December Ultimatum (14 page)

‘The Fahd thing?’

‘About Gaddafi. And
OPEC?’

‘I know all about it. I got it from Fahd himself. And I gave it to the Agency.’

‘Good Lord!’

‘Good Lord what, Howard?’

‘A newspaperman? And you know so much?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Nothing,’ said the Englishman, ‘really nothing.’

But it all suddenly made sense to him. He had wondered why the Americans in London had been so insistent it should be Franklin who went into the cordon area for Schneider. Franklin was the risk . . . a high risk. He was not a regular and yet he had information that no non-regular should have. So they were sending him in after Schneider, and into an area where the odds of coming out were very slim indeed. The Americans in London knew that and so presumably did Washington. Now Franklin was to be put out of the way, and the ends to be neatly tied up—very neatly indeed.

The Englishman smiled what he considered to be his last smile at Franklin. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you off. You Americans,’ he said, patting Franklin on the back, ‘sometimes show style. Wonderful style.’

December 23rd

US, NATIONWIDE

‘Let the bastards freeze’

Already the President’s Ultimatum, as it was now being called worldwide, had backfired—just as his adversaries in Washington, Riyadh, Moscow, Paris and Bonn had predicted it would. The first intimation was the signal relayed to him from Naval Headquarters in the Pentagon, received via the surveillance satellite
SATCOM
that the
LPH 3
Assault Ship
USS Okinawa
in the Persian Gulf had suddenly increased its speed, slightly altered its course, and was not responding to orders to sail south-west.

Had there been a technical fault, the President had demanded?

Was it possible the Soviets were jamming communications? Surely, said the President, there must be other ways for US Navy Command to contact one of its vessels at sea? No, sir, was the answer. Not if the ship cannot or will not answer. Will not? What is the implication, the President had asked. None at this time, was the answer, but we are investigating with utmost vigour.

Not for the first time in his short Presidential career, suddenly intimate with the nation’s most precious military secrets, the President realized that the military machine, working properly, is one colossal marvel. But faulty circuitry can reduce its many parts to sudden impotency.

Readiness Command at Modill Air Base in Florida coordinated a twelve-thousand-million dollar worldwide military control system—
WIMEX
for short—which was supposed to tie up the whole of the United States global electronic intelligence-gathering network. It had satellites twenty-two thousand miles up in space and submarine-listening buoys down on the floor of every ocean, all linking up with that telephone on the President’s desk and he in turn was linked to all the twenty-seven major US Commands around the world.

Yet at that moment, a warship of the United States Navy, fully armed with a variety of missiles and a full complement of men, steaming through the waters of the most politically volatile area in the world, was suddenly out of touch. And approaching it, according to the satellite photographs, were twenty-two warships of the Soviet fleet. And all the Pentagon could do was to investigate with utmost vigour.

The President’s attention was quickly diverted to the immediate domestic crisis. He had expected the nation’s support, but on the morning following his address to the nation, it became clear to him that he had underestimated his fellow-citizens’ panic and their fury at the loss of their God-given right to mobility.

Some Governors in the North-Eastern States had already taken precautionary measures in anticipation of it. In Massachusetts, where the overnight temperature had fallen to a freak fourteen degrees Fahrenheit below zero, a ban was placed that morning on the sale of all fuel, except for domestic heating. The Governor, who had held that office for twenty-seven years, reckoned he knew his constituents like his own family, and was convinced they would accept that he had done what had needed to be done for the general good.

He was wrong, and petrol bombs thrown through his windows reduced his pretty New England wood-shell house to charcoal.

Across the nation very rapidly that morning, from East to West Coast, from the Canadian to the Mexican borders, lobbyists besieged Washington with charges of incompetence, nepotism and corruption. ‘There is,’ said one Congressman, ‘energy McCarthyism at work.’ It was quickly and generally agreed that the fair sharing of available fuel stocks would be impossible to achieve, and the consensus was that it was quickly going to be every man for himself and the lobby with the most punch would be the winner. The President had appealed the night before for sacrifice; he had also spoken of the Jeremiahs who, in the President’s words, had predicted a regional, racial and economic divisiveness not seen since slavery and secession. He was not going to get his sacrifice but for sure he was getting the rest.

Shortly after the television breakfast news shows, spelling out the fuel crisis were over, a crowd of over a hundred in Freemansburg, Pennsylvania, attacked the manager of a gas station, beat him unconscious, filled up their tanks and drove off.

In Levittan, an estimated two thousand militants and thrill-seekers began systematically wrecking those stations that had either run out of fuel or pretended they had. At one of the largest, in the centre of the town, they used a lorry to knock over the pumps which then began spewing hundreds of gallons of gasoline on to the streets, like the original gusher. In an attempt to cut off the electricity to the pumps, a policeman pulled out the power line. It earthed, accidentally, and the flash set the lake of gasoline alight; the policeman and twenty-two rioters went running hysterically around the centre of the main street on fire.

