The Fist of God Read online

  And the Agency did not know. They had a Head of Station in Baghdad, of course. But the man had been frozen out for weeks past. The Agency man was known to that bastard Rahmani who headed Iraqi Counterintelligence, and it was now plain that what had been fed to the Head of Station for weeks had all been bullshit. His best “sources” were apparently working for Rahmani and had been telling him trash.

  Of course, they had the pictures—enough pictures to drown in. The satellites, KH-11 and KH-12, were rolling over Iraq every few minutes taking happy snapshots of everything in the entire country. Analysts were working around the clock identifying what might be a poison gas factory, what might be a nuclear facility—or might be what it claimed to be, a bicycle workshop.

  Fine. The analysts of the National Reconnaissance Office, a part-CIA and part-Air Force enterprise, along with the scientists at ENPIC, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, were putting together a picture that would one day be complete. This here is a major command post, this is a SAM

  missile site, this is a fighter base. Good, because the pictures tell us so. And one day, maybe, they would all have to be bombed back to the Stone Age. But what else did Saddam have? Hidden away, stashed deep underground?

  Years of neglect of Iraq were now bearing fruit. The men who were slumped in their chairs behind Webster were old-time spooks who had made their bones on the Berlin wall when the concrete was not even dry. They went back a long way, before electronics had taken over the business of intelligence-gathering.

  And they had told him that the cameras of the NRO and the listening ears of the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade could not reveal plans, they could not spy out intentions, they could not go inside a dictator’s head.

  So the NRO was taking pictures and the ears of Fort Meade were listening and taping every word on every telephone call and radio message into, out of, and inside Iraq. And still he had no answers.

  The same administration, the same Capitol Hill that had been so mesmerized with electronic gadgetry that they had spent billions of dollars developing and sending up every last gizmo that the ingenious mind of man could devise, were now clamoring for answers that the gizmos did not seem to be giving them.

  And the men behind the DCI were saying that elint, the name for electronic intelligence, was a backup and a supplement to humint, or human intelligence-gathering, but not a substitute for it. Which was nice to know, but no solution to his problem.

  Which was that the White House was demanding answers that could only be given with authority by a source, an asset, a spook, a spy, a traitor, whatever, placed high inside the Iraqi hierarchy. Which he did not have .

  “You’ve asked Century House?”

  “Yes. Same as us.”

  “I’m going to Tel Aviv in two days,” said Chip Barber. “I’ll be seeing Yaacov Dror. Shall I ask him?”

  The DCI nodded. General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror was the head of the Mossad, most uncooperative of all the “friendly” agencies. The DCI was still smarting over the case of Jonathan Pollard, who had been run by the Mossad right inside America against the United States. Some friends. He hated to ask the Mossad for favors.

  “Lean on him, Chip. We are not messing around here. If he has a source inside Baghdad, we want in.

  We need that product. Meanwhile, I’d better go back to the White House and face Scowcroft again.”

  On that unhelpful note, the meeting ended.

  The four men who waited at the SIS London headquarters that morning of August 5 had been busy most of the night.

  The Director of Special Forces, Brigadier J. P. Lovat, had been on the phone for most of it, allowing himself a two-hour catnap in his chair between two and fourA.M. Like so many combat soldiers, he had long since developed the knack of grabbing a few hours whenever and wherever a situation permitted.

  One never knew how long it might be until the next chance to recharge the batteries. Before dawn, he had washed and shaved and was ready to go on for another day running on all cylinders.

  It was his call to a contact high in British Airways at midnight (London time) that had held the airliner on the ground at Abu Dhabi. The British Airways executive, roused at his home, did not ask why he should hold an airliner three thousand miles away until an extra passenger could board it. He knew Lovat because they were members of the Special Forces Club in Herbert Crescent, knew roughly what he did, and fulfilled the favor without asking why.

  At the breakfast hour the orderly sergeant had checked with Heathrow that the Abu Dhabi flight had made up a third of its ninety-minute delay and would land about ten. The major should be at the barracks close to eleven.

  A motorcycle messenger had rushed up a certain personal career file from Browning Barracks, headquarters of the Parachute Regiment at Aldershot. The regimental adjutant had pulled it out of Records just after midnight. It was the file that covered Mike Martin’s career in the Paras from the day he presented himself as an eighteen-year-old schoolboy through all the nineteen years he had been a professional soldier, except the two long periods he had spent on transfer to the SAS Regiment.

  The commanding officer of the 22nd SAS, Colonel Bruce Craig, another Scot, had driven through the night from Hereford, bringing with him the file that covered those two periods. He strode in just before dawn.

  “Morning, J.P. What’s the flap?”

  They knew each other well. Lovat, always known as J.P. or Jaypee, had been the man in command of the squad that had retaken the Iranian embassy in London from the terrorists ten years earlier, and Craig had been a troop commander under him at the time. They went back a long way.

  “Century wants to put a man into Kuwait,” he said. That seemed to be enough. Long speeches were not his passion.

  “One of ours? Martin?” Colonel Craig tossed down the file he had brought.

