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  “I am a leader to my people, and I will inspire them to throw off their oppressors.”

  “You’re a thug, and you’re spouting platitudes.”

  Saif sighed again and stood up. He started pacing around behind Sasha. “You talk about me being a murderer. You killed two men and injured another as they brought you here. Why?”

  His words hit home. She felt a stab of anguish, but shot back at him despite it, “Don’t be absurd. To get away. To get another shot at you.”

  Saif walked in front of her, leaned toward her face and said, “Where does it stop? The killing?”

  “When you’re dead.”

  Saif looked off at the wall, thinking for a few moments. “We have become a nation of privilege, access and influence.”

  Now it was Sasha’s turn to sigh. “That was a tired old argument over 20 years ago. You said you were going to do something about it then, and you’ve done nothing.”

  “That’s right. And now I am doing something about it.”

  “Oh? Killing people needlessly? Taking tens of thousands of your righteous Muslim faithful hostage and watching them murdered in the crossfire or starved to death? Assassinating a group of policemen as they come to rescue them?”

  “You’re completely missing the point”

  Sasha sneered at him. “You don’t have one.”

  “I do. We’ve become a nation of haves and have-nots. Every coveted position is handed out to royal family members, 50,000 princes and counting. It’s no different than the class system of the British Empire. The Saudi royals are living in the past. I want you to join me, be at my side as I restore Saudi Arabia to what it once was. In doing so, you and I can recapture what we once had together. When you’ve come around to see the error of your views, there will be nothing to keep us apart. If you think back, you’ll remember and know I’m right.”

  “You’re living in the past. You were my first lover. We were together for six months 20 years ago, before either of us knew much of anything about life. Get over it.”

  “I can see this isn’t going anywhere. I’m going to leave you again to give you more time to think. Think about the direction of your life.”

  “I don’t need to think about the direction of my life.”

  “Yes, you do. You need to examine your life, how you’ve been used by the Americans to further their goal of dominating the Eastern world for their political and economic ends. To secure the oil supplies for their bloated lifestyle. And how you’ve supported the corrupt royals’ collusion with them to line their own pockets and live off the backs of the average Saudi.”

  “Are you done with your speeches for today?”

  Saif didn’t respond. He walked to the door and left.

  Saif made the rounds visiting the men. Two of his top lieutenants—Kareem and Zaki—had been against it.

  “What if the royals have snipers? You will be out in the open, an easy target.”

  Rashid had said, “All the more reason to show the men you aren’t afraid.”

  Saif had agreed. “He’s right. It will inspire the men.”

  He left Rashid in command, then walked outside with his shoulders thrust back and his head held high, accompanied by Kareem and Zaki. His wish to impress the men notwithstanding, once he crossed the courtyard he stayed close to the perimeter wall so he’d be shielded from sniper fire.

  It was glorious. The sun was bright, but the day not too oppressively hot. The smell of cordite was still in the air, the odor and black smoke from the burning armored vehicles lending an aura of battle drama. The men spotted him as he approached the first western gate that had been attacked by the armored vehicles. They formed a crowd, cheering and waving their weapons, then parted as he strode through them, nodding, smiling and waving his arms. He made a point of congratulating each of his lieutenants who had overseen the defense, hugging and slapping them on the backs. He thought of giving a short speech, then realized he had two more gates to visit.

  He was just returning to the main prayer hall after 45 minutes of visiting with his men when he heard the helicopters coming in. He looked up and the air went out of his lungs. The sky was full of them. At least two dozen Black Hawks with Saudi markings were coming in low and fast, as if on a strafing run. He ran through the prayer hall for the steps to the communications room, the rotors pounding so loudly he had to yell to be heard. “To the roof,” he shouted to Rashid. He grabbed two AK-47s and ran for the stairs.

