Day Of Wrath by Larry Bond Read Free Book Online

covertly with representatives of Israel—either in Washington itself or in an undisclosed neutral capital.
    The Front has developed a plan to assassinate Carleton as soon as he arrives on Saudi soil. They seek the funds necessary to carry out this action.
    Ibrahim turned to the detailed proposal attached to the cover sheet.
    He studied it intently in silence and then nodded. The Radical Islamic Front was a small group—a breakaway faction of the much larger and more loosely organized Hizballah. They were known to have good intelligence sources, and it looked as though they’d scored quite a coup this time.
    The Front’s plan was a clever one—simple, direct, and with only a minimal chance of detection by the Saudi security services.
    And he agreed wholeheartedly with their choice of target.
    He’d followed this American’s activities closely now for a number of months. Carleton had apparently dedicated himself to restarting the perennially stalled Middle East peace process once again.
    The thought of instigating Carleton’s assassination intrigued Ibrahim.
    The man was one of the U.S. State Department’s rising stars, and his official visit would naturally be made under tight security. Killing such a high-ranking diplomat would not only embarrass the Americans and the Saudi security services, it would also make them afraid—unsure of where the next terrorist blow would land. It was also guaranteed to paralyze American policy-making in the region for weeks or months—at least until a new undersecretary was appointed to fill the dead man’s shoes.
    All of which would dovetail rather nicely with his own larger plans, Ibrahim decided.
    He smiled thinly, imagining again the horror that environmental scientists with Persian Gulf Trust grants would feel if they ever learned they shared funding with some of the world’s most ruthless terrorist organizations. Not that they ever would. He had spent most of a lifetime living and working in two very separate worlds—one the world of international business and finance, and the other the armed struggle against Israel and its allies in the West.
    Only a handful of men still living—all of them his most trusted servants knew that Prince Ibrahim al Saud, the chairman of Caraco, was also the hidden financier of international terrorism. For year after year, he had funneled money into carefully selected terrorist operations—always laundering his contributions through a labyrinthine maze of front organizations and other cutouts. And, as other sources of funding for terrorism had dried up, the prince had gathered more and more of the reins of power into his own carefully concealed hands. His word was fast becoming law for terrorist groups as diverse as Hizballah, Hammas, ‘the Radical Islamic Front, Japan’s Red Army, and Colombian’s M19 guerrillas.
    Month in and month out, year in and year out, the cycle continued.
    Proposals for major terror actions percolated their way upward through his networks until they reached his desk. And then orders issuing the necessary funds filtered back down to the men carrying the guns or bombs. Sometimes Ibrahim felt as though he had been fighting his covert war with America, Europe, and Israel forever—that the long, weary struggle stretched from the moment of his birth and would last until his death.
    But he knew that was not so.
    Ibrahim could pinpoint the instant, the very second almost, that his hatred for the West had first flared to life.
    His eyes closed briefly. Even now the memories were painful.
    He had been just seven years old. His father, a farthinking man in many ways, had seen the outside world fast encroaching on Saudi Arabia’s isolation —run by the oceans of oil beneath the Kingdom’s desert sands. Oilmen from Texas, Great Britain, and other Western countries were pouring money into the onceimpoverished land at a fantastic clip—altering age-old patterns of life in the span of just a few years. To prepare his oldest son