Using their hands on the hulls, they pushed their way under, and Dupont was relieved to find there was a long gap down to the harbor floor.
Nonetheless, it was nothing short of dead creepy down there in the pitch dark, like some hideous horror film. If they’d had time they would probably have shuddered. However, on the dock side of the tanker it was suddenly much brighter, which felt better, but was plainly more dangerous.
Both groups now made for the seaward pylons on the two corners, and both were irritated at the number of barnacles on the steel. They had to scrape them off with combat knives before the bombs would clamp on tightly. Of course, the time settings were all different in the countdown to H hour at 0400 hours.
For instance, at 1956, on the first pylon, the timer was set for eight hours and four minutes. On the landward corner pylon, which took longer to reach, it was set for seven hours and fifty-seven minutes.
They made their way under the platform to seek out the next four pylons, the center supports below the gigantic platform pumping systems. And there the clamping and timing processes were repeated until all eight of the sixty-pounders were in place, clocks set, the final one for seven hours and eighteen minutes.
With their cumbersome loads now gone, the men headed back the way they had come, under the tankers, and back out to the waiting boats. On the way in, they had kicked approximately eighty times, each one carrying them ten feet, or three and a half meters. On the return journey, again twelve feet under the water, they counted the kicks again.
At the count of eighty they all surfaced, quite widely spread out. Dupont reached for his “bleeper” to signal their position to the Zodiacs. But, as his did so, his number-two man whacked his head on Potier’s bow and had to suppress a yell of terror, because he thought he’d hit a shark. This caused a lot of chuckling, and all eight men were instantly hauled inboard, breathing their first fresh air for well over an hour.
The Zodiacs now turned away from the Yanbu docks and made a fast beeline for the waiting
They came alongside, grabbed the lines, and began to disembark. The last men off-loaded the rifles, ammunition, and equipment into canvas bags, which were immediately hauled inboard. Then they took their Kaybar combat knives and slashed six wide holes in each of the pressure compartments in the Zodiacs’ rubber hulls. And before the hit men had even pulled off their flippers and hoods, both Zodiacs were settled nicely in two hundred fathoms on the bed of the Red Sea.
Commander Dreyfus ordered all hatches closed, main ballast opened, and took the
The Special Forces had dinner immediately they returned and settled down to two tables of bridge. Garth Dupont, flushed with what he believed was the total success of their first mission, opened the bidding in
Everyone fell about laughing and someone mentioned they hoped he could count a damned sight better underwater than he could on the surface. Dupont assured them he was challenging for the Underwater Bridge Championship of France when they returned.
In fact Dupont had been asleep for only three hours when they reached the calm waters off Rabigh just after 0100 on Thursday morning. Commander Dreyfus had made fast time all along the Saudi coast, where they found that the deep ocean was absolutely deserted both on and below the surface. They picked up only two small fishing boats on their passive sonar all the way from Yanbu.
It was still only 2345 when they came to periscope depth, confirmed their GPS fix, and found the quick- flashing warning light on the headland of Shi’b al Khamsa, a small deserted island directly in front of the fifteen- mile-long bay that protected the port of Rabigh.
Commander Dreyfus left the island to starboard and pressed on for another four miles, right into the gateway to the bay, another wide seaway, with a flashing light on the right-hand side but nothing on the left, where a coastal shoal rose up three hundred feet from the seabed to a level only about a hundred feet below the surface.
However, the well-chartered bay had depths of three hundred feet until quite close to the shore. And Commander Dreyfus elected to make a hard right turn, at PD, into the wide southern end of the bay. This was no cul-de-sac, well, not for surface ships, because there was a narrow fifty-foot channel at the end of Shi’b al Bayda, one of three islands that more or less blocked the bay to the south. However, the Bay of Rabigh was a cul-de-sac for a submarine.
Commander Dreyfus thus came quietly to the surface and made a 180-degree turn in this sheltered, “private” end of the bay. There was not a ship in sight, on radar or sonar, on or below the surface of the water. And it would take him mere moments to go deep and vanish, heading out of the bay any time he wanted.
Rabigh was not as busy as Yanbu, mainly because it had no major trans-Saudi pipeline coming in off the Aramah Mountains. Nonetheless, it could be full of tanker traffic in mid-week since it did have a very large refinery. And this took in crude from Yanbu and dispersed it in various forms of gasoline, petrochemicals, and LPG, taking the heat off the constantly overworked terminal ninety miles to the north.
Once more Garth Dupont led his team out of the submarine and into two Zodiacs, new ones of course, same procedures, all the way into the docks. But Rabigh was not so light as Yanbu, and he hoped to find an even closer holding point. However, off to the left, in a holding area about two miles away, Dupont could see one tanker making its way slowly inshore, but the jetties were Sunday-night empty.
Just one other tanker was within sight of the frogmen, a VLCC of unknown origin, making its way out of the bay about a half mile off their port beam. But the Zodiacs carried no running lights, and the sky was cloudy. The warm air that hung above the water seemed muggy, and there was no moonlight to cast even the remotest light on the surface.
Dead ahead the jetties looked quiet, and about 400 yards out Garth Dupont decided to summon the hit teams overboard and down into the depths en route to the loading platforms. That way the boat drivers could hang around in the dark well clear of the distant incoming tanker, which appeared to be going so slowly it might not make its mooring by Wednesday.
But that was the nature of these VLCCs. They took about four miles to stop at their regular running speed in excess of fifteen knots. At four knots, creeping into the jetties, it took them almost forty-five minutes from two miles out, because they actually covered the last 200 yards barely above drifting speed.
“You just be ready to leave as the tanker arrives,” Dupont had stressed to his men, explaining the importance of staying deep, well under the keel of the ship, the moment it came to a halt. He told them he wanted no heroics trying to go underneath the 350,000-ton hulk while it was still moving. “We move when that thing stops,” he said. “Unless we can get out before it arrives.”
Thereafter they kicked their way in, just as they had done at Yanbu. They were not observed, in fact, from high above, no one even had a look over the side. There were no active guards on the jetties, and the shore crews had gone for a welcome cup of coffee before the new tanker arrived.
In perfect isolation, the French divers worked underwater beneath the towering platform, and within fifty minutes they had all eight bombs expertly set; times were synchronized precisely with those beneath the loading terminal at Yanbu. And the slow, ominous ticking of the sixteen detonator clocks, deep in the water, separated by ninety miles of ocean, could not be heard by anyone.
At precisely 0400 there would be two almighty explosions on the east coast of the Red Sea. Dupont wondered how long it would take the Saudi authorities to work out that there might be a connection.
By the time they reached the seaward front of the dock, the incoming tanker was moored, and they had to go deep under the hull before they broke free into clear water. They all hated that part. But again there was plenty of water below the keel, and they kicked their way to freedom up the starboard side of the colossal hull.
They swam twelve feet under the surface, all the way back to the Zodiacs, kicking and counting, kicking and counting. When they burst up into fresh night air, they were around fifty feet from the nearest of their inflatables. The ocean was deserted, and within twenty minutes they had reached the
Procedures were identical to those at Yanbu. They unloaded the gear, climbed on to the casing, scuttled both boats, and headed to their headquarters on the lower deck. Commander Dreyfus ordered the submarine deep, and
