Hunter Killer (28 page)

There was an element of frustration, of course, because there was nothing visible for the fighter-bombers to attack, but there was also an element of cowardice. These minor royals had been brought up to a life of unimaginable luxury, and their principal concern was for their own safety.

But the Air Force had another Achilles’ heel. The ground staff had no wish to become involved in a war in which they might conceivably be bombed during the course of some kind of internal power struggle. Flight technicians, air traffic controllers, and personnel concerned with fueling and arming the aircraft were just melting away into the vast deserts that surrounded the major Saudi bases.

The only real activity within the Air Force was at the Riyadh base, where Number One Squadron, Royal Flight, was located. This fleet contained several Boeing 737s and 747s, British Aerospace executive jets, and other chartered aircraft. All of them were busy ferrying senior members of the royal family to neighboring Arab countries, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. In some cases they were flying as far afield as Morocco, Switzerland, Spain, and France.

Inside the blasted ramparts of Dir’aiyah, under heavy camouflage, Colonel Gamoudi was bringing his force to a high state of readiness. He had great faith in General Rashood, in the south, and as darkness fell his petroleum tanker teams worked on the tasks of refueling the tanks and armored vehicles and loading the trucks with weapons and ammunition. He had always planned to leave this part of the operation to the last minute. Even if anyone had observed the convoy of gas tankers moving through the dusk and into the ruins, it would be far, far too late to do anything about it.

Prince Nasir himself, now in combat uniform—desert boots, fatigues, camouflage jacket—with a red-and-white-checkered
ghutra
, remained at the heart of the preparations, staying close to Jacques Gamoudi, watching an outstanding professional soldier make ready to capture a city.

TUESDAY, MARCH
23, 1900
YEMENI MOUNTAINS, ABOVE KHAMIS MUSHAYT

Ravi Rashood and his men broke camp as dusk fell over the desert. His sixty-strong troop, including his own Hamas personnel, began the march behind the al-Qaeda militia. Each man’s face was blacked with camouflage cream. They all carried high explosive and their own personal weapons, plus the two big machine guns between teams of four men.

They had considered making the journey to their three separate destinations using trucks, because it was so much quicker. But General Rashood had decided against this. The level of high alert at both the military base and the Air Force base was, he decided, too big a risk. “The only thing worse than failure is discovery,” he told his men. And all the senior officers agreed.

And so they faced the five-mile walk, down to the loop road that crossed the river and ran past both bases before rejoining the road it originally left. They traveled in single file, marching cross-country, staying off the old Bedouin tracks, with two al-Qaeda outriders mounted on camels a mile in front of the leaders, checking for intruders.

At 2100 precisely, there would be a truck breakdown to their right, two miles south of the air base, blocking the only approach from the west. They would cross the road into the rough ground that surrounded the airfield, knowing there could be no danger on their right flank.

Rashood’s men had watched this road every night since their arrival, and nothing had ever come down from the left, from the military base itself. The General supposed there must be an internal road between the Army and the Air Force, and he placed just two sentries with a big machine gun on the left flank beside the road. If any traffic approached, both the vehicle and its passengers would be eliminated instantly.

They reached the road on time, and said good-bye to the sixman command team, the men with the communications equipment that would be essentially their only lifeline if things went badly wrong. The six would take up position on high ground overlooking the air base about a half mile to the north, with the capability of communicating with the General, the al-Qaeda commander, and all three of the demolition force’s team leaders. They could also call up reinforcements in the town of Khamis Mushayt if there were a rescue requirement. General Rashood considered this most unlikely.

The combat teams crossed the road in pitch dark in groups of four, making a run across the blacktop on the command of the leaders. It was 2125 when General Rashood finally crossed the road, the last man to leave the “safe” side of the track.

