Hunter Killer (21 page)

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
27.01
N
50.24
E, 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 Romanet 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.

The
Perle
ran on through the dark water. There was still a half hour’s running time before he must be in those tanker lanes. But if he was even fifteen minutes late, that quarter-hour would come back to haunt him all night. Because any other ten-minute delay would mean almost a half-hour behind his schedule. And there were still four miles in front of him, before the flashing light on the Gharibah sandbank.

The waters in a five-mile radius around the submarine were palpably deserted. Alain Roudy ordered a two-knot increase in speed. That, he knew, would bring him down to the tanker throughway in good time.

Again he ordered the periscope up for as short a time as possible. And then again, even though he was still relying on passive sonar to warn him of any ship coming close aboard. And suddenly, dead ahead, were the Gharibah sandbank lights, fine on his starboard bow.

Come right four degrees…steer two-six-zero…make your speed six…

Aye, sir.

UP PERISCOPE!

Alain Roudy saw a green buoy a hundred meters coming up to starboard, and he knew they were almost in the
outgoing
tanker lane. He peered through the lenses and down the route and could just make out the running lights of a massive ship heading toward.

DOWN PERISCOPE!

Aye, sir.

The turbines thrust her forward, and the
Perle
accelerated across the outgoing mile-wide lane, traveling at about the same speed as the oncoming VLCC, a mighty 300,000-tonner riding empty, high out of the water.

No one even got a sniff of her as Captain Roudy pressed on, and then, five minutes later, took a final look at the incoming lane to the right. This was his direction and his runway. Captain Roudy wanted a couple of miles between his submarine, fore and aft, and any other ships running down to the LPG dock this eventful Sunday night.

If necessary, he would wait around to ensure he had it, but in fact the
Perle
crossed the outgoing tanker’s line of approach with more than a half mile to spare, and the nearest ship to them on the dark waters of the far side was another VLCC, about a mile and a half ahead.

Captain Roudy ordered a forty-degree turn to port, and the
Perle
fell in, line astern.

Steer course two-two-zero…make your speed fifteen knots…stay at PD…mast down…ten kilometers to ops area.

Two decks below, Cdr. Jules Ventura now summoned his men to complete their checks—attack boards, Draegers, rifles, and ammunition to be loaded into the Zodiacs. Combat knives, flippers, det-cord, timers, detonators, wires, cutters, screwdrivers, bombs securely packed. All six of the men going in were now barefoot in their jet black wet suits, hoods down, goggles high on their foreheads, faces smeared with black camouflage cream.

Final preparations were made for the boats. The Zodiacs would be hoisted first, then the two black Yamaha outboard engines, tuned like racing cars by the engineers, just in case. The two inflatables could probably outrun the
QM2
over a short course, assuming of course that someone had by now extricated
Shades of Arabia
from her portside bow.

Three minutes later, Capt. Alain Roudy ordered the helmsman to make a hard turn…
ninety degrees to port…stop engines…blow main ballast…surface…

The
Perle
made her turn and came driving up to the surface, water streaming off the casing. She righted herself, moving forward, then slowly came to a complete stop, showing no lights.

On the command of the Captain, Commander Ventura led his men up the unlit companionway and out onto the casing. It was strange, but this great, burly, taciturn Special Forces leader was talkative now for the first time since they left Brest.

Ventura was encouraging his men, shaking hands with crew members, thanking everyone for all they had done on the voyage, as he left the ship, to face the unknown in an open rubber-hull boat. Ventura was transformed now into the mortal enemy of the King of Saudi Arabia and his Navy.

The boat driver went aboard the Zodiac first, and Ventura followed him, helping with the lines. When they were set to leave, the Commander personally curled and threw the lines back up to the deck, then sat down and ordered the big inflatable away from the submarine’s hull.

It was extraordinary how thoroughly invisible the Zodiac became on the black water. There was no rising moon yet, and this was a black boat, with a black engine, carrying men in black wet suits, with black hoods and black faces. Even from thirty feet they were impossible to see.

Even the submarine, now without even flashlights on the casing, had effectively vanished from sight. Certainly when the gigantic VLCC came rolling past over in the outward lane, no one onboard the twenty-one-story crude-oil leviathan had the slightest idea that there was a 2,500-ton hunter-killer within a mile, with men on the deck and a black ops team about to destroy the world’s premier supply of oil.

The second Zodiac came away from the
Perle
’s hull and melted into the night. The
Perle
herself came away from her holding position and melted into the ocean, back to PD, in the down lane, about a mile in front of a new oncoming tanker, and still a couple of miles astern of their original leader. All of them were on the seven-mile run to the world’s largest offshore oil terminal on the manmade Sea Island.

While Team Two finalized its preparation for the insert, less than one hour hence, under the command of twenty-six-year-old Lt. Reme Doumen, Jules Ventura and his men chugged steadily along at only five knots. They had a lot of explosives on board, and a lot of time to set them. The
Perle
would not be back to collect them for almost four hours.

It was five miles down to the LPG terminal, and Commander Ventura had all the time he needed to study the dock lights and find the darkest stretch of water to begin the mission. He checked his attack board watch and saw that it was 1915, and he wondered what his friend and colleague Lt. Garth Dupont was doing. Dupont, he knew, was leading the identical mission on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula…
he’s probably doing the same as me, groping about in the dark with a bomb on his back
, thought Ventura.