(Wrath-02)-Darkness of This World (2012) Read online

  Tala focused on what he cradled: a RPG-7 rocket tube. Her eyes traveled up the tube and saw it was loaded with a rocket-propelled grenade. The dawning realization and terror drained all rational thought from her brain, leaving her unfeeling and calm. “Don t you dare touch my children!” she tried screaming but nothing came out.

  The walking horror took a step toward her and pulled off his mask. Tala pulled a quick breath and her heart nearly burst.

  No! It couldn’t be!

  She looked into the dark eyes of one of her husband’s brothers!

  He smiled at her, stepped back thirty big steps, waved at her, and shouldered the RPG-7.

  “Please, Allah, save the kingdom!” were Princess Tala’s last words.

  The rocket-propelled grenade did not miss.

  • • •

  The garden came alive with security forces and military police. Like ants from an anthill, they seemed to appear everywhere.

  General Brighton took a step toward the prince, but a bodyguard pushed him back. The prince stared at him with glaring eyes. “It has started,” he whispered hoarsely as his bodyguards pulled him away.

  “What’s going on, Prince Saud? What is a Firefall?”

  “Stay here!” the prince demanded. “Don’t move from this place. Don’t move a foot or they might shoot you. I have little control over any of them now. When I can, I will send men who will escort you back to your compound. Go with them and do exactly what they say! I must go, I must go!” The prince turned and disappeared down the path.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes after leaving his palace, Prince Saud’s motorcade screamed through the gates at King Khalid International Airport outside of Riyadh. The line of black Mercedes and American SUVs rolled onto the tarmac where his aircraft was parked. A huge 747-400 taxied by, but the motorcade didn’t hesitate to race in front of it, forcing the Air Saudi airliner to come to a sudden halt. Prince Saud’s personal jet was waiting near the taxiway, its four engines running. Mobile stairs had already been positioned next to the aircraft and the prince took them two at a time. The side door was closed and the aircraft began to taxi the instant the stairs were pulled away.

  Inside, the prince’s chief of staff was waiting to give him the news. Saud listened while staring straight ahead, then dismissed his staff. Pushed up from his chair, he walked to his private office at the back of the jet.

  Later that night, Crown Prince Saud was escorted into a large chrome and tile morgue in the royal family’s private hospital in Medina. What remained of the bodies of his murdered family were placed on steel tables and positioned side by side. He walked to them, crying, then demanded to be left alone. The physician nodded and bowed before leaving the room.

  The crown prince fell to his knees between the four gurneys where his family had been laid. He wept for three hours, crying out to Allah, cursing and pleading and begging to die. He made outrageous promises if Allah would bring them back, then fell in exhaustion and slept on the tile floor. Sometime later, the physician carefully entered the room to see the prince kneeling by his wife’s body again. He held her hand tightly as he looked down at the floor.

  “Get out!” the prince hissed and the doctor withdrew.

  • • •

  Lucifer watched Prince Saud suffer from the upper corner of the room. Lucifer stood still, his arms limp, his eyes staring down. He smiled as he watched, almost laughing with glee, the pleasure of the prince’s suffering causing a cold glint in his eye. He was gloating just a little, a rare moment of evil joy.

  He had accomplished by himself his act of murder, for killing the family was far too important to leave to any of his slaves. But his work was not yet finished. There was one more thing he had to do.

  Lucifer knew he had to get the prince while he was desperate, before he had any time to think. He had to get him while he was consumed with bitterness, before he had a chance to settle down. So he moved quickly beside the mortal and began to hiss in his ear.

  • • •

  The prince remained in the room for almost twenty-four hours. When he emerged, he was unshaven, smelly and frayed as old cloth.

  He knew who had killed his family. They were not far away. And they were not finished with their killing. There was more they had to do.

  So he had come to a decision.

  Then he had figured out a plan.

  Forget everything he had ever promised his father about freedom or democracy. Forget all of his dreams. It was a different world now. A new battle. A new war.

  Although brothers had escaped injury, there would be no unwounded soldiers in this war.

  And it didn’t matter where it led him, he would have his revenge!

  SEVEN

  It was almost six hours before Major General Neil Brighton’s military aircraft was cleared to takeoff because of the emergency hold put on all air traffic in and out of King Khaled Riyadh International Airport. As he waited for clearance to leave the kingdom, the general fidgeted anxiously in his seat. As the evening sun settled, his C-20 was finally cleared for departure, the first aircraft in a long line of civilian traffic that was cleared to takeoff. The aircraft quickly climbed to thirty-nine thousand feet and leveled off. Brighton undid his lap belt and settled back in his seat. A young servicewoman dressed in her Air Force skirt and blue sweater served the general a light dinner, then brought him a secure telephone and encryption cable to so he could plug his laptop into the aircraft’s satellite communications system.

  “Anything else?” the servicewoman asked after helping him plug in.

  The general shook his head. “No thanks, Sergeant Rice.”

  “You look tired, sir.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “I’m sure you’re eager to get home.”

  “Always eager, Sergeant Rice.”

