And as they watched, incredulously, several of them saw the unthinkable, as two sub-Harpoon missiles came scything through the crystal-clear skies and smashed straight into the hull of the Victor Hugo. They blew most of the 1,000-yard-long deck 100 feet into the air, straight out over the starboard rails like a can of sardines, opening sideways.
Again, the crew was largely saved by the great distance between the upperworks and the long front end of the ship, which housed the oil. Four men, who were working for’ard, were of course killed instantly, and the ensuing fires were unimaginable. From the bridge, it looked like a lake of pure flame roaring up into the stratosphere. Crude oil is hard to ignite, but when it does it’s extremely difficult to extinguish.
As with the Voltaire, the Master of the Victor Hugo had no option but to abandon her. There were two gigantic, thirty-foot-long jagged holes in the tanker’s port side, close to the waterline, and there was oil leaking out into the ocean but burning fiercely.
The fire was growing hotter by the second. If the Captain and his crew did not get off this massive ship in the next ten minutes, they would surely fry.
At that point, with the lives of everyone onboard the two ships hanging in the balance, Captain Stimpson elected to leave the area. He made one final visual observation of the havoc he had wrought, and then ordered the North Carolina deep again, instructing the helmsman to turn away, south.
“Bow down ten…depth two hundred…make your speed twenty…course one-three-five…
In his seaman’s heart, he hoped that rescue would be prompt and thorough, using every possible ship and helicopter the Omani Navy possessed. For the catastrophe was closest to their shores. But he could not afford to dwell on the unfairness of the sailors’ fate. France had transgressed the natural laws of survival on the planet earth. And she deserved every last bit of vengeance the U.S.A. chose to inflict upon her.
The warship, and the men who sailed it, was the responsibility of the French Navy and the politicians in Paris. Captain Stimpson believed the survivors should be well compensated. Like him, they were only carrying out their orders.
SAME DAY, 1600 (LOCAL)
ELYSÉE PALACE
PARIS
The President of France had been this angry before, but not in living memory. He twice banged his fist down upon his Napoleonic sideboard, which made the Louis XVI Sevres porcelain cups dance up and down on their saucers and the silver Napoleonic coffee pot bounce on the polished inlaid surface of the sideboard.
Another couple of whacks like that and the burly little former communist mayor could have done about a million dollars’ worth of damage.
“I AM NOT PUTTING UP WITH IT,” he roared. “THEY CAN’T…THEY…THEY…THEY CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS. IT’S…IT’S LUNACY…WHO THE HELL DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?”
“That, of course is the main trouble, sir,” replied Pierre St. Martin. “They know who they are.”
“Well, whoever they are, they can’t just keep sinking ships and killing people.”
“Sir, they can. And I believe they will, until we stop trying to ship oil out of the Middle East. They have issued a very firm warning, and with that dreadful bastard Morgan in the White House, they are going to continue.”
“Then you are saying we must stop trying to keep this country running?”
“No, sir. I am not. But we have to find other ways of importing oil than with tankers out of the Persian Gulf—”
“But, Pierre,” interrupted the French President, “that’s just not acceptable. We cannot just lie down and give in, like a…like a…poodle.” The President was so angry he could hardly speak.
“Sir, we have to, because those submarines of theirs are impossible to deal with. You cannot even find them, far less destroy them. And even if we did, the Americans could probably produce fifty more.”
“FIFTY!” yelled the President. “FIFTY! That’s ridiculous.”
“Sir, I have told you already. The U.S. Navy is invincible.”
At which point the President of France lost all semblance of control. “YOU ALSO TOLD ME THAT DESTROYER WOULD PROTECT THE TANKER…YOU…YOU GUARANTEED IT…YOU SAID IT WAS A SPECIALIST ANTISUBMARINE WARSHIP…AND IT TOOK THE UNITED STATES ABOUT ONE MINUTE TO BLOW IT IN HALF! FUCK YOU, PIERRE. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR? F-U-U-U-U-CK YOU!”
“I was only repeating naval advice.”
“GAZING AT YOUR NAVEL…THAT’S THE NEAREST YOU GET TO KNOWLEDGE!” he bellowed. “I am surrounded by lunatics. My friends and my enemies. Imbeciles and killers. And I am sick to death of it.”
At which point, the butler entered the room to announce the arrival of Gen. Michel Jobert’s staff car at the main door downstairs.
“Bring him straight up,” said the President, not even looking at the man.
And three minutes later, the Commander in Chief of France’s joint service Commandment des Opérations Spéciales walked into the room. General Jobert had presented himself with the task of trying to prove what had happened in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Red Sea. He instantly announced that he was the bearer of important information, which was just as well, given the general atmosphere in that room—the President fit to be tied, his Foreign Minister cowering before the onslaught.
“Sir, as you know,” said the General, “we were unable to discover anything about the Voltaire or the Moselle. However, today’s atrocity is very different. Most of the De Grasse’s ship’s company survived, that’s 20 officers and 294 men.
