Hunter Killer (25 page)

Here at the crossroads of east and west, British Intelligence operated a hub from which they intercepted satellite messages, phone calls, and transmissions emanating from all over the Middle East. To the north lay Turkey; to the east Syria, Israel, and Iraq; to the southeast Jordan and Saudi Arabia; to the south Egypt.

JSSU was manned by the cream of British electronic interceptors from all three services, the majority from the Army. They maintained a constant watch, monitoring communications around the clock, every one of their operators a highly qualified linguist trained purely to make literal translations of intercepted messages and conversations as they were transmitted.

The satellite communications intercept ran the gamut—faxes, e-mails, coded messages in 100 languages—the majority of the data being recorded on a long-running tape for later analysis. Particularly interesting conversations, however, were written down by the listening operator as they were spoken, and then immediately translated.

The electronic outpost in southeastern Cyprus was regarded as a priceless asset by British Intelligence, and in turn by the National Security Agency in Fort Meade. Because JSSU was part of the fabled British Intelligence operation in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). If Cyprus was the jewel in the crown of GCHQ, in turn GCHQ was the jewel in the crown of Britain’s espionage industry, which cost $1.5 billion a year to run.

It was from Cyprus that terrorists’ combat communications were first breached, from tiny Nikolaos where they hacked into bin Laden and his henchmen in faraway Afghanistan. The U.S. National Security Agency willingly pooled all of its intelligence with Cheltenham, where the 4,000-strong workforce operated in blast-proof offices under an armor-plated roof. It was a huge new building, absolutely circular, with a round center courtyard. They called it the Doughnut.

That particular Monday had obviously been a pandemonic day, with the Saudi oil fields destroyed and a zillion cell phone calls being made all across the Middle East. In fact, it was probably the busiest day in the Cyprus listening post since the Egyptian Second Army rampaged across Israel’s Bar-Lev line in 1973. Only now, as the evening abated and the riots died down and businesses and banks closed, did satellite communications begin to slow up. Cpl. Shane Collins, a twenty-eight-year-old signals expert from one of the British Army’s tank regiments, was at his screen in the Nikolaos ops room checking the traffic, which was, naturally, mostly in Arabic. He was just having his first cup of coffee of the evening when he heard a message that absolutely caught his attention. He wrote down nothing, but listened carefully, knowing it was being automatically recorded on that specific frequency.

The voice was French. Very French.
Le Conservateur? La fête? En avance?
Corporal Collins pressed his Listen Again button and carefully wrote down the full transcript, noting the brevity, the lack of any personal greeting, or even recognition.

He knew some French but not sufficient to be sure. He punched the brief sentences into his computer and transmitted them to the translation section on the next floor. Within five minutes it was back:

This party has started early, and it’s getting out of control. I think we should get going at least a day early, maybe two days early. Can I have your agreement to proceed as I think fit?

Affirmative. I’ll leave our friends in the south to you.

It was all in French. Both ends. And while Corporal Collins could not activate a trace to establish where the phone call had emanated, he immediately called over his duty Captain and reported that he had had a conversation on the satellite that was plainly more than just a personal call.

The Captain agreed that the call was unusual. And he lost no time in passing the text straight back to GCHQ in Cheltenham for detailed analysis. It was 2130 in Riyadh, 2030 in Cyprus, and 1830 in Gloucestershire, England.

The Middle Eastern Desk, deep inside the Doughnut, put an immediate trace on the satellite, searching for the start point of the call. They established a line on the frequency, which stretched back from Cyprus, across the Lebanon coast, south of Damascus, through Jordan, and straight through Saudi Arabia, bisecting Riyadh and the central desert, and ending somewhere down in the Rhub al Khali, the Empty Quarter.

Somewhere along that line, a Frenchman had activated his cell phone to…someone. GCHQ then put out a tracer to other listening posts to try to locate a different “line” that would bisect their own, revealing the location of the French caller. No one was surprised when another listening post in northeast Africa came up with one. The lines bisected each other around twenty miles north of Riyadh.

