Doumen stared at the distant lights and at the gigantic U.S. tanker on the jetty. They were two miles away now, but he would take to his grave the memory of that night—the pitch-black water under the ship, Philippe’s hand trembling on his left shoulder as they kicked into the pylons, the knife on the steel, the tiny spotlight they used for the close electronic work, the lethal det-cord, the wires, the magnetic tug of the bomb, the way his hands shook as he spliced the det-cord to Philippe’s bomb on pylon number three.
Six hours and twenty-five minutes. They were numbers he would never forget. And now it was almost 2230. Only five and a half hours now, before the true measure of his team’s work would be known, before the Sea Island Terminal was blown into a thousand hunks of useless metal.
Would he ever tell his father what he had done? His girlfriend, Annie? One day, his children? Tell them of the night he became, for a couple of hours, one of the world’s most prominent terroristes?
Of course he never would. The code of the French Special Forces, like all Special Forces, was never broken. And Doumen knew he had to cast that word terroriste from his mind, forever. He was Lt. Reme Doumen, loyal French Naval officer, and he had just completed the most important mission entrusted to his country’s Navy since…well…Trafalgar.
Reme Doumen shrugged and glanced across the water to the other Zodiac. He wondered if everyone was thinking the same, looking back at the mighty oil loading terminal, knowing it had fewer than six hours to live. And that they had actually committed, with relentless precision, the oncoming outrage.
Doumen had always been a very tough kid. At one point it was thought he might represent France at rugby football. He was a medium-size center three-quarter, a hard, fast runner in university, and wanted by the Toulouse Club. But the Navy had other uses for his unusual strength, and his father, who had started life working as a deckhand on the La Rochelle ferry, was enormously impressed by the thought of an Admiral for a son. The French Navy beat the French Rugby Football Union comfortably.
But a terroriste? “Mon Dieu!” muttered Reme, as they came in toward the waiting Perle. “I’d better avoid tomorrow’s newspapers for the rest of my life!”
Yet he knew he’d get the same old feeling of burgeoning pride in his uniform, and in the fact that the Navy had selected him alone to lead the Special Forces into the staggering assault on the Sea Island Terminal. What’s more, he knew he would do it again, if they asked him.
Even as he led his team up the rope ladder to the foredeck, he could feel the sense of urgency in the submarine. The CO himself was out on the casing, and twice Doumen heard Captain Roudy exclaim, “Vite…vite…dépêche-toi!”
Of course, everyone knew the sub was stopped in a dangerous place, in the middle of the central buoyed channel, in probably the narrowest part of the tanker route. On the bridge and on the bow, lookouts with high-powered night-vision binoculars were sweeping the sea, for’ard and aft, for any sign of an onrushing VLCC, its helmsman a hundred feet above them.
The night was cloudy and very dark, and the transfer from the boats was made in excellent time. The two Zodiacs were scuttled, but the Perle just beat them in the race to get under the surface, diving to periscope depth, in fifteen fathoms, leaving Alain Roudy to decide whether to risk going deeper.
Right now there was thirty feet below the keel, and the CO decided to stay at PD, but to take down the mast, moving nor’nor’east up the outgoing channel at ten knots. That way nothing would gain on him from behind, and he would gain nothing on any ship up ahead. The ten-knot speed limit, and requirement, was strictly observed along Saudi tanker routes.
It was five hours running time to H hour. Five hours to 0400. Five hours to the temporary end to civilization as they knew it in the free world. The end of cheap oil on the global market.
The crew of the Perle was not giving this much thought as they pushed on up the channel. But there was a growing tension down in the missile room, where most of the operators were soon to launch all twelve of their cruises, not at some phantom practice target, as usual, but this time with real warheads packed with TNT and aimed unerringly, with precision and absolute malice.
After eight miles Captain Roudy ordered a course change to the northeast…come right…steer course zero-five-zero…
And twelve miles later he elected to leave the tanker lanes completely. With the main channel about to run due east, the CO ordered the helmsman to cross the lanes and exit to the north, making a wide sweep in deeper water for twenty-five miles to the missile launch area he had been allotted: 27.06N 50.54E.
They arrived at 0340, still fifty feet below the surface of the water, unobserved by anyone since first they went deep in the Red Sea south of the Gulf of Suez.
Missile Director…Captain…final checks, s’il vous plaît.
And for the last time, Lt. Cdr. Albert Paul illuminated the computerized screen that showed the targets and their numbers: Abqaiq Complex—25.56N 49.32E; eastern pipeline—25.56N 49.34E. The third barrage of four missiles would be aimed at 26.31N 50.01E, the Qatif Junction manifold complex, at four slightly different locations, hoping to blast the one area where the pipeline was custom-made, and would take months and months to repair.
Basically, hitting pipelines was not a great idea, nor was hitting oil wells, because both could be capped and repaired with standard equipment, which Aramco had in abundance. The trick was to hit the loading docks, the pumping stations, and, on the Red Sea coast, the refineries.
