December Ultimatum (11 page)

‘I have also expressed alarm at the prospect of a Soviet war fleet in the Persian Gulf, I consider it an obstacle to peace in the area, and for this last reason I have, as your President, tonight sent an urgent appeal to the Secretary General of the United Nations, asking for an immediate meeting of the Security Council. I am proposing that the entire Persian Gulf, from latitude 26 degrees North be declared an International Zone under United Nations’ administration, policed by a
UN
peacekeeping force.

‘As President of the United States, I give notice to all parties concerned that I will stand by here at the White house, ready to offer counsel and material aid should it be asked for. I will wait twenty-four hours as of this time. If there is no positive response to my appeals by that deadline, I will do whatever I consider to be right and proper in the best interests of my country. The choice of the alternatives available will be mine. The timing of that choice will be mine. The responsibility for any American initiative will be mine and mine alone.

‘Let our position be made absolutely clear. Any attempt by outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America. And such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. To make this warning more credible I have asked Congress to authorize the registration of young Americans for the draft.

‘The path we have chosen is full of hazard, as all paths are, but it is one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation. Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right; not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom. God wiling, we’ll achieve it.’

THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ

‘We’re on the march’

Captain Edward Hanks had stood in his corner of the bridge of the
USS Okinawa
and heard the President’s speech live at 0510 hours local time, via the Satellite Communications link that connects all US Navy ships at sea directly and at all times with Navy Command at the Pentagon.

The Captain had ordered all the six hundred and nine officers and men aboard to stop all but essential duties and be out of their beds so that they should hear what their Commander-in-Chief had to say.

Captain Hanks, just as soon as the President’s broadcast had ended, did the most extraordinary and uncharacteristic thing. He was never a man who needed much sleep, often boasting that he could manage on three hours in every twenty-four. But, the Washington speech over, he ordered the officer on deck to reduce the
Okinawa’s
cruising speed of eighteen knots to four, just enough to keep her manageable. Then he went to his cabin and, fully dressed, lay down and slept like a child.

When he woke he felt reborn. He casually showered, shaved, put on newly-laundered shirt and trousers and lunched on tuna fish salad. Then he called up the bridge and ordered full speed ahead on bearing 042 degrees, which the officer on watch, Lt Vaduz, knew was the course that would take them to the Straits of Hormuz at the southern end of the Persian Gulf.

After his light lunch Captain Hanks sat at his table, staring at the row of books on the shelf above the rack which held his logs and charts. The President’s voice still echoed, his words and phrases still exploding in a speech that perfectly captured the spirit of all those things American Captain Hanks thought had long been ridiculed into oblivion by the new generation of Americans, those children who mocked everything and to whom nothing was sacred. And yet here was a man of that same generation, and a Democrat, resurrecting what Hanks was certain had long fallen and been lost—the spirit of America past. He sat there, his hands in his lap, staring but seeing nothing. He was trying to grasp what was happening around him, physically around him, here in the Persian Gulf. He had heard the President quoting the signal he, in command of the
Okinawa,
had sent. He had heard the President’s own reaction to that signal, the President of the United States publicly responding to the warning that Soviets were about to barge their way into the Gulf and take it the way they took everything. How closely in tune he suddenly felt with this young man seven thousand miles away, his President, his Commander-in-Chief, who now promised to restore to all Americans their pride and dignity.

Quickly, like a mushroom spore pushing its way through black peat, the psyche of Captain Hanks began to assume a new situation and a new ambition. A state of war or something like it now existed around him. Russian warships were now sailing towards him, approaching the narrow sea corridor that would bring them into the Persian Gulf and the oilfields. But the President of the United States had suddenly and unexpectedly said
no!
He had said
enough
! He had issued an ultimatum, just as John F. Kennedy had done—the last time, as Captain Hanks remembered it, an American leader had shown spunk. He knew it because he had heard his President say so.

A band of sweat had formed across his forehead, darkening the grey hairline, and his jaw muscles hardened, flexing the powerful bunches of sinew at the sides of his face. He reached across the desk and from an ashtray in which there had never been a cigarette, he picked up a squash ball and began to turn it in his right hand, kneading the hard black rubber with his short, stubby, powerful fingers.

