The Protocols of Carstairs - Cover

The Protocols of Carstairs

Copyright© 2021 by Ron Dudderie

Chapter 20: All Your Base Are Belong to Us

“Iranian secret service? I didn’t even know that’s a thing.”

“That’s how good we are,” smiled Amina.

“What are you guys called?”

“People still call us the SAVAK, but that was our predecessor until the revolution. I’m with the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

“That rolls off the tongue.”

“Yeah. MI6 is a bit pithier. Would you like to know the Persian name? It’s shorter.”

“God no. But are you telling me I’m now in league with the Iranian government? Because on my international list of bad guys I have to say Iran ranks a little below Nestle and only one step above the Shining Path. Not that I’m not grateful, but...”

“Yes, I understand. Can I just ask: are you personally happy with everything the British government is doing or has ever done, or are you in it for the excitement and the chance to catch some bad guys who might hurt your family?”

“Oh, very much the latter. They’re a bunch of idiots. Even at my agency.”

“Well, same here. I could be at home, making babies or doing some clerical work for the government, or I can be here and do something useful.”

“Not to be disrespectful, but you’re here as a maid who is confined to her room most of the time. You can’t even drive.”

She shrugged.

“Not every assignment is glamourous. I worked in Berlin for two years before this. But this is a shit posting, I’ll admit. Now, you said something about discovering something on Omar’s laptop. We’ve got some time before we have to leave. Want me to have a look at it? Because I assume it’s in Arabic.”

“Can I get a cup of tea first, or is that weird?”

Amina frowned.

“There is a dead body hidden in a closet two rooms down and I am supposed to be doing the afternoon room check. Could it wait until we get out of here?”

“You’re sure you’re leaving? You could just stay and pretend like nothing happened, and pin it on me.”

“Shall we have a look at what you found on the laptop first? You said you suspected Omar of planning some sort of attack.”

“Oh, yes, yes, I have it here. Read this:”

She sat down behind my laptop and skimmed the keylogger file.

“Those characters are Arabic, right?”

“Yes. I should be able to convert them to something legible, but I’ve never had to do that before. Right now it’s just what the keyboard captured, stored in ASCII, I think.”

“Okay ... Let’s see. So he mentions Tabuk, and a camp outside a fort.”

“A fort?”

“There. In the mail to the General. Do you know that General?”

“Nope. No idea.”

“It would be good to know what he typed in Arabic. May I?”

“Sure, this is just a copy of the file.”

And then she did some things, copying the file and changing the extension to see what Open Office would make of it, that I’d never have considered. That moment I realised you can be a bit too old-school. I know about file types and headers and Unicode and UTF-8 and all that, so I saw a mixed document and figured it would take quite a bit of tinkering and downloading some tools to figure out what it all was and convert it. Amina just thought: let’s feed this to a Word Processor, set it to Arabic and see what pops up. She had legible text on screen in two minutes! Now the English text was gone, but we’d already read that.

“What does it say?”

“It’s five pages! Give me a moment...” she said, her eyes darting across the screen.

“Here is Tabuk again.”

“That name has come up before during my investigation. That’s a place up north, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A large city near Jordan. But here he’s referring to a fort. Dhat-al Hajj. And a camp in the desert, half an hour away from the fort.”

I backed up an inch or so, to give her time to read. She opened the logfile again, so she had the English text available as well.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at a line in English.

“Socked. Bypassed. Slithered. Hmm ... A password?”

Omar hadn’t typed anything before that which might indicate a login, but of course a keylogger doesn’t record mouse movements. Then I noticed three forward slashes in front of the words.

“Could that be a location? There’s a website that uses words instead of coordinates. Whatthreewords.com.”

Amina typed the url. The site came up in Arabic and the words yielded no location.

“Pick English. And no spaces between the words.”

Eventually we got a grid, but the map underneath it wouldn’t load.

“Maybe part of it is blocked by the Saudi internet providers?” she suggested.

“Maybe. But that is clearly a valid location. We’ll look at it later. There’s more for you to look at.”

“Yes. I think you should start packing a bag. I have some reading to do.”

“Okay.”

I got out my borrowed suitcase, but she frowned.

“Too big! We are fleeing!”

