The Fist of God

PRAISE FOR

THE FIST

OF GOD

“ ‘The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.’ So begins Frederick Forsyth’s —and even with just that one line you can see that he has returned to the pulse-pounding form of such books as The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War. Forsyth has written perhaps the first true thriller to come out of the Gulf War.”

— Book-of-the-Month Club News

“[A] fat, layered, complex, and altogether sublime spy action novel ...

is delicious yet authentic fun, the stuff of good espionage thrillers.”

— Chicago Sun-Times

“The Gulf War is the setting of Forsyth’s brilliantly plotted ‘what if’

thriller in which historical facts are turned into gripping fiction. ... It’s the mark of master Forsyth that characters and background information are introduced so cleanly and precisely that impossibly complex events are never confusing, and the story develops its grip so surely it’s almost impossible to put the book down.”

— Publishers Weekly

“The novel ends in a blaze of top-notch military action, finely wrought descriptions of the gadgetry of destruction, and a twisty revelation. ...

Super sleuthing.”

— Kirkus Reviews

FREDERICK

FORSYTH

THE FIST

OF GOD

For the widows and orphans of the Special Air Service Regiment.

And for Sandy, without whose support this would have been so much harder.

To those who know what really happened in the Gulf, and who spoke to me about it, my sincere thanks. You know who you are; let it be.

CAST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

THE AMERICANS

George Bush President

James Baker Secretary of State

Colin Powell Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff General Norman Commander-in-Chief, Coalition Schwarzkopf Forces, Gulf Theater Lieutenant General Commander, Coalition Air Forces, Charles (Chuck) Horner Gulf Theater Brigadier General Deputy to Chuck Horner Buster Glosson

Bill Stewart Deputy Director (Operations), CIA Chip Barber Head, Middle East Division, CIA William Webster Director of Central Intelligence, CIA Don Walker USAF fighter pilot Steve Turner USAF fighter squadron commander Tim Nathanson Wizzo to Don Walker Randy Roberts Wingman to Don Walker Jim Henry Wizzo to Randy Roberts Harry Sinclair Head of London Station, CIA Saul Nathanson Banker and philanthropist The Fist of God

“Daddy” Lomax Retired nuclear physicist

THE BRITISH

Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister

John Major Thatcher’s successor as Prime Minister

Lieutenant General Commander, British Forces, Gulf Theater Sir Peter de la Billière

Sir Colin McColl Chief, SIS

Sir Paul Spruce Chairman, British Medusa Committee

Brigadier J.P, Lovat Director, Special Forces

Colonel Bruce Craig Commanding Officer, 22nd SAS Regiment

Major Mike Martin Major, SAS

Major “Sparky” Low SAS Officer, Khafji Dr. Terry Martin Academic and Arabist Steve Laing Director of Operations, Mid-East Division, SIS

Simon Paxman Head of Iraq Desk, SIS

Stuart Harris British businessman, Baghdad Julian Gray Head of Station, SIS, Riyadh Dr. Bryant Bacteriologist, Medusa Committee Dr. Reinhart Poison gas expert, Medusa Committee Dr. John Hipwell Nuclear expert, Medusa Committee Sean Plummer Head of Arab Service, GCHQ

Wing Commander Commanding Officer, 608th Squadron, RAF

Philip Curzon

Squadron Leader Pilot, 608th Squadron, RAF

Lofty Williamson

Flight Lieutenant Williamson’s navigator Sid Blair

Flight Lieutenant Pilot, 608th Squadron Peter Johns

Flight Lieutenant Johns’s navigator Nicky Tyne

Sergeant Peter SAS man Stephenson

Corporal Ben Eastman SAS man

Corporal Kevin North SAS man

THE IRAQIS

Saddam Hussein President The Fist of God

Izzat Ibrahim Deputy President

Hussein Kamil Saddam’s son-in-law, head of MIMI

Taha Ramadam Prime Minister

Sadoun Hammadi Deputy Premier

Tariq Aziz Foreign Minister

Ali Hassan Majid Governor-General, occupied Kuwait General Saadi Tumah Commander, Republican Guard Abbas

General Ali Musuli Commander, Engineering Corps General Abdullah Commander, Armored Corps Kadiri

Dr. Amer Saadi Deputy to Hussein Kamil Brigadier Hassan Chief, Counterintelligence Rahmani

Dr. Ismail Ubaidi Chief, Foreign Espionage Brigadier Omar Chief, Secret Police (Amn-al-Amm) Khatib

Colonel Osman Colonel, Army Engineers Badri

Colonel Abdelkarim Colonel, Iraqi Air Force Badri

Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar Head, nuclear program Colonel Sabaawi Secret Police Chief, occupied Kuwait Dr. Salah Siddiqui Nuclear engineer

THE KUWAITIS

Khaled Al-Khalifa Pilot, captain Ahmed Al-Khalifa Merchant Colonel Abu Fouad Head, resistance movement Asrar Qabandi Heroine of resistance

THE ISRAELIS

Itzhak Shamir Prime Minister

General Yaacov Head of Mossad

“Kobi” Dror

Sami Gershon Head, Combatants Division, Mossad

David Sharon Head of Iraq Desk, Mossad

Benjamin Netanyahu Deputy Foreign Minister

Gideon “Gidi” Mission controller, Operation Joshua The Fist of God

Barzilai

Dr. Moshe Hadari Arabist, Tel Aviv University Avi Herzog, alias Mossad agent in Vienna Karim Aziz

THE VIENNESE

Wolfgang Gemütlich Vice-president, the Winkler Bank

Edith Hardenberg Gemütlich’s private secretary

THE FIST OF GOD

Chapter 1

The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.

The source of his amusement was a story just told him by his personal aide, Monique Jaminé, who was driving him home that chill, drizzling evening of March 22, 1990, from his office to his apartment.

It concerned a mutual colleague in the Space Research Corporation offices at rue de Stalle, a woman regarded as a real vamp, a man-eater, who had turned out to be gay. The deception appealed to the man’s lavatorial sense of humor.

The pair had left the offices in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, Belgium, at ten to seven, Monique driving the Renault 21 estate wagon. She had, some months earlier, sold her employer’s own Volkswagen because he was such a rotten driver, she feared he would end up killing himself.

It was only a ten-minute drive from the offices to his apartment in the center building of the three-building Cheridreu complex off rue François Folie, but they stopped halfway there at a baker’s shop. Both went inside, he to buy a loaf of his favorite pain de campagne. There was rain in the wind; they bowed their heads, failing to notice the car that followed behind them.

Nothing strange in that. Neither was trained in tradecraft; the unmarked car with its two dark-jowled occupants had been following the scientist for weeks, never losing him, never approaching him, just watching; and he had not seen them. Others had, but he did not know.

Emerging from the shop just in front of the cemetery, he tossed his loaf into the back seat and climbed aboard to complete the journey to his home. At ten minutes after seven, Monique drew up in front of the plate-glass doors of the apartment building, set fifteen meters back from the street. She offered to come up with him, to see him home, but he declined. She knew he would be expecting his girlfriend Helene and did not wish them to meet. It was one of his vanities, in which his adoring female staff indulged him, that Helene was just a good friend, keeping him company while he was in Brussels and his wife was in Canada.

He climbed out of the car, the collar of his belted trench coat turned up as ever, and hefted onto his shoulder the big black canvas bag that hardly ever left him. It weighed over fifteen kilograms and contained a mass of papers: scientific papers, projects, calculations, and data. The scientist distrusted safes and thought illogically that all the details of his latest projects were safer hanging from his shoulder.

The last Monique saw of her employer, he was standing in front of the glass doors, his bag over one shoulder, the loaf under the other arm, fumbling for his keys. She watched him go through the doors and the self-locking plate glass swing closed behind him. Then she drove off.

The scientist lived on the sixth floor of the eight-story building. Two elevators ran up the back wall of the building, encircled by the stairs, with a fire door on each landing. He took one of them and stepped out at the sixth floor. The dim, floor-level lights of the lobby came on automatically as he did so. Still jangling his keys, leaning against the weight of his bag, and clutching his loaf, he turned left and left again across the russet-brown carpet and tried to fit his key into the lock of his apartment door.

The killer had been waiting on the other side of the elevator shaft, which jutted into the dimly lit lobby. He came quietly around the shaft holding his silenced 7.65-mm. Beretta automatic, which was wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent the ejected cartridges from spilling all over the carpet.

Five shots, fired from less than a one-meter range into the back of the head and neck, were more than enough. The big, burly man slumped forward against his door and slithered to the carpet. The gunman did not bother to check; there was no need. He had done this before, practicing on prisoners, and he knew his work was done. He ran lightly down the six flights of stairs, out of the back of the building, across the tree-studded gardens, and into the waiting car. In an hour he was inside his country’s embassy, in a day out of Belgium.

Helene arrived five minutes later. At first she thought her lover had had a heart attack. In a panic she let herself in and called the paramedics. Then she realized his own doctor lived in the same building, and she summoned him as well. The paramedics arrived first.

One of them tried to shift the heavy body, still facing downward. The man’s hand came away covered in blood. Minutes later, he and the doctor pronounced the victim quite dead. The only other occupant of the four flats on that floor came to her door, an elderly lady who had been listening to a classical concert and heard nothing behind her solid timber door. Cheridreu was that kind of building, very discreet.

The man lying on the floor was Dr. Gerald Vincent Bull, wayward genius, gun designer to the world, and more latterly armorer for Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

In the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Gerry Bull, some strange things began to happen all over Europe. In Brussels, Belgian counterintelligence admitted that for some months Bull had been followed on an almost daily basis by a series of unmarked cars containing two men of swarthy, eastern Mediterranean appearance.

On April 11, British Customs officers seized on the docks of Middlesborough eight sections of huge steel pipes, beautifully forged and milled and able to be assembled by giant flanges at each end, drilled to take powerful nuts and bolts. The triumphant officers announced that these tubes were not intended for a petrochemical plant, as specified on the bills of lading and the export certificates, but were parts of a great gun barrel designed by Gerry Bull and destined for Iraq. The farce of the Supergun was born, and it would run and run, revealing double-dealing, the stealthy paws of several intelligence agencies, a mass of bureaucratic ineptitude, and some political chicanery.

Within weeks, bits of the Supergun began popping up all over Europe.

