Hunter Killer (10 page)

They had only four minutes to wait. And when General Jobert’s Citroën began its fifteen-mile journey into the city, there was a Mossad tail right behind, with two of Simon Baum’s most lethal operators in the two front seats. They were not so much agents as hit men.

They drove directly into Marseille, and ran west down the wide, main boulevard of La Canebiere, toward the Old Port. With the busy harbor in front of them, they turned right and made their way to the north side, to the Quai du Port, and immediately turned away from the water, into the labyrinth of streets that housed some of the best restaurants in Marseille.

The army staff car came to a sudden halt outside the world-renowned fish restaurant L’Union, and both General Jobert and General Rashood disembarked and hurried up the two front steps. They were inside, with the big mahogany doors closed behind them, before the Mossad trackers had turned the corner.

But Simon Baum’s men saw the car backing into a parking space not twenty yards from L’Union’s main entrance, and they guessed that the passengers had already made an exit. Agent David Schwab jumped out and waited outside the restaurant, while his colleague, Agent Robert Jazy, parked the car and returned on foot.

Five minutes later both men went into the paneled bar area of the big, noisy restaurant and identified General Rashood from Jacob Fabre’s photographs, which they had received from Paris via the Internet. Neither of them could identify General Jobert, and the third man, now speaking to the two new arrivals from Paris, was unknown to them.

The Mossad agents did not know it, but they were watching a minor piece of secret history. This was the first meeting between General Rashood and Col. Jacques Gamoudi, the two men who would command the military assault on Saudi Arabia.

In two separate places, twenty-five feet apart at the long, polished wooden bar, the five men sipped glasses of wine from the vineyards of the Pyrenees, until, shortly after 7:30
P.M
., General Jobert and his men walked out of the bar into the main restaurant and were led to a wide, heavy oak table covered with a bright red-and-white checkered tablecloth in the corner of the room. Two flickering candles were jammed jauntily into the necks of empty bottles of Chateau Petrus, the most expensive Bordeaux in France.

The three men occupied three sides of the table; no one’s back was turned to the arched entrance across the room. Colonel Gamoudi and General Rashood had already established a mutual respect and were locked in conversation, mostly involving the armored vehicles necessary to storm Riyadh’s main royal palace from the front. General Rashood favored a quiet, fraudulent entry against unsuspecting guards, who could then be taken by surprise, with an armored vehicle jamming the main gates open.

Jacques Gamoudi was inclined to hit those main gates with a tank, and have his infantry charge from behind that heavier armored vehicle, moving straight ahead, firing from the hip.

“My method is less likely to cause us casualties,” said Rashood. “Because that way we’ll call all the shots, with a huge element of surprise. A tank’s damned noisy and likely to alert the entire place.”

“It’s also very scary,” replied Colonel Gamoudi. “And may even cause a quick surrender of the palace guards.”

At this point the waiter came, and all three of them decided to order the local speciality, bouillabaisse, a seafood stew with onion, white wine, and tomatoes flavored with fennel and saffron. One big steaming bowl for three. They ordered a bottle of white wine from Jurançon, and some Italian antipasto to start.

“I think one of our main problems will be getting the guys in for the hit on the King Khalid Air Base,” said Rashood.

“Bouillabaisse—air base—it’s all the same to us, heh?” laughed Gamoudi. “And the sea’s the key to both operations.”

Michel Jobert chuckled, and the conversation continued in a light-hearted manner until the main course arrived. The principal decisions had been made. Both Rashood and Gamoudi had accepted the money. The plan was to be executed as masterminded by Prince Nasir.

But they all understood that the sticking point was the entry into southwestern Saudi Arabia. “It’s all very well for you, Jacques Gamoudi,” said Rashood. “Your guys are in and ready, as soon as you arrive. I have to get my squad into the country, and it’s not going to be easy. I don’t know if the Saudis can fight, but there’s a lot of them. And we have to be extremely careful.”

“That’s true, General,” replied Colonel Gamoudi. “Because my operation depends entirely on the news from Khamis Mushayt. It’s critical that the Saudi Army in Riyadh understand there has been a major surrender in the south. And critical that they know it before my opening attack.”

