Egypt had no interest in the French submarine, signed the papers, issued the permits, and informed the entire world by satellite that France had just sent a hunter-killer from the Med into the Red. There was nothing sinister about that. They did it by international agreement, like many other guardians of sensitive waterways around the world.
They were under way by 1230, and the Perle set off south on the surface toward the halfway point of Ismailia, at the top of Lake Timsah. By nightfall they were on their way down to the Great Bitter Lake, and at 0200 they came through Port Taufiq and ran into the Gulf of Suez. The water was still only 150 feet deep throughout this 160-mile seaway, but it was littered with rocky rises and a couple of wrecks, not to mention several sandbanks.
The seaway was narrow, about twelve miles wide, but the land on the portside, along the Sinai Peninsula, shelved out very gradually into the Gulf, and the left-hand side was thus no place for a submarine.
Captain Roudy kept the Perle on the surface until they had moved through the Strait of Gubal and into deep Red Sea waters. The seabed sloped sharply down there, to a depth of two thousand feet. And at 1709 on Friday afternoon, March 5, Alain Roudy ordered the French submarine dived, all hatches tight, main ballast blown.
Bow down ten…make your depth two hundred meters…speed twelve.
Aye, sir…
Until now, the speed, direction, and position of the Perle had been public knowledge. But shortly after 5 P.M. on that Sunday afternoon, this was no longer so. No one knew her speed any longer, or her direction or position in the water. And certainly not the intentions of her Captain.
Those watching the satellites may have assumed that she was headed south into the Gulf of Aden. But the important thing was, no one knew for certain. And no one ever would know either, since the Perle would not be seen or detected again; not this month.
Indeed she would not be seen until the second week in April, when she was scheduled to arrive in La Réunion. And by then, the world would be a very different place. Especially if you happened to be a member of the Saudi royal family, or indeed the President of France.
Five days later, as Captain Roudy worked his way south down the Red Sea, underwater, the Perle’s sister ship, the Améthyste, was ready to clear the submarine jetties in the Naval harbor of Brest, in western France.
It was 0500, not yet light, but there was a small crowd gathered under the arc lights to see them off. Just families, the shore crew, a few engineers who had conducted her final tests, and, somewhat surprisingly, the head of the French Submarine Service, Adm. Marc Romanet.
They’d begun pulling the rods the previous evening to bring the Améthyste’s nuclear reactor slowly up to temperature and pressure. Commander Dreyfus had already finalized the next-of-kin-list, which detailed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every crew member’s nearest relatives, should the submarine, for any reason, not return. The NOK list was standard procedure for all submarine COs the world over.
Madame Janine Dreyfus, aged thirty-one, mother of Jerzy, four, and Marie-Christine, six, was at the top of the list. All three of them stood now, with the other families, in the pouring rain, under a wide golf umbrella, awaiting the departure — Janine watching her husband, and the children their father, who was standing with the officer-of-the-deck and the XO, high on the fin, speaking into his microphone.
At 0515 the order was issued to “Attend bells.” Eight minutes later, Commander Dreyfus snapped to the engineers, “Answer bells.” The XO ordered, “Lines away,” and the tugs began to pull the Améthyste away from the pier.
The strong, gusting southwest wind off the Atlantic swept the rain almost sideways across the hull, and Commander Dreyfus, his greatcoat collar up, cap pulled down, waited for the tugs to clear before calling, “Ten knots speed!”
The great black hull swung to starboard in a light churning wash, and she moved silently forward in the rain, across the harbor, toward the outer point of the south jetty, then out into the main submarine roads of the French Navy.
She swept wide of the Saint Pierre Bank and then steered two-four-zero, southwest down the narrow waters of the Goulet, her lights just visible in the squally weather. Some wives of crew members stayed to see them finally disappear. Janine Dreyfus and her children were the last to leave.