On April 23, Turkey announced it had stopped a Hungarian truck carrying a single ten-meter steel tube for Iraq, believed to be part of the gun. The same day, Greek officials seized another truck with steel parts and held the hapless British driver for several weeks as an accomplice. In May the Italians intercepted seventy-five tons of parts, while a further fifteen tons were confiscated at the Fucine works, near Rome. The latter were of a titanium steel alloy and destined to be part of the breech of the gun, as were more bits and pieces yielded by a warehouse at Brescia, in northern Italy.

The Germans came in, with discoveries at Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, also identified as parts of the by now world-famous Supergun.

In fact, Gerry Bull had placed the orders for his brainchild skillfully and well. The tubes forming the barrels were indeed made in England by two firms, Walter Somers of Birmingham and Sheffield Forgemasters. But the eight intercepted in April 1990 were the last of fifty-two sections, enough to make two complete barrels 156 meters long and with an unbelievable one-meter caliber, capable of firing a projectile the size of a cylindrical telephone booth.

The trunnions or supports came from Greece, the pipes, pumps, and valves that formed the recoil mechanism from Switzerland and Italy, the breech block from Austria and Germany, the propellant from Belgium. In all, seven countries were involved as contractors, and none knew quite what they were making.

The popular press had a field day, as did the exultant customs officers and the British legal system, which began eagerly prosecuting any innocent party involved. What no one pointed out was that the horse had bolted. The intercepted parts constituted Superguns 2, 3, and 4.

As for the killing of Gerry Bull, it produced some weird theories in the media. Predictably, the CIA was nominated by the CIA-is-responsible-for-everything brigade. This was another absurdity. Although Langley has, in the past and under particular circumstances, countenanced the elimination of certain parties, these parties have almost always been in the same business—contract officers turned sour, renegades, and double agents. The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.

Moreover, Gerry Bull was not from that back-alley world. He was a well-known scientist, designer, and contractor of artillery, conventional and very unconventional, an American citizen who had once worked for America for years and talked copiously to his U.S.

Army friends about what he was up to. If every designer and industrialist in the weapons industry who was working for a country not at that time seen to be an enemy of the United States was to be

“wasted,” some five hundred individuals across North and South America and Europe would have to qualify.

Finally, Langley has for at least the past ten years become gridlocked by the new bureaucracy of controls and oversight committees. No professional intelligence officer is going to order a hit without a written and signed order. For a man like Gerry Bull, that signature would have to come from the Director of Central Intelligence himself.

The DCI at that time was William Webster, a by-the-book former judge from Kansas. It would be about as easy to get a signed hit authority out of William Webster as to burrow a way out of the Marion penitentiary with a blunt teaspoon.

But far and away the league leader in the who-killed-Gerry-Bull enigma was, of course, the Israeli Mossad. The entire press and most of Bull’s friends and family jumped to the same conclusion. Bull had been working for Iraq; Iraq was the enemy of Israel; two and two equals four. The trouble is, in that world of shadows and distorting mirrors, what may or may not appear to be two, when multiplied by a factor that may or may not be two, could possibly come out at four but probably will not.

The Mossad is the world’s smallest, most ruthless, and most gung-ho of the leading intelligence agencies. It has in the past undoubtedly undertaken many assassinations, using one of the three kidon teams—the word is the Hebrew for bayonet. The kidonim come under the Combatants or Komemiute Division, the deep-cover men, the hard squad. But even the Mossad has its rules, albeit self-imposed.

Terminations fall into two categories. One is “operational requirement,” an unforeseen emergency in which an operation involving friendly lives is put at risk by someone, and the person in the way has to be eased out of the way, fast and permanently. In these cases, the supervising katsa, or case officer, has the right to waste the opponent who is jeopardizing the entire mission, and will get retroactive support from his bosses back in Tel Aviv.

The other category of terminations is for those already on the execution list. This list exists in two places: the private safe of the Prime Minister and the safe of the head of the Mossad. Every incoming Prime Minister is required to see this list, which may contain between thirty and eighty names. He may initial each name, giving the Mossad the go-ahead on an if-and-when basis, or he may insist on being consulted before each new mission. In either event, he must sign the execution order.

Broadly speaking, those on the list fall into three classes. There are a few remaining top Nazis, though this class has almost ceased to exist.

Years ago, although Israel mounted a major operation to kidnap and try Adolf Eichmann because it wanted to make an international example of him, other Nazis were simply liquidated quietly. Class two are almost all contemporary terrorists, mainly Arabs who have already shed Israeli or Jewish blood like Ahmed Jibril and Abu Nidal, or who would like to, with a few non-Arabs thrown in.

Class three, which might have contained the name of Gerry Bull, are those working for Israel’s enemies and whose work will carry great danger for Israel and her citizens if it progresses any further.

The common denominator is that those targeted must have blood on their hands, either in fact or in prospect.

If a hit is requested, the Prime Minister will pass the matter to a judicial investigator so secret, few Israeli jurists and no citizens have ever heard of him. The investigator holds a “court,” with the charge read out, a prosecutor, and a defender. If the Mossad’s request is confirmed, the matter goes back to the Prime Minister for his signature. The kidon team does the rest—if it can.

The problem with the Mossad-killed-Bull theory is that it is flawed at almost every level. True, Bull was working for Saddam Hussein, designing new conventional artillery (which could not reach Israel), a rocket program (which might, one day), and a giant gun (which did not worry Israel at all). But so were hundreds of others. Half a dozen German firms were behind Iraq’s hideous poison gas industry, with whose products Saddam had already threatened Israel. Germans and Brazilians were working flat-out on the rockets of Saad 16. The French were the prime movers and suppliers of the Iraqi research for a nuclear bomb.

That Bull, his ideas, his designs, his activities, and his progress deeply interested Israel, there is no doubt. In the aftermath of his death much was made of the fact that in the preceding months he had been worried by repeated covert entries into his flat while he was away. Nothing had ever been taken, but traces had been left. Glasses were moved and replaced; windows were left open; a videotape was rewound and removed from the player. Was he being warned, he wondered, and was the Mossad behind it all? He was, and they were—but for a less-than-obvious reason.

In the aftermath, the black-jowled strangers with the guttural accents who tailed him all over Brussels were identified by the media as Israeli assassins preparing their moment. Unfortunately for the theory, Mossad agents do not run around looking and acting like Pancho Villa.

They were there, all right, but nobody saw them; not Bull, not his friends or family, not the Belgian police. They were in Brussels with a team who could look like and pass for Europeans—Belgians, Americans, whatever they chose. It was they who tipped off the Belgians that Bull was being followed by another team.

Moreover, Gerry Bull was a man of extraordinary indiscretion. He simply could not resist a challenge. He had worked for Israel before, liked the country and the people, had many friends in the Israeli Army, and could not keep his mouth shut. Challenged with a phrase like:

“Gerry, I bet you’ll never get those rockets at Saad 16 to work,” Bull would leap into a three-hour monologue describing exactly what he was doing, how far the project had got, what were the problems, and how he hoped to solve them—the lot. For an intelligence service, he was a dream of indiscretion. Even in the last week of his life he was entertaining two Israeli generals at his office, giving them a complete up-to-the-minute picture, all tape-recorded by the devices in their briefcases. Why would they destroy such a cornucopia of inside information?

Finally, the Mossad has one other habit when dealing with a scientist or industrialist, but never with a terrorist. A final warning is always given; not a weird break-in aimed at moving glasses or rewinding videotapes, but an actual verbal warning. Even with Dr. Yahia El Meshad, the Egyptian nuclear physicist who worked on the first Iraqi nuclear reactor and was assassinated in his room at the Meridien Hotel in Paris on June 13, 1980, the procedure was observed. An Arabic-speaking katsa went to his room and told him bluntly what would happen to him if he did not desist. The Egyptian told the stranger at his door to get lost—not a wise move. Telling a Mossad kidon team to perform an impractical act upon themselves is not a tactic approved by the insurance industry. Two hours later, Meshad was dead. But he had had his chance. A year later, the whole French-supplied nuclear complex at Osirak 1 and 2 was blown away by an Israeli air strike.

Bull was different—a Canadian-born American citizen, genial, approachable, and a whiskey drinker of awesome talent. The Israelis could talk to him as a friend, and did constantly. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to send a friend to tell him bluntly that he had got to stop or the hard squad would come after him—nothing personal, Gerry, just the way things are.

Bull was not in the business of winning a posthumous Congressional Medal. Moreover, he had already told the Israelis and his close friend George Wong that he wanted out of Iraq—physically and contractually. He had had enough. What happened to Dr. Gerry Bull was something quite different.

Gerald Vincent Bull was born in 1928 at North Bay, Ontario. At school he was clever and driven by an urge to succeed and earn the world’s approval. At sixteen he graduated from high school, but because he was so young the only college that would accept him was the University of Toronto Engineering Faculty. Here he showed he was not just clever but brilliant. At twenty-two he became the youngest-ever Ph.D. It was aeronautical engineering that seized his imagination, specifically ballistics—the study of bodies, whether projectiles or rockets, in flight. It was this that led him down the road to artillery.

After Toronto, he joined the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment, CARDE, at Valcartier, a then quiet little township outside Quebec City. In the early 1950s man was turning his face not only toward the skies but beyond them to space itself. The buzzword was rockets. It was then that Bull showed he was something apart from technically brilliant. He was a maverick—inventive, unconventional, and imaginative. It was during his ten years at CARDE that he developed his idea, which would become his life’s dream for the rest of his days.

Like all new ideas, Bull’s appeared quite simple. When he looked at the emerging range of American rockets in the late 1950s, he realized that nine-tenths of these then impressive-looking rockets were only the first stage. Sitting right on top, only a fraction of the size, were the second and third stages and, even smaller, the tiny nipple of the payload.

The giant first stage was intended to lift the rocket up through the first 150 kilometers of air, where the atmosphere was thickest and gravity strongest. After the 150-kilometer mark, it needed much less power to drive the satellite on into space itself, and into orbit at between 400 and 500 kilometers above the earth. Every time a rocket went up, the whole of that bulky and very expensive first stage was destroyed—burned out, to fall forever into the oceans.

Supposing, Bull mused, you could punch your second and third stages, plus the payload, up those first ISO kilometers from the barrel of a giant gun? In theory, he pleaded with the money men, it was possible, easier, and cheaper, and the gun could be used over and over again.

