Hunter Killer Page 4

  “What if no one ever found out we were implicated?” replied the President. “What if no one ever knew? What if it all appeared to be just an Arab matter—a military coup by the people against their corrupt rulers; a kind of insurrection that spread, most unfortunately, to the oil wells?”

  “Sir, do you think it possible such a momentous action by France could ever be kept secret?”

  “Again,” said the President, “I have no idea. But the reason we are in this room, at this unearthly hour of the morning, is that we have been asked for help by a senior representative of one of our major trading partners…a partner that would feel obliged, in future, to purchase all of their military hardware from France—warships, fighter aircraft, and weaponry worth billions. Thus, gentlemen, please find out what we could do, how quietly we could do it, and whether we could stay sufficiently remote never to be proven guilty of anything. Meanwhile I shall behave as if this conversation had never taken place. You are the only two people in France who know anything of the prince’s visit, and of the proposals he made. Perhaps you would be good enough to contact me when you have formulated your thoughts.”

  And with that, the most powerful man in the European Union stood up, replaced his coffee cup on the tray, and walked to the door.

  Neither Pierre St. Martin nor Gaston Savary could recover swiftly enough even to open it for him. Both the French Foreign Minister and the head of France’s Secret Service were in shock. And they just stood there, gawping, at the departing President, momentarily stunned by the enormity of the task he had set for them.

  “Sacré merde!” muttered Pierre St. Martin.

  FRIDAY MORNING, MAY 8

  PARIS

  Gaston Savary was alone, driving his black Citroën staff car through heavy commuter traffic into the remotest outpost of the northwest suburbs of the city. He was going against the incoming traffic, but it was still outlandishly busy, with queues of buses, vans, and trucks all the way, as always, in both directions. Over three and a half million people fight their way into, and out of, Paris every working day.

  He reached the outer suburb of Taverny and drove up to the guardhouse at the entrance to one of the most secretive compounds in Europe—the headquarters of France’s Commandement des Operations Speciales (COS), the joint service establishment that controls the worldwide special ops activities of all three French armed forces.

  As head of the largely civilian French Secret Service, Savary was a regular visitor, and both duty guards wished him “Bonjour” before waving him through to a waiting escort who slipped into the front seat of the Citroën.

  They drove toward the offices of the First Marine Parachute Infantry Regiment, the prime special ops unit in France, the direct equivalent of Britain’s SAS, and the U.S.A.’s Navy SEALs and Rangers. This is a formidable black ops outfit, which clandestinely provides special training and even assistance to foreign countries; plus offensive action if necessary. It also conducts its own military intelligence gathering and in recent years has been at the sharp end of most French counterterrorist operations. Two heavily armed helicopter squadrons are under its command.

  Gaston Savary instructed his escort, a young Army Lieutenant, to park the car. He let himself out at the main entrance, where another young officer wished him “Bonjour” and took him immediately to the special ops C-in-C, General Michel Jobert.

  The two men were old acquaintances, but nonetheless Savary handed over a letter, certified by the office of the Foreign Minister of France, instructing the General to work carefully and in the strictest confidence with the bearer, examining the project scrupulously, before arriving at one of two conclusions: possible or impossible.

  And in the most clandestine manner, the two most senior undercover warriors in France began their feasibility test on behalf of their government and, in a sense, on behalf of Prince Nasir Ibn Mohammed of Saudi Arabia.

  In the next fifteen minutes General Jobert’s dark, bushy eyebrows rarely descended to their normal position on the lower part of his forehead. He was truly astounded at the scale of the proposition. Gaston Savary reckoned Jobert softly exclaimed, Mon Dieu! about twelve times.

  But the proposition was real enough. The President of France wanted a professional opinion; whether the Saudi oil industry could be brought to its knees by military attack for a period of around two years, and whether, in the ensuing days, with the Saudi economy in ruins, it would be possible to subdue the Saudi armed forces and then take the capital city of Riyadh. All with France, to all appearances, having not the slightest involvement.

