Palace, with its high white walls gleaming in the sunlight, and from 200 yards out Colonel Gamoudi and the two tanks flanking him opened fire.
The shells went screaming into the walls, punching huge holes. Bricks and concrete flew everywhere. Four other shells smashed straight into the second floor of the palace. The guard post high on the outer walls crashed inwards, but this was an important place, and a detachment of twelve guards rushed out to defend their royal masters.
Again Jacques Gamoudi’s tanks opened fire, this time not with their big artillery but with raking machine gun rounds, sweeping a steel curtain across the road and the palace gates as lethal as the German gunners on the Somme.
The twelve guards fell in the road, and Jacques Gamoudi’s tanks rolled forward, straight at the gates, Colonel Gamoudi himself standing up forward, his fist raised high, and shouting,
The big M1A2 Abrams rammed the iron gates, which buckled and then ripped off their hinges, flying inward, sparks flying as they grazed the concrete paving of the driveway. The Colonel leaned back and hurled two grenades straight through the windows to the left of the doorway, and the commander of the tank to his right hurled two more, all four of which detonated with diabolical force, instantly killing the staff in the guardroom and the secretary to the right of the foyer.
The doors were flung open, and another detachment of six guards rushed out, perhaps to surrender, perhaps not. They were heavily armed, but their weapons were not raised. Gamoudi cut them down where they stood, round after round spitting from his submachine gun. No questions asked.
And now his commandos were in, pouring out of the two troop carriers behind the lead tanks. The first four men up the steps to the building were crack ex — Saudi Special Forces, battle commanders in their own right, veterans of anti — al-Qaeda “black operations” in the opening years of the twenty-first century.
They opened fire on the empty foyer, spraying machine gun rounds every which way. And right behind them came six al-Qaeda fighters, heading immediately for the stairs.
Which was where the first serious problem began. The guards upstairs on duty in front of the main conference room had been given possibly two minutes to man their defenses. They had two heavy machine guns at the top of the stairs, and with the al-Qaeda troops fighting to get a foothold on that second floor, they opened fire and blew the invaders away, killing all six of them on the stairs.
By now Jacques Gamoudi was in the door, and he saw to his horror that the machine gun was now aimed at him alone. He hurled himself to the floor, sideways, away from the stairs, and somehow clawed his way through the rubble to the cover of the big reception desk, a hail of bullets riddling the wall behind him.
His other troops were under the stairs in a relatively safe position. And with no visible targets, the machine gun at the top of the stairs was temporarily silenced. Jacques Gamoudi edged his way out almost directly below the upper balcony.
Right now he thanked God he had learned in the Pyrenees to become something of a master at the great French pastime of
Gamoudi had spent many cheerful hours in the late afternoon with the village men back home in Heas, playing in the grandly named Heas Boulodrome, a shady piece of rough, flat, sandy ground near the modest town square. It had often occurred to him that a
He ripped the pin out of his first grenade and tossed it over the balustrade, where his men lay dead halfway up the stairs. It fell just below them. There was silence now in the foyer, but immediately the machine guns above opened up straight at the stairs again, where the hand grenade was rattling around.
Gamoudi had only a split second, and he took one stride forward and hurled his second grenade, with a wicked top-spin twist, upward toward the balustrade. Because of its weight it did not have much spin, not like a cricket ball or a baseball. But it did have just enough, and it curled over the upper balustrade, detonating four seconds later, right after the one on the stairs.
How Jacques Gamoudi got back underneath that high balcony he never knew; he knew only that he took off from his left foot, twisted, and landed facedown on the floor, eight feet behind his throwing mark. The explosion blew the upper balustrade clean off its foundation, and it crashed down into the lower hall. If Gamoudi had still been standing there it would have killed him stone dead. He felt the ground shake as the balustrade hit the floor.
Upstairs was a scene of carnage. The palace guards were killed to a man, their two machine guns blown into tangled wreckage. Colonel Gamoudi regained his feet, and roared orders to the men waiting outside the door. Three of them came bursting out of the wreckage of the guardroom and followed him up the stairs, the other one called for a medical detail to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades, over whom Gamoudi and his men were clambering.
At the top of the stairs they paused before the big double doors. The Colonel booted the doors open and then stood back for three grenades to be hurled inside. Fifteen Saudi ministers, fourteen of them royal princes, were seated around the table. Only two of them survived the blast, having had the good sense to get under the table before the grenades came in. The two stood up at the far side of the table and made a gesture of surrender, but Colonel Gamoudi shot them dead in their tracks with two savage bursts from his machine gun.
By now his men were fighting their way up the stairs. There was no opposition, but it did look as if the entire second-floor balcony structure might collapse. With thirty men now on the upper floor, Colonel Gamoudi gave his final order to his forward commander in the Prince Miohd Palace…
The question now was, where’s the King? He plainly had not arrived for the council meeting. They would have found him, his huge entourage, and about seventeen Mercedes limousines if he had. But there was no sign of him. It was impossible he had not yet heard of the staggering events of the past two or three hours.
Colonel Gamoudi called together the senior staff officers still serving in the front line of the battle with him. He checked the road maps, pointing out the two minor palaces, situated approximately along the route to the Al Salam royal palace, where he expected to find the ruler.
Again his instructions to his commanders were terse. “There will be no one of any great importance in either of them,” he said. “Take them both by force of arms, causing as little damage as possible. We want the buildings and we do not want blood and dead bodies all over the place.
“Tell the staff to remain in place — any royal princes, take prisoner…but I doubt there will be any. You’ll want a force of maybe forty people for each palace. No more. The new King will make his opening broadcast to the people from one of them.”
And with that Col. Jacques Gamoudi headed back to his tank for the one-mile journey to the residence of the King. They had not traveled more than 100 yards before the next serious problem appeared to be hovering overhead, one Saudi military helicopter, that was not on their own aircraft list. It appeared to be taking an unusually close look at the marching revolutionary army.
Jacques Gamoudi raised his binoculars and checked the clattering chopper, which was now flying low, about 300 feet above his tank. The numbers on its fuselage did not correspond to any of three choppers run by Prince Nasir. So far as Gamoudi could tell, it might be arriving to evacuate the King, and he could not tolerate that. But before he could call up two or three Stinger missiles and attempt to shoot it down, it flew off, straight toward the palace.
And then, before Gamoudi could finish cursing, two more Saudi Army helicopters came battering their way over the horizon, flying low above the buildings. Again Jacques Gamoudi raised his glasses, and this time he could see the insignia of the King’s Royal Regiment painted clearly on the rear of both helicopters.
He assessed this as an operation to evacuate the King. And he was correct in that. The two helicopters, giant troop-carrying Chinooks, followed the first much smaller one directly along the road to the palace, and Gamoudi saw them hovering, preparing to land inside the walls that surrounded the royal residence.
This was an emergency. He ducked back inside the tank, seized the communications system, and shoved down the red button. And twenty-one miles away, at King Khalid International Airport, an aging Boeing 737, takeoff priority number one, began to roll down the main runway with two young al-Qaeda braves at the controls, making their last-ever journey, the one before the three trumpets sounded, summoning them across the bridge, into paradise and the arms of Allah.