  “We’ll be changing crews at Ramstein, sir, but I’ll make certain they bring on some hot oatmeal for your breakfast. And fresh grapefruit juice and oranges. Did I forget anything?”

  Brighton shook his head and thanked her, then turned on his laptop and started typing everything he could remember from the meeting with Prince Saud. He closed his eyes, trying to remember every word. Then he concentrated on the chaos he had witnessed. Firefall? What was a Firefall? What was going on?

  He had witnessed something important, but he did not understand.

  It was a six-hour flight to Ramstein where they would refuel and change pilots for the long flight back to the United States. As the aircraft approached the Mediterranean Sea, the air became heavy with humidity and haze. Looking down, Brighton could see a solid cloud layer forming beneath him, and ahead there were growing lines of thunderstorms, huge angry monsters reaching up to sixty-thousand feet. The shadows from the thunderstorm cells cast purple, gray and blue hues across the lower layers of white. He saw the first bolt of lightning flash from one of the cells. He knew the small jet would have to weave its way between the storm cells and the pilot inside him wanted to climb into the cockpit and push one of the young captains aside. Fighting the temptation, he turned back to his work.

  Behind him, his two aides fell asleep while the security officer stared out his window on the other side of the cabin. Another flash of lightning lit up the interior of the cabin and the security officer grabbed his armrest in a death grip. Brighton felt the aircraft begin to climb, trying to get a little higher to get over the storms, then turn a few degrees to the north.

  Closing his eyes, he leaned back in his chair.

  He thought of the stark-raving terror that had fallen across the crown prince’s face, the guards milling in confusion around him, the tension in their voices, their weapons and radios, their determined urgency as they had pulled the prince away.

  He knew it was likely he would never know what had happened today. The flow of information out of the kingdom was extremely tightly controlled. And the doings of the royal family of the House of Saud was the most highly guarded secret of them all. Personal informa
tion was completely nonexistent. He knew there would be nothing in the press, nothing over the wires, nothing in any intelligence reports.

  But something had happened, something dangerous and deadly. He knew it, he felt it somewhere deep in his bones. He thought of the warnings the prince had given, the most frank and disheartening conversation with a world leader he had ever had, then sat back and shivered from a fear he didn’t understand.

  EIGHT

  Prince al-Rahman stood at the window of his Dhahran penthouse atop the Royal Saudi Oil company headquarters and gazed out on the ports of the city. The office was an enormous room filled with leather and rare woods from the far corners of the world. Racks of various game animals hung on the wall, some of them legal, most of them not, many of them endangered African animals shot by the Prince himself. He was good with a knife and he was good with a gun, the blood of his warrior ancestors running thick through his veins. He loved to track game, he was good at it, and he loved to kill. He loved to butcher his meat—gutting the animal and smelling the blood—there was something about it that was appealing to him. Like his Bedouin ancestors, he hungered to hunt though he never brought the meat home, but left it on the prairie for other scavengers to feed.

  To Al-Rahman’s right, a large plaque hung on the wall that was engraved with words from the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, sometimes called the Covenant of Hamas:

  “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it . . . .”

  . . . .

  “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslem, O Abdulla, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”

  . . . .

  [S]o-called peaceful solutions and international conferences . . . are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.

  . . . .

  There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.

  The prince loved the words from the Covenant. They inspired him by reminding him of his comrade’s convictions to improving the world through the spread of jihad.

  As for himself, his battle was anything but a holy war. Indeed, it was very unholy, he would freely admit. He was not into God or religion, leaving such concerns to other men.

  Al-Rahman stood at the floor-to-ceiling window. His younger brothers stood behind him, letting him think. The setting sun cast long shadows across the city, casting the office in a natural glow. He peered out the window to where the gray-blue waters of the Persian Gulf glimmered in the setting sun. The city was busy, the port alive and bustling with men, equipment and machines. Enormous oil tankers moved toward the sea docks where they would take on their loads of rich Saudi crude. After filling their enormous holds, the tankers would turn for various ports in the West and East where the Saudi oil would help to quench the insatiable thirst for energy that drove the economic machines of the world. Prince al-Rahman glanced down and imagined the reservoirs of oil that lie ten thousand feet under his feet, huge underground pools that stretched a hundred miles in every direction. A quarter of the world’s known oil supply lay under the Arabian sands; four hundred trillion dollars worth of underground liquid gold. And the oil guaranteed not only the wealth of the Royal Saudi family, but the wealth of their subjects, providing each Saudi citizen with one of the highest standards of living in the world. For generations ahead, their wealth and well-being was assured.

  But not if . . . But not if . . . .

  The prince shuddered in anger and raised his eyes to the coast.

  Once loaded with oil, the tankers would steam out to sea, passing huge cargo ships on their way to Saudi ports. Al-Rahman turned to the docks on the east side of the city and watched the multicolored container ships unloading their wares; luxury cars, electronics, food, soda, clothing, frozen meat, furniture, steel, plastics, wood and cables, heavy equipment, office supplies, golf clubs and boats, cotton balls, medicine, cement, and scientific equipment. The list of imports was as long as the docks that paralleled the sea, for his nation imported almost everything they needed to survive. He was reminded again that this was where the cycle was complete. Oil for cash. Cold cash for things. Oil revenues in exchange for the beautiful things of the world.

