The Fist of God Page 17

  “Yes. You just point out the buildings,” said Sinclair.

  “Here, the whole complex of seventeen buildings ... here, this big single plant—you see the air scrubber unit? And here, this one ... and this whole complex of eight buildings ... and this one.”

  Sinclair studied a list from his attaché case. He nodded grimly.

  “As we thought. Al Qaim, Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Salman Pak, and Samarra. Doctor, I’m very very grateful to you. Our guys in the States figured out exactly the same. They’ll all be targeted for the first wave of attacks.”

  When the meeting broke up Sinclair, with Simon Paxman and Terry Martin, strolled up to Piccadilly and had a coffee at Richoux.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” said Sinclair as he stirred his cappuccino, “but for us the bottom line is the gas threat. General Schwarzkopf is convinced already. That’s what he calls the nightmare scenario: mass gas attacks, a rain of airbursts over all our troops. If they go, they’ll go in masks and gas capes, head to foot. The good news is, this gas doesn’t live long once it’s exposed to air. It touches the desert, it’s dead. Terry, you don’t look convinced.”

  “This rain of airbursts,” said Martin. “How’s Saddam supposed to launch them?”

  Sinclair shrugged.

  “Artillery barrage, I guess. That’s what he did against the Iranians.”

  “You’re not going to pulp his artillery? It’s only got a range of thirty kilometers. Must be out there in the desert somewhere.”

  “Sure,” said the American, “we have the technology to locate every gun and tank out there, despite the digging-in and the camouflage.”

  “So if his guns are broken, how else does Saddam launch the gas rain?”

  “Fighter-bombers, I guess.”

  “But you’ll have destroyed them too, by the time the ground forces move,” Martin pointed out. “Saddam will have nothing left flying.”

  “Okay, so Scud missiles—whatever. That’s what he’ll try. And we’ll waste them one by one. Sorry, guys, gotta go.”

  “What are you getting at, Terry?” asked Paxman when the CIA man had gone. Terry Martin sighed.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that Saddam and his planners will know all that. They won’t underestimate American air power. Simon, can you get me all Saddam’s speeches over the past six months? In Arabic—must be in Arabic.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. GCHQ in Cheltenham will have them, or the BBC Arabic Service. On tape or transcript?”

  “Tape if possible.”

  For three days Terry Martin listened to the guttural, haranguing voice out of Baghdad. He played and replayed the tapes and could not get rid of the nagging worry that the Iraqi despot was making the wrong noises for a man in such deep trouble. Either he did not know or recognize the depth of his trouble, or he knew something that his enemies did not.

  On September 21, Saddam Hussein made a new speech, or rather a statement from the Revolutionary Command Council, that used his own particular vocabulary. In the statement he declared there was not the slightest chance of any Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, and that any attempt to eject Iraq would lead to

  “the mother of all battles.”

  That was how it had been translated. The media had loved it, and the words became quite a catchphrase.

  Dr. Martin studied the text and then called Simon Paxman.

  “I’ve been looking at the vernacular of the Upper Tigris valley,” he said.

  “Good God, what a hobby,” replied Paxman.

  “The point is, the phrase he used, ‘the mother of all battles.’ ”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “The word translated as ‘battle.’ Where he comes from, it also means ‘casualty’ or ‘bloodbath.’ ”

  There was silence down the line for a while.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  But despite that, Terry Martin did.

  Chapter 7

  The tobacconist’s son was frightened, and so was his father.

  “For pity’s sake, tell them what you know, my son,” he begged the boy.

  The two-man delegation from the Kuwait Resistance Committee had been perfectly polite when they introduced themselves to the tobacconist, but were quite insistent that they wished his son to be frank and truthful with them.

  The shopkeeper, though he knew the visitors had given him pseudonyms instead of their real names, had enough wit to realize he was talking to powerful and influential members of his own people. Worse, it had come as a total surprise to him to learn that his son was involved in active resistance at all.

