December Ultimatum (6 page)

‘I am, sir.’ They waited. He said nothing.

‘I think we can do without the inscrutability,’ said Admiral Holliwell after a half-minute had passed.

Sorenson looked at each of them in turn, smiling. Mystification was something he enjoyed. It was his most irritating habit.

‘Mr President,’ he said at last. ‘If you send combat troops into Saudi Arabia, you as our President are going to need protection. This proposal of mine will provide exactly that. It’s an umbrella that will give the Rapid Deployment Force some legitimacy. If we go in without it you are in trouble. This simple strategy will enable us to pre-empt the protests and keep you respectable for a time.’

‘I like it,’ murmured Johns from the end of the table.

‘Much relieved to hear it,’ replied Sorenson. He was still smiling.

‘Genuine attempt to restore peace and stability to a vital economic area of the world—notification to Congress

‘Exactly, Mr President, the War Powers Act.’

‘It could just work.’ Johns again. ‘Not for long, but long enough.’

‘The Soviets will know what we’re up to,’ said the President.

‘Of course. Point is, Mr President, everyone will know what we’re up to, including our friends, but by then our men will be on the ground. We give Rahbar and the
UN
simultaneous ultimatums, Rahbar to resume oil supplies, the
UN
to declare the Gulf an International Zone and bar the Soviet fleet. And we give them twenty-four hours to respond, knowing they can’t or won’t in that time. Then our boys drop on the oilfields, ostensibly to stabilize the area until the
UN,
or Rahbar, or both, make up their minds. It’s not perfect, but it’s the only gambit available to us, simply appearing to be seen to be doing what’s best. A holding tactic to get us into those fields under the guise of a peacekeeping force—anything less than that and we can expect immediate Soviet response in a very physical way.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Mr President,’ said Sorenson. ‘You know that the seas south of the Persian Gulf are saturated with Soviet warships and re-supply ships. Remember those satellite surveillance photographs you showed us, Admiral, only a week ago? Eighteen ships of their Sixth Fleet anchored at Aden, eleven of their Third Fleet at Massawa in the Red Sea, including two battleships and a helo-carrier. At this very moment there’s a convoy of twenty-two south of the Gulf of Oman on warm-water exercises.’

‘That’s right, Mr President.’ Admiral Holliwell got up from the table and went to the wall-map of the Middle East to remind the others where Aden, Massawa and the Gulf of Oman were. The Admiral’s hand swept the area. He said, ‘This is the first time, Mr President, that they’ve had such a concentration of their fleets so close to the Persian Gulf. This convoy,’ he circled an area with his finger, ‘is certainly the biggest in fire and missile power we’ve ever seen in that latitude. The carrier
Minsk
is with them and it’s their largest carrier. The
Ivan Rogov
is with her. That’s an assault ship with helos and about a thousand combat marines aboard, battalion strength.’

‘What do you read into so many Soviet ships being so close to the oilfields at this time?’ asked the President.

‘Well,’ said the Admiral, ‘Moscow let it be known ten days ago that their Seventh Fleet would be on exercises in that area. They do warm-water training every winter. Last year it was in the Arabian Sea, south of Karachi.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said the President ‘that they just happen to be in there at the time of the coup. Are they close enough to be used against us?’

‘If they moved into the Persian Gulf, yes.’

‘What do we have there?’

‘An assault ship, sir. The
Okinawa.
It’s been on a show-the- flag visit to Bahrain but she’s on her way out. Should be moving through the Straits of Hormuz some time tomorrow.’ The President beckoned to Admiral Holliwell to sit down again and turned to Sorenson.

‘Tom,
if we go ahead with your UN manoeuvre, how long have we got?’

‘Four days, maybe. Probably less.’

‘And then?’

‘That’s up to Johns, Mr President. I can buy us time at the
UN,
but it’s up to the
CIA
to use that time to get Fahd back. Make no mistake, the success of this thing from the moment our boys jump on those oil wells depends on us taking the King back to Riyadh. As Johns says he’s pivotal. I can get us into Saudi Arabia with the least damage internationally, but if we are going to stay there, it’s got to be with the Saudis’ okay and that means putting Fahd back on his throne. We have four days, as I’ve said—maybe less—but after that, combat troops of the United States army remain on foreign soil as aggressors and an army of occupation. And we can guess the consequences.’

The President looked at the man at the end of the table. ‘Johns?’ It sounded like a summons.

The Director stood up from his chair and pushed his gold-rimmed spectacles further up the bridge of his long thin nose. He was slim and frail, looking almost as grey as his worsted flannel suit, more like a failing academic than the nation’s Intelligence chief.

