hours. There was French bread, eggs, fish, and orange juice for Team Three’s breakfast at 0400, one hour prior to departure.
The hours between 0200 and 0400 were spent breaking camp, with the twenty-four men packing their equipment and storing it in the most efficient manner: the processed food, water, ammunition, and bedding.
One hour before the sun rose above the Red Sea, to the east, they were driven down to the seaport on the north side of Moulhoule, where the three dhows awaited them. They had to walk the equipment out to the boats along the long jetties, and General Rashood himself supervised the seating and storing of supplies.
Each of the seventy-foot dhows was arranged for its eight passengers to rest up during the two-day voyage. Awnings were spread on poles to protect them from the pitiless sun out on the water. The moon was already setting as they pushed out into the offshore waters of the Bab el Mandeb Strait, running slowly north, sails high, in twenty fathoms and a light breeze.
The dhows sailed around four hundred yards apart, and by 0630, with the sun now just visible above the eastern horizon, they made their starboard turn, toward the blazing sky, each hidden man with a Kalashnikov inches from his hand, each man with a hand grenade in his belt.
To a passing ship, the three dhows could have been nothing but peaceful traders plying the old routes, probably carrying cargo of salt from Djibouti up to Jizan. They certainly appeared nothing like an assault force that would be attempting the capture of Saudi Arabia and the overthrow of the King.
But this was the unobtrusive start of a famous land attack: three Arab dhows, their cargo under awnings, elderly captains at the helm, sons and family tending the huge sails as they slipped through the wavelets on a hot, serene morning. It was a timeless, biblical scene in the Red Sea, one that could have been a thousand years old — not a semblance of menace, even in these dangerous times in the Middle East.
But General Rashood’s instructions were clear…
They logged the French nuclear hunter-killer submarine
Egyptian officials rarely board a Naval vessel making the transit, largely because of objections by the Russians, who have always used the canal to transfer ships from the Black Sea and Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf.
Captain Roudy watched one of the Egyptian Navy’s
Egypt had no interest in the French submarine, signed the papers, issued the permits, and informed the entire world by satellite that France had just sent a hunter-killer from the Med into the Red. There was nothing sinister about that. They did it by international agreement, like many other guardians of sensitive waterways around the world.
They were under way by 1230, and the
The seaway was narrow, about twelve miles wide, but the land on the portside, along the Sinai Peninsula, shelved out very gradually into the Gulf, and the left-hand side was thus no place for a submarine.
Captain Roudy kept the
Until now, the speed, direction, and position of the
Those watching the satellites may have assumed that she was headed south into the Gulf of Aden. But the important thing was, no one knew for certain. And no one ever would know either, since the
Indeed she would not be seen until the second week in April, when she was scheduled to arrive in La Reunion. And by then, the world would be a very different place. Especially if you happened to be a member of the Saudi royal family, or indeed the President of France.
Five days later, as Captain Roudy worked his way south down the Red Sea, underwater, the
It was 0500, not yet light, but there was a small crowd gathered under the arc lights to see them off. Just families, the shore crew, a few engineers who had conducted her final tests, and, somewhat surprisingly, the head of the French Submarine Service, Adm. Marc Romanet.
They’d begun pulling the rods the previous evening to bring the
Madame Janine Dreyfus, aged thirty-one, mother of Jerzy, four, and Marie-Christine, six, was at the top of the list. All three of them stood now, with the other families, in the pouring rain, under a wide golf umbrella, awaiting the departure — Janine watching her husband, and the children their father, who was standing with the officer-of- the-deck and the XO, high on the fin, speaking into his microphone.
At 0515 the order was issued to “Attend bells.” Eight minutes later, Commander Dreyfus snapped to the engineers, “Answer bells.” The XO ordered, “Lines away,” and the tugs began to pull the
The strong, gusting southwest wind off the Atlantic swept the rain almost sideways across the hull, and Commander Dreyfus, his greatcoat collar up, cap pulled down, waited for the tugs to clear before calling, “Ten knots speed!”
The great black hull swung to starboard in a light churning wash, and she moved silently forward in the rain, across the harbor, toward the outer point of the south jetty, then out into the main submarine roads of the French Navy.
She swept wide of the Saint Pierre Bank and then steered two-four-zero, southwest down the narrow waters of the Goulet, her lights just visible in the squally weather. Some wives of crew members stayed to see them finally disappear. Janine Dreyfus and her children were the last to leave.
Commander Dreyfus finally left the bridge as they approached the light off Point St. Mathieu, at the southwestern tip of the Brest headland. Then he ordered the ship deep, on a long swing to starboard beneath the turbulent waters of the outer Bay of Biscay, and then south to the endless coastlines of Portugal and Spain and the Straits of Gibraltar.
This was the hottest day so far. Gen. Ravi Rashood and his men were still walking. They had been going for almost ten days now up through the mountains, ever since the landing on the deserted beaches north of the Yemeni
