The Fist of God Page 10

  Life had been easy and elegant for the British community in Baghdad in the fifties. There was membership in the Man-sour Club and in the Alwiya Club, with its swimming pool, tennis courts, and squash court, where officers of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the embassy would meet to play, swim, lounge, or take cool drinks at the bar.

  He could remember Fatima, their dada or nanny, a plump gentle girl from an up-country village whose wages were hoarded to make her a dowry so that she could marry a well-set-up young man when she went back to her tribe. He used to play on the lawn with Fatima until they went to collect Mike from Miss Saywell’s school.

  Before each boy was three, he was bilingual in English and Arabic, learning the latter from Fatima or the gardener or the cook. Mike was especially quick at the language, and as their father was a keen admirer of Arab culture, the house was often full of his Iraqi friends.

  Arabs tend to love small children anyway, showing far more patience with them than Europeans, and when Mike would dart about the lawn with his black hair and dark eyes, running free in the white dish-dash and chattering in Arabic, his father’s Iraqi friends would laugh with pleasure and shout:

  “But Nigel, he’s more like one of us!”

  There were outings on the weekends to watch the Royal Harithiya Hunt, a sort of English foxhunt transported to the Middle East, which hunted jackals under the mastership of the municipal architect Philip Hirst, with a “mutton grab” of kuzi and vegetables for all afterward. And there were wonderful picnics down the river on Pig Island, set in the middle of the slow-moving Tigris which bisected the city.

  After two years Terry had followed Mike to Miss Saywell’s kindergarten, but because he was so gifted they had gone on together to the Foundation Prep School, run by Mr. Hartley, at the same time.

  He had been six and his brother eight when they turned up for their first day at Tasisiya, which contained some English boys but also Iraqi lads of upper-class parents.

  By then, there had already been one coup d’état in Iraq. The boy king and Nuri as Said had been slaughtered and the nee-Communist General Kassem had taken absolute power. Though the two young English boys were unaware of it all, their parents and the English community were becoming worried.

  Favoring the Iraq Communist Party, Kassem was carrying out a vicious pogrom against the nationalist Ba’ath Party members, who in turn tried to assassinate the general. One of those in the group that failed to machine-gun the dictator was a young firebrand called Saddam Hussein.

  On his first day at school Terry had found himself surrounded by a group of Iraqi boys.

  “He’s a grub,” said one. Terry began to cry.

  “I’m not a grub,” he sniffled.

  “Yes, you are,” said the tallest boy. “You’re fat and white, with funny hair. You look like a grub. Grub, grub, grub.”

  Then they all took up the chant. Mike appeared from behind him. Of course, they were all talking Arabic.

  “Do not call my brother a grub,” he warned.

  “Your brother? He doesn’t look like your brother. But he does look like a grub.”

  The use of the clenched fist is not part of Arab culture. In fact, it is alien to most cultures, except in certain parts of the Far East. Even south of the Sahara the closed fist is not a traditional weapon. Black men from Africa and their descendants had to be taught to bunch the fist and throw a punch; then they became the best in the world at it. The closed-fist punch is very much a western Mediterranean and particularly Anglo-Saxon tradition.

  Mike Martin’s right-hand punch landed full on the jaw of the chief Terry-baiter and knocked him flat.

  The boy was not so much hurt as surprised. But no one ever called Terry a grub again.

  Surprisingly, Mike and the Iraqi boy then became the best of friends. Throughout their prep school years, they were inseparable. The tall boy’s name was Hassan Rahmani. The third member of Mike’s gang was Abdelkarim Badri, who had a younger brother, Osman, the same age as Terry. So Terry and Osman became friends as well, which was useful because Badri Senior was often to be found at their parents’ house. He was a doctor, and the Martins were happy to have him as their family physician. It was he who helped Mike and Terry Martin through the usual childhood ailments of measles, mumps, and chicken pox.

