The Fist of God

His elder brother’s deep laugh came across the line.

“I wondered why the buggers suddenly got interested in me. Take you to lunch, did they?”

“Yes, we were talking about something else. It just cropped up, sort of slipped out. Look, you don’t have to go. Tell them I was mistaken.”

“Too late. Anyway, I’ve accepted.”

“Oh God. ...” In his office, surrounded by erudite tomes on medieval Mesopotamia, the younger man was almost in tears.

“Mike, look after yourself. I’ll pray for you.”

Mike thought for a moment. Yes, Terry had always had a touch of religion. He probably would.

“You do that, bro. See you when I get back.”

He hung up. Alone in his office, the ginger-haired scholar who hero-worshiped his soldier brother put his head in his hands.

When the British Airways 8:45 P.M. flight for Saudi Arabia lifted off from Heathrow that night, right on time, Mike Martin was on it with a fully visa-ed passport in another name. He would be met just before dawn by Century’s Head of Station at the Riyadh embassy.

Chapter 4

Don Walker eased down on the brake pedal and the ’63 vintage Corvette Stingray paused for a moment at the main entrance to Seymour Johnson Air Force base to let a couple of campers pass before emerging onto the highway.

It was hot. The August sun blasted down up ahead on the small North Carolina town of Goldsboro so that the tarmac seemed to shimmer like moving water. It was good to have the top down and feel the wind, warm though it was, running through his short blond hair.

He maneuvered the classic sports car over which he had lavished so much attention up through the slumbering town to Highway 70, then pulled onto Highway 13 heading northeast.

Don Walker, that hot summer of 1990, was twenty-nine years old,

single, a fighter jockey, and had just learned that he was going to war.

Well, maybe. Apparently it would depend on some weird Arab called Saddam Hussein.

That same morning the wing commander, Colonel (later General) Hal Hornburg, had laid it out: In three days, on August 9, his squadron, the 336th Rocketeers of the Ninth Air Force of Tactical Air Command was shipping out to the Arabian Gulf. The orders had come through from TAC command at Langley Air Force base in Hampton, Virginia. So it was on. The elation among the pilots had been ecstatic. What was the point of all those years of training if you never got to fire the goodies?

With three days to go there was a mess of work to get through, and for him as squadron weapons officer more than most. But he had begged for just twenty-four hours’ furlough to go and say good-bye to his folks, and Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, chief of weapons, had told him if there was one tiny detail missing on August 9 when the F-15E Eagles rolled, he—Turner—would personally kick ass. Then he had grinned and told Walker if he wanted to get back by sun-up, he had better get moving.

Walker was hammering up through Snow Hill and Greenville by nine that morning, heading for the chain of islands east of Pamlico Sound.

He was lucky his parents were not back in Tulsa, or he could never have made it. Being August, they were taking their annual vacation at the family beach house near Hatteras, a five-hour drive from the base.

Don Walker knew he was a hotshot pilot, and he reveled in it. To be twenty-nine and do the thing you love best in the world and do it supremely well is a good feeling. He liked the base, he liked the guys, and he adored the exhilaration and power of the McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle that he flew. It was, he thought, the best piece of airplane in the whole U.S. Air Force, and the hell with what the men on the Fighting Falcons said. Only the Navy’s F-18 Hornet might compare, or so they said, but he had never flown the Hornet, and the Eagle was just fine by him.

At Bethel he turned due east for Columbia and Whalebone, which was where the highway turned into the island chain; with Kitty Hawk behind him to his left, he turned south toward Hatteras, where the road finally ran out and the sea was on all sides. He had had good vacations at Hatteras as a boy, going out to sea in the early dawn with his grandfather for bluefish, until the old man got sick and could not go anymore.

Now that his dad was retiring from the oil job in Tulsa maybe he and Mom would spend more time at the beach house and he could get down there more often. He was young enough that the thought that he might not come back from the Gulf, if there was a war, did not cross his mind.

Walker had graduated from high school in Tulsa at the age of eighteen with only one burning ambition—he wanted to fly. So far as he could recall, he had always wanted to fly. He spent four years at Oklahoma State, majoring in aeronautical engineering, and he graduated in June 1983. He had done his time with the ROTC, and that fall he was inducted into the Air Force.

He underwent pilot training at Williams AFB, near Phoenix, flying the T-33 and the T-38, and after eleven months, at wings parade, he learned he had passed as a distinguished graduate, fourth out of forty pupils. To his abiding joy, the top five graduates went to fighter leadin school at Holloman AFB, near Alamagordo, New Mexico. The rest of the pupils, he thought with the supreme arrogance of a young man destined to fly fighters, would be sent to become bomb-droppers or trash-carriers.

At the replacement training unit at Homestead, Florida, he finally quit the T-38 and converted to the F-4 Phantom, a big, powerful brute of a plane, but a real fighter at last.

Nine months at Homestead ‘terminated with his first squadron posting, to Osan in South Korea, flying the Phantoms for a year. He was good and he knew it, and so apparently did the brass. After Osan, they sent him to the Fighter Weapons School at McConnell AFB in Wichita, Kansas.

Fighter Weapons runs arguably the toughest course in the USAF. It marks out the high-fliers, career-wise. The technology of the new weapons is awe-inspiring. Graduates of McConnell have to understand every nut and bolt, every silicon chip and microcircuit of the bewildering array of ordnance that a modern fighter plane can launch at its opponents, in the air or on the ground. Walker emerged again as a distinguished graduate, which meant that every fighter squadron in the Air Force would be happy to have him.

The 336th Squadron at Goldsboro got him in the summer of ’87, flying Phantoms for a year, followed by four months at Luke AFB in Phoenix, then converting to the Strike Eagle with which the Rocketeers were being reequipped. He had been flying the Eagle for more than a year when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

The Stingray turned just before midday into the island chain; a few miles to his north stood the monument at Kitty Hawk where Orville and Wilbur Wright had hauled their string-and-wire contraption into the air for a few yards to prove that man really could fly in a powered airplane. If they only knew ...

Through Nag’s Head he followed the crawl of campers and trailers until they finally petered out and the road emptied past Cape Hatteras onto the tip of the island. He ran the Stingray onto the driveway of his parents’ timber-clad frame house just before one. He found them on the porch that faced out over the calm blue sea.

Ray Walker caught sight of his son first and let out a shout of pleasure.

Maybelle came out from the kitchen, where she had been preparing lunch, and rushed into his embrace. His grandfather was sitting in his rocking chair, looking at the sea. Don walked over and said:

“Hi, Grandpa. It’s me, Don.”

The old man looked up and nodded and smiled; then he looked back at the ocean.

“He’s not so good,” said Ray. “Sometimes he knows you, sometimes he doesn’t. Well, sit down and tell us the news. Hey, Maybelle, how’s about a couple of beers for some thirsty guys?”

Over the beers, Don told his parents he was off to the Gulf in five days. Maybelle’s hand flew to her mouth; his father looked solemn.

“Well, I guess that’s what it’s for, the training and all,” he said at length.

Don swigged his beer and wondered not for the first time why parents always had to worry so much. His grandpa was staring at him, some kind of recognition in his rheumy eyes.

“Don’s going off to war, Grandpa,” Ray Walker shouted at him. The old man’s eyes flickered with life.

All his career he had been a Marine, joining the Corps straight out of school many, many years before, in 1941 he had kissed his wife good-bye and left her with her folks in Tulsa, along with their newborn baby, Maybelle, to go to the Pacific. He had been with MacArthur on Corregidor and heard him say, “I shall return,” and he had been twenty yards away from the general when MacArthur did return.

In between he had fought his way through a dozen miserable atolls in the Marianas and survived the hell of Iwo Jima. He carried seventeen scars on his body, all from combat, and was entitled to wear the ribbons of a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and seven Purple Hearts on his chest.

He had always refused to take a commission, happy to stay a master sergeant, for he knew where the real power lay. He had waded ashore at Inchon, Korea, and when they finally sent him to finish his Corps days as an instructor at Parris Island, his dress uniform carried more decorations than any other piece of cloth on the base. When they finally retired him after two deferments, four generals showed up at his last parade, which was more than normally show up for another general.

The old man beckoned his grandson toward him. Don rose from the table and leaned over.

“Watch out for them Japanese, boy,” the old man whispered, “or they’ll gitcha.”

Don put an arm round the old man’s thin, rheumaticky shoulders.

“Don’t you worry, Grandpa. They won’t get anywhere near me.”

The old man nodded and seemed satisfied. He was eighty. It was not, finally, the Japanese or the Koreans who had gotten the immortal sergeant. It was old Mr. Alzheimer. These days he spent most of his time in a pleasant dream, with his daughter and son-in-law to look after him because he had nowhere else to go.

After lunch Don’s parents told him about their tour of the Arabian Gulf, from which they had returned four days earlier. Maybelle went and fetched her pictures, which had just arrived back from the developer.

Don sat by his mother’s side while she went through the pile, identifying the palaces and mosques, sea-fronts and markets of the chain of emirates and sheikhdoms she and Ray had visited.

“Now you be careful when you get down there,” she admonished her son. “These are the kind of people you’ll be up against. Dangerous people—just look at those eyes.”

Don Walker looked at the picture in her hand. The Bedouin stood between two sand dunes with the desert behind him, one trailing end of his keffiyeh tucked up and across his face. Only the dark eyes stared suspiciously out toward the camera.

“I’ll be sure and keep a look-out for him,” he promised her. At that she seemed satisfied.

At five o’clock he decided he should head back to the base. His parents escorted him to the front of the house where his car was parked. Maybelle hugged her son and told him yet again to take care, and Ray embraced him and said they were proud of him. Don got into the car and reversed to swing into the road. He looked back.

From the house his grandfather, supported by two canes, emerged onto the veranda. Slowly he placed the two canes to one side and straightened up, forcing the rheumatism out of his old back and shoulders until they were square. Then he raised his hand, palm down, to the peak of his baseball cap and held it there, an old warrior saluting his grandson who was leaving for yet another war.

Don, from the car, brought up his hand in reply. Then he touched the accelerator and sped away. He never saw his grandfather again. The old man died in his sleep in late October.