‘Mr President, I agree totally,’ he said in his clipped Princeton accent, reminding the President of familiar Boston tea-parties. ‘If you want Saudi oil, you will certainly have to use American troops to get it. But you will have to use King Fahd to keep it. The Generals here, sir, tell us we can survive, despite the location and line of re-supply. But like Sorenson, I believe we cannot survive international reaction, or the protests here at home, and there’ll be plenty, unless we put the King back in his palace. You may get those oil supplies moving again, sir, but without Fahd you’ll not survive your presidency.’

Richard Johns sat down again and looked around the table for some endorsement, but there was none. The generals were looking at their President, their Commander-in-Chief. Very slowly, he did up the button of his shirt collar and straightened his black tie. Then he stood up and went behind this chair, his hands on the back of it, facing them. He coughed to clear his throat and, when he spoke, every one of them, there in the Situation Room, knew that the anxiety had left him. His voice was menacing. Advice had been given, strategies tossed around, and he had made up his mind. For good or for bad, country right or wrong, he had decided what he now thought best for America.

‘Gentlemen. An hour ago I was briefed by Professor Nicholas Grüber of the Petroleum Institute on the simple facts of oil, not that I needed reminding, God help me! Grüber’s conclusion, after forty minutes, was stark and simple. The United States of America needs that oil like a bleeding man needs plasma. Every fibre of our daily life depends on what Grüber calls hydrocarbons and we call oil, and which, by the saddest accident in God’s world has lodged itself under the Arabs. Four million barrels a day we use of it, four million barrels, three hundred and sixty-Five days a year. Our oil import bill is topping five million dollars an hour—d’you get that—every hour, that’s over eighty thousand dollars a minute. Add to that the tankers, the truckers, the refineries, the marketing. And we reckon this is a crisis? By God, we haven’t even started yet. At the moment we are only importing sixty per cent of our oil needs, but in eight years’ time—let me repeat, eight years—all of our own oil will be used up. There will not,
not
, be a drop of claimable American oil left in the ground outside of Alaska. Who says so? The US Department of Energy says so. The American Petroleum Institute says so. Data Resources Incorporated says so. You want more? Because there’s plenty who say so—here, in Europe, in Asia. And their figures tally. Conclusion? In eight years most—not all, but most—of the oil we want will be owned by the Arabs. Most of us will drive by courtesy of the Arabs. Most of the wheels that turn in this country will turn by courtesy of Arab oil. And by Christ! Do they know it!

‘Ten years ago it was costing us three dollars a barrel and selling at the gas stations at eighteen cents a gallon. You all know what it is today. A twenty-five per cent increase in the past eleven months and the next
OPEC
meeting will push it even higher because they know, every single one of them, that we can’t live without it. They’re oil pushers feeding an addiction, feeding us addicts who demand more and more of it every day, whatever the price, whatever the conditions, whatever the humiliation!’

He paused and drank from the vacuum flask of iced water on the table. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and the six men watching saw sweat on their President’s forehead and saw that his left eye had become noticeably more bloodshot.

The President’s voice got suddenly louder. ‘But when a pusher stops supplying, the clients get angry and rough it up, and that is exactly what I intend to do. I am President of the most powerful, most technically advanced, nation history has known, or will ever know, a nation that once fought a colonial war for its liberty and two world wars to keep it. And a nation that has sent its own men to the moon will not be brought to its knees by a few million Arabs who’d still be living in the Dark Ages, squatting in tents and eating camel shit, if we hadn’t brought the oil up out of the sand for them. They have it. We need it!

‘I’ve read all your reports and heard all I need to hear in this room, and I am persuaded that if we do not move fast to those oilfields, others will. You tell me that this man Rahbar is a devout Moslem. I say he has led a revolution and has used Marxists and Soviet-supplied weapons to do it. I don’t care a monkey’s ball whether the Jews or the Arabs, the Protestants or the Catholics, the Moslems, Hindus, Hare Krishnans or the Mafia own that chunk of desert. But I do care what they do with the oil in it, because we have a stake in it—a large and very vital stake, and if we lose it we will not survive. Our factories will wind down, our farms will go derelict, we will sit and go impotent. The lights would go out all over America. That oil is the stuff of our survival!

‘It’s something we have known about for a long time now. Five American Presidents before me knew about it, so did umpteen Generals, so did the Department of Energy, and the oil companies. But none of us care to think too long about it. Impossible, we used to say, that the wells would run dry. Even now, go out into the streets, ask a dozen people how much oil they think we have left and they’ll guess at twenty, thirty, fifty years. And anyway, they’d say, there’s always Arab oil—there’s plenty around. And they would be right, two days ago. Two days ago we were just paying rotten high prices for it. Today it’s not there to buy any more.

