He was dead. The American let him fall back again, face down. One of the Englishmen, his right eye blue and closed by a deep cut above the cheekbone, shouted as a pole spun through the air like a boomerang and hit him squarely in the throat and he fell backwards across the dead Belgian.
Then Franklin heard it, distant but unmistakable above the screams of the crowds: automatic gunfire—long bursts, six guns, maybe more—coming from the direction of Al Ahsa Road where many of the American families lived. He heard a siren, more long bursts of firing, then three explosions. And then nothing. He looked across at the tall American holding on to the other corner of the truck, a man of about fifty. His head started to shake as if he was saying ‘No’ to himself a hundred times. Stones hit him and a bottle split his cheek, but still he stared in the direction of Al Ahsa and still he shook his head.
‘You okay, fella?’ Franklin shouted at him.
‘My wife and kids,’ he said, not looking back. ‘Our house is there—’
But he didn’t finish. Something crashed him backwards, so fast and so hard that he took another three men down on to the floor with him. Hanging from a first-floor window, a heavy wooden barrel swinging from a rope backwards and forwards had caught the American in the full force of its swinging arc, breaking his ribs and forcing them into his lungs. Franklin went down on is hands and knees and began to crawl towards him, but one of the Englishmen who had gone down in the fall waved him back and turned his thumb to the floor. The American’s face had turned blue and thick blood splashed from his mouth. Then he slumped to one side and was still and the blood flow stopped just as abruptly.
Youths were now running alongside the trucks, hitting the knuckles of those who were holding on to the sides and throwing handfuls of wet camel dung up into their faces. Franklin saw that the people in the truck in front were covered in cow’s offal emptied from the window over an abattoir. Other youths were throwing cow pats, sending the discs baked hard in the sun spinning through the air, cutting through clothes with edges as sharp and as hard as rock.
They were driven from the Khurays past the roundabout into the Al Islam Road and the last half-mile of city streets. Soon they would be turning at the giant Petromin Building and out on to the desert road to the airport. One of the older Americans, who had been sitting on the floor half conscious, held his hand out to Franklin to pull him up. Then, holding on to Franklin with one hand and holding his jacket, now sodden with blood, to his head, his grey hair turned red, he began singing loudly. And one by one, as the rest in the truck heard the tune above the screaming Arabs they joined in, the Japanese road engineer happy to sing the only American song he knew.
‘Tom Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
‘Tom Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
‘Tom Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
‘But his soul goes marching on.’
‘I’m sorry,’ shouted the old American as they went into the chorus of ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah’, but it’s the only song I know the words to.’
‘Except ‘God Bless America’,’ Franklin shouted back. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t reckon to finish that entirely and anyway, I’m not exactly in the right mood for Thanksgiving.’
They were into the seventeenth verse—the seventeenth repetition of the same verse—when the truck, moving fast now along the desert road, suddenly veered left off the main tarmac into Riyadh International Airport, swung left again past the main terminal building, past the fire-damaged cargo sheds and on to the concrete of the parking apron. And then they saw them, eight massive Galaxies, brilliant white, the largest air transport jets in the world, parked in line facing out towards the runway.
The turbine blades were turning inside the giant cowls and there was a shimmer of heat above the wings. Over three thousand people had been organized into eight queues, one to each of the aircraft. Men, women and their children shuffled slowly forwards, dirty, forlorn and silent. None carried any baggage, though some had a pillowcase or a plastic laundry bag tucked under their arms, filled with the few valuables they could find in the scramble from their homes, before the mobs destroyed whoever was white, and whatever was not of Islam.
The truck stopped just short of the nearest queue and the Saudi soldiers banged the trucks sides with their rifle butts. Children in the queue began to cry and their mothers covered them with their arms as American medical orderlies came running.
Franklin lay still in his bunk. Only the shudder of the aircraft rising into the sky disturbed him. There were tight straps across his chest and knees and the surgical spirit they had used to clean the cuts and grazes were stinging. In the bunk above him he could hear the Japanese engineer still humming quietly ‘Tom Brown’s Body’ and someone, a man, was sobbing, in the bunk below. Franklin raised his head. The aircraft was packed with the refugees from Riyadh. They had arrived months, even years, before at the beginning of their various contracts in style and expectation. Men of the United States Military Command, come to introduce the Pentagon’s newest and most sophisticated weaponry and train the Saudis how to protect their oil Kingdom. Civilian Americans and their families who had kept the oil flowing from subterranean Arabia. American security and communication instructors. Civilian non-Americans, who had come to build the roads, railways, the Royal palatial annexes and the government office towers, blocks of glass and mosaic tributes to architectural ego. Civil engineers from Britain whose irrigation projects had brought water where they had been none for hundreds of millions of years. Agriculturalists from Ireland who had grown rice in the sand where nothing in the history of the world had ever grown before. British and Canadian doctors repairing inflamed lungs, removing cataracts, restoring sight and hope in hospitals newly built by the West Germans. Men and their families turning a remote feudal desert Kingdom into a twentieth-century nation enabling eight million Arabs who had known nothing but disease, poverty and anonymity to join the ranks of the all-powerful. Eight aircraft, now flying high over the desert, were carrying these people away as discarded, disgraced and humiliated refugees, arbitrarily punished by Islam, for talents and ambitions that were not of Islam.
