The Fist of God Page 4

  They had started in the north in Kuwait, then driven the off-road loaned them by the company south into Saudi Arabia through Khafji and Al-Khobar, crossed the causeway into Bahrain, then back and down through Qatar and into the UAE. At each stopover Ray Walker had made a perfunctory “inspection” of his company office—the ostensible reason for the trip—while she had taken a guide from the company office and explored the local sights. She felt very brave going down all those narrow streets with only a single white man for an escort, unaware that she would have been in more danger in any of fifty American cities than among the Gulf Arabs.

  The sights enthralled her on her first and perhaps last journey outside the United States. She admired the palaces and the minarets, wondered at the torrent of raw gold on display in the gold soukhs , and was awed by the tide of dark faces and multicolored robes that swirled about her in the Old Quarters.

  She had taken photographs of everything and everyone so she could show the ladies’ club back home where she had been and what she had seen. She had taken to heart the warning by the company representative in Qatar to be careful of taking a picture of a desert Arab without his permission, as some still believed the taking of a photograph captured part of the target’s soul.

  She was, she frequently reminded herself, a happy woman and had much to be happy about. Married almost straight out of high school to her steady date of two years, she found herself wedded to a good, solid man with a job in a local oil company who had risen through the ranks as the company expanded, until he was now finishing as one of the vice-presidents.

  They had a nice home outside Tulsa and a beach house for summer vacations at Hatteras, between the Atlantic and Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. It had been a good thirty-year marriage, rewarded with one fine son. And now this, a two-week tour at the company’s expense of all the exotic sights and sounds, smells, and experiences of another world, the Arabian Gulf.

  “It’s a good road,” she remarked as they crested a rise and the strip of bitumen shimmered and shivered away in front of them. If the temperature inside the vehicle was seventy degrees, it was one hundred and twenty out there in the desert.

  “Ought to be,” her husband grunted. “We built it.”

  “The company?”

  “Nah. Uncle Sam, goddammit.”

  Ray Walker had a habit of adding the single word goddammit when he dispensed pieces of information.

  They sat for a while in companionable silence while Tammy Wynette urged her to stand by her man, which she always had done and intended to do through their retirement.

  Nudging sixty, Ray Walker was taking retirement with a good pension and some healthy stock options, and a grateful company had offered him the two-week, all-expense-paid, first-class tour of the Gulf to

  “inspect” its various outstations along the coast. Though he too had never been there before, he had to admit he was less enthralled by it all than his wife, but he was delighted for her sake.

  Personally, he was looking forward to finishing with Abu Dhabi and Dubai, then catching the first-class cabin of an airliner aimed directly at the United States via London. At least he would be able to order a long, cold Bud without having to scuttle into the company office for it. Islam might be all right for some, he mused, but after staying in the best hotels in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and being told they were completely dry, he wondered what kind of a religion would stop a guy from having a cool beer on a hot day.

  He was dressed in what he perceived to be the rig of an oil man in the desert—tall boots, jeans, belt, shirt, and Stetson—which was not entirely necessary, as he was really a chemist in quality control.

  He checked the odometer: eighty miles to the Abu Dhabi turnoff.

  “Gonna have to take a leak, honey,” he muttered.

  “Well then, you be careful,” warned Maybelle. “There are scorpions out there.”

  “But they can’t leap two feet,” he said, and roared at his own joke. Being stung on the dick by a high-jumping scorpion—that was a good one for the boys back home.

  “Ray, you are a terrible man,” replied Maybelle, and laughed also. Walker swung the Ram Charger to the edge of the empty road and opened the door. The blast of heat came in as if from the door of a furnace. He climbed out and slammed the door behind him to trap the cool air.

  Maybelle stayed in the passenger seat as her husband walked to the nearest dune and unzipped his fly.

  Then she stared out through the windshield and muttered:

  “Oh, my God, would you just look at that.”

  She reached for her Pentax, opened her door, and slithered to the ground.

