The Fist of God Page 6

  The West, with its attention span of a few weeks, would get fed up and leave it to the four Arabs—two kings and two presidents—and so long as the oil kept flowing to create the smog that was choking them, the Anglo-Saxons would stay happy. Unless Kuwait was savagely brutalized, the media would drop the subject, the Al Sabah regime would be forgotten in exile somewhere in Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaitis would get on with their lives under a new government, and the quit-Kuwait conference could chew words for a decade until it didn’t matter anymore.

  It could be done, but it would need the right touch. Hitler’s touch—“I only seek a peaceful settlement to my just demands. This is absolutely my last territorial ambition.” King Fahd would fall for it—no one had any love for the Kuwaitis anyway, let alone the Al Sabah lotus-eaters. King Fahd and King Hussein would drop them, as Chamberlain had dropped the Czechs in 1938.

  The trouble was, although Saddam was street-smart as hell or he wouldn’t still be alive, strategically and diplomatically he was a buffoon. Somehow, Hassan Rahmani reasoned, the Rais would get it wrong; he would neither pull out nor roll on, seize the Saudi oil field, and present the Western world with a fait accompli that they could do nothing about except destroy the oil and their own prosperity for a generation.

  “The West” meant the Americans, with the Brits at their side, and they were all Anglo-Saxons. He knew about Anglo-Saxons. Five years at Mr. Hartley’s Tasisiya prep school had taught him his perfect English, his understanding of the British, and his wariness of that Anglo-Saxon habit of giving you a very hard punch on the jaw without warning.

  He rubbed his chin where he had collected such a punch long ago, and laughed out loud. His aide across the room jumped a foot. Mike bloody Martin, where are you now?

  Hassan Rahmani—clever, cultured, cosmopolitan, educated, and refined, an upper-class scion who served a regime of thugs—bent to his task. It was quite a task. Of the 1.8 million people in Kuwait that August, only 600,000 were Kuwaitis. To them you could add 600,000 Palestinians, some of whom would stay loyal to Kuwait, some of whom would side with Iraq because the PLO had done so, and most of whom would keep their heads down and try to survive. Then 300,000 Egyptians, some of them no doubt working for Cairo, which nowadays was the same as working for Washington or London, and 250,000 Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and Filipinos, mainly blue-collar laborers or domestic servants—as an Iraqi, he believed the Kuwaitis could not scratch a fleabite on their arse without summoning a foreign servant.

  And then 50,000 First World citizens—Brits, Americans, French, Germans, Spanish, Swedes, Danes—name it. And he was supposed to suppress foreign espionage. ... He sighed for the days when messages meant messengers or telephones. As head of Counterintelligence, he could seal the borders and cut the phone lines. But now any fool with a satellite could punch numbers into a cellular phone or a computer modem and talk to California. Hard to intercept or track the source, except with the best equipment, which he did not have.

  He knew he could not control the outflow of information or the steady dribble of refugees escaping over the border. Nor could he affect the overflights of American satellites, all of which he suspected had now been reprogrammed to swing their orbits over Kuwait and Iraq every few minutes. (He was right.) There was no point in attempting the impossible, even though he would have to pretend he had, and had succeeded. The main target would have to be to prevent active sabotage, the actual killing of Iraqis and destruction of their equipment, and the formation of a real resistance movement. And he would have to prevent help from outside, in the form of men, know-how, or equipment, from reaching any resistance.

  In this he would come up against his rivals of the AMAM, the Secret Police, who were installed two floors below him. Khatib, he had learned that morning, was installing that thug Sabaawi, an oaf as brutal as himself, as head of the AMAM in Kuwait. If resisting Kuwaitis fell into their hands, they would learn to scream as loudly as dissidents back home. So he, Rahmani, would just stick to the foreigners. That was his brief.

  * * *

  That morning, Dr. Terry Martin finished his lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a faculty of London University off Gower Street, shortly before noon and retired to the senior staff common room. Just outside the door, he ran into Mabel, the secretary he shared with two other senior lecturers in Arabic studies.

  “Oh, Dr. Martin, there’s been a message for you.”

  She fumbled in her attaché case, propping it up on one tweed-skirted knee, and produced a slip of paper.

  “This gentleman rang for you. He said it was rather urgent if you could call him back.

  Inside the common room Martin dumped his lecture notes on the Abassid Caliphate and used a pay phone on the wall. The number answered on the second ring, and a bright female voice just repeated the number back. No company name, just the number.

  “Is Mr. Stephen Laing there?” asked Martin.

  “May I say who is calling?”

  “Er—Dr. Martin. Terry Martin. He called me.”

  “Ah, yes, Dr. Martin. Would you hold on?”

  Martin frowned. She knew about the call, knew his name. For the life of him, he could not recall any Stephen Laing.

  A man came on the phone. “Steve Laing here. Look, it’s awfully good of you to call back so promptly. I know it’s incredibly short notice, but we met some time ago at the Institute for Strategic Studies. Just after you gave that brilliant paper on the Iraqi arms-procurement machine. I was wondering what you’re doing for lunch.”

