Frontal Assault

11

Don Stroh threw down the printout and glared at it. Murdock picked it up and started to read it.

“Straight off the Reuters News Service Web page. As of today, all Western nationals will be excluded from Iraq. All United Nations employees, workers, and volunteers will be put on planes and shipped out of the country. The Iraq Department of Commerce has totally and unilaterally canceled all agreements about imports and exports. Iraq will sell oil to anyone she wishes, anywhere in the world.

“In short, Iraq is declaring war on the U.N. and the Western powers and is defying anyone to do anything about it.”

“That’s a hell of a bold step for a small country like Iraq,” Murdock said.

“But she has one strong bargaining point. About ninety-two billion barrels of oil reserves in her country just waiting to be pumped, loaded, and shipped.”

“Sure, but one aircraft carrier sitting right here at the strait can stop any Iraqi tanker that comes this way, or any tanker we know is hauling embargoed Iraqi oil.”

“If we’d do it,” Stroh said. He flopped into a chair in the SEALs’ assembly room. “Hell, we knew Iraq could do this at any time. So far, we’ve been able to keep her in chains. Now Saddam is smashing those chains.”

A sailor came into the room, looked around, and spotted Stroh. He hurried over.

“Mr. Stroh, a call for you. I’ll have it transferred to the phone in here.”

“Oh, damn, what the fuck has gone wrong this time?”

He went to the phone and soon was talking a little and listening a lot. After more than two minutes on the phone, he nodded, said something more, and hung up. His hand held the phone on the hook for several seconds, then slipped off as he turned and walked back to Murdock.

“Saddam took the next step. We’ve just had word that he now rejects all U.N. agreements and operations on the no-fly zone. He says he will defend the territorial integrity of all of Iraq. Any foreign military aircraft flying over any part of Iraq will be shot down without warning.”

“I bet that damn Saddam is a poker player,” Murdock said. “He sure knows how to up the ante. Any reports from the no-fly zone yet?”

Stroh shook his head. “No, but we have planes in the air patrolling that large no-fly zone. It won’t be long.”

Two F-16s with U.S. Air Force markings slanted along the top border of the Iraqi no-fly zone. Captain Archer Smarthing kicked the Fighting Falcon over into a roll and checked his radar. Nothing ahead. He’d been on thirty-two of these flights and had to chase only one Iraqi MiG back over the line to the north. Sometimes he wondered how valuable this service was.

He knew the Kurds appreciated it, but it took a lot of manpower and aircraft to do the job. He looked over at his wingman, Jeffrey Smith, and waved. They rode in tandem part of the time, then split off for checking the rest of the envelope they had as their responsibility.

Still nothing showing on radar to the front.

If the Iraqi planes intruded, it usually was from due north. The plane-to-plane radio jolted him back to reality.

“Arch, I’ve got three blips coming hard from the north,” his wingman, First Lieutenant Broderson, said. “Looks like we’re going to have company today.”

Captain Smarthing swung his craft more to the north. There they were on his screen, coming fast. They were already over the line into the no-fly zone. “I see them. You go left, I’ll go right,” Smarthing said. “Let’s give them a reception.” He moved the controls only a little and the Mach 2 craft slammed to the right, raced around in a wide arc, and slanted at the invaders from the side. He saw the missile shoot almost when it left the Iraqi MiG. He hit the chaff button to disperse a false target for the missile and did a second sudden turn, then came in behind one of the MiGs. He maneuvered carefully and had the plane in his crosshairs and a lock.

He hit the firing button and felt the AIM-9 Sidewinder drop off the wing and slam forward, trailing a white plume of condensation. The nine-and-a-half-foot-long rocket leaped ahead of the plane at 2.5 Mach, slanting in on the tail end MiG in the group. The target must have shown a missile warning and began to maneuver, but before it completed the first turn, the Sidewinder hit it just in back of the wing. The annular blast fragmentation warhead wrapped in a sheath of preformed rods, exploded with a shattering roar, and triggered the detonation of three Iraqi missiles under the wing. The combination of explosions blasted the MiG into wheelbarrow-sized chunks of scrap metal and bloody body parts that began their long fall to the desert below.

“I’ve got trouble!” Lieutenant Broderson shouted on the radio. “Two of the bastards. I’m going low and fast. You see them?”

Smarthing scanned the sky but couldn’t find his wing mate. He checked the radar screen and moved around, hunting them. Then he saw a flash of sunlight off metal to the west, and he angled that way. Soon he had the three blips on his screen. He targeted the front plane in the trio but received back a friendly signal. The last two were his targets.

He judged the distance and hit the afterburner to catch up, but before he could get into a good firing position, he saw a flash of light in the sky.

“Broderson, come in. Broderson, where are you?”

There was no response. The two MiGs put on their own afterburners and jolted away to the north. He was in no position to follow them. He kept searching the sky and at last found a black cloud slowly rising. Far, far below he saw what was left of an aircraft impacted into a dry gulch in the desert floor. There was no parachute. He slanted down and overflew the wreck. He found one part with the white star on a blue circle, the insignia of the U.S. Air Force. Smarthing swore for two minutes, then climbed back to his assigned altitude.