Rashood nodded in agreement. At which point, agents David Schwab and Robert Jazy suddenly appeared in the waiting area of the main dining room. Now they each wore long, black leather coats, which they had not been wearing in the bar. They were standing in the slightly raised entranceway at the top of the two wooden steps that led down into the dining area, facing Jacques Gamoudi head-on, from a distance of around 100 feet. They stood to Rashood’s left and General Jobert’s right. Colonel Gamoudi was staring back at them, when, amazingly, he saw each of them swiftly drawing AK-47s from inside the front flaps of their coats. He watched the unmistakable shape of the short barrels being raised to shoulder height.

With the instincts of the lifetime combat soldier, he grasped the heavy table and hurled it forward, wine, bouillabaisse and God knows what else crashing to the floor. With his left hand he grabbed Rashood by the throat and with his right he grabbed the General, hurling them both down.

The opening burst from the AK-47s smashed a line of bullets clean down the middle of the hefty table top, which now acted as a barrier between Rashood, Gamoudi, and Jobert, and the flying lead from the Kalashnikovs. All three of them could hear the bullets whining around the room. Behind them, two waiters had gone down with blood pumping from their chests.

Crockery was shattered, bottles of wine were smashed, women were screaming, everyone was rushing for cover. Another ferocious burst of fire confirmed that the hit men were making their way across the restaurant. Jacques Gamoudi drew the only weapon he had, his big bear-hunting knife, and Ravi Rashood pulled his Browning 9mm from the wide leather belt near the small of his back.

Colonel Gamoudi snapped to Rashood, “It’s you they’re after,
mon ami
. I’ll take one, and you shoot the other soon as you can see him. General Jobert, stay right there behind the table.”

And with that, the iron-souled mountain guide crashed under the adjoining tables until he reached a heavy white column in the center of the room. The precise path of Jacques Gamoudi was obvious by the sheer volume of destruction he left behind him on the floor of the restaurant, overturned tables and chairs, magnificently cooked seafood, burning candles mostly extinguished by wine and the contents of ice buckets.

But it was impossible to shoot him as he dived beneath the tables, staying low, hammering his way forward. However, the Mossad men gave it their best shot, and bullets ricocheted in all directions.

Agent Jazy now hung back, at once looking for the charging Gamoudi and trying to provide cover for his partner, as David Schwab moved forward for the kill, advancing toward the upturned table, behind which his quarry was crouching.

But somehow Jacques Gamoudi got around behind Jazy. He leaped at him with a bound that would have made a mountain lion gasp, and plunged his knife right into the man’s throat, ripping the windpipe and jugular. Jazy had no time to scream. He dropped his rifle and fell back, dying, in the mighty arms of Le Chasseur.

Agent Schwab turned around and swung his rifle straight at Gamoudi, who was using Jazy as a human shield. He hesitated for one split second, and Ravi Rashood, moving even faster than Gamoudi, dived horizontally out from behind the table and shot Schwab clean through the back of the head, twice. A line of bullets, hopelessly ripping across the timbered ceiling, was the Mossad man’s only reply.

The entire room was now a bloodbath—or at least a blood-and-wine bath. Fifteen diners were injured, five of them seriously, four staff were dead, including the headwaiter, who had been caught in the opening crossfire. Such was the speed of the battle that no one had yet called either an ambulance or the police. Surviving staff members were either in shock or still taking cover.

Colonel Gamoudi and General Rashood hauled Michel Jobert back to his feet. They grabbed for the two fallen AK-47s, all three of them running for the exit.

Outside they could see a black Peugeot with a driver plainly awaiting the two hit men. To the amazement of his two companions General Jobert cut the driver down in cold blood, right behind the wheel, with a burst of fire that obliterated the windshield and riddled the driver’s-side door, and the driver’s left temple.

They piled into the backseat of their own car, and General Jobert snapped to their driver, “Aubagne! And step on it! Back roads. Stay off the highway.”