  By the time he reached the roof, four of the helicopters were hovering just above the ground in the courtyard, and a dozen men had already abseiled from them. He crouched in firing position and started shooting at the soldiers as they hit the ground. With the noise of the choppers, he couldn’t hear any others firing, but knew his men were responding, because most of the soldiers collapsed before they could run more than ten yards.

  It took less than a minute or two for the first Black Hawks to deposit their men, and the first group of helicopters lifted off and hovered a few hundred feet over the mosque as another four Black Hawks came in. The first Black Hawks provided cover from their side gunners while the second group deposited their men. At least a dozen men from this wave survived and ran to join the few of their colleagues from the first tranche who had made it to shelter behind the four-foot-thick columns surrounding the walkway beneath the perimeter walls.

  Saif looked up to see the face of one of the helicopter pilots as he swung his Black Hawk around, lowered its nose and trained its guns on the group of men who had accompanied Rashid and him to the roof.

  “Down!” Saif yelled, pushing Rashid into the stairwell and diving in after him. Two of the men made it into the stairwell a few seconds after Saif heard the clatter of the Black Hawk’s cannon. The man in the rear, still in the doorway, was cut in half, while the man in front had one of his arms severed just before his head exploded. His headless torso fell onto the first landing where Saif lay.

  Saif waited a few moments after the cannon fire stopped and climbed the steps again. He shivered with disgust as he lay down on the bloody threshold to peer out at the sky. Another wave of Black Hawks was coming in as the preceding one lifted off. Over a dozen of the choppers were hovering, continuing to provide covering fire as additional men abseiled from newly arriving ones. Rashid appeared next to him, handing Saif an AK-47, then taking aim with his. He emptied a clip at the tail rotor of the nearest Black Hawk. Almost immediately, the chopper began wobbling, then spinning out of control. It descended out of sight below the edge of the roof into the courtyard below.

  Saif crawled out to the edge of the roof and saw the Black Hawk sitting on the courtyard. He raised his AK-47 and sighted in on the tail rotor of another Black Hawk. He expended his clip to no effect. He turned back toward the doorway and saw Rashid firing at the same chopper from a prone position. As he entered the doorway he heard a metallic groan behind him, turned and saw the Black Hawk wobbling and vibrating where it hovered. This one banked to the right and headed east, away from the mosque and disappeared from view.

  “I’ll tell the men to fire at the tail rotors,” Saif hollered, pulling out his cell phone to call his lieutenants.

  “No need,” Rashid yelled back. He pointed over his shoulder. Two more Black Hawks were now wobbling and spinning, one heading for the courtyard, the other toward the street outside the west wall. Most of the other Black Hawks were pulling up, safely out of range of effective small arms fire. Saif could also see they weren’t firing into the mosque itself, only at his men on the roof and the tops of the perimeter walls.

  Saif motioned for Rashid to follow him down. He stopped at the communications room, grabbed two more clips for his AK-47 and ran down the stairs. The main prayer hall was jammed with pilgrims huddling and crying, their faces showing fear and horror. Saif pushed his way through. When he reached the doorway to the courtyard, he saw clusters of his men huddled in the doorway and behind the columns in firing position, in a firefight with the remaining Royal Army tro
ops who had managed to shelter themselves behind the outer columns. He could see his men all the way across the courtyard firing from behind columns as well. Then his men began using grenade launchers, shooting grenades almost horizontally, skipping them from one side to the other across the marble surface of the courtyard. The firefight went on for another hour, the Royal Army troops in a continual crossfire, the Black Hawks hovering above but no longer firing. When return fire from the Royal Army troops on the ground had ceased, the Black Hawks, one by one, flew off toward the east. After another few minutes the skies were clear and the only sounds in the mosque were the moans of the wounded and dying, and the prayers and whimpers from terrified pilgrims.

  CHAPTER 17

  Day Five. Grand Mosque, Mecca.

