December Ultimatum Read Online Free Page A

Kingdom an island where all progress, all civilization, is swept into the sea in the name of Islam. Abdullah is waiting for a mandate for his Islamic fundamentalism. He sees himself as the supreme leader, renouncing Western exchange for total power in the Islamic world. But he’s a fool. He will gain nothing except his own death. Moscow alone will be the beneficiary.’
    ‘Moscow?’ repeated Franklin.
    ‘Moscow. The collapse of OPEC, a market free-for-all, pricing fluctuations that would cripple the leading currencies, Gaddafi and the madmen in Iran using their oilwells against first one enemy and then another. Can you imagine the suicidal fighting that would begin right across Arabia? All this would delight Moscow. But the Politburo has grander ambitions than that. It would not be enough to deny the West the Gulf’s oil. They want it for themselves. And they are in no hurry. They are championing Islamic reform because they know better than most the total chaos it would bring. They witnessed Iran. They watched the Ayatollah. They appreciate catastrophe.’
    ‘Crown Prince Abdullah must know this?’ asked Franklin. ‘He is blind to it. He uses the simpleton’s logic, the logic of all Third World revolutionaries from South America, Africa, Asia. If Moscow gives us guns we will take them. If Moscow offers advisers we will take them. If Moscow teaches us propaganda we will listen. But we are nationalists first and when we have won our revolution we will send all things of Moscow back. Abdullah speaks that way and believes that way will work. He may well send the guns and advisers home when his new Islamic nation is founded, but he will not dig up the seeds the Russians leave behind.’
    ‘And Prince Sultan?’ asked Franklin.
    ‘A visionary too. But increasingly a pragmatist who treads carefully and who treads with me in my direction. He is my Army Commander and he will fight for me. But first I must know my army. We have lost the National Guard to Abdullah. I must discover how much of his rot has infected my Army. And my Air Force.’ For the next hour King Fahd briefed Franklin on the events that now made civil war inevitable, telling Franklin he thought he had another ten days to prepare.
    But the countdown to the takeover was already under way. Even while preparations for the OPEC meeting were being finalized in the conference rooms of Riyadh, and final protocol was being discussed in the King’s palace, bands of men were moving into the country from Iraq in the North and from Yemen in the South. They had come off ships in Jeddah and international airliners at Riyadh, men with a single purpose converging on the capital under a single banner. And the name they would shout in revolution was not Abdullah, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, but Rahbar, the saviour of Islam, the new Messiah sent as the prophet Mohammed had promised, to save Islam from evil, to purge Islam of all the impurities and contamination of the West. It was a plan of great religious fervour. It was a plan also helped along by Soviet-built AK-47 assault rifles, rocket- propelled grenades, mortars and machine-guns.
    The propaganda had been borrowed from an earlier successful and equally-ambitious fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Like the Shah of Iran, King Fahd was represented as all that was evil, all that was threatening Islam, a man intoxicated by the petro-dollar, a charlatan won over by Wes tern-American greed, who had taken the
    Koran from his hand and substituted a chequebook, who had taken Islam from his heart and put there instead the harsh doctrine of American capitalism. The slogans would be scrawled across the roads and walls of Riyadh, Jeddah and Medina, and the graffiti was infectious: ‘Fahd betrays Mohammed.’ ‘God has left us.’ ‘Build the Great Wall in Arabia.’ ‘Islam, Rise!’ ‘Rahbar, the New Messiah.’ The aerosol cans had been distributed and the banners painted, waiting for Rahbar. And he, in turn, waited for