He could see the third helicopter circling, hovering, and then dropping down also to land behind the high walls, in the vast front garden before the palace. “Merde,” he muttered, frantically signaling to all drivers to make all speed to the gates of the King’s residence.
Engines howled, but the palace was still three minutes away. And it was still one minute away when the air was split by two enormous explosions. Flames and black smoke rose into the air, but no one could see what had happened behind the walls.
They reached the gates and smashed their way through amid scattered gunfire from the remaining palace guards, who had taken refuge inside the downstairs floor of the palace. Colonel Gamoudi’s men returned fire with heavy machine guns and quickly silenced the defenders, who appeared to have no further desire to stick their heads above the parapet.
But the scene in that front yard was one that Jacques Gamoudi would remember for the rest of his life. The two Chinooks were blasted beyond recognition, six dead robed Arabs lay on the ground, and off to the right, leaning somewhat casually on a palm tree, was the unmistakable figure of the former British SAS Maj. Ray Kerman, in company with one of his Hamas bodyguards. They were both holding antitank rocket launchers, still smoking.
“Afternoon, Jacques,” said General Rashood. “I thought I’d better get rid of those two Chinooks for you. You don’t mind, do you?”
Jacques Gamoudi was almost speechless. “Jésus Christ!” he exclaimed. “Did you just get here in that third helicopter?”
“How the hell did you think I got here?” said the General, looking surprised. “On the bus?”
Gamoudi shook his head and laughed. But then the enormity of his problems came cascading back upon him, and he suddenly shouted, in a loud, involuntary voice, “Jésus Christ, Rashood! WHERE’S THE KING! WHERE THE HELL’S THE KING?”
“He’s in there,” replied the General, nodding toward the palace.
“How do you know?” said Gamoudi, his voice rising again.
“Mainly because I just saw him go in there,” said Rashood. “With a group of five bodyguards. The King was carrying an AK-47.”
“But what if he escapes? Out the back way or something?”
“He can’t. I just sent three of my commandos to seal off the rear entrance. Anyway, I’d guess it was too bloody hot to get through the gardens. There is, I expect you noticed, a 200-seater Boeing 737 with about 400 tons of fuel on fire under the date palms.”
“So we’ll have to roust him out, right?”
“Yup. Do you guys want me to give you a hand?”
“Mon Dieu! Was General de Gaulle French?” Gamoudi replied.
“You need a machine gun?”
“What d’you think I need, a bow and arrow?”
Gamoudi ignored the sardonic humor of the victor of the Battle for Khamis Mushayt and headed back to his waiting chiefs-of-staff. Someone fetched a machine gun and ammunition for General Rashood, and an al-Qaeda soldier turned up with a diagram of the royal palace, courtesy of Osama’s organization, which had provided engineers’ maps of buildings constructed by the bin Laden family business.
Jacques Gamoudi had seen the plan of the palace before, but he never thought he would need it. He had counted on the suicide bomber to inflict fatal damage on the huge hall of royal residence. He had assumed a final intervention by the forces of Prince Nasir would be strictly routine.
But things were now very different. The palace had some serious damage high up on the dome, and there was obviously going to be masonry all over the top floor. But the first two floors, which contained twenty-seven bedrooms, were probably unscathed, and it was likely the King’s personal bodyguard, numbering at least twenty armed members of the Royal Regiment, would put up a desperate fight to protect their forty-six-year-old ruler.
They might even have a pre-planned hiding place, like the old “priest holes” in Catholic monasteries, where clergymen hid from the malevolence of Henry VIII in medieval England.
Colonel Gamoudi did not think much of the prospect of chasing the King up some chimney or into some dungeon. And neither, for that matter, did General Rashood. They studied the floor plans of the sprawling palace. It was a maze of corridors, great yawning state rooms, dining rooms of unimaginable luxury. And below were kitchens and storage rooms. There was a long arched walk-way to one side of an interior courtyard. Jacques Gamoudi shook his head in frustration.