  Abdelkarim, the older Badri boy, Terry recalled, was fascinated by poetry, his head always buried in a book of the English poets, and he won prizes for poetry reading even when he was up against the English boys. Osman, the younger one, was good at mathematics and said he wanted to be an engineer or an architect one day and build beautiful things. Terry sat in his pew on that warm evening in 1990 and wondered what had happened to them all.

  While they studied at Tasisiya, things around them in Iraq were changing. Four years after he came to power by murdering the King, Kassem himself was toppled and butchered by an Army that had become worried by his flirtation with Communism. There followed eleven months of rule shared between the Army and the Ba’ath Party, during which the Ba’athists took savage revenge on their former persecutors, the Communists.

  Then the Army ousted the Ba’ath, pushing its members once again into exile, and ruled alone until 1968.

  But in 1966, at the age of thirteen, Mike had been sent to complete his education at an English public school called Haileybury. Terry duly followed in 1968. In late June that summer, his parents took him over to England so they could all spend the long vacation together there before Terry joined Mike at school. That way they missed by chance the two coups, on July 14 and 30, that toppled the Army and swept the Ba’ath Party to power under President Bakr, with a vice-president called Saddam Hussein.

  Nigel Martin had suspected something was coming and had made his plans. He left the IPC and joined a British-based oil company called Burmah Oil, and after packing up the family’s affairs in Baghdad, he settled the family outside Hertford, from where he could commute daily to London and his new job.

  Nigel Martin became a keen golfer, and on weekends his sons would often act as caddies when he played with a fellow executive from Burmah Oil, a certain Mr. Denis Thatcher, whose wife was quite interested in politics.

  Terry loved Haileybury, which was then under the head-mastership of William Stewart; both boys were in Melvill House, whose housemaster then was Richard Rhodes-James. Predictably, Terry turned out to be the scholar and Mike the athlete. Scorning having a go at a place in university, Mike announced early that he wanted to make a career in the Army. It was a decision with which Mr. Rhodes-James was happy to agree. If Mike’s protective attitude toward his shorter and chubbier brother had begun at Mr.

  Hartley’s school in Baghdad, it was confirmed at Haileybury, as was the younger boy’s adoration of his sibling.

  Terry Martin left the darkened church when the choir practice ended, walked across Trafalgar Square, and caught a bus to Bayswater, where he and Hilary shared a flat. As he passed up Park Lane, he thought back to the school years with Mike. And now, by being stupid when he should have kept his mouth shut, he had caused his brother to be sent into occupied Kuwait. He felt close to tears with worry and frustration.

  He left the bus and scurried down Chepstow Gardens. Hilary, who had been away for three days on business, should be back. He hoped so; he needed to be comforted. When he let himself in, he called out and heard with joy the answering voice from the sitting room.

  He entered the room and blurted out the stupid thing he had done. Then he felt himself enfolded in the warm, comforting embrace of the kind, gentle stockbroker with whom he shared his life.

  Mike Martin had spent two days with the Head of Station in Riyadh, a station that had now been beefed up with the addition of two more men from Century.

  The Riyadh station normally works out of the embassy, and since Saudi Arabia is regarded, as a most friendly country to British interests, it has never been regarded as a “hard” posting, requiring a large staff and complex facilities. But the ten-day-old crisis in the Gulf had change
d things.

  The newly created Coalition of Western and Arab nations adamantly opposed to Iraq’s continued occupation of Kuwait already had two appointed co-commanders-in-chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf of the United States and Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a forty-four-year-old professional soldier, trained in the States and at Sandhurst in England, a nephew of the King, and son of Defense Minister Prince Sultan.

  Prince Khaled, in response to the British request, had been as gracious as usual, and with remarkable speed a large detached villa had been acquired on the outskirts of the city for the British embassy to rent.

  Technicians from London were installing receivers and transmitters with their inevitable encryption machines for secure usage, and the place was about to become the headquarters of the British Secret Service for the duration of the emergency. Somewhere across town, the Americans were doing much the same for the CIA, which clearly intended to have a very major presence. The animus that would later develop between the senior brass of the U.S. armed forces and the civilians of the Agency had not yet begun.

