Quiet Saudi Town Now Near Front : Persian Gulf: The seaside oil city of Khafji is an ‘Ellis Island’ for Kuwaiti refugees. It’s also a strategic point for defending troops.

There is the pleasant clatter of teacups, silverware and conversation over lunch. Mursi abu Bakr glides amiably around in the dining room and adjoining lobby, clucking over his guests. How is their health? Have they heard from their families? From the dining room window stretches the Persian Gulf, a motionless plain of iridescent turquoise rolling languidly onto fields of hot, flat sand.

It is a scene of such tranquility that it is hard to imagine that the first Iraqi border guards are less than 9 miles away, that this sleepy seaside oil town could represent Saudi Arabia’s first urban line of defense against an Iraqi invasion.

Khafji, a community that would have barely made it on the map if it weren’t for the Arabian oil companies, has become the Ellis Island of Saudi Arabia for nearly 200,000 refugees from Kuwait and a key strategic defense point for the tens of thousands of American and Arab soldiers streaming into the desert kingdom.

Khafji now has a civil defense plan, of all things. It has sirens set up on loudspeakers and pamphlets for its residents telling them to board the buses that will be waiting in the streets when they hear the sirens.

“We are facing them here, but if any attack happens, we have enough to stop them until more troops come,” Khafji’s governor, Khalid Otaishan, said Sunday. “You see, we are ready. We are not looking for war, but if they start, we are ready for them.”

The governor was flanked by two men with automatic rifles, and outside his compound sat three tanks and an armored personnel carrier. A squad of Saudi soldiers lounged in the sweltering gulf heat under a canopy nearby.

Since Iraqi soldiers pushed into Kuwait on Aug. 2 and began digging in along the Saudi border, Khafji--the main crossing between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia--has been funneling the daily onslaught of evacuees from Kuwait into treatment centers, shepherding them on to larger cities in the kingdom, and waiting to see what would happen next.

Production from the Japanese-Saudi-Kuwaiti-owned Arabian Oil Co.’s huge offshore fields has remained at 300,000 barrels a day, but many oil workers have sent their families out, and oil service companies have drawn contingency plans to shut down their operations and evacuate their employees on a moment’s notice should the Iraqis make the move. Most have already pared their staffs to a minimum, moving as much of their operations as possible to Dhahran or Khobar, a three-hour drive to the south.

“We have to play two games. If nothing happens, we keep doing business. If something does happen, we move south,” said Albert Skiba, a Tucson, Ariz., oil service company manager.

“I don’t think you want to be here if something starts up,” added his partner, Scott Scheid of Newport Beach.

Gov. Otaishan said the Saudis have established a 10,000-unit tent city 25 miles southwest of Khafji in case there is a need to evacuate the city. Refugee centers have been set up in tents, providing water and emergency medical care for evacuees who cross the border broken by heat and exhaustion. For the first two weeks, food supplies for the evacuees ran low.

But on Sunday, with the largest crush of evacuees over, this quiet community of 35,000 (50,000 if you count the surrounding area) was settling back into an uneasy calm. Several hundred who had fled the city had begun moving back, newly confident now that military forces are stationed through northern Saudi Arabia.

Yet, in a community near a former neutral zone in which Kuwaitis and Saudis have long lived as virtual countrymen, the tension has not disappeared with the declining likelihood of an imminent invasion. Now, the refugee center nearest the Kuwaiti border crossing is surrounded by cars, and inside the cars, tense Kuwaitis as well as Saudis with friends in Kuwait dial their cellular telephones. With regular phone service to Kuwait cut since the Iraqi invasion, a car phone near the border is a way of occasionally getting through.

Mohammed Ajami, a Kuwaiti air force air defense captain who fled Kuwait 10 days ago, is keeping track of the resistance inside Kuwait from his Chevrolet Caprice.

According to his reports, the resistance scored a major coup Saturday with a car bomb attack against a makeshift Iraqi military headquarters set up in Kuwait city’s former Hadi Hospital. He also had reports, confirmed by a high-ranking Saudi government official, that Kuwaitis have purchased at least two tanks from disinterested Iraqi soldiers and then blew them up. Looting by some Iraqi soldiers continues, he said.

“It’s something crazy. Everything’s gone in Kuwait,” he said. “The goods, the houses, everything. Just like mean animals come into a flock of sheep.”

At the Khafji Beach Hotel, Abu Bakr is offering his Kuwaiti guests a discount. Two hundred ryals a night for a single instead of the usual 250. Good food, cool drinks. A place to compare notes and try to get news of their families left behind.

One of his patrons, a Kuwaiti who escaped Saturday, was preparing to cross back into Kuwait to rescue his mother and his grandfather. His grandfather, he said, doesn’t want to go. But he figures he’s on his own, trying to do something about it.

“The Iraqis won’t pull out,” he said bitterly. “They’re sitting on a gold mine, and they don’t want to lose it. They’ll take over Kuwait, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to do anything about it. We’ll be Iraqi nationals.”

Abu Bakr brought him another cup of tea. “The first week we were nervous,” he said confidently, “but things are getting better. We will work this the best that we can.”

Outside the hotel, the muezzin from the mosque called the faithful to late afternoon prayers. A camouflage-colored jeep pulled over to the side of the road and four Saudis in fatigues laid down their rifles, got out, turned west and touched their foreheads reverently to the searing asphalt.