The Alexandria Connection (26 page)

A short while later, the enlarged convoy, led by Yousef in one of the Toyotas, headed west across the desert for Bam, the site of an ancient citadel on the old Silk Road which dated back to the sixth century BC. But the citadel was now in ruins. On 26 December 2003, an earthquake registering 6.6 on the Richter Scale had struck, killing 26 000 people, and the old fortress had been destroyed.

From there, the convoy headed northwest again, before turning south on Highway 91, where the trucks were forced to engage low gear as they ground their way up into the barren rocks of the Jebal Barez mountains. At the top of the range, Yousef could see a vast plain stretching below them, and in the distance, the Halil River and the city of Jiroft, one of the hottest places in Iran. They pushed on to the south, past the suddenly green cultivated fields of Anbarãbãd, and on through Kahnooj and Dehbãrez, until they reached Minab, 100 kilometres to the east of Bandar Abbas. Minab was famous for its prawns and date palms, but more importantly for Yousef, it provided a safe house close to the coast and the Strait of Hormuz.

Yousef led the way through the centre of the city, past the roadside portraits of the bearded Ayatollah Khamenei, dressed in his traditional black turban and robes. The traffic was surprisingly light, and Yousef guessed correctly that the city’s occupants had gravitated to the famous Panjshambe Bazar or ‘Thursday’s Bazaar’, where vendors were selling anything from
ghalyeh mahi
, a spicy fish stew, to Persian carpets. Here, the older women wore the full-length burqa. Younger women wore long dresses and the headscarf or hijab, and to protect their faces from the heat, many women wore colourful woven masks, unique to this part of Iran.

A short distance past the city centre, Yousef turned off into a dirt lane leading to a lone, adobe mud-brick house. For the past two years, it had been home to al Qaeda agents inside Iran. Yousef gave orders to unload the timber from the trucks and configure the missile tubes.

Over 2000 kilometres away, in his villa in the hills above Islamabad, it was seven-thirty p.m. General Khan received the alert on his laptop, and he reached for a mobile he used rarely. ‘Columbus has landed,’ he texted. A further 12 500 kilometres away in Dallas, it was eight-thirty in the morning and Sheldon Crowley was at his desk on the eighty-second floor of EVRAN Towers. He sent a short encrypted direction to René du Bois, in the headquarters of the Crédit Group in Paris. ‘Buy oil and sell all other stocks’.

The World Federation of Exchanges based in Paris took in fifty-two regulated stock market exchanges around the world. René du Bois smiled and he swivelled in his leather chair toward a bank of screens providing him with a dizzying array of up-to-the-minute financial charts. One screen showed the total value of world equities at US $54.57 trillion. The Dow Jones industrial average was up nearly half a per cent, Standard & Poors 500 Index was up a third of a per cent, and the Nasdaq Composite Index was also up by 0.98 per cent. The figures would have meant little to the average person in the street, but to Du Bois, they represented gains of hundreds of millions of dollars. He keyed in a code, and a string of classified assessments from highly paid market analysts in Crédit Group appeared on another of his screens. Oil had rallied, and more importantly, Crédit Group analysts had estimated that over the next twelve months, world demand for oil would increase by 850 000 barrels per day, taking global demand to over ninety million barrels a day. Growth in the Chinese economy, even though down 0.2 per cent, was still expected to be at a healthy 7.5 per cent.

Not for very much longer, Du Bois mused. With insider knowledge, Crédit Group had made billions getting out of equities before the devastating effects of the 2008 crash. The value of world stocks had plunged a staggering 47 per cent, but stock markets had largely recovered since then. Pharos was right, it was time to strike again.

Du Bois keyed in another code, and pulled up the top twenty-five oil stocks by capitalisation. Over the past few weeks, Crédit Group had quietly increased its holdings in companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, the Brazilian behemoth Petrobras and its counterpart in Asia, Petro China. The sheer volume of stock had driven share prices up nearly two percentage points, but Du Bois knew the surge in oil stocks in twenty-four hours’ time would be considerably more dramatic, and the impact on world stock markets would not stop there.

Abdullah Hadid, the master of the
Leila,
rubbed his eyes. He had been on deck for nearly twenty-four hours, right through the tricky berthing at Ras Tanura, and the loading of over two million barrels of crude, but he would not hand over to the officer of the watch until the massive tanker was clear of the Strait of Hormuz and well into the Gulf of Oman where they would head for the Arabian Sea.

