The Great and Terrible

by Chris Stewart

  “Walk away . . .” Brighton warned him.

  “No way, Amri, not till I have some fun!” The German grabbed Brighton’s shirt and cocked his fist back.

  Brighton bolted to his feet, sending the small table crashing to the floor. He grabbed the German’s wrist and twisted, almost breaking his hand, then swung him around and jerked his arm upward, and the huge man squealed in pain. His nearest buddy pulled a knife from his pocket and lurched toward Sam. Sam grabbed the metal fork from his plate and slashed it down on his arm. The man cried in agony as the fork penetrated to his bone, just below the shoulder, into the meat of his arm. It stuck from his bicep, and he dropped the knife to the floor. Sam kicked it aside and waited for the next assault. The other men hesitated, then rushed him as one. Sam stepped back and twisted, kicking his right foot high in the air. He smashed his boot into the leading man’s throat and he fell back, grasping his shattered Adam’s apple, sucking desperately for air. The third man grabbed Sam’s hair and jerked his head back while another approached him with a small knife in his hand. Sam grabbed the German’s arm and twisted, bringing all of his weight against the elbow while extending his hip and pushing down. There was a soft crack and a cry as the man stumbled backward, holding his broken arm.

  Three down. Two left standing. It was all even now.

  Brighton held the huge German and jammed his arm upward again until he felt the muscles in the man’s shoulder begin to tear lose. The fat man screeched in pain, then pulled away violently, using his weight to try to knock Brighton to the side. Brighton moved with the German, using his momentum against him, then smashed his forearm across the man’s face and forced his chin to one side until his neck almost snapped. Reaching under the German’s shirt, he gripped his collarbone and held it, using it as a handle to force his forearm against the German’s face. The fat man shrieked again, almost fainting, then fell suddenly still. Brighton knew it was too painful for the man to move, too painful to scream. He jerked the German’s switchblade from his sheath, flipped it open, and tossed it in the air, then caught the handle again. Holding the knife loosely against the man’s neck, he felt the German grow limp with fear.

  There was only one other German left standing now. He froze, his buddies rolling on the floor around him crying from various sources of pain, then made a weak feint toward Sam before stopping again.

  Brighton tugged on the fat one’s collarbone and whispered in his ear. “Look what you’ve done to your buddies. Some of them got hurt. I think you should apologize!”

  The huge man huffed in pain. “I’d die first, Pigdog.”

  “Your choice!” Brighton jerked on his arm and waved the knife in front of his eyes. The German cried in pain. “I’ll kill you!” he screamed.

  Brighton almost laughed. “Now what is there in this situation that would lead me to believe that!” he asked. “I mean, look at this, Friedrich! Help me understand.”

  Sam took a step toward his father. “Don’t kill him!” he stammered, then quickly winked to his dad. “Don’t kill this one, General. Just let him go.”

  Brighton felt the German’s knees buckle, and he jerked his arm up again. He waved the knife around him. “But I haven’t killed anyone this week,” he shot back to Sam.

  “But you’re on your way to Iraq. You can kill someone there!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Brighton answered, and the German went limp again from the pain.

  “Help me!” he coughed, but his uninjured buddy didn’t move. He had seen quite enough and wanted no more of this mess. Sam took a quick step toward him and he cowered again.

  “You think I’m a killer,” Brighton hissed. “Should we find out if you’re right?”

  “Nein, nein!” the German cried, his eyes wide in pain.

  “I just came here for a quiet dinner. Now is that too much to ask?”

  The German groaned in agony. “Nein, sir, nein. That is not too much trouble. No, sir, not at all!”

  Brighton swung his hand sideways, crashing the switchblade into the brick wall. The knife blade broke at the hilt and he dropped the handle on the floor. “Now perhaps we have an understanding,” he said in a calm voice. “You don’t want trouble. I don’t want trouble. It seems we agree.”

