A Richard Rohmer Omnibus, page 41
From the look of astonishment on the captain’s face, Said realized that the old man had seen his eyes. Slowly and deliberately, Said removed his face mask and reached into the pocket of his wet trousers for his mirror sunglasses, which he wiped dry on Ahmed’s shirttail and put on. He looked up again at Rashid, who inexplicably felt relieved that he did not have to look into those astounding blue eyes again.
“My dear captain, we have been undertaking some operational practice. That’s all, just some operational practice.” The three heads surrounding him, faces at full grin, vigorously nodded their agreement.
The captain could not contain his curiosity any longer, but he did not want any member of his crew to hear the explanation if, indeed, he was to get one. His face disappeared from the bridge opening. They could hear him noisily clambering down the metal steps. In a moment, breathless, he was standing nose to nose with Said. By this time the PLO leader had unbuckled the oxygen canister which Ahmed tucked protectively under his muscular arm.
“What have you been doing?” Rashid demanded. “I’m the captain of this ship, and I have a right to know.”
The smile disappeared from Said’s face. It was replaced by a look of grim satisfaction. “The Israeli patrol boat …”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Attached to its ass-end, clamped on like a bloodsucker, is a beautiful metal mechanism, packed, my dear captain, with enough high-power explosive to blast it and anything close to it to a million pieces.”
The old man’s teeth sucked air. “A mine!”
“A mine.”
Rashid’s eyes opened wide with astonishment mixed with fear. “You fool. When that thing goes off, the Israelis will be out after us like a pack of bloodhounds.”
“They will not. I can assure you, captain, they will not. If I had thought otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it. I don’t want to foul up our main mission—or this boat.”
The captain was adamant. His right arm lifted to point over Said’s shoulder toward Haifa. “I tell you, if that damn thing goes off between here and Haifa, we’ll have the whole Israeli navy after us!”
“There’s no way it can go off between here and Haifa. It can’t explode unless I set it off myself.”
“And how can you do that?” There was a tone of disbelief in the captain’s voice.
“By radio signal.”
The nonplussed Rashid contemplated the consequences of that information until its significance dawned on him. His voice rose in a hiss of protest, “You are not going to … You can’t. In the name of Allah, no!”
“I not only can, but I will. They’ll never know what hit them. Don’t worry. There won’t be any evidence to tie this old rust bucket with what’s going to happen.”
Hassan, the radio expert, added, “Because it’s going to happen right in the harbor at Haifa.” He repeated what Said had said. “They’ll never know what hit them.”
“And,” Said went on, “with any luck we’ll destroy any other ships close to it.”
That was the end of the explanation. It was time to get on with the business of finishing the first operational exercise. Said bent down to take off his flippers. As he stood up, he asked the shocked captain, “Give me your best estimate on how long it will take them to get back into port at Haifa and tie up. And remember, captain, it’s in your best interest as well as mine to have them in the port, well inside it.”
Rashid looked at his watch. “I checked our position on the chart just before they came on board. We have just gotten under way. We’re about thirty-six miles off Haifa, and it’s ten to seven now. They should be in the harbor by five after eight, ten after, at the outside.”
Said turned to Hassan, “Get the transmitter out. Test to make sure it’s working properly. We go at quarter past eight.”
The captain protested, “But the crew will still be on board.”
If Rashid could have seen Said’s eyes through the sunglasses, he would have caught the cold determination that filled them. “Precisely. The destruction must be maximum. The Israelis are our enemies to the death.”
The conversation with Rashid was at an end. Telling Maan and Hassan to bring his gear, Said walked aft, his bare feet padding against the metal deck, his mind rejoicing with his success, yet impatient for the next step. Would the mine go off in response to the radio signal? Detonating the deadly device on the tail of the Israeli patrol boat would be crucial to the chance of success in the big operation to come.
By eight o’clock, Hassan had completed his meticulous testing of the radio transmitter-receiver. He was satisfied. The portable, battery-operated unit was a compact high-powered HF (high frequency) radio with a designed transmission range of up to 4,000 miles. Ingenious Japanese miniaturization had produced a radio that weighed less than three pounds, a black box of the most sophisticated type. Hassan was confident that it would not fail.
He had set up the radio on a wooden table that Ahmed had appropriated from the galley of the protesting cook and placed on the open passageway on the port side of the Mecca. That position provided a clear line of sight to the area where they estimated Haifa, now well over the horizon, to be. The sea was still calm, but with a gentle roll from the west to which the ship responded as it plowed on. The table on which the radio rested was solid and stable, a good base for the testing equipment as well as Hassan’s tool kit. Now all they could do was wait in the gathering darkness. The sun had gone down at 7:15. By eight the darkness was virtually complete. The sky was crystal clear. A rising half-moon split the horizon to the southeast. The running lights of the Mecca were not matched by those of any other ship as the old freighter thumped along its lonely course to Port Said, drawing farther and farther away from the menace of Haifa.
