Miss Vickie is early for her appointment with the Iraqi navy. After her overnight voyage from Kuwait, the no-frills supply vessel spends the last three hours before dawn idling on station, wallowing in the moderate swell at a rendezvous point approximately 30 kilometres off the south-eastern tip of Iraq's Al Faw Peninsula.
This is Point Gromit, a set of co-ordinates that serves as a gateway to the 3,000-metre military exclusion zone surrounding Iraq's offshore Khor al-Amaya Oil Terminal, better known to the coalition and Iraqi forces who guard it as KAAOT. Here, all vessels with authorised business inside the zone must wait to be boarded and searched.
KAAOT doesn't open to visitors until 7am, and the smell of cooking wafts up from Miss Vickie's galley as the crew of eight takes advantage of the down time. They make this supply run up to three times a week and, when the vessel is finally boarded by six armed Iraqi sailors, they don't have to be told to muster on the open aft deck.
There, under the gaze of two of the Iraqis, they sit patiently in the rising heat as the rest of the boarding party searches the ship. Eventually they are called forward one at a time and searched as their passports, papers and even pockets are checked. The Iraqis are polite and professional.
Gromit and its sister points Wallace and Cheese, gateways to the exclusion zone surrounding the neighbouring US-controlled Al Basrah Oil Terminal (ABOT, to its guardians), were named by some now forgotten wag in the British Royal Navy. In these dangerous waters the names are beacons of light relief, although nobody out here takes security anything less than very seriously.
This is where the bulk of Iraq's oil, pumped in undersea pipes from the southern onshore oilfields, is loaded onto tankers and shipped to the world. Such is the importance of these ageing, war-ravaged structures to Iraq's economic recovery that they are considered to be among the top terrorism targets in the Middle East.
That was a lesson driven home painfully seven years ago. Just after dusk on April 24, 2004, the USS Firebolt, a US patrol ship, despatched a boarding party to intercept a dhow that had entered the KAAOT exclusion zone and was heading straight for the terminal. As the fast rigid inflatable drew alongside, the dhow exploded, killing three of the crew and wounding the other four. Twenty minutes later Iraqi gunners on ABOT opened fire on two speedboats heading towards them and blew them up short of their target.
Today, as every day, fishing dhows from Iraq and Iran prowl the teeming waters around both exclusion zones and security is as tight as ever. First light reveals ghostly silhouettes in the mist.
A white US Coastguard cutter, the telltale broad diagonal red flash on its bow barely visible through the gloom, circles slowly and, as the haze starts to burn away, an even more formidable shape begins to materialise on the horizon. The 150-metre guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Hamilton and its crew of 250, deployed to the Arabian Gulf from the Pacific Fleet, are a long way from their Pearl Harbor home.
Inside the KAAOT zone, Miss Vickie's arrival is eagerly awaited on board the AOS Provider, a 58-metre Sharjah-based tug serving as the floating headquarters for Maritime and Underwater Security Consultants, a British company whose team of surveyors, former Royal Navy clearance divers and ex-Royal Marines has spent the past two years clearing a path towards a better future for Iraq.
Along with the usual supplies -fresh and frozen food, soft drinks, water and, on this run, long-overdue toilet paper - the supply ship is carrying a special cargo on her open rear deck: four skips and a set of specially made metal cages, hastily manufactured in Kuwait to play a key role in the project's unexpectedly dramatic final act.
As though reluctant to give up its secrets, the sea has saved its biggest surprise for last.
It began a few days earlier with a routine dive, just like any of the many hundreds of others they had carried out over the past year. It ended with a potentially explosive find that vindicated all the difficult and painstaking work that had gone before and will remove the final physical obstacle to the rebuilding of the oil industry upon which Iraq's reconstruction depends.
Iraq has all the oil it needs to put its shattered economy back on track. A revised estimate in October increased the country's reserves by 24 per cent to 143 billion barrels - almost half as much again as the UAE - and, thanks to increasing foreign investment, the country's neglected onshore oilfields have been getting back up to speed.
The problem, however, lies offshore. ABOT and KAAOT may be the gateway to the world market for the country's oil and the key to its future but, damaged by war and neglect and fed by ageing undersea pipes now too fragile to operate under full pressure, they are also a bottleneck preventing the country from making the most of its vast reserves.
"What is more important for us now than increasing crude-oil output is how to load and export the oil," Dhiaa Jaafar, chairman of the state-run South Oil Company, told The Wall Street Journal in April. "Our export terminals ... need rebuilding and expansion."
Production in the southern onshore oilfields, where the bulk of Iraqi oil is concentrated, has risen over the past few years to 2.2 million barrels a day, but exports are limited to the 1.8m barrels that can be loaded daily onto tankers at ABOT and KAAOT. South Oil plans to increase this capacity to 4.5m barrels a day by the end of 2012, but before it could consider building new terminal facilities - a series of satellite moorings, around which tankers will be able to swing with the tide as they load - and laying new pipes across a seabed potentially littered with the unexploded debris of three major wars, it had to know the answer to one key question: what lies beneath?
