Hunter Killer (24 page)

“I mean, Christ, Jimmy! Have you seen the pictures? The loading docks are on fire, the terminals have been blown up, and the main pump station at Abqaiq has been destroyed. Even the manifold complex at Qatif Junction is smashed beyond repair. I’m telling you, whoever did this really knew what they were about.”

“You mean an inside job, perpetrated by Saudis on the entire nation?”

“Well, that’s the way it looks. And you can guess what the panic’s like here. Because, to people working under this roof, the words
Abqaiq complex
and
pumping station,
the
Qatif Junction manifold, Sea Island, Yanbu, Rabigh,
and
Jiddah—
they’re everyday currency to oil men. We know how important they are. We know if there’s a problem with any one of them, the world’s oil supply is in trouble. But Jesus! They’re all destroyed, and the price of Saudi sweet crude just went to eighty-five dollars a barrel, from forty-six dollars last night.”

“Has it stabilized?” asked Ramshawe.

“Let me check on the screen. No. It’s eighty-six dollars.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“None of us knows that until the Saudis make some kind of a statement. So far, they have not said a thing.”

“What about the King?”

“Not a squeak out of him. And nothing from the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain. No one knows what’s happening, and that makes the market so much worse.”

“Well, there’s not much we can tell you either,” said Ramshawe.

“We were waiting for word from our embassy in Riyadh. But nothing’s come through yet.”

“Hey, there is just one thing,” recalled Smythson. “You remember the last time we spoke—about the French buying up futures?”

“Sure I do.”

“Well, I kept an eye on that. And it was France, definitely. And they bought nothing from Saudi Arabia. But they went in strongly on Abu Dhabi oil, and Bahrain. They bought some from Qatar, and a lot from the Baku field in Kazakhstan, which is more expensive.

“You can’t help thinking, can you? Because that makes France the only player in the world market that does not care about this crisis. So far as we can tell, they scooped up around 600 million barrels over the next year or so, despite their longtime contracts with Aramco.”

Jimmy Ramshawe hung up thoughtfully.

MONDAY, MARCH
22, 3:00
P.M
.
RIYADH

The first riots after the collapse of the oil industry began in the Diplomatic Quarter of the city. A crowd of possibly four hundred to five hundred advanced on the U.S. embassy compound and began to hurl rocks at the walls. It was not yet clear why the Americans were being blamed for the potential collapse of the Saudi economy.

U.S. Marine guards retreated and then spoke to the crowd, yelling through bullhorns for them to retreat or face a volley of gunfire. Saudi’s religious police were called, but ran into a hail of rocks and missiles from the crowd. The police commanders, accustomed to cooperating with the U.S., requested the Marines drive back the crowd with gunfire, but only over the heads of the raging populace.

The first volley had its effect. Most of the crowd turned and ran for their lives, but they reformed and gathered in front of the British embassy, shouting and chanting, “
INFIDELS OUT…OUT! OUT! OUT!”

By now the Saudi rioters had acquired a few guns for themselves, which they began firing into the air, and finally threw a hand grenade into the embassy grounds. No one was hurt, but the local guards answered with real gunfire, and four Arabs fell wounded in the street.

The religious police had now summoned the National Guard in force. This was the historically loyal army, dedicated to serving and protecting the King and his family. It operated entirely separately from the regular Saudi land forces, and it accompanied the monarch wherever he went.

In Riyadh, the National Guard’s elite force was the Royal Guard Regiment, which once was autonomous, until it was incorporated into the Army in 1964. Nonetheless, it remained directly subordinate to the King and maintained its own communications network and a simple brief: to protect the King, loyally and at all times.

It was this small but well-trained force that arrived in central Riyadh with the religious police on that Monday evening. Armed with light weapons and armored vehicles, they advanced on the crowd and drove them back.

But now the rioting populace regrouped at the major downtown junction on Al Mather Street and began marching into the main commercial district. This was a fiery dragon unsure at what it should roar.

