Hunter Killer (2005)

by Robinson Patrick

  The comms man pushed the buttons to dial the officer-of-the-deck up on the casing, checking that the phone was working. Then they reversed the process, ensuring they had two-way transmission. The second Zodiac was lowered into the water, and the second half of Team One went through the same checks. When they had checked the phones once more, one to another, they set off for Yanbu, the massive, 900,000-barrel-a-day oil colossus of the Red Sea.

  The Zodiacs carried no running lights as they moved swiftly through the water at around half-speed, fifteen knots. Garth Dupont sat next to the driver, his night binoculars trained on the black ahead, but his vision was not improved by the rising moon.

  A mile in front he picked up the lights of a tanker coming toward them, off his starboard bow, but he could see only her green running light and he guessed that she was leaving by the southern route around Sharm. Way ahead of that was another tanker, going his way, slowly into port, probably lining up to receive the last oil from Saudi Arabia for a very long while.

  Within twelve minutes they could see the lights on the loading docks, now only a couple of miles ahead, across the bay, and it quickly became clear that this was a busy Sunday evening. Dupont could pick out two tankers he thought were on the jetties, with three waiting to come in, a mile offshore out to his port side.

  One mile from the jetties he ordered Potier to slow right down to five knots, then to slip in very slowly. The Navy had no indication of sonar surveillance in these waters, but Dupont was taking no chances. By now it was clear that there was a great deal of light on the docks, shining from both the enormous tankers and the jetty itself. And those lights seemed to spill out for two, maybe three hundred yards into the main approaches to the Yanbu terminals.

  Dupont ordered the engines cut back to idling speed, just enough to hold a position without drifting. He took one final look ahead and ordered the other swimmers to action stations. The four men sat down and pulled on their flippers, fixed goggles, and Draeger lines, and then slid softly over the side. The comms officer quietly passed the instruction to the second boat. There was no shouting in black ops.

  The eight men in the water came together as two groups, two leaders and two followers in each. Garth ordered them deep with a silent thumbs-up gesture and they began to kick their way underwater, each of the “followers” swimming with their right hands on the left shoulder of their leader, in the pitch-black water twelve feet below the surface.

  The leaders swam with flippers only, their attack boards held at arm’s length out in front of them, like regular floatable kickboards, but these boards contained instruments that showed the precise time and direction, without the swimmer needing to pause to check either watch or compass.

  The lead pair in each group had made the inshore journey in Garth Dupont’s boat. This meant there was no need for instructions to be passed from one group to another. In any event, the plan was simple. Each four-man team was to head directly toward the tankers, Dupont’s men to the one on the left, the others to the one on the right.

  Given the complications of mooring lines, and propellers that could start at any time, the underwater leader had ordered them to take each tanker amidships, diving right down to the keel—forty feet on a loaded tanker but only thirty feet on these half-laden hulls.

  There would be twenty feet of water under the keels, and once through and under the dock, the swimmers were to head to the far ends of the platform and place their bombs deep on the corner pylons, two men attending each objective.

  And so they kicked in rhythmically through the water, one pressure stroke on the flippers every ten seconds…KICK…one…two…three…four…KICK…one…two…three…four. Kick and glide, conserving energy, all together. That way they arrived on the starboard sides of the tankers absolutely together. Using their hands on the hulls, they pushed their way under, and Dupont was relieved to find there was a long gap down to the harbor floor.

  Nonetheless, it was nothing short of dead creepy down there in the pitch dark, like some hideous horror film. If they’d had time they would probably have shuddered. However, on the dock side of the tanker it was suddenly much brighter, which felt better, but was plainly more dangerous.

  Both groups now made for the seaward pylons on the two corners, and both were irritated at the number of barnacles on the steel. They had to scrape them off with combat knives before the bombs would clamp on tightly. Of course, the time settings were all different in the countdown to H hour at 0400 hours.

  For instance, at 1956, on the first pylon, the timer was set for eight hours and four minutes. On the landward corner pylon, which took longer to reach, it was set for seven hours and fifty-seven minutes.

  They made their way under the platform to seek out the next four pylons, the center supports below the gigantic platform pumping systems. And there the clamping and timing processes were repeated until all eight of the sixty-pounders were in place, clocks set, the final one for seven hours and eighteen minutes.

  With their cumbersome loads now gone, the men headed back the way they had come, under the tankers, and back out to the waiting boats. On the way in, they had kicked approximately eighty times, each one carrying them ten feet, or three and a half meters. On the return journey, again twelve feet under the water, they counted the kicks again.

  At the count of eighty they all surfaced, quite widely spread out. Dupont reached for his “bleeper” to signal their position to the Zodiacs. But, as his did so, his number-two man whacked his head on Potier’s bow and had to suppress a yell of terror, because he thought he’d hit a shark. This caused a lot of chuckling, and all eight men were instantly hauled inboard, breathing their first fresh air for well over an hour.

  The Zodiacs now turned away from the Yanbu docks and made a fast beeline for the waiting Améthyste, out there beyond the north end of the island. The comms men were both in contact with the mother ship, and within fifteen minutes they saw the quick-flashing light signal on the submarine’s foredeck.

