December Ultimatum

by Michael Nicholson

  When eventually the bulldozers and tractors pulled the debris away and after the rescue workers had separated torsos and limbs from the wreckage, they pieced together six hundred and twenty bodies. In earlier times the catastrophe might have been seen as a sign of God’s wrath, an act of holy vengeance. But this was the twentieth century, and the two Iranians who had planted the bombs were well-practised, as were their accomplices in Teheran who had made them. The Saudis, and the American experts they employed to sift the debris, quickly provided evidence of sabotage and murder. Bits of the bomb casings were found and displayed. But no one In Islam wanted to believe it. Instead, the rumour spread that the pylons had collapsed because they were weak; because their design had been defective; because the Japanese steel had been inferior and because princes, encouraged by King Fahd, managing the contract had cut corners and taken bribes. The House of Ibn Saud was publicly accused by Islam of avarice and corruption, the consequences of which were evident in the carnage at Jeddah airport and the overflowing putrefaction at the Jeddah mortuary.

  And suddenly, the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh overflowed with demonstrating Saudis sickened by the monsters who ruled them and made profit out of the devout. Rahbar’s men moved quickly, adding mischief to the fire, and with them were the same Iranians and Palestinians who three months before had attempted to bring down the Oil King another way and had failed.

  Within two days of the collapse of the tented terminal the revolution had begun. It was December the 20th.

  King Fahd knew of the fighting at twenty minutes past two in the afternoon, when a 122 mm rocket hit the Eastern gate of his palace. By four o’clock, sitting in the fortified cellars, he was told that the armoured units of his Bedouin Corps had surrendered and that none of his jets had been able to take off because their fuel had been contaminated by water. At five o’clock he was told that eleven members of his Cabinet had been publicly executed, that the offices of Petromin were on fire and that four hundred and fifty-two Americans—men, women and children—were under siege inside the United States Consulate compound. By five o’clock, the King received a hand-written message from Rahbar advising him that the Islamic People’s Democratic Republic had assumed government and urged him to wait in the palace until a way could be found to get him and his family out of the country. Rahbar assumed the King’s cooperation, the alternative being execution. The King pressed the ring on his right hand into Rahbar’s letter, indenting it and thereby signalling his assent. Before midnight he was flying away from his Kingdom.

  The coup was more efficient and less bloody than the Baghdad Council of War had expected and they were well pleased. Threatened Islam was now safe again and the two vast countries either side of the Persian Gulf could together form a bond of Islamic unity that would never again be broken by the forces of Western evil. Rahbar announced over Radio Riyadh that the first Islamic Summit would soon be held in Mecca, chaired by him and attended by the Iranian Revolutionary Council.

  That same evening, Rahbar, ever-mindful of his good friends in the War Council, sent them all a message of thanks and prayed that God would bless their souls. Immediately after hearing this in Tripoli, Colonel Gaddafi sent out his own cables containing the single word ‘Yamani’, the codename to signal their break from OPEC.

  The OPEC members, who received the ‘Yamani’ cable were pleased and much relieved. After all, they had risked a great deal in capitals as far apart as Lagos and Caracas, pledging their money in secret support of Gaddafi’s plan.

  There was one member of the War Council who, having received his cable from Gaddafi, in turn sent his own, a carefully-coded telex to his masters in yet another capital, men who had been waiting more anxiously perhaps than the OPEC members for the outcome of the Saudi coup. Colonel Gaddafi had accepted credit within OPEC for originating the plot and ensuring its military success. But the seed of the idea had been planted on him by Saadoun Abdel Karim, member of the War Council, Iraq’s Defence Minister, committed Communist and agent of the KGB since 1962.

  It was Karim who, after many long briefings in Moscow, had carefully polished the plan that, left to Gaddafi, would certainly have floundered. Karim was the end of the long arm of the Soviets’ ambition in the Persian Gulf to take control of oilfields.

  For purpose of anonymity, Karim sent his telex from the General Post Office in the centre of Baghdad to an Import- Export company in Yugoslavia who in turn radioed the message to the Kremlin. Within minutes, following rapid decoding, the Soviet President and his Politburo had been informed and they were well pleased.