It was his first real brush with politicians and bureaucrats, and he failed, mainly because of his personality. He hated them, and they hated him. But in 1961 he got lucky. McGill University came in because it foresaw some interesting publicity. The U.S. Army came in for reasons of its own; guardian of American artillery, the Army was in a power play with the Air Force, which was battling for control over all rockets or projectiles going above 100 kilometers. With their combined funds, Bull was able to set up a small research establishment on the island of Barbados. The Army let him have a package of one out-of-storage sixteen-inch Navy gun (the biggest caliber in the world), one spare barrel, one small radar tracking unit, a crane, and some trucks. McGill set up a metal workshop. It was like trying to take on the Grand Prix racing industry with the facilities of a back-street garage. But Bull did it. His career of amazing inventions had begun, and he was thirty-three years old: shy, diffident, untidy, inventive, and still a maverick.

He called his research in Barbados the High Altitude Research Project, or HARP. The old Navy gun was duly erected, and Bull began work on projectiles. He called them Martlet, after the heraldic bird that appears on the insignia of McGill University.

Bull wanted to put a payload of instruments into earth orbit cheaper and faster than anyone else. He knew perfectly well that no human could withstand the pressures of being fired from a gun, but he figured rightly that in the future ninety percent of scientific research and work in space would be done by machines, not men. America under Kennedy, goaded by the flight of the Russian Yuri Gagarin, pursued from Cape Canaveral the more glamorous but ultimately rather pointless exercise of putting mice, dogs, monkeys, and eventually men up there.

Down in Barbados, Bull soldiered on with his single gun and his Martlet projectiles. In 1964 he blew a Martlet 92 kilometers high, then added an extra 16 meters of barrel to his gun (it cost just $41,000), making the new 36-meter barrel the longest in the world. With this, he reached the magic 150 kilometers with a 180-kilogram payload.

He solved the problems as they arose. A major one was the propellant.

In a small gun the charge gives the projectile a single hard smack as it expands from solid to gas in a microsecond. The gas tries to escape its compression and has nowhere to go but out of the barrel, pushing the shell ahead of it as it does so. But with a barrel as long as Bull’s, a special, slower-burning propellant was needed not to split the barrel wide open. He needed a powder that would send his projectile up this enormous barrel in a long, steadily accelerating whoosh. So he designed it.

In 1966, Bull’s old adversaries among the Canadian Defense Ministry bureaucrats got him by urging their minister to pull his financing. Bull protested that he could put a payload of instruments into space for a fraction of what it cost Cape Canaveral. To no avail. To protect its interest, the U.S. Army transferred Bull from Barbados to Yuma, Arizona.

Here, in November of that year, he put a payload 180 kilometers up, a record that stood for twenty-five years. But in 1967, Canada pulled out completely, both the government and McGill University. The U.S. Army followed suit. The HARP project closed down. Bull set himself up on a purely consultative basis at an estate he had bought at Highwater that straddled the border of northern Vermont and his native Canada. He called his company Space Research Corporation.

There were two postscripts to the HARP affair. By 1990, it was costing ten thousand dollars to put every kilogram of instruments into space in the Space Shuttle program out of Cape Canaveral. To his dying day, Bull knew he could do it for six hundred dollars per kilo.

And in 1988 work began on a new project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The project involved a giant gun, but so far with a barrel only four inches in caliber and a barrel only fifty meters long. Eventually, and at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is hoped that a much, much bigger one will be built, with a view to firing payloads into space. The project’s name is Super-High Altitude Research Project, or SHARP.

Gerry Bull lived in and ran his complex at Highwater on the border for ten years. In that time he dropped his unfulfilled dream of a gun that would fire payloads into space and concentrated on his second area of expertise—the more profitable one of conventional artillery.

He began with the major problem: Almost all the world’s armies based their artillery on the universal 155-mm. howitzer field gun. Bull knew that in an artillery exchange, the man with the longer range is king. He can sit back and blow the enemy away while remaining inviolate. Bull was determined to extend the range and increase the accuracy of the 155-mm. field gun. He started with the ammunition. It had been tried before, but no one had succeeded. In four years Bull cracked it.

In control tests the Bull shell went one and a half times the distance as the same 155-mm. standard gun, was more accurate, and exploded with the same force into 4,700 fragments, as opposed to 1,350 for a NATO shell. NATO was not interested. By the grace of God, neither was the Soviet Union.

Undeterred, Bull plowed on, producing a new full-bore extended-range shell. Still NATO was not interested, preferring to stay with its traditional suppliers and the short-range shell.

But if the powers would not look, the rest of the world did. Military delegations swarmed to Highwater to consult Gerry Bull. They included Israel (this was when he cemented friendships begun with observers in Barbados), Egypt, Venezuela, Chile, and Iran. He also acted as a consultant on other artillery matters to Britain, Holland, Italy, Canada, and the United States, whose military scientists (if not the Pentagon) continued to study with some awe what he was up to.

In 1972, Bull was quietly made a U.S. citizen. The next year, he began work on the actual 155-caliber field gun itself. Within two years he had made another breakthrough, discovering that the perfect length for a cannon barrel is neither more nor less than forty-five times its caliber. He perfected a new redesign of the standard 155-mm. field gun and called it the GC (for gun caliber) 45. The new gun, with his extended-range shells, would outgun any artillery in the entire Communist arsenal. But if he expected contracts, he was disappointed.

Again, the Pentagon stayed with the gun lobby and its new idea for rocket-assisted shells at eight times the price per shell. The performance of both shells was identical.

Bull’s fall from grace, when it came, started innocently enough in 1976, when he was invited with CIA connivance to help improve the artillery and shells of South Africa, which was then fighting the Moscow-backed Cubans in Angola.

Bull was nothing if not politically naive—to an amazing degree. He went, found he liked the South Africans, and got on well with them.

The fact that South Africa was an international outcast for its apartheid policies did not worry him. He helped them redesign their artillery along the lines of his increasingly sought-after GC-45 long-barreled long-range howitzer. Later, the South Africans produced their own version, and it was these cannon that smashed the Soviet artillery, rolling back the Russians and Cubans.

Returning to the United States, Bull continued to ship his shells. In 1977, however, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, and when Jimmy Carter became president, Bull was arrested and charged with illegal exports to a forbidden regime. The CIA dropped him like a hot potato. He was persuaded to stay silent and plead guilty. It was a formality, he was told; he would get a slap on the wrist for a technical breach.

On June 16, 1980, a U.S. judge sentenced Bull to a year in prison, with six months suspended, and a fine of $105,000. He actually served four months and seventeen days at Allenwood prison in Pennsylvania. But for Bull that was not the point.

It was the shame and the disgrace that got to him, plus the sense of betrayal. How could they have done this to him? he asked reasonably.

He had helped the United States wherever he could, taken her citizenship, gone along with the CIA appeal. While he was in Allenwood, his company, Space Research Corporation, went bankrupt and closed down. He was ruined.

On emerging from jail he quit the United States and Canada forever, emigrating to Brussels and starting all over again in a one-room walk-up with a kitchenette. Friends said later that he was changed after the trial, was never the same man again. He never forgave the CIA, and he never forgave America; yet he struggled for years for a rehearing and a pardon.

He returned to consultancy and took up an offer that had been made to him before his trial: to work for China on the improvement of its artillery. Through the early and mid-1980s Bull worked mainly for Beijing and redesigned their artillery along the lines of his GC-4S

cannon, which was now being sold under world license by Voest-Alpine of Austria, which had bought the patents from Bull for a one-time payment of two million dollars. Bull always was a terrible businessman, or he would have been a multimillionaire.

While Bull had been away in China, things had happened elsewhere.

The South Africans had taken his designs and improved greatly upon them, creating a towed howitzer called the G-5 from his GC-45 and a self-propelled cannon, the G-6. Both had a range with extended shells of forty kilometers. South Africa was selling them around the world.

Because of his poor deal with the South Africans, Bull got not a penny in royalties.

Among the clients for these guns was a certain Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It was these cannon that broke the human waves of Iranian fanatics in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, finally defeating them in the Fao marshes. But Saddam Hussein had added a new twist, especially at the battle of Fao. He had put poison gas in the shells.

Bull then worked for Spain and Yugoslavia, converting the old Yugoslav Army’s Soviet-made 130-mm. artillery to the new 155-mm.

cannon with the extended-range shells. Though he would never live to see it, these were the guns, inherited by the Serbs on the collapse of Yugoslavia, that were to pulverize the cities of the Croats and Muslims in the civil war. And in 1987 he learned that the United States would, after all, research the payloads-into-space cannon—but with Gerry Bull firmly cut out of the deal.

That winter he received a strange phone call from the Iraqi embassy in Bonn: Would Dr. Bull like to visit Baghdad as Iraq’s guest?

What he did not know was that in the mid-1980s, Iraq had witnessed Operation Staunch, a concerted American effort to shut off all sources of weapons imports destined for Iran. This followed the carnage among American Marines in Beirut when Iranian-backed Hezbollah fanatics attacked their barracks.

Iraq’s reaction, although they benefited in their war with Iran from Operation Staunch, was: If the Americans can do that to Iran, they can do it to us. From then on, Iraq determined to import not the arms but wherever possible the technology to make their own. Bull was first and foremost a designer; he interested them.

The mission to recruit him went to Amer Saadi, who was number two at the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, known as MIMI. When Bull arrived in Baghdad in January 1988, Amer Saadi, a smooth, cosmopolitan diplomat/scientist speaking English, French, and German as well as Arabic, played him beautifully.

The Iraqis, he said, wanted Bull’s help with their dream of putting peaceful satellites into space. To do this, they had to design a rocket that could put the payload up there. Their Egyptian and Brazilian scientists had suggested that the first step would be to tie together five Scud missiles, of which Iraq had bought nine hundred from the Soviet Union. But there were technical problems, many problems. They needed access to a supercomputer. Could Bull help them?

Bull loved problems—they were his raison d’être. He did not have access to a supercomputer, but on two legs he himself was the nearest thing. Besides, he told Amer Saadi, if Iraq really wanted to be the first Arab nation to put satellites into space, there was another way—cheaper, simpler, faster than rockets starting from scratch. Tell me all, said the Iraqi. So Bull did.

