“Why not?” said the Admiral.
“Because it’s impossible. The Saudi National Guard, which exists to protect the oil fields and the King, is a force of thousands. And they’re heavily armed and well paid. They also have tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, rockets, access to the Air Force. All of those big oil installations are strongly protected — alarms, laser beams, floodlights, patrols, probably attack dogs. The Saudis are not stupid. They know the value of their assets and they have protected them stringently. Trust me. I’ve checked it out.”
Arnold nodded. “Keep going,” he said.
“Well, there were ferocious attacks on two massive loading platforms in the Red Sea plus three huge refineries, all of them blown to pieces. On the east coast they obliterated the Sea Island Terminal, blew up the liquid gas terminal at Ras al Ju’aymah. They knocked out the Qatif Junction manifold — that’s the station that directs all the oil in the eastern half of the country; they smashed Pump Station Number One, which sends every last gallon of crude right across the mountains to the Red Sea port of Yanbu; they blasted the pipeline from Abqaiq, which sits in the middle of the desert; and they set fire to the entire Abqaiq operation, the biggest oil complex in the world.
“It all happened within a few minutes. It was an absolute bloody precision operation. And it was not conducted by a bunch of towelheads running around the desert with bombs under their bloody togas or whatever they’re called. This was military. Because not a single alarm went off, no one made a mistake, no one got caught.
“And what beats the hell out of me is, how could anyone have got anywhere near Abqaiq or Qatif or the pumping station? They’re all in the middle of dead flat desert. There’s no cover. They’re swept by bloody radar and guarded by literally hundreds of soldiers. I do not know how it was done. But it was not done by some shifty little bastard with a bomb. This was a military operation.”
“Or a naval one,” replied the Admiral.
“Sir?” said Ramshawe, longing to hear the Admiral utter the words that would put the two of them, and not for the first time, on precisely the same wavelength.
“If I wanted to knock out those installations,” said Morgan, “I’d send in the SEALs from submarines to time- bomb the seaward targets. Then, on the way home, I’d flatten the oil fields in the desert with cruise missiles, fired sub-surface.”
“So would I, Arnie. So would I. But the Saudis don’t have a submarine. So it must have been someone else. And I think that someone was France.”
“If there was even a semblance of a motive, I’d say you may be right, Jimmy. But it beats me why anyone would want to do this. But there could be developments in the next few days.”
“Damn right, boss,” said Ramshawe. “Remember, the Frog in the Desert: he’s going to the party early.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The world oil crisis hit home very hard. Immediately after the opening bell at the International Petroleum Exchange in London, Brent Crude, the world’s pricing benchmark, hit eighty-seven dollars a barrel, up around forty dollars from the close last Friday afternoon. Even on the opening day of Saddam Hussein’s war against Kuwait in 1990, Brent Crude never breached the seventy-dollar barrier.
And it was not going down. If anything, it was still rising, as the big players battled to buy futures at whatever price it took. All of the major corporations that relied on transport to survive — airlines, especially airlines, railroads, long-distance truck fleets, power generators, and, of course, refiners and petrochemical corporations from all over the world.
The London market actually opened at 10 A.M. with the first opening bell for natural gas futures. And the last sight most of the gas brokers had seen on their television screens before coming to work was the 150-foot-long blowtorch from hell, blasting from the wreckage of the LPG terminal offshore from Ras al Ju’aymah, courtesy of Cdr. Jules Ventura, French Navy.
To the brokers, that signaled the end of Saudi Arabia’s ability to produce liquid petroleum gas in large quantities. And when that ten o’clock bell sounded, in the great tiered, hexagonal-shaped trading floor of the International Exchange, it simply ceased to be a trading floor. It had become a bear pit.
People were caught in the crush to the lower levels as brokers fought and struggled to be heard — bidding, shouting, yelling:
But the brokers did not need to hear it. They knew the time, and the pandemonium doubled, with an army of men in red, yellow, blue, and green jackets surging forward, roaring out bids for Brent Crude futures.
Exchange officials waited in vain for the chaos to die down. But it did not subside at all. It grew worse. And at 11 A.M., for the first time in the history of the Exchange, the bell sounded long and hard to signify that trading was being suspended.
The chairman, Sir David Norris, addressed the floor, saying that he hoped everyone would agree that this uproar could not be allowed to continue. He pointed out, among other things, that it was grossly unfair to the female brokers and traders, who were less used to operating in the front row of a Rugby Union scrummage.
Sir David, who had been a considerable rugby player himself at Cambridge University, where he also won a cricket Blue, insisted that some form of order be returned to the floor. And he requested that the biggest buyers and sellers attend a private conference in his office immediately.
At least this gave the market time to recover its breath. But the underlying frenzy was ever present and the morning high of eighty-seven dollars never showed any sign of dropping. On London’s television news bulletins that evening, Sir David made a personal appearance to announce that the Exchange would not open on Wednesday morning. “Trading is temporarily suspended due to the situation in Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Many people thought that the alacrity with which the New York market, NYMEX, immediately followed suit suggested that Sir David and the Prime Minister had been in direct contact with the White House in the past few hours.
It should be made clear that the International Exchange in London is not so much bigger or more important than NYMEX in New York. Indeed it is often smaller. But the five-hour time difference meant that London opened first and set the prices. New York had to sit and watch from 5 A.M. until 10 A.M. before they joined the daily battle for America’s fuel requirements.
And, of course, the knock-on effect from a tumultuous day’s trading, during which oil prices had tripled at source, was nothing less than shocking.
By that Tuesday evening, in the United States, gasoline was costing $8 a gallon, instead of $2.50. In London, petrol prices at the pumps had tripled to a similar amount in pounds sterling. It was the same all over Europe, except for France, where prices went up less than one euro, and then fell back.
Japan was in chaos. The country had no access to natural gas, and almost every household throughout the islands cooked with propane. That was LPG, the stuff still thundering out into the sea off the oil town of Ras al Ju’aymah. That was where Japan acquired a huge percentage of its daily cooking fuel.
Restaurant prices in Japan doubled, on the basis that soon no one would be cooking anything, except over a fire. There was a stupendous run on electric cookers, which would probably turn out to be a waste of time, since Japan’s energy grid was totally reliant on oil and gas from the Middle East.
Right now there were twenty-four Japanese tankers, between 4 and 1,000 miles from the Saudi oil ports in the Gulf. All of them were either on the verge of returning home or were trying to make the journey to other terminals, in the Black Sea or in other Gulf states. There was no oil available in the Red Sea, where the two main loading jetties were in ruins.
Internationally, airfares doubled overnight, led by British Airways and American Airlines, which immediately canceled all cheap transatlantic flights. And no one could really blame them, since no one knew the price jet fuel
