Hunter Killer (17 page)

General Rashood knew they had another four miles to cover before dark. Almost thirty miles behind him he knew Team Two was moving slightly quicker under the command of the teak-hard former Legionnaire, Maj. Henri Gilbert. His own tireless number two, Maj. Etienne Marot, made a satellite communication with Henri every two hours.

The final group, Team One, commanded by the Corsica-born Maj. Paul Spanier, was twelve miles in arrears of Major Gilbert, and moving faster than all of them, along a different route. That was the nature of a march like this: everyone began to get slower.

The sun was just beginning to sink somewhere into the Red Sea, several miles to their left, when Team One saw two camels appear on the horizon. They were walking in a slow swaying rhythm, unchanged in thousands of years. And they were not on the track that General Rashood’s men occupied. They were coming from the northeast, across rough, high desert sand littered with boulders and virtually no vegetation, leaving a dusty slipstream behind them. Sometimes the riders disappeared with the undulation of the ground, but their dust cloud never did.

General Rashood checked them out through binoculars. Both Bedouins were armed, rifles tucked into leather holsters in front of their saddles. The General ordered everyone off the track, to the right, down behind a line of rocks…weapons drawn…action stations.

Slowly the Arab riders advanced on their position, and made no attempt to conceal themselves. They drew right alongside the rocks and dismounted. The leader spoke softly. “General Rashood. I am Ahmed, your guide.”

“Password?” snapped the Hamas commander.

“Death Squad,” replied the Arab.

General Rashood advanced from behind his rock, right hand held out in greeting.

“As salaam alaykum,”
responded the Bedouin. “We have brought you water. There are only two miles left of your long journey.”

“I am grateful, Ahmed,” said the General. “My men are very tired and very thirsty. Our supplies are low.”

“But ours are plentiful, and they are very close by now. Let your men drink…and then follow us in.”

“Did you see us from far away?”

“We saw the dust, and we saw movement along the track from more than two miles away. But we never heard you, not until now. You move very softly, like Bedouins.”

“Some of us are Bedouins,” replied the General. “And we are grateful to see you.”

Ahmed’s companion, a young Saudi al-Qaeda fighter, had pulled two plastic three-gallon water containers from his camel and set them up on a low rock for the men to drink. That was two pints each, and there was not much left after ten minutes.

They picked up their burdens again, the two Arabs remounted, and they set off—as always moving north—and the ground began to fall away in front of them as they approached the “hide” the al-Qaeda men had built.

At first it was difficult to discern. Not until they were within a hundred yards could they make out its shape—a crescent of rocks guarding the rear and a solid rock face 150 feet to the south, overlooking a dusty valley. Beyond that were low hills, and in the far distance there was flat land, too far away to see the aircraft hangars on the King Khalid Base.

Inside the “hide” were wooden shelters about eight feet high, with just a back wall. The other three sides were open, with poles holding up palm-leaf roofs covered in bracken. One square earth-colored tent, again with bracken on the roof, plainly contained stores. Big cardboard containers could be seen through its open double doors.

Off to the left were several small primus stoves for cooking. There was no question of a fire out here, since its smoke would be seen in the crystal-clear blue skies from both the air base and the army base, nearly five miles away.

This rough “hide,” set in the foothills of the Yemeni mountains, would be home to the French-Arabian assault force for thirteen days. It would be a time of intensive surveillance of the bases, checking every inch of the ground, studying the movements of the Air Force guards night after night, observing the movements in and out of the main gates, noting the lights that remained on all night.

When Captain Alain Roudy’s missiles slammed into Abqaiq’s Pumping Station Number One in the small hours of Monday morning, March 22, General Rashood’s hit men would be ready.

