Colonel Bandar’s group peeled away and headed directly to the main television stations.
Colonel Gamoudi pushed on toward the Interior Ministry, with the crowd massing behind his tanks and the Saudi commander bellowing through bullhorns for everyone to hold their fire until orders were given.
They approached the great wide entrance to the Ministry, with its massive oak doors, hand-carved in the magnificent Iranian city of Esfahan. The doorman, nervous, like most people, took one look at the incoming convoy and retreated, banging the great doors behind him.
Colonel Gamoudi immediately opened fire, slamming two shells straight into those doors, left and right, like a short broadside in an eighteenth-century naval battle.
The doors flew inward and smashed down into the foyer, and Jacques Gamoudi unleashed the dogs of war. Twenty-six al-Qaeda commandos, trained in the camps in the Afghanistan Mountains, charged forward, the lead six hurling hand grenades straight through the lower windows.
The simultaneous blasts in the downstairs offices were nothing short of staggering. Office workers were blown apart, crashed into walls, furniture was splintered, at which point the commandos raced into the building, machine guns held hip-high, yelling,
Two government Ministers rushed from the mezzanine floor committee rooms, leaning over the wrought-iron handrail and looking below, demanding to know what was happening. The al-Qaeda men cut them down with a burst of gunfire, and both officials toppled over the balustrade grotesquely and to their deaths on top of the flattened doors.
Six more commandos piled in through the entranceway and headed up the stairs. Everyone knew the layout of the building by heart since they had acquired the engineers’ plans as used twenty years earlier by the Bin Laden Construction Companies.
And now, in a sense, they were in there fighting for the Ministry, in the name of their elusive spiritual leader whose creed they followed: to destroy the wanton, Western-influenced ruler of their home country.
The commandos reached the second floor and waited close to the eastern wall, beneath a huge stone archway. Three seconds later there was a thunderous blast from above, as Le Chasseur opened fire on the third floor and two more tank shells ripped high into the building. Plaster and masonry cascaded down the central area between the staircases.
And now the commandos were set to take the Ministry. There were fifty of them inside now, and they marched from room to room, kicking open doors, firing into voids, inviting anyone inside to surrender.
They combed every room, swept the corridors, herded dozens of terrified workers into order in the downstairs foyer. Thirty-two minutes after Colonel Gamoudi’s opening shells, the Saudi Arabian Ministry of the Interior, complete with its entire staff, was the first casualty of Prince Nasir’s takeover.
Colonel Gamoudi ordered the building secured. He left behind five trained commandos plus a group of twenty armed men selected from the great throng that had followed him to the Ministry. He ordered phone lines cut and turned his tanks around in the wide courtyard. Then he headed back north, toward the Diplomatic Quarter and the royal palaces that lay beyond.
At this precise time, Colonel Bandar’s men reached the main entrance to the television stations, Channels 1 and 2 in the same building. The doors were glass, but Colonel Bandar, a former regular officer in the Saudi Army, elected not to drive his tank straight through them. But he drove up, within ten feet, and hurled a hand grenade through the open window of the downstairs mail room, which blasted asunder, scattering viewers’ e-mails and letters to the desert winds. He ordered the commandos inside the building. They came through the doors behind four grenades that blew the foyer to pieces, sending an eight-foot-high portrait of the King deep into the plaster of the ceiling, where it hung for a few seconds and then crashed into the rubble below.
Fifteen members of the staff came out with their hands high and were ordered into the street, where a guard detail lined them up against the wall and ordered them not to move. Thirty more commandos dismounted from the troop carriers and stormed into the building. The first floor was deemed secure, and now they headed to the transmission room, two floors above.
They came bursting up the stairwell, ignoring the elevators. Two permanent guards stepped out to block their entry. Jacques Gamoudi’s commandos gunned them down in cold blood. The leading detail of six men rammed a steel chair into the newsroom door, and they thundered into the long room with its sound studios at the back and newscasting sets occupying almost the entire foreground.
At first no shots were fired, as two of the raiders traversed the walls, ripping electric plugs and cables out of their sockets and tearing apart any electrical connections that were all over the floor.
At a table in the far corner, much like the newsroom in a newspaper office, the editors and reporters were preparing for the next broadcast. With the stations now quiet, Colonel Bandar’s men opened fire, the bullets flying high above the heads of the staff.
At which point the Colonel himself, a direct descendant of the elders of the Murragh tribesmen in the south, came through the door and strode over to the news desk, telling the staff to get up, get their headsets off, and pay attention. Then he barked in Arabic, “Who’s the chief station editor?”
Two of the nine men pointed to different executives, and Colonel Bandar shot them both down with a burst from his sub-machine gun. He asked again, and this time one man stepped forward and said quietly, “I am the news editor of the station.”
Colonel Bandar appointed a four-man detail to accompany the former news editor all through the building, routing out the television station executives and journalists and ordering them to the front hall, where they were searched and allowed to stand easy, under guard.
Twenty minutes later, the Colonel came downstairs and demanded that ten transmission technicians report back to the news-room. Ten petrified electricians stepped forward and made their way back up the stairs flanked by the Colonel’s guards, under orders to reconnect the broadcast units that the marauding force had been so careful to leave intact.
The rebel leader then made an announcement that the kingdom would very soon be under new rule, that of the Crown Prince, who would be broadcasting within a few hours. He asked which of the staff would be prepared to carry on as before, but working under a new fundamentalist regime, and which of them would prefer to announce their loyalty to the outgoing King and face immediate execution. Not necessarily on this day, but certainly by the end of the week.
The staff of both Channel 1 and 2 right away pledged undying loyalty to the incoming ruler and were permitted to return to their offices, under guard, but still on the payroll. Colonel Bandar told them to prepare an outside broadcast unit to attend the Prince’s palace four hours from then, to make the historic first film of a nationwide address by their new proprietor.
The main television stations had been captured with as little damage as possible, considering the circumstances. They would be up and running, under different management, within two hours. And now a ring of 200 armed men was placed around the building, to await the arrival of a specially appointed public relations executive, from the Aramco organization.
The staff would soon discover that he was a young man in his early thirties, passionately loyal to Prince Nasir, and he would oversee every future word broadcast on the two main Saudi channels. His salary would be $250,000 a year, and he was not a member of the royal family.
By now Major Majeed’s group was driving forward, straight at the gates of King Khalid Airport, his convoy led by two tanks, line abreast, followed by four armored vehicles and 100 highly trained commandos, the leaders al- Qaeda combat troops handpicked by Jacques Gamoudi, the rest ex — Saudi military.
To the amazement of the security staff, the tanks swung into the precincts of the busy airport and headed straight for the control tower, crushing the tall, white fence like matchwood. They drove on, straight at the tower. Stunned passengers boarding packed passenger jets suddenly saw an antitank crew launch four rockets directly at the all-around glass windows high above the runways.
Only one hit. Two of the other three crashed into the building’s lower floor, and the fourth smashed into the huge radar installation above the ops room, which was a scene of devastation.
All the windows had blown, mercifully outward, but the blast had played havoc with the sensitive equipment.
