The Scorpion's Gate

by Richard A. Clarke

  “Of course I’ll be there. I go to Kuwait first, but by then I will just have wrapped up in Bahrain and need to stop in the Emirates anyway,” MacIntyre said, and then he paused, picking up on what had just been said. “You report directly to Sir Dennis? You’re an SIS station chief; he’s Cabinet Office. And you say your report isn’t just going to be for Sir Dennis but for my boss as well? What gives?”

  Brian Douglas rose and emptied his glass. “Well, SIS has its wiring diagrams and Sir Dennis has his. As you might suspect from looking around this place, there are old-boy networks. Dennis and Sol are two of a loose club of intellocrats. Despite his bitching, Sir Dennis has just eagerly gone off to meet one of the better members of that club at the Australian ambassador’s house. He’s supposed to get a report on planned Chinese naval activities in the Indian Ocean, a gem that Canberra collected from a source so good that they are unwilling to risk it by sharing the information with London. But tonight they’ll give it to Dennis,” Brian said, replacing the empty glass on the tray. “Shall we go down for dinner? There’s a lot I want to go over with you.”

  Looking up at a bust of the Greek god Hermes, Russell MacIntyre was feeling the way he had the first night he’d applied for membership at the Magic Castle. He had thought he knew something about prestidigitation, until he had seen the members there perform for one another. And here...He shook his head.

  As MacIntyre and Douglas left the library, the false bookcase slid back into place. The Balvenie and the empty glasses had disappeared.

  6

  FEBRUARY 8

  Causeway to Islamyah

  “Dr. Ahmed bin Rashid,” the Bahraini border police officer said, reading Ahmed’s new Islamyah passport at the entrance to the causeway leading from Bahrain. Ahmed remembered when there had hardly been any formalities at the causeway at all. The revolution that had thrown out the al Sauds had changed all of that. “How long will you be gone, Doctor, and what is the purpose of your trip?” the border guard asked in Arabic while eyeing the dashboard computer screen on the new BMW.

  “Back tomorrow. Family emergency, Officer,” Ahmed replied courteously. The officer scanned the passport into a computer. Ahmed noticed in his rearview mirror that a television camera was pivoting to image the rear license plate of the BMW. Another camera was looking at him through the windshield. The officer waited a moment. The computer in the gatehouse booth beeped, and the officer then pressed a button on a handheld device. The V barrier, a metal plate that had been raised in front of the car, dropped, a green light flashed on, and Ahmed was on his way for the 16-mile drive across the causeway.

  Border control at the Islamyah checkpoint was much swifter. Here he flashed the special green-and-gold passport that his brother had given him and was waved through. After arriving back on dry land, he turned east and drove fifteen minutes to the al Khobar Corniche and the Golden Tulip, the hotel next to the Aramco building.

  Aramco, the largest oil company in the world, now totally owned by the Islamyah government, had not changed its name. Everything else, he noticed, seemed to have new designations. The signs saying King Fahd Causeway, King Khalid Street, Prince Turki Street, had all been removed or painted over. He could see the new pattern. They were being named after the early caliphs, who had succeeded one another as leader of the Umma after the death of the Prophet. It was now the Abu Bakr Khalifa Causeway, Umar I Street, Muawiyah Abu Sufyan Street, and Yazid I Street. There would be no roads named after the early Shi’a caliphs, like al Hasan and al Husayn, he thought, even though the local residents here in the Eastern Province were overwhelmingly Shiites.

  The encrypted e-mail from his brother had said that he would be at Aramco most of the day, reviewing security for the massive oil infrastructure, but would join him at the Golden Tulip for an early dinner. At six o’clock, one of Abdullah’s bodyguards came to Ahmed’s room to escort him to a private patio off the pool barbecue area.

  As the waiters were setting a small mezza for two, Abdullah strode in. “My heroic doctor,” he said, grabbing his younger brother. Ahmed lightly kissed each of his brother’s cheeks in a sign of friendship and respect. Four of Abdullah’s bodyguards moved into positions around the patio, their backs to Abdullah, looking out.

