“Okay. And does the Air Force have fighter jets in the air? Any sign of gunships?”
“No. I’m told Air Force morale is very low. Many princes have fled.”
“Any sign of significant troop movements from any of the other bases?”
“I am told absolutely not. They seem to have gone into ostrich mode.”
“Well, sir, you’re an expert on sand, so we’ll take that as definite.”
The Prince laughed. “You are very funny, Colonel, even at a time like this. But now I must ask you, when do we attack?”
“Right now, sir. This is it. I’ll call you later.”
The phone conversation had already been too long for guaranteed privacy. Jacques Gamoudi hit the disconnect button and strode out into the open space beyond the walls of the mosque. He called all five of his senior commanders together and told them to fire up the heavy armored division. “We pull out in twenty minutes,” he said.
Even as he spoke, Prince Nasir was on the line to the loyalists in the city, where thousands of armed Saudi citizens were preparing to march on the principal royal palace, behind the tanks.
And for the first time since 1818, the great crumbling walls of Dir’aiyah trembled to the sound of ensuing battle, as Jacques Gamoudi’s big M1A2 Abrams tanks thundered into life and began moving out toward the road, passing the dozens of armored trucks loaded to the gunwales with ordnance.
The noise was deafening as they started their engines and rumbled forward, in readiness to form the convoy that would take down the modern-day rulers of Saudi Arabia.
With only minutes to go before start-time, Colonel Gamoudi moved back inside the ruins of the mosque and pressed the buttons on his cell phone. This was his final check with a small detachment of French Secret Service operators who had gone into Riyadh three weeks previously to gather the final information Gamoudi needed for his assault plan. The Colonel trusted his Saudi intelligence, but not quite so well as he trusted French intelligence.
Michel Phillipes, leader of the detachment, had little to add, except that the King had ordered the National Guard to deploy from their barracks on the edge of the city, with tanks and armored personnel carriers. According to Phillipes, the Guardsmen had been tasked with protecting at all costs the Al Mather, Umm al Hamman, and Nasriya residential areas. These were the districts that contained the walled mansions and gleaming white palaces of high government officials and many royal princes.
But Phillipes reported that this had been a very halfhearted operation. A few units had deployed somewhat nervously, and immediately retreated behind the walled gardens. But other units had not deployed at all, many of their soldiers having disappeared quietly back to their homes.
He said that the early-morning city news had announced that the major banks would again be closed for the day. But so far as he could tell, the predictable rioting and looting had not materialized. In fact, all his team felt that Riyadh was unusually quiet for this time in the early morning, with the sun already glaring above the desert.
“Seems to us like the calm before the storm,” said Phillipes. “Un peu sinistre,” he added. A bit ominous.
There was, however, nothing even remotely ominous going on at Dir’aiyah. This was an army moving in for the kill. Weapons were checked, shells stored onboard the tanks, the Abrams crews climbing aboard. Engines roared, small arms were primed and loaded, ammunition belts slung over combat fatigues.
Every armored vehicle was prepared to open fire at a moment’s notice. The gloves were off here in Dir’aiyah, and at 0920, Jacques Gamoudi’s army rumbled out onto the highway and swung right for the capital, moving slowly, tank after tank rumbling down the dusty tracks from the ruins, truck after truck laden with trained Saudi fighters and hauling its warriors out onto the road.
And in the lead tank, his head and shoulders jutting out from the forward hatch, submachine gun in his huge hands, stood the grim-faced, bearded figure of the Assault Commander.
Jacques Gamoudi, husband of Giselle, father of Jean-Pierre, thirteen, and Andre, eleven, was going back to war. In his wide-studded leather belt he still carried his sheathed bear-killing combat knife, just in case today’s fight went to close quarters.
He had ordered a rigid convoy line of battle, three tanks moving slowly along the highway, line astern, followed by a formation of six armored vehicles moving two abreast…then three more tanks…then six more armored trucks…then three more tanks, followed by a dozen armored trucks.
