The petrol-bombers, as the press catch-named them, operated in teams of three. Dressed in blue overalls with the initials ‘BP’ on their backs, and passing for British Petroleum maintenance engineers, they broke the lock on the brass sealer cap and emptied four five-gallon cans of petrol down the pipe. Being lighter than the heavy fuel oil, this floated on top. Then they rolled down the pipe three small balls, two inches in diameter, each containing a phosphorus-based compound sealed in a thin layer of hard wax. They sank into the fuel oil and as they floated back to the surface the petrol dissolved the wax. Within three minutes, and with the bogus BP engineers safely away from the area, the phosphorus was exposed to air and ignited. The flash set the petrol on fire and within another four minutes the fuel oil had been heated to five thousand degrees Centigrade, the temperature at which it combusts. Sealed inside the tank, the heat and pressure generated by it was enormous, and the blast took the steel- plated top of the storage tank up through the basement floor, the super-heat instantly killing twenty-four Saudis queuing at the Home Affairs desk for air tickets home. Their bodies, immediately sealed in burning oil, were then forced twenty feet through the wooden floorboards above and into the First Secretary’s offices where the scorching heat and the burning oil took their second round of victims.
Fifty-four Saudis died in their Embassy, thirty-eight Libyans and forty-one Iranians in theirs. The just-living casualties, survivors so badly burnt and so deformed they would never walk again, would drink their food through pipes and would never close their eyes to sleep again, totalled, for the three Embassies, eighty-eight. That evening, the terrible casualties made television viewers throughout the world forget for an instant their own separate woes and they joined the outraged protests. But then, just as quickly, fuel rationing, the President’s ultimatum, United Nations’ confusion and Soviet naval activity—lumped together by the media as the ‘Gulf Crisis’—took back their attention, and the dead and the slowly dying who had been brought out of the three Arab Embassies in London were quickly forgotten.
It was hoped that the outrage would dissipate the accelerating anti-Arab sentiments that were now being promoted on street corners, in pubs, bars, Parliament and clubs, but it did not. All kinds of British Nationalist Movements under many titles and for many reasons began quickly to spread anti-Arab propaganda and the Arab suddenly supplanted the West Indian and the Pakistani as the targets of racist attacks. This caused much relief in London’s Southall, Lewisham, Brixton and the country’s other Black immigrant ghettoes and, almost in a sense of gratitude, the Black and the Asian became as quickly and as vehemently anti-Arab.
The Monday Club, a select association of wealthy right- wing racist-xenophobists, demanded the immediate nationalization of all Arab investment and property in the United Kingdom, including the sequestration of Arab money held by British banks and Arab stocks and shares held by British brokers. ‘Do what they did to us’, became the Club’s shibboleth, reminding people of Sir Anthony Eden’s loss of the Suez Canal to Nasser in 1956, and his futile attempts to bomb the Egyptians back to submission.
The Monday Club clarion was quickly taken up by others. There was much to fire Mr Ordinary Britisher’s hatred of the Arab. ‘Wog’ was reintroduced to his vocabulary of abuse and ‘A-rab’ became the vilest term of derision in school playgrounds and factory shop-floors. Overnight it had become a physical hazard for anyone dressed in djellabahs to hail a taxi, let alone walk Regent’s Street. Arabs were advised by their Embassies to stay indoors and they did. Harrods, long called ‘Arabs’ by Londoners, seemed suddenly bare without them and the chain department-store, Marks and Spencer, wondered, looking at the West End daily sales returns, whether Arabs had been their only customers. There were empty waiting rooms in Harley Street and exclusive doctors and dentists bit their nails and wondered whether the replacement Porsche might not have to wait a while. In quick retreat from the sudden antagonism the Arabs created something of a vacuum.
The anti-Arab rantings across the entire spectrum of the British Right was given much exposure and therefore much encouragement by the media. The long-dead Lord Avon, Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden at the time of Suez, became the hero of the day and, taking the precaution of informing Fleet Street picture agencies and the television news networks, the League of Empire Loyalists draped the Union Jack over his grave at Alvediston cemetery, near Salisbury in Wiltshire while a bugler sounded the ‘Last Post’.
