Then the mines would lay in wait, checking each ship that went over it, until the right signals came. The mine’s acoustic sensors would determine the size of the ship and if it fit the right conditions that had been programmed into it. When the right conditions were met, the analog circuits would tell it to fire. When the mine was triggered, it would break apart and fire a torpedo that would slam upward, seeking the steel target. The torpedoes were designed with delay fuses, so they would penetrate well into the tanker before exploding with tremendous force.
Lieutenant Aziz checked with his navigator. They were near the first marker on his map. The patrol boat slowed. Crewmen had the first mine ready. It was lowered gently into the water. It had been designed to settle slowly to the bottom and to remain upright. Divers went along with lights for the first fifty feet to be sure it settled properly. The average depth of the strait here was 300 feet. When the men were sure the mine was moving properly, they returned to the boat and boarded.
Ten times they dropped the mines in a straight line across the three-mile channel through the strait.
It was almost dawn when they finished. Currents had thrown them off line three times, and they had to reestablish their position. Now Lieutenant Aziz held the portable transmitter and eyed it. It was time. He pushed on a switch, then lowered the device into the water. He pressed the sending button on a long cord twice to be sure that the mines would receive the signal to activate them. Even after this long a time, he was sure that all ten of the mines would activate and establish an absolutely impenetrable wall, not allowing any ship to pass. In practice runs, the test mine had activated on each try.
Back in the small bridge, he put the activator transmitter away. He looked at it critically. While deadly for all ships, there was one way to let friendly ships sail through the screen. All he had to do was to send a deactivating signal to the mines, and they would be turned off.
After Iraq’s own oil tankers passed through the strait, the mines could be turned on again, trapping any ships inside the Persian Gulf that were already there and denying entry by any from the Gulf of Oman. It was a brilliant strategy and one that could win the whole Middle East for Iraq.
Back onshore, he left his crew on board and made a telephone call. It was his signal to Colonel Hamdoon that the mines were in place and activated.
Iran knew of the plan and would not send any of its tankers through after midnight. Iraq would not send any of her oil-for-food ships through, either. There had been some discussion between Colonel Hamdoon, Lieutenant Aziz, and Saddam Hussein about giving a warning to the shippers. It had been decided that the first tanker to be blown up would be the first warning to the world.
Then the official Iraqi news agency would tell everyone that the Strait of Hormuz was mined and that no ship of any nation would be permitted to enter or leave the Persian Gulf.
Lieutenant Aziz smiled as he thought about it. Now Iraq had a powerful handle on the oil trade. He laughed softly. Now Iraq could increase the price of oil as much as she wanted to. She could double the price of oil to forty dollars per barrel. As he remembered, crude oil from the Persian Gulf nations accounted for more than 70 percent of the oil consumed by the world market.
With absolute control of the strait, they could force other nations in the gulf to raise their prices, or they wouldn’t get their tankers through the minefield. Raise their price to the Iraqi price, and they would be safely passed through.
It was a masterful plan, one that was unbeatable. He would not sleep tonight. He would be on watch to see which oil tanker would be the first to feel the sting of the fifty-five-year-old German torpedo mines.
12
Murdock watched Stroh with a slight frown where they sat in the SEALs’ assembly room on the big carrier.
“Let me understand this, Mr. Stroh. The two-carrier, 350- plane armada of the U.S. military machine is scared shitless of the minuscule Iraq navy. So Third Platoon is nominated to go in and scuttle the whole four to six vessels in their safe harbor?”
“About the size of it Kimo Sabe. Hey, we’re not at war with Iraq, so we can’t bomb the ships into kindling. But there could be some kind of accident in the naval port and all of their ships suffer such damage that they might never again sail the mighty waters of the Persian Gulf.”
“That’s CIA talk to hit them before they hit us. Yeah, sure, we can do it. When?”
“Tonight. We’ll fly you to Kuwait City, and from there you’ll take an army chopper up to the border with Iraq. There you’ll meet with a ground party of four Kuwaiti drivers and their civilian vehicles, which will transport you to as close to Basra as they can. Our guess is it’s about forty miles.”
“We’ll need our wet suits and explosives and our weapons. How do we do that?”
“The civilian cars will have Iraqi identification and will be spaced out so it won’t look like a convoy. Our sources say you should have no trouble getting to the Euphrates River, which runs through Basra and where their naval base is situated.”
“So we could hit the water and work upstream to the base, blow it, and then try to get out?”
“That’s what your rebreathers are for. We’ll have a fast boat at the mouth of the Euphrates in international waters to pick you out of the wet.”
“Might work, if we can get into that river close enough to the base.”
“How close is that?”
“Within a quarter of a mile. We’ll travel light. Just TNAZ and our weapons. What kind of ships are we talking about?”
“Our latest intel shows that they have one frigate, the Ibn Khaldoum, but it is not in operation. It should be taken out. There are two Corvettes shown on their books, but only one we know of was delivered from China and it is not fully operational, and does not have any weapons systems. It went to the dock in 1995 for minor repairs and has not been out of the yard since.
“We understand there are three patrol craft left from the fifteen purchased from Yugoslavia. Most were sunk in wars with Iran and Desert Storm. One of the three left may be operational. These are hundred-foot-long ships. There may be as many as eighty twelve- to twenty-meter inshore patrol boats of the Sawari class. There is also one replenishment tanker of four hundred and twenty-three feet, but it is not ported in Basra.”
Murdock looked at his watch. “It’s oh-eight-fifteen. When do we leave here?”
“On a COD in two hours. Get twisting some tails.”
The phone in the assembly room rang, and Murdock took it. He listened and then looked at Stroh.
“Now there is some real trouble. A Kuwaiti tanker just took a torpedo from a mine of some sort in the Strait of Hormuz. It’s on fire and sinking. Saddam Hussein has just broadcast a warning to all tankers in the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. It is mined, and any ship trying to enter or leave the gulf will be sunk.”
Lieutenant Aziz had taken his patrol boat out of the small harbor and anchored just offshore. He had his search radar, an older Decca 1226 I-band, watching the approaches to the strait. They had been watching most of the night. Now, slightly before dawn, his radar showed a tanker moving down the channel at eighteen knots. He didn’t know what registry it was, but it was steaming into certain disaster.
If his mines worked the way they should, the huge tanker would send a signal more than strong enough to trigger the firing of the closest mine. He wondered if two of the mines might fire almost at the same time, if the ship came between two of them. He didn’t know.