This was the point where the attacking forces broke up. Maj. Paul Spanier and Maj. Henri Gilbert separated their twelve-strong groups and moved east, for the long walk around the air base to the high bracken at the edge of the wire on the north fence. Ten men who would go in separately and head for the aircraft hangars, then help to fight for the main entrance, would move along behind them. The two wire-cutters marched in the lead with the two French Majors.

General Rashood led his troop to the west to take up position four and a half miles away, close to the main gates of the military base. The al-Qaeda fighters who would launch the diversionary attack at the gates to the air base were under orders to begin at 0055, five minutes before every aircraft on the base was blown to pieces.

Meanwhile, it was al-Qaeda’s task to ensure that the troop carrier trucks were in position, well hidden in the desert, with drivers ready to come in and evacuate the aircraft demolition teams on the north side. The team that blew the hangars and then assisted the al-Qaeda fighters at the gates would ultimately leave through the hills on the north side of the road with the local forces.

Only General Rashood and his twelve-strong attack squadron would remain on the ground after the air base was wiped out. And they would be stationed before the gates of the military city.

The night was cloudy, but the terrain had dried out since a prolonged afternoon rain shower. It was extraordinarily quiet, and General Rashood had scheduled a ten-minute break after the five-mile walk-in from the mountains, not because of the distance but because they had all carried heavy loads of explosives and arms over very uneven ground.

And at the end of this time, the General shook hands with Major Spanier and Major Gilbert and wished them luck. He said good-bye to the al-Qaeda freedom fighters and also to many of the combat troops with whom he had become well acquainted. It was unlikely he would ever meet any of them again.

Upon completion of the operation, the majority of his troops were being flown in three helicopters from the northern slopes of the mountains back into Yemen. The General had authorized this because the Saudis’ surveillance capability in this part of the country would be nonoperational.

As no one had known of their arrival, no one would know of their departure. All of the French troops would return home by air, taking off from the Yemeni capital, San’a, which is situated deep in the interior. Air France flies once a week to this biblical city, said to have been built by Shem, the son of Noah. This week there would be two flights.

General Rashood himself would fly in a Saudi Air Force helicopter directly from the Khamis Mushayt base to Riyadh, where he would join General Gamoudi and Prince Nasir and assist them with the final capitulation of the city.

Meanwhile, there was a great deal of work to do in the southwest. Major Spanier and his team traversed the perimeter of the air base and were in position by 2235. They made contact with the al-Qaeda commander who had the getaway trucks in position. He was accompanied by four armed bodyguards, two of whom would drive the trucks, and they checked radio frequencies with the senior French officer in case there should be an emergency.

By 2250, the wire-cutter detail had clipped out an entry point in the fence. There were no lights on out here, on the remotest side of the air field, which General Rashood had considered to be absurd. But this was a very quiet place, and no one had ever even dreamed of attacking it before. Not even the Yemeni in their most virulent mood against the Saudis.

And so, in the pitch dark, Major Gilbert and his eleven men began to move through the wire, racing inward, away from the perimeter road, and then swerving right, into the dark part of the field where the thirty-two British-built Tornadoes were parked in four lines of eight.

The men split into six teams of two each and began their work. Four teams started at the far ends of the four lines. The other two teams concentrated on the eight remaining aircraft, the ones nearest the perimeter, the ones closest to the approaching headlights of the guard vehicles.

The teams on the Tornadoes actually had a far better view of the perimeter road. It was Major Spanier’s group, working in among the F-15s, who were unsighted by the thirty-two Tornadoes and could not see clearly along the road that led back to the hangars.

Which was why General Rashood had two machine gunners right now prostrated behind the wheels of the two F-15s closest to the perimeter. From ground level they could provide cover for both groups. But the moment Maj. Henri Gilbert’s men had completed their work on the first six aircraft, two of the saboteurs would swap their det-cords, explosives, and screwdrivers for machine guns.

They would take up new positions, behind the aircraft wheels at the farthest point, down the perimeter road. No chances. High-explosives men, working on targets, tend to grow preoccupied with their tasks. They need guards.