The Cheltenham analysts asked their computerized system to make several trillion calculations in five minutes, and quickly established that this was not a code but, rather, veiled speech. “The curator” was and would remain unknown, but the experts were certain this had military overtones.

Corporal Collins had sensed it. The analysts inside the Doughnut agreed with him. No greeting, no good-bye. This was a signal, not a conversation. One piece of information—the party started early and might get out of control. One question—can we go early? One answer—yes.

But, go where? What party? Did this refer somehow to the uproar currently going on in Riyadh? If so, who wanted to get involved? Had the JSSU tapped into al-Qaeda’s command headquarters?

The British Intelligence officers had been wrestling with this problem all day. Why al-Qaeda, an organization that had received sums of up to $500 million from Saudi sources in the past fifteen years? Al-Qaeda, which was comprised of Saudis, who made up the vast majority of the 9/11 hit men and were believed to be almost the entire terrorist population of Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. Naval base in Cuba. Why on earth would al-Qaeda wish to cripple the economy that fed them?

Well, if not al-Qaeda, then who? The analysts at GCHQ were baffled about motive and culprit, but they were not baffled by the innate importance of Corporal Collins’s signal. And at 2200 they relayed it on to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade. It was 1700 in Washington.

The NSA ops room had been buzzing all day with a perfectly astounding lack of information about the Saudi oil crisis. No one had given serious importance to the theory of outside involvement. It still seemed a completely internal Arab matter. Someone, for whatever reason, had apparently planted a succession of bombs from one end of the Arabian Peninsula to the other, and simultaneously blown up the entire shebang.

If there was malice, it was directed principally toward the King and the ruling members of the royal family. No one, from the highest echelons of America’s espionage organizations to the top brass at the Pentagon, had come up with one feasible idea as to why a foreign power should want to perpetrate such an action.

The most available oil in the world was Saudi, and to most countries it would be unthinkable to be without it. Saudi Arabia, for instance, provided twenty percent of the daily requirement for the United States. Without it, France’s mighty traffic network would grind to a complete halt.

And yet…Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe had an uneasy feeling. Nothing about this astounding attack sat correctly with him. He had spent much of the day pulling up data on the Saudi oil defenses, and there were a lot of them. Every one of those giant structures—the pump stations, the loading terminals, the refineries, the offshore jetties at Sea Island, and the LPG docks off Ras al Ju’aymah—were surrounded by heavily armed guards.

According to the Middle East Desks at the FBI and the CIA, you could not get anywhere near those places, certainly not by land. You simply could not reach them, not carrying the kind of explosives that would blast them to smithereens. It was downright impossible. However, it could perhaps have been done by sea, with frogmen coming in and planting explosive under the docks.

At least, the U.S. Navy SEALs could probably have done it, or the Royal Navy. Maybe Russia, not China, but possibly France. Certainly not Saudi Arabia, a country that did not even own a submarine and certainly possessed no underwater Special Forces capability.

No. Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe could not figure it out. And, anyway, even if the Saudi Navy had suddenly risen up as traitors against the King, that did not explain how someone else had managed to hit the Abqaiq eastern pipeline amidships, then blow up the manifold at Qatif Junction, flatten Pump Station Number One, and set fire to the biggest oil processing complex in the Middle East—the one at Abqaiq, which was situated bang in the middle of nowhere and operated behind a steel cordon of armed guards.

If this was indeed a purely Saudi matter, he, Jimmy Ramshawe, considered it must have been the biggest inside job ever pulled. And there was no motive. Not even a suggestion of one. If the action was Saudi, it was committed by a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims trying to commit financial suicide.

And the Saudis, he knew, were not regarded as stupid. He scanned back on his computer screen and checked the strength of the Saudi National Guard, the independent force whose special brief was to guard those oil installations in the Eastern Province.

The Saudis were revealing no accurate numbers, but there were thousands of troops, deployed by their commanders along some 12,500 miles of pipeline, which reached fifty oil fields and several refineries and terminals.

