The teams worked carefully, using hammers and sharp pointed steel “punches” to bang a hole through each panel through which to thread the det-cord. When the bomb was fixed and armed, they refixed the panels and ran the det-cord out to a point midway between four aircraft.
And there one of their senior high-explosives technicians spliced the four lines into one “pigtail” and screwed it tightly into a timing clock. They checked their own watches, and after the first aircraft were dealt with at 2315, they set the main timed fuse for one hour and forty-five minutes. Each set of four aircraft thereafter would have their detonation times adjusted for the 0100 blast.
And despite the certainty of their operation — the definite fact that these bombs would blow up at 0100— they still made sure that no bits of det-cord, screwdrivers, or any traces of the operation were left lying around.
Even if they had to abort the mission, run for cover, or even find themselves on the wrong end of a firefight, it remained essential that no one ever know the French Special Forces had worked on the airfield at Khamis Mushayt.
Two patrols came and went, neither one of them even pausing as they rushed past the parked Tornadoes and F-15s. Each time, the jeeps set off from the hangars, the lookout men spotted them, and everyone hit the ground. Each time, the jeeps never even slowed down as they came past the ops area of the French Majors.
At 0042 the tiny alarms went off on each man’s watch, signaling the scheduled ETD of the last patrol. For the third time, everyone hit the ground, knowing that, fourteen minutes from now, the jeep, packed with its six armed guards, would drive by less than fifty feet from the demolition teams.
They also knew that as that jeep drove away from the big doors to the two massive aircraft hangars, almost a half mile from where they were working, their own team would be into the gigantic doors, winding the det-cord, setting the timers, and concealing themselves in a place where they could see the blast, before charging inside to do their worst.
As the minutes ticked by, the tension rose, not because any of them was afraid of a straight fight, which they knew they would win anyway, but because of the danger of discovery — of the one careless move that would alert the Saudi patrol that something was afoot, the one-minute giveaway that might give the Saudis the split second they needed to report back to the military base that they may be under attack.
On came the jeep, and the men pressed their black faces into the ground down behind the aircraft wheels. Only the sentries kept their heads up, ready to machine-gun that jeep to oblivion should there be the slightest suspicion of discovery.
But the jeep came and went as it always did. Fast and unseeing. And at the hangar doors, the French explosives team was wrapping the det-cord around the locks, with one lookout on each of the field-side corners of the buildings just in case of a foot patrol.
There was, however, no danger of that. Tonight, this Air Force base was as inefficient as it had ever been. The defection of some of their senior officers, royal princes who apparently had matters to which they had to attend in Riyadh, had caused a shuddering effect on morale. The pilots were without proper leadership, and while the oil fields burned and the capital city collapsed into self-inflicted chaos, there was literally nothing for them to defend, never mind attack.
Air Forces need targets, and dozens of aircrew and indeed guard patrols had gone missing, heading for the Yemeni Mountains. The pilots, a more senior breed, had not deserted their posts or resigned their commissions or even left the area. But they were mostly asleep or just sitting around talking. They were not hired to guard and service fighter aircraft. They were hired to fly them, and there was at present nothing to fly them at.
And anyway, for how long would they have their highly paid jobs, with the King reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy? In Saudi Arabia, as in all Western countries, the media was truly expert at frightening the life out of the population, if at all possible.
Just as “journalists” had had half the world terrified that the midnight date change at the new millennium would cause total catastrophe when every computer on the planet crashed, so the Saudi Arabian newspapers and television networks had the middle-line commissioned officers of the desert military convinced that they would never work again.
The Frenchmen set the timers on the hangar doors for 0100, and then headed toward the north fence to hide out while the work of their colleagues was completed. At 0100, they would take out the entire contents of the hangars, and then move toward the main gate on the southern perimeter.
At 0055 the al-Qaeda freedom fighters launched their attack on that gate. Two hand grenades were hurled into the outer sentry station, blowing up and killing all four guards. Four young al-Qaeda braves flew across the road and hauled back the wrought-iron gates, which were not locked while the guards were on duty.
Immediately four rocket-propelled grenades were blasted in from the other side of the road, three of them straight through the windows of the inner guardhouse, which killed all six of the night-duty patrol. One of them already had the handset in his hand, trying to report the first explosion. He died with the handset still in his hand, which made the opening attack a close-run thing. But the young Saudi never had a chance to speak.
Light instantly began to go on in the guards’ accommodation block, and this was two hundred yards away, out of range for the rocket grenades — out of range at least for any form of accuracy. And that was why General Rashood had insisted that the moment those gates were open six young al-Qaeda fighters race through, four of them with handheld grenades, the other two with submachine guns.
Simultaneously, two British-built GPMG machine guns were being hauled into position on the flat ground opposite the remains of the inner guardhouse. Occasionally criticized for its heavy twenty-four-pound weight — that was unloaded, on its tripod — this thing delivered devastatingly accurate firepower out to a quarter of a mile. The SAS never went anywhere without this tough, reliable weapon.
And now the young Saudis were running, straight at the aimed barrels of three guards who had burst from the accommodation block door to find out what was going on. The first of the boys hurled his grenade straight at them, but they saw him in the light from the fires at the gate and cut him down with small-arms fire. The three other boys swerved left and hurled their grenades through the windows of the accommodation block, which disinte-grated in a huge explosion.
The big al-Qaeda machine guns opened up inside the gates and peppered the front of the building, killing all three of the Air Force guards who had initially stepped outside. The final two of the six al-Qaeda runners reached the burning building and sprayed the far-side windows with gunfire, thus discouraging any further interference.
It was one minute before 0100, and the al-Qaeda sprinters were running back to their fallen comrade, confident they had stopped any communication from the guards, but heartbroken at the almost certain death of their friend and, for one of them, brother.
They reached him safely under covering fire from the GPMGs, which was precisely when the opening explosions from the airfield detonated with savage force. The first four Tornado aircraft literally exploded like bombs, and since light travels a lot faster than sound, the silhouettes of the sobbing young Arabs could instantly be seen as they tried to drag their comrade to safety, tried to stop the blood, tried to save him from dying.
The deafening explosion that followed made a sound like another bomb. And then all the aircraft on the field blew to pieces, during a thunderous short period of perhaps twenty-five seconds maximum. The skies above the airfield lit up, with wide luminous flashes reaching out along the skyline. And each one was punctuated with a mighty
Flames reached a hundred feet into the air, and the glow in the sky was visible for miles. At the conclusion of the eighteenth massive blast, with the last set of four fighter jets exploding, there was for a few moments a calm, interrupted only by the crackling of the flames. And then the biggest blast of all absolutely shook the base to its foundations.
The hangar door blew outward, and six of the French Special Forces raced forward, firing M60 grenade launchers aimed at each of the three aircraft inside, two of them fueled at the completion of their service. Six rocket grenades thus struck almost simultaneously, and detonated in the midst of several hundred gallons of jet fuel.
The blast was sensational. It blew the hangar to shreds and obliterated the curved roof, which collapsed, allowing the flames to roar skyward. The next hangar contained two E-3A AWACS, radar surveillance aircraft. And when the rocket grenades went in there, it was the final devastation for the base.
With flames raging into the sky, and almost eighty aircraft destroyed, there was scarcely anything left to defend. And the final elements of the Fourth (Southern) Air Defense Group, whose duty it was to protect the base from air attack, quite simply fled. If there was an excuse for their incompetence it was perhaps that their two