Ever since the early morning the dragon had been listening only to radio and television networks talking about the “national bankruptcy” of a nation with no resources for many years. The terror of abject poverty, the first they had ever known, had gripped every resident of Riyadh. And then, shortly after 3
P.M
., a rumor swept through the city that the banks were closing, and may not open again that week.

The British Saudi Bank on the wide throughway of King Faisal Street was one of the biggest buildings in the city, and with its doors slammed shut, it was suddenly targeted by the mob. The rioters now rampaged into the street outside the bank, stopping traffic, firing guns, and surging toward the main entrance.

The Saudi police were not up to this. Because there were a thousand people ready to storm the bank. The police used their mobile phones to contact the guardroom at the royal palace of the King, requesting extra reinforcements from the Royal Guard Regiment.

But none came, and at 4:45, four young Saudi warriors drove a huge garbage truck straight through the main doors of the bank, setting off burglar alarms and smoke alarms, and ramming the vaults located behind a steel portcullis. The trauma to the bank’s security system also activated a complete shutdown of the counter areas, with steel grills and ironclad door-locking systems turning on.

Inside the bank the crowd went wild, shooting their old-fashioned rifles and, regardless of their own safety, hurling grenades that had materialized from somewhere, probably from members of the military who a few days hence would fight for Prince Nasir.

From there the crowd turned its attention on automobiles parked in the street, heaving them over onto their roofs and then setting them on fire. By 6
P.M
. the entire situation was turning very ugly, mainly because the mob had no real target upon which to vent their fury. All they knew was, someone had wrecked the only asset the kingdom had, and the King appeared to be powerless, had never even spoke to his people—almost as if the royal family had decided to batten down the hatches and wait until the crisis was over.

As night fell, a terrible rampage of looting began. Armed with sledgehammers and axes, the people stormed into some of the most expensive shops in the city, battering down the doors, oblivious to burglar alarms. They stole everything they could, then torched the shops. As darkness fell, Saudi Arabia’s capital was literally falling apart.

It was not until 9
P.M
. when the National Guard began to get some control. Of course many of the crowd had drifted away, holding their loot, some of it extremely valuable, grabbed from the tourist shops. The police and small details of Guardsmen began making arrests, but they were principally concerned with protecting the big downtown hotels, which were now bolted and barred like fortresses, with all guests on the inside.

The Al Bathaa, Safari, and Asia Hotels looked like war zones, with armed sentries patrolling outside. And in the middle of all this, Col. Jacques Gamoudi, in company with three al-Qaeda bodyguards, all former officers in the Saudi Army, toured the city in a jeep, watching carefully, making notes, and observing the unfolding chaos.

Every half hour his cell phone would ring, and one of the five French Secret Service agents who were planted in the city purely to assist him with information would call to update him on the fluctuating situation. The Colonel was probably the best-informed person in Riyadh among either the loyalists or the rebels.

In the opinion of Colonel Gamoudi, this was progressing entirely too quickly. Prince Nasir had warned him many times that his people would take to the streets just as soon as they realized that every part of their lives was threatened; that in the immediate future, the rulers of Saudi Arabia would have no money to distribute to the population.

And of course the people most desperately affected by this unfortunate turn of events were the royal princes, thousands of them, people like the late Prince Khalid bin Mohammed al-Saud.

Over the years, as the outcry against the King’s family’s spending grew louder, the princes had found all kinds of novel ways to supplement their incomes—many of them taking kickbacks from big construction firms like bin Laden, which had been making colossal profits from government projects. This was plainly about to stop, and so were the kickbacks.

Other enterprising princes would use all of their influence to buy any profitable business, particularly restaurants. They would just walk in and announce that they were buying the place, offer a ludicrously low price, and move in. The proprietor knew that there was no choice if he wanted to remain a free man.

In addition to all of this, some diabolically corrupt moves had been made by princes who served inside the government, particularly in the area of property development in the biggest cities.