The Governor of Georgia declared a State of Emergency which gave him wide powers and he applied them in the way Southern Governors traditionally do. Dusk-to-dawn curfews were imposed in Alabama after widespread rioting, and national guardsmen were given authority to shoot to kill anyone on the streets during curfew hours and to arrest, during the day, any people who gathered in a public place in groups of five or more.

There was the same extreme emergency law enforcement in Ohio when men came on to the streets, armed with shotguns, to confront policemen who were trying to prevent a mob from taking over a Gulf Oil fuel depot containing one hundred and eighty-two thousand gallons of high octane gasoline.

And in the oil-producing states of the South, Mr America was reminded of what the Jeremiahs had meant when they had promised ‘regional divisiveness’. Masked men had shot dead a security guard and critically wounded three more in an attack on the pipeline taking oil north where it crossed the state border. Then they sabotaged the supplies by blowing up the pipeline and the pump relay station. And when police arrived by helicopter, they saw scrawled in the sand in oil,
‘IT’S OURS. WE KEEP IT.’

There were also attacks on the refineries at Galveston and Houston, Texas, because refining more heating oil for the chilly north-east meant less petrol for the auto-dependent West. And diesel for the farmers of the mid-West meant less for the truckers who carried east and north most of what the farmers sold.

The truckers, promised diesel by Federal decree, found they were suddenly having to pay four times the price for it, and even if they filled their tanks they were still immobilized by traffic jams with the highways strewn with abandoned vehicles and throughways clogged by motorists queuing for fuel. In Florida, troopers were flown in by helicopters to force motorists off the streets at gunpoint so that a stranded convoy of meat trucks could pass through.

Stickers started to appear in the back windows of cars in the southern oil states with the simple, provocative message addressed to their fellow home-heating consumer Americans in the North:
‘
LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE.’

In California preparations were made to plough under hundreds of thousands of acres of ripe tomatoes, lettuce and melons, because there were no trucks to take them to market. Ten and a half thousand head of beef cattle waiting in the abattoirs in the mid-Western States of Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Minnesota were shot dead and burnt because it was too expensive to feed them. There were no trucks to take the meat off to their markets and the freezers were already full to capacity.

People thought of building their own fuel reservoirs in their back gardens, but for most it was already too late. There were plenty of plastic tanks, but where was the fuel to fill them? Wherever fuel supplies were moved, by train or by road tankers, they were heavily guarded by army and state troopers. Gasoline was now better watched than Fort Knox gold simply because it was now more scarce.

GREAT BRITAIN

‘They drink camels’ piss’

‘PETROL RATIONING . . . IF WE’RE LUCKY!’
The headlines were splashed large. The story dominated the media, reporting in detail Britain’s newest and most unpleasant economic surprise, the consequence of a decision taken that morning by the Privy Councillors at Number Ten Downing Street, in reaction to another earlier one taken in a hot desert capital four thousand miles away from bitterly cold London.

The Prime Minister had been in Cabinet ever since the Privy Councillors had left Number Ten. She was expected to emerge in the early afternoon to make a statement to the House of Commons.

But as it happened, neither she nor her Foreign Affairs advisers knew all the developments. It was later described as ‘a communications lapse’.

An Admiralty signal of priority classification had been received early that morning from the British Naval Intelligence Unit stationed on the coast of Oman, reporting the arrival in the area of twenty-two warships of the Soviet Seventh Fleet which, according to earlier information, had been undergoing warm-water exercises south in the Arabian Sea. The signal reported the Soviets headed by the carrier
Minsk
and the assault ship
Ivan Rogov
cruising towards the Strait of Hormuz, presumably to enter the Persian Gulf.

The signal was considered important enough to be forwarded immediately by Intelligence at Admiralty to the First Sea Lord for him to acknowledge and advise the Prime Minister accordingly. Unfortunately, although it was considered by him of much relevance, it was not, because of the immediate domestic emergency, thought crucial enough to worry the Prime Minister immediately. But then he had not been told, nor would he be, of the presence of the American assault ship
Okinawa’s
position at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Neither could he have known the character, or mental instability of the
Okinawa’s
Captain. So the Oman signal was acknowledged as received by the First Sea Lord’s personal secretary, logged by him and then placed in a file marked
‘PRIORITY’
on the right-hand corner of his desk, where it was soon covered by Orders of the Day concerning vital fuel supplies to the Combined Services pending the implementation of fuel rationing in the country’s private and public sectors.

The Prime Minister’s decision of an immediate and total embargo on all North Sea oil exports received, after some debate, unanimous Cabinet approval. Most of the Ministers present, sitting in the cramped Cabinet room overlooking a snow-covered Horse Guards Parade, voted enthusiastically for it. They knew it would most certainly lead to confrontations with the
EEC
and in turn Britain’s probable expulsion from the Community, and they were not displeased at the prospect.

