The Shark Mutiny (2001)

by Patrick Robinson

  To Jimmy Ramshawe this was food and drink—a complex, slightly sinister problem that wanted studying, if not solving. He knew the gigantic Antonov freighter—known as the Ruslan, after a mythological Russian giant—could carry a colossal 120 tons of freight 35,000 feet above the earth’s surface. He had a good imagination and did not need to utilize much of it before he could visualize 120 big sea mines hurtling through the stratosphere at 550 knots, bound for some distant ocean where they could be primed to inconvenience U.S. Navy fleets.

  At the age of 28, Jimmy had been selected by the Navy to serve in the Intelligence service. A tall dark-haired young officer, he possessed an acutely analytical mind. He was a lateral thinker, an observer of convolutions, complications and intricacies. As a commanding officer he would have developed into a living nightmare. No team in any warship would ever have provided him with quite sufficient data to make a major decision.

  But he had a superb intelligence, the highest IQ in his class at Annapolis, and his superiors spotted him a long way out. Lt. Ramshawe was born for Intelligence work at the highest level. And while his young fellow officers went forward, following their stars as future commanding officers of surface or subsurface warships, the lanky, athletic Jimmy was sent into the electronic hothouse of America’s most sensitive, heavily guarded Intelligence agency, where, to quote the admissions Admiral, “There would be ample outlet for his outstanding talents.”

  He was an unusual member of Fort Meade’s staff for the simple reason that he looked and sounded like an Australian. The son of a Sydney diplomat, he had been born in Washington, D.C., while his father served a five-year tour of duty as Military Attaché at the grandiose Australian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue

  . They’d returned to New South Wales for just two years before Admiral Ramshawe accepted a position on the board of the Australian airline Qantas, working permanently in New York.

  Young Jimmy, with his U.S. passport, went to school in Connecticut, starred for three years as a baseball pitcher who sounded as if he should have been playing cricket. And then followed his father into a career in Dark Blue. American Dark Blue, that is. He’d been in the U.S. Navy now for 10 years, but a couple of weeks earlier he had still brought a smile to the lugubrious face of the NSA’s Director, Admiral George Morris, by announcing, “G’day, sir…. I picked up that stuff you wanted…gimme two hours…she’ll be right.”

  Ramshawe was always going to sound like Banjo Patterson and other members of Australian folklore, but he was American through and through, and Admiral Morris valued him highly, as highly as he valued his longtime friendship with Ramshawe Senior, the retired Aussie Diplomat/Admiral.

  The trouble was, right now, Admiral Morris had just been admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital with suspected lung cancer, and the deputy directer, Rear Admiral David Borden, was a more remote, formal figure, who was not instantly receptive to young Lt. Ramshawe’s observations. And that might prove difficult for both of them—the acting director because he might miss something, for Jimmy because he might not be listened to.

  He stared at the two signals in front of him, and attacked the problem as he always did: going instantly for the obvious worst-case scenario. That is, some foreign nutcase has just bought several hundred sea mines from the bloody Russians with a view to laying the bastards somewhere they want to keep private.

  Lt. Ramshawe frowned. It seemed unlikely the Russians were using the mines themselves. They had nowhere to mine, and these days they rarely manufactured Naval hardware unless it was for export.

  So who the hell did they make ’em for? Jimmy Ramshawe ran the checks swiftly through his mind. One of those crazy bastards in the gulf…Gadaffi? The Ayatollahs? The Iraqis? No reason really for any of them, but the Iranians had threatened a minefield more than once. But then the AN-124 would have been running south, not east. Or else the mines would have been transported by road. China? No. They’d make their own…I think. North Korea? Maybe. But they make their own.

  Lieutenant Ramshawe deemed the puzzle worthy of careful consideration. And he gathered up the two signals, muttering to himself, “I don’t think we better fuck this up, because if ships start blowing up, somewhere in the Far East or wherever, we’re likely to get the blame. ’Specially if an American ship was lost…bloody oath there’d be trouble then.”

  He stood up from his screen, pushed his floppy dark hair off his forehead and walked resolutely out of the ops area down to the Director’s office. He was still reading the signals when he arrived in the hallowed area once occupied by Arnold Morgan himself. And he walked through absentmindedly, still reading, tapped on the door, pushed it open and walked in, as he always did.

  “G’day, Admiral,” he said. “Coupla things here I think we want to take a sharp look at.”

  David Borden looked up, an expression of surprise on his face.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “I wonder if you could bring yourself to give me the elementary courtesy of knocking before you enter my office?”

  “Sir? I thought I just did.”

  “And then perhaps waiting to be invited in?”

  “Sir? This isn’t a bloody social call. I have urgent stuff in my hand which I think you should know about right away.”

  “Lieutenant Ramshawe, there are certain matters of etiquette still observed here in the U.S. Navy, though I imagine they have long been dispensed with in your own country.”

  “Sir, this is my country.”

  “Of course. But your accent sounds like no other U.S. officer I ever met.”

  “Well, I can’t help that. But since we’re wasting time, and I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot now that you’re in the big chair, I’ll get back outside and we’ll start over, right?”