The force worked in close cooperation with Aramco, with its strong American connections, financially, technologically, and militarily. These people, Ramshawe mused, cannot be taken lightly.

A bunch of hit men creeping past battalions of guards, laser beams, patrols, probably bloody attack dogs…then fixing bombs all over the place! Get outta here. That’s just bloody ridiculous…especially since dozens of bombs, from one end of the bloody country to the other, went off bang within a few minutes of each other.

The Saudi National Guard was just too strong for that. The brass at Aramco would not have let that happen.
Jesus! These guys have bloody tanks, artillery, rockets, plus a bloody Air Force, fighter-bombers, gunships, and Christ knows what else! I don’t buy it. And I’m not going to start buying it any time soon.

The clincher, so far as Ramshawe was concerned, was simple: the sheer number of targets hit.
You’re trying to tell me, of all the guards in all of those priceless oil installations, not one of them saw anything…not a single warning, not a single mistake, not a single alarm. Nothing. A bunch of blokes dressed in sheets flattened and burned 25 percent of the world’s oil, and NO ONE suspected anything! Get out. This was military. Not terrorism.

The clock ticked past 1730, and a duty officer from the international division tapped on Ramshawe’s door and delivered copies of the very few coded signals from GCHQ in Cheltenham, anything that might be worth his time. These were delivered twice a day, in hard copy at his request. Admiral Morris used computers, but looking at screens was not Ramshawe’s first choice. He liked the signals “in black and white, right where I can see ’em.”

Ramshawe looked at the top sheet. He knew the satellite intercepts were arranged in descending order of importance by the NSA staff. And at first sight, he could not see anything wildly exciting about this early party someone was planning to attend.

But then he looked at the notes from the British case officer, which pointed out the brevity of the message and the fact that it had all the hallmarks of the military. And that grabbed his attention. Then he saw that the signal had been sent on a cell phone situated nineteen miles north of Riyadh, and that really tweaked his interest.

On a day like this,
anything
that said “Riyadh” was interesting. But what made his hair stand on end was the final paragraph, which displayed the conversation as it was spoken—in French.

Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe instantly put two and two together and made about 723. “There’s something going on,” he told the empty room. “There’s something bloody going on. And who’s this bloody curator? And who’s this French bastard poncing about in the desert, sending military signals?”

Jimmy had read enough signals from all over the world to know military when he saw it. There was the recipient of the call, the curator!
No one asks for the bloody curator. That’s a pseudonym. And the question—your permission to proceed?—that’s military. No one on earth talks like that except Army, Navy, Air Force. And the reply! Jesus! AFFIRMATIVE! He might as well have signed it General de Gaulle. It’s all military. These clever bastards at GCHQ have hit something here. I’m right bloody sure of that
.

The problem was, Lt. Commander Ramshawe was not sure whom to talk to. Admiral Morris was in the Navy yards in San Diego, probably out on a carrier, definitely not wanting to be interrupted, especially not by a wild, if well considered, speculation.

The Lt. Commander pondered the situation for a half hour. Then he decided that there was only one person he would like to wrestle with the problem, and he was retired. But this was right up the Admiral’s street. Jimmy Ramshawe picked up the telephone and dialed the private number of the old Lion of the West Wing, Adm. Arnold Morgan himself.

“Morgan. Speak.”

“Hello, sir. Jimmy Ramshawe here. Have you got a couple of minutes?”

“Well, we’re going out soon, so make it quick.”

Jimmy’s mind jumped two notches. He would either deliver a slam-dunk sentence to seize the Admiral’s attention, right now, or risk a slow-burn introduction, during which the irascible former presidential Security Adviser might get bored and tell him to leave it for another time. Jimmy knew that the Admiral’s boredom threshold was extremely low. Seriously bored, Arnold Morgan would sit there contemplating the possibility of ending his own life.

Jimmy went for the slam dunk. “Sir, I believe it is entirely possible that the Republic of France, for reasons best known to themselves, have just blown up the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.”