Ventura had no idea if anyone was directly above, but he instantly drew his silenced rifle from its waterproof holster on his back and, with his finger on the trigger, stared seaward at the hull of the liquid gas tanker moored to the dock.
To his utter horror he heard running footsteps above him, just one person heading to the edge. Ventura and Lefevre were no more than sixteen feet inward from that point when they heard a thump above them. An upside-down face appeared from above and then the beam of a flashlight.
Whoever it was — military guard, gas crew worker, tanker man — Jules had no idea, but the man was staring straight at him.
“Who’s there?” The words seemed disembodied since the face was upside down. But they were serious, and Jules took the only option open to him. He blew that face clean off its head with his silenced AK-47. There was just a muffled clicking sound, nothing as noisy as the screwdriver.
The body slumped over the edge, a burst of just four bullets riddling the forehead, blood dripping forty feet down into the sea. Ventura went along that beam like a circus tightrope walker. With an outrageous display of strength, he grabbed the throat of the man and hauled him overboard, straight down into the sea below. And he just stood there, his heart thumping, in deadly silence, wondering how many more they’d have to kill before they could get away.
To the amazement of both the Commander and the Navy seaman, there was not another sound, neither from above nor from the tanker. Whoever had seen them had been alone. There were no more footsteps above, no shouting, nothing.
Jules Ventura ordered Lefevre back along the beam. And he followed him to the junction of five steel rafters that came together in one spot, right below the gas pumps. And there they clamped Lefevre’s bomb, which needed no timer, having been specially primed to explode via the det-cord charge.
Ventura wound the cord around the bomb and one of the beams, finally jamming the det-cord into the hole normally used for the timed detonator wires. He tightened two screws and leaned back to admire his handiwork.
One thing was for certain: when that first high bomb blew at 0400, the second one would follow, a millisecond later. He motioned to Lefevre to begin the climb down, which took them eight minutes. And they crossed one horizontal beam just above the water, to pylon number four, and then dropped back into the Gulf to collect their flippers and Draegers.
As arranged, the team gathered at the pylon, where Commander Ventura’s men were longing to know why he had found it necessary to shoot someone. They pointed out the body, which had already drifted under the structure on the rising tide twenty-five feet away.
Commander Ventura’s orders were brisk. They took the spare det-cord and wound it around the body, a long double-thickness cord coming out from under each armpit. Two young seamen were told to drag the body under the surface, hauling it back to the Zodiacs, line astern. Ventura told them that he did not give a damn about the man he had shot, but he gave a huge damn about anyone’s finding the body.
And so they set off, four of the divers helping to pull the corpse through the water. When they reached the Zodiacs, they took a longer line from inboard, secured it to the body, and towed the body back behind the rear inflatable, like a water-skier who’d fallen off.
At the submarine, they took the same towline and lashed the man to the Yamaha engine. He was wearing military uniform and had plainly been in the Royal Saudi Air Force, which had special responsibilities for guarding and protecting the country’s obviously vulnerable oil pumping stations, processing and loading facilities, and oil platforms in the Gulf.
The young Arab sank with the two little inflatable boats, straight to the bottom, in a hundred feet of water, right at the end of the Saudi tanker lanes. Six hours from now, there would be many others joining him in death. But no one would ever know that there was anything special about the loss of the young loading dock guard.
They were all merely fallen martyrs, in the cause of the world’s richest and most avaricious industry.
CHAPTER SIX
SAME NIGHT, 2215
OFF SEA ISLAND TERMINAL
SAUDI ARABIA
The last two Zodiacs were heading east now, back toward the tanker lanes. Lt. Reme Doumen was from the chic Atlantic seaport of La Rochelle, where his father, a greatly respected local ferry owner, was mayor.
Generally speaking, Doumen had never been on the wrong side of the law in his life. But now he sat in the stern of the lead Zodiac and gazed back at the floodlit steel structure of the massive Sea Island Oil Terminal, and tried to accept what he, Reme, had just done.
