“Bring it home, Sixteen. Watch yourself. We just had word that Saddam has called off his observance of the no-fly zone. It’s open season out there. We’re sending up three replacements to work the edges. Get it on home.”
“That’s a roger, Mother Lode.”
Captain Smarthing turned his plane and headed back toward the field near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He had a letter to write to a widow. Later, Smarthing heard that his was the first aerial combat of the day that would see four United Nations planes shot down and eight Iraqi fighters blasted from the air.
Colonel Jarash Hamdoon sat watching his idol and longtime friend pacing beside his big desk in the fifth sublevel of one of his bombproof war rooms. In it were complete communications with his armed forces, with the government, even with his favorite baker. The complex had been stocked with enough food, water, and batteries to last a month. Even the emergency electrical power generator was in place with a separate smokestack and air inlet from the surface to function in another part of the fifth underground level.
Saddam Hussein turned and stared at the colonel. “My friend, it was not supposed to go like this. We had seven of the eight nations practically in our pocket. We had set up takeovers from inside the countries by trusted and loyal friends. We paid dearly for that friendship. Now we have only one of those nations under our control. We need the larger ones, Syria especially.”
“But you have made a statement, Mr. President. You have declared Iraq’s freedom from the devil Western powers. You have cut down four of their fighters over Iraqi airspace; you have sent tankers with Iraqi oil into the marketplace. You have declared our freedom.”
Saddam slumped into the executive leather chair behind the desk and frowned at his top adviser.
“My good friend Jarash. It has been twenty years, you and I at the helm of this great nation. We are not in the position today that I hoped we would be in back in 1979. What has happened?”
“Iraq has many enemies, Mr. President. They coil and strike like serpents. They are everywhere we look. We must be careful how we walk through the desert in our bare feet.”
Saddam smiled, then rubbed his face and his mustache. “It was not supposed to go this way. We must do something quickly, and it must be dramatic. They will not attempt to bomb us into surrendering. They tried that for two months in the Desert War, and it didn’t work. It won’t work now. So what will they do?
“They will try to isolate us, to cut us off from all the rest of the world. We must do something to shut out the rest of the world from us.”
“The Strait of Hormuz?” Hamdoon asked softly.
“Exactly. We have planned for two years. Everything is ready. Iran has given me its word for cooperation whenever we ask. The time is now. Let me make one call to Tehran, then you make the necessary calls to get the program into motion. I want it done tonight. It all must be in place by morning. No ships will go through the strait until Iraq says that they can. That will gain us a lot of respect. Do it now.”
Hamdoon went to his separate office next door. Two minutes later, his phone buzzed and he picked it up.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“My call is completed. The door is open. The rest is up to you.”
“Thank you. It will be done.” He hit the disconnect button, waited a moment, then made three phone calls. For each of them he gave the one code word, Armageddon. One navy lieutenant challenged it.
“Sir, for that word, you must have a secondary countersign word. Do you know what it is?”
“No, Lieutenant Aziz. The question is, do you know what the countersign is?”
“Yes sir, ‘In Allah’s hands’.”
“Very well, Lieutenant Aziz. See that it is done, tonight.”
In the port city of Qeshm, Iran, on the coast of the Strait of Hormuz, Lieutenant Aziz rousted out his crew of seventeen and fifteen special technicians. They had been in place here in Iran for six months. Every day they practiced. Lately, they had been practicing at night.
Now they would do it at night.
Lieutenant Aziz felt a wave of emotion fill his mind and body. For the greater glory of Allah.
The Iraqi PB-90 coastal patrol boat moved out of the Iranian port at dusk. All was ready on board the ninety-foot Iraqi naval boat. It was the lone survivor of a fleet of fifteen of the speedy coastal craft purchased years ago. Six had been sunk in the war with Iran, three more sunk in the Desert Storm war against Kuwait, three were scrapped, and three left at the naval port of Basra. Only one had been refitted and made seaworthy. Now it would have the honor of bringing the Western powers to their knees.
Lieutenant Aziz felt his heart racing as he went over the plans again as he had daily for the past six months. They would proceed to the narrowest part of the strait, a thirty-five-mile-wide section. However, the ship channel through that area was no more than three miles across. It was a well-known and much-used passage.
His divers knew their job. He went to the hold and to the special containers on the deck and checked to be sure all was ready. The large boxes held relics of World War II that Iraq had purchased seven years ago when the old Soviet Union was breaking up. Many arms and munitions, even atomic weapons, had been for sale back then if you knew the right people to contact.
Lieutenant Aziz heard that their leader, Saddam Hussein, had wanted to buy two nuclear bombs, but he didn’t have enough ready cash. Instead, he bought the munitions resting on the deck of the PB-90. Lieutenant Aziz had the commander’s trust that he could do the job that must be done to insure Iraq’s surge to becoming a world power. Soon they would have all of the clout they needed to do it.
He knew the history of the items in his care. They had been devised, researched, and developed by Germany near the end of World War II. The Nazis never had a chance to use them. By then, they were in a land war on their home country and had no need for naval arms.
He touched the case gently. Soon they would be uncrated and inserted into the Strait of Hormuz at precise locations.
The Germans had been brilliant on this project. They developed a passive mine that could be planted on the sea floor, activated on command, and then would lay in wait with its sensors tuned for the right moment to fire.
Aziz went over in his mind again how the mines worked. They lay on the gulf bottom. The sensitive mine felt the magnetic pull of a large mass of metal, the steel hull of a large ship such as a tanker. The magnetic force moved a pressure piston in the mine in response to each change in the electromagnetic flux. This generated a small trickle of electricity as its armature cut through the magnetic lines of force. With this feature, the mine would gather electricity from the ships moving near it but well overhead.
As with many early naval mines, these were shaped like torpedoes. A titanium casing, developed by the Germans late in the war, protected the mine’s interior from any corrosive element in the sea or in the dank caves where they were stored for years.
Inside the mine, a small magnetic generator and a primitive signal transducer still worked. Each of the mines had been taken apart and checked to be sure they functioned.
Once the mines were placed on the strait bottom, they would be activated with a specific signal from a transmitter on board the patrol boat. The mine would hear the signal. Inside the titanium shell, a relay in a spectrum analyzer would click on. Electrons would trickle out of a capacitor and into the firing circuit. At that moment, the mine would be armed and ready to fire.