Like their American cousins, the British found it easy to despise the Arabs, who had created a dozen crises in as many years; taking the Israelis repeatedly to war, causing recession after recession in Western capitalism with their insatiable demand for petro-dollars, hijacking and destroying aircraft, killing innocent people for some non-existent never-to-begotten Palestine. Bombing, bullying, hostage taking, machine- gunning and hand-grenading their way to the world’s attention. They were the makers of mayhem with their unique Moslem intolerance in a world that possibly deserved better treatment. Western eyes made no distinction. Palestinian, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Iranian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian: they were all Arabs and they were hateful. They were Moslems. They were filthy. They fornicated with goats and ate sheep’s balls. They drank camel’s piss. They were to be despised.
Again, like their American cousins, the British did not take kindly to the new and very severe restrictions caused by the fuel rationing, caused by the Arabs. Until petrol coupons could be printed, all petrol stations were closed and, until the government had decided how coupons could be distributed equitably, only public transport would be available. Request for permits to obtain petrol had to be applied for at local magistrate’s courts, and they were not expected to grant them freely.
As always, many thousands of motorists refused or were unable to look reality and the law in the eyes, and on the evening following the Prime Minister’s decree the roads and motorways of Britain were littered with cars and lorries, abandoned wherever the needle had finally crossed ‘empty’.
And that night, on the separate main news bulletins, Mr Britain saw live, via satellite, what extraordinary and increasingly outrageous things Mr America was doing to keep himself mobile. And they saw too the extraordinary outrageous thing their President now seemed willing to do to keep it that way.
The patience of the British, like their apathy, is well known, and, in the tradition of the British in times of crisis, it was widely believed that it would all blow over, despite what they saw on their screens, in spite of what they heard on their radios and read in their newspapers. The President’s ultimatum would do the trick. Anyway, there was always North Sea oil. Nothing could touch that. Which, as it happened, almost proved disastrously wrong.
It was a force nine and gout in the skipper’s right foot that prevented it.
The Pegasus was a converted Scottish motor trawler operating out of Aberdeen on the West Scottish coast. Once a week it sailed from that port eighty miles out into the North Sea to the giant oil drilling rig Constellation, supplying the one hundred and five men working there with essentials like kippers and smoked bacon, cigarettes, bread, water and a regular assortment of expensive rig equipment to replace the worn and the faulty. And once a month the Pegasus would bring out a new shift of men and take the tired ones back for a fortnight’s shore leave.
But on this morning, the Pegasus had been held up in Aberdeen harbour because of the pain in the skipper’s foot, long diagnosed as gout, symptom of a high uric acid level in his blood, the result of sixty-two excessive years. He should have been at the wheel at three am, but the pain was such that when he had swallowed the last of his Brufen painkillers, he realized he could not sail without more. He would wait for his doctor’s surgery to open, get a new prescription and sail at nine. But in the meantime the wind turned around from south-west to north-east and the waves began hitting the breakwater twenty feet high. For three hours the Pegasus, deep in the water and full of supplies, rode
the swell inside the protected harbour, tugging at her ropes, with her skipper—the painkillers having dissolved the pain—striding back and forth along the quay then looking at the sky and cursing the cussedness of Scottish weather. He did not know it but the north-easterly and his gout caused what was possibly the most fortunate delay in recent British history.
The Pegasus should have tied up at the rig at eleven that morning but instead she eventually came alongside at ten that night. It meant that the two men, hidden in the forward hold of the supply vessel, had either to abandon their attempt to blow up the rig or do what they could despite the late hour, and despite the tide that was now running from slack to ebb.
They knew that the one hour of slack tide had been crucial to their operation, so meticulously planned. Sitting there in the dark, sick with the sea’s buffeting and the smell of diesel oil, they talked in whispers. They could go back to Aberdeen and report to their superiors that the attack had had to be abandoned. Or they could do what they had come all this way to do, in spite of the tide and the odds against them.
