gulf of Mexico, and making 20 knots, just about due east now, through Hormuz.

  Her comms room had picked up the warning from the Omani Navy that temporary restrictions were in operation and that there was no clear seaway out to the Arabian Sea at this time. The restricted area ran in a line from Ra’s Qabr al Hindi on the northern Omani coast right across to the Iranian shore more than 30 miles away at position 25.23N, 57.05E. No explanation was offered, save for the fact that a LNG carrier had burned out three days ago, and a damaged VLCC was still leaking oil a dozen miles farther east.

  Captain Tex Packard was unimpressed. His tanker took almost four miles to come to a halt traveling at this speed. He was late, after a pump problem at al Ahmadi where he had spent almost 34 hours loading, instead of the scheduled 21. And it was hotter than hell. All he wanted to do was “drive this baby the fuck out of this godawful place and get home to the Gulf Coast of the USA,” where, incidentally, it was also hotter than hell.

  Captain Tex was not just a dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong tanker man. He was a copper-bo
ttomed purist, even among the men who drive these technological atrocities along the world’s oceans. His ship was almost a quarter of a mile long, and he knew every inch of her.

  He was a great blond-haired bull of a man from the Panhandle plains of northwest Texas, where, he constantly reminded his shipmates, a man could still make a living on the back of a horse, riding the vast cattle ranches. Why, his own family had been doing so for generations, and he was the very first of the Packard cowboys to leave those wide-open spaces for a different kind of wilderness.

  At the age of 47, Captain Tex still spoke fondly of the Panhandle city of Lubbock, where he had attended Texas Tech University in the hometown of the legendary rocker Buddy Holly. In fact Buddy had died the year before Tex was born, but the big sea captain spoke of him as if they had been fast friends “back home in Lubbock.”

  And there were still sweltering evenings in the Iranian Gulf when the distant cries of the mullahs summoning the faithful on the echoing loudspeakers above the mosques mingled out on the calm water with the unmistakable sounds of “Peggy Sue,” “Maybe Baby,” and “Oh Boy!” drifting out from the bridge of the gigantic Galveston Star.

  First thing Captain Tex did when he welcomed a new crew was to make sure they could join in the chorus of “Peggy Sue,” and to make equally certain the cook knew precisely how to make the fabled Texas dish of chicken-fried steak (CFS). He showed them how to pulverize the beef to within an inch of its life with a kitchen mallet, then hand-dip it in egg batter, double-dredged in seasoned flour, before dropping it into searing-hot oil in an iron skillet.

  “That’s CFS, boy,” he would rumble in his deep baritone drawl. “Cook that raht, and you’ll get a place on the highest honor role in mah home state. Ain’t but a few cooks can git it just raht, and I want you to join that golden group, hear me?”

  There was, however, nothing of the buffoon about Tex Packard. He was a superb navigator, and supremely confident in his own unique ability to handle his city-sized vessel, probably the biggest ship there had ever been, and just about indestructible, with her double hull and watertight compartments. As he frequently reminded his crew, “Fifty years ago the British and French landed an army at Suez with nothing else to do ’cept keep the crude-oil carriers moving.”

  He knew the history of the world of tankers, understood that normal life, for millions and millions of people, rested entirely on the free and unimpeded passage of these monster ships.

  It was thus a surprise to no one when Captain Tex Packard told his Chief Engineer, his Cargo Officer and his Chief Officer he had no intention of stopping for the goddamned Omani Navy, whatever their problem was. “Christ, you could lose their entire country in West Texas…. We’ll keep steering zero-nine-zero, and make our southerly turn when we’re just out of Oman’s national water, but not far enough into the Iranian side. Right then we’re going straight through. Next stop, the Texas Gulf Coast, and no more bullshit.

  “Hold this easterly course,” he ordered. “And maintain speed.”

  The Chief Engineer, Jeb Duross, from south Louisiana, said routinely, “This course is gonna take us clear across the incoming tanker lanes. We’d better keep a good watch and a lot of radar.”

  “According to the Omanis, ’most every ship’s stopped, waiting for clearance,” replied the Captain. “So I don’t guess we’re gonna get a whole lot of tonnage coming across our bows. Anyway, we’ll pick ’em up miles away. No problem.”

  The Galveston Star plowed forward. Twenty knots was a good speed for a VLCC, but she was already late, and at this time Captain Packard was prepared to sacrifice fuel for speed. His ship had a range of over 12,000 miles, and up on the bridge, 100 feet above the surface of the water, Buddy Holly was about to rock the high command of the tanker down toward the Iranian end of Jimmy Ramshawe’s Straight Line.

  By now there were several “paints” on the radar, showing tankers making some kind of a holding pattern inside the gulf in the northeastern national waters of Oman. The far side of the tanker lanes, incoming, seemed more or less deserted. There was a depth of 180 feet below the keel, and, in clear seas on longitude 56.44E, Captain Packard made a southeasterly turn, selecting a course that would take him five miles north of the stricken Greek tanker, before he turned due south and went for the Line.