It was already dark by then in London. Terry Martin had worked late, for although the undergraduates were away for the long summer vacation, he had lectures to prepare, and because of the specialized vacation courses the school also ran, he was kept quite busy even through the summer months. But that evening he was forcing himself to find something to do, to keep his mind off his worry.

He knew where his brother had gone, and in his mind’s eye he imagined the perils of trying to penetrate Iraqi-occupied Kuwait under deep cover.

At ten, while Don Walker was beginning his drive north from Hatteras, Terry left the school, bidding a courteous good night to the old janitor who locked up after him, and walked down Gower Street and St.Martin’s Lane toward Trafalgar Square. Perhaps, he thought, the bright lights would cheer him up. It was a warm and balmy evening.

At St. Martin-in-the-Fields, he noticed that the doors were open and the sound of hymns came from inside. He entered, found a pew near the rear, and listened to the choir practice. But the choristers’ clear voices only made his depression deeper. He thought back to the childhood that he and Mike had shared thirty years earlier in Baghdad.

Nigel and Susan Martin had lived in a fine, roomy old house on two floors in Saadun, that fashionable district in the half of the city called Risafa. Terry’s first recollection, when he was two, was of his dark-haired brother being dressed up to start his first day at Miss Saywell’s kindergarten school. It had meant shirt and short trousers, with shoes and socks, the uniform of an English boy. Mike “had yelled in protest at being separated from his usual dish-dash, the white cotton robe that gave freedom of movement and kept the body cool.

Life had been easy and elegant for the British community in Baghdad in the fifties. There was membership in the Man-sour Club and in the Alwiya Club, with its swimming pool, tennis courts, and squash court, where officers of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the embassy would meet to play, swim, lounge, or take cool drinks at the bar.

He could remember Fatima, their dada or nanny, a plump gentle girl from an up-country village whose wages were hoarded to make her a dowry so that she could marry a well-set-up young man when she went back to her tribe. He used to play on the lawn with Fatima until they went to collect Mike from Miss Saywell’s school.

Before each boy was three, he was bilingual in English and Arabic, learning the latter from Fatima or the gardener or the cook. Mike was especially quick at the language, and as their father was a keen admirer of Arab culture, the house was often full of his Iraqi friends.

Arabs tend to love small children anyway, showing far more patience with them than Europeans, and when Mike would dart about the lawn with his black hair and dark eyes, running free in the white dish-dash and chattering in Arabic, his father’s Iraqi friends would laugh with pleasure and shout:

“But Nigel, he’s more like one of us!”

There were outings on the weekends to watch the Royal Harithiya Hunt, a sort of English foxhunt transported to the Middle East, which hunted jackals under the mastership of the municipal architect Philip Hirst, with a “mutton grab” of kuzi and vegetables for all afterward.

And there were wonderful picnics down the river on Pig Island, set in the middle of the slow-moving Tigris which bisected the city.

After two years Terry had followed Mike to Miss Saywell’s kindergarten, but because he was so gifted they had gone on together to the Foundation Prep School, run by Mr. Hartley, at the same time.

He had been six and his brother eight when they turned up for their first day at Tasisiya, which contained some English boys but also Iraqi lads of upper-class parents.

By then, there had already been one coup d’état in Iraq. The boy king and Nuri as Said had been slaughtered and the nee-Communist General Kassem had taken absolute power. Though the two young English boys were unaware of it all, their parents and the English community were becoming worried. Favoring the Iraq Communist Party, Kassem was carrying out a vicious pogrom against the nationalist Ba’ath Party members, who in turn tried to assassinate the general. One of those in the group that failed to machine-gun the dictator was a young firebrand called Saddam Hussein.

On his first day at school Terry had found himself surrounded by a group of Iraqi boys.

“He’s a grub,” said one. Terry began to cry.

“I’m not a grub,” he sniffled.

“Yes, you are,” said the tallest boy. “You’re fat and white, with funny hair. You look like a grub. Grub, grub, grub.”

Then they all took up the chant. Mike appeared from behind him. Of course, they were all talking Arabic.

“Do not call my brother a grub,” he warned.

“Your brother? He doesn’t look like your brother. But he does look like a grub.”

The use of the clenched fist is not part of Arab culture. In fact, it is alien to most cultures, except in certain parts of the Far East. Even south of the Sahara the closed fist is not a traditional weapon. Black men from Africa and their descendants had to be taught to bunch the fist and throw a punch; then they became the best in the world at it.

The closed-fist punch is very much a western Mediterranean and particularly Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Mike Martin’s right-hand punch landed full on the jaw of the chief Terry-baiter and knocked him flat. The boy was not so much hurt as surprised. But no one ever called Terry a grub again.

Surprisingly, Mike and the Iraqi boy then became the best of friends.

Throughout their prep school years, they were inseparable. The tall boy’s name was Hassan Rahmani. The third member of Mike’s gang was Abdelkarim Badri, who had a younger brother, Osman, the same age as Terry. So Terry and Osman became friends as well, which was useful because Badri Senior was often to be found at their parents’ house. He was a doctor, and the Martins were happy to have him as their family physician. It was he who helped Mike and Terry Martin through the usual childhood ailments of measles, mumps, and chicken pox.

Abdelkarim, the older Badri boy, Terry recalled, was fascinated by poetry, his head always buried in a book of the English poets, and he won prizes for poetry reading even when he was up against the English boys. Osman, the younger one, was good at mathematics and said he wanted to be an engineer or an architect one day and build beautiful things. Terry sat in his pew on that warm evening in 1990 and wondered what had happened to them all.

While they studied at Tasisiya, things around them in Iraq were changing. Four years after he came to power by murdering the King, Kassem himself was toppled and butchered by an Army that had become worried by his flirtation with Communism. There followed eleven months of rule shared between the Army and the Ba’ath Party, during which the Ba’athists took savage revenge on their former persecutors, the Communists.

Then the Army ousted the Ba’ath, pushing its members once again into exile, and ruled alone until 1968.

But in 1966, at the age of thirteen, Mike had been sent to complete his education at an English public school called Haileybury. Terry duly followed in 1968. In late June that summer, his parents took him over to England so they could all spend the long vacation together there before Terry joined Mike at school. That way they missed by chance the two coups, on July 14 and 30, that toppled the Army and swept the Ba’ath Party to power under President Bakr, with a vice-president called Saddam Hussein.

Nigel Martin had suspected something was coming and had made his plans. He left the IPC and joined a British-based oil company called Burmah Oil, and after packing up the family’s affairs in Baghdad, he settled the family outside Hertford, from where he could commute daily to London and his new job.

Nigel Martin became a keen golfer, and on weekends his sons would often act as caddies when he played with a fellow executive from Burmah Oil, a certain Mr. Denis Thatcher, whose wife was quite interested in politics.

Terry loved Haileybury, which was then under the head-mastership of William Stewart; both boys were in Melvill House, whose housemaster then was Richard Rhodes-James. Predictably, Terry turned out to be the scholar and Mike the athlete. Scorning having a go at a place in university, Mike announced early that he wanted to make a career in the Army. It was a decision with which Mr. Rhodes-James was happy to agree. If Mike’s protective attitude toward his shorter and chubbier brother had begun at Mr. Hartley’s school in Baghdad, it was confirmed at Haileybury, as was the younger boy’s adoration of his sibling.

Terry Martin left the darkened church when the choir practice ended, walked across Trafalgar Square, and caught a bus to Bayswater, where he and Hilary shared a flat. As he passed up Park Lane, he thought back to the school years with Mike. And now, by being stupid when he should have kept his mouth shut, he had caused his brother to be sent into occupied Kuwait. He felt close to tears with worry and frustration.

He left the bus and scurried down Chepstow Gardens. Hilary, who had been away for three days on business, should be back. He hoped so; he needed to be comforted. When he let himself in, he called out and heard with joy the answering voice from the sitting room.

He entered the room and blurted out the stupid thing he had done.

Then he felt himself enfolded in the warm, comforting embrace of the kind, gentle stockbroker with whom he shared his life.

Mike Martin had spent two days with the Head of Station in Riyadh, a station that had now been beefed up with the addition of two more men from Century.

The Riyadh station normally works out of the embassy, and since Saudi Arabia is regarded, as a most friendly country to British interests, it has never been regarded as a “hard” posting, requiring a large staff and complex facilities. But the ten-day-old crisis in the Gulf had changed things.

The newly created Coalition of Western and Arab nations adamantly opposed to Iraq’s continued occupation of Kuwait already had two appointed co-commanders-in-chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf of the United States and Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, a forty-four-year-old professional soldier, trained in the States and at Sandhurst in England, a nephew of the King, and son of Defense Minister Prince Sultan.

Prince Khaled, in response to the British request, had been as gracious as usual, and with remarkable speed a large detached villa had been acquired on the outskirts of the city for the British embassy to rent.

Technicians from London were installing receivers and transmitters with their inevitable encryption machines for secure usage, and the place was about to become the headquarters of the British Secret

Service for the duration of the emergency. Somewhere across town, the Americans were doing much the same for the CIA, which clearly intended to have a very major presence. The animus that would later develop between the senior brass of the U.S. armed forces and the civilians of the Agency had not yet begun.

In the interim, Mike Martin had stayed at the private house of the Station Head, Julian Gray. Both men agreed there would be no advantage in Martin being seen by anyone in the embassy. The charming Mrs. Gray, a career wife, had been his hostess and never dreamt of asking who he was or what he was doing in Saudi Arabia.

Martin spoke no Arabic to the Saudi staff, just accepted the offered coffee with a smile and a thank you in English.

On the evening of the second day, Gray was giving Martin his final briefing. They seemed to have covered everything they could, at least from Riyadh.

“You’ll be flying to Dhahran tomorrow morning. Civilian flight of Saudia. They’ve stopped running direct into Khafji. You’ll be met.

The Firm has set up a dispatcher in Khafji; he’ll meet you and run you north. Actually, I think he’s ex-regiment. Sparky Low—do you know him?”

“I know him,” said Martin.

