THE WHITE FORD PICKUP rolled quietly to a stop below Tower Number Seven, one of ten large cylindrical structures at Abqaiq that are used to remove sulfur from petroleum, or turn it from "sour" to "sweet," in oil-patch jargon. A dirty tarp covered the cargo bed; extra-heavy shocks kept the bed from sagging onto the axle. To the east, across the Saudi desert, a hint of the morning sun peeked over the horizon. The truck driver, one of thousands of Shi'a Muslims who work the Saudi oil fields, cut the engine, checked his watch one last time, and began reciting verses from the Qur'an, memorized long ago. The lights of the world's largest oil-processing facility twinkled all around him.

Three hours earlier, a fishing boat equipped with twin two-hundred-fifty-horsepower Evinrude engines had set out from Deyyer, on the southern coast of Iran. By dark, the boat had sprinted across the Persian Gulf to the Saudi port at al Jubayl. From there, the Iranian pilot had crept south, hugging the coastline, until he came in sight of the Sea Island oil-loading platform at Ras Tanura, forty-five miles to the northeast of Abqaiq. Now, with the water beginning to glow pink, he pointed the bow at Platform Four and slammed the throttle to full.

Just inland from Ras Tanura, at Qatif Junction, an Egyptian engineer -- a Muslim Brother who had made the grand tour of militant Islam, from Cairo to Tehran -- flicked on his flashlight and admired his handiwork. The Semtex was expertly crammed into and around every manifold, every valve, every last pipe junction. It was art, really, lacing it all together in a single charge: a work of beauty, of Allah's great creation.

West of Abqaiq, in the foothills of the al Aramah Mountains at a small Bedouin encampment, a Saudi in his mid-twenties bent over a 120-mm Russian-made mortar for what seemed the hundredth time. A Wahhabi, descended from the religious zealots who brought the House of Sa'ud to power, he had been trained in munitions in Afghanistan by a man who was taught by the Central Intelligence Agency. Below him, at the base of the foothills, sat Pump Station One, the first stop on the oil pipeline that carried nearly a million barrels of extra-light crude daily from Abqaiq across the peninsula to the Red Sea port at Yanbu.

A pager vibrated lightly against his chest and went dead. It was time. The Al Sa'ud were coming down. The oil that fed their whoring and corruption would flow no more. Islam would be purified; the American devils, crippled; and their Israeli protectorate, cut free to die on its own. The world would have to take notice, and for the simplest of reasons: The global economy was fucked.

* * *

I'VE DOLLED UP the details and updated them, but I didn't invent them. They come courtesy of people who studied the Saudi oil industry from the ground up. From the mid-1930s until well into the 1960s, Saudi Arabia was a branch office of America's oil giants -- a Republican internationalist's fantasy. The United States remained secure in the knowledge that Saudi oil would always be there for us, under the sand, cheap, and as safe as if it were locked up in Fort Knox. We built Saudi Arabia's oil business and, for our efforts, got full and easy access to its crude.

The first OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil embargo in 1973 took the bloom off that rose, but anxiety turned into full panic in the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, especially when it looked as if Iran might take the war to the Arab side of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. With the nightmare of an Islamic prairie fire taking down the world's economy, disaster planners in and out of government began to ask uncomfortable questions. What points of the Saudi oil infrastructure were most vulnerable to terrorist attack? And by what means? What sorts of disruptions to the flow of oil, short-term and long-term, could be expected? And with what economic consequences?

Almost to a person, the disaster planners concluded that the Abqaiq extralight crude complex was both the most vulnerable point of the Saudi oil system and its most spectacular target. With a capacity of seven million barrels, Abqaiq is the Godzilla of oil-processing facilities. Generally, the study groups posited a multiprong attack on Abqaiq, with severe damage to storage tanks and the large spheroids used to reduce pressure on oil during the refining process, and moderate damage to the stabilizing towers where petroleum is purged of sulfur.

Restoring the pressure-reducing spheroids would require not much more than the installation of a series of temporary valves, to be replaced eventually by permanent ones. The storage tanks wouldn't be much of a problem, either. A few repairs here and there, and you would have full-production capacity back in no time at all.