“I know. But this is ten thousand pounds worth of bespoke suits. They’re coming with me.”

She made a dismissive gesture and kept on reading, while I packed. That took five minutes, because packing up is always easier: you don’t have to think about what you’re bringing, after all.

“Done. What have you learned?”

“That he’s at a fort called Dhat-al Hajj, or in a bedouin camp in the area. And that there’s this big thing that’s supposed to take place during the hajj, which will teach the Jews not to attack Saudi ever again.”

“When did the Jews ever attack Saudi Arabia?”

“According to him last month, when they blew up his mosque and his beloved imam.”

I was about to say: ‘That wasn’t the Jews, that was me’, but there is such a thing as oversharing.

“Right. And what is he planning?”

“It’s not clear, but he’s planning something with a Chinese General.”

“Might not be Chinese. Might be North-Korean. And if North-Koreans are involved, it might be nuclear. That’s about all they have to sell.”

“Okay. Well, that is something I should report to my handler. If anything happens in the Middle East, Iran always gets blamed for it. I’m sure they’d like to know what it is. So let’s team up and see what’s up in Tabuk? You are no longer safe here.”

I sighed.

“I was kinda hoping to go home. Why don’t we just report this and skedaddle?”

“Report it? And then what? How many operatives do you think there are, exactly?”

“Well, presumably my boss can just inform the Saudi government and they can deal with it. My brief was to find out what he’s up to. And now we know. Sort of.”

“Sort of. He’s playing around with nuclear materials in a remote location and you want to leave this to the Saudis?”

“Well, what am I going to do about it?”

“We go there, we gather as much information as we can and then we can decide if we trust our bosses or if we go public. My government has zero influence here, but they won’t mind shouting it from the rooftops. I’ll need to gather a lot more evidence, though. And your government could put pressure on the Saudis, but that will work a whole lot better with some pictures or a recorded confession. This just isn’t enough.”

“So you think the Saudi government basically doesn’t care if one of their own is messing about with nukes?”

“Own of their own. You said it. You have no idea who is supporting Omar. Asim clearly knew something about it. Look, what kind of agent are you, anyway?”

“A tired one. But okay, I suppose we should see this through. Let’s find Tabuk on a map.”

With Amina’s help we found it. Quite easily, in fact. When the name had popped up on the list of terrorists I’d found at Imam Musa’s mosque I had a quick look at Google Maps, but somehow figured it would just be a tiny village. It’s anything but: Tabuk dates back to Ptolemy’s time. Nearby Mount Hasmi is mentioned in pre-Islamic poetry and the whole area is an archeologist’s dream, but even today it’s the heart of a largely deserted region. It’s a sizeable city with a small international airport, but that’s about it. If you’re not in downtown Tabuk, you’re standing in empty, mountainous wasteland.

“I think it’s this,” said Amina, scrolling furiously through Google Earth. “Dhat al-Hajj. A fort on the Hajj route. I think that’s Omar’s base.”

Even on Google maps we could only determine the vague outlines of two or three buildings and some bright lines on the ground, which were presumably dirt roads.

“That’s at least one hundred kilometres from Tabuk. Even if we fly to that airport, it’s quite a trip.”

“We’re not flying! Far too dangerous. We’re driving. There are highways and paved roads all the way to Tabuk. Up to Duba it’s a coastal road and then you go inland. It’s not too bad. And Tabuk isn’t as hot as Mecca or Riyadh. It’s about 700 metres above sea level.”

I checked that with my phone.

“It’s 38 degrees there as we speak. That qualifies as hot, at least to me. But it’s ten degrees less than here. We’ll need an off-road vehicle for that last bit, if we’re looking for a camp. And a lot of gear and supplies, I imagine. And some guns, wouldn’t mind some guns. Hey, where’s Asim’s pistol?”

“In a drawer, I wiped it clean. Let’s leave it there, maybe it gets Omar in trouble if he comes back here and Asim is discovered. We can take your car. The sooner we get going, the better.”

“My car is a saloon car and it’s electric. It can’t possibly make the trip on a single charge. Tabuk is a thousand kilometres from here!”

“Okay, but it’s ready to go now. If we steal a car here, they may start looking for us sooner. Act now, solve problems when they arise. I need to pack some clothes. Meet me in the lobby in ... ten minutes? Oh and dress like a Saudi!”

