December Ultimatum

by Michael Nicholson

  The propaganda had been borrowed from an earlier successful and equally-ambitious fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Like the Shah of Iran, King Fahd was represented as all that was evil, all that was threatening Islam, a man intoxicated by the petro-dollar, a charlatan won over by Wes tern-American greed, who had taken the

  Koran from his hand and substituted a chequebook, who had taken Islam from his heart and put there instead the harsh doctrine of American capitalism. The slogans would be scrawled across the roads and walls of Riyadh, Jeddah and Medina, and the graffiti was infectious: ‘Fahd betrays Mohammed.’ ‘God has left us.’ ‘Build the Great Wall in Arabia.’ ‘Islam, Rise!’ ‘Rahbar, the New Messiah.’ The aerosol cans had been distributed and the banners painted, waiting for Rahbar. And he, in turn, waited for the signal— not from people of Saudi Arabia, but from people who knew much better than he the strategy and timing for the coup.

  Five years earlier few Saudi-watchers, academics, Pentagon emissaries, Aramco oilmen, political strategists, foreign relation specialists or Central Intelligence Agents would have considered a coup a remote possibility. The House of Ibn Saud, from Abd Al Aziz to King Fahd, had been the unquestioned rulers of the barren desert Kingdom with the biggest deposits of oil in the Middle East. Revolution was unthinkable. Unlike the Moslem Shiites in Iran, unlike Reza Pahlavi the Shah, the Saudi Kings had merged state and religious leadership into one. The political House of Ibn Saud had married into the religious House of Ibn Wahhabi, so that they were inseparable. Dissent against the King disputed the sanctity of Islam itself. So as religious leader, the King ruled by divine right, and his credentials were impeccable; he was ruler of the land of Mecca, birthplace of Mohammed and of Hadj, centre of pilgrimage for the world’s eight hundred million Moslems.

  Franklin stopped typing, put the typewriter on the floor and stretched his legs. The night outside was suddenly bright with flares. He turned the torch off as sweat ran into his eyes. The bathful of tepid water seemed a thousand yards away. He was beginning to feel helpless. He waited until the light of the flares had dimmed and began his typing again. The torch batteries were running low. He leaned closer to the paper.

  The Shah of Iran had tampered with Islam, and Islam had won. But Islam and the King of the Saudis was the same— and who or what could pull them apart?

  The answer was oil. And the things it could buy. Transistor radios, colour televisions, American cars, Japanese motorcycles and the exciting new life-styles that came with them. Oil bought Western music and Western books, a Western culture full of new ideas that gave young men and women an appetite for more. Schools were built by Western contractors to Western designs with the Western curriculum in mind. Concrete arterial highways were beginning to stretch out from Riyadh to Mecca, Medina and Dhahran, increasing the speed of Saudi life, and spreading the invasion even quicker across the deserts. Seamen came off the merchant ships at Dhahran and Jeddah trading in alcohol, cigarettes and hashish. And Saudi women sold their bodies though the Koran forbad them even to show their faces.

  There was a cancer in the Kingdom and it was called oil and its malignancy was spreading to every corner. Turbaned mullahs squatted on crimson carpets, sipping bitter coffee served by women in their austere chadors, and watched the infidels from the West who neither made pilgrimage to Mecca, nor seemed to pray, nor gave any visible service to God, and yet were infinitely more prosperous than the faithful. The Saudi Shia peasants and the workers in the Aramco oil camps saw excess in everything and they were suddenly hungry too. Doubts were created about those things of the spirit they had always valued. Few lost their faith, but many lost their devoutness.