  THE NEXT MORNING, TOM WAS standing over Zac and his communications equipment in the bedroom of the suite. Zac was playing with the dials on a shoebox-sized piece of equipment he called a MantaRay. It had a laptop connected to it with a USB cable. The laptop had dozens of vertical bars with numbers underneath them showing on the screen. He pulled off his headphones and spoke to Tom.

  “The MantaRay is from the same company that makes the StingRay that the FBI and police departments use in the US to track bad guys’ cell phones,” Zac said. “The StingRay can only track location. The MantaRay is much more sophisticated. It lets you listen in on cell phone conversations. It’s the same device I use to pick up the transmitters we put in Sasha’s abaya. It mimics a cell phone tower and gets phones to connect to it, then measures the signals. I have it pointed at the mosque, and I’ve got two more units in buildings on either side of the mosque, so with the mapping software in my laptop I can instantly triangulate to the location of any cell phone I pick up. I’m getting hundreds of signals.”

  “Hundreds? How do you figure that?” Tom asked.

  “The rebels are using them to communicate, and maybe even some of the pilgrims were cheating by carrying cell phones with them on the Hajj.”

  Tom nodded for him to go on.

  “But that’s not the important point. I’m getting consistent signals from a number of phones, particularly those emanating from the area of the communications room. I think I’m close to zeroing in on Saif’s cell phones and being able to listen to his conversations.”

  Tom smiled and walked back into the living room of the suite just as Yassar called. Yassar apologized for going dark on him and said he’d explain if Tom could join him and Assad in his suite, five floors above Tom’s in the same hotel.

  “Tom, please come in,” Yassar said as one of his bodyguards answered the door. It was only Yassar and Assad in the living room of the suite, attended by two more bodyguards. Yassar motioned and the three bodyguards disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door.

  Yassar motioned to an armchair, and as Tom walked toward it he saw the Grand Mosque through the window, more damage apparent than from the view on his floor. He saw pockmarks from small weapons fire and big chunks blown out of the tops of the perimeter wall from the Gatling guns on the Black Hawks. Debris was scattered all over the marble courtyard, and rebel crews dragged dead bodies toward the shade underneath the columned walkways by the wall. Dark stains of blood were evident everywhere. Two of the armored vehicles were still smoldering in the street, as was a Black Hawk that had been downed, the acrid odor evident even inside the hotel.

  Man, have these guys gone about this the wrong way.

  After they sat down, Yassar said, “Please allow me to apologize. I was out of touch, and Assad did not contact you, because we were dealing with some internecine issues within the royal family. Defense Minister Ali ordered both of yesterday’s strikes. In his defense, neither of the assault teams obeyed orders. The ground troops were not authorized to fire until they had crashed through the gates, and then only at the rebels inside the mosque, with instructions to hold pilgrim casualties to a minimum. The helicopter pilots were not authorized to fire at all. As I am sure you saw, the results were disastrous. King Abdul has since intervened and requested that Assad, with my guidance, command the situation at the mosque.”

  Tom asked, “What if the situation escalates beyond that into a countrywide revolution?”

  Yassar said, “Naturally, Defense Minister Ali will command our armed forces, but King Abad has already insisted that Assad and I have direct access to him and input into our strategy and tactics.”

  Tom nodded.

  Assad said, “I would like to get your assessment of where we stand, since it seems your intelligence is superior to ours. I would also like to know the status of Sasha’s efforts. But first, allow me to apprise you of the current situation in the mosque.” He settled back in the sofa and looked up at the wall as if he were reading from a blackboard. “We estimate that somewhere between 50 and 75 thousand pilgrims are trapped inside the mosque. We have effectively evacuated Mecca, which means that the roughly 3 million pilgrims who participated in the Hajj have left the city, and that anyone living within three blocks of the Grand Mosque has been temporarily relocated.”

  Tom imagined millions of Mecca residents living in thousands of tents in the desert outside the city, as the Hajj pilgrims did.