But, of course, the favorite way was just to keep borrowing from the bank and never paying the money back. Everyone in business in Saudi Arabia was in fear of the wrath of the ruler and his family advisers, because the King was all-powerful. He had all the money. And the armed forces were sworn to protect him. But now the banks were closed, and their future in the country was obviously questionable.

The King himself was the principal wheel in the economy, but the other critical aspect of the financial health of Saudi Arabia was of course the daily spending of the people. The Saudi population of possibly nine million—no one had an accurate figure—spent its annual per capita stipend of approximately $7,000 on consumer products. And that $63 billion kept the wheels of commerce moving in this overblown welfare state, with its free everything, health, education, interest-free loans for buying homes, unbelievably cheap, below-cost interior services like electricity, telephones, water, domestic air travel, and of course gasoline. And right now no one knew what was going to happen.

There was an instant run on the currency, as merchants, businessmen, and other shrewd operators attempted to withdraw their funds. Currency holdings fell dramatically in just a few hours. And by 3
P.M
. the Saudi American Bank was forced to join the Saudi British Bank in closing its doors, not just in Riyadh but also in Jiddah and Taif.

And all of this meant that more and more princes were on the move. By the end of that Monday afternoon the first of the private jets were leaving King Khalid Airport. Various members of the royal family who worked in government and in the armed services took only a short time to realize the extent of the financial crisis that loomed.

Throughout that morning and into the early part of the afternoon, vast sums of money were being wire-transferred to French, Swiss, and American banks. Entire families were preparing to leave, many of them driving toward the northwest borders, which led into Jordan and Syria.

And the real trouble had not even begun.

Colonel Gamoudi continued his tour of the city, sensing with every turn of the wheel the turmoil among the population. In his opinion, this situation could explode. There were alarm bells ringing not just in the shattered portals of the big banks but also in the mind of Jacques Gamoudi.

He could see two main threats to the operational plans of Prince Nasir: (1) the mob was about to burn down the entire city; and (2) if things did not improve rapidly the King would consider calling in the Army from the military cities to restore order. The Army was still loyal to the royal family. That would put Gamoudi’s own operation completely out of the question. However many rebels, anarchists, and al-Qaeda fighters he had, his dozen or so tanks and brigade-strength armored vehicles would be no match for the entire Saudi Army and Air Force.

Jacques Gamoudi could not wait until Thursday or Friday to launch his attack. This was all happening far, far sooner than anyone had previously thought.

He ordered his driver back to the Dir’aiyah base and, once there, called a staff meeting for 2200. Meanwhile, he took his cell phone out beyond the ruins and into the desert. He walked for ten minutes, fast, along an ancient camel route. And when he was quite satisfied that there was not a sound coming from anywhere, he punched in the numbers to a private line in the heart of the Commandement des Opérations Speciales (COS) complex in Taverny, north of Paris.

He used the veiled speech they had agreed upon for an emergency: “I wish to speak to the curator, s’il vous plaît.”

“The curator speaking.”

“This party has started early and it’s getting out of control. I think we should get moving at least a day early, maybe two days early. Can I have your agreement to proceed as I think fit?”

“Affirmative. I’ll leave our friends in the south to you.”

At which point the twenty-second conversation ended abruptly. Gen. Michel Jobert replaced his receiver. And Jacques Gamoudi pushed the button to end the conversation and walked slowly back to the garrison in the desert ruins.

The phone call had been critical, vital to the operation, and tactically sound—it would govern the entire French-Saudi alliance for the next forty-eight hours.

But it was a mistake, as Jacques Gamoudi knew it could be when he took the risk.

SAME DAY, SAME TIME
JOINT SERVICES SIGNALS UNIT
ISLAND OF CYPRUS

This was a very secret place. It was the United Kingdom’s listening post in Cyprus (JSSU), located at a place called Ayios Nikolaos, up in the hills north of the military base in the UK sovereign territory of Dhekelia, southeast Cyprus.