For just three million dollars, he said, he could produce a giant gun that would do the job. It would be a five-year program. He could beat the Americans at Livermore to the punch. It would be an Arab triumph. Dr. Saadi glowed with admiration. He would put the idea to his government and recommend it strongly. In the meantime, would Dr. Bull look at the Iraqi artillery?

By the end of his one-week visit, Bull had agreed to crack the problems of tying five Scuds together to form the first stage of a rocket of intercontinental or space-reaching performance; to design two new artillery pieces for the Army; and to put a formal proposal for his payload-into-orbit Supergun.

As with South Africa, he was able to block his mind to the nature of the regime he was about to serve. Friends had told him of Saddam Hussein’s record as the man with the bloodiest hands in the Middle East. But in 1988 there were thousands of respectable companies and dozens of governments clamoring to do business with big-spending Iraq.

For Bull, the bait was his gun, his beloved gun, his life’s dream, at last with a backer who was prepared to help him bring it to fulfillment and join the pantheon of scientists.

In March 1988, Amer Saadi sent a diplomat to Brussels to talk to Bull.

Yes, said the gun designer, he had made progress on the technical problems of the first stage of the Iraqi rocket. He would be glad to hand them over on signature of a contract with his company, once again the Space Research Corporation. The deal was done. The Iraqis realized that his offer of a gun for only three million dollars was silly; they raised it to ten million but asked for more speed.

When Bull worked fast, he worked amazingly fast. In one month he put together a team of the best available free-lancers he could find.

Heading the Supergun team in Iraq was a British projects engineer called Christopher Cowley. Bull himself christened the rocket program, based at Saad 16 in northern Iraq, Project Bird. The Supergun task was named Project Babylon.

By May, the exact specifications of Babylon had been worked out. It would be an incredible machine. One meter of bore; a barrel 156 meters long and weighing 1,665 tons—the height of the Washington Monument.

Bull had already made plain to Baghdad that he would have to make a smaller prototype, a Mini-Babylon, with a 350-mm. bore weighing only 113 tons. But in this he could test nose cones that would also be useful for the rocket project. The Iraqis liked this—they needed nose-cone technology as well.

The full significance of the insatiable Iraqi appetite for nose-cone technology seems to have escaped Gerry Bull at the time. Maybe, in his limitless enthusiasm to see his life’s dream realized at last, he just suppressed it. Nose cones of very advanced design are needed to prevent a payload from burning up from friction heat as it reenters earth’s atmosphere. But orbiting payloads in space do not return; they stay up there.

By late May 1988, Christopher Cowley was placing his first orders with Walter Somers of Birmingham for the tube sections that would make up the barrel of Mini-Babylon. The sections for full-scale Babylons 1, 2, 3, and 4 would come later. Other strange steel orders were placed all around Europe.

The pace at which Bull was working was awesome. Within two months he covered ground that would have taken a government enterprise two years. By the end of 1988, he had designed for Iraq two new guns—self-propelled guns, as opposed to the towed machines supplied by South Africa. Both pieces would be so powerful, they could crush the guns of the surrounding nations of Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who purchased theirs from NATO and America.

Bull also managed to crack the problems of tying the five Scuds together to form the first stage of the Bird rocket, to be called Al-Abeid, “the Believer.” He had discovered that the Iraqis and Brazilians at Saad 16 were working on faulty data, produced by a wind tunnel that was itself malfunctioning. After that, he handed over his fresh calculations and left the Brazilians to get on with it.

In May 1989 most of the world’s armaments industry and press, along with government observers and intelligence officers, attended a great weapons exhibition in Baghdad. Considerable interest was shown in the mock-up prototypes of the two great guns. In December, the Al-Abeid was test-fired to great media hoopla, seriously jolting Western analysts.

Heavily covered by Iraqi TV cameras, the great three-stage rocket roared off from the Al-Anbar Space Research Base, climbed away from the earth, and disappeared. Three days later, Washington admitted that the rocket did indeed appear capable of putting a satellite into space.

But the analysts worked out more. If Al-Abeid could do that, it could also be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly, Western intelligence agencies were jerked out of their assumption that Saddam The Fist of God

Hussein was no real danger, years away from being a serious threat.

The three main intelligence agencies, the CIA in America, the Secret Intelligence Service—SIS—in Britain, and the Mossad in Israel, came to the view that of the two systems, the Babylon gun was an amusing toy and the Bird rocket a real threat. All three got it wrong. It was the Al-Abeid that did not work.

Bull knew why, and he told the Israelis what had happened. The Al-Abeid had soared to twelve thousand meters and been lost to view. The second stage had refused to separate from the first. The third stage had not existed. It had been a dummy. He knew because he had been charged with trying to persuade China to provide a third stage and would be going to Beijing in February.

He did indeed go, and the Chinese turned him down flat. While he was there, he met and talked at length with his old friend George Wong.

Something had gone wrong with the Iraqi business, something that was worrying the hell out of Gerry Bull, and it was not the Israelis.

Several times he insisted he wanted out of Iraq, and in a hurry.

Something had happened inside his own head, and he wanted out of Iraq. In this decision he was entirely right, but too late.

On February 15,1990, President Saddam Hussein called a full meeting of his group of inner advisers at his palace at Sarseng, high up in the Kurdish mountains.

He liked Sarseng. It stands on a hilltop, and through its triple-glazed windows he could gaze out and down to the surrounding countryside, where the Kurdish peasants huddled through the bitter winters in their shacks and hovels. It was not many miles from here to the terrified town of Halabja, where for the two days of March 17 and 18 in the year 1988, he had ordered the seventy thousand citizens to be punished for their alleged collaboration with the Iranians.

When his artillery had finished, five thousand Kurdish dogs were dead and seven thousand maimed for life. Personally, he had been quite impressed with the effects of the hydrogen cyanide sprayed out from the artillery shells. The German companies that had helped him with the technology to acquire and create the gas—along with the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin—had his gratitude. They had earned it with their gas, similar to the Zyklon-B which had so properly been used on the Jews years before and might well be again.

He stood before the windows of his dressing room and gazed down that morning. He had been in power, undisputed power, for sixteen years, and he had been forced to punish many people. But much also had been achieved.

A new Sennacherib had risen out of Nineveh and another Nebuchadnezzar out of Babylon. Some had learned the easy way, by submission. Others had learned the hard, the very hard way and were mostly dead. Still others, many others, had yet to learn. But they would, they would.

He listened as the convoy of helicopters clattered in from the south, while his dresser fussed to adjust the green kerchief he liked to wear in the V above his combat jacket to hide his jowls. When all was to his satisfaction, he took his personal sidearm, a gold-plated Beretta of Iraqi make, bolstered and belted, and secured it around his waist. He had used it before on a cabinet minister and might wish to again. He always carried it.

A flunky tapped on the door and informed the President that those he had summoned awaited him in the conference room.

When he entered the long room with the plate-glass windows dominating the snowy landscape, everyone rose in unison. Only up here at Sarseng did his fear of assassination diminish. He knew that the palace was ringed by three lines of the best of his presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay, and that no one could approach those great windows. On the roof were French Crotale antiaircraft missiles, and his fighters ranged the skies above the mountains.

He sat himself down in the throne-like chair at the center of the top table that formed the crossbar of the T. Flanking him, two on each side, were four of his most trusted aides. For Saddam Hussein there was only one quality he demanded of a man in his favor: loyalty.

Absolute, total, slavish loyalty. Within this quality, experience had taught him, there were gradations. At the top of the list came family; after that the clan; then the tribe. There is an Arabic saying: “I and my brother against our cousin; I and my cousin against the world.” He believed in it. It worked.

He had come from the gutters of a small town called Tikrit and from the tribe of the Al-Tikriti. An extraordinary number of his family and the Al-Tikriti were in high office in Iraq, and they could be forgiven any brutality, any failure, any personal excess, provided they were loyal to him. Had not his second son, the psychopathic Uday, beaten a servant to death and been forgiven?

To his right sat Izzat Ibrahim, his first deputy, and beyond was his sonin-law, Hussein Kamil, head of MIMI, the man in charge of weapons procurement. To his left were Taha Ramadam, the Prime Minister, and beyond him Sadoun Hammadi, the Deputy Premier and devout Shi’a Moslem. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, but his one and only area of tolerance was in matters of religion. As a non-observer (except when it suited), he did not care. His Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a

Christian. So what? He did what he was told.

The Army chiefs were near the top of the stem of the T, the generals commanding the Republican Guard, the Infantry, the Armor, the Artillery, and the Engineers. Further down came the four experts whose reports and expertise were the reason he had called the meeting.

Two sat to the right of the table: Dr. Amer Saadi, technologist and deputy to his son-in-law, and beside him Brigadier Hassan Rahmani, head of the Counterintelligence wing of the Mukhabarat, or Intelligence Service. Facing them were Dr. Ismail Ubaidi, controlling the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat, and Brigadier Omar Khatib, boss of the feared Secret Police, the Amn-al-Amm, or AMAM.

The three secret service men had clearly denned tasks. Dr. Ubaidi conducted espionage abroad; Rahmani counterattacked foreign-mounted espionage inside Iraq; Khatib kept the Iraqi population in order, crushing all possible internal opposition through a combination of his vast network of watchers and informers and the sheer, stark terror generated by the rumors of what he did to opponents arrested and dragged to the Abu Ghraib jail west of Baghdad or to his personal interrogation center known jokingly as the Gymnasium beneath the AMAM headquarters.

Many had been the complaints brought to Saddam Hussein about the brutality of his Secret Police chief, but he always chuckled and waved them away. It was rumored that he personally had given Khatib his nickname Al-Mu’azib, “the Tormentor.” Khatib, of course, was Al-Tikriti and loyal to the end.

Some dictators, when delicate matters are to be discussed, like to keep the meeting small. Saddam thought the opposite; if there was dirty work to be done, they should all be involved. No man could say: “I have clean hands, I did not know.” In this way, all around him would get the message: “If I fall, you fall.”

When all had resumed their seats, the President nodded to his son-in-law Hussein Kamil, who called on Dr. Saadi to report. The technocrat read his report without raising his eyes. No wise man raised his eyes to stare Saddam in the face. The President claimed he could read into a man’s soul through his eyes, and many believed it. Staring into his face might signify courage, defiance, disloyalty. If the President suspected disloyalty, the offender usually died horribly.