“He’s got all the things you said you needed. And he’s found a young Kuwaiti pilot you might like to talk to. He’ll be getting from us all the latest pictures from the American satellites showing the border area and the main concentrations of Iraqi troops to avoid, plus anything else we get. Now, lastly, these pictures have just come in from London.”

He spread a row of large, glossy pictures out on the dining table.

“Saddam doesn’t seem to have appointed an Iraqi Governor-General yet; he’s still trying to put together an administration of Kuwaiti quislings and getting nowhere. Even the Kuwaiti opposition won’t play ball. But it seems there’s already quite a Secret Police presence there. This one here seems to be the local AMAM chief, name of Colonel Sabaawi, quite a bastard. His boss in Baghdad, who may visit, is the head of the Amn-al-Amm, Omar Khatib. Here.”

Martin stared at the face in the photograph: surly, sullen, a mix of cruelty and peasant cunning in the eyes and mouth.

“His reputation is pretty bloody. Same as his sidekick in Kuwait, Sabaawi. Khatib is about forty-five, comes from Tikrit, a clansman of Saddam himself and a longtime henchman. We don’t know much about Sabaawi, but he’ll be more in evidence.”

Gray pulled over another photograph.

“Apart from the AMAM, Baghdad has sent in a team from the Mukhabarat’s Counterintelligence wing, probably to cope with the foreigners and any attempt at espionage or sabotage directed from outside their new conquest. The CI boss is this one here—got a reputation as cunning and nobody’s fool. He may be the one to be careful of.”

It was August 8. Another C-5 Galaxy was rumbling overhead to land at the nearby military airport, part of the vast American logistical machine that was already in gear and pouring its endless materiel into a nervous, uncomprehending, and extremely traditional Moslem kingdom.

Mike Martin looked down and stared at the face of Hassan Rahmani.

It was Steve Laing on the phone again.

“I don’t want to talk,” said Terry Martin.

“I think we should, Dr. Martin. Look, you’re worried about your brother, are you not?”

“Very much.”

“There’s no need to be, you know. He’s a very tough character, well able to look after himself. He wanted to go, no question of it. We gave him absolute right to turn us down.”

“I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“Try and look at it this way, Doctor. If worse comes to worst, we may have to send a lot of other brothers, husbands, sons, uncles, loved ones out to the Gulf. If there’s anything any of us can do to limit their casualties, shouldn’t we try?”

“All right. What do you want?”

“Oh, another lunch, I think. Easier to talk man to man. Do you know the Montcalm Hotel? Say, one o’clock?”

“Despite the brains, he’s quite an emotional little blighter,” Laing had remarked to Simon Paxman earlier that morning.

“Good Lord,” said Paxman, like an entomologist who has just been told of an amusing new species discovered under a rock.

The spymaster and the academic had a quiet booth to themselves—Mr.

Costa had seen to it. When the smoked salmon cornets had been served, Laing broached his subject.

“The fact of the matter is, we may actually be facing a war in the Gulf.

Not yet, of course; it will take time to build up the necessary forces.

But the Americans have the bit between their teeth. They are absolutely determined, with the complete support of our good lady in Downing Street, to get Saddam Hussein and his thugs out of Kuwait.”

“Supposing he gets out of his own accord,” suggested Martin.

“Well, fine, no war needed,” replied Laing, though privately he thought this option might not be so fine after all. There were rumors in the wind that were deeply disturbing and had in fact given rise to his lunch with the Arabist.

“But if not, we shall just have to go in, under the auspices of the United Nations, and kick him out.”

“ ‘We’?”

“Well, the Americans mainly. We’ll send forces to join them; land, sea, air. We’ve got ships in the Gulf right now, fighters and fighter-bomber squadrons heading south. That sort of thing. Mrs. T is determined we’ll not be seen to be slacking. At the moment it’s just Desert Shield, stopping the bastard from getting any thoughts of moving south and invading Saudi Arabia. But it may come to more than that. You’ve heard of WMD, of course?”

“Weapons of mass destruction. Of course.”

“That’s the problem. NBC. Nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical.

Privately, our people at Century have been trying to warn the political masters for a couple of years about this sort of thing. Last year the Chief presented a paper, ‘Intelligence in the Nineties.’ Warned that the great threat now, since the end of the cold war, is and will be proliferation. Jumped-up dictators of highly unstable aspect getting hold of seriously high-tech weaponry and then possibly using it. ‘Top marks,’ they all said, ‘jolly good’—then did bugger-all about it. Now, of course, they’re all worried shitless.”

“He’s got a lot of it, you know: Saddam Hussein,” remarked Martin.

“That’s the point, my dear fellow. We estimate Saddam has spent fifty billion dollars over the past decade on weapons procurement. That’s why he’s bankrupt—owes fifteen billion to the Kuwaitis, another fifteen to the Saudis, and that’s just for loans made to him during the Iran-Iraq war. He invaded because they refused to write it all off and bung him another thirty billion to get his economy out of trouble.

“Now, the meat of the problem is that one-third of that fifty billion—an incredible seventeen billion greenbacks—has been spent acquiring WMD or the means to make them.”

“And the West has woken up at last?”

“With a vengeance. There’s a hell of an operation going on. Langley’s been told to race around the world to trace every government that’s ever sold anything to Iraq and check out the export permits. We’re doing the same.”

“Shouldn’t take that long if they all cooperate, and they probably will,” said Martin, as his wing of skate arrived.

“It’s not that easy,” said Laing. “Although it’s early yet, it’s already clear Saddam’s son-in-law Kamil has set up a damnably clever procurement machine. Hundreds of small dummy companies all over Europe and North, Central, and South America. Buying bits and bobs that didn’t seem to mean much. Forging export applications, fudging the details of the product, lying about its end-use, diverting purchases through countries that were on the export certificate as the final destination. But put all the innocent-seeming bits and bobs together, and you can get something really nasty.”

“We know he’s got gas,” said Martin. “He’s used it on the Kurds and the Iranians at Fao. Phosgene, mustard gas. But I’ve heard there are nerve agents as well. No odor, no visible sign. Lethal and very short-lived.”

“My dear chap, I knew it. You’re a mine of information.”

Laing knew all about the gas, but he knew more about flattery.

“Then there’s anthrax,” said Martin. “He’s been experimenting with that, and maybe pneumonic plague. But you know, you can’t just run up these things with a pair of kitchen gloves. You need some very specialized chemical equipment. It should show up on the export licenses.”

Laing nodded and sighed with frustration.

“Should, yes. But the investigators are already running into two problems. A wall of obfuscation from some companies, mainly in Germany, and the question of dual-use. Someone ships out a cargo of pesticide—what could be more innocent in a country trying to boost its agricultural production, or so it says. Another company in another country ships a different chemical—same apparent reason, pesticide.

Then some smart chemist puts them together and bingo—poison gas.

Both the suppliers whine, ‘We didn’t know.’ ”

“The key will lie in the chemical blending equipment,” said Martin.

“This is high-tech chemistry. You can’t mix these things up in a bathtub. Find the people who supplied the turnkey factories and the men who assembled them. They may huff and puff, but they’ll know exactly what they were doing when they did it. And what it was for.”

“Turnkey factories?” asked Laing.

“Whole plants, built from scratch by foreign contracted companies.

The new owner just turns the key and walks in. But none of this explains our lunch. You must have access to chemists and physicists.

I’ve only heard of these things because of a personal interest. Why me?”

Laing stirred his coffee thoughtfully. He had to play this one carefully.

“Yes, we have chemists and physicists. Scientists of all kinds. And no doubt they’ll come up with some answers. Then we’ll translate the answers into plain English. The Americans will do the same. We’re working in total cooperation with Washington on this, and we’ll compare our analyses. We’ll get some answers, but we won’t get them all. We believe you have something different to offer. Hence this lunch. Do you know that most of our top brass still take the view that the Arabs couldn’t assemble a kid’s bicycle, let alone invent one?”

He had touched on a nerve, and he knew it. The psycho-portrait he had ordered on Dr. Terry Martin was about to prove its worth. Martin flushed deep pink, then controlled himself.

“I really do get pissed off,” he said, “when my own fellow countrymen insist the Arab peoples are just a bunch of camel-herders who choose to wear tea towels on their heads. Yes, I have actually heard it expressed that way. The fact is, they were building extremely complex palaces, mosques, ports, highways, and irrigation systems when our ancestors were still running around in bearskins. They had rulers and lawgivers of amazing wisdom when we were in the Dark Ages.”

Martin leaned forward and jabbed at the man from Century with his coffee spoon.

“I tell you, the Iraqis have among them some brilliant scientists, and as builders they are beyond compare. Their construction engineers are better than anything for a thousand-mile radius around Baghdad, and I include Israel. Many may have been Soviet or Western trained, but they have absorbed our knowledge like sponges and then made an enormous input themselves.”

He paused, and Laing pounced.

“Dr. Martin, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve only been with Century’s Mid-East Division for a year, but I’ve come to the same view as you—that the Iraqis are a very talented people. But they happen to be ruled by a man who has already committed genocide. Is all this money and all this talent really going to be put to the purpose of killing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people? Is Saddam going to bring glory to the people of Iraq, or is he going to bring them slaughter?”

Martin sighed.

“You’re right. He’s an aberration. He wasn’t once, long ago, but he’s become one. He’s perverted the nationalism of the old Ba’ath Party into National Socialism, drawing his inspiration from Adolf Hitler.

What do you want of me?”

Laing thought for a while. He was close, too close to lose his man now.

“George Bush and Mrs. T have agreed that our two countries put together a body to investigate and analyze the whole area of Saddam’s WMD. The investigators will bring in the facts as they discover them.

The scientists will tell us what they mean. What has he got? How developed? How much of it? What do we need to protect ourselves against, if it comes to war—gas masks? Space suits? Antidote syringes? We don’t know yet just what he’s got or just what we’ll need—”

“But I know nothing of these things,” Martin interrupted him.

“No, but you know something we don’t. The Arab mind, Saddam’s mind. Will he use what he’s got? Will he tough it out in Kuwait, or will he quit? What inducements will make him quit? Will he go to the end of the line? Our people just don’t understand this Arab concept of martyrdom.”

