“No need to tell me, old boy,” replied the General, reverting to his natural Englishness while speaking to a Frenchman. “And we have to get him fast.”
“Do we charge the front door with a tank and go in with all guns blazing?”
“Sounds better than ringing the doorbell,” said Rashood. “Let’s get a half-dozen guys with antitank rocket launchers aimed at the front of the palace. They can open fire on the second-and third-floor windows as soon as we’ve stormed the entrance.”
“Right,” said Gamoudi. “We don’t want to drive these guys upward into that mess below the dome. There may be good cover up there, and we don’t want to fight on a bomb site.”
“Correct,” said Rashood. “We better beef up that detail in the rear of the building, if it’s cool enough. But we don’t want a lot of guys in the open. For all we know the troops inside are mounting machine gun nests in the windows.”
“We’re going to have to fight for this on the inside,” said Gamoudi.
“’Fraid so,” said the General. “And we better be very quick. I’m not much looking forward to it either.”
They selected sixteen Special Forces to come in behind the tank. In their rear were twenty al-Qaeda and Hamas fighters, all carrying submachine guns and grenades. Jacques Gamoudi would lead the troops inside, the first moment they breached the entrance. He would concentrate on the downstairs areas, going room by room.
General Rashood would lead his commandos up the main stairs to the second floor. As ever, the principal danger was to the assault force, the troops who had to make it happen. The King’s guard could fight a solid rearguard action, protecting their man, no hurry, until darkness came. And then they had a huge advantage, on terrain they knew backward. There was also, of course, the truly uncomfortable fact that no one knew what extra resources the King could call upon, including overwhelming world opinion.
Gamoudi and Rashood had to nail him. And they had to nail him right now. The Hamas General, for good measure, quoted the only rules that mattered during any military coup: “Let’s do it fast, Jacques, and let’s do it right.”
Colonel Gamoudi boarded the M1A2 Abrams. The opening assault brigades moved into formation, and the engines of the tank screamed as it rolled toward the palace doors, the French veterans moving behind it.
The Colonel ducked low as the iron horse slammed into the doors, smashing them inward. And as they did so, two savage bursts of heavy machine-gun fire riddled the steel casing of the tank. Nothing penetrated, but the guns had them pinned down, half in and half out of the entranceway, facing into the main hall.
Now it was Jacques Gamoudi who could not dare put his head above the parapet. He ordered the tank to reverse and the gun to be raised. At which point he blasted the upper balcony with four successive shells, which crashed into the walls behind the gallery, which in turn caved in and caused the total collapse of the third floor in that part of the building.
There was dust and concrete everywhere, and the guns were, for the moment, silenced. The room on the second floor behind the shattered wall was nonexistent. Anyone in there was no longer alive. But there was no sound, and Colonel Gamoudi assumed the danger up there had receded.
He signaled for General Rashood to lead his men into the devastated reception hall and to take the remainder of the second floor. He watched the Hamas C-in-C bounding up the stairs, his troops following, tightly grouped on the wide marble staircase. There was still no sound from that second-floor gallery where the King’s initial machine gun nest had been located.
Gamoudi split his men into two groups, one left and one right. He took the left-hand corridor and, room by room, booted open the doors and hurled in hand grenades. There was one aspect of this type of warfare that made the task slightly easier: no one cared who was in the rooms or whether they lived or died, and no one cared what damage was inflicted on the palace. There was no need for restraint.
Everything went to plan for six rooms. At the seventh, Jacques Gamoudi kicked open the door, and from inside someone threw a hand grenade out. It hit the opposte wall and clattered to the floor. Gamoudi wheeled around and, with his arms outspread, crashed everyone to the floor, or at least everyone he could grab — six of the eight.
When the grenade detonated he lost two of his best men instantly. The rest of them climbed to their feet coated in dust, some of them cut and bruised. As they did so, a second grenade flew out of the seventh door and clattered to the floor.
Again Jacques Gamoudi saw it and again he spread his arms, this time hurling the whole scrum in through the door opposite, and slamming the heavy door closed, just as the grenade blasted the corridor to pieces.
Suddenly this was serious. The men seized a huge piece of furniture and rammed it against the door, just to buy them a few minutes. They were short of guns, four of them still lying in the rubble outside. They had no more grenades left, and there were six of them essentially trapped until someone could open one of the high windows eight feet above ground level.
They had no idea how many opponents they had in this remote interior passageway. They knew the palace was surrounded, and they knew that General Rashood was gutting the upper floor for the King’s guard. But they themselves were trapped, with only two guns and not much ammunition.
They did not dare shout for assistance, because there seemed no need to alert the opposition as to where they were. Whichever way they looked at it, this was the hunter hunted. And Le Chasseur took a very moderate view of that.
The one useful aspect of this reception room was the wide serving area at the rear — a massive marble- and-granite slab behind which they could take cover, even under heavy fire. The trouble was it would be almost impossible to fire back against a determined enemy, since that would require them to stand up against a white- marble background.
Their only chance was to cower there until the guards moved in, then hope to take them in close-combat fighting. Everyone carried a combat knife, and they all knew how to use them.
They could hear the huge doors being shoved open, the massive chest of drawers being edged inward. Gamoudi ordered his men to the floor, behind the marble serving counter.
They awaited their fate, which was not long coming. When the door was open less than two feet, six men, five of them uniformed and all of them armed, slipped into the room and opened fire at the space above the granite slab.
No one moved, until the commander signaled them to fan out and advance down the eighty-foot-long room. In English he called out, “Come out, all of you, with your hands held high…
No one moved, and then the commander spoke again. “Should you decide not to come out, my men will throw three grenades behind that counter. We will retreat out of the door, and you will die. ALL OF YOU! NOW COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS HIGH!”
And then, much more quietly, he added, “The King wishes to see those who would be his enemies. I will count to ten before the grenades are tossed in among you.”
There was absolute silence in the room. Privately, Jacques Gamoudi thought they might catch a couple of the grenades and hurl them back, but even he doubted they would be able to catch all three.
“ONE…TWO…THREE…FOUR…”
Suddenly there was a slight movement at the doorway, and with one leap the terrifying figure of General Rashood entered, a black mask protecting his nose and mouth from the choking dust and cordite in the corridor, his machine gun spitting fire in a long sweep right across the line of palace guards. Rashood aimed high, as he always did, at their backs. No one had time to turn and see their executioner.
It was like a firing squad. Nothing less. And one by one the guards slumped to the floor, bullets riddling their heads and necks, blood seeping onto the white marble.
The air was clean in here, and the General pulled the mask down from his face. He walked to the line of men he had shot dead in cold blood. He ignored five of them and he walked straight to the man who wore no uniform, but who, like the others, was facedown on the floor, the back of his head blown away.
He kicked the man over and stared down, directly into the unseeing eyes of a familiar face. Prostrate at General Rashood’s feet lay the body of the King of Saudi Arabia. He may have lived like a Pasha, but he had died like a Bedouin warrior, his machine gun primed, facing his enemies. Except for the one who had shot him in the back.