And at high speed they headed out of Marseille; they were men who were above suspicion, two decorated French Army officers, one of them serving at the highest possible level, and an Arabian General called in to assist France in a highly classified operation, by presidential edict.

“Trouble, sir?” asked the driver.

“Not really, Maurice. Couple of amateurs made a rather silly misjudgment,” said Michel Jobert. “Not a word, of course. We were nowhere near Marseille.”

“Certainly not, sir. I know the rules.”

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER
19, 2009
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, personal assistant to the director of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agency, was looking for the third time that fall at a sudden, sharply upward spike in the world’s oil prices. He had noticed one in September, another in October, and here were West Texas Intermediate trading futures today at almost fifty-three dollars a barrel on Wall Street’s NYMEX exchange.

It was the same story on the International Petroleum Exchange in London. Brent Crude had actually hit $55 there earlier that morning, before New York opened for trading. In mid-afternoon it fell back to $48.95. The pattern was not drastic, but it was steady.

Somewhere in the world, perhaps shielding behind international brokers and traders, there was a new player in the market. And as Jimmy Ramshawe put it,
the bastard’s buying a whole lot of oil. And he’s doing it on a damn regular basis…I wonder who the hell that is.

Gas was now four dollars a gallon at the pumps in the United States, which was pleasing no one, especially the President. In England it had hit almost nine dollars. And so far as Jimmy could see, it was all caused by just one big player in the futures market, on both side of the Atlantic—buying, buying, buying, driving up the prices.

Lt. Commander Ramshawe could not fathom how the buyer had managed to keep it all so secret. The sheer volume of oil futures being purchased was of mammoth proportions. Someone who thought he needed an extra 1.5 million barrels a day, or almost 40 million barrels a month.

“Multiply that bastard by forty-two,” muttered Ramshawe, “and you’ve got some bloody mongrel out there trying to buy one and a half billion gallons of gas every month. Christ! He must have a lot of cars.”

The initial suspect, in the young Lt. Commander’s opinion, had to be China.
A billion bloody cars and no oil resources. But then
, he thought,
they wouldn’t do it like that. Not out there on the open market, buying high-priced futures. They’d cut some kind of a deal with Siberia or Russia or the Central Asians around the Baku fields. It can’t be them
.

And it could scarcely be Russia, which now had all kinds of oil resources from the Baku fields. Great Britain? No, they still have their own North Sea fields. Japan? No. They had very cozy long-term contracts with the Saudis for both gasoline and propane. So who? Germany? France? Unlikely. Especially France, who for years has been reducing its oil requirements in favor of nuclear-powered electricity plants.

Nonetheless Lt. Commander Ramshawe reckoned it had to be one of them, because no one else could play on that scale. He keyed into the Internet and checked the energy status of France, which was not only the fifth largest economy in the world but also one of the largest producers of nuclear power.

Ramshawe read a pocket summary of the recent history of the French oil giant Total, merged with the Belgian company Petrofina in 1999. Then it merged again, with Elf Aquitaine, to create, unimaginatively, TotalFinaElf, the fourth largest publicly listed oil company in the world—right after ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP.

The company had proven reserves of 10.8 billion barrels, and production of 2.1 million barrels a day. It owned more than 50 percent of all the refining capacity in France. TotalFinaElf was the seventh largest refiner on earth. It was a major shareholder in the 1,100-mile pipeline out of Baku, through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Christ!
thought Jimmy.
They’re big enough, but why? France uses only 1.9 million barrels a day, and if push came to shove their own oil company produces more than that. Beats the hell out of me, unless they’re closing down their nuclear power plants and switching back to oil.

So far as Ramshawe could see, this was a hugely unlikely scenario. France had reduced her oil usage in the past thirty years, from 68 percent of gross energy consumption to around 40 percent. But she still imported 1.85 million barrels a day, mostly for road, rail, and air transportation. As a nation she was totally reliant on imported oil, the vast bulk of it coming from Saudi Arabia, with some from Norway and a very small amount from other producers.

France generated 77 percent of her electricity from nuclear power, and she was the second largest exporter of electricity in Europe.
They’re not going to close down the bloody nuclear plants, are they?