The brass ship’s clock above the bookshelf clicked as the minute hand went past the half hour and the Captain’s right eyelid twitched in response, though he heard nothing. He was suspended in excitement, relief, anticipation. He was on the move again and there was no going back, not for him, not now, not after such a speech promising so much so earnestly. No land duties, no early retirement, no scrapyard, no twenty and more years of loneliness. He was back in the business he was best at. Back at war.

He began to grind his teeth, crunching the molars sideways, contorting the jaw muscles and twisting the skin at his temples so that the beads of sweat collecting there formed tiny rivulets and ran down the hairline of his grey sideburns, across his chin, through the folds of loose skin on his neck and on to the open collar of his khaki shirt.

He leaned back in his chair, raised his head backwards and turned it slowly from side to side to relax the neck muscles that nowadays tightened up more and more, making him hunch his shoulders with the nagging ache. As his head rolled, his eyes scanned the framed photographs screwed to the wall each side of the brass clock. The
West Virginia,
the first ship he had served on; the
Yorktown
and the
Maryland
of the Philippines campaign. And the
Okinawa
now, as he saw it, girding herself to defend US interests in this newest arena of the continuing American war against Communist aggression. Against the Russians in the Persian Gulf.

With his left hand he pulled a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of his shirt and began to bend it between his thumb and finger, keeping his eyes on the photograph. It would not, as he saw it, be a contest of strength but a show of courage by a single US vessel, a declaration by him to the Soviets on behalf of his President that the game of hide-and- seek was over for all time and that the Russians’ attempt at a sea monopoly was at last being disputed. Hadn’t he seen it—hadn’t everyone?—the certain gradual build up of the Soviet fleets in all the seas around the world, dropping their anchors in more and more of the ocean’s ports, challenging the sanctity of the West’s established sea-lanes? For years now he had been warning people and they’d told him to go and shout ‘wolf somewhere else. But now at last the US Navy had a President who had decided to kick against the pricks.

Suddenly the plastic ballpoint broke between his fingers, and the noise seemed to wake him as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers. He was alert and he looked quickly around the cabin. He got up and opened the door to the lavatory and then the door to his wardrobe. He looked puzzled, as if he was trying to remember why he was where he was, why he was wet with sweat and why there was a growing throbbing pain in his back molars.

By the time he had reached the bridge, the tension and the pain had gone. He had washed the sweat from his face and had put on his peak cap and, as he entered the bridge, the helmsman stiffened with a ‘Good evening, sir’, and Captain Hanks smiled back, something neither the crewman nor anyone else could ever remember him doing before.

‘Say your head,’ the Captain said to him.

‘Maintaining constant 042 degrees, sir, at 23 knots.’ ‘What time is it, son?’

The crewman looked at the large clock immediately above the gyrocompass to the side of the Captain’s head. ‘Just on 1800 hours sir.’

Captain Hanks leant forward to the control consul and spoke to the radar room. ‘Cap’n here. Position of
Minsk?’

‘26-02 degrees North by 56-45 degrees East, sir.’

‘Expected time at the turn?’

‘Standby one, sir.’

The computer went rapidly through its wind-tide-speed calculation.

‘The leading ship should begin its turn west on to a new heading opposite the Musandum Peninsula in forty-five minutes, sir.’

‘Is that the narrowest channel of entry into the Straits?’ ‘Yessir. The deep water channel is only two miles across at that point.’

‘Thank you, radar.’ Captain Hanks turned back to the crewman. ‘What time’s sundown?’

‘18h33, sir.’

‘Completely dark about ten minutes later?’

‘Normally, sir. But tonight there’s a full moon and we should have good visibility.’

‘All the better to see them with.’

‘Excuse me, sir?’

But Captain Hanks was already walking to the forward window of the bridge on the port side. He looked out across the angled flight deck to the stub-nosed bows and the sea, gold with the low evening sun beyond it. Thirty men or more sat half-naked at the edge of the bows, their feet touching the safety net and watching, two hundred feet below them, hundreds of flying fish criss-crossing their way in front. There was a sudden cheer as a school of dolphins leapt from the water less than a hundred yards away to starboard.