When Dr. Saadi had finished, Saddam thought for a while.

“This man, this Canadian. How much does he know?”

“Not all, but enough, I believe, to work it out, sayidi.”

Saadi used the honorific Arabic address equivalent to the Western sir, but more respectful. An alternative acceptable title was Sayid Rais, or

“Mr. President.”

“How soon?”

“Soon, if not already, sayidi.”

“And he has been talking to the Israelis?”

“Constantly, Sayid Rais,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. “He has been friends of theirs for years. Visited Tel Aviv and given lectures on ballistics to their artillery staff officers. He has many friends there, possibly among the Mossad, though he may not know that.”

“Could we finish the project without him?” asked Saddam Hussein.

Hussein Kamil cut in. “He is a strange man. He insists on carrying all his most intimate scientific paperwork around with him in a big canvas bag. I instructed our counterintelligence people to have a look at this paperwork and copy it.”

“And this was done?” The President was staring at Hassan Rahmani, his Counterintelligence chief.

“Immediately, Sayid Rais. Last month during his visit here. He drinks much whiskey. It was doped, and he slept long and deep. We took his bag and photocopied every page in it. Also, we have taped all his technical conversations. The papers and the transcripts have all been passed to our comrade Dr. Saadi.”

The presidential stare swiveled back to the scientist.

“So, once again, can you complete the project without him?”

“Yes, Sayid Rais, I believe we can. Some of his calculations make sense only to himself, but I have had our best mathematicians studying them for a month. They can understand them. The engineers can do the rest.”

Hussein Kamil shot his deputy a warning look: You had better be right, my friend.

“Where is he now?” asked the President.

“He has left for China, sayidi,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. “He is trying to find us a third stage for the Al-Abeid rocket. Alas, he will fail. He is expected back in Brussels in mid-March.”

“You have men there, good men?”

“Yes, sayidi. I have had him under surveillance in Brussels for ten months. That is how we know he has been entertaining Israeli delegations at his offices there. We also have keys to his apartment building.”

“Then let it be done. On his return.”

“Without delay, Sayid Rais.” Dr. Ubaidi thought of the four men he had in Brussels on arm’s-length surveillance work. One of them had done this before: Abdelrahman Moyeddin. He would give the job to him.

The three intelligence men and Dr. Saadi were dismissed. The rest stayed. When they were alone, Saddam Hussein turned to his son-in-law.

“And the other matter—when will I have it?”

“I am assured, by the end of the year, Abu Kusay.”

Being family, Kamil could use the more intimate title “Father of Kusay.” It reminded the others present who was family and who was not. The President grunted.

“We shall need a place, a new place, a fortress; not an existing place, however secret. A new secret place that no one will know about. No one but a tiny handful, not even all of us here. Not a civil engineering project, but military. Can you do it?”

General Ali Musuli of the Army Engineers straightened his back, staring at the President’s midchest.

“With pride, Sayid Rais.”

“The man in charge—your best, your very best.”

“I know the man, sayidi. A colonel. Brilliant at construction and deception. The Russian Stepanov said he was the best pupil in maskirovka that he had ever taught.”

“Then bring him to me. Not here—in Baghdad, in two days. I will commission him myself. Is he a good Ba’athist, this colonel? Loyal to the party and to me?”

“Utterly, sayidi. He would die for you.”

“So would you all, I hope.” There was a pause, then quietly: “Let us hope it does not come to that.”

As a conversation-stopper, it worked. Fortunately that was the end of the meeting anyway.

Dr. Gerry Bull arrived back in Brussels on March 17, exhausted and depressed. His colleagues assumed his depression was caused by his rebuff in China. But it was more than that.

Ever since he had arrived in Baghdad more than two years earlier, he had allowed himself to be persuaded—because it was what he wanted to believe—that the rocket program and the Babylon gun were for the launch of small, instrument-bearing satellites into earth orbit. He could see the enormous benefits in self-esteem and pride for the whole Arab world if Iraq could do that. Moreover, it would be lucrative, pay its way, as Iraq launched communications and weather satellites for other nations.

As he understood it, the plan was for Babylon to fire its satellite-bearing missile southeast over the length of Iraq, on over Saudi Arabia and the south Indian Ocean, and into orbit. That was what he had designed it for.

He had been forced to agree with his colleagues that no Western nation would see it that way. They would assume it was a military gun.

Hence, the subterfuge in the ordering of the barrel parts, breech, and recoil mechanism.

Only he, Gerald Vincent Bull, knew the truth, which was very simple—the Babylon gun could not be used as a weapon for launching conventional explosive shells, however gigantic those shells might be.

For one thing, the Babylon gun, with its 156-meter barrel, could not stay rigid without supports. It needed one trunnion, or support, for every second of its twenty-six barrel sections, even if, as he foresaw, its barrel ran up the forty-five-degree side of a mountain. Without these supports, the barrel would droop like wet spaghetti and tear itself apart as the joins ripped open.

Therefore, it could not raise or depress its elevation, nor traverse from side to side. So it could not pick a variety of targets. To change its angle, up or down or side to side, it would have to be dismantled, taking weeks. Even to clean out and reload between discharges would take a couple of days. Moreover, repeated firings would wear out that very expensive barrel. Lastly, Babylon could not be hidden from counterattack.

Every time it fired, a gobbet of flame ninety meters long would leap from its barrel, and every satellite and airplane would spot it. Its map coordinates would be with the Americans in seconds. Also, its reverberation shock waves would reach any good seismograph as far away as California. That was why he told anyone who would listen, “It cannot be used as a weapon.”

His problem was that after two years in Iraq, he had realized that for Saddam Hussein science had one application and one only: It was to be applied to weapons of war and the power they brought him and to nothing else. So why the hell was he financing Babylon? It could only fire once in anger before the retaliatory fighter-bombers blew it to bits, and it could only fire a satellite or a conventional shell.

It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.

Chapter 2

The big Ram Charger sped down the main highway from Qatar toward Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, making good time. The air conditioning kept the interior cool, and the driver had some of his favorite country-and-western tapes filling the interior with back-home sounds.

Beyond Ruweis, they were out in open country, the sea to their left only intermittently visible between the dunes, to their right the great desert stretching away hundreds of bleak and sandy miles toward Dhofar and the Indian Ocean.

Beside her husband Maybelle Walker gazed excitedly at the ochre-brown desert shimmering under the midday sun. Ray Walker kept his eyes on the road. An oil man all his life, he had seen deserts before.

“Seen one, seen ’em all,” he would grunt when his wife made one of her frequent exclamations of wonderment at the sights and sounds that were so new to her.

But for Maybelle Walker it was all new, and although she had packed enough medications before leaving Oklahoma to open a new branch of Eckerd, she had loved every minute of her two-week tour of the Arabian Gulf—what used to be called the Persian Gulf.

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.

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 earthmover 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 two A.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.

Just before dawn, there was a tank engagement at the small Kuwaiti oil town of Jahra, north of Kuwait City. The only Kuwaiti armored brigade had been rushed northward, having been held back in the week before the invasion in order not to provoke the Iraqis.

It was one-sided. The Kuwaitis, who were supposed to be no more than merchants and oil profiteers, fought hard and well. They held up the cream of the Republican Guard for an hour, which allowed some of their Skyhawk and Mirage fighters farther south at the Ahmadi air base to get airborne, but the Kuwaitis did not stand a chance. The huge Soviet T-72s cut to pieces the smaller Chinese T-55s used by the Kuwaitis. The defenders lost twenty tanks in as many minutes, and finally the survivors pulled out and back.

Osman Badri, watching from a mile away as the mastodons swerved and fired in the belching clouds of dust and smoke while a pink line touched the sky over Iran, could not know that one day these same T-72s of the Medina and Tawakkulna divisions would themselves be blown apart by the Challengers and Abramses of the British and Americans.

By dawn, the first point units were rumbling into the northwestern outskirts of Kuwait City, dividing their forces to cover the four highways that gave access to the city from that quarter; the Abu Dhabi road along the seashore, the Jahra road between Granada and Andalus suburbs, and the Fifth and Sixth Ring highways farther south. After the split, the four prongs headed into central Kuwait.

Colonel Badri was hardly needed. There were no ditches for his sappers to fill in, nor obstructions to be blown away with dynamite, nor concrete bollards to be bulldozed. Only once did he have to dive for his life.

Rolling along through Sulaibikhat, quite close (though he did not know it) to the Christian cemetery, a single Sky hawk wheeled out of the sun and targeted the tank ahead of him with four air-to-ground rockets. The tank jolted, lost a track, and began to burn. The panicking crew poured from the turret. Then the Skyhawk was back, going for the following trucks, flames flickering from its nose. Badri saw the tarmac erupt in front of him and hurled himself from the door just as his screaming driver hauled the truck off the road, into a ditch, and turned it over.

No one was hurt, but Badri was furious. The impudent dog. He finished the journey in another truck.

There was sporadic gunfire all through the day as the two divisions, with their armor, artillery, and mechanized infantry, rolled through the sprawl of Kuwait City. At the Defense Ministry a group of Kuwaiti officers shut themselves in and tried to take on the invaders with some small arms they found inside.

One of the Iraqi officers, in a spirit of sweet reason, pointed out that they were dead men if he opened up with his tank gun. While a few Kuwaiti resisters argued with him before surrendering, the rest changed out of their uniforms into dish-dash and ghutra and slipped away out the back. One of these would later become the leader of the Kuwaiti resistance.

The principal opposition occurred at the residence of the Emir Al Sabah, even though he and his family had long before fled south to seek sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. It was crushed.

At sundown Colonel Osman Badri stood with his back to the sea at the northernmost point of Kuwait City on Arabian Gulf Street and stared at the facade of that residence, the Dasman Palace. Already a few Iraqi soldiers were inside the palace, and now and then one would emerge carrying a priceless artifact torn from the walls, stepping over the bodies on the steps and the lawn to place the booty in a truck.

He was tempted to take something himself, a gift fine and worthy for his father at the old man’s home in Qadisiyah, but something held him back: the heritage of that damned English school he had attended all those years ago in Baghdad, and all because of his father’s friendship with the Englishman Martin and his admiration of all things British.

“Looting is stealing, boys, and stealing is wrong. The Bible and the Koran forbid it. So do not do it.”

