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Someone once said: All men dream, but they are most dangerous who dream with their eyes open. Colonel Robert Easterhouse sat in the elegant reception room atop the Pan-Global Building and stared at the window and the panoramic view of Houston. But his pale-blue eyes saw the vaulted sky and ocher sands of the Nejd and he dreamed of controlling the income from the Hasa oil fields for the benefit of America and all mankind.
Born in 1945, he was three when his father accepted a teaching job at the American University in Beirut. The Lebanese capital had been a paradise in those days, elegant, cosmopolitan, rich, and safe. He had attended an Arab school for a while, had French and Arab playmates; by the time the family returned to Idaho he was thirteen and trilingual in English, French, and Arabic.
Back in America the youth had found his schoolmates shallow, frivolous, and stunningly ignorant, obsessed by rock ‘n’ roll and a young singer called Presley. They mocked his tales of swaying cedars, Crusader forts, and the plumes of the Druse campfires drifting through the Chouf mountain passes. So he was driven to books, and none more than The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Lawrence of Arabia. At eighteen, forsaking college and the girls back home, he volunteered for the 82nd Airborne. He was still at boot camp when Kennedy died.
For ten years he had been a paratrooper, with three tours in Vietnam, coming out with the last forces in 1973. Men can acquire fast promotion when casualties are high and he was the 82nd’s youngest colonel when he was crippled, not in war but in a stupid accident. It had been a training drop in the desert; the DZ was supposed to be flat and sandy, the winds a breeze at five knots. As usual the brass had got it wrong. The wind was thirty-plus at ground level; the men were smashed into rocks and gullies. Three dead, twenty-seven injured.
The X-ray plates later showed the bones in Easterhouse’s left leg like a box of matches scattered on black velvet. He watched the embarrassing scuttle of the last U.S. forces out of the embassy in Saigon—Bunker’s bunker, as he knew it from the Tet offensive—on a hospital TV in 1975. While in the hospital he chanced on a book about computers and realized that these machines were the road to power: a way to correct the madnesses of the world and bring order and sanity to chaos and anarchy, if properly used.
Quitting the military, he went to college and majored in computer science, joined Honeywell for three years, and moved to IBM. It was 1981, the petrodollar power of the Saudis was at its peak, Aramco had hired IBM to construct for them foolproof computer systems to monitor production, flow, exportation, and above all royalty dues throughout their monopoly operation in Saudi Arabia. With fluent Arabic and a genius for computers, Easterhouse was a natural. He spent five years protecting Aramco’s interests in Saudi, coming to specialize in computer-monitored security systems against fraud and theft. In 1986, with the collapse of the OPEC cartel, the power shifted back to the consumers; and the Saudis felt exposed. They head-hunted the limping computer genius who spoke their language and knew their customs, paying him a fortune to go free-lance and work for them instead of IBM and Aramco.
He knew the country and its history like a native. Even as a boy he had thrilled to the written tales of the Founder, the dispossessed nomadic Sheikh Abdal Aziz al Sa’ud, sweeping out of the desert to storm the Musmak Fortress at Riyadh and begin his march to power. He had marveled at the astuteness of Abdal Aziz as he spent thirty years conquering the thirty-seven tribes of the interior, uniting the Nejd to the Hejaz to the Hadhramaut, marrying the daughters of his vanquished enemies and binding the tribes into a nation—or the semblance of one.
Then Easterhouse saw the reality, and admiration turned to disillusion, contempt, and loathing. His job with IBM had involved preventing and detecting computer fraud in systems devised by unworldly whiz kids from the States, monitoring the translation of operational oil production into accounting language and ultimately bank balances, creating foolproof systems that could also be integrated with the Saudi treasury setup. It was the profligacy and the dizzying corruption that turned his basically puritan spirit to a conviction that one day he would become the instrument that would sweep away the result of a freak accident of fate which had given such huge wealth and power to such a people; it would be he who would restore order and correct the mad imbalances of the Middle East, so that this God-given gift of oil would be used first for the service of the Free World and then for all the peoples of the world.
He could have used his skills to skim a vast fortune for himself from the oil revenues, as the princes did, but his morality forbade him. So to fulfill his dream he would need the support of powerful men, backup, funding. And then he had been summoned by Cyrus Miller to bring down the corrupt edifice and deliver it to America. Now, all he had to do was persuade these barbarian Texans that he was their man.
“Colonel Easterhouse?” He wa
s interrupted by the honeyed tones of Louise. “Mr. Miller will see you now, sir.”
He rose, leaned on his cane for a few seconds till the pain eased, then followed her into Miller’s office. He greeted Miller respectfully and was introduced to Scanlon. Miller came straight to the point.