The stabilizing towers are another story. Sulfur and oil go hand in hand. The same eons-long processes that make one make the other. But until the sulfur is removed, petroleum is useless. To get from one state to the other -- from sour to sweet -- petroleum goes through a process known as hydrodesulfurization.

At Abqaiq, hydrodesulfurization takes place in ten tall, cylindrical towers. Inside the towers, hydrogen is introduced into the oil in sufficient quantities to convert sulfur into hydrogen sulfide gas, which then rises to the top of the structure, where it is harvested and rendered into harmless, environmentally safe, and usable sulfur.

But hydrogen sulfide is no everyday gas. Familiar to generations of high school chemistry students as the rotten-egg (or "fart") gas, it is highly corrosive and potentially fatal to humans. As long as the gas is confined in the stabilizing towers, everything is fine. Blow the top off a tower, or a wide hole through it, or bring it crashing down by detonating a truck loaded with three thousand pounds of explosives at its base, and all hell breaks loose.

In the atmosphere, hydrogen sulfide reacts with moisture to create the acid sulfur dioxide. Once formed, the acid would rapidly settle on surrounding pipes, valve fittings, flanges, connectors, pump stations, and control boxes, and begin eating its way through everything like some bionic omnivorous termite. But the initial release of hydrogen sulfide would have far more serious effects because of what it does to humans.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control, classifies hydrogen sulfide as a broad-spectrum poison -- that is, it attacks multiple systems in the body. "Breathing very high levels of hydrogen sulfide can cause death within just a few breaths," ATSDR reports. "There could be loss of consciousness after one or more breaths. Exposure to lower concentrations can result in eye irritation, a sore throat and cough, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs. These symptoms usually go away in a few weeks. Long-term, low-level exposure may result in fatigue, loss of appetite, headaches, irritability, poor memory, and dizziness."

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) wing of the U.S. Department of Labor has established an acceptable ceiling concentration of twenty parts per million (ppm) of hydrogen sulfide in the workplace, with a maximum level of fifty ppm allowed for ten minutes "if no other measurable exposure occurs." The more conservative -- and less politically sensitive -- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends a maximum exposure level of ten ppm.

A moderately successful attack on the Abqaiq facility's stabilizing towers would let loose seventeen hundred ppm of hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. That strength would dissipate, but not quickly enough to prevent the death of workers in the immediate vicinity and serious injury to others in the general area -- or to stop sulfur dioxide from eating into the metallic heart of the Saudi oil infrastructure. The toxicity also would deter the onset of repairs for months.

At the least, a moderate-to-severe attack on Abqaiq would slow average production there from 6.8 million barrels a day to roughly a million barrels for the first two months postattack, a loss equivalent to approximately one-third of America's current daily consumption of crude oil. Even as long as seven months after an attack, Abqaiq output would still be about 40 percent of preattack output, as much as 4 million barrels below normal -- roughly equal to what all of the OPEC partners collectively took out of production during the devastating 1973 embargo.

* * *

THE ABQAIQ SCENARIO was only one of many considered by the Reagan-era disaster planners, in part because Saudi Arabia's oil system is so target-rich. Any oil extraction, production, and delivery system relies on a large, mostly exposed exoskeleton. Add to that the topography of eastern Saudi Arabia, where the vast oil fields are located -- an ocean of sand broken by shifting dunes, all of it sloping gently into the Persian Gulf -- and you have a security consultant's worst nightmare. Taking down Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure is like spearing fish in a barrel. It's not a question of opportunity; it's a question of how good your bang men are and what you give them to work with.

Saudi Arabia has more than eighty active oil and gas fields, and more than a thousand working wells, but half of its proven reserves--12.5 percent of all the known oil in the world -- is contained in eight fields, including Ghawar, the world's largest onshore oil field; and Safaniya, the largest offshore field in existence. One element that made Pearl Harbor such an attractive target in 1941 was so much American firepower, air and sea, boxed in such a small space. Even if a Japanese bomb missed its target, it was likely to find something worth blowing up. Tactically, the Saudi fields offer much the same sort of target environment. One scenario concluded that if terrorists were to simultaneously hit only five of the many sensitive points in Saudi Arabia's downstream oil system, they could put the Saudis out of the oil-producing business for about two years.

