The night passed slowly. And he spent the hours before midnight reading a book about international terrorism, a fundamentally depressing read, citing samples of inordinate stupidity by the Intelligence services of various Western governments.
Jesus, a whole lot of this crap could have been avoided if people were just that little bit sharper…. Even at the business end of the Intelligence game there are still people more intent on protecting their own jobs, rather than concentrating on getting it right, at all costs.
Jimmy Ramshawe was still young enough to own those ideals. Just. But he would not want to work too long for a conservative cynic like David Borden, whose pension beckoned, and who preferred to pass the buck than start a high-profile scare over nothing.
Midnight came and went. It was a half hour since the morning satellite shots had been taken again, high above the harbor of Bandar Abbas.
Nothing arrived until 0040. And the young Lieutenant shuffled the new photos from the National Reconnaissance Office, searching for a shot of the Chinese destroyer. And here it was…fully laden with its mines, just as it had been before the midnight naval exercises in the gulf. The frigates too were back at their Iranian jetties, the tarpaulins that covered their cargo still in place.
There were also the standard daily shots of Chah Behar, and they showed empty spaces where the three Chinese Kilos had been last Saturday night. “Christ knows where they are,” muttered Jimmy.
And he picked up his jacket and made his way out of the office, walking through the main doors of the building and across to the dimly lit parking lot where two Marine guards saluted him.
He climbed into the driver’s seat and drove to the main gates, showed his pass to the duty guards and gunned his 10-year-old black Jaguar out to the exit road and on down to the Washington-Baltimore Parkway. It was a fast ride at this time of night, and he let the speedometer hover around 75 as he cruised down to the Beltway for the 10-mile run to Exit 33, Connecticut Avenue, which would take him straight into the center of the capital.
He made a right at Dupont Circle, skirted the campus of George Washington University, and ran on down to the Watergate complex where his parents had owned an apartment for the better part of 30 years. Naturally they rarely, if ever, used it, since they lived mostly in New York. Which was excellent news for Jimmy, who thus had a millionaire’s residence for free.
He drove into his underground parking space and turned off the engine. It was almost 2 A.M., and he was almost too tired to get out of the car. But he still wished Jane could have been there waiting for him. And he thought again of how much easier life had been when Admiral George Morris had been in charge at the NSA.
The thing about George was, he was damned confident, and he had the ear of the Big Man in the White House. No one was closer to Arnold Morgan than George, and the two of them always consulted. Admiral Morris was thus a fabulous guy to work for. He always listened. He always weighed all the eventualities, and all the possibilities. Never tried to second-guess his staff. He worked on the theory that if one of his chosen men thought something should be investigated, then that was probably correct. Not like this bloody Boredom character.
Jimmy sat there in the driver’s seat for a moment, pondering his dreary task tomorrow when he had to talk to Admiral Borden and admit the Chinese destroyer was still fully laden with her sea mines, as she had been the previous night.
He could hear the world-weary old bastard right now: “Well, Lieutenant, what a great surprise that must be to you…but don’t say I didn’t warn you….”
“Just as long as he doesn’t tempt me to tell him another unlikely truth,” muttered Jimmy to himself. “That the bloody morning mines might be different ones from those we saw last night. He’ll say that’s bollocks. Probably paranoid bollocks. But it isn’t. Because that’s what I’d do myself if I wanted to lay a minefield in the Strait of Hormuz.”
He climbed out of the car and locked it. Wandering over to the elevator, still muttering, “…replace the mines on deck before the zero-eight-hundred satellite pass, right? Put the stupid Americans off the trail.”
2
On Saturday morning, April 7, at first light, the Chinese warships sailed, apparently, for home. At least two of them did, the Hangzhou and the Shantou. The other two stayed right where they were at the jetties in Bandar Abbas harbor. Three hours later, shortly before 0950 (local time), the three Chinese Kilos pushed out of Chah Behar into the Hormuz Strait and made their way south toward the Arabian Sea.
The U.S. satellites picked up the entire scenario on bright sunlit waters, and back in Fort Meade, Lieutant Ramshawe wrote a short memorandum to the NSA’s Acting Director, detailing the ship movements.
Two days later a report came in from the Middle Eastern desk at Langley that Iran was moving heavy Sunburn missiles, plus launchers, plus antiaircraft artillery, to a point along their southeastern coast on the Gulf of Oman.
Langley’s man did not know precisely where the hardware was headed, but Fort Meade made a slight adjustment in the satellite’s photographic direction, and from way up in the stratosphere the massive U.S. camera snapped off two shots of the big Sunburns being maneuvered into position facing out to sea, 29 miles south of the coastal town of Kuhestak.
Lieutenant Ramshawe marked up his wide chart, 26.23N 57.05E. He automatically glanced across to see the nearest point of land, but there really was nothing. If the missiles were fired westerly at 90 degrees to the coast, they would head straight out to sea. A slightly more southerly course would aim them at the northern headland of the Iranians’ friends, the Omanis.
That headland, the outermost point of the barren Musadam Peninsula, scarcely had a town or a village on it. The only name marked on Jimmy Ramshawe’s chart, way out on the jutting eastern coast, was Ra’s Qabr al Hindi.
“Christ,” he muttered. “What kind of a bloody name’s that? Imagine coming from there, and traveling to the States…er, Place of residence, sir? Ra’s Qabr al Hindi. Jeez, they’d probably lock you up on principle…heh heh heh!”
In any event, the Lieutenant drafted a report confirming they now had a firm position for the Iranian missiles. And then he returned to his consistent preoccupation, the two remaining Chinese warships in Bandar Abbas, the Kangding and the Zigong. The photographs that had just arrived showed both ships now flying Iran’s national flag.
And Jimmy Ramshawe stared at them for a long time. What if they had laid a secret minefield somewhere out there last week…What if the two frigates had been left behind in readiness to go out and activate the mines?
He knew that such a theory would be ridiculed by Admiral Borden, who had of course ridiculed his every thought about the mines. And thus far had been proved right. Nonetheless, Lieutenant Ramshawe elected to go and see his leader, and present his worst fears.
The veteran Admiral smiled, with a jaded, indulgent air.
“James,” he said. “May I call you James?”
“Jimmy, sir, actually. No one’s ever called me James. I’d think you were talking to someone else.”
The Admiral blinked at the Australian’s forthrightness, which always caught him off guard.
“Right, Jimmy. Now listen to me…. Do you know why the two frigates are now flying the flag of Iran?”
“Not really, sir. But it could be some kind of a Chinese cover-up, while they’re getting ready either to lay mines or activate them.”