She didn’t even wait for an answer. As soon as she closed the door behind her I sighed and began to take off my suit. Well, at least I’d be a lot more comfortable in a dishdasha and on slippers.

“Self-driving? Incredible.”

We were driving along the highway from Mecca to Asfan. Eight lanes of flawless asphalt. Amina was fully covered up, except for her eyes. Normally she’d have sat in the back, but K-T had no rear seats. We had both brought along a sports bag with some clothes and essentials, plus every plastic bottle of water we could find and enough KitKat to ... Actually, I don’t know what you’d do with that many KitKats except get diabetes. When I realised how unwieldy it was I had left my red Samsonite with all my lovely suits and various tech junk in the hotel’s luggage room, an area where anyone could stuff their bag in a locker to bridge the gap between check-out and heading to the Jeddah bullet-train. I’d labelled it for the Four Seasons in London care of Mr. R. Carstairs, just in case the hotel one day opened the locker and decided to just ship it there. My sports bag contained little more than some underwear and two shirts, and my laptop.

“Yeah, it’s great like that. And it’s got some gear stashed away. K-T, what kind of weaponry do you have?”

“I have no offensive weapons systems,” answered K-T. That got Amina’s attention!

“No, I mean weapons for me.”

“Operator weapons include one hand pistol plus one hundred rounds of ammunition, one electric stun gun, two morphine syringes, two explosive charges with remote detonators, one collapsable baton, one combat knife, one concealed ice pick.”

“Concealed where?”

“The ice pick is concealed in the car jack handle.”

“It talks!” squealed Amina. “How wonderful! A real spy car! Hello, car? Do you have a sniper rifle?”

“No such item exists in inventory.”

“Oh, what a shame. Martin, do you have one?”

“Would you mind calling me Carstairs?”

“Oh, yes! Sorry. Well?”

“No sniper rifles, no air to ground missiles, no land mines, sorry. Fresh out.”

“Too bad. I’m rated for up to one kilometre. You?”

“What?”

“What are you rated for? Which weapons?”

“Uhm ... small calibre pistols ... uhm ... snow balls with a rock in the centre ... tire irons.”

She giggled.

“Okay, you don’t have to tell me. Now, we need to make a shopping list. Car, can you record a shopping list?”

In response K-T dinged and blanked the large display on the console. A cursor blinked next to a purple circle, which was intended as a bullet point.

“Sniper rifle.”

K-T added it to the list.

“Proper boots for both of us.”

It appeared on the list.

“Binoculars!”

“Binoculars are available in compartment C2,” said K-T, as the bottom half of the screen displayed a wire frame model of the car. An area above the left wheel well turned red. Amina almost chirped from pure joy.

“Yay! What a fantastic car! Standard issue?”

“Not exactly. K-T, how much range is left?”

“Two hundred and seventeen kilometres at current speed.”

“Not nearly enough. Any chargers between us and Tabuk?”

“Unknown. It is assumed there is no charging infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.”

“But what if we find, say, a car park with an outlet?” asked Amina.

“Then we’ll be there for twenty-four hours at least and we still won’t make it to Tabuk. No, this is useless. We’ll have to find a proper car.”

“Why did they give you an electric car?”

“Why indeed ... Anyway, let’s work on that list. Unobtanium, shall we put that on?”

“I don’t know what that is. Oh, food! We’ll need lots of food and water. And a cooler.”

The list grew to about twenty items. That sniper rifle might be a bit of a problem. This wasn’t Kansas or Colorado, where you could just walk into a store and find a display case full of them under a banner that read: ‘School is starting soon! Get geared up!’

“Did you hear about the incident?” asked Amina, after she was done adding items to the list and over the shock of being in a talking car. Let’s not forget it was 2015. Siri and Alexa were already a thing.

“Which incident?”

“At the hajj. This morning. They are saying over a thousand people died in a ... crush?”

“Oh my Lord, really?”

“Yes. My colleagues were talking about it.”

“A thousand people? K-T, can you tune in the BBC World Service?”

She did so silently. A very proper British voice was reading a news bulletin without even a tiny hint of emotion.

