The Phoenix Affair - Dave Moyer (smart ebook reader TXT) 📗

is great” the old man said. He stood back while the two young men opened the gates wide, then they drove through, dismounted and closed and locked them. Uncle Majid got in beside Ali.

The compound was in two halves, west and east, and in between was a long, straight drive that divided them. Here, near the gate, the drive was surrounded by a semicircle of grass fifty yards in diameter with a line of palm trees along its edge. The drive went the length of the compound, nearly 200 yards, where it ended in a wide circle before the mass of the north wall. At the apex of the circle was the mosque, but to the left and right of this were the garages, each with its own door, enough for ten cars in all. The compound was two hundred yards wide as well. Along each side of the drive was a strip of grass, trees planted at intervals along the way, and then a concrete walk. Along the walk on each side ran a wall, and these walls concealed the private gardens of each villa, so that each nuclear family had its own privacy where its women could move about un-veiled in the green space. There were four villas on each side of the compound.

They stopped the vehicles in front of the second villa on the left. All the buildings were identical, three stories of stucco and marble, with what looked like stone balusters on balconies below the second-floor windows in the front of the houses. These were actually concrete, as were the walls of each building, the floors, and the roofs. Indeed, concrete was the preferred building material in Saudi Arabia: wood was much too scarce to build with. It was a horrible irony, however, that for concrete the Saudis had to import sand and aggregate. Saudi sand is too fine to make concrete, and there is not nearly enough stone, either. It was just as well. A concrete house was cooler than anything else, and even here it would reach one hundred and five degrees on most summer days.

They began waking the other kids, ranging in age from thirteen down to little Saud who was six. The second house on the left was that of the Fahd al-Auda family, and Ali opened the door in the wall to allow his brothers and sisters to walk through, cross the garden, and enter the house through the front door. Saad carried Saud piggy-back style; Uncle Majid had the twin girls Aisha and Aina by the hands. The rest walked, all were chattering away, very pleased to be at their summer home, in the cooler, drier air of the central plateau of Arabia, but mostly just pleased that they’d left school two weeks early and would not be going back until the next term.

Everyone knew their rooms, they had not packed much, so there was not much to do to move in. In a short while everyone was back asleep, all except Ali, Saad and Uncle. The three men gathered in the great living room, the majlis room where men gathered to talk and drink tea and eat dates in the evenings. Ali made tea, and brought it out of the kitchen with the flat Bedouin bread he’d bought the night before when they stopped for their prayers and supper. There was no fuul, or hummus, but the bread would be enough while they talked.

“We will people here to help around the houses this afternoon, Ali. They are good people, Muslims, praise be to God, and they have served the family for five years.” Uncle Majid was proud of the family’s wealth.

“Good, Uncle,” Ali said. “I do not know when my father returns from Europe. What news do you have from him?”

“None, but they are in no danger. Now that you are here everyone is safe.” He munched on a piece of the bread, sipped the tea. “Those filth out there,” he waved southward, “are not Muslims. The Prophet, Peace be upon Him, tells us that it is wrong for the Muslims to usurp the power of their government. We have a king, and a government, only the King can declare jihad. But why would he, why should he? These Americans have done us no harm, most of them are Christians, are they not, Saad? People of the Book! Weren’t you born there? Have not my nephews Fahd, and your father Isa, may God keep him in Paradise, been there many times? Were these Americans not good to you every time? They were, or I would have heard of it, by the Grace of God. No, we have no quarrel with them, and they have done God’s work, ridding the Iraq,” he waved north, “of that pig Saddam, may his bones rot in the hell of swine’s offal he deserves. These people are vermin, these that you met in the desert, Nephew, to threaten or attack or even kill other Muslims. They will not come here, we are the al-Auda.” He sipped the tea and took more bread.

Saad was not so sure. When he thought of it, he was still shaken by what he’d seen at the desert camps, especially the third one. The Mullahs had been passionate, the Afghanis, Saudis who had been in the jihad against the Russians in the old days, were hard men, their eyes cold, distant, frightening. They talked of war, killing, nobody was innocent, nobody immune. They were serious, dangerous people, and many of the other boys who had come seemed to think the same way. They were not as convincing, not as hard, not as trained, and they had not killed yet. But many of them would when their time came, of that he had been sure. He shivered a little. The Al-Auda tribe had been more or less supreme in this part of Arabia for nearly two thousand years, but times were changing. The police here were mostly from the tribe, but they were armed, if at all, with automatic pistols, and most of the time they were not loaded. Most families kept guns for hunting, but nothing heavy. Saad had never been in the army, he was too young, and he did not want to be. But he could understand that if any of those Afghanis came to Ha’il looking for them, they would come with guns, grenades, explosives, and hate, and they would kill. It would not be pretty if it happened. Still, they were safer here than they could be anywhere else in the Kingdom, at least until Uncle Fahd returned. He would know what to do, or would have already done it. “God keep us” he thought.