The packed troop carriers came next, with a rear guard of one final M1A2 Abrams tank. This was not an easy convoy to attack. If anyone did feel so inclined, it was damned nearly impregnable from the front, rear, and either flank. It was bristling with heavy weapons, and all of them were loaded.
Before they had traveled three miles, Colonel Gamoudi’s cell phone sounded. It was Michel Phillipes again, reporting an early-morning stampede to King Khalid International Airport. It was the same in faraway Jiddah Airport, which also had many flights direct to other countries. Expatriates and their families, executives and managers within the oil industry, even manual workers and women, servants, teachers, secretaries, and nurses were desperately attempting to leave the country.
Scores of personnel from the Eastern Province were streaming along the road that led to the causeway to the island of Bahrain. The much smaller airport in Dhahran was packed with people trying to buy outward flights.
Even the U.S. armed forces were effectively making a break for it. Personnel from training bases across the country were attempting to reach Al Kharj, which lay 60 miles south of Riyadh—that was the old Prince Sultan Air Base in the Gulf War, and the only runway on which the U.S. military could organize contingency plans to evacuate its troops.
Michel Phillipes had men at Kharj airfield, where they encountered dozens of British expatriates who had been working on defense contracts. They met others who worked in Saudi Arabia for British Aerospace, and they were all trying to get out.
Judging by all known intelligence, Jacques Gamoudi could not imagine any stiff military resistance that morning, except from the guards at the main royal palace. And the convoy rolled on toward the northern perimeter of Riyadh.
All along the way, the armed freedom fighters waved at any local people they saw, presenting the face of friendship to everyone who stood by and watched. The troops even threw candy to passing children, following Colonel Gamoudi’s creed always to make a friend if you can, when you’re about to invade.
In fact the people generally assumed that this was the official Army of Saudi Arabia they were seeing. Everyone was in uniform, the vehicles were painted in Saudi Army livery. What else could it be? If there was to be more trouble following the destruction of the oil fields, this was surely the defense force of the King moving into position.
The first group to peel off was that of Gamoudi’s great friend Major Majeed, whose two tanks and four armored vehicles swung left cross-country for King Khalid Airport, an objective they were ordered to take by storm.
Colonel Gamoudi’s convoy pressed on to the head of Makkah Road, where a vast, somewhat unexpected throng awaited them, shouting and cheering, waving in the air the brand-new rifles Prince Nasir’s commanders had stockpiled so carefully for so many weeks.
In mighty formation they marched on down King Khalid Road, to the junction of Al Mather Street, where Colonel Bandar’s group peeled away and headed directly to the main television stations.
Colonel Gamoudi pushed on toward the Interior Ministry, with the crowd massing behind his tanks and the Saudi commander bellowing through bullhorns for everyone to hold their fire until orders were given.
They approached the great wide entrance to the Ministry, with its massive oak doors, hand-carved in the magnificent Iranian city of Esfahan. The doorman, nervous, like most people, took one look at the incoming convoy and retreated, banging the great doors behind him.
Colonel Gamoudi immediately opened fire, slamming two shells straight into t
hose doors, left and right, like a short broadside in an eighteenth-century naval battle.
The doors flew inward and smashed down into the foyer, and Jacques Gamoudi unleashed the dogs of war. Twenty-six al-Qaeda commandos, trained in the camps in the Afghanistan Mountains, charged forward, the lead six hurling hand grenades straight through the lower windows.
The simultaneous blasts in the downstairs offices were nothing short of staggering. Office workers were blown apart, crashed into walls, furniture was splintered, at which point the commandos raced into the building, machine guns held hip-high, yelling, “Get DOWN…everyone get DOWN!!”
Two government Ministers rushed from the mezzanine floor committee rooms, leaning over the wrought-iron handrail and looking below, demanding to know what was happening. The al-Qaeda men cut them down with a burst of gunfire, and both officials toppled over the balustrade grotesquely and to their deaths on top of the flattened doors.
