Hunter Killer Page 2

  Meanwhile, ships and yachts moored in the harbor rocked violently as the massive wake from Shades of Arabia rolled into them, causing glasses and crockery to crash to the floor and even people to lose their footing and slam into walls. In that briefest of scenarios anyone could understand the reason for the draconian French laws about speeding that were enforced in every Riviera harbor.

  Prince Khalid never gave them a thought. He hurtled past the harbor walls, missing the flashing light on the wall to his portside by about ten feet, and roared out into the open sea. With all care cast aside by the Krug–coke combo, he hammered those big diesels straight toward the deep water, less than a mile offshore.

  And out there, with over sixty fathoms beneath his keel, the Prince began a long, swerving course through the light swell, which delighted his guests, who were all by now on the top deck aft viewing area, marveling at the speed and smoothness of this fabulous seagoing craft.

  No one took the slightest notice of the big searchlight a mile astern, which belonged to the coast guard patrol launch, summoned by the harbor master and now in hot pursuit, making almost forty knots through the water.

  The night was warm, but there were heavy rain clouds overhead, and it was extremely dark. Too dark to see the massive, dark shape of the ocean liner that rode her gigantic anchor one mile up ahead. In fact there was a light sea mist, not quite fog, lying in waxen banks over the surface of the sea.

  One way or another the 150,000-ton Cunarder, the Queen Mary 2, was extremely difficult to see that night, even with all her night lights burning. Any approaching vessel might not have locked on to her, even five hundred yards out, unless the afterguard were watching the radar sweeps very carefully, which Prince Khalid was most certainly not doing. Captain Reynolds was so busy staring at the blackness ahead that he, too, was negligent of the screen. But at least he had an excuse—mainly that he was frozen in fear for his life.

  At length he snapped to the Prince, “Steady, sir. Come off fifteen knots. We just can’t see well enough out here…this is too fast…”

  “Don’t worry, Hank,” replied Prince Khalid. “I’m feeling very good. This is fun…just for a few minutes I can cast aside the cares of my country and my responsibilities.”

  Captain Reynolds’s eyes rolled heavenward as his boss tried to coax every last ounce of speed out of the yacht, despite the fact they were in another fog bank and visibility at sea level was very poor.

  The watchmen on the largest, longest, tallest, and widest passenger ship ever built did however spot the fast-approaching Shades of Arabia, from a height close to that of a twenty-one-story building. They sounded a deafening blast on the horn, which could be heard for ten miles, and at the last minute ordered a starboard-side reverse thrust in order to swing around and present their narrower bow to the oncoming motor yacht rather than their 1,132-foot hull. But it was too late. Way too late.

  Shades of Arabia came knifing through the mist, throttles wide open, everyone laughing and drinking up on the aft deck, Prince Khalid tenderly kissing Adele, one hand on the controls, one on her backside. Hank Reynolds, who had heard the Queen Mary’s horn echo across the water, yelled at the last moment, “JESUS CHRIST!” He dived for the throttles, but not in time.

  The 107-foot motor yacht smashed into the great ocean liner’s port bow. The pointed bow of Shades of Arabia buried itself twenty feet into the Queen Mary’s steel plating. The colossal impact caused a huge explosion in the engine room of the Prince’s pride and joy, and the entire yacht burst into flames. No one got out, save for bodyguard Rashid, who had seen the oncoming steel cliff and hurled himself off the top deck twenty feet into the water. Like Ishmael, he alone lived to tell the tale.

  Two days later, in a palatial private residence in the northern suburbs of the city of Riyadh, Prince Nasir Ibn Mohammed al-Saud, a fifty-six-year-old devout Sunni Muslim and the heir apparent to the King, was sipping dark Turkish coffee and staring with horror at the front page of the London Daily Telegraph.

  Beneath a six-column-wide photo of the badly listing Queen Mary 2, was the headline: DRUNKEN SAUDI PRINCE ALMOST SINKS WORLD’S LARGEST OCEAN LINER; High-speed motor yacht rams QM2, causing mass evacuation in 100 fathoms off Monaco.

