a cab from the airport and checked into the busy Asian Hotel off al-Bathaa Street.
Not for two days did he meet with three emissaries from Prince Nasir, and that was in the Farah, a local restaurant on al-Bathaa Street resplendent with large red-and-white Arab lettering above the door, enhanced by a large picture of a cheeseburger. From then on things looked sharply up. That afternoon he moved into a beautiful house behind high white walls and a grove of stately palm trees.
He was given a communications officer, two maids, a cook, a driver, and two staff officers from the al-Qaeda organization, both Saudis, both natives of Riyadh. One of them was the brother of Ahmed, General Rashood’s guide seven hundred miles away in the foothills above Khamis Mushayt.
And for two weeks they studied the maps, looking for an ideal spot to store armored military vehicles, several of them carrying antitank guns and possibly six MIA2 Abrams, the most advanced tank ever built in the United States. Saudi Arabia’s armored brigades owned more than three hundred of these battlefield bludgeons, half of them parked in lines at Khamis Mushayt.
They also needed a place to stockpile light and heavy machine guns, for later distribution, and for handheld rocket and grenade launchers. Not to mention several tons of ammunition and regular grenades. Much of this arsenal was currently in storage in the military cities under the watchful gaze of Saudi Army personnel sympathetic to the cause of Prince Nasir.
The questions were, when could the cache be moved, and where could it go?
Jacques Gamoudi called staff meetings, sometimes attended by six, even eight, specially invited al-Qaeda revolutionaries. He conferred with his small specialist team, and he spoke encrypted to General Rashood in the south. There was no communication whatsoever with France.
One night there was a sudden visit from Prince Nasir himself, and Jacques Gamoudi expressed bewilderment at the principal problem: how to move the hardware out of the military stores and place it all under tight control, ready for the daytime attack on the reigning royal family and their palaces.
The Prince himself had masterminded the acquisition of the weapons, and he had called on his loyalists to store and protect them. Curiously that had not been difficult. All of it was essentially stolen from the Royal Saudi Land Forces, which, awash with money for many, many years, were apt to be relatively casual with ordnance.
For two years there had been the most remarkable nationwide operation of pure deception going on in Saudi Arabia. One by one, battle tanks had gone missing from the big southern base at Mushayt, driven out straight through the main gates, on massive tank transporters, and north to Assad Military City, at Al Kharj, sixty miles southeast of Riyadh, where the national armaments industry was also located.
No one bothered to inquire when the tank had been loaded on the transporter by regular soldiers. The sentries never even questioned the drivers as the huge trucks roared out through the gates. And certainly the guards at Assad never even blinked when a Saudi Army transporter, driven by serving Saudi soldiers, hauling a regular M1A2 Abrams tank bearing the insignia of the Saudi Army, drove up and banged on the horn. They naturally let them in.
The tanks were parked in a neat group out on the north side of the parade grounds, and everyone assumed someone else had issued the order. But you can only do that when half the population hates the King and all he stands for. And even then, only if they think there is a real chance of a change of regime.
No one ever said anything. Hardly anyone even noticed. And it was the same with hundreds and hundreds of weapons boxed, crated, and moved from base to base, always placed in a spot that everyone assumed had been designated by a senior officer. When, actually, those spots had been designated by no one.
Prince Nasir’s secret arsenal was there for all to see. But no one really saw it. There were literally thousands of rounds of ammunition packed into the storage centers at Assad. Another huge cache of weapons had been driven to the southern warehouses in King Khalid Military City itself. But there was no paperwork. It was all just there, like everything else. And no one would miss it when it went, in the two weeks leading up to March 25.
There were even armored cars hidden quietly in various wadis and oases, all of them looking official, all of them occasionally visited by uniformed personnel from the armored brigades. Sometimes they were moved, sometimes left for another two or three days. But no one ever tampered with the well-paid Army in Saudi Arabia, and there were many officers and corporals already dedicated to the safety of the arsenal of the Crown Prince.
But now it was time to move. And the Prince and his advisers had each assumed, like the Saudi guards and quartermasters, that someone else had that under control. In fact, no one had it under control, even though it was the first question Colonel Gamoudi asked…
From the very beginning the Saudi rebels had been bemused by the forthright military opinions and questions gritted out by the ex — French Special Forces commander.
And the trouble was, he could not solve the problem. It was the Saudis who knew the territory, they who knew the available strongholds and houses. It was they who were supposed to be telling Jacques where to make his headquarters, not Jacques telling them.
And by late February it was growing tense. Hiding boxes of ammunition and even cases of light machine guns was one thing. Disguising a damn great Abrams combat tank in someone’s front yard, on the outskirts of Riyadh, prior to charging straight down the Jiddah Road with guns blazing on the morning of March 25…well, that was rather a different matter.
Colonel Gamoudi had marked up various possibilities — big houses with big gardens behind high walls. But he did not like any of them. It was always in his mind…
He told the Prince of his concerns. He told him he needed a base where the public could not go. It had to be near a main highway, and it needed to be absolutely impenetrable by prowlers or sightseers. That meant it needed to be a place that
“Sir, do you have the power to select somewhere, and have the authorities deem it off limits until further notice? Somewhere we can start moving into, somewhere we can move the ordnance…somewhere from which we can attack?”
Prince Nasir pondered for two hours. He paced the room and sipped his coffee. He pored over the map of the city and its environs. And at 2:30 A.M. he stood up and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I have it. I am, after all, head of the National Guard, and I have many serving officers loyal to me. The
Which was why, on Monday, March 15, there were eight M1A2 Abrams tanks parked bang in the middle of the ancient ruins of Dir’aiyah, and why the eighteenth-century mosque had a new roof, made of camouflage canvas to shelter the hundreds of tons of materiel hidden behind its great sandstone walls…. And of course why the ramparts of the old city were again manned by heavily armed guards, huddled behind high rock outposts, with searchlights front and center, all powered from the electric cable that once fed only the kiosk selling guidebooks, ice-creams, and cold drinks to tourists.
Ibrahim Pasha would have needed to think twice about an attack in the year 2010. Because any intruder caught unlawfully within a quarter-mile of Dir’aiyah was essentially history.
Col. Jacques Gamoudi had a grudging admiration for the thoroughness of Pasha’s attack, but he was grateful for the high section of the city wall left unharmed. He had a total of twenty-five armored vehicles parked beneath it, on the inside. And every hour, military vehicles arrived with more and more ordnance.
Le Chasseur, working in a specially built wooden office, logged and recorded every single delivery. The walls were pinned with maps. He knew the location of the principal palaces he must take. He knew where the radio station was. He was briefing his drivers and, above all, his tank commanders. There would be casualties, he was certain of that, and he was amazed at the volunteers who came forward to pilot the tanks he wanted driven directly into the principal palace.
It seemed that whatever he asked for was provided. The Moroccan-born Colonel knew in his own mind he was ready to take the capital of Saudi Arabia.
Capt. Alain Roudy’s submarine was steaming into the Strait of Hormuz, the great hairpin-bend gateway to the