  Franklin shivered. The sweat was now cold on his face and his legs and back ached. It was twenty past four in the morning. The fighting outside had all but stopped. Occasionally a single sniper’s bullet whined its way across the road from the open ground opposite, followed by the thump of a returning mortar. He could see from the glow in the sky that Riyadh was still burning, though it was probably from old fires that no one dared extinguish. Slowly he edged himself closer to the window and raised his head level with the sill. The cold air coming in through the broken panes of glass smelt strongly of cordite. It was hardly light but in ten minutes or so the open ground where the King’s men had been hidden would be seen clearly, and those there who were not dead would soon be so. The Revolutionaries in the car park below had stopped firing and waited for movement, but there was none. Then, as the first rays of sun hit the rooftops, one of them—anxious to be the first to announce the end of the war—ran to the side of the car park, past the smouldering cars and coaches, to the gates. He was young, bearded and wore a camouflage tunic, a figure of revolution that had appeared in a thousand and more photographs. When he got to the gates, he jumped up on to one of the stone pillars and began shouting, waving his rifle above his head. And then Franklin saw him cut in two. Many times in the days that followed he wondered if he had imagined it, but it would always reappear in his mind’s eye unchanging. The youth was suspended in mid-air, jumping two feet off the post, when the heavy calibre bullets from the machine-gun split him in two. And Franklin saw daylight between the halves.

  He expected an immediate bombardment of the ground opposite, and he lowered his head. He waited a half minute but none came and when he looked up again he saw why. The machine-gunner, the lone survivor, had got up from his foxhole and was walking slowly towards the car park, his hands spread across his chest in a cross. He too was young, with a beard and in camouflage, and could easily have been the brother of the man he had just killed. Still the Revolutionaries below did not fire. Then, half-way across the road, he went down on his knees, a solitary target, and faced Mecca to pray. And as his head touched the road it exploded into pulp.

  Franklin knew the young machine-gunner would not be the last to die in Riyadh that day. Nor the last to die praying.

  WASHINGTON

  ‘It’s Iran all over’

  ‘How come we didn’t know it was on?’

  ‘No one knew, Mr President.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question, Johns. You had men there?’ ‘Yessir. We had men there. So had King Fahd.’

  The President would not argue with the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was his understanding that the CIA, with a budget costing the American taxpayer billions a year, was in the business to encourage coups and revolutions that were in America’s interest and to prevent those that were not. Clearly the coup in Saudi Arabia was not.

  ‘This rundown you’ve given me, Johns,’ the President said, tapping the single sheet of paper on his blotter pad on the desk in front of him, ‘is this all you can give me on Crown Prince Abdullah, alias Rahbar?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It’s the best our people could signal me—given the circumstances.’

  ‘Given the circumstances, Johns, we should have had our people already out. Until they’re out, we’re paralysed. Whatever we want to do, whatever we decide today, we’ve got to wait until every one of o
ur people is safely out of that hole.’

  ‘Mr President. Arrangements for that are already well under way.’ General David C. Jarvis, United States Air Force, pulled at a hair in his nostril. ‘Our planes are on standby in Cairo. We’re only waiting the clearance from Riyadh and we can be in there in a little under two hours. Galaxies, sir, they’ll take all of ours and any other foreign nationals the Saudis let go.’

  ‘When they let go. If they let go.’ The President stood up quickly and pushed his chair away with the back of his legs. He undid his shirt-collar button, loosened his tie and ran his fingers through his greying black curly hair, scraping his nails into the layer of dandruffed skin of his scalp. He tugged at the small curls of grey hair at his sideburns, looking at everyone in the room and no one for long. As they waited for him to speak, he dug out the dead skin from under his fingernails with the tip of his silver ballpoint pen.

  All five men there in the Situation Room in the fortified basement of the White House were now used to their new President’s routine, concealing his anxiety with arrogance. But today the six knew, because each had been briefed by his own separate Intelligence, the political, military and economic implications of what had just happened in the Saudi desert capital seven thousand miles away.

