AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And after the massacre?” Cyrus Miller asked the question. He had no time for euphemisms.
“In the last stages of the firefight inside the stadium, it will catch fire,” said Colonel Easterhouse smoothly. “This has been arranged. The flames will engulf the structure fast, disposing of the remains of the Royal House and their assassins. The cameras will continue to run until meltdown, followed on screen by the Imam himself.”
“What is he going to say?” queried Moir.
“Enough to terrify the entire Middle East and the West. Unlike Khomeini, who always spoke very quietly, this man is a firebrand. When he speaks he becomes carried away, for he speaks the message of Allah and Mohammed, and wishes to be heard.”
Miller nodded understandingly. He, too, knew the conviction of being a divine mouthpiece.
“By the time he has finished threatening all the secular and Sunni orthodox regimes around Saudi’s borders with their imminent destruction; promising to use the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollars-a-day income in the service of Holy Terror, and to destroy the Hasa oil fields if thwarted, every Arab kingdom, emirate, sheikhdom, and republic, from Oman in the south up north to the Turkish border, will be appealing to the West for help. That means America.”
“What about this pro-Western Saudi Prince who is going to replace him?” asked Cobb. “If he fails ...”
“He won’t,” said the colonel with certainty. “Just as the Army’s trucks and the Air Force fighter-bombers were immobilized when t
hey might have prevented the massacre, they will reenter service in time to rally to the Prince’s call. The Palestinians will see to that.
“Prince Khalidi bin Sudairi will stop by my house on his way to the dress rehearsal. He will have a drink—no doubt about that; he’s an alcoholic. The drink will be drugged. For three days he will be detained by two of my Yemenite house servants in the cellar. There he will prepare video and radio tapes announcing he is alive, the legitimate successor to his uncle, and appealing for American help to restore legitimacy. Note the phrase, gentlemen: the United States will intervene, not to conduct a countercoup, but to restore legitimacy with the full backing of the Arab world.
“I will then transfer the Prince to the safekeeping of the U.S. embassy, forcing America to become involved whether it likes it or not, since the embassy will have to defend itself against Shi’ah mobs demanding the Prince be handed over to them. The Religious Police, the Army, and the people will still need a trigger to turn on the Shi’ah usurpers and eliminate them, to a man. That trigger will be the arrival of the first U.S. airborne units.”
“What about the aftermath, Colonel?” asked Miller slowly. “Will we get what we want—the oil for America?”
“We will all get what we want, gentlemen. The Palestinians get a homeland; the Egyptians, an oil quota to feed their masses. Uncle Sam gets to control the Saudi and Kuwaiti reserves, and thus the global oil price for the benefit of all mankind. The Prince becomes the new King, a drunken sot with me at his elbow every minute of the day. Only the Saudis will be disinherited, and return to their goats.
“The Sunni Arab states will learn their lesson from such a close call. Faced with the rage of the Shi’ah at having been so near and then defeated, the secular states will have no option but to hunt down and extirpate Fundamentalism before they all fall victim. Within five years there will be a huge crescent of peace and prosperity from the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.”
The Alamo Five sat in silence. Two of them had thought to divert Saudi’s oil flow America’s way, nothing more. The other three had agreed to go along. They had just heard a plan to redraw a third of the world. It occurred to an appalled Moir and Cobb, though not to the other three, and certainly not to the colonel, that Easterhouse was a completely unbalanced egomaniac. Each realized too late that they were on a roller coaster, unable to slow down or get off.
Cyrus Miller invited Easterhouse to a private lunch in his adjacent dining room.
“No problems, Colonel?” he queried over the fresh peaches from his greenhouse. “Really, no problems?”
“There could be one, sir,” said the colonel carefully. “I have one hundred and forty days to H-hour. Long enough for a single bad leak to blow it all away. There is a young man, a former bank official ... he lives in London now. Name of Laing. I would like someone to have a word with him.”
“Tell me,” said Miller. “Tell me about Mr. Laing.”
Quinn and Sam drove into the northern Dutch town of Groningen two and a half hours after fleeing Oldenburg. The capital of the province of the same name, Groningen, like the German city across the border, dates from medieval times, with an inner heart, the Old Town, protected by a ring canal. In olden days the inhabitants could flee into the center and lift their fourteen bridges to seal themselves behind their watery ramparts.
The wisdom of the city council decreed that the Old Town should not be despoiled by the industrial sprawl and poured-concrete obsession of the late twentieth century. Instead, it has been renovated and restored, a circular half-mile of alleys, markets, streets, squares, churches, restaurants, hotels, and pedestrian malls, almost all of them cobbled. At Quinn’s direction Sam drove to the De Doelen Hotel on Grote Markt and they registered.
Modern buildings are few in the Old Town, but one is the five-story red-brick block on Rade Markt, which houses the police station.
“You know somebody here?” asked Sam as they approached the building.
“I used to,” admitted Quinn. “He may be retired. Hope not.”
He was not. The young blond officer at the reception desk confirmed that, yes, Inspector De Groot was now Chief Inspector and commanded the Cernéente Politic. Whom should he announce?
Quinn could hear the shout over the telephone when the policeman phoned upstairs. The young man grinned.
“He seems to know you, mijnheer.”
They were shown up to the office of Chief Inspector De Groot without delay. He was waiting for them, advancing across the floor to greet them, a big florid bear of a man with thinning hair, in uniform but wearing carpet slippers to favor a pair of feet that had pounded many miles of cobbled streets in thirty years.
The Dutch police has three branches: the Gemeente, or Community, Police, the criminal branch, known as the Recherche, and the highway patrol, the Rijkspolitie. De Groot looked the part, a Community Police chief whose avuncular frame and manner had long earned him among his own officers and the populace the nickname Papa De Groot.
“Quinn, good heavens alive, Quinn. It’s been a long time since Assen.”
