December Ultimatum (2 page)

RIYADH

‘Rahbar – the new Messiah’

Franklin had been listening to the gunfire for a whole day and night, and slowly it had come nearer. He hadn’t known it at the beginning, but the remnants of the army—men still loyal to King Fahd, still believing he was in the country— had fought their way out of their barracks through the narrow streets to the open spaces of the European suburbs where they thought the walled-off gardens of the big houses would give them mobility and protection. They had been wrong. Few of the peasant soldiers knew anything of Riyadh-suburbia, and they found out too late that the western boundary of the city, beyond the garden walls, was nothing but desert. Open, vulnerable, easy target desert. So they dug themselves in and fought their separate lonely battle from foxholes beneath the tamarisk trees.

Their enemy, commando-fedayeen of the new Islamic People’s Democratic Republic, now surrounded them on three sides, the desert on the fourth. Artillery had been set up in the car park below Franklin’s bedroom window—105 mm field-guns, 90 mm recoilless rifles, light and heavy mortars, light and heavy machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades. By Franklin’s reckoning, many thousands of rounds had been fired into those emplacements, but still there were men alive to fire back, men unable to run, refusing to surrender, unlikely to survive.

Just before dusk, from his shelter six floors up, Franklin had watched a family crossing the open square, walking quickly and in single file towards the hotel; a Swiss family. The father in front had held up the large red flag with the white cross high above his head. The mother with her two small blonde children clinging to her had waved white handkerchiefs. Another minute and they would have made it to the car park gates, just another fifty yards. But, with safety so near, the father panicked. A hundred yards down Al Madhar Road, he saw the guns of a halftrack pointing towards him and suddenly he ran, and screamed to his family to run after him. Then the young Islamic revolutionaries opened fire, and Franklin remembered the red tracers curving towards them and how the woman and her children seemed to explode. The father, unhurt, stopped and looked down at them, still waving his Swiss flag.

For half a minute or more they let him stand there. When he sank to his knees, as if to pray they shot him too. Later Franklin looked again, and saw that someone had covered the pile of gore with the red and white flag, draped it over them like colours on a military coffin. It was time for prayer and Arabs found the dead and bloody Christian gore offensive at such a time.

The silence for prayers was almost as shattering as the firefight. Standing sideways to the bedroom window, Franklin watched as the Saudis below paused in their killing to wipe their feet and touched their foreheads on the sand and offer thanks to their God and pray for salvation. He edged back around the perimeter of the room and opened his door. The corridor was full of people, guests, porters, room boys, cooks, all crouching in the dark. Mattresses had been lined along the walls to absorb the sound of the mortars and shells and the blast if it should come. He smelt blood. People wandered past, looking for greater safety or for a friend or a lost family, and in the light of their torches he could see glass splinters in their faces. Shirts were drenched in blood, bandages had been made from towels, arm slings from bed sheets. A boy was holding a hand-towel sopping red to his right eye, and when the boy noticed him he held the towel away and Franklin saw that the eye had been torn from its socket and only the pressure of the towel kept it in its place. Franklin backed into the bedroom and locked the door. Prayers would soon be over, the firefight would start again: he must forget what was outside his bedroom door and concentrate on his own survival.

He had never expected this. He had made a promise to himself three years earlier, standing on Brooklyn Bridge on New Year’s Eve. No more wars, he had said, no more hassles, whatever the promise of glory and a bonus. Considering all he had done and all he had survived it was sensible and practical to draw a line through whatever ambitions were left. He had done and seen more than most in the trade; a long and reasonably successful career, with only casual injuries and a cholesterol level and blood pressure that hadn’t upset the insurance company doctor. Anyway, he was tired of deception. Eighteen years was a long time to call yourself one thing when you were also something else. A long worrying time. He could never be certain somebody wouldn’t finally expose him.

So, he had made a New Year’s resolution. Life would henceforth be a great deal more comfortable and less of a worry. To this end he would gradually move away from the Agency, back into the paper, and find himself a chair there sans blood, sans guts, sans glory, sans bonus. And so, for the past three years, his by-line had appeared more frequently in the
New York Times,
and the Central Intelligence Agency, despite its protests and threatening innuendoes, had come to accept it had lost a good rover.