‘Now the Soviet Union remains the biggest single oil producer in the world. With or without Arab oil it is self-sufficient and its war machine will continue to run. But the only guaranteed fuel we’ll have if the Saudi fields remain closed to us is rocket fuel for our intercontinental ballistic missiles. D’you see? Without oil there is no such thing as limited conventional war. Without oil we have only the once-and-for-all nuclear warhead left. The Arabs are pushing us to our final option. As of this day, oil has a greater power potential than the entire American Military because without it there is no American Military. We know it. So do the Arabs. So does Moscow. And that is why I intend to go and get it. By persuasion if the Saudis can be persuaded. By force if they cannot.

‘So, do what’s necessary, Tom, to get our Peace Zone Resolution into the
UN
and, Generals, Admiral, get our men moving. I’m going ahead with an Address to the Nation and I’m going up to Camp David to write it. By the time I go on television I want confirmation that we have troops standing- by within two hours of their drop over those fields. And, Johns, you get going on Fahd. God knows how you’ll do it in the time we have, but you’re gonna do it, by Christ you are. I’ll have him back on that throne if it needs a task force to put him there!’

He moved away from the table towards the one-man elevator that would take him into the public world of the Oval Office and to the bright winter sunlight overlooking the White House gardens.

As he got up the Generals, the Admiral, the Director of the
CIA
and the President’s Foreign Affairs Adviser quickly stood to attention, men who would not stand that way for any other living American.

He turned. There was sweat on his forehead, his arms were stretched straight down the seams of his trousers with the palms open and the fingers splayed wide open. When he spoke his voice was almost lost in the hiss from the air- conditioning duct above him.

‘An hour ago, I spoke to General Volney-Wagner at Macdill airbase. I asked him if he was ready. I quote him word for word. “I’m ready for anywhere, for any place at any time. You tell me where to put the x on the map and tell me what’s under the x and I’ll tailor my force and go there.’’ Gentlemen, I’m putting that x right bang on those oilfields. I mean to get that oil . . . before the Soviets go in and get it themselves.’

December 21st

RIYADH

‘But his soul goes marching on’

Fires were still smouldering in Riyadh, five hundred miles west of the
Okinawa’s
position in the Gulf, but the gunfire and the explosions of grenades and mortars no longer echoed through the narrow streets of the Saudi capital. There were still hundreds, possibly thousands, dead, but one by one, as their families claimed them, they were carried away in the half-light of dawn, sprawled across a camel’s back or stretched out under a cloth in an open donkey cart. Makeshift flags of the new Islamic People’s Democratic Republic had been quickly sewn together from remnants of red and black cloth and they hung limp from shuttered windows in the still cold morning air. Other bits of the same coloured rags had been hurriedly nailed to doors and on to the mud walls of the small squat houses.

At twenty minutes past five the sun rose above the desert horizon and shutters were carefully opened and doors were just as cautiously unlocked. The survivors of Saudi Arabia’s first civil war nodded to each other, brought out their prayer mats and went down on their knees to touch the sand with their foreheads and thank Allah for their salvation. Loudspeakers on top of the minarets carried the same thanksgiving across the flat roofs and far away other muezzins relayed the message until all in Riyadh were down on their knees and elbows facing Mecca and thanking the God of Islam they were still alive to do it.

Within minutes of their prayers ending, as they washed their hands and feet again and boiled water for their coffee, they suddenly heard other loudspeakers proclaiming a message not of God. They went back to their doorways and windows and watched Land Rovers turn the corner and come slowly down the street in convoy. The windscreens and sides of the vehicles had been smashed and ripped with bullets and youths stood in the back, holding rifles high above their heads, strips of red and black cloth streaming from the barrels. On a signal from the leading driver, the Land Rovers stopped. A man with a megaphone began a new flow of propaganda, the youths in the vehicles jumped off and on walls and doors and shop windows they began spraying the initials of the new government
IDPR,
and the name Rahbar.

The youths shouted and danced and screamed abuse of King Fahd and spat phlegm at the ground. The people in the shadows of their doorways and those standing back from their windows watched silently for they knew with a simple wisdom that it was foolish to show commitment so soon. After all, today was only the third day in the week, and on the first day King Fahd had been their divine ruler. Was it not possible he might be again by the seventh? If he was not, then, and only then, would it be time to join hands with these young men with their Land Rovers and rifles and their magic paint, who shouted obscenities at the King and spat on the ground where the prayer mats had been only minutes before.

