“No, no, Baby Elephant—you promised me. You’re going to do exactly what I tell you. If you don’t want to marry Margarita, I have two Egyptian girls here, come and have a look at them. They’re not bad. Marry one of them.”
Mehmet put the phone down. “Margarita, this Saturday, we’re getting married,” he said.
They flew the next day to London; Salem sent a car to retrieve them from the airport. When Mehmet hurriedly invited his only sister to the wedding, she asked, “If Salem says you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to kill yourself?”1
Bin Laden family and friends converged on London from several continents. Salem put his guests up in suites at the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane and arranged for limousines to shuttle them to and from Offley Chase. He had chosen July 4, 1987, and as ever, he was fortunate—the skies were clear and the sun shined magnificently through the afternoon. The atmosphere at the estate blended the elegance of a 1930s country house with Ringling Brothers festivity. A line of antique automobiles rolled into the driveway, ferrying the wedding party. In a field beyond the mansion billowed a hot air balloon with green, red, yellow, and purple stripes, its basket open to offer rides to the 250 guests. A helicopter parked on the grass nearby, also available for rides. Clowns, snake handlers, and acrobats wandered among grand white tents pitched on the lawns.2
Salem donned a Saudi
Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, attended with her second husband, an Austrian diplomat she had met in Jeddah, a match that signaled her modern, independent-minded outlook. Randa, too, arrived with her new husband. All in all, about twenty of Salem’s sisters and brothers came, a self-selecting group who were comfortable enough to circulate in England wearing business suits and dresses, in a setting without gender segregation and teeming with Europeans and Americans. The turnout at such an important event—the wedding of the family’s leader to an Englishwoman—measured the size of the Bin Ladens’ Western-leaning caucus at about half of Mohamed’s fifty-four children.
Salem offered a sentimental speech about his friendship with Baby Elephant, and how they had pledged to take this passage into matrimony together. That night, as the music died down, the two betrothed couples climbed into cars and rode a few minutes to the Luton Airport, where they boarded one of Salem’s jets and flew to Bristol for a double-dating honeymoon night in a nearby hotel, and then on to the South of France and Germany.
His friends understood, of course, that Salem would never grow up entirely, but after so many years of flying hard on the edge, he seemed at last to be trying to settle and restore himself a little. Among other things, he desired more children. Three months after the wedding, Carrie was pregnant.
SALEM CAMPED in the Saudi desert with Fahd the following winter. The mid-1980s had been a difficult period for the Bin Laden construction business in Saudi Arabia because falling oil prices crimped payment schedules and new project launches. Renovation projects in Medina provided some ballast, but according to Bengt Johansson, the desert sojourn of early 1988 produced a particularly big breakthrough when the king committed to a number of lucrative projects, including a massive renovation in Mecca, to follow on the work in Medina. Another individual close to Salem recalled that he was buoyant about these contracts; he instructed this friend to set up new Swiss accounts to ensure that Salem and his family banked a more reliable share of the proceeds than he had managed to do in the past.3
At the same time, however, two individuals who worked closely with Salem recalled separately that he was haunted that same winter by a large international business transaction, involving bartered oil sales in the spot markets, which had gone very badly, causing Salem a substantial loss. One of these people recalled that the deal involved the acquisition by the Saudi government of commercial airliners from Boeing Corporation; the other believed that the deal may have concerned arms shipments to Afghanistan from China and Eastern Europe. In any event, by both of these accounts, Salem felt that he had been let down financially by his partners in the deal, and he was unusually angry and gloomy about what had happened.4
In mid-April, Salem vacationed in Greece with Carrie and his two children. A week later, he flew to America with his two half-brothers, Tareq and Shafiq. Salem had purchased a Hawker Siddeley jet, the same model his father had owned at the time of his death two decades earlier. Among other projects, Salem oversaw the remodeling of its interior by an American company. He hopped back and forth across the Atlantic in May.5 Late that month, he called his former girlfriend, Lynn Peghiny, in Orlando; he had not spoken to her in about a year.
“I’m going to be in Orlando, and I’d love to see you and take you to dinner—and your family is invited,” he told her, as Lynn recalled it.6
She called up several of her sisters, who all lived nearby, and they met Salem at a little Italian restaurant a few nights later. Lynn learned about his marriage and also that Carrie was pregnant, so far along now that she could no longer travel. Salem and his entourage were all headed for Texas to attend the wedding of Anthony Auerbach, Gerald’s only son.
Salem brought his guitar to the Italian restaurant. He ran through his favorites and sang boisterously. He remained enamored of the most familiar American standards. “You Are My Sunshine” was one of his very favorites, and he belted it out that night.
He seemed, as Lynn Peghiny recalled it, “just so happy.”7
ON SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1988, Salem joined about 250 guests at the Auerbach wedding, which was held at the Officers Club at Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio. The Cone Sisters, three platinum blondes who sang big band standards, provided the entertainment, but of course, when they were on break, Salem and his pilot friend Don Kessler took over their instruments and performed. During the reception, Salem stood before the crowd and ran through a comedy routine that was by now familiar to regular guests at Bin Laden weddings. He announced that he had written a commemorative poem for the occasion. Then he pulled a roll of inscribed toilet paper out of his pocket, explaining that in the bathroom, “I do my best work.”8
Late the next morning, Sunday, Salem called his friend Jack Hinson from his midmarket hotel along Interstate 410. He was trying to figure out how to spend the day.
“The Thunderbirds are flying,” Hinson told him, as he recalled it, referring to the air force’s precision-flying demonstration team.
“I’ve seen the Thunderbirds,” Salem said.
Hinson said he was going over to the field where he kept some ultralights, eat a little breakfast, and maybe do some flying.
“What do they have for breakfast?” Salem asked
“They have ham and eggs, fresh ham and eggs, and fresh tomatoes,” Hinson said. Teasing, he added, “You don’t eat none of that ham.”
Salem knew the place; he had flown there several times before. “We’re going to come out,” he said, according to Hinson. As for the breakfast, Salem joked, “You tell everybody with me it’s beef…I know I’m going to hell anyway.”9
The Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams lay about twenty miles northeast of San Antonio, on the edge of Schertz, an undistinguished town of several thousand people that was being slowly consumed by San Antonio’s far suburbs. A tattooed former U.S. Marine named Earl Mayfield had created the flying field about seven years earlier. He owned a small restaurant near San Antonio, took up ultralight flying as a hobby, and decided that he needed some land to fly properly. He bought a plot of fifty-seven acres off the Old Nacogdoches Road. He cleared the cedar trees himself with a bulldozer and built a few light metal hangars. One of his clients was AlamoArrow Ultralights, the local retailer whose salesman, George Harrington, had accompanied Salem all the way to Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 1985. AlamoArrow kept some rental aircraft at the field. It was a relaxed, casual place. In the open grass, Mayfield had built a small asphalt runway; it was about twenty feet wide. Nearby he had erected a snack bar with picnic tables and barbecues. The field lay flanked by scrubland—tall grasses and thorny mesquite trees bent by the wind. To the south, beyond a line of brush and trees, power line towers shaped like giant metallic scarecrows traversed a cleared right of way, running west to east; these towers rose more than one hundred feet into the air.10