  The photo showed the remains of the Shades of Arabia jutting out from the bow of the ship, the heavy list to port on the forward half of the mighty ship, and worst of all the French coast guard helicopters swarming above the stricken liner, evacuating some of her 2,620 passengers and 1,250 crew.

  The lifeboats were also being lowered, even though there was no immediate danger of the great ship’s sinking. But she could not propel herself, and would have to be towed into port to be pumped out and temporarily repaired, in preparation for the two-thousand-mile journey to the mouth of the Loire River, to the shipyards of Alstom-Chantiers de l’Atlantique, in Saint-Nazaire, where she’d been built.

  Prince Nasir was appalled. An inset picture of young Prince Khalid was captioned: HE DIED IN A FIREBALL PRECISELY AS HE LIVED—RECKLESS TO THE END. The story named the dead companions, chronicled the champagne in the casino. It referred to Prince Khalid’s losses at the tables, his womanizing, his love of cocaine, his incredible wealth. It quoted Lloyds insurance brokers’ ranting and raving about their losses, bracing themselves for a huge payout to the Cunard shipping line for collision damage to the $800 million ship, loss of income, lawsuits from passengers, and compensation to the French government for the costs of the evacuation.

  Prince Nasir knew perfectly well this was the biggest story in the world, one that would sweep the television and radio stations of the United States and Europe, as well as every newspaper in the world. And it would go on doing so for several days yet.

  The Prince loathed everything about it. He hated the humiliation it brought upon his country. He detested the plain and obvious defiance of the Koran. And he hated the sheer self-indulgence of Prince Khalid and the terrible harm to Saudi Arabia’s image caused by this lunatic spending of petro-dollars by young men in their twenties.

  Prince Nasir would one day be king. And the only obstruction that stood between him and the throne of Saudi Arabia was his well-publicized and vehement disapproval of the lifestyles of the royal family. For the moment, however, he was the nominated Crown Prince, a wise and pious Islamic fundamentalist who had made it quite clear that when he ascended the throne the shame was all going to end.

  Nasir was the outstanding political and business mind in the kingdom, at home in the corridors of power in London, Paris, Brussels, and the Middle East. The King valued his counsel in a wary and cautious way, but of course Prince Nasir had countless enemies: sons, brothers, and grandsons of the King.

  There had been three attempts to assassinate him. But the Saudi populace loved him, for he alone stood up for them, gave interviews revealing the real reason for the drop in their state incomes from $28,000 to $7,000 over fifteen years—the astronomical cost of the royal family.

  He was a tall, bearded man, descended like most of the royal family from the great Ibn Saud. The call of the desert for him was never far away. Most evenings, he would be driven out to the hot, lonely sands north of the city, where he would rendezvous with friends. His servants would cast upon the desert floor a vast, near-priceless rug from Iran. A three-sided tent would be erected. And there they would dine, talking of the great revolution to come, a revolution that would surely one day topple the ruling branch of the House of Saud.

  Today the Prince rose to his feet muttering, as he had done many times before, “This country is like France before the Revolution. One family bleeding the state to death. In eighteenth-century Paris, it was the Bourbon kings. In twenty-first-century Riyadh, it’s the al-Saud family.”

  And then, louder now, as he hurled the newspaper aside, “THIS HAS TO STOP!”

  CHAPTER ONE

  TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2009

  KING KHALID INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  SAUDI ARABIA

  The black Cadillac stretch lim
ousine moved swiftly around the public drop-off point to a wide double gate, already opened by the two armed guards. On each wing of the big American automobile fluttered two pennants, the green-and-blue ensigns of the Royal Saudi Naval Forces. Both guards saluted as the instantly recognizable limo swept past and out toward the wide runway of terminal three, the exclusive enclave of Saudia, the national airline.

  Inside the limousine was one solitary passenger, Crown Prince Nasir Ibn Mohammed, deputy minister of the armed forces to his very senior cousin Prince Abdul Rahman, son of the late King Faisal. Both sentries saluted as Prince Nasir went by, heading straight for the take-off area where one of the King’s newest Boeing 747s was awaiting him, engines idling in preparation for take-off. Every other flight was on hold until the meticulously punctual Prince Nasir was in the air.