Martin laughed. “President Bush,” he said, “and all the people around him will act according to their upbringing. Which is based on the Judeo-Christian moral philosophy supported by the Greco-Roman concept of logic. And Saddam will react on the basis of his own vision of himself.”

“As an Arab and a Moslem?”

“Uh-unh. Islam has nothing to do with it. Saddam doesn’t care a fig for the hadith, the codified teachings of the Prophet. He prays on camera when it suits him. No, you have to go back to Nineveh and Assyria. He doesn’t mind how many have to die, so long as he thinks he can win.”

“He can’t win, not against America. Nobody can.”

“Wrong. You use the word win as a Britisher or an American would use it. The way Bush and Scowcroft and the rest are using it even now.

He will see it differently. If he quits Kuwait because he is paid to by King Fahd, which might have happened if the Jeddah conference had taken place, he can win with honor. To be paid to quit is acceptable.

He wins. But America will not allow that.”

“No way.”

“But if he quits under threat, he loses. All Arabia will see that. He will lose, and probably die. So he will not quit.”

“And if the American war machine is launched against him? He’ll be smashed to bits,” said Laing.

“It doesn’t matter. He has his bunker. His people will die. Not important. But if he can hurt America, he will win. If he can hurt America badly, really badly, he will be covered in glory. Dead or alive. He will win.”

“Bloody hell, it’s complicated,” sighed Laing.

“Not really. There’s a quantum leap in moral philosophy when you cross the Jordan. Let me ask again: What do you want of me?”

“The committee is forming, to try and advise our masters on the question of these weapons of mass destruction. The guns, tanks, airplanes—the Ministries of Defence will deal with those. They’re not the problem. Just ironmongery—we can destroy it from the air.

“Actually, there are two committees, one in Washington and one here in London. British observers on theirs, American observers on ours.

There’ll be people from the Foreign Office, Aldermaston, Porton Down. Century has two places. I’m sending a colleague, head of the Iraq desk, Simon Paxman. I’d like you to sit with him, see if there’s an aspect of interpretation that we might miss because it’s a peculiarly Arab aspect. That’s your forte—that’s what you can contribute.”

“All right, for what I can contribute, which may be nothing. What’s it called, the committee? When does it meet?”

“Ah, yes, Simon will call you with the when and where. Actually, it’s got an appropriate name. Medusa.”

A soft and warm Carolina dusk was moving toward Seymour Johnson Air Force base that late afternoon of August 10, beckoning the sort of evening for a pitcher of rum punch in the ice bucket and a corn-fed steak on the grill.

The men of the 334th Tactical Fighter Squadron who were still not operational on the F-15E, and those of the 335th TFS, the Chiefs, who would fly out to the Gulf in December, stood by and watched. With the 336th Squadron, they made up the Fourth Tactical Fighter Wing of the Ninth Air Force. It was the 336th who were on the move.

Two days of frenzied activity were at last coming to an end; two days of preparing the airplanes, planning the route, deciding on the gear, and stashing the secret manuals and the squadron computer—with all its battle tactics locked in its data bank—into containers to be brought by the transports. Moving a squadron of warplanes is not like moving a house, which can be bad enough. It is like moving a small city.

Out on the tarmac the twenty-four F-15E Strike Eagles crouched in silence, fearsome beasts waiting for the spidery little creatures of the same species who had designed and built them to climb aboard and unleash with insignificant fingertips their awful power.

They were rigged for the long flight across the world to the Arabian Peninsula in one single journey. The fuel weight alone—thirteen and a half tons—was the payload of five Second World War bombers. And the Eagle is a fighter.

The crews’ personal gear was packed in travel pods, former napalm pods now put to more humane use, canisters below the wings containing shirts, socks, shorts, soap, shaving gear, uniforms, mascots, and girlie magazines. For all they knew, it might be a long way to the nearest singles bar.

The great KC-10 tankers that would mother-hen the fighters all the way across the Atlantic, and on to the Saudi peninsula, all four of them feeding six Eagles each, were already aloft, waiting out over the ocean.

Later, an air caravan of Starlifters and Galaxies would bring the rest, the small army of riggers and fitters, electronics men and support staff, the ordnance and the spares, the power jacks and workshops, the machine tools and the benches. They could count on finding nothing at the other end; everything to keep two dozen of the world’s most sophisticated fighter-bombers up and combat-ready would have to be transported on that same odyssey halfway around the world.

Each Strike Eagle that evening represented $44 million worth of black boxes, aluminum, carbon-fiber composites, computers, and hydraulics, along with some rather inspired design work. Although that design had originated thirty years earlier, the Eagle was a new fighter plane, so long does research and development take.

Heading up the civic delegation from the town of Goldsboro was the mayor, Hal K. Plonk. This very fine public servant rejoices in the nickname awarded him by his grateful twenty thousand fellow citizens—“Kerplunk,” a sobriquet he earned for his ability to amuse sober delegations from politically correct Washington with his southern drawl and fund of jokes. Some visitors from the capital have been known, after an hour of the mayor’s rib-ticklers, to leave for

Washington in search of trauma therapy. Naturally, Mayor Plonk is returned to office after each term with an increased majority.

Standing beside the wing commander, Hal Hornburg, the civic delegation gazed with pride as the Eagles, towed by their tractors, emerged from the hangars and the aircrew climbed aboard, the pilot in the forward seat of the dual cockpit and his weapons systems officer, or wizzo, in the rear. Around each airplane a cluster of ground crew worked on the prestartup checks.

“Did I ever tell you,” asked the mayor pleasantly to the very senior Air Force officer beside him, “the story of the general and the hooker?”

At this point, Don Walker mercifully started his engines and the howl of two Pratt and Whitney F100-PW-220 turbo-jets drowned out the details of that lady’s unfortunate experiences at the hands of the general. The F100 can convert fossil fuel to a lot of noise and heat and 24,000 pounds of thrust and was about to do so.

One by one the twenty-four Eagles of the 336th started up and began to roll the mile to the end of the runway. Small red flags fluttered under the wings, showing where pins secured the underwing Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles to their pylons. These pins would only come out just before takeoff. Their journey to Arabia might be a peaceful one, but to send an Eagle aloft with no means of self-defense at all would be unthinkable.

Along the taxiway to takeoff point were groups of armed guards and Air Force police. Some waved, some saluted. Just before the runway, the Eagles stopped again and were subjected to the final attention of a swarm of ordnance men and ground crew. They chocked the wheels, then checked over each jet in turn, looking for leaks, loose fittings, or panels—anything that might have gone wrong during the taxiing.

Finally, the pins on the missiles were pulled out.

Patiently, the Eagles waited, sixty-three feet long, eighteen high and forty across, weighing 40,000 pounds bone dry and 81,000 at maximum takeoff weight, which they were close to now. It would be a long takeoff run.

Finally, they rolled to the runway, turned into the light breeze, and accelerated down the tarmac. Afterburners kicked in as the pilots rammed the throttles through the “gate,” and thirty-foot flames leaped from the tail pipes. Beside the runway the crew chiefs, heads protected by helmets from the fearsome noise, saluted their babies away on foreign assignment. They would not see them again until Saudi Arabia.

A mile down the runway, the wheels left the tarmac and the Eagles were airborne. Wheels up, flaps up, throttles pulled back out of afterburn and into military power setting. The twenty-four Eagles turned their noses to the sky, established a climb rate of five thousand feet per minute, and disappeared into the dusk.

They leveled at 25,000 feet, and an hour later saw the position lights and navigation strobe of the first KC-10 tanker. Time to top up. The two F100 engines have a fearsome thirst. With afterburner running, they each go through 40,000 pounds of fuel per hour, which is why the afterburn or “reheat” is only used for takeoff, combat, or emergency let’s-get-out-of-here maneuvers. Even at normal power settings, the engines need a top up every one and a half hours. To get to Saudi Arabia they would need their KC-10s, their gas stations in the sky, desperately.

The squadron was by now in wide formation, each wingman formatting on his element leader in line abreast, about a mile between wingtips. Don Walker, with his wizzo behind him, glanced out to see his wingman holding position where he should be. Flying east, they were now in darkness over the Atlantic, but the radar showed the position of every aircraft, and their navigational lights picked them out.

In the tail of the KC-10 above and ahead of him, the boom operator opened the panel that protected his window on the world and gazed out at the sea of lights behind him. The fuel boom extended, waiting for the first customer.

Each group of six Eagles had already identified its designated tanker, and Walker moved in for his turn. A touch on the throttle, and the Eagle swam up under the tanker, in range of the boom. In the tanker the operator “flew” his boom onto the nozzle protruding from the forward edge of the fighter’s left wing. When he had “lock on,” the fuel began to flow, two thousand pounds per minute. The Eagle drank and drank.

When it was full, Walker pulled away and his wingman slid up to suckle. Across the sky, three other tankers were doing the same for each of their six charges.

They flew through the night, which was short because they were flying toward the sun at about five hundred miles per hour over the ground.

After six hours the sun rose again, and they crossed the coast of Spain, flying north of the African coast to avoid Libya. Approaching Egypt, which was a member of the Coalition forces, the 336th turned southeast, drifted over the Red Sea, and caught its first sight of that huge ochre-brown slab of sand and gravel called the Arabian Desert.

After fifteen hours airborne, tired and stiff, the forty-eight young Americans landed at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. Within hours they were diverted to their ultimate destination, the air base of Thumrait in the Sultanate of Oman.

For four months, until mid-December, they would live here in conditions on which they would later look back with nostalgia, seven hundred miles from the Iraqi border and the danger zone. They would fly training missions over the Omani interior when their support gear arrived, swim in the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, and wait for whatever the good Lord and Norman Schwarzkopf had in store for them.

In December they would relocate into Saudi Arabia, and one of them, though he would never know it, would alter the course of the war.

Chapter 5

The Dhahran Airport was choked. It seemed to Mike Martin as he arrived from Riyadh that most of the eastern seaboard wanted to be on the move. Situated at the heart of the great chain of oil fields that brought Saudi Arabia her fabulous wealth, Dhahran had long been accustomed to Americans and Europeans—unlike Taif, Riyadh, Yenbo, and the other cities of the kingdom. Even the bustling port of Jeddah was not accustomed to so many Anglo-Saxon faces on the street, but by the second week of August, Dhahran was reeling from the invasion.

