But loading ships in that manner is wasteful as far as space and time are concerned. As there were few ships in the RRF available to move the corps's equipment and supplies, the Navy wanted to pack each ship as efficiently as possible. The bulk of the Navy's true cargo-handling capability was either scattered around the world or in mothballs. Time would be required to assemble those ships or refit and man those in mothballs. Until then, every ship counted.
The third party was the ships' owners and their agents on the spot, the ships' captains. While the theory of the RRF was fine in peacetime, a severe case of cold feet broke out when the plan began to be implemented for real. Some captains and ships' crews went out of their way to accommodate the Navy and Army personnel. Others were openly hostile, one ship's captain having to be threatened with arrest if he failed to comply with his contract. Most fell between the two extremes, doing what was required of them, but with great reluctance.
As one seaman put it, "I ain't in the Navy or the Army. I didn't sign on to get my ass blown off and don't intend to." The number of "unaccounted-for personnel" increased daily. The captain and crew of the Cape Fear fell into this middle category.
The Cape Fear itself was designed to allow vehicles to simply roll on and roll off without the use of cranes or hoists, hence the name RO-RO ship.
She had a crew of thirty-four and a capacity of almost twelve thousand tons, or enough hauling capacity, in theory, to transport two hundred tanks. This was where the problems began.
When Dixon arrived at the dock, he found the unit's equipment being driven off the Cape Fear instead of on. Bewildered, he grabbed the first noncommissioned officer he found and asked what was going on. The sergeant said they had been told by a Navy officer with an oak leaf like a major that they were loading the boat wrong and would have to start over again.
Infuriated, Dixon stormed off in search of the ship's bridge, with the idea that he might find the naval officer there. Knowing nothing about ships other than what he had seen in the movies, he went up the ramp that the battalion's equipment was coming down on. Once inside the cavernous cargo area, he wandered about until he found a door. His plan of attack was simple: so long as he continued to go up, he was sure that eventually he would find the bridge. Surprisingly, it worked until he was just short of the bridge, when a seaman stopped him and said that the soldiers weren't allowed or welcomed there. They almost came to blows when Dixon tried to bull his way past. Only intervention by a ship's officer stopped the fight.
The officer was the first officer of the Cape Fear, and Dixon could tell right off that he was not happy about his ship's current mission.
When Dixon asked why equipment was being offloaded instead of loaded, the first officer gave him a quizzical look, then replied that they were doing what they had been told to do by the Navy. He had no idea of the whereabouts of the Navy officer who had told them. That officer, he said, had come aboard after most of the battalion's equipment was loaded, and he had left after seeing the manifest and issuing new orders to the crew. The ship's first officer went on to say that until the military got its act together and decided on what it wanted to do, his crew wasn't going to load another piece of equipment. With that, he turned away from Dixon and went up to the bridge.
Dixon stood there, seething with anger that an entire day had been wasted.
He turned toward the dock and viewed the confused tangle of men and equipment there. As far as he could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to the effort below him. In a rage, he stormed back into the passageway he had used to reach the bridge and headed for the dock to search for someone in charge.
Major Vorishnov sat in the shade of a fruit tree, listening as the second officer, in charge of intelligence, summarized the regimental intelligence report on Iranian operations to date for him and the company commanders. Across from them the tanks of the 3rd Battalion waited in line, pulled off the road. The crews moved around their vehicles with little enthusiasm, giving the appearance of working on the tanks, but in reality doing nothing. Fuel trucks rolled by, winding down the serpentine road into a narrow defile five hundred meters from where the officers sat. The trucks kicked up dust and almost drowned out the second officer.
The sporadic and disorganized resistance of the first two days had given way to an increase in activities by the Iranians. While the lead division of the 28th CAA had yet to meet any sizable forces, it had been seriously delayed by incessant roadblocks and an increasing number of ambushes. At each of the roadblocks, forces had to stop, deploy, and scatter any enemy forces covering the obstacle. Once that had been done, engineers had to come forward and clear the road. The delays that were thus incurred had shattered the time schedule of the operation and were causing a growing number of casualties. Instead of reaching Tabriz on the third day, the 28th was still short of the objective on the morning of the fifth day. The airborne unit that had been dropped into Tabriz was hanging on to most key installations, but would be hard pressed to last for more than another day or two. Twice, the Iranians had actually gotten onto the airfield, the airborne unit's only link to the outside world, before being thrown back.
Vorishnov turned to watch the fuel trucks while the second officer droned on. As each truck reached the defile, it had to slow, change gears and ease between the sheer sides of the defile. Suddenly Vorishnov saw a flash, a puff of smoke, and a streak of flame that raced toward a truck which had just begun to slow down in the defile.
Dumbfounded, he watched the flame hit the truck. In an instant the truck disintegrated into a ball of fire.
The force of the explosion caught the second officer off guard and threw him to the ground. Vorishnov could feel the heat of the fireball as it passed over them.
"Ambush!"
The officers scattered. Vorishnov leaped to his feet and grabbed the commander of the lead company. Pointing to where he had seen the initial flash, he ordered the commander to move his three lead vehicles into a position where they could fire on that location. He cautioned him to be careful of other attacks from the flank.
The crews that had been going through the motions of working had disappeared into their tanks. Engines sprang to life as gunners and tank commanders began to traverse the turrets, searching for targets.
But there was none to be found. As two tanks from the lead company began to pour machine-gun fire into the area Vorishnov had indicated, another tank, equipped with a plow blade, began to move down the road past the fuel trucks, now pulled off to the side. When it reached the remains of the destroyed fuel truck, it pushed them through the defile and out of the way.
Then the plow tank pulled off the road and began to fire toward the area at which the other tanks were shooting. Those two tanks, in turn, ceased fire and moved down the road to join the plow tank.
Vorishnov, by then, had mounted his BTR and followed the two tanks through the defile. Once on the other side, the tanks deployed off the road near the plow tank and began to search the area for signs of the enemy. As Vorishnov also searched the far hill with his binoculars, he realized that their efforts were fruitless. The enemy was gone. Odds were, it had been nothing more than two men with a rocket launcher. Guerrillas, stay-behinds whose sole purpose was to harass and disrupt the Soviet rear area. Still, Vorishnov thought as he turned to look at the remains of the shattered fuel truck, their choice of targets had been good. In order to reach the Strait of Hormuz, the 28th CAA would depend on a long line of fuel trucks like the one just destroyed. The army couldn't afford to lose too many of them to stray parties of guerrillas wandering about its supply routes. Either the Iranians had been incredibly lucky to hit such an important target or they knew exactly what they were doing and had waited for the fuel trucks. If the latter was the case, the delays the 28th CAA had experienced to date were only a foretaste of hard times to come.