  Worst of all, he had just learned that his offspring was not even with the official Kuwaiti resistance but had been seen tossing a bomb under an Iraqi truck at the behest of some strange bandit of whom he had never heard. It was enough to give any father a heart attack.

  The four of them sat in the drawing room of the tobacconist’s comfortable house in Keifan while one of the visitors explained that they had nothing against the Bedou but simply wished to contact him so that they could collaborate.

  So the boy explained what had happened from the moment his friend had been pulled down behind a pile of rubble at the moment he was about to fire at a speeding Iraqi truck. The men listened in silence, only the questioner occasionally interjecting with another query. It was the one who said nothing, the one in dark glasses, who was Abu Fouad.

  The questioner was particularly interested in the house where the group met with the Bedou. The boy gave the address, then added:

  “I do not think there is much point in going there. He is extremely watchful. One of us went there once to try and talk to him, but the place was locked. We do not think he lives there, but he knew we had been there. He told us never to do that again. If it ever happened, he said, he would break contact, and we would never see him again.”

  Sitting in his corner, Abu Fouad nodded in approval. Unlike the others, he was a trained soldier, and he thought he recognized the hand of another trained man.

  “When will you meet him next?” he asked quietly.

  There was a possibility that the boy could pass a message, an invitation to a parley.

  “Nowadays, he contacts one of us. The contacted one brings the rest. It may take some time.”

  The two Kuwaitis left. They had descriptions of two vehicles: a battered pickup apparently in the disguise of a market gardener bringing his fruit into town from the countryside, and a powerful four-wheel-drive for journeys into the desert.

  Abu Fouad ran the numbers of both vehicles past a friend in the Ministry of Transportation, but the trace ran out. Both numbers were fictional. The only other lead was through the identity cards that the man would have to carry to pass those ubiquitous Iraqi roadblocks and checkpoints.

  Through his committee he contacted a civil servant in the Interior Ministry. He was lucky. The man recalled running off a phony identity card for a market gardener from Jahra. It was a favor he had done for the millionaire Ahmed Al-Khalifa six weeks earlier.

  Abu Fouad was elated and intrigued. The merchant was an influential and respected figure in the movement. But it had always been thought that he was strictly confined to the financial, noncombatant side of things. What on earth was he doing as the patron of the mysterious and lethal Bedou?

  South of the Kuwaiti border, the incoming tide of American weaponry rolled on. As the last week of September slid by, General Norman Schwarzkopf, buried in the rabbit warren of secret chambers two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry on Old Airport Road in Riyadh, finally realized that he had enough strength at last to declare Saudi Arabia safe from Iraqi attack.

  In the air, General Charles “Chuck” Horner had built an umbrella of constantly patrolling steel, a fast-moving and amply provisioned armada of air-superiority fighters, ground-attack fighter-bombers, air-to-air refueling tankers, heavy bombers, and tank-busting Thunderbolts, enough to destroy the incoming Iraqis on the ground and in the air.

  He had airborne
technology that could and did cover by radar every square inch of Iraq, that could sense every movement of heavy metal rolling on the roads, moving through the desert, or trying to take to the air, that could listen to every Iraqi conversation on the airwaves and pinpoint any source of heat.

  On the ground, Norman Schwarzkopf knew he now had enough mechanized units, light and heavy armor, artillery, and infantry to receive any Iraqi column, hold it, surround it, and liquidate it.

  In the last week of September, in conditions of such total secrecy that not even its Allies were told, the United States made its plans to move from defensive role to offensive. The assault on Iraq was planned, even though the United Nations mandate was still limited to securing the safety of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and only that.

  But he also had problems. One was that the number of Iraqi troops, guns, and tanks deployed against him was double the number when he had arrived in Riyadh six weeks earlier. Another problem was that he would need double the amount of Coalition forces to liberate Kuwait than that needed to secure Saudi Arabia.