  Before Admiral Borden could answer, Jimmy Ramshawe had walked out and closed the door behind him. Then he knocked on it, and the Director, feeling slightly absurd, called, “Come in, Lieutenant.”

  “Christ, I’m glad we got that over with,” said Jimmy, turning on his Aussie-philosophical, lopsided grin. “Anyway, g’day, Admiral. Got something here I think we should take a look at.”

  He handed the two signals over, and David Borden glanced down at them.

  “I don’t see anything urgent here,” he said. “First of all, we do not even know the mines were on board the Russian aircraft. If they were, we don’t have the slightest idea where they might be going…and wherever that may be, it’s going to take a long time for anyone to unload them, transport them, and then start laying them in the ocean. At which point our satellites will pick them up. I shouldn’t waste any more time on it if I were you.”

  “Now, hold hard, sir. We got possibly several hundred brand-new sea mines almost certainly packed into the hold of the biggest freight aircraft on earth, now heading due east toward China, maybe India, maybe Pakistan, Korea, Indonesia? Brand-new mines specifically ordered and manufactured? And you don’t think we want to trace the bloody jokers who own them, right away?”

  “No, Lieutenant. I think we’ll find out in good time without wasting any of our valuable resources, and in particular, your energies.”

  “Well, I suppose if you say so, sir. But that’s a lot of high explosives, and…well, I mean some bugger wants it for something pretty definite. I think Admiral Morris would want it investigated…maybe alert the Big Man in the White House.”

  “Lieutenant, Admiral Morris is no longer in command of this agency. And from now on, I trust you’ll respect my judgment. Forget the mines. They’ll come to the surface in good time.”

  “Just hope they don’t bring a pile of bloody wreckage with ’em, that’s all.”

  Lt. Ramshawe nodded, curtly, turned on his heel and left, muttering to himself an old Australian phrase, “Right mongrel bastard he’s turned out to be.”

  Evening, same day. Ops Room.

  Great Hall of the People.

  The big computer screen had been switched off now. The Iranian delegation was heading northeast out
along Jichang Lu toward Beijing International Airport. And Admiral Zhang was talking with Zu Jicai. Everyone else had gone. The two great Naval friends and colleagues sat alone, sipping tea, which Yushu had coerced a guard to produce, in the absence of any staff whatsoever in the Great Hall. It tasted, he thought, like a leftover thermos from Mao’s Long March of 1935.

  “I am still slightly mystified, Yushu. Do you really think there is enough advantage in this for us to become involved in a worldwide oil catastrophe?”

  “Ah, Jicai. You are ever the tactician, ever the strategist. Always the battle commander. You see things very clearly, the immediate crunch, the immediate aftermath.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “I used to, when I was C-in-C of the Navy. But I must be political now, and I have changed my perspectives. I am trying to look at a wider picture.”

  “I think, my Yushu, you will face a very wide picture indeed if an American tanker should collide with one of those Russian mines in the Strait of Hormuz.”

  Admiral Zhang smiled, sipped his tea, grimaced and said softly, “Do you think they accepted my plan? Do you think Hossein will call back with the agreement of his government?”

  “I am quite sure they accepted it. You can be very persuasive toward people who want to be convinced.”

  “That’s part of my strategy, Jicai. I know that deep in the soul of every Iranian military officer there beats the heart of a revolutionary. Oh yes, they would like to make colossal sums of money from a world oil crisis. But what they really want is to strike a violently disruptive blow against the Great Satan, particularly one with the potential to cause widespread chaos in the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.”

  “I am afraid you read them accurately, Yushu. And I am afraid your plan will take place. The minefield will be laid. But I am very afraid of the consequences. The Americans are likely to turn up in the gulf with guns blazing. Possibly against our own warships, and we are not really a match for them….”

  “There you go again, my good Jicai. The immediate crunch. The immediate aftermath. Soon I will ask you to raise your sights. But not quite yet…not until we are given an affirmative answer by the Iranians. Then all will be revealed to you.”

  “I look forward to that immensely, Yushu…but we have been in this room for almost twelve hours now. I think we should go and find some dinner together.”

  The two men traveled up in the elevator to the central floor of the Great Hall, and an eight-man military escort took them to the main doors, beyond which lay the dark, freezing Tiananmen Square. A long black Mercedes, its engine running, awaited them, and the guard escort remained in formation until its tires had creaked out across the fresh, uncluttered snow, bearing its two high commanders north. North along the west side of the square, toward the Forbidden City, the old guardian of the Dragon Throne, and still, in the eyes of most Westerners, the symbol of the might of Communist China.

  The great portrait of the unforgotten Mao Zedong, staring out, somehow shy, and cold, may not have formed a secret smile through the falling snow, as the Admirals’ Mercedes swept past Tiananmen Gate. But it should have. Mao, above all other men, would have loved Zhang Yushu’s as yet unspoken plan.

  2100 (local). Same day.

