At Saudi Hotel, Footsteps, Shouts Warned Guests of Possible Air Raid : Alert: Foreigners and Saudi employees knew their drills well and were prepared for any attack.

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia —  Sometime deep in the middle of the night, there was a low, throaty roar of jets lifting off, and then the long silence that followed while a slow drizzle began dripping out of a moonless sky.

In Dhahran, you always listen for the fighters. At King Abdulaziz Air Base, dozens of U.S. military aircraft lift off the runways every day, and the sounds vary from the horrible screech of the mammoth C-5A cargo carriers struggling into the sky to the slow rumble of the troop ferries. But the fighters are what you listen for late at night, waking uneasily to the sound of jet engines in the pre-dawn, waiting for the night they’ll peel off the runway and pick out a course for Baghdad.

This was the night. “This is history in the making,” Col. Ray Davies, 44, told combat pool reporters in central Saudi Arabia. “The first ones took off at 12:50 a.m.,” he said. “It’s absolutely awesome. I mean, the ground shook, and you felt it.”

By the time it was possible to sort out one rumble from another in Dhahran, the telephones were ringing with news that the skies over Iraq were alight with tracer fire. At the hotel which has served as headquarters for media and U.S. military officials in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province since the crisis in the Persian Gulf began more than five months ago, there was the sound of running footsteps and urgent shouts.

“Air raid! Air raid!” men were shouting in the halls as those in their rooms still tried frantically to telephone out. As the civil defense sirens began wailing outside, Saudi officials in the hotel became even more frantic, running from door to door, banging on each and screaming, “Down! Down!”

Then the lights went out. And the shouting got worse.

Everyone knew what to do, from the thin, wisecracking Filipino who restocks the mini-bars to the head of the Pentagon’s Joint Information Bureau. All had drilled together back by the swimming pool on how to don gas masks, how to inject nerve gas antidote into the meaty part of the leg, how to go down into the basement and remain quiet until the threat was over.

All knew that Dhahran had a chance of about a four-minute warning of an incoming Scud missile from Iraq, possibly loaded with deadly chemical weapons, possibly armed only with high explosives to destroy the airfield just next door.

Minutes after the news story of the decade broke, hundreds of reporters were side by side with U.S. and Saudi soldiers in the basement of the hotel, eerily silent as everyone peered anxiously through the windows of their gas masks and tried to feel for any leaks.

There was a few minutes’ respite, time for most journalists to hook up with their networks or type out a quick story before the sirens began screaming again and everyone plunged back into the basement.

A Saudi Information Ministry official said later that there was no indication that Iraq had launched any missiles toward Saudi Arabia.

Elsewhere in Dhahran, citizens who had been stocking up supplies in their bathrooms grabbed their gas masks and locked themselves inside, placing wet towels against the crack under the door.

At Dhahran International Airport, a Saudia Airlines L-1011 scheduled for Jidda, on the Red Sea coast, had already loaded two-thirds of its passengers from a hopelessly crowded terminal when air traffic controllers notified it and a preceding flight to unload the passengers and prepare to get the planes out of Dhahran as soon as possible.

Flight engineer Michael Maguire said the captains of the two flights were radioing urgently around the country to find out the reason, and when no answers came back--simply a terse, “It’s a hold from Jidda”--Maguire said his flight crew began considering trying to take off anyway. They had a pretty good idea what was happening, with the dozens of military refueling planes that had been climbing out of Jidda before their inbound leg to Dhahran.

Many of the passengers on board had waited days to get a flight out, and it was almost within reach. “At times like that you think, we’ll rewrite the rules and let’s get out of this thing,” Maguire said.

The crew in the plane ahead must have had a similar thought. The plane was taxiing rapidly for the runway and was brought to a halt only by a controller’s terse order, he said.

The crew opened up the cabin door, and when the sound of air raid sirens flooded into the cabin, the passengers began panicking.

“We were in the cockpit, and I said, ‘Close the door,’ because things were getting real weird,” Maguire said. “It was as chaotic as you might expect. The sirens were what made the passengers panic so much.”

The L-1011 waited 10 minutes at the runway, engines running, before controllers told the pilots to evacuate the planes and get to a shelter. Maguire and the rest of the crew joined the others in the basement of the nearby hotel. As he was leaving the airport, Saudi F-15 fighter-bombers began lifting off the nearby military runway.

“I saw the fighters taking off, and I said, ‘Go get ‘em, guys. This is it.’ ”

The drizzle stopped with dawn, and Dhahran faced the morning after the war started with an uneasy quiet. Most people stayed indoors. One of six gas mask distribution centers in nearby Al Khubar opened at 4 a.m. and sold 1,200 masks in the next three hours.

The coffee shop at the hotel filled up with people debating why Iraq had apparently launched few or none of its missiles and little of its air force. Did that mean the strike had been an overwhelming success? Or that Iraq was simply waiting--and that death could come whistling in sometime later in the day?