Nonetheless, the Hangzhou ran on at a steady 20-knot speed, which again Dan Headley thought was ridiculous. By varying her rate of knots between say four and 25, it would have been much more difficult for a submarine to track her. Alternatively, at her quiet, low speed, she might have actually heard the submarine, charging along astern, trying to catch up, making a noise like a freight train. Beats the shit out of me where they train these guys. Some Chinese laundry, I guess.
And so the Shark slipped into a classic sprint-and-drift pursuit, running as deep as she dared in the 50-fathom waters along the coastline for fifteen minutes, then coming up for another visual setup, to update the operations plot for the Fire Controller, just in case they should be ordered into action. Naturally, every time they came up they lost speed, “drifting” quietly forward at five knots, losing ground all the time.
Six miles short of the minefield, the Hangzhou made a course change, swinging more westerly, as if to run along the line of the minefield. It was light now, and Lt. Commander Headley immediately accessed the flag to inform them of the change in direction.
Admiral Bert Harman, in the group ops room high in the island of the Harry S Truman, was uncertain, although his orders were clear. He instructed his comms room to alert the destroyer she was straying into a prohibited area where U.S. warships were supervising a mine-clearing operation. She was to be warned in no uncertain terms to leave forthwith, to resume her course to Bandar Abbas and to remain in harbor right there until further notice.
But the Chinese Commanding Officer had been instructed to observe proceedings, and to bow to no threats from the U.S. Navy or any other Navy. The CO, Colonel Yang Xi, thought this might have been perfectly feasible from a desk in Beijing, but out here it looked very different. He could see U.S. Navy ships out on the horizon, steaming along the line of the minefield, in which he’d just seen a sizable explosion.
He decided to ignore the warning, since he considered the Americans were unlikely to open fire. Rather he would slow down and go in closer for two more miles. He was now in international waters, and he could take his time with his turn. Meanwhile he would place his surface-to-surface Sunburn missiles on full alert.
The carrier ops room observed the Chinese CO make no attempt to obey their warning. Admiral Harman picked up his orders and read them carefully…. “Should any warship of any nation insist in straying into our prohibited area, you will order the tracking submarine to disable her, not sink her but put her out of commission.”
There was nothing ambiguous about that, and the Hangzhou was a hugely dangerous enemy to both U.S. ships and aircraft. Admiral Harman thus sent his signal to USS Shark, instructing the submarine to disable the Chinese warship should she fail to turn around.
Lieutenant Commander Headley read the signal, and ordered the conn to take a long left-hand swing at flank speed in order to come up on the port side of the Chinese warship. He planned to fire one torpedo, well aft of her beam from range two thousand yards. This meant, essentially, that the MK 48 would strike the stern and cripple the propulsion of the ship leaving her helpless in the water until assistance arrived.
He sent an immediate message to the Captain, who arrived in the control room at 0745. He seemed agitated, uncomfortable with the decisions, not at all eager to open fire on a major Chinese warship. He questioned the intelligence of the orders, wondering if they might not have been changed. If there had been some mistake.
Lieutenant Commander Headley brought Shark to PD once again and requested the CO take a look for himself. “The Chinese CO has ignored our warnings, no doubt about that,” said the XO. “And these orders make our duty clear. We are to cripple it, put it out of action with minimum loss of life.”
“Yes, I understand that,” said Commander Reid, declining the periscope. “But the Hangzhou is not doing anyone any harm right now, maybe just taking a look.” He repeated, absentmindedly, “Maybe just taking a look.”
“These orders don’t tell us to speculate, sir,” replied Dan. “They tell us to hit the destroyer hard when we are told to do so. And this piece of paper right here says right now.”
The Captain of USS Shark looked unenthusiastic. “It doesn’t say how long we give it to turn around,” he said. “I think we might check that with the flag, XO.”
“As you wish, sir. But I would prefer you do it, because in my view these orders are specific. The Chinese ship has been warned, it has not turned around, and I have a piece of paper here ordering us to open fire.”
