“If I were you, David, I would be damned careful about taking a negative view, because if you delay us, put us behind the eight ball, I shall be forced to HAVE YOUR ASS, RIGHT?” Click. Down phone.
“KATHY!”
The door opened once again. And Ms. O’Brien entered, smiling sweetly. Too sweetly. “Would it make you any happier, my darling,” she said, “if I went out and bought a ship’s Klaxon so I could signal back to you? I expect people would get used to it…‘KAAAAA-THEEEEE!..BAHAA…BAHAAA….’ Two blasts for positive, one for negative, three for panic…”
The Admiral burst into laughter, despite his rising irritation at the attitude of David Borden.
“Kathy, upon whom the sun rises and sets for me, I wanna let you into a deep and, thus far, unspoken secret. Right here I suspect I’m dealing with a total asshole in the chair of the good George Morris at the NSA.”
“Oh, how very depressing.”
“Possibly more than you know. Book us a table at the restaurant in Georgetown tonight, will you? Between you, and Monsieur Pierre, and my old friend Billy Beychevelle, perhaps you can raise my spirits.”
“Why, sir…,” she replied, putting on a southern accent even more firmly than her own far-lost Alabama drawl, “ah sure would be deeply honored to bring y’all raaht back into the world of good cheer and fahn manners.”
Arnold watched her strut out, shook his head, smiling, and turned CNN back on.
Meanwhile, back at his desk in Fort Meade, Jimmy Ramshawe, surrounded by ocean charts, was glaring at the one that mapped the Bassein River on the Bengal Bay coast of Burma, or, as it is now known, Myanmar.
“Crazy bastards,” he muttered. “Like changing the bloody name of Australia to Michelob.”
He picked up the telephone and called the embassy, trying to catch Jane before she left for Georgetown. He just made it.
“Just a quick question,” he said. “Can I meet you at home tonight instead of in the bar?”
“You mean my home?”
“Right.”
“Okay. What time?”
“Six. I got a little project you might want to help me with.”
“No worries. I’ll be waiting.”
The day passed without further drama, or knowledge as to what happened to the Global Bronco. The great tower of fire alongside the ship raged on into the heavens until the evaporating gas had burned off, and when it finally died it left the starboard side of the Bronco shimmering white hot. The huge tanker was wallowing in the water, bow down, the waves now washing right up to the still-intact Tank Two, which sat full of liquid gas, poised between the devil of the melting aft quarter of the ship and the ripped-metal destruction in the deep blue sea up for’ard.
CNN, and the rest of the media, could elaborate no further. Bob Heseltine had called Admiral Morgan to inform him that Texas Global was sending its own investigators immediately to Dubai. He also mentioned he had been in conference with his technical advisers all day and no one could come up with one single reason how the for’ard tank could possibly have exploded, short of being blown apart by a mine or a torpedo.
When Arnold replaced the receiver, he was so thoughtful, so concerned, he had actually found time to say good-bye to the helpful Texan on the wire from Travis Street, Houston.
Lieutenant Ramshawe spent the day studying satellite photographs and charts of the strait. He also talked to the CIA’s Middle East desk, searching for any clue as to whether Iran might have decided to lock the rest of the world out of the almost-landlocked sea they regarded, historically, as their own.
Satellite photographs showed the two Chinese warships, Hangzhou and Shantou, now moored alongside, in China’s new Burmese Naval dockyard on Haing Gyi Island, which sits north of a wide six-mile shoal, surrounded almost entirely by sea marshes, but with a short easterly coastline facing a surprisingly deep trench with varying low-water depths of well over 40 feet.
In a massive building program in recent years, China had converted a stretch of this two-mile coastline into a concrete haven for its warships far from home. The island was strategically perfect, on the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, at the mouth of the 12-mile-wide estuary of the Bassein River. It was equipped with long jetties and standard shipyard equipment, cranes, loading facilities, refueling pumps, 16 big concrete holding tanks, and sprawling lines of ships’ stores. It was the first fully equipped overseas Naval base China had possessed for more than 500 years, 7,500 sea miles from Shanghai.
Jimmy Ramshawe did not like it. The two Chinese warships, even in a long-range satellite photograph, looked a lot too comfortable at the Burmese jetties, just around the coast from a foreign ocean. “Like someone parking a couple of Iraqi frigates outside the Opera House by Sydney Harbor Bridge,” he muttered. “Seriously out of place…I just wish I bloody knew what the Orientals were at — maybe I’ll get my last name changed to Rickshawe and get in there as a spy and find out.”
Tickled by his own groan-inspiring humor, the Lieutenant made out a brief report, detailing the information that the Chinese frigate and destroyer were now refueling for the journey home. He made a note that the three Kilos were not in residence in Burma and presumed they had taken a more southerly route to avoid the Malacca Strait, through which they would have been forced to travel on the surface. “It looks rather as if they do not wish to be seen,” he wrote. “For reasons unspecified. For good measure he added the words “as yet.”
He then returned to his big chart of the Hormuz Strait, published by the U.S. Navy and likely to be extremely accurate. He took a long ruler and drew a line from the new Iranian missile position at 26.23N 57.05E. The line was precisely 14 inches long. The chart’s scale was one inch: 125,000. So he divided 125,000 by 36 to give him yards, then that number by 1,760 to give him miles. The calculator told him that on this chart one inch equaled 1.97 miles. Which meant the tanker had exploded in 360 feet of water, 27.58 miles from the missiles, right along his straight line at 26.18N 56.38E.
He noted that from the point of the explosion the water stayed very deep west toward the Omani coast. Heading east it began to shelve up steadily all the way back along his line, growing a regular 30 or 40 feet shallower every few miles. Absentmindedly he muttered to himself, “If there really is a minefield out there, I’d say they used those Kilos to lay ’em in the deep water over on the Omani side and the surface ships where it gets shallower…. I wonder.”
His shift ended officially at 1600, but he’d been in the office since before 0600, and he was still there at 1700, wrestling with his decision. It was a drastic step, he knew, and may very easily cost him his career. But he was going for it.
Jimmy Ramshawe folded up his chart and took it with him when he left his desk. A minute later he was aiming the Jaguar toward the highway that would take him to the Australian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. The traffic was “the usual bloody awful,” and he drove in through the gates just before 6 P.M. Jane Peacock and her mother were chatting in the parking lot, and they killed a few minutes discussing the spectacular spring weather, blossoms and associated flora, before Jane and Jimmy headed back into the embassy, to the ambassador’s private quarters.
She ordered tea, and then sat down next to him on a large sofa and told him to spill the beans. “Come on, Jimmy, what’s happening?”
“Well, it’s like this…I am planning to speak to the President’s National Security Adviser, Admiral Arnold Morgan.”