49

 

Somewhere in northern Saudi Arabia

They’d left in the dark of night. They’d been riding in trucks through the Arabian desert for the better part of two days, pulling trailers full of horses behind them. But they were nearing their destination and would soon abandon the trucks and mount the horses for a day’s ride to Mecca.

“Tell me again—why are we bringing horses?” one of the men had asked before they set off into the desert. “Why aren’t we just remaining in the trucks as we get to Mecca?”

“Because the leader demands it from us,” said one of the commanders who answered directly to Iran’s president.

“And which leader is that?” asked one of the others, a mercenary who’d been through four previous conflicts in different parts of the world.

“Does it matter?” asked a third. “We’re being paid handsomely, and it’s a just cause.”

“Yeah, but swords? That’s what we ride into Mecca with?” asked a fourth.

“And what are we supposed to do once we get to Mecca?” asked the first mercenary. “Fight the Saudis off with these Zulfiqars? Seriously?”

“Enough,” said the commander. “We’ll know more when we get there. We’ll have what we need. I trust the leader. It will make sense, once we’ve reached our destination.”

Now, as they rode at night so prying eyes would not know of their covert mission, doubts crept into their minds. It certainly seemed like a suicide mission. Take Mecca with nothing more than horses, black flags, and double-edged swords?

It gave them no comfort to hear that a second wave of cavalry would be approaching Mecca from the south, through southern Arabia. “Twice the number of soldiers armed with nothing but swords doesn’t make matters better,” they told each other.

Yet these were loyal, hardened, combat-tested soldiers. They’d been hand-picked by Ahmadian from around the globe for this mission. They would do as they were told and would fight with the tools at hand.

And if things did not go well initially during the fight, they were under no special constraints. They could fade away into the desert. All had already been paid, and they were not conscripted by any single government entity.

What they could not have known was that forces well beyond their understanding swirled around them in many different directions as they drove through the deserts of northern Arabia.

Forces of change were beginning to make their voices heard and their presence known in Arabia and other parts of the world connected to the kingdom.

This was not a simple conflict. Myriad powers were at play and games within games at play. The “black flag” cavalry that would ride into Mecca from the north was simply a chess piece on a grand board.

But the men who drove toward Mecca cared nothing about those things. They just knew they’d been hired for a singular, if psychotic, mission by a religious zealot who also happened to be the elected president of an oil-rich Arab nation.

What might ultimately happen if, by some miracle, they were successful was not something they contemplated. That was someone else’s plan.