  “Ray, do you think he’d mind if I took his picture?”

  Ray was facing the other way, absorbed in one of a middle-aged man’s greater satisfactions.

  “Be right with you, honey. Who?”

  The Bedouin was standing across the road from her husband, having apparently walked out from between two dunes. One minute he was not there, the next he was. Maybelle Walker stood by the front fender of the off-road, her camera in her hand, irresolute. Her husband turned around and zipped himself up. He stared at the man across the road.

  “Dunno,” he said. “Guess not. But don’t get too close. Probably got fleas. I’ll get the engine started.

  You take a quick picture, and if he gets nasty, jump right in. Fast.”

  He climbed back into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. That boosted the air conditioner, which was a relief.

  Maybelle Walker took several steps forward and held up her camera.

  “May I take your picture?” she asked. “Camera? Picture? Click-click? For my album back home?”

  The man just stood and stared at her. His once-white djellaba , stained and dusty, dropped from his shoulders to the sand at his feet. The red-and-white flecked keffiyeh was secured on his head by a two-strand black cord, and one of the trailing corners was tucked up under the opposite temple so that the cloth covered his face from the bridge of the nose downward. Above the flecked doth the dark eyes stared back at her. What little skin of forehead and eye sockets she could see was burned brown by the desert. She had many pictures ready for the album she intended to make back home, but none of a tribesman of the Bedouin with the expanse of the Saudi desert behind him.

  She raised her camera. The man did not move. She squinted through the aperture, framing the figure in the center of the oblong, wondering if she could make the car in time, should the Arab come running at her. Click .

  “Thank you very much,” she said. Still he did not move. She backed toward the car, smiling brightly.

  “Always smile,” she recalled the Reader’s Digest once advising Americans confronted by someone who cannot understand English.

  “Honey, get in the car!” her husband shouted.

  “It’s all right, I think he’s okay,” she said, opening the door.

  The audiotape had run out while she was taking the picture. That cut the radio station in. Ray Walker’s hand reached out and hauled her into the car, which screeched away from the roadside.

  The Arab watched them go, shrugged, and walked behind the sand dune, where he had parked his own sand-camouflaged Land-Rover. In a few seconds he too drove off in the direction of Abu Dhabi.

  “What’s the hurry?” complained Maybelle Walker. “He wasn’t going to attack me.”

  “That’s not the point, honey.” Ray Walker was tight-lipped, the man in control, able to cope with any international emergency. “We’re getting into Abu Dhabi and taking the next flight home. It seems this morning Iraq invaded Kuwait, goddammit. They could be here any hour.”

  It was ten o’clock, Gulf Time, on the morning of August 2, 1990.

  Twelve hours earlier, Colonel Osman Badri waited, tense and excited, by the tracks of a stationary T-72

  main battle tank near a small airfield called Safwan. Though he could not know it then, the war for Kuwait would begin there and it would end there, at Safwan.

&nbs
p; Just outside the airfield, which had runways but no buildings on it, the main highway ran north and south.

  On the northward road, down which he had traveled three days earlier, was the junction where travelers could turn east for Basra or northwest for Baghdad.

  South, the road ran straight through the Kuwaiti border post five miles away. From where he stood, looking south, he could see the dim glow of Jahra, and beyond it, farther east across the bay, the glow of the lights of Kuwait City itself.

  He was excited because his country’s time had come. Time to punish the Kuwaiti scum for what they had done to Iraq, for the undeclared economic warfare, for the financial damage and their haughty arrogance.

  Had not his country for eight bloody years held off the hordes of Persia from sweeping into the northern Gulf and ending all their luxury lifestyles? And was her reward now to sit silent while the Kuwaitis stole more than their fair portion of the oil from the shared Rumailah field? Were they now to be beggared as Kuwait overproduced and drove the oil price downward? Should they now meekly succumb as the Al Sabah dogs insisted on repayment of the miserable $15 billion loan they had made to Iraq during the war?

