As the truck was on its way, another seismological vessel, a converted coast guard cutter, was also closing in on Galveston. Without explaining his reasons for needing the vessel, Cronkite had obtained it through the good offices of Durant, who had represented the Galveston-area companies at the meeting of the ten at Lake Tahoe. The cutter, which went by the name of Tiburon, was normally based at Freeport, and Cronkite could quite easily have taken the shipment there, but this would not have suited his purpose. The tanker Crusader was unloading at Galveston, and the Crusader was one of the three tankers that plied regularly between the Seawitch and the Gulf ports.
The Tiburon and Cronkite arrived almost simultaneously sometime after midnight. Mul-hooney, the Tiburorfs skipper, eased his ship into a berth conveniently close to the Crusader. Mulhooney was not the regular captain of the Tiburon. That gentleman had been so overcome by the sight of two thousand dollars in cash that he had fallen ill, and would remain so for a few days. Cronkite had recommended his friend Mulhooney. Cronkite didn't immediately go aboard the Tiburon. Instead he chatted with a night-duty dock inspector, who watched with an idle eye as what were obviously explosives were transferred to the Tiburon. The two men had known each other for years. Apart from observing that someone out in the Gulf must have been careless with matches again, the port official had no further pertinent comment to make. In response to idle questioning, Cronkite learned that the Crusader had finished off-loading its cargo and would be sailing in approximately one hour.
He boarded the Tiburon, greeted Mulhooney and went straight to the crew's mess. Seated among the others at this early hour were three divers already fully clad in wetsuits. He gave brief instructions and the three men went on deck. Under cover of the superstructure and on the side of the ship remote from the dock the three men donned scuba gear, went down a rope ladder and slid quietly into the water. Six objects – radio-detonated magnetic mines equipped with metallic clamps – were lowered to them. They were so constructed as to have a very slight negative buoyancy, which made them easy to tow under water.
In the predawn darkness the hulls of the vessels cast so heavy a shadow from the powerful shorelights that the men could have swum unobserved on the surface. But Cronkite was not much given to taking chances. The mines were attached along the stern half of the Crusader's hull, thirty feet apart and at a depth of about ten feet. Five minutes after their departure the scuba divers were back. After a further five minutes the Tiburon put out to sea.
Despite his near-legendary reputation for ruth-lessness, Cronkite had not lost touch with humanity: to say that he was possessed of an innate kindliness would have been a distortion of the truth, for he was above all an uncompromising and single-minded realist, but one with no innate killer instinct. Nonetheless, there were two things that would at that moment have given him considerable satisfaction.
The first of those was that he would have preferred to have the Crusader at sea before pressing the sheathed button before him on the bridge. He had no wish that innocent lives should be lost in Galveston, but it was a chance that he had to take. Limpet mines, as the Italian divers had proved at Alexandria in World War – and this to the great distress of the Royal Navy – could be devastating^ effective against moored vessels. But what might happen to high-buoyancy limpets when a ship got under way and worked up to maximum speed was impossible to forecast, as there was no known case of a vessel under way having been destroyed by limpet mines. It was at least possible that water pressure on a ship under way might well overcome the tenuous magnetic hold of the limpets and tear them free.
The second temptation was to board the helicopter on the Tiburorfs after helipad – many such vessels carried helicopters for the purpose of having them drop patterned explosives on the seabed to register on the seismological computer – and have a close look at what would be the ensuing havoc, a temptation he immediately regarded as pure self-indulgence.
He put both thoughts from his mind. Eight miles out from Galveston he unscrewed the covered switch and leaned firmly on the button beneath. The immediate results were wholly unspectacular, and Cronkite feared that they might be out of radio range. But in the port area in Galveston the results were highly spectacular. Six shattering explosions occurred almost simultaneously, and within twenty seconds the Crusader, her stern section torn in half, developed a marked list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured through the ruptured side. Another twenty seconds later the distant rumble of the explosions reached the ears of listeners on the Tiburon. Cronkite and Mulhooney, alone on the bridge – the ship was on automatic pilot – looked at each other with grim satisfaction. Mulhooney, an Irishman with a true Irishman's sense of occasion, produced an opened bottle of champagne and poured two brimming glassfuls. Cronkite, who normally detested the stuff, consumed his drink with considerable relish and set his glass down. It was then that the Crusader caught fire.
Its gasoline tanks, true, were empty, but its engine diesel fuel tanks were almost completely topped up. In normal circumstances ignited diesel does not explode but burns with a ferocious intensity. Within seconds the smoke-veined flames had risen to a height of two hundred feet, the height increasing with each moment until the whole city was bathed in a crimson glow, a phenomenon which the citizens of Galveston had never seen before and would almost certainly never see again. Even aboard the Tiburon the spectacle had an awe-inspiring and unearthly quality about it. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped as the Crusader turned completely over on its side, the harbor waters quenching the flames into hissing extinction. Some patches of floating oil still flickered feebly across the harbor, but that was all that there was to it.
Clearly Lord Worth was going to require a new tanker, a requirement that presented quite a problem. In this area of a gross oversupply of tankers, any one of scores of laid-up supertankers could be had just through exercising enough strength to lift a telephone. But 50,000-ton tankers, though not a dying breed, were a dwindling breed, principally because the main shipyards throughout the world had stopped producing them. "Had" is the operative word. Keels of that size and even smaller were now being hastily laid down, but would not be in full operation for a year or two to come. The reason was perfectly simple. Supertankers on the Arabian Gulf-Europe run had to make the long and prohibitively expensive circuit around the Cape of Good Hope because the newly reopened Suez Canal could not accommodate their immense draft, a problem that presented no difficulties to smaller tankers. It was said, and probably with more than a grain of truth, that the notoriously wily Greek shipowners had established a corner on this particular market. The dawn was in the sky.
At that precise moment there were scenes of considerable activity around and aboard the Seawitch. The Panamanian-registered tanker Torbetto was just finishing off-loading the contents of the SeawitcWs massive floating conical oil tank. As they were doing so, two helicopters appeared over the northeastern horizon. Both were very large Sikorsky machines which had been bought by the thrifty Lord Worth for the traditional song, not because they were obsolete but because they were two of the scores that had become redundant since the end of the Vietnam War, and the armed forces had been only too anxious to get rid of them: civilian demand for ex-gunships is not high.