“Fuck me,” said Jimmy Ramshawe.
“And there’s more. One of the eyewitnesses was a well-known ex — Saudi officer named Colonel Bandar, a fanatical loyalist to the new King. I’ve seen his statement. He says he served under one of the men, Col. Jacques Gamoudi, during the siege of Riyadh. The other was the Commander of King Nasir’s assault team in the south, the guy who took Khamis Mushayt. They’d all had dinner at Da Pino. But he did not know the name of the second commander.”
Jimmy Ramshawe said, “This is a very important call, Charlie. And it’s great you made it. Do you have copies of the witness statements to the Saudi police?”
“Yes. I guess I can fax ’em. And there’s not much room for doubt. Someone just tried to kill Gamoudi, and I would guess he’s now under the direct protection of the King. That’s going to make it very difficult for us to locate him.”
“As for his mate, I suppose that’s out of the question?”
“They don’t have a name for him, and I sense the police have become real sensitive. Just an hour ago, they would tell me nothing. They acted kinda scared. I guess Nasir’s men are flexing a little muscle.”
“I guess so, Charlie. Stay in touch, will you? This is very important.”
Ramshawe made his way back to the office on a jaunty stride. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we just got a real break. Last Thursday night there was an attempt on the life of Col. Jacques Gamoudi in the middle of the city of Riyadh. Someone drove a Paris-registered Citroen at high speed straight at him on Olaya Street.”
“Presumably they missed,” said Morgan.
“They did. And both men in the Citroen were subsequently killed, either by Gamoudi or his companion, who the police say was King Nasir’s forward Commander in the battle for Khamis Mushayt. Identified by a Saudi Colonel loyal to Nasir.”
“I told you so,” said Morgan. “The French are trying to get him. And that’s good news, so long as they don’t succeed.”
“Sir,” said Ramshawe, “there’s just one other thing. Both these assassins carried Kalashnikovs, and both of them were cut down before they could fire, by a guy who broke one of their necks and rammed the other guy’s nose into his brain…that got a familiar ring to you?”
“You mean our old friend Maj. Ray Kerman, who specializes in such methods?”
“Our old friend Ray Kerman, sir, who flew into Paris last August and was hunted down by the Mossad to a restaurant in Marseille that is now under the protection of the local gendarmes.”
“That’s the guy, Jimmy. You think we just found who he was dining with that night?”
“Absolutely, sir. One dollar gets you one hundred Ray Kerman and Jacques Gamoudi shared a bowl of that French fish soup
“Which is all the more reason why you should avoid making it sound like a submarine anchorage,” replied Morgan.
He still sounded like Jackie Gleason doing his Chevalier, but both Arnold Morgan and Jimmy Ramshawe knew that right now the noose was tightening around the throat of the French government.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Adm. Alan Dickson, the fifty-six-year-old former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, was not wildly looking forward to the next ten minutes. As the current Chief of Naval Operations, he was about to inform Arnold Morgan that he considered it too dangerous a mission to try and blockade the five major French seaports at Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, Bordeaux, and Marseille.
First of all, it would take half the U.S. Atlantic Fleet of submarines to be in any way effective. Second, the French Navy might elect to come out and fight a sea battle. Third, it would cost more money than World War II.
Admiral Dickson felt like Lew Grade, the legendary London movie mogul who made the catastrophic money- losing film
Nonetheless, Admiral Morgan was not going to love this.
There was a chill early-spring wind outside, cutting through the nation’s capital, and Admiral Dickson, a heavyset former destroyer CO in the Gulf War, still had his hands in the pockets of his great-coat. One of them clutched the little notebook he carried everywhere, with its minute details of U.S. Navy fleet deployments, written in his tiny, near-calligraphic writing.
The frown that creased his forehead seemed kind of stark on skin the color of varnished leather. But Alan Dickson was an old sea dog, a man of strict, disciplined method from the New England city of Hartford. And he knew that Arnold Morgan, in this instance, was whistling Dixie. Okay. Right now Admiral Morgan had the power to do anything he damn well pleased…but not in this man’s Navy.
Alan Dickson could see war on the horizon. And while he most certainly wanted to ram an American hard boot straight up the ass of the pompous, arrogant French, he did not savor the prospect of the U.S. Navy’s being hit back by probably the most efficient Navy in Europe.
Admiral Dickson knew all about the fighting capacity of the French, their hotshot modern guided-missile frigates and destroyers, their powerful fleet of submarines, and their two fast and well-equipped carriers. And he had no intention of tangling with them.
He also knew he was one of the few people in this world to whom Admiral Morgan would listen. He further knew that the Admiral was not a dogmatic man, but if you wished him to change course a few degrees, you better be heavily armed with facts, facts, and more facts. Alan Dickson was certain he had ’em.
“Please go through now,” said Kathy Morgan’s secretary. “I assume you would like coffee with the Admiral?”
“Thank you,” replied Admiral Dickson as he began the short walk toward Arnold Morgan’s gun deck.
“Morning, Alan,” said the office’s occupant without looking up from a chart of the approaches to the Port of Le Havre, on the northern shore of the Seine River estuary. “Worries the hell out of me, Alan,” Morgan said. “No goddamn deep water for twenty miles outside the main shipping channel — at least not deep enough to hide a submarine. It’s gonna be hard. But we’ll find a way.”
“Sorry, Arnold. I didn’t quite catch that. Which port are you looking at?”
“Oh, yeah, Le Havre…right here on the coast of Normandy…in a sense, this is the big one for us…this is where Gonfreville l’Orcher is located, the biggest oil refinery in France.
“See it…right here, Alan…on this peninsula between these two canals. Sonofabitch must be two miles wide… look at this…gasoline all along the north shore, this huge petrochemical complex on the south side. Starve that of crude for a few weeks, you got one dry-hole country.” Arnold Morgan had never quite thrown off his south Texas roots.
Admiral Dickson shifted his weight from his right foot to his left. He was grateful when Kathy Morgan drifted through the door carrying the coffee tray — one silver pot, two mugs, sugar, cream, and a blue tube of buckshot.
“Hello, Alan,” she said. “Nice to see you. Black, as usual?”
“Thanks, Kathy.”
She poured two mugs of incineratingly hot coffee, the way Morgan liked it, fired two bullets into Morgan’s mug — the one on the left, which sported an inscription in black letters that read SILENCE! GENIUS AT WORK — and retreated to the outer office.
“Sir,” said Admiral Dickson, seizing the bull by the horns, or at least the genius by the tail, “it is my considered opinion that a blockade on the big French ports would be too difficult, too dangerous, and too expensive.”
Right now Morgan was somewhere along the buoyed channel, ten miles west of Le Havre, trying to maintain