Even to this day, he could recall Mr. Hartley, the headmaster of the Tasisiya Foundation Preparatory School, run by the British Council, lecturing his pupils, English and Iraqi, at their desks.

How often had he reasoned with his father since joining the Ba’ath Party that the English had always been imperialist aggressors, holding the Arabs in chains for centuries to reap their own profits?

And his father, who was now seventy and so much older because Osman and his brother had been born to the second marriage, had always smiled and said:

“Maybe they are foreigners and infidel, but they are courteous and they have standards, my son. And what standards does your Mr.

Saddam Hussein have, pray?”

It had been impossible to get through the old man’s thick skull how important the Party was to Iraq and how its leader would bring Iraq to glory and triumph. Eventually he ceased these conversations, lest his father say something about the Rais that would be overheard by a neighbor and get them all into trouble. He disagreed with his father on this alone, for he loved him very much.

So because of a headmaster twenty-five years before, Colonel Badri now stood back and did not join in the looting of the Dasman Palace,

even though it was in the tradition of all his ancestors and the English were fools.

At least his years at the Tasisiya school had taught him fluent English, which had turned out to be useful because it was the language in which he could best communicate with Colonel Stepanov, who had for a long time been the senior engineering officer with the Soviet Military Advisory Group before the cold war came to its end and he went back to Moscow.

Osman Badri was thirty-five, and the year 1990 was proving to be the greatest of his whole life. As he told his elder brother later:

“I just stood there with my back to the Gulf and the Dasman Palace in front of me and thought, ‘By the Prophet, we’ve done it. We’ve taken Kuwait at last. And in just one day.’ And that was the end of it.”

He was wrong, as it happened. That was just the beginning.

While Ray Walker was, in his own phrase, hauling ass through the Abu Dhabi airport, hammering the sales counter to insist on the American’s constitutional right to an instant airline ticket, a number of his fellow countrymen were ending a sleepless night.

Seven time zones away in Washington, the National Security Council had been up all night. In earlier days they used to have to meet personally in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House; newer technology now meant they could confer by secure videolink from their various locations.

The previous evening, still August 1 in Washington, early reports had indicated some firing along Kuwait’s northern border. It was not unexpected. For days sweeps by the great KH-11 satellites over the northern Gulf had shown the buildup of the Iraqi forces, telling

Washington more than the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait actually knew.

The problem was, What were Saddam Hussein’s intentions: to threaten or to invade?

Frantic requests had been sent the previous day to the CIA headquarters at Langley, but the Agency had been less than helpful, turning in “maybe” analyses on the basis of the satellite pictures garnered by the National Reconnaissance Office and political savvy already known to the State Department’s Middle East Division.

“Any half-ass can do that,” growled Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the NSC. “Don’t we have anyone right inside the Iraqi regime?”

The answer to that was a regretful no. It was a problem that would recur for months.

The answer to the conundrum came before ten P.M., when President George Bush went to bed and took no further calls from Scowcroft.

That was after dawn Gulf Time, and the Iraqi tanks were beyond Jahra, entering the northwestern suburbs of Kuwait City.

It was, the participants would recall later, quite a night. There were eight on the videolink, representing the NSC, the Treasury, the State Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Pentagon. A flurry of orders went out and were implemented. A similar series was coming out of a hastily convened COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room Annex) committee meeting in London, which was five hours away from Washington but Only two from the Gulf.

Both governments froze all Iraqi financial assets lodged abroad, as well as (with the agreement of the Kuwaiti ambassadors in both cities) all Kuwaiti assets, so that any new puppet government working for Baghdad could not get its hands on the funds. These decisions froze billions and billions of petrodollars.

President Bush was awakened at 4:45 A.M. on August 2 to sign the documents. In London, Margaret Thatcher, long up and about and raising seven levels of Cain, had already done the same before going to catch her plane for the States.

Another major step was to hustle together the United Nations Security Council in New York to condemn the invasion and call for an immediate withdrawal by Iraq. This was achieved with Resolution 660, signed at four-thirty A.M. that same morning.

Around dawn the videolink conference ended, and the participants had two hours to get home, wash, change, shave, and be back at the White House for the eight A.M. full meeting of the NSC, chaired by President Bush in person.

Newcomers at the full meeting included Richard Cheney of Defense, Nicholas Brady of Treasury, and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Bob Kimmitt continued to stand in for the State Department because Secretary James Baker and Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger were both out of town.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had arrived back from Florida, bringing with him the general in charge of Central Command, a big burly man of whom more would be heard later.

Norman Schwarzkopf was at General Powell’s side when they walked in.

George Bush left the meeting at 9:15 A.M., when Ray and Maybelle Walker were thankfully airborne and somewhere over Saudi Arabia heading northwest for home and safety. The President took a helicopter from the south lawn to Andrews Air Force base, where he transferred to Air Force One and flew to Aspen, Colorado. He was scheduled to give an address on U.S. defense needs. As it turned out, it was an appropriate topic, but the day would be much busier than foreseen.

In midair he took a long call from King Hussein of Jordan, monarch of Iraq’s smaller and much-overshadowed neighbor. The Hashemite King was in Cairo, conferring with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

King Hussein was desperate that the United States give the Arab states a few days to try to sort things out without a war. He himself proposed a four-state conference, including President Mubarak, himself, and Saddam Hussein and as chairman His Majesty King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. He was confident that such a conference would persuade the Iraqi dictator to withdraw from Kuwait peaceably. But he needed three, maybe four days, and no public condemnation of Iraq by any of the nations participant to the conference.

President Bush told him: “You got it. I defer to you.” The unfortunate George had not yet met the lady from London, who was waiting for him in Aspen. They met that evening.

The Iron Lady soon got the impression that her good friend was about to start wavering again. Within two hours she put a broom handle so far up the President’s left trouser leg that it came out near the collar line.

“He cannot, he simply cannot, be allowed to get away with it, George.”

Faced with those flashing blue eyes and the cut-crystal tones slicing through the hum of the air conditioner, George Bush admitted that this was not America’s intention either. His intimates later felt he had been less worried by Saddam Hussein with his artillery and tanks than by that daunting handbag.

On August 3, the United States had a quiet word with Egypt. President Mubarak was reminded just how much his armed forces were dependent on American weaponry, just how much Egypt owed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and just how much

U.S. aid came his way. On August 4 the Egyptian government issued a public statement roundly condemning Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

To the Jordanian King’s dismay but not to his surprise, the Iraqi despot at once refused to go to the Jeddah conference and sit beside Hosni Mubarak under the chairmanship of King Fahd.

For the King of Saudi Arabia it was a brutal snub, delivered within a culture that prides itself on elaborate courtesy. King Fahd, who conceals a shrewd political brain behind an unfailingly gracious persona, was not pleased.

This was one of the two factors that blew away the Jeddah conference.

The other was the fact that the Saudi monarch had been shown American photographs taken from space that proved that the Iraqi Army, far from halting its advance, was still in full battle order and moving south toward the Saudi border on the southern fringes of Kuwait.

Would the Iraqis really dare to sweep on and invade Saudi Arabia itself? The arithmetic added up. Saudi Arabia has the biggest oil reserves in the world. Second comes Kuwait, with over a hundred years of reserves at present production levels. Third is Iraq. By taking Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had reversed the balance. Moreover, ninety percent of Saudi oil wells and reserves are locked into the far northeastern corner of the Kingdom, around Dhahran, Al-Khobar, Dammam, and Jubail, and inland from these ports. The triangle lay right in the path of the advancing Republican Guard divisions, and the photos proved that more divisions were pouring into Kuwait.

Fortunately, His Majesty never discovered that the photos had been doctored. The divisions close to the border were digging in, but the bulldozers that made this evident had been airbrushed out.

On August 6 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia formally asked U.S. forces to enter the Kingdom for its defense.

The first squadrons of fighter-bombers left for the Middle East the same day. Desert Shield had begun.

Brigadier Hassan Rahmani jumped out of his staff car and ran up the steps of the Hilton Hotel, which had quickly been taken over as the headquarters of the Iraqi security forces in occupied Kuwait. It amused him, as he swung through the glass doors into the lobby that morning of August 4, that the Hilton was right next to the American embassy, both on the seashore with lovely views over the glittering blue waters of the Arabian Gulf.

The view was all that the staff of the embassy were going to get for a while—at his suggestion the building had been immediately ringed with Republican Guards and would stay that way. He could not prevent foreign diplomats from transmitting messages from inside their sovereign territory to their governments back home, and he knew he did not have the supercomputers needed to break the more sophisticated codes that the British and Americans would be using.

But as head of Counterintelligence for the Mukhabarat, he could ensure they had little of interest to send home by confining their observations to the views from their windows.

That left, of course, the possibility of their obtaining information from fellow nationals still at large in Kuwait by telephone. Another top priority: Ensure that all outside telephone lines were cut or tapped—tapped would be better, but most of his best men were fully engaged back in Baghdad.

He swung into the suite of rooms that had been set aside for the Counterintelligence team, took off his Army jacket, tossed it to the sweating aide who had brought up his two suitcases of documents, and walked to the window to gaze down into the pool of the Hilton Marina.

A nice idea to have a swim later, he thought, then noticed that two soldiers were filling their water bottles from it and that two more were peeing into it. He sighed.

At thirty-seven, Rahmani was a trim, handsome, clean-shaven man—he could not be bothered with the affectation of a Saddam Hussein—like moustache. He was where he was, and he knew it, because he was good at his job, not because of political clout; he was a technocrat in a world of politically elevated cretins.

Why, he had been asked by foreign friends, do you serve this regime?

The question was usually asked when he had got them partly drunk at the bar of the Rashid Hotel or in a more private place. He was allowed to mix with them because it was part of his job. But every time he remained quite sober. He had no objection to liquor on religious grounds—he just ordered a gin and tonic, but he made sure the bartender knew to give him only tonic.

So he smiled at the question and shrugged and replied: I am an Iraqi and proud of it; which government would you have me serve?

Privately, he knew perfectly well why he served a regime most of whose luminaries he privately despised. If he had any emotion in him, which he frequently claimed he did not, then it came out in a genuine affection for his country and its people, the ordinary people whom the Ba’ath Party had long ceased to represent.

But the principal reason was that he wanted to get on in life. For an Iraqi of his generation there were few options. He could oppose the regime and quit, to earn a hand-to-mouth living abroad dodging the hit squads and making pennies translating from Arabic into English and back, or he could stay inside Iraq.