  Wearing Arab dress, he was escorted to the outside stairway by both the chief steward and a senior naval officer. Prince Nasir’s own son, the twenty-six-year-old Commodore Fahad Ibn Nasir, served on a Red Sea frigate, so his father was always treated like an Admiral wherever he traveled in the kingdom.

  The moment he was seated in the upstairs first-class section, the door was tightly secured and the pilot opened the throttles. The royal passenger jet, reveling in its light load, roared off down the runway and screamed into the clear blue skies, directly into the hot south wind off the desert, before banking left, toward the Gulf, and then northwest across Iraq, to Syria.

  He was the only passenger onboard. It was almost unheard of for a senior member of the royal family to travel alone, without even a bodyguard. But this was different. The 747 was not going even halfway to Prince Nasir’s final destination. He used it only to get out of Saudi Arabia, to another Arab country. His real destination was entirely another matter.

  A suitcase at the rear of the upstairs area contained his Western clothes. As soon as the flight was airborne, Prince Nasir changed into a dark gray suit, blue shirt, and a maroon print silk tie from Hermès, complete with a solid-gold clip in the shape of a desert scimitar. He wore plain black loafers, handmade in London, with dark gray socks.

  The suitcase also held a briefcase containing several documents, which the Prince removed. He then packed away his white Arabian thobe, red-and-white ghutra headdress with its double cord, the aghal. He had left King Khalid Airport, named for his late great-uncle, as an Arab. He would arrive in Damascus every inch the international businessman.

  When the plane touched down, two hours later, a limousine from the Saudi embassy met him and drove him directly to the regular midday Air France flight to Paris. The aircraft already contained its full complement of passengers, and although none of them knew it, they were sitting comfortably, seat belts fastened, awaiting the arrival of the Arabian prince.

  The aircraft had pulled back from the Jetway, and a special flight of stairs had been placed against the forward entrance. Prince Nasir’s car halted precisely at those stairs, where an Air France official waited to escort him to his seat. Four rows and eight seats, that is, had been booked in the name of the Saudi embassy, on Al-Jala’a Avenue. Prince Nasir sat alone in 1A. The rest of the seats would remain empty all the way to Roissy–Charles de Gaulle Airport, nineteen miles north of Paris.

  They served a special luncheon, prepared by the cooks at the embassy, of curried chicken with rice cooked in the Indian manner, followed by fruit juice and sweet pastries. Prince Nasir, the most devout of Muslims, had never touched alcohol in his life and disapproved fiercely of any of his countrymen who did. The late Prince Khalid of Monte Carlo was not among his absolute favorites. The great man knew, beyond any doubt, of the antics of that particular deceased member of his family.

  They flew on across Turkey and the Balkan states, finally crossing the Alps and dropping down above the lush French farmland that lies south of the forest of Ardenne, over the River Seine, and into northwest Paris.

  Again, Prince Nasir endured no formalities nor checks. He disembarked before anyone else, down a private flight of stairs, where a jet-black, unmarked French government car waited to drive him directly to the heavily guarded Elysée Palace, on Rue St. Honoré, the official residence of the Presidents of France since 1873.

  It was a little after 4 P.M. in Paris, the flight from Damascus having taken five hours, with a two-hour time gain. Two officials were waiting at the President’s private entrance, and Prince Nasir was escorted immediately to the President’s private apartment on the first floor overlooking Rue de l’Elysée.

  The President was awaiting him in a large modern drawing room, which was decorated with a selection of six breathtaking Impressionist paintings, two by Renoir, two by Monet, and one each by Degas and Van Gogh. One hundred million dollars would not have bought them.

  The President greeted Prince Nasir in impeccable English, the language agreed upon for the forthcoming conversation. By previous arrangement, no one would listen in. No ministers. No private secretaries. No interpreters. The following two hours before dinner would bring a meaning to the word privacy that was rarely, if ever, attained in international politics.