  Laing, whoever he was, had adopted that mode of self-expression that is at once diffident and persuasive, hard to turn down.

  “Today? Now?”

  “Unless you have anything fixed. What had you in mind?”

  “Sandwiches in the canteen,” said Martin.

  “Couldn’t possibly offer you a decent sole meunière at Scott’s, could I? You know it, of course. Mount Street.”

  Martin knew of it, one of the best and most expensive fish restaurants in London. Twenty minutes away by cab. It was half-past twelve. And he loved fish. And Scott’s was way beyond his academic salary.

  Did Laing by any chance know these things?

  “Are you actually with the ISS?” he asked.

  “Explain over lunch, doctor. Say one o’clock. Looking forward to it.” The phone went down.

  When Martin entered the restaurant, the headwaiter came forward to greet him personally.

  “Dr. Martin? Mr. Laing is at his table. Please follow me.”

  It was a quiet table in a corner, very discreet. One could talk unoverheard. Laing, whom by now Martin was sure he had never met, rose to greet him, a bony man in dark suit and sober tie with thinning gray hair. He ushered his guest to a seat and gestured with a raised eyebrow to a bottle of fine chilled Meursault that sat in the ice bucket. Martin nodded.

  “You’re not with the Institute, are you, Mr. Laing?”

  Laing was not in the least fazed. He watched the crisp cool liquid poured and the waiter move away, leaving them a menu each. He raised his glass to his guest.

  “Century House, actually. Does that bother you?”

  The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy.

  “No, just interested,” said Martin.

  “Actually, it’s we who are interested. I’m quite a fan of yours. I try to keep abreast, but I’m not as clued up as you.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” said Martin, but he was flattered. When an academic is told he is admired, it is pleasing.

  “Quite true,” insisted Laing. “Sole for two? Excellent. I hope I have read all your papers delivered to the Institute, and the United Services people and Chatha
m. Plus, of course, those two articles in Survival .”

  Over the previous five years, despite his youth at only thirty-five, Dr. Martin had become more and more in demand as a speaker presenting erudite papers to such establishments as the Institute for Strategic Studies, the United Services Institute, and that other body for the intensive study of foreign affairs, Chatham House. Survival is the magazine of the ISS, and of each issue twenty-five copies go automatically to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in King Charles Street, of which five filter down to Century House.

  Terry Martin’s interest for these people was not because of his scholastic excellence in medieval Mesopotamia, but for the second hat he wore. Quite as a private interest, he had begun years earlier to study the armed forces of the Middle East, attending defense exhibitions and cultivating friendships among manufacturers and their Arab clients, where his fluent Arabic had made him many contacts. After ten years he was a walking encyclopedia in his chosen pastime subject and was listened to with respect by the top professionals, much as the American novelist Tom Clancy is regarded as a world expert on the defense equipment of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact.

  The two soles meunière arrived, and they began to eat with appreciation.

  Eight weeks earlier Laing, who was at that time Director of Operations for the Mid-East Division at Century House, had called up a pen portrait of Terry Martin from the Research people. He had been impressed with what he saw.

  Born in Baghdad, raised in Iraq, then schooled in England, Martin had left Haileybury with three advanced levels, all with distinction, in English, history, and French. Haileybury had had him down as a brilliant scholar, destined for a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge.

  But the boy, already a fluent Arab speaker, wanted to go on to Arabic studies, so he had applied as a graduate to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, attending the spring interview of 1973.

  Accepted at once, he had joined in the autumn term of 1973, studying history of the Middle East.

  He walked through a first-class degree in three years and then put in a further three years for his doctorate, specializing in Iraq of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, with particular reference to the Abassid Caliphate fromA.D. 750 to 1258. He took his Ph.D. in 1979, then one year off for a sabbatical—he had been in Iraq in 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran, triggering the eight-year war, and this experience began his interest in Middle Eastern military forces.

  On his return he was offered a lectureship at the age of only twenty-six, a signal honor at the SOAS, which happens to be one of the best and therefore one of the toughest schools of Arabic learning in the world. He was promoted to a readership in recognition of his excellence in original research, and he became a reader in Middle East history at the age of thirty-four, clearly earmarked for a professorship by the age of forty.

  So much had Laing read in the written biography. What interested him even more was the second string, the compendium of knowledge about Middle Eastern arms arsenals. For years, it had been a peripheral subject, dwarfed by the cold war, but now ...

  “It’s about this Kuwait business,” he said at last. The remains of the fish had been cleared away. Both men had declined a dessert. The Meursault had gone down very nicely, and Laing had deftly ensured that Martin had most of it. Now two vintage ports appeared as if unbidden.

  “As you may imagine, there’s been a hell of a flapdoodle going on these past few days.”

  Laing was understating the case. The Lady had returned from Colorado in what the mandarins referred to as her Boadicea mode, a reference to that ancient British queen who used to chop Romans off at the knees with the swords sticking out of her chariot wheels if they got in the way. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was reputed to be drinking of taking to wearing a steel helmet, and the demands for instant enlightenment had rained down on the spooks of Century House.

