“Teams One and Two will leave two days later, each of them in two dhows. That’s two leaving around o-six-hundred, and two more at fourteen-hundred. All the dhows will land on a very lonely stretch of coastline in northern Yemen, each team in a separate location. Again I am trying to avoid a concentration of personnel and equipment. I am unworried about being attacked. I am worried only about being noticed. Your landing sites have all been selected after long study of reconnaissance photographs taken specially by French Air Force surveillance aircraft.”
Everyone nodded in both understanding and agreement. There were even a couple of “D’acs” from the French officers. “And now,” said General Rashood, “comes the bad news. I have wracked my brains for a comfortable, unobtrusive way into southern Saudi Arabia from the coast of Yemen. But there is none. There’re hardly any roads except the one along the coast, and that carries whatever traffic there is between the two countries. Which means it’s busy. Which rules it out for us.
“We can’t go by air, because the only landing places are Saudi controlled. We daren’t risk helicopters because they’re too noisy and may easily be located by military surveillance around Khamis Mushayt. And that means we’ll have to walk.”
“How far is it, sir?” called one of the Saudi troopers.
“Less than a hundred fifty miles, but more than a hundred thirty. Probably only a hundred and ten as the crow flies.” General Rashood shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “We must walk through the mountains, and it will take us ten to twelve days. Anything we need we carry, and that means heavy bergan rucksacks, and there are not many armies that could do it.
“The terrain is awful, with steep gradients, and the heat’s a bloody nightmare. But we are not ordinary forces. We’re Special Forces. And we’re about to find out how we got the word special next to our names. No one else could do it, except us.”
Again the assembly of brutally trained men nodded in agreement. “Twelve miles a day does it, right, sir?” one of General Rashood’s Hamas freedom fighters called out.
“Correct, Said,” replied the General. “Sometimes it will be easier marching along the high ground. Other times it will be much more difficult. Maybe down to one mile an hour on the steep escarpments. But overall we’ll aim for fourteen miles a day, and some days we’ll cover perhaps twenty, and others only four. But we’ll make it. We have to make it.”
He waited for the interpreters to make clarifications, and there was no dissension. The General continued. “Each team will take a different route from the Yemeni coast through the mountains to our RV, which is four miles south of the King Khalid Air Base. There’ll be al-Qaeda guides out in the mountains to bring us in. There is already a carefully selected “hide,” and everyone will have a minimum of twenty-four hours to rest up before the attack. Most of us should get a little longer than that, but there will be recces throughout each night—around the air base and along the road that leads up to Khamis Mushayt.
“By the time you reach the RV, you may have used your food and water. Which is fine. There will be fresh everything awaiting us. The Foreign Legion brought the food and mineral water in through Abha Airfield, to the west of King Khalid. Al-Qaeda transported it by camel up through the foothills to our rendezvous point.
“There will also be local maps for each man, which I’ll distribute in a moment. You will see there’s a road leading up to the base, which we obviously ignore totally. We will come cross-country, to the village of al-Rosnah, then cross a secondary mountain track and into wild country above another village, called Elshar Mushayt.
“From there we look down through the hills and see in the distance the military base to the left and the airfield to the right. It’s a perfect spot for us. And the people of both these little places probably know we’re coming and will be ready to assist.
“Once we’re in those hills we’re more or less safe. Just so long as we shoot straight and hard on the night of March twenty-fifth.”
The chefs had organized a superb farewell dinner and roasted a half of everything they had left, mostly duck, chicken, and veal. There was one large joint of lamb, and they even made a cassoulet. They had run out of potatoes and rice, but there was about a half-ton of spinach and salad. The cheeses that remained were plentiful, and the dinner was topped off with a massive chocolate pudding.
The commanding officers had even allowed a bottle of wine between four men, and by 10 P.M., when the troops retired to bed for a four-hour sleep, there was just enough left to feed the diminishing force for forty-eight hours. There was French bread, eggs, fish, and orange juice for Team Three’s breakfast at 0400, one hour prior to departure.
The hours between 0200 and 0400 were spent breaking camp, with the twenty-four men packing their equipment and storing it in the most efficient manner: the processed food, water, ammunition, and bedding.
One hour before the sun rose above the Red Sea, to the east, they were driven down to the seaport on the north side of Moulhoule, where the three dhows awaited them. They had to walk the equipment out to the boats along the long jetties, and General Rashood himself supervised the seating and storing of supplies.
Each of the seventy-foot dhows was arranged for its eight passengers to rest up during the two-day voyage. Awnings were spread on poles to protect them from the pitiless sun out on the water. The moon was already setting as they pushed out into the offshore waters of the Bab el Mandeb Strait, running slowly north, sails high, in twenty fathoms and a light breeze.
The dhows sailed around four hundred yards apart, and by 0630, with the sun now just visible above the eastern horizon, they made their starboard turn, toward the blazing sky, each hidden man with a Kalashnikov inches from his hand, each man with a hand grenade in his belt.
To a passing ship, the three dhows could have been nothing but peaceful traders plying the old routes, probably carrying cargo of salt from Djibouti up to Jizan. They certainly appeared nothing like an assault force that would be attempting the capture of Saudi Arabia and the overthrow of the King.
But this was the unobtrusive start of a famous land attack: three Arab dhows, their cargo under awnings, elderly captains at the helm, sons and family tending the huge sails as they slipped through the wavelets on a hot, serene morning. It was a timeless, biblical scene in the Red Sea, one that could have been a thousand years old—not a semblance of menace, even in these dangerous times in the Middle East.
But General Rashood’s instructions were clear…any intruder gets within a hundred feet, civilian or Naval, eliminate the crew and sink the ship. Instantly.
THURSDAY, MARCH 4
PORT SAID
EGYPT
They logged the French nuclear hunter-killer submarine Perle through the northern terminal of the Suez Canal shortly before midday. Captain Roudy would make most of the 105-mile journey on the bridge. But first he dealt with the formalities in Port Said, coming ashore and speaking personally to the customs officers and inspectors from the Egyptian Naval base situated beyond the vast commercial network that controlled the canal.
Egyptian officials rarely board a Naval vessel making the transit, largely because of objections by the Russians, who have always used the canal to transfer ships from the Black Sea and Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf.
Captain Roudy watched one of the Egyptian Navy’s Shershen-class fast-attack Russian gunboats move slowly by, heading south, and shook his head at the age of the craft. “Probably forty years,” he told his XO. “I wonder if they’ve updated the old missile system—they used to be aimed manually like bows and arrows!”
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 only 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. B
ut 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.
Hunter Killer (2005) Page 15