  ‘You say our people there are convinced it’s religion and not Marxism, Johns?’

  ‘Yes, Mr President. Absolutely certain. Rahbar, when he was Crown Prince, abhorred Communism. As religious leader of the country he must maintain that Islam and Communism are diametrically opposed.’

  The President groaned out loud. ‘Soviet Communism’s diametrically opposed to everything in this world, Johns, even to other kinds of Communism. You told us, at least your predecessor in the Agency did, that the Ayatollah Khomeini was not a Communist. And we believed it. I still believe it, but it didn’t stop him cutting off his oil to us. Seven hundred thousand barrels a day we were importing from Iran then, and it’s nix, absolutely nil today. Just because their diseased little Shah tried to die on us, it cost us seven per cent of our oil imports, which is why we’re so dependent on the Saudis. And that’s why I want to know, Johns, whether this shit means to cut us out for good and sell instead to the Soviets.’

  ‘Rahbar is no Communist, sir. He’s a devout—extreme— Moslem.’

  ‘He’s popular?’

  ‘He’s in power, sir.’

  ‘Balls, Johns! Don’t play word games with me.’

  The President slammed his fist down hard on the metal table and the little brass Stars and Strips on its little brass base-jumped an inch with the shock. He tugged at his tie again, coughed, swallowed the phlegm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A tiny haemorrhaged vein in his left eye began to spread blood across the yellowing white. Here, in this underground room out of the public eye, he could have been a bookmaker or a poolroom regular.

  ‘It’s Iran all over again,’ he said. ‘We’ve been caught on the hop just as Carter was with those student pigs. “Give them hell, Jimmy,” we shouted then and for what? D’you remember the great phrases? How America had lost its clout, how everyone was still terrified by the Vietnam Syndrome, how America had lost its faith in the future for the first time in its history? Remember the burning effigy of Uncle Sam the students held up in our Embassy in Teheran . . . with a goat’s skull for a head and collecting trash in Old Glory? D’you remember Vance trying to do the right thing? Remember his phrases? “We must strike a balance between timidity and provocation . . . American power is no longer the answer . . . not a sign of America’s decline but a measure of America’s maturity.” Remember Carter—a hawk one minute, chicken the next?

  ‘Well, let me tell you something you know already. That’s not how I intend it. I won’t play possum to some crazy dervish. They have broken all the rules, just as they did in Iran, and we are now going to play all the long shots. You say Rahbar is no Communist and I tell you that he and his mobs are doing the Kremlin’s work even if they’re not doing its bidding.

  ‘Let’s get it straight. He has closed down our oilfields, and we’re going to sit here until we’ve decided how we’re going to open them up again. Maybe the oil is his but the ways and means of getting it out of the sand have always been ours, our machines, our know-how, our men, our markets, our money.’

  He left the table and walked to one of the wall-maps, a large-scale projection of Saudi Arabia. It was coloured yellow, a land of desert from the Red Sea on its western borders to the Persian Gulf on its eastern. And in between, the Great Nefud and Rubai Khali deserts consuming most of the Arabian peninsula, stretching a thousand five hundred miles from Jordan and Iraq in the North to the Yemeni States in the South. The President put his right forefinger on the capital of Riyadh and slowly traced the road travelling east to the Persian Gulf and the oilfields. He turned, half facing them.

  ‘Six months ago a certain chief of a certain Allied European Intelligence Service stood just where I am now. You brought him, Johns. Remember what he said? It’s all cinema, he said, all just cinema. Whatever the Soviets say they mean to do, whether it’s about detente, or about strategic arms limitation, or about lessening the tensions, is just something they know we want to hear, just something to distract us while they set about their serious work elsewhere. Brezhnev kisses Carter on the cheek and initials SALT, and soon after Russian tanks rumble into Afghanistan. Remember, Johns, what our friend showed us on this map? Remember how he made a wide sweep of it? He pointed to Ethiopia where the Russians have got themselves a Red Sea port with access to the Indian Ocean, pointed across the Arabian peninsula, across South Yemen where they have anchorage refuel facilities and submarine pens on the Arabian Sea. And then he swung his hand around, completing the circle of Soviet ambition. And in the centre of that huge area he pointed to the Persian Gulf. This, he said, is the Soviet’s objective, this is what they are after, this is what is real to them. They’re trying to take over what he called the “rimlands” of the Middle East oilfields . . . as part of their strategy of denial against the West’s energy sources; the creation of pro-Soviet oil states, including Saudi Arabia itself.’