They had come aboard in their black neoprene diving suits, carrying their compressed air-bottles, the previous evening while supplies were still being loaded into the Pegasus’s holds. They had taken it in turns to sleep during the night, but they had both heard the wind turn and felt the rise and swell of the water inside the harbour and they knew before they heard the skipper’s curses that it was going wrong and there was nothing they could do to change it.
Their own people would ask later why, knowing that the delay in the harbour made it impossible for the attack on the rig to succeed, the two went ahead with it? Why didn’t they abandon Pegasus and report back and wait for new orders? There was never to be an answer.
The rubber tyres on the supply boat’s sides prevented the teak boards from being splintered in the sea’s buffeting and after much manoeuvring the skipper got his lines securely tied to one of the rig’s tubular steel legs. The hatches were then opened and through the icy, stinging spray supplies were slowly hoisted to the main platform a hundred and twenty feet up, the rig’s floodlights making harsh daylight on Pegasus’s deck. All eyes were on the work, so no one saw the two divers emerge through the forward hatch and slip overboard, though had anyone seen them they would have been taken for maintenance divers going below to carry out any one of a hundred routine checks on the drilling gear. They carried across their chests toolpacks identical to those used by the rig’s diving engineers, and the same weighted orange coloured torches. But they did not carry tools in the chest packs. Neatly arranged inside them were seven pounds of plastic high explosive, two electro-magnets, nylon lines and detonators that could be activated by a radio signal sent from the radio transmitter carefully concealed between the timbers of the Pegasus’s forward hold.
Before they began their dive through the black sea, they tied a cord to the steel tow-ring at the base of the boat’s bow, a bright orange nylon cord that would guide them back up. Slowly they began their struggle down and, every few minutes, each man shone his torch at the depth gauge on his wrist. Only these occasional flashes through the blackness assured the other he was not alone. Still they carried on down, hoping the current would ease. At eighty feet they came together, facing each other, their torches alight so that the one could see the other. One passed his hand sideways across his throat in a cutting motion, but the other shook his head and pointed downwards indicating that they should dive deeper. There was a moment’s hesitation. Then the other nodded, the torch lights went out and the orange cord unwound further.
At one hundred and twenty feet beneath the hull of the Pegasus, they stopped diving, their torches came on again and they checked the depth gauges on their wrists. Their faces were only a yard apart and in the brilliant glare they saw each other’s eyes through their masks. They had hoped that at this depth the strength of the running tide would not prevent them doing what they had come to do, but they were still struggling to keep their position against the leg of the rig, twisting to stop their air bottles turning them upside down. They felt the vicious tug at their goggles and mouthpiece and they knew, even as they began to undo their chest packs, that they had failed.
Their target was one of the four huge legs that supported the rig above water and the series of underwater bearing supports that held the drill in position. Both men had been employed on oil rigs as construction divers, so they both knew exactly what could be sabotaged with a little explosive. It was impractical to blow the drill. Any malfunction in the drilling mechanism itself or any blow in the pipeline and the oil outlet on the seabed was immediately and completely sealed by what oil men call the ‘Christmas tree’. To blow the Christmas tree meant going down three hundred feet or more, and that could only be done in a diving bell. It was decided that the quickest and easiest sabotage was to collapse one of the legs at its weld seam, the weakest point, so the entire rig would topple into the sea. There was an even chance that as it went over it would pull the Christmas tree up with it, freeing the pressure of oil and spilling it out at the rate of a thousand gallons a minute. It had been estimated by the planners who had hired and trained the divers that it would take between eight and thirty hours to cap the well again, an operation delayed and hampered by the oil and the need to rescue the survivors who had gone overboard. In that time, they calculated, nearly ten million gallons of crude oil would have spilled into the North Sea with the tides and wind spreading it fast to the eastern Scottish coast, the Norwegian and Danish coasts and, with the wind constant from the North East, oil would enter the English Channel, the Thames Estuary, and touch the Normandy coast.