  Assad continued. “We estimate hundreds dead and many more wounded inside the mosque. Rebels, pilgrims and Royal Army troops. Outside Mecca, we are monitoring approximately 15 radical sheiks who have been elevating their rhetoric in the last week, presaging the coming of the Mahdi at sunup in three days. Our aerial surveillance has located seven rebel tent camps outside six of our major cities and two tent camps in the desert near major oil fields in the Eastern Province, all of which we are monitoring for any activity. All our armed forces are on heightened alert.” He looked back at Tom.

  Tom arched his eyebrows at Assad’s last comments, surprised and impressed with the Saudis’ intelligence and readiness.

  Tom said, “Thank you. First, regarding Sasha, she’s inside the mosque. She has signal transmitters in her abaya, and we received a signal three days ago that put her someplace near the main prayer hall. We haven’t heard anything since. Overall, we have no new intelligence beyond my briefing to you, Assad, last week in Riyadh.” Tom had never told either Yassar or Assad they had a man inside and decided it was too risky to disclose that at this point, either. “I haven’t received confirmation yet from my director, but he told me three days ago that the national security advisor to our president had contacted our head of Special Operations Command to consider making a team of our counterterrorism specialists available to assist.”

  Yassar said, “Perhaps we should tell you what Assad has been thinking as to how we should proceed.”

  Assad said, “We’re virtually certain they have no medical supplies or trained medical personnel inside the mosque. We’re also certain that many pilgrims who were not even injured in the fighting are in need of medical attention. Many are elderly and the five days of the Hajj are physically demanding. We also suspect there are limited or no food supplies inside the mosque. On that basis we propose to contact the rebels and offer a truce so that we may evacuate wounded, remove the dead so they may be buried on a timely basis in accordance with Islamic tradition, and allow the families of any dead, and any sick or infirm pilgrims, to leave the mosque.”

  “Why do you think they’ll release any of the pilgrims? I’ve assumed the rebels consider them hostages.”

  Assad didn’t reply.

  Tom said, “Okay, so let’s assume they go along with that. Then what?”

  Yassar said, “Then we wait and see, with no further assaults.”

  Not much of a plan, Tom thought. “Doesn’t that just play into their hands?”

  Assad said, “How so? If we have to, we’ll starve them out.”

  “Time isn’t on our side. You said yourself that the radical sheiks are already priming the pump about the Mahdi. What happens when Saif unveils him and starts blasting his message from the loudspeakers in the minarets? And then that message gets picked up and spouted al
l over the country? We think that’s the beginning of Saif’s endgame, and it’s only three days away. At that point, holy war.”

  Yassar said, “If we need to take action against the camps we have located, we will.”

  “I get that. But I can’t imagine you’ve located them all. And most of the Arab Spring uprisings have started directly within the cities. So even if you take out some camps, assume you wind up with a full-blown revolution in the streets of all your major cities after Saif turns over his Mahdi card. Then what?”

  Yassar and Assad looked back and forth at each other. Neither had a response.

  Tom leaned forward and cleared his throat. “Assad, I have an idea I’ve kicked around with my team. How about we go downstairs and talk in my suite.”

  When Assad and Tom got downstairs to Tom’s suite, Tom called Ryan, Zac and Seth into the living room and sat down in front of the maps of the Grand Mosque. Tom pointed to the dotted lines, like passageways, all over the map.

  “We saw these and wondered what they were,” Tom said, then flipped forward a few pages in the maps, “then we found this page, which has those dotted lines as solid lines, with the outline of the mosque as dotted lines.” He looked up at Assad and pointed to the caption on the page.

  “Yes,” Assad said, “the catacombs.”

  “You know about them?”

  “Of course. They date back to the 8th or 9th century, built when the mosque was first constructed. They’re a labyrinth of miles of underground tunnels and rooms beneath and around the mosque, with access from multiple locations inside the mosque.”

  “Do the rebels know about them?”

  “I can only assume so. They are no secret to those who are knowledgeable about the mosque.”

  “Do they have maps of them like this?”