Read Online The Shark Mutiny by Patrick Robinson - Free Book Online

Beijing, waiting quietly for Zhang Yushu to come to the phone.
    When the great man finally spoke on the line from the Chinese capital, the conversation was unusually brief for two such old friends.
    “Nothing on any foreign networks re DRAGONFLY.”
    “No suspicion anywhere?”
    “None. Shall I activate the field in the next two days?”
    “Affirmative.”
    “Good-bye, sir.”
    “Good-bye, Jicai.”
    Three days later. April 27 .
The Strait of Hormuz .
    Hardly a ripple disturbed the flat blue calm of the southern waters of the strait. It was one of those sultry Arabian mornings, in which the livid heat of the desert sun makes life on land almost unbearable, and life on board any ship not a whole lot better.
    Six miles northeast of the Musandam Peninsula, thewaters were almost oily to look at, as the tide began to turn inward from the Arabian Sea. There was no ocean swell, no little eddying cats’ paws on the surface, no movement in the hot, still air.
    But ripples were on the way. Giant ripples, from the big white bow wave of the 80,000-ton black-hulled gas carrier Global Bronco , making a stately 18 knots, southeasterly through the water. The 900-foot carrier was laden down with 135,000 cubic meters of liquefied natural gas, frozen to minus 160 degrees centigrade. In more comprehensive stats, that’s 3,645,000 cubic feet, or, a 100-foot-high building, 200 feet long by 200 feet wide. Which is a lot of frozen gas, and it forms, by general consensus, the most potentially lethal cargo on all the world’s oceans.
    Unlike crude oil, which does not instantly combust, liquid natural gas is hugely volatile, compressed as it is 600 times from normal gas. Tanker corporations are near-paranoid about safety regulations for its transportation around the world. Layer upon layer of fail-safe backup systems are built into every LNG carrier. They are not the biggest tankers on the ocean, but then, neither is the nuclear-headed torpedo the biggest bomb. In any event, the worldwide industry of transporting liquid gas has never once suffered a fire, never mind an explosion.
    Up on the bridge, almost 100 feet above the water, the obsessively careful Commodore Don McGhee stared out over the four bronze-colored holding domes, which each rose 60 feet above the scarlet-painted deck. The bow of the Global Bronco was nearly 300 yards in front of him, and the veteran Master from the southeast Texas gulf port of Houston had a view straight down the massive gantry that ran as a steel catwalk clean across the top of each dome, all the way down to the foredeck.
    Right now the ship was making its way well outside the Omani inshore traffic zone, with the local Navy’s firing practice area 10 miles astern. Ahead of them was thenarrowest part of the Hormuz Strait, and in this clear weather they would see plainly the Omani headlands of Jazirat Musandam, and two miles farther south, Ra’s Qabr al Hindi. They were too far away to catch a glimpse on the horizon of the glowering shores of Iran on the eastern side of the crescent-shaped 30-mile-wide seaway.
    Commodore McGhee was in conference with Chief Engineer Andre Waugh. And up ahead of them they could still see a Liberian-registered British tanker, a 300,000-ton VLCC bound for the North Atlantic. They had been catching her slowly all the way down from the new gas-loading terminal off Qatar, right around the Emirates peninsula, past Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and now they were less than 50 miles from the open waters of the Arabian Sea. All tanker captains were glad to get out of the gulf, and McGhee was no exception.
    There was always a menace about patrolling Iranian warships, a menace compounded in the past few months by yet another Iranian militant threat to lay a minefield directly off its coast at the choke point of the entrance.
    Both tanker officers knew there had been for several weeks a worldwide unease about China’s warships currently moored in the Ayatollah’s Navy base at Bandar Abbas. And they