  The first three items—the oil, the surrender of the army, and the capture of Riyadh—were probably possible. In the opinion of General Jobert the collapse of the economy would leave an army somewhat disinclined to fight anyone. The problem was the fourth item: could France somehow make it all possible, with a substantial military involvement, and yet remain anonymous?

  General Jobert, on reflection, thought absolutely not. So did Gaston Savary. Which essentially meant that the President would have to decline the offer of the Saudi Prince to make France his sole supplier of future military hardware, and the sole world agent for all Saudi oil products. And that particular non would ultimately represent the rejection of an opportunity for the hard-pressed French Republic to earn several hundred billion dollars.

  And that was a scenario both General Jobert and Gaston Savary suspected might not sit too well with a President whose country had been known, traditionally, to operate almost exclusively from a sense of unfettered self-interest.

  The General, who had not received the slightest indication as to why he was meeting with Savary, read again the second page of the letter from Pierre St. Martin. It contained the briefest outline of the requirements that Prince Nasir considered would cripple the Saudi oil industry.

  Priority number one was the destruction of the world’s largest processing complex, at Abqaiq, which was situated twenty-five miles inland from the Gulf of Bahrain. Abqaiq was the destination of all crude oil from the Saudi south, particularly from Ghawar, the most productive oil field on earth. Beneath the shifting desert sands, right there, sixty miles southwest of Dhahran, lay 70 billion barrels.

  Close to Abqaiq, Pump Station Number One sent some 900,000 barrels of light crude per day, seven hundred miles, up and over the Aramah Mountains, to the Red Sea oil port of Yanbu al Bahr.

  If Pump Station Number One went down, the massive loading terminals of both Yanbu and, ninety miles to the south, Rabigh would be finished. So would the huge refineries in the area, including the enormous complexes at Rabigh, Medina, and Jiddah.

  Nonetheless, Prince Nasir believed the Red Sea terminals should be hit and destroyed. On the Gulf coast, the largest offshore oil field in the world, at Safaniya, 160 miles north of Dhahran, was another of the Prince’s prime targets. The reserves out there, below the warm, sandy Gulf seabed, numbered 30 billion barrels—around 500,000 barrels a day for about 164 years.

  The biggest terminal on the Gulf was Ras Tannurah, which had capacity for 4.3 million barrels of oil a day out at the end of a narrow, ten-mile-long sandy peninsula. The colossal loading dock was offshore, at the Sea Island complex, where Platform Number Four pumped more than two million barrels a day into the world’s waiting tankers. In Prince Nasir’s opinion, a direct hit at that platform would virtually wrap it right up for Ras Tannurah. Especially if someone banged out the pipeline from Abqaiq, which the Prince had thoughtfully mapped out for the President of France.

  In Nasir’s opinion, the final, critical hit should be slightly north, on the 4.2-million-barrel-a-day complex at Ju’aymah, principal loading bay for liquid petroleum—propane, that is, the prime source of all Japanese cooking. If Prince Nasir’s plan ever came off, the Japanese would find themselves eating a whole lot of sushi, accompanied by stone-cold sake.

  The terminals of Ras Tannurah and Ju’aymah, plus the Red Sea ports, loaded Saudi Arabian oil products into a staggering 4,000 massive tankers a year. Uns
urprisingly, Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company), 100 percent owned by the Saudi government since 1976, was the largest oil company on earth. Its headquarters were in the Eastern Province city of Dhahran and its capability was approximately 10 million barrels a day, though in the twenty-first century it had pumped considerably less.

  Twenty-six percent of all the oil on the planet lay beneath the Saudi desert—that’s around 262 billion barrels, which, at 5.5 million a day, ought to last around 130 years. The Saudi royal family were the sole proprietors of Aramco, which owned every last half-pint.

