The Saudis were revealing no accurate numbers, but there were thousands of troops, deployed by their commanders along some 12,500 miles of pipeline, which reached fifty oil fields and several refineries and terminals.
The force worked in close cooperation with Aramco, with its strong American connections, financially, technologically, and militarily. These people, Ramshawe mused, cannot be taken lightly.
A bunch of hit men creeping past battalions of guards, laser beams, patrols, probably bloody attack dogs…then fixing bombs all over the place! Get outta here. That’s just bloody ridiculous…especially since dozens of bombs, from one end of the bloody country to the other, went off bang within a few minutes of each other.
The Saudi National Guard was just too strong for that. The brass at Aramco would not have let that happen. Jesus! These guys have bloody tanks, artillery, rockets, plus a bloody Air Force, fighter-bombers, gunships, and Christ knows what else! I don’t buy it. And I’m not going to start buying it any time soon.
The clincher, so far as Ramshawe was concerned, was simple: the sheer number of targets hit. You’re trying to tell me, of all the guards in all of those priceless oil installations, not one of them saw anything…not a single warning, not a single mistake, not a single alarm. Nothing. A bunch of blokes dressed in sheets flattened and burned 25 percent of the world’s oil, and NO ONE suspected anything! Get out. This was military. Not terrorism.
The clock ticked past 1730, and a duty officer from the international division tapped on Ramshawe’s door and delivered copies of the very few coded signals from GCHQ in Cheltenham, anything that might be worth his time. These were delivered twice a day, in hard copy at his request. Admiral Morris used computers, but looking at screens was not Ramshawe’s first choice. He liked the signals “in black and white, right where I can see ’em.”
Ramshawe looked at the top sheet. He knew the satellite intercepts were arranged in descending order of importance by the NSA staff. And at first sight, he could not see anything wildly exciting about this early party someone was planning to attend.
But then he looked at the notes from the British case officer, which pointed out the brevity of the message and the fact that it had all the hallmarks of the military. And that grabbed his attention. Then he saw that the signal had been sent on a cell phone situated nineteen miles north of Riyadh, and that really tweaked his interest.
On a day like this, anything that said “Riyadh” was interesting. But what made his hair stand on end was the final paragraph, which displayed the conversation as it was spoken — in French.
Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe instantly put two and two together and made about 723. “There’s something going on,” he told the empty room. “There’s something bloody going on. And who’s this bloody curator? And who’s this French bastard poncing about in the desert, sending military signals?”
Jimmy had read enough signals from all over the world to know military when he saw it. There was the recipient of the call, the curator! No one asks for the bloody curator. That’s a pseudonym. And the question — your permission to proceed? — that’s military. No one on earth talks like that except Army, Navy, Air Force. And the reply! Jesus! AFFIRMATIVE! He might as well have signed it General de Gaulle. It’s all military. These clever bastards at GCHQ have hit something here. I’m right bloody sure of that.
The problem was, Lt. Commander Ramshawe was not sure whom to talk to. Admiral Morris was in the Navy yards in San Diego, probably out on a carrier, definitely not wanting to be interrupted, especially not by a wild, if well considered, speculation.
The Lt. Commander pondered the situation for a half hour. Then he decided that there was only one person he would like to wrestle with the problem, and he was retired. But this was right up the Admiral’s street. Jimmy Ramshawe picked up the telephone and dialed the private number of the old Lion of the West Wing, Adm. Arnold Morgan himself.
“Morgan. Speak.”
“Hello, sir. Jimmy Ramshawe here. Have you got a couple of minutes?”
“Well, we’re going out soon, so make it quick.”
Jimmy’s mind jumped two notches. He would either deliver a slam-dunk sentence to seize the Admiral’s attention, right now, or risk a slow-burn introduction, during which the irascible former presidential Security Adviser might get bored and tell him to leave it for another time. Jimmy knew that the Admiral’s boredom threshold was extremely low. Seriously bored, Arnold Morgan would sit there contemplating the possibility of ending his own life.
Jimmy went for the slam dunk. “Sir, I believe it is entirely possible that the Republic of France, for reasons best known to themselves, have just blown up the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.”
The Admiral chuckled and went into military mode. “Degree of certainty, Lt. Commander?”