  “The fact is, we would like to slip someone into Kuwait to find out exactly what is going on.”

  “Under Iraqi occupation?” asked Martin.

  “I’m afraid so, since they seem to be in charge.”

  “So why me?”

  “Let me be frank,” said Laing, who intended to be anything but. “We really do need to know what is going on inside. The Iraqi occupation army—how many, how good, what equipment. Our own nationals—how are they coping, are they in danger, can they realistically be got out in safety. We need a man in on the ground. This information is vital. So—someone who speaks Arabic like an Arab, a Kuwaiti or Iraqi. Now, you spend your life among Arabic-speakers, far more than I do—”

  “But surely there must be hundreds of Kuwaitis right here in Britain who could slip back in,” Martin suggested.

  Laing sucked leisurely at a piece of sole that had stuck between two teeth.

  “Actually,” he murmured, “one would prefer one of one’s own people.”

  “A Brit? Who can pass for an Arab, right in the middle of them?”

  “That’s what we need. I’m afraid we doubt if there is one.”

  It must have been the wine, or the port. Terry Martin was not used to Meursault and port with his lunch.

  Later, he would willingly have bitten off his own tongue if he could turn the clock back a few seconds.

  But he spoke, and then it was too late.

  “I know one. My brother Mike. He’s a major in the SAS. He can pass for an Arab.”

  Laing hid the stab of excitement that jumped inside him as he removed the toothpick and the offending morsel of sole.

  “Can he now,” he murmured. “Can he now?”

  Chapter 3

  Steve Laing returned to Century House by cab in a spirit of some surprise and elation. He had arranged the lunch with the academic Arabist in the hopes of recruiting him for another task, which he still had in mind, and had only raised the matter of Kuwait as a conversational ploy.

  Years of practice had taught him to start with a question or a request that the target could not fulfill, then move on to the real matter at hand. The theory was that the expert, stumped by the first request, would be more amenable for his own self-respect to agreeing to the second.

  Dr. Martin’s surprise revelation happened to answer a query that had already been raised during a high-level conference at Century the previous day. At the time it had been generally regarded as a no-hope wish. But if young Dr. Martin were right ... a brother who spoke Arabic even better than he ...

  and who was already in the Special Air Service Regiment and therefore accustomed to the covert life ...

  interesting, very interesting.

  On arrival at Century, Laing marched straight in on his immediate superior, the Controller Mid-East.

  After an hour together they both went upstairs to see one of the two Deputy Chiefs.

  The Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS—also popularly if inaccurately known as MI-6—remains even in the days of supposed “open” government a shadowy organization that guards its secrecy. Only in recent years has a British government formally admitted that it exists at all. And it was as late as 1991 that the same government publicly named its boss, a move regarded by most insiders as a foolish and short-sighted one that served no purpose other than to force that unfortunate gentleman to the unwelcome novelty of needing bodyguards, paid for at public expense. Such are the futilities of political correctness.

  The staff of the SIS are listed in no manual but appear if at all as civil servants on the lists of a variety of ministries, mainly the Foreign Office, under whose auspices the Service comes. The budget appears in no accounts, being squirreled away in the budgets of a dozen different ministries.

  Even its shabby headquarters was for years supposed to be a state secret, until it became plain that any London cab driver, asked to take a passenger to Century House, would reply, “Oh, you mean the Spook House, guv?” At this point it was admitted that if London’s cabbies knew where it was, the KGB

  might have worked it out.

  Although much less
famous than the CIA, infinitely smaller and more meanly funded, “the Firm” has earned a solid reputation among friend and foe for the quality of its “product” (secretly gathered intelligence). Among the world’s major intelligence agencies, only the Israeli Mossad is smaller and even more shadowy.

  The man heading the SIS is known quite officially as the Chief and never , despite endless misnomers in the press, as the Director-General. It is the sister organization MI-5, or the Security Service, responsible for counterintelligence within the United Kingdom’s borders, that has a Director-General.

  In-house, the Chief is known as “C,” which ought to stand for Chief but does not. The first-ever Chief was Admiral Sir Mansfield Cummings, and the C comes from that long-dead gentleman’s last name.

  Under the Chief come two Deputy Chiefs and under them five Assistant Chiefs. These men rule the five main departments: Operations (or Ops, who gather the covert information); Intelligence (who analyze it into a hopefully meaningful picture); Technical (responsible for false papers, minicameras, secret writing, ultracompact communications, and all the other bits of metal needed to do something illegal and get away with it in an unfriendly world); Administration (covering salaries, pensions, staff lists, budget accountancy, Legal Office, Central Registry, and the like); and Counterintelligence (which tries to keep the Service clean of hostile penetration by vetting and checking).

  Under Ops come the Controllers, who handle the globe’s various divisions—Western Hemisphere, Sov Bloc, Africa, Europe, Mid-East, and Australasia—with a side office for Liaison, which has the ticklish task of trying to cooperate with “friendly” agencies.