The Devil's Banker

Chapter 59

It took him five minutes to reach the crest of the highest dune near the camp. Looking north, Omar al-Utaybi surveyed the sweeping, undulant expanse of the Rub ‘al Khali. The Empty Quarter. Sand. Rock. Parched herbage. It was a landscape of despair. Yet, no other vista could thrill him as this one did.

In fewer than twelve hours, he would begin executing the plan to make it his own.

“Sheikh,” came a young boy’s cry. “The council is waiting.”

Utaybi waved to his second son from his second wife. “I shall come at once.”

Taking a last look at the sweeping sands, he started down the dune to the mobile encampment that was home to his government in exile. It was more a small, vibrant town than a camp. Eighty-four persons in all. Fourteen Land Cruisers. Seven trailers modified for desert travel. Eleven four-wheel all-terrain vehicles. Sixteen all-weather tents. Four portable generators capable of providing enough electricity to power a state-of-the-art communications facility, a mobile refrigeration unit, and a pair of Liebert air conditioners to keep the all-important servers, mainframes, and laptops that comprised the nerve center of any invading army at a perfect sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

Omar al-Utaybi had ordered camp established at the leeward base of a great dune. The cusp of the dune, and the dunes around it, all rising eighty feet or more, provided a natural bowl that deflected electronic surveillance measures and made it difficult for eyes on high to penetrate. A two-square-acre web of camouflage netting interwoven with the advanced reflective composites used in the construction of Stealth fighter aircraft helped nature with the task.

Utaybi threw back the flap to the communications tent and entered. As one, the ten men present bolted from their consoles and stood at rigid attention. All wore the starched white dishdasha and the red-checked khaffiyeh of his country’s ruling classes. Sweeping off his headdress, he motioned for them to sit.

“Let us begin our review with the armed forces,” he said. “Colonel Farouk, if you please.”

Farouk was stocky and tactiturn, a thirty-year veteran who had been passed over for promotion because of his fierce fundamentalist beliefs. On Utaybi’s cue, he began a recitation of the events that would unspool upon the death of the Saudi chief of staff and his deputy, both guests of the King during his four-day state visit to the United States of America. A liquidation squad in place in Riyadh and Jidda would target the remaining army leaders loyal to the King. Farouk’s men would replace them and storm the palace compound. Martial law would be declared until Omar al-Utaybi reached the city and imposed his clan as the new and rightful rulers of Arabia. The cost of Farouk’s complicity came to one hundred million dollars.

One hundred million dollars to the Bank of Riyadh.

“Finance,” Utaybi called out.

“World markets are down on average five percent since the shorts were put on. Marked-to-market, our positions show a profit of seventy million dollars. Authorized wire transfers have been submitted to all our brokers. We are anticipating a first day’s decline of between twenty and thirty-five percent, more on the volatile Asian exchanges.”

Treasury had been bought for sixty million.

Sixty million dollars to the Jordani Bank of Commerce.

Utabyi listened intently, while his mind imagined the havoc the bomb would wreak.

The detonation of a one-kiloton nuclear device inside the White House would obliterate every building within a two-square-block radius. The explosion, the equivalent of one thousand tons of TNT, would vaporize the White House, including the West Wing, the Old Executive Office Building, the Treasury Building, and the Treasury Annex and leave behind a crater two hundred feet across and forty feet deep. Everyone inside these buildings would die instantly and painlessly, as the initial gamma-ray blast would literally erase every trace of their bodies before the electrical signals from their sensory organs could reach their brain. The expanding shock waves would level the Veterans Administration Building, the Commerce and Interior departments, the headquarters of the American Red Cross, and every building around them. If lucky, the force of the blast might even topple the Washington Monument, though it was not prudent to hope for so much.

As the blast spread outward it would create winds upward of one hundred miles an hour, wreaking severe structural damage on all buildings within a two-mile radius and shattering windows up to five miles away. The narrow corridors of the Federal Triangle would become a killing zone as shards of metal, concrete, and glass rocketed through the air at near-supersonic speeds. The intense heat generated by the explosion would melt the asphalt streets before causing them to burst into flame, and ignite a firestorm engulfing everything in its wake. Thehurricane-force winds would feed and enlarge a mushroom cloud, pushing it a mile into the night sky.

While the American system of democracy was capable of marching on with hardly a stutter in its step, the deaths of the King, his ministers of finance and education, and his chief of armed forces would leave Utaybi’s oil-rich homeland paralyzed and open to new, more capable leadership. Evidence linking certain Saudi princes to Hijira would prove the final straw.

Though espousing a return to the fundamental values of the Koran, Gabriel would not sever relations with the Americans. He was already realizing that his earlier plans to return Arabia to its pure Wahhabi roots might prove unwise. He would limit “the rot.” Oil workers would be forbidden from visiting the larger cities. American troops would be expelled. Yet, he would wield a carrot as deftly as a stick. He would break with OPEC. He would lower prices. He would increase twofold his oil production. No one would threaten such a proponent of economic growth. The U.S. would move quickly to recognize the new regime. The House of Utaybi’s reign would be assured.

“Education,” Utaybi called, and discreetly he checked his gold Piaget wristwatch.