hatch on the forecasing and manhandling them onto the deck, where the seamen had already brought out the electric air pumps.
The 175-horsepower Yamaha outboard engines that would power the two craft were coming up separately from the torpedo room, where they had been stored for the voyage. Within moments, six engineers were out on the casing, three of them bolting the heavy motors into position on the stern, expertly clipping on the fuel lines, and attaching the battery cables and ignition wires while the boat was still being inflated.
The engines were clipped into the upward-tilt position. Two other seamen filled the fuel tanks with diesel and loaded a four-and-a-half-gallon spare fuel tank inboard each boat. Also being loaded were assault rifles, ammunition, six grenades, just in case, and the comms transmitter, which would guide them home after the bombs were fixed.
There were also medical supplies, morphine, and bottles of water, mainly in case someone was badly injured and needed to drink. The two “attack boards” that contained the swimmers’ watch and compass, both inbuilt, non- glare, were also placed on-board.
The lead frogmen would swim in with the boards out in front of them; they would especially need them if they had to exit the Zodiacs sooner than planned, for whatever reason — busy harbor, launch activity — anything the Zodiac captain considered might compromise the safety of the boats, if anything or anyone came too close.
When the first Zodiac was ready, they pushed it to the downward slope of the deck and allowed the hard- decked inflatable to slide down into the water, held secure by two lines attached to its bow, each one held by two brawny seamen.
Another two men attached and rolled a wooden-rung rope ladder down the side of the
Dupont was of course unrecognizable from the chuckling bridge player of the lower deck. He was dressed in his jet black wet suit, hood up, goggles above his face, which was coated in black camouflage cream. His big flippers were attached to his belt, and on his back, in a waterproof rucksack, he carried a massive sixty-pound “sticky bomb,” which would clamp magnetically to one of the giant steel pylons supporting the loading dock in Yanbu. Also on his belt were his sheathed specially made Sabatine combat knife and a roll of det-cord and wires, with a twenty-four-hour timer.
His air system, the Draeger, also carried on his back, was a compact model, containing air for only ninety minutes, which was about twice what he would need. The system was a special non-bubble breather, which would betray nothing to a curious sentry staring down into the water. In any event, the Frenchmen would operate fifty feet below the surface, which would render them invisible from the platform.
Privately, all four of the frogmen hoped that there would be tankers on the docks, which would cast huge shadows and shield the men from anyone’s eyes. They would work in the dark, unseen, somewhere down below the tankers’ keels, which would, of course, suit them absolutely perfectly.
The four swimmers would work in pairs, and when the bombs were stuck hard to the pylons, the timer would be magnetically clamped to a third one, with wires running to the splice in the detcord. When the timer reached 0400, it would send an impulse into the det-cord splice, which would ignite the explosive fuse.
This would streak at a rate of two miles a second, straight into the detonators fixed to the bombs, which would blast the pylons in half, probably blowing the deck on the platform into several pieces. Any ship on the dock would probably have its hull split asunder and sink to the floor of the harbor, all 300,000 tons of it, which, in time, might take quite a bit of removing.
Add to this the activity of the
Garth Dupont climbed backward down the ladder, found his footing, and slipped over the rubber hull of the Zodiac, which was still held with fore and aft lines by the seamen on the submarine.
Then, one by one, his five-man team joined him, the three other swimmers, the boat driver, and the comms officer with his GPS receiver and mobile phone to communicate codes back to the submarine if necessary.
Seaman Raul Potier took the wheel and kicked the engine over; it started first time. If it hadn’t, one of the engineers would probably have been keel-hauled. Potier untied both lines and expertly curled and then hurled them back onto the submarine’s deck. He took the Zodiac quietly away from the hull, fifty feet out into the water, and waited.
The comms man pushed the buttons to dial the officer-of-the-deck up on the casing, checking that the phone was working. Then they reversed the process, ensuring they had two-way transmission. The second Zodiac was lowered into the water, and the second half of Team One went through the same checks. When they had checked the phones once more, one to another, they set off for Yanbu, the massive, 900,000-barrel-a-day oil colossus of the Red Sea.
The Zodiacs carried no running lights as they moved swiftly through the water at around half-speed, fifteen knots. Garth Dupont sat next to the driver, his night binoculars trained on the black ahead, but his vision was not improved by the rising moon.
A mile in front he picked up the lights of a tanker coming toward them, off his starboard bow, but he could see only her green running light and he guessed that she was leaving by the southern route around Sharm. Way ahead of that was another tanker, going his way, slowly into port, probably lining up to receive the last oil from Saudi Arabia for a very long while.
Within twelve minutes they could see the lights on the loading docks, now only a couple of miles ahead, across the bay, and it quickly became clear that this was a busy Sunday evening. Dupont could pick out two tankers he thought were on the jetties, with three waiting to come in, a mile offshore out to his port side.
One mile from the jetties he ordered Potier to slow right down to five knots, then to slip in very slowly. The Navy had no indication of sonar surveillance in these waters, but Dupont was taking no chances. By now it was clear that there was a great deal of light on the docks, shining from both the enormous tankers and the jetty itself. And those lights seemed to spill out for two, maybe three hundred yards into the main approaches to the Yanbu terminals.
Dupont ordered the engines cut back to idling speed, just enough to hold a position without drifting. He took one final look ahead and ordered the other swimmers to action stations. The four men sat down and pulled on their flippers, fixed goggles, and Draeger lines, and then slid softly over the side. The comms officer quietly passed the instruction to the second boat. There was no shouting in black ops.
The eight men in the water came together as two groups, two leaders and two followers in each. Garth ordered them deep with a silent thumbs-up gesture and they began to kick their way underwater, each of the “followers” swimming with their right hands on the left shoulder of their leader, in the pitch-black water twelve feet below the surface.
The leaders swam with flippers only, their attack boards held at arm’s length out in front of them, like regular floatable kickboards, but these boards contained instruments that showed the precise time and direction, without the swimmer needing to pause to check either watch or compass.
The lead pair in each group had made the inshore journey in Garth Dupont’s boat. This meant there was no need for instructions to be passed from one group to another. In any event, the plan was simple. Each four-man team was to head directly toward the tankers, Dupont’s men to the one on the left, the others to the one on the right.
Given the complications of mooring lines, and propellers that could start at any time, the underwater leader had ordered them to take each tanker amidships, diving right down to the keel — forty feet on a loaded tanker but only thirty feet on these half-laden hulls.
There would be twenty feet of water under the keels, and once through and under the dock, the swimmers were to head to the far ends of the platform and place their bombs deep on the corner pylons, two men attending each objective.
And so they kicked in rhythmically through the water, one pressure stroke on the flippers every ten seconds…
