Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05 (21 page)

“As we agreed.”

“And the final installment?”

“Upon delivery of the last nuclear warhead,” the Palestinian wet his cracked lips.

The Pakistani tightened his fingers around the butt of his brown cigarette. Suddenly, without reason, he began to sweat like a pig. He pressed his lips together and folded the paper napkin into a small square. He studied his client. “So that is it?” he concluded.

The Palestinian nodded. “I believe that it is.”

“We will not meet again.”

“There is no reason.”

“So tell me, before we separate, I would dearly like to know. Where did you get your money? One hundred million U.S. dollars is not a small sum. Who is your financer, I’m dying to know.”

“A poor choice of words, Dr. Atta. Be careful what you ask for or you might get your wish.”

The Pakistani scowled. “I have provided you with nuclear warheads, not an easy thing to do. I am taking an enormous risk, more than you could ever know. I control many generals, but I do not control every one. I have put my neck in a noose here. Don’t I deserve to know who is financing this operation?”

The Palestinian pushed himself away from the table. “Too many questions is not a good thing. The money will be delivered. That is all you need to know. We want the last warhead by Friday. Now our business is done.”

The Palestinian dropped a couple dirty
dinres
on the table and moved for the street.

* * *

Two days later, a rusted container ship loaded with barrels of refined kerosene, lubricants, and refurbished electrical generators, left the port at Karachi bound for the Straits of Hormuz. It only took three days to reach the port of Ad Dammam, the huge Saudi port on the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf.

On the burning pavement of the seaside dock, three large but non-descript crates were loaded onto the back of a two-ton army truck. The truck pulled away from the warehouse and turned to drive south. Overhead, two helicopters followed its path.

That night, the third, fourth and fifth nuclear warheads were placed in an underground storage facility on the Saudi air force base of Al Hufuf.

* * *

Twenty hours after the last warhead was delivered, Dr. Abu Nidal Atta, deputy director, Pakistan Special Weapons Section, principal advisor on national security to the Pakistani president himself, didn’t wake up after his customary afternoon nap. When his wife couldn’t rouse him, she immediately called for his personal doctor. He arrived within minutes, but it was already too late. The doctor’s heart had ruptured. There was nothing he could do.

An autopsy was requested by the physician, but the president of Pakistan turned down the request. Following local tradition, the body was cremated before sundown that day.

* * *

Prince al-Rahman smiled when he was informed of the news. He waved his advisor out of his office and immediately picked up the phone. “Get my money back,” he commanded. “I want every dime.”

A little more than four hours after taking off from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, Major General Brighton’s C-20 lined up on final approach at Riyadh’s civilian airport. Upon landing, he met the local staff and immediately went to work, attending endless meetings, conferring with the ambassador and his military staff, the CIA station chief, and six others involved with trying to keep the kingdom from falling off the cliff. He slept four hours that night, then got back to work.

Late that afternoon, after completing his official assignments within the kingdom, Brighton stood on the balcony of his suite of the grand Al Faisaliah hotel, waiting for his car to pick him up and take him to his appointment with Prince Saud. Standing next to the glass rail that surrounded the balcony, he looked down upon a city that glistened in the brilliant setting sun.

Riyadh sits in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s an exceptionally modern city, with a stunning architectural mix of glass high-rise buildings and ancient desert mosques. The skyscrapers ascend like something out of a children’s drawing book: sweeping arches, enormous space-saucer shaped coliseum, forked skyscrapers made of steel, glass and glistening chrome. The streets are tree-lined and well-lit, and swept daily to keep the blowing sand at bay. Desert browns, whites, and pastels are the dominant colors, and though the city is considered one of the modern wonders of the world, traditional Arab influence can be seen in the arched doorways, dome-topped mosques and caliph-inspired city center. Enormous highways sweep through the city, the cement having been laid over the trails where Bedouin camels used to trek.

