The Coasties, thick with body armor and carrying rifles, inch methodically toward a half-sunken Iraqi cargo ship, tie up and climb aboard. With their rifles and handguns trained on portholes, the sailors tiptoe and crawl through the sand-colored ship’s superstructure looking for weapons, uniforms, documents — anything that might show that Iraqis are using the ship as a sniper nest.

Today, there’s nothing to worry about. No one is inside this dead ship, radioing back coalition ship movements or planning suicide small-boat attacks. The sailors briefly consider climbing the wreck’s aft tower, separated by water from the superstructure, but if a sniper were hiding inside, “he’d have gotten us by now,” said Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Mike Roche, of Huntingtown, Md.

It’s one of the more tense jobs of the Aquidneck, a 110-foot cutter home-ported in Fort Macon, N.C. Tearing up and down the Khawr Abd Allah waterway, between the mouth of the river at the northern edge of the Persian Gulf to the port of Umm Qasr 40 miles north, the crew boards shipwrecks and fishing boats alike looking for anything out of the ordinary.

Although the major combat portion of the war with Iraq has come to a close, Navy and Coast Guard sailors patrolling this area are keeping fingers on triggers. As ship-carried humanitarian aid slowly gains momentum here and more fishermen feel safe venturing onto the water again, the confusion and the threat stay high.

“We’re still a good target,” said Navy Capt. David Brown, force security officer for Umm Qasr, and “mayor” of the tent city housing more than 200 sailors and Coast Guardsmen at the port.

The entire security force stretching the length of the Khawr Abd Allah, or KAA, is a mixture of Navy and Coast Guard units melded into the single mission of protecting the port and its entry points along the finger of Iraqi soil that reaches south into the Persian Gulf.

Wedged between Kuwait and Iran, the Al Faw Peninsula and Umm Qasr were the first areas to fall under coalition control after the war with Iraq began. As sporadic gunfire rang out over the dusty port city, security units already were moving into place.

Early on, Navy units cleared mines from the waterway, while explosive ordnance-disposal technicians detonated any unexploded material they found.

The security forces here, made up of Coast Guard port security units and patrol boats alongside Navy inshore boat units and their longer coastal patrol boats — with cover provided by fixed security units ashore — searched the wrecks along the waterway.

A British army organization, the 17 Port Maritime Unit, runs the port, handling food, cranes and other port services.

Along the waterway, the Navy and Coast Guard units hit pay dirt early on. The cutter Adak took three Iraqi prisoners who were found flailing in the water after their boat sank. Aquidneck boarding teams searching a wreck found AK-47s, Iraqi uniforms and berthing for many men, said Coast Guard Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Mike Shabinaw, of Diamond Bar, Calif.

“It was a rustbucket, halfway under water with pipes sticking out all over the place,” said Shabinaw, of the Aquidneck’s boarding team. “I don’t see how guys can live like that.”

Units scoured the barren Al Faw peninsula, a strip of land

running along the east side of the KAA. Among the empty bunkers, units found large caches of weapons waiting to be used on any enemy forces.

“What Iraqis like to do is cache weapons they can go back and use,” Brown said. “They’re all over the Al Faw peninsula. Iraq is basically an armed camp with stashes of weapons all over the place.”

There were so many, Brown said, EOD technicians spent three days blowing everything up.

The mixture

The security corridor starts south at the wide mouth of the KAA. There, two Navy patrol coastal vessels — the Chinook and the Firebolt — serve as the “front door,” Brown said.

The middle tier of defense is shouldered by the four, 110-foot Coast Guard patrol boats shooting up and down the river: the Aquidneck, Adak, Wrangell and Baranof. The crew of the cutter Sapelo also is in Bahrain to help out the four crews while their ship is in the yard in Maryland.

Each boat is manned with more than 20 sailors and carries law-enforcement detachments trained to board ships along with the patrol boat sailors. They’re just looking for anything suspicious, especially among the wooden fishing dhows that are beginning to repopulate the waters now that the shooting has stopped.

“With the dhows, we’re not here to harass them,” said Lt. Holly Harrison, of Vienna, Va., the commanding officer of the Aquidneck. “We usually just say ‘show me a fish’ or check their nets. If they’re not fishing, we want to know what they’re up to.”