Once it's out of the ground or the seabed, Saudi oil moves through roughly seventeen thousand kilometers of pipe: from well to refinery, from refinery to onshore and offshore ports, within the kingdom and without. Much of that pipe is above ground. The buried part lies an average of three quarters of a meter below the surface, often in land occupied by nomadic tribes. A camel for transport, a spade, and a cordless drill are enough to sabotage a section of pipe. But if you want to step up the damage, there's no want of explosives in the explosive Middle East. A sack of fertilizer, a bucket of fuel oil, and a stick of dynamite would do the trick.

The kingdom maintains a huge inventory of pipe, which makes a single saboteur no more threatening than a gnat, but multiple saboteurs operating in concert at broadly spaced intervals throughout the oil web would create a plague of gnats as unpleasant and diverting as -- and far more destructive than -- the clouds of gnats that settle on Sunday picnics. Pipes, though, are the least of the problems.

A typical Saudi oil well produces about five thousand barrels a day of runny gunk: an unusable mixture of oil, dissolved gases, sulfur impurities, and salt water pumped into the well to create sufficient pressure to force the gunk out. From the wells, oil is pumped to one of five gas and oil separation plants maintained by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state oil company. In vast, bulbous spheroids, a pressure step-down process releases most of the dissolved gases, while a second process takes out the salt water. The remaining sour crude is piped on to one of five stabilization facilities, where the pressure is further stepped down and oil is held in storage tanks pending desulfurization.

From a system engineer's point of view, all this movement, from the well through the refining process, is a ballet of connectivity. The stabilizing towers where the sulfur is neutralized, the spheroids where pressure is reduced and other impurities are siphoned off, the storage tanks where the oil is held between processing and shipping are, in effect, cathedrals of the industrial process. Terrorists and saboteurs tend to view the world differently. To them, the architectural features of downstream production offer one very attractive thing: virtually unimpeded line-of-sight targeting, just like the World Trade Center towers on a clear day.

There's also the distribution and delivery side. The Saudi oil system is divided into northern and southern producing areas. Northern oil gets refined at multiple locations, then piped to one of two terminals along the Gulf -- Ju'aymah and Ras Tanura -- and from there out to offshore loading platforms and mooring buoys located in water deep enough to handle oceangoing oil tankers.

All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq, about forty kilometers inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain, for processing, and from there on to Ju'aymah or Ras Tanura, or via the East-West pipeline over twelve hundred kilometers across the Arabian peninsula and the mountainous spine of western Saudi Arabia to the terminal at Yanbu on the Red Sea. (Another route out of Abqaiq, the seventeen-hundred-kilometer Trans-Arabian pipeline that runs to Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon, is mothballed as I write, as is the Iraq-Saudi pipeline, shut down in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.)

Whatever the terminal, whichever the coast, the choke points are too many to count. At Ju'aymah the most likely point of attack would be the metering platform located eleven kilometers offshore. Four underwater pipelines feed crude oil and bunker fuel to the platform from onshore storage tanks. The platform, in turn, feeds five single-point mooring buoys, located still farther offshore, each capable of transferring 2.5 million barrels of oil and other fuel per day to tankers.

On an average day, about 4.3 million barrels of oil leave Saudi Arabia via the Ju'aymah terminal. Destroy the surface-metering equipment and control platform, inflict significant damage to half the mooring buoys and moderate damage to the onshore tank form, and loading capacity at Ju'aymah would be reduced from those 4.3 million barrels to somewhere between 1.7 and 2.6 million barrels two months out. Restoring full capacity might take as long as seven months.

A commando boat attack would do the job. Then and now, the waters surrounding the arid Arabian peninsula remain, vessel for vessel, one of the most dangerous navigable sites on earth, a place where even case-hardened destroyers like the U.S.S. Cole can be sunk by a Zodiac, a couple hundred kilos of plastique, and a crewman resolved to meet his maker.

