He later sent a memorandum to Admiral Morgan outlining the gist of their conversation, and absolving himself of any blame whatsoever if this thing blew up in everyone’s face, with the entire Navy on the move at huge expense, for nothing.
Arnold Morgan screwed up the memo and tossed it, dismissing its contents as the ramblings of a disarranged mind, if not those of a “total asshole.”
The American-owned crude carrier Galveston Star was, without question, the biggest VLCC currently operating in the Gulf. She had a deadweight of 420,000 tons, and her six cargo tanks were fully laden with 450,000 cubic meters of oil, loaded from the man-made steel island at Mina al Ahmadi off the Kuwaiti coast. She was bound for the Gulf of Mexico, and making 20 knots, just about due east now, through Hormuz.
Her comms room had picked up the warning from the Omani Navy that temporary restrictions were in operation and that there was no clear seaway out to the Arabian Sea at this time. The restricted area ran in a line from Ra’s Qabr al Hindi on the northern Omani coast right across to the Iranian shore more than 30 miles away at position 25.23N, 57.05E. No explanation was offered, save for the fact that a LNG carrier had burned out three days ago, and a damaged VLCC was still leaking oil a dozen miles farther east.
Captain Tex Packard was unimpressed. His tanker took almost four miles to come to a halt traveling at this speed. He was late, after a pump problem at al Ahmadi where he had spent almost 34 hours loading, instead of the scheduled 21. And it was hotter than hell. All he wanted to do was “drive this baby the fuck out of this godawful place and get home to the Gulf Coast of the USA,” where, incidentally, it was also hotter than hell.
Captain Tex was not just a dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong tanker man. He was a copper-bottomed purist, even among the men who drive these technological atrocities along the world’s oceans. His ship was almost a quarter of a mile long, and he knew every inch of her.
He was a great blond-haired bull of a man from the Panhandle plains of northwest Texas, where, he constantly reminded his shipmates, a man could still make a living on the back of a horse, riding the vast cattle ranches. Why, his own family had been doing so for generations, and he was the very first of the Packard cowboys to leave those wide-open spaces for a different kind of wilderness.
At the age of 47, Captain Tex still spoke fondly of the Panhandle city of Lubbock, where he had attended Texas Tech University in the hometown of the legendary rocker Buddy Holly. In fact Buddy had died the year before Tex was born, but the big sea captain spoke of him as if they had been fast friends “back home in Lubbock.”
And there were still sweltering evenings in the Iranian Gulf when the distant cries of the mullahs summoning the faithful on the echoing loudspeakers above the mosques mingled out on the calm water with the unmistakable sounds of “Peggy Sue,” “Maybe Baby,” and “Oh Boy!” drifting out from the bridge of the gigantic Galveston Star.
First thing Captain Tex did when he welcomed a new crew was to make sure they could join in the chorus of “Peggy Sue,” and to make equally certain the cook knew precisely how to make the fabled Texas dish of chicken-fried steak (CFS). He showed them how to pulverize the beef to within an inch of its life with a kitchen mallet, then hand-dip it in egg batter, double-dredged in seasoned flour, before dropping it into searing-hot oil in an iron skillet.
“That’s CFS, boy,” he would rumble in his deep baritone drawl. “Cook that raht, and you’ll get a place on the highest honor role in mah home state. Ain’t but a few cooks can git it just raht, and I want you to join that golden group, hear me?”
There was, however, nothing of the buffoon about Tex Packard. He was a superb navigator, and supremely confident in his own unique ability to handle his city-sized vessel, probably the biggest ship there had ever been, and just about indestructible, with her double hull and watertight compartments. As he frequently reminded his crew, “Fifty years ago the British and French landed an army at Suez with nothing else to do ’cept keep the crude-oil carriers moving.”
He knew the history of the world of tankers, understood that normal life, for millions and millions of people, rested entirely on the free and unimpeded passage of these monster ships.
It was thus a surprise to no one when Captain Tex Packard told his Chief Engineer, his Cargo Officer and his Chief Officer he had no intention of stopping for the goddamned Omani Navy, whatever their problem was. “Christ, you could lose their entire country in West Texas…. We’ll keep steering zero-nine-zero, and make our southerly turn when we’re just out of Oman’s national water, but not far enough into the Iranian side. Right then we’re going straight through. Next stop, the Texas Gulf Coast, and no more bullshit.
“Hold this easterly course,” he ordered. “And maintain speed.”
The Chief Engineer, Jeb Duross, from south Louisiana, said routinely, “This course is gonna take us clear across the incoming tanker lanes. We’d better keep a good watch and a lot of radar.”
“According to the Omanis, ’most every ship’s stopped, waiting for clearance,” replied the Captain. “So I don’t guess we’re gonna get a whole lot of tonnage coming across our bows. Anyway, we’ll pick ’em up miles away. No problem.”
The Galveston Star plowed forward. Twenty knots was a good speed for a VLCC, but she was already late, and at this time Captain Packard was prepared to sacrifice fuel for speed. His ship had a range of over 12,000 miles, and up on the bridge, 100 feet above the surface of the water, Buddy Holly was about to rock the high command of the tanker down toward the Iranian end of Jimmy Ramshawe’s Straight Line.
By now there were several “paints” on the radar, showing tankers making some kind of a holding pattern inside the gulf in the northeastern national waters of Oman. The far side of the tanker lanes, incoming, seemed more or less deserted. There was a depth of 180 feet below the keel, and, in clear seas on longitude 56.44E, Captain Packard made a southeasterly turn, selecting a course that would take him five miles north of the stricken Greek tanker, before he turned due south and went for the Line.
Of course, only Admiral Morgan and Lt. Ramshawe were certain of the existence of the regular three-line minefield, the PLT-3-moored sea mines every 500 yards. The laying of mines in the dark is an inexact science, but in general terms, this meant there was a mine in the path of any ship separated by a maximum distance of around 170 yards.
It also meant that if a ship slid by the first one, missing it by, say, 10 yards to starboard, the next one would come up 160 yards to port, and the next two after that 340 yards to port, and 170 to starboard. It was thus possible to miss them altogether, as many ships had. But it was still the maddest game of Russian roulette ever invented, especially for this particular tanker. The giant Galveston Star was 75 yards wide.
Three miles short of the first line, Captain Packard received a formal warning from one of the Omani Navy Corvettes that it was dangerous to proceed. No one was yet admitting there may be a minefield, and the warning thus had no teeth so far as big Tex Packard was concerned. “Screw ’em,” he confirmed. “We’re outta here.”
Up ahead the seas were clear. At least they were on the surface, and the Galveston Star came barreling down the strait in a freshly developed high wind off the Arabian desert, an early harbinger of the evolving southwest monsoon.