Hunter Killer (2005)

by Robinson Patrick

  In the next fifteen minutes General Jobert’s dark, bushy eyebrows rarely descended to their normal position on the lower part of his forehead. He was truly astounded at the scale of the proposition. Gaston Savary reckoned Jobert softly exclaimed, Mon Dieu! about twelve times.

  But the proposition was real enough. The President of France wanted a professional opinion; whether the Saudi oil industry could be brought to its knees by military attack for a period of around two years, and whether, in the ensuing days, with the Saudi economy in ruins, it would be possible to subdue the Saudi armed forces and then take the capital city of Riyadh. All with France, to all appearances, having not the slightest involvement.

  The first three items—the oil, the surrender of the army, and the capture of Riyadh—were probably possible. In the opinion of General Jobert the collapse of the economy would leave an army somewhat disinclined to fight anyone. The problem was the fourth item: could France somehow make it all possible, with a substantial military involvement, and yet remain anonymous?

  General Jobert, on reflection, thought absolutely not. So did Gaston Savary. Which essentially meant that the President would have to decline the offer of the Saudi Prince to make France his sole supplier of future military hardware, and the sole world agent for all Saudi oil products. And that particular non would ultimately represent the rejection of an opportunity for the hard-pressed French Republic to earn several hundred billion dollars.

  And that was a scenario both General Jobert and Gaston Savary suspected might not sit too well with a President whose country had been known, traditionally, to operate almost exclusively from a sense of unfettered self-interest.

  The General, who had not received the slightest indication as to why he was meeting with Savary, read again the second page of the letter from Pierre St. Martin. It contained the briefest outline of the requirements that Prince Nasir considered would cripple the Saudi oil industry.

  Priority number one was the destruction of the world’s largest processing complex, at Abqaiq, which was situated twenty-five miles inland from the Gulf of Bahrain. Abqaiq was the destination of all crude oil from the Saudi south, particularly from Ghawar, the most productive oil field on earth. Beneath the shifting desert sands, right there, sixty miles southwest of Dhahran, lay 70 billion barrels.

  Close to Abqaiq, Pump Station Number One sent some 900,000 barrels of light crude per day, seven hundred miles, up and over the Aramah Mountains, to the Red Sea oil port of Yanbu al Bahr.

  If Pump Station Number One went down, the massive loading terminals of both Yanbu and, ninety miles to the south, Rabigh would be finished. So would the huge refineries in the area, including the enormous complexes at Rabigh, Medina, and Jiddah.

  Nonetheless, Prince Nasir believed the Red Sea terminals should be hit and destroyed. On the Gulf coast, the largest offshore oil field in the world, at Safaniya, 160 miles north of Dhahran, was another of the Prince’s prime targets. The reserves out there, below the warm, sandy Gulf seabed, numbered 30 billion barrels—around 500,000 barrels a day for about 164 years.

  The biggest terminal on the Gulf was Ras Tannurah, which had capacity for 4.3 million barrels of oil a day out at the end of a narrow, ten-mile-long sandy peninsula. The colossal loading dock was offshore, at the Sea Island complex, where Platform Number Four pumped more than two million barrels a day into the world’s waiting tankers. In Prince Nasir’s opinion, a direct hit at that platform would virtually wrap it right up for Ras Tannurah. Especially if someone banged out the pipeline from Abqaiq, which the Prince had thoughtfully mapped out for the President of France.

  In Nasir’s opinion, the final, critical hit should be slightly north, on the 4.2-million-barrel-a-day complex at Ju’aymah, principal loading bay for liquid petroleum—propane, that is, the prime source of all Japanese cooking. If Prince Nasir’s plan ever came off, the Japanese would find themselves eating a whole lot of sushi, accompanied by stone-cold sake.

  The terminals of Ras Tannurah and Ju’aymah, plus the Red Sea ports, loaded Saudi Arabian oil products into a staggering 4,000 massive tankers a year. Unsurprisingly, Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company), 100 percent owned by the Saudi government since 1976, was the largest oil company on earth. Its headquarters were in the Eastern Province city of Dhahran and its capability was approximately 10 million barrels a day, though in the twenty-first century it had pumped considerably less.

  Twenty-six percent of all the oil on the planet lay beneath the Saudi desert—that’s around 262 billion barrels, which, at 5.5 million a day, ought to last around 130 years. The Saudi royal family were the sole proprietors of Aramco, which owned every last half-pint.

  “You want me to hit that lot?” asked General Jobert incredulously. “That’s probably ten different targets. Three would be difficult. I suppose we could get three hit squads in there. But they’d need backup, and the explosive would weigh God knows how much. We’d need forty men in each team. But ten targets? Mon Dieu! I’d say that would be impossible. We’d have a better chance bombing it.”

  “That, of course, is out of the question,” said Gaston Savary.

  “Remember, the President’s prime requirement is secrecy. If we sent in a squadron of fighter bombers, they’d know the nationality of the attackers in about ten minutes. The Saudis have a lot of very sophisticated U.S. surveillance kits.”

