Hunter Killer (42 page)

“I don’t think he has much choice. Plainly he’s a man who could be charged with anything, and we know he stormed the royal palace in Riyadh. Charlie Brooks sent us a fucking photograph of him in the leading tank.

“What I’m hoping is, the French make an attempt on his life, as I’m certain they will. And then we can rush in and get to him first. That way he’ll be damn glad to shop his treacherous employers, and save his own skin by rowing in with us.”

“Well,” said Admiral Morris, “he won’t be able to return to France, will he?”

“Not likely,” replied Morgan. “Which means we also have to get his wife and family out of the goddamn Pyrenees where they live, because if we don’t, they’ll be as good as hostages. And Jacques, being the kind of man he is, may prefer to die to save her and the kids from the malevolence of his own government.”

“I wonder how the hell we’ll ever know if France has attempted to assassinate him,” muttered Jimmy Ramshawe. “Tell the truth, we don’t even know where he is at the moment. He was in Riyadh a week ago, but a week’s a long time in the assassination game.”

Just then, Morgan’s assistant secretary tapped and looked around the door. “Sir, there’s an urgent call for Lt. Commander Ramshawe from one of our envoys in Saudi Arabia…would he like to take it in the outside office?”

The Lt. Commander climbed to his feet, nodding in agreement, and stepped out of Admiral Morgan’s new White House headquarters. He sat at a spare desk in the outer room and said, “Ramshawe, who’s speaking?”

“Jimmy, it’s Charlie Brooks. I’m on the encrypted line, but I’m calling because I think something very interesting happened here last Thursday night. A couple of French hit men got wiped out in the middle of Olaya Street. They were both dead when the police arrived, one of ’em half in the car, which was a big Citroën. Paris registered. The other guy was lying behind it. They both carried Kalashnikovs, and witnesses say they were killed by the man they were after.”

“Oh yeah? Go on, Charlie.”

“Well, we have a few contacts in the Saudi police, and for a couple of days they carried out a regular investigation, just like it was a normal double murder. And then, according to our man Said, the investigation was stopped on the direct orders of the King. Apparently the car that drove the killer away from the scene was registered to King Nasir. And the police say that one of the men inside that car was Colonel Jacques Gamoudi. But there were a few reliable eyewitnesses, from whom the police took statements. They all say the same thing: the Citroën tried to run down two men at high speed, but it missed and stopped dead. There was some kind of a fight after that. And both the would-be murderers were killed by some terrible guy, obviously an expert in unarmed combat. One of ’em choked to death because of a broken neck, and the other had his nose somehow rammed into his brain.”

“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 Citroën at high speed straight at him on Olaya Street.”

“Presumably they missed,” said Morgan.

“They did. And both men in the Citroën 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
buoy
base
that night…It’s the specialty dish of Marseille, sir,” he added knowledgeably.

“Which is all the more reason why you should avoid making it sound like a submarine anchorage,” replied Morgan.
“BOUILLABAISSE, BOY! BOUILLABAISSE!”

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.

MONDAY, APRIL
5, 0900
THE WHITE HOUSE

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
Raise the Titanic!
and who afterward commented with characteristic self-deprecation, “I could have lowered the Atlantic for less!”

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 periscope depth. “Uh-huh,” he responded, half listening, half blowing all kingstons. Then the shock of the CNO’s words seemed to hit home. And for a moment he was speechless. He looked up. “Did you just say what I thought you just said?” he grated.

“Yessir.”

“Well, what the hell are you talking about? I thought we all agreed our plan of action—for the President to come out and accuse France of treachery and then to blockade her, while we’re still safe in the protection of solid world opinion. Isn’t that right?”

“Yessir. But I thought about it some more. A lot more. And in my view it’s a very shaky plan.”

“Alan, you and I have known each other for a lot of years. Don’t tell me you’re losing your nerve?”