Until one day last month, the answer was not much.
The vital job of looking for unexploded shells, missiles or bombs along a broad corridor running 40 kilometres from a pumping station on Al Faw peninsula to the offshore terminals was awarded in 2008 to MUSC, a company founded in the Seventies by former British Royal Navy personnel and with years of experience in maritime and pipeline security and the disposal of unexploded ordnance.
"Up until two weeks ago we had found only a few items of ordnance and a rocket motor, probably from a missile," says Barry Everest, 49, MUSC's offshore superintendent and a former clearance diver in the Australian navy, sitting in his office on board the Provider. "And a fridge." Not just a fridge.
In the thick mud of the intertidal area immediately off the coast, MUSC found and dealt with large numbers of anti-personnel mines, mortar rounds, artillery shells and rocket parts.
In 2009, during phase one of the contract, shore teams and survey boats equipped with magnetometers, sonar scanners and sophisticated software programmed to identity metal objects of a weight, shape and size likely to fit the profile of unexploded ordnance (or UXO, to use the military term), tracked back and forth across the path of the proposed pipeline, using hovercraft and man-hauled sledges in the mudflats off the coast and a fleet of three vessels in the waters beyond.
"Over the past years here there have been Iraqi, Iranian and coalition munitions," says Everest, "so we had a shopping list of potential UXO."
In all, they identified about 8,000 potential targets. The route of the pipeline was then designed to bypass the bulk of these and in June last year MUSC began the painstaking work of revisiting the 850 or so targets that lay along the chosen path.
The vast majority turned out to have an innocent explanation, as recorded in the daily dive register: "Target B2-687 ... Poss UXO ... music speaker and amplifier, recovered to surface ... B2-809 ... Diver dug down to uncover the target, target is a large tyre ... B2-810 ... Large quantity of broken fish traps ..."
Ships' anchors, fishing gear, chains, hatches, a sunken navigation light - even a couple of uncharted wrecks emerged from the Stygian gloom of the muddy seabed, pinpointed by touch by divers equipped with hand-held magnetometers and often working in zero visibility. It has, says Chris Austen, the former Royal Navy officer who is MUSC's chief executive, based at the company's offices in Ras al Khaimah, been "an astonishing feat, never done before. I am so proud of these guys, working in near-impossible conditions, pinpointing and recovering single objects, not only under 30 metres of water, but also buried in up to four metres of mud."
And then, on May 7, they made a remarkable find.
By now, the MUSC team was nearing the end of the project, with only a handful of sites remaining to be investigated and all within the exclusion zone surrounding KAAOT. The dredgers paving the way for the pipe-layers had begun work in March and were on their heels.
MUSC's high-tech survey data is fed back to analysts working in the company's offices in Ras al Khaimah Free Trade Zone. Last month, using Oasis Montaj, a sophisticated processing and mapping software program normally used in oil and gas exploration, they had taken another look at three large targets that previously had been discounted as a large mass of steel wire - probably a ship's anchor cable. Now however, the contacts were in the path of a planned undersea cable. It was time for a closer look.
Fresh analysis with 3D imaging revealed what appeared to be a series of six individual heaps, each with a strong magnetic signature, and the divers were ordered down to investigate.
"It was a normal day, the project was coming to an end," says Everest. "These were the last targets bar three in this particular area, and we didn't think much of it."
Until, that is, the first diver down found what he thought was an artillery shell, encrusted with coral. At that point, admits Everest with a smile, "I think everybody got a little bit excited. We were ramping up to go home and all of a sudden it was, 'Hang on a second' ... And right on the cable route. You just wouldn't believe your luck."
Down the line to the site went Billy Holman, a 46-year-old specialist explosive ordnance disposal diver with 18 years of experience working in underwater bomb clearance teams for the Royal Navy.
"I found the projectile, confirmed it was ordnance and then did a circular search of the area," he said. "I found a hundred-plus on my one dive. It was like a reef made of coral and projectiles; since then it has just escalated and we've uncovered more and more."
The find was especially rewarding for Holman, who just a few weeks earlier had suffered an attack of the bends after surfacing from a dive - a reminder that, although much of the underwater work has been routine for the experienced divers, danger is never far away. Each of the three MUSC vessels is equipped with a hyperbaric chamber, a standard precaution that saved his life.
"With the bends, every minute counts, so we keep the ship within half a kilometre," says Ross Stephen, another of the divers. "When he arrived on board he was in a bad way, paralysed from the waist down, but as soon as we got him in the chamber he recovered straight away."
At 15 metres, divers are limited to about 40 minutes on the bottom and so it was left to a third diver to bring one of the shells to the surface, where it was measured, photographed and quickly returned to the bottom.
"Once they come to the surface some munitions can start reacting with the air," says Everest. "They start fizzing and that's what you don't want."