Commander Dreyfus finally left the bridge as they approached the light off Point St. Mathieu, at the southwestern tip of the Brest headland. Then he ordered the ship deep, on a long swing to starboard beneath the turbulent waters of the outer Bay of Biscay, and then south to the endless coastlines of Portugal and Spain and the Straits of Gibraltar.
FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1500
NORTHWESTERN YEMEN
This was the hottest day so far. Gen. Ravi Rashood and his men were still walking. They had been going for almost ten days now up through the mountains, ever since the landing on the deserted beaches north of the Yemeni town of Midi, four miles from the Saudi border at Oreste Point.
Only the supreme fitness of the men had kept them going. The concentrated food bars they carried with them had kept their essential bodily requirements intact, but the last two days had seen some weight loss, and the General was anxious for them to reach the RV.
No one had complained as they trudged up the high escarpments, heads down, hats pulled forward, day in and day out, guided only by the General’s compass and GPS. But when elite troops like these ask for rest, you give it to them immediately. And General Rashood noticed that these requests were now coming more often than before.
The temperature was constantly in the low nineties, and the army bergens the men carried on their backs were growing lighter as they devoured their food, but not sufficiently to make the march much easier.
Their weapons were slung across their backs, and each man carried a heavy belt of ammunition across his chest. In four-man groups, they took turns carrying for thirty minutes at a time two heavy machine guns set on leather grips. It would be incomprehensible for a normal person to grasp the strength and training of these men; to watch them walk, mile after mile, sweat pouring off them, uphill, then downhill, not pausing, even to take in water, only when it seemed someone might pass out.
General Rashood knew they had another four miles to cover before dark. Almost thirty miles behind him he knew Team Two was moving slightly quicker under the command of the teak-hard former Legionnaire, Maj. Henri Gilbert. His own tireless number two, Maj. Etienne Marot, made a satellite communication with Henri every two hours.
The final group, Team One, commanded by the Corsica-born Maj. Paul Spanier, was twelve miles in arrears of Major Gilbert, and moving faster than all of them, along a different route. That was the nature of a march like this: everyone began to get slower.
The sun was just beginning to sink somewhere into the Red Sea, several miles to their left, when Team One saw two camels appear on the horizon. They were walking in a slow swaying rhythm, unchanged in thousands of years. And they were not on the track that General Rashood’s men occupied. They were coming from the northeast, across rough, high desert sand littered with boulders and virtually no vegetation, leaving a dusty slipstream behind them. Sometimes the riders disappeared with the undulation of the ground, but their dust cloud never did.
General Rashood checked them out through binoculars. Both Bedouins were armed, rifles tucked into leather holsters in front of their saddles. The General ordered everyone off the track, to the right, down behind a line of rocks…weapons drawn…action stations.
Slowly the Arab riders advanced on their position, and made no attempt to conceal themselves. They drew right alongside the rocks and dismounted. The leader spoke softly. “General Rashood. I am Ahmed, your guide.”
“Password?” snapped the Hamas commander.
“Death Squad,” replied the Arab.
General Rashood advanced from behind his rock, right hand held out in greeting.
“As salaam alaykum,” responded the Bedouin. “We have brought you water. There are o
nly two miles left of your long journey.”
“I am grateful, Ahmed,” said the General. “My men are very tired and very thirsty. Our supplies are low.”
“But ours are plentiful, and they are very close by now. Let your men drink…and then follow us in.”
“Did you see us from far away?”
“We saw the dust, and we saw movement along the track from more than two miles away. But we never heard you, not until now. You move very softly, like Bedouins.”
“Some of us are Bedouins,” replied the General. “And we are grateful to see you.”
Ahmed’s companion, a young Saudi al-Qaeda fighter, had pulled two plastic three-gallon water containers from his camel and set them up on a low rock for the men to drink. That was two pints each, and there was not much left after ten minutes.
They picked up their burdens again, the two Arabs remounted, and they set off — as always moving north — and the ground began to fall away in front of them as they approached the “hide” the al-Qaeda men had built.