Some were trying to get out; many had driven across the causeway into Bahrain to fly out from there. Others were at the Dhahran airport, wives and families of oil men mainly, heading for Riyadh and a connecting flight home.

Others were coming in, a torrent of Americans with their weaponry and stores. Martin’s own civilian flight just squeezed in between two lumbering C-5 Galaxies, two of an almost nose-to-tail air convoy from Britain, Germany, and the United States that was engaged in the steady buildup that would transform northeastern Saudi Arabia into one great armed camp.

This was not Desert Storm; the campaign to liberate Kuwait was still five months away. This was Desert Shield, designed to deter the Iraqi Army, now increased to fourteen divisions deployed along the border and throughout Kuwait, from rolling south.

To a watcher at the Dhahran airport, it might seem impressive, but a more intensive study would reveal that the protective skin was paper-thin. The American armor and artillery had not yet arrived—the earliest sea departures were just clearing the U.S. coastline—and the stores carried by the Galaxies, Starlifters, and Hercules were a fraction of the sort of cargo a ship could carry.

The Eagles based at Dhahran and the Hornets of the Marines on Bahrain, plus the British Tornados that had just arrived at Dhahran and hardly cooled down from their journey from Germany, had enough ordnance between them to mount half a dozen missions before running out.

It takes more than that to stop a determined onslaught of massed armor. Despite the impressive show of military hardware at a few airfields, northeastern Saudi Arabia still lay naked under the sun.

Martin shouldered his way out of the milling throng in the arrivals hall, his tote bag over one shoulder, and caught sight of a familiar face among the crowd at the barrier.

On his first selection course for the SAS, when they had told him they were not going to try and train him but instead try and kill him, they had almost succeeded. One day he had marched thirty miles over the Brecons, some of the crudest terrain in Britain, in freezing rain with one hundred pounds of gear in his Bergen rucksack. Like the others, he was beyond exhaustion, locked into a private world where all existence was a miasma of pain and only the will survived.

Then he had seen the truck, that beautiful waiting truck. The end of the march and, in terms of human endurance, the end of the line. A hundred yards, eighty, fifty; an end to the all-consuming agony of his body crept nearer and nearer as his numbed legs drove him and the Bergen those last few yards.

There had been a man sitting in the back of the truck, watching the rain-streaked, pain-wracked face staggering toward him. When the tailboard was ten inches from Martin’s outstretched fingers, the man rapped on the rear of the cab and the truck rolled away. It did not roll an extra hundred yards; it rolled another ten miles. Sparky Low had been the man in the truck.

“Hi, Mike. Good to see you.”

That sort of thing takes an awful lot of forgiving.

“Hi, Sparky. How are things.”

“Bloody hairy, since you ask.”

Sparky hauled his nondescript four-wheel-drive jeep out of the parking lot, and in thirty minutes they were clear of Dhahran and heading north. It was two hundred miles up to Khafji, a three-hour run, but after the port of Jubail slipped by to their right, they at least had some privacy. The road was empty. No one had any appetite for a visit to Khafji, a small oil community on the border of Kuwait, now reduced to a ghost town.

“Refugees still coming over?” asked Martin.

“Some,” nodded Sparky. “Down to a trickle, though. The main rush has come and gone. Those coming down the main road are mainly women and kids with passes—the Iraqis let them through to get rid of them. Smart enough. If I were running Kuwait, I’d want to get rid of the expatriates too.

“Some Indians get through—the Iraqis seem to ignore them. Not so smart. The Indians have good information, and I’ve persuaded a couple to turn around and go back with messages for our people.”

“Have you got the stuff I asked for?”

“Yep. Gray must have pulled some strings. It arrived in a truck with Saudi markings yesterday. I put it in the spare bedroom. We’ll have dinner tonight with this young Kuwaiti Air Force pilot I told you about. He claims he has contacts inside, reliable people who might be useful.”

Martin grunted. “He doesn’t see my face. Might get shot down.”

Sparky thought it over. “Right.”

Sparky Low’s commandeered villa was not half bad, thought Martin. It belonged to an American oil executive from Aramco, which had pulled its man out of there and back to Dhahran.

Martin knew better than to ask just what Sparky Low was doing in that neck of the woods. It was obvious that he, too, had been “borrowed” by Century House, and his task seemed to be intercepting the refugees filtering south and, if they would talk, debriefing them on what they had seen and heard.

Khafji was virtually deserted, apart from the Saudi National Guard, who were dug in defensive positions in and around the town. But there were still a few disconsolate Saudis wandering around, and from one stallholder in the market, who could not believe that he actually had a customer, Martin bought the clothes he needed.

Electric power was still running in Khafji in mid-August, which meant the air conditioning functioned, as did the water pump from the well and the water heater. There was a bath available, but he knew better than to take one.

He had not washed, shaved, or brushed his teeth for three days. If Mrs.

Gray, his hostess back in Riyadh, had noticed the increasing odor, which she certainly had, she was too well bred to mention it. For dental hygiene Martin just picked his teeth with a splint of wood after a meal. Sparky Low did not mention it, either, but then, he knew the reason.

The Kuwaiti officer turned out to be a handsome young man of twenty-six who was consumed with rage at what had been done to his country and was clearly a supporter of the ousted Al Sabah royal dynasty, which was now lodged in a luxury hotel in Taif as guests of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

He was also bewildered to find that though his host was what he expected—a British officer in civilian casual dress—the third person at the meal appeared to be a fellow Arab but was dressed in a soiled off-white thob with a speckled keffiyeh on his head, one trailing corner tucked across the lower half of his face. Low introduced them.

“You are really British?” asked the young man in surprise. It was explained to him why Martin was dressed the way he was and why he kept his face covered. Captain Khaled Al-Khalifa nodded.

“My apologies, Major. Of course I understand.”

The captain’s story was clear and straightforward. He had been called at his home on the evening of August 1 and told to report to Ahmadi air base, where he was stationed. Through the night, he and his fellow officers had listened to radio reports of the invasion of their country from the north. By dawn, his squadron of Skyhawk fighters had been fueled, armed, and ready for takeoff. The American Skyhawk, though by no means a modern fighter, could still prove quite useful in a ground attack. It would never be any match for the Iraqi MiG 23, 25, or 29 or the French-built Mirage, but fortunately, on his one combat mission to date, he had never met any.

He had found his targets in the northern suburbs of Kuwait City just after dawn.

“I got one of their tanks with my rockets,” he explained excitedly. “I know, because I saw it brew. Then I’d only the cannon left, so I went for the trucks behind. Got the first one—it swerved into a ditch and rolled over. Then I was out of ammo, so I flew back. But over Ahmadi, the control tower told us to head south for the border and save the planes. I had just enough fuel to make Dhahran.

“We got over sixty of our aircraft out, you know. Skyhawks, Mirages, and the British Hawk trainers. Plus Gazelles, Puma and Super-Puma helicopters. Now I’ll fight from here and go back when we are liberated. When do you think the attack will start?”

Sparky Low smiled cautiously. The boy was so blissfully certain.

“Not yet, I’m afraid. You must be patient. There is preparatory work to be done. Tell us about your father.”

The pilot’s father, it seemed, was an extremely wealthy merchant, a friend of the royal family and a power in the land.

“Will he favor the invasion forces?” asked Low.

The young Al-Khalifa was incensed.

“Never, never! He will do anything he can to assist the liberation!” He turned to the dark eyes above the checkered cloth. “Will you see my father? You can rely on him.”

“Possibly,” said Martin.

“Will you give him a message from me?”

He wrote for several minutes on a sheet of paper and gave it to Martin.

When he had driven back to Dhahran, Martin burned the sheet in an ashtray. He could carry nothing incriminating into Kuwait City.

On the following morning, he and Low packed the gear he had asked for into the rear of the jeep, and they drove south again as far as Manifah, then turned west along the Tapline Road, which shadows the Iraqi border all the way across Saudi Arabia. It was called Tapline because TAP stands for Trans Arabian Pipeline, and the road serviced the pipeline carrying so much Saudi crude to the west.

Later, the Tapline Road would become the main transport artery for the biggest military land armada ever seen, as 400,000 American, 70,000 British, 10,000 French, and 200,000 Saudi and other Arab soldiers massed for the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait from the south.

But that day it was empty.

A few miles along it, the jeep turned north again, back to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border but at a different place, well inland. Near the fly-blown desert village of Hamatiyyat on the Saudi side, the border is at its nearest point to Kuwait City itself.

Moreover, American photoreconnaissance pictures obtained by Gray in Riyadh showed that the mass of Iraqi forces were grouped just above the border but near the coast. The farther inland one went, the thinner the scattering of Iraqi outposts. They were concentrating their forces between the Nuwaisib crossing point on the coast and the Al-Wafra border post forty miles inland.

The village of Hamatiyyat was a hundred miles into the desert, tucked up into a kink in the line of the border that shortens the distance to Kuwait City.

The camels that Martin had asked for were waiting for them at a small farm outside the village, a rangy female in her prime, and her offspring, a cream-colored calf with a velvet muzzle and gentle eyes, still at the suck. She would grow up to become as foul-tempered as the rest of her genus, but not yet.

“Why the calf?” asked Low as they sat in the jeep and watched the animals in the corral.

“Cover story. If anyone asks, I’m taking her to the camel farms outside Sulaibiya for sale. The prices are better there.”

He slid out of the jeep and shuffled on sandaled feet to rouse the camel-drover, who dozed in the shade of his shack. For thirty minutes the two men squatted in the dust and haggled the price of the two beasts. It never occurred to the drover, glancing at the dark face, the stained teeth, and the stubble, squatting in the dust in his dirty shift and his odor, that he was not talking to a trader of the Bedouin with money to spend on two good camels.

When the deal was settled, Martin paid up from a roll of Saudi riyals that he had taken from Low and held under one armpit for a while until they were soiled. Then he led the two camels a mile away and stopped when they were shielded from prying eyes by the sand dunes. Low caught up in the jeep.

He had sat a few hundred yards from the drover’s corral and watched.