  “Even the troublesome ones on the Shura Council agreed that I should congratulate you for your hand in uncovering the Persian plot to blow up the American base. We would certainly have been blamed. Now even the White House spokesman admits that those on board were Iraqis.” Abdullah scooped up some baba ghanouj. “So which Iraqis were these, do you know yet?”

  “What I think and what I can prove are two different things,” Ahmed began. “The instinct in me says they were from the martyr brigade that the Iranian Rev Guards have been training, but we do not yet have the proof. The Iranians involved left Bahrain on several small boats and left no trace that they had ever been there. Abdullah, these Iranian Qods Force people are very good at what they do.”

  “Yes, yes, they are. And for now it is in our interest to make sure they do not succeed. We must keep the King on the throne in Bahrain,” Abdullah confided. “Yes, yes, I know he is from a royal house, but he has been fighting corruption, bringing the people into the decision making. If he were thrown off the throne, what would replace him, Ahmed? Just another Iranian puppet government like Baghdad, no friends of ours,” the Islamyah security chief said, jabbing the table with his index finger. “We voted this morning to resume secret funds transfers to the Bahraini government, for social projects and jobs in the poorest Shi’a communities.”

  The sun had set and a slight cool breeze blew in from the north. Two waiters lit heating lamps and then withdrew to leave the sheik alone with his guest. “Then the Shura is better behaved than last we talked?” Ahmed asked.

  “Seldom.” The waiters now brought the entrée of grilled hammour, grouper fish. Abdullah slowly cut the fillet with a fork. “There is a strong faction, led by Zubair bin Tayer, who want strict enforcement of Sharia rules, and to keep all women in their homes, you know the list, and then,” Abdullah said, throwing his fork on the table, “then they also want us to export the revolution, bring Wahhabism to all Islam, grow strong enough to confront the infidels. These are the ones who pushed to complete the Chinese missile project. Now they say we should have nuclears for the missiles. From China, Korea, or Pakistan, or build our own.”

  Ahmed was aghast. He put both hands on the table, almost as if to steady himself. “Brother, these were all mistakes of the Sauds. That way leads to stagnation or worse. Surely the people will not support this in the election.”

  Abdullah said nothing, then looked into Ahmed’s eyes. “They also do not want to have the election, or perhaps only one election ever, to approve their rule. Only approved Islamic scholars would be allowed to vote after that.”

  “One man, one vote, one time,” Ahmed said softly, almost to himself.

  “What?” his brother asked.

  “It is what the Americans said about the elections in Algeria: only men could vote, and they would only be allowed to vote once—they would give up their right to ever vote again. That cannot happen here!” Ahmed said.

  “The Americans!” Abdullah spit. “The Americans think democracy solves everything. It took them over a hundred years to allow all their people to vote, the poor, women, the blacks. Has it solved their problems? They waste so much time and fortune in their elections. It is a game to them and they never stop playing at it. And are their results so different? We overthrew hereditary rule here. They still have it: fathers followed by sons, wives seeking to replace husbands.

  “They have three hundred twenty-five million people and how many ruling families?” Abdullah asked, waving his hand. “Do they not have poverty, do they not make their people pay for doctors, for university, in the supposedly richest country in the world?

  “Then they think they are so superior that they must reshape the Arab world in their ghastly image. How? By bombing our cities, killing ou
r women and children? Locking up our people forever? Raping them?” Abdullah said, repeating a rant Ahmed had heard before.

  “With respect, it is not about our becoming like the Americans,” Ahmed responded. “It is about what was promised to our people: more freedom, more progress, more opportunity, participation, ownership of their country.” Ahmed was using phrases that he had heard his brother use before the revolution. “It is about not being like the Sauds. They held back our people by spending the people’s oil money exporting their Wahhabist view of Islam, which many of our own people do not follow. They spent it buying expensive arms from the Americans, the British, the French, the Chinese. They threw away our sisters’ skills and closed the doors to their secret family meetings.