Soon, hundreds of shells had been located in six distinct heaps. Within days the grand total was in excess of 4,000. The linear pattern of the piles appeared to suggest they had been dumped off the back of a slowly moving ship, a load at a time.
In the end, teams of divers were at it for more than a week, working on the heaps with crowbars, hammers, chisels and water jets to free the shells from the coral that had encased them.
The question now was, what to do with them? First, MUSC had to find out what it was dealing with and the photographs, measurements and serial numbers were sent to the Nato-funded Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technical Information Cell (EODTIC) in the UK, which maintains a database of all known munitions.
As the team awaited EODTIC's conclusion, speculation among the former Royal Marines, at least one of whom was back in waters he had last seen in 2003 as part of an amphibious assault force invading Iraq, was of course rife, if not entirely serious. "Perhaps," he suggested over breakfast one morning, with a wry smile, "these are those WMDs we were all looking for."
The truth, when it came, was less sensational, but nevertheless fascinating, and a vivid reminder that history is nothing if not circular. According to EODTIC what they had found were British-made white phosphorous shells, believed to date from the First World War and an earlier chapter in the region's troubled, oil-related history.
"They were well preserved in the mud," says Austen. "Some are thought to date to 1916. It is very hard to know whose they were; Britain was a great exporter of munitions at that time."
The question of why they were dumped, and by whom, will almost certainly remain a mystery, but British forces were in action in these waters from the start of the Great War in 1914, when the Royal Navy sailed into the Shatt al Arab to confront Ottoman forces in Mesopotamia and protect the Anglo-Persian oil refinery at Abadan on the Persian shore. To complete the sense of historical déjà vu, an earlier generation of Royal Marines were landed on the Al Faw peninsula in 1914, spearheading an advance on Basra.
White phosphorous is nasty stuff. Used primarily for battlefield illumination or for making smoke, it will also burn clean through clothing and skin and the US admitted using it as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants during the 2004 assault on Fallujah. Because it ignites in contact with oxygen it remains safe under water and this is where Miss Vickie's skips and cages come in; the cages will be loaded with shells on the seabed and then craned into the water-filled skips for transport to a land site for disposal.
"We can't leave them in the sea," says Austen. "Phosphorous is, in effect, a nasty chemical weapon. If the casings break open and the phosphorous becomes mobile it could end up in a net or on a beach. They have to be recovered, taken ashore and disposed of there. You can't blow up phosphorous; it has to be burnt off."
As MUSC's specialists set about working out the details of how to deal with the final challenge thrown up by this demanding two-year project, a curiously touching informal ceremony takes place on the aft deck of the Provider.
Security for the project has been provided by a team of former Royal Marines and private Iraqi guards, operating on board the ships and out on the water in fast rigid inflatables to ensure that no one gets within 500 metres of any of the MUSC vessels. Even here in the Iraqi-controlled MEZ the team remains on alert; earlier today a group of fishing dhows breached the cordon and headed towards the Provider.
"They could have been anybody up to anything," says Billy Daniels, an ex-Royal Marine and security co-ordinator for the project. "My guys on the nearest RIB [rigid inflatable boat] were straight on it and pushed them out of the way."
MUSC's British and Iraqi security teams have developed close bonds, running joint boat patrols and surveillance day and night. Outside the exclusion zones, vessels have been known to be attacked by armed thieves and there is particular vigilance during the hours of darkness.
Now, as the Provider's role in the two-year project draws to a close inside the protected exclusion zone, the role of the Iraqi guards is over and a tug has arrived to ferry three of the remaining four men back to the port city of Umm Qasr. Before they leave, they don their helmets and flak jackets and cradle their AK-47s to pose for photographs, arms around the shoulders of the former Royal Marines they have come to regard as friends. "It's mutual," says one of the Brits, who has spent long days over the past year patrolling in a RIB with a former Iraqi soldier for company. "He was a good bloke." Overcoming the language barrier, the two veterans discovered they had both been in action in Basra at about the same time in 2003.
Troy, the Iraqi team leader who doubles as a translator, will be staying behind to see out the last few days of the contract. He faces an uncertain future and is not looking forward to leaving. "This is a nice job. I feel safe. And I feel it here," he says, touching his chest, "what we do here."
Troy is not his real name, but the one he adopted when he worked for two years as a translator for US forces in Taji. After that it took him a year and a half to find this job and he is apprehensive about returning to Baghdad where, for fear of reprisals, his family has told neighbours he has been staying with relatives in another part of the country.
He has grown fond of his British colleagues and will miss more than their idiosyncratic sense of humour. "They give to us what you need, important things like our respect," he says. He is fighting his emotions as he looks around the bustling bridge of the AOS Provider. "They respect us and always smile with us."
But Troy needs more than respect. For Iraq and for himself, he is impatient for change. "Summer is coming and now the electric is so bad," he says. "We have nothing from this oil, since fall of Baghdad to now."
It's a reminder that, for ordinary Iraqis, the country's oil bonanza can't start to flow soon enough.
Jonathan Gornall is a senior features writer at The National.