  “You want me to hit that lot?” asked General Jobert incredulously. “That’s probably ten different targets. Three would be difficult. I suppose we could get three hit squads in there. But they’d need backup, and the explosive would weigh God knows how much. We’d need forty men in each team. But ten targets? Mon Dieu! I’d say that would be impossible. We’d have a better chance bombing it.”

  “That, of course, is out of the question,” said Gaston Savary.

  “Remember, the President’s prime requirement is secrecy. If we sent in a squadron of fighter bombers, they’d know the nationality of the attackers in about ten minutes. The Saudis have a lot of very sophisticated U.S. surveillance kits.”

  Both men ruminated over the apparent hopelessness of step one, and a mood of tacit acceptance prevailed. The critical path of the operation required a succession of ten swift, devastating hits on the greatest oil-producing network in the Middle East. And so far as General Jobert could see, it was militarily impossible, either by land or by air—at least, without getting caught it was.

  General Jobert paced the room. He was an impressive man—not tall, but built like a middleweight fighter, with thick, black, curly hair and a swarthy complexion, very French, with the merest suggestion that somewhere in the family tree there may have lurked a North African ancestor.

  He was a man in stark contrast to the lean, pale-skinned, six-foot-two-inch Gaston Savary, whose mournful expression concealed a cool sense of irony and a somewhat sarcastic turn of humor. However, on this morning they were thinking as one, both of them aware that an outright rejection of the President’s request was not a great idea—for either of them.

  The General mused. Land attack? C’est impossible. Air attack? Non, absolument non. Then he brightened somewhat. “How about by sea?”

  Gaston Savary looked up sharply. “You mean frogmen, brought in by submarine, swimmers who could fix sticky bombs on the offshore rigs?”

  “Exactement!”

  “Have you checked the depth of the water lately? I mean around Abqaiq, which is not only in the middle of the desert but is also the key to the entire operation?” Savary loved the rhetorical question.

  But the General smiled. His smile was that of a man one move from checkmate. “As a civilian, you of course do not understand everything about the military mind,” he said. “However, I expect you have heard of cruise missiles, and these days there are some very effective ones, that fly out of nowhere.”

  “In these days of intense surveillance, nothing comes out of nowhere,” replied the Secret Service Chief. “There’s always someone watching.”

  “True,” replied the General. “But the chances of detecting a missile fired from a submerged submarine are very low. I’m talking about a missile programmed to fly over the ocean and then over the middle of the desert. I assure you no one will pick that up. The element of surprise is too great.”

  Savary knew when an important sentence had been uttered. He paused for a moment, nodding his head slightly. And then he asked, “Do you really think we could put a submarine in the Gulf without anyone knowing? And then have it unleash a barrage of cruise missiles at the shores of Saudi Arabia without anyone finding out?”

  “They’d find out when the oil terminals, pumping stations, and refineries went up in smoke. But they’d never guess, in their wildest dreams, who the culprits were or, above all, how they did it.”

  “And what about the other coast?” asked Gaston Savary. “The Red Sea? You can’t even get in there without traveling on the surface.”

  General Jobert shrugged. “A submarine would be logged through Suez. But so would many, many other ships. But it would not be logged through the southern end. The Red Sea can be transited underwater, and it is not unusual for a French submarine to make that journey. Also, that sea is extremely deep in places.”

  “And we also have the element of motive in our favor,” said Savary. “We are great friends with Saudi Arabia. And why would anyone, in their right mind, want to blow up the oil system that keeps not only us but most of the civilized world in business? No one would suspect us. No one.”

  “I have no doubt the President of France considered that most carefully before he asked us to conduct this feasibility test.”

  “Do you think the whole operation could be carried out using cruise missiles alone?”

  The General frowned. “I cannot say, but my instinct is no. We certainly could hit the refineries and the pumping stations, because pinpoint accuracy is not a requirement. But the loading platforms and offshore rigs would require real accuracy, and I don’t think we could count on a cruise to hit such a small target in exactly the right place. And anyway, someone working on the rig might see a wayward cruise come in. They’re supposed to be accurate to ten meters. But that’s too big a margin if you’re trying to hit the upper deck of a drilling rig. Better to attack from below the surface.”

