The Secret Soldier

compromises necessary for a peaceful transition.

“Going into the desert. His object lesson.”

In fact, they were heading back to Riyadh and the embassy. Kurland, Rana, and Maggs rode in the second Suburban, the third vehicle in the convoy. Maggs had moved Kurland out of the lead Suburban, explaining that he didn’t want to be predictable. Maggs and Kurland sat side by side in the middle seat. Rana and a marine corporal were in back, with two more marines up front. Two Saudi police cars cleared traffic ahead of the convoy, sirens screaming, while an armored Jeep from the king’s private security detail brought up the rear. Saudi drivers were famously aggressive, but even they stayed away from this rolling mass of iron.

“Yeah, we’ll skip the desert,” Kurland said. Though part of him wanted to see what the king had meant. Walk in the heat until he collapsed.

“I have to say attacking Alia was brilliant. Shows the princes nobody’s safe. And takes out a progressive voice, a woman, someone who can speak to America and Europe. And it’s pushing Abdullah over the edge at this moment when he’s fighting with Saeed for control. Three for the price of one.”

“Could Saeed have been involved?”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m not saying directly. But he’s the defense minister. He’s got intel on her protection. Maybe he or Mansour gave that to somebody who didn’t like her. When we saw him, he didn’t seem too upset she was gone.”

“Okay. Abdullah’s furious that Alia died. Wants someone to pay. He and his brother, they’re rivals, hate each other. And Abdullah’s blaming Saeed. But why would Saeed take that risk? I don’t see it. And I promise you that’s what Foggy Bottom will think. They’ll say this proves that Abdullah is too old and we can’t trust him anymore.”

“What if we’re looking at it backward?” Kurland said. “What if Saeed is just crazy? What if he’s waited forever to be king, and he can’t stand the idea that Abdullah wants to skip him?”

“You’re letting your dislike for Saeed color your thinking.”

“Maybe. But there’s something I don’t get. The family’s kept this to themselves. We didn’t have a clue.”

Rana hesitated. “True.”

“So Al Qaeda probably doesn’t know, either. Or Hezbollah. Unless they have better intel into what’s happening in the monarchy than we do.”

“Which is unlikely, sure.”

“And when was the last time the Sauds had this kind of internal struggle?”

“Not since the early sixties,” Rana said. “When King Saud was drinking himself to death and his brothers exiled him.”

“Almost fifty years ago. So why now? The other bombings, sure. But Alia? Like you said, that was a surgical strike at Abdullah. If the terrorists aren’t getting tipped from inside, how could they know exactly the right time and way to hit him?”

“Coincidence,” Rana said. “They’d planned awhile, and they had a chance at Princess Alia and they took it.”

“I hate coincidence.”

The convoy passed a massive construction project, hundreds of cranes working on half-finished apartments and office towers, part of the campus of Princess Noura University for Women. The royal family was spending more than eleven billion dollars on the school, part of its effort to funnel oil wealth into creating a sustainable society. Past the campus, northern Riyadh came into focus, concrete houses and mansions and mosques jumbled close behind high walls. In a city where summer temperatures topped one hundred twenty degrees, outdoor space was not a priority. The houses were built nearly to the edges of their lots. Kurland tried to imagine living inside one. He couldn’t. “You think you understand Saudi Arabia?” Abdullah had almost sneered when he said the words. No, Kurland thought. But maybe that was his own failure—

THE AMBUSH BEGAN WITH what seemed to be an accident.

A panel truck sliced across the highway right to left, tires squealing, leaving streaks of rubber across the asphalt. It smashed sidelong into the van leading the convoy, pummeling it against the center divider, putting a foot-deep gash in the van’s armored frame. And then it blew up—

A half-second later, a Toyota 4Runner pulled up beside the first Suburban, eighty yards ahead of Kurland’s vehicle—

And disappeared in a bright orange fireball that cut through the Suburban’s armored windows and twisted it onto its side and incinerated the marines and embassy staffers inside—

THROUGH THE SUBURBAN’S SMOKED-GLASS windshield, Kurland saw the truck hit the van and explode. Then everything happened at once.

Twin shock waves came at them up the highway, and the Suburban reared back like a horse trying to buck and then landed hard, its massive shocks rattling, and sped through the intense heat of the 4Runner’s fireball—

And accelerated, pushing Kurland into his seat, and swerved into the center lane and then halfway into the right lane as the driver, who’d been through three roadside bombs in Iraq, tried to get them out of the kill zone—

The sergeant in the passenger’s seat grabbed the tactical radio mounted to the Suburban’s dash. “Charlie Four, this is Charlie Six—”

Metal clacked on metal, and Kurland looked back to see the lance corporal in the back jamming his M-4 through the firing port in the truck’s liftgate with one hand while shoving a shotgun into the port over the left rear wheel well with the other, as yet another SUV closed in on them—

Maggs yelled “Down!” and pushed Kurland’s head onto the seat, and Kurland couldn’t see what was happening anymore — and the shotgun exploded from the seat behind them, both barrels—

The Suburban shook with a crash that snapped Kurland’s head into Maggs’s body armor, the contact coming from the front, the passenger side, and pushing the truck left into a skid—

The sergeant whispered, “We are hit—” And Kurland didn’t understand why he was whispering and then realized that the shotgun had temporarily deafened him—

Kurland squirmed up, needing to see if he couldn’t hear, and saw Maggs grab the pistol on his right hip and shove it through the port on the door beside him and fire at the Toyota that had crashed into them—

Two neat round holes appeared in the Toyota’s metal skin and a third in the driver’s-side window, and the driver, a small man in a white thobe, ratcheted forward and his arm came off the wheel and the first spurt of blood flowered on his shoulder—

The marine behind them muttered, “RPG incoming,” and Maggs shoved Kurland down — and this time the explosion happened behind Kurland, a searing wave of heat and glass—

The Suburban lurched sideways and down, and Kurland felt as much as heard a terrible grinding as its back half scraped along the pavement—

They ground to a stop, and in the silence Kurland heard another sound, a low grunting from the backseat, not even human, a dying animal, and he tried to sit up, but Maggs was holding him down, and Maggs said to someone, “Chase units, tac team, gotta get him out—”

And Kurland forced himself up. Whatever happened next, he wasn’t going to his slaughter with his eyes closed.

TO SAVE WEIGHT, THE steel armor at the back of the Suburban was only a half-inch thick. The rocket- propelled grenade ripped through the plate like tissue paper. Its next stop was Lance Corporal Ray Wade. The grenade shattered his Kevlar body armor and tore open Wade’s ribs and poured lightning into his heart and lungs, killing him instantly.

By taking most of the explosion, Wade saved four of the other five men in the Suburban. Rana, his seatmate, was less lucky. Shrapnel tore open his face and neck, and one jagged piece chopped through his skull and cut into the arteries around his brain, causing massive internal bleeding. He died, but not soon enough. For thirty seconds he lay guttering in agony, whispering in words beyond translation, a language only he could understand, until a merciful unconsciousness took him.