As the convoy accelerated away to other streets and other shy spectators, women went to their stoves to prepare the meal of the day and their men went to their Koran for guidance, astonished at Allah’s ways.

Franklin was ordered into the open truck with fifteen other foreign nationals. Eleven were fellow Americans, all oil men, two were British computer technicians, there was a Japanese road engineer and a Belgian who had never confided to any one what his business in Riyadh had been.

They had been ordered at gunpoint from their bedrooms and told to leave everything except their passports behind.

As they crossed the downstairs reception foyer they saw the safe deposit boxes behind the cashier’s grid blown open and thousands of US hundred-dollar bills were scattered across the floor, ‘An expensive carpet even for the Oil King,’ one of the British had said, but no one laughed. The soldiers in the foyer ignored the money, but the Belgian could not. He went down on his knees to scoop it up and the nearest soldier hit him with his rifle butt; then, as he sprawled across the dollars, others kicked him hard in his head and crutch. He was thrown up into the truck unconscious, blood and bile oozing from his mouth.

The Saudi driver kept the truck in first gear and they left the hotel car park, manoeuvring slowly past the burnt-out wrecks of cars, coaches and artillery pieces as a hundred or more soldiers saw them on their way with stones and spittle.

Just beyond the gate Franklin saw that the inquisitive had pulled the Swiss flag away from the dead family. They were covered in dust and flies and for a moment he thought the truck driver meant to drive over them. His gorge rose, but at the last second, laughing, the driver swung his truck away and the flies settled again. Except for a father who had been too frightened for their safety, Franklin thought, the two little blonde children would be here in the truck huddled in the arms of their mother on their way to the airport and freedom and home.

Whoever it was who had ordered their departure had worked fast and thoroughly because, as they joined seven other open trucks carrying other foreigners out, Franklin saw the route was lined with people, an avenue of thousands of hostile Saudis encouraged by their new party organizers to throw curses, stones, glass, camel dung and any missile at hand at these non-Moslems who had attempted to contaminate Islam, who had tried to impose their evils, their diseases, their greed, their blasphemies, even their own images of God, upon the guardians of Mecca in the land of the Holy Koran.

When the people saw their targets passing so close and so slowly, they avenged themselves enthusiastically. The trucks had gone less than two hundred yards but already two of the older American oilmen were on the floor of the truck, their heads and faces bleeding. The little Japanese, terrified at first, not understanding the ritual, had hidden behind Franklin; but then, understanding the slogans and abuse, he suddenly and quickly moved to the side of the truck and faced them, hands by his sides, standing as straight as a ramrod. The Belgian was lying face down in a pool of his own blood and vomit—Franklin shouted to one of the injured Americans to pull the man towards him and turn him over. But as the blood and vomit ran off his face, Franklin saw that the eyes were open and unblinking.

He was dead. The American let him fall back again, face down. One of the Englishmen, his right eye blue and closed by a deep cut above the cheekbone, shouted as a pole spun through the air like a boomerang and hit him squarely in the throat and he fell backwards across the dead Belgian.

Then Franklin heard it, distant but unmistakable above the screams of the crowds: automatic gunfire—long bursts, six guns, maybe more—coming from the direction of Al Ahsa Road where many of the American families lived. He heard a siren, more long bursts of firing, then three explosions. And then nothing. He looked across at the tall American holding on to the other corner of the truck, a man of about fifty. His head started to shake as if he was saying ‘No’ to himself a hundred times. Stones hit him and a bottle split his cheek, but still he stared in the direction of Al Ahsa and still he shook his head.

‘You okay, fella?’ Franklin shouted at him.

‘My wife and kids,’ he said, not looking back. ‘Our house is there—’

But he didn’t finish. Something crashed him backwards, so fast and so hard that he took another three men down on to the floor with him. Hanging from a first-floor window, a heavy wooden barrel swinging from a rope backwards and forwards had caught the American in the full force of its swinging arc, breaking his ribs and forcing them into his lungs. Franklin went down on is hands and knees and began to crawl towards him, but one of the Englishmen who had gone down in the fall waved him back and turned his thumb to the floor. The American’s face had turned blue and thick blood splashed from his mouth. Then he slumped to one side and was still and the blood flow stopped just as abruptly.

Youths were now running alongside the trucks, hitting the knuckles of those who were holding on to the sides and throwing handfuls of wet camel dung up into their faces. Franklin saw that the people in the truck in front were covered in cow’s offal emptied from the window over an abattoir. Other youths were throwing cow pats, sending the discs baked hard in the sun spinning through the air, cutting through clothes with edges as sharp and as hard as rock.