“This is your watch, XO. I would like the writer to record my unease and my wish for a second opinion on the orders. But if you are certain as to the orders, you have my permission to proceed as you see fit.”
“Thank you, sir…. Now…torpedo room — XO, prepare tubes one and two…MK 48s….”
Lieutenant Commander Headley turned to Master Chief Drew Fisher, who had materialized at his side. “Check that out, Chief, will you? I’m only preparing a second tube in case of malfunction. I intend to fire just one.”
“Aye, sir.”
Inside the sonar room, the operators could still hear the steady beat of the Hangzhou’s propellers, rising and falling in the ocean swell, making the same soft chuff-chuff-chuff sound in the water, now less than 2,000 yards away, dead ahead.
Dan Headley grabbed for the periscope handles at knee level as the “eyes” of the submarine rose up out of the deck of the control room. He scanned the ocean, called out bearing, then range…“Zero-seven-zero…twenty-one thirty yards…down all masts…make your depth one hundred.”
Seconds passed, and then the sonar room operator called it…. “XO — sonar…track three four…bearing zero-six-zero…range two thousand.”
Down in the torpedo room, both tubes were loaded, and the guidance officer was in direct contact with Lt. Commander Headley, speaking quietly into his slim-line microphone.
Dan Headley ordered the Officer of the Deck, Lt. Matt Singer, to take the conn…. “Hold your speed at three knots.”
The sonar team checked the approach, calling out the details softly to the XO. The rest of the ship was stone silent as they crept forward, preparing to fire the shot that would most certainly be heard in the Great Hall of the People.
Lieutenant Commander Headley took another fast look at the screen. Then he ordered, “STAND BY ONE…stand by to fire by sonar….”
“Bearing zero-six-zero…range two thousand yards…computer set.”
“SHOOT!” snapped Dan Headley.
And everyone felt the faint shudder as the big MK 48 swept out into the ocean, making a beeline toward the Chinese destroyer.
“Weapon under guidance, sir.”
At 40 knots, the torpedo would run for less than two minutes before hitting the utterly unprepared Sovremenny-Class destroyer. And it hit in the precise spot Dan Headley had specified, bang on the stern.
It slammed into the long, low aft section and detonated, blowing the main shaft into three pieces, the propeller into the deep water and the rudder into a split and twisted mess of steel. The Hangzhou could no longer maneuver, couldn’t steer, couldn’t move. As the pall of smoke began to clear away from her stern area, she looked more or less normal, but in truth she was powerless.
Her crew could hear the ship’s tannoy blaring instructions, and the medical teams were already making their way aft to tend the wounded, but by the standards of torpedoed warships there was relatively little bloodshed.
The communications room was still intact, and the ops room was unharmed. In fury, Colonel Yang Xi was thrashing around looking for a target at which to lash back. But he could see nothing short range for well over two miles. He had missiles, shells and torpedoes, but nothing close at which to aim any of them specifically. Nor could he see what had hit his ship, if indeed anything. For all he knew, it was just an explosion. But he knew that was stretching the realms of coincidence.
Three minutes after the impact, he received yet another signal from the American carrier, again o
rdering him out of the area, but offering to request assistance from the Iranians if the destroyer’s comms were down.
The Colonel did not answer. Neither did he consider it prudent to open fire with his missiles, because if he did the Americans would surely sink him. In his present situation he was the epitome of a sitting duck. Instead he relayed a signal to the Iranian Naval Command at Bandar Abbas requesting assistance.
Meanwhile Lt. Commander Headley turned USS Shark around and returned to his position on station 20 miles off the port bow of the Harry S Truman.
0100. Friday, May 4.
The White House.
Admiral Morgan sat alone in his office in the West Wing. He had promised Kathy he would be home by 11 P.M., but that was before the Shark had planted a torpedo in the stern of the Hangzhou. He had been on the line to the CNO almost every moment since.
Right now the John F. Kennedy Battle Group was five days out of Pearl Harbor and making a swing to the south from her normal route up to the coast of Taiwan. Admiral Dixon had ordered her straight to Diego Garcia.