Turning to Uncle Majid, he gestured at the AK. “Uncle, I didn’t know you had such a thing. Where did you get it?”

The old man smiled broadly, revealing two brilliant rows of perfect, white teeth, his dark brown eyes flashed. “Nephew,” he said, “we are the Al-Auda, the Abu Tayii. Our people have kept this land for as long as anyone can remember, before the time of the Prophet, Peace be upon Him. We did not do it with camel’s milk, we have always been armed.” A little of the fire appeared to dim, but the eyes still gleamed with something like anticipation. “We have everything we need in the armory under the mosque.” He hefted the AK. “Many of these, many bullets, a few grenades, even a few fine swords.” At this the smile split his face, his right hand clenched in a fist, and the fire in his eyes was bright and terrible.

*****

The sun was well up over the Arabian Gulf, four hundred miles east of Ha’il. Khalid al-Shahrani was just beginning to stir from a sound sleep in his own bedroom in the apartment in the Al-Khobar district of Dhahran. It was not a luxury apartment; Khalid was not wealthy, and he would not have wanted to be conspicuously so in any case. He was a jihadi, or that was how he thought of himself. He’d lived the hard life in Afghanistan from the last year of the Soviet occupation until shortly before the great attack on the United States in 2001. Since then he’d been here, coordinating Al-Qaeda operations in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, recruiting young men to do the work of jihad, motivating, shaping, preparing them for the fight that was only now beginning.

Since the disaster of Afghanistan had forced the core of Al-Qaeda from its stronghold there, the mujahedeen had had to adapt to a new reality. War had its costs. Still, this was a war they had chosen, and they’d enjoyed many victories so far, so there was no complaining. Many of the faithful who survived the American war luckily made their way back home, and Al-Qaeda’s strongest and most active presence was now in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi officials were slow to understand the threat, which had initially made Khalid’s task relatively simple. He’d begun with the huge attacks on residential compounds near the diplomatic quarter in Riyadh. These had killed many, including his fighters. That was unfortunate, but it was useful in many very subtle ways. It had frightened the expatriate community, one of the key pillars that kept things running all over the kingdom, and keeping things running was what kept the al-Saud family in power. Frighten the expats into leaving, and the whole edifice of the Saudi government would crumble as public works ceased to function, oil and its money ceased to flow, banking ceased to work and capital fled to safer harbors. That was the key strategic objective, to undermine the public’s perception that the al-Saud could maintain order by making it appear that they were powerless to prevent these acts of chaotic violence.

Suicide attacks contributed to the overall effect, and it worked as expected. Few expats were willing to die for their business interests in Saudi Arabia, while his people were willing to die. The slower learners among the more resilient expatriates, principally the Americans and British, had needed more direct action. Kidnappings and beheadings, and random sudden shootings of selected individuals had largely solved that problem. Many of the larger American and British firms were still running skeleton staffs 5 years later, with only a handful of their own people, trying to carry on with local workers. But it was a losing battle for them, he believed. Things in the Kingdom were slowing down, money was not being made, investment was drying up, and the vast bulk of the young Saudi population was becoming more and more restless.

But the situation was not without its problems. The al-Saud had finally reacted when it became clear what the Al-Qaeda objective really was, and their reaction had been more violent, determined, and more disruptive than Khalid liked to admit. In the last five years nearly two hundred and fifty of his people had been martyred or captured, and those captured would never see the light of day again unless to see it glinting off the sword swinging down to separate their heads from their necks. War had come to Saudi Arabia, Khalid al-Shahrani had brought it. He was proud of this, but even he would admit that the issue was undecided, and there was much fighting left before it would finally be so.

With these mixed feelings of satisfaction and uncertainty Khalid found himself awake. He was uncomfortable in his mind, despite the fact, he told himself, that things were going remarkably well. He had an excellent and bold plan that was well advanced, a plan that might once again put the nations of the West back into economic turmoil. He was fighting a creditable battle with the Saudis, winning sometimes, losing about equally often, but he was in no doubt that he and his men would eventually win. “What is it that bothers me so about this Air Force general?” he asked himself yet again. It was a question he