Captain Roudy’s targets had been supremely well selected. The Abqaiq station handled 70 percent of all the nation’s oil. It not only pumped from the enormous Ghawar field, over the mountains to the entire Red Sea coast, it also fed the entire east coast. This included the loading docks at Sea Island, Ras al Ju’aymah, and Ras Tannurah, from which Sea Island was fed.
The pipeline out of Abqaiq was plainly critical, and Prince Nasir had selected it as the only pipeline to be targeted. Alain Roudy’s final target, the Qatif Junction manifold complex, directed every last gallon of oil on the east coast.
Prepare tubes one to four…
Aye, sir.
Ten minutes later, o-three-fifty…prepare to launch…tube ONE…TIREZ DE FUSIL…FIRE!!
The first of the Perle’s MBDA Stormcat cruise missiles came ripping out of the torpedo tube, its aft swerving left and right as it found its bearings. It flashed upward through the water, broke the surface with a thunderous roar, and lanced into the night sky, the numbers flashing through its “brain” as it steadied onto course two-four-zero, still climbing, a fiery tail crackling in its wake.
It hit its flying speed of Mach 0.9, two hundred feet above the water, at which point the gas turbines cut in and extinguished the flames in its wake. In the warm air at sea level over the Gulf, Mach 0.9 was the equivalent of more than six hundred miles per hour, which meant that the missile would blast into the Abqaiq complex ten minutes from launch.
Before it had traveled twenty miles, there were three more missiles dead astern. The lead missile crossed the narrow peninsula of Ras Tannurah and swerved over the Saudi coastline at 0357. It rocketed over the coastal highway and changed course, flashing through the dark skies above the desert straight at the Abqaiq complex. With ten miles to go it made its final course change, coming in from the northeast on a line of approach that took it marginally north of the main complex.
At precisely 0400.01 it smashed with stupendous force straight into the middle of Pump Station Number One, buried itself in the main engineering system, and detonated with monstrous force—360 pounds of TNT in a blinding flash of savagery that would have blown an aircraft carrier apart.
No one working anywhere on the station’s night shift survived. All of the main machinery was obliterated by the explosion. Anyone standing a couple of miles away might have been staggered by the destruction and fires that began as soon as the oil ignited. But just a short distance from the remnants of the pumps, there was a fire to end all fires as Alain Roudy’s
second missile slammed into the central area of Abqaiq’s petrochemical fractioning towers.
These huge steel cylinders, full of belting hot gases and liquids, were colossally flammable. And they did not just burn. They incinerated into a violet and orange inferno. Dante would have called the fire department. Heavy fuel oil, gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas, sulphur, and God knows what else blasted into the sky. And the heat was so intense it caused a chain reaction among these refining towers, which exploded one by one in the face of the searing fire.
Everything the towers contained was totally combustible, and years later Abqaiq would still be considered the world’s largest industrial calamity, greater even than the Texas City disaster in 1946, when a tanker full of ammonium nitrate blew up an entire south Texas town. Abqaiq now burned from end to end. Alain Roudy’s four missiles had all struck home. And he was not finished yet.
The next four smashed into the eastern pipeline on its way to the Qatif Junction manifold complex. Then that too exploded in a fireball. And out to the west the flames could actually be seen in the sky from the obliterated Sea Island Terminal, which seemed to blow itself to pieces at 0403 with about a square mile of oil on fire all around it.
The most spectacular fire was off Ras al Ju’aymah, where Ventura’s two high bombs had slammed the upper deck of the terminal a hundred feet into the air, blown to smithereens the valve system for the petroleum gas, and ignited the blowtorch from hell, as forecast six weeks previously by Gaston Savary. The fire was currently roaring across the water, an incinerating white gas flame two feet across at source and 150 feet long.
The actual jetty was in shreds in the water, but the causeway was more or less intact and the liquefied gas pipe was jutting at a ridiculous angle, forty-five degrees to the horizontal, feeding the giant flame with an unending rush of propane that no one could turn off.
Twenty minutes after the explosions had comprehensively destroyed the Saudi Arabian oil industry on the east coast, no one had yet connected them together. There was no one alive who had been working near any of the explosion sites. The administration blocks at Abqaiq and Qatif were flattened, and anyone who was awake even remotely close to the fires could only stand in awe of the gargantuan flames exploding into the sky every few minutes. Abqaiq was of course right in the middle of nowhere.
Indeed the first alarm was raised in the distant city of Yanbu al Bahr, where the loading jetties had been blown sky high by Garth Dupont’s bombs. But those jetties were close to the shore, and the explosion scarcely harmed any of the main parts of the town. The missiles fired by Commander Dreyfus had just hit the refinery, which stood a couple of miles beyond the Yanbu perimeters. And this meant that the Police Chief and several duty officers in Aramco’s high-security forces were definitely aware that something big had just blown up.
The Yanbu police phoned Rabigh, which was in much the same condition as they were—big flames, constant explosions from the burning refineries, jetties gone. In turn they both phoned Jiddah, which had, in the last few minutes, lost its own refinery, courtesy of another well-aimed cruise by Commander Dreyfus.