  Norman Schwarzkopf was a man who took George Patton’s dictum very seriously: One dead American or Brit or Frenchie or any other Coalition soldier or airman was one too many. Before he would go in, he would want two things: twice the amount of force he presently had, and an air assault guaranteed to

  “degrade” by fifty percent the strength of the Iraqi forces arrayed north of the border.

  That meant more time, more equipment, more stores, more guns, more tanks, more troops, more airplanes, more fuel, more food, and a lot more money. Then he told the stunned armchair Napoleons on Capitol Hill that if they wanted a victory, they had better let him have it all.

  Actually, it was the more urbane Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who passed the message on, but he softened the language a bit. Politicians love to play the games of soldiers, but they hate to be addressed in the language of soldiers.

  So the planning in that last week of September was utterly secret. As it turned out, it was just as well.

  The United Nations, leaking peace plans at every seam, would wait until November 29 before giving the go-ahead to the Coalition to use all necessary force to evict Iraq from Kuwait unless she quit by January 15. Had planning started at the end of November, it could never have been completed in time.

  Ahmed Al-Khalifa was deeply embarrassed. He knew Abu Fouad, of course, who and what he was.

  Further, he sympathized with his request. But he had given his word, he explained, and he could not go back on it.

  Not even to his fellow-Kuwaiti and fellow-resister did he reveal that the Bedou was in fact a British officer. But he did agree to leave a message for the Bedou in a place he knew the man would find it sooner or later.

  The following morning he left a letter, with his personal recommendation urging the Bedou to agree to meet Abu Fouad, under the marble tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery.

  * * *

  There were six soldiers in the group, headed by a sergeant, and when the Bedou came around the corner, they were as surprised as he.

  Mike Martin had parked his small truck in the lock-up garage and was making his way across the city on foot toward the villa he had chosen for that night. He was tired, and unusually, his alertness was blunted. When he saw the Iraqis and knew they had seen him, he cursed himself. In his job, men can die for a moment’s lack of alertness.

  It was well after curfew, and though he was quite used to moving through the city when it was deserted of law-abiding citizens and only the Iraqi patrols were on the prowl, he made a point of moving through the ill-lit side streets, across the darkened patches of waste ground, and down the black alleys, just as the Iraqis made a point of sticking to the main highways and intersections. That way, they never troubled each other.

  But following Hassan Rahmani’s return to Baghdad and his vitriolic report on the uselessness of the Popular Army, some changes were taking place. The Green Berets of the Iraqi Special Forces had begun to appear.

  Though not classed with the elite Republican Guard, the Green Berets were at least more disciplined than the rabble of conscripts called the Popular Army. It was six of these who stood quietly by their truck at a road junction where normally there would have been no Iraqis.

  Martin just had time to lean heavily on the stick he carried with him and adopt the posture of an old man.

  It was a good posture, for in the Arab culture the old are given respect or at least, compassion.

  “Hey, you,” shouted the sergeant. “Come over here.”

  There were four assault rifles trained on the lone figure in the checkered keffiyeh . The old man paused, then hobbled forward.

  “What are you doing out at this hour, Bedou?”

  “Just an old man trying to get to his home before the curfew, sayidi ,” the man whined.

  “It’s past the hour of curfew, fool! Two hours past.”

  The old man shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I didn’t know, sayidi . I have no watch.”

  In the Middle East watches are not indispensable, just highly prized, a sign of prosperity. Iraqi soldiers arriving in Kuwait soon acquired them—they just took them. But the word Bedouin comes from bidun , meaning “without.”

  The sergeant grunted. The excuse was possible.

  “Papers,” he said.

  The old man used his spare hand to pat his soiled robe.

  “I seem to have lost them,” he pleaded.

  “Frisk him,” said the sergeant. One of the soldiers moved forward. The hand grenade strapped to the inside of Martin’s left thigh felt like one of the watermelons from his truck.

