Hunter Killer

the casing. It was strange, but this great, burly, taciturn Special Forces leader was talkative now for the first time since they left Brest.

Ventura was encouraging his men, shaking hands with crew members, thanking everyone for all they had done on the voyage, as he left the ship, to face the unknown in an open rubber-hull boat. Ventura was transformed now into the mortal enemy of the King of Saudi Arabia and his Navy.

The boat driver went aboard the Zodiac first, and Ventura followed him, helping with the lines. When they were set to leave, the Commander personally curled and threw the lines back up to the deck, then sat down and ordered the big inflatable away from the submarine’s hull.

It was extraordinary how thoroughly invisible the Zodiac became on the black water. There was no rising moon yet, and this was a black boat, with a black engine, carrying men in black wet suits, with black hoods and black faces. Even from thirty feet they were impossible to see.

Even the submarine, now without even flashlights on the casing, had effectively vanished from sight. Certainly when the gigantic VLCC came rolling past over in the outward lane, no one onboard the twenty-one-story crude-oil leviathan had the slightest idea that there was a 2,500-ton hunter-killer within a mile, with men on the deck and a black ops team about to destroy the world’s premier supply of oil.

The second Zodiac came away from the Perle’s hull and melted into the night. The Perle herself came away from her holding position and melted into the ocean, back to PD, in the down lane, about a mile in front of a new oncoming tanker, and still a couple of miles astern of their original leader. All of them were on the seven-mile run to the world’s largest offshore oil terminal on the manmade Sea Island.

While Team Two finalized its preparation for the insert, less than one hour hence, under the command of twenty-six-year-old Lt. Reme Doumen, Jules Ventura and his men chugged steadily along at only five knots. They had a lot of explosives on board, and a lot of time to set them. The Perle would not be back to collect them for almost four hours.

It was five miles down to the LPG terminal, and Commander Ventura had all the time he needed to study the dock lights and find the darkest stretch of water to begin the mission. He checked his attack board watch and saw that it was 1915, and he wondered what his friend and colleague Lt. Garth Dupont was doing. Dupont, he knew, was leading the identical mission on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula…he’s probably doing the same as me, groping about in the dark with a bomb on his back, thought Ventura.

The Zodiacs were now running over the wide shoal that guarded the eastern approaches to the great offshore terminal of Ras al Ju’aymah. At least it guarded it from submarines, since there were only six fathoms here, and the outboards ran across it very slowly. Jules Ventura and his men finally arrived a half mile north of the loading jetties around 2000 hours.

This was a very bright terminal, and Commander Ventura saw no reason to approach it head on, not when all the undisturbed darkness was north and south of the outer dock.

He could see now what he had seen on the chart for so many weeks. The long man-made bridge/causeway to the offshore jetties ran four and a half miles out from the land, and ended in a great V shape at the end. He presumed the liquid gas pipes ran under the causeway and ended in the huge pumping and valve control systems positioned on the jetty, and plainly visible to the satellite cameras.

There were two tankers in residence, one of them an 80,000-ton black-hulled gas carrier out of Houston, Texas. Jules picked out the name Global Mustang on her stern. But he needed light- sensitive night-vision glasses to do so. He checked out the bow of the tanker at the other end, but he could not make out the lettering there. Not even close. He thus formed a definite conclusion that the north end was darker.

“Take her in another seven hundred meters,” he commanded.

“Dead slow, minimum revs. We’ll swim the last few hundred.”

Commander Ventura was in fact more concerned by the traffic than the light. To the northwest of Ras al Ju’aymah, there were five oil pipelines traversing the ocean floor — there was the Qatif oil field, there was another large offshore oil rig, there was an anchorage area for waiting tankers — all in a vast restricted area. The place was literally humming with small craft. Big Jules could see green and red running lights all over the place, but he had none on his Zodiacs and no one could see him.

They chugged almost silently toward the jetties, and still the great shadow of the dock hung over the water, and to the north there were no reflected bright lights beyond a hundred feet. Ventura called his men to action stations, and five minutes later they all slipped over the side and began the swim-in, just as Garth Dupont’s men had done an hour earlier, over in the Red Sea.

There was one principal difference in the two missions. In Yanbu and Rabigh, Dupont’s men had been ordered merely to blow the terminal out of the water, all eight bombs on the supporting pylons. Here at Ras al Ju’aymah, there was more to it. Commander Ventura was required to blast the pumping and valve system, thus igniting the colossally volatile liquid gas.

The terminal itself was more fragile than the docks at Yanbu simply because it was a mere seaward structure miles from the land. Out here, the terminal would probably collapse with the explosions of two or three sixty-pound bombs. Six would make total collapse a certainty.

But Jules Ventura, and young seaman Vincent Lefevre, aged twenty-three, needed to climb the structure, inside, coming up directly beneath the boots and trucks of the LPG personnel. And then they had to attach the massive time bombs right below the pumps.

“If you’re going to blow the damn thing up,” Admiral Pires had instructed, “you better make sure that liquid gas blows out like a flamethrower. Our objects are twofold: to destroy and to frighten. Make sure the blowtorch at Ras al Ju’aymah ignites.”

They had studied the layout of these jetties for weeks now, and each man knew intimately the supporting pylon he sought. With all eight men in the water, the boat drivers and comms operators headed farther out for a few hundred yards, with orders to make their way back inshore for the pickup in one hour.

The swim-in took just two or three minutes, and as instructed, they gathered underneath the structure to hear last-minute words from Ventura, who told them, “You all know what to do…go in pairs to the two pylons you have been allotted and fix the six bombs. Then wait below the surface at pylon number four on the chart. Lefevre will be right above you, working on the two high bombs.

“Don’t, for Christ’s sake, let anything go off early, or you’ll kill us all—’specially me and Lefevre. We rendezvous again under pylon number four and return to the Zodiacs together.”

And so they swam to their appointed stations and like Garth Dupont’s men, found they had to scrape away the barnacles in the warm water for the magnetic bombs to clamp onto the steel.

As they expected, the tide was not yet high, and Ventura and Lefevre took off their flippers below the surface at number four. Then they unclipped the straps that held the Draegers, because though the state-of-the-art breathing apparatus was weightless in the water, it weighed thirty pounds out of water. Jules lashed the gear to the pylon, twenty feet below the surface, and they pulled on their waterlogged black Nike sneakers and kicked their way up into the fresh, but dank, oil-smelling air below the jetty.

The steel strut they wanted, jutting diagonally up to the next horizontal beam, was now two feet above their heads. Both men reached up with thick rubber-gloved hands to grab it. From there on, it was a simple forty-foot climb to the underside of the decking on the high central area of the jetty. Simple, that is, for trained Navy black ops forces. Quite sufficient to induce a heart attack in lesser men.

They reached the uppermost horizontal, which stretched for twenty feet, four feet below the decking. Pylon number four ended right there. It was about the diameter of a telegraph pole and freshly painted, rust red in color. There were of course no barnacles this far above the water.

Ventura sat astride the beam and unzipped the rubberized container that held his bomb. He gently scraped the magnetic surface with his knife and then held it to the pylon, then felt its pull as the magnets jammed it hard against the steel.

Vincent Lefevre passed to Ventura the timing device, which on this type of bomb screwed into the casing. It could be done by hand, but you got a much tighter fix if you used a screwdriver. Ventura turned the timer into place, and set it for seven hours and forty minutes. He held out his hand for the screwdriver and tightened the timer and the screws that held the det-cord detonator in place.

Then he and Lefevre began to edge along the horizontal beam, Lefevre playing out the det-cord. Halfway