The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  “When they attacked Alia, they went too far,” Abdullah said suddenly.

  Kurland needed a moment to parse the words. “You think your brother was behind the bombing in Jeddah?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “What would he gain?”

  “Look at me!” The words were a plea as much as a command. Abdullah lifted his right hand and watched it quiver. “If Saeed sees my death, he’s not far wrong. He’s stronger than I am. More ruthless.”

  Abdullah squeezed his fingers together to hide their trembling and rested his hand on his lap. “Saeed is more ruthless than I am, and more ruthless than you could ever be, and he’s going to win. And there’s nothing you or I can do about it.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. He seemed to have lost interest in the conversation.

  “Can you prove he was involved? Because if you can—”

  “Of course I can’t.”

  “But she was his grandniece, too—”

  “Americans always believe in kindness. When you leave here, drive back to that prison you call an embassy, take a detour. Drive into the desert. Tell me what kindnesses you see there, Mr. Ambassador.”

  Kurland knew he shouldn’t be angry at this half-mad man. But he couldn’t help hating Abdullah a little. “That’s what you called me here to say.”

  “And to ask you a question.”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “Suppose I could prove that Saeed had killed my granddaughter. Would it matter? To the United States of America?”

  “It would matter.”

  “Would it?” the king said again. “Would it mean anything at all?”

  “Yes.” Kurland hoped he was right.

  “SO I GUESS WE’RE not following the king’s advice?” Rana said, as the convoy swung south onto the highway that ran from the palace toward downtown Riyadh.

  “Hmmm?” Kurland was still trying to understand what Abdullah had said about Saeed. Would the prince use terrorists to attack his own family? These men had everything to lose from a civil war, everything to gain from keeping the Kingdom stable. Maybe Kurland was naive, but he thought they’d be rational enough to make the compromises necessary for a peaceful transition.

  “Going into the desert. His object lesson.”

  In fact, they were heading back to Riyadh and the embassy. Kurland, Rana, and Maggs rode in the second Suburban, the third vehicle in the convoy. Maggs had moved Kurland out of the lead Suburban, explaining that he didn’t want to be predictable. Maggs and Kurland sat side by side in the middle seat. Rana and a marine corporal were in back, with two more marines up front. Two Saudi police cars cleared traffic ahead of the convoy, sirens screaming, while an armored Jeep from the king’s private security detail brought up the rear. Saudi drivers were famously aggressive, but even they stayed away from this rolling mass of iron.

  “Yeah, we’ll skip the desert,” Kurland said. Though part of him wanted to see what the king had meant. Walk in the heat until he collapsed.

  “I have to say attacking Alia was brilliant. Shows the princes nobody’s safe. And takes out a progressive voice, a woman, someone who can speak to America and Europe. And it’s pushing Abdullah over the edge at this moment when he’s fighting with Saeed for control. Three for the price of one.”

  “Could Saeed have been involved?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m not saying directly. But he’s the defense minister. He’s got intel on her protection. Maybe he or Mansour gave that to somebody who didn’t like her. When we saw him, he didn’t seem too upset she was gone.”

  “Okay. Abdullah’s furious that Alia died. Wants someone to pay. He and his brother, they’re rivals, hate each other. And Abdullah’s blaming Saeed. But why would Saeed take that risk? I don’t see it. And I promise you that’s what Foggy Bottom will think. They’ll say this proves that Abdullah is too old and we can’t trust him anymore.”

  “What if we’re looking at it backward?” Kurland said. “What if Saeed is just crazy? What if he’s waited forever to be king, and he can’t stand the idea that Abdullah wants to skip him?”

  “You’re letting your dislike for Saeed color your thinking.”

  “Maybe. But there’s something I don’t get. The family’s kept this to themselves. We didn’t have a clue.”

  Rana hesitated. “True.”

  “So Al Qaeda probably doesn’t know, either. Or Hezbollah. Unless they have better intel into what’s happening in the monarchy than we do.”

  “Which is unlikely, sure.”

  “And when was the last time the Sauds had this kind of internal struggle?”