And what was the King doing right now? Was he on the phone, perhaps informing the world of his plight? Maybe he was telling his friend, the President of the United States, that his palace and his regime were under attack by a bunch of lunatics and that the United Nations must somehow save him? Worse yet was the possibility that the King’s extremely shrewd army commanders were planning to hole up inside the vast building and make their escape under cover of darkness. Colonel Gamoudi and General Rashood had inflicted heavy damage and they had a popular uprising going their way, but the King was still staggeringly rich, owning and controlling tremendous military resources.
And those resources might well be capable of getting him out, and that would be appalling news for Prince Nasir. Both Gamoudi and Rashood could well imagine the King sitting in some palatial residence on Lake Geneva, not so far from his multibillion-dollar fortune, giving weekly “exclusive” interviews to the world’s media.
There would be headlines pointing out the sheer tyranny, the wickedness, and the savage lowlife intentions of the armed thugs who drove the rightful King of the Saudis from his peaceful and prosperous kingdom. The fall of the best friend the West ever had. The media would love it, true or not, and it could very easily cause the United Nations to condemn Prince Nasir and all that he stood for.
“Rashood, we have to get him,” said Jacques Gamoudi grimly.
“No need to tell me, old boy,” replied the General, reverting to his natural Englishness while speaking to a Frenchman. “And we have to get him fast.”
“Do we charge the front door with a tank and go in with all guns blazing?”
“Sounds better than ringing the doorbell,” said Rashood. “Let’s get a half-dozen guys with antitank rocket launchers aimed at the front of the palace. They can open fire on the second-and third-floor windows as soon as we’ve stormed the entrance.”
“Right,” said Gamoudi. “We don’t want to drive these guys upward into that mess below the dome. There may be good cover up there, and we don’t want to fight on a bomb site.”
“Correct,” said Rashood. “We better beef up that detail in the rear of the building, if it’s cool enough. But we don’t want a lot of guys in the open. For all we know the troops inside are mounting machine gun nests in the windows.”
“We’re going to have to fight for this on the inside,” said Gamoudi.
“’Fraid so,” said the General. “And we better be very quick. I’m not much looking forward to it either.”
They selected sixteen Special Forces to come in behind the tank. In their rear were twenty al-Qaeda and Hamas fighters, all carrying submachine guns and grenades. Jacques Gamoudi would lead the troops inside, the first moment they breached the entrance. He would concentrate on the downstairs areas, going room by room.
General Rashood would lead his commandos up the main stairs to the second floor. As ever, the principal danger was to the assault force, the troops who had to make it happen. The King’s guard could fight a solid rearguard action, protecting their man, no hurry, until darkness came. And then they had a huge advantage, on terrain they knew backward. There was also, of course, the truly uncomfortable fact that no one knew what extra resources the King could call upon, including overwhelming world opinion.
Gamoudi and Rashood had to nail him. And they had to nail him right now. The Hamas General, for good measure, quoted the only rules that mattered during any military coup: “Let’s do it fast, Jacques, and let’s do it right.”
Colonel Gamoudi boarded the M1A2 Abrams. The opening assault brigades moved into formation, and t
he engines of the tank screamed as it rolled toward the palace doors, the French veterans moving behind it.
The Colonel ducked low as the iron horse slammed into the doors, smashing them inward. And as they did so, two savage bursts of heavy machine-gun fire riddled the steel casing of the tank. Nothing penetrated, but the guns had them pinned down, half in and half out of the entranceway, facing into the main hall.
Now it was Jacques Gamoudi who could not dare put his head above the parapet. He ordered the tank to reverse and the gun to be raised. At which point he blasted the upper balcony with four successive shells, which crashed into the walls behind the gallery, which in turn caved in and caused the total collapse of the third floor in that part of the building.
There was dust and concrete everywhere, and the guns were, for the moment, silenced. The room on the second floor behind the shattered wall was nonexistent. Anyone in there was no longer alive. But there was no sound, and Colonel Gamoudi assumed the danger up there had receded.