He switched frequencies on his radio and contacted his home field. “Mother Lode, this is Sweet Sixteen One.”

“Go, Sixteen.”

“Just tangled with three Iraqi fighters. I shot down one of them, the other two jumped Broderson and they splashed him. No chute. I just flew over the crash. Not much left of the plane.”

“Bring it home, Sixteen. Watch yourself. We just had word that Saddam has called off his observance of the no-fly zone. It’s open season out there. We’re sending up three replacements to work the edges. Get it on home.”

“That’s a roger, Mother Lode.”

Captain Smarthing turned his plane and headed back toward the field near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He had a letter to write to a widow. Later, Smarthing heard that his was the first aerial combat of the day that would see four United Nations planes shot down and eight Iraqi fighters blasted from the air.

Colonel Jarash Hamdoon sat watching his idol and longtime friend pacing beside his big desk in the fifth sublevel of one of his bombproof war rooms. In it were complete communications with his armed forces, with the government, even with his favorite baker. The complex had been stocked with enough food, water, and batteries to last a month. Even the emergency electrical power generator was in place with a separate smokestack and air inlet from the surface to function in another part of the fifth underground level.

Saddam Hussein turned and stared at the colonel. “My friend, it was not supposed to go like this. We had seven of the eight nations practically in our pocket. We had set up takeovers from inside the countries by trusted and loyal friends. We paid dearly for that friendship. Now we have only one of those nations under our control. We need the larger ones, Syria especially.”

“But you have made a statement, Mr. President. You have declared Iraq’s freedom from the devil Western powers. You have cut down four of their fighters over Iraqi airspace; you have sent tankers with Iraqi oil into the marketplace. You have declared our freedom.”

Saddam slumped into the executive leather chair behind the desk and frowned at his top adviser.

“My good friend Jarash. It has been twenty years, you and I at the helm of this great nation. We are not in the position today that I hoped we would be in back in 1979. What has happened?”

“Iraq has many enemies, Mr. President. They coil and strike like serpents. They are everywhere we look. We must be careful how we walk through the desert in our bare feet.”

Saddam smiled, then rubbed his face and his mustache. “It was not supposed to go this way. We must do something quickly, and it must be dramatic. They will not attempt to bomb us into surrendering. They tried that for two months in the Desert War, and it didn’t work. It won’t work now. So what will they do?

“They will try to isolate us, to cut us off from all the rest of the world. We must do something to shut out the rest of the world from us.”

“The Strait of Hormuz?” Hamdoon asked softly.

“Exactly. We have planned for two years. Everything is ready. Iran has given me its word for cooperation whenever we ask. The time is now. Let me make one call to Tehran, then you make the necessary calls to get the program into motion. I want it done tonight. It all must be in place by morning. No ships will go through the strait until Iraq says that they can. That will gain us a lot of respect. Do it now.”

Hamdoon went to his separate office next door. Two minutes later, his phone buzzed and he picked it up.

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“My call is completed. The door is open. The rest is up to you.”

“Thank you. It will be done.” He hit the disconnect button, waited a moment, then made three phone calls. For each of them he gave the one code word, Armageddon. One navy lieutenant challenged it.

“Sir, for that word, you must have a secondary countersign word. Do you know what it is?”

“No, Lieutenant Aziz. The question is, do you know what the countersign is?”

“Yes sir, ‘In Allah’s hands’.”

“Very well, Lieutenant Aziz. See that it is done, tonight.”

In the port city of Qeshm, Iran, on the coast of the Strait of Hormuz, Lieutenant Aziz rousted out his crew of seventeen and fifteen special technicians. They had been in place here in Iran for six months. Every day they practiced. Lately, they had been practicing at night.

Now they would do it at night.

Lieutenant Aziz felt a wave of emotion fill his mind and body. For the greater glory of Allah.

The Iraqi PB-90 coastal patrol boat moved out of the Iranian port at dusk. All was ready on board the ninety-foot Iraqi naval boat. It was the lone survivor of a fleet of fifteen of the speedy coastal craft purchased years ago. Six had been sunk in the war with Iran, three more sunk in the Desert Storm war against Kuwait, three were scrapped, and three left at the naval port of Basra. Only one had been refitted and made seaworthy. Now it would have the honor of bringing the Western powers to their knees.

Lieutenant Aziz felt his heart racing as he went over the plans again as he had daily for the past six months. They would proceed to the narrowest part of the strait, a thirty-five-mile-wide section. However, the ship channel through that area was no more than three miles across. It was a well-known and much-used passage.

His divers knew their job. He went to the hold and to the special containers on the deck and checked to be sure all was ready. The large boxes held relics of World War II that Iraq had purchased seven years ago when the old Soviet Union was breaking up. Many arms and munitions, even atomic weapons, had been for sale back then if you knew the right people to contact.

