Alec and Brian nodded with appreciation as they saw the Gurkha guards, with their foot-long kukri knives and the Belgian folding automatic weapons, ready for action, lining the street in front of the embassy. They were members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, headquartered in Brunei. These short soldiers were some of the few Nepalese left who still served as part of the British army, a tradition that dated back almost two centuries. Alec had helped train the 2nd Battalion when Whitehall had decided the Gurkhas would protect British embassies in the Gulf. “Silent, ruthless, dangerous little men,” said Alec as the van continued down Government Avenue past the embassy. “They’d give their lives if they had to, to protect the Kutty.”
As soon as they heard the bomb blast, the Station began implementing the response plan for a terrorist action, bypassing the British Embassy, a possible target for a follow-on attack, and moving senior station staff to a clandestine facility off-site.
The Bedford slowed as it turned left onto Isa al Kabeer Avenue, just past the embassy, and headed to a compound two blocks down on the right. As it made the turn, Brian looked out the slit in the backdoor window and saw three Bahraini army Warrior armored vehicles lumbering, black smoke snorting up from their exhaust pipes. The Warriors moved to the front of the Foreign Ministry building across Government Avenue. At the precise second that the Bedford reached the gray metal gate of the Al Mudynah Machine Works compound, the covert home of the backup station, a 15-foot-high gate moved aside. The van dashed forward into the courtyard and then braked hard. Armed men rushed around the vehicle. Seconds behind them, a British army medic in civilian clothes slid open the side door of the van and scrambled inside. He tended to Brian Douglas’s head wound before the station chief got out.
Brian’s number two, Nancy Weldon-Jones, was standing next to the van as he emerged. She flinched as she saw the bandage on his head. “No need to worry, Nance. I’m going to live.” He paused and looked at the asphalt. “Unfortunately, Ian isn’t.” Then he looked up again. “Now, then, what’s the report?”
“I got on to Admiral Adams over at the Navy base,” Nancy said. “There’s dead Brits and Americans, maybe a dozen each. Three times that many in local staff and guest workers. We think it was a truck bomb, probably an RDX mix over ammonium perchlorate.” She offered her arm to Douglas, but he shook his head and stepped forward. She continued her report: “A drive-by shooting followed, just as the rescue workers showed up. Word is that the drive-by shooter was in a Red Crescent wagon. An American Under Secretary for something-or-other was on an upper floor. Of course, the lucky bastard was unharmed. He wasn’t in the lobby café because he had them open up the al Fanar Club on the roof for a private little breakfast with somebody.”
With Alec urging them forward, gun in hand, the station chief and his deputy crossed the yard and went inside the white concrete-block building. “Okay, Nance, but we know first reports are usually wrong. Any claims of responsibility?”
“Not yet. No need, really. There’s no question it’s Bahraini Hezbollah, otherwise known as your friendly Iranian Rev Guards and their lovely Qods Force boys.” Qods Force, or Jerusalem Force, was the covert action arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. “Is London up on secure vid yet?” Douglas asked as he forced himself slowly up the stairs to the station’s backup communications center.
“Up and waiting. You should have the Big Four: the director, her deputy, chief of staff, and…” She smiled. “The ME division chief.”
“Ah, good, what could we do without the ME division chief?” Douglas asked sarcastically. Roddy Touraine, nominally his immediate supervisor, seemed to delight in making Brian’s professional life miserable.
Brian and Nancy made their way through two vault doors to a room within a room, its walls, floor, and ceiling made of heavy see-through plastic. Exhaust fans buzzed loudly in the walls. The “boy in a bubble” room was just large enough for the plastic conference table that filled it. Attached to the far wall was a 42-inch flat screen showing the crisp image of a far more elegant conference room, complete with wood paneling and a china tea service. Just sitting down in her pale blue chair at the head of that table in Vauxhall Cross was Barbara Currier, director of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
As soon as she sat down, the director began the meeting. “Douglas, you look an awful mess. My deepest sympathies about Ian Martin. I will ring up his wife as soon as we are done here. We will, of course, take care of her.” Currier took a cup of tea being offered to her by ME Division Chief Touraine. “Do we understand, Brian, that this is the beginning of an overt destabilization effort directed against Bahrain by the new rulers in Riyadh?”
“I agree it’s unlikely a one-off, Director,” the station chief said as he looked into the camera above the monitor, “unless they had it out for someone specific, perhaps that visiting American dig. No, I would advise Whitehall that this is the start of something, but not in our view inspired by Riyadh. More likely Iranian-inspired and intended to get the little king here to kick out the Americans from their Navy base.”
“Will King Hamad fall for that, Brian?” asked Currier’s chief of staff, Pamela Braithwaite, who had been chief of staff for three directors of SIS.
“Not bloody likely, Pam. They’re a savvy group here. They may be close to the Americans, but they can and do think for themselves.” Douglas leaned back, running his fingers through his unkempt hair and adjusting the bandage. “I think what we have here is the opening of a new terror wave in Bahrain, controlled by Tehran. And remember,” Douglas continued as he glanced at some papers that his deputy slid in front of him, “the Shi’a are in the majority here, even though the king’s government is largely Sunni. Iran has seen that as a potential weakness here for years. Failed every time they tried to exploit it, but haven’t given up.”
Douglas saw his nemesis, SIS Middle East Division Chief Roddy Touraine, lean into the camera’s frame of view. “With all deference to our heroic and, I see, bloodied station chief, I think in the thick of it, as it were, Director, that he overlooks the obvious. This is not an Iranian attack. It comes across the causeway from Saudi. The Riyadh crowd wants to make sure King Hamad doesn’t let the Yanks use this little island as a base for operations against their fledgling little caliphate.”
“Whoever it is, Director,” Douglas responded, his face reddening, “we will give all assistance to the king here, but we shall not be alone in that. The Americans won’t abandon this place. The little Gulf states are all that they have left after the fall of the House of Saud and the creation of Islamyah, coming right after their pullout from Iraq. The Yanks are like sandwich meat spread thin onto the Gulfies between two very big hunks of hostile bread, Iran and Islamyah.”
In London, Barbara Currier shook her head in sadness. “Kicked out of Iran in ’79, politely pushed out of Saudi in ’03, invited to leave Iraq by their Frankenstein in ’06. Then the fall of the al Sauds last year. Now they are just hanging on in the region, with only the little guys to help them: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirates, Oman. And how long can they hang on there?Sic transit gloria imperi. Just ask us.” She paused at a noise coming from the Bahrain end of the conference call. “What was that?”
A long, low rumble shook the bubble room in Bahrain. The exhaust fans seemed to cough. From London, Currier could see on her flat screen that someone who had just entered the room in Bahrain was bending over Brian Douglas, whispering something. Douglas had his hand over the microphone. He spoke briefly to those around him, and then he looked back up at the camera.