“ ... Salah Al-Maskhout, a prominent Libyan Zuwarah militia leader, was reportedly killed in Tripoli by Italian special forces. The EU recently approved military action against people smuggling networks operating out of Libya. Al-Maskhout was suspected of being a key operator in the smuggler rings operating in Libya.”

A tiny cough.

“Saudi authorities estimate the current death toll of the incident which occurred near Mecca this morning during the annual Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj, is between six- and eight hundred people. Local observers believe the actual number may be as high as two thousand. At around eleven a.m. local time a stampede in the city of Mina, where pilgrims stay in a tent city in preparation for their visit to Mount Arafat, crushed several hundreds of people when they were funnelled into a walkway leading towards the pillars that symbolize the devil, at Jamaraat. Eye witnesses say that automated barriers designed to control the crowd had behaved erratically, causing panic and confusion amongst Saudi security officers. Major General Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi interior ministry, said the crush occurred when two large groups of pilgrims converged from different directions on to one street. It is the deadliest incident to occur during the pilgrimage in 25 years.

French president François Hollande will chair the...”

“OH! OH! This is terrible!” gasped Amina. “Those poor people! Eight HUNDRED?! Can you believe it?”

I could. Very much so. Clearly that hadn’t been a filtration system I was looking at. Now that I thought about it, it might very well have been a very basic representation of the walkways and thoroughfares inside Tent City. Those large green blocks along the blue line were likely the train stations. Yup, the more I thought about it ... Barriers behaving erratically, huh? Well well well...

“Is there more? Car, can you find more news about this?” she asked.

“Working. Please hold.”

After a few seconds K-T’s screen showed a web browser. We saw gruesome images of dozens of corpses lined up, with confused soldiers in the background and a man dressed in ihram sheets kneeling next to the body of a woman, holding her hand. Amina breathlessly read the text.

“Ooooh ... oh my God ... Iranians! There were so many Iranians in that crowd! Over eighty! Oh my God ... Nigeria. Chad. Senegal ... They crushed a man in a wheelchair, ooooohhh... ‘dead bodies as far as the eye could see’... ‘Two groups of pilgrims from different sections were accidentally merged together.’ Ha! How could they let that happen! There’s a hajj every year!”

“I’m ah ... sorry to hear that. About your countrymen,” I offered.

Bloody hell, had that really been my handiwork? All I did was click a few buttons on a website!

Amina was quiet for a few seconds and stared out of the window.

“It is terrible. But they are all martyrs now. Dying during the hajj ... Still, that doesn’t make it any less horrible. Have you been to Tent City?”

“Only yesterday. I can well imagine how a stampede might be lethal there. Those tents aren’t made of canvas, they’re some kind of plastic. And there are lots of steel barriers.”

She nodded and was lost in thought for a few minutes. I was glad K-T could drive herself, because I had something to mull over as well. How could I possibly use this in my video if everybody thought it was an accident? I didn’t even have a screen shot of the web interface!

“Warning. We are about to leave my current operational range,” warned K-T after about half an hour. Amina and I had both been quiet, as she was texting and I was looking up car rental stations.

“What does that mean?” asked Amina. K-T answered her directly:

“If we proceed beyond my operational range I will be unable to return to my last known charging location.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I think we can rent a car at King Abdullah city. We should be there in about an hour. I’m struggling a bit with the various rental sites, so maybe you could...”

“And what will we do with this car?” asked Amina.

“Leave it behind.”

“And then what?”

“Get a four wheel drive that runs on petrol and can go off-road.”

“No, I mean: what happens to the car?”

“It can recharge very slowly by absorbing heat, so I imagine it can limp home. Or MI6 can come pick it up.”

“What a shame!”

“Yeah, well ... It’s only a car. We’ll take out everything we might need later on, don’t worry. Though I’m still not sure where I can get you a sniper rifle, or limpet mines or whatever else you think you might need.”

“I just said it would be nice to have. Okay, we’ll find a rental station. Is your Arabic good enough to hire a car?”

“No, not by a long shot. And you’re not even allowed to drive. I’ll pull over when I see a chance to change into Western clothes. You may have to hide in the back for a while.”