Lieutenant Aziz heard that their leader, Saddam Hussein, had wanted to buy two nuclear bombs, but he didn’t have enough ready cash. Instead, he bought the munitions resting on the deck of the PB-90. Lieutenant Aziz had the commander’s trust that he could do the job that must be done to insure Iraq’s surge to becoming a world power. Soon they would have all of the clout they needed to do it.

He knew the history of the items in his care. They had been devised, researched, and developed by Germany near the end of World War II. The Nazis never had a chance to use them. By then, they were in a land war on their home country and had no need for naval arms.

He touched the case gently. Soon they would be uncrated and inserted into the Strait of Hormuz at precise locations.

The Germans had been brilliant on this project. They developed a passive mine that could be planted on the sea floor, activated on command, and then would lay in wait with its sensors tuned for the right moment to fire.

Aziz went over in his mind again how the mines worked. They lay on the gulf bottom. The sensitive mine felt the magnetic pull of a large mass of metal, the steel hull of a large ship such as a tanker. The magnetic force moved a pressure piston in the mine in response to each change in the electromagnetic flux. This generated a small trickle of electricity as its armature cut through the magnetic lines of force. With this feature, the mine would gather electricity from the ships moving near it but well overhead.

As with many early naval mines, these were shaped like torpedoes. A titanium casing, developed by the Germans late in the war, protected the mine’s interior from any corrosive element in the sea or in the dank caves where they were stored for years.

Inside the mine, a small magnetic generator and a primitive signal transducer still worked. Each of the mines had been taken apart and checked to be sure they functioned.

Once the mines were placed on the strait bottom, they would be activated with a specific signal from a transmitter on board the patrol boat. The mine would hear the signal. Inside the titanium shell, a relay in a spectrum analyzer would click on. Electrons would trickle out of a capacitor and into the firing circuit. At that moment, the mine would be armed and ready to fire.

Then the mines would lay in wait, checking each ship that went over it, until the right signals came. The mine’s acoustic sensors would determine the size of the ship and if it fit the right conditions that had been programmed into it. When the right conditions were met, the analog circuits would tell it to fire. When the mine was triggered, it would break apart and fire a torpedo that would slam upward, seeking the steel target. The torpedoes were designed with delay fuses, so they would penetrate well into the tanker before exploding with tremendous force.

Lieutenant Aziz checked with his navigator. They were near the first marker on his map. The patrol boat slowed. Crewmen had the first mine ready. It was lowered gently into the water. It had been designed to settle slowly to the bottom and to remain upright. Divers went along with lights for the first fifty feet to be sure it settled properly. The average depth of the strait here was 300 feet. When the men were sure the mine was moving properly, they returned to the boat and boarded.

Ten times they dropped the mines in a straight line across the three-mile channel through the strait.

It was almost dawn when they finished. Currents had thrown them off line three times, and they had to reestablish their position. Now Lieutenant Aziz held the portable transmitter and eyed it. It was time. He pushed on a switch, then lowered the device into the water. He pressed the sending button on a long cord twice to be sure that the mines would receive the signal to activate them. Even after this long a time, he was sure that all ten of the mines would activate and establish an absolutely impenetrable wall, not allowing any ship to pass. In practice runs, the test mine had activated on each try.

Back in the small bridge, he put the activator transmitter away. He looked at it critically. While deadly for all ships, there was one way to let friendly ships sail through the screen. All he had to do was to send a deactivating signal to the mines, and they would be turned off.

After Iraq’s own oil tankers passed through the strait, the mines could be turned on again, trapping any ships inside the Persian Gulf that were already there and denying entry by any from the Gulf of Oman. It was a brilliant strategy and one that could win the whole Middle East for Iraq.

Back onshore, he left his crew on board and made a telephone call. It was his signal to Colonel Hamdoon that the mines were in place and activated.

Iran knew of the plan and would not send any of its tankers through after midnight. Iraq would not send any of her oil-for-food ships through, either. There had been some discussion between Colonel Hamdoon, Lieutenant Aziz, and Saddam Hussein about giving a warning to the shippers. It had been decided that the first tanker to be blown up would be the first warning to the world.

Then the official Iraqi news agency would tell everyone that the Strait of Hormuz was mined and that no ship of any nation would be permitted to enter or leave the Persian Gulf.

Lieutenant Aziz smiled as he thought about it. Now Iraq had a powerful handle on the oil trade. He laughed softly. Now Iraq could increase the price of oil as much as she wanted to. She could double the price of oil to forty dollars per barrel. As he remembered, crude oil from the Persian Gulf nations accounted for more than 70 percent of the oil consumed by the world market.

With absolute control of the strait, they could force other nations in the gulf to raise their prices, or they wouldn’t get their tankers through the minefield. Raise their price to the Iraqi price, and they would be safely passed through.

It was a masterful plan, one that was unbeatable. He would not sleep tonight. He would be on watch to see which oil tanker would be the first to feel the sting of the fifty-five-year-old German torpedo mines.