“Colonel, I would like my friend and colleague here to be convinced, as I am, of the feasibility of your concept. I respect his judgment and would like him to be involved with us.”
Scanlon appreciated the compliment. Easterhouse spotted that it was a lie. Miller did not respect Scanlon’s judgment, but they would both need Scanlon’s ships, covertly used to import the needed weaponry for the coup d’état.
“You read my report, sir?” Easterhouse asked Scanlon.
“That bit about the Hez-Boll-Ah guys, yes. Heavy stuff, lot of funny names. How do you think you can use them to bring down the monarchy? And more important, deliver the Hasa oil fields to America?”
“Mr. Scanlon, you cannot control the Hasa oil fields and direct their product to America unless you first control the government in Riyadh, hundreds of miles away. That government must be changed into a puppet regime, wholly, ruled by its American advisers. America cannot topple the House of Sa’ud openly—Arab reaction would be impossible. My plan is to provoke a small group of Shi’ah Fundamentalists, dedicated to Holy Terror, to carry out the act. The idea that Khomeinists have come to control the Saudi peninsula would send waves of panic throughout the entire Arab world. From Oman in the south, up through the Emirates to Kuwait, from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Israel would come immediately overt or covert pleas to America to intervene to save them all from Holy Terror.
“Because I have been setting up a computerized Saudi internal security system for two years, I am aware that such a group of Holy Terror fanatics exists, headed by an Imam who regards the King, his group of brothers—the inner Mafia known as the Al-Fahd—and the entire family of three thousand princelings who make up the dynasty, with pathological loathing. The Imam has publicly denounced them all as the Whores of Islam, Defilers of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. He has had to go into hiding, but I can keep him safe until we need him by erasing all news of his whereabouts from the central computer. Also, I have a contact with him—a disenchanted member of the Mutawain, the ubiquitous and hated Religious Police.”
“But what’s the point in handing over Saudi Arabia to these yo-yos?” demanded Scanlon. “With Saudi’s pending income of three hundred million U.S. dollars a day—hell, they’d wreak absolute havoc.”
“Precisely. Which the Arab world itself could not tolerate. Every state in the area excepting Iran would appeal to America to intervene. Washington would be under massive pressure to fly the Rapid Deployment Force into its prepared base in Oman, on the Musandam Peninsula, and thence into Riyadh, the capital, and Dhahran and Bahrein, to secure the oil fields before they could be destroyed forever. Then we’d have to stay to prevent its ever happening again.”
“And this Imam guy,” asked Scanlon. “What happens to him?”
“He dies,” said Easterhouse calmly, “to be replaced by the one princeling of the House who was not present at the massacre, because he was abducted to my house in time to avoid it. I know him well—he’s Western educated, pro-American, weak, vacillating, and a drunk. But he will legitimize the other Arab appeals by one of his own, by radio from our embassy in Riyadh. As the sole surviving member of the dynasty, he can appeal for America to intervene to restore legitimacy. Then he’ll be our man forever.”
Scanlon thought it over. He reverted to type.
“What’s in it for us? I don’t mean the U.S.A. I mean us!”
Miller intervened. He knew Scanlon and how he would react.
“Mel, if this prince rules in Riyadh and is advised every waking moment of the day by the colonel here, we are looking at the breaking of the Aramco monopoly. We are looking at new contracts, shipping, importing, refining. And guess who’s at the head of the line?”
Scanlon nodded his assent. “When do you plan to schedule this ... event?”
“You may know that the storming of the Musmak Fortress was in January 1902; the declaration of the new kingdom was in 1932,” said Easterhouse. “Fifteen months from now, in the spring of 1992, the King and his court will celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the first and the diamond jubilee of the kingdom. They are planning a vast billion-dollar jamboree before a world audience. The new covered stadium is being built. I am in charge of all its computer-governed security systems—gates, doors, windows, air conditioning. A week before the great night there will be a full dress rehearsal attended by the leading six hundred members of the House of Sa’ud, drawn from every corner of the world. That is when I will arrange for the Holy Terrorists to strike. The doors will be computer-locked with them inside; the five hundred soldiers of the Royal Guard will be issued defective ammunition, imported, along with the submachine carbines needed by the Hezb’Allah to do the job, in your ships.”
“And when it’s over?” asked Scanlon.
“When it’s over, Mr. Scanlon, there will be no House of Sa’ud left. Nor of the terrorists. The stadium will catch fire and the cameras will continue rolling until meltdown. Then the new ayatollah, the self-styled Living Imam, inheritor of the spirit and soul of Khomeini, will go on television and announce his plans to the world, which has just seen what happened in the stadium. That, I’m certain, will start the appeals to Washington.”