He signaled for General Rashood to lead his men into the devastated reception hall and to take the remainder of the second floor. He watched the Hamas C-in-C bounding up the stairs, his troops following, tightly grouped on the wide marble staircase. There was still no sound from that second-floor gallery where the King’s initial machine gun nest had been located.
Gamoudi split his men into two groups, one left and one right. He took the left-hand corridor and, room by room, booted open the doors and hurled in hand grenades. There was one aspect of this type of warfare that made the task slightly easier: no one cared who was in the rooms or whether they lived or died, and no one cared what damage was inflicted on the palace. There was no need for restraint.
Everything went to plan for six rooms. At the seventh, Jacques Gamoudi kicked open the door, and from inside someone threw a hand grenade out. It hit the opposte wall and clattered to the floor. Gamoudi wheeled around and, with his arms outspread, crashed everyone to the floor, or at least everyone he could grab — six of the eight.
When the grenade detonated he lost two of his best men instantly. The rest of them climbed to their feet coated in dust, some of them cut and bruised. As they did so, a second grenade flew out of the seventh door and clattered to the floor.
Again Jacques Gamoudi saw it and again he spread his arms, this time hurling the whole scrum in through the door opposite, and slamming the heavy door closed, just as the grenade blasted the corridor to pieces.
Suddenly this was serious. The men seized a huge piece of furniture and rammed it against the door, just to buy them a few minutes. They were short of guns, four of them still lying in the rubble outside. They had no more grenades left, and there were six of them essentially trapped until someone could open one of the high windows eight feet above ground level.
They had no idea how many opponents they had in this remote interior passageway. They knew the palace was surrounded, and they knew that General Rashood was gutting the upper floor for the King’s guard. But they themselves were trapped, with only two guns and not much ammunition.
They did not dare shout for assistance, because there seemed no need to alert the opposition as to where they were. Whichever way they looked at it, this was the hunter hunted. And Le Chasseur took a very moderate view of that.
The one useful aspect of this reception room was the wide serving area at the rear — a massive marble-and-granite slab behind which they could take cover, even under heavy fire. The trouble was it would be almost impossible to fire back against a determined enemy, since that would require them to stand up against a white-marble background.
Their only chance was to cower there until the guards moved in, then hope to take them in close-combat fighting. Everyone carried a combat knife, and they all knew how to use them.
They could hear the huge doors being shoved open, the massive chest of drawers being edged inward. Gamoudi ordered his men to the floor, behind the marble serving counter.
They awaited their fate, which was not long coming. When the door was open less than two feet, six men, five of them uniformed and all of them armed, slipped into the room and opened fire at the space above the granite slab.
No one moved, until the commander signaled them to fan out and advance down the eighty-foot-long room. In English he called out, “Come out, all of you, with your hands held high…COME OUT! IN THE NAME OF THE KING!”
No one moved, and then the commander spoke again. “Should you decide not to come out, my men will throw three grenades behind that counter. We will retreat out of the door, and you will die. ALL OF YOU! NOW COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS HIGH!”
And then, much more quietly, he added, “The King wishes to see those who would be his enemies. I will count to ten before the grenades are tossed in among you.”
There was absolute silence in the room. Privately, Jacques Gamoudi thought they might catch a couple of the grenades and hurl them back, but even he doubted they would be able to catch all three.
“ONE…TWO…THREE…FOUR…”
Suddenly there was a slight movement at the doorway, and with one leap the terrifying figure of General Rashood entered, a black mask protecting his nose and mouth from the choking dust and cordite in the corridor, his machine gun spitting fire in a long sweep right across the line of palace guards. Rashood aimed high, as he always did, at their backs. No one had time to turn and see their executioner.
It was like a firing squad. Nothing less. And one by one the guards slumped to the floor, bullets riddling their heads and necks, blood seeping onto the white marble.