Ras Tanura pumps slightly more oil than Ju'aymah -- 4.5 million barrels of sustainable daily export -- and it offers a wider variety of targets and more avenues of attack. Ras Tanura's Sea Island facility, 1.5 kilometers east of the north pier in the Gulf, handles nearly all the terminal's export oil; Platform Four handles half of that and is the only one of the four to have its own surge tanks and metering equipment, in the latter case under the platform. (The others use equipment and surge tanks onshore.) As with Ju'aymah's metering platform, a commando attack on Platform Four by surface boat or a Kilo-class submarine -- anything is for sale in the global arms bazaar -- would be devastating.

Sea Island is fed by a complex of tanks, pipelines, and pumps that is further connected by pipe to Ju'aymah for added flexibility. This onshore complex is vulnerable to terrorist attack by ground and air: Ras Tanura sits about a hundred kilometers from the northern tip of Qatar, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalists.

Yanbu, on the Red Sea, is more immune to attack, the engineers concluded, but happily there's no need to go after it. (I'm thinking like a saboteur here, just as the CIA trained me to do. One of the benefits of having spent a career as an agency case officer in some of the world's most volatile regions was a thorough education in how to destroy things.) You need only interdict the roughly nine hundred thousand barrels of Arabian light and superlight crude that are pumped daily to Yanbu to put the terminal out of business, and to do that, you simply take out Pump Station One, the closest to Abqaiq. Why? Because Pump Station One sends the oil uphill, into the al-Aramah mountain range, so it can begin its long journey across the peninsula. Without a working pump behind it, the oil flows in the wrong direction.

Even the short pipe run from Abqaiq to the Gulf terminals is not without opportunity. At Qatif Junction, a few kilometers inland from the coast, a manifold complex directs the flow of oil to Ras Tanura or Ju'aymah, or to the dormant Trans-Arabian pipeline. Inflict heavy damage on the complex and you'll stop the oil in its tracks for months. Unlike the off-the-shelf pipes that connect the terminals and processing facilities, the manifolds and pipe junctions at Qatif Junction would require custom fabrication to replace.

The assessments by the disaster planners were downplayed, for fear of rocking global oil markets, but you can bet they are not the only people to have calculated how much damage could be done to the Saudi petroleum chain -- or the global money chain -- by an expedient as relatively simple as blowing one of Abqaiq's stabilizing towers, or Ras Tanura's Platform Four, or the East-West pipeline's Pump Station One to smithereens. (Or, of course, all three.) A single jumbo jet with a suicide bomber at the controls, hijacked during takeoff from Dubai and crashed into the heart of Ras Tanura, would be enough to bring the world's oil-addicted economies to their knees, America's along with them. Indeed, such an attack would be more economically damaging than a dirty nuclear bomb set off in midtown Manhattan or across from the White House in Lafayette Square.

* * *

PROMOTERS OF ALASKAN, Mexican Gulf, Caspian, and Siberian oil sound like a broken record when they point out that the United States has been weaning itself from Saudi oil. They argue that Saudi Arabia accounts for only roughly 8 percent of U.S. crude oil consumption. They also argue that three of our four main oil suppliers are in the Western Hemisphere: Canada, Venezuela, and Mexico. True enough. But what they forget to mention is that Saudi Arabia sits on 25 percent of the world's proven reserves, maybe barrel per barrel the cheapest oil in the world to extract. More important, the Saudis own half the world's surplus production capacity -- two to three million barrels a day. Take the Saudi surplus out of play, and the market loses its stability and liquidity. It may not seem like much oil, but the surplus capacity is what keeps the world's oil markets from going on a facedown roller-coaster ride during periods of crisis. In other words, no matter what country you buy your oil from, Saudi Arabia determines world price by how much oil it chooses to produce.

It was Saudi Arabia that broke the back of the 1973 OPEC embargo (though not before it enriched itself by tens of billions of dollars). As the Iranian revolution segued into Iran's protracted war with Iraq, the Saudis again used their surplus capacity to keep the oil flowing to the industrialized West. By 1979-80, the Ju'aymah terminal on the Persian Gulf was shipping about nine million barrels of oil daily, twice its normal output.

The same thing occurred during the 1990-91 Gulf War. The Saudis, backed by a couple of other Gulf states, produced an extra five million barrels a day, making up for the loss of Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil. Without its surplus capacity, the price of a barrel of oil likely would have soared to over a hundred dollars.