  “Looks like it. I’ve called him back from Abu Dhabi.”

  “Well, fuck them. You going to go along with it?”

  Mike Martin was one of Craig’s officers, and they too went back a long way. He did not like his men being pinched from under his nose by Century House. The DSF shrugged.

  “May have to. If he fits. If they feel like it, they’ll probably go very high.”

  Craig grunted and took a strong black coffee from the orderly sergeant whom he greeted as Sid—they had fought in Dhofar together. When it came to politics, the colonel knew the score. The SIS might act diffident, but when they wanted to pull strings they could go as high as they liked. Century House would probably win on this one if it wanted to. The regiment would have to cooperate, even though Century would have overall control under the guise of a joint mission.

  The two men from Century arrived just after the colonel, and they were all introduced. The senior man was Steve Laing. He had brought with him Simon Paxman, head of the Iraq Desk. They were seated in a waiting room, given coffee, and offered the two CV files to read. Both men buried themselves in the background of Mike Martin from the age of eighteen onward. The previous evening, Paxman had spent four hours with the younger brother learning about the family background and upbringing in Baghdad and Haileybury public school.

  Martin had written a personal letter to the Paras during his last term at Haileybury in the summer of 1971

  and been offered an interview that September at the depot in Aldershot. He had been regarded by his school as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. The boy was accepted and began training the same month, a grueling twenty-two weeks that brought the survivors of the course to April 1972.

  First there had been four weeks of square-bashing, basic weapons handling, basic fieldcraft, and physical fitness; then two more of the same plus first aid, signals, and study of precautions against NBC—nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical warfare.

  The seventh week was for more fitness training, getting harder all the time, but not as bad as weeks eight and nine—endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales, where
strong and fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia, and exhaustion.

  Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range, where Martin, just turned nineteen, rated as a marksman. Eleven and twelve were test weeks carried out in open country near Aldershot—just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain, and freezing hail of midwinter.

  “Test weeks?” muttered Paxman, turning the page. “What the hell has the rest been?”

  After the test weeks, the young men got their coveted red beret and paratrooper smocks before three more weeks in the Brecons for defense exercise, patrolling, and live firing exercise. By then—it was late January—the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept rough and wet without fires.

  Weeks sixteen to nineteen were for the basic parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out, and not just from the aircraft.

  After two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called last fence and some polishing of parade-ground drill skills, week twenty-two saw Pass-out Parade, with proud parents at last allowed to see the youths who had left them six months earlier.

  Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM—potential officer material—and in May 1972

  he went to Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, joining the one-year standard military course. In the spring of 1973, the new Lieutenant Martin went straight to Hythe to take over a platoon in preparatory training for Northern Ireland, and he commanded the platoon during twelve miserable weeks crouching in an observation post called Flax Mill that covered the ultra-Republican enclave of Ardoyne, Belfast. He had been assigned to the Third Battalion, known as Three Para, and after Belfast returned to the depot at Aldershot to command the recruit platoon, putting newcomers through the same purgatory he himself had endured. In the summer of 1977 he returned to Three Para, now based at Osnabrück as part of the British Army of the Rhine.

  It was another miserable time. The Paras were assigned to “penguin mode,” meaning that for three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, they were off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-borne infantry. All Paras hate penguin mode. Morale was low, fights broke out between the Paras and the Infantry, and Martin had to punish men with whom he thoroughly sympathized. He stuck it out for nearly a year, then in November 1977 he volunteered for transfer to the SAS.

  A good proportion of the SAS come from the Paras, perhaps because the training has similarities, though the SAS claim theirs is harder, that they take very fit men and then start to work on them.

  Martin’s papers went through the regiment’s Records Office at Hereford, where his fluent Arabic was noted, and in the summer of 1978 Martin did the standard “initial” selection course of six weeks.

  On the first day a smiling instructor told them all:

  “On this course, we don’t try and train you. We try and kill you.”

  They did too. Only ten percent pass the initial course into the SAS. It saves time later. Martin passed.

  Then came continuation training, jungle training in Belize, and one extra month back in England devoted to resistance to interrogation. Resistance means trying to stay silent while some extremely unpleasant practices are inflicted. The good news is that both the regiment and the volunteer have the right every hour to insist on an RTU—return to unit—for the volunteer.

  “They’re mad,” said Paxman, throwing down the file and helping himself to another coffee. “They’re all bloody mad.”

  Laing grunted. He was engrossed in the second file; it was the man’s experience in Arabia that he needed for the mission he had in mind.

  Martin had spent three years with the SAS on his first tour, with the rank of captain and role of troop commander. He had opted for A Squadron, the freefallers—the squadrons are A, B, C, and G—which was a natural choice for a man who had jumped while in the Paras with their high-altitude freefall display team, the Red Devils.

  If the Paras had no cause to use his Arabic, the Regiment did. In the three years 1979-1981 he had served alongside the Sultan of Oman’s forces in western Dhofar, taught VIP protection in two Gulf emirates, taught the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, and lectured the private bodyguards of Sheikh Isa of Bahrain. There were notations after these listings in his SAS file: that he had redeveloped a strong boyhood bond with Arab culture, that he spoke the language like no other officer in the regiment, and that he had a habit of going for long walks in the desert when he wanted to think a problem through, impervious to the heat and the flies.