“Nossir. I’m not at all. But when you finish looking at these charts, like I’ve been doing for most of the night, you’re going to see problems turning up every which way. You’ve already located one of them. The vast expanse of shallow water that surrounds the port of Le Havre. I presume you would like to maintain an element of secrecy, rather than charging into the attack on the surface like Captain Hornblower?”

“Alan, I want you to stand there and methodically, logically, destroy my plan. That way, if I agree with you, we can get going and start again. I don’t want to hear it in a disjointed way. You said, I think, ‘too difficult, too dangerous, and too expensive.’ Lay it on me in that order. And for Christ’s sake stop calling me sir.”

Admiral Dickson could take an order as sharply as he could issue one. “Arnie,” he said, “each of the seaports involves a wide, sprawling target. It’s impossible, as you well know, to blockade with just one ship, even if it is a submarine. I admit you could do it, if you went right ahead and sank something immediately, thus frightening the bejesus out of everyone. But I think we should avoid that kind of first-strike violence in French waters.

“So we’d probably want two submarines at each place—Le Havre, Cherbourg, Bordeaux, Brest, and Marseille. That’s ten Los Angeles–class SSNs from the Atlantic Fleet, most of them stationed well offshore because of the depth. We would need backup on the surface, mainly so the French could see we meant business. That would probably mean five frigates and five destroyers from our bases on the east coast. Plus two or three fleet oilers if we want them to work for several weeks. And even then the operation would only work off Cherbourg and Le Havre. There’s a substantial French Navy presence in the port of Brest, and there are always French warships off the coast of Marseille. Bordeaux is probably worse, because the biggest French Navy firing ranges are positioned all along that stretch of Atlantic coast, and there are French warships all over the place almost all of the time. We’d certainly need at the very minimum, say, six surface ships off those three places, if we want an intimidating presence.

“Arnie, in case you hadn’t noticed…that’s more than twenty-five U.S. warships…”

“It’s twenty-nine. And I had, asshole.”

Alan Dickson laughed. But he pressed on. “My next point is the danger element,” he said lightly. “And, again, in case you hadn’t noticed, the French have a very formidable, very modern, well-trained Navy.”

“I had, supreme asshole.”

“Well, Arnie,” continued the CNO, “consulting my little black book here, I would like you to consider the following facts: The French Navy runs two carriers, one for fixed-wing aircraft, one for helicopters.”

“Right now they’re both in Brest,” replied Admiral Morgan.

“The
Charles de Gaulle,
with twenty Super Etendards boarded, and the
Jeanne d’Arc,
with a lot of helicopters.”

“Excellent,” said Admiral Dickson. “Which brings me to the submarine force. The French run twelve of them, all very efficiently. There are six Rubis-class attack submarines currently operational, plus two strategic missile ships, and four Triomphant-class SSBNs.

“They also have thirteen operational destroyers, all of them armed with heavy arsenals of guided missiles. The latest Exocets. They run twenty guided-missile frigates stuffed with Exocets, some of them carrying the new extended-range missile, the MM40 Block 3, which is probably the world’s foremost anti-ship missile.”

“Is that the one with the new air-breathing turbojets instead of the old rocket motors?” asked Morgan.

“That’s right,” said Admiral Dickson. “Damn thing flies a hundred nautical miles”

“And at high speed, I read,” replied Morgan. “Just subsonic, but fast. Can we take it out?”

“Maybe. But it’s capable of complex flight profiles. And good enough for land attack.”

“Damn thing. I guess we don’t want to fool with it, unless we have to.”

“No, Arnie. We don’t want to do that. And in my view it’s not necessary.”

Admiral Morgan nodded, unsmiling. “Are we ready to talk expense?”

“No. Not quite. I just wanted to throw in a couple of points about the French military philosophy. As you know, they have always retained total independence. They build their own ships, missiles, and fighter aircraft. They always have. For them it’s always France. Nothing else. And they’re pretty damned good at it.

