“Why so much traffic south?” I asked.
“It’s vacation season,” he said breezily. “Kuwaitis like to go on desert treks. I booked rooms for you at the Hilton Hotel. It’s a favorite of visiting VIPS. It overlooks the Bay with a nice water view, and it’s close to the U.S. Embassy. It’s a little distant from the business center, but you’ll have a car and driver at your disposal at all hours.”
It was late evening by the time we arrived at the Hilton Hotel. I’d eaten plenty on the plane, and what I now longed for was a snooze. He checked me in at the desk, and before the porter took me up he said, “You should take it easy at first, get yourself settled. Serious business we can commence soon enough. The important thing is to get a good night’s rest. Some matters have unexpectedly arisen, so I will be unable to join you tomorrow. Instead, I’ve arranged for you a tour of Kuwait City in the morning. It will give you your bearings. Whenever you’re ready, tell the desk and they’ll summon your car.”
The Hilton was a five-star joint, elegant in an overstuffed sort of way. My rooms were spacious and comfortable, really more space than I needed. The sofa had an abundance of throw pillows, and the windows were heavily draped. The carved coffee table sat atop a small (cheap) oriental rug. They’d put me on the city side of the building affording a fine view of Kuwait Bay, the ocean view as promised, though there wasn’t much to view at night besides the distant lights of a number of boats heading out around the point. Down below, people still lounged by the floodlit outside pool. Otherwise I couldn’t make out much in the dark.
I slept okay, considering that my internal clocks were eleven hours out of synch. I woke up way too early but felt rested enough. I cleaned up and dressed, then did some exploring until the restaurant opened its breakfast buffet. The buffet catered to every man from every land: congee for Asians, dates and rolls for Arabs, eggs and pancakes for Americans (handy hint for visitors to the Middle East—don’t expect too much from the beef bacon).
It was already too hot to cross the highway and go for a run along the shoreline, and too early to start my tour, so I got a copy of the Arab Times, one of the English language papers, and looked for clues to the local scene over a second cup of coffee. An odd, tense vibe reverberated through the place. Men bent heads together over their tables talking rapidly in hushed tones, giving their worry beads a workout. A number gulped their breakfasts and hurried out. Those lined up at the checkout desk seemed unusually fidgety. I felt that vibe when I arrived at the airport, too. There was nothing in the paper to suggest anything amiss, however. But then most of the international news was gleaned from British wire services, and I didn’t doubt that the Al Sabah’s gate-kept the local skinny to ensure the news got no one out of joint.
Around 0900 hours I asked the concierge about my car and driver. It had all been arranged, I was told. Could he be there in a half hour? He could and would, I was assured. I returned to my room and readied myself, throwing on the lightest weight clothes I’d brought (and believe me, we don’t customarily dress for that kind of heat in Malibu), then went down to finish my paper in the lobby. At 0930 a bright-eyed and bushy-bearded young Arab man in a khaki military uniform approached me and asked, “Excuse me, sir. Are you Mr. Jake?”
“That I am. Are you my driver?”
“Yes sir,” he said. “Mr. Fawaz asked me to conduct you around Kuwait City. I am Lieutenant Haroun Asad Al Sabah.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr… . Haroun?” He nodded. “Are you then related to Mr. Fawaz?”
“Yes, distantly. We are members of the Al Sabah family, and it is rather large. Please come with me, Mr. Jake.” He led me outside, where the temperature had already reached 100F (forecasted to top 115F later). A doorman opened the passenger door of a new Mercedes Benz E-class sedan. “If you have any specific interests or things you specially wish to see, please let me know,” Haroun said genially after we’d settled in.
“It’s my first day in town,” I said. “Perhaps Mr. Fawaz told you things he thought I should see?”
“He had no specific plan but thought familiarizing you with the city would be to your benefit. As we are now on Arabian Gulf Street perhaps we should continue along it, passing by the Kuwait Towers, and then the road will take us into the city center.”