The increased tension in the Hormuz area had also caused the CNO to tell the Atlantic Commander-in-Chief to move the sixth operational U.S. CVBG, that of the Theodore Roosevelt, out of the Mediterranean and on to the Indian Ocean.
Like Admiral Morgan, he had no idea what the Chinese were up to, and he had a bad feeling about that new Chinese base on the Bassein River. Within a few days they would have four carrier groups conducting a roulement between Diego Garcia and the Hormuz Strait, with the Roosevelt free to roam the Indian Ocean, with her consorts, anywhere it looked as though the Chinese might cause more trouble.
As far as Arnold Morgan was concerned, he had seen enough. Always completely mistrustful of the men from the Orient, he now believed their true colors were being shown. They had cold-bloodedly caused a massive world oil crisis, they had caused scenes of chaos in the Gulf of Iran and right now no one dared to bring a big tanker across Jimmy Ramshawe’s line, which defined the essential contour of the minefield.
The oil market frenzy had abated slightly thanks to soothing words from the American President that free-and-clear passage through the Strait of Hormuz would soon be resumed. But Americans were paying three dollars and fifty cents a gallon at the pumps, and Texaco, along with three other U.S.-based corporations, was threatening to put the price up to four dollars next week.
The President was at his wit’s end, demanding the strait be reopened immediately, apparently unable to grasp the consequences of another tanker being blown up, and the global uproar that would surely follow if the USA had declared the route safe to resume trade.
The weekend passed more or less uneventfully. White Rajah was made the hot favorite, before losing by a half length at Churchill Downs after closing on the winner all the way down the stretch. But at 0530 (local time) on Monday morning, May 7, at the northern end of the Malacca Strait, an even more unexpected event happened. A 300,000-ton, virtually empty Japanese-registered crude carrier literally blew itself to pieces: went up in a colossal fireball right off the northern headland of Sumatra, within a few miles of the open ocean.
Like Hormuz, this is a very busy oil route, the seagoing highway to the Far East, the route of almost every tanker coming out of the Gulf of Iran, or even from the oil fields of Africa — straight across the Indian Ocean toward the Nicobar Islands, then through the Great Channel into the Malacca Strait, which divides Sumatra and the Malayan Peninsula.
The strait is close to 600 miles long, and the tankers use it for their outward and inward journeys. Almost 100 percent of all the fuel oil and gas requirements in the Far East are carried on the big tankers through that narrowing seaway, the shortcut to the South China Sea.
It saves over a thousand wasteful miles, for without the strait, ships would have to travel right around the outside of the old East Indies.
Arnold Morgan heard the news with an undisguised groan as he and Kathy sat down to dinner on Sunday night, 12 time zones back. “This,” he grated, “is getting goddamned serious.”
No word of complaint had been heard from the Chinese since their destroyer was damaged. Nor, of course, had there been any word of admission for their part in mining Hormuz in the first place.
Ms. O’Brien had actually heard the report on the news while Arnold was grilling some pork chops. They had been out all day, sailing along the Potomac on a friend’s yacht, and for some reason there had been only drinks and potato chips on board. The President’s National Security Adviser rarely, if ever, touched alcohol during the day, and both he and Kathy had concluded the voyage, cold after the sun went down, and hungry in extremis, as the Admiral put it.
They declined going to a restaurant with the other guests and sped home in Arnold’s staff car. With heavy sweaters on, and glasses of wine from the Loire Valley, they had fired up the grill and were just moving into Arnold’s favorite part of the day, when Kathy reported the demise of the giant VLCC.
“Now how the hell did that happen?” he asked Kathy’s Labrador, Freddie, who made no reply but continued to look, with eyes like lasers, at the pork chops.
Kathy returned with the wine bottle but little information. “They just said the tanker was unladen,” she said. “No information was available about how the accident happened. They did draw a parallel with the ships that blew up in Hormuz last week, and the newscaster mentioned that there seemed to be a jinx on the shipping of heavy crude oil these days.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “A jinx wearing a goddamned lampshade on its head and eating its dinner with a couple of painted sticks.”
