Chapter 34

“The Saudi’s have the former gold and diamond mine property in South Africa listed for sale. Look at the price; that’s one hundred dollars an acre,” Vick’s sticky note said.

Vicky and I had several discussions about the mines while we were waiting those few days for the Prince to arrive and then several more after we saw the gold, diamonds and rubies Crown Prince Sultan al-Zahab had acquired to pay for the Chinese weapons.

There was no way that amount of wealth could be extracted from a depleted mine. He could not remove those kinds of things from the royal treasury without a lot of attention that he would not want. Once they were gone he would have no way to replace them.

At the time I was willing to bet the Crown Prince manipulated production to convince the King to close the mine as not being productive enough to pay the costs. This would allow the Prince to divert the production to fund his terrorist ambitions. It all made sense to me the more I thought about it.

The mine property covered six thousand acres, both mines, all mineral rights and what was left of the airport, the short runway close to the mine, and the town including the hotel where I killed the group of them.

I wondered why they wanted to sell now. Then the thought hit me; the Saudi war in Yemen was not going good for them, much worse than the world knew. The factions they were supporting had stalled in their offense because their arch enemy Iran was aggressively supporting the other side.

Iran had sent them missiles and now an occasional missile was falling in the homeland. Oil prices were down so oil revenue was down and the cost of running a proxy war was always high.

Saudi Arabia was a unique country, rich in history. For centuries nomads roamed the desert and ruled by terror, controlling the trade routes and oasis water. Then they were controlled by various European and Asian powers, the Assyrians, Medes, Achaemenids, Romans, Turks, Mongols, the Ottoman dynasty, the French and finally the British.

Then along came more powerful sheikhs with bigger following of cut-throats and forced the nomad tribes to join or die and eventually forced an end to colonial rule and declared a king. To maintain power the King collected taxes, bribes and blackmail to generate revenue that was divided among the nomad tribes.

Then came the massive oil revenue money that flowed in buckets, needing to be divided. The solution to the division of the money and keeping the nomads in line was a process of naming royal princes, princes and other delegations, nominally buying loyalty. This process ate hundreds of billions of dollars. With declining oil revenues and the proxy war, the royal reserves were being depleted at an alarming rate. Then the King died, internal power struggles grew tremendously and became the norm.

Now the kingdom was struggling internally and the heirs to the throne were resorting back to the old ways. Princes and their following were being charged with corruption and other offences that carried long prison terms or the death penalty, some simply disappeared.

It was under this cloud that the power struggle cultivated support for the proxy war as a distraction and to unify. Proxy wars were never won, always ending in stalemates unless you were willing to commit your own troops and overwhelming firepower.

The house of Saud was not going to commit troops. The nomads may have pledged loyalty but there were still deep seated resentments against the house that fighting and dying would bring out.

It had become a quagmire and was eating funding, creating the need to unload anything not needed and a dead mine surely was not needed. They were being sneaky about it by selling it through a third party broker and listed by the original mine name.

Six million was chicken feed if it turned out it could be even a marginal mine and paid its way. Worst case scenario - it could be a hole in the ground. Even a hole in the ground had uses. I had several in mind if it went that way.

Paying for it with some of their own money I had stolen would be a riot. I had Lorrie contact the broker for information. I had Marcy call Jeanna to find someone who could do a survey and geological study of the mine and its continued viability. I called Jake to see if he was interested in surveying the equipment, if it came to that.