Hunter Killer

^{THE DEEP-WATER CHANNEL — SOUTHERN EXIT FROM THE RED SEA}

“Nossir. But my executive officer has. And so has my navigation officer. We’ll be fine.”

Admiral Romanet nodded and looked back to his chart. “Your ops area is about halfway down the Red Sea, in waters mostly around five hundred meters deep. We have decided this is not a perfect area for an SDV (swimmer delivery vehicle), and anyway our Rubis submarines are not ideally equipped to carry one. Instead our SF will make the transit from the submarine in two Zodiac inflatables, six men to a boat. The outboard engines run very quietly, and the guys can row in the last few hundred yards for maximum silence.

“We have targets at Yanbu and Rabigh, enormous terminals, with these huge loading docks, in the picture here…” The Admiral pointed with the tip of his gold ballpoint pen. “They will be separate operations, ninety miles apart. The plan is to attach magnetic bombs to the supporting pylons, utilizing timed detonators, and then have the lot crash into the sea at the same time.

“At nineteen hundred, as soon as it’s dark, the Special Forces will leave the submerged submarine, which will be stopped around five miles offshore. That gives them a fifteen-minute run-in, making thirty knots through the water in the Zodiacs. Two boats. The submarine will wait, pick them up, then travel quietly down to the loading bays at Rabigh, arriving at around o-two-hundred.

“There is no passive sonar listening in that part of the Red Sea, nothing before Jiddah, a hundred ten miles farther on, where the Saudi Navy has its western Navy HQ. That’s a big dockyard, with vast family accommodation: mosques, schools, et cetera. But its only real muscle is three or four missile frigates, all French-built, bought directly from us. We’re experts on what they can and cannot do. And anyway we’re not going that far south.

“The chances of the Saudis’ picking up a very quiet nuclear submarine running several miles offshore is zero. And even if they do, there’s not much they can do about it. They have virtually no ASW capability. And even if they did send out a patrol boat, even a frigate, for whatever reason, we’d either hide easily or sink it.”

Commander Dreyfus nodded. “Same procedures as Yanbu for the Special Forces? Send in two Zodiacs and wait?”

“Correct. Then you will move out to sea…you’ll be around halfway between Yanbu and Jiddah…make your ops station somewhere here…” The Admiral pointed again to the chart. “Correlate your timing,” he said, “with the bombs on the loading dock pylons. I want them all to go off bang at precisely the same time.

“So you will open fire simultaneously with the cruises, seven and a half minutes before H hour on the pylons. You will fire three preprogrammed batteries, four missiles in each. The first four straight at the Jiddah refinery, then four at the main refinery in Rabigh. And one into the refinery at Yanbu, right on the coast…here…directly north of your hold-area position.”

“Fire and forget, sir?”

“Absolument. The moment the birds are away, steam southwest, out into the deepest water, then proceed south toward the Gulf of Aden. Stay submerged all the way. Then move into the Indian Ocean. Proceed south in open water, still submerged, to our base at La Reunion, three hundred miles off the west coast of Madagascar, and remain there until further notice.”

“Sir.”

“I think, gentlemen, we should dine now. And perhaps outline our plans for the Persian Gulf with Captain Roudy as we go along? D’accord?”

“D’ac,” said Georges Pires, jauntily using the French slang for “in agreement.” “This kind of talk is apt to dry the mouth. I think a few swallows of that excellent Meursault up there would alleviate that perfectly.”

“Spoken like a true French officer and gentleman,” said Gaston Savary.

Admiral Romanet seated himself at the head of the table, with Georges Pires to his left and Savary to his right. The two submarine commanding officers held the other two flanks. Almost immediately a white-coated orderly arrived and served the classic French coquilles Saint-Jacques, scallops cooked with sliced mushrooms in white wine and lemon and served on a scallop half-shell with piped potato.

The orderly filled their glasses generously. For all four of the visitors it was much like dining at a top Paris restaurant. The main course, however, provided a sharp reminder that this was a French Naval warship base, where real men did not usually eat coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Admiral Romanet’s man served pork sausages from Alsace, the former German region of France. There was none of the traditional Alsace sauerkraut, but the sausages came with onions and pommes frites. It was the kind of dinner that could set a man up, just prior to his blowing out the guts of one of the largest oil docks in the world.

The golden brown sausages were perfectly grilled, and they were followed by an excellent cheese board, containing a superb Pont l’Eveque and a whole Camembert…les fromages, one of the glories of France. And only then did the waiter bring each man a glass of red wine, a 2002 Beaune Premier Cru from the Maison Champney Estate, the oldest merchant in Burgundy.

Admiral Pires considered that, one way or another, the Submarine Flag Officer at the Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Brest was a gastronomic cut above the hard men who lived and trained at his own headquarters, in Taverny. But Admiral Romanet, a tall, swarthy ex-missile director in a nuclear boat, was still concerned with the business of the evening. He had replaced the wine glass in his right hand by a folded chart of the Persian Gulf waters to the east of Saudi Arabia. And he now considered that he knew Captain Roudy sufficiently well to address him by his first name.

“Alain,” he said, “I think we have established that your exit from the Red Sea can be conducted submerged. And, as you know, it’s a two-thousand-mile run from there up to your ops areas in the Persian Gulf.

“As you know, it’s also possible to enter the Gulf, via the Strait of Hormuz, underwater. The Americans run submarines in there all the time. However, it’s not very deep, and some of the time you’ll have a safety separation of only thirty-five meters in depth, which does not give you a lot of room, should you need to evade.

“However, I don’t think anyone will notice you because they won’t be looking. The Iranians on the north shore are so accustomed to ships of many nationalities coming through Hormuz, they are immune to visitors.

“Your real difficulties lie ahead…up here, north of Qatar. And that’s your new ops area. You’ll need to run north, straight past the Rennie Shoals…right here…marked on the chart. You’ll leave them to starboard, but I don’t think you should venture any closer inshore. You want to stay north, right around this damned great offshore oil field…what’s it called? The Aba Sa’afah. There’ll be some surveillance there, and it’s marked as a restricted area, so you’ll stay as deep as you can.

“Now, the main tanker route is right here…this long dogleg, about a mile to starboard. It’s half a mile wide coming out, and about the same running in. It’s deadly shallow, between twenty-five and thirty-five meters, which you don’t need. And all around it, the deep water is starting to run out. This is a dredged tanker channel and it’s the only way inshore if you want to stay submerged, at least at periscope depth.

“It would be nice to put yourself right here…in thirty-five meters of water, north of that sandbank. But it’s too far off the Saudi shore — it would give the Special Forces team a near fourteen-kilometer run-in to this long jetty; that’s this black line on the chart…the main loading dock, one mile offshore from the huge Ras al Ju’aymah oil complex. That’s the biggest liquid petroleum terminal in the world. There’s Japanese tankers as big as Versailles pulling in there night and day.

“And so, gentlemen, the Perle must make her run-in down the tanker route — that’s about nine kilometers — and we’ll have up-to-date data on how busy that route is at night. But the Saudi tanker docks are always busy, so we must assume a run south to our holding point will entail running between the VLCCs.

“You’ll cut into the channel here…two thousand meters north of this flashing red light, marked number two. Then you’ll cross the tanker route, watching carefully to starboard, heading straight toward this light on the Gharibah Bank…see it, Alain, right here?”

“Okay, sir. Six quick flashes and then the light, correct?”

“C’est ca. And then you run south down the ingoing channel for about five kilometers to your first drop-off point. Exactly here…”

“Do we leave the main channel to reach that point, sir?” asked Captain Roudy. “I mean when the Team One Special Forces departs the submarine?”