Hunter Killer (26 page)

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, eh?”

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 anyone 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.”

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.

But the brokers did not need to hear it. They knew the time, and the pandemonium doubled, with an army of men in red, yellow, blue, and green jackets surging forward, roaring out bids for Brent Crude futures.

Exchange officials waited in vain for the chaos to die down. But it did not subside at all. It grew worse. And at 11
A.M
., for the first time in the history of the Exchange, the bell sounded long and hard to signify that trading was being suspended.

The chairman, Sir David Norris, addressed the floor, saying that he hoped everyone would agree that this uproar could not be allowed to continue. He pointed out, among other things, that it was grossly unfair to the female brokers and traders, who were less used to operating in the front row of a Rugby Union scrummage.

Sir David, who had been a considerable rugby player himself at Cambridge University, where he also won a cricket Blue, insisted that some form of order be returned to the floor. And he requested that the biggest buyers and sellers attend a private conference in his office immediately.

At least this gave the market time to recover its breath. But the underlying frenzy was ever present and the morning high of eighty-seven dollars never showed any sign of dropping. On London’s television news bulletins that evening, Sir David made a personal appearance to announce that the Exchange would not open on Wednesday morning. “Trading is temporarily suspended due to the situation in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Many people thought that the alacrity with which the New York market, NYMEX, immediately followed suit suggested that Sir David and the Prime Minister had been in direct contact with the White House in the past few hours.

It should be made clear that the International Exchange in London is not so much bigger or more important than NYMEX in New York. Indeed it is often smaller. But the five-hour time difference meant that London opened first and set the prices. New York had to sit and watch from 5
A.M
. until 10
A.M
. before they joined the daily battle for America’s fuel requirements.

And, of course, the knock-on effect from a tumultuous day’s trading, during which oil prices had tripled at source, was nothing less than shocking.

By that Tuesday evening, in the United States, gasoline was costing $8 a gallon, instead of $2.50. In London, petrol prices at the pumps had tripled to a similar amount in pounds sterling. It was the same all over Europe, except for France, where prices went up less than one euro, and then fell back.

Japan was in chaos. The country had no access to natural gas, and almost every household throughout the islands cooked with propane. That was LPG, the stuff still thundering out into the sea off the oil town of Ras al Ju’aymah. That was where Japan acquired a huge percentage of its daily cooking fuel.

Restaurant prices in Japan doubled, on the basis that soon no one would be cooking anything, except over a fire. There was a stupendous run on electric cookers, which would probably turn out to be a waste of time, since Japan’s energy grid was totally reliant on oil and gas from the Middle East.

Right now there were twenty-four Japanese tankers, between 4 and 1,000 miles from the Saudi oil ports in the Gulf. All of them were either on the verge of returning home or were trying to make the journey to other terminals, in the Black Sea or in other Gulf states. There was no oil available in the Red Sea, where the two main loading jetties were in ruins.

Internationally, airfares doubled overnight, led by British Airways and American Airlines, which immediately canceled all cheap transatlantic flights. And no one could really blame them, since no one knew the price jet fuel would fetch on the market at the end of the week.

The London stock market shuddered, the FTSE dropping 1,000 points in two hours. By the end of the day’s trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 842 points, wiping billions of dollars off corporate values. Airline stocks caved in worldwide, no one much wanting shares in flying corporations that could not afford their own fuel.

Industries all over the world that were reliant on heavy road transportation for food, agriculture, and automotives warned the public of drastic price increases unless the market stabilized. Shares in General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler crashed around 20 percent.

The population slowly awakened to the fact that the United States still imported one gallon in five of its gasoline from Saudi Arabia. And that particular gallon was about to vanish.

The Democratic administration had its back to the wall. And, in a special night session of Congress, Republican Senators and Representatives railed against the lunatic left-wing protection of the virgin wilds of Alaska, where oil-drilling had been so restricted by the shrill lobbies of Friends of the Earth, American Indians, Eskimos, and assorted tree-huggers.

The dire warnings of the Republicans throughout the twenty-first century had just come true in a blazing inferno on the other side of the world. America was too reliant on Arab oil, and especially reliant on Saudi oil. A reduction of 5 percent of its daily consumption would have represented an economic crisis for Uncle Sam. Twenty percent was earth-shattering.

On that Tuesday, at 9
P.M
., the President of the United States, Paul Bedford, a right-of-center Democrat and former naval officer, broadcast to the nation direct from the White House. He assured everyone that the United States was not entirely dependent on Saudi oil, and that U.S. consumption had been falling in recent years.

He said that in the great scheme of things, this was a mere glitch, although it most certainly highlighted the world’s vulnerability to terrorism. He said that once more the mighty economy of America had been shaken by actions on the other side of the world.