But Pegasus had been late, the divers had lost their one precious hour of slack water, and the tide was now running fast and quickly, sapping their strength. Yet they had come this far, had risked so much, and the reward promised was so great that, struggling in the darkness at a depth of one hundred and twenty feet, they decided to continue.
Holding on to the nylon line with one hand, they unzipped their chest packs, took out one of the two electromagnets and clamped it to the leg. On the magnet was an eyelet and, as one man held the other steady in the surge, he threaded half-inch thick nylon cord through it and through that he threaded the small round doughnut-shaped packs of explosive and the detonator rings. They struggled to keep their position as the sea surged this way and that, turning them and pulling them away from the steel leg. But the magnet was now clamped tight on to the steel and the divers used it to keep themselves steady. For another five minutes they slowly threaded the explosive doughnuts and the detonators on to the cord, every effort harder than the last, until fifteen had been secured.
Then, pulling the second magnet from his chest pack, the senior diver, took hold of the end of the cord and began to swim around the twenty-five foot circumference of the huge leg, so that the explosives were evenly spread around it. But at that moment, as he let go of the orange safety line, a current of sea pushed its way through the maze of steel struts and he was suddenly caught in its flow. Desperately he began clawing for the safety line but as the other watched in the flood of torchlight, he saw the black body tossed up and down and smashed against the steel, and he saw the man’s airpipe torn from the valve and a burst of bubbles shoot from the bottles. Then only the blackness, only the nylon cord carrying the doughnuts, shaking violently around him with the heavy electro-magnet on the end of it. Quickly he tugged in the orange safety line and began to pull himself up, forcing his flippers down in an effort to lever his tiring body away from the explosives, away from the heavy magnet that spun around him in the swirling current. But just as he felt he was free the cord and the explosives whipped around him like a dozen lassos, tying his arms tight against his body and then there was the sudden and terrifying thump on his back as the electromagnet clamped itself to his steel bottles.
The rig’s maintenance divers found him the following morning, his head torn off by the whiplash of the
underwater current. He was trussed up like rolled mutton, the nylon cord wrapped tightly around him, secured at one end by one powerful electro-magnet to the steel leg and held by the second clamped to his bottles.
The headless torso, the explosive doughnuts and the detonators were brought to the surface, the body to be examined and its finger-prints taken, the detonators to be disarmed and the plastic to be taken away by a Royal Air Force helicopter to Kinross. By the time the Pegasus had arrived back in Aberdeen, eight police in uniform and three men in civilian clothes were waiting on the quayside. With apologies from the police Superintendent, the plain clothes men, led by a middle-aged man the other two referred to as Colonel, went into the boat’s holds. They stayed down there searching for forty minutes and when they reappeared, the Colonel was carrying what looked to the skipper like a small portable radio transmitter, though he had seen nothing quite like it before.
When they had left, with casual apologies, the skipper took the Pegasus around to the dry dock for inspection. The portside screw had been fouled up and he saw that it was bound in a bright orange nylon cord that someone, for some extraordinary reason unknown to him, had tied to the forward tow shackle on the underneath of the bow.
Nothing was made public concerning the Constellation rig or the headless diver, tied up in explosive, who had been found one hundred feet beneath it. Nor was much interest shown locally when the skipper told his story over his evening beer about the plain-clothes man called Colonel who had found a radio in Pegasus’s forward hold. And, as no organization claimed the diver’s torso, the incident was for ever to remain a secret.
Only in Dublin, Belfast and New York did the lack of radio and television news that morning confirm that the sabotage attempt had been a failure. The divers must be dead. They would have made contact otherwise. Shortly after midday a call from Dublin to the Irish Revolutionary Party offices in New York, relaying an eye-witness account from their agent in Aberdeen, confirmed that the Pegasus had returned undamaged but with a headless passenger.
December Ultimatum Page 15