  “Did you, brother, fight, and did you take lives, so that some new Sauds could arise to keep our people as second-class citizens?”

  Abdullah was staring at him, but Ahmed could not stop. He had wanted to say things like this to him for so long. “Yes, I have lived in North America, but I have also been to Germany and Singapore, to medical conferences in China and Britain. Things are invented there. Technology and pharmaceuticals. What have we invented in the last thousand years? The world is leaving us behind because we have tied this Wahhabist brick around our ankles. Our scholars study only the Koran, which is good, but we need only so many Koranic scholars in a generation.”

  Ahmed pulled a blue book from beneath his robe. “This UN report is by Arabs. It is about how we measure up to the rest of the world. Not well. The winners in the modern world are knowledge societies, countries that put an emphasis on learning, sharing information, doing research.

  “Look at these numbers,” he said, paging rapidly. “Two percent of our people have Internet access, compared with ninety-eight percent in Korea. Five books are translated into Arabic a year per million people, compared with nine hundred translated into Spanish. Even in our own language, we publish only one percent of the world’s books. One out of five books published in Arabic is on religion. We spend less than one-third of one percent of our GNP on research. Maybe this explains why one out of four of our university graduates leave the Arab world as soon as they can. We do not create knowledge; we do not import knowledge. We import finished goods. This is not the way of the modern world, which is leaving us in the dust.

  “You can be modern and Islamic. The Islamic scientists I met in Canada, Germany, and America are devout. Islam is the fastestgrowing religion in America! No one prevents Muslims there from following the teachings of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him. Besides, the Prophet never taught that we should convert or kill the Christians and Jews. And if we tried, even if we took centuries, we would only devastate this little planet in the process. Does Allah want that? The nuclears, if we get them, will cause the ruin of our country.

  “If you let these people on the council have their way, we will continue to be slaves of our own oil, able to do nothing but watch as what Allah put in the ground comes out of it. And the money we get from it will continue to be wasted in supposedly ‘religious’ follies. We are not a country, we are an oil deposit! And if that is all we are, others will come, the scorpions will come for their food, their precious black liquid. They will keep us enslaved, buying everything we need from them, including weapons which we do not need.

  “We could instead use our wealth to join the twenty-first century, to revive the time of greatness when Arabs invented mathematics, astronomy, pharmacy, and the other sciences. You could do that, brother.” Afraid he had gone too far, Ahmed stopped abruptly and hung his head, averting his eyes from the continued silent stare from Abdullah.

  Somewhere in the hotel, a television was on. Ahmed could hear a news program and also the roar of the gas flame in the heater above his head.

  “Do you think, little brother, that while you were skiing in the snows, dancing in the clubs, that I was risking my life, hiding in basements, killing men I had never met, to create a society in which our people would waste their lives? Do you?” Abdullah’s voice rose with the question, then sank to a whisper. “I did terrible things, for which I pray Allah will forgive me, but when I read the Koran I am not sure he will. Right here in Khobar in 1996, while you were almost still a baby, I was in a cell that helped the Hezbollah and the Iranian Qods attack the U.S. Air Force base here.”

  This was the first time Ahmed was hearing this story, the first time that his brother had lifted the curtain on his vague, earlier terrorist life. “Qods,” Ahmed asked, “these are the men who were trying to blow up the American Navy base in Bahrain. You worked with them?”

  “No, I worked for Khalid Sheik Muhammad, who was bin Laden’s operations man. Because I thought that he wanted to kick the foreign troops out of our country,” Abdullah admitted, reluctantly. “Khalid was asked by the Qods people to have some of us lend a hand with an operation that they were planning in Khobar, against the foreign base. So I helped them set up at a farm not far from here. Khalid said we owed the Qods a lot, so I helped.”

  Ahmed was afraid to say anything that would stop his brother from continuing. Nonetheless, he had to ask, “What did al Qaeda owe Qods?”

