"Jack Bauer here."
A comm-sys operator at CTU GCR Center said, "Your call is being switched to Director Randolph."
Jack hadn't requested to speak to Randolph, he was just reporting in, but Randolph had some ideas of his own. The director was already up to speed on the Golden Pole massacre, having already been briefed by Pete Malo.
Randolph said, "We've got a forensics team and every available backup unit dispatched to the scene. They'll be there any minute now."
"They'll be needed. It's one unholy mess out there."
"What happened, Jack? How do you read it?"
"Somebody tried to liquidate Paz and botched the job. It was a professional job, a pretty slick setup. Unfortunately for them, Paz was slicker. And they had the bad luck to shoot their move when Pete and I were on the scene. They didn't know we were there, and got caught in a crossfire between us and Paz."
Randolph tsk-tsked. "Lord! This is the kind of thing you expect to find in Iraq or some banana republic, not in the United States of America. New Orleans is already on edge that Everette's going to swat it. An incident like this — well, it's the last thing we or the city needs right now."
Jack said, "I guess there's never a good time for a massacre."
"It's going to raise a big stink, Jack."
"Maybe the storm will wash it away."
3
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 A.M. AND 8 A.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME
Ministry of the Interior Substation,
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
3:00 P.M., local time
Because of the shape it takes, sandwiched between the lake and the river, New Orleans is known as the Crescent City.
On the other side of the world, the capital of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, could fairly be called a "city of the crescent" — said crescent being the holy symbol of the faith of Islam.
Chance — or destiny — has seen fit to locate the world's richest sea of high-grade oil under the kingdom's desert sands. Petro-power has made it one of world's supreme wealth generators, whose power and influence has been a major geopolitical factor for the last half century and more. And whose economic and political clout can only increase, as world demand for oil inexorably rises as existing reserves steadily shrink.
Riyadh is a showcase for Arabian oil riches, a wonder city reared up in a desert wasteland, a vast, sprawling technopolis of skyscrapers and palaces, its modernistic urban complexes knit together by a network of superhighways.
There is luxury in Riyadh, opulence. Supreme master of the city and all the kingdom is the inner circle of the royal family of the House of Saud, a ruling cadre numbering several hundred individuals. They seek luxury and splendor the way flowering plants turn their faces to the sun.
But not the twelve men who now met in solemn conclave in the conference hall at an obscure substation of the Ministry of the Interior, located at the inland edge of the city, the borderland where the great desert begins.
Their rank and power entitled them to sit in the most august and respected precincts of power, but instead they preferred to assemble in the relative obscurity and anonymity of a minor office complex on the outskirts of the megalopolis.
It was safer that way. Their mission was a dangerous one, best shielded in secrecy.
The building was unprepossessing, one of the Ministry's more modest holdings. No lofty glass and steel needle tower, it was wide, squat, low-slung, and built close to the ground. It fronted south, its east wing facing the city, its west wing facing the dark immensity of the mainland, of vast stony plains marching inland to depths of desert solitudes.
The structure was integrated closely into the landscape, so that it seemed to be an outcropping of the hill on which it was set. There was something in its form suggestive of ancient stone forts and castles, updated to the modern era. A pile of tan and sandy vertical and horizontal slabs of stone and steel-reinforced concrete, with narrow, slitted windows. Arrays of satellite dishes mushroomed atop its flat roof.
On the third, top floor, in a conference room, the Special Council met. The meeting place had the aspect of a corporate boardroom. A rectangular wooden table, long and slender, occupied the central axis of the space. Grouped around it was an oval ring of high-backed swivel chairs. Occupying those chairs were the twelve members of the special committee.
* * *
Seated at the head of the table and master of the council was Prince Fedallah, chief of the Internal Security Section of the Ministry of the Interior — a secret police apparatus that worked directly for the King.
Fedallah was a royal, but only a minor princeling, one from a line far removed from the inner circle of the ruling class. His present prominence testified to his ability; he'd won his post as the King's trusted spy and hatchet man not through family connections but through a ruthless mastery of intrigue.
He was lean, wiry, balding, with leathery skin stretched taut across a long, bony face. His eyebrows rose in points in their middles. The hairs looked like individual copper wires. His nose was beaklike; his mouth was downturned.
He wore a red-and-white checked kaffiyeh headpiece and a khaki outfit that fell somewhere between a military uniform and a safari suit. It was custom-tailored, with crisp, sharp edges.
He provided his own security. Elite troopers from the enforcement arm of his Special Section guarded the building. A pair of them stood watch outside the closed conference room doors.
The others at the table were a mixed group of royals, clerics, and military intelligence officers. Most of them wore white ceremonial robes over business suits or Western-style clothes.
Conservative ceremonial attire for a tradition-bound land. Good protective cover for the council, whose task had already set them well on the way toward perdition according to the more ulfraorthodox-minded of their coreligionists.
The majority were senior officials, graybeards, with a scattering of middle-aged members.
One of the youngest — and he was in his mid-forties — was Tariq bin Tassim. He was a prince, too. His family was much more closely connected to the ruling royals than Fedallah's.
