overcome that. The new ground for all of them would be the last mile, when it was too shallow to swim, possibly too tiring to wade fast carrying a lot of gear, including the flippers.
The twelve-man assault team for the attack on the refinery was essentially one and a half SEAL squads, from Group One, Coronado, the numbers being governed by the number of men who could fit into the ASDV. They would be led by the near-legendary combat SEAL Lt. Commander Ray Schaeffer, from the seaport of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Ray had taken part in two of the most lethal peacetime SEAL missions ever mounted, a submarine attack deep in the interior of northern Russia and the harrowing assault on the Chinese jail the previous year, for which he had been highly decorated.
In SEAL tradition, he was not required to accept another order to go into combat. But there was no need for any order. Lieutenant Commander Schaeffer not only volunteered; he insisted, and his old boss Rick Hunter was delighted to have him aboard. The attack on the refinery would be Ray’s first, and last, overall field command, before he returned to the East Coast as a senior BUD/S instructor at Little Creek, Virginia.
Ray was eminently qualified for this command. Aside from his experience both under fire and undercover, he was a superb navigator and an expert seaman and yachtsman. He was the son of a sea captain and former platoon middleweight boxing champion.
He was not as big as Rick Hunter, nor as brute-force strong. But then neither was anyone else. But Ray Schaeffer was an ice-cold operator, ruthless with a knife, deadly with any firearm and, under attack, a trained, merciless killer. His men would follow him into hell.
His 2 I/C would be Lt. Dan Conway, from Connecticut, who had performed with highest distinction in the attack on the Chinese jail. He was thirty now, a tall dark-haired demolition expert from the submarine base town of New London. He’d finished in first place after the BUD/S “Hell Week,” the murderous SEAL indoctrination that breaks one in two of the applicants.
A superb athlete, Dan had very nearly gone for a career in professional baseball, but Annapolis beat out Fen-way Park for his services, and the ex-college all-star catcher had never looked back. Everyone knew he was destined for high office in the Navy SEALs, and his promotion to Lt. Commander after this mission in the Hormuz Strait was a foregone conclusion.
One other Lieutenant would be included in the first group, the 28-year-old Virginian John Nathan, serving on his first combat mission. John, the son of a prosperous Richmond travel agent, had elected to become a SEAL specialist in high explosives and their various detonators. He was thus in overall charge of the eleven limpet mines, now stowed in the hold of the giant Navy freighter. Six of them, with specially aimed charges, would be attached to the massive holding tanks in the gasoline and petrochemical areas — another three to the bases of the 100-foot- high steel bubble towers that separated the crude. All eleven were fitted with backpack straps for the swim-in, and large magnets to grip the target surface.
John Nathan had sat in on the meeting with Admiral Bergstrom and Commanders Bennett and Hunter while they discussed tactics to take out the Control Center. At first the Admiral had toyed with a plan to hit the center with Mk 138 satchel bombs: just hurl them through the windows and run like hell for the fence, right at the last minute, leaving the Chinese to deal with the chaos for a couple of hours before the main charges went off and, hopefully, blew the place to pieces. The destruction of the Control Center would, of course, render it nearly impossible to turn off the valves and isolators that regulated the flow of crude oil through the main pipelines.
But Rusty was skeptical of this strategy. The SEAL leader from Maine thought the explosion in the Control Center would cause the Chinese instantly to summon assistance from the Iranian base at Bandar Abbas to conduct a thorough search of the entire refinery. It would be, said Rusty, a search that would surely reveal the limpet mines on the tanks and towers. “They’d only need to find one,” he said, “and they’d go through the place, searching every square inch until they found the rest.”
In his opinion, that would be “kinda silly.”
No, the Control Center would have to go off bang with all the other stuff, using a delayed charge of a couple of hours to give the SEALs time to get clear, out into the deep water. John Nathan recommended the plastic explosive C4, which looks like modeling clay and can be made into any shape. It works off an M-60 time fuse lighter, which burns through regular green plastic cord loaded with gunpowder at around one foot per 40 seconds. John preferred this fuse because it’s a spring-loaded pin like a shotgun, no matches, no bright light, and extremely quiet, just a dull thud. Also there was a new timing device that could delay it several hours, and in John Nathan’s experience it was just about 100 percent reliable.
Final details for the second SEAL mission, to the Bassein Delta, were not yet finalized, but all the necessary fuses, plastic explosives, mines and detonators were loaded into the Galaxy for storage at Diego Garcia. There was enough C4 alone in the hold to “blow up half the world,” according to John Nathan, who carried with him the complete list of ordnance throughout the long flight.
“Something combustible hits this baby,” he said, in his deep Virginian drawl, “guess we’d wobble the goddamned rings of Saturn.”
Nathan had started off his Navy career as a navigation officer in a frigate, and still liked to pontificate about astronomy, the universe and the solar system. The heavy-set, fair-haired southerner answered to the nickname of Clouds, which everyone thought was hysterical, given its obvious proximity to his present field of expertise, with a progression to the word
Sitting right next to Clouds, on the rear bench, was another southerner, Petty Officer Ryan Combs, from North Carolina. He was a tall, athletic outdoorsman, expert with a hunting gun and a fishing rod. Ryan was only 26, but he was a tremendous swimmer and as good with a machine gun as anyone on the Coronado Base. He could handle the 500-rounds-a-minute M-60E4 single-handedly, and he would carry it under the wire into the Chinese refinery. Commander Bennett had personally requested his appointment to the SEAL combat mission on the shores of Iran. It would be Ryan’s first.
Rusty had also requested personally the big, beefy Pennsylvanian Rob Cafiero, the platoon’s heavyweight boxing champion, who was as big and almost as strong as Commander Hunter himself. Rob was a mild-mannered giant, with dark, close-cut hair and not an ounce of fat on his 220-pound frame. At 32 he had made Chief Petty Officer, but Rob was ambitious and was studying to take a commission as soon as possible. Like Lt. Nathan, he was an expert in high explosives, but his best field of expertise was unarmed combat. He was a veteran of the conflict in the mountains of Kosovo.
These were the five key players in the 12-man assault force that would slide into the warm shallows along the coast of Iran fewer than five days from then.
Lieutenant Commander Dan Headley could not make up his mind whether he was being trivial or not. The new orders had arrived that Friday night, while he and the CO had been together in the control room. Dan had read them out to the Commander, whose comment had been, at best, vague.
The orders specified a critical new mission, the insertion of a SEAL team, a precision task that always heightens tension on a submarine. But Commander Reid had merely said, “I really must take my shoes off.” And then had proceeded to do so.
Lieutenant Commander Headley had thus found himself for the first time in his life next to a commanding officer who was standing in the control room in his socks.
It wasn’t much. But it was new. And Dan Headley did not really do new. He was a devotee of the tried-and- tested ways of the United States Navy. He liked and expected his fellow officers to act in a predictable, cautious, but determined way: though sometimes with an added dash of daring, the way most senior warship officers are trained to view an often hostile world.
He particularly liked his commanding officer to react in a calculated manner.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Dan.
The trouble was, he could not get it out of his mind, though he knew it to be insignificant. The CO had swiftly returned to normal, even suggested they have a private talk about the insertion later in the afternoon. But he had left without really acknowledging the seriousness of the forthcoming Black Op the following Tuesday night.
Dan Headley found it curiously disconcerting. And now, as the submarine cruised slowly at periscope depth, 20 miles off the port bow of the