  “Not since the early sixties,” Rana said. “When King Saud was drinking himself to death and his brothers exiled him.”

  “Almost fifty years ago. So why now? The other bombings, sure. But Alia? Like you said, that was a surgical strike at Abdullah. If the terrorists aren’t getting tipped from inside, how could they know exactly the right time and way to hit him?”

  “Coincidence,” Rana said. “They’d planned awhile, and they had a chance at Princess Alia and they took it.”

  “I hate coincidence.”

  The convoy passed a massive construction project, hundreds of cranes working on half-finished apartments and office towers, part of the campus of Princess Noura University for Women. The royal family was spending more than eleven billion dollars on the school, part of its effort to funnel oil wealth into creating a sustainable society. Past the campus, northern Riyadh came into focus, concrete houses and mansions and mosques jumbled close behind high walls. In a city where summer temperatures topped one hundred twenty degrees, outdoor space was not a priority. The houses were built nearly to the edges of their lots. Kurland tried to imagine living inside one. He couldn’t. “You think you understand Saudi Arabia?” Abdullah had almost sneered when he said the words. No, Kurland thought. But maybe that was his own failure—

  THE AMBUSH BEGAN WITH what seemed to be an accident.

  A panel truck sliced across the highway right to left, tires squealing, leaving streaks of rubber across the asphalt. It smashed sidelong into the van leading the convoy, pummeling it against the center divider, putting a foot-deep gash in the van’s armored frame. And then it blew up—

  A half-second later, a Toyota 4Runner pulled up beside the first Suburban, eighty yards ahead of Kurland’s vehicle—

  And disappeared in a bright orange fireball that cut through the Suburban’s armored windows and twisted it onto its side and incinerated the marines and embassy staffers inside—

  THROUGH THE SUBURBAN’S SMOKED-GLASS windshield, Kurland saw the truck hit the van and explode. Then everything happened at once.

  Twin shock waves came at them up the highway, and the Suburban reared back like a horse trying to buck and then landed hard, its massive shocks rattling, and sped through the intense heat of the 4Runner’s fireball—

  And accelerated, pushing Kurland into his seat, and swerved into the center lane and then halfway into the right lane as the driver, who’d been through three roadside bombs in Iraq, tried to get them out of the kill zone—

  The sergeant in the passenger’s seat grabbed the tactical radio mounted to the Suburban’s dash. “Charlie Four, this is Charlie Six—”

  Metal clacked on metal, and Kurland looked back to see the lance corporal in the back jamming his M-4 through the firing port in the truck’s liftgate with one hand while shoving a shotgun into the port over the left rear wheel well with the other, as yet another SUV closed in on them—

  Maggs yelled “Down!” and pushed Kurland’s head onto the seat, and Kurland couldn’t see what was happening anymore — and the shotgun exploded from the seat behind them, both barrels—

  The Suburban shook with a crash that snapped Kurland’s head into Maggs’s body armor, the contact coming from the front, the passenger side, and pushing the truck left into a skid—

  The sergeant whispered, “We are hit—” And Kurland didn’
t understand why he was whispering and then realized that the shotgun had temporarily deafened him—

  Kurland squirmed up, needing to see if he couldn’t hear, and saw Maggs grab the pistol on his right hip and shove it through the port on the door beside him and fire at the Toyota that had crashed into them—

  Two neat round holes appeared in the Toyota’s metal skin and a third in the driver’s-side window, and the driver, a small man in a white thobe, ratcheted forward and his arm came off the wheel and the first spurt of blood flowered on his shoulder—

  The marine behind them muttered, “RPG incoming,” and Maggs shoved Kurland down — and this time the explosion happened behind Kurland, a searing wave of heat and glass—

  The Suburban lurched sideways and down, and Kurland felt as much as heard a terrible grinding as its back half scraped along the pavement—

  They ground to a stop, and in the silence Kurland heard another sound, a low grunting from the backseat, not even human, a dying animal, and he tried to sit up, but Maggs was holding him down, and Maggs said to someone, “Chase units, tac team, gotta get him out—”

  And Kurland forced himself up. Whatever happened next, he wasn’t going to his slaughter with his eyes closed.