He was one of the new breed, Western-educated, including a graduate degree from the Harvard Business School. He spoke English fluently; he had spent much time in America. He handled a number of major investments for leading royals, princes within the direct line of descent for the throne. He swam in a global monetary environment of the twenty-four-hour business cycle; of hedge funds, shell corporations, interlocking directorates and cartels, commodities and credits.
He piled up fortunes on Wall Street. He socialized with powerful U.S. politicians in Washington, D.C. He skied in Aspen, gambled at Monte Carlo, and yachted in the Aegean.
His friends included an ex-president of the United States, several current cabinet heads, a half-dozen or more senators, and a dozen senior congressional representatives.
A handsome man, he had dramatic features: thick, dark, wavy hair; dark brown eyes; a neatly trimmed ginger-colored beard.
He sat at the middle of the table, on Minister Fedallah's right-hand side. He was not the youngest council member. That role belonged to Prince Hassani.
Hassani had excellent royal connections but a somewhat checkered past. He was in his late thirties but looked younger. His watery-eyed gaze was blurred and unfocused behind the thick lenses of his black plastic-framed spectacles. His spade-shaped chin beard was thin and wispy.
Hassani's Western sojourns had been disappointing and unsuccessful. He'd had personal problems. He'd attended college in California and had lost direction, going off his moral compass. Repatriation to the kingdom, and extensive reimmersion in the ultraorthodox tenets of the kingdom's fundamentalist Wahabi sect, were the cure to his malaise, which was, at bottom, spiritual.
Farther up the table, seated in the penultimate place of power on Fedallah's right hand, was Imam Omar, better known throughout the kingdom and beyond as the Smiling Cleric.
He
projected the image of a sweet, good-natured older uncle. He wore a white headpiece, glasses, and a bushy gray beard. His eyes were bright and merry. He smiled readily and often, and was ever ready with an old saw or pious saying.
The Imam represented a different source of power than royal connections or oil wealth. His was the power of faith and of the faithful. Traditionalist tenets are encoded in the Saudi Arabian operating system, at every level of the society. Even the highest are careful not to provoke the disapprobation of the powerful fundamentalist clerics, whose wrath has been known to unleash a whirlwind of mass fervor that can topple a throne.
Wahabism, the state religion of Saudi Arabia, is one of the strictest and most rigorously fundamentalist branches of Islam. The variety of Wahabism preached and practiced by Imam Omar was harsh and ascetic, rejecting much of the modern world, even the modern Muslim world.
Yet no matter how harsh his decrees, or uncompromising his rejectionism, his demeanor was unfailingly merry, with a twinkle in his eye. He was the spiritual leader of an influential mosque in Riyadh, one attended by some of the most devout and observant members of the royal dynasty.
The mosque was the beneficiary of royal patronage and largesse, receiving hundreds of millions of petro-dollars. Some of this money was used to fund a network of madrassas, religious schools, throughout not only the kingdom but also in Yemen, Jordan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
A second branch of his organization was an equally far-flung chain of charities.
A third branch was the Imam's connections to the kingdom's religious police, the self-styled Committee for the Prevention of Vice and the Propagation of Virtue. Established in every city, town, and village, it consisted of thousands of zealots who volunteered to patrol and police their fellows to ensure orthodox obedience and suppress all deviations from the fundamentalism line. They had the authority to make arrests, close buildings, and administer whippings on the spot to violators of religious law.
Not a private army, perhaps, but a private police force, and one not necessarily under the sway of royal overlordship.
Which made Imam Omar a powerful man indeed. His influence reached both the urban masses of the Arab street and the desert dwellers of the inland settlements. He was a powerful force for tradition. His opposition to a government plan or decree was often enough to kill it.
A dangerous man, in a kingdom so precariously balanced on the edge of a sword.
* * *
The meeting having been called to order, Minister Fedallah addressed the other members of the council. "As you know, the King has charged me with carrying out a program vital to the security of the realm," he began.
The others knew it, all right. Fedallah never missed a chance to remind them of his position of preferment near the throne.
He went on, "His Majesty has charged me to carry out his plan, and I picked each and every one of you to serve as instruments of his will. Our task is not an easy one. It will continue to increase in difficulty. The purity of our intent is subject to misunderstanding by the very countrymen we seek to help. But there is no other alternative.
"To safeguard kingdom and throne, we must bestow a supreme gift to those very forces who would destroy us — the Americans. We must gift them with a surplus of the oil which they crave like a creature of Satan craves the blood of the innocent. This is our sacred task."
* * *
The planners and policymakers in Washington had labeled the mission Operation Petro Surge.
The Saudis of the secret council called it Cloak of Night.
Behind it lay the age-old enmity between the two leading branches of Islam, the division between Sunni and Shi'a. The Arab sect was the Sunnis; the Iranian sect was the Shiites.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the leading Shiite power of Iran was offset by the Iraqi regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni. Saddam and the Iranian ayatollahs fought a war in the 1980s that saw titanic clashes and bloodletting on a scale not seen since the battles of World War II. It ended in a draw.
