Rashood’s left and General Jobert’s right. Colonel Gamoudi was staring back at them, when, amazingly, he saw each of them swiftly drawing AK-47s from inside the front flaps of their coats. He watched the unmistakable shape of the short barrels being raised to shoulder height.
With the instincts of the lifetime combat soldier, he grasped the heavy table and hurled it forward, wine, bouillabaisse and God knows what else crashing to the floor. With his left hand he grabbed Rashood by the throat and with his right he grabbed the General, hurling them both down.
The opening burst from the AK-47s smashed a line of bullets clean down the middle of the hefty table top, which now acted as a barrier between Rashood, Gamoudi, and Jobert, and the flying lead from the Kalashnikovs. All three of them could hear the bullets whining around the room. Behind them, two waiters had gone down with blood pumping from their chests.
Crockery was shattered, bottles of wine were smashed, women were screaming, everyone was rushing for cover. Another ferocious burst of fire confirmed that the hit men were making their way across the restaurant. Jacques Gamoudi drew the only weapon he had, his big bear-hunting knife, and Ravi Rashood pulled his Browning 9mm from the wide leather belt near the small of his back.
Colonel Gamoudi snapped to Rashood, “It’s you they’re after,
And with that, the iron-souled mountain guide crashed under the adjoining tables until he reached a heavy white column in the center of the room. The precise path of Jacques Gamoudi was obvious by the sheer volume of destruction he left behind him on the floor of the restaurant, overturned tables and chairs, magnificently cooked seafood, burning candles mostly extinguished by wine and the contents of ice buckets.
But it was impossible to shoot him as he dived beneath the tables, staying low, hammering his way forward. However, the Mossad men gave it their best shot, and bullets ricocheted in all directions.
Agent Jazy now hung back, at once looking for the charging Gamoudi and trying to provide cover for his partner, as David Schwab moved forward for the kill, advancing toward the upturned table, behind which his quarry was crouching.
But somehow Jacques Gamoudi got around behind Jazy. He leaped at him with a bound that would have made a mountain lion gasp, and plunged his knife right into the man’s throat, ripping the windpipe and jugular. Jazy had no time to scream. He dropped his rifle and fell back, dying, in the mighty arms of Le Chasseur.
Agent Schwab turned around and swung his rifle straight at Gamoudi, who was using Jazy as a human shield. He hesitated for one split second, and Ravi Rashood, moving even faster than Gamoudi, dived horizontally out from behind the table and shot Schwab clean through the back of the head, twice. A line of bullets, hopelessly ripping across the timbered ceiling, was the Mossad man’s only reply.
The entire room was now a bloodbath — or at least a blood-and-wine bath. Fifteen diners were injured, five of them seriously, four staff were dead, including the headwaiter, who had been caught in the opening crossfire. Such was the speed of the battle that no one had yet called either an ambulance or the police. Surviving staff members were either in shock or still taking cover.
Colonel Gamoudi and General Rashood hauled Michel Jobert back to his feet. They grabbed for the two fallen AK-47s, all three of them running for the exit.
Outside they could see a black Peugeot with a driver plainly awaiting the two hit men. To the amazement of his two companions General Jobert cut the driver down in cold blood, right behind the wheel, with a burst of fire that obliterated the windshield and riddled the driver’s-side door, and the driver’s left temple.
They piled into the backseat of their own car, and General Jobert snapped to their driver, “Aubagne! And step on it! Back roads. Stay off the highway.”
And at high speed they headed out of Marseille; they were men who were above suspicion, two decorated French Army officers, one of them serving at the highest possible level, and an Arabian General called in to assist France in a highly classified operation, by presidential edict.
“Trouble, sir?” asked the driver.
“Not really, Maurice. Couple of amateurs made a rather silly misjudgment,” said Michel Jobert. “Not a word, of course. We were nowhere near Marseille.”
“Certainly not, sir. I know the rules.”
CHAPTER THREE
Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, personal assistant to the director of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agency, was looking for the third time that fall at a sudden, sharply upward spike in the world’s oil prices. He had noticed one in September, another in October, and here were West Texas Intermediate trading futures today at almost fifty-three dollars a barrel on Wall Street’s NYMEX exchange.
It was the same story on the International Petroleum Exchange in London. Brent Crude had actually hit $55 there earlier that morning, before New York opened for trading. In mid-afternoon it fell back to $48.95. The pattern was not drastic, but it was steady.
Somewhere in the world, perhaps shielding behind international brokers and traders, there was a new player in the market. And as Jimmy Ramshawe put it,
Gas was now four dollars a gallon at the pumps in the United States, which was pleasing no one, especially the President. In England it had hit almost nine dollars. And so far as Jimmy could see, it was all caused by just one big player in the futures market, on both side of the Atlantic — buying, buying, buying, driving up the prices.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe could not fathom how the buyer had managed to keep it all so secret. The sheer volume of oil futures being purchased was of mammoth proportions. Someone who thought he needed an extra 1.5 million barrels a day, or almost 40 million barrels a month.
“Multiply that bastard by forty-two,” muttered Ramshawe, “and you’ve got some bloody mongrel out there trying to buy one and a half billion gallons of gas every month. Christ! He must have a lot of cars.”
The initial suspect, in the young Lt. Commander’s opinion, had to be China.
And it could scarcely be Russia, which now had all kinds of oil resources from the Baku fields. Great Britain? No, they still have their own North Sea fields. Japan? No. They had very cozy long-term contracts with the Saudis for both gasoline and propane. So who? Germany? France? Unlikely. Especially France, who for years has been reducing its oil requirements in favor of nuclear-powered electricity plants.
Nonetheless Lt. Commander Ramshawe reckoned it had to be one of them, because no one else could play on that scale. He keyed into the Internet and checked the energy status of France, which was not only the fifth largest economy in the world but also one of the largest producers of nuclear power.
Ramshawe read a pocket summary of the recent history of the French oil giant Total, merged with the Belgian company Petrofina in 1999. Then it merged again, with Elf Aquitaine, to create, unimaginatively, TotalFinaElf, the fourth largest publicly listed oil company in the world — right after ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP.
The company had proven reserves of 10.8 billion barrels, and production of 2.1 million barrels a day. It owned more than 50 percent of all the refining capacity in France. TotalFinaElf was the seventh largest refiner on earth. It was a major shareholder in the 1,100-mile pipeline out of Baku, through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
So far as Ramshawe could see, this was a hugely unlikely scenario. France had reduced her oil usage in the