Franklin rested his head back on the pillow. The medical orderly had given him a painkiller. He had said it would make him sleepy and already the noise and friction of the people around him were beginning to fade into soft echoes. He felt his body shrinking inside the stiff white sheets, and he could no longer feel the straps holding him down, holding him safe as the huge transport jet shuddered through the air turbulence. He closed his eyes and relaxed. It was all over, he whispered to himself, all over. But as he sank deeper into sleep, another part of him gently nudged and told him that perhaps it was really only just beginning.
The Galaxies levelled off at forty-one thousand feet and turned on to a new heading north-west. Below was the vast empty Great Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh was already two hundred miles behind.
In one hour and ten minutes’ time, the pilots would check the radio navigational beacon over the Gulf of Aqaba, Southern Jordan, then turn their aircraft due west across the Sinai Peninsula, across the Gulf of Suez and begin their descent into Cairo.
BONN
‘The House in Bonngasse’
The little man stopped at the corner and waited for the last cars of the night to pass. It was bitterly cold but he was always telling people the desert was as cold at night as any German winter. He watched the wind spiral the snow through the yellow light of the shop windows. It stuck like glue to his coat and like ice to his eyebrows and beard. He had watched it from inside the taxi, flying at the windscreen, building up each side of the wipers until it reduced their sweeping arc and the taxi driver had stopped to scrape it away, using German words he had never heard before.
He would protest later at being dropped off here like this, alone in the snow, but the instructions over the telephone les
s than an hour ago had been explicit enough. ‘Stand with your back to the Rathaus,’ the voice had said, ‘and face the Marktplatz. Look left. That is Wenzlegasse. Walk three blocks and turn into Friedrichstrasse. Go another fifty metres and Bonngasse is on the right. Number thirty-five is the old house, just down from Beethoven’s.’
He remembered the German voice. ‘Once you leave the Marktplatz we’ll be around you. Our security. Not yours.’ The house in Bonngasse in the West German capital of Bonn had been famous once in its own small way, which had nothing to do with the nearness of Beethoven’s birthplace.
Fifteen years ago, an enterprising local photographer walking past it during the first fall of snow early one December evening had seen its commercial potential. He borrowed a small fir tree in a tub, bought a large wreath of fir cones and holly which he tied with a red ribbon to the old oak door and, using his own floodlights, completed a dozen colour photographs. The snow that evening was deep and fresh and it covered the steep roof of number thirty-five like great soft rolls of white dough. He was well pleased with the effect.
Later, in his studio, he superimposed another print: a carol singer he’d photographed at Christmas the year before, a small girl complete with carol sheet, lantern, bobcap and scarf. He completed his Yuletide composition with a negative from his print library, one of the Icon of Christ on the Cross taken inside Bonn’s Munster Cathedral.
This gleamed from the dark December sky above the snow-covered tiles of number thirty-five.
Suitably mounted, it earned him an immediate profit and a contract for it to be reprinted in its thousands as Christmas cards. For a while the seventeenth-century house in Bonngasse, one of the very few escapees of the Allied bomber blitz, was famous and people came to take their own snaps. It became almost a place of pilgrimage, though visitors left disappointed because number thirty-five looked drab without the snow, without the holly and the red ribbon, without the little caroller and Christ in the dark December sky watching her. It looked vulgar in daylight, wedged between a sex shop and a coin-operated washerette, facing a used-car lot.
No one ever discovered the little girl’s name, despite searches by national model agencies, but as it happened she later became very well-known in West Germany. This, however, had nothing to do with singing or Christmas or Christ. The pretty child grew up with a fierce dedication to international anarchy and the ability to kill very efficiently in its cause. She was also extremely lithe, with a body and a face men considered beautiful and desirable.
Anna Birgit Schneider joined the Baader-Meinhoff terrorists late. Already Fraulein Ulrike Meinhoff had killed herself in defeat in her solitary confinement cell. And Andreas Baader and his mistress Gudrin Ensslin had followed with double suicides in Stammheim. Anna Schneider then joined Verone Becker, Jorg Kranz, Wolfgang Hüber and Hanna-Glise Krobbe, collectively known as the Red Army Faction, a confused, desperate and lethal gang of young middle-class anarchists.
For more than a year, Anna’s identity and membership of the Red Army Faction was not known to the West German police. She had grown up in a middle-class, inconspicuous district of Bonn, respectably, as befits the only daughter of widower Johann Schneider, Doctor of Medicine. Her lack of a police record was valuable to those in charge of the Red Army Faction who were working on the inside of it and to those lawyers and other young anonymous professionals promoting its aims on the outside. Schneider was used as a go-between, crossing international borders freely, carrying passports, letters, poisons, munitions, replacement spares for the Red Army’s weapons, from one underground cell to another. And returning cash to the suppliers.
But the job as courier was frustrating to the young ambitious Anna. It was not enough for her to be assistant in the organisation. She was twenty-two years old and desperate for terrorist activity.
