The young three-striper repeated his orders: “Sir, I am to take the point with the destroyer under my command, the Borodin, and proceed to the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel at normal cruising speed. One kilometer from the channel marker buoy I will break out holiday bunting and muster the men on the main deck for coming into port. I shall order speed reduced to ten knots. If any challenge comes by radio, blinker, voice, or other means, I shall ignore it. If any hostile fire comes from air, land, or sea, I shall ignore it, not returning fire. If no fire or hostile action prevents it, I shall proceed to the designated anchorage in the ship basin in downtown Houston. Sir, this is my understanding of the admiral’s orders.”
The admiral looked at him sadly and nodded. The destroyer Borodin was a stalking horse. The young man knew it, his crew knew it. It was their reward for being the best destroyer complement in the Seventeenth Fleet. None other could be depended upon not to fire back, possibly destroying the battle plan. Because they were the best, they had been chosen for the suicide mission-for reconnaissance of the Texan’s dispositions and their repeated warnings for the Russians to keep their distance left no doubt that, within hours, they would all be dead. They were going to their deaths because he had ordered it, just as many Texans would die immediately after because the Kremlin had ordered it. The admiral wished there was another way.
“Good luck, Captain,” the admiral said, saluting.
The young commander saluted, his jaw line firm, tears springing to his eyes. He knew how much the old man must be suffering.
The admiral suddenly stepped forward and clasped him in a hard embrace. “God bless you,” he whispered, then turned away.
When he turned again, the young man was gone. He cursed himself for an old fool, but then, with sagging shoulders, excused himself on the grounds that this was the first such emotional display of which he had been guilty in his forty-four years in the Soviet Navy. And the young captain was, after all, his only son.
“Range?” said Major Motley, commanding the Channel Delta Sector.
“Eight hundred fifty meters and closing.”
The major swore.
“All means have been used to raise them-you’re sure?”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Biddle replied. “We’ve been guarding their radio frequencies for the past thirty-six hours, and have sent warnings in English and Russian at one-minute intervals since the first sighting to stay clear of our territorial waters or be fired upon. We’ve used international code, signal flags, loudspeakers on the pilot boat that was sent to intercept them-everything. Chief Charley Red Horse even tried Indian sign language.”
“And they refuse to reply?”
“Yes, sir. They stand at attention on deck like dummies in a show window, and take no notice of us whatever.”
“Are they bluffing?”
“That’s a negative, sir.”
“I suppose not.”
“But I can tell you one thing, Major: if 7 were the admiral, I’d kill myself before I sent my son on a suicide mission like this.”
“That’s why you’re a captain, not an admiral. Besides, he may have switched commanders on the Borodin.”
He studied the advancing destroyer, a sleek white ship sliding through the water, as eerie in its silence as the Flying Dutchman. “Try raising it once more,” Major Motley said.
Keys rattled and voices spoke urgently into microphones as the ritual warnings were repeated.
There was no reply.
“Range?”
“Two hundred twenty meters, sir. Point-blank.”
“All guns on target?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Commence firing! Blow the son-of-a-bitch out of the water!”
And within twenty seconds, they did.
8 JULY 1998: NOON
The sea lanes between Tampico, Vera Cruz, and other Mexican oil ports and the European continent, which depended largely on Mexican oil products, were as crowded during the closing years of the twentieth century as the Straits of Hormuz had been a generation earlier. The million-ton tanker was now standard among world fleets, an immense brute that looked like a black iceberg looming over the relatively tiny ships of the few remaining navies. The 98,000-ton aircraft carrier U.S.S. Truman, for instance, was dwarfed when crossing the bows of the Russian tanker Omsk during fleet maneuvers in the Caribbean, and its flight deck was only two or three meters higher than the main deck of the Omsk when the tanker was fully loaded; in ballast, it towered over the Truman and every other man-of-war afloat.
