The Shark Mutiny by Patrick Robinson Page B

the starboard side of the Bronco shimmering white hot. The huge tanker was wallowing in the water, bow down, the waves now washing right up to the still-intact Tank Two, which sat full of liquid gas, poised between the devil of the melting aft quarter of the ship and the ripped-metal destruction in the deep blue sea up for’ard.
    CNN, and the rest of the media, could elaborate no further. Bob Heseltine had called Admiral Morgan to inform him that Texas Global was sending its own investigators immediately to Dubai. He also mentioned he had been in conference with his technical advisers all day and no one could come up with one single reason how the for’ard tank could possibly have exploded, short of being blown apart by a mine or a torpedo.
    When Arnold replaced the receiver, he was so thoughtful, so concerned, he had actually found time to say good-bye to the helpful Texan on the wire from Travis Street, Houston.
    Lieutenant Ramshawe spent the day studying satellite photographs and charts of the strait. He also talked to the CIA’s Middle East desk, searching for any clue as to whether Iran might have decided to lock the rest of theworld out of the almost-landlocked sea they regarded, historically, as their own.
    Satellite photographs showed the two Chinese warships, Hangzhou and Shantou , now moored alongside, in China’s new Burmese Naval dockyard on Haing Gyi Island, which sits north of a wide six-mile shoal, surrounded almost entirely by sea marshes, but with a short easterly coastline facing a surprisingly deep trench with varying low-water depths of well over 40 feet.
    In a massive building program in recent years, China had converted a stretch of this two-mile coastline into a concrete haven for its warships far from home. The island was strategically perfect, on the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, at the mouth of the 12-mile-wide estuary of the Bassein River. It was equipped with long jetties and standard shipyard equipment, cranes, loading facilities, refueling pumps, 16 big concrete holding tanks, and sprawling lines of ships’ stores. It was the first fully equipped overseas Naval base China had possessed for more than 500 years, 7,500 sea miles from Shanghai.
    Jimmy Ramshawe did not like it. The two Chinese warships, even in a long-range satellite photograph, looked a lot too comfortable at the Burmese jetties, just around the coast from a foreign ocean. “Like someone parking a couple of Iraqi frigates outside the Opera House by Sydney Harbor Bridge,” he muttered. “Seriously out of place…I just wish I bloody knew what the Orientals were at—maybe I’ll get my last name changed to Rickshawe and get in there as a spy and find out.”
    Tickled by his own groan-inspiring humor, the Lieutenant made out a brief report, detailing the information that the Chinese frigate and destroyer were now refueling for the journey home. He made a note that the three Kilos were not in residence in Burma and presumed they had taken a more southerly route to avoid the Malacca Strait, through which they would have been forced to travel on the surface. “It looks rather as if they do notwish to be seen,” he wrote. “For reasons unspecified. For good measure he added the words “as yet.”
    He then returned to his big chart of the Hormuz Strait, published by the U.S. Navy and likely to be extremely accurate. He took a long ruler and drew a line from the new Iranian missile position at 26.23N 57.05E. The line was precisely 14 inches long. The chart’s scale was one inch: 125,000. So he divided 125,000 by 36 to give him yards, then that number by 1,760 to give him miles. The calculator told him that on this chart one inch equaled 1.97 miles. Which meant the tanker had exploded in 360 feet of water, 27.58 miles from the missiles, right along his straight line at 26.18N 56.38E.
    He noted that from the point of the explosion the water stayed very deep west toward the Omani coast. Heading east it began to shelve up