  The President raised his voice. ‘Our friend ended with a simple warning, “If the Russians could get the Gulf oilfields by stealth and default, they would become masters of the world . . . and without ever having to go to war. The balance of advantage is already with them.”

  ‘So my question again, Johns. Is he popular? What is his Soviet connection? Is he there by demand, are they all with him? Or is there a chance, I don’t care what the odds are, just a chance of shifting him right out again? Because if we cannot, this country can kiss itself goodbye and amen.’

  ‘Mr President . . .’

  ‘Let me finish, Johns. Without that oil we’re not in the world-power business any more. You know it, I know it and by tomorrow, everyone from LA to Philadelphia will know it too. And they’re not going to blame sonofabitch Rahbar and his Islamic People’s Proletarian Revolution. They’re not going to blame the oil companies and they certainly won’t blame themselves. The President will be the kicking butt ’cause I’m supposed to look after them and I shouldn’t have let it happen.’

  Richard Johns, CIA, stood up again. His face seemed greyer than usual and his eyes were wide behind his spectacles.

  ‘Mr President, with respect, and I want this put on record, if we put one invading American soldier anywhere on Saudi Arabian soil, Islam will explode. There is a unanimous belief that any semblance of stability there would be shattered by US military intervention . . . whatever the provocation. We must dilute, not aggravate, the situation. We do not know for sure how much control Rahbar has of the country . . . nor can we be certain Iraq, or Syria or Iran wouldn’t go to its aid. We must assume Soviet complicity but at this time we are fighting Islam. By going in for that oil we may spark off a reaction in all Islam and set off a fire that neither they nor we could control.’

 
‘That’s a pretty speech, Johns.’ The President said it slowly. ‘I suppose this couldn’t have come at a better time, you being such an Arab watcher. I forget that before you took to other people’s crimes you did, what was it? Arab Affairs at Yale?’

  ‘Islamic Studies, sir.’

  ‘And Professor?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Well, too much knowledge is sometimes a dangerous thing, Johns. It narrows your vision, elongates comprehension, but gives it no breadth. Tell me, did Islam explode when Soviet tanks went into Afghanistan? Did it? I’m telling you to look beyond the Arabs and the prophet Mohammed. Look instead to the irreligious Russians, the apostles of Marx. I’d rather contest the Arabs now and put off later contest with Moscow, because that’s what this is all about. Don’t you see, Johns? They’re probing again. They tried us on in Cuba and Vietnam and Angola and Iran and Afghanistan. They probed us on the neutron bomb and the B-l bomber and they’ve come to the conclusion we’re soft. So they probe and they find mush so they probe a little further. But God help me. I’m damned if they’ll shove their filthy fingers any deeper into me. That’s my answer, Johns, to your Islamic explosion. We’ll set them on fire maybe. But we’ll put out the flames soon after.’

  He massaged his scalp for another twenty seconds and sat down again at the head of the long metal table in the centre of the Situation Room. The six men watched but said nothing.

  The Situation Room is in the central basement of the White House, itself in the centre of Washington, so the little-known room could be said to be the centre of American presidential government. Or more concisely, the centre of crisis American presidential government, because it is in this long padded room, with its artificial strip lighting, its recycled air, its temperature and humidity control, that crucial decisions have been made by American presidents during the many and varied crises in the nation’s history this century. And their secret conversations, controversial decisions, conspiracies and many deceits, are as secure in this room as a scream in a vacuum, because the doors, walls and ceiling of the room are sealed in a field of electro-magnetism.