  No, the Rais had gotten it right as usual. Kuwait was historically the nineteenth province of Iraq; always had been, until the British drew their damned line in the sand in 1913 and created the richest emirate in the world. Kuwait would be reclaimed this night, this very night, and Osman Badri would be a part of it.

  As an Army Engineer, he would not be in the first line, but he would come close behind with his bridging units, earthmovers, bulldozers, and sappers to cut open the path should the Kuwaitis try to block it. Not that aerial surveillance had shown any obstructions. No earthworks, no sand berms, no antitank trenches, no concrete traps. But just in case, the engineers would be there under the command of Osman Badri to cut open the road for the tanks and mechanized infantry of the Republican Guard.

  A few yards from where he stood, the field command tent was full of the senior officers poring over their maps and making last-minute adjustments to their plan of attack as the hours and minutes ticked by while they waited for the final “go” order from the Rais in Baghdad.

  Colonel Badri had already seen and conversed with his own commanding general, All Musuli, who was in charge of the entire Engineering Corps of the Iraqi Army and to whom he owed utter devotion for recommending him for the “special duty” last February. He had been able to assure his chief that his—Badri’s—men were fully equipped and ready to go.

  As he stood talking with Musuli, another general had strolled up, and he had been introduced to Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the tanks. In the distance he had seen General Saadi Tumah Abbas, commanding the elite Republican Guard, enter the tent. As a loyal Party member and worshipper of Saddam Hussein, he had been perplexed to hear the tank general Kadiri mutter “political creep” under his breath. How could this be? Was not Tumah Abbas an intimate of Saddam Hussein, and had he not been rewarded for winning the crucial battle of Fao that finally beat the Iranians? Colonel Badri had dismissed from his mind rumors that Fao had actually been won by the now-vanished General Maher Rashid.

  All around him, men and officers of the Tawakkulna and Medina divisions of the Guard swarmed in the darkness. His thoughts strayed back to that memorable night in February, when General Musuli had ordered him from his duties putting the finishing touches to the facility at Al Qubai to report to headquarters in Baghdad. He had assumed he would be reassigned.

  “The President wants to see you,” Musuli had said abruptly. “He will send for you. Move into the officers’ quarters here, and keep yourself available night and day.”

  Colonel Badri bit his lip. What had he done? What had he said? Nothing disloyal—that would have been impossible. Had he been falsely denounced? No, the President would not send for such a man. The wrongdoer would simply be picked up by one of the goon squads of Brigadier Khatib’s Amn-al-Amm and taken away to be taught a lesson. Seeing his face, General Musuli burst out laughing, his teeth flashing beneath the heavy black moustache that so many senior officers wore in imitation of Saddam Hussein.

  “Don’t worry. He has a task for you, a special task.”

  And he had. Within twenty-four hours Badri had been summoned to the lobby of the officers’ quarters, where a long black staff car was waiting for him, with two men from the Amn-al-Khass, the presidential security detail. He was whisked straight to the Presidential Palace for the most thrilling and momentous meeting of his life.

  The palace was then situated in the angle of Kindi Street and July 14 Street, near the bridge of the same name, both celebrating the date of the first of the two coups of July 1968 that had brought the Ba’ath Party to power and broken the rule of the generals. Badri was shown into a waiting room and kept there for two hours. He was frisked thoroughly, twice, before being shown into the Presence.

  As soon as the guards beside him stopped, he stopped, then threw up a quivering salute and held it for three seconds, before whipping off his beret and swinging it under his left arm. After that he remained at attention.

  “So you are the genius of maskirovka ?”

  He had been told not to look the Rais straight in the eyes, but when he was spoken to he could not help it. Saddam Hussein was in a good mood. The eyes of the young officer in front of him shone with love and admiration. Good, nothing to fear. In measured tones the Rais told the engineer what he wanted.

  Badri’s chest swelled with pride and gratitude.