The capital city of the kingdom, with a population of almost five million people, Riyadh was derived from an Arab word meaning
place of garden and trees.
Ancient wadis run through the center of the city and the surrounding soil is fertile and rich. Powerful electric motors pump fresh water from deep underground aquifers to keep the manmade oasis green and desirable.

To the west and south of the city, the terrain rises gradually for four hundred miles until it suddenly juts upward at the rocky Midian Mountains. To the east, the land descends through the Summan, gradually transforming from barren desert to rangelands to the fertile crescent that borders the Persian Gulf. A constant wind blows from the desert and the flies seem to swarm when the night cools down, especially when the date trees are bearing fruit. To the south lies the
Rub’el Khal
—the Empty Quarter—a land so bleak and brutal few humans have ever trekked across its sands; a land so desolate the Saudis were more than happy to give most of it to Yemen and Oman.

Overhead, the sky is almost always a deep gray-blue, a huge open saucer sitting over the land; cloudless and so deep in color it seems as if one were looking at the edge of space. The air is clean and clear, and the lights from the city can be seen for hundreds of miles on a clear desert night. Spring storms can bring violent rain, and the sandstorms can be deadly if one is caught in the open, but for three hundred and forty days a year the weather is monotonously predictable. Hot and dry in January, searing hot the rest of the year.

Like the city, the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a bewildering example of contradictions and extremes.

Much of the nation is an entirely inhospitable desert, yet the oases that dot the country are lush, wet and brimming with life. The cities are bright, beautiful and more contemporary than any in the world, but beyond their city limits, the Bedouin nomads live much as they have for almost two thousand years. The Royal Family jets around the globe, meeting with Hollywood celebrities and foreign heads of state, headlining cultural conferences and human rights events, while the women in some localities are not even allowed to learn how to read. The Saudi infrastructure is modern in every way, but the Kingdom still denies basic freedoms of expression and many human rights. The
Qur’an
teaches love and peace, emphasizing the need for discussion and the give-and-take of discourse, yet the royal family allows no opposing political parties; indeed there are no political parties in the kingdom at all, and the royal family was certainly not a party, but a close-knit, manipulative and fortified group of relatives who guard their family secrets above everything else.

It is as if the government straddles two ice floes that are moving apart; one foot in the West and one foot in the desert, preaching progress and equality while denying the same. Any expression of anti-government activity is unthinkable. Women cannot drive or even appear in public without a male family member as escort. Use of corporal punishment is the rule. In fact, the punishment for various offenses is precisely prescribed in Saudi law—beheadings for rape, murder, sodomy, or sorcery; amputations of the feet or hands for robbery; and public lashings for offenses such as public drunkenness.

All of the media, including the eight daily newspapers, are owned and controlled by one prince or another. The government maintains the Royal Decree for Printed Material and Publications with a list of topics that are prohibited to be written about or discussed. The Saudi Communications Company controls the backbone network through which access to the Internet must pass, and the list of approved sites is very short indeed. The
mutawwa
are tasked with enforcing the Wahhabist interpretation of Islam by scouring the culture for immoral teachings or immodest dress. Every public facility, including Western businesses like McDonalds or Starbucks, must enforce a kind of sexual apartheid, with separate entries and facilities for women and men. The men’s sections are lavish and comfortable, while the women and family sections are often dilapidated and neglected, sometimes not even offering seats.

It is appalling to those who aren’t familiar with the culture. But it is the way it’s been in Saudi Arabia for hundreds of years.

Until now.

Now there were a very few of those who felt it was time to make a change. A few men within the royal family who felt it was time to turn the monarchy over to the forces of democratic power.

His Royal Highness, King Faysal, Monarch of the House of Saud, was one of those men.

King Faysal knew it would take several generations for the transition to be complete, but he was convinced that democracy and the teachings of Islam were not mutually exclusive ideals, and it was time for the kingdom to take the first step. Which meant it was time for the monarch to give up much of his family’s great power. It was a radical heretical and insane idea! But King Faysal had already begun. Over the past twenty years, he had reined in the
mutawwa
, set up civil courts with professional judges, authorized city councils outside of the influence of royal patronage, and, for the first time, named men to senior government positions who were not his nephews or sons. The next step was to free the press. A national assembly would follow, though that was still ten or fifteen years away.

