The Fourth War (27 page)

The president looked confused and then worried. “Get out of here!” he cried.

“Mr. President, you need to understand. Such men will not find safe harbor in your nation any longer. Even as we speak we have tails on them. If you want them safe, arrest them. This evening. Right now. We will give you half an hour, not one second more. If these men are not taken into custody, our snipers will take them out. I promise you, not one of them will live through the night.”

“This is not our problem! This is not our war!”

“I believe, Mr. President, history shows you are not adverse to war. What you seem to be adverse to is victory, but that isn't the point. Now we are providing you opportunity to finally take a stand.
S'il vous plait,
take this opportunity to join the winning team.”

The president fumed, his face puffing with rage. “I know you,” he stammered. “You're with—”

“Of course, Mr. President. You know who I am. Now, sir, I believe you were telling me that you have recently had a change of heart, that you understand the necessity of doing your part. That is fine news. We look forward to your cooperation. And I suspect over time we will have other suggestions on how you might assist. I'll report to my president that you were willing, even anxious, to join in our cause.”

The president was speechless. Behind him, his mistress began to stretch in her bed. He glanced back at her and turned away from the door to move down the hall. His eyes blazed in anger, his face flushing red. A purple vein in his balding forehead pumped with every beat of his heart. “Listen to me, you arrogant fool,” he hissed. “What were you thinking, following me here! Get out! Tell your president that cowboys are not welcome here. We are a civilized people. This is not how we work.”

The American agent reached into his coat and extracted a small CD case. “Is this how you work, Mr. President?” He stepped forward and pushed the CD toward the president.

The French leader stood his ground. “Get out!” he cried.

“I think when you hear some of your conversations we have captured on this disk, you might be more willing to help us. In fact, we are betting you will.”

The president kept his hands at his sides, refusing to take the CD. The American smiled and placed it carefully on the table. “There is more, Mr. President. Lots more, in fact. We have video. Documents. Money trails. The whole thing. And we're not talking about some tawdry affair with some student mistress or aide. It appears your wife is the only individual in France who doesn't know about those. This is the good stuff, the bad stuff—the stuff, I suspect, you really need to keep to yourself. We're talking criminal indictments. Some very powerful men, even more powerful than yourself, would really appreciate you keeping your business dealings just between you and your friends.” The man glanced at his watch, then turned and moved for the back door. “Twenty-seven minutes, Monsieur President. We want those men in custody. There will be further requirements. I look forward to working with you.”

The man turned and left, slipping through the back door. The president waited, listening, hoping for shouts or gunshots from his security guards in the alley. But the misty evening was quiet. Not a sound did he hear. He stood without moving for a very long time, staring at the floor, then picked up the disk and turned for his laptop computer.

Minutes later, he emerged from the apartment, a sickly look on his face. His private car was waiting. He jumped in without a word.

Mudhnib al Auda Presidential Palace
Five Kilometers South of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The four U.S. Army Special Forces Delta soldiers watched from the darkness, forty meters beyond the perimeter fence. The Saudi presidential security guards moved behind the chain-link and barbwire, aloof, tired, and clearly uninterested. It was just after four in the morning. Sunrise was a little more than three hours away. The Saudi soldiers were on a normal patrol, guarding one of the two dozen or so presidential palaces the king visited when he had a little time on his hands. Very rarely, however, did members of the royal family come to Mudhnib al Auda. And even as they walked the fence, the guards didn't realize that the King of Saudi Arabia slept inside this palace this night. They had seen the motorcade and entourage, but decoys moved throughout the kingdom all the time, and they had learned that black limousines didn't always mean that the king or his family was near. Truth was, the guards, three of twenty that were responsible for palace security, had long ago ceased to speculate if the king was inside.

But while the Saudi guards didn't know where the king was, the Americans did.

 

The U.S. soldiers' eyes were barely visible atop the desert floor, their bodies completely buried under a layer of sand. Perfectly camouflaged and deadly silent, they had been waiting for almost an hour for the three guards to pass. The Saudis walked in silence, quietly checking the security of the outer fence.

