The British Intelligence officers had been wrestling with this problem all day. Why al-Qaeda, an organization that had received sums of up to $500 million from Saudi sources in the past fifteen years? Al-Qaeda, which was comprised of Saudis, who made up the vast majority of the 9/11 hit men and were believed to be almost the entire terrorist population of Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. Naval base in Cuba. Why on earth would al-Qaeda wish to cripple the economy that fed them?
Well, if not al-Qaeda, then who? The analysts at GCHQ were baffled about motive and culprit, but they were not baffled by the innate importance of Corporal Collins’s signal. And at 2200 they relayed it on to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade. It was 1700 in Washington.
The NSA ops room had been buzzing all day with a perfectly astounding lack of information about the Saudi oil crisis. No one had given serious importance to the theory of outside involvement. It still seemed a completely internal Arab matter. Someone, for whatever reason, had apparently planted a succession of bombs from one end of the Arabian Peninsula to the other, and simultaneously blown up the entire shebang.
If there was malice, it was directed principally toward the King and the ruling members of the royal family. No one, from the highest echelons of America’s espionage organizations to the top brass at the Pentagon, had come up with one feasible idea as to why a foreign power should want to perpetrate such an action.
The most available oil in the world was Saudi, and to most countries it would be unthinkable to be without it. Saudi Arabia, for instance, provided twenty percent of the daily requirement for the United States. Without it, France’s mighty traffic network would grind to a complete halt.
And yet…Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe had an uneasy feeling. Nothing about this astounding attack sat correctly with him. He had spent much of the day pulling up data on the Saudi oil defenses, and there were a lot of them. Every one of those giant structures — the pump stations, the loading terminals, the refineries, the offshore jetties at Sea Island, and the LPG docks off Ras al Ju’aymah — were surrounded by heavily armed guards.
According to the Middle East Desks at the FBI and the CIA, you could not get anywhere near those places, certainly not by land. You simply could not reach them, not carrying the kind of explosives that would blast them to smithereens. It was downright impossible. However, it could perhaps have been done by sea, with frogmen coming in and planting explosive under the docks.
At least, the U.S. Navy SEALs could probably have done it, or the Royal Navy. Maybe Russia, not China, but possibly France. Certainly not Saudi Arabia, a country that did not even own a submarine and certainly possessed no underwater Special Forces capability.
No. Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe could not figure it out. And, anyway, even if the Saudi Navy had suddenly risen up as traitors against the King, that did not explain how someone else had managed to hit the Abqaiq eastern pipeline amidships, then blow up the manifold at Qatif Junction, flatten Pump Station Number One, and set fire to the biggest oil processing complex in the Middle East — the one at Abqaiq, which was situated bang in the middle of nowhere and operated behind a steel cordon of armed guards.
If this was indeed a purely Saudi matter, he, Jimmy Ramshawe, considered it must have been the biggest inside job ever pulled. And there was no motive. Not even a suggestion of one. If the action was Saudi, it was committed by a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims trying to commit financial suicide.
And the Saudis, he knew, were not regarded as stupid. He scanned back on his computer screen and checked the strength of the Saudi National Guard, the independent force whose special brief was to guard those oil installations in the Eastern Province.
The Saudis were revealing no accurate numbers, but there were thousands of troops, deployed by their commanders along some 12,500 miles of pipeline, which reached fifty oil fields and several refineries and terminals.
The force worked in close cooperation with Aramco, with its strong American connections, financially, technologically, and militarily. These people, Ramshawe mused, cannot be taken lightly.
The Saudi National Guard was just too strong for that. The brass at Aramco would not have let that happen.
The clincher, so far as Ramshawe was concerned, was simple: the sheer number of targets hit.
The clock ticked past 1730, and a duty officer from the international division tapped on Ramshawe’s door and delivered copies of the very few coded signals from GCHQ in Cheltenham, anything that might be worth his time. These were delivered twice a day, in hard copy at his request. Admiral Morris used computers, but looking at screens was not Ramshawe’s first choice. He liked the signals “in black and white, right where I can see ’em.”
Ramshawe looked at the top sheet. He knew the satellite intercepts were arranged in descending order of importance by the NSA staff. And at first sight, he could not see anything wildly exciting about this early party someone was planning to attend.
But then he looked at the notes from the British case officer, which pointed out the brevity of the message and the fact that it had all the hallmarks of the military. And that grabbed his attention. Then he saw that the signal had been sent on a cell phone situated nineteen miles north of Riyadh, and that really tweaked his interest.
On a day like this,
Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe instantly put two and two together and made about 723. “There’s something going on,” he told the empty room. “There’s something bloody going on. And who’s this bloody curator? And who’s this French bastard poncing about in the desert, sending military signals?”
Jimmy had read enough signals from all over the world to know military when he saw it. There was the recipient of the call, the curator!
The problem was, Lt. Commander Ramshawe was not sure whom to talk to. Admiral Morris was in the Navy yards in San Diego, probably out on a carrier, definitely not wanting to be interrupted, especially not by a wild, if well considered, speculation.
The Lt. Commander pondered the situation for a half hour. Then he decided that there was only one person he would like to wrestle with the problem, and he was retired. But this was right up the Admiral’s street. Jimmy Ramshawe picked up the telephone and dialed the private number of the old Lion of the West Wing, Adm. Arnold Morgan himself.
“Morgan. Speak.”
“Hello, sir. Jimmy Ramshawe here. Have you got a couple of minutes?”
“Well, we’re going out soon, so make it quick.”
Jimmy’s mind jumped two notches. He would either deliver a slam-dunk sentence to seize the Admiral’s attention, right now, or risk a slow-burn introduction, during which the irascible former presidential Security Adviser might get bored and tell him to leave it for another time. Jimmy knew that the Admiral’s boredom threshold was extremely low. Seriously bored, Arnold Morgan would sit there contemplating the possibility of ending his own life.
Jimmy went for the slam dunk. “Sir, I believe it is entirely possible that the Republic of France, for reasons best known to themselves, have just blown up the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.”
The Admiral chuckled and went into military mode. “Degree of certainty, Lt. Commander?”
“About one per cent,” replied Jimmy, laughing.
“Oh, then we should probably nuke ’em, right, Jimmy? This week or next?”
It was a funny relationship. The young Lt. Commander had worked with the Admiral on several occasions,