That left three alternatives. Oppose the regime again, and end up in one of the torture chambers of that animal Omar Khatib, a creature he personally loathed in the full knowledge that the feeling was mutual; or try to survive as a free-lance businessman in an economy that was being systematically run into the ground; or keep smiling at the idiots and rise within their ranks through brains and talent.

He could see nothing wrong with the latter. Like Reinhard Gehlen, who served first Hitler, then the Americans, and then the West Germans; like Marcus Wolf, who served the East German Communists without believing a word they said, he was a chess player. He lived for the game, the intricate moves of spy and counterspy. Iraq was his personal chessboard. He knew that other professionals the world over could understand that.

Hassan Rahmani returned from the window, sat in the chair behind the desk, and began to make notes. There was one hell of a lot to do if Kuwait were ever to be even reasonably secure as the nineteenth province of Iraq.

His first problem was that he did not know how long Saddam Hussein intended to stay in Kuwait. He doubted the man knew himself. There was no point in mounting a huge counterintelligence operation, sealing all the leaks and security holes that he could, if Iraq was going to pull out.

Privately, he believed Saddam could get away with it. But it would mean boxing cleverly, making the right moves, saying the right things.

The first ploy had to be to attend that conference tomorrow in Jeddah, to flatter King Fahd until he could take no more, to claim Iraq wanted no more than a just treaty over oil, Gulf access, and the outstanding loan, and he would go home to Baghdad. That way, keeping the whole thing in Arab hands and at all costs keeping the Americans and the

Brits out, Saddam could rely on the Arab preference to keep talking until hell freezes over.

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 Chatham. 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 from A.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.

To be frank, it is not quite that tidy (nothing British is ever quite that tidy), but they seem to muddle through.

That August 1990, the focus of attention was Mid-East, and particularly the Iraq Desk, upon whom the entire political and bureaucratic world of Westminster and Whitehall seemed to have descended like a noisy and unwelcome fan club.

The Deputy Chief listened carefully to what the Controller Mid-East and the Director Ops for that region had to say and nodded several times. It was, he thought, or might be, an interesting option.

It was not that no information was coming out of Kuwait. In the first forty-eight hours, before the Iraqis closed down the international telephone lines, every British company with an office in Kuwait had been on the phone, the telex, or the fax machines to their local man.

The Kuwaiti embassy had been bending the ear of the Foreign Office with the first horror stories and demanding instant liberation.

The problem was, virtually none of the information was of the sort the Chief could present to Cabinet as utterly reliable. In the aftermath of the invasion, Kuwait was one giant “bugger’s muddle,” as the Foreign Secretary had so mordantly phrased it six hours earlier.

Even the British embassy staff were now firmly locked in their compound on the edge of the Gulf, almost in the shadow of the needle-pointed Kuwait Towers, trying to contact by telephone those British citizens on a grossly inadequate list to see if they were all right. The received wisdom from these frightened businessmen and engineers was that they could occasionally hear gunfire. “Tell me something I don’t know” was the reaction at Century to such gems of intelligence.

Now a man in on the ground, and a trained deep-penetration, covert-ops man who could pass for an Arab—that could be very interesting.

Apart from some rock-hard real information as to what the hell was going on in there, a chance existed to show the politicians that something was actually being done and to cause William Webster over at the CIA to choke on his after-dinner mints.

The Deputy Chief had had no illusions about Margaret Thatcher’s almost kittenish esteem (mutual) for the SAS since that afternoon in May 1980 when they had blown away those terrorists at the Iranian embassy in London, and she had spent the evening with the team at the

Albany Street barracks drinking whiskey and listening to their tales of derring-do.

“I think,” he said at last, “I’d better have a chat with the DSF.”

Officially, the Special Air Service Regiment has nothing to do with the SIS. The chains of command are quite different. The active-service 22nd SAS (as opposed to the part-time 23rd SAS) is based at a barracks called Stirling Lines, outside the county town of Hereford in the west of England. Its commanding officer reports to the Director of Special Forces, or DSF, whose office is in a sprawl of buildings in West London. The actual office is at the top of a once-elegant pillared building covered in a seemingly perpetual skin of scaffolding, part of a rabbit warren of small rooms whose lack of splendor belies the importance of the operations planned there.

The DSF comes under the Director of Military Operations (a general) who reports to the Chief of General Staff (an even higher general), and the General Staff comes under the Ministry of Defence.

But the Special in the title of the SAS is there for a reason. Ever since it was founded in the Western Desert of Libya in 1941 by Colonel David Stirling, the SAS has operated covertly. Its tasks have always included deep penetration with a view to lying hidden and observing enemy movements; deep penetration with a view to sabotage, assassination, and general mayhem; terrorist elimination; hostage recovery; close protection, a euphemism for bodyguarding the high and mighty; and foreign training missions.

Like members of any elite unit, the officers and men of the SAS tend to live quietly within their own society, unable to discuss their work with outsiders, refusing to be photographed, and rarely emerging from the shadows.

Because the lifestyles of the members of the two secret societies had much in common, the SIS and the SAS knew each other at least by sight and had frequently cooperated in the past, either on joint operations or with the intelligence people, “borrowing” a specialist soldier from the regiment for a particular task. It was something of this kind that the Deputy Chief of the SIS (who had cleared his visit with the Chief, Sir Colin) had in mind when he took a glass of single malt whiskey from Brigadier J. P. Lovat in the covert London headquarters that evening as the sun went down.

The unwitting object of such discussion and private musing in London and Kuwait was at that moment poring over a map in another barracks many miles away. For the past eight weeks, he and his team of twelve instructors had been living in a section of the quarters assigned to the private bodyguard unit of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan of Abu Dhabi.

It was a task the regiment had undertaken many times before. All up and down the western shore of the Gulf, from the Sultanate of Oman in the south to Bahrain in the north, lies a chain of sultanates, emirates, and sheikhdoms in and out of which the British have been pottering for centuries. The Trucial States, now the United Arab Emirates, were so called because Britain once signed a truce with their rulers to protect them with the Royal Navy against marauding pirates in exchange for trading privileges. The relationship continues, and many of these rulers have princely guard units trained in the finer points of close protection by visiting SAS instructor teams. A fee is paid, of course, but to the Ministry of Defence in London.

Major Mike Martin had a large map of the Gulf and most of the Middle East spread out over the mess hall table and was studying it, surrounded by several of his men. At thirty-seven, he was not the oldest man in the room; two of his sergeants topped forty, tough, wiry, and very fit soldiers whom a man twenty years their junior would have been extremely foolish to take on.

“Anything in it for us, boss?” asked one of the sergeants.

As in all small, tight units, first names are widely used in the regiment, but officers are normally called “boss” by other ranks.

“I don’t know,” said Martin. “Saddam Hussein has got himself into Kuwait. Question is: Will he get out of his own accord? If not, will the UN authorize a force to go in and throw him out? If yes, I would think there ought to be something in there for us to do.”

“Good,” said the sergeant with satisfaction, and there were nods from the other six around the table. It had been too long, so far as they were concerned, since they had been on a real, high-adrenaline combat operation.

There are four basic disciplines in the regiment, and each recruit must master one of them. There are the freefallers, specializing in high-altitude parachute drops; the mountain-men, whose preferred terrain is rock faces and the high peaks; the armored scout car men, who drive and operate stripped-down, heavily armored long-base Land-Rovers over open terrain; and the amphibians, skilled in canoes, silent-running inflatables, and subaqua or underwater work.

In his team of twelve, Martin had four freefallers, including himself, four scout car men teaching the Abu Dhabis the principles of fast attack and counterattack over desert ground, and because Abu Dhabi lies by the Gulf, four subaqua instructors.

Apart from their own speciality, SAS men must have a good working knowledge of the other disciplines, so that inter-changeability is common. They have to master more besides—radio, first aid, and languages.

The basic combat unit consists of only four men. If one is ever out of action, his tasks will be quickly shared among the surviving three,

whether they be radio operators or unit medics.

They pride themselves on a far higher educational level than any other unit in the Army, and because they travel the world, languages are a must. Every soldier must learn one, apart from English. For years Russian was a favorite, now going out of fashion since the end of the cold war. Malay is very useful in the Far East, where the regiment for years fought in Borneo. Spanish is on the increase since the covert operations in Colombia against the cocaine lords of Medellin and Cali.

French is learned—just in case.

And because the regiment had spent years assisting Sultan Qaboos of Oman in his war with Communist infiltrators from South Yemen into the interior of Dhofar, plus other training missions up and down the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia, many SAS men speak passable Arabic. The sergeant who had asked for some action was one of them, but he had to admit: “The boss is bloody amazing. I’ve never heard anyone like him.

He even looks the part.”

Mike Martin straightened and ran a nut-brown hand through jet-black hair.

“Time to turn in.”

It was just after ten. They would be up before dawn for the usual ten-mile run with their charges before the sun became too hot. It was a chore the Abu Dhabis loathed but upon which their sheikh insisted. If these strange soldiers from England said it was good for them, it was good for them. Besides, he was paying for it, and he wanted value for his money.

Major Martin retired to his own quarters and slept quickly and deeply.

The sergeant was right; he did look the part. His men often wondered if he got his olive skin, dark eyes, and deep black hair from some Mediterranean forebears. He never told them, but they were wrong.

The maternal grandfather of both Martin boys had been a British tea planter at Darjeeling in India. As kids they had seen pictures of him—tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth, gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger. Very much the pukka sahib, the Englishman of the Indian Raj.

Then in 1928 Terence Granger had done the unthinkable: He had fallen in love with and insisted on marrying an Indian girl. That she was gentle and beautiful was not the point. It was simply not done.

The tea company did not fire him—that would have brought it out in the open. They sent him into internal exile (that was what they actually called it) to an isolated plantation in faraway Assam.

If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride, the former Miss Indira Bohse, loved it there—the wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers, the deep green tea slopes, the climate, the people. And there Susan was born in 1930.

They raised her there, an Anglo-Indian girl with Indian playmates.

By 1943 war had rolled toward India, with the Japanese advancing through Burma to the border. Granger was old enough not to have to volunteer, but he insisted, and after basic training at Delhi he was posted as a major to the Assam Rifles. All British cadets were promoted straight to major; they were not supposed to serve under an Indian officer, but Indians could make lieutenant or captain.