“Their sonar room caught an incoming torpedo three hundred meters out. They even had its bearing. They have the recording and the software, with someone calling out ‘Torpedo! Torpedo! Torpedo!’
“It’s the first time we have had incontrovertible evidence that our ships were hit by a malevolent enemy. And, sir, it gets better: Four of the crew of the Victor Hugo were watching the destroyer burn when two guided missiles came in and smashed into the tanker’s hull. They saw them in the air, aimed straight at the ship, sir. They were right there on the high portside rail.
“Mr. President, we are in a position to go to the United Nations with irrefutable evidence that the United States has committed at least two most terrible crimes on the high seas.”
The President smiled for the first time that morning. “Paul Bedford may have thought he had enough to accuse us publicly, but we really have enough to nail the Americans.”
“Except for one thing,” said St. Martin. “The Americans will deny it flatly. They’ll just say it was the Japanese or someone.”
“Not quite,” interjected General Jobert. “When a sonar search system acquires an incoming missile or a torpedo, it instantly bangs it into a software program that identifies the type of sonar the enemy is using.”
He saw the President’s slightly puzzled face, and simplified the matter. “Sir,” he said, “if I walked out of that door and shouted something from the other side, you would know it was me. You’d recognize my voice. Same with a sonar system. When it receives a radar or sonar beam, its computer can identify the source of that beam. In this case, according to the De Grasse’s ops room, a Gould Mark 48 ADCAP transmitting active. That’s American. And, sir, the Omanis are just helping us to airlift the entire contents of the destroyer’s operational computer system, before she sinks.”
Again, the President smiled. “Then we have them, General?”
“Yessir.”
“Then we shall humiliate the mighty U.S.A. publicly. I shall broadcast to the entire world, tonight, condemning their actions. I’ll describe them as cold-blooded killers, cowboys, bandits. Irresponsible. Reckless. I’ll say the United Nations should not even be in New York. It should be in Paris. Center of the world…where people are…well, civilized, not madmen.”
“Steady, sir,” cautioned St. Martin. “The Americans would be glad to be rid of the UN. What do they call it…? Yes, the Chat-terbox on the East River.”
“Hmm,” said the President. “We shall see, Pierre. We shall see.”
And that n
ight the roof fell in on international relations between France and the United States of America. The French President made his broadcast at 7 P.M. in Paris, in precisely the terms he had outlined in the Elysée Palace for St. Martin and General Jobert. It was theatrical, accusing, rude in the extreme, and political to the nth degree.
The French President threw at the U.S.A. every insult every French President has longed to utter since World War II. Not even De Gaulle, at his most insufferably imperious, had ever let fly at the world’s policemen with quite that much venom.
And he ended it with this jackhammer flourish: “As from this moment, the envoys of the United States are no longer welcome in this country,” he thundered. “I hereby expel them all. I hereby close down their embassy, which pollutes the beauty of the Avenue Gabriel, not three hundred yards from where I am standing.
“I know that under international law that building and that land is officially designated land of the United States of America. As from this week, it is restored to its proper title deeds. Gabriel Avenue
, in its entirety, belongs to LA FRANCE!” And he raised both arms in the air and signed off with the joyous shout: “VIVE LA FRANCE!…VIVE LA FRANCE!”
When he marched off the wide upper landing of the Elysée Palace, stepping between the television arc lights, he entered once more his private drawing room and clasped the hand of General Jobert, who had sat and watched the performance onscreen with the Foreign Minister.
“Well, General, how was that?” he demanded. “Did your President do your country proud?”
“Oh, most definitely, sir,” replied the General. “That was a speech from the very…er…heartbeat of the French people. It needed to be said.”
St. Martin once more sounded a word of caution. “It was perfect, sir,” he murmured softly. “Just so long as the Americans don’t get to Col. Jacques Gamoudi before we do.”
And that night the stakes were raised yet again. At 10 P.M. President Paul Bedford formally expelled every French diplomat from their embassy on Reservoir Road
in Washington, D.C. And while he was about it, he ordered the following French consulates to close down: New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and New Orleans.
It was the lowest point of relations between fellow Permanent Members of the UN Security Council since the Russians shot down the United States Air Force U-2 spy plane almost a half century previously.
And with the East Coast of America operating six hours behind Paris, the U.S. newspapers and television stations had ample time to rearrange their front pages and the top story that they had been planning all morning. That was the one about the state of the world economy, the one that had dominated the world’s media ever since the fateful March night when the French Navy had flattened the Saudi oil industry.
Every night things were globally bad, but tonight was especially dismal. There had been a complete electricity blackout in Tokyo, lasting from 11 P.M. to 6 A.M. Not one flicker of a neon light penetrated the blackness, and the Japanese government stated that this might be happening every night until further notice. They warned the population of Tokyo to be patient. The lights had been off for three days in the cities of Osaka and Kobe, as the electric-power generators used the last of the fuel oil.