Immediately below the bridge towards the stern, Captain Hanks saw the neatly parked rows of Harrier vertical takeoff aircraft, the tips of their hinged wings pointing to the sky, exposing on their undersides the racks that carried their bombs and rockets and behind them Sea King and Sea Stallion helicopters. Squads of men in singlets and shorts were on physical exercises and beyond them in the gun turrets on the edge of the deck, men in green helmets turned the barrels of their three-inch guns left to right and back again, sweeping the sky and sea in silent gunnery practice. Every few minutes, gaping holes sixty yards square would suddenly appear in the flat deck aft as lift platforms sunk down into the hangars below to reappear with another Harrier or another helicopter, manoeuvred by men in blue helmets and jerseys. Ordnance crews wore red, the refuellers the purple, the plane captains brown, and the flight directors yellow. From the bridge a hundred feet above the flight deck, they looked like an army of technicoloured roving ants, moving rapidly in irregular directions, touching but never colliding, and to anyone not of the sea, the activity might have seemed frantic and uncoordinated and without discipline.

Captain Hanks seemed not to see or hear any of this.

Perhaps after so many years he noticed nothing so routine, saw only the exception, the irregular, only that which was out of place. But on his ship, nothing was ever out of place. He stood where he always stood on the bridge, the Captain’s corner they called it, quite still except for the squash ball slowly turning in the fingers of his right hand. The clock above the gyrocompass read 1805 hours. In forty minutes the leading ship of the Soviet fleet would begin its slow turn, ready to pass through the narrowest part of the Straits of Hormuz, the deep water channel between Kuzari Point and Resuradam Island, the tight sea corridor into the Gulf. And in thirty minutes, ten minutes before them, the
Okinawa
would be there too.

Lt Vaduz, the ship’s Communications Officer, came on to the bridge, bringing the warm, sticky evening air with him. He held a signal.

‘From Command, sir,’ he said.

Captain Hanks stretched his arms behind him and braced his shoulders. The little black rubber ball slowly revolved in his right palm.

‘Yes?’ he said without turning.

‘It reads, sir, “Ships of Soviet Seventh Fleet in your area 18h45 local. You will remain in Gulf but will proceed immediately South to 24 degrees 30 North, 54 degrees 100 East, remaining off Abu Dhabi until further notice. Confirm new co-ordinates. Repeat - confirm immediate receipt of this signal.’”

Captain Hanks did not move. Lieutenant Vaduz watched the squash ball turning. It was the barometer of the man’s moods. As anger and anxiety rose inside him, his fingers would spin the ball faster and faster until it was squashed flat by his short, powerful fingers, and his anger would explode in vicious and obscene language. But as he watched, Lieutenant Vaduz saw no change, the fingers turned slowly. He waited. ‘Shall I acknowledge, sir?’ Still no reply. ‘Shall I confirm change of course, sir?’ Another thirty seconds passed. Then Captain Hanks answered. His voice was low and quiet and even.

‘How far is Abu Dhabi, Mr Vaduz?’

‘Navigation say it’s two hundred and fifty miles, eleven hours sailing, sir.’

‘Not exactly eyeball to eyeball, is it?’

‘Sir?’ Lieutenant Vaduz looked at his Captain and then across to the crewman, who shrugged.

‘Give me the signal, Mr Vaduz.’ Without looking away from the window, Captain Hanks held out his hand and Lieutenant Vaduz gave him the piece of paper.

‘You have a copy?’

‘Yessir. For logs, sir.’

‘Bring it.’

‘Sir?’

‘I said I want the carbon, Mr Vaduz.’

Again the young lieutenant looked across to the young helmsman, but this time the sailor was looking dead ahead. From this point on, he decided, he would hear nothing, see nothing of the conversation between the Captain and the lieutenant.

Vaduz hesitated. He looked down at the squash ball. The fingers still caressed it slowly.

‘Shall I send confirmation of receipt, sir?’

‘No, sir,’ said the Captain. ‘You will do no such thing, sir. You will send my own reply shortly—just as soon as I’ve written it. Goddamnit! Don’t you see? You see, don’t you?’ Suddenly he swung round at them. His face was on fire. The evening sun was now red and large and sitting low on the western horizon and it lit up the Captain’s head and shoulders; he was no longer grey, not his skin not his hair. He was crimson and sweat sparkled red on his forehead, and his eyes were wide and so bright they looked as if they were burning.

Then he whispered to the two of them as if only they should be party to his conspiracy.

‘Maintain our course, boys. Get me there before them and give me time to turn broadside. We’ll not go south, not us, not the
Okinawa,
not the United States Navy. We’ve finished running and you’d better thank God and the President of the United States for it. We’ve turned about at last. Keep engines full ahead. Goddamnit, don’t you see? We’re on the march again.’