  In the interim, Mike Martin had stayed at the private house of the Station Head, Julian Gray. Both men agreed there would be no advantage in Martin being seen by anyone in the embassy. The charming Mrs.

  Gray, a career wife, had been his hostess and never dreamt of asking who he was or what he was doing in Saudi Arabia. Martin spoke no Arabic to the Saudi staff, just accepted the offered coffee with a smile and a thank you in English.

  On the evening of the second day, Gray was giving Martin his final briefing. They seemed to have covered everything they could, at least from Riyadh.

  “You’ll be flying to Dhahran tomorrow morning. Civilian flight of Saudia. They’ve stopped running direct into Khafji. You’ll be met. The Firm has set up a dispatcher in Khafji; he’ll meet you and run you north.

  Actually, I think he’s ex-regiment. Sparky Low—do you know him?”

  “I know him,” said Martin.

  “He’s got all the things you said you needed. And he’s found a young Kuwaiti pilot you might like to talk to. He’ll be getting from us all the latest pictures from the American satellites showing the border area and the main concentrations of Iraqi troops to avoid, plus anything else we get. Now, lastly, these pictures have just come in from London.”

  He spread a row of large, glossy pictures out on the dining table.

  “Saddam doesn’t seem to have appointed an Iraqi Governor-General yet; he’s still trying to put together an administration of Kuwaiti quislings and getting nowhere. Even the Kuwaiti opposition won’t play ball.

  But it seems there’s already quite a Secret Police presence there. This one here seems to be the local AMAM chief, name of Colonel Sabaawi, quite a bastard. His boss in Baghdad, who may visit, is the head of the Amn-al-Amm, Omar Khatib. Here.”

  Martin stared at the face in the photograph: surly, sullen, a mix of cruelty and peasant cunning in the eyes and mouth.

  “His reputation is pretty bloody. Same as his sidekick in Kuwait, Sabaawi. Khatib is about forty-five, comes from Tikrit, a clansman of Saddam himself and a longtime henchman. We don’t know much about Sabaawi, but he’ll be more in evidence.”

  Gray pulled over another photograph.

  “Apart from the AMAM, Baghdad has sent in a team from the Mukhabarat’s Counterintelligence wing, probably to cope with the foreigners and any attempt at espionage or sabotage directed from outside their new conquest. The CI boss is this one here—got a reputation as cunning and nobody’s fool. He may be the one to be careful of.”

  It was August 8. Another C-5 Galaxy was rumbling overhead to land at the nearby military airport, part of the vast American logistical machine that was already in gear and pouring its endless materiel into a nervous, uncomprehending, and extremely traditional Moslem kingdom.

  Mike Martin looked down and stared at the face of Hassan Rahmani.

  It was Steve Laing on the phone again.

  “I don’t want to talk,” said Terry Martin.

  “I think we should, Dr. Martin. Look, you’re worried about your brother, are you not?”

  “Very much.”

  “There’s no need to be, you know. He’s a very tough character, well able to look after himself. He wanted to go, no question of it. We gave him absolute right to turn us down.”

  “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “Try and look at it this way, Doctor. If worse comes to worst, we may have to send a lot of other brothers, husbands, sons, uncles, loved ones out to the Gulf. If there’s anything any of us can do to limit their casualties, shouldn’t we try?”

  “All right. What do you want?”

  “Oh, another lunch, I think. Easier to talk man to man. Do you know the Montcalm Hotel? Say, one o’clock?”

  “Despite the brains, he’s quite an emotional little blighter,” Laing had remarked to Simon Paxman earlier that morning.

  “Good Lord,” said Paxman, like an entomologist who has just been told of an amusing new species discovered under a rock.

  The spymaster and the academic had a quiet booth to themselves—Mr. Costa had seen to it. When the smoked salmon cornets had been served, Laing broached his subject.

