“That’s precisely where I had the rendezvous point, Alan…. Great minds, right?”
“Realistic minds, at least, sir…Shark wouldn’t want to move inshore any farther. She starts leaving a wake — that’s asking for trouble. Iran’s got a few fast attack craft with ASW mortars. We wanna stay real silent.”
“How many guys does the SDV hold?”
“Well, the old ones carried only ten. That’s the one on Mendel Rivers…crew of two and eight SEALs. This new one holds fourteen, so we got twelve active SEAL demolition guys. We’re just lucky the SDV is on the deck of Shark, otherwise we’d be all over the damned place. Still, I guess we’re due for a bit of luck. Haven’t had much for a while, and I gotta real gut feeling about getting Beijing out of Arabia.”
“You and me. What d’you say, General?”
Tim Scannell looked thoughtful. “I was just thinking: Something goes wrong, say the submarine gets hit and crippled, any thoughts on backup? You need a carrier in the area to frighten everyone away, or you want me to order up some fighter aircraft we can deploy out of Oman, with the Brits’ help?”
“Good call, General. Anything hits our submarine, I mean a surface ship, we vaporize it, right?”
“Yessir, Arnie. But how about an Iranian or Chinese Kilo-Class submarine in the area? Both nations have ’em, and as you know they’re little bastards under the water.”
Admiral Dixon responded immediately: “I’ll order a coupla LA-Class nuclear boats to ride shotgun on Shark while she goes in. They’ll pick up a Kilo if it’s close enough.”
“And then?” Arnold Morgan looked quizzical.
“If it’s under the surface, we sink it. No questions asked.”
“Thank you, CNO. That’s my language you’re talking, right there. You can only fuck around with these towelheads and Orientals for just so long, right?”
“Right, sir.”
“No bullshit,” added Admiral Morgan, by way of emphasis.
“Matter of fact, sir,” said Alan Dixon, “I’d say our biggest worry is getting the guys in, once they leave the SDV…. You see, the twenty-meter depth line is all of five miles offshore…the ten-meter line’s only about a half mile farther in…then they got a coupla miles in about four feet of water on flat sand…. Terrain’s fine, but there is a risk of detection…and it’s a long way back to deep water and safety.”
“A long way for you and me, Alan. But not these guys…they’ll slide through those warm shallows like a shoal of Florida bonefish — fast, sleek, unpredictable and likely to fight like hell.” Arnold Morgan made a curving forward motion with the palm of his left hand…. “Death to the Chinese oilers, right?”
“Actually, I’m more worried about pursuit than anything else, Arnie, especially if they keep a fleet of helicopters at the refinery.”
“Alan, if that place goes up the way I think it will, there’s not going to be anything even resembling pursuit. Bergstrom has the charts, and his top instructors will be involved in the planning. I expect Commander Rick Hunter will lead the squad, but I’m not sure if he’ll go into Iran or Burma. Not both.”
“You have real faith in those SEALs, don’t you?”
“Yes. If they can’t do it, it can’t be done. And I know that a group of the most highly trained demolition killers on this planet can blow up a goddamned oil refinery. Gimme a book o’matches, and I’ll blow the fucker up myself.”
Both Alan Dixon and Tim Scannell laughed at the President’s top military adviser: always just the right combination of steel and intellect, respect and contempt, fortitude and laughter. Arnold Morgan really was anyone’s idea of the perfect keeper of America’s front line.
Both the Admiral and General now stood back and watched as Morgan once more stepped up to the chart, this time holding a grainy black-and-white photograph in his left hand while making a tiny drawing on the chart, a small pencil line five miles offshore right on the 20-meter depth line.
“See that?” he said. “That’s the loading dock. Just completed construction. That’s where the big Chinese VLCCs will be landing. The pipeline’s already in, but we have no evidence of trade yet. Pity the sonofabitch is so far from shore, otherwise we could just hit some combustible merchant ship and give ’em Texas City Two. But, as the proprietors of the refinery might put it, no can do. So we’ll just have to slam the fucker, bang in the middle of the plant. Then maybe take out the loading dock on the way back, if there’re ships at it.”
“Okay, sir. Sounds good, if a bit tricky. You wanna talk some about the Bassein River hit?”
“Not now, Tim. I’m judging that to be a lot more complicated. We’ll have John Bergstrom in before we finalize. And possibly a couple of his commanders — maybe forty-eight hours. Wednesday morning.”
He saw the two service chiefs out, and then walked slowly back to the chart of the Strait of Hormuz. And he muttered to himself, “They must know that goddamned refinery is vulnerable. They must know there will be some form of retribution if the U.S. finds out they helped lay that minefield. Or maybe they figure we’ll never find out for certain….”
He paused for a full minute. And then he muttered, “Nah, they’re just not that stupid. They must know we’ll find out….”
And if that’s the case, he pondered, there’s only one question left: What in the name of Christ are they up to?
She was turned along the southwesterly run of the minefield now, the U.S. Navy’s beloved forty-year-old “Connie,” plowing forward into the hot wind of this sweltering Arabian night. Right now she was about five miles north of the field, and the area seemed quiet as the Indian Pondicherrys moved steadily about their hazardous business, cutting the mines free and then blowing them on the surface.
But still the howling F-14D Tomcats, courtesy of U.S. fighter wing VF 2—the fabled Bounty Hunters — gunned their aircraft off Connie’s 1,000-foot-long flight deck, up and into the black skies that now blanketed the most lethal stretch of ocean in the entire world.
Each pilot wore on his right sleeve the Bounty Hunters’ triangular emblem, the yellow delta-winged fighter-bomber on red-white-and-blue stripes. Most of them also sported the jaunty gunslinger patch, the cowboy tomcat leaning on a big D, with the new stitched lettering, Anytime, Pal.
And they flew right out on the edge of the envelope, banking in hard over the Iranian coastline and then back out to sea. This really was Anytime, Pal, because right now the U.S. Navy meant business, and everyone knew it. One squeak out of an Iranian antiaircraft battery, one illumination, one suggestion, and that battery would be obliterated by a phalanx of missiles with an accuracy record of around 100 percent.
Navy pilots are used to being accused of “U.S. bullying.” But they were not bullies tonight, while the whole world awaited the reopening of the gulf to oil tankers.
Tonight the Navy fliers were the fearless White Knights of the Skies, the way they mostly saw themselves anyhow. And they hurled their Tomcats through the high darkness of Islam, the single most threatening airborne cavalry ever assembled, on a mission to shut down the menace of a known aggressor. Anytime, Pal. The patches said it all.