Kathy laughed. No one had ever made her laugh like Arnold Morgan, especially when he was being sardonic. She threw her arms around him, and kissed him softly and slowly. No one that agonizingly beautiful had ever kissed Arnold Morgan. Certainly not like that.
“If it wasn’t for about a billion tons of shipping blazing away in the Far East threatening to cause an end to civilization as we know it,” he said, “I could get very involved with that kissing business.”
“Well, you should think about it more often,” she said. “Get a kind of rotation system going…you know, save the world…make love to Kathy…save the world…kiss Kathy for a few hours…then save the world again. If necessary. Meantime, I’ll take you just as you are.”
“Thank you,” he said, grinning. “How about…eat the chops…make love to Kathy…drink the Meursault…kiss Kathy?”
“I’ll buy that,” she said. “But how about saving the world?”
“Screw the world,” he said, putting his arm around her. “Can’t the goddamned world see when I’m too busy?”
The Admiral removed the chops from the grill with a pair of long silver tongs. One of them broke, and the meaty part fell to the flagstone patio. Freddie dove at it as if he had not been fed during this century, and retreated sneakily into the bushes.
“Has that greedy little character got any Chinese blood?” he asked.
Kathy giggled, took the plate of chops from the Admiral and told him, “Sure he has. Freddie, honored grandson of the Dalai Lama.”
“That’s Tibet, dingbat,” he said.
“Same thing, if you ask the People’s Republic,” she said.
It took only a few more moments for them to turn off the new gas grill and move inside to where the Admiral had lit a log fire in the study. This was a rather grand house, and Kathy had been awarded it, amicably, by her husband in the divorce settlement. He had been a fairly rich man, and his pride and joy had been his book-lined study, which was situated through a beamed arch from the dining room. Kathy assumed he had another such setup in his new house in Normandy, France, where he now lived with his French wife.
A studious diplomat, with a family grain business in the Midwest, he was always described by Kathy as kind, and lovely, totally preoccupied with the problems of the world and “about as much fun as a tree.” He had been much older than she, as Arnold was. But the laughter she shared with Arnold,
his willingness always to talk to her and the sheer joy of their being together made up for any age differential. They were as devoted as it was possible to be. And one day she would marry him. When he retired.
Meanwhile, she served the pork chops, salad and the french loaf, sat down and asked him, “How do big ships burn, when there’s nothing in them? What’s to burn? The newscaster said it was returning unladen to the gulf.”
“Well, I didn’t really hear it, but that sounds right. You see, those big tankers never really get rid of that crude oil when they unload at the terminal. I’m not sure what’s left, but in a vast holding tank, there’s probably several inches still slopping around after the pumps are turned off.
“Now then, it’s not the actual crude oil, which is like a black sludge, that burns. It’s the gases rising up from it. So you can very easily have a situation where a fully loaded tanker is a lot less inflammable than an empty one. Because the holding tanks in the empty one are full of gases, and those babies will go up real fast.
“It’s the same with gasoline. If you could somehow plunge a lighted match into the gasoline without igniting the gases that are evaporating, the liquid would put the flame out, like water. You probably won’t remember, but twenty-five years ago when the Brits fought the Argentinians for the Falkland Islands, a bomb came right into a ship — actually I think it came in low, and traveled right through and out the other side.
“Anyway, it started a minor fire, but hit a big diesel-gas tank on the way through and tons of ice-cold fuel cascaded out and extinguished the fire. That’s how it works. And that’s what caused the explosion in this latest tanker. The gases going up with a major bang.”
“Thank you, sir. Nicely explained. What do you think caused it?”
“I’m afraid to think about that right now. But I know one thing: It’s not another minefield. Both Singapore and Sumatra get rich on the pilotage fees through the Malacca. They’re high and getting higher. Last thing they want is a blockade. The Chinese would get no help from them. That means we’re looking for something else. But not tonight. We’re having a quiet dinner…then I’m not going to save the world, and we’ll go to bed quietly together.
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