The fate of Tehran had — predictably — totally unhinged the regime in Baghdad whose first irrational response to the news from Iran had been to probe across the Iranian border north of Khorramshahr with elements of three armoured brigades, looking for advantage from the old enemy’s misfortune. After forty-eight hours of inconclusive fighting with a much smaller Iranian force a handful of British Army tanks sent north from Abadan had fallen on the flank of the leading Iraqi brigade, prompting the local Iranian defenders to mount a counter attack. Within hours the Iraqi invasion force had been routed, and was retreating in pell-mell confusion and panic, the survivors abandoning at least half their tanks on the eastern, Iranian side of the Arvand River as they melted back into the suburbs of Basra on the west bank. By all accounts there had since been widespread rioting and civil disorder in the city.
Farther north nobody actually knew for sure what was going on in Baghdad; other that was, than in the wake of the ‘disaster’ in the south there had been some sort of ‘palace coup’ and that there was sporadic fighting in the streets involving competing units of the Iraqi Army.
Thomas Barger would have despaired if he had believed it would have helped; but he was not that sort of man. Among his countrymen he was a rare animal, a Middle East ‘expert’, a man who had devoted much of his adult life to developing an affinity with, and an understanding off, that most ephemeral of things; the ‘Arab mind’. There was of course, no such thing as the ‘Arab mind’, any more than there was any such thing as an ‘American’ or a ‘British’ mind; what there was in reality was a regional culture that to most westerners, was as ancient as it was unfathomable. Therein lay the root cause of the majority of ‘western’ misconceptions about Arabia and the Middle East.
The Middle East was a jigsaw of feudal emirates, countries invented by the reckless — and criminally lazy — pens of European diplomats, religious hatreds, ethnic bigotry; an unholy farrago of proxies of past and present colonial overlords. The region had been a powder keg in Ottoman times; and then after the greater part of the World’s known easily extractable oil reserves had been discovered under its deserts and rocky fastnesses in the first half of the twentieth century, East and West had ruthlessly vied for the upper hand, weaponry had poured into the region, unspeakable despots had been propped up, and the region’s multiple fracture lines papered over. It was a miracle the whole Middle East had not imploded after the October War; the trouble was that anybody with eyes in his head could see that the day of reckoning had not been averted, merely delayed.
Today it seemed as if judgment day had not been delayed overlong.
Barger was an oil man, a businessman and he understood that at times like this diplomats were no better than flimflam men. The World had gone to Hell in a hand basket in the last week. The news from Malta had been bad enough — very nearly disastrous, in fact — but at least the British had held on until the Seventh Cavalry, in the shape of the US Navy had belatedly saved the day.
The repulse of the Soviet invasion force at Malta was the last of the good news. Hard on its heels had followed the reports of the atrocities perpetrated by the Irish Republican Army in England. After that who could blame the British for reacting as they had? Worse, in the Middle East the United States’ former clients had noted — with no little alarm and growing despondency — the feebleness and indecision with which the Kennedy Administration had responded and drawn their own lessons; none of which boded well for future Arab-US relations. The irresolution of the American response — bordering on ‘disinterest’ — was in stark contrast to the uncompromisingly belligerent line that the British had adopted following the Soviets’ ‘unilateral employment of a nuclear weapon against a civilian population’ in Tehran.
Every thirty minutes the BBC World Service broke into its normal programming to broadcast an unequivocal statement of intend that began: ‘The Soviet leadership is hereby given notice that any further use of nuclear weapons by it, its allies or its proxies will result in an all out strike by the United Kingdom against the forces of the Soviet Union and any surviving concentrations of population or industry within the former territories of the Soviet Union, or in any territories deemed to now be under Soviet control.’
The ninety second statement went on in a relentlessly similar vein and concluded: ‘RAF bombers stand ready at the end of their runways at four minutes notice to go to war. Other RAF bombers are airborne at this time ready to strike within minutes of the receipt of the order to attack!’
There had been no such unambiguous statement of intent from the Kennedy Administration.
The arrival of two ‘bombed up’ RAF Avro Vulcan V-Bombers and three transport aircraft carrying their spares and service crews at Dhahran yesterday afternoon had sent the Saudi government exactly the sort of signal that it had been waiting in vain for the Kennedy Administration to send it for much of the last week.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Arabian American Oil Company sighed and looked to his companion; whom he knew to be a gifted, westernized example of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s new generation of technocrats who understood exactly what the catastrophic events unfolding six hundred miles to the north portended.
“So,” the younger man remarked dryly in Arabic, subconsciously brushing his immaculately trimmed goatee with his right forefinger, “it seems that the World turns again, my friend?”
The first thing Thomas Barger had done after he jumped onto that rotting, dilapidated pier at Al Khobar in 1937 to set foot in what was then an impoverished, tribal backwater populated with still warring desert tribes, was to attempt to familiarise himself with the terrain and the basic customs of Arabia. The second thing he had done was to set about becoming fluent in Arabic; which over the last quarter of a century he had learned to speak like a native. This was no idle affectation, the Kingdom was his home; four of his children had been born in Saudi Arabia and many of his closest friends and practically all his most trusted lieutenants were Saudis.
“I think we must wait and see, your Excellency.”
The younger man nodded politely.
Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the thirty-three year old Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources whom westerners with no understanding of the Kingdom and little respect for its ancient mores and traditions, casually referred to as ‘Sheik’ Yamani, nodded thoughtfully. Like the older man he understood that regardless of their business, personal, or political agendas — which inevitably were radically different — the situation in Iran and Iraq was profoundly dangerous to absolutely everything they both held dear.
There was a knock at the door and two young men — Saudis on Thomas Barger’s staff entered and placed a coffee jug and cups and saucers on a low table set away from the Aramco CEO’s broad desk.
Presently, Barger and Yamani were alone again.
Today the quietness seemed somehow oppressive with shadows looming over their heads. It was a signature of the times that two such powerful men could feel so insecure on account of unforeseen events over which they had no control taking place many hundreds of miles away.