The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [52]
Turki worked out a strategy that would minimize casualties and damage to the holy shrine. The first priority was intelligence, and for that he called on the bin Ladens. The brothers had maps and electrical layouts and all the technical information about the mosque that would be critical for the assault that Turki was contemplating.
Salem bin Laden, the oldest of the brothers and the head of the clan, arrived on the hood of a car brandishing a machine gun. Salem was a wonderful character, so much the opposite of his pious, remote, and taciturn father. He was known throughout the Kingdom for his bravado and his nutty humor, traits that endeared him to the king, who loved him despite the practical jokes that Salem sometimes played on him. A daredevil pilot, Salem would buzz the ruler’s desert camp and carry on such antics in the sky that the king eventually banned him from flying.* Once, according to family legend, Salem had a hemorrhoid operation, and he had a videotape of the procedure sent to the king. In this stoic culture, few people—perhaps no one else—exercised such rough liberties.
Oteibi and his followers had control of the mosque’s public address system, and they were using this opportunity to broadcast their message to the world. Despite the government’s efforts to marginalize the insurgents as religious fanatics upset by the spread of video games and football, Oteibi’s brazen demands echoed through the streets of Mecca, electrifying the coffee houses and sheesha bars of the Kingdom.
Oteibi insisted on the adoption of Islamic, non-Western values and the rupture of diplomatic relations with Western countries, thus rolling back the changes that had opened the society to modernity. The Saudi Arabia these men wanted to create would be radically isolated. The royal family would be thrown out of power, and there would be a full accounting of the money that they had taken from the Saudi people. Not only the king but also the ulema who countenanced his rule would be denounced as sinful and unjust. Oil exports to the United States would be cut off, and all foreign civilian and military experts would be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula. These demands foreshadowed those that Osama bin Laden would make fifteen years later.
BY FRIDAY, the fourth day of the siege, Saudi forces had regained the upper stories of the Grand Mosque and two of the minarets. Battles flared in the covered corridors surrounding the Kaaba, and the stench of death clouded the air. The bodies of dead rebels had been mutilated—their faces shot off by female insurgents—to keep them from being identified. One of the bodies government troops recovered more or less intact was that of Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, the purported Mahdi, whose jaw was blown away. But even the death of the Mahdi did not put an end to the rebellion.
Using maps of the compound provided by Salem, Turki oversaw a series of reconnaissance probes by Special Security Forces, who slipped in and out among the hundred doors, retrieving bodies of fallen soldiers. But Turki wanted to see for himself. He exchanged his ministerial robes for the khaki uniform of an ordinary soldier; then he and a handful of men, including his brother, Prince Saud, and Salem bin Laden, entered the holy mosque.
The mosque’s lengthy arcades and grand plaza were eerily vacant. Turki and his companions discovered that the main body of rebels had taken refuge in the warren of underground prayer rooms carved into the lava that underlay the great courtyard. The subterranean hive that the rebels now occupied was easily defended. The government had no idea how long the insurgents could hold out on the dates and water they had cached in the storerooms; nor was there any possibility of an assault upon this labyrinth, which offered infinite opportunities for ambush. Thousands of soldiers and an unknown number of hostages would die. For half an hour, the