Hunter Killer

oil empires of the Middle East. The Perle ran fifty feet below the surface, holding course three-one-five, slightly to the Iranian side of the seaway. Right now they were not trying to evade or avoid anyone’s radar or watchdogs.

They were leaving a very slight wake on the surface, but one that would have been discernible only to an expert. This did not include tanker captains or their afterguards, and there were no patrol boats in radar sight, either from the Iranian or Omani Navy.

There was a massive LPG tanker making ten knots, way up in front, and twenty minutes ago they had passed a 350,000-ton Liberian-registered VLCC heading south about four miles off their port beam. Alain Roudy knew the seaway would probably grow busier as they headed into the mainstream north-south tanker routes inside the Gulf, but for the moment, the Perle ran smoothly underwater in thirty fathoms, oblivious to wind, waves, and tide.

They would begin their turn to the left two hundred miles hence, to the northeast, west of Ras Qabr al Hindi, the jutting headland of the Musandam Peninsula, the northernmost point of the Arab sultanate of Oman, and a closed military zone. Captain Roudy would probably encounter Navy patrols off there, and he would accordingly slow right down, wiping that faint but telltale wake clean off the surface.

From there the submarine would head west, steering course two-six-one, slowly, only seven knots, directly toward the Saudi oil fields. It was a 520-mile run, 170 miles a day, which would put them comfortably in their ops area in the late afternoon of Sunday, March 21—just west of the Abu Sa’afah oil field, that is, and five miles east of the world’s busiest tanker route, the one that led down to Saudi Arabia’s Sea Island Terminal.

On board the Perle were sixteen men from Commander Hubert’s D’Action Sous Marine Commando (CASM) — underwater action commando. This was the French Navy’s combat diver capability, and they were very good, right up there with the U.S. Navy SEALs and Britain’s SBS. Twelve of these frogmen, the swimmers who would hit the oil platforms, came directly from CASM, Section B, Maritime Counterterrorism, which was a bit rich under the prevailing circumstances. The other four, expert boat drivers and communications personnel, had been seconded to the mission from Commander Hubert’s specialist Second Company. They were the four best men in the critical fields of placing the Zodiacs inch-perfect in the right place, and staying in communication with the swimmers and the mother ship.

The hit men had been very within themselves on the journey out — quiet, thoughtful, and rarely seeking conversation with the crew. But everyone understood. These sixteen men represented the frontline muscle of the mission. Should they fail, or be hit by gunfire and wounded, or even killed, the result would be an absolute catastrophe for the Republic of France.

Everyone appreciated what these swimmers were scheduled to accomplish and also the dangers they faced. Of course most of the crew knew the precise identity of the target.

But submariners were apt to be extremely bright, and there was no one aboard the Perle who did not understand that the men from CASM were most definitely going to hit something hard. That was the critical path of the mission, the sharp end. Black ops men, in all the Special Forces in all the major Navies, were allergic to failure.

Commander Jules Ventura, a thirty-two-year-old bear of a man — swarthy, taciturn, half-Algerian, from Provence — would lead the divers to the probably more dangerous offshore LPG Terminal at Ras al-Ju’aymah. The submariners who served with Ventura and talked to him were already treating him like a god. Which was the one thing that actually made Big Jules smile.

THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 1630

25.40N 35.54E, COURSE ONE-FOUR-ZERO, SPEED 7, DEPTH 400

The Amethyste crept slowly through the warm waters of the Red Sea, 340 miles south southeast now from Port Said. There were almost 600 fathoms below her keel, and her new nuclear reactor was running sweetly. She made no sound in the water, and the biggest excitement so far on this journey was when they passed, briefly at PD, within five miles of the flashing light on the jagged El Akhawein Rock jutting up from the seabed at latitude 26.19.

Thirty-five miles ahead of them was their next marker, another craggy rock, Abu el Kizan, suddenly scything up from the seabed on the desolate sand-swept Egyptian side. They would pass within twenty miles, too far to see its light, even if they came to PD, 120 miles from the ops area.

They were in good time for the night of March 21, when they would blast the massive Red Sea oil terminal at Yanbu al-Bahr clean out of existence, a few minutes after their commanding officer, Louis Dreyfus, had fired a volley of cruise missiles straight at the Yanbu, Rabigh, and Jiddah refineries.

Generally speaking, the Amethyste was a more cheerful ship than the Perle. But her mission was infinitely less dangerous, since she was operating in deep open waters, in a lonely sea — at least, in terms of warships — against a country that had a weak Navy and was inexpert in the use of submarines.

Amethyste was the biggest fish in the tank, so long as there were no U.S. Navy submarines passing through. Thus she had no enemies as she crept through these international waters. And if Commander Dreyfus and his helmsmen held their nerve, they would never have any enemies, because no one would even see her for the next four or five weeks. And when they did — thousands of miles south in the hot western waters of the Indian Ocean — there would be no reason on earth to suspect that she had anything whatsoever to do with the night of stupendous combustion that destroyed Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. That was surely, just “an Arab thing.”

Commander Dreyfus and his senior officers understood this extremely well. That knife-edge element of real danger, always present in the Perle as she picked her way through the Gulf of Iran, was missing from the Amethyste.

^{THE TANKER ROUTE LEADING TO THE GREAT SAUDI ARABIAN OIL TERMINALS}

Which was why the Amethyste was a very cheerful ship. And why the dark, lean, and droll commander of the frogmen, Garth Dupont, aged thirty-one, spent many hours playing bridge with his colleagues and the crew, though for stakes about twenty-six thousand times lower than those wagered by the late, great playboy Prince Khalid bin Mohammed al-Saud in the lush environs of Monte Carlo.

In fact the entire sum of the cash wagered by Garth Dupont and his pals on the 3,000-mile voyage from Brest added up to one — one thousandth of the money blown in a half hour in Monte Carlo by the late Prince Khalid, and HRH Princess Adele (deceased), late of south London.

^{THE NORTHERN END OF THE RED SEA}

CHAPTER FIVE

SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 0030 (LOCAL)

NORTHERN PERIMETER, KING KHALID AIR BASE

General Rashood, Major Marot, and their two senior French explosives experts were lying flat among the dust, bracken, and rocks, beyond the high-wire fence that guarded the air base from attack from the rear. They were watching, for the umpteenth time, the guard change in the base. It took place at this time every night, at which point a Saudi Air Force jeep drove half a dozen men right around the perimeter. They always drove fast, always drove with the jeep’s main beams raised, they were always noisy, and their lights cast a useful illumination on the aircraft parked out here on the north side of the airfield.

General Rashood and his command team had spent many weeks studying the field from satellite photographs, and however many training flights took off and landed at King Khalid, there always seemed to be the same number of fighter-bombers on this station — forty U.S.-built F-15s, and thirty-two British Tornadoes.

The U.S. aircraft were arranged in five rows of eight, the British jets in four rows. Very occasionally wide hangar doors, two hundred yards away, were opened, and it was possible to see three more fighter aircraft in there. It may have been a service rotation, or just running repairs to active aircraft. General Rashood could never