SAME DAY, SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 1900
24.10N 37.35E, SPEED 5, DEPTH 100
The Améthyste moved slowly through the dark waters west of the jagged island of Shi’ib ash Sharm, guardian of the ten-mile-long deepwater bay along the coastline north of Yanbu al Bahr.
Shortly after 1900, with night settling heavily over the ocean, Commander Dreyfus ordered his ship to the surface, and the French nuclear hunter-killer came sliding up out of the depths of the flat, calm Red Sea to take up her ops station. Water cascaded off her hull as she shouldered aside the ocean, moving forward slowly, making as little surface commotion as possible for a 2,500-tonner.
Just ahead they could see the warning light on Sharm’s rocky headland, flashing every few seconds and casting a white light on the glinting waters, mostly to warn tanker captains of the dangers inherent in not making a sharp landward turn.
Shi’ib ash Sharm sat five miles off shore, directly west of the loading platforms that serviced the world’s biggest oil tankers at the far end of the seven-hundred-mile trans-Saudi pipeline. That was the one that ended at the port of Yanbu, having cleaved its way across the vast central desert and over the Aramah Mountains, all the way from Pump Station Number One, near Abqaiq.
To reach the main loading terminal at Yanbu, tankers had to make a hard turn, at either end of Sharm, from the north or south. For the SF insert tonight, Commander Dreyfus had chosen the northerly route, a three-mile-wide seaway between the island and a large shallow area that had to be avoided by the VLCCs and most certainly by the Améthyste.
The water was beautifully flat, and the rising moon to the east, from behind the mountains, was casting a pale light on the narrows. The submarine was just about invisible, its black hull casting no shadow on the surface. But inside there was a frenzy of activity.
Several hands were already hoisting and hauling the deflated twenty-two-foot Zodiacs up through the big hatch on the forecasing and manhandling them onto the deck, where the seamen had already brought out the electric air pumps.
The 175-horsepower Yamaha outboard engines that would power the two craft were coming up separately from the torpedo room, where they had been stored for the voyage. Within moments, six engineers were out on the casing, three of them bolting the heavy motors into position on the stern, expertly clipping on the fuel lines, and attaching the battery cables and ignition wires while the boat was still being inflated.
The engines were clipped into the upward-tilt position. Two other seamen filled the fuel tanks with diesel and loaded a four-and-a-half-gallon spare fuel tank inboard each boat. Also being loaded were assault rifles, ammunition, six grenades, just in case, and the comms transmitter, which would guide them home after the bombs were fixed.
There were also medical supplies, morphine, and bottles of water, mainly in case someone was badly injured and needed to drink. The two “attack boards” that contained the swimmers’ watch and compass, both inbuilt, non-glare, were also placed on-board.
The lead frogmen would swim in with the boards out in front of them; they would especially need them if they had to exit the Zodiacs sooner than planned, for whatever reason — busy harbor, launch activity — anything the Zodiac captain considered might compromise the safety of the boats, if anything or anyone came too close.
When the first Zodiac was ready, they pushed it to the downward slope of the deck and allowed the hard-decked inflatable to slide down into the water, held secure by two lines attached to its bow, each one held by two brawny seamen.
Another two men attached and rolled a wooden-rung rope ladder down the side of the Améthyste, and the officer-of-the-deck signaled for the first six of the Special Forces assault group, led by Lt. Garth Dupont, to come up through the foredeck hatch and proceed to the head of the ladder.
Dupont was of course unrecognizable from the chuckling bridge player of the lower deck. He was dressed in his jet black wet suit, hood up, goggles above his face, which was coated in black camouflage cream. His big flippers were attached to his belt, and on his back, in a waterproof rucksack, he carried a massive sixty-pound “sticky bomb,” which would clamp magnetically to one of the giant steel pylons supporting the loading dock in Yanbu. Also on his belt were his sheathed specially made Sabatine combat knife and a roll of det-cord and wires, with a twenty-four-hour timer.
