December Ultimatum Read Online Free Page B

the signal— not from people of Saudi Arabia, but from people who knew much better than he the strategy and timing for the coup.
    Five years earlier few Saudi-watchers, academics, Pentagon emissaries, Aramco oilmen, political strategists, foreign relation specialists or Central Intelligence Agents would have considered a coup a remote possibility. The House of Ibn Saud, from Abd Al Aziz to King Fahd, had been the unquestioned rulers of the barren desert Kingdom with the biggest deposits of oil in the Middle East. Revolution was unthinkable. Unlike the Moslem Shiites in Iran, unlike Reza Pahlavi the Shah, the Saudi Kings had merged state and religious leadership into one. The political House of Ibn Saud had married into the religious House of Ibn Wahhabi, so that they were inseparable. Dissent against the King disputed the sanctity of Islam itself. So as religious leader, the King ruled by divine right, and his credentials were impeccable; he was ruler of the land of Mecca, birthplace of Mohammed and of Hadj, centre of pilgrimage for the world’s eight hundred million Moslems.
    Franklin stopped typing, put the typewriter on the floor and stretched his legs. The night outside was suddenly bright with flares. He turned the torch off as sweat ran into his eyes. The bathful of tepid water seemed a thousand yards away. He was beginning to feel helpless. He waited until the light of the flares had dimmed and began his typing again. The torch batteries were running low. He leaned closer to the paper.
    The Shah of Iran had tampered with Islam, and Islam had won. But Islam and the King of the Saudis was the same— and who or what could pull them apart?
    The answer was oil. And the things it could buy. Transistor radios, colour televisions, American cars, Japanese motorcycles and the exciting new life-styles that came with them. Oil bought Western music and Western books, a Western culture full of new ideas that gave young men and women an appetite for more. Schools were built by Western contractors to Western designs with the Western curriculum in mind. Concrete arterial highways were beginning to stretch out from Riyadh to Mecca, Medina and Dhahran, increasing the speed of Saudi life, and spreading the invasion even quicker across the deserts. Seamen came off the merchant ships at Dhahran and Jeddah trading in alcohol, cigarettes and hashish. And Saudi women sold their bodies though the Koran forbad them even to show their faces.
    There was a cancer in the Kingdom and it was called oil and its malignancy was spreading to every corner. Turbaned mullahs squatted on crimson carpets, sipping bitter coffee served by women in their austere chadors, and watched the infidels from the West who neither made pilgrimage to Mecca, nor seemed to pray, nor gave any visible service to God, and yet were infinitely more prosperous than the faithful. The Saudi Shia peasants and the workers in the Aramco oil camps saw excess in everything and they were suddenly hungry too. Doubts were created about those things of the spirit they had always valued. Few lost their faith, but many lost their devoutness.
    The oil was pumping out of Saudi desert at the rate of ten million barrels every day, four hundred million gallons every twenty-four hours, and the enormous earnings from it slowly transformed the land of the Koran into something strange and hostile—just as they had in Iran, on the other side of the Gulf. Petro-dollars provided the Saudi rulers, eager with ambition, the means to transform a country that had known nothing but poverty into a thoroughly modern twentieth-century state. The world’s largest royal family was earning over three hundred and forty-five million pounds a day every day in the year. There wasn’t a global institution to match its purchasing power. Had it been on offer it could have bought out General Motors in a little over a week; British Leyland in two days seven hours, London’s most prestigious store, Harrods, in nineteen