* * *
The convoy was nearing the bottom of the mountain. There were two more sharp curves below them, then a straight line to the electronically controlled gate that blocked access to the road. The line of cars decelerated for a curve, and the vehicles bunched together as they slowed.
Inside the black limousine, Princess Tala laid her head back and closed her eyes, deep in thought. The little girl was asleep, and the two young men were quiet. The BMW bounced lightly as it hit some gravel in the road, then pulled into the turn.
* * *
“Stand fast!” the lead assassin whispered into his microphone, sensing the anxiety in the air. The vehicles were almost directly below them, not more than eighty feet away. “Two, are you ready?”
“Ready!” the second assassin replied.
“Ready . . . ready . . . NOW!” the team leader cried.
The four RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers fired in a hiss of white-hot smoke and flame. The four missiles trailed forward, reaching their targets in a fraction of a second, and the four vehicles exploded in bright orange and yellow flames. The lead truck rocked up on its front wheels, crushing its bumper against the asphalt, then nearly rolled onto its back. The black SUV with the doctors simply disappeared, swallowed in a fireball of black smoke and orange flame. The other two vehicles exploded a hundredth of a second later. The heat was so intense it started melting the asphalt, the oil-based road catching fire and spewing black smoke. The second assassin reloaded quickly and fired again and the lead military vehicle was blown in two, secondary explosions bursting from its cargo bay and blasting the air.
The black BMW screeched as the driver slammed on the brakes. The road ahead and behind him was completely blocked by fiery walls of melting steel. The sedan didn’t move for a moment, the driver momentarily confused; then he threw the car into reverse, the tires screeching as he backed up, crashing into the wreckage behind. The driver gunned the engine and his tires squealed as he tried to push the burning SUV out of the way.
The assassins had already picked up their other weapons, and the sound of automatic machine-gun fire burst through the air. They blew out the fleeing BMW’s tires, shredding them in a hail of bullets; then the windshield was shattered, then the engine, then the driver and bodyguard’s upper torsos and heads—everything from the front seat of the vehicle forward to the grill was blown to pieces in a hail of gunfire. The BMW came to rest against the hulk of the burning car behind it. Another explosion rocked the hot air as the gas tank in the last car finally burst into flames. A single soldier stumbled from the second automobile, his clothing on fire. He rolled in the dirt, then fell still, his arms reaching out, as he burned to death. Fire and thick smoke billowed from the burning vehicles, the flames curling around the shattered windows and half-open doors. Another soldier crawled from the largest truck, pulling himself on his belly toward the ditch, and the lead assassin fired, the hail of heavy machine-gun fire nearly cutting him in two.
The assassins jumped from their hiding places and ran down the hill. Behind them they heard the dull whop, whop, whop as their evacuation helicopter crested the saddle in the mountain and swooped toward the rising smoke. The assassins reached the road in a matter of seconds and came to a quick stop. Charred bodies, burning tires, blackened pieces of metal and melted weapons were scattered everywhere. The air was heavy with the stench of burning flesh and fuel.
It was a clean hit. A perfect hit. Not a soldier was living. It was all they could ask for.
The team leader turned to the black BMW, the only vehicle in the convoy that had not been destroyed. The royal family was in there. He started to move.
* * *
Crown Prince Saud shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked on his feet. The waterfall gushed around them, cooling the air with its mist. Then he heard footsteps approach from behind a cluster of palm trees forty yards up the trail, and he looked over to see his personal aide running toward them. “Your Majesty!” the servant cried as he ran.
The prince took a step toward him, and the aide came to a sudden stop and bowed quickly, touching his palms to his knees. “Your Majesty!” he repeated as he lifted his eyes. The crown prince saw the panic, and his heart slammed in his chest. The aide grabbed the prince around the shoulders and began to pull him up the path. Behind him, other palace guards began to race into view. “Your Highness, come quickly!” the aide hissed in his ear.
“What is it?” Saud demanded.
The aide’s eyes bulged. “A Firefall! Your family . . . ” he cried.
Prince Saud’s knees grew weak. He knew the code. Firefall! An assault on his family. “What? When?” he demanded.
Two bodyguards appeared out of nowhere and started pressing close to him, protecting him from all sides. Prince Saud reached out to the aide. “What is going on?” he cried.
“Princess Tala hit the panic button!” the aide said to the prince. “That’s all that we know. Now, please, come with us, Your Majesty.”
* * *
Princess Tala sat upright, her jaw tight in horror, her eyes wide and glaring in gut-wrenching fear. She reached under her seat and hit the panic button again. Her daughter was screaming in terror, a high screeching sound, and the princess reached over and slammed her head toward the floor. Dropping to her knees, she held her daughter’s head in her hands. Peering over the seat, the princess tried to look out the front of the car, but the bulletproof window that separated the front and rear seats was so smeared with blood and gore that she couldn’t see through it.
“Get down!” she screamed to her sons. The oldest one stared blankly past her, looking through the back window at the carnage behind. She followed his gaze and saw a burning body hanging out of the front windshield. Then she felt the tremor of a smaller explosion behind them. The car rolled backward, then suddenly bumped to a stop as the searing heat and smoke began to seep into the car.
