“Right out there I got two guided-missile frigates. Your guys have radios. Those fucking choppers get too close, I’m gonna have them blown right outta the sky and blame the goddamned refinery explosion. Matter of fact, I might blow ’em right out of the sky on takeoff. Fucking towelheads.”
“How about they happen to have a helicopter or two down by the minefield missile sites?”
“Anything moves into the sky anywhere near that minefield, it’s toast,” growled the Admiral. “Remember, right now the U.S. of A is in sole Naval control of the gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Northern Arabian Sea. No one moves there unless we say so. NO ONE.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Commander Bennett.
“Anytime, Commander. Glad to be of help.” Arnold Morgan smiled, thinly. He was loving this. Talking to real fighting men. Guys who knew something. Proper people.
He gazed at the SEAL, a veteran of more dangerous situations than most people could even imagine. Rusty stood there, still looking at the chart, still writing in his notebook, his bearing upright, his dark moustache perfectly trimmed, his gaze steady.
Arnold Morgan could have talked to him for a week. And at this moment he suddenly asked the SEAL from the coast of Maine, “Commander, may I ask you a question? A rather personal question?”
“Of course, sir.”
“When you hit the island in the South China Sea, at the head of your team last year, were you ever afraid?”
“Yessir.”
“Did your fear subside once you got into action?”
“Nossir. I was afraid all the time.”
“Did any of your men realize that?”
“Nossir.”
“Were they afraid?”
“Yessir.”
“Did anyone give in to his worst fears?”
“Nossir.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they all wear the trident, sir. We don’t give in to anything.”
Arnold Morgan just nodded and said, “Of course.”
It was plain that the Admiral was quite moved by the short conversation, and John Bergstrom stepped in and said, “Rusty, you will be going on the mission, I believe? Not into combat, but you are going to be there?”
“Yessir. I was unclear before what it entailed. I would like overall command, until they go in. Then I’ll hand over to the Team Leader. I’ll go with them in the submarine as far as the rendezvous point. That way I’ll be close if something should…well…happen. Something…er…unexpected, I mean. I’d like your permission for that, sir.”
“You have it, Commander.”
Admiral Morgan said now that he considered that the insertion of the SEALs, plus the getaway, was clear to everyone and that it was time to take a look at the refinery itself. He clicked off the electronic chart and replaced it with an excellent color transparency, 30 inches by 24, taken by satellite of China’s vast new petrochemical plant on the Iranian coast.
He told them it had cost close to $2 billion to build and would generate product worth more than $10 million a day. It refined petrol, kerosene, jet fuel, heavy fuel oil, liquefied petroleum gas, tar and sulphur. After just a couple of months operational, it was refining 250,000 barrels a day.
“You guys hit this hard, there’s gonna be a lot of very, very angry Chinamen running around. It’s a big place with a lot of pipes and towers and valves. However, it’s no good just blowing holes in things. Busted pipes and bent towers can be shut off and repaired, with little lasting harm done. And that’s not our objective. We intend to blow this place sky-high, and right here I’m looking for ignition, right? Pure combustion.”
“No bullshit,” said Admiral Dixon, in an undisguised parody of Arnold Morgan’s favorite phrase.
“Precisely, CNO,” confirmed the National Security Chief. “No bullshit.”
He walked back to his desk, picked up his 36-inch-long steel ruler and came back to the screen. “Right,” he said. “I’m going to stand off to the side here so you can all see the area I’m referring to. That way Rusty, here, can use a yellow marker on one of these prints I had done.
“Okay, now I’m assuming you are not all experts on refining, and I’m going to explain what you are looking for. By the way, twenty-four hours ago I knew none of this, but I do now because I had Jack Smith come down and explain it to me.
“I have had notes on this prepared for everyone to take back and study, but I do want to go over it. For a start, we should be clear: a refinery converts crude oil — in this case from Kazakhstan — into a whole range of products. The crude is really just a combination of hydrocarbons that are separated inside the refinery into various groups, or fractions. It’s actually called ‘separation, conversion and chemical treatment.’ The stuff basically gets distilled, but it’s complicated because some fractions vaporize, or boil, at very different temperatures — gasoline at seventy-five Fahrenheit, some heavy fuel oils at six hundred Fahrenheit. They also condense at different temperatures.
“What happens is the crude gets pumped via pipes, through a furnace, which heats it to maybe seven hundred twenty-five Fahrenheit. The resulting mixture of gas and liquids then passes into a vertical steel cylinder, called a fractioning tower, or a bubbling tower.
“This little bastard is what we’re after. Because inside that tower we got a lot of shit happening — the heavy fuels condense in the lower section, light fractions like gasoline and kerosene condense in the middle and upper sections. The liquids, all highly inflammable, are collected in trays and drawn by pipes along the sides of the tower. Some fractions never even cool enough to condense, and these get passed out through the top of the tower into a vapor recovery unit.
“Right here I’m talking high-test incendiary. One of these towers goes up because of a bomb stuck on its lower casing, can you imagine? It blows the heavy fuel oil into a blizzard of fire that hits gasoline, kerosene and then liquefied gas in the vapor unit. That tower, as far as you’re concerned, is potentially one of the world’s biggest fireworks.”
He rapped the screen with his ruler…. “See this group here at the north end? There’re ten towers…as far as I can see, the biggest maybe a hundred feet high…. We wanna bomb this one…this one…and this one, out here on the right by these holding tanks. According to Jack, they’re full of gasoline. I’d say if the towers blow, they’ll take the storage tanks with ’em. They might even take the entire local landscape, so I’d prefer you guys to be well clear before you detonate.”
He paused for effect. But no one spoke. So he pressed on. “This tall building here,” said Admiral Morgan, “is the control center. It is essential that you hit this. And hit it hard. Because in there they can turn off the flow of oil through literally miles of pipeline. We don’t want that. We want that stuff flowing in, feeding the fire, keeping it raging.
“And finally we come to this group of holding tanks. Jack says this is where they store thousands of tons of deep-frozen liquefied natural gas. Looks like there’re around thirty of them, and they are strategically well placed from our point of view. They are nowhere near the towers, and far from the control center, so we’re not wasting any of our explosive assets. You can see from this picture the tanks are huge, maybe fifty feet high and forty feet in diameter. I’d guess if we hit five of them, that’d send the rest of them up. It would also give us a triangle of fire and explosions, the towers, the control center and the holding tanks, which will certainly take out this middle storage area that lies between them.”
He looked at his audience and noticed that he still had their attention. “Gentlemen,” he said, “out here on the northwest of the plant you can see yet another large grouping of tanks. Jack thinks this is the chemical area, maybe a lot of ammonium nitrate for fertilizer. I realize that you are going to be shorthanded, only twelve of you can go in…but if you found yourselves with some spare time, with a little spare explosives, you could do a lot of damage out there with the stuff that once blew up Texas City.”