Six more commandos piled in through the entranceway and headed up the stairs. Everyone knew the layout of the building by heart since they had acquired the engineers’ plans as used twenty years earlier by the Bin Laden Construction Companies.
And now, in a sense, they were in there fighting for the Ministry, in the name of their elusive spiritual leader whose creed they followed: to destroy the wanton, Western-influenced ruler of their home country.
The commandos reached the second floor and waited close to the eastern wall, beneath a huge stone archway. Three seconds later there was a thunderous blast from above, as Le Chasseur opened fire on the third floor and two more tank shells ripped high into the building. Plaster and masonry cascaded down the central area between the staircases.
And now the commandos were set to take the Ministry. There were fifty of them inside now, and they marched from room to room, kicking open doors, firing into voids, inviting anyone inside to surrender.
They combed every room, swept the corridors, herded dozens of terrified workers into order in the downstairs foyer. Thirty-two minutes after Colonel Gamoudi’s opening shells, the Saudi Arabian Ministry of the Interior, complete with its entire staff, was the first casualty of Prince Nasir’s takeover.
Colonel Gamoudi ordered the building secured. He left behind five trained commandos plus a group of twenty armed men selected from the great throng that had followed him to the Ministry. He ordered phone lines cut and turned his tanks around in the wide courtyard. Then he headed back north, toward the Diplomatic Quarter and the royal palaces that lay beyond.
At this precise time, Colonel Bandar’s men reached the main entrance to the television stations, Channels 1 and 2 in the same building. The doors were glass, but Colonel Bandar, a former regular officer in the Saudi Army, elected not to drive his tank straight through them. But he drove up, within ten feet, and hurled a hand grenade through the open window of the downstairs mail room, which blasted asunder, scattering viewers’ e-mails and letters to the desert winds. He ordered the commandos inside the building. They came through the doors behind four grenades that blew the foyer to pieces, sending an eight-foot-high portrait of the King deep into the plaster of the ceiling, where it hung for a few seconds and then crashed into the rubble below.
Fifteen members of the staff came out with their hands high and were ordered into the street, where a guard detail lined them up against the wall and ordered them not to move. Thirty more commandos dismounted from the troop carriers and stormed into the building. The first floor was deemed secure, and now they headed to the transmission room, two floors above.
They came bursting up the stairwell, ignoring the elevators. Two permanent guards stepped out to block their entry. Jacques Gamoudi’s commandos gunned them down in cold blood. The leading detail of six men rammed a steel chair into the newsroom door, and they thundered into the long room with its sound studios at the back and newscasting sets occupying almost the entire foreground.
At first no shots were fired, as two of the raiders traversed the walls, ripping electric plugs and cables out of their sockets and tearing apart any electrical connections that were all over the floor.
At a table in the far corner, much like the newsroom in a newspaper office, the editors and reporters were preparing for the next broadcast. With the stations now quiet, Colonel Bandar’s men opened fire, the bullets flying high above the heads of the staff.
At which point the Colonel himself, a direct descendant of the elders of the Murragh tribesmen in the south, came through the door and strode over to the news desk, telling the staff to get up, get their headsets off, and pay attention. Then he barked in Arabic, “Who’s the chief station editor?”
Two of the nine men pointed to different executives, and Colonel Bandar shot them both down with a burst from his sub-machine gun. He asked again, and this time one man stepped forward and said quietly, “I am the news editor of the station.”
“WRONG!” yelled the Colonel. “You used to be the news editor of the station. Right now I am the news editor. You will now go with my men and have your entire staff parade in the front hall. The slightest sign of disobedience, you and any member of your staff will be executed instantly. The rest of you, hold your hands high and walk slowly downstairs, no elevators.”
Colonel Bandar appointed a four-man detail to accompany the former news editor all through the building, routing out the television station executives and journalists and ordering them to the front hall, where they were searched and allowed to stand easy, under guard.