Though he knew the Arabian Peninsula well, he had never worked with Martin, and he was impressed. The man did not just pretend to be an Arab; when he had slipped from the jeep, he had simply become a Bedou in every line and gesture.

Though Low did not know it, the previous day in Kuwait two British engineers, seeking to escape, had left their apartment dressed in the white neck-to-floor Kuwaiti thob with the ghutra headdress on their heads. They got halfway to their car fifty feet away when a child called up from the gutter: “You may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like English.” The engineers went back to their flat and stayed there.

Sweating in the sun but out of sight of any who might be surprised at such labor being carried out in the heat of the day, the two SAS men transferred the gear into the baggage panniers that hung on either side of the she-camel. She was hunkered down on all fours but still protested at the extra weight, spitting and snarling at the men who worked on her.

The two hundred pounds of Semtex-H explosive went into one, each five-pound block wrapped in cloth, with some Hessian sacks of coffee beans on top in case any curious Iraqi soldier insisted on looking. The other pannier took the submachine guns, ammunition, detonators, time-pencils, and grenades, along with Martin’s small but powerful transceiver with its fold-away satellite dish and spare cadmium-nickel batteries. These too were topped with coffee bags.

When they were finished, Low asked:

“Anything more I can do?”

“No, that’s it, thanks. I’ll stay here till sundown. No need for you to wait.”

Low held out his hand.

“Sorry about the Brecons.”

Martin shook it.

“No sweat. I survived.”

Low laughed, a short bark.

“Yeah, that’s what we do. We fucking survive. Stay lucky, Mike.”

He drove away. The camel rolled an eye, belched, regurgitated some cud, and began to chew. The calf tried to get at her teats, failed, and lay down by her side.

Martin propped himself against the camel saddle, drew his keffiyeh around his face, and thought about the days to come. The desert would not be a problem; the bustle of occupied Kuwait City might be. How tight were the controls, how tough the roadblocks, how astute the soldiers who manned them? Century had offered to try and get him forged papers, but he had turned them down. The Iraqis might change the ID cards.

He was confident that the cover he had chosen was one of the best in the Arab world. The Bedouin come and go as they please. They offer no resistance to invading armies, for they have seen too many—Saracen and Turk, Crusader and Knight Templar, German and French, British and Egyptian, Israeli and Iraqi. They have survived them all because they stay out of all matters political and military.

Many regimes have tried to tame them, all without success. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, decreeing that all his citizens should have houses, built a handsome village called Escan, equipped with all modern facilities—a swimming pool, toilets, baths, running water. Some Bedouin were rounded up and moved in.

They drank the pool (it looked like an oasis), crapped on the patio, played with the water faucets, and then moved out, explaining politely to their monarch that they preferred to sleep under the stars. Escan was cleaned up and used by the Americans during the Gulf crisis.

Martin knew that his real problem was his height. He was an inch under six feet, but most Bedouin are far shorter than that. Centuries of sickness and malnourishment have left most of them disease-ridden and stunted. Water in the desert is only for drinking, by man, goat, or camel; hence, Martin’s avoiding the bath. The glamour of desert living, he knew, is strictly for Westerners.

He had no identification papers, but that was not a problem. Several governments have tried to issue the Bedouin with ID papers. The tribesmen are usually delighted because they make such good toilet paper, better than a handful of gravel. For a policeman or soldier to insist on seeing a Bedou’s ID papers is a waste of time, and both parties know it. From the authorities’ point of view, the main thing is that the Bedouin cause no trouble. They would never dream of getting involved in any Kuwaiti resistance movement. Martin knew that; he hoped the Iraqis did, too.

He dozed until sundown, then mounted the camel. At his “hut hut hut,”

she rose to her feet. Her baby suckled for a while, tethered behind her, and they set off at that ambling, rolling pace that seems to be very slow but covers an amazing amount of ground. The she-camel had been well fed and watered at the corral and would not tire for days.

He was well to the northwest of the Ruqaifah police station, where a track road passes from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, when he crossed the border shortly before eight. The night was black, save for a low gleam from the stars. The glow of Kuwait’s Manageesh oil field lay to his right and would probably have an Iraqi patrol in it, but the desert ahead of him was empty.

On the map it was thirty-five miles to the camel farms just south of Sulaibiya, the outlying district of Kuwait City where he intended to leave his beasts until he needed them again. But before that, he would bury the gear in the desert and mark the spot.

Unless he was stopped and delayed, he would do this in darkness before sunrise, which was nine hours away. The tenth hour would bring him to the camel farms.

When the Manageesh oil field dropped behind him, he steered by his hand compass in a straight line for his destination. The Iraqis, as he had surmised, might patrol the roads, even the tracks, but never the empty desert. No refugee would try to escape that way, nor enemy to enter.

From the camel farms, after sunrise, he knew he could scramble onboard a truck heading into the heart of town, twenty miles farther on.

Far above him, silent in the night sky, a KH-11 satellite of the National Reconnaissance Office slid across the sky. Years earlier, previous generations of American spy satellites had had to take their pictures and at intervals spit out the capsules in reentry vehicles, to be laboriously recovered and the film processed.

The KH-11s, sixty-four feet long and weighing thirty thousand pounds each, are smarter. As they take their images of the ground below them, they automatically encrypt the pictures into a series of electronic pulses that are beamed upward to another satellite.

The receiver satellite above is one of a network positioned in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they drift through space at a speed and on a course that keeps them always above the same spot on the earth.

In effect, they hover. Having received the images from the KH-11, the hovering satellite either beams them straight down to the United States or, if the curve of the earth gets in the way, bounces them across space to another hovering “bird” that sends the pictures down to its American masters. Thus the NRO can collect its photographic information in real time, just seconds after the pictures are taken.

The bonus in war is huge. The KH-11 can see, for example, an enemy convoy on the move well in advance, in time to call up an air strike to blast the trucks into oblivion. The unfortunate soldiers inside them would never know how the fighter-bombers found them. For the KH-11s can work through night and day, in cloud or fog.

The phrase has been used about them: all-seeing. Alas, it is a self-delusion. The KH-11 that night swept out of Saudi Arabia and over Kuwait. But it did not see the lone Bedou tribesman entering forbidden territory, nor would it have cared if it had. It moved over Kuwait and into Iraq. It saw many buildings, great sprawls of industrial minicities around Al-Hillah and Tarmiya, Al-Atheer and Tuwaitha, but it did not see what was in those buildings. It did not see the vats of poison gas in preparation, nor the uranium hexafluoride destined for the gas-diffusion centrifuges of the isotope separation plant.

It moved north, picking out the airfields, the highways, and the bridges. It even saw the automobile junkyard at Al Qubai, but took no notice. It saw the industrial centers of Al Qaim, Jazira, and Al-Shirqat west and north of Baghdad, but not the devices of mass death that were being prepared inside them. It passed over the Jebel al Hamreen, but it did not see the Fortress that had been built by the engineer Osman Badri. It saw only a mountain among other mountains, hill villages among other hill villages. Then it passed on over Kurdistan and into Turkey.

Mike Martin plodded on through the night toward Kuwait City, invisible in robes he had not worn for almost two weeks. He smiled on recalling the moment when, returning to his Land-Rover from a hike in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, he had been surprised to be intercepted by a plump American lady pointing a camera and shouting “click click” at him.

It had been agreed that the British Medusa Committee should meet for its preliminary conference in a room beneath the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. The main reason was that the building was secure, being regularly swept against listening devices, although it did seem that with Russians being so terribly nice these days, they might have stopped at last attempting such tiresome practices.

The room to which the eight guests were led was two floors below ground level. Terry Martin had heard of the warren of shockproof, bugproof chambers where the most delicate matters of state could be discussed in complete discretion below the innocent-looking building opposite the Cenotaph.

Sir Paul Spruce took the chair, an urbane and experienced bureaucrat with the rank of Assistant Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet. He introduced himself and then everyone to everyone. The American embassy and thus the United States was represented by the Assistant Defense Attaché and Harry Sinclair, an astute and experienced officer from Langley who had headed the CIA’s London station for the past three years. Sinclair was a tall, angular man who favored tweed jackets, frequented the opera, and got along extremely well with his British counterparts.

The CIA man nodded and winked at Simon Paxman, whom he had met once at a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee, on which the CIA has a permanent seat in London.

Sinclair’s job would be to note anything of interest that the British scientists might come up with and convey that information back to Washington, where the considerably larger American end of the Medusa Committee was also in session. All the findings would then be collated and compared in the continuing search to analyze Iraq’s potential to cause appalling casualties.

There were two scientists from Aldermaston, the Weapons Research Establishment in Berkshire—they like to drop the word atomic in front of WRE, but that is what Aldermaston is all about. Their job would be to try and elucidate from information out of the United States, Europe, and anywhere else it could be gleaned, plus air photographs of possible Iraqi nuclear research facilities, just how far, if at all, Iraq had proceeded in its quest to crack the technology of making an atomic bomb of her own.

There were two other scientists, from Porton Down. One was a chemist, the other a biologist specializing in bacteriology.

Porton Down has often been accused in the press of researching chemical and bacteriological weapons for British use. In fact, its research has for years been concentrated on seeking antidotes to any and all forms of gas and germ warfare that might be leveled at British and allied troops. Unfortunately, it is impossible to develop antidotes to anything without first studying the properties of the toxin. The two scientists from Porton therefore had under their aegis, and in conditions of massive security, some very nasty substances. But then so, that August 13, had Mr. Saddam Hussein. The difference was, the Allies had no intention of using them on Iraqis, but it was felt that Mr.Hussein might not be so forbearing.

The Porton men’s job would be to see if, from lists of chemicals purchased by Iraq over a period of years, they could deduce what he had, how much, how nasty, and if it was usable. They would also study air photographs of a range of factories and plants in Iraq to see if any telltale signs in the form of structures of certain size and shape—decontamination units, emission scrubbers—might identify the poison gas factories.

“Now, gentlemen,” Sir Paul began, addressing the four scientists, “the principal burden rests upon you. The rest of us will assist and support where we can.