  They came alongside, grabbed the lines, and began to disembark. The last men off-loaded the rifles, ammunition, and equipment into canvas bags, which were immediately hauled inboard. Then they took their Kaybar combat knives and slashed six wide holes in each of the pressure compartments in the Zodiacs’ rubber hulls. And before the hit men had even pulled off their flippers and hoods, both Zodiacs were settled nicely in two hundred fathoms on the bed of the Red Sea.

  Commander Dreyfus ordered all hatches closed, main ballast opened, and took the Améthyste to three hundred feet below the surface, running south at twelve knots, straight down to the next great Saudi loading dock in the oil port of Rabigh.

  The Special Forces had dinner immediately they returned and settled down to two tables of bridge. Garth Dupont, flushed with what he believed was the total success of their first mission, opened the bidding in les piques, spades, in the first rubber; he ended up bidding six and making one.

  Everyone fell about laughing and someone mentioned they hoped he could count a damned sight better underwater than he could on the surface. Dupont assured them he was challenging for the Underwater Bridge Championship of France when they returned.

  In fact Dupont had been asleep for only three hours when they reached the calm waters off Rabigh just after 0100 on Thursday morning. Commander Dreyfus had made fast time all along the Saudi coast, where they found that the deep ocean was absolutely deserted both on and below the surface. They picked up only two small fishing boats on their passive sonar all the way from Yanbu.

  It was still only 2345 when they came to periscope depth, confirmed their GPS fix, and found the quick-flashing warning light on the headland of Shi’b al Khamsa, a small deserted island directly in front of the fifteen-mile-long bay that protected the port of Rabigh.

  Commander Dreyfus left the island to starboard and pressed on for another four miles, right into the gateway to the bay, another wide seaway, with a flashing light on the right-hand side but nothing on the left, where a coastal
shoal rose up three hundred feet from the seabed to a level only about a hundred feet below the surface.

  However, the well-chartered bay had depths of three hundred feet until quite close to the shore. And Commander Dreyfus elected to make a hard right turn, at PD, into the wide southern end of the bay. This was no cul-de-sac, well, not for surface ships, because there was a narrow fifty-foot channel at the end of Shi’b al Bayda, one of three islands that more or less blocked the bay to the south. However, the Bay of Rabigh was a cul-de-sac for a submarine.

  Commander Dreyfus thus came quietly to the surface and made a 180-degree turn in this sheltered, “private” end of the bay. There was not a ship in sight, on radar or sonar, on or below the surface of the water. And it would take him mere moments to go deep and vanish, heading out of the bay any time he wanted.

  Rabigh was not as busy as Yanbu, mainly because it had no major trans-Saudi pipeline coming in off the Aramah Mountains. Nonetheless, it could be full of tanker traffic in mid-week since it did have a very large refinery. And this took in crude from Yanbu and dispersed it in various forms of gasoline, petrochemicals, and LPG, taking the heat off the constantly overworked terminal ninety miles to the north.

  Once more Garth Dupont led his team out of the submarine and into two Zodiacs, new ones of course, same procedures, all the way into the docks. But Rabigh was not so light as Yanbu, and he hoped to find an even closer holding point. However, off to the left, in a holding area about two miles away, Dupont could see one tanker making its way slowly inshore, but the jetties were Sunday-night empty.

  Just one other tanker was within sight of the frogmen, a VLCC of unknown origin, making its way out of the bay about a half mile off their port beam. But the Zodiacs carried no running lights, and the sky was cloudy. The warm air that hung above the water seemed muggy, and there was no moonlight to cast even the remotest light on the surface.

  Dead ahead the jetties looked quiet, and about 400 yards out Garth Dupont decided to summon the hit teams overboard and down into the depths en route to the loading platforms. That way the boat drivers could hang around in the dark well clear of the distant incoming tanker, which appeared to be going so slowly it might not make its mooring by Wednesday.

  But that was the nature of these VLCCs. They took about four miles to stop at their regular running speed in excess of fifteen knots. At four knots, creeping into the jetties, it took them almost forty-five minutes from two miles out, because they actually covered the last 200 yards barely above drifting speed.

  “You just be ready to leave as the tanker arrives,” Dupont had stressed to his men, explaining the importance of staying deep, well under the keel of the ship, the moment it came to a halt. He told them he wanted no heroics trying to go underneath the 350,000-ton hulk while it was still moving. “We move when that thing stops,” he said. “Unless we can get out before it arrives.”

  Thereafter they kicked their way in, just as they had done at Yanbu. They were not observed, in fact, from high above, no one even had a look over the side. There were no active guards on the jetties, and the shore crews had gone for a welcome cup of coffee before the new tanker arrived.

  In perfect isolation, the French divers worked underwater beneath the towering platform, and within fifty minutes they had all eight bombs expertly set; times were synchronized precisely with those beneath the loading terminal at Yanbu. And the slow, ominous ticking of the sixteen detonator clocks, deep in the water, separated by ninety miles of ocean, could not be heard by anyone.