  The oil was pumping out of Saudi desert at the rate of ten million barrels every day, four hundred million gallons every twenty-four hours, and the enormous earnings from it slowly transformed the land of the Koran into something strange and hostile—just as they had in Iran, on the other side of the Gulf. Petro-dollars provided the Saudi rulers, eager with ambition, the means to transform a country that had known nothing but poverty into a thoroughly modern twentieth-century state. The world’s largest royal family was earning over three hundred and forty-five million pounds a day every day in the year. There wasn’t a global institution to match its purchasing power. Had it been on offer it could have bought out General Motors in a little over a week; British Leyland in two days seven hours, London’s most prestigious store, Harrods, in nineteen hours and twelve minutes. Had Buckingham Palace been on the market King Fahd could have bought the residence to suit his ego in two days, twelve hours and eighteen minutes of pumping.

  But no people could have been less fitted to receive the deluge of wealth oil thrust upon them. Wealth poured over them, deluged them, drowned them; wealth beyond all reason, beyond all need. Fifty years earlier Rockefeller’s men had counted out thirty-five thousand British gold sovereigns and in return the Saudis had given them a sixty- year oil concession. Eventually the oil revenues gave kings and oil princes an annual income of over a million million dollars. This enormous explosion of wealth made multimillionaires of over eight hundred Saudi princes and spawned an epidemic of corruption, extravagance and scandal. Fahd’s half-brother Khalid had been a relatively inconspicuous spender, but he had had a two-hundred-foot yacht which he used only once a year, and a Boeing 747 jumbo-jet palatially equipped in gold fittings and Persian- carpeted with its own royal bedroom suite, bathroom and cinema, and an in-flight open-heart operating theatre.

  The really big spenders, the young princes with more energy and lust, were known to gamble a million dollars a week in the casinos of London and the Riviera. Arab dandies would hire an entire ski-slope at Val d’Isère exclusively for a weekend so that their tumbles would not be witnessed. They stabled a dozen of the world’s most expensive cars and flew the world’s most expensive hookers to and from their villas in a fleet of the world’s most expensive executive jets. The second casino on Monte Carlo’s skyscraper waterfront had cost the Principality ten million dollars to build. In the first week of opening a Saudi prince of the Royal Family lost five million dollars at blackjack and roulette. They were still waiting for him to return to finance the other half.

  The Saudi princes did things in faraway places with far- out people, enjoying excesses the rules of Islam back home denied them.

  Their money was spread evenly in many capitals and enjoyed by many. All except those who needed it most, the Saudi poor. It had been estimated that if only one year’s oil revenue was distributed evenly among Saudi’s seven million population, every man, woman and child would receive fifteen thousand dollars each. Most would have been content with one hundred and fifty. Or failing that, five.

  But that was small thinking in the eyes of the King and his ambitious brothers, sons and nephews. The House of Ibn Saud had grown big because, in the American vernacular, it had thought big. The Royal Family was grandiose and its projects reflected it, right down to the hundred-foot-square smoked glass windows shipped in from Hamburg or the forty-foot-square white marble table-tops flown in from Florence. Entire cities were being built block by block, new factories awaited adventurous investors. Free education was envisaged for every last camel boy and goatherd. And every son of every sheikh, prince and merchant banker flew first- class to the Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Harvard. Under the House of Ibn Saud, devout Saudi Arabia was a country on the make.

  But oil brought more than gloss. It made two countries of one. The extremist devotees of Islam rejected the movement forward, spat at new thought, cursed the growing unstoppable dominance of Western ideas. Their murmur gained momentum and demanded the rejection of all things not of Islam. They spread their message loudly and menacingly and every Saudi was reminded of what was happening. Good Moslems winced at the dreadful probability that the evil of the West was contaminating Islam, the Koran itself; the writings of the great Mohammed were being defiled. But Islamic fundamentalism would resist.

&n
bsp; Franklin paused and lit a cigarette, cupping his hands to hide the flame. He re-read his last lines of typing and wondered how much more he would need to write to describe the rigidity and devotion of the Saudi Sunni Moslems, the most conservative of all Moslems in the most severe and intolerant of all the world’s religions.