MONDAY, MARCH
15, 0900 (
LOCAL
)
CENTRAL SAUDI ARABIA

The main road leading to the ancient ruins of Dir’aiyah, twenty miles northeast of Riyadh, was closed. At the junction with al-Roubah Road, just beyond the Diplomatic Quarter, a Saudi military tank stood guard. Two armed soldiers were talking to three officers from the
matawwa
, the Saudi religious police, that fearsome squad of moral vigilantes who enforced the strictest interpretation of the Koran. Almost to a man the
matawwa
supported the creed of Prince Nasir. Above an official-looking sign read
ROAD TO DIR
’
AIYAH CLOSED OWING TO RESTORATION
.

Motorists who stopped and claimed to be going on farther than the famous ruins were informed that they could pass, and were given a permit to be handed in to the guards stationed two miles from the ancient buildings. No one would be allowed to leave their vehicles. And it was the same coming south from Unayzah.

When the highway reached Dir’aiyah there was a roadblock in both directions. Uniformed soldiers prevented anyone going down the track that led west from the main highway. They collected passes and politely told motorists that the reopening of the ruins would be announced in the
Arab News
. Of course, most drivers who arrived at that point did not care much when the ruins reopened; the tourists had already been stopped miles away, on the edge of the city.

Anyone who gave any thought to this might have been quizzical about the ironclad security that now surrounded the very first capital city of the al-Saud tribe. Dir’aiyah, the kingdom’s most popular archaeological site, was under martial law. Not since the Turkish conqueror Ibrahim Pasha ransacked, burned, and destroyed the place almost two hundred years ago had a Saudi army seemed so intent on defending it.

In effect, Dir’aiyah was just a ghost town because, in 1818, Ibrahim Pasha had demanded that every door, wall, and roof be flattened. His marauding army pounded the walls with artillery, even wiped out every palm tree in the town, before they marched back to Egypt.

The palm trees grew again, but the Saudis never wanted to rebuild what was once their greatest city, and instead elected to start again with a new capital to the south, Riyadh. And for more than a 180 years Dir’aiyah was just the remnants of the old buildings—a mosque, the dwellings, the military watchtowers, the shapes of the streets—an entire cityscape, all open to the skies.

It was a place where life had become extinct, just a sand-blown Atlantis, with the sounds of shifting feet, as the tourists with their cameras shuffled around one of the glories of Arabian history.

Until Col. Jacques Gamoudi showed up, that is.

He had arrived on a scheduled Air France flight from Paris to King Khalid International Airport on December 2 and been in residence in Riyadh ever since. His appearance in the Saudi capital was completely unobserved. He took a cab from the airport and checked into the busy Asian Hotel off al-Bathaa Street.

Not for two days did he meet with three emissaries from Prince Nasir, and that was in the Farah, a local restaurant on al-Bathaa Street resplendent with large red-and-white Arab lettering above the door, enhanced by a large picture of a cheeseburger. From then on things looked sharply up. That afternoon he moved into a beautiful house behind high white walls and a grove of stately palm trees.

He was given a communications officer, two maids, a cook, a driver, and two staff officers from the al-Qaeda organization, both Saudis, both natives of Riyadh. One of them was the brother of Ahmed, General Rashood’s guide seven hundred miles away in the foothills above Khamis Mushayt.

And for two weeks they studied the maps, looking for an ideal spot to store armored military vehicles, several of them carrying antitank guns and possibly six MIA2 Abrams, the most advanced tank ever built in the United States. Saudi Arabia’s armored brigades owned more than three hundred of these battlefield bludgeons, half of them parked in lines at Khamis Mushayt.

They also needed a place to stockpile light and heavy machine guns, for later distribution, and for handheld rocket and grenade launchers. Not to mention several tons of ammunition and regular grenades. Much of this arsenal was currently in storage in the military cities under the watchful gaze of Saudi Army personnel sympathetic to the cause of Prince Nasir.

The questions were, when could the cache be moved, and where could it go?

Jacques Gamoudi called staff meetings, sometimes attended by six, even eight, specially invited al-Qaeda revolutionaries. He conferred with his small specialist team, and he spoke encrypted to General Rashood in the south. There was no communication whatsoever with France.