  Both men ruminated over the apparent hopelessness of step one, and a mood of tacit acceptance prevailed. The critical path of the operation required a succession of ten swift, devastating hits on the greatest oil-producing network in the Middle East. And so far as General Jobert could see, it was militarily impossible, either by land or by air—at least, without getting caught it was.

  General Jobert paced the room. He was an impressive man—not tall, but built like a middleweight fighter, with thick, black, curly hair and a swarthy complexion, very French, with the merest suggestion that somewhere in the family tree there may have lurked a North African ancestor.

  He was a man in stark contrast to the lean, pale-skinned, six-foot-two-inch Gaston Savary, whose mournful expression concealed a cool sense of irony and a somewhat sarcastic turn of humor. However, on this morning they were thinking as one, both of them aware that an outright rejection of the President’s request was not a great idea—for either of them.

  The General mused. Land attack? C’est impossible. Air attack? Non, absolument non. Then he brightened somewhat. “How about by sea?”

  Gaston Savary looked up sharply. “You mean frogmen, brought in by submarine, swimmers who could fix sticky bombs on the offshore rigs?”

  “Exactement!”

  “Have you checked the depth of the water lately? I mean around Abqaiq, which is not only in the middle of the desert but is also the key to the entire operation?” Savary loved the rhetorical question.

  But the General smiled. His smile was that of a man one move from checkmate. “As a civilian, you of course do not understand everything about the military mind,” he said. “However, I expect you have heard of cruise missiles, and these days there are some very effective ones, that fly out of nowhere.”

  “In these days of intense surveillance, nothing comes out of nowhere,” replied the Secret Service Chief. “There’s always someone watching.”

  “True,” replied the General. “But the chances of detecting a missile fired from a submerged submarine are very low. I’m talking about a missile programmed to fly over the ocean and then over the middle of the desert. I assure you no one will pick that up. The element of surprise is too great.”

  Savary knew when an important sentence had been uttered. He paused for a moment, nodding his head slightly. And then he asked, “Do you really think we could put a submarine in the Gulf without anyone knowing? And then have it unleash a barrage of cruise missiles at the shores of Saudi Arabia without anyone finding out?”

  “They’d find out when the oil terminals, pumping stations, and refineries went up in smoke. But they’d never gue
ss, in their wildest dreams, who the culprits were or, above all, how they did it.”

  “And what about the other coast?” asked Gaston Savary. “The Red Sea? You can’t even get in there without traveling on the surface.”

  General Jobert shrugged. “A submarine would be logged through Suez. But so would many, many other ships. But it would not be logged through the southern end. The Red Sea can be transited underwater, and it is not unusual for a French submarine to make that journey. Also, that sea is extremely deep in places.”

  “And we also have the element of motive in our favor,” said Savary. “We are great friends with Saudi Arabia. And why would anyone, in their right mind, want to blow up the oil system that keeps not only us but most of the civilized world in business? No one would suspect us. No one.”

  “I have no doubt the President of France considered that most carefully before he asked us to conduct this feasibility test.”

  “Do you think the whole operation could be carried out using cruise missiles alone?”

  The General frowned. “I cannot say, but my instinct is no. We certainly could hit the refineries and the pumping stations, because pinpoint accuracy is not a requirement. But the loading platforms and offshore rigs would require real accuracy, and I don’t think we could count on a cruise to hit such a small target in exactly the right place. And anyway, someone working on the rig might see a wayward cruise come in. They’re supposed to be accurate to ten meters. But that’s too big a margin if you’re trying to hit the upper deck of a drilling rig. Better to attack from below the surface.”

  Gaston Savary could see why Michel Jobert had been made a general, and he could most certainly see how he came to spearhead the French Army’s Special Forces.

  “Well, General,” he said. “I think we must agree it is the most interesting plan. Because if it succeeds, the new King of Saudi Arabia will owe us everything. Certainly we will have enormous power over him, because he could never admit he was the mastermind behind the destruction of his own country’s oil industry.”

  “Well, no, he could not,” replied Michel Jobert. “And that would mean French companies would undertake the entire rebuilding program. There would be huge contracts awarded to us, just as the Americans claimed almost all the rebuilding contracts for Iraq.”

  “And there’d be a lot of very grateful French industries,” said Savary. “And the riches for the oil industry would be incalculable. Imagine owning the sole marketing agency for all Saudi Arabian oil. Mon Dieu! That would be something, eh?”

  “And I would not be surprised if that led to a long and comfortable retirement for both of us,” said the General. “But for now, let’s not get too excited. I would like to call Admiral Pires over for a half hour.”

  “I don’t believe I know him.”

  “He’s COMFUSCO.”

  “Who the hell’s COMFUSCO?”

  “Commandement des Fusiliers Marines Commandos. It’s the French Navy’s special ops outfit. Admiral Pires is the head of it. But he’s an ex-submariner. And right now he is in overall command of all naval assault commandos, plus the Commando Hubert divers unit and the Close Quarters Combat Group—that’s naval counterterrorist—both assigned to COS.”

  “That’s every kind of assault from the sea, correct?”

