And in the most clandestine manner, the two most senior undercover warriors in France began their feasibility test on behalf of their government and, in a sense, on behalf of Prince Nasir Ibn Mohammed of Saudi Arabia.
In the next fifteen minutes General Jobert’s dark, bushy eyebrows rarely descended to their normal position on the lower part of his forehead. He was truly astounded at the scale of the proposition. Gaston Savary reckoned Jobert softly exclaimed,
But the proposition was real enough. The President of France wanted a professional opinion; whether the Saudi oil industry could be brought to its knees by military attack for a period of around two years, and whether, in the ensuing days, with the Saudi economy in ruins, it would be possible to subdue the Saudi armed forces and then take the capital city of Riyadh. All with France, to all appearances, having not the slightest involvement.
The first three items — the oil, the surrender of the army, and the capture of Riyadh — were probably possible. In the opinion of General Jobert the collapse of the economy would leave an army somewhat disinclined to fight anyone. The problem was the fourth item: could France somehow make it all possible, with a substantial military involvement, and yet remain anonymous?
General Jobert, on reflection, thought absolutely not. So did Gaston Savary. Which essentially meant that the President would have to decline the offer of the Saudi Prince to make France his sole supplier of future military hardware, and the sole world agent for all Saudi oil products. And that particular
And that was a scenario both General Jobert and Gaston Savary suspected might not sit too well with a President whose country had been known, traditionally, to operate almost exclusively from a sense of unfettered self-interest.
The General, who had not received the slightest indication as to why he was meeting with Savary, read again the second page of the letter from Pierre St. Martin. It contained the briefest outline of the requirements that Prince Nasir considered would cripple the Saudi oil industry.
Priority number one was the destruction of the world’s largest processing complex, at Abqaiq, which was situated twenty-five miles inland from the Gulf of Bahrain. Abqaiq was the destination of all crude oil from the Saudi south, particularly from Ghawar, the most productive oil field on earth. Beneath the shifting desert sands, right there, sixty miles southwest of Dhahran, lay 70 billion barrels.
Close to Abqaiq, Pump Station Number One sent some 900,000 barrels of light crude per day, seven hundred miles, up and over the Aramah Mountains, to the Red Sea oil port of Yanbu al Bahr.
If Pump Station Number One went down, the massive loading terminals of both Yanbu and, ninety miles to the south, Rabigh would be finished. So would the huge refineries in the area, including the enormous complexes at Rabigh, Medina, and Jiddah.
Nonetheless, Prince Nasir believed the Red Sea terminals should be hit and destroyed. On the Gulf coast, the largest offshore oil field in the world, at Safaniya, 160 miles north of Dhahran, was another of the Prince’s prime targets. The reserves out there, below the warm, sandy Gulf seabed, numbered 30 billion barrels — around 500,000 barrels a day for about 164 years.
The biggest terminal on the Gulf was Ras Tannurah, which had capacity for 4.3 million barrels of oil a day out at the end of a narrow, ten-mile-long sandy peninsula. The colossal loading dock was offshore, at the Sea Island complex, where Platform Number Four pumped more than two million barrels a day into the world’s waiting tankers. In Prince Nasir’s opinion, a direct hit at that platform would virtually wrap it right up for Ras Tannurah. Especially if someone banged out the pipeline from Abqaiq, which the Prince had thoughtfully mapped out for the President of France.
In Nasir’s opinion, the final, critical hit should be slightly north, on the 4.2-million-barrel-a-day complex at Ju’aymah, principal loading bay for liquid petroleum — propane, that is, the prime source of all Japanese cooking. If Prince Nasir’s plan ever came off, the Japanese would find themselves eating a whole lot of sushi, accompanied by stone-cold sake.
The terminals of Ras Tannurah and Ju’aymah, plus the Red Sea ports, loaded Saudi Arabian oil products into a staggering 4,000 massive tankers a year. Unsurprisingly, Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company), 100 percent owned by the Saudi government since 1976, was the largest oil company on earth. Its headquarters were in the Eastern Province city of Dhahran and its capability was approximately 10 million barrels a day, though in the twenty-first century it had pumped considerably less.
Twenty-six percent of all the oil on the planet lay beneath the Saudi desert — that’s around 262 billion barrels, which, at 5.5 million a day, ought to last around 130 years. The Saudi royal family were the sole proprietors of Aramco, which owned every last half-pint.
“You want me to hit that lot?” asked General Jobert incredulously. “That’s probably ten different targets. Three would be difficult. I suppose we could get three hit squads in there. But they’d need backup, and the explosive would weigh God knows how much. We’d need forty men in each team. But ten targets?
“That, of course, is out of the question,” said Gaston Savary.
“Remember, the President’s prime requirement is secrecy. If we sent in a squadron of fighter bombers, they’d know the nationality of the attackers in about ten minutes. The Saudis have a lot of very sophisticated U.S. surveillance kits.”
Both men ruminated over the apparent hopelessness of step one, and a mood of tacit acceptance prevailed. The critical path of the operation required a succession of ten swift, devastating hits on the greatest oil-producing network in the Middle East. And so far as General Jobert could see, it was militarily impossible, either by land or by air — at least, without getting caught it was.
General Jobert paced the room. He was an impressive man — not tall, but built like a middleweight fighter, with thick, black, curly hair and a swarthy complexion, very French, with the merest suggestion that somewhere in the family tree there may have lurked a North African ancestor.
He was a man in stark contrast to the lean, pale-skinned, six-foot-two-inch Gaston Savary, whose mournful expression concealed a cool sense of irony and a somewhat sarcastic turn of humor. However, on this morning they were thinking as one, both of them aware that an outright rejection of the President’s request was not a great idea — for either of them.
The General mused. Land attack?
Gaston Savary looked up sharply. “You mean frogmen, brought in by submarine, swimmers who could fix sticky bombs on the offshore rigs?”
“Have you checked the depth of the water lately? I mean around Abqaiq, which is not only in the middle of the desert but is also the key to the entire operation?” Savary loved the rhetorical question.
But the General smiled. His smile was that of a man one move from checkmate. “As a civilian, you of course do not understand everything about the military mind,” he said. “However, I expect you have heard of cruise missiles, and these days there are some very effective ones, that fly out of nowhere.”
“In these days of intense surveillance, nothing comes out of nowhere,” replied the Secret Service Chief. “There’s always someone watching.”
“True,” replied the General. “But the chances of detecting a missile fired from a submerged submarine are very low. I’m talking about a missile programmed to fly over the ocean and then over the middle of the desert. I assure you no one will pick that up. The element of surprise is too great.”
Savary knew when an important sentence had been uttered. He paused for a moment, nodding his head slightly. And then he asked, “Do you really think we could put a submarine in the Gulf without anyone knowing? And then have it unleash a barrage of cruise missiles at the shores of Saudi Arabia without anyone finding out?”
“They’d find out when the oil terminals, pumping stations, and refineries went up in smoke. But they’d never guess, in their wildest dreams, who the culprits were or, above all, how they did it.”
“And what about the other coast?” asked Gaston Savary. “The Red Sea? You can’t even get in there without traveling on the surface.”
General Jobert shrugged. “A submarine would be logged through Suez. But so would many, many other ships. But it would not be logged through the southern end. The Red Sea can be transited underwater, and it is not