The first of the U.S. soldiers, the squad leader, slowly moved his fingers over the sand. The adrenaline was pumping, causing a constant rush in his ears. His rifle was already positioned, wrapped in plastic to protect it and buried in the sand, with only the scope and muzzle exposed.

“Okay,” he whispered into the tiny microphone at his throat, his voice no louder than a silent wind. “Lead has the target on the east. White brim hat. Cigarette. Two, take the fat one behind him. Three, you've got the straggler. Four, if we need follow-up, you got it. Copy all!”

Two.” “Three.” “Four,” the squad leader heard in reply. He moved his head down and peered through his night vision gun site. “In three,” he announced, then counted in his mind. There was a faint puff, a flash of smoke, and a nearly silent
thooth.
Behind him and to his left he heard two other silenced shots fired.

The squad leader's target reached to his neck, then fell to his knees. The U.S. soldier heard a gasp as all three men were down. The Deltas didn't hesitate. Bursting from the dirt like some kind of underground monsters, they emerged from the sand and moved toward the fence. By then, all three Saudi guards were lying face down on the ground, their eyes closed, looks of pain and surprise frozen on their faces.

The soldiers, dressed in black camouflage, stood beside the fence. While his team checked their weapons on the downed Saudis, the team leader spoke into his secure radio. “Give me sparks!” he commanded.

“Roger,” he heard in his earpiece. “Sparks on the way!”

Five thousand feet above the soldier the drone dove down from the night sky.

The team leader glanced up at the darkness, then cut the fence with black cutters and his soldiers moved through. A lance corporal, the youngest member of the team, moved toward the downed Saudi guards and extracted the tranquilizer darts from their necks. They had all been shot in exactly the same place, at the base of the skull and just behind the ear, almost directly into the main blood vessel that led between the brain and the heart. The Saudi guards would be unconscious for seven hours or so, and a little sore, a little wiser, when they finally woke up.

The Deltas moved toward the inner wall, a ten-foot stucco-and-brick barrier that separated the palace from the desert. Floodlights illuminated along the top of the fence. Along the inner wall, the soldiers knew there were multiple layers of laser motion detectors and audio sensors. Beyond the wall were a host of guards and their dogs. The four soldiers moved into position, pressing against the wall. Overhead, they could hear the soft drone of a propeller. The drone approached from the south and flew over the presidential compound at five hundred feet, doing two hundred knots. As the pilotless aircraft approached, the soldiers pressed against the wall, using the cement to provide added protection against the pulse-energy radiation that emitted from its nose. Although their Kevlar body armor protected their guts and their helmets protected their eyes and brains, they still were anxious to hug close to the wall. Similar to an EMP, but with a more focused beam that cut a three-hundred-yard swath, the pulse energy weapon could be hard on the flesh. Capable of destroying any device that was not hardened to exact specifications, the pulse weapon fried every computer, electronic chip, or transistor in the compound as it passed overhead.

“Radiating,” the leader warned his team over their headsets.

As the drone flew over, every light in the compound sizzled, then popped. The electrified wire went down, as did every security detector and sensor. Indeed, every piece of electronic equipment within the compound had been instantly fried from the high-powered energy beam that had been emitted from the bulbous nose on the drone. The Delta's radios, protected by circuits and lead plates, were the only electronic things still operating inside the compound.

One of the Deltas stepped back and tossed a small rock on top of the wall, then fell against the stucco and listened. None of the motion or audio detectors went off. The soldier gave a thumbs up and another soldier threw up a thin nylon rope with a metal hook on the end. In seconds, the U.S. soldiers were over the wall.

