along, they paused while Ventura took a length of tape and wrapped it around the beam, holding the det-cord firm and invisible from any angle. Which was when he dropped the screwdriver. It fell from his grasp and hit two metal beams with a metallic clatter on its way down and then splashed into the water.
Ventura had no idea if anyone was directly above, but he instantly drew his silenced rifle from its waterproof holster on his back and, with his finger on the trigger, stared seaward at the hull of the liquid gas tanker moored to the dock.
To his utter horror he heard running footsteps above him, just one person heading to the edge. Ventura and Lefevre were no more than sixteen feet inward from that point when they heard a thump above them. An upside- down face appeared from above and then the beam of a flashlight.
Whoever it was — military guard, gas crew worker, tanker man — Jules had no idea, but the man was staring straight at him.
“Who’s there?” The words seemed disembodied since the face was upside down. But they were serious, and Jules took the only option open to him. He blew that face clean off its head with his silenced AK-47. There was just a muffled clicking sound, nothing as noisy as the screwdriver.
The body slumped over the edge, a burst of just four bullets riddling the forehead, blood dripping forty feet down into the sea. Ventura went along that beam like a circus tightrope walker. With an outrageous display of strength, he grabbed the throat of the man and hauled him overboard, straight down into the sea below. And he just stood there, his heart thumping, in deadly silence, wondering how many more they’d have to kill before they could get away.
To the amazement of both the Commander and the Navy seaman, there was not another sound, neither from above nor from the tanker. Whoever had seen them had been alone. There were no more footsteps above, no shouting, nothing.
Jules Ventura ordered Lefevre back along the beam. And he followed him to the junction of five steel rafters that came together in one spot, right below the gas pumps. And there they clamped Lefevre’s bomb, which needed no timer, having been specially primed to explode via the det-cord charge.
Ventura wound the cord around the bomb and one of the beams, finally jamming the det-cord into the hole normally used for the timed detonator wires. He tightened two screws and leaned back to admire his handiwork.
One thing was for certain: when that first high bomb blew at 0400, the second one would follow, a millisecond later. He motioned to Lefevre to begin the climb down, which took them eight minutes. And they crossed one horizontal beam just above the water, to pylon number four, and then dropped back into the Gulf to collect their flippers and Draegers.
As arranged, the team gathered at the pylon, where Commander Ventura’s men were longing to know why he had found it necessary to shoot someone. They pointed out the body, which had already drifted under the structure on the rising tide twenty-five feet away.
Commander Ventura’s orders were brisk. They took the spare det-cord and wound it around the body, a long double-thickness cord coming out from under each armpit. Two young seamen were told to drag the body under the surface, hauling it back to the Zodiacs, line astern. Ventura told them that he did not give a damn about the man he had shot, but he gave a huge damn about anyone’s finding the body.
And so they set off, four of the divers helping to pull the corpse through the water. When they reached the Zodiacs, they took a longer line from inboard, secured it to the body, and towed the body back behind the rear inflatable, like a water-skier who’d fallen off.
At the submarine, they took the same towline and lashed the man to the Yamaha engine. He was wearing military uniform and had plainly been in the Royal Saudi Air Force, which had special responsibilities for guarding and protecting the country’s obviously vulnerable oil pumping stations, processing and loading facilities, and oil platforms in the Gulf.
The young Arab sank with the two little inflatable boats, straight to the bottom, in a hundred feet of water, right at the end of the Saudi tanker lanes. Six hours from now, there would be many others joining him in death. But no one would ever know that there was anything special about the loss of the young loading dock guard.
They were all merely fallen martyrs, in the cause of the world’s richest and most avaricious industry.
CHAPTER SIX
The last two Zodiacs were heading east now, back toward the tanker lanes. Lt. Reme Doumen was from the chic Atlantic seaport of La Rochelle, where his father, a greatly respected local ferry owner, was mayor.
Generally speaking, Doumen had never been on the wrong side of the law in his life. But now he sat in the stern of the lead Zodiac and gazed back at the floodlit steel structure of the massive Sea Island Oil Terminal, and tried to accept what he, Reme, had just done.
He knew, in the strictest naval terms, the full dimension of his mission. He had just led a team of highly trained hit men into the heart of the enormous construction and organized the placing of high explosives sufficient to knock down the Eiffel Tower.
Doumen stared at the distant lights and at the gigantic U.S. tanker on the jetty. They were two miles away now, but he would take to his grave the memory of that night — the pitch-black water under the ship, Philippe’s hand trembling on his left shoulder as they kicked into the pylons, the knife on the steel, the tiny spotlight they used for the close electronic work, the lethal det-cord, the wires, the magnetic tug of the bomb, the way his hands shook as he spliced the det-cord to Philippe’s bomb on pylon number three.
Six hours and twenty-five minutes. They were numbers he would never forget. And now it was almost 2230. Only five and a half hours now, before the true measure of his team’s work would be known, before the Sea Island Terminal was blown into a thousand hunks of useless metal.
Would he ever tell his father what he had done? His girlfriend, Annie? One day, his children? Tell them of the night he became, for a couple of hours, one of the world’s most prominent
Of course he never would. The code of the French Special Forces, like all Special Forces, was never broken. And Doumen knew he had to cast that word
Reme Doumen shrugged and glanced across the water to the other Zodiac. He wondered if everyone was thinking the same, looking back at the mighty oil loading terminal, knowing it had fewer than six hours to live. And that they had actually committed, with relentless precision, the oncoming outrage.
Doumen had always been a very tough kid. At one point it was thought he might represent France at rugby football. He was a medium-size center three-quarter, a hard, fast runner in university, and wanted by the Toulouse Club. But the Navy had other uses for his unusual strength, and his father, who had started life working as a deckhand on the La Rochelle ferry, was enormously impressed by the thought of an Admiral for a son. The French Navy beat the French Rugby Football Union comfortably.
But a
Yet he knew he’d get the same old feeling of burgeoning pride in his uniform, and in the fact that the Navy had selected him alone to lead the Special Forces into the staggering assault on the Sea Island Terminal. What’s more, he knew he would do it again, if they asked him.
Even as he led his team up the rope ladder to the foredeck, he could feel the sense of urgency in the submarine. The CO himself was out on the casing, and twice Doumen heard Captain Roudy exclaim,
Of course, everyone knew the sub was stopped in a dangerous place, in the middle of the central buoyed