Less than a month ago he had celebrated his fiftieth birthday with his ex-wife on his small farm in New Hampshire in a further attempt at reconciliation. He had returned to New York to be told of his promotion to assistant editor—management status, with a rise—the prospect of rosy years and the occasional soft story abroad. Until two weeks ago it really did look as if the promise on Brooklyn Bridge was going to hold. Then Oberdorfer, the paper’s financial editor, had got excited about the forthcoming OPEC meeting in Riyadh. Saudi contacts and Aramco friends had told him that the 1983 fiasco was about to be repeated, with the Iranians and Libyans trying again to destabilize the oil markets of the West both by raising the price of oil and by introducing mischievous variants on production levels. Oberdorfer sketched in the background: ‘global petropolitics’ had altered world opinions. While Western economic strategists in the late 1970s had wanted OPEC’s demise, now the emphasis was on keeping it together.

‘Keep the various mongrels in the same kennel,’ Oberdorfer had said. ‘That’s the only way to stop one or other of them from using oil against us.’

The Saudis had held the cartel together, resisting other countries’ desire to use oil as a weapon of pressure in international power politics. But now it seemed that Saudi oil had been chosen as just that weapon, with perfect timing because the Saudi royal family was so split they could not present a united front. They had, said Oberdorfer, other things on their minds. The trouble, as in all Royal dramas, was succession. When King Khalid died in 1982 his half- brother Fahd became King. That had been Khalid’s wish and had long been known. It had made for continuity and stability and therefore made good Royal sense. Except that other half-brothers in succession, Crown Prince Abdullah and the younger Sultan, began plotting their own very separate ambitions.

It didn’t help that there were two armies. Younger brother Sultan controlled the National Army on Kind Fahd’s behalf whereas Abdullah was Commander of the National Guard, a thirty-thousand-strong force of Bedouin with tanks and modern artillery of their own. And the two commanders refused to speak to each other except at official functions. Sultan was aggressively reformist, well-read in British constitutional history and an advocate of constitutional monarchy. And Sultan began to go public.

There should be a Parliament, he said. There should be adult male suffrage. There is no Divine Right, he preached, God did not choose my grandfather, Ibn Saud, nor my father Faisal nor my brother Khalid, nor my brother Fahd. The King should be elected by the people as a Constitutional Head of State; democracy, he decreed, is the cornerstone of national reform. And King Fahd said nothing to agree or condemn, which in many Saudis’ eyes was tantamount to condoning Sultan’s excesses.

Certainly Abdullah thought so. He was not for reform if it meant modernization and liberalization. He would be for it, however, if it meant a return to the old ways, the ways of Islam. In this he had the total support of the ULEMA
,
the stark, fiercely unyielding Muslim clergy. Very quickly Abdullah had become known and revered as a ‘traditionalist’. And then, as the name and concept spread, as an Islamic ‘fundamentalist’.

And Abdullah learnt other ways. He married a new Syrian wife from the Alawite sect, closing ties with the Syrian President Assad of the same sect. And through Assad, the Crown Prince began to make indirect contact with Moscow.

The family split came finally when King Fahd, unable to ignore the obvious any longer, went to the Americans for help. And for his own safety he secretly by-passed his own Embassy in Washington and dealt directly with the White House. Shortly afterwards, and on American advice, there followed widespread arrests and imprisonment of the militant ‘fundamentalists’. King Fahd used Sultan’s army to impose his law and order with one eye on Abdullah and his National Guard waiting by their tanks and Howitzers.

So the rift inside the great Saudi Royal House had been exposed, and, once exposed, the comforting sense of continuity could never again be reinstated. And the people shook their heads, kicked their goats and spat on the floor of their mud huts, angry at their slowness and dismal incomprehension.

Oberdorfer’s briefing session had been concise but the predictions written into it had seemed distant. Franklin had asked him specifically how long before the fuse would blow.

Oberdorfer had answered, ‘A year, rather than months. But one year rather than two. It’s that soon.’

That was two weeks ago, and it had all seemed straightforward, even attractive. Away from New York, a big story, a touch of the old glory and a celebrated by-line, and a pause to think over the previous weekend’s negotiations of remarriage.

But now suddenly Franklin was back to old routines, in the middle of a war as savage and as unexpected as any before.