Built in Soviet shipyards on the ultrasecret warm-water coast of Khuzistan, far from inhabited areas of the Iranian Soviet Socialist Republic, the construction of the Omsk and other such megatankers had aroused speculation among naval architects as to the reason for all the mystery. After all, it was just another tanker, wasn’t it?
Not quite. As a tanker, its compartmentation was singularly ill-designed, and its full cargo of crude would scarcely have fueled the automobiles of Pocatello, Idaho, for a year. “Loading” operations in Mexico, however, were always handled by reliable Communist
Party members, who also fudged account books and tank farm records to conceal the fact that no more than a few thousand tons of crude were loaded at any port of call. Yet the ship sank steadily in the water during its loading, and nobody who didn’t need to know ever realized that the cargo was salt water. This it would pump out in Europe-where onshore “oil” tanks registered as filling-only to take on later somewhat less sea water for the return to Mexico in ballast. In common with many Russian inventions, its purported function was camouflage.
The Omsk’s real cargo was not crude at all, but very refined. It had been designed by the best naval architects in the Soviet Union, and tested in computer simulations for every possibility, for to participate in live maneuvers would have given away its vital secret to enemy reconnaissance satellites. The crew was trained and retrained to razor sharpness. During the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet’s courtesy calls at Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego, the Omsk’s sister ship Pinsk had three times been “incapacitated with main-shaft lubrication problems” just out of sight of land, but never more than a hundred or so miles from the fleet’s anchorage. When the fleet sailed south to pass through the Soviet Union’s Panama Canal, the Pinsk, too large to clear the locks, proceeded from its station off San Diego to its usual destination, the oil terminus of Callao, Peru. As the shadow of the Seventeenth Fleet, it was replaced in the Gulf of Mexico by the Omsk, which had been cruising on station just over the horizon from the fleet ever since.
At dawn on 6 July 1998, the Omsk received orders to move toward the Texas coast at full speed, with all hands at action stations.
When it received its orders from Admiral Grell, the Omsk was eighty kilometers south of Galveston. The day was hot and sunny. Not a cloud obscured the sky. Perfect helicopter weather.
* * *
“Pilots! Man your planes!” ordered Captain Ugarov, air operations officer of the Omsk.
The main deck of the tanker at the moment of the command resembled that of any other megatanker at sea-a sailor in salt-streaked blue dungarees was on his way by motorcycle from his fo’c’s’le quarters to the bridge aft, two of his mates were over the side on staging touching up the black paintwork, a lookout was aloft in the crow’s-nest on the foremast. But otherwise the decks were devoid of humanity. Running fore and aft were the huge layers of pipe, neatly aligned like black spaghetti, that allowed crude to be pumped from one compartment to another to maintain the ship’s trim. Aft, the multiple decks of the poop reared like a ten-story apartment building grafted onto the ship’s fantail.
As the echoes of Captain Ugarov’s order faded in the air, the Omsk began to undergo a metamorphosis, like an enormous black caterpillar giving birth to butterflies. The mass of the deck piping parted down the middle and rolled back smoothly to the port and starboard sides. Below was a grid of forty-eight round wells in the main deck, in mathematically precise ranks of twelve fore and aft, four athwartships. Sunlight flashed from the blades of forty-eight helicopters as they rose on their elevators into the light of day. A moment later the tiny craft lifted into the air, four by four, and bored through the hazy sky toward Galveston. The elevators sank out of sight only to deliver another brood of black gunships three minutes later. Wave on wave the Omsk disgorged, until from a distance they appeared as a swarm of monstrous mosquitoes homing on the fat flank of southern Texas.
“Course!” barked Captain Gregori Semenev, leader of Red Wing One, the first group of eight helicopters launched.
“Two hundred and seventy degrees true,” the navigator replied.
“Distance to target?”
“Seventy-three kilometers, sir.”
The pilot cranked the information into his autopilot and read off the estimated-time-over-target. At his present speed, his ETOT would be twenty-four minutes hence. “Very well,” he said, leaning back in his armored seat and lighting the last cigarette he would have before finishing the run. He handed the packet over to his copilot.