Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [63]
Valerie was an aerobics instructor and the wife of an American oil worker. I’d gotten her name from a woman in Riyadh; they had met at a Girl Scout convention in Kuwait. Well, great, come on over, Valerie chirped when I called. A towering blonde with bright blue eyes, fine features, and a southern lilt, she picked me up from the front gate in a Land Rover. Her yellow hair gleamed and bounced, fresh from a hair dryer and unwilted by a head scarf. The bronzed run of flesh from her fingertips to shoulder stretched bare. Outside the gates, back in the real Saudi Arabia, she could have been caned and jailed for any number of sins. But we were in the compound now. I slithered out of my abaya and felt my limbs go suddenly light, as if I had peeled Saudi Arabia itself off my back.
Here in the far stretches of the kingdom, the compound was a hologram of America complete with baseball diamonds, a cheery library stocked with English titles, and lawns sprinkler drenched in defiance of a withering Arabian sun. Smooth, flat streets vein the desert with implacable American nomenclature: Rainbow Road, Golf Course Boulevard, and Prairie View Circle. On the edge of the Persian Gulf, near the hardscrabble towns of chronically disadvantaged Saudi Shiites, the compound cradles the workers of the Saudi Arabian American Oil Company, Saudi Aramco for short, the government-owned corporation trafficking in the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
For decades, thousands of foreigners have hidden behind walls in Saudi Arabia, barricaded against the kingdom’s stringent code of public morals. The compounds boasted smuggled whiskey and bathtub gin, outlawed Christian services, and pools where men and women mingled illegally. Saudi Arabia stayed outside the gates; within, the capitalized West thrummed along. But now, in the summer of 2004, an insurgency battered Saudi Arabia’s expatriate housing compounds and oil facilities. Militants rammed car bombs into apartment blocks, attacked government ministries, and gunned down BBC reporters. It wouldn’t be long before they sawed the head off an American helicopter engineer and stored it in a refrigerator. One bright day in May, they had dragged a dead American oil worker into a schoolyard to preach about the murdered Muslims of Fallujah. The insurgents worked languidly, as if time meant nothing, and everybody was muttering about whether Saudi law enforcement was infiltrated by jihadis. Answers and information were scarce. This is a Saudi problem, inscrutable Saudi officials said, and only Saudis know how to handle it. They droned on about tribes and families, swore that everybody was against terrorism and that, despite appearances, everything was under control. Still the violence kept coming, cracking the calm of desert life and turning the compounds into strategic forts. The walls and guards, once a protection from the cultural nuisance of strict laws, were now a barricade against mayhem. America was fading into armed fortresses, first in Iraq and now in Saudi Arabia.
A few days before I visited Valerie at Aramco, insurgents had stormed the nearby Oasis compound and killed twenty-two people, almost all of them foreigners. The Oasis was an unremarkable warren of palm groves and condominiums under red tile roofs. The gunmen stalked the grounds hunting for non-Muslims, and spared the infidels no mercy. An Italian and a Swede were butchered, their throats cut like animals. Others were shot dead. When they tired of slaughtering nonbelievers, the insurgents simply scrambled up an artificial waterfall, clambered over the back wall, and evaporated. This should have been impossible. Eight hundred Saudi commandos ringed the walls. Had security forces helped them slip away? There were other questions, too—disputes over how many men had been involved, things that gave the distinct impression that Saudi officials knew more than they said, that there was a deeper, hidden truth even more frightening