The Assassins Read online

  In the control room of the Saudi Early Warning Center, Major Musa was still contemplating these things when he noticed that Iranian Flight 6 was no longer on its normal course.

  He stared at the radar image for several seconds before acting on what he saw. Instead of flying straight toward the Jordanian border, IA#6 was now ten degrees south of its prescribed flight path. Musa reached for the hotline phone—another American innovation—that connected him with the Regional Air Traffic Control Center. His hand picked up the telephone handset—but before he could ask what was going on, the blip on his radar screen suddenly disappeared.

  Major Musa held the phone next to his chest as he waited for the radar repeater to make another revolution. When it did and he still saw nothing where Flight 6 had once been, he put the phone to his ear to make his inquiry. The line was dead.

  ARAMCO Gulf Service Vessel

  ________________________________________

  Safaniya Offshore Oil Field, Persian Gulf

  Sunday, 14 October 2007

  1057 Hours Local

  The 145-foot red and black hydrofoil with the words “ARAMCO Gulf Services” boldly painted on its side was a familiar sight in the northern Persian Gulf. Since the 1980s, ten of the high-speed craft had been routinely delivering crews, parts, mail, and food to the dozens of Saudi and Emirate-owned oil platforms up and down the Persian Gulf.

  On the bridge of the vessel, Ibrahim al-Hadid, the youthful pilot, spoke softly in Arabic to the helmsman—a fellow Yemeni. “Keep on this course, and maintain your speed. Ignore their signals to slow down. We do not want to be late making our delivery of this precious cargo to Safaniya.” If the two men were nervous, they didn't show it.

  Looming just a few hundred yards directly in front of the vessel, a massive, towering structure with sixteen huge steel legs, anchored atop the largest oil field in the Persian Gulf, rose up out of the blue water. The giant rig was much more than an oil platform. Since it was first towed into position in 1975, Safaniya had been transformed into the offshore hub for a spiderweb of seabed pipelines connected to scores of offshore rigs. On the huge platform's main deck, eighty-five feet above the water's surface, forty-six carefully calibrated pumps and hundreds of valves controlled the distribution of heavy crude and natural gas through a network of submerged pipes, sixty miles south to the supertanker terminal at Ras Tanura.

  But the biggest—and by far the most critical—pumps, valves, and controls aboard Safaniya didn't move oil or gas. Instead they moved millions of gallons of seawater—through pipes hundreds of feet underwater—injecting it deep into offshore and onshore pockets of heavy crude. The water was needed to force the diminishing supply of crude to the surface.

  As widely suspected, but known for certain by only a few dozen petroleum experts and oil geologists, the vast Saudi oil fields were slowly running dry. The myth of “gushers”—spouting black gold high in the air above a drilling rig—had been just that, a myth, for decades.

  The most critical function performed by the 343 Filipino, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indonesian, Yemeni, and Turkish workers aboard Safaniya was to ensure that the thirty-one enormous seawater pumps on the platform's 01 Level, immediately below main deck, never faltered. If the water stopped flowing, so, too, would the oil—from beneath the seabed as well as the huge Ramallah oil field ashore. Well over half of Saudi production depended on the seawater delivered by Safaniya.

  Ibrahim al-Hadid knew all this, for he had worked on the Safaniya platform for nearly five years—three of them after he had been recruited by Ansar al Islam. For the last two of those years the Islamic terror group that considered al-Hadid to be a member of their sleeper cells never contacted him. When he left the rig two weeks ago for his quarterly “shore rotation,” al-Hadid had planned on spending the time at home with his family in Yemen. But two days after arriving in Sana, an official from the Iranian Embassy had quietly approached him at his mosque. The Iranian simply said, “It is time. You have a mission from Allah.” Al-Hadid was given a ticket to Kaki, Iran, and when he arrived there, was introduced to the five young men now aboard the hydrofoil with him. Together they had been taken to the naval base at Mal Gonzel.