The road was several lanes wide and in excellent condition. He drove slowly and deliberately, ensuring that I got a good look. Not that he could have gone much faster. Traffic was heavy, particularly with a number of heavily-laden cars going south. Mostly what I saw, until we reached the towers, were luxe hotels and a vast amount of calm blue water. Several big cruisers hugged the coast heading south, a continuation of the previous night’s parade I’d noted. The numerous trees in view were date palms. The vaunted Towers thrust upward on a point of parkland demarcating Kuwait Bay on the east coast from the harbor along the north coast that lay at a right angle. From a distance, they resembled three large artichokes impaled on 600-foot-high white ice picks. I asked Mr. Haroun what they did, and he explained that they had a restaurant in one green globe, an observation deck in another and some water storage capacity, but mostly they were supposed to symbolize modern Kuwait. He drove out to the seaward edge of the park and stopped the car. “What do you think about that island?” he asked, pointing out to sea.
A low island lay about five miles off shore. “What about the island?” I asked.
“Failaka Island. It has ruins on it, ancient Greek, they say. Thousands of years ago, before the Arabs settled here. I imagine they came for the pearls. Before oil, Kuwait’s main export was pearls… until the Japanese introduced cultured pearls, which cut drastically into the market for natural pearls. Would you say the island has a good location? For defending the harbor, I mean.”
“Excellent for that. A few big guns could keep any ship out.”
“Yes, it would require some big guns,” he sighed. He backed the car out of the parking space and resumed the tour. We rounded the bend and the city skyline rose up to meet us. There were more modern glass-façade high rises than I’d expected, some still under construction and topped with building cranes. “Our national bird,” Mr. Haroun quipped. He proceeded slowly through the central district streets, pointing out the Foreign Ministry, the National Assembly Building, the Stock Exchange--starkly modern buildings all. “Over next to the Municipal Park is our covered souk,” he remarked. “A marketplace, quite extensive. One can buy anything there except gold. The nearby gold souk is where the gold sellers do their business.”
“The souk seems much newer and more orderly than the Tehran Bazaar,” I remarked.
“I have never been to Tehran, but I hear their Bazaar is quite large and comprehensive, and also very much older. Arab souks are much the same from one city to the next, I imagine. Hawkers doing business. If you should happen to shop there, never accept the seller’s asking price. He will think you a fool if you do. Kuwait City is, of course, a small place compared to Tehran.” And has a worse climate, I was thinking. Not only had the temperature surpassed 110F, but it was steamy humid. Tehran, at nearly a mile in the air, was sheer bliss by comparison. He drove by the Grand Mosque and Seif Palace of the Emir. He found a spot where the road veered close to the shore, and he pulled over and stopped. “What is your impression of the beach?” he asked.
It was narrow, and the strand was pebbly. There was no surf. “Not bad as city beaches go,” I said. “It would be a good respite from the heat. I’m sure the Kuwaitis enjoy it.” There were, in fact, very few people down there in the water, just a few kids splashing. The adults were well-covered up and sitting in the shade of umbrellas, catching no rays whatsoever.
“Do you think troops could land here? Coming in from the sea, I mean.”
An odd question. Amphib landings were the Marines’ specialty; the Rangers rarely attacked that way. “It seems a little spare for a beachhead,” I said. “A few could land, but not a large force.”
“Would it be hard to defend?”
“On the one hand, there’s no cover on the beach, so an invading force would be easy targets until they got across this road. But there’s also no cover for defenders to dig in. You’d need artillery and air superiority to do an adequate job.”
He nodded glumly and pulled away. We left the clean and modern city center, continued around the bay past the commercial harbor and approached an industrialized area. It seemed mostly to be oil storage tanks, petroleum refineries and miles of pipeline. “These are some of our oil facilities,” he said. “There are other such centers down the coast. We don’t ship so much crude as we do higher value petroleum products, such as refined oil, gasoline, jet fuel and so forth. More profitable, you know. It looks rather vulnerable, wouldn’t you say?” he added wistfully.
