Hunter Killer (2005)

by Robinson Patrick

  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 when 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.

  But now it was time to move. And the Prince and his advisers had each assumed, like the Saudi guards and quartermasters, that someone else had that under control. In fact, no one had it under control, even though it was the first question Colonel Gamoudi asked…where’s our base camp?…From where do we launch our attack?…Where’s our command headquarters?…Does it have communications?…If so let’s test them right away. You can’t have a decent revolution if you can’t talk to each other.

  From the very beginning the Saudi rebels had been bemused by the forthright military opinions and questions gritted out by the ex–French Special Forces commander.

  And the trouble was, he could not solve the problem. It was the Saudis who knew the territory, they who knew the available strongholds and houses. It was they who were supposed to be telling Jacques where to make his headquarters, not Jacques telling them.

  And by late February it was growing tense. Hiding boxes of ammunition and even cases of light machine guns was one thing. Disguising a damn great Abrams combat tank in someone’s front yard, on the outskirts of Riyadh, prior to charging straight down the Jiddah Road

  with guns blazing on the morning of March 25…well, that was rather a different matter.

  Colonel Gamoudi had marked up various possibilities—big houses with big gardens behind high walls. But he did not like any of them. It was always in his mind…One careless word from a servant, one sighting by an unsuspecting passerby, one friend of the family loyal to the Crown…that was all it would take.

  He told the Prince of his concerns. He told him he needed a base where the public could not go. It had to be near a main highway, and it needed to be absolutely impenetrable by prowlers or sightseers. That meant it needed to be a place that could be cordoned off, for an obvious reason, a place that would cause no consternation among the public.

  “Sir, do you have the power to select somewhere, and have the authorities deem it off limits until further notice? Somewhere we can start moving into, somewhere we can move the ordnance…somewhere from which we can attack?”

  Prince Nasir pondered for two hours. He paced the room and sipped his coffee. He pored over the map of the city and its environs. And at 2:30 A.M. he stood up and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I have it. I am, after all, head of the National Guard, and I have many serving officers loyal to me. The matawwa are also fiercely loyal to me. No one would think twice about it if we closed an historical site for restoration. I would not even need to tell anyone.”

  Which was why, on Monday, March 15, there were eight M1A2 Abrams tanks parked bang in the middle of the ancient ruins of Dir’aiyah, and why the eighteenth-century mosque had a new roof, made of camouflage canvas to shelter the hundreds of tons of materiel hidden behind its great sandstone walls…. And of course why the ramparts of the old city were again manned by heavily armed guards, huddled behind high rock outposts, with searchlights front and center, all powered from the electric cable that once fed only the kiosk selling guidebooks, ice-creams, and cold drinks to tourists.

  Ibrahim Pasha would have needed to think twice about an attack in the year 2010. Because any intruder caught unlawfully within a quarter-mile of Dir’aiyah was essentially history.

  Col. Jacques Gamoudi had a grudging admiration for the thoroughness of Pasha’s attack, but he was grateful for the high section of the city wall left unharmed. He had a total of twenty-five armored vehicles parked beneath it, on the inside. And every hour, military vehicles arrived with more and more ordnance.

  Le Chasseur, working in a specially built wooden office, logged and recorded every single delivery. The walls were pinned with maps. He knew the location of the principal palaces he must take. He knew where the radio station was. He was briefing his drivers and, above all, his tank commanders. There would be casualties, he was certain of that, and he was amazed at the volunteers who came forward to pilot the tanks he wanted driven directly into the principal palace.

  It seemed that whatever he asked for was provided. The Moroccan-born Colonel knew in his own mind he was ready to take the capital of Saudi Arabia.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 0100

  25.50N 56.55E, SPEED 12, DEPTH 50

  Capt. Alain Roudy’s submarine was steaming into the Strait of Hormuz, the great hairpin-bend gateway to the oil empires of the Middle East. The Perle ran fifty feet below the surface, holding course three-one-five, slightly to the Iranian side of the seaway. Right now they were not trying to evade or avoid anyone’s radar or watchdogs.

