Countdown to Terror

Chapter Nine

The Gent took a direct British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Jeddah, leaving at 21:30 hours. The flight was comfortable, and he slept most of the six hours thirty minutes, arriving at King Abdulaziz International Airport at 06:20 the following morning. After clearing passport control, a customary search was made of his luggage. This could take some time, he thought, as each item of clothing in his first bag was unceremoniously unfolded, and he was becoming alarmed at the intensity of the search when fortunately the next officer along found something of great interest in a package he was searching and his own was passed over. Entering the arrivals hall, he was warmly welcomed by Gus MacDonald, the construction manager, who grabbed one of the cases and led the way from the air-conditioned arrivals hall through the automatic doors leading outside, which was like walking into a furnace. The air burned his throat. He was relieved that Gus had the air-conditioning system turned to as cold as possible in the Toyota Estate for the journey downtown. The company had rented two villas in the Bani Malik district, not far from the Jeddah Marriott Hotel on the corner of Palestine Road and King Fahad Street. Gus and half a dozen other managers had one, and more engineers were quartered next door.

It was Friday, the day of prayers and the one day of the week that the men did not have to work. To a background of calls to prayers from the local mosque, introductions were made. To great delight, he produced from his unsearched suitcase six packs of Danish bacon, which were seized immediately as it was time for breakfast. He was lucky: had a more detailed search been made at the airport, the bacon would have been confiscated. Later in the day most of the men drove north out of the city to Jeddah beach, beyond the creek, where they could relax and top up their tans away from the attentions of the patrolling religious police who would beat people with bamboo sticks for displaying too much flesh. Some of the men would swim or snorkel off the reef, where the colours of the coral and myriad of fish were an amazing sight to behold. This left time for Gus to discuss some of his more pressing issues.

Moving into Gus’s office, the Gent was amazed to see an old fax machine.

‘Gus,’ he remarked, ‘that thing gathering dust over there must be over twenty years old by now, surely, and be classed as an antique! Is it worth much? Does it still work, even?’

‘Ye may jest, young man, but I had to use it only last week for correspondence with a construction site in Africa, where although they do have an old computer in the office it had broken down. There is a bit of a story to this. We had three offices in the Kingdom (Saudi Arabia) back then: this one in Jeddah, one in the Capital Riyadh, and another in Al-Khobar over in the East on the Persian Gulf. We could not trust the postal service, so everything had to be sent by courier service. It cost us tens of thousands each year, then one day we got this new whippersnapper young accountant, who explained that the new phase-three fax machines were becoming standard and were reliable. He wanted to buy three of them, at a cost of nearly four thousand pounds each at the time to put one in each office. Took a bit of convincing with corporate Head Office, I can tell you, but ended up saving us thousands over the years.’

The Gent was impressed. ‘There’s technology for you. Fantastic when it works, eh!’

Gus put the coffee on and they got down to business. Apart from the recruitment problems in general, Gus had a few issues to discuss, not least having two engineers in jail on charges of selling Sid (Siddiqui – the meaning in Arabic was my friend, an alcoholic spirit often illegally distilled by ex-pat chemists). The Gent offered to approach the Embassy for their assistance in dealing with the legal process of the imprisoned men.

They talked about cash flow and how long it took Head Office to respond to his requests for funds to be transferred. Were they aware of the number of days to reach the local branch in Jeddah after routing through the corporate office? An hour was spent on arranging site visits, at two of which he was to pretend to be an accountant visiting from the corporate office, and could they have a payment now please? The usual reply being, “The Sheik is not in today”.