At first it was difficult to discern. Not until they were within a hundred yards could they make out its shape — a crescent of rocks guarding the rear and a solid rock face 150 feet to the south, overlooking a dusty valley. Beyond that were low hills, and in the far distance there was flat land, too far away to see the aircraft hangars on the King Khalid Base.
Inside the “hide” were wooden shelters about eight feet high, with just a back wall. The other three sides were open, with poles holding up palm-leaf roofs covered in bracken. One square earth-colored tent, again with bracken on the roof, plainly contained stores. Big cardboard containers could be seen through its open double doors.
Off to the left were several small primus stoves for cooking. There was no question of a fire out here, since its smoke would be seen in the crystal-clear blue skies from both the air base and the army base, nearly five miles away.
This rough “hide,” set in the foothills of the Yemeni mountains, would be home to the French-Arabian assault force for thirteen days. It would be a time of intensive surveillance of the bases, checking every inch of the ground, studying the movements of the Air Force guards night after night, observing the movements in and out of the main gates, noting the lights that remained on all night.
When Captain Alain Roudy’s missiles slammed into Abqaiq’s Pumping Station Number One in the small hours of Monday morning, March 22, General Rashood’s hit men would be ready.
MONDAY, MARCH 15, 0900 (LOCAL)
CENTRAL SAUDI ARABIA
The main road leading to the ancient ruins of Dir’aiyah, twenty miles northeast of Riyadh, was closed. At the junction with al-Roubah Road, just beyond the Diplomatic Quarter, a Saudi military tank stood guard. Two armed soldiers were talking to three officers from the matawwa, the Saudi religious police, that fearsome squad of moral vigilantes who enforced the strictest interpretation of the Koran. Almost to a man the matawwa supported the creed of Prince Nasir. Above an official-looking sign read ROAD TO DIR’AIYAH CLOSED OWING TO RESTORATION.
Motorists who stopped and claimed to be going on farther than the famous ruins were informed that they could pass, and were given a permit to be handed in to the guards stationed two miles from the ancient buildings. No one would be allowed to leave their vehicles. And it was the same coming south from Unayzah.
When the highway reached Dir’aiyah there was a roadblock in both directions. Uniformed soldiers prevented anyone going down the track that led west from the main highway. They collected passes and politely told motorists that the reopening of the ruins would be announced in the Arab News. Of course, most drivers who arrived at that point did not care much when the ruins reopened; the tourists had already been stopped miles away, on the edge of the city.
Anyone who gave any thought to this might have been quizzical about the ironclad security that now surrounded the very first capital city of the al-Saud tribe. Dir’aiyah, the kingdom’s most popular archaeological site, was under martial law. Not since the Turkish conqueror Ibrahim Pasha ransacked, burned, and destroyed the place almost two hundred years ago had a Saudi army seemed so intent on defending it.
In effect, Dir’aiyah was just a ghost town because, in 1818, Ibrahim Pasha had demanded that every door, wall, and roof be flattened. His marauding army pounded the walls with artillery, even wiped out every palm tree in the town, before they marched back to Egypt.
The palm trees grew again, but the Saudis never wanted to rebuild what was once their greatest city, and instead elected to start again with a new capital to the south, Riyadh. And for more than a 180 years Dir’aiyah was just the remnants of the old buildings — a mosque, the dwellings, the military watchtowers, the shapes of the streets — an entire cityscape, all open to the skies.
It was a place where life had become extinct, just a sand-blown Atlantis, with the sounds of shifting feet, as the tourists with their cameras shuffled around one of the glories of Arabian history.
Until Col. Jacques Gamoudi showed up, that is.
He had arrived on a scheduled Air France flight from Paris to King Khalid International Airport on December 2 and been in residence in Riyadh ever since. His appearance in the Saudi capital was completely unobserved. He took a cab from the airport and checked into the busy Asian Hotel off al-Bathaa Street.