  He knew that already Iran, under the guardianship of the Ayatollah Khomeini, had voted to turn back history and become an Islamic island within itself, and now Rahbar was encouraging the Saudis to do the same. On his own, Franklin thought, he could not have done it, but suddenly and unexpectedly he had support from fellow Arabs, fellow Moslems, fellow purists who, like him, denounced the contamination of Islam by the gangsters of the West. And if the West was too vague an enemy, too vague a target, then—as before, when Islam at last went into the attack in Iran—America became the focus for vilification. America was the West; Western evil was America’s evil.

  But no one in the West knew that in late October Gaddafi of Libya, that devout mischief-maker, had secretly met Crown Prince Abdullah, alias Rahbar, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. Waiting there too were representatives of the Palestinians, Jabir Sabah of the South Yemen, a strong and obedient ally of Moscow, Abolhassan Behesti, strong man of the Iranian Revolutionary Council and President Assad’s own emissary from Syria. It took three and a half days of talking to finalize the plan. The infidels of the West would be expelled and a great wall would be built across the frontiers of Islam to protect its purity for ever. Radio and television stations would be destroyed, books not of the Koran would be burnt, arterial highways would stop in mid-desert, the ports would be closed to all but food and medical cargoes, airports would be shut. All but Moslems would be deported, schools and hospitals built with foreign money to foreign designs would have their roofs torn off and be filled with sand as monuments to Western decay. The sacred memory of Mohammed would be safe. God would be pleased and Saudis would be promised eternal grace.

  Gaddafi had then outlined the military logistics. King Fahd had a large efficient army and air force, equipped and trained by the Americans. It was the most powerful war machine in the entire Middle East, following the demise of the Shah’s. It was one thing, said Gaddafi, to call the prayer from the minarets but something else to take over the bases at Al Kharj, Tabjk and Mushalt and neutralize an active armed force of forty thousand men. It would take more than faith and devotion to ground Phantom and Mirage jet fighters. So Rahbar’s agents began to sound out low ranking members of the armed services, men known to be devout Moslems and who, in a crisis of religious conscience, would defend Islam first and the King second. It was a delicate operation, and Rahbar’s men trod carefully.

  By mid-November the Baghdad War Council was satisfied that Rahbar had enough men in the necessary places to create confusion on the way, men who were in positions where they could cripple, if only for a few hours, the Saudi military machine. And this fitted into the scheme of things because, according to Gaddafi, a few hours was all that was needed. Then the other agents in the revolt, the Yemenis, the Iraqis, the Syrians, Iranians and the Palestinians, would move into the capital and sweep up new recruits at every street corner.

  The Phantoms and the Mirages would be grounded by sabotaging their fuel, and the barracks and garrisons would be encircled by the mobs. But how would the tank commanders react? And the men behind the machine-guns? Would they shoot another Saudi in defence of their King? No! said Gaddafi. No! echoed Rahbar. Moslems would not kill other Moslems who were shouting the defence of Islam.

  The War Council cleverly brought the forces together, quickly and at the right time. Thousands of Palestinians were already in the country working on the building and road projects, and revolution was as natural to them as eating, drinking and dying.

  Over three hundred more Palestinians, mostly weapon instructors, arrived in Saudi Arabia in October and November and spread out among the resident Palestinian labour force to recruit and train.

  The second force of fighters came across the southern border towards the end of November, one thousand three hundred men of the South Yemeni army, disguised as nomad tribesmen, sent by President Abdul Fattah Ismail with their camel sacks packed with arms and ammunition. They trekked across the Rub-Al-Khali desert by night and rested during the day, until they were finally spread along the southern city boundary of Riyadh.

  By the second week of December the Baghdad plan was ready. The Palestinians, working with the Iranians and Syrians, were spread evenly throughout the capital with units in Jeddah and Medina. The dissident Hijaz and Majd tribesmen would support them there and the Shias would help in the east of the country around the oilfields. The South Yemeni force was stationed along the southern suburbs, close to the tank and artillery garrisons, ready to rendezvous with Rahbar’s own army of military and political dissidents.