Hong Kong, another voracious user of oil-fired electric power, was into its emergency supplies, and Rome, the Eternal City, was headed for eternal darkness. The northwest of France was running out of gasoline, and the great seaport of Rotterdam was virtually closed down.
There was a complete blackout in Calcutta. Traffic was grinding to a halt in Germany, and there was no power in Hamburg, with brownouts in Berlin and Bremen. In England the refineries in the Thames Estuary were slowing right down, and the government had banned all neon lights in London. In the county of Kent, particularly southeast of Ashford, there was absolutely no electricity—at all.
On the East Coast of the United States the situation was becoming critical, as the refineries along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, opposite New York City, began to fail.
That ought to have been enough to keep the most insatiable news editor happy, but the standoff between France and the United States knocked every other story off the front pages, and from the leadoff spots on television news.
Back in the National Security Agency, Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe was trying to hold together a great spider’s web of agents all over the Middle East, all of them trying to find Jacques Gamoudi.
And the situation was not greatly assisted by a phone call every two hours from Admiral Morgan, which always started with the words Found him yet? And always ended with Well, where the hell is he?
If they had but known it, the U.S. operation was way behind the eight ball in the battle with France to find the missing assault commander, because France had inserted five top agents into Riyadh as assistants to Colonel Gamoudi in the runup to the attack on the palaces. Throughout his preparations, they had kept him informed of developments, and all five of them had enjoyed free and easy access to the ex–French Special Forces Commander. Three of them were still in Riyadh, just observing on behalf of the French Secret Service, and all three of them were regular visitors to the splendid white-painted house that King Nasir had made available for the Colonel as long as he needed it.
And suddenly, as both the U.S.A. and France stepped up the pace to locate the Colonel, the game changed. Gaston Savary, the only man with access to these three French spies, called the senior officer, former Special Forces Major Raul Foy, and instructed him, in the fewest possible words, to report to the French Ambassador in the Diplomatic Quarter.
Somewhat mystified, the Major drove over to the embassy, where the Ambassador’s secretary told him it would be necessary to wait for new orders, direct from Paris, which would be given to him by the Ambassador in person. His Excellency would be free in ten minutes.
In fact he was free in five, and Major Foy was ushered into the office. The two men shook hands, but the Ambassador did not invite his guest to sit down. He just said simply, “Major, I do not wish you to remain here for one second longer than necessary. I have just been speaking for the second time this morning to Gaston Savary. I am instructed to tell you, in the most clandestine terms, that you and your men are to assassinate Col. Jacques Gamoudi this day, on the direct orders of the President of France.”
If the Major had been given the courtesy of a cup of coffee, he would have choked on it. “B-but…” he stammered.
“No buts, Major. My own instructions are to call the Elysée Palace the moment you leave, to confirm I have passed on the orders. I don’t need to tell you how serious this is. But I am asked to inform you that there will be an excellent financial reward for you upon your return to Paris. We’re talking six figures.”
Major Foy, a man who had faced death more than once in the service of his country, just stood and gawped.
“I’m sorry, Raul,” said the Ambassador in a kindly tone. “I know that you are certainly a very good colleague of the Colonel’s, if not a friend. But I think I mentioned, this is supremely important. The blackest of black ops, you might say. Good-bye.”
The forty-one-year-old Major turned away without a word, and walked out of the building to his car, parked outside the main door. He climbed into the driver’s seat and just sat there, stunned. He was not, of course, the first soldier to bridle at an order, and perhaps not the first to tell himself, I did not join either the Army or the Secret Service to kill my fellow French officers.
But he may have been the first to be told he must assassinate his own boss. And all he could think of was Colonel Gamoudi’s decency, professionalism, and understanding of his own problems working undercover in the city. When he first arrived from France, he had dined with Jacques Gamoudi on two or three occasions. The two men had spoken every day, always with immense dignity and respect.
Major Foy, who like the Colonel had served with distinction in Brazzaville at the height of the Co
ngo revolution, was not at all sure about this—six figures or no six figures. But then, he thought of all it would mean for him, and for his wife and children.
He started the car and drove away, back toward his own apartment in the center of the city. He resolved for the moment to tell no one of his five minutes with the Ambassador. He just needed some coffee, and some time to think. He glanced at his watch. It was almost eleven o’clock on that hot Thursday morning, which gave him a lot of time to contemplate, since there was no way he was going to shoot Colonel Gamoudi in cold blood in broad daylight.
THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 10:00 P.M.
DIPLOMATIC QUARTER
RIYADH
Major Foy parked his car approximately two hundred yards from the “grace and favor” home awarded by King Nasir to Jacques Gamoudi. He had made up his mind now. He locked the car door and walked quietly up the deserted street, beneath the trees and the fading pink and white spring blossoms still hanging over the high walls of these impressive houses.
Hunter Killer (2005) Page 46