  NSA. Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Admiral Borden had gone home. A new shift of U.S. surveillance operators was working through the night. Only one member of the day staff was still on duty: Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe was in his office, still working, behind closed doors, poring over maps of Asia, pulling up charts on his computer, trying to ascertain where the giant Antonov-124, with its lethal cargo of ship-killing high explosives, could be headed, and where, more importantly, it would have to refuel.

  Those four big D-18Ts have gotta guzzle up more than ten tons of fuel per hour—which gives it a range of two thousand six hundred miles maximum. The bastard’s gotta stop somewhere. And it’s gotta stop soon.

  Jimmy’s thoughts were clear and accurate. He thought the aircraft would have to land around five hours after takeoff. Twice he checked with the CIA’s Russian desk at Langley, but there was nothing new. Three times he checked with MENA, Fort Meade’s Middle East North Africa desk, and they knew nothing either.

  Lieutenant Ramshawe, however, had a stubborn streak the size of Queensland, and he had resolved to sit right there until someone told him precisely where the world’s biggest cargo aircraft had landed.

  The hour 2200 came and went. Then 2230. And right after that the phone rang, secure line from Langley. No one was telling him where it had landed. But the news was definite. The Antonov had just taken off from a guarded airfield outside the remote central Kazakhstan city of Zhezkazgan. The interesting part was the name of the airfield, Baykonur—top-secret home base of the Russian space program. The CIA had always had a man in there.

  “Very nice and quiet, old mate,” muttered Jimmy Ramshawe thoughtfully to the air traffic controller 7,000 miles away in central Asia. “Very nice indeed.”

  Then he pulled up his computer maps again, and tried once more to assess the destination of the 120 sea mines. He checked the routes southeast to India, and gazed at the great high-peaked mass of the Himalayas, but in the end there was only one conclusion: The mines were on their way to China.

  “And since the bastards only work underwater,” he murmured, “a mighty intellect like mine would conclude they might be going all the way to the ocean, possibly Shanghai, or maybe one of the Chinese Naval bases in the south.”

  Either way, he decided, the Antonov would certainly have to be refueled again. But that would probably happen at a remote Chinese military base in the western part of the country.

  In which case, I’m going home to bed, he thought. But twelve hours from now, a little before midday tomorrow here, I’m looking for a report that it’s landed on the shores of the China Sea—probably near a Naval base.

  Still, there’s no point getting excited since the new bloke I work for wouldn’t give a kangaroo’s bollocks for my opinions. And he walked, somewhat disconsolately, through the huge main room, the dimly lit National Security Operations Center (NSOC), heading home.

  Thus Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe, like his boss, was sound asleep when the Antonov touched down to refuel on northwest China’s remote and forbidden airstrip—the one on the edge of the pitiless Taklamakan Desert, at Lop Nor, home of China’s nuclear weapons research and testing facility.

  The Taklamakan is China’s largest desert, 1,200 miles long, uninhabited for vast areas. Its name means “the desert one enters, but never leaves.” The Antonov, being Russian, completely ignored that, and one hour after landing, took off again with full tanks, heading southeast for another 1,700 miles to the headquarters of Admiral Zu’s Southern Fleet.

  Seven weeks later. March 13, 2007.

  Southern Fleet Headquarters. Zhanjiang,

  Province of Guangdong.

  The dock lights along the jetties did their best to illuminate the gloomy late evening. But rain from the west swept across the sprawling Naval base under low cloud and cold, drifting mist. Out on Jetty Five a black Navy staff car, its engine running, headlights on, windshield wipers fighting the downpour, was parked in the shadows.

  Its two occupants, Admirals Zhang and Zu, were watching the departure of, probably, the first Chinese blue-water fleet to depart these shores for a foreign mission beyond home waters since the treasure-ship voyages of the eunuch Admiral Zheng He in the first half of the fifteenth century.

  Back then, the seven epic voyages of Admiral Zheng, across the Indian Ocean, to the Persian Gulf and the coast of Africa, were acclaimed as the highest achievements of the greatest Navy the world had ever seen. And it was a great Navy. At its zenith there were 3,500 ships, 2,700 of them warships, based in a network of major Navy bases and dockyards along China’s eastern coast.

  Admiral Zheng took more than 100 ships and almost 30,000 men to the east coast of Africa, to Kenya, to Arabia, way up into the Red Sea, right into the gulf, through t
he Strait of Hormuz, anchoring and trading their silks and porcelain for advanced Arab medicines, and the Egyptians’ preservative, myrrh. Pearls, gold and jade were taken on board from Siam en route home.

  Admiral Zheng’s own flagship was a massive 400-foot-long nine-master, almost five times the size of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria, 60 years later. The Chinese Navy’s great explorer beat Vasco da Gama to the coast of East Africa by 80 years, and it was just as well they did not arrive at the same time because the massive warships of Admiral Zheng would surely have obliterated the “tiny,” 85-foot-long Portuguese caravels that struggled around the Cape of Good Hope.

  Whatever possessed the Ming Dynasty Emperor to willfully eliminate his mighty fleet a few years later can only be guessed at: China’s endless suspicion of foreigners, all foreigners? Its view of itself, and its ancient feelings of superiority? Perhaps its own melancholic sense of isolation?