  For five months after that, he had worked against the impossible deadline and succeeded with days to spare. He had had all the facilities the Rais had promised him. Everything and everyone was at his disposal. If he needed more concrete or steel, he had but to call Kamil on his personal number, and the President’s son-in-law would provide it at once from Ministry of Industry sources. If he needed more manpower, hundreds of laborers would arrive, and always indentured Koreans or Vietnamese. They cut and they dug, they lived in miserable cantonments down in the valley during that summer, and then they were taken away, he did not know where.

  Apart from the coolies, no one came in by road, for the single rough track, eventually to be obliterated itself, was only for the trucks bringing steel and cargo, and the cement-mixers. Every other human being except the truck drivers came in by one of the Russian MIL helicopters, and only when they arrived were their blindfolds removed, to be replaced when they left. This applied to the most senior as to the humblest Iraqi.

  Badri had chosen the site himself, after days of scouting by helicopter over the mountains. He had finally picked his spot high in the Jebal al Hamreen, north and farther into the mountains from Kifri, where the hills of the Hamreen range become mountains on the road to Sulaymaniyam.

  He had worked twenty hours a day, slept rough on the site, bullied, threatened, cajoled, and bribed amazing work performances from his men, and finally it had been done before the end of July. The area had been cleared of every trace of work, every brick and lump of concrete, every piece of steel that might glint in the sun, every scrape and scratch on the rocks.

  The three guardian villages had been completed and inhabited with their goats and sheep. Finally, the single track had been obliterated, tumbled in rough rubble and scree into the valley beneath by an earth-mover trundling backward, and the three valleys and the raped mountain had been restored to what they once were. Almost.

  For he, Osman Badri, colonel of engineers, inheritor of the building skills that had erected Nineveh and Tyre, student of the great Stepanov of Russia, master of maskirovka , the art of disguising something to look like nothing or something else, had built for Saddam Hussein the Qa’ala, the Fortress. No one could see it, and no one knew where it was.

  Before it was closed over, Badri had watched the others, the gun assemblers and the scientists, build that awesome cannon whose barrel seemed to reach up to the very stars. When all was complete they left, and only the garrison remained behind. They would stay
and live there. None would walk out. Those who had to arrive or leave would do so by helicopter. None of these would land; they would hover over a small patch of grass away from the mountain. The few arriving or leaving would always be blindfolded.

  The pilots and crew would be sealed inside one single air base with neither visitors nor phones. The last wild grass seeds were scattered, the last shrubs planted, and the Fortress was left alone to its isolation.

  Though Badri did not know it, the workers who had arrived by truck were finally driven away, then transferred to buses with blackened windows. Far away in a gulch the buses containing the three thousand Asian workers were stopped, and the guards ran away. When the detonations brought down the mountain side all the buses were buried forever. Then the guards were shot by others. They had all seen the Qa’ala.

  Badri’s reverie was interrupted by an eruption of shouting from the command tent, and word ran quickly through the crowds of waiting soldiers that the attack was “go.”

  The engineer ran to his truck and hauled himself into the passenger seat as his driver gunned the engine.

  They held position as the tank crews of the two Guard divisions that would spearhead the invasion filled the air with ear-shattering noise and the Russian T-72s rumbled off the airfield and onto the road to Kuwait.

  It was, he would later tell his brother Abdelkarim, a fighter pilot and colonel in the Air Force, like a turkey shoot. The miserable police post on the border was brushed aside and crushed. By twoA.M. the column was over the border and rolling south. If the Kuwaitis were kidding themselves that this army, the fourth-largest standing army in the world, was going to advance to the Mutla Ridge and rattle its sabers until Kuwait acceded to the demands of the Rais, they were out of luck. If the West thought this army would just capture the desired islands of Warbah and Bubiyan, giving Iraq its long-lusted-for access to the Gulf, they too were up the wrong tree. The orders from Baghdad were: Take it all.