He knew, in the strictest naval terms, the full dimension of his mission. He had just led a team of highly trained hit men into the heart of the enormous construction and organized the placing of high explosives sufficient to knock down the Eiffel Tower.
Doumen stared at the distant lights and at the gigantic U.S. tanker on the jetty. They were two miles away now, but he would take to his grave the memory of that night — the pitch-black water under the ship, Philippe’s hand trembling on his left shoulder as they kicked into the pylons, the knife on the steel, the tiny spotlight they used for the close electronic work, the lethal det-cord, the wires, the magnetic tug of the bomb, the way his hands shook as he spliced the det-cord to Philippe’s bomb on pylon number three.
Six hours and twenty-five minutes. They were numbers he would never forget. And now it was almost 2230. Only five and a half hours now, before the true measure of his team’s work would be known, before the Sea Island Terminal was blown into a thousand hunks of useless metal.
Would he ever tell his father what he had done? His girlfriend, Annie? One day, his children? Tell them of the night he became, for a couple of hours, one of the world’s most prominent terroristes?
Of course he never would. The code of the French Special Forces, like all Special Forces, was never broken. And Doumen knew he had to cast that word terroriste from his mind, forever. He was Lt. Reme Doumen, loyal French Naval officer, and he had just completed the most important mission entrusted to his country’s Navy since…well…Trafalgar.
Reme Doumen shrugged and glanced across the water to the other Zodiac. He wondered if everyone was thinking the same, looking back at the mighty oil loading terminal, knowing it had fewer than six hours to live. And that they had actually committed, with relentless precision, the oncoming outrage.
Doumen had always been a very tough kid. At one point it was thought he might represent France at rugby football. He was a medium-size center three-quarter, a hard, fast runner in university, and wanted by the Toulouse Club. But the Navy had other uses for his unusual strength, and his father, who had started life working as a deckhand on the La Rochelle ferry, was enormously impressed by the thought of an Admiral for a son. The French Navy beat the French Rugby Football Union comfortably.
But a terroriste? “Mon Dieu!” muttered Reme, as they came in toward the waiting Perle. “I’d better avoid tomorrow’s newspapers for the rest of my life!”
Yet he knew he’d get the same old feeling of burgeoning pride in his uniform, and in the fact that the Navy had selected him alone to lead the Special Forces into the staggering assault on the Sea Island Terminal. What’s more, he knew he would do it again, if they asked him.
Even as he led his team up the rope ladder to the foredeck, he could feel the sense of urgency in the submarine. The CO himself was out on the casing, and twice Doumen heard Captain Roudy exclaim, “Vite…vite…dépêche-toi!”
Of course, everyone knew the sub was stopped in a dangerous place, in the middle of the central buoyed channel, in probably the narrowest part of the tanker route. On the bridge and on the bow, lookouts with high-powered night-vision binoculars were sweeping the sea, for’ard and aft, for any sign of an onrushing VLCC, its helmsman a hundred feet above them.
The night was cloudy and very dark, and the transfer from the boats was made in excellent time. The two Zodiacs were scuttled, but the Perle just beat them in the race t
o get under the surface, diving to periscope depth, in fifteen fathoms, leaving Alain Roudy to decide whether to risk going deeper.
Right now there was thirty feet below the keel, and the CO decided to stay at PD, but to take down the mast, moving nor’nor’east up the outgoing channel at ten knots. That way nothing would gain on him from behind, and he would gain nothing on any ship up ahead. The ten-knot speed limit, and requirement, was strictly observed along Saudi tanker routes.
It was five hours running time to H hour. Five hours to 0400. Five hours to the temporary end to civilization as they knew it in the free world. The end of cheap oil on the global market.
The crew of the Perle was not giving this much thought as they pushed on up the channel. But there was a growing tension down in the missile room, where most of the operators were soon to launch all twelve of their cruises, not at some phantom practice target, as usual, but this time with real warheads packed with TNT and aimed unerringly, with precision and absolute malice.