“About one per cent,” replied Jimmy, laughing.
“Oh, then we should probably nuke ’em, right, Jimmy? This week or next?”
It was a funny relationship. The young Lt. Commander had worked with the Admiral on several occasions, and indeed Arnold Morgan knew both Ramshawe’s father and his fiancée Jane Peacock’s father, the Australian ambassador to Washington, really well.
Ramshawe and Morgan shared a kind of wry sense of irony. But for several years now, the ex — National Security Adviser had understood that when the studious young Aussie came on with a theory, it was almost certainly worth listening to.
“Sir, I am trying to piece something together. But I don’t know anyone else I can talk to about this. I have some new information I really want you to think about. If you’ve got time. You know George Morris is in San Diego, I expect.”
“Okay, Jimmy. I’ll tell you what. Is Jane in town?”
“No, she’s with her dad in New York.”
“Do you want to come and have dinner at Le Bec Fin in Georgetown tonight? Kathy and I were going alone, but you can come if you like. About eight o’clock?”
“Sir, that would be terrific. And you’re gonna love this.”
“I am?”
“Well, I think so. But basically I only said that to make sure you didn’t change your mind.”
Arnold Morgan laughed. “End of the second dogwatch, right?” he said, using Naval parlance for 2000 hours.
“Aye, sir,” replied the Lt. Commander. And he sat back again at his desk still consumed with the signal that Corporal Collins had stabbed out of cyberspace on the other side of the world. Permission to proceed…affirmative.
“I just wonder what the bloody hell’s going to happen over there,” he said, again to the empty room. “We don’t know. But I’m dead certain someone does. And anyway, who’s his bloody friends in the south?”
He decided to end his twelve-hour shift and make his way home, to smarten up for the Admiral. The traffic was awful, and he was already five minutes late before he parked his car. He stopped outside the restaurant and called to the doorman, “Is Admiral Morgan here yet?”
The doorman nodded and beckoned for Ramshawe to leave the car. “We’ll take care of that, sir,” he said. “Admiral’s orders.”
Ramshawe entered the restaurant and was shown to Morgan’s wide booth. Kathy, who looked wonderful in an emerald green suit with a cream silk shirt, wore her dark red hair long. She was sipping white wine. Morgan was drinking red wine from Bordeaux, and there was a bottle and an extra glass on the table. Morgan filled it for Ramshawe, who glanced appreciatively at the label and noted that the Great Man had selected a 1995 Chateau Lafleur from the left bank of the Gironde River estuary. He sipped it, and, beautifully mannered as he had been brought up, said, “Thank you for this, sir. Thank you very much.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Jimmy. Since you plan to accuse and then guillotine the great Republic of France during dinner, I thought we might as well kiss her good-bye with a decent bottle of her own wine.”
Ramshawe laughed, and said, “Dead bloody right. Those Frogs might be a bit treacherous, but they know a thing or two about the grape, e
h?”
Kathy smiled at Ramshawe. His rough-edged Aussie slant on life sat very well on a young officer. Much like the abrasive hard-edged humor of the Admiral sat so marvelously well on a man of Morgan’s learning. She thought then, as she often did, how much alike they were — like a couple of college professors who thought like Al Capone or, in young Jimmy’s case, Ned Kelly. She also thought this was going to be a very private, very interesting evening. As did her husband.
The menus came almost immediately. The Admiral was brusque. “Okay, Jimmy,” he said. “Let’s get the ordering done fast, then you can regale me with your sievelike theories on France’s wrong-doing…”
“Steady, sir. I told you I had a one percent certainty level. This isn’t just a shot in the dark. I’m on the case.”
“Well, if that’s true, I’ll prepare myself with a bowl of turtle soup, laced with a glass of dry sherry, and I’ll soothe my nerves with a couple of lamb chops. If you haven’t tried ’em, they’re as good as any in the city. Except at our house.”
“Okay, sir. I’ll try a small dish of those mussels to start and then I’ll go with the chops, medium rare.”
“Excellent,” said Morgan. “Kathy will want to treat this long menu as if she were reading War and Peace, before she orders prosciutto and melon followed by grilled Dover sole off the bone. She’ll be about ten minutes doing that, so you might as well start explaining why you’re here.”