In 1945 he died in the crossing of the Irrawaddy. His body was never brought back; it vanished in those drenched Burmese jungles, one of tens of thousands who had seen some of the most vicious hand-to-hand fighting of the war.

With a small company pension, his widow retreated back into her own culture. Two years later, more trouble came. India was being partitioned in 1947. The British were leaving. Ali Jinnah insisted on his Moslem Pakistan in the north, Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India in the south. As waves of refugees of the two religions rolled north and south, violent fighting broke out. Over a million died.

Mrs. Granger, fearful for her daughter’s safety, sent her to complete her education with her late father’s younger brother, a very proper architect of Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later, the mother died in the rioting.

So at seventeen Susan Granger came to England, the land of her fathers that she had never seen. She spent one year at a girls’ school near Haslemere and then two years as a trainee nurse at Farnham General Hospital, followed by one more as a secretary to a Farnham solicitor.

At twenty-one, the youngest permitted age, she applied as a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She trained with the other girls at the BOAC school, the old converted St. Mary’s Convent at Heston, just outside London. Her nursing training was the clincher, and her looks and manner an added plus.

At twenty-one she was beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and skin like a European with a permanent golden suntan. On graduation she was assigned to Number 1 Line, London to India—an obvious choice for a girl speaking fluent Hindi.

It was a long, long trip in those days aboard the four-propeller Argonaut. The route was London-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi-Bombay. Then on to Delhi, Calcutta, Colombo, Rangoon, Bangkok, and finally Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Of course, one crew could not do it all, and the first crew stopover was Basra in the south of Iraq, where another crew took over.

It was there in 1951, over a drink at the Port Club, that she met a rather shy young accountant with the Iraq Petroleum Company, then owned and run by the British. His name was Nigel Martin, and he asked her to dinner. She had been warned about wolves—among the passengers, the crew, and during the stopovers. But he seemed nice, so she accepted. When he took her back to the BOAC station house, where the stewardesses were quartered, he held out his hand. She was so surprised, she shook it.

Then she lay awake in the awful heat wondering what it would be like to kiss Nigel Martin.

On her next stopover in Basra, he was there again. Only after they were married did he admit he had been so smitten that he found out through the BOAC Station Officer Alex Reid when she was due next.

That autumn of 1951 they played tennis, swam at the Port Club, and walked through the bazaars of Basra. At his suggestion she took a leave and came with him to Baghdad, where he was based.

She soon realized it was a place where she could settle down. The swarming throngs of brightly colored robes, the sights and smells of the street, the cooking meats by the edge of the Tigris, the myriad little shops selling herbs and spices, gold, and jewels—all reminded her of her native India. When he proposed to her, she accepted at once.

They married in. 1952 at St. George’s Cathedral, the Anglican church off Haifa Street, and although she had no one on her side of the church, many people came from the IPC and the embassy to fill both rows of pews.

It was a good time to live in Baghdad. Life was slow and easy, the boy king Faisal was on the throne with Nuri as Said running the country, and the overwhelming foreign influence was British. This was partly because of the powerful contribution of the IPC to the economy and partly because most of the Army officers were British-taught, but mainly because the entire upper class had been potty-trained by starched English nannies, which always leaves a lasting impression.

In time the Martins had two sons, born in 1953 and 1955. Christened Michael and Terry, they were as unlike as chalk and cheese. In Michael the genes of Miss Indira Bohse came through; he was black-haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned; wags from the British community said he looked more like an Arab. Terry, two years younger, took after his father: short, stocky, pink-skinned, and ginger-haired.

At three in the morning, Major Mike Martin was shaken awake by an orderly.

“There is a message, sayidi.”

It was quite a simple message, but the urgency coding was “blitz,” and the signoff meant it came personally from the Director of Special Forces. It required no answer. It just ordered him back to London on the first available plane.

He handed over his duties to the SAS captain, who was on his first tour with the regiment and was his second-in-command for the training assignment, and raced to the airport in civilian clothes.

The 2:55 A.M. for London should have left. Over a hundred passengers snored or grumbled on board as the stewardess brightly announced that the operational reason for the ninety-minute delay would soon be sorted out.

When the doors opened again to admit a single, lean man in jeans, desert boots, shirt, and bomber jacket with a tote bag over one shoulder, a number of those still awake glared at him. The man was shown to an empty seat in business class, made himself comfortable, and within minutes of takeoff tilted back his seat and fell fast asleep.

A businessman next to him who had dined copiously and with much illicit liquid refreshment, then waited two hours in the airport and two more on the plane, fed himself another antacid tablet and glowered at the relaxed, sleeping figure beside him.

“Bloody Arab,” he muttered, and tried in vain to sleep.

Dawn came over the Gulf two hours later, but the British Airways jet was racing it toward the northwest, landing at Heathrow just before ten local time. Mike Martin came out of the customs hall among the first because he had no baggage in the aircraft hold. There was no one to meet him; he knew there would not be. He also knew where to go.

It was not even dawn in Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince Georges County, where the Patuxent River flows down to join the Chesapeake. On the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as Langley, the lights still burned.

Judge William Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence, rubbed fingertips over tired eyes, rose, and walked to the picture windows.

The swath of silver birches that masked his view of the Potomac when they were in full leaf, as they were now, still lay shrouded in darkness.

Within an hour the rising sun would bring them back to pale green. It had been another sleepless night. Since the invasion of Kuwait he had been catnapping between calls from the President, the National Security Council, the State Department, and so it seemed, just about anyone else who had his number.

Behind him, as tired as he, sat Bill Stewart, his Deputy Director (Operations), and Chip Barber, head of the Middle East Division.

“So that’s about it?” asked the DCI, as if asking the question again might produce a better answer.

But there was no change. The position was that the President, the NSC, and State were all clamoring for deep-mined hypersecret intelligence from inside the heart of Baghdad, from the innermost councils of Saddam Hussein himself. Was he going to stay in Kuwait?

Would he pull out under threat of the United Nations resolutions that were rolling out of the Security Council? Would he buckle in the face of the oil embargo and the trade blockade? What was he thinking?

What was he planning? Damn it, where was he anyway?

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 four A.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 his 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.

“That’s about it, Major. I don’t expect an answer immediately, right now, but time is of the essence.”

“Do you mind if we have a few words with our colleague in private?” asked J.P.

“Of course not. Look, Simon and I will trot back to the office. You have my desk number. Perhaps you’d let me know this afternoon?”

Sergeant Sid showed the two civilians out and escorted them down to the street, where he watched them hail a taxi. Then he climbed back to his aerie under the roof beams behind the scaffolding.

J.P. went to a small fridge and extracted three cold beers. When the tabs were off, all three men took a swig.

“Look, Mike, you know what’s what. That’s what they want. If you think it’s crazy, we’ll go along with that.”

“Absolutely,” said Craig. “In the Regiment you get no black marks for saying no. This is their idea, not ours.”

“But if you want to go with them,” said J.P., “walk through the door, so to speak, then you’re with them till you come back. We’ll be involved, of course. They probably can’t run it without us. But you’ll be under them. They’ll be in charge. When it’s over, you come back to us as if you’d been on leave.”

Martin knew how it worked. He’d heard of others who had worked for Century. You just ceased to exist for the Regiment until you came back. Then they all said, “Good to see you again,” and never mentioned or asked where you had been.

“I’ll take it,” he said. Colonel Craig rose. He had to get back to Hereford. He held out his hand.

“Good luck, Mike.”

“By the way,” said the brigadier, “you have a lunch date. Just down the street. Century set it up.”

He handed Martin a slip of paper and bade him farewell.

Mike Martin went back down the stairs. The paper said his lunch was at a small restaurant four hundred yards away, and his host was Mr.

Wane Al-Khouri.

Apart from MI-S and MI-6 the third major arm of British intelligence is the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a complex of buildings in a guarded compound outside the staid town of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

GCHQ is the British version of America’s National Security Agency, with which it cooperates very closely—the listeners whose antennae eavesdrop on almost every radio broadcast and telephone, conversation in the world if they so wish.

Through its cooperation with GCHQ, the American NSA has a number of outstations inside Britain, apart from its other listening posts all over the world, and GCHQ has its own overseas stations, notably a very large one on British sovereign territory at Akrotiri in Cyprus.

The Akrotiri station, being closer to the scene, monitors the Middle East, but it passes all its product back to Cheltenham for analysis.

Among the analysts are a number of experts who, although Arabs by birth, are cleared to a very high level. Such a one was Mr. Al-Khouri, who had long before elected to settle in Britain, naturalize, and marry an English wife.

This genial former Jordanian diplomat now worked as a senior analyst in the Arabic Service of GCHQ where, even though there were many British scholars of Arabic, he could often read a meaning behind the meaning of a taped speech by a leader in the Arab world. It was he who, at the request of Century, was waiting for Mike Martin at the restaurant.

They had a convivial lunch that lasted two hours and spoke nothing but Arabic. When they parted, Martin left and strolled back toward the SAS building. There would be hours of briefings before he was ready to leave for Riyadh with a passport he knew Century would by then have ready, complete with visas in a false name.

Before he left the restaurant Mr. Al-Khouri called a number from the wall phone by the men’s room.

“No problem, Steve. He’s perfect. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone like him. It’s not scholar’s Arabic, you know; it’s even better, from your point of view. Street Arabic, every swearword, slang, piece of jargon. ... No, not a trace of an accent. ... Yes, he can pass all right... on just about any street in the Middle East. No, no, not at all, old chap. Glad to be of assistance.”

Thirty minutes later, Mike Martin had retrieved his rental car and was on the M4 heading back to Cheltenham. Before he entered the headquarters, he also made a call, to a number just off Gower Street.

The man he was calling picked up the phone, since it was in his office in the SOAS, where he was working over papers on an afternoon that called for no lectures.

“Hullo, bro. It’s me.”

The soldier had no need to introduce himself. Since they had been at prep school together in Baghdad, he had always called his younger brother “bro.” There was a gasp at the other end of the line.

“Mike? Where the hell are you?”

“In London, in a phone booth.”

“I thought you were somewhere in the Gulf.”

“Got back this morning. Probably leave again tonight.”

“Look, Mike, don’t go. It’s all my fault. ... I should have kept my bloody mouth shut—”