Fighting two hundred years of tradition, the courageous king had instituted the first steps of reform.

But to say there was resistance among the princes would have been a colossal understatement, for they knew what they would lose. All of their money and power was at risk. They were the richest family in the world. It was a lot to give away.

The king understood their anger, for he wasn’t a fool. Still, after a long life of laying the foundation, King Faysal intended to accelerate the transition to democracy by appointing his first son, Crown Prince Saud bin Faysal, to take his place on the throne, and Crown Prince Saud bin Faysal would be the last king, for he had already made a covenant with his father to complete the transition to democracy.

The only problem, of course, was that there were other sons.

And they were far from convinced that Crown Prince Saud should be king.

* * *

On the outskirts of the great city, at the end of a tree-lined road that abruptly stopped at a cement barricade, behind a wall with hidden towers and razor wire, was one of the three dozen homes the Crown Prince of the House of Saud had. The future king was a large man with dark eyes and broad shoulders and short, curly hair. He was fourty-seven, but looked younger, though there were days he felt very old. With a degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the crown prince was decisive and sharp-tongued with his subordinates, but warm and easily manipulated by his family and friends.

The prince sat quietly at the end of an enormous mahogany table. To his side, sat the American general. They were the only two men in a room so large it could have accommodated a group of a hundred or more. Brilliant tapestries, some five hundred years old, hung on the walls. The floor was imported Italian tile, the doorframes were rare and unnamed woods shipped from the Indian forest. The ceiling moldings were gold plated. Crushed glass had been mixed with the pastel paints on the walls, giving the room a brilliant radiance from the desert sun that reflected through the twenty-foot windows.

The general stared for a brief moment, taking in the beauty of the room. The prince didn’t notice. He had a lot on his mind. He needed a smoke and he fidgeted nervously as he tapped on his pack of American cigarettes. Moving his chair across the tile, the prince leaned his arms on the table. “Coffee?” he offered.

The general shook his head.

“I’ve got some beautiful teas I’ve brought in from Oman. The leaf is so thick, it will, how do you say it . . . knock your feet off.”

The general smiled. “I think you mean knock your socks off, Prince Saud, and no tea, but thank you.” He smiled again, knowing the prince was teasing him now.

“How about a Coke then, General Brighton?”

“Yes. That’d be great.”

“Diet? Caffeine free?”

“Regular Coke is fine.”

“Oh, you crazy fool!” the prince scolded, trying to hide the smile on his face. “Get you away from Sara and you
really
cut loose! Next thing you know, you’ll visit my kingdom and take home another wife!”

The general shook his head adamantly. “You know Sara. I don’t need to say any more.”

“Yes, yes, General Brighton,” the prince finally smiled. “If all men were so lucky! And frankly, good friend, I don’t understand how she fell for you. You are like a Bedouin camel herder who married a princess. Despite all your failings, God has smiled on you.”

Neil only nodded. The crown prince was joking, but he knew it was true. “And how is Princess Tala?” Neil asked.

Saud nodded happily. “Beautiful as ever! And did you know we were expecting another son?”

Neil smiled happily. “Congratulations!”

Prince Saud clapped his hands in a gesture of gratitude, then touched a hidden button under his desk. A young Indian man hurried into the room holding a silver tray over his head. He poured soda for the American and tea for his master, then laid out a silver tray of sugar cookies and pastries and hurried from the room.

The crown prince studied his friend and smiled with satisfaction. “How long has it been, Neil?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Crown Prince Saud,” Neil replied. He never called the prince by his first name. “Sometime just before the fall of the Prince Basser. We saw each other at the U.N. Liberation Conference. That’s been, what, almost a year now?”