Five minutes later the price hit $50 when a Rotterdam trader bid on a precious cargo of Shell crude currently on its way to Scandinavia. For a brief four minutes the price hung and then faltered at around $50. Then a rumor swept the floor that a major fleet of minesweepers from the Indian Navy was under escort moving up the Arabian Sea to the strait.
The price of Brent Crude Futures hit $55 in 42 seconds. And by now it was impossible to hear anything above the thunder of the pits as the traders piled in, bellowing bids for any available crude oil already free of the confines of the Gulf of Iran. On a normal trading day, 50 million barrels changes hands in this room. In today’s uproar, almost 30 million were traded in the first 45 minutes. There was only one thing worse than paying through the nose for oil, and that was not having any.
“PLUS TWO…PLUS FOUR…PLUS WHATEVER IT TAKES.”
By 11 o’clock that morning the price of world fuel oil had doubled. By the close of trade it stood at $72. Up over 150 percent. No one in the International Petroleum Exchange had ever seen anything like it. In New York, West Texas Intermediate had opened at $60 a barrel. Gas oil futures had gone through the roof, and Natural Gas futures, thanks to the exploded Global Bronco, were even higher.
Admiral Morgan stared at the pile of data before him. The minesweepers were in action in Hormuz, and there was no doubt the field was composed entirely of Russian-made PLT-3s. So far as the Indian commanding officers were concerned, they were looking at three lines, less than half a mile apart. Inshore on the Omani side, they were in deep water, and it looked as though the same three lines stretched clean across the strait to the Iranians’ Sunburn missile site. Lieutenant Ramshawe had thus far been correct in all of his assumptions.
But now the tasks facing Fort Meade were different. Question One was Where is China now deploying the warships? The Kilos appeared to have disappeared from the face of the earth, but the two frigates that had been flying the national flag of Iran had been picked up by the overheads traveling toward China’s Burmese base in the Bassein River. The Shantou had already left there and was making her way toward the Malacca Strait. But of China’s big Sovremenny destroyer there was no sign.
Quite frankly, the Chinese completely baffled the President’s National Security Adviser. For a start, he had no idea what they hoped to achieve by providing the hardware for the Ayatollahs to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Nonetheless they had plainly done it, and the Western world along with Japan and Taiwan, and to an extent South Korea, was presently in deep trouble. The world would run out of oil in a matter of weeks if the Gulf of Iran was not opened up very quickly.
The Chinese obviously thought they were immune to this chaos, and in Arnold Morgan’s opinion they must be taught a very sharp lesson. It might be possible to tweak and irritate the United States, but when you start tampering with the national interest of the world’s one superpower, you might very well end up in deadly serious trouble. Nonetheless Admiral Morgan was determined not to overreact until he could ascertain what the men in Beijing were doing.
Not so the President. He went into a complete dither as world oil prices went into some kind of meltdown, or rather a meltup. Constantly on the line to his Energy Secretary, Jack Smith, he kept asking, over and over, “But what’s this going to mean for the average American at the gas pump?”
As early as midafternoon, answers were coming in fast and furious. And they were all the same. Up, up, and up again, as the big gas-station chains found themselves paying fortunes for every barrel of crude oil on either side of the Atlantic. West Texas Intermediate looked set to close even higher than Brent Crude Futures. And still Big Tex Packard’s mighty tanker blazed alone out in the strait, lighting up the waters. When the gusting wind swung back around to the northeast, it sent a gigantic black oil cloud into the night skies above Arabia.
In a week when gas prices could very easily hit three dollars a gallon at the pump, or even three-fifty, President Clarke faced rampaging inflation on a scale that would send the Federal Reserve into shock. Every commodity and product in the USA was going to suffer because of drastic increases in transport costs. Taxis, buses, diesel freight trains, interstate trucks, airlines, especially airlines, anything that moved was going to be hit.
And that was not the worst of it. President Clarke had a vision of the ultimate national uproar. The United States starting to run out of oil, with no time to tap its own deep reserves. High gas prices were one thing. No gas at any price was entirely another. If the country ground to a halt, his name would surely be remembered as one of the most ineffective Presidents in the entire history of the nation. And what the hell was his oh-so-brilliant National Security Adviser doing about it? As far as he could see, a big fat zero.
He picked up his phone and asked a secretary to have Admiral Morgan report to him instantly. Two minutes later, Arnold came growling in through the open door to the Oval Office.
“You wanted me, sir?”
“Admiral, what the hell are we doing about this standoff in the gulf?”
“Sir, we got a minefield across the Strait of Hormuz, as I explained. The gulf is now shut. The Iranians are saying nothing, admitting nothing and they sure as hell aren’t about to clear it. Neither are their buddies in Beijing.
“That means we have to clear the minefield ourselves, and the Indian Navy, working on our behalf, began that process several hours ago. They have six minesweepers, under our protection, locating and exploding the mines. But it’s slow, and there’s a lot of them. I understand they have attended to three so far, and my guess is forty still to go, in order to secure safe passage for essentially defenseless tankers. There’s already an environmental nightmare of spilled oil in the strait.”
“Well, what are we doing about the goddamned Iranians? That’s your area, Arnold.”
“Sir, you want me to declare war on ’em? Or at least advise you to do so?”
“I don’t know, Arnold.” The President’s voice was rising. “I just know this could be a major national crisis. And we seem powerless.”
“Well, we’re not that, sir. However, I do not want to make any kind of extravagant move until we clear the mines, quietly, and with as little rancor as possible. A hot war raging around the minesweepers would clearly be absurd. However, when the field is cleared, I’ll be happy to station a lot of muscle in the strait and warn both Iran and China that one false move means we’ll sink ’em.”
“Well, why not issue that warning right now?”
“I just did, sir. Three hours ago.”
“You told ’em we’d sink them?”
“Sir, I just sent a joint communiqué to Tehran and Beijing informing them of our anger at their conduct, and our intention to eliminate any warship from any nation that tries to interfere with the removal of the sea mines.”
“And what about the future, Arnold? The future. That’s what my job is all about. What about the damned future? How do we know the Chinese might not mastermind this kind of stunt again?”
“Sir, as you know, they have a very large petrochemical and oil refinery on the southern Iranian coast. And it’s tapped right into the heart of the oil fields of Kazakhstan. I was proposing to recommend its elimination.”