  It was there that the five men were escorted aboard the hydrofoil. The utility ship was tied up beneath a large canvas awning—not as protection from the sun, but to hide the vessel from the prying eyes of American, Indian, French, Russian, and Chinese intelligence satellites.

  For a week the five radical Muslims had gone out each night with an Iranian Navy officer who taught them the rudiments of navigation and seamanship. Each day they studied the Quran with a mullah from the nearby maddrassa. For two days prior to departing, al-Hadid and the others helped Iranian sailors load tons of ammonium nitrate in large barrels aboard the boat. Then, the five “volunteer martyrs” watched as a team of Revolutionary Guard explosives “experts” mixed diesel fuel with the white, powdery granules, tied the detonating charges together with primacord, and wired them together with eleven blasting caps—all of which were then connected in serial to an electric switch on the bridge.

  Before leaving the five men, the head of the explosives team showed al-Hadid how to hook up the battery to the blasting circuit—a lesson the Iranian concluded with the admonition, “Make this connection last, just before you approach your target.”

  The trip across the gulf had taken less than two hours and was totally uneventful. Now, as the huge platform loomed before them, al-Hadid connected the red and black leads from the battery to the open switch on the bridge and made a final check of the wires taped to the deck and running aft to the blasting caps. Behind the pilothouse in the galley, his three other colleagues were poised with AK-47s and hand grenades—a precaution against being stopped and boarded. He nodded to them and said, “It is almost time. We will strike a blow for Islam and against the infidels!”

  “Allah be praised. It will happen as you say,” one of them replied more perfunctorily than enthusiastic.

  “We will meet again in paradise! We go in triumph to meet Allah, bringing with us the heads of our enemies.” Al-Hadid turned back to the young jihadist at the steering station, put his hand on the helmsman's shoulder, and said, “Do not change course even if their security force begins firing. They have heavy firepower, but we are going fast enough that I think we can get through any attempt to stop us. Just keep speed and course steady. Estimated time—thirty seconds.” No one spoke as the ship hurtled toward the huge Safaniya oilrig while al-Hadid completed arming the terminals of the blasting circuit.

  “Are you ready?” al-Hadid asked in the direction of the boy.

  “Yes,” came the reply, almost a croak.

  “Good,” said al-Hadid. Then, a few seconds later, he reached for the switches on the console and shouted, “Now! Full speed. Allah Akbar!”

  Chartered Gulfstream V

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  Heading 130° at 30,000'

  Approaching Abqaiq Processing Center, Saudi Arabia

  Sunday, 14 October 2007

  1058 Hours Local

  Muammar al-Qutb was comfortable at the controls of the chartered Gulfstream V. An experienced, senior Egypt Air commercial pilot, al-Qutb had more than eight thousand hours in various commercial and charter aircraft. His employers knew that he often supplemented his income with charter work—a lucrative sideline in his home country and throughout the region. What they did not know was that the forty-two-year-old father of three was also a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—and had been for more than two decades.

  On Thursday, 11 October, al-Qutb had departed from the Charter FBO at Cairo's Marsa Alam airport after filing a flight plan for Maan airport, just outside of Amman, Jordan. Upon arrival, he taxied the Gulfstream into a hangar on the south side of the field, opposite the main passenger terminal. Once the hangar door closed, five of his Muslim Brotherhood colleagues immediately began stripping the interior out of the luxurious plane. Once the luxurious
leather seats, plush carpeting, lavatory, even the sound-deadening insulation were all removed, the formerly posh passenger cabin resembled the inside of a boxcar. It was then packed floor to ceiling with more than five thousand pounds of Libyan-made plastic explosives.

  By the time al-Qutb left for evening prayers at the nearby mosque on Friday afternoon, the luxury aircraft had been turned into a flying bomb. His only admonition to his associates: “Please ensure that the load is properly balanced—and that you do not add anymore fuel than necessary.” What the pilot al-Qutb knew, but the others did not, was that an identical chartered Gulfstream was being similarly modified in a hangar at the Beirut International Airport.