  Of course, only Admiral Morgan and Lt. Ramshawe were certain of the existence of the regular three-line minefield, the PLT-3-moored sea mines every 500 yards. The laying of mines in the dark is an inexact science, but in general terms, this meant there was a mine in the path of any ship separated by a maximum distance of around 170 yards.

  It also meant that if a ship slid by the first one, missing it by, say, 10 yards to starboard, the next one would come up 160 yards to port, and the next two after that 340 yards to port, and 170 to starboard. It was thus possible to miss them altogether, as many ships had. But it was still the maddest game of Russian roulette ever invented, especially for this particular tanker. The giant Galveston Star was 75 yards wide.

  Three miles short of the first line, Captain Packard received a formal warning from one of the Omani Navy Corvettes that it was dangerous to proceed. No one was yet admitting there may be a minefield, and the warning thus had no teeth so far as big Tex Packard was concerned. “Screw ’em,” he confirmed. “We’re outta here.”

  Up ahead the seas were clear. At least they were on the surface, and the Galveston Star came barreling down the strait in a freshly developed high wind off the Arabian desert, an early harbinger of the evolving southwest monsoon.

  This part of the gulf was a wind-convergence zone, where, in the late spring, the northeasters out of the central Chinese desert, which prevail all winter, gave way to the southwesters from Africa. This year they were early. And strong gusty breezes can catch the massive hull of a VLCC and cause a significant leeway.

  The Galveston Star was thus sliding infinitessimally east as she stood fair down the strait, plowing through the short surface waves, having completed her long gentle turn toward the south.

  In fact, she missed the first of Admiral Zhang’s mines by at least 150 yards to starboard. But the good news on Line One was almost certainly going to put her bows awfully close to the PLT-3 moored on Line Two.

  On she ran for another 600 yards, still drifting very slightly east, closing the gap between her own course and the murderous one-ton, steel-encased hunk of TNT that bobbed on its wire mooring 12 feet below the surface.

  The massive bows of the Galveston Star actually missed it completely, and the wash of the widening hull pushed the mine away on its wire. However, it swung back inward, hard and fast, crashing into the port side of the hull, 300 feet from the point of the bow.

  At four minutes past 8 P.M. it detonated with awesome force, blowing the plates apart, right through both layers of the hull, blasting a massive hole in Cargo Tank Four. And Buddy Holly was still singing as the onrushing crude oil blew up in a raging fireball above the ocean.

  “Stars appear and shadows a-falling…you can hear my heart a-calling…Oh boy!”

  Tex Packard could not believe his eyes. And the 420,000-tonner shuddered in its death throes as her colossal weight began to tear the entire hull apart. It was the biggest shipwreck in history, and it was only four miles from the Greek tanker that had been pouring out oil since Saturday. The Galveston Star was wallowing bang on Jimmy Ramshawe’s Straight Line, 12 miles off the coast of Iran.

  Captain Packard knew a career-blowing decision when he saw one. And he’d just made it.

  “What are you going to do, sir?” asked Jeb Duross, anxiety written all over his face.

  “Probably buy a cattle ranch,” replied Big Tex, thoughtfully.

  “Actually, I meant right now.”

  “Send out a MAYDAY! Radio Oman and Dubai, see if we can salvage any of the cargo, which I doubt. At least not yet, till we can get a couple of big ships out here to start pumping. Meanwhile we just gotta watch the fires. Crude sometimes doesn’t burn, but ours
is doing just that, and once it gets started, it’s likely to go on for a long time.”

  “Looks like the fire’s inside the ship, and that might be real dangerous,” said Jeb.

  “Sure might. She gets much hotter, we’ll have to abandon. Sure hate to leave her, but this stuff can really burn gets hot enough. I’m not planning to be the hero, least not the dead hero…. Have the lifeboats ready, Jeb, and have someone turn off the music, willya?…Just don’t want Buddy singing in a death ship. ’Sides I wanna get mah CDs home to Texas…Buddy wouldn’t wanna be singing to no towelheads.”

  All mah life I been a-waiting…tonight there’ll be no hesitatin’…Oh boy!

  Midday (local). Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Lieutenant Ramshawe had his small office television turned on several minutes early for CNN’s 12 o’clock bulletin, and when he heard the lead item there was no longer any doubt in his or anyone else’s mind.

  “We are receiving reports that one of the biggest oil tankers in the world, the four-hundred-twenty-thousand-ton Galveston Star out of the Texas Gulf port of Houston, is currently on fire and breaking up in the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.

  “The cause of the accident is at present unknown, but the Captain and his crew are believed to be preparing to abandon her. Fires are reported raging over one hundred feet into the skies.

  “This is the third major shipping accident in the strait in the past four days, following the inferno of the liquid-gas carrier Global Bronco of Houston, on Friday, and the explosion in the Greek crude carrier Olympus 2004 on Saturday.”

  The newscaster ended the report by stating the U.S. Navy would be issuing a statement later in the afternoon, but as yet there was no suggestion that any nation had elected to place sea mines in the strait to endanger world oil-shipping routes.

  Right at that moment Jimmy’s phone rang, and he heard the gruff and distinct tones of Admiral Morgan. “Okay, Jimmy, I guess that does it. Go keep your boss up to speed, but keep me personally alerted to any information you get off the overheads.”