At ten past eight, all four PLO soldiers were near the precious radio. Ahmed and Maan squatted a few feet forward of it in the passageway, talking as Ahmed sucked on a cigarette. Hassan sat at the table on a chair he had brought from his cabin. He wore earphones as he twisted the radio’s receiver dial in the futile hope that he might pick up some message from the Israeli patrol boat as it approached and entered Haifa harbor. It was doubly futile in that, had he been lucky enough to pick up their operating frequency, he did not understand the language. Even so, there was an off-chance.
At two minutes past eight the Israeli boat was in the entrance of Haifa harbor, moving fast past Bat Galim. The twinkling lights of the city glittered close by on the starboard side, rising up in the distance to the heights of central Carmel, some 600 feet above the sea. At half speed, the warship moved past the long pier that stretches eastward for almost a mile from Bat Galim and protects the main harbor from the onslaughts of the Mediterranean. The anxious Israeli captain picked his way slowly through the ships anchored in the main harbor at the agonizing speed of eight knots, steering for the pier lights that mark the narrow entrance to the inner Kishon harbor, where his craft and the six others of the patrol squadron were berthed.
At 8:10 he cut his speed back even further in the darkness. With his searchlight on, the commander ordered hard to starboard to round the northern end of the western jetty forming the Kishon harbor. Ahead he could see the long forms of the other five patrol boats of his squadron crowded along the U-shaped dock. His boat’s berth was in the middle, right at the bottom of the U. Towering floodlights bathed the area with glaring white light. In a few minutes he would be docked. Then he would turn over the ship to his second-in-command to secure for the night. The filing of his report on the boarding of the Mecca could wait until the morning. At 8:12 the starboard side of the patrol boat touched gently against the protective rubber bumpers lining the pier wall. Reversed engines brought the craft to a full stop. He gave instructions to his first lieutenant as hands secured the mooring lines fore and aft. He tried to control his impatience, but the need to get to Rachel was compelling. He was already ten minutes late. By the time he got into his car at the end of the pier, it would be another fifteen minutes before he was at her apartment in the Kiryat Hatechnion area of the city to the south.
At 8:15, the captain of the patrol boat stepped from the gangplank to the pier. He took one quick step southward toward his car, looking to his left with pleasure and pride at his magnificent boat. At that instant, the Israeli captain, his splendid craft and crew, were no more. They dissolved, totally disintegrating in the vortex of the thundering, flaming blast as its devastating shock waves hammered out in all directions, filling the air. A rolling mass of fire and smoke, torn, shredded, broken bits of metal, plastic, glass and human flesh burst up and out in a black, red, and white ball mixed with steaming harbor water sucked from the spot where the patrol boat had sat only a second before.
Within the trapped confines of the small naval basin, the reverberating waves rammed out against the fetid salt water, shoving it over the confining piers and lifting the five other patrol boats into the air with the outward thrust of the blast. They shattered like toys as they smashed against the unbending concrete of the dock. Secondary explosions burst from their splitting fuel tanks as they opened to spill thousands of volatile gallons of diesel fuel into the already raging inferno.
Far out to sea, to the southwest, on a weather beaten, derelict old freighter, four young Arabs clustered in the darkness watching in silent awe as the tip of a gigantic, orange fireball lifted above the eastern horizon like a new sun. The pressure of Hassan’s index finger on the radio’s detonate button, orange and circular like the fireball it had created, was all it had taken to cause death and destruction in the harbor of Said’s birthplace.
The four uttered no sounds of jubilation, made no signs of the lifting emotions of victory. Rather, it was a moment of sober assessment of the scale of the power that was in their hands. It was a mammoth power. Brutal. Instantaneous. A power of mass destruction that could annihilate a target-object a hundred, hundreds, or even thousands of miles distant. All that was needed was the pressure of a single finger on the small orange button on a black box.
In Haifa the woman named Rachel would never know that she had influenced the course of events that would soon turn the direction of the world.
4
9 March 10:00 A.M.
Cabinet Room, the White House
“To sum up the main points of the briefing, Mr. President …”
John Hansen, the forty-first president of the United States of America, moved his eyes away from the Pentagon briefing officer standing at the lectern on his right at the end of the cabinet room conference table. He looked across the table at his secretary of defense, Robert Levy. On Levy’s right was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a five-star air force general, Glen Young. To the president’s immediate left was his secretary of state, John Eaton; on his right, Vice-President Mark James; and immediately beyond him, his National Security Council special adviser, Walter Kruger. This group comprised the executive committee of the National Security Council. It was this team the new president would rely upon for assistance and advice in dealing with foreign crises.
Before his installation two months before, Senator John Hansen, as he then was, did not have a full appreciation of the amount of time and attention the president must give to foreign affairs. It seemed to him he was spending at least half his waking hours considering how to deal with problems in South America, how to handle Cuba, and the intrusions of the Cubans in Africa with their mentors the Soviets, how to cope with the sensitive Western Europeans, and the problems in NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Then there was the subject matter of this meeting on the morning of March 9—the buildup of Soviet forces, not only in Afghanistan, but also along the Soviet-Iran border both east and west of the Caspian Sea.