After eight miles Captain Roudy ordered a course change to the northeast…come right…steer course zero-five-zero…
And twelve miles later he elected to leave the tanker lanes completely. With the main channel about to run due east, the CO ordered the helmsman to cross the lanes and exit to the north, making a wide sweep in deeper water for twenty-five miles to the missile launch area he had been allotted: 27.06N 50.54E.
They arrived at 0340, still fifty feet below the surface of the water, unobserved by anyone since first they went deep in the Red Sea south of the Gulf of Suez.
Missile Director…Captain…final checks, s’il vous plaît.
And for the last time, Lt. Cdr. Albert Paul illuminated the computerized screen that showed the targets and their numbers: Abqaiq Complex—25.56N 49.32E; eastern pipeline—25.56N 49.34E. The third barrage of four missiles would be aimed at 26.31N 50.01E, the Qatif Junction manifold complex, at four slightly different locations, hoping to blast the one area where the pipeline was custom-made, and would take months and months to repair.
Basically, hitting pipelines was not a great idea, nor was hitting oil wells, because both could be capped and repaired with standard equipment, which Aramco had in abundance. The trick was to hit the loading docks, the pumping stations, and, on the Red Sea coast, the refineries.
Captain Roudy’s targets had been supremely well selected. The Abqaiq station handled 70 percent of all the nation’s oil. It not only pumped from the enormous Ghawar field, over the mountains to the entire Red Sea coast, it also fed the entire east coast. This included the loading docks at Sea Island, Ras al Ju’aymah, and Ras Tannurah, from which Sea Island was fed.
The pipeline out of Abqaiq was plainly critical, and Prince Nasir had selected it as the only pipeline to be targeted. Alain Roudy’s final target, the Qatif Junction manifold complex, directed every last gallon of oil on the east coast.
Prepare tubes one to four…
Aye, sir.
Ten minutes later, o-three-fifty…prepare to launch…tube ONE…TIREZ DE FUSIL…FIRE!!
The first of the Perle’s MBDA Stormcat cruise missiles came ripping out of the torpedo tube, its aft swerving left and right as it found its bearings. It flashed upward through the water, broke the surface with a thunderous roar, and lanced into the night sky, the numbers flashing through its “brain” as it steadied onto course two-four-zero, still climbing, a fiery tail crackling in its wake.
It hit its flying speed of Mach 0.9, two hundred feet above the water, at which point the gas turbines cut in and extinguished the flames in its wake. In the warm air at sea level over the Gulf, Mach 0.9 was the equivalent of more than six hundred miles per hour, which meant that the missile would blast into the Abqaiq complex ten minutes from launch.
Before it had traveled twenty miles, there were three more missiles dead astern. The lead missile crossed the narrow peninsula of Ras Tannurah and swerved over the Saudi coastline at 0357. It rocketed over the coastal highway and changed course, flashing through the dark skies above the desert straight at the Abqaiq complex. With ten miles to go it made its final course change, coming in from the northeast on a line of approach that took it marginally north of the main complex.
At precisely 0400.01 it smashed with stupendous force straight into the middle of Pump Station Number One, buried itself in the main engineering system, and detonated with monstrous force—360 pounds of TNT in a blinding flash of savagery that would have blown an aircraft carrier apart.
No one working anywhere on the station’s night shift survived. All of the main machinery was obliterated by the explosion. Anyone standing a couple of miles away might have been staggered by the destruction and fires that began as soon as the oil ignited. But just a short distance from the remnants of the pumps, there was a fire to end all fires as Alain Roudy’s second missile slammed into the central area of Abqaiq’s petrochemical fractioning towers.
These huge steel cylinders, full of belting hot gases and liquids, were colossally flammable. And they did not just burn. They incinerated into a violet and orange inferno. Dante would have called the fire department. Heavy fuel oil, gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas, sulphur, and God knows what else blasted into the sky. And the heat was so intense it caused a chain reaction among these refining towers, which exploded one by one in the face of the searing fire.