The young Lieutenant Commander actually had other things to do right now, but he put in two routine calls, to the International Petroleum Exchange in London and to NYMEX in New York, leaving messages at both numbers to call back the National Security Agency in Fort Meade.

Ramshawe knew both men at those numbers, having talked with them during various oil crises before. He did not want this to be official. He just wanted someone to mark his card on who was the unexpected major buyer in the world oil market right now, the guy driving up the prices not to earth-shaking levels, but enough to cost a lot of people a great deal of money.

Lt. Commander Ramshawe knew there were always reasons for things. When someone was in any market, buying heavily, there was always a solid reason. Just as when someone was out there selling there was always a reason. And in Jimmy Ramshawe’s global view, those reasons needed to be located and assessed. As his boss Adm. George Morris so often said,
Damned good intelligence officer, young Ramshawe.

And it did not take him long to find his answers. Roger Smythson, a very senior oil broker in London, said he could not be certain, but the buyer who was unsettling the London market was undoubtedly European. He had already run a few traces, and it looked like France.

Orders, he said, were coming in from brokers based in Le Havre, France’s biggest overseas trading port, which contains the largest of all the French refineries, Gonfreville l’Orcher. In Roger’s view, the fingerprints of TotalFinaElf were all over some huge trades made from that area.

From New York, the suspicion was the same. Frank Carstairs, who worked almost exclusively as a dealer for Exxon, said flatly, “I don’t know who it is, Jimmy, but I’d bet a lot of money it’s France. The orders are all European, and there’s a big broker down in the Marseille area who’s been very busy these past couple of months.”

“That’s a major oil area, right?” said Ramshawe. “TotalFinaElf country, right?”

“Oh, sure,” said Carstairs. “Marseille handles around one-third of all France’s crude oil refining. Terminals at Fos-sur-Mer, that’s us, Exxon. Berre, that’s Shell, Le Mede, TotalFina, and Lavera, BP. They got a damned great methane terminal down there, and an underground LPG depot the size of Yankee Stadium.”

“That’s liquid petroleum gas, right, Frank?”

“You got it, Jimmy. Mostly from Saudi Arabia, like the majority of French oil products.”

“Thanks, Frank. Don’t wanna keep you. Just wondering what’s going on, okay?”

SAME DAY
, 7:00
P.M
.
CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

The big Colonial house that stood well back from the road, fronted by a vast lawn and a sweeping blacktop drive, was not an official embassy of the United States. Though no one would have guessed it.

There were two armed Special Agents, one just inside the wrought-iron gates, one in a black government automobile near the front door. There were surveillance cameras set into the gables of the house, laser beams, alarm bells, and God knows what else.

And the visitors were legion. In any one month, the agents at various times waved through cars from foreign embassies, cars from the Pentagon, cars from the National Security Agency, cars from the CIA, and cars from the White House.

When Adm. Arnold Morgan (Ret.) was in residence, there were a lot of people with a lot of problems who needed the advice of the old “Lion of the West Wing.” And since many of those problems had a direct bearing on the health and well-being of the United States of America, the Admiral usually agreed to give people the time of day.

As retirements went, the autumn of the Admiral’s life was full of bright colors. The former National Security Adviser to the President was still in action, unpaid, but still growling…
I wouldn’t trust that sonofabitch one inch.
So much for the President of one of the richest states in the Middle East…
Who? That dumbwit couldn’t fight his way out of a Lego box, never mind build a decent nuclear submarine.
So much for the science and research director of the world’s fourth largest Navy.

Admiral Morgan was like a desert sheik dispensing wisdom and guidance to his flock at the weekly
Majlis
. Except the Admiral’s flock was worldwide, with no racial boundaries. There were probably ten foreign armed services, allies of the United States, who preferred to check in with the Admiral before making any major decision. The same applied, often, to the President of the United States, Paul Bedford.

Most of the Admiral’s guests came at their own request. But the guest tonight was there as an old friend, invited for dinner by Admiral and Mrs. Morgan, the beautiful Kathy, who had served as his secretary in the White House with the patience of Mary Magdalene.