“Very,” I agreed. Any attack would turn it instantly into an inferno, but why was he concerned about it?
We stayed there for a few minutes, and then he started away. “I wish I could show you our desalination plants. We have some of the world’s most sophisticated desalination equipment. Our lives depend on it. As any desert Bedouin can tell you, water is more precious than oil. But they are a little up the coast and out of our range today.”
“Kuwait has no ground water?”
“Believe me, we’ve looked and looked, and we haven’t found much. Oil is what we have under the ground, not water. But at least we can use the oil to run the desalination plants. That would be hideously expensive, had we not such a plentitude of oil. It used to be that all our water was supplied by boat. This is a great improvement over that plan. Well, that about does it for the business side of Kuwait. Let’s take a break for lunch, and after that I will take you around to show you where the people live.”
He steered us to a posh restaurant where he knew everybody we encountered. However, we took a leisurely meal in a private booth, where he filled me in with facts and figures about his country. Nothing came up in any way related to the job I was brought there to do. I passed it off as that practice of the Arab culture not to brook business hastily. Of course it was possible he was not party to anything about the investigation at all.
At half past two p.m. we started off again. “It is customary to take a nap in the heat of the day, but I want to complete our tour and get you back to your hotel. It’s not a big city, so it won’t take much longer.” As he drove he explained that most of the foreign workers lived in apartment blocks designated for them, but most Kuwaiti citizens lived in private villas. The various ethnic groups had their own districts—it created better harmony, he said. So the Filipinos tended to cluster together, likewise the Palestinians, the Indians, the Bangladeshis, and so forth. He pointed out some of the respective apartment districts as we encountered them. “Most of these foreign people are here to do menial work,” he said. “Cleaning, gardening, maids and nannies, nurses and such, work that Kuwaitis disdain or lack the training to do. Each group has its own ways, and we are tolerant of other faiths so long as they do not impose themselves on the Faithful.”
“Their quarters look adequate enough,” I said. “Does Kuwait have any slum districts?”
“None to speak of,” he said. “Oh, the menial workers do not live luxuriously, by any means, but many of them nevertheless make enough money to remit a good portion home to their families. And while they stay here they live in great comfort compared to their home countries. So they come here to work, by preference. We would not allow indigent foreigners to remain. As it is, there are considerably more foreigners here than Kuwaiti citizens. It’s an interesting question: would the foreigners act on Kuwait’s behalf in a time of strife, I wonder?”
“Native sons generally are more loyal than outsiders, I’ve observed.”
His face went a little grim. “I suppose that’s so,” he said. He crossed over into a residential district. “Now you see typical Kuwaiti villas. You cannot see much, actually, as most of them present plain faces to the world.” He meant high, bare concrete or stone walls topped by broken glass and interrupted only by large gates. “Do not be fooled by this appearance. Inside those walls may be luxurious palaces, as high as three stories. We find it is best to present a humble face to the outside world.”
There wasn’t much to see in the villa districts—concrete walls aren’t especially scenic. The districts had minareted mosques aplenty and also shopping areas, mostly enclosed, their parking lots filled with shiny new cars. Even the Arab districts were segregated, as Sunnis and Shiites get along better throughout the Arab world if they are kept apart, he noted.
There wasn’t much life on the streets, not surprising in that heat. Traffic on the boulevards was heavy, and among the housing districts congested. I saw a number of heavily laden cars, vans and SUVs emerge from villa gates and head toward the south, the menial help securing the gates behind them.
He was right: the city was not large. A couple more hours of slow touring exhausted the possibilities of the residential districts. Mr. Haroun took to a major, modern road, Highway 6, or Sixth Ring Road. It passed the airport, which seemed very busy for a city that size. Planes took off at a steady pace. Planes sat loading passengers at every boarding gate. Incoming planes lined up on the tarmac waiting for departure gates to clear.