“It is my opinion that if we sank a French warship right off their own coast, they would fight back, probably with that damned missile. And it would not be the greatest shock in the world if they hit and destroyed a couple of our own frigates. And what do you want to do then? Bomb the Arc de Triomphe?”

“No,” said Morgan. “No, I really don’t.”

“Well, then I guess we have to think again. Because to my mind it’s just too reckless for us to blockade France and start sinking ships. They’re just a little too strong for that.”

“And ain’t that a goddamn lesson for the left-wing assholes in our own precious Congress,” growled Morgan. “In serious international discussion, even we, a hundred times stronger than almost all the other nations put together, do not much want to mix it with the French. And why? Because we know they have the capacity to hit back a little too hard. And what’s more, they are proud enough to do it. And we do not want to get involved with such an operation. That’s the precise philosophy that’s kept this nation safe from foreign invasion for so long. No one wants to tangle with our military. We’re just too tough.”

“I agree with you,” said Admiral Dickson. “Which still leaves us with the problem of how to deal with the French. And it’s not easy. Because once President Bedford has made his speech, and hopefully lined up the rest of the world on our side, someone needs to do something.”

“You got any suggestions?” asked Morgan. “I know you would not have come in here on a purely destructive mission.”

“Arnie, I think we gotta hit the French oil industry at source.”

“You do?”

“Sure, I do. As we know, they have replaced most of their Saudi crude oil and LPG contracts with ones from other Gulf States. And that’s their Achilles’ heel. That stretch of coastline is where the really big reserves are found—Abu Dhabi has an oil economy like Saudi Arabia; Kuwait has the second largest crude reserves on earth; and Qatar’s north gas field is the biggest LPG source in the world.

“And that’s where the French have gone. And that means French-owned VLCCs moving very swiftly through the Strait of Hormuz. In my opinion, Arnie, we should take out one French VLCC right there in the southern part of the strait. Smack it hard with a torpedo. No one will know what the hell’s happened.”

“Then what?” asked Morgan.

“We park a submarine at the south end of the Red Sea and wait for one of those big gas carriers to come steaming in from Qatar, en route back to Marseille, and we whack that one as well. Then the French will know they’re in trouble. But they will not be certain who their enemy is.”

“Then what?” asked Morgan.

“Well, I’d guess the French will get very haughty about the entire thing, but will say nothing. Not with the whole world ranged against them. But the next French VLCC to come trundling out through the Strait of Hormuz will be escorted by one of those brand-new Horizon-class destroyers that, as we speak, is with a French flotilla exercising out in the northern Arabian Sea…”

“Interesting,” said Arnie. “Outstanding research. I like it already. Then what?”

“We slam the escort with a torpedo. You know, a new heat-seeking ADCAP. It’ll go straight for the props. Probably blow off the stern. Put her on the bottom.”

“Beautiful,” replied Morgan. “Then what?”

“In deference to world opinion on ocean pollution, we sink the tanker with a battery of Harpoon missiles. That way we’ll set her on fire, and the oil will burn instead of making a huge slick all over the goddamn strait.”

“Yeah. I like it,” said Morgan. “The assassin with a heart, right?”

“Yes. That’s us. And that’ll do it. The French will have been hit by an unseen enemy. The world will laugh. And there’ll be a dozen suspects as to who committed the crime. But the French will not try again to bring oil out of the Gulf, because they will know what’s likely to happen. And they will not want to lose another of their magnificent Horizons. So they’ll just have to forget imported oil from the Gulf for a bit. Much like the rest of us.

“And, in the meantime, Arnie, we have to get a hold of Colonel Gamoudi and his family, and get ’em out of harm’s way. Then we can hang the French out to dry in front of the United Nations.”

Admiral Morgan stood up. “You win, old buddy,” he said. “You’re correct on all fronts. My damn plan was exactly what you say—too difficult, too dangerous, and too expensive.”