The Fist of God Read online

  Then he had seen the truck, that beautiful waiting truck. The end of the march and, in terms of human endurance, the end of the line. A hundred yards, eighty, fifty; an end to the all-consuming agony of his body crept nearer and nearer as his numbed legs drove him and the Bergen those last few yards.

  There had been a man sitting in the back of the truck, watching the rain-streaked, pain-wracked face staggering toward him. When the tail-board was ten inches from Martin’s outstretched fingers, the man rapped on the rear of the cab and the truck rolled away. It did not roll an extra hundred yards; it rolled another ten miles. Sparky Low had been the man in the truck.

  “Hi, Mike. Good to see you.”

  That sort of thing takes an awful lot of forgiving.

  “Hi, Sparky. How are things.”

  “Bloody hairy, since you ask.”

  Sparky hauled his nondescript four-wheel-drive jeep out of the parking lot, and in thirty minutes they were clear of Dhahran and heading north. It was two hundred miles up to Khafji, a three-hour run, but after the port of Jubail slipped by to their right, they at least had some privacy. The road was empty. No one had any appetite for a visit to Khafji, a small oil community on the border of Kuwait, now reduced to a ghost town.

  “Refugees still coming over?” asked Martin.

  “Some,” nodded Sparky. “Down to a trickle, though. The main rush has come and gone. Those coming down the main road are mainly women and kids with passes—the Iraqis let them through to get rid of them. Smart enough. If I were running Kuwait, I’d want to get rid of the expatriates too.

  “Some Indians get through—the Iraqis seem to ignore them. Not so smart. The Indians have good information, and I’ve persuaded a couple to turn around and go back with messages for our people.”

  “Have you got the stuff I asked for?”

  “Yep. Gray must have pulled some strings. It arrived in a truck with Saudi markings yesterday. I put it in the spare bedroom. We’ll have dinner tonight with this young Kuwaiti Air Force pilot I told you about.

  He claims he has contacts inside, reliable people who might be useful.”

  Martin grunted. “He doesn’t see my face. Might get shot down.”

  Sparky thought it over. “Right.”

  Sparky Low’s commandeered villa was not half bad, thought Martin. It belonged to an American oil executive from Aramco, which had pulled its man out of there and back to Dhahran.

  Martin knew better than to ask just what Sparky Low was doing in that neck of the woods. It was obvious that he, too, had been “borrowed” by Century House, and his task seemed to be intercepting the refugees filtering south and, if they would talk, debriefing them on what they had seen and heard.

  Khafji was virtually deserted, apart from the Saudi National Guard, who were dug in defensive positions in and around the town. But there were still a few disconsolate Saudis wandering around, and from one stallholder in the market, who could not believe that he actually had a customer, Martin bought the clothes he needed.

  Electric power was still running in Khafji in mid-August, which meant the air conditioning functioned, as did the water pump from the well and the water heater. There was a bath available, but he knew better than to take one.

  He had not washed, shaved, or brushed his teeth for three days. If Mrs. Gray, his hostess back in Riyadh, had noticed the increasing odor, which she certainly had, she was too well bred to mention it.

  For dental hygiene Martin just picked his teeth with a splint of wood after a meal. Sparky Low did not mention it, either, but then, he knew the reason.

  The Kuwaiti officer turned out to be a handsome young man of twenty-six who was consumed with rage at what had been done to his country and was clearly a supporter of the ousted Al Sabah royal dynasty, which was now lodged in a luxury hotel in Taif as guests of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

  He was also bewildered to find that though his host was what he expected—a British officer in civilian casual dress—the third person at the meal appeared to be a fellow Arab but was dressed in a soiled off-white thob with a speckled keffiyeh on his head, one trailing corner tucked across the lower half of his face. Low introduced them.

  “You are really British?” asked the young man in surprise. It was explained to him why Martin was dressed the way he was and why he kept his face covered. Captain Khaled Al-Khalifa nodded.

  “My apologies, Major. Of course I understand.”