  They were leaving a very slight wake on the surface, but one that would have been discernible only to an expert. This did not include tanker captains or their afterguards, and there were no patrol boats in radar sight, either from the Iranian or Omani Navy.

  There was a massive LPG tanker making ten knots, way up in front, and twenty minutes ago they had passed a 350,000-ton Liberian-registered VLCC heading south about four miles off their port beam. Alain Roudy knew the seaway would probably grow busier as they headed into the mainstream north-south tanker routes inside the Gulf, but for the moment, the Perle ran smoothly underwater in thirty fathoms, oblivious to wind, waves, and tide.

  They would begin their turn to the left two hundred miles hence, to the northeast, west of Ras Qabr al Hindi, the jutting headland of the Musandam Peninsula, the northernmost point of the Arab sultanate of Oman, and a closed military zone. Captain Roudy would probably encounter Navy patrols off there, and he would accordingly slow right down, wiping that faint but telltale wake clean off the surface.

  From there the submarine would head west, steering course two-six-one, slowly, only seven knots, directly toward the Saudi oil fields. It was a 520-mile run, 170 miles a day, which would put them comfortably in their ops area in the late afternoon of Sunday, March 21—just west of the Abu Sa’afah oil field, that is, and five miles east of the world’s busiest tanker route, the one that led down to Saudi Arabia’s Sea Island Terminal.

  On board the Perle were sixteen men from Commander Hubert’s D’Action Sous Marine Commando (CASM)—underwater action commando. This was the French Navy’s combat diver capability, and they were very good, right up there with the U.S. Navy SEALs and Britain’s SBS. Twelve of these frogmen, the swimmers who would hit the oil platforms, came directly from CASM, Section B, Maritime Counterterrorism, which was a bit rich under the prevailing circumstances. The other four, expert boat drivers and communications personnel, had been seconded to the mission from Commander Hubert’s specialist Second Company. They were the four best men in the critical fields of placing the Zodiacs inch-perfect in the right place, and staying in communication with the swimmers and the mother ship.

  The hit men had been very within themselves on the journey out—quiet, thoughtful, and rarely seeking conversation with the crew. But everyone understood. These sixteen men represented the frontline muscle of the mission. Should they fail, or be hit by gunfire and wounded, or even killed, the result would be an absolute catastrophe for the Republic of France.

  Everyone appreciated what these swimmers were scheduled to accomplish and also the dangers they faced. Of course most of the crew knew the precise identity of the target.

  But submariners were apt to be extremely bright, and there was no one aboard the Perle who did no
t understand that the men from CASM were most definitely going to hit something hard. That was the critical path of the mission, the sharp end. Black ops men, in all the Special Forces in all the major Navies, were allergic to failure.

  Commander Jules Ventura, a thirty-two-year-old bear of a man—swarthy, taciturn, half-Algerian, from Provence—would lead the divers to the probably more dangerous offshore LPG Terminal at Ras al-Ju’aymah. The submariners who served with Ventura and talked to him were already treating him like a god. Which was the one thing that actually made Big Jules smile.

  THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 1630

  25.40N 35.54E, COURSE ONE-FOUR-ZERO, SPEED 7, DEPTH 400

  The Améthyste crept slowly through the warm waters of the Red Sea, 340 miles south southeast now from Port Said. There were almost 600 fathoms below her keel, and her new nuclear reactor was running sweetly. She made no sound in the water, and the biggest excitement so far on this journey was when they passed, briefly at PD, within five miles of the flashing light on the jagged El Akhawein Rock jutting up from the seabed at latitude 26.19.

  Thirty-five miles ahead of them was their next marker, another craggy rock, Abu el Kizan, suddenly scything up from the seabed on the desolate sand-swept Egyptian side. They would pass within twenty miles, too far to see its light, even if they came to PD, 120 miles from the ops area.