“No, Jimmy,” he said with heavy emphasis. “That is not the reason. They are flying the Iranian flag because Iran has just bought the two Chinese frigates. That was the objective of the big dockyard junket. It was a Chinese sales tour…. You don’t think they’d come all that way for nothing, do you?…Not the Chinese. They like money a lot more than they like anything else.
“It was a goodwill sales visit. No doubt in my mind. They conducted a fleet exercise together, exchanged information, and at the conclusion of the festivities, Iran agreed to purchase the two ships. The first two guided-missile frigates they’ve ever owned.”
“Well, sir, if that’s your opinion…I’ll have to agree.”
“Do you have a different opinion?”
“Well, sir. I have been wondering about the mines. And I’m still not sure the Chinese haven’t made some kind of a devious move with a view to laying them.”
“Ah, that’s your prerogative as an Intelligence officer, Jimmy. But it’s been your prerogative for weeks, months, and nothing has happened, as I told you it wouldn’t.”
“Righto, boss. I’ll buy that. Maybe they did just want to store up some Russian mines for some future mission. Anyway, if you’re right, they just paid for them, with the frigate money. Good on ’em, right?”
The Admiral smiled. “You’re learning, Jimmy. In this business, it’s very easy to spend your life chasing your tail…seeing spooks, plots and schemes around every corner. Just stay focused, and keep a weather eye out for the really big stuff, when you’ve got real evidence. That’s all.”
The young Lieutenant left, returning to his office, and gazing once more at his wide, marked chart of the Strait of Hormuz. He stared at it for several minutes, and muttered to himself, “I just wonder what’s sitting down there on the seabed, right offshore of those new missile placements.”
Admiral Zu Jicai, now C-in-C of the entire Navy, was back in his old office, and he opened up the secure line to Beijing, waiting quietly for Zhang Yushu to come to the phone.
When the great man finally spoke on the line from the Chinese capital, the conversation was unusually brief for two such old friends.
“Nothing on any foreign networks re DRAGONFLY.”
“No suspicion anywhere?”
“None. Shall I activate the field in the next two days?”
“Affirmative.”
“Good-bye, sir.”
“Good-bye, Jicai.”
Hardly a ripple disturbed the flat blue calm of the southern waters of the strait. It was one of those sultry Arabian mornings, in which the livid heat of the desert sun makes life on land almost unbearable, and life on board any ship not a whole lot better.
Six miles northeast of the Musandam Peninsula, the waters were almost oily to look at, as the tide began to turn inward from the Arabian Sea. There was no ocean swell, no little eddying cats’ paws on the surface, no movement in the hot, still air.
But ripples were on the way. Giant ripples, from the big white bow wave of the 80,000-ton black-hulled gas carrier Global Bronco, making a stately 18 knots, southeasterly through the water. The 900-foot carrier was laden down with 135,000 cubic meters of liquefied natural gas, frozen to minus 160 degrees centigrade. In more comprehensive stats, that’s 3,645,000 cubic feet, or, a 100-foot-high building, 200 feet long by 200 feet wide. Which is a lot of frozen gas, and it forms, by general consensus, the most potentially lethal cargo on all the world’s oceans.
Unlike crude oil, which does not instantly combust, liquid natural gas is hugely volatile, compressed as it is 600 times from normal gas. Tanker corporations are near-paranoid about safety regulations for its transportation around the world. Layer upon layer of fail-safe backup systems are built into every LNG carrier. They are not the biggest tankers on the ocean, but then, neither is the nuclear-headed torpedo the biggest bomb. In any event, the worldwide industry of transporting liquid gas has never once suffered a fire, never mind an explosion.
Up on the bridge, almost 100 feet above the water, the obsessively careful Commodore Don McGhee stared out over the four bronze-colored holding domes, which each rose 60 feet above the scarlet-painted deck. The bow of the Global Bronco was nearly 300 yards in front of him, and the veteran Master from the southeast Texas gulf port of Houston had a view straight down the massive gantry that ran as a steel catwalk clean across the top of each dome, all the way down to the foredeck.
Right now the ship was making its way well outside the Omani inshore traffic zone, with the local Navy’s firing practice area 10 miles astern. Ahead of them was the narrowest part of the Hormuz Strait, and in this clear weather they would see plainly the Omani headlands of Jazirat Musandam, and two miles farther south, Ra’s Qabr al Hindi. They were too far away to catch a glimpse on the horizon of the glowering shores of Iran on the eastern side of the crescent-shaped 30-mile-wide seaway.
Commodore McGhee was in conference with Chief Engineer Andre Waugh. And up ahead of them they could still see a Liberian-registered British tanker, a 300,000-ton VLCC bound for the North Atlantic. They had been catching her slowly all the way down from the new gas-loading terminal off Qatar, right around the Emirates peninsula, past Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and now they were less than 50 miles from the open waters of the Arabian Sea. All tanker captains were glad to get out of the gulf, and McGhee was no exception.
There was always a menace about patrolling Iranian warships, a menace compounded in the past few months by yet another Iranian militant threat to lay a minefield directly off its coast at the choke point of the entrance.
Both tanker officers knew there had been for several weeks a worldwide unease about China’s warships currently moored in the Ayatollah’s Navy base at Bandar Abbas. And they knew also of the tensions caused by the opening of the brand-new Sino-Iranian refinery at the end of the Chinese-built pipeline, which ran 1,000 miles, out of the Kazakhstan oil fields, across Turkmenistan, and clean through the sweltering Iranian Plateaux to the coast. Everyone in the Western oil business knew this pipeline gave China something close to a “lock” on the second-largest easy-access oil deposits on earth.
One more threat by Iran’s increasingly noisy anti-West politicians to bottle up the entrance to the gulf would probably send the Pentagon into a collective dance of death. It was all politics, threat and counterthreat, but to men like Commodore McGhee, masters of the big crude-oil and gas carriers working the north end of the Arabian Sea, those politics had an edge of grim reality.
“This darned place always gives me the creeps,” he said. “I’ll just be glad to make the open ocean.”
“I know what you mean,” replied Chief Andre Waugh. “So do the British by the look of it…that’s a Royal Navy helicopter up ahead, checking that big tanker out of the area. Right now they’re checking every British ship in and out of the gulf. Guess they don’t like the political situation, right?”
No ships in the entire history of navigation have been more political than the big tankers, upon whose safe passage half the world depends in order to keep moving. The fate and prosperity of nations literally hang in the balance as these great leviathans carry the principal source of world energy from where it is to where it is needed.
Commodore McGhee, a tanker man for thirty years, had never once entered Iranian waters, always keeping well over on the Omani side. Back home in Texas, in the Houston control room, on the thirty-second floor of the Travis Street headquarters of Texas Global Ships, Inc., Robert J. Heseltine III, the president, had issued specific instructions: Stay well clear of the Ayatollahs and their Navy. Don McGhee did not need reminding.