  The captain’s story was clear and straightforward. He had been called at his home on the evening of August 1 and told to report to Ahmadi air base, where he was stationed. Through the night, he and his fellow officers had listened to radio reports of the invasion of their country from the north. By dawn, his squadron of Skyhawk fighters had been fueled, armed, and ready for takeoff. The American Skyhawk, though by no means a modern fighter, could still prove quite useful in a ground attack. It would never be any match for the Iraqi MiG 23, 25, or 29 or the French-built Mirage, but fortunately, on his one combat mission to date, he had never met any.

  He had found his targets in the northern suburbs of Kuwait City just after dawn.

  “I got one of their tanks with my rockets,” he explained excitedly. “I know, because I saw it brew. Then I’d only the cannon left, so I went for the trucks behind. Got the first one—it swerved into a ditch and rolled over. Then I was out of ammo, so I flew back. But over Ahmadi, the control tower told us to head south for the border and save the planes. I had just enough fuel to make Dhahran.

  “We got over sixty of our aircraft out, you know. Skyhawks, Mirages, and the British Hawk trainers.

  Plus Gazelles, Puma and Super-Puma helicopters. Now I’ll fight from here and go back when we are liberated. When do you think the attack will start?”

  Sparky Low smiled cautiously. The boy was so blissfully certain.

  “Not yet, I’m afraid. You must be patient. There is preparatory work to be done. Tell us about your father.”

  The pilot’s father, it seemed, was an extremely wealthy merchant, a friend of the royal family and a power in the land.

  “Will he favor the invasion forces?” asked Low.

  The young Al-Khalifa was incensed.

  “Never, never! He will do anything he can to assist the liberation!” He turned to the dark eyes above the checkered cloth. “Will you see my father? You can rely on him.”

  “Possibly,” said Martin.

  “Will you give him a message from me?”

  He wrote for several minutes on a sheet of paper and gave it to Martin. When he had driven back to Dhahran, Martin burned the sheet in an ashtray. He could carry nothing incriminating into Kuwait City.

  On the following morning, he and Low packed the gear he had asked for into the rear of the jeep, and they drove south again as far as Manifah, then turned west along the Tapline Road, which shadows the Iraqi border all the way across Saudi Arabia. It was called Tapline because TAP stands for Trans Arabian Pipeline, and the road serviced the pipeline carrying so much Saudi crude to the west.

  Later, the Tapline Road would become the main transport artery for the biggest military land armada ever seen, as 400,000 American, 70,000 British, 10,000 French, and 200,000 Saudi and other Arab soldiers massed for the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait from the south. But that day it was empty.

  A few miles along it, the jeep turned north again, back to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border but at a different place, well inland. Near the fly-blown desert village of Hamatiyyat on the Saudi side, the border is at its nearest point to Kuwait City itself.

  Moreover, American photoreconnaissance pictures obtained by Gray in Riyadh showed that the mass of Iraqi forces were grouped just above the border but near the coast. The farther inland one went, the thinner the scattering of Iraqi outposts. They were concentrating their forces between the Nuwaisib crossing point on the coast and the Al-Wafra border post forty miles inland.

  The village of Hamatiyyat was a hundred miles into the desert, tucked up into a kink in the line of the
border that shortens the distance to Kuwait City.

  The camels that Martin had asked for were waiting for them at a small farm outside the village, a rangy female in her prime, and her offspring, a cream-colored calf with a velvet muzzle and gentle eyes, still at the suck. She would grow up to become as foul-tempered as the rest of her genus, but not yet.

  “Why the calf?” asked Low as they sat in the jeep and watched the animals in the corral.

  “Cover story. If anyone asks, I’m taking her to the camel farms outside Sulaibiya for sale. The prices are better there.”

  He slid out of the jeep and shuffled on sandaled feet to rouse the camel-drover, who dozed in the shade of his shack. For thirty minutes the two men squatted in the dust and haggled the price of the two beasts.

  It never occurred to the drover, glancing at the dark face, the stained teeth, and the stubble, squatting in the dust in his dirty shift and his odor, that he was not talking to a trader of the Bedouin with money to spend on two good camels.