  Al-Qutb spent Saturday at Amman's most famous bordello on Al Bassah Street in the company of a Swedish prostitute. He arose early Sunday morning, and after filing a flight plan from Amman to Al Jubay, Saudi Arabia, he took off at 0855 without incident and, once at his cruising altitude, gently turned the heavily laden Gulfstream southeast. By 0955 al-Qutb was at 27,000 feet, the nose of the sleek jet pointed toward the sprawling Abqaiq processing facility off in the distance. He knew, from detailed briefings he had received almost a week before in Cairo, that two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's crude oil was exported from the gulf via the processing facility—amounting to a staggering ten million barrels a day.

  As he soared toward his destination, al-Qutb routinely responded over the radio to the series of instructions from Saudi air traffic controllers who periodically told him to change his IFF transponder code and vectored him over various waypoints—all designed to ensure that he avoided “sensitive” areas in the royal kingdom. On two occasions he heard controllers talking to the other Gulfstream that had left Beirut, en route to “pick up a VIP” at the port city of Yanbu—terminus for the sixty-inch liquid natural gas (LNG) pipeline that snakes parallel to the Petroline Pipeline for 750 miles from Shadqam to the Abqaiq processing facility, and then to Yanbu al Bahr, at Ras Tanura on the Persian Gulf—the “load point” for more than four thousand mammoth tankers annually. The export terminals at Ras Tanura on the Persian Gulf were, al-Qutb had been told, the largest in the world. What he didn't know was that nearly all of the royal kingdom's wealth passes through these critical nodes.

  Without them, the only way the Saudis could move any quantity of crude was by way of the old sixty-inch Trans-Arabian Pipeline that ran through Saudi Arabia and Syria to Az Zahrani on the Mediterranean Sea in Lebanon—but it had been shut down since the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s. The only other oil conduit through the kingdom was the old forty-eight-inch IPSA Pipeline that ran from the southern Iraqi border across Saudi Arabia. But it had been taken off-line in August 1990 as part of the UN oil embargo against Iraq, and Bedouin thieves had scavenged whole sections of it.

  Muammar al-Qutb knew all of this from the extensive briefings he had received in Cairo a week before he chartered the Gulfstream. He also knew that his fellow pilot—and fellow member of the Muslim Brotherhood—was supposed to depart Beirut that same morning on the other Gulfstream on a similar mission. But al-Qutb knew nothing of Iran Flight 6, the hydrofoil off the coast, or the four Ansar al Islam cells poised to strike at the Kirkuk-Baji and Ramallah-Basra pipelines in Iraq. Nor did he know about the scores of six-man teams of well-armed “Brothers” who had slipped into Saudi Arabia from Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, and Jordan earlier in the week or the others who had surreptitiously crossed the Red Sea into the kingdom from Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. Riding motorcycles and using handheld GPSs, these highly trained young zealots had traversed the largely uninhabited, trackless desert and assembled undetected at their staging areas near every Saudi city and royal palace.

  At 1058 on Sunday, 14 October, Muammar al-Qutb began to nose his Gulfstream down in a long straight trajectory toward the Abqaiq processing facility and the Ghawar oil field. Few of the 471 young men involved in this action knew more than their own role in the largest terror operation in history. Though it was an incredibly complex undertaking, there were no electronic instructions passed by radio, telephone, or the Internet. No calls were made that could be intercepted by the technology of the infidels. Instead, trusted couriers had hand-carried all necessary commands from Tehran to each of the participants.

  As the Gulfstream descended, al-Qutb shut off his IFF transponder, pushed the throttles forward, hard against the stops, and muttered to himself, “Allah Akbar.” The jet aircraft was now a hurtling guided bomb.

  National Reconnaissance Office Operations Center

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  Chantilly, VA

  Sunday, 14 October 2007

  0359 Hours Local

  Chief Warrant Officer Dan Peters loved his job—flying satellites. The KH-13 that he was “piloting” over the Middle East was traveling at 26,000 miles per hour, at 102 miles above the earth—and he never even had to leave Virginia. From his “cyber-cockpit” in the basement of the NRO Operations Center, less than a mile from the back gate at Dulles International Airport, he could point a satellite's long lens at just about any point on the planet that mattered and “take your picture.” At least that's the way he often put it to friends who had the security clearance to know what he did for a living.

