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

on their land, changing as the times require so that they survive, and they remember many, many ancient things through stories. They are not much good to history, mind you, but they will have these memories that come down through tens, sometimes hundreds, of generations, and they are fiercely attached to the land of their fathers. It is their place, they know nothing else.” Fahd looked sad. “It is this, sadly, that confounds you Americans too often when you try, with the noblest intention in human history itself, to solve the problems in places you do not really understand. It is not that you are evil, or do not try, it’s just that your frame of reference is so fundamentally different, and . . .ahh, but I wander. Another piece of this delicious fine goat, Patrick? Perhaps you’d like one of the eyeballs—a real delicacy?”

Ripley took another bite and a handful of rice, stared over the head of the man on the other side of the platter from him into the night sky of Arabia, and thought for a long time. XXIII. Paris/Buraydah/al-Ha'il

Nearly midnight in Paris, and Henri Broussard was almost finished for the night. He was reading a report on the Boeing Company, chief competitor to Europe’s Airbus, and parts of this report he would forward to the latter’s executives within the next few days. It was a good report, with details of the Boeing proposal to sell its 777 and 787 jets to Qantas Airlines of Australia. The pricing data in the proposal, along with the details of side deals Boeing would make with the Australians would make it easier for Airbus to win the competition with its own jets, the A340, the A330 or perhaps the new super-jumbo A380.

The phone rang and it was his assistant’s voice in the outer office, “Sir, you have a call from the embassy in Amman, Jordan. Will you take it tonight, or would you rather they call back tomorrow?”

“Oh I’ll take it Michel, send it through.”

A series of clicks and beeps as the call was connected, routed through the crypto devices, and the voice was now that of his station chief in Amman.”

“Misseur le Director, good evening. I hope I have not disturbed you this late?” he said.

“No, not at all, I was just finishing up for the day, but I’m pleased that you’ve called. I trust you have something for me on our American and Saudi friends there?”

This was awkward, since in truth he had lost the Americans, but he did know where they were, or at least where they’d been. He decided to risk dissembling a little. “Director, the party left the American Embassy here this morning quite early. They mounted a diversion, drove around town in two groups for a while, and eventually one of these returned to the embassy and the other left Amman heading south and east.” This was all true of course, but he did not say they’d had no idea of that at the time, not at least until the group they were following returned as he’d described. But it seemed to be going well, so he continued, “We did not follow them far on the road east, Director, since there is only one place for them to go in that direction, and that is into Saudi Arabia. Our people here did not have the right visas to follow, so we let them go.”

Broussard was silent, and the Chief in Amman grimaced as he waited for a storm he half expected, but only for a moment. When it didn’t come immediately, he pressed on, hoping it would not come at all if he could finish quickly. “However, our listening post in the embassy has the latest equipment, and we intercepted a cellular telephone call that was made from the Jordan-Saudi border crossing at al-Kaf. It appears an interior ministry policeman there made the call to report the transit of a group of Saudis, including the Air Force Brigadier and three Americans. That was about ten-forty-five local time this morning, thirteen hours ago. Do you have a map of Saudi Arabia within easy reach, director? I can wait while you find it, or I can describe where they are going for you.”

Broussard was working at his keyboard, he would find the map, but the man might as well go on, and he said, “Please continue.”

“Right, sir. Well, there isn’t much out there. The group will go east, make a few turnings, and then mount the Tapline Road that parallels the pipeline from the Persian Gulf oil terminals all the way across Arabia and Jordan to the Mediterranean. Once on the road, they go all the way to the Gulf, probably to Dhahran, Jubail, or Al-Khobar. The Brigadier is almost certainly stationed at the big Saudi Air Force Base outside Dhahran. We think the Americans are simply escorting him and his family back home. I think that means whatever their operation intended to do, they believe it is done, and they’re just winding things up.”

“Well, if they’re done, they have a right to be. The al-Qaeda networks in three countries are more or less all in a wreck because of them.” Broussard thought for a moment, then asked, “Jean, do you have any theories, what do you think their objectives were, and do you think they did what they set out to do, or are they just shutting the operation down.”

“No sir, no theory really. They seem to have had some really good information that they didn’t share with us, and all we got was the leavings here in Amman, and that only because we got to the airport Arab before they did. It was very close, they had an operative waiting, but our man . . .”