The briefing was almost finished: “Six new infantry divisions and two armored have been identified along the Soviet-Iran border. In Afghanistan, indications are that another 20,000 troops with supporting equipment have been deployed with concentrations in the area of Herat, a major Afghanistan city in the northwest sector of the country, near the border with Iran. The estimated number of Soviet troops in Afghanistan now is 130,000, supported by tanks and aircraft. All the increases in strength in Afghanistan and along the Soviet-Iran border have occurred in the last seven days and are significant in terms of a potential Soviet move against Iran. That is the end of the briefing, sir.”
The president looked to the other men around the table and at the one man he had not appointed, General Glen Young. He wasn’t sure about Young. In the meetings they’d had in the two months since Hansen took office, he had had difficulty in drawing the general out. Perhaps it was that, having been appointed by Hansen’s predecessor, a man quite different from Hansen and of another party, Young simply did not like the president and his politics. In Young, Hansen found a degree of truculence as well as condescension. He was no expert in military matters; the general had made that very clear several times in the patronizing way he answered the president’s questions. It was quite obvious that General Young considered himself to be superior, even perhaps to the president himself.
Hansen spoke to the heavyset air force general. “What do you and your people make of this?”
Young was ready with his reply. “We think they’re about to make a move on Iran, Mr. President. We don’t know when it’s going to come. It could be within the next week or ten days. Or they may wait until the weather is better, say the beginning of May. That’s what we think they’ll do, wait for good weather. The highway net into Iran from the north is good. They’d have a straight run in unless the Iranians were able to mount a defense. The Iranian army is in a shambles, as is the country. Their defense is nonexistent. As we see it, the Russian troops in Afghanistan would have difficulty crossing the mountain range on the east side of Iran, but we think they would try it, at the same time the main force was moving down from the north.”
Secretary of State John Eaton asked, “What about Pakistan?”
The general nodded: “We think that when the Russians move against Iran, they’ll also go for Pakistan. They invaded Afghanistan for the weak reason that they wanted to protect their influence there. They have a far more compelling reason to invade Pakistan: they want the warm water port at Karachi for the Red Navy.”
“I’m interested in compelling reasons.” The president turned to his Secretary of State. “John, if you were Grigori Romanov in the Kremlin, what would be your compelling reason to move into Iran?”
Eaton opened the leather file folder he had placed on the conference table in front of him at the beginning of the meeting. He ruffled through the papers and found the one he wanted. He scanned it for a moment, then lifted his head to reply.
“There’s more than one compelling reason, Mr. President. The first is an oil shortage. As you know, at the end of the seventies the Soviets were net exporters of crude oil, about one million barrels a day. Today, we estimate they have a shortfall of half a million barrels a day and their shortages are escalating rapidly. In fact, we may be conservative in our estimates, but that’s the best number I have at the moment. The fact is that the Soviets desperately need oil. They haven’t had any big finds of their own in recent years. The place to make up that shortfall is Iran, which is capable of producing about four-and-a-half million barrels a day, even though recently they’ve only been producing one-and-a-half and that’s falling. All of their production equipment is American and since our hassle over the hostages with the Ayatollah Khomaini, it’s a wonder they’re producing anything. So that’s compelling reason number one.”
The secretary checked his notes.
“The second is to maintain the Soviet Union’s fulfillment of the ideological doctrine of world domination. You may not think that’s compelling, Mr. President, but it is. Iran is in a shambles, in virtual anarchy. With the counterrevolutionary activity that has been going on, it’s in a state of civil war. If the call for help came from one side or the other in Iran, that would be the pretext for the Soviets to enter to stabilize the country. The same justification was used for the first incursions into Afghanistan, long before they went in in the last days of 1979. In keeping with the Marxist-Leninist ideology of world domination, Iran is an ideal objective.
“The third compelling reason is the one General Young has outlined. It goes along with the taking of Iran. The Russians desperately need that warm water port in the Indian Ocean, one they can put money and equipment into and know they’re not going to lose it, as they lost the Port of Berbera in Somalia. If they had Karachi, no one would take it away from them. While the invasion of Pakistan is not the same as an invasion of Iran—which is your question, Mr. President—I agree with General Young. The two things would be done together.”
The president went back to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What can we do if we have to stop them, General Young?”
“In Iran or Pakistan, Mr. President?”
The president thought his question was perfectly plain. He was tempted to answer, “In the whole of the Persian Gulf,” but said instead, “Both—Iran and Pakistan.”
The general examined his fingernails, then looked up at the president.
“Not as much as I’d like to,” he said finally. “You’re aware of these things, Mr. President, from the briefings we’ve given you over the last two months.”
That was designed to put me in place, the president thought.
“I’ll review the situation for you. In the whole of the Persian Gulf area, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean we have only one base available to us. That’s Diego Garcia.
“Diego Garcia is a British island, one thousand nautical miles south of the tip of India. We made a deal with the Brits back in the middle seventies and took the island over. It has a good anchorage. We’ve put in everything that’s needed for a complete support base for a full fleet. There’s a runway 12,000 feet long which can handle anything we put in the area, even a C-5. The Soviets countered us by doing a deal recently with the Maldivian government—the Maldive Islands are about 450 miles north of Diego Garcia. They’ve taken over abandoned British military installations, airport, harbor, the whole works.
