town of Midi, four miles from the Saudi border at Oreste Point.
Only the supreme fitness of the men had kept them going. The concentrated food bars they carried with them had kept their essential bodily requirements intact, but the last two days had seen some weight loss, and the General was anxious for them to reach the RV.
No one had complained as they trudged up the high escarpments, heads down, hats pulled forward, day in and day out, guided only by the General’s compass and GPS. But when elite troops like these ask for rest, you give it to them immediately. And General Rashood noticed that these requests were now coming more often than before.
The temperature was constantly in the low nineties, and the army bergens the men carried on their backs were growing lighter as they devoured their food, but not sufficiently to make the march much easier.
Their weapons were slung across their backs, and each man carried a heavy belt of ammunition across his chest. In four-man groups, they took turns carrying for thirty minutes at a time two heavy machine guns set on leather grips. It would be incomprehensible for a normal person to grasp the strength and training of these men; to watch them walk, mile after mile, sweat pouring off them, uphill, then downhill, not pausing, even to take in water, only when it seemed someone might pass out.
General Rashood knew they had another four miles to cover before dark. Almost thirty miles behind him he knew Team Two was moving slightly quicker under the command of the teak-hard former Legionnaire, Maj. Henri Gilbert. His own tireless number two, Maj. Etienne Marot, made a satellite communication with Henri every two hours.
The final group, Team One, commanded by the Corsica-born Maj. Paul Spanier, was twelve miles in arrears of Major Gilbert, and moving faster than all of them, along a different route. That was the nature of a march like this: everyone began to get slower.
The sun was just beginning to sink somewhere into the Red Sea, several miles to their left, when Team One saw two camels appear on the horizon. They were walking in a slow swaying rhythm, unchanged in thousands of years. And they were not on the track that General Rashood’s men occupied. They were coming from the northeast, across rough, high desert sand littered with boulders and virtually no vegetation, leaving a dusty slipstream behind them. Sometimes the riders disappeared with the undulation of the ground, but their dust cloud never did.
General Rashood checked them out through binoculars. Both Bedouins were armed, rifles tucked into leather holsters in front of their saddles. The General ordered everyone off the track, to the right, down behind a line of rocks…weapons drawn…action stations.
Slowly the Arab riders advanced on their position, and made no attempt to conceal themselves. They drew right alongside the rocks and dismounted. The leader spoke softly. “General Rashood. I am Ahmed, your guide.”
“Password?” snapped the Hamas commander.
“Death Squad,” replied the Arab.
General Rashood advanced from behind his rock, right hand held out in greeting.
“I am grateful, Ahmed,” said the General. “My men are very tired and very thirsty. Our supplies are low.”
“But ours are plentiful, and they are very close by now. Let your men drink…and then follow us in.”
“Did you see us from far away?”
“We saw the dust, and we saw movement along the track from more than two miles away. But we never heard you, not until now. You move very softly, like Bedouins.”
“Some of us are Bedouins,” replied the General. “And we are grateful to see you.”
Ahmed’s companion, a young Saudi al-Qaeda fighter, had pulled two plastic three-gallon water containers from his camel and set them up on a low rock for the men to drink. That was two pints each, and there was not much left after ten minutes.
They picked up their burdens again, the two Arabs remounted, and they set off — as always moving north — and the ground began to fall away in front of them as they approached the “hide” the al-Qaeda men had built.
At first it was difficult to discern. Not until they were within a hundred yards could they make out its shape — a crescent of rocks guarding the rear and a solid rock face 150 feet to the south, overlooking a dusty valley. Beyond that were low hills, and in the far distance there was flat land, too far away to see the aircraft hangars on the King Khalid Base.
Inside the “hide” were wooden shelters about eight feet high, with just a back wall. The other three sides were open, with poles holding up palm-leaf roofs covered in bracken. One square earth-colored tent, again with bracken on the roof, plainly contained stores. Big cardboard containers could be seen through its open double doors.
Off to the left were several small primus stoves for cooking. There was no question of a fire out here, since its smoke would be seen in the crystal-clear blue skies from both the air base and the army base, nearly five miles away.
This rough “hide,” set in the foothills of the Yemeni mountains, would be home to the French-Arabian assault force for thirteen days. It would be a time of intensive surveillance of the bases, checking every inch of the ground, studying the movements of the Air Force guards night after night, observing the movements in and out of the main gates, noting the lights that remained on all night.
When Captain Alain Roudy’s missiles slammed into Abqaiq’s Pumping Station Number One in the small hours of Monday morning, March 22, General Rashood’s hit men would be ready.
The main road leading to the ancient ruins of Dir’aiyah, twenty miles northeast of Riyadh, was closed. At the junction with al-Roubah Road, just beyond the Diplomatic Quarter, a Saudi military tank stood guard. Two armed soldiers were talking to three officers from the
Motorists who stopped and claimed to be going on farther than the famous ruins were informed that they could pass, and were given a permit to be handed in to the guards stationed two miles from the ancient buildings. No one would be allowed to leave their vehicles. And it was the same coming south from Unayzah.
When the highway reached Dir’aiyah there was a roadblock in both directions. Uniformed soldiers prevented anyone going down the track that led west from the main highway. They collected passes and politely told motorists that the reopening of the ruins would be announced in the
Anyone who gave any thought to this might have been quizzical about the ironclad security that now surrounded the very first capital city of the al-Saud tribe. Dir’aiyah, the kingdom’s most popular archaeological site, was under martial law. Not since the Turkish conqueror Ibrahim Pasha ransacked, burned, and destroyed the place almost two hundred years ago had a Saudi army seemed so intent on defending it.
In effect, Dir’aiyah was just a ghost town because, in 1818, Ibrahim Pasha had demanded that every door, wall, and roof be flattened. His marauding army pounded the walls with artillery, even wiped out every palm tree in the town, before they marched back to Egypt.
The palm trees grew again, but the Saudis never wanted to rebuild what was once their greatest city, and instead elected to start again with a new capital to the south, Riyadh. And for more than a 180 years Dir’aiyah was just the remnants of the old buildings — a mosque, the dwellings, the military watchtowers, the shapes of the streets — an entire cityscape, all open to the skies.
It was a place where life had become extinct, just a sand-blown Atlantis, with the sounds of shifting feet, as the tourists with their cameras shuffled around one of the glories of Arabian history.
Until Col. Jacques Gamoudi showed up, that is.
He had arrived on a scheduled Air France flight from Paris to King Khalid International Airport on December 2 and been in residence in Riyadh ever since. His appearance in the Saudi capital was completely unobserved. He took