Not for two days did he meet with three emissaries from Prince Nasir, and that was in the Farah, a local restaurant on al-Bathaa Street resplendent with large red-and-white Arab lettering above the door, enhanced by a large picture of a cheeseburger. From then on things looked sharply up. That afternoon he moved into a beautiful house behind high white walls and a grove of stately palm trees.
He was given a communications officer, two maids, a cook, a driver, and two staff officers from the al-Qaeda organization, both Saudis, both natives of Riyadh. One of them was the brother of Ahmed, General Rashood’s guide seven hundred miles away in the foothills above Khamis Mushayt.
And for two weeks they studied the maps, looking for an ideal spot to store armored military vehicles, several of them carrying antitank guns and possibly six MIA2 Abrams, the most advanced tank ever built in the United States. Saudi Arabia’s armored brigades owned more than three hundred of these battlefield bludgeons, half of them parked in lines at Khamis Mushayt.
They also needed a place to stockpile light and heavy machine guns, for later distribution, and for handheld rocket and grenade launchers. Not to mention several tons of ammunition and regular grenades. Much of this arsenal was currently in storage in the military cities under the watchful gaze of Saudi Army personnel sympathetic to the cause of Prince Nasir.
The questions were, when could the cache be moved, and where could it go?
Jacques Gamoudi called staff meetings, sometimes attended by six, even eight, specially invited al-Qaeda revolutionaries. He conferred with his small specialist team, and he spoke encrypted to General Rashood in the south. There was no communication whatsoever with France.
One night there was a sudden visit from Prince Nasir himself, and Jacques Gamoudi expressed bewilderment at the principal problem: how to move the hardware out of the military stores and place it all under tight control, ready for the daytime attack on the reigning royal family and their palaces.
The Prince himself had masterminded the acquisition of the weapons, and he had called on his loyalists to store and protect them. Curiously that had not been difficult. All of it was essentially stolen from the Royal Saudi Land Forces, which, awash with money for many, many years, were apt to be relatively casual with ordnance.
For two years there had been the most remarkable nationwide operation of pure deception going on in Saudi Arabia. One by one, battle tanks had gone missing from the big southern base at Mushayt, driven out straight through the main gates, on massive tank transporters, and north to Assad Military City, at Al Kharj, sixty miles southeast of Riyadh, where the national armaments industry was also located.
No one bothered to inquire wh
en the tank had been loaded on the transporter by regular soldiers. The sentries never even questioned the drivers as the huge trucks roared out through the gates. And certainly the guards at Assad never even blinked when a Saudi Army transporter, driven by serving Saudi soldiers, hauling a regular M1A2 Abrams tank bearing the insignia of the Saudi Army, drove up and banged on the horn. They naturally let them in.
The tanks were parked in a neat group out on the north side of the parade grounds, and everyone assumed someone else had issued the order. But you can only do that when half the population hates the King and all he stands for. And even then, only if they think there is a real chance of a change of regime.
No one ever said anything. Hardly anyone even noticed. And it was the same with hundreds and hundreds of weapons boxed, crated, and moved from base to base, always placed in a spot that everyone assumed had been designated by a senior officer. When, actually, those spots had been designated by no one.
Prince Nasir’s secret arsenal was there for all to see. But no one really saw it. There were literally thousands of rounds of ammunition packed into the storage centers at Assad. Another huge cache of weapons had been driven to the southern warehouses in King Khalid Military City itself. But there was no paperwork. It was all just there, like everything else. And no one would miss it when it went, in the two weeks leading up to March 25.
There were even armored cars hidden quietly in various wadis and oases, all of them looking official, all of them occasionally visited by uniformed personnel from the armored brigades. Sometimes they were moved, sometimes left for another two or three days. But no one ever tampered with the well-paid Army in Saudi Arabia, and there were many officers and corporals already dedicated to the safety of the arsenal of the Crown Prince.
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