On September 12, 2001, less than 24 hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Saudis put on the market an extra nine million barrels of oil, going mostly to the United States. As a result, oil prices stayed low, and U.S. inflation spiked marginally in spite of the single most devastating terrorist attack in history. Take that same liquidity out of play with twenty pounds of plastique, and all bets would be off.

* * *

A DECEMBER 2000 study by the International Monetary Fund looked at the effect of a hypothetical five-dollar-per-barrel rise in the price of oil. Gross domestic product in the United States and most European countries would decline .3 percent on an annual basis. Financial markets would fall, but not to disastrous depths. Nations with a net export of crude oil would grow in wealth; those with a net import would fall. The Far East would suffer particularly because it produces so little oil of its own.

But all that was calculated on what would have been a then roughly 20 percent rise in the price of crude, a mild bump as economic catastrophes go. The terrorist attack on the Abqaiq oil facility envisioned by the Reagan-era scenarists would remove as many as 5.8 million barrels of crude a day from world markets, double the three million barrels a day taken out of production during the OPEC oil embargo, almost double the daily amount lost to the revolution in Iran and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war, and almost one-fourth the current average daily consumption.

What does history tell us about the effects of such a loss? Well, Americans saw double-digit annual inflation only ten times in the last century, four if you exclude the effects of the two world wars: in 1974, in the wake of the OPEC embargo, when inflation soared to 11 percent; and in 1979-81, when inflation topped out at 13.5 percent. By 1981 the price of a barrel of crude had hit $53.39, and regular gasoline was selling at U.S. service stations for over $2 a gallon.

The OPEC embargo sent the stock market plummeting. By the time the Standard & Poor 500 bottomed out in September 1974, it had lost 47.7 percent of its value in twenty-one months, almost exactly equal to the 47.8 percent lost in the twenty-eight months beginning in March 2000 as the dot-com bubble burst. Between 1980 and 1982, the index gave up another 27.1 percent of its value as the unrest in Iran and Iraq rocketed oil to staggering highs.

Inflicting selectively heavy damage on the Abqaiq oil-processing center would almost certainly duplicate those inflation figures and send stock indices plunging again. A coordinated attack on Abqaiq, Ras Tanura's Platform Four, and the East-West pipeline's Pump Station One, just to pick and choose from dozens of potential targets, would increase both effects exponentially while leaching the last bit of elasticity from the global oil-supply chain. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve would only help prop up international markets for several months. Unless alternative sources of oil quickly kicked in after that, we'd be in virgin territory -- a kind of economic equivalent of the postnuclear-holocaust world of Nevil Shute's 1957 bestseller, On the Beach.

So what exactly would happen to the price of oil? I've surveyed contacts in the oil industry, but no one could come up with even an approximate figure. Apparently, good econometric forecasts on this kind of scenario don't exist. They tell me, though, that initially we could count on seeing oil hit $80 or $90 a barrel, based on supply and demand. But this does not factor in the panic that would ensue -- wild speculative buying. And then there is the wild card of run-of-the-mill disruptions occurring at the same time, like in Nigeria or Venezuela. Now we have oil selling at way over $100 a barrel. But what if chaos in Saudi Arabia slopped over the border into the other Arab sheikhdoms that collectively own 60 percent of the world's oil reserves? My contacts won't even touch that one, but my guess is that we'd see oil at $150 a barrel or a lot higher. It wouldn't take long for everything else to follow suit: economic collapse, world political instability, and a level of personal despair not seen since the Great Depression.

Incidentally, Osama bin Laden has a more modest price expectation for Saudi oil: $144 a barrel. Take that multiple over the current market price, carry it back fifty years or so to the time when the West became dependent on Arab oil, and work forward from there -- and you would have a wealth transfer on the order of $76 trillion from the industrial economies to the Muslim world, about $1.5 trillion a year. It wasn't until 1985 that the accumulated debt of the United States exceeded $1.5 trillion; 1985 was the first time the U.S. government budget topped the $1.5 trillion mark.

Copyright © 2003 by Robert Baer