But it was not life threatening. He appealed for calm at the pumps, restraint in driving, and sympathy for “our very great friends, the Saudi royal family.” He said he was confident that the al-Sauds would turn once more to America in the great task of rebuilding its industry, which would mean profits and jobs in the U.S.

And he reiterated the observation of the British Prime Minister, who spoke on global television a few hours previously. “Saudi Arabia has not lost its oil,” said President Bedford. “It all remains intact beneath the desert floor. The Saudis have suffered a temporary setback in the mining and refining of that oil.

“With our help,” he added, “That will be corrected in the very near future. I spoke to the King a half hour ago, and he had to be awake very, very early to take my call. But he was calm and measured in his assessment of the damage.

“He does not know who could wish such harm to the peace-loving peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, and, quite frankly, neither do I. But the road back to prosperity is already being built. There will be American engineers in Riyadh with the King and his advisers before the end of this week.

“For the moment, we have lost twenty percent of our daily requirements of gasoline. And the Energy Secretary is working on a program of allocations that will see us through the coming months. A little restraint, common sense, and consideration—that’s all we need in order to come through this.

“Right now we are opening up new markets, finding more suppliers in South America. And I intend to speak to the Russian President in the morning with regard to special contracts in the Baku fields in Kazakhstan.

“I have ordered representatives of all the big oil corporations to report to Washington in the next twenty-four hours, and I intend to ensure there will be no price-gouging in this country. You may expect prices at the pumps to fall back. And in the wider picture of the economy, there will be corporate priorities, particularly for the major truck fleets and airlines.

“My fellow Americans, it is doubtful if the Saudis will ever need to provide twenty percent of our oil, ever again. This has been a wake-up call to the U.S.A., and I intend to place before Congress an immediate bill to step up drilling in northern Alaska.

“I have made it my personal crusade to rid this country once and for all of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And on that note, I wish you good night, and may God bless America.”

Which was a pretty good speech, for a Democrat in crisis. The problem was, no one took the slightest notice.

All through the night there were huge lines at the pumps right across the country, the oil companies were effectively charging anything they liked, and prices were spiraling upward like in some fourth-rate banana republic.

Under a dark March sky, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode again. As Grantland Rice once observed, “In dramatic lore, their names were Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. But these were only aliases.” In the U.S. of A, 2010, their real names were Gasoline, Diesel, Propane, and Jet Fuel.

And despite the President’s appeal for calm, there was an even greater force preparing to fan those flames of fear all over the world. Even as the President wished everyone good night, news-rooms all over the country were preparing for a bonanza of frightening news, the priceless commodity that puts newspaper circulations up and sends television ratings sky-high.

The papers were preparing to run thousands of extra copies, print advertising rates were about to hit an all-time high, and television advertising on the networks would instantly go to levels normally associated only with a Super Bowl Sunday or a presidential election.

Right now, the media was in fat city. And the more scared people became as they faced a loss of mobility, the more the world’s news editors and advertising execs liked it. This was the week to justify big salaries and colossal expense accounts.

Hang on to your hats, boys!

Things were calmer in Pompeii in
A.D
. 79.

TUESDAY, MARCH
23, 2100
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, MARYLAND

The U.S. Marine jet bearing the considerable figure of Adm. George Morris from San Diego touched down a little heavily. It taxied to the parking area, where a helicopter awaited him, rotors spinning, in readiness for the short journey to Fort Meade.

The Director of the National Security Agency had different priorities from both the administration and the politicians. Admiral Morris was not concerned with inflation, prices, or the economy. He wanted to know just three things: (1) who had blown up the Saudi oilfields; (2) why; and (3) might they do something else? Also he hoped to God young Ramshawe was on the case.

The Admiral was in his office twenty-three minutes after landing at Andrews Air Force Base. And Lt. Commander Ramshawe was on his way along the corridor with a file containing a high volume of speculation but very few undisputable facts. He went over more or less the same ground he had covered with Arnold Morgan, at the end of which the Admiral had said, “Jimmy, that’s all very well observed. And I’m sure you are onto something, but I don’t know what. Because there appears to be no motive.”

Admiral Morris sat still for a few minutes, ruminating, as he always did when a very grave problem stared him in the face. At length he said, “I do agree this was a military operation. But I can only imagine it was the Saudi military. No one else could possibly want to smash up the oil industry. To what end? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I tell you what, sir. It made sense to someone.”

“Guess so. You had a chat with the Big Man yet?”

“Uh-huh. Had dinner with him and Kathy last night.”

“And what does he say?”

“He thinks the wholesale devastation in Saudi Arabia could have been achieved only with submarines, SEALs, high explosives, and, in the end, missiles to hit the land targets.”

“That is the only way,” said the former Commander of a U.S. Carrier Battle Group. “Unless you bombed them, which plainly no one did. And you could not pull off something like that with amateurs planting bombs in the night.”