Hadid checked the radar plot, noting the blips on the screen that represented other ships. The southern shipping lane was reserved for outbound vessels, and
Leila
was almost abeam of the fishing village of Khasab, located on Oman’s Musandam cape at the northernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Ahead was the
Gulf Lexicon
, a Liberian flagged tanker of just over 200 000 tonnes. Ten nautical miles behind, another Dutch flagged tanker of similar tonnage, the
Black Viking,
was maintaining a steady 12 knots, smashing through the heavy chop. Hadid knew it would soon be time to begin a series of changes of course that would take the
Leila
through 270 degrees around the notorious bend between the coast of Iran and Oman. Hadid also noted a line of radar blips in the northern inbound shipping lane. Even though there was a three-kilometre median separating the inbound and outbound lanes, when large ships were operating in close proximity, that was not a lot of distance.

Hadid walked outside on to the port wing of the
Leila
’s bridge and scanned the horizon through his binoculars. It was as he suspected. Even though the sun was setting, the shape was unmistakable. The 100 000-tonne Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier USS
Truman
was entering the Gulf to join the American Fifth Fleet based out of Manama in Bahrain, just to the south of the Saudi refinery. Although the massive carrier’s top speed was classified, it was powered by two nuclear reactors generating over a quarter of a million horsepower. The carrier’s four huge screws gave the ship a staggering speed of over 30 knots. Manned by over 3200 officers and men, and escorted by the guided missile cruiser
Gettysburg,
and an array of destroyers, she carried ninety aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters, F-14B Tomcats, EA-6B Prowlers, and E-2C Hawkeyes. Hadid smiled to himself. Navigation laws in the confined waters of the Gulf stipulated they be on the surface, but the US Navy didn’t always comply with regulations. Lurking beneath the relatively calm evening waters would, he knew, be the USS
Hyman G. Rickover,
and the USS
Bergall.
American nuclear carriers never went
anywhere
without at least one, and usually two nuclear submarines for extra protection. Ten nautical miles astern of Carrier Group Ten, an even larger vessel was looming on the horizon, all 500 000 tonnes of her: the
Atlantic Giant
, a tanker so massive it was too big to fit through the new locks of the Panama Canal, and too big to manoeuvre in the English Channel.

Hadid checked his position. They were now abeam the small fishing village of Kumzar, the most northerly inhabited place in Oman and accessible only by boat. It was time to begin the long turn that would take them around the rocky islands at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

‘Starboard ten,’ Hadid ordered.

‘Starboard ten,’ the helmsman acknowledged. Even though the ship’s powerful hydraulics had acted in an instant, turning
Leila
’s state-of-the art rudders, such was the momentum of a supertanker that Hadid knew it would be several hundred metres more before the bow started to turn. Even in an emergency, with the engines straining at full astern, he knew it would take more than three nautical miles to stop her.

He looked past the myriad pumps and pipelines running for hundreds of metres up to the
Leila
’s bow. The sun was setting, shedding an orange glow on the white, choppy surface of the sea.

Yousef led the small convoy back down the dirt lane into Minab, and then south along the coast on Route 91. The missile launchers were now fully assembled on the back trays of the Bedford trucks, and covered with tightly lashed tarpaulins. To the west, the sun was setting in a fiery ball, reflected in a purple-orange heat haze over the shipping lanes of the Hormuz Strait and the Persian Gulf. To the east, a line of bare rocky hills paralleled the Iranian coast.

Traffic was light, and Yousef drove steadily. They passed through the small towns of Talvar and Bemãni-ye-gachine, veering closer to the coast until they reached Bondãrãn. Here, Yousef took a minor road that led east into the hills, the desert broken here and there by small oases where palm trees flourished on water courses. Three kilometres further on, Yousef turned off the road.

‘Those palm trees over there,’ he commanded, directing the trucks. ‘Get the tarpaulins off, quickly . . . Get them ready!’ Yousef knew they might still be seen by the Infidel’s drones, but the sun had now set, and at least they were hidden from view on the ground. He climbed a rocky outcrop and focused his powerful binoculars on the shipping lanes in the Strait. Yousef could not believe the images in the twin lens. It was beyond his wildest dreams. ‘
Alhamdulillah!
Allah be praised!’ he cried.

‘Starboard ten,’ Hadid ordered.

‘Starboard ten,’ the helmsman acknowledged.

The
Atlantic Giant
was approaching from the east. As big a supertanker as the
Leila
was, Hadid never ceased to be in awe of the ULCCs, of which there were only three in the world. The
Atlantic Giant
was still riding relatively high in the water, and Hadid guessed that she had already loaded some crude prior to calling in to the Gulf. Powered by a massive 50 000-shaft horsepower engine, the turbulence from her single 30-foot diameter, 50-tonne propeller was clearly visible. Capable of fitting four St Paul’s Cathedrals into her holds, and longer than the Empire State building was tall, the
Atlantic Giant
would take on another two million barrels of crude oil.