They argued that every one of the Member countries would do exactly the same, given similar circumstances, given that they too had oil to barter with. The British Government, they insisted, would ride the protests and the charges of infidelity and selfishness from the super-critical Germans, and the hypocritical French. And anyway, as the Foreign Secretary had argued so reasonably, oil had suddenly become a scarce product, and the prospect was that it would become even scarcer; and Europe was nothing without it. If Britain was expelled from the Community and the time came later for readmission, who among the member governments would object? The Foreign Secretary was right; oil had become a powerful weapon and Britain should use it.

The Prime Minister agreed, as it was expected she would. It was, she said, a crisis of such proportion that extraordinary decisions had to be taken. She reminded them of the urgent need for strong purposeful leadership, and the commitment Ministers had to collective responsibility. She concluded, as she always did at moments when her will and her office were liable to be questioned with a warning. Because of the nature of the present crisis and the need for quick Cabinet consensus, she would have to consider taking certain Ministerial portfolios to herself.

The vindicatory was understood by all and there were no objections, and that evening the Prime Minister went on television on all four channels simultaneously to explain why her Majesty’s Government considered the British oil embargo and fuel rationing essential to survival. She ended her statement to the nation with phrases similar to those used by the American President in his; appealing for the support of ‘each and every one of you, confident you will rally’. And like the American President, she was wrong.

The petrol bombs were thrown through the first-floor window of Number Ten Downing Street one hour and ten minutes after the Prime Minister had left for her house in Chelsea. No one was injured, but the fire spread quickly and extensively, damaging curtains and carpets. The worst damage was done by firemen whose water jets pierced the smoke and ripped apart two canvases hanging on the wall of the first floor landing, a Turner and a Sisley on loan from the National Gallery.

At first the
IRA
was blamed, they being held responsible for all black mischief in the United Kingdom. But an anonymous telephone-caller to the Press Association claimed responsibility and promised there would be more. His ration of petrol, he said, wouldn’t move his car out of his garage so the petrol would be put to better use. Within the hour there were similar attacks on the Home Office, a hundred yards down Whitehall from Downing Street, and another on the Department of Employment in St James’s Square.

The last flaming bottle went through the swing doors of the Foreign Office and hit the night porter in his chest, severely burning him. There were no further incidents that night and no further calls to the Press Association, and it was hoped the fire-bomber had used up his ration of petrol.

Squads of workmen from the Department of the Environment began screwing steel-mesh fireguards over the windows of all important government buildings at ground and first- floor levels and it was hoped the protest and demolition would end. It did not. It became far more spectacular.

The Saudi Arabian Embassy was hit at ten minutes past two, the Libyan and Iranian Embassies at twenty past. The techniques of these explosions were identical and simple, using—with macabre irony—Arab oil to do it.

In the basements of the three West London Embassies were large storage tanks containing fuel oil for the central heating boilers. It was an exceptionally cold London winter, and special care had been taken to ensure that the tanks were always kept full. At the time of the attacks, the tank at each of the three Embassies contained one thousand, two hundred gallons of highly combustible fuel oil.

The central heating system in all three embassies had been installed by the same national central heating company so the design was identical. At the Saudi Embassy, leading from the underground storage tank was the inlet supply pipe, three inches in diameter and fifteen feet long, coming up just above ground level on the outside wall at a convenient height for visiting fuel tanker lorries to connect their resupply hoses to. The tank’s supply pipe was sealed by a heavy brass cap and secured by a single padlock.

The petrol-bombers, as the press catch-named them, operated in teams of three. Dressed in blue overalls with the initials ‘BP’ on their backs, and passing for British Petroleum maintenance engineers, they broke the lock on the brass sealer cap and emptied four five-gallon cans of petrol down the pipe. Being lighter than the heavy fuel oil, this floated on top. Then they rolled down the pipe three small balls, two inches in diameter, each containing a phosphorus-based compound sealed in a thin layer of hard wax. They sank into the fuel oil and as they floated back to the surface the petrol dissolved the wax. Within three minutes, and with the bogus
BP
engineers safely away from the area, the phosphorus was exposed to air and ignited. The flash set the petrol on fire and within another four minutes the fuel oil had been heated to five thousand degrees Centigrade, the temperature at which it combusts. Sealed inside the tank, the heat and pressure generated by it was enormous, and the blast took the steel- plated top of the storage tank up through the basement floor, the super-heat instantly killing twenty-four Saudis queuing at the Home Affairs desk for air tickets home. Their bodies, immediately sealed in burning oil, were then forced twenty feet through the wooden floorboards above and into the First Secretary’s offices where the scorching heat and the burning oil took their second round of victims.