  The German nodded eagerly. “I don’t want any trouble, no, sir.”

  “Then I’ll make you a deal. I’m going to let you go. Then you and your buddies are going to get out of here. I think your wives are calling. Is that what I hear?”

  “Yes, sir, they’re calling. It is time that I go.”

  Brighton relaxed his grip, and the German almost fell to the floor. He crawled away from the general. Brighton nodded to his waiter, who was standing wide-eyed by the bar. “How much do I owe you?” he asked.

  “Nothing, buddy. Just get yourselves out of here.”

  Brighton stared at him, then nodded. He and Sam walked past the fallen Germans and through the front door.

  They stood alone in the alley, and Sam looked back at the café. “That was interesting,” he said simply.

  Brighton stared back at Miss Lela’s and shook his head sadly. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered.

  “Hey, Dad, let’s get this thing straight,” Sam said as he turned toward him. “We didn’t ask for a fight. And that guy would have killed you if we had given him the chance. He was too drunk and too stupid. And they all were carrying knives. You didn’t do anything wrong here. Those goons were looking to fight us before I even sat down.”

  Brighton looked ashamed, then turned quickly to Sam. “Not a word of this to Sara. She would die if she knew this. Not one word, right?”

  Sam smiled and patted his shoulder. “No worries, mate.”

  Brighton watched him, then turned. “Let’s get out of here before those goons call their friends.”

  Sam followed him to his car. “You know, Dad, that was pretty good work back there. If you ever decide you want to join the real army, I know a few people. It’s a pretty tight club, but I think I could get you in.”

  “No, thanks,” Brighton answered. “I’m getting too old for this.”

  “Apparently not,” Sammy answered, glancing back at the café. “Not from what I saw back there.”

  “I just held my own. You did all the hard work.”

  Sam just shook his head.

  “You’ve got to go now?” he asked his father.

  Brighton glanced at his watch and nodded. “I was hoping we’d have more time to talk.”

  “Next time, I guess.”

  “Next time,” Brighton answered.

  The two men stood in silence. “When are you going back to Afghanistan?” Brighton asked as he unlocked his car.

  “A couple of days, from what I’m hearing. By the end of the week.”

  Brighton looked at his son intently. “Be careful,” he told him.

  “Always, Dad.”

  The two men stared at each other; then Sammy stepped back and saluted. “General,” he said.

  Brighton braced himself and returned the salute. “Sergeant,” he replied.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A little more than five hours after taking off from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, Major General Brighton’s C-21 lined up to land at Riyadh’s civilian airport.

  Sitting in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula, Riyadh is an exceptionally modern and beautiful city, with a stunning architectural mix of glass high-rise buildings and ancient desert mosques. The skyscrapers ascend like something out of a children’s drawing book: sweeping arches, enormous space-saucer shaped coliseums, needle-nosed skyscrapers made of steel and glass, and glistening chrome buildings rising like two-forked prongs into the air. Desert browns, whites, and pastels are the dominant colors. Though the city is considered one of the modern wonders of the world, the traditional Arab influence is pervasive and can be seen everywhere in the arched doorways, dome-topped mosques, and caliph-inspired city centers. Enormous highways sweep through the city, the cement having been laid o
ver the trails where Bedouin camels used to trek; though the only camels one would see in the city now would likely be in the back of a truck and on the way to the meat market. The side streets are tree-lined and well lit and swept every day to keep the blowing sands from the desert at bay.

  The capital city of the kingdom, with a population of almost 5 million people, Riyadh got its name from an Arab word meaning place of garden and trees. Ancient wadis, now dry, run through the center of the city, and the surrounding soil is fertile and rich. Powerful electric motors pump fresh water from the deep underground aquifers to keep the man-made oasis green and desirable.