The air was clean in here, and the General pulled the mask down from his face. He walked to the line of men he had shot dead in cold blood. He ignored five of them and he walked straight to the man who wore no uniform, but who, like the others, was facedown on the floor, the back of his head blown away.
He kicked the man over and stared down, directly into the unseeing eyes of a familiar face. Prostrate at General Rashood’s feet lay the body of the King of Saudi Arabia. He may have lived like a Pasha, but he had died like a Bedouin warrior, his machine gun primed, facing his enemies. Except for the one who had shot him in the back.
“Jésus,” said Jacques Gamoudi, as he walked across the room.
“Am I glad to see you.”
“Yes, I expect so,” replied Rashood, in that clipped British accent of his, honed in the portals of a distant Harrow School. “But I owe you one. And I’d never say you weren’t damned useful in a French bistro. Me, I tend to excel in royal palaces.”
And with that he hurled his arms around his fellow commander. Between them, they had, after all, just conquered the largest country on the Arabian Peninsula.
SAME DAY, 4:00 P.M.
Prince Nasir stood before the cameras and made his inaugural broadcast to the people of Saudia Arabia from one of the smaller palaces a mile from the former royal residence. He described the death of the King, which had occurred during the People’s Revolution, which had been so long in coming.
And he stressed that the late King and his enormous family had done nothing but plunder and spend the vast treasure beneath the sands — the treasure that belonged to everyone, not just to members of one family.
He railed against the closeness of the King and his immediate family to the United States, and how it was so much more natural for Saudi Arabia to forge alliances with closer and more traditional allies like France.
He pointed out the long history of cooperation between the two countries, and told the nation that he was already speaking to the French President in order to formulate a plan to rebuild the oil industry, which he deeply regretted had been the first casualty of the popular uprising. It was indeed a consequence of years of reckless living and massive incompetence by the royal family.
Where was the King when our great industries came under attack? The Crown Prince spread his arms apart in a gesture of mock confusion.
But throughout the broadcast, Nasir gave a message of hope and optimism
. He swore to help Saudi Arabia regain its former position of wealth and influence, with a fair share of that wealth for every Saudi family. Not just one family.
He at last came to the words that everyone wanted to hear: In accordance with our ancient laws, as Crown Prince, I have assumed leadership of our country. I have taken my vows with the elders of the Council. And I have sworn before God to uphold our laws…I am both your humble servant and your proud leader, King Nasir of Saudi Arabia.
CHAPTER NINE
SAME DAY, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24, 7:45 A.M. (LOCAL)
THE WHITE HOUSE
Kathy Morgan, sitting at the wheel of their new Hummer, swung the civilian version of the U.S. Army’s fabled Humvee straight into the West Wing entrance to the White House. Next to her sat her husband, Admiral Morgan, whom the guards saluted. Whenever the great man visited Pennsylvania Avenue it was like General Eisenhower returning to the beaches of Normandy. No one caused quite the same ripple of admiration.
He said good-bye to Kathy, who was having breakfast with her mother at the Ritz-Carlton, and headed toward the main West Wing entrance. The Marine guard stared at the enormous bunch of daffodils, saluted Morgan, and held open the door to the West Wing, inside which the Secret Service detail, on direct orders from the President, dispensed with the requirement for a visitor’s pass and escorted the Admiral straight to the Oval Office.
Admiral Morgan, as he had done for so many years, walked briskly past the President’s secretary, tapped on the door, and walked straight in.
The President stood and gaped at the daffodils. “Morning, Arnie,” he said, smiling. “Hey, you got the blossoms. And you’re right on time, as ever.”
“End of the morning watch, eh?” replied the Admiral, mindful of the fact that the former Lt. Paul Bedford was immensely proud of having once served as navigation officer in a U.S. Navy guided-missile frigate.
The President chuckled. But his smile did not last for long. He buzzed his secretary and asked her to find someone to put his daffodils in a vase.
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