His air system, the Draeger, also carried on his back, was a compact model, containing air for only ninety minutes, which was about twice what he would need. The system was a special non-bubble breather, which would betray nothing to a curious sentry staring down into the water. In any event, the Frenchmen would operate fifty feet below the surface, which would render them invisible from the platform.
Privately, all four of the frogmen hoped that there would be tankers on the docks, which would cast huge shadows and shield the men from anyone’s eyes. They would work in the dark, unseen, somewhere down below the tankers’ keels, which would, of course, suit them absolutely perfectly.
The four swimmers would work in pairs, and when the bombs were stuck hard to the pylons, the timer would be magnetically clamped to a third one, with wires running to the splice in the detcord. When the timer reached 0400, it would send an impulse into the det-cord splice, which would ignite the explosive fuse.
This would streak at a rate of two miles a second, straight into the detonators fixed to the bombs, which would blast the pylons in half, probably blowing the deck on the platform into several pieces. Any ship on the dock would probably have its hull split asunder and sink to the floor of the harbor, all 300,000 tons of it, which, in time, might take quite a bit of removing.
Add to this the activity of the Perle’s cruise missiles, which were to hit the faraway pumping station at Abqaiq, and the great Red Sea port of Yanbu al Bahr was in dead trouble — starved of oil, its loading terminal obliterated, perhaps half a million tons of shipping jamming its jetties.
Garth Dupont climbed backward down the ladder, found his footing, and slipped over the rubber hull of the Zodiac, which was still held with fore and aft lines by the seamen on the submarine.
Then, one by one, his five-man team joined him, the three other swimmers, the boat driver, and the comms officer with his GPS receiver and mobile phone to communicate codes back to the submarine if necessary.
Seaman Raul Potier took the wheel and kicked the engine over; it started first time. If it hadn’t, one of the engineers would probably have been keel-hauled. Potier untied both lines and expertly curled and then hurled them back onto the submarine’s deck. He took the Zodiac quietly away from the hull, fifty feet out into the water, and waited.
The comms man pushed the buttons to dial the officer-of-the-deck up on the casing, checking that the phone was working. Then they reversed the process, ensuring they had two-way transmission. The second Zodiac was lowered into the water, and the second half of Team One went through the same checks. When they had checked the phones once more, one to another, they set off for Yanbu, the massive, 900,000-barrel-a-day oil colossus of the Red Sea.
The Zodiacs carried no running lights as they moved swiftly through the water at around half-speed, fifteen knots. Garth Dupont sat next to the driver, his night binoculars trained on the black ahead, but his vision was not improved by the rising moon.
A mile in front he picked up the lights of a tanker coming toward them, off his starboard bow, but he could see only her green running light and he guessed that she was leaving by the southern route around Sharm. Way ahead of that was another tanker, going his way, slowly into port, probably lining up to receive the last oil from Saudi Arabia for a very long while.
Within twelve minutes they could see the lights on the loading docks, now only a couple of miles ahead, across the bay, and it quickly became clear that this was a busy Sunday evening. Dupont could pick out two tankers he thought were on the jetties, with three waiting to come in, a mile offshore out to his port side.
One mile from the jetties he ordered Potier to slow right do
wn to five knots, then to slip in very slowly. The Navy had no indication of sonar surveillance in these waters, but Dupont was taking no chances. By now it was clear that there was a great deal of light on the docks, shining from both the enormous tankers and the jetty itself. And those lights seemed to spill out for two, maybe three hundred yards into the main approaches to the Yanbu terminals.
Dupont ordered the engines cut back to idling speed, just enough to hold a position without drifting. He took one final look ahead and ordered the other swimmers to action stations. The four men sat down and pulled on their flippers, fixed goggles, and Draeger lines, and then slid softly over the side. The comms officer quietly passed the instruction to the second boat. There was no shouting in black ops.
The eight men in the water came together as two groups, two leaders and two followers in each. Garth ordered them deep with a silent thumbs-up gesture and they began to kick their way underwater, each of the “followers” swimming with their right hands on the left shoulder of their leader, in the pitch-black water twelve feet below the surface.