  “Don’t you touch my balls,” said the old Bedou sharply. The soldier stopped. One in the back let out a giggle. The sergeant tried to keep a straight face.

  “Well, go on, Zuhair. Frisk him.”

  The young soldier Zuhair hesitated, embarrassed. He knew the joke was on him.

  “Only my wife is allowed to touch my balls,” said the Bedou. Two of the soldiers let out a guffaw and lowered their rifles. The rest did the same. Zuhair still held back.

  “Mind you, it doesn’t do her any good. I’m long past that sort of thing,” said the old man.

  It was too much. The patrol roared with laughter. Even the sergeant grinned.

  “All right, old man. On your way. And don’t stay out again after dark.”

  The Bedou limped off to the corner of the street, scratching under his clothes. At the corner he turned.

  The grenade, priming arm sticking clumsily out to one side, skittered across the cobbles and came to rest against the toe-cap of Zuhair. All six stared at it. Then it went off. It was the end of the six soldiers. It was also the end of September.

  That night, far away in Tel Aviv, General Kobi Dror of the Mossad sat in his office in the Hadar Dafna building, taking a late-night drink after work with an old friend and colleague, Shlomo Gershon, always known as Sami.

  Sami Gershon was head of the Mossad’s Combatants or Komemiute Division, the section responsible for running illegal agents, the dangerous cutting edge of espionage. He had been one of the other two present when his chief had lied to Chip Barber.

  “You don’t think we should have told them?” Gershon asked, because the subject had come up again.

  Dror swirled his beer in the bottle and took a swig. “Screw them,” he growled. “Let them recruit their own bloody assets.”

  As a teenage soldier in the spring of 1967, Dror had crouched under his Patton tank in the desert and waited while four Arab states prepared to settle accounts with Israel once and for all. He still recalled how the outside world had confined itself to muttering, “Tut tut.”

  With the rest of his crew, commanded by a twenty-year-old, he had been one of those under Israel Tal who had punched a hole straight through the Mitla Pass and driven the Egyptian Army back to the Suez Canal.

  And he recalled how, w
hen Israel had destroyed four armies and four air forces in six days, the same Western media that had wrung its hands at his country’s impending obliteration in May had accused Israel of bully-boy tactics by winning.

  From then on, Kobi Dror’s philosophy had been made: Screw them all. He was a sabra, born and raised in Israel, and had none of the breadth of vision nor forbearance of people like David Ben-Gurion.

  His political loyalty lay with the far-right Likud Party, with Menachem Begin, who had been in the Irgun, and Itzhak Shamir, formerly of the Stern Gang.

  Once, sitting at the back of a classroom, listening to one of his staff lecture the new recruits, he had heard the man use the phrase “friendly intelligence agencies.” He had risen and taken over the class.

  “There is no such thing as a friend of Israel, except maybe a diaspora Jew,” he told them. “The world is divided into two: our enemies and neutrals. Our enemies we know how to deal with. As for neutrals, take everything, give nothing. Smile at them, slap them on the back, drink with them, flatter them, thank them for their tipoffs, and tell them nothing.”

  “Well, Kobi, let’s hope they never find out,” said Gershon.

  “How can they? There’s only eight of us who know. And we’re all in the Office.”

  It must have been the beer. He was overlooking someone.

  In the spring of 1988 a British businessman called Stuart Harris was attending an industrial fair in Baghdad. He was sales director of a company in Nottingham that made and sold road-grading equipment. The fair was under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of Transport. Like almost all Westerners, he had been staying at the Rashid Hotel on Yafa Street, which had been built mainly for foreigners and was always under surveillance.

  On the third day of the exhibition, Harris had returned to his room to find a plain envelope pushed under his door. It had no name on it, just his room number, and the number was correct.

  Inside was a single sheet of paper and another completely plain envelope of the airmail type. The slip of paper said in English and in block capitals: “On your return to London pass this envelope unopened to Norman at the Israeli embassy.”