  At precisely 0400 there would be two almighty explosions on the east coast of the Red Sea. Dupont wondered how long it would take the Saudi authorities to work out that there might be a connection.

  By the time they reached the seaward front of the dock, the incoming tanker was moored, and they had to go deep under the hull before they broke free into clear water. They all hated that part. But again there was plenty of water below the keel, and they kicked their way to freedom up the starboard side of the colossal hull.

  They swam twelve feet under the surface, all the way back to the Zodiacs, kicking and counting, kicking and counting. When they burst up into fresh night air, they were around fifty feet from the nearest of their inflatables. The ocean was deserted, and within twenty minutes they had reached the Améthyste.

  Procedures were identical to those at Yanbu. They unloaded the gear, climbed on to the casing, scuttled both boats, and headed to their headquarters on the lower deck. Commander Dreyfus ordered the submarine deep, and they moved quietly out of the bay before Rabigh.

  Once in open water they steered course one-five-zero down the main deep-water seaway of the Red Sea, 400 feet below the surface. They would not see daylight again for two weeks, until they reached the French Navy Base on the tiny subtropical island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, 3,800 miles away.

  And no one, on the entire Arabian peninsula, would ever know what they had done.

  SAME EVENING , 1730

  27.01N 50.24E, COURSE TWO-FIVE-ZERO, SPEED 7 DEPTH 20

  Night comes crashing in over the Arabian desert and its shores far more suddenly than in more temperate northerly regions of the globe. However, on this particular night, twenty-five miles off Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Coast, it was never going to be fast enough for Capt. Alain Roudy.

  The forty-one-year-old commanding officer from Tours, in the Loire Valley, was for the first time in his naval career on the edge of his nerves, though he would not have betrayed that to anyone, even his much younger second wife, Anne Marie. Actually, especially not his much younger second wife.

  Captain Roudy was a disciplinarian, a man cut in the mold of eighteenth-century French battle commanders. And while he understood he might have been under pressure to defeat Great Britain’s ferocious Admiral Nelson and his veterans in 1805, he reckoned he would have fought Trafalgar a sight better than the somewhat defeatist Comte de Villeneuve, who lost his ship, was taken prisoner, and later committed suicide.

  Alain Roudy, who still lived in his hometown of Tours, was currently boxed into an extremely tough time frame. Right now it was around 5:30 P.M., and the light was not fading over these waters, twenty miles west of the Abu Sa’afah oil field. The Perle was twenty feet below the surface without a mast up, moving slowly toward the main tanker lanes, which would lead him down toward the gigantic LPG terminal off Ras al Ju’aymah.

  The trouble was, he needed to be in those lanes by 1815, and every time he risked a thirty-second glance through the periscope he was seeing more moving traffic than there was on the Champs-Elysées at this time on a Sunday evening.

  It was supposed to be a restricted area, but he’d seen at least two patrol boats circling the oil fields, four aged freighters to the north, three big fishing dhows, a trawler, and a ninety-foot harbor launch, plus two helicopters heading out to the landing platform in the middle of the Abu Sa’afah field.

  In only sixteen fathoms of water, he really should have been moving west with a continuous lookout through the periscope. But he could not risk running with a mast jutting out, which may very well have betrayed him, or even identified him. He knew the Saudis would not have a submarine in these waters, nor probably a warship, but the Américains sont très furtifs. Captain Roudy did not wish to see the Stars and Stripes represented around here in any form whatsoever, above or below the surface.

  The governing factor in his operation was that he needed to be fifty miles from the datum, in the launch zone, by 0400 tomorrow morning, Monday. And that meant there would be all kinds of deadlines to observe…must be away from the last pickup point by 2315 latest…must be away from the first pickup point by 2215…must wait two and half hours at the second point for the divers to return.

  And it all meant being in there, with those tankers, running south almost in a convoy, like them, at ten knots, not later than 1815, forty-five minutes from now. Otherwise, much later tonight, he would have to unleash his missiles before he reached the launch area specified by Admirals R
omanet and Pires. He could not slow down, or ask for more time, because Louis Dreyfus would be accomplishing his much easier task over in the Red Sea, and they needed to be identical.

  “Merde,” said Roudy under his breath, glancing at his watch for the seventh time in the last twenty minutes. If the slightest thing goes wrong, we’re in real trouble.

  Fifteen more nail-biting minutes went by, and Captain Roudy called, “PERISCOPE!”

  “Aye, sir.”

  And once more he heard the smoothest of machinery carrying the telescopic mast upward, to jut out of the water. He seized the handles long before they were at eye level and took an all-around look at the surface picture. The speed and grasp that had once made him leading student at the French Navy’s Ecole de Sousmarin had not deserted him. No one could record a surface picture in his mind faster than young Roudy. And twenty years later, nothing had changed. Capt. Alain Roudy was still the master of his profession, in all of France.

  DOWN PERISCOPE!

  The careful surface check took him exactly thirty seconds. And for the first time in several miles he could see nothing in any direction. It was also, he noticed, at last growing dark.