We had a one stop shopping experience in a large mall on the outskirts of King Abdullah City, which isn’t so much a city as an economic development zone with about as much history and authenticity as a Spud-u-like. Still, in that one mall I managed to rent a Nissan Navara and stock up on food, water, basic camping supplies, sun cream and even a camera with a six inch telephoto zoom lens. Amina found sturdy boots for both of us (she somehow knew my size), some high end sunglasses and a surprisingly professional long range walkie-talkie set. I mean Handheld Transceiver, sorry. It even had encryption, and a wired headset for hands-free use. I imagine this was not so much intended for children but for construction crews and dock workers. King Abdullah city has a large port and there’s a lot of construction going on. That’s why sturdy shoes and quality outdoor gear were easy to find as well.

Amina bought all that in full burqua, with only her eyes visible. But within the confines of a mall, women are generally allowed to roam without their husbands. As soon as they leave the building without a mahram the religious police will come and bother them, but as long as they are moving from shop to shop and avoid interaction with men they’re fine.

Meanwhile, I had changed into Western clothes and managed to rent that Nissan Navara, a stylish if rather large combination between a four by four and a pick-up truck. I also rented an electric cooler and for once opted for the full insurance package. The Indian guy behind the counter was keen to practice his English on me and somehow believed I worked in the shipping industry. I guess every white guy around here did. We were chatting so much he didn’t seem to register that my documented address was in Riyadh.

Eventually I got the keys, made sure a full spare and all the tools were on board and drove the car away, to another floor of that same parking structure. Just when I was about to start putting all our stuff from K-T into the Navara, Amina showed up pushing a shopping cart with three large paper carrying bags and a dozen three litre water bottles. She stood next to K-T, who opened her side rear door for her. This surprised me, but then I realised K-T had probably observed Amina and decided she could have access in my presence.

“Okay, let’s get what we need from my car and head out.”

“No!” she hissed, without looking at me.

“What?”

“Not here. There may be cameras watching us! We can do it elsewhere.”

“But you can’t drive. I mean, you’re not allowed.”

“The car can drive, yes? It can follow us.”

Oh yeah! Hmmm ... Not my proudest moment. I looked around and did indeed see a white security camera mounted on a wall, looking right at us. I’d have been swapping over guns and explosives in full view of it. Most security footage is never reviewed, but it would still have been a serious risk.

I wouldn’t have minded a bite to eat, but that would take too long. And so I threw on the thobe and the shemagh in a washroom and we ordered fast food to go from a chain I wasn’t familiar with even though it desperately tried to make me think I was. (Kate calls those MockDonalds.)

Even ordering in English was a bit of an ordeal because people weren’t really expecting to hear it, especially from someone dressed like a local, but I pretended to suddenly have a sore throat and left ordering to Amina. As long as I was standing next to her, the Sudanese man who took her order was allowed to communicate with her. I have no preference when it comes to fast food: any burger will do me. I was a bit surprised when I had to pay 198 Riyal. That’s fifty bucks worth of food! Two bulging plastic bags were heaved onto the counter.

“How much did you get? Was there some confusion?” I asked, once we were out of earshot.

“Just supplies. We’ll be travelling for a while,” said Amina, as we passed the sliding doors that led into the parking structure.

“But it will be cold by then.”

“But it will still be food. Anyway, I don’t think you will want warm food where we are going. Now, did you use the bathroom? For ... everything?”

“Oh! Good one!”

She was right, of course. I scurried back into the mall and found a Western style toilet. It wasn’t to my liking but it would be a lot better than squatting behind a rock in the desert, so I took full advantage and remembered to set my watch to privacy mode. As I came back, Amina wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

“K-T, where’s Amina?”

“It is time for Maghrib prayer. She has gone to the mosque. I attempted to notify you, but your watch was set to privacy mode.”

Only then did I register the howling that came through the speakers, even here in the parking structure. No wonder I got such a dirty look from a guard when I turned left at the sliding doors, instead of following him to the mall’s prayer room. I guess I’d become as inured to the calls to prayer as someone who lives under a runway or next to a rail crossing.

“No shit ... She actually believes in that bullcrap,” I muttered, as I sat down in my white thobe and readjusted my shamagh.

“I am unable to parse your statement.”

“That’s fine. Look, I’m going to leave you behind. Our destination is just too far away. I’ll need the gun, the ammo, the grenades ... everything, basically.”