  TO SAVE WEIGHT, THE steel armor at the back of the Suburban was only a half-inch thick. The rocket-propelled grenade ripped through the plate like tissue paper. Its next stop was Lance Corporal Ray Wade. The grenade shattered his Kevlar body armor and tore open Wade’s ribs and poured lightning into his heart and lungs, killing him instantly.

  By taking most of the explosion, Wade saved four of the other five men in the Suburban. Rana, his seatmate, was less lucky. Shrapnel tore open his face and neck, and one jagged piece chopped through his skull and cut into the arteries around his brain, causing massive internal bleeding. He died, but not soon enough. For thirty seconds he lay guttering in agony, whispering in words beyond translation, a language only he could understand, until a merciful unconsciousness took him.

  KURLAND SAW ALL THIS as he sat up. Saw the bodies behind him. Saw that the jihadi in the Land Cruiser was dead. Saw that they had stopped on the highway, smashed against the center median.

  He unbuckled his belt, stepped out of the Suburban. He stood between the truck and the median. The road was strangely empty. A few hundred yards back, the carcasses of the first two vehicles in the convoy smoldered. Behind them, two panel trucks formed a V that blocked the highway and the breakdown lane. A Jeep sat in front of the panel trucks.

  As his hearing returned, Kurland picked up horns honking and shots rattling. The noise was coming from behind the trucks, which he realized now had intentionally created a roadblock to split the convoy.

  He turned the other way, south. Not far ahead, the two Saudi police cars that had been their escorts burned wildly. Kurland had never been a soldier, but even so, he could see how carefully the attack had been planned. Nearly a dozen vehicles must have been involved, and at least twice that many jihadis. And they seemed to want to take him alive. Otherwise, they would have blown up this Suburban like the others.

  Maggs pushed out of the Suburban and grabbed Kurland’s arm. Kurland twisted away. “Enough. I’m a big boy.”

  “I am trying to save your life. Get down. Now.” Maggs pointed at the roadblock, and Kurland saw that the Jeep was heading toward them, two jihadis standing, bracing themselves on the roll bar and holding automatic rifles. The two marines scrambled out of the Suburban. One took a knee at the back corner of the Suburban and braced his rifle against his shoulder. The other pulled himself onto the SUV’s roof.

  “Have to sit tight,” Maggs said. “Take these guys out and wait for the cavalry.”

  Kurland nodded. He heard sirens now, distant but closing. The Saudi police had faced terrorist attacks in Riyadh before. They would be here soon, first in ones and twos, and then by the dozens. So Kurland followed Maggs forward and hid beside the Suburban’s wheel. Maggs squatted low himself and reached for his cell phone, as the marines started to fire short bursts.

  Kurland closed his eyes and prayed for the chance to see his wife again.

  THE LEAD SUBURBAN HAD carried the radio and satellite uplinks that provided secure connections to the embassy. But everyone inside the lead Suburban was dead. Maggs was stuck trying to call embassy security into his cell phone.

  Twice he punched *55, his pre-programmed speed-dial for embassy security. Twice he got an Arabic voice chirping at him. Either the Saudis had already shut down the network or the volume of calls had overwhelmed the local towers.

  Even so, the deputy chief of security should be getting the embassy’s Black Hawk up and putting the tactical response team together. All the vehicles in the convoy were equipped with GPS transceivers that continuously broadcast their locations to the embassy. Even without a distress call, the ambush would have been screamingly obvious from the fact that the convoy had suddenly stopped in the middle of a highway.

  But the security team would need at least ten minutes to get the bird in the air, and another five to get here. Maggs checked his watch. The ambush had started just five minutes ago. They were going to have to defend this position awhile. He drew his pistol and edged a few feet up the median so he cleared the front of the Toyota, whose wrecked grille formed an open jaw with the Suburban. From here he could cover the Jeep if it drove past them and looped back from the south. With the two marines covering to the north, they’d finally established a defensible position.

