guard to mail it. It was only a short walk over to the submarine jetties where the
“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
“You’ve studied the media more than I, Jicai. Has anyone made a connection?”
“Only the Sunday edition of the
“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.”
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
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.”
The American-owned crude carrier
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-bottomed 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