The princess stared at her son, her eyes terrified. He reached for the door handle. “We’ve got to get out!” he cried.
“No!” Tala screamed as she slammed the locks down on the rear doors. “Whatever is out there, they can’t get in! We must stay inside the vehicle. It is the safest place we can be!” She reached for her crying daughter and pulled her into her lap, then thrust her fingers under her seat and hit the satellite-monitored alarm again. She heard the dull whop of an approaching helicopter and almost cried in false hope before realizing the chopper could not be her friend. She thumped the front window, desperate to see through the blood, then heard voices and saw shadows approaching through the smoke to the side. She pushed her daughter down and lowered her head.
“Get on the floor!” she commanded her terrified sons.
The children dropped to the floor, and Princess Tala fell over them.
The car rocked back from a single shotgun blast to the door. Tala felt someone pull on the door handle, but it didn’t give. Another shotgun blast; her daughter screamed; another blast, another pull. The door fell open, and three men in black uniforms were standing there.
Tala looked at them, her face passive. The terror had drained all rational thought from her brain, leaving her unfeeling and calm. “Don’t you dare touch my children!” she tried screaming, but nothing came out.
The first man moved toward her, then slowly took off his mask. Tala pulled a quick breath, and her heart nearly burst.
What was he doing? No! It couldn’t be!
She looked into his dark eyes, and he smiled as he lifted his gun.
“Please, Allah, save the kingdom!” were Princess Tala’s last words.
Four shots were fired, each carefully aimed, each one to the head. Then a last shot was fired into the princess’s abdomen to ensure the unborn child was dead. It was a statement, not a necessity, for the fetus would have died anyway.
But as a message to the crown prince, it pretty much said everything.
* * *
The garden came alive with security forces and military poli
ce. Like ants from an anthill, they seemed to appear everywhere.
General Brighton took a step forward, but the prince pushed him back. He stared at him a moment with dark, glaring eyes. “It has started,” he whispered hoarsely as his bodyguards pulled him away.
“What’s going on, Prince Saud? What is a Firefall?”
“Stay here!” the prince demanded. “Don’t move from this place. I will have someone escort you back to your compound. Go with them and do exactly what they say! I must go! I must go!” The prince turned and disappeared down the path.
* * *
Twenty minutes after leaving his palace, Prince Saud’s motorcade screamed through the gates of King Khalid International Airport outside of Riyadh. The line of black Mercedes and American SUVs rolled onto the tarmac where his aircraft was parked. A huge 747–400 taxied by, but the motorcade didn’t hesitate to race in front of it, forcing the Air Saudi airliner to come to a sudden halt. Prince Saud’s personal jet was waiting near the taxiway, its four engines running. Mobile stairs had already been positioned next to the aircraft, and the prince took them two at a time. The side door was closed, and the aircraft began to taxi the instant the stairs were pulled away from the jet.
Inside, the crown prince’s chief of staff was waiting to give him the news. Saud listened, staring straight ahead, then dismissed his staff. He pushed himself up from his chair and walked to his private office at the back of the jet.
Later that night, Crown Prince Saud was escorted into a large chrome and tile morgue in the royal family’s private hospital in Medina. His family was stretched out on steel tables and positioned side by side, each of them lying face-up under white sheets. He walked to them, crying, then demanded to be alone. The physician nodded and bowed and silently left the room.
The crown prince fell to his knees between the four gurneys where his dead family lay. He wept for three hours, crying out to his God, cursing and pleading and begging to die. He made outrageous promises if God would bring them back to him, then fell in exhaustion and slept on the tile floor. Sometime later, the physician carefully entered the room to see the prince kneeling by his wife’s body again, holding her hand tightly as he stared at the floor.
“Get out!” the prince hissed, and the doctor withdrew.
The prince remained in the room for almost twenty-four hours. When he emerged he was unshaven, smelly, and as frayed as rotten cloth.
But he had made his decision. And he had figured out a plan.
He knew who had killed them. They were not far away.
Forget all his dreams and the promises he had made to his father.
He would destroy the kingdom if he had to. But he would have his revenge!
* * *
Lucifer, the Great Master, watched Prince Saud suffer from the upper corner of the room. He stood still, his arms limp, his eyes staring down at the scene. He smiled as he watched, almost laughing with glee, the pleasure of the prince’s suffering causing a cold glint of joy in his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was almost six hours before Major General Neil Brighton’s military aircraft was cleared to take off because of the emergency hold put on all air traffic in and out of King Khalid International Airport.
As the evening sun settled, his C-21 executive jet was finally cleared for departure, the first aircraft in a long line of civilian traffic that was cleared to take off. The aircraft quickly climbed to 39,000 feet and leveled off, and Brighton undid his lap belt and settled back in his seat. A young airman dressed in a military skirt and blue sweater served the general a light dinner, then brought him a secure telephone and data cable so he could plug his laptop into the aircraft’s satellite communications system.
“Anything else?” the airman asked after helping him plug in the phone.
The general stared at her blankly, then shook his head. “No thanks, Airman Rice.”