  Gaston Savary could see why Michel Jobert had been made a general, and he could most certainly see how he came to spearhead the French Army’s Special Forces.

  “Well, General,” he said. “I think we must agree it is the most interesting plan. Because if it succeeds, the new King of Saudi Arabia will owe us everything. Certainly we will have enormous power over him, because he could never admit he was the mastermind behind the destruction of his own country’s oil industry.”

  “Well, no, he could not,” replied Michel Jobert. “And that would mean French companies would undertake the entire rebuilding program. There would be huge contracts awarded to us, just as the Americans claimed almost all the rebuilding contracts for Iraq.”

  “And there’d be a lot of very grateful French industries,” said Savary. “And the riches for the oil industry would be incalculable. Imagine owning the sole marketing agency for all Saudi Arabian oil. Mon Dieu! That would be something, eh?”

  “And I would not be surprised if that led to a long and comfortable retirement for both of us,” said the General. “But for now, let’s not get too excited. I would like to call Admiral Pires over for a half hour.”

  “I don’t believe I know him.”

  “He’s COMFUSCO.”

  “Who the hell’s COMFUSCO?”

  “Commandement des Fusiliers Marines Commandos. It’s the French Navy’s special ops outfit. Admiral Pires is the head of it. But he’s an ex-submariner. And right now he is in overall command of all naval assault commandos, plus the Commando Hubert divers unit and the Close Quarters Combat Group—that’s naval counterterrorist—both assigned to COS.”

  “That’s every kind of assault from the sea, correct?”

  “Absolument. That’s beach reconnaissance, assaults on ships, intelligence gathering, amphibious landings, small boat operations, raids, rescue ops, and of course combat search and rescue—CSAR.”

  “Of course,” said Savary, who was always amazed by the military’s detailed, meticulous operational structures.

  General Jobert ordered coffee for three, and a young Army Lieutenant pushed open the door to announce that the Admiral would be there in ten minutes.

  Gaston Savary privately thought the entire scheme was a boundless exercise in naked ambition that would probably end up being abandoned. As a kind of super-policeman, he was used to bureaucrats conducting relentless searches, desperately trying to find reasons not to do things. And if ever there was an opportunity to say no, this was surely it. Offhand he could think of a
bout ten reasons himself.

  THE ARABIAN PENINSULA, WITH THE FOUR SAUDI MILITARY CITIES MARKED

  But, like many of his fellow spies and spy masters, Savary was an adventurer at heart. And he knew how to work the system. No one had asked him to blow up the oil fields. He had merely been requested to find out if it was possible to do so without getting caught. And he was most certainly doing that.

  Admiral Pires arrived on time, with the flourish of a man who had better things to do than talk to Secret Service agents. Six minutes later, having received a sharply worded briefing from General Jobert, he was reduced to utter silence.

  “Mon Dieu!” he said. “That is the most dangerous plan I have ever heard.”

  Savary gave him the benefit of his own wisdom. “Admiral,” he said, “we are not being asked to blow up half of Saudi Arabia. We are merely being asked to decide whether it can be done, in secret…to the inestimable advantage of France.”

  “Well, technically we could put one of our new SSNs into the Gulf, making an underwater entry through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s deep enough, and it’s been done before.”

  “Is that one of the old Rubis-class boats?” asked Savary.

  “No. No. This is one of the new Project Barracuda boats we have been building in Cherbourg for several years. You may have read about them. We have just two that will become operational this year. They’re bigger than the old Rubis, around 4,000 tons, nuclear hunter-killers with torpedo and cruise missile capabilities. They actually carry ten MBDA SCALP naval missiles. That’s a derivative of the old Storm/Shadows. They’re good, quiet ships with very good missiles. We’re conducting sea trials right now, off the Brest navy yards.”

  “What would you consider the likelihood of getting in and out of the Gulf undetected?” asked the General.