“Yes, I know all that,” Broussard cut in. His own opinion was that that this General maybe had some small tidbit of information, made contact with the Americans, and they put this thing together quickly not really knowing what would happen or having any great expectations. They’d all been very lucky, really, but that was often the nature of intelligence. The big breaks made things happen, all you could do was to be ready to take advantage of them when they came.

“Very well,” Henri said, “anything else, then? Any loose ends there in Amman?”

“None director, our guest has been taken care of in the usual way.”

The Amman people were efficient, anyway. You could still work that way in the East, and in Africa, it made things so much less awkward. “Bon,” Henri said, “goodnight, then.” He hung up the phone without waiting for a reply. He’d have to think about his next call to Anderson at CIA in the car on the way home. “Bloody Americans.”

*****

A cool morning for late April in Jeddah, and a breeze sweeping over the Red Sea coast stirred the normally oppressive humidity away toward the escarpment to the east of the old city. The airport in Jeddah is the terminal through which nearly a million pilgrims a year enter the Kingdom on the annual Haj, the pilgrimmage to Mecca that is one of the pillars of Islam every Muslim must try to make once in his lifetime. At the airport there is a huge outdoor structure, white, tent-like, where these often poor pilgrims are held during both their inbound and outbound marshalling periods, and many people worldwide remember that shelter as the place where a small cooking fire got out of control in the nineties and something like a thousand piligrims died in the fire and the stampeding mass of humanity trying to flee it.

What most people in America don’t know, but might find ironic, is that the gate system at Jeddah International is almost exactly like the old system at Washington Dulles, the latter still partially in use. Huge vehicles move people between terminals high off the ground, at the height of the aircraft doorways, and these huge buses can change their height up and down as needed to match the aircraft for each load of passengers. The vehicles at the two airports are identical in every way. At Jeddah, passengers still board one of these at their departure gate, and then the vehicle takes them to their waiting aircraft somewhere out on the sweltering tarmac.

The airport was crowded this morning as it always was, and several flights were boarding their vehicles at a variety of “gates”. None of this was remarkable.

But unknown to any airport authority or policeman, terrorists were moving. Three of the flights boarding were headed for Europe: one to Rome, one to Athens, and one to Barcelona. Each of the large buses now packed and heading for their airplanes contained a determined young Saudi man, traveling for now on his Saudi passport, but in his pocket each also held an American passport. They were the first of Khalid’s men to begin moving West.

Five others would also go today, but they departed from Dhahran and from Riyadh. Two of those were actually going the long way around, East via Tokyo and then across the Pacific to Vancouver. Sunday there would be more who would leave. In less than ten days sixty trained terrorists would be in the United States, prepared to execute Khalid’s plan whenever he chose to order it.

*****

Mohammad’s little caravan and six men drove into the hot, dusty town of Buraydah around ten-thirty. They found a small café where they drank water, juice, and had some bread for a late breakfast, and sat relaxing while they waited for the noon prayer, which would come around eleven-thirty on this day. After prayer they would have lunch and find some kind of hotel or boarding house, or if there was not one they would go to one of the larger mosques and ask for a room for the night. Their meeting with Khalid’s men was not until tomorrow, so they would have the rest of today to relax.

On the long drive from Riyadh it’d occurred to Mohammed that the plan with Khalid was not all that good. It would have been better to have met here today, and then to have gone on to al-Ha’il today so that the team could do a reconnaissance of the compound, get the lay of the town, plan their attack and escape routes. As it was they would have little time to do any of that, and some of what they did have might be at or after dark.

“Jabreel, my friend,” Mohammed said, seizing an idea. “Please go to the Nissan and bring me back the map, Brother.”

He did, and when it was on the table Mohammed studied it. The drive from here to al-Ha’il should take a little over an hour, maybe ninety minutes at the most if there was a lot of traffic. The road was good. It would be an easy thing to drive there after zohr prayer at noon, take a look around, perhaps find hotels or someplace where he could put the thirty men in smaller groups. He would try to find the compound, maybe drive by, and if there was time he would watch it for a while, to see who came and went, how the gates worked, maybe how many people were inside.