  Abdullah was quiet, as though he was calling up the memories from a corner of his brain that he had not recently visited. “I met bin Laden, met with his brains, Dr. Zawahiri, and his muscle, Khalid Sheik Muhammad. Osama himself was not as important to operations as those two. They used him as the symbol, the unifier. I went to Afghanistan to see them. Why? Because they were the only ones really opposing the al Saud monarchy. No one else was doing anything to get these leeches off our people. I was not opposed to monarchy. I know England and the small Gulf states have good monarchies, but we did not! The Sauds were stealing, holding our people back. They let foreigners set up their own military bases in the land of the Two Holy Mosques, not to help us but to protect the oil for themselves!”

  Ahmed sensed there was guilt in Abdullah about this past. His tone was the one he had used when explaining to their father that he had dented the car. Ahmed tried to shift the conversation from his brother’s role to his own current interest, the Iranians. “And you met Qods people in bin Laden’s camps?”

  “No, no. They were never visible. If you were good at something special and they trusted you, Khalid would send you to Iran for advanced training with Qods or with Mugniyah’s Hezbollah people. Dr. Zawahiri had an office in Tehran and went there a lot, from the days when he ran Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Many of the brothers came to the Afghan camps by flying to Tehran, where the Qods people got them through immigration and sent them on their way by bus to the border,” Abdullah recalled. “But the fact that Qods was helping al Qaeda with money and training was never to be spoken about, because even the President of Iran did not know. And, of course, the Americans did not.”

  Ahmed shook his head in amazement. The Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force really was a service within a service, reporting only to the big ayatollah, the Iranian supreme leader. “What happened, Abdullah, between you and al Qaeda? Why did you break with them and start your own movement inside our country?”

  Abdullah shrugged, as if to say that the answer to that question was well known, or should be obvious. “After 9/11, I broke off from bin Laden. I thought they had gone too far, killing innocent people. Then, after the Americans invaded Iraq, I went to Iraq and worked with that crazy man Zarqawi for a short time. Why? For the same reason our uncle fought in Afghanistan. For the same reason I opposed the al Sauds. To get the foreign troops out. I participated, I learned, and then I led so that we could be our own nation, a great nation, not an American military base, not one family’s money machine.”

  Ahmed was so proud of his brother, who had seen the excesses and mistakes of the others and forged his own movement to free his homeland. There was also something of a parallel with al Qaeda in what Abdullah had done, because Abdullah had done the hard work of operations and let theoreticians like Zubair bin Tayer be the public face of the movemen
t. “And you succeeded,” Ahmed added.

  “Yes, but right now we are weak. The Sauds took our money.” Abdullah returned to one of his current themes, financing. “The Americans have frozen most of it, probably so they can claim it for themselves. But with what they have, the Sauds are buying trouble for us. They want to come back and rule again, and kill me and all the council. I don’t know how much time I have before they do that. Every day I get reports.” Ahmed looked up and their eyes met. Abdullah pointed with his head toward one of the bodyguards.

  Abdullah continued, “I accept many things in the Shura that I do not personally agree with, things I do not think will be good for the future of our people. I accept them for now because we are weak and cannot have internal divisions that our enemies, what you call your scorpions, will exploit.”

  Ahmed thought for a moment and then replied, humbly, “I know the only right I have to speak on these issues is that our father’s blood flows in both of us. I have not earned a say, as you have.

  “But I do love this land and I do love you and I do not want to see your efforts go to waste. If you do not stop your enemies on the council now, they will shape Islamyah in a mold that will harden fast. Then they will come after you, because you are not part of what they want to build. And what they want to build will weaken Islamyah and attract my scorpions in droves, especially if they try to get the nuclears.” Ahmed reached across the table and squeezed his brother’s forearm. “If you think you are going to get killed, die for something you believe in, not for what they believe in.”

  Abdullah put his right hand gently on top of the vise grip that Ahmed had placed on his left forearm. “So is that your prescription, Doctor, that I should get killed?”