There had been demonstrations and fighting in Jeddah in early October—but Franklin had not been concerned with events in the Gulf area then. And, two days ago, Jeddah had again seen fighting and death . . . The bedroom shook and the entire hotel felt as if it was shivering. The prayers were over, Allah was consoled, and the mortars had begun their bombardment again of the King’s men across the Square. Franklin went down on his knees, crawled across the floor to the bathroom and dipped his head into the bath he had filled in the first hour of the coup, an old precaution. He sat on the stone-tiled floor and let the water run down over his shoulders and chest. When it reached his stomach it was as warm as his sweat.

He smelt his own excreta in the lavatory bowl and through the thin bathroom wall he could hear a woman crying and a man shouting obscenities in French. He crawled back towards the far wall, across the room lit up now by flame-throwers billowing across the car park. Someone was knocking on his door, and he heard his room-boy screaming to him that he had lost his towel and his eye had fallen out on to his cheek.

Franklin reached up to the desk by his bed, pulled his portable typewriter down and rested it on his lap. He steadied a torch on an open drawer and switched it on. It was still a long time to dawn, perhaps longer to the end of the fighting. He would write his story anyway, though it was a thousand to one chance it would ever reach New York, would be told long before he ever got out of Riyadh. Or would it? The story behind the story? Why it had happened?

The end of the House of Ibn Saud, all-powerful Saudi Kings fallen suddenly from Islamic grace in a coup engineered from the Kremlin—whose target was the Gulf and its oil.

It went far beyond what Oberdorfer had talked about, way beyond his understanding of Global petro-politics. As he had explained it the intrigue was
OPEC’s
alone, an intrigue that was to serve the separate greedy members’ own interests. He had said nothing about direct Soviet involvement.

But yesterday, only eighteen hours ago, Franklin had been summoned to the Palace for an audience with King Fahd. He had been given a minute to collect his notebook and pens; no camera, no tape recorder.

They had sat facing each other, Franklin on a cushion, the King flanked by six bodyguards. Another two stood by Franklin and so close he breathed in the sickly-sweet herb lotions they had rubbed into their bodies. The King was over-polite, ordering mocha coffee, thick and black and bitter, and served in English Doulton porcelain cups. During the first ten minutes of niceties, the King had offered ginger sticks and crystallized fruits and fresh dates stuffed with honeyed nuts. And then he had suddenly snapped his fingers and the coffee tray and bowls of fruits were quickly taken away and the bodyguards moved back to the edge of the carpet. He had spoken quietly but quickly, as if he had little time left.

‘You are an American
I
can trust,’ he said. ‘You are
CIA. I
know you are a journalist but your loyalties must be the Agency’s for me to talk as I wish and for you to carry my favour to Washington as I may need. Do I have your word?’

‘Yes, your majesty,’ said Franklin, ‘you have it.’

The King wiped his lips with a silk handkerchief.

‘You came to Riyadh to report the
OPEC
meeting.
I
fear you may leave with a story of much greater moment. I shall tell you why and I ask you to carry this information to your Government. I may not be able to.

‘You will know from the briefing with your own people that certain
OPEC
members are planning to break up the Organization. Libya, Iran and Iraq. Others will follow. What you will not know is that they will use this to destroy the House of Ibn Saud, to end the Kingdom for ever.’

He leaned back in his sofa and wiped the handkerchief across his forehead. A minute passed. Then he shifted himself forward and closer to Franklin. When he spoke it was little louder than a whisper.

‘You know the problems within the family. It is no secret. Crown Prince Abdullah, Prince Sultan. They have ambitions, wide ones that encompass the Gulf, ambitions that move as opposites and so fiercely they will tear my Kingdom and the entire Gulf apart. And they have willing helpers who will use my brothers to suit themselves. The mischief-maker in Libya leads them. Crown Prince Abdullah thinks he is using them in his stupid endeavours to turn history backwards, to pull up a drawbridge and make the Kingdom an island where all progress, all civilization, is swept into the sea in the name of Islam. Abdullah is waiting for a mandate for his Islamic fundamentalism. He sees himself as the supreme leader, renouncing Western exchange for total power in the Islamic world. But he’s a fool. He will gain nothing except his own death. Moscow alone will be the beneficiary.’