  “The fact of the matter is, we may actually be facing a war in the Gulf. Not yet, of course; it will take time to build up the necessary forces. But the Americans have the bit between their teeth. They are absolutely determined, with the complete support of our good lady in Downing Street, to get Saddam Hussein and his thugs out of Kuwait.”

  “Supposing he gets out of his own accord,” suggested Martin.

  “Well, fine, no war needed,” replied Laing, though privately he thought this option might not be so fine after all. There were rumors in the wind that were deeply disturbing and had in fact given rise to his lunch with the Arabist.

  “But if not, we shall just have to go in, under the auspices of the United Nations, and kick him out.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Well, the Americans mainly. We’ll send forces to join them; land, sea, air. We’ve got ships in the Gulf right now, fighters and fighter-bomber squadrons heading south. That sort of thing. Mrs. T is determined we’ll not be seen to be slacking. At the moment it’s just Desert Shield, stopping the bastard from getting any thoughts of moving south and invading Saudi Arabia. But it may come to more than that. You’ve heard of WMD, of course?”

  “Weapons of mass destruction. Of course.”

  “That’s the problem. NBC. Nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical. Privately, our people at Century have been trying to warn the political masters for a couple of years about this sort of thing. Last year the Chief presented a paper, ‘Intelligence in the Nineties.’ Warned that the great threat now, since the end of the cold war, is and will be proliferation. Jumped-up dictators of highly unstable aspect getting hold of seriously high-tech weaponry and then possibly using it. ‘Top marks,’ they all said, ‘jolly good’—then did bugger-all about it. Now, of course, they’re all worried shitless.”

  “He’s got a lot of it, you know: Saddam Hussein,” remarked Martin.

  “That’s the point, my dear fellow. We estimate Saddam has spent fifty billion dollars over the past decade on weapons procurement. That’s why he’s bankrupt—owes fifteen billion to the Kuwaitis, another fifteen to the Saudis, and that’s just for loans made to him during the Iran-Iraq war. He invaded because they refused to write it all off and bung him another thirty billion to get his economy out of trouble.

  “Now, the meat of the problem is that one-third of that fifty billion—an incredible seventeen billion greenbacks—has been spent acquiring WMD or the means to make them.”

  “And the West has woken up at last?”

  “With a vengeance. There’s a hell of an operation going on. Langley’s been told to race around the world to trace every government that’s ever sold anything to Iraq and check out the export permits.

  We’re doing the same.”

 
“Shouldn’t take that long if they all cooperate, and they probably will,” said Martin, as his wing of skate arrived.

  “It’s not that easy,” said Laing. “Although it’s early yet, it’s already clear Saddam’s son-in-law Kamil has set up a damnably clever procurement machine. Hundreds of small dummy companies all over Europe and North, Central, and South America. Buying bits and bobs that didn’t seem to mean much.

  Forging export applications, fudging the details of the product, lying about its end-use, diverting purchases through countries that were on the export certificate as the final destination. But put all the innocent-seeming bits and bobs together, and you can get something really nasty.”

  “We know he’s got gas,” said Martin. “He’s used it on the Kurds and the Iranians at Fao. Phosgene, mustard gas. But I’ve heard there are nerve agents as well. No odor, no visible sign. Lethal and very short-lived.”

  “My dear chap, I knew it. You’re a mine of information.”

  Laing knew all about the gas, but he knew more about flattery.

  “Then there’s anthrax,” said Martin. “He’s been experimenting with that, and maybe pneumonic plague.

  But you know, you can’t just run up these things with a pair of kitchen gloves. You need some very specialized chemical equipment. It should show up on the export licenses.”

  Laing nodded and sighed with frustration.

  “Should, yes. But the investigators are already running into two problems. A wall of obfuscation from some companies, mainly in Germany, and the question of dual-use. Someone ships out a cargo of pesticide—what could be more innocent in a country trying to boost its agricultural production, or so it says. Another company in another country ships a different chemical—same apparent reason, pesticide.

  Then some smart chemist puts them together and bingo—poison gas. Both the suppliers whine, ‘We didn’t know.’ ”