One night there was a sudden visit from Prince Nasir himself, and Jacques Gamoudi expressed bewilderment at the principal problem: how to move the hardware out of the military stores and place it all under tight control, ready for the daytime attack on the reigning royal family and their palaces.

The Prince himself had masterminded the acquisition of the weapons, and he had called on his loyalists to store and protect them. Curiously that had not been difficult. All of it was essentially stolen from the Royal Saudi Land Forces, which, awash with money for many, many years, were apt to be relatively casual with ordnance.

For two years there had been the most remarkable nationwide operation of pure deception going on in Saudi Arabia. One by one, battle tanks had gone missing from the big southern base at Mushayt, driven out straight through the main gates, on massive tank transporters, and north to Assad Military City, at Al Kharj, sixty miles southeast of Riyadh, where the national armaments industry was also located.

No one bothered to inquire when the tank had been loaded on the transporter by regular soldiers. The sentries never even questioned the drivers as the huge trucks roared out through the gates. And certainly the guards at Assad never even blinked when a Saudi Army transporter, driven by serving Saudi soldiers, hauling a regular M1A2 Abrams tank bearing the insignia of the Saudi Army, drove up and banged on the horn. They naturally let them in.

The tanks were parked in a neat group out on the north side of the parade grounds, and everyone assumed someone else had issued the order. But you can only do that when half the population hates the King and all he stands for. And even then, only if they think there is a real chance of a change of regime.

No one ever said anything. Hardly anyone even noticed. And it was the same with hundreds and hundreds of weapons boxed, crated, and moved from base to base, always placed in a spot that everyone assumed had been designated by a senior officer. When, actually, those spots had been designated by no one.

Prince Nasir’s secret arsenal was there for all to see. But no one really saw it. There were literally thousands of rounds of ammunition packed into the storage centers at Assad. Another huge cache of weapons had been driven to the southern warehouses in King Khalid Military City itself. But there was no paperwork. It was all just there, like everything else. And no one would miss it when it went, in the two weeks leading up to March 25.

There were even armored cars hidden quietly in various wadis and oases, all of them looking official, all of them occasionally visited by uniformed personnel from the armored brigades. Sometimes they were moved, sometimes left for another two or three days. But no one ever tampered with the well-paid Army in Saudi Arabia, and there were many officers and corporals already dedicated to the safety of the arsenal of the Crown Prince.

But now it was time to move. And the Prince and his advisers had each assumed, like the Saudi guards and quartermasters, that someone else had that under control. In fact, no one had it under control, even though it was the first question Colonel Gamoudi asked…
where’s our base camp?…From where do we launch our attack?…Where’s our command headquarters?…Does it have communications?…If so let’s test them right away. You can’t have a decent revolution if you can’t talk to each other.

From the very beginning the Saudi rebels had been bemused by the forthright military opinions and questions gritted out by the ex–French Special Forces commander.

And the trouble was, he could not solve the problem. It was the Saudis who knew the territory, they who knew the available strongholds and houses. It was they who were supposed to be telling Jacques where to make his headquarters, not Jacques telling them.

And by late February it was growing tense. Hiding boxes of ammunition and even cases of light machine guns was one thing. Disguising a damn great Abrams combat tank in someone’s front yard, on the outskirts of Riyadh, prior to charging straight down the Jiddah Road with guns blazing on the morning of March 25…well, that was rather a different matter.

Colonel Gamoudi had marked up various possibilities—big houses with big gardens behind high walls. But he did not like any of them. It was always in his mind…
One careless word from a servant, one sighting by an unsuspecting passerby, one friend of the family loyal to the Crown…that was all it would take.

He told the Prince of his concerns. He told him he needed a base where the public could not go. It had to be near a main highway, and it needed to be absolutely impenetrable by prowlers or sightseers. That meant it needed to be a place that
could
be cordoned off, for an obvious reason, a place that would cause no consternation among the public.

“Sir, do you have the power to select somewhere, and have the authorities deem it off limits until further notice? Somewhere we can start moving into, somewhere we can move the ordnance…somewhere from which we can attack?”