Twenty minutes later, the Colonel came downstairs and demanded that ten transmission technicians report back to the news-room. Ten petrified electricians stepped forward and made their way back up the stairs flanked by the Colonel’s guards, under orders to reconnect the broadcast units that the marauding force had been so careful to leave intact.
The rebel leader then made an announcement that the kingdom would very soon be under new rule, that of the Crown Prince, who would be broadcasting within a few hours. He asked which of the staff would be prepared to carry on as before, but working under a new fundamentalist regime, and which of them would prefer to announce their loyalty to the outgoing King and face immediate execution. Not necessarily on this day, but certainly by the end of the week.
The staff of both Channel 1 and 2 right away pledged undying loyalty to the incoming ruler and were permitted to return to their offices, under guard, but still on the payroll. Colonel Bandar told them to prepare an outside broadcast unit to attend the Prince’s palace four hours from then, to make the historic first film of a nationwide address by their new proprietor.
The main television stations had been captured with as little damage as possible, considering the circumstances. They would be up and running, under different management, within two hours. And now a ring of 200 armed men was placed around the building, to await the arrival of a specially appointed public relations executive, from the Aramco organization.
The staff would soon discover that he was a young man in his early thirties, passionately loyal to Prince Nasir, and he would oversee every future word broadcast on the two main Saudi channels. His salary would be $250,000 a year, and he was not a member of the royal family.
By now Major Majeed’s group was driving forward, straight at the gates of King Khalid Airport, his convoy led by two tanks, line abreast, followed by four armored vehicles and 100 highly trained commandos, the leaders al-Qaeda combat troops handpicked by Jacques Gamoudi, the rest ex–Saudi military.
To the amazement of the security staff, the tanks swung into the precincts of the busy airport and headed straight for the control tower, crushing the tall, white fence like matchwood. They drove on, straight at the tower. Stunned passengers boarding packed passenger jets suddenly saw an antitank crew launch four rockets directly at the all-around glass windows high above the runways.
Only one hit. Two of the other three crashed into the building’s lower floor, and the fourth smashed into the huge radar installation above the ops room, which was a scen
e of devastation.
All the windows had blown, mercifully outward, but the blast had played havoc with the sensitive equipment. Computerized screens were caved in, alarms were sounding, all transmissions to incoming aircraft ceased abruptly, and fourteen staff were badly hit by shrapnel. Two of them died instantly.
The commandos stormed the tower, demanding the surrender of all personnel in air traffic control, but there were no key operatives who could surrender. That antitank rocket had caused total catastrophe, and Jacques Gamoudi was going to be displeased. He had warned them to use rockets only if they met stiff resistance.
And now the control tower was wrecked. And Major Majeed’s men were swarming into the airport ordering passengers out of the terminal at gunpoint, telling them to return to their homes, to the city, by whatever means they could. Airport buses were commandeered, taxis were ordered to fill up with passengers and to get out.
A squad of six heavily armed al-Qaeda warriors charged through the downstairs baggage area, informing personnel to concentrate on outgoing flights. They informed staff that their jobs were safe, but their task was to get people out of the airport and swiftly onto departing flights.
The al-Qaeda fighters in the tower ordered electricians from the first-floor ops room to switch off the runway lights. Fueled aircraft ready for takeoff could leave, but fully laden passenger jets would not be permitted to land.
Major Majeed ordered the restaurants to stay open and keep serving, and he told the airport announcement system to keep ferrying passengers out to Riyadh, but on no account was any aircraft to land without special permission from the Major himself.
Abdul Majeed wanted to ensure that private corporate jets coming to pick up senior technology staff from Aramco and British Aerospace were given maximum cooperation. Prince Nasir was going to need these people in the very near future. One hour after his arrival, the Major called Jacques Gamoudi and informed him that the airport had fallen to his forces.
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