Everything the towers contained was totally combustible, and years later Abqaiq would still be considered the world’s largest industrial calamity, greater even than the Texas City disaster in 1946, when a tanker full of ammonium nitrate blew up an entire south Texas town. Abqaiq now burned from end to end. Alain Roudy’s four missiles had all struck home. And he was not finished yet.
The next four smashed into the eastern pipeline on its way to the Qatif Junction manifold complex. Then that too exploded in a fireball. And out to the west the flames could actually be seen in the sky from the obliterated Sea Island Terminal, which seemed to blow itself to pieces at 0403 with about a square mile of oil on fire all around it.
The most spectacular fire was off Ras al Ju’aymah, where Ventura’s two high bombs had slammed the upper deck of the terminal a hundred feet into the air, blown to smithereens the valve system for the petroleum gas, and ignited the blowtorch from hell, as forecast six weeks previously by Gaston Savary. The fire was currently roaring across the water, an incinerating white gas flame two feet across at source and 150 feet long.
The actual jetty was in shreds in the water, but the causeway was more or less intact and the liquefied gas pipe was jutting at a ridiculous angle, forty-five degrees to the horizontal, feeding the giant flame with an unending rush of propane that no one could turn off.
Twenty minutes after the explosions had comprehensively destroyed the Saudi Arabian oil industry on the east coast, no one had yet connected them together. There was no one alive who had been working near any of the explosion sites. The administration blocks at Abqaiq and Qatif were flattened, and anyone who was awake even remotely close to the fires could only stand in awe of the gargantuan flames exploding into the sky every few minutes. Abqaiq was of course right in the middle of nowhere.
Indeed the first alarm was raised in the distant city of Yanbu al Bahr, where the loading jetties had been blown sky high by Garth Dupont’s bombs. But those jetties were close to the shore, and the explosion scarcely harmed any of the main parts of the town. The missiles fired by Commander Dreyfus had just hit the refinery, which stood a couple of miles beyond the Yanbu perimeters. And this meant that the Police Chief and several duty officers in Aramco’s high-security forces were definitely aware that something big had just blown up.
The Yanbu police phoned Rabigh, which was in much the same condition as they were — big flames, constant explosions from the burning refineries, jetties gone. In turn they both phoned Jiddah, which had, in the last few minutes, lost its own refinery, courtesy of another well-aimed cruise by Commander Dreyfus.
Everyone called the security headquarters in
Riyadh, where they had now heard from the town of Ras al Ju’aymah that the LPG jetties four miles offshore had just blown up and taken a 200,000-ton tanker with them. It was not, however, until after 5 A.M. that Riyadh learned of the full catastrophe in Abqaiq, which quite literally ended all activity in the oil industry west of the Aramah Mountains, and most of the activity on the east coast.
Nearly all of the great loading jetties in the country were smashed beyond repair, the pumping system was history, and the Qatif manifold would take at least a year to repair. The Saudis had always known their oil industry was vulnerable, but this was too much to comprehend.
They had a lot of security in all of the complexes, and yet some kind of a marauding force appeared to have breached every last line of defense, and laid waste to the golden goose that had turned this arid desert kingdom into a modern-day nirvana for one of the richest ruling families on earth. All 35,000 of them.
If the goose was still laying, anywhere out in the desert, she was laying fried eggs. Many of the oil fires would not be extinguished for a week.
And in separate oceans, a thousand miles apart, two undetected submarines of the French Navy were making their way quietly home. Indeed, on board the Perle, running silently toward the Strait of Hormuz, a hundred feet below the surface, Big Jules Ventura, destroyer of the LPG terminal, had just bid an extremely modest two-no-trumps.
MONDAY, MARCH 22, 8:00 A.M.
WESTERN SUBURBS, RIYADH
Prince Nasir heard the news before most people, mainly because he had observers placed in all the selected sites, each of them under instructions to call him immediately anything happened. This made him an extremely busy prince between 0400 and 0420.
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