The leaders swam with flippers only, their attack boards held at arm’s length out in front of them, like regular floatable kickboards, but these boards contained instruments that showed the precise time and direction, without the swimmer needing to pause to check either watch or compass.
The lead pair in each group had made the inshore journey in Garth Dupont’s boat. This meant there was no need for instructions to be passed from one group to another. In any event, the plan was simple. Each four-man team was to head directly toward the tankers, Dupont’s men to the one on the left, the others to the one on the right.
Given the complications of mooring lines, and propellers that could start at any time, the underwater leader had ordered them to take each tanker amidships, diving right down to the keel — forty feet on a loaded tanker but only thirty feet on these half-laden hulls.
There would be twenty feet of water under the keels, and once through and under the dock, the swimmers were to head to the far ends of the platform and place their bombs deep on the corner pylons, two men attending each objective.
And so they kicked in rhythmically through the water, one pressure stroke on the flippers every ten seconds…KICK…one…two…three…four…KICK…one…two…three…four. Kick and glide, conserving energy, all together. That way they arrived on the starboard sides of the tankers absolutely together. Using their hands on the hulls, they pushed their way under, and Dupont was relieved to find there was a long gap down to the harbor floor.
Nonetheless, it was nothing short of dead creepy down there in the pitch dark, like some hideous horror film. If they’d had time they would probably have shuddered. However, on the dock side of the tanker it was suddenly much brighter, which felt better, but was plainly more dangerous.
Both groups now made for the seaward pylons on the two corners, and both were irritated at the number of barnacles on the steel. They had to scrape them off with combat knives before the bombs would clamp on tightly. Of course, the time settings were all different in the countdown to H hour at 0400 hours.
For instance, at 1956, on the first pylon, the timer was set for eight hours and four minutes. On the landward corner pylon, which took longer to reach, it was set for seven hours and fifty-seven minutes.
They made their way under the platform to seek out the next four pylons, the center supports below the gigantic platform pumping systems. And there the clamping and timing processes were repeated until all eight of the sixty-pounders were in place, clocks set, the final one for seven hours and eighteen minutes.
With their cumbersome loads now gone, the men headed back the way they had come, under the tankers, and back out to the waiting boats. On the way in, they had kicked approximately eighty times, each one carrying them ten feet, or three and a half meters. On the return journey, again twelve feet under the water, they counted the kicks again.
At the count of eighty they all surfaced, quite widely spread out. Dupont reached for his “bleeper” to signal their position to the Zodiacs. But, as his did so, his number-two man whacked his head on Potier’s bow and had to suppress a yell of terror, because he thought he’d hit a shark. This caused a lot of chuckling, and all eight men were instantly hauled inboard, breathing their first fresh air for well over an hour.
The Zodiacs now turned away from the Yanbu docks and made a fast beeline for the waiting Améthyste, out there beyond the north end of the island. The comms men were both in contact with the mother ship, and within fifteen minutes they saw the quick-flashing light signal on the submarine’s foredeck.
They came alongside, grabbed the lines, and began to disembark. The last men off-loaded the rifles, ammunition, and equipment into canvas bags, which were immediately hauled inboard. Then they took their Kaybar combat knives and slashed six wide holes in each of the pressure compartments in the Zodiacs’ rubber hulls. And before the hit men had even pulled off their flippers and hoods, both Zodiacs were settled nicely in two hundred fathoms on the bed of the Red Sea.
Commander Dreyfus ordered all hatches closed, main ballast opened, and took the Améthyste to three hundred feet below the surface, running south at twelve knots, straight down to the next great Saudi loading dock in the oil port of Rabigh.
The Special Forces had dinner immediately they returned and settled down to two tables of bridge. Garth Dupont, flushed with what he believed was the total success of their first mission, opened the bidding in les piques, spades, in the first rubber; he ended up bidding six and making one.
Everyone fell about laughing and someone mentioned they hoped he could count a damned sight better underwater than he could on the surface. Dupont assured them he was challenging for the Underwater Bridge Championship of France when they returned.