And one by one they attacked the Saudis’ fighter-bombers. They unscrewed the panels that protected the engines on the starboard side, clipped out a gap in the wires that ran across this side of the block, and clamped on the first of the magnetic bombs that would blast the entire engine asunder. The bomb was of sufficient force to split the engine into two pieces and also to blow out the cockpit and control panels. Under no circumstances would this fighter-bomber ever fly again.

The French Special Forces were never certain how much fuel was aboard each aircraft, but they were sure that some of them were fully fueled. Observing from the long bracken in the afternoons with General Rashood, they had noticed that some of the Tornadoes had moved straight to the takeoff point without refueling at all. Thus there was the high probability that the ensuing fires, as a result of the initial blasts, would be extremely hot, and would very likely leave only burned-out hulks in their crackling-red wake.

The teams worked carefully, using hammers and sharp pointed steel “punches” to bang a hole through each panel through which to thread the det-cord. When the bomb was fixed and armed, they refixed the panels and ran the det-cord out to a point midway between four aircraft.

And there one of their senior high-explosives technicians spliced the four lines into one “pigtail” and screwed it tightly into a timing clock. They checked their own watches, and after the first aircraft were dealt with at 2315, they set the main timed fuse for one hour and forty-five minutes. Each set of four aircraft thereafter would have their detonation times adjusted for the 0100 blast.

And despite the certainty of their operation—the definite fact that these bombs would blow up at 0100—they still made sure that no bits of det-cord, screwdrivers, or any traces of the operation were left lying around.

Even if they had to abort the mission, run for cover, or even find themselves on the wrong end of a firefight, it remained essential that no one ever know the French Special Forces had worked on the airfield at Khamis Mushayt.

Two patrols came and went, neither one of them even pausing as they rushed past the parked Tornadoes and F-15s. Each time, the jeeps set off from the hangars, the lookout men spotted them, and everyone hit the ground. Each time, the jeeps never even slowed down as they came past the ops area of the French Majors.

At 0042 the tiny alarms went off on each man’s watch, signaling the scheduled ETD of the last patrol. For the third time, everyone hit the ground, knowing that, fourteen minutes from now, the jeep, packed with its six armed guards, would drive by less than fifty feet from the demolition teams.

They also knew that as that jeep drove away from the big doors to the two massive aircraft hangars, almost a half mile from where they were working, their own team would be into the gigantic doors, winding the det-cord, setting the timers, and concealing themselves in a place where they could see the blast, before charging inside to do their worst.

As the minutes ticked by, the tension rose, not because any of them was afraid of a straight fight, which they knew they would win anyway, but because of the danger of discovery—of the one careless move that would alert the Saudi patrol that something was afoot, the one-minute giveaway that might give the Saudis the split second they needed to report back to the military base that they may be under attack.

On came the jeep, and the men pressed their black faces into the ground down behind the aircraft wheels. Only the sentries kept their heads up, ready to machine-gun that jeep to oblivion should there be the slightest suspicion of discovery.

But the jeep came and went as it always did. Fast and unseeing. And at the hangar doors, the French explosives team was wrapping the det-cord around the locks, with one lookout on each of the field-side corners of the buildings just in case of a foot patrol.

There was, however, no danger of that. Tonight, this Air Force base was as inefficient as it had ever been. The defection of some of their senior officers, royal princes who apparently had matters to which they had to attend in Riyadh, had caused a shuddering effect on morale. The pilots were without proper leadership, and while the oil fields burned and the capital city collapsed into self-inflicted chaos, there was literally nothing for them to defend, never mind attack.

Air Forces need targets, and dozens of aircrew and indeed guard patrols had gone missing, heading for the Yemeni Mountains. The pilots, a more senior breed, had not deserted their posts or resigned their commissions or even left the area. But they were mostly asleep or just sitting around talking. They were not hired to guard and service fighter aircraft. They were hired to fly them, and there was at present nothing to fly them at.