  To the west and south of the city, the terrain rises gradually for four hundred miles until suddenly it juts upward at the rocky Midian Mountains. To the east, the terrain descends through the Summan, where the landscape gradually transforms from barren desert to rangelands to the fertile crescent that borders the Persian Gulf. A constant wind blows from the desert, and the flies seem to swarm when the nights cool down, especially when the date trees are in flower or bearing fruit. To the south lies the Rub’ el Khal—the Empty Quarter—a land so bleak and brutal few humans have ever trekked across its sands, a land so desolate and miserable even the Saudis were more than happy to give most of it to Yemen and Oman.

  Overhead, the sky is almost always a deep gray-blue, a huge open saucer sitting over the land, cloudless and so deep in color it seems as if one is looking at the edge of space. The air is clean and clear, and the lights from the city can be seen for hundreds of miles on a clear desert night. During the spring storms it can rain violently, and the sandstorms can be deadly if one is caught in the open; but 340 days a year the weather is monotonously predictable: hot and dry in December, searing the rest of the year.

  * * *

  Like the city of Riyadh, the entire kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a bewildering example of contradictions and extremes.

  Much of the nation is an entirely inhospitable desert, yet the oases that dot the country are lush and wet and brimming with life. The cities are bright and beautiful and more contemporary than any in the world, but outside the cities the Bedouin nomads live much as they have for almost two thousand years. The royal family jets around the globe, meeting with Hollywood celebrities and foreign heads of state, headlining cultural conferences and human rights events, while the women in some localities are not even allowed to learn how to read. The Saudi infrastructure is modern and up-to-date in every way, but the kingdom still denies basic freedoms of expression and many human rights. The Qur’an teaches love and peace, emphasizing the need for discussion and the give-and-take of discourse, yet the kingdom allows no opposing political parties; indeed, there are no political parties in the kingdom at all—the royal family isn’t a party, but a close-knit, manipulative, and fortified group of relatives who guard their family secrets above anything else.

  It is as if the government straddles two ice flows that are moving apart, with one foot in the West and one foot in the desert, preaching progress and equality while many times denying both to its citizens. Any expression of antigovernment activity is unthinkable. Women cannot drive or even appear in public without a male family member as escort. Use of corporal punishment is the rule; beheadings, amputations, and lashings regularly take place in city squares. The punishment for various offenses is precisely prescribed in Saudi law—beheading for rape, murder, sodomy, or sorcery, amputations of the feet or hands for robbery, and public lashings for offenses such as public drunkenness. All of the media, including the eight daily newspapers, are owned and controlled by the royal family, and the government maintains the Royal Decree for Printed Material and Publications, a list of topics that are prohibited to be written about or discussed. The Saudi Communications Company controls the backbone network through which access to the Internet must pass, and the list of approved sites is very short indeed. The mutawwa’in, members of the state-financed religious police known as the Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice, are tasked with enforcing the Wahhabi interpretation of religion and scouring the culture for immoral teachings or immodest dress. Every public facility, including Western companies such as McDonalds, Starbucks, and other U.S. firms, enforce a kind of sexual apartheid, with separate entries and facilities for women and men. The men’s sections are lavish and comfortable, many exceeding Western standards, while the women and family sections are often run-down and neglected, sometimes not even offering seats.

  It is appalling to those who aren’t familiar with the culture. It is also, however, the way it has been on the Arabian Peninsula for generations.

  But some felt it was now time for drastic change. A few men, a very few, felt it was time to turn the monarchy over to the forces of democratic power.

  And His Royal Highness, King Faysal, Monarch of the House of Saud, was one of those men.

  King Faysal knew it would take time for the transition to be complete. It wouldn’t take place in his lifetime—the upheaval would be too great, and he was too old now to push anymore. But it would more fully take place with his son, who would gradually make the needed changes. By the time his grandson came to power in twenty years, the transition to democracy would be complete.