  “Good afternoon, Your Highness,” began the President. “I trust my country’s travel arrangements have been satisfactory?”

  “Quite perfect,” replied the Prince, smiling. “No one could have required more.” The two men knew each other vaguely, but were hardly even friends, let alone blood brothers. Yet.

  The door to the drawing room was closed, and two uniformed military guards, summoned from the exterior security force, stood sentry in the outside corridor. The President of France himself poured coffee for his guest from a silver service laid out on a magnificent Napoleonic sideboard.

  Prince Nasir complimented the President on the beauty of the piece and was amused when the President replied, “It probably belonged to Bonaparte himself—the Palais de l’Elysée was occupied by Napoleon’s sister Caroline for much of the nineteenth century,”

  The highly educated Arabian Prince loved the traditions of France. He not only had a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from Harvard, but also a maîtrise (master’s degree) in European history from the University of Paris. The knowledge that Bonaparte himself may have been served from this very sideboard somehow made the coffee taste all the richer.

  “Well, Your Highness,” said the President. “You must tell me your story, and why you wished to have a talk with me in this most private manner, at such very short notice.” He was of course keenly aware of the traditions of highborn Arabs: talk about almost anything else for a half hour before tackling the main subject.

  Prince Nasir knew that time was precious at this level. The balding, burly politician who stood before him had, after all, an entire country to run. The Prince decided to speak carefully, but with heavyweight intonations.

  “Sir,” he said, “My country is in terminal decline. In the past twenty years the ruling family—my own—has managed to spend over a hundred billion dollars of our cash reserves. We are probably down to our last fifteen billion. And soon that will be ten billion and then five billion. Twenty years ago my people received a generous share of the oil wealth that Allah has bestowed upon us. Around thirty thousand dollars per capita. Today that figure is close to six thousand. Because we can afford no more.”

  “But, of course,” replied the President of France, “you do own twenty-five percent of all the world’s oil…”

  Prince Nasir smiled. “Our problem, sir, is not the creation of wealth,” he said. “I suppose we could close down modern Saudi Arabia and all go back to the desert and sit there allowing our vast oil revenues to accrue, and make us once more one of the richest nations on earth. However, that would plainly be impracticable.

  “Our problem is the reckless spending of money by a ruling family that is now corrupt beyond redemption. And a huge percentage of that expenditure goes on the family itself. Thousands and thousands of royal princes are being kept in a style probably not seen on this planet since…well, the Bourbon roya
l family’s domination of your own country. I have stated it often enough. Saudi Arabia is like France before the Revolution. Monsieur le Président, I intend to emulate your brave class of warriors of the late eighteenth century. In my own country, I intend to re-enact that renunciation of the rights of the nobility.”

  The President’s early left-wing leanings were well known. Indeed he had risen to power from a base as the communist mayor of a small town in Brittany. In a previous incarnation, this particular French President would have stormed the gates of Paris in the vanguard of the Revolution. Prince Nasir realized the word Bourbon would elicit instant sympathy.

  The President shrugged, a deeply Gallic gesture. And he held out both hands, palms upward. “I knew of course some of the difficulties in Saudi Arabia…but I put it down mostly to your closeness to the Americans.”

  “That, too, is a grave problem, sir,” replied Prince Nasir. “My people long for freedom from the Great Satan. But this King is a vigorous globally ambitious man, aged only forty-eight, and under him it would be impossible. We are bound up with the infidels so tightly…even though the majority of Saudis wish devoutly they could be once more a God-fearing nation of pure Muslims. Not terrorists, just a religious people in tune with the words of the Prophet, rather than the grasping material creeds of the United States.

  “I tell you this, sir. If Osama bin Laden suddenly materialized in Riyadh and ran for President, or even King, he would win in a landslide.”

  The President of France chuckled. “I imagine there are many Saudi Princes who would not agree exactement with your views,” he said. “I don’t imagine that young man who almost sank the Queen Mary last week would have been…er…too sympathique.”