Her opportunity came on the fourteenth of July, 1979. Three Red Army members preparing to leave their apartment in the dock area of Hamburg to rob the Deutsche Bank in Jungfernsteg came face to face with three men of the Zielfahndung GS10, the West German Police Target Squad, who shot the three young terrorists—two boys and a girl—through their faces at a range of two metres as they left the front door of their hideaway, their weapons still in their holdalls. The sudden deaths were a great encouragement to the West German counter-terrorist units and a blow to the Red Army, but the bank had still to be robbed and three replacements were quickly assembled. Anna Schneider, caressing her newly-acquired Tokarev pistol, was one. Seven hundred thousand Deutschmarks were taken from the cashiers but then, even though the two others were on their way out of the front door, Anna shot dead two of the cashiers and a mother and her child lying face down on the floor. And she dropped her father’s visiting-card by the bodies. Never again would she spend her time carrying messages. As of that day, in that one obscene act of terror, she became West Germany’s most wanted terrorist and—in the logic of terrorism—the Red Army’s most prized possession.
She had now come to thirty-five Bonngasse, but for one evening only. Fifteen years before, she had collected dozens of the famous Christmas cards and so had her father; it had been their secret. If Anna now recognized the house, she did not show it. She sat on the bare, stained mattress in the bedroom on the first floor, a sleeping-bag tied up to her waist to keep her warm, polishing her small black Tokarev pistol with a piece of mutton-cloth. Anna Schneider, now twenty-seven years old, graduate of Leipzig University, disciple of Marcuse, Guevara, Morighelles and Habash, was waiting for a knock on the street door, a loud knock. She was waiting for someone who could tell her about a place called Ullswater in what was known as the Lake District of northern England, where King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was staying and where he was to be assassinated.
Schneider took off her gloves and from the breast pocket of her anorak pulled out a small silencer, screwed it carefully on to the barrel of the gun, placed the pistol on her lap, covered it with the sleeping-bag and waited for the Arab.
At that moment, three thousand miles away East in the Persian Gulf, an assault ship of the United States Navy began to change course in a slow three-mile-wide turning circle. Men aboard shielded their eyes from the low yellowing evening sun and felt the coolness on their faces as they turned into the breeze. The USS Okinawa, seventeen- thousand-ton veteran, had completed its goodwill visit to the Gulf and was obeying a signal from the US Naval Headquarters in the Pentagon, Washington, to make a new course south east, out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, into the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.
PERSIAN GULF
‘They’re trying another Cuba’
Their faces were green and blank and entirely without contour, lacking the third dimension. Their eyes were wide and unblinking as if witnessing some dreadful evil.
The room was dark except for the luminous glare of the radar screens. It was also hot and humid, and the green faces glistened with sweat. The low hum of the ship’s generators was the only sound.
The five men stood still. Occasionally one would ease his weight from one foot to the other, or lean forward to see the tiny moving blobs as the radar scanners swept clockwise around their dials, and each man in turn, every few minutes or so, would check his own wristwatch against the quartz digital above the main radar consul.
All five wore the light khaki uniforms of officers of the United States Navy—tropical dress—short-sleeved shirts, open necks. They stood in line behind the radar operators, or rather they stood at a slight angle, one slightly behind the other, as if service discipline made it necessary to stand a half-step behind one’s superior officer, it being assumed leadership meant always being a half a step ahead.
Captain Edward James Hanks therefore stood furthest forward, nearest the radar screens. He had been in command of the Okinawa for nine and a half years and it was his last sea command. In four months’ time he would take shore-leave and then a posting to Annapolis Naval College, Maryland pending his ret
irement from the US Navy, after forty-two years in the service. Life had come full circle. He had been fresh out of Annapolis on his first overseas posting as a ensign aboard the West Virginia and had come as close as he had ever been to losing his sea-legs and his life when a Japanese Nakajima torpedo-bomber took the side out of the bunk-room as he was sleeping off a night watch at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor.
Captain Hanks survived four years of the war in the Pacific. He was junior Gunnery Officer aboard the carrier Yorktown, had taken shrapnel in his back during the battle of the Midway and was with the Enterprise when McClusky went after Yamamoto. He wore the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Navy Achievement Medal and a breastful more.
He took command of the Okinawa in February, 1975, two months before the fall of Saigon. It was from this twenty- one-year-old assault ship he’d been given, forty miles out in the South China Sea, that task force helicopters took off for the US Embassy to bring refugees from defeated South Vietnam back aboard, thousands of Vietnamese who filled the Okinawa from bow to stern—living in their own stench and urine in the semi-dark of the hangars sixty feet below sea level as the ship steamed slowly to the Philippines and the promised New World beyond that.
Captain Hanks could still smell them, even though the hangars had been steam-hosed and disinfected many times over since. On tropical nights, when the air maintenance crews opened the doors to the lift shafts going down from the carrier’s deck and the air was still and warm, Captain Hanks could smell the stench rising and he would not eat his food and would refuse his coffee, and he would stand on the bridge in silence holding a clean white handkerchief soaked in aftershave to his nose.
December Ultimatum Page 7