  It would take two generations, and wrench the kingdom apart, but Faysal was convinced that democracy and the teachings of Islam were not mutually exclusive ideals, and it was time for the kingdom to take the first step. That meant it was time for the monarch to give up much of his family’s great power. It was a radical idea. In fact, some called him a heretic and accused him of insanity. But King Faysal had already begun. Over the past twenty years he had reined in the mutawwa’in, set up civil courts with professional judges, authorized city councils outside the influence of royal patronage, and, for the first time, named men to senior government positions who were not his nephews or sons. The next step was to free the press. A national assembly would follow, though that was still ten or fifteen years away.

  The king had been bold and courageous. Fighting two hundred years of tradition, he had instituted the first steps of reform, and to say there was resistance among the princes was an understatement at best. He knew of their anger, and he wasn’t a fool. But after a long life of laying the foundation for change, King Faysal intended to accelerate the transition to democracy by appointing his first son, Crown Prince Saud bin Faysal, to take his place on the throne. Saud bin Faysal had made a covenant with his father to continue the transition to democracy, and while the monarchy would not disappear, it would hand over much of its power.

  The king sometimes wondered what his great-grandfather, the first king of the House of Saud, would have thought of his intentions. After much thought and consideration, he had come to the conclusion that his great-grandfather would have been proud.

  * * *

  The founder of modern-day Saudi Arabia was King Abd al-Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman bin Faysal Al Saud. A nomadic warrior-prince, King Abd al-Aziz captured Riyadh in 1902 by defeating his long-time rivals, the Rashidi clan, in a bloody and violent desert war. Soon after, he gained control of all central Saudi Arabia. His Bedouin army then turned east and west, uniting the tribes under the puritanical Wahhabi Islamic order until the entire Arabian Peninsula was under his command. After American petroleum engineers discovered oil in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province in 1932, King Abd al-Aziz began to strengthen the kingdom’s relationship with the United States.

  King Abd al-Aziz had some twenty wives, producing forty-five sons and sixty-five children in all. Over time, his posterity proved nothing if not fruitful, and in a country of 23 million people there are now more than six thousand members of the royal family.

  Approaching old age, King Abd al-Aziz made it clear that the crown would pass from one king to the next by way of the oldest son. Sometimes this happened, sometimes it did not; for the simple fact was that the incredible power and wealth of the oil-driven kingdom was not something that was easily dismissed, and ambition and greed proved to be destructive tools in the li
ves of many sons. As a result, the transition of power became unpredictable, and Western leaders eventually accepted that it was impossible to predict with any certainty who would be the next king, or who the world would be dealing with from one generation to the next. Over time, the internal struggles over inheritance became a state secret so closely guarded that it made the old Kremlin power struggles look like a third-grade vote for class president.

  King Faysal, the current king of the House of Saud, had several wives and many sons. The actual number—who they were and what they did—was little talked about among the Saudi people, but it had already been established that his oldest son, son of his first wife, Queen Isodore, a green-eyed and dark-haired beauty raised in the holy city of Medina, would be the next king. Indeed, the decision had been made many years before, when Crown Prince Saud was still a young child, and every step of the young prince’s life had been carefully choreographed in order to prepare him for the day when he would reign as monarch and king. Prince Saud had proven to be a strong but kindly progressive who spent a great deal of time in the West, soaking up the philosophies behind democratic regimes.

  Through the years, as the king watched his son grow, he became more and more convinced he had made the right decision. Indeed, he became convinced Crown Prince Saud was nothing short of an emissary from God, a man sent to rule the kingdom during the painful transition into the twenty-first century, the most difficult times the kingdom would ever see. The crown prince had proven capable. He was intelligent and compassionate and strong to the core. Moreover, he had the vision. He agreed with his father. He knew what his purpose was.

  Did he have the strength and wisdom such a task would require? Did he have the tenacity to place his nation on the road to democracy? The king thought he did. And Crown Prince Saud thought he did too. So he would take over the kingdom when King Faysal passed away.

  The only problem, of course, was that there were other sons.