  The kingdom was in order. There was peace and prosperity. His subjects were well-fed and happy. It was as it should be.

  So why did his idiot father insist on screwing it up?

  He turned quickly and examined his two younger brothers, weak men whose only assets were that they always did what he told them to do: two evil and cold-hearted babies who hated the thought of losing their power almost as much as he.

  He studied their faces; twentyish, handsome, identical dark hair and mustaches, fine teeth and round shoulders. Yet they were so needy, so dependent, it was almost comical. Neither of his younger brothers had worked a day in their lives and it disgusted Al-Rahman that they were so incapable of taking care of themselves. They didn’t know how to drive, how to cook, or even how to make their own beds. They hardly knew how to get dressed without their valets selecting their clothes and neither could draw a bath without screaming in frustration when the water flowed too hot or too cold. And they certainly didn’t know how to fight, that’s what their bodyguards were for, though they seemed to fight and scream at each other at the drop of a hat.

  Still, Al-Rahman had learned his younger brothers weren’t entirely stupid. Indeed, they had proven that they were capable of learning if they were motivated enough. And the plans of their father had motivated them now.

  “Are you here alone?” Al-Rahman asked the younger of the brothers.

  The youngest prince had recently taken to traveling with a young woman he had met in Greece, dragging her around like a security blanket. It seemed she was always around, lurking in the next room and Al-Rahman didn’t like it. He would have to get rid of her soon.

  His youngest brother snorted. “Of course I’m alone. I’m not stupid,” he replied.

  Al-Rahman eyed him with a cold-hearted smile. Yes, he was stupid. And when he started a sentence with “Of course,” one couldn’t presume that was necessarily what he meant.

  Al-Rahman turned away from the window and sat down at his gold-accented, mahogany desk. His brothers watched him carefully, sitting on the edge of their seats. Al-Rahman lit a cigarette while they waited, took a long drag, then leaned back and held the smoke in his lungs.

  The older prince smiled almost sadly. Sometimes he wished his brothers could be more like him. But they weren’t. Motivated by short-term pleasure and money, they couldn’t see beyond the next day. So he would use them, then kill them. It was the order of things.

  Al-Rahman glanced at his cigarette, letting the smoke drift from his nose. He bit on his lip, feeling a piece of stray tobacco there. “Did you show her your face like I told you?”

  “Yes, brother, I did.”

  “And what was her reaction?”

  The younger prince shot an anxious look toward his brother. “I’m not certain. It happened pretty quickly.”

  “Did she die quietly?” he demanded. “Did she say anything?”

  The younger brother lit his own cigarette and pulled a nervous drag. “She said something . . . I don’t know, something about Allah and the kingdom.”

  Al-Rahman smiled. That sounded like Tala, always praising Allah. “All right, brothers,” he concluded, “you did a good job. That will be all for now.” Finished with them, he wanted them out of the room.

  The two princes stood up together. The youngest one turned for the door, then glanced back to Al-Rahman. “And Crown Prince Saud?” he wondered quickly.

  Al-Rahman waved an impatient hand. “That is not your concern.”

  The younger prince stared at his brother. “You know our father, the king, will figure this out. That will not be a good thing. We have to be ready to d
efend ourselves.”

  “The king is a coward,” Al-Rahman shot back. “He will not do anything.”

  “But he still holds great power . . . .”

  “Which is exactly my point! He holds to the same power that he wants to rip from our hands! He plans to dismantle our kingdom and turn it over to them.” Abdullah shot an angry hand toward the west. “But does he pay the price of his decision? Of course not! We do! He waits until he grows old, enjoying a life of great ease, then commands his oldest son to take our kingdom apart. But I will not allow it.” Al-Rahman cursed. “I swear that on his grave! It is he who betrays us! He is disloyal to Mohammad, and disloyal to me! He has been planning our destruction since before we were born!”

  The older prince slapped both hands on the table, then pointed a finger at the younger men. “Remember this, my brothers,” he hissed a final time. “We are trying to save the kingdom. That is all that we do. We are trying to save the kingdom from this selfish king, save it from his stupid son!”

  The youngest prince lowered his head in subjection as he backed toward the door.

  • • •

  The door swung close behind them and Al-Rahman touched a button on his desk to lock it. Seconds later, a side door to his office swung back. The old man stepped into the office. He walked painfully, shuffling between the chrome handles of a walker and it seemed to take him forever to make his way to the couch. He sat down wearily, then looked at the prince.

  The old man’s skin was so thin and waxy, he almost looked dead. Al-Rahman noted the sick eyes and hollow face then glanced to the side door that led to a private study, knowing the old man’s doctor was waiting there. The old man coughed deeply, bringing up the collected phlegm from his chest.

  Al-Rahman waited for him to spit, then reported. “They are dead,” he announced.