“Most weaponry is concealed behind my interior and exterior body panels. Would you like me to unlock them?”

“Not now. We’ll do it somewhere else. Show me an inventory of everything you have, please.”

“Compiling.”

Ten minutes later Amina came back. By then I’d moved to the Navara.

“Hi. Was it fun?” I said, as she got in.

“Was what fun?”

I tapped my watch.

“Never mind. K-T, follow us. I’ll be looking for a secluded spot to remove your panels.”

“Understood.”

I drove to the exit. Amina and I looked like a Muslim couple, especially in this type of car. The joke wasn’t lost on us.

“We should cover the seats in plastic to complete the illusion,” I remarked, as I adjusted my seat.

“Yes. And we should hang one of those brass pendants with the tassels from the mirror,” grinned Amina.

“I’ll pick one up at a gas station. Do you know, I haven’t been to one of those in months! Okay, here we go.”

The car park didn’t have barriers, because such things are usually free in Saudi. It was there to keep the customers’ cars out of the sun, not to make a buck. I drove around looking for a place to swap over everything from K-T to the Nissan, but Saudi is surprisingly short of secluded places. Probably because it doesn’t have any trees or shrubbery.

“How about there?” said Amina, pointing at a large residential parking lot that was almost empty. “No cameras.”

“It has to be in the shade or I’ll die. It may take a while.”

It took some doing, but eventually we found a construction site that seemed to have been abandoned. King Abdullah city at that time was already turning out to be yet another Saudi boondoggle, a large money pit intended to boost the economy of a country nobody wanted anything to do with except siphon off the oil underneath.

A large harbour remained mostly unused, people weren’t nearly as interested in playing golf as the bored billionaires who had invested in the fabulous golf course had imagined and in those very rare areas where some shops and residents had given it a go, most businesses provided office supplies or services for shipping. Anything else was available from two or three big box retailers. A lot of empty plots were waiting for someone to come along and build something. The area’s greatest ‘get’ was a Mars factory, no doubt lured in by the promise of cheap labor, port access, low taxes and high subsidies.

“Here?” asked Amina.

I slowed and saw an empty concrete shell of a villa that cast a bit of shade. I could even drive into it, as it didn’t have front or rear walls yet.

“Let’s do it.”

It took half an hour to transfer everything from K-T to the Navara. K-T’s body panels came off after she unlocked them, but they were large and unwieldy, and very hot to the touch. I used a towel Amina had bought to hold them, and I was worried if I’d ever get them back on. Amina helped, but mostly kept a lookout. She had asked for a pistol and I’d given her one, because no bloody construction site security guard was going to get me sent back to prison.

The Navara was pretty much ideal for this trip: everything I didn’t want to have exposed to the sun went in the cab, which had storage behind the back seat, and the rest went into the rear cargo area, or whatever that part of a pickup truck is called. I used a tarp and a web lashing to secure it all. Amina had bought rather a lot of camping equipment I hoped never to have to use.

“Okay ... bullets. Check. stun gun. Check. Box of syringes. Check. Explosive charges. Check. Combat knife. Check. Ice pick ... Why the hell not. Satellite phone. Check. Satellite phone charging cable ... Jesus, where’s that bloody ... AMINA! Have you ... Oh, never mind! Uhm ... K-T, is that everything?”

“There is a First Aid kit under the passenger seat.”

“Oh, yeah ... Let’s have that. Anything else?”

“My air compressor unit can be removed.”

“Oh. I don’t think I’ll need that. What’s that for?”

“I can adjust my tyre pressure. Soft tyres help me get across some types of terrain.”

“I’ll chance it. The Navara’s tyres are practically new and there’s a spare. No, I think that’s it. Let’s get you dressed and then we’ll say goodbye.”

I chugged a half litre bottle of water after I’d finally managed to reattach the last door panel. I was sweating like a pig, because even though we were parked in the shade, it was still a very hot day. K-T’s door panels contained electrical components that converted heat into electrical power, so reattaching them meant making sure no sand had gotten into the slots.

“How are you supposed to do this in a crisis?” I asked myself for the fifteenth time.

“Are we ready?” asked Amina, still keeping a lookout on the other side of the building.

 

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT...

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