Fifty-four Saudis died in their Embassy, thirty-eight Libyans and forty-one Iranians in theirs. The just-living casualties, survivors so badly burnt and so deformed they would never walk again, would drink their food through pipes and would never close their eyes to sleep again, totalled, for the three Embassies, eighty-eight. That evening, the terrible casualties made television viewers throughout the world forget for an instant their own separate woes and they joined the outraged protests. But then, just as quickly, fuel rationing, the President’s ultimatum, United Nations’ confusion and Soviet naval activity—lumped together by the media as the ‘Gulf Crisis’—took back their attention, and the dead and the slowly dying who had been brought out of the three Arab Embassies in London were quickly forgotten.

It was hoped that the outrage would dissipate the accelerating anti-Arab sentiments that were now being promoted on street corners, in pubs, bars, Parliament and clubs, but it did not. All kinds of British Nationalist Movements under many titles and for many reasons began quickly to spread anti-Arab propaganda and the Arab suddenly supplanted the West Indian and the Pakistani as the targets of racist attacks. This caused much relief in London’s Southall, Lewisham, Brixton and the country’s other Black immigrant ghettoes and, almost in a sense of gratitude, the Black and the Asian became as quickly and as vehemently anti-Arab.

The Monday Club, a select association of wealthy right- wing racist-xenophobists, demanded the immediate nationalization of all Arab investment and property in the United Kingdom, including the sequestration of Arab money held by British banks and Arab stocks and shares held by British brokers. ‘Do what they did to us’, became the Club’s shibboleth, reminding people of Sir Anthony Eden’s loss of the Suez Canal to Nasser in 1956, and his futile attempts to bomb the Egyptians back to submission.

The Monday Club clarion was quickly taken up by others. There was much to fire Mr Ordinary Britisher’s hatred of the Arab. ‘Wog’ was reintroduced to his vocabulary of abuse and ‘A-rab’ became the vilest term of derision in school playgrounds and factory shop-floors. Overnight it had become a physical hazard for anyone dressed in djellabahs to hail a taxi, let alone walk Regent’s Street. Arabs were advised by their Embassies to stay indoors and they did. Harrods, long called ‘Arabs’ by Londoners, seemed suddenly bare without them and the chain department-store, Marks and Spencer, wondered, looking at the West End daily sales returns, whether Arabs had been their only customers. There were empty waiting rooms in Harley Street and exclusive doctors and dentists bit their nails and wondered whether the replacement Porsche might not have to wait a while. In quick retreat from the sudden antagonism the Arabs created something of a vacuum.

The anti-Arab rantings across the entire spectrum of the British Right was given much exposure and therefore much encouragement by the media. The long-dead Lord Avon, Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden at the time of Suez, became the hero of the day and, taking the precaution of informing Fleet Street picture agencies and the television news networks, the League of Empire Loyalists draped the Union Jack over his grave at Alvediston cemetery, near Salisbury in Wiltshire while a bugler sounded the ‘Last Post’.

Like their American cousins, the British found it easy to despise the Arabs, who had created a dozen crises in as many years; taking the Israelis repeatedly to war, causing recession after recession in Western capitalism with their insatiable demand for petro-dollars, hijacking and destroying aircraft, killing innocent people for some non-existent never-to-begotten Palestine. Bombing, bullying, hostage taking, machine- gunning and hand-grenading their way to the world’s attention. They were the makers of mayhem with their unique Moslem intolerance in a world that possibly deserved better treatment. Western eyes made no distinction. Palestinian, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Iranian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian: they were all Arabs and they were hateful. They were Moslems. They were filthy. They fornicated with goats and ate sheep’s balls. They drank camel’s piss. They were to be despised.

Again, like their American cousins, the British did not take kindly to the new and very severe restrictions caused by the fuel rationing, caused by the Arabs. Until petrol coupons could be printed, all petrol stations were closed and, until the government had decided how coupons could be distributed equitably, only public transport would be available. Request for permits to obtain petrol had to be applied for at local magistrate’s courts, and they were not expected to grant them freely.

As always, many thousands of motorists refused or were unable to look reality and the law in the eyes, and on the evening following the Prime Minister’s decree the roads and motorways of Britain were littered with cars and lorries, abandoned wherever the needle had finally crossed
‘empty’.

And that night, on the separate main news bulletins, Mr Britain saw live, via satellite, what extraordinary and increasingly outrageous things Mr America was doing to keep himself mobile. And they saw too the extraordinary outrageous thing their President now seemed willing to do to keep it that way.

The patience of the British, like their apathy, is well known, and, in the tradition of the British in times of crisis, it was widely believed that it would all blow over, despite what they saw on their screens, in spite of what they heard on their radios and read in their newspapers. The President’s ultimatum would do the trick. Anyway, there was always North Sea oil. Nothing could touch that. Which, as it happened, almost proved disastrously wrong.