“I have here two volumes of intelligence so far received from our people abroad, embassy staff, trade missions, and the—ah—covert gentlemen. Early days yet. These are the first results from the cull of export licenses to Iraq over the past decade, and needless to say, they come from governments that are being most promptly helpful.

“We have thrown the net as wide as possible. Reference is made to exports of chemicals, building materials, laboratory equipment, specialized engineering products—just about everything but umbrellas, knitting wool, and cuddly toys.

“Some of these exports, indeed probably the majority, will turn out to be quite normal purchases by a developing Arab country for peaceful purposes, and I apologize for what may turn out to be wasted time studying them. But please concentrate not only on specialized purchases for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, but also on dual-use purchases—items that could be adapted or cannibalized for a purpose other than that stated.

“Now, I believe our American colleagues have also been at work.”

Sir Paul handed one of his files to the men from Porton Down and one to those from Aldermaston. The man from the CIA produced two files and did the same. The bewildered scientists sat facing a block of paperwork.

“We have tried,” explained Sir Paul, “not to duplicate—the Americans and ourselves—but, alas, there may be some element of duplication. I apologize again. And now, Mr. Sinclair.”

The CIA Head of Station, unlike the Whitehall civil servant who had almost sent the scientists to sleep with his verbosity, was direct and to the point.

“The thing is, gentlemen, we may have to fight these bastards.”

This was more like it. Sinclair spoke as the British like to think Americans speak—direct, and unafraid to mince words. The four scientists gave him their rapt attention.

“If that day ever comes, we will go in first with air power. Like the British, we will want to lose the absolute minimum possible in casualties. So we’ll go for their infantry, their guns, tanks, and planes.

We’ll target their SAM missile sites, communications links, command centers. But if Saddam uses weapons of mass destruction, we would take awful casualties, both of us. So we need to know two things.

“One, what has he got? Then we can plan for gas masks, capes, chemical antidotes. Two, where the hell has he put it? Then we can target the factories and the storage depots—destroy it all before he can use it. So study the photographs, use magnifying glasses, look for the telltale signs. We’ll keep tracing and interviewing the contractors who built him these factories and the scientists who equipped them. That should tell us a lot. But the Iraqis may have moved it around a bit. So it comes back to you gentlemen, the analysts. You could get to save a lot of lives here, so give it your best shot. Identify the WMD for us, and we’ll go in and bomb seven shits out of it.”

The four scientists were smitten. They had a job to do, and they knew what it was. Sir Paul was looking slightly shell-shocked.

“Yes, well, I’m sure we’re all deeply grateful to Mr. Sinclair for his—er—explanation. May I suggest we reconvene when either Aldermaston or Porton Down has something for us?”

When they left the building, Simon Paxman and Terry Martin strolled in the warm August sunshine out of Whitehall and into Parliament Square. It was thronged with the usual columns of tourist buses. They found an empty bench close to the marble statue of Winston Churchill, glowering down on the impudent mortals who clustered beneath him.

“You’ve seen the latest from Baghdad?” asked Paxman.

“Of course.”

Saddam Hussein had just offered to pull out of Kuwait if Israel pulled out of the West Bank and Syria out of Lebanon. An attempt at linkage.

The United Nations had rejected it out of hand. The resolutions continued to roll out of the Security Council: cutting off Iraq’s trade, oil exports, currency movements, air travel, resources. And the systematic destruction of Kuwait by the occupying army went on.

“Any significance?”

“No, just the usual huff and puff. Predictable. Playing to the audience.

The PLO liked it, of course, but that’s all. It’s not a game plan.”

“Has he got a game plan?” asked Paxman. “If so, no one can work it out. The Americans think he’s crazy.”

“I know. I saw Bush last night on TV.”

“Is he crazy, Saddam?”

“Like a fox.”

“Then why doesn’t he move south into the Saudi oil fields while he has the chance? The American buildup is only starting—ours, too. A few squadrons, carriers in the Gulf, but nothing on the ground. Air power alone can’t stop him. That American general they’ve just appointed ...”

“Schwarzkopf,” said Martin. “Norman Schwarzkopf.”

“That’s the chap. He reckons he’ll need two full months before he has the forces to stop and roll back a full-scale invasion. So why not attack now?”

“Because that would be attacking a fellow Arab state with which he has no quarrel. It would bring shame. It would alienate every Arab. It is against the culture. He wants to rule the Arab world, to be acclaimed by it, not reviled by it.”

“He invaded Kuwait,” Paxman pointed out.

“That was different. He could claim that was correcting an imperialist injustice because Kuwait was always historically part of Iraq. Like Nehru invading Portuguese Goa.”

“Oh, come on, Terry. Saddam invaded Kuwait because he’s bankrupt.

We all know it.”

“Yes, that’s the real reason. But the up-front reason is that he was reclaiming rightful Iraqi territory. Look, it happens all over the world.

India took Goa, China took Tibet, Indonesia has taken East Timor.

Argentina tried for the Falklands. Each time, the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory. It’s very popular with the home crowd, you know.”

“Then why are his fellow Arabs turning against him?”

“Because they think he won’t get away with it,” said Martin.

“And he won’t get away with it. They’re right.”

“Only because of America, not because of the Arab world. If he is to gain the acclamation of the Arab world, he must humiliate America, not his Arabian neighbor. Have you been to Baghdad?”

“Not recently,” said Paxman.

“It’s full of pictures of Saddam portrayed as the desert warrior on a white charger with raised sword. All bunkum, of course; the man’s a back-street shooter. But that’s how he sees himself.”

Paxman rose.

“It’s all very theoretical,’ Terry. But thanks for your thoughts, anyway.

Trouble is, I have to deal with hard facts. In any case, no one can see how he can humiliate America. The Yanks have all the power, all the technology. When they’re ready, they can go in there and blow his army and air force away.”

Terry Martin squinted up against the sun.

“Casualties, Simon. America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don’t matter to him.”

“But there aren’t enough Americans there yet.”

“Precisely.”

The Rolls-Royce bearing Ahmed Al-Khalifa swept up to the front of the office building that announced itself in English and Arabic as the headquarters of Al-Khalifa Trading Corporation Ltd. and hissed to a stop.

The driver, a big manservant, half chauffeur and half bodyguard, stepped out of the driver’s seat and went to the rear to open the door for his master.

Perhaps it had been foolish to bring the Rolls, but the Kuwaiti millionaire had brushed aside all pleas to use the Volvo for fear of offending the Iraqi soldiers on the roadblocks.

“Let them rot in hell,” he had growled over breakfast. In fact, the drive had been uneventful from his sumptuous home in its walled garden in the luxurious suburb of Andalus to the office building in Shamiya.

Within ten days of the invasion, the disciplined and professional soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard had been withdrawn from Kuwait City, to be replaced by the conscript rabble of the Popular Army. If he had hated the first, he had nothing but contempt for the latter.

In their first few days, the Guards had looted his city, but systematically and deliberately. He had seen them enter the national bank and remove the $5 billion worth of gold bullion that constituted the national reserve. But this was not looting for personal gain. The bullion bars had been placed in containers, sealed in trucks, and driven to Baghdad.

The gold Soukh had yielded another billion dollars in solid gold artifacts, and that had gone the same way.

The roadblocks of the Guards, who were distinguishable by their black berets and general bearing, had been strict and professional. Then, quite suddenly, they had been needed farther south, to take up position on the southern border facing Saudi Arabia.

In their place had come the Popular Army, ragged, unshaven, and undisciplined and, for that reason, more unpredictable and dangerous.

The occasional killing of a Kuwaiti for refusing to hand over his watch or his car gave testimony to that.

By the middle of August, the heat was coming down like a hammer on an anvil. The Iraqi soldiers, seeking shelter, ripped up paving slabs and built themselves small stone huts down the streets they were supposed to be checking, and crawled inside. In the cool of the dawn and the evening they emerged to pretend to be soldiers. Then they harassed civilians and looted food and valuables under pretense of checking cars for contraband.

Mr. Al-Khalifa normally liked to be at work by seven in the morning but by delaying until ten, when the sun was hot, he had swept past the stone bivouacs with the Popular Army inside them and no one had stopped him. Two soldiers, scruffy and hatless, had actually thrown up an inept salute at the Rolls-Royce, assuming it must contain some notable of their own side.

It could not last, of course. Some thug would steal the Rolls at gunpoint sooner or later. So what? When he had been driven back home—he was convinced he would be, but he did not know how—he would buy another.

He stepped out onto the pavement in gleaming white thob, the light cotton material of the ghutra, secured around his head with two black cords, falling about his face. The driver closed the door and returned to the other side of the car to take it away to the company garage.

“Alms, sayidi, alms. For one who has not eaten for three days.”

He had only half seen the man squatted on the sidewalk close to the door, apparently asleep in the sun, a sight common in any Middle Eastern city. Now the man was beside him, a Bedou in stained robes, hand outstretched.

His driver was striding back around the Rolls to send the mendicant away with a stream of curses. Ahmed Al-Khalifa held up his hand. He was a practicing Moslem who tried to abide by the teachings of the Holy Koran, one of which is that a man should give alms as generously as he can.

“Park the car,” he ordered. From the side pocket of his robe, he withdrew his wallet and extracted a ten-dinar note. The Bedou took the bill in both hands, the gesture indicating that the gift of the benefactor is so weighty that it needs two hands to support it.

“Shukron, sayidi, shukran.” Then without changing his tone of voice, the man added, “When you are in your office, send for me. I have news from your son in the south.”

The merchant thought he must have misheard. The man was shuffling away down the pavement, pocketing the banknote. Al-Khalifa entered the office building, nodded in greeting to the commissionaire, and went up to his top-floor office in something of a daze. When he was seated at his desk, he thought for a moment, then pressed the intercom.

“There is a Bedouin tribesman on the pavement outside. I wish to speak to him. Please send him up.”

If his private secretary thought her employer had gone mad, she gave no sign of it. Only her wrinkled nose, as she showed the Bedou into the cool of the office five minutes later, indicated what she thought of the personal odor of her boss’s unlikely guest.

When she left, the merchant gestured to a chair.

“You said you had seen my son?” he asked shortly. He half thought the man might be here for an even bigger banknote.

“Yes, Mr. Al-Khalifa. I was with him two days ago in Khafji.”