They were driven from the Khurays past the roundabout into the Al Islam Road and the last half-mile of city streets. Soon they would be turning at the giant Petromin Building and out on to the desert road to the airport. One of the older Americans, who had been sitting on the floor half conscious, held his hand out to Franklin to pull him up. Then, holding on to Franklin with one hand and holding his jacket, now sodden with blood, to his head, his grey hair turned red, he began singing loudly. And one by one, as the rest in the truck heard the tune above the screaming Arabs they joined in, the Japanese road engineer happy to sing the only American song he knew.

‘Tom
Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

‘Tom Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

‘Tom Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

‘But his soul goes marching on
.’

‘I’m sorry,’ shouted the old American as they went into the chorus of ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah’, but it’s the only song I know the words to.’

‘Except ‘God Bless America’,’ Franklin shouted back. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t reckon to finish that entirely and anyway, I’m not exactly in the right mood for Thanksgiving.’

They were into the seventeenth verse—the seventeenth repetition of the same verse—when the truck, moving fast now along the desert road, suddenly veered left off the main tarmac into Riyadh International Airport, swung left again past the main terminal building, past the fire-damaged cargo sheds and on to the concrete of the parking apron. And then they saw them, eight massive Galaxies, brilliant white, the largest air transport jets in the world, parked in line facing out towards the runway.

The turbine blades were turning inside the giant cowls and there was a shimmer of heat above the wings. Over three thousand people had been organized into eight queues, one to each of the aircraft. Men, women and their children shuffled slowly forwards, dirty, forlorn and silent. None carried any baggage, though some had a pillowcase or a plastic laundry bag tucked under their arms, filled with the few valuables they could find in the scramble from their homes, before the mobs destroyed whoever was white, and whatever was not of Islam.

The truck stopped just short of the nearest queue and the Saudi soldiers banged the trucks sides with their rifle butts. Children in the queue began to cry and their mothers covered them with their arms as American medical orderlies came running.

Franklin lay still in his bunk. Only the shudder of the aircraft rising into the sky disturbed him. There were tight straps across his chest and knees and the surgical spirit they had used to clean the cuts and grazes were stinging. In the bunk above him he could hear the Japanese engineer still humming quietly ‘Tom Brown’s Body’ and someone, a man, was sobbing, in the bunk below. Franklin raised his head. The aircraft was packed with the refugees from Riyadh. They had arrived months, even years, before at the beginning of their various contracts in style and expectation. Men of the United States Military Command, come to introduce the Pentagon’s newest and most sophisticated weaponry and train the Saudis how to protect their oil Kingdom. Civilian Americans and their families who had kept the oil flowing from subterranean Arabia. American security and communication instructors. Civilian non-Americans, who had come to build the roads, railways, the Royal palatial annexes and the government office towers, blocks of glass and mosaic tributes to architectural ego. Civil engineers from Britain whose irrigation projects had brought water where they had been none for hundreds of millions of years. Agriculturalists from Ireland who had grown rice in the sand where nothing in the history of the world had ever grown before. British and Canadian doctors repairing inflamed lungs, removing cataracts, restoring sight and hope in hospitals newly built by the West Germans. Men and their families turning a remote feudal desert Kingdom into a twentieth-century nation enabling eight million Arabs who had known nothing but disease, poverty and anonymity to join the ranks of the all-powerful. Eight aircraft, now flying high over the desert, were carrying these people away as discarded, disgraced and humiliated refugees, arbitrarily punished by Islam, for talents and ambitions that were not of Islam.

Franklin rested his head back on the pillow. The medical orderly had given him a painkiller. He had said it would make him sleepy and already the noise and friction of the people around him were beginning to fade into soft echoes. He felt his body shrinking inside the stiff white sheets, and he could no longer feel the straps holding him down, holding him safe as the huge transport jet shuddered through the air turbulence. He closed his eyes and relaxed. It was all over, he whispered to himself, all over. But as he sank deeper into sleep, another part of him gently nudged and told him that perhaps it was really only just beginning.

The Galaxies levelled off at forty-one thousand feet and turned on to a new heading north-west. Below was the vast empty Great Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh was already two hundred miles behind.

In one hour and ten minutes’ time, the pilots would check the radio navigational beacon over the Gulf of Aqaba, Southern Jordan, then turn their aircraft due west across the Sinai Peninsula, across the Gulf of Suez and begin their descent into Cairo.