  When the deal was settled, Martin paid up from a roll of Saudi riyals that he had taken from Low and held under one armpit for a while until they were soiled. Then he led the two camels a mile away and stopped when they were shielded from prying eyes by the sand dunes. Low caught up in the jeep.

  He had sat a few hundred yards from the drover’s corral and watched. Though he knew the Arabian Peninsula well, he had never worked with Martin, and he was impressed. The man did not just pretend to be an Arab; when he had slipped from the jeep, he had simply become a Bedou in every line and gesture.

  Though Low did not know it, the previous day in Kuwait two British engineers, seeking to escape, had left their apartment dressed in the white neck-to-floor Kuwaiti thob with the ghutra headdress on their heads. They got halfway to their car fifty feet away when a child called up from the gutter: “You may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like English.” The engineers went back to their flat and stayed there.

  Sweating in the sun but out of sight of any who might be surprised at such labor being carried out in the heat of the day, the two SAS men transferred the gear into the baggage panniers that hung on either side of the she-camel. She was hunkered down on all fours but still protested at the extra weight, spitting and snarling at the men who worked on her.

  The two hundred pounds of Semtex-H explosive went into one, each five-pound block wrapped in cloth, with some Hessian sacks of coffee beans on top in case any curious Iraqi soldier insisted on looking. The other pannier took the submachine guns, ammunition, detonators, time-pencils, and grenades, along with Martin’s small but powerful transceiver with its fold-away satellite dish and spare cadmium-nickel batteries. These too were topped with coffee bags.

  When they were finished, Low asked:

  “Anything more I can do?”

  “No, that’s it, thanks. I’ll stay here till sundown. No need for you to wait.”

  Low held out his hand.

  “Sorry about the Brecons.”

  Martin shook it.

  “No sweat. I survived.”

  Low laughed, a short bark.

  “Yeah, that’s what we do. We fucking survive. Stay lucky, Mike.”

  He drove away. The camel rolled an eye, belched, regurgitated some cud, and began to chew. The calf tried to get at her teats, failed, and lay down by her side.

  Martin propped himself against the camel saddle, drew his keffiyeh around his face, and thought about the days to come. The desert would not be a problem; the bustle of occupied Kuwait City might be.

  How tight were the controls, how tough the roadblocks, how astute the soldiers who manned them?

  Century had offered to try and get him forged papers, but he had turned them down. The Iraqis might change the ID cards.

  He was confident that the cover he had chosen was one of the best in the Arab world. The Bedouin come and go as they please. They offer no resistance to invading armies, for they have seen too many—Saracen and Turk, Crusader and Knight Templar, German and French, British and Egyptian, Israeli and Iraqi. They have survived them all because they stay out of all matters political and military.

  Many regimes have tried to tame them, all without success. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, decreeing that all his citizens should have houses, built a handsome village called Escan, equipped with all modern facilities—a swimming pool, toilets, baths, running water. Some Bedouin were rounded up and moved in.

  They drank the pool (it looked like an oasis), crapped on the patio, played with the water faucets, and then moved out, explaining politely to their monarch that they preferred to sleep under the stars. Escan was cleaned up and used by the Americans during the Gulf crisis.

  Martin knew that his real problem was his height. He was an inch under six feet, but most Bedouin are far shorter than that. Centuries of sickness and malnourishment have left most of them disease-ridden and stunted. Water in the desert is only for drinking, by man, goat, or camel; hence, Martin’s avoiding the bath. The glamour of desert living, he knew, is strictly for Westerners.

  He had no identification papers, but that was not a problem. Several governments have tried to issue the Bedouin with ID papers. The tribesmen are usually delighted because they make such good toilet paper, better than a handful of gravel. For a policeman or soldier to insist on seeing a Bedou’s ID papers is a waste of time, and both parties know it. From the authorities’ point of view, the main thing is that the Bedouin cause no trouble. They would never dream of getting involved in any Kuwaiti resistance movement. Martin knew that; he hoped the Iraqis did, too.