The First Gulf War drastically checked Saddam's dreams of conquest, yet left the balance of power between Baghdad and Tehran fundamentally unchanged. The Second Gulf War, the American liberation of Iraq, demonstrated the unpalatable truth that whatever else his faults were, Saddam knew how to rule his country. He ruled it with instant obliteration of foes and dissenters, mass executions, wholesale torture, and relentless terror. Thereby welding the fractious Iraqis into a nation.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The hole in the landscape left by the absence of Saddam was filled with the Iranians.
Iran's prospects for regional supremacy were bright. Few riper or more tempting targets for takeover existed in the region than the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Its numbers were thin and threadbare compared to the far more populous Iran, with its teeming millions. Iran was well armed, with a huge conventional army as well as thousands of terrorists and guerrillas it could field to infiltrate, subvert, and destroy the foe.
Iran could take Saudi Arabia simply by marching an army into the kingdom. The mullahs in Tehran and the holy city of Qom would become the masters of the world's richest reserves of high-grade oil.
Standing between Iran's conquest of the kingdom was the bulwark of the United States. Washington and Riyadh have had a long and complicated relationship (like a hostile married couple, they stayed together for the sake of "the children") — that is, the oil fields.
Despite deep currents of hostility, suspicion, and mutual detestation, the two nations needed each other. The United States needs Saudi oil, and the Saudi royals need the United States to guarantee their throne and sovereignty.
Now a crisis was approaching. U.S. involvement in Iraqi nation building was reaching the beginning of the end. The misadventure had caused the United States to hemorrhage vast amounts of blood and treasure. Further gargantuan sums were required to keep the U.S. Navy and Air Force patrolling the vital sea-lanes of the Persian Gulf — Arabian Sea, by kingdom lights. The cruisers, destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers, air bases, and all the other components of the U.S. military infrastructure burned vast reserves of oil every day to maintain the status quo.
Washington had recently made it clear to the royals in Riyadh that it needed some relief from the gnawing expense. Even the long-suffering American taxpayer was beginning to grumble with obvious signs of discontent. The Saudi royals' resistance to American pressure began to crumble.
The result was Cloak of Night.
* * *
Cloak of Night — that was the royals' term for a bold economic thrust on the world market.
The Americans, the oil executives, diplomats, and military attaches who'd helped broker the deal for Washington, called the forthcoming market glut Operation Petro Surge.
One result of the surge would be a sudden drop in gas prices at the pump and in home heating fuel costs. Extra money in the pockets of American consumers — a welcome event in what was shaping up as a tricky election year for the incumbent Administration.
The oil glut would be a onetime phenomenon. The Saudis had agreed to it this once because of the immediate threat presented by Iran's expansionist activities in the Gulf. It was a guarantor of American military protection.
Best of all, no real harm would be done to the kingdom's long-term interests. The oil glut would be soaked up and absorbed by the market, and prices would once more begin to rise, zooming upward. It would stifle any flickering impulses on the part of the Americans to develop some degree of energy independence, ultimately making them even more dependent on Saudi oil.
Most important of all, it would check the Iranians — hard.
* * *
The theory was simplicity itself: supply trumps demand. The kingdom maintained a vast sea of oil reserves, storage tank reservoirs containing millions of barrels of high-grade oil. They sat on it, carefully shepherding it to avoid putting too much on the market at once. A glut of oil would, at least temporarily, depress prices.
>
That cut into Saudi profits.
The boldness of Cloak of Night lay in its counterintuitive nature. It proposed to release those reserves, flooding them on the open market and dramatically driving down prices.
At first glance, it was seemingly contrary to Saudi interests. It also countered the dictates of OPEC, the global petroleum producers' price-fixing cartel, an organization of which Saudi Arabia was an integral part. As was Iran, the kingdom's dreaded rival and immediate threat.
Cloak of Night, the Saudi planners called it, a phrase with a self-consciously archaicizing feel. The newly freed reserves comprised a sea of night-black oil. But there was a deeper meaning. The oil ploy was an act of darkness, for it would directly benefit the unbelievers and crusaders of the Western adversary, particularly the Great Satan, U.S.A.
But not for long.
* * *
Minister Fedallah continued, "As expected, Cloak has produced no small amount of unrest at all levels of the populace, in cities and villages."
Khalid, of the religious police — a key ally of Imam Omar — was unreceptive, quarrelsome. "Who can blame them? Bad enough that we, the shepherds of the faithful, must oversee a process that rewards the Western foe who seeks to destroy us."
Fedallah countered, "Dissent is an act of disloyalty against His Majesty himself and therefore a crime, no matter how nicely motivated. To tolerate unrest is a betrayal."
Tariq noted, "No one will ever reproach your zeal in the service of the King, Fedallah."
Imam Omar said, "The King has spoken, his will must be done."
"I'm glad you feel that way, Imam," Fedallah said. "Some of the rioters and provocateurs are persons associated with your mosque."
"Then they are no followers of mine, for I counsel obedience to His Majesty's commands."
"Still, they listen to you and respect you. Words from you on cheerful obedience to the King's command would go a long way in quelling some of the more unruly and rebellious sentiment."
24 Declassified: 07 - Storm Force Page 4