In fact Dupont had been asleep for only three hours when they reached the calm waters off Rabigh just after 0100 on Thursday morning. Commander Dreyfus had made fast time all along the Saudi coast, where they found that the deep ocean was absolutely deserted both on and below the surface. They picked up only two small fishing boats on their passive sonar all the way from Yanbu.
It was still only 2345 when they came to periscope depth, confirmed their GPS fix, and found the quick-flashing warning light on the headland of Shi’b al Khamsa, a small deserted island directly in front of the fifteen-mile-long bay that protected the port of Rabigh.
Commander Dreyfus left the island to starboard and pressed on for another four miles, right into the gateway to the bay, another wide seaway, with a flashing light on the right-hand side but nothing on the left, where a coastal shoal rose up three hundred feet from the seabed to a level only about a hundred feet below the surface.
However, the well-chartered bay had depths of three hundred feet until quite close to the shore. And Commander Dreyfus elected to make a hard right turn, at PD, into the wide southern end of the bay. This was no cul-de-sac, well, not for surface ships, because there was a narrow fifty-foot channel at the end of Shi’b al Bayda, one of three islands that more or less blocked the bay to the south. However, the Bay of Rabigh was a cul-de-sac for a submarine.
Commander Dreyfus thus came quietly to the surface and made a 180-degree turn in this sheltered, “private” end of the bay. There was not a ship in sight, on radar or sonar, on or below the surface of the water. And it would take him mere moments to go deep and vanish, heading out of the bay any time he wanted.
Rabigh was not as busy as Yanbu, mainly because it had no major trans-Saudi pipeline coming in off the Aramah Mountains. Nonetheless, it could be full of tanker traffic in mid-week since it did have a very large refinery. And this took in crude from Yanbu and dispersed it in various forms of gasoline, petrochemicals, and LPG, taking the heat off the constantly overworked terminal ninety miles to the north.
Once more Garth Dupont led his team out of the submarine and into two Zodiacs, new ones of course, same procedures, all the way into the docks. But Rabigh was not so light a
s Yanbu, and he hoped to find an even closer holding point. However, off to the left, in a holding area about two miles away, Dupont could see one tanker making its way slowly inshore, but the jetties were Sunday-night empty.
Just one other tanker was within sight of the frogmen, a VLCC of unknown origin, making its way out of the bay about a half mile off their port beam. But the Zodiacs carried no running lights, and the sky was cloudy. The warm air that hung above the water seemed muggy, and there was no moonlight to cast even the remotest light on the surface.
Dead ahead the jetties looked quiet, and about 400 yards out Garth Dupont decided to summon the hit teams overboard and down into the depths en route to the loading platforms. That way the boat drivers could hang around in the dark well clear of the distant incoming tanker, which appeared to be going so slowly it might not make its mooring by Wednesday.
But that was the nature of these VLCCs. They took about four miles to stop at their regular running speed in excess of fifteen knots. At four knots, creeping into the jetties, it took them almost forty-five minutes from two miles out, because they actually covered the last 200 yards barely above drifting speed.
“You just be ready to leave as the tanker arrives,” Dupont had stressed to his men, explaining the importance of staying deep, well under the keel of the ship, the moment it came to a halt. He told them he wanted no heroics trying to go underneath the 350,000-ton hulk while it was still moving. “We move when that thing stops,” he said. “Unless we can get out before it arrives.”
Thereafter they kicked their way in, just as they had done at Yanbu. They were not observed, in fact, from high above, no one even had a look over the side. There were no active guards on the jetties, and the shore crews had gone for a welcome cup of coffee before the new tanker arrived.
In perfect isolation, the French divers worked underwater beneath the towering platform, and within fifty minutes they had all eight bombs expertly set; times were synchronized precisely with those beneath the loading terminal at Yanbu. And the slow, ominous ticking of the sixteen detonator clocks, deep in the water, separated by ninety miles of ocean, could not be heard by anyone.
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