Everyone called the security headquarters in Riyadh, where they had now heard from the town of Ras al Ju’aymah that the LPG jetties four miles offshore had just blown up and taken a 200,000-ton tanker with them. It was not, however, until after 5 A.M. that Riyadh learned of the full catastrophe in Abqaiq, which quite literally ended all activity in the oil industry west of the Aramah Mountains, and most of the activity on the east coast.
Nearly all of the great loading jetties in the country were smashed beyond repair, the pumping system was history, and the Qatif manifold would take at least a year to repair. The Saudis had always known their oil industry was vulnerable, but this was too much to comprehend.
They had a lot of security in all of the complexes, and yet some kind of a marauding force appeared to have breached every last line of defense, and laid waste to the golden goose that had turned this arid desert kingdom into a modern-day nirvana for one of the richest ruling families on earth. All 35,000 of them.
If the goose was still laying, anywhere out in the desert, she was laying fried eggs. Many of the oil fires would not be extinguished for a week.
And in separate oceans, a thousand miles apart, two undetected submarines of the French Navy were making their way quietly home. Indeed, on board the Perle, running silently toward the Strait of Hormuz, a hundred feet below the surface, Big Jules Ventura, destroyer of the LPG terminal, had just bid an extremely modest two-no-trumps.
MONDAY, MARCH 22, 8:00 A.M.
WESTERN SUBURBS, RIYADH
Prince Nasir heard the news before most people, mainly because he had observers placed in all the selected sites, each of them under instructions to call him immediately anything happened. This made him an extremely busy prince between 0400 and 0420.
And now he sat in his study with Colonel Jacques Gamoudi, sipping coffee and watching the Arab-language television stations to see how the disastrous news was playing out. Most commentators had put together a conspiracy theory that the oil industry had indeed been destroyed by persons unknown.
Of course al-Qaeda was an immediate suspect, but al-Qaeda was a shadowy organization without a titular head, without a headquarters, without known leadership. It was a seething internal mob, angry, determined, stateless, and malevolent to the rulers of the kingdom. And since it was funded as an organization mostly by Saudi Arabia, or at least Saudi Arabians, it was difficult to see why on earth al-Qaeda should have wanted to cut off the hand that fed it. Certainly the activities of the assault forces of the night had in half an hour brought the Saudi economy to its knees. The question was, who were the assault forces of the night? And why had they committed this apparently motiveless act of flagrant criminal aggression? Not to mention, what military genius had masterminded the assaults so brilliantly that they had treated the security forces as if they did not exist?
Prince Nasir and Colonel Gamoudi cheerfully watched the tortuous writhing of the commentators trying to find answers to questions that seemed unanswerable. Prince Nasir considered it a brilliant night’s work. And already, on television, there were constant calls to the King to speak to his people, to give them assurances, to point the way forward, to rally the Saudi nation. But right now the King was in shock. As were his principal ministers, and his Generals.
And on some of the English-language channels, political journalists were forecasting the end of the rule of the al-Sauds. Indeed they were forecasting the end of the Saudi economy, the total collapse of the currency, and the complete inability of the government to finance anything, now that the oil had apparently stopped flowing.
There was no word from the King, which may have been shortsighted on his part, since the nation was in the process of going bust. In fact there was no official word from anyone, until 1 P.M., when the Channel 2 newscaster handed over to a spokesman for the Government, who spoke rather angrily, informing the populace that there had been an attack on the oil fields and loading docks. But he said no details were available. Channel 3, run by Aramco, was understandably circumspect, revealing very little.
By far the best source of information was from the English-language stations in Bahrain and Qatar, which spent the morning interviewing anyone they could contact from Aramco. Slowly they pieced together the shocking truth that someone had launched a spectacular assault on the Saudi oil industry, coordinating stupendous bomb attacks, all apparently to explode within ten minutes of each other.
These stations were in constant communication with the London media, and by 11 A.M. they had camera crews heading by helicopter to the fires still raging on Sea Island and, to the north, the LPG terminal blowtorch. By 1 P.M. there were pictures of various Saudi oil infernos on their way around the world.
At 2 P.M. the first riots began in the capital city of Riyadh.
SAME DAY, 5:00 A.M. (LOCAL)
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe was
very soundly asleep in his parents’ luxurious apartment in the Watergate complex, which he used as his home base. He and his fiancée, Jane Peacock, had been out late with friends and he had dropped her off at the Australian embassy at 2 A.M.
He was due in his office at the National Security Agency at 7 A.M., which did not leave much time for the amount of sleep he most definitely required. In Ramshawe’s opinion, midday would have been a better start time.
And when the phone rang at 5:01 A.M. he nearly jumped out of his pajamas. He jolted himself awake, instantly, like all naval officers, accustomed to the lunatic hours of the watch, and muttered, “Jesus, this better be bloody critical.”
The duty officer at the NSA chuckled and said, “Morning, Lieutenant Commander. There’s something come up I think you ought to know about right away.”
“Shoot,” said Ramshawe, copying the standard greeting of his great hero, the now retired Adm. Arnold Morgan.
Hunter Killer (2005) Page 21