Gen. David Gavron, the sixty-two-year-old Israeli ambassador to the United States, was unmarried, though there were at least two Washington hostesses who were nearly certain he might marry them. He loved dinner with Arnold and Kathy, and he always came alone. The three of them met quite often, occasionally at their favorite Georgetown restaurant, sometimes at the Israeli embassy, three miles north of the city, and sometimes here in Chevy Chase.

It was growing cold in Washington, and Admiral Morgan considered he was in the final couple of weeks of his outside barbecue season. On the grill were five gigantic lamb chops—which would be eaten with a couple of bottles of Comtesse Nicholais’s 2002 Corton-Bressandes, a superb Grand Cru from her renowned Domaine Chandon de Briailles, in the heart of the Côte de Beaune.

Morgan was a devotee of the Comtesse’s red burgundy, and considered lamb chops to be utterly incomplete without it. Which meant that the chops were incomplete about a dozen times a year, because Corton-Bressandes cost around fifty dollars a bottle, and Arnold considered that a touch extravagant on a day-to-day basis.

However, he had purchased a couple of cases of the 2002 several years ago, and he took great delight in serving it to special guests, like David Gavron, who had introduced him to the perfect, silky dessert wines of the old Rothschild vineyards fifteen miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Admiral Morgan’s cellar was never without a case of that.

Tonight it was a very relaxed dinner. The wine was perfect and the chops were outstanding. Afterward they each had a slice of Chaume cheese and finished the Burgundy. By 11
P.M
. they had retired to the fireside in the timbered book-lined study, and Kathy had served coffee—a dark, strong Turkish blend that Gavron himself had brought as a gift.

They were discussing their usual subject, terrorism and the sheer dimension of the pain-in-the-ass it caused all over the world, the cost and the inconvenience. Which was, after all, what the terrorists intended.

Quite suddenly, General Gavron asked, “Arnold, have you heard anything more about our old friend Maj. Ray Kerman?”

“Plenty,” replied the Admiral. “Too damned much. Volcanoes, power stations, and god knows what. But we never really got a smell of him. He’s an elusive sonofabitch.”

“We nearly had him, you know,” said the General. “Damn nearly had him.”

Morgan looked up sharply. “What do you mean, nearly had him?”

“Darned nearly took him out.”

“You did? Where? When?”

“Couple of months ago. Marseille.”

“Is that right? I never heard anything.”

“I’m not surprised. But do you remember a major gangland killing in a restaurant? Bullets flying. Customers injured, staff dead?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“No. The French police covered it up pretty tight.”

“You’ve lost me, David—what about Kerman?”

“The night before the killings, we picked up Kerman arriving in Paris. On an entirely empty Air France flight, big European Airbus-Boeing. Then we located him again at the French Foreign Legion training base at Aubagne, just east of Marseille. Remember, we want Kerman just as badly as you do.”

“And then?”

“We sent two of our best agents in.”

“Assassins?”

“Agents, with a…well…flexible agenda.”

“And what happened?”

“They were both killed stone dead in some kind of a shootout. But of course no one knew who they were. The French police announced it was a gangland killing, involving drugs, tried to blame one of the dead waiters.

“We never even knew what was going on till we saw police pictures of two dead men being carried out of the restaurant. They were never even released, far less published, but one of our field officers saw them, and instantly identified one of the bodies on the stretcher, throat cut wide open.”

“Christ!” said Morgan. “What about the other agent?”

“Also dead. Two bullets to the back of the head, fired from a semi-automatic Browning high-power pistol…nine millimeter. The SAS has used them for years, but not many other modern forces do.”

“None of this was in the newspapers, right?”

“Certainly not. For some reason the police, or the French government, someone, wanted this thing played right down. We of course were not anxious to have the names of our dead agents plastered all over the place. And they carried no identification with them. We just decided to let it ride. And the French kept it quiet for us. The bodies apparently vanished. And no one ever heard anything more. But it was Kerman we were after. And Kerman, I believe, whose finger was on the trigger of his trusty Browning service revolver.”

“You think he cut the other agent’s throat?”

“No. That must have been his buddy, whoever that was.”