She pointed out that since the river narrows dramatically as boats head north toward Umm Qasr, terrorists can do quite a bit of damage if they sink a ship heading into the port.

“They could stop the whole thing,” she said.

The scores of wrecks rotting alongside the channel, which stretches north of Umm Qasr, pose their own special challenge, she said. Some have been sitting there since Operation Desert Storm and before, fishermen have told the Coasties.

“If anybody’s aboard that wreck, it would be very easy for them to sit there with a cell phone watching coalition forces,” Harrison said. “We’ve found food aboard those ships that hasn’t spoiled yet.”

The wrecks, which are tied to a pier, run aground, half sunk or submerged entirely, pose a bizarre challenge to mariners navigating the channel. The extreme tidal changes unseat ships, which then shift positions. On March 22, a barge floating down river at night struck the hull of the British minesweeper Grimsby, then bumped against the Coast Guard buoy tender Walnut before crashing into a pier.

Shabinaw and other sailors said the crews are well aware that Umm Qasr could be considered a crown jewel of terrorist targets.

“What a perfect opportunity for terrorists to make an anti-American statement,” he said. “You assume they would take every opportunity to get us or the humanitarian ships.”

Saltwater cowboys

A Navy-Coast Guard team of eight machine gun-toting small boats serves as a trigger-puller in the heart of the port. They run six 25-foot Boston Whalers from Coast Guard Port Security Unit 311, based in San Pedro, Calif., and two 32-foot Kingston boats from Navy Inshore Boat Unit 14, of St. Louis. Another port security unit, 313, is guarding an oil platform in the northern Persian Gulf.

All day and night, the boats zip up and down a five-mile stretch of water — two-and-a-half miles north and south of the port — looking for anything suspicious.

“A lot of stuff is stopping fishermen from coming into the buffer zone,” said Coast Guard Port Securityman 1st Class Edward Harnby, of Huntington Beach, Calif. He explained that when he runs up against the language barrier, shouting “Move now!” works.

During a recent trip aboard one of the boats pounding north on the waterway, crew members looked to the side to see a ship sliced perfectly in half, apparently from an aerial bomb. “That’s my favorite one,” Harnby said. “[The cut] is so clean.”

The sailors often see lines of smoke drifting up from Umm Qasr and piles of ashes along the piers, evidence of further looting and destruction by Iraqi civilians.

“There are so many fires. A lot of that is just ignorance, I think,” said Machinery Technician 3rd Class Bill Payne, also of Huntington Beach. “It’s anarchy right now.”

The influx of fishermen on motor boats and dhows increases the tension, said Navy Chief Boatswain’s Mate Edgel “Tator” Harrison, of Harrah, Okla.

“It just brings trouble,” he said. “You don’t know who the nice guys are.”

He said units boarded boats early on, but that tapered off when the sailors started recognizing the regulars who were fishing.

The Navy/Coast Guard mixture, Brown said, is merely a function of getting as many units as they could to the port.

The only difference between the two services, Harrison said, is that the Coast Guard units are trained to board other boats. The Navy boats, on the other hand, have night vision for late-night operations.

“We haven’t come across any hostile forces,” said Utilitiesman 2nd Class Lloyd Brown, of O’Fallon, Mo. “They have this river locked down pretty securely.”

Crew members said they’re considered “cowboys” by other forces in the area, as they tear up and down the river with guns pointed in all directions.

And like good cowboys — and good cops — they’ve got backup. Providing aid on land is the Navy’s Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit 114, based at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. Working out of a tent at the fork of the river across from the port, the unit uses surface-search radar, thermal imaging and high-powered cameras to monitor who’s coming in and out. Often, the Navy and Coast Guard boats radio back to the MIUW what they see, or the MIUW asks sailors to check out suspicious objects or boats in the water.

“We prevent what happened to the Cole,” said Chief Sonar Technician (Surface) Jennie Pilcher, the MIUW Operation Center’s watch supervisor, of Garden City, Kan. The destroyer Cole was damaged by a terrorist attack that killed 17 sailors during a refueling stop in Yemen. “We ensure that our people are as protected as possible.”

None of the units knows when they’ll be going home. But with the fact that Iraqi forces have fallen and the machinery to restore order to the country has begun, they hope their days in Umm Qasr are numbered.