“You look tired, sir.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Have you been in Riyadh a long time?
“Just a few days.”
“Still, I’m sure you’re anxious to get home.”
“Always anxious, Airman Rice.”
“We’ll be changing crews at Ramstein, sir, but I’ll make certain they bring on some hot oatmeal for your breakfast. And fresh grapefruit juice and oranges. Did I forget anything?”
Brighton shook his head and thanked her, then turned to his laptop computer and tried to get some work done. It was a five-hour flight to Ramstein, where they would refuel and change pilots for the long flight back to the States. As the aircraft approached the Mediterranean Sea, the air became heavy with humidity and haze. Looking down, Brighton could see a solid cloud layer forming beneath him, and ahead there were growing lines of thunderstorms, huge angry monsters reaching up to 60,000 feet. The sun was off to his left side and setting quickly toward the horizon, and the shadows from the thunderstorm cells cast purple, gray, and blue hues across the lower layers of white. He studied the thunderstorms and saw the first bolt of lightning flash from one of the storms. He knew the small jet would have to weave its way between the storm cells, and the pilot inside him wanted to climb into the cockpit and push one of the two young captains aside, but he fought the temptation and turned back to his work.
Behind him, his two aides fell asleep, while the security officer stared quietly out his window on the other side of the cabin. Another flash of lightning lit up the interior of the cabin, and the officer grabbed his armrest in a death grip. Brighton felt the aircraft begin to climb to get over the storms, then turn a few degrees to the north.
Pulling his shade, he turned back to his work. The aircraft bounced through the rough skies for forty minutes or so and then settled down as they passed through the last of the storms.
Brighton pulled out another report, forcing himself to read, but though he struggled to concentrate, his mind kept wandering back to what Prince Saud’s guard had cried. “Firefall! Your family . . . ” A cold chill ran down his spine.
Firefall? Firefall? What did the code mean? He thought of the stark terror that had fallen across the crown prince’s face, the guards falling in confusion around him, the tension in their voices, their weapons and chattering radios, their determined urgency as they had pulled him away.
He knew it was likely he would never know what had happened this day. The flow of information out of the kingdom was extremely tightly controlled, and personal information regarding the royal family of the House of Saud was almost nonexistent, inside of the kingdom or out. He knew there would be nothing in the press, nothing over the wires, nothing in any intelligence report.
But he knew that something had happened, something dangerous and deadly. He knew it; he felt it somewhere deep in his bones. He thought of the warnings the prince had given, the most frank and disheartening conversations with a world leader he had ever had, then pictured the look on the prince’s face once again.
Firefall? Firefall? Another shiver ran down his spine.
Three hours later, the C-21 landed, refueled and changed aircrews at Ramstein then took off again, heading back to D.C.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Late in the afternoon, Prince Abdullah al-Rahman stood at the window of his Dhahran penthouse atop the Royal Saudi Oil Company headquarters and stared out on the ports of the city. The office was an enormous room filled with leather and scarce woods from the far corners of the world. Racks of various game animals hung on the wall, some of them legal, most of them not, many of them exotic and endangered African animals shot by Prince Abdullah on one of his hunts. Abdullah was good with a knife and he was good with a gun, the blood of his warrior ancestors running thick through his veins. He loved to track and was good at it; and he loved to kill. He loved to butcher his meat. There was something about it—the touch and the smell, the warmth of the flesh when it was still freshly killed, gutting the animal and feeling the blood—there was just something about it that was appealing to him. Like his Bedouin an
cestors, he hungered to hunt and was always successful, though he never brought the meat home but left it out on the prairie to feed other predators such as himself.
To Abdullah’s right, a large plaque hung on the wall, engraved with words from the Covenant of Hamas:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: “O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.” So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.
The prince loved the words from the covenant. They inspired him by reminding him of his comrade’s convictions to bettering the world through the spread of jihad.
As for himself, his battle was anything but a holy war. Indeed, it was very unholy, as he would freely admit.
Abdullah looked through the floor-to-ceiling window. His younger brothers stood behind him, letting him think. The late sun sent long shadows across the city, casting the office in a natural glow. He stared out the window to where the gray and blue waters of the Persian Gulf glimmered in the setting sun. A light evening breeze blew in from the coast. The city was busy, the port alive and bustling with men, equipment, and machines. Enormous oil tankers moved toward the sea docks, where they would take on their loads of rich Saudi crude. After filling their enormous holds, the tankers would turn for various ports in both the West and East, where the Saudi oil would help to quench the insatiable thirst for energy that drove the economic machines of the world. Prince Abdullah watched the nearest tanker move through the calm seas, then glanced down and imagined the reservoirs of oil that lay ten thousand feet below, huge underground pools that stretched a hundred miles in every direction. A quarter of the world’s known oil supply lay under the Arabian sands: 400 billion barrels, a hundred trillion dollars worth of underground liquid gold. And the oil guaranteed not only the wealth of the Royal Saudi family, but the wealth of their subjects as well, providing each Saudi citizen with one of the highest standards of living in the world. For generations ahead, their wealth and well-being was assured.
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