  Maggs looked over the median. Astonishingly, on the other side of the highway, the northbound side, the traffic was still flowing. But it was slowing by the second as drivers stopped to gawk at the apocalypse across the road. Then he heard the sirens screaming north up the other side of the highway, saw blue lights flashing in the distance. Maybe the Saudi cops would get here quicker than he had expected.

  WHEN THE JEEP GOT to two hundred yards, the marines opened up, short, controlled bursts that dug holes in its windshield and hood. The Jeep accelerated, and the two men in back stood and braced their AKs on the roll bar and fired on full automatic. The Jeep blew by as the marines kept shooting. Nobody hit anybody. No surprise. Shooting at a vehicle moving obliquely past a static post was next to impossible. A quarter-mile south, the Jeep slowed and began a tight right turn across the empty highway.

  Maggs squeezed his Glock between his hands, wishing he had something more potent. The Jeep stopped, came forward two car lengths, then stopped. Maggs didn’t understand why the jihadis were hesitating. They had planned the ambush brilliantly. But they seemed to have run out of momentum. Maybe they hadn’t counted on facing three armed men at this point and didn’t have enough guys left to make the final assault.

  The sirens on the other side of the highway got louder. So did the explosions behind the two panel trucks. If the jihadis wanted Kurland, they’d have to move soon, Maggs thought. As if the jihadis had suddenly reached the same conclusion, the Jeep accelerated toward the Suburban. Maggs retreated behind the corner of the Suburban’s armored grille. The marine on the roof twisted himself around so he was now facing south, toward the Jeep. “Wait!” Maggs yelled. “Let’em close!”

  The Jeep closed to two hundred yards, one hundred fifty, one hundred, the jihadis firing high and wild, rounds dinging off the Suburban’s armored windshield and grille—

  At eighty yards, the marine on the roof opened up, full auto this time, a burst that shattered the windshield. The driver was low in his seat, and Maggs couldn’t tell if he’d been hit. The Jeep skidded to a stop, its tires squealing. The driver jumped onto the pavement, holding his stomach.

  Maggs took his time and squeezed off three shots that caught one of the guys standing in the back in the chest. His arms came off the roll bar as though he was trying to do a jumping jack, and he fell off the Jeep and thudded against the pavement. The guy next to him jumped down and crawled behind the Jeep and fired three shots that banged off the median a couple feet from Maggs.

  THEN THE
CAVALRY SHOWED up, in the form of two white Chevy Tahoes on the northbound side of the highway, blue bar lights flashing, sirens screaming, their front doors carrying the open-eyed logo of the Saudi police.

  The Tahoes stopped across the median from the wreck, and their doors opened and four officers wearing body armor over their blue uniforms poured out. One yelled something in Arabic, and two of the others pulled out a pair of over-under double-barreled shotguns from the second.

  Maggs turned, wishing he spoke Arabic, wanting to avoid friendly fire. “Hold your fire—” he yelled, wondering as he did how they’d had time to get into their body armor — and realizing too late that these weren’t cops at all, that they were terrorists, part of the ambush—

  As one of them jumped onto the median and fired twice at the marine on top of the Suburban. Even the marine’s Kevlar couldn’t protect him from the shotgun’s fury, which nearly split him in half at the waist. Almost simultaneously, a second terrorist fired at the marine on the back corner of the Suburban, catching him in the neck and dropping him instantly—

  And the third turned his shotgun at Maggs. Maggs lifted his pistol and fired wildly, his shots catching the jihadi in the neck and twisting him sideways—

  But the jihadi was already pulling the trigger. A torrent of steel tore through Maggs’s arm and shoulder, a left hook from a giant wearing razor-studded gloves. Maggs fell against the Suburban and tried to raise his hand to return fire. Nothing happened. He looked down to see his arm hanging limply from its socket and his blood pouring down the side of his Kevlar vest. He knew he was dead, had to be, weaponless and useless, and he couldn’t do anything but watch as the jihadis reached for Kurland, who had been hiding like Maggs told him and was just now realizing what was happening—