  The Baghdad Council was satisfied that the explosive ingredients were now properly placed and primed, and all that was necessary was the detonation, a spark, something not necessarily of Rahbar’s making, but something he could grasp, so outrageous that Moslem anger would be quickly and spontaneously combusted. It came sooner than Rahbar or the Baghdad Council expected, and at a place they would not have predicted. Jeddah.

  Jeddah is Saudi Arabia’s single commercial seaport, straddling the Red Sea on the country’s Western coast. It is where all the goods bought by oil arrive. It is also where the world’s Muslims disembark by sea and by air to attend Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, forty miles up the road from Jeddah. Over two million pilgrims a year make the journey to the Prophet Mohammed’s birthplace, Islam’s holiest shrine.

  Between the eighth and thirteenth day of the twelfth month of their lunar year—the Dhu-Al-Hijjah—these millions tumble into Jeddah, fifty thousand every day at the airport alone.

  To cope with them, the Saudis had built a tented terminal, the modern marvel of the Muslim world. Here the devout could file off the airliners and be processed by health, immigration and customs officials in the shade of the world’s biggest tent, protected from the sun and the flies and the dust, cooking their lamb and goat at the communal kitchens and praying as directed.

  The tented terminal was not one, but many, tents strung together over one hundred acres, an area larger than the Pentagon. Four hundred and forty steel pylons weighing eighty tons each and a hundred metres high supported those acres of tents. It was the Bedouin tent writ large, the tent of Arabia built in such enormous style and splendour as only the Oil King could conceive of. Or afford.

  But the modern marvel of Islam had its defects. It was designed and built by the Americans; instead of Bedouin cloth, fibreglass from Rhode Island was used as covering, and the pylons came from the alien Japanese shipyard city of Tsu. So, among the fanatical and those who called themselves fundamentalists, this too was a symbol of Western contamination. It was evil. Simple, then, for the enemies of the Oil King to bring the tent down about his ears. Which was precisely what they did.

  During hajj, thousands of Iranian and Palestinian pilgrims, ostensibly on their way to Mecca, demonstrated for two days and two nights inside the tented terminal, turning the pilgrimage by their unholy behaviour into a radical political theatre. On the evening of the first day, Saudi police moved in with venom and batons, determined that hajj should not become a political event nor their king be further embarrassed. The demo quickly became a pitched battle, Saudi baton against Palestinian head, Iranian dagger into Saudi stomach.

  On the morning of the second day of rioting the Saudis used tear gas, percussion grenades and rifle fire and by that afternoon a convoy of ambulances and lorries stretched almost bumper to bumper from the airport to the hospital in the centre of Jeddah. As the hours passed, the bodies began to swell and bloat in the heat outside the mortuary, already packed tight with the dead.

  Four hundred and thirty-two people died. Eighty were Saudi policemen and Saudi airport officials. But their death did not end it.
The Iranian and Palestinian survivors quickly spread their propaganda across the Gulf; the tented terminal became a symbol of oppression and, because of its American association, a symbol of foreign contamination. So it was the obvious target for the militant radical.

  Eleven weeks later, over one thousand five hundred pilgrims on a charter tour, devout and without malice, quietly assembled themselves under the tent after completing Saudi immigration and customs control, and prepared themselves for the final coach journey to Mecca. The first light of the morning sun was tinting the tent pink as they queued patiently, shuffling slowly forward, some still praying, some still half asleep.

  Later, eye-witnesses who survived could not remember what came first, the sound of the explosions or the crack as the pylons snapped. There were those who couldn’t remember hearing any explosions, and there were those who were quick to persuade everyone that there never were explosions, only the horrible thunder as the eighty-ton pylons came toppling down, bringing with them the hundred tons of the fibreglass covering and the mesh of steel cables.

  Those on the outside later described it as like a giant parachute billowing on to the ground, spreading out in slow motion, burying the screams and horror of the dying beneath it. Pilgrims and Saudi officials were crushed instantly by the pylons, or cut in two by the mesh of cables. And those who survived that were suffocated under the weight of the fibreglass.