Kathy punched the Admiral playfully on the arm, and assured Ramshawe that her husband did not have the slightest idea what she was going to order.
“Righto, sir,” he said, grinning.
“And for Christ’s sake stop calling me sir,” said the Admiral.
“I’m a retired private citizen who was in the Navy a long time ago. I’ve known your father for years, and your future father-in-law even longer. I think it’s time for you to call me ‘Arnie,’ like everyone else.”
“Yessir,” said Ramshawe, which caused Kathy to giggle, as she always did, sometimes secretly, when anyone had the temerity to defy the great Arnold Morgan.
“Sorry, Arnie,” Ramshawe added. “But here I go: As you know, we heard last November that one of the European nations was suddenly, and for no reason, buying up a whole slew of oil futures on the world market. We were told it might very well be France, and over the past couple of months it has apparently emerged as definitely France.
“I found out today that the French purchased more than six hundred million barrels for delivery over the next year. Some from Abu Dhabi, some from Bahrain, and some from Qatar, with an extra supply from Kazakhstan. But, NONE from their old friends and regular oil suppliers, Saudi Arabia. And they bought enough to take care of their 1.8-million-barrels-a-day import requirement all over again.
“I ask, why? Anyone needs extra oil, you go to Saudi Arabia. They’ve got more than everyone else, and with a big national government contract, it’s cheaper. But no, France goes everywhere else. And today, someone destroys the entire Saudi oil industry, and there’s only one nation in the industrial world that doesn’t give a damn: France. Because she has her supply well covered from elsewhere. In my view, France MUST have known this was coming. Coincidence is too great, the circumstances too strange.”
Arnold Morgan nodded. Said nothing. Hit the Chateau Lafleur with renewed zest.
“And then,” said Jimmy, “what else do we hear? The most wanted Middle Eastern terrorist in the world, the Commander in Chief of Hamas himself, Major Ray Kerman, is picked up by the Mossad at some kind of a secret meeting in Marseille, shipped in by the French government via Taverny, the headquarters of their Special Forces operation.
“He is also secretly smuggled out. Plainly with the cooperation of the French Secret Service, who proceed to tell a pack of lies the size of a grown wallaby. All about the happenings of that night, the deaths at the restaurant…in Marseille…France,” he put heavy emphasis on the last word. “What’s the great Middle Eastern hit man fundamentalist doing in bloody France anyway? He MUST have had their protection. Forget that, sir. He DID have their protection.
“Which brings me to my last point. Sometime today, the GCHQ listening station in Cyprus picks up this message. It’s plainly military, as you will see when I show you in a minute. And it was transmitted by a bloody Frenchman from a spot in the desert nineteen miles north of Riyadh. It was also answered by a Frenchman.
“Now how about that? And what I want to know is this: WHO PRECISELY was our Major Kerman meeting in Marseille when the bullets started flying? And where is Major Kerman right now?
“And, anyway, does that not suggest to you that France is somehow mixed up in this Saudi oil bullshit — right up to the armpits?”
Arnold Morgan again sipped his wine thoughtfully. Kathy ordered Parma ham and melon followed by Dover sole, and all three of them fell about laughing.
But the Admiral was taking this seriously; the French connection, that is, not the Dover sole. “Jimmy, I have not heard one sentence from anyone that suggests the attacks on the Saudi oil fields were conducted by anyone other than Arabs, probably al-Qaeda but most definitely by Saudis.”
“They could not have done it, Arnie. I’ve been studying the bloody semantics all day. They could not. Unless the whole country was in revolution, including the Army, the National Guard, the Navy, and the Air Force. Otherwise it could not have happened.”
“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 anyo
ne 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
TUESDAY MORNING, MARCH 23
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: UP TWO!..UP FOUR!..UP SIX!.. Dollar amounts unheard of in the sedate and mostly unexciting world of oil futures. Those “up twos” were normally just cents, usually trading in a slowish band between twenty and thirty-five dollars. Today they were not cents; they were dollars — regular greenbacks — and the yells were so loud no one heard the second opening bell, which sounded at 10:02 A.M., signaling the start of crude oil trading.
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