  The record showed he returned to the Paras after his three-year secondment to the SAS in the winter of

  ’81 and found to his joy that the Paras were taking part in Operation Rocky Lance during January and February 1982 in, of all places, Oman. So he came back to the Jebel Akdar for that period, before taking leave in March. In April he was hastily recalled—Argentina had invaded the Falklands. Paras Two and Three went to the South Atlantic. They sailed on the liner Canberra , which had been hastily converted for military troopship use, and went ashore at San Carlos Water. Three Para tabbed right across East Falkland in the sleet and rain toward Port Stanley. Tabbing meant force-marching in foul conditions while carrying 120 pounds of gear.

  Three Para headquartered themselves at a lonely farm called Estancia House and prepared for the last assault on Port Stanley, which meant first taking the heavily defended Mount Longdon. It was in that vicious night of June 11 that Captain Mike Martin collected his bullet.

  It started as a silent night attack on the Argentine positions and turned very noisy when Corporal Milne stepped on a mine that blew his foot off. The Argentine machine guns opened up, the flares lit the mountain like day, and Three Para could either run back to cover or into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and more than forty injured. One of these was Mike Martin, who nursed a slug through one leg and gave vent to a hissed stream of foul invective, fortunately in Arabic.

  After most of the day on the mountainside, he was brought out to the advanced dressing station at Ajax Bay, patched up, and helicoptered to the hospital ship Uganda . The Uganda stopped in Montevideo, and Martin was among those fit enough to fly home by civilian airliner to Brize Norton. The Paras then gave him three weeks at Headley Court, Leather-head, for convalescence.

  That was where he met the nurse, Lucinda, who was to become his wife after a brief courtship. Perhaps she liked the glamour of a husband in the Paras, but she was mistaken. They set up housekeeping in a cottage near Chobham, convenient for her job at Leatherhead and his at Aldershot. But after three years, having actually seen him for four and a half months, Lucinda quite properly put to him a choice: you can have the Paras and your bloody desert, or you can have me. He thought it over and chose the desert.

  She was quite right to go. In the autumn of 1982 he had studied for Staff College, gateway to senior rank and a nice desk, perhaps in the Ministry. In February 1983 he fluffed the exam.

  “He did it deliberately,” said Paxman. “His CO’s note here says he could have breezed through if he wanted.”

  “I know,” said Laing. “I’ve read it. The man’s ... unusual.”

  In the summer of 1983 Martin was posted to the job of British staff officer assigned to the Sultan of Oman’s Land Forces HQ at Muscat. He went straight into two more years secondment, keeping his Para badge but commanding the Northern Frontier Regiment, Muscat. He was promoted to major in Oman in the summer of ’86.

  Officers who have served one tour in the SAS can come back for a second, but only on invitation.

  Hardly had he landed back in England in the winter of ’87, when his uncontested divorce went through, than the invitation came from Hereford. He went back as a squadron commander in January ’88, serving with Northern Flank (Norway), then with the Sultan of Brunei and six months with the internal security team at Stirling Lines at Hereford. In June 1990 he was sent with his team of instructors to Abu Dhabi.

  Sergeant Sid knocked and poked hi
s head around the door.

  “The brigadier asks if you’d care to rejoin him. Major Martin is on his way up.”

  When Martin walked in, Laing noted the sun-darkened face, hair, and eyes and shot a glance at Paxman. One down, two to go. He looked the part. Now, would he do it, and could he speak Arabic as they said?

  J.P. walked forward and took Martin’s hand in his bone-crushing grip.

  “Good to see you back, Mike.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He shook hands with Colonel Craig.

  “Let me introduce these two gentlemen,” said the DSF. “Mr. Laing and Mr. Paxman, both from Century. They have a—er—proposition they would like to put to you. Gentlemen, fire ahead. Would you prefer to have Major Martin in private?”

  “Oh, no, please,” said Laing hastily. “The Chief is hoping that if anything results from this meeting, it will definitely be a joint operation.”

  Nice touch, thought J.P., mentioning Sir Colin. Just to show how much clout these bastards intend to exercise if they have to.

  All five sat down. Laing talked, explaining the political background, the uncertainty as to whether Saddam Hussein would get out of Kuwait quickly, slowly, or not at all unless thrown out. But the political analysis was that Iraq would first strip Kuwait of every valuable, then stick around demanding concessions that the United Nations was simply not in a mood to concede. One might be looking at months and months.

  Britain needed to know what was going on inside Kuwait—not gossip and rumor, nor the lurid stories flying around the media, but rock-hard information: about the British citizens still stuck there, about the occupation forces, and if force had eventually to be used, whether a Kuwaiti resistance could be useful in pinning down more and more of Saddam’s otherwise frontline troops.

  Martin nodded and listened and asked a few pertinent questions but otherwise stayed silent. The two senior officers gazed out the window. Laing concluded just after twelve.