They ran toward the east side of the presidential palace where the lawn was lush and green and thick as a carpet under their feet. Their footsteps fell silent. Palm trees and water fountains were everywhere, the fountains silent now that the power was out. A single guard appeared around the corner of the palace, and without breaking stride, the leader shot a tranquilizer dart in his chest. The Saudi huffed, then slumped over with a groan of pained breath. Another guard followed. Deltas Two and Four fired as one and the Saudi went down with a dart in his face and neck. The soldiers heard the soft sound of footsteps behind them as another guard moved across a paved parking lot. “Stop!” the guard screamed in Arabic. All four Deltas turned and fired at the same time. Their four darts hit the Saudi almost square in the face and he dropped like a rock, a muffled thud on the cement.

The team leader turned to the lieutenant. “That boy is going to sleep for eight weeks,” he laughed.

The lieutenant smiled, but only barely. The truth was the Saudi might never wake up. The tranquilizer was powerful, and the human body could only take so much.

The Americans turned again for the palace. The white marble, rounded columns, and red-tiled roof loomed enormously before them, an incredible symbol of wealth, power, and prestige. Perhaps the most wealthy man in the world, certainly among the top five, all of the Saudi king's palaces were symbolic of his ego and pride, and the enormous structure loomed before them, the white marble silhouetting the moonlit sky. The Deltas approached at a run, broke through the back door, which was unlocked, and moved through the kitchen. The layout of the palace was just as they had been briefed. The soldiers knew everything—the timing and movement of the guards, what kind of weapons they carried, the location of furniture in the rooms, and where the security stations were located. They even knew which direction the hallway door opened and how many steps they had to climb.

Up the stairs, down the hall, and into the royal bedroom suite. The guards burst through the door. The king of the House of Saud was awake, sitting on the edge of his bed. The U.S. Deltas moved toward him. The king screamed like a girl, a high pitched, whiny sound and held out his hands in a gesture of fear and surprise. The blackened faces of the soldiers blended perfectly in the night and the king saw mostly flashes of movement and human forms in the dark. The squad leader looked as his watch. Two minutes, fifty seconds to get over the wall and into the palace. About what they had predicted. He was pleased with his team.

The leader walked toward the king with a determined look on his face and the king backed away. “Take this!” the Delta commanded in Arabic. He extended his hand, which held a single sheet of folded paper.

The king sat expressionless, too dumbfounded to move, and the soldier thrust his hand forward again. The king reached out for the paper, his palms sweaty and wet and trembling with fear. “What is it!” he asked in a terrified voice.

“Your instructions,” the solider replied.

The king shook his head.

The Delta spoke carefully. His message was well-rehearsed, the words having been carefully chosen at a level in the government that was far above him, for the threat he was to convey could not be misunderstood. “Your son, Crown Prince Talan bin Abd al-Aziz, is in England right now,” the U.S. soldier said. It was a statement, not a question, though he seemed to wait for a reply.

The king watched the soldier in the darkness, then nodded his head.

“Crown Prince Talan bin Abd al-Aziz is your chosen heir,” the soldier continued.

The king nodded slowly. It was his greatest desire to see the crown prince take the throne. A tense silence followed as the king began to understand and, shifting his weight, his body grew taunt.

“The crown prince has many enemies,” the soldier went on. “There are lots of men in this world who would bring him down if they could; evil men and hostile governments who are not as refined as we; the Israelis, al Qaeda, the Iranian mullahs—even more.”

The threat was ugly and personal, but things were different now. Sitting atop a significant portion of the world's known oil reserves, the king wasn't playing poker with a low hand. He could not be threatened by much, he was too powerful and too rich. But the Americans knew how to hit him in the only place it could hurt, which was the transition of power to the son that he loved.

“You would not hurt him!” the king hissed. “You would not hurt the prince!”

“Of course not, Your Highness. But we might turn our heads.”

The king's dark eyes narrowed and he cursed bitterly. The soldier moved toward him and tapped the paper in his hand. “Take out these targets,” he said with a frown.

The king dropped his eyes to the paper, and the soldier held a tiny flashlight so that he could see. Reading, the king's lips drew tight and pale. “Al Shabakak!? Nykay babiyan!? These are Saudi sites!” he cried.