  Making all this possible, of course, were the arrays of computers behind him. Peters could do this—and often did—taking “snapshots” of various places that were of interest to someone high up the food chain of the federal government or intelligence community. Usually it was some place in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan—and had been for over six years—ever since U.S. troops had deployed in the region for Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001.

  The middle of the day in Southwest Asia was normally “quiet time” for KH-13 #62B—the newest “Keyhole” imagery satellite “working” the region. From long experience Peters knew that the hours between 1030 and 1430 local time beneath the satellite were never the optimum time for doing the kind of imagery that the “heavies” liked to see in their morning intelligence briefs. They wanted nice, crisp, clear photos of their targets—and for that there had to be shadows. Those shots were best taken when it was early morning or late afternoon beneath the satellite—while the sun was lower in the skies in “his” part of the world.

  That's why Peters volunteered for the midnight to 0800 watch. Most nights, unless there was a crisis, by this time in Virginia, the “tasking orders” for imagery from KH-13 #62B—one of more than a dozen such “birds” high above the earth—would already be completed. That meant he could sit down beneath the sign that read MANUAL CONTROL— AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, insert his “credit card” identity badge into the slot, take the control yoke with its toggle switches in his hands, and “fly the bird.”

  Using the GPS display as a navigation aid, Peters flicked a switch on the yoke labeled IR and the image on the monitor in front of him changed from what first looked like an HDTV color TV picture to what now appeared as a color negative image. As he did so, the word thermal appeared in the upper right side of the screen.

  Peters panned the lens west across Saudi Arabia and zoomed in, “hitting” various installations, pointing the camera at things he wanted to look at. As the satellite passed over Ras Tanura, a sudden bright flash flared on the screen, “blinding” the bird and blotting out the image in front of him. Peters recoiled in the ergonomic seat, his first thought, The lens was hit by a laser!

  It was a logical assumption. All of the NRO watch officers had been briefed on the ground-based, Chinese laser attacks on U.S. intelligence satellites. But in seconds, the powerful computers slowly restored the image on the screen. As the picture came back on-line, Peters blinked and said, in an awe-filled, prayerful gasp, “Oh, my God!”

  The deputy watch officer, an Air Force master sergeant, heard Peters' intake of breath. He glanced up at the TV monitor and stood up so quickly that he knocked over his chair. Both Peters and his assistant leaned over to look at another monitor with a normal optical image, confirming what they were watc
hing, live, on the screen. Then Peters shouted an expletive and hit an alarm switch on the console with his left palm. There was no mistaking what they were seeing on the monitor.

  Department of Homeland Security Operations Center

  ________________________________________

  Nebraska Avenue, Washington, DC

  Sunday, 14 October 2007

  0401 Hours Local

  The metallic sound of the klaxon over the map display sent a squirt of adrenalin through Matt Roderick's gut. The retired Marine infantry officer pushed the button on his desk, shutting off the annoying sound—just as he had done in more than a dozen national emergency preparedness exercises. He—and all twenty-seven of his watch officers—looked at the map display on the large plasma screen on the front wall. On the map of the Middle East there was a bright red icon, blinking over Saudi Arabia. Then, almost as though they were choreographed, they all moved their eyes at once—from the large map display to the red-bordered message that appeared on every computer screen in the room:

  NRO KH-13 #62B REPORTS LEVEL FOUR EXPLOSIVE FLARE.

  Then, just seconds later, another message:

  CORRECTION: MULTIPLE EXPLOSIVE FLARES IN NE SAUDI ARABIA.

  IMAGERY TO FOLLOW. STAND BY.

  Roderick felt his heart begin to race as he focused on the large-screen map and the computer monitors around the room. Within minutes, additional markers showed up on the display, matching the original single red icon on the plasma screen. Roderick called to his CIA and DIA watch officers monitoring the intelligence situation: “Any word yet?”