  He dozed until sundown, then mounted the camel. At his “hut hut hut,” she rose to her feet. Her baby suckled for a while, tethered behind her, and they set off at that ambling, rolling pace that seems to be very slow but covers an amazing amount of ground. The she-camel had been well fed and watered at the corral and would not tire for days.

  He was well to the northwest of the Ruqaifah police station, where a track road passes from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, when he crossed the border shortly before eight. The night was black, save for a low gleam from the stars. The glow of Kuwait’s Manageesh oil field lay to his right and would probably have an Iraqi patrol in it, but the desert ahead of him was empty.

  On the map it was thirty-five miles to the camel farms just south of Sulaibiya, the outlying district of Kuwait City where he intended to leave his beasts until he needed them again. But before that, he would bury the gear in the desert and mark the spot.

  Unless he was stopped and delayed, he would do this in darkness before sunrise, which was nine hours away. The tenth hour would bring him to the camel farms.

  When the Manageesh oil field dropped behind him, he steered by his hand compass in a straight line for his destination. The Iraqis, as he had surmised, might patrol the roads, even the tracks, but never the empty desert. No refugee would try to escape that way, nor enemy to enter.

  From the camel farms, after sunrise, he knew he could scramble onboard a truck heading into the heart of town, twenty miles farther on.

  Far above him, silent in the night sky, a KH-11 satellite of the National Reconnaissance Office slid across the sky. Years earlier, previous generations of American spy satellites had had to take their pictures and at intervals spit out the capsules in reentry vehicles, to be laboriously recovered and the film processed.

  The KH-11s, sixty-four feet long and weighing thirty thousand pounds each, are smarter. As they take their images of the ground below them, they automatically encrypt the pictures into a series of electronic pulses that are beamed upward to another satellite.

  The receiver satellite above is one of a network positioned in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they drift through space at a speed and on a course that keeps them always above the same spot on the earth. In effect, they hover. Having received the images from the KH-11, the hovering satellite either beams them straight down to the United States or, if the curve of the earth gets in the way, bounces them across space to another
hovering “bird” that sends the pictures down to its American masters. Thus the NRO

  can collect its photographic information in real time, just seconds after the pictures are taken.

  The bonus in war is huge. The KH-11 can see, for example, an enemy convoy on the move well in advance, in time to call up an air strike to blast the trucks into oblivion. The unfortunate soldiers inside them would never know how the fighter-bombers found them. For the KH-11s can work through night and day, in cloud or fog.

  The phrase has been used about them: all-seeing . Alas, it is a self-delusion. The KH-11 that night swept out of Saudi Arabia and over Kuwait. But it did not see the lone Bedou tribesman entering forbidden territory, nor would it have cared if it had. It moved over Kuwait and into Iraq. It saw many buildings, great sprawls of industrial minicities around Al-Hillah and Tarmiya, Al-Atheer and Tuwaitha, but it did not see what was in those buildings. It did not see the vats of poison gas in preparation, nor the uranium hexafluoride destined for the gas-diffusion centrifuges of the isotope separation plant.

  It moved north, picking out the airfields, the highways, and the bridges. It even saw the automobile junkyard at Al Qubai, but took no notice. It saw the industrial centers of Al Qaim, Jazira, and Al-Shirqat west and north of Baghdad, but not the devices of mass death that were being prepared inside them. It passed over the Jebel al Hamreen, but it did not see the Fortress that had been built by the engineer Osman Badri. It saw only a mountain among other mountains, hill villages among other hill villages. Then it passed on over Kurdistan and into Turkey.

  Mike Martin plodded on through the night toward Kuwait City, invisible in robes he had not worn for almost two weeks. He smiled on recalling the moment when, returning to his Land-Rover from a hike in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, he had been surprised to be intercepted by a plump American lady pointing a camera and shouting “click click” at him.

  It had been agreed that the British Medusa Committee should meet for its preliminary conference in a room beneath the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. The main reason was that the building was secure, being regularly swept against listening devices, although it did seem that with Russians being so terribly nice these days, they might have stopped at last attempting such tiresome practices.