We were on the outskirts of town, but it was not like other cities’ outskirts. Kuwait City had no suburbs in our sense of the word, with lawns, driveways and school yards. And whereas most large cities in undeveloped countries bleed off into the boondocks with shabby commercial strips and sporadic shacks and hovels, Kuwait City had fairly abrupt boundaries. To the right along the highway sat businesses and residential complexes—walled villas in various shades of brown, ornamented predominantly by palm trees. To our left lay flat, limitless, barren plains. The bulk of the traffic, heavily laden cars and trucks interspersed with convoys of army trucks and haulers, headed west. We drove several miles on the highway to a cloverleaf intersection where almost all the traffic, except the army vehicles, took the Highway 70 exit and went south.
We continued along Highway 6 to Selayel Resort, where Mr. Haroun proposed we take some afternoon refreshment. It was an oasis graced with modern buildings, greenery, large reflecting pools of water and at least one elegant restaurant. What I really craved was a cold Dos Equis or three, but Kuwait being a strictly Muslim country, a tall fruit smoothie and some pastry had to do. It was a welcome relief after several hours in the car. Afterwards we traveled a little further along to another cloverleaf intersection. Mr. Haroun took the north exit and joined Highway 80, another modern highway with three lanes in both directions. Unlike downtown Kuwait City the traffic was light; few other vehicles besides military convoys took Highway 80 north. After a mile or so he found a convenient place to pull over and stopped.
“This is the highway to Basrah, in Iraq,” he said. “Beyond here there is nothing much to see.” There wasn’t much to see right there. To the west flat, barren, arid plains stretched toward ruler-straight horizons that promised no delights beyond. There was a line of low hills off in the distance to the northeast.
“Are those mountains in Kuwait?” I asked.
“What you are looking at is Mutla ridge, our highest point, all of 300 meters.”
“Your country is basically flat, then. It’s odd there’s no other traffic on the Basrah road than military vehicles,” I remarked.
“Maybe they’re having exercises at J-One Army Base at Sulaibikhat or something,” he said. “And I guess no one else wants to go to Basrah right now. There’s nothing much between here and the Iraq border except oil fields and some farms.”
“How far is the border?”
“From here, perhaps 60 kilometers,” he replied. “This fine highway was originally built as a token of friendship with Iraq,” he added. “It never sees much traffic. Iraq is not a welcoming place.” He threw a U-ey and headed the other way back toward the ci
ty.
“I noticed that many civilian cars turned south on Highway 70. That leads to Saudi Arabia?”
“Yes, that is true.” He did not further elaborate. “Well, that’s pretty much the extent of Kuwait, Mr. Jake. You’ve seen it all,” Mr. Haroun concluded. “What do you think of our fair city, Mr. Jake?”
“Most impressive. It is without a doubt one of the most modern, prosperous and well-tended cities I’ve visited.”
“We are proud of what we have accomplished in such a short period of time. Two generations ago very little of this existed, and our people lived in mud-walled houses much less fine.” He paused. “I wish to ask your opinion about something, Mr. Jake. Would Kuwait City be easily conquered by an outside invader?”
Why was he asking me such a question? “Mr. Haroun, you must understand that my military training and experience was as a combat soldier, specifically in jungle warfare. I’ve no familiarity with urban combat or desert warfare. An honest answer to your question would depend on many factors—your defenses, the nature of the invader and his forces, and so forth. Is there some reason why you bring up this question? If I knew what was on your mind, I could perhaps form a better answer.”
“Just wondering, that is all,” he said. “Well, let’s get you back to your hotel.” Soon we were back in the crush of cars and commercial traffic, and it took a while to reach the Hilton. By then the sun had set, and my jet-lagged carcass shrieked for Z’s. We’d long exceeded my internal bed time. My fondest desire was to grab a bite to eat and crash.
Mr. Haroun pulled to a stop at the front door and waved away the attendant who’d hurried over to usher us in. “I hope you found our tour informative, Mr. Jake,” he said.
“Very informative, indeed. I’m looking forward to spending more time in your sumptuous city when my work here commences.”
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 46