  “Absolument. That’s beach reconnaissance, assaults on ships, intelligence gathering, amphibious landings, small boat operations, raids, rescue ops, and of course combat search and rescue—CSAR.”

  “Of course,” said Savary, who was always amazed by the military’s detailed, meticulous operational structures.

  General Jobert ordered coffee for three, and a young Army Lieutenant pushed open the door to announce that the Admiral would be there in ten minutes.

  Gaston Savary privately thought the entire scheme was a boundless exercise in naked ambition that would probably end up being abandoned. As a kind of super-policeman, he was used to bureaucrats conducting relentless searches, desperately trying to find reasons not to do things. And if ever there was an opportunity to say no, this was surely it. Offhand he could think of about ten reasons himself.

  But, like many of his fellow spies and spy masters, Savary was an adventurer at heart. And he knew how to work the system. No one had asked him to blow up the oil fields. He had merely been requested to find out if it was possible to do so without getting caught. And he was most certainly doing that.

  Admiral Pires arrived on time, with the flourish of a man who had better things to do than talk to Secret Service agents. Six minutes later, having received a sharply worded briefing from General Jobert, he was reduced to utter silence.

  “Mon Dieu!” he said. “That is the most dangerous plan I have ever heard.”

  Savary gave him the benefit of his own wisdom. “Admiral,” he said, “we are not being asked to blow up half of Saudi Arabia. We are merely being asked to decide whether it can be done, in secret…to the inestimable advantage of France.”

  “Well, technically we could put one of our new SSNs into the Gulf, making an underwater entry through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s deep enough, and it’s been done before.”

  “Is that one of the old Rubis-class boats?” asked Savary.

  “No. No. This is one of the new Project Barracuda boats we have been building in Cherbourg for several years. You may have read about them. We have just two that will become operational this year. They’re bigger than the old Rubis, around 4,000 tons, nuclear hunter-killers with torpedo and cruise missile capabilities. They actually carry ten MBDA SCALP naval missiles. That’s a derivative of the old Storm/Shadows. They’re good, quiet ships with very good missiles. We’re conducting sea trials right now, off the Brest navy yards.”

  “What would you consider the likelihood of getting in and out of the Gulf undetected?” asked the General.

  “Oh, very good. And the missiles are all pre-programmed. Yes. I suppose we could launch them at a given target along the Saudi coast.”

  “Would anyone see them in flight?”

  “Most unlikely. The Saudis are quite sophisticated. But I’d be very surprised if they picked up low-flying missiles like these on radar. They would not be expecting such an attack.”

  “Certainly not from their next king,” said Savary, helpfully.

  “Any thoughts on operations on the other coast?”

  “The Red Sea?” said the Admiral. “Well, that is more difficult, because you’d come through the Suez Canal on the surface. But I don’t think that would attract undue attention. And you might manage to exit the southern end, off Djibouti, at periscope depth; assuming you wanted to stay out of sight. That’s the Bab el Mandeb, the narrow straits that lead out into the Gulf of Aden—shallow, sometimes under 100 meters deep.

  “Anyway, a half-submerged submarine might look a bit suspicious to the American radar, if they picked us up—especially with oil fields ablaze four hundred miles astern of the ship. It would probably be better just to go straight through, on the surface, in the normal way, the very picture of innocence.”

  Gaston Savary really liked this suave and knowledgeable Admiral, who looked extremely young to hold such a high office and rank. But he was not young in thought, and he had grasped the significance of the problem very swiftly, as indeed had General Jobert.

  “I should of course like to speak to Admiral Romanet first,” said Georges Pires, looking at Savary. “He’s our Flag Officer Submarines in Brest. And I don’t want to second-guess him. But I would say we could hit our missile targets on both coasts from submerged SSNs. And, certainly, in my own area of operations, we could send in teams of commandos to take out the loading platforms and offshore rigs…the Saudi Navy has never been up to much. They’d be no trouble whatsoever.”

  The Admiral paused, looked thoughtful. Then he said, “Those platforms are big constructions though. We’d probably need a mix of RDX (research-developed explosive), TNT, and aluminum. And the frogmen would have to swim in with twenty-five-kilogram watertight sat
chels. And we’d use timers, so the swimmers and perhaps an SDV and the submarine, could get clear before the blast. But we could do it. Most certainly we could do it.”

  Admiral Pires again paused. And then he added, “But the Navy’s role is only the beginning, correct? And so I will leave you, while I confer with Admiral Romanet.”

  “I’d prefer you bring him here,” said General Jobert. “I think at this early stage, while we are just appreciating the situation, all discussions should remain under this roof.”

  “Aha,” said Admiral Pires. “Already we are slipping into the black ops mode, already it is occurring to you that we may be ordered actually to carry out this assault on our robed brothers in the desert. Or, at the least, on their oil wells.”

  “That’s the trouble with you guys. You always say yes,” said Gaston Savary.

  “That’s because we are loyal servants of the republic,” replied the General. “We are here to do the bidding of the politicians. And we try, if asked, to achieve the impossible.”