The Kuwaiti’s heart leaped. It had been two weeks and no news. He had learned only indirectly that his only son had taken off that morning from Ahmadi air base, and after that—nothing. None of his contacts seemed to know what had happened. There had been much confusion that day, August 2.

“You have a message from him?”

“Yes, sayidi.”

Al-Khalifa held out his hand.

“Please give it to me. I will reward you well.”

“It is in my head. I could bring no paper with me, so I memorized it.”

“Very well. Please tell me what he said.”

Mike Martin recited the one-page letter that the Skyhawk pilot had written, word for word.

“ ‘My dear father, despite his appearance the man in front of you is a British officer. ...’ ”

Al-Khalifa jerked in his chair and stared at Martin, having some difficulty believing his eyes or ears.

“ ‘He has come into Kuwait under cover. Now that you know this, you hold his life in your hands. I beg you to trust him, as he must now trust you, for he will seek your help.

“ ‘I am safe and well and based with the Saudi Air Force at Dhahran. I was able to fly one mission against the Iraqis, destroying one tank and a truck. I will fly with the Royal Saudi Air Force until the liberation of our country.

“ ‘Each day I pray to Allah that the hours will speed by until I can return and embrace you again. Your dutiful son, Khaled.’ ”

Martin stopped. Ahmed Al-Khalifa rose, walked to the window, and stared out. He took several long, deep breaths. When he had composed himself, he returned to his chair.

“Thank you. Thank you. What is it you wish?”

“The occupation of Kuwait will not last a few hours or a few days. It will take some months, unless Saddam Hussein can be persuaded to pull out.”

“The Americans will not come quickly?”

“The Americans and the British and the French and the rest of the Coalition will need time to build up their forces. Saddam has the fourth-largest standing army in the world, over a million men. Some are rubbish, but many are not. This occupation force will not be dislodged by a handful of soldiers.”

“Very well. I understand.”

“In the meantime, it is felt that every Iraqi soldier and tank and gun that can be pinned down in the occupation of Kuwait cannot be used on the frontier—”

“You are talking of resistance, armed resistance, fighting back,” said Al-Khalifa. “Some wild boys have tried. They have shot at Iraqi patrols. They were gunned down like dogs.”

“Yes, so I believe. They were brave but foolish. There are ways of doing these things. The point is not to kill hundreds, or be killed. The point is to make the Iraqi occupation army constantly nervous, always afraid, needing to escort every officer whenever he travels, never able to sleep in peace.”

“Look, Mr. English, I know you mean well, but I suspect you are a man accustomed to these things and skilled at them. I am not. These Iraqis are a cruel and savage people. We know them of old. If we do what you say, there will be reprisals.”

“It is like rape, Mr. Al-Khalifa.”

“Rape?”

“When a woman is to be raped, she can fight back or succumb. If she is docile, she will be violated, probably beaten, maybe killed. If she fights, she will be violated, certainly beaten, maybe killed.”

“Kuwait is the woman, Iraq the rapist. This I already know. So why fight back?”

“Because there is tomorrow. Tomorrow Kuwait will look in the mirror.

Your son will see the face of a warrior.”

Ahmed Al-Khalifa stared at the dark-faced, bearded Englishman for a long time, then he said:

“So will his father. Let Allah have mercy on my people. What is it you want? Money?”

“Thank you, no. I have money.”

He had in fact ten thousand Kuwaiti dinars, abstracted from the ambassador in London, who had drawn it from the Bank of Kuwait, on the corner of Baker Street and George Street.

“I need houses to stay in. Six of them.”

“No problem. There are already thousands of abandoned apartments—”

“Not apartments. Detached villas. Apartments have neighbors. No one will investigate a poor man engaged to caretake an abandoned villa.”

“I will find them.”

“Also identity papers. Real Kuwaiti ones. Three in all. One for a Kuwaiti doctor, one for an Indian accountant, and one for a market gardener from out of town.

“All right. I have friends in the Interior Ministry. I think they still control the presses that produce the ID cards. What about the picture on them?”

“For the market gardener, find an old man on the street. Pay him. For the doctor and the accountant, choose men among your staff who look roughly like me but are clean-shaven. These photographs are notoriously bad.

“Lastly, cars. Three. One white station wagon, one four-wheel-drive jeep, one old and battered pickup truck. All in lock-up garages, all with new plates.”

“Very well, it will be done. The ID cards and the keys to the garages and houses—where will you collect them?”

“Do you know the Christian cemetery?”

Al-Khalifa frowned.

“I’ve heard of it, I’ve never been there. Why?”

“It’s on the Jahra road in Sulaibikhat, next to the main Moslem cemetery. A very obscure gate with a tiny notice saying: For Christians. Most of the tombstones are for Lebanese and Syrians, with some Filipinos and Chinese. In the far right-hand corner is one for a merchant seaman, Shepton. The marble slab is loose. Under it I have scraped a cavity in the gravel. Leave them there. If you have a message for me, same thing. Check the grave once a week for messages from me.”

Al-Khalifa shook his head in bewilderment.

“I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”

Mike Martin disappeared into the maelstrom of people who teemed through the narrow streets and alleys of the Bneid-al-Qar district. Five days later, under Able Seaman Shepton’s tombstone he found three identity cards, three sets of garage keys with locations, three sets of ignition keys, and six sets of house keys with addresses on their tags.

Two days later, an Iraqi truck coming back into town from the Umm Gudayr oil field was blown to fragments by something it ran over.

Chip Barber, the head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, had been in Tel Aviv for two days when the phone in the office they had given him at the U.S. embassy rang. It was the CIA’s Head of Station on the line.

“Chip, it’s okay. He’s back in town. I fixed a meeting for four o’clock.

That gives you time to grab the last flight out of Ben-Gurion for Stateside. The guys say they’ll come by the office and pick us up.”

The Head of Station was calling from outside the embassy, so he spoke in generalities in case the line was tapped. It was tapped, of course, but only by the Israelis, who knew anyway.

The “he” was General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror, head of the Mossad; the office was the embassy itself, and the guys were the two men from Dror’s personal staff, who arrived in an anonymous car at ten minutes after three.

Barber thought fifty minutes was a lot of time to get from the embassy compound to the headquarters of the Mossad, which is situated in an office tower called the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard.

But that was not where the meeting was to be. The car sped northward out of town, past Sde Dov military airfield, until it picked up the coastal highway to Haifa.

Just outside Herzlia is situated a large apartment-and-hotel resort called simply the Country Club. It is a place where some Israelis but mainly elderly Jews from abroad come to relax and enjoy the numerous health and spa facilities the place boasts. These happy folk seldom glance up the hill above the resort.

If they did, they would see, perched on the top, a rather splendid building commanding fine views over the surrounding countryside and the sea. If they asked what it was, they would be told it is the Prime Minister’s summer residence.

The Prime Minister of Israel is indeed permitted to come there, one of very few who are, for this is the Mossad training school, known inside the Mossad as the Midrasha.

Yaacov Dror received the two Americans in his top-floor office, a light, airy room with the air conditioning turned up high. A short, chunky man, he wore the regulation Israeli short-sleeve, open-neck shirt and smoked the regulation sixty cigarettes a day.

Barber was glad for the air conditioning; smoke played havoc with his sinuses.

The Israeli spy chief rose from his desk and came lumbering forward.

“Chip, my old friend, how are you these days?”

He embraced the tall American in a hug. It pleased him to rumble like a bad Jewish character actor and play the friendly, genial bear. All an act. In previous missions as a senior operative, as a katsa, he had proved he was very clever and extremely dangerous.

Chip Barber greeted him back. The smiles were as fixed as the memories were long. And it had not been that long since an American court had sentenced Jonathan Pollard of Navy Intelligence to a very long prison term for spying for Israel, an operation that had certainly been run against America by the genial Kobi Dror.

After ten minutes they came to the grist: Iraq.

“Let me tell you, Chip, I think you are playing it exactly right,” said Dror, helping his guest to another cup of coffee that would keep him awake for days. He stubbed his third cigarette into a big glass ashtray.

Barber tried not to breathe but had to give up. “If we have to go in,” he said, “if he won’t quit Kuwait and we have to go in, we’ll start with air power.”

“Of course.”

“And we’ll be going for his weapons of mass destruction. That’s in your interest, too, Kobi. We need some cooperation here.”

“Chip, we’ve been watching those WMDs for years. Dammit, we’ve been warning about them. Who do you think all that poison gas, those germ and plague bombs, are destined for? Us. We were warning and warning, and no one took any notice. Nine years ago we blew apart his nuclear generators at Osirak, set him back ten years in his quest for a bomb. The world condemned us. America too.”

“That was cosmetic. We all know that.”

“Okay, Chip, so now it’s American lives on the line, it’s not ‘cosmetic’ anymore. Real Americans might die.”

“Kobi, your paranoia is showing.”

“Bullshit. Look, it suits us for you to blow away all his poison gas plants, and his plague laboratories, and his atom bomb research. It suits us fine. And we even get to stay out of it because now Uncle Sam has Arab allies. So who’s complaining? Not Israel. We have passed you everything we have on his secret weapons programs. Everything we have. No holding back.”

“We need more, Kobi. Okay, maybe we neglected Iraq a bit these past years. We had the cold war to deal with. Now it’s Iraq, and we’re short of product. We need information—not street-level garbage, but real, high-level paydirt. So I’m asking you straight: Do you have any asset working for you, high in the Iraqi regime? We have questions to put, and we need answers. And we’ll pay—we know the rules.”

There was silence for a while. Kobi Dror contemplated the tip of his cigarette. The other two senior officers looked at the table in front of them.

“Chip,” said Dror slowly, “I give you my word. If we were running any agent right up inside the councils of Baghdad, I’d tell you. I’d pass it all over. Trust me, I don’t.”

General Dror would later explain to his Prime Minister, a very angry Itzhak Shamir, that at the time he spoke he was not lying. But he really ought to have mentioned Jericho.

Chapter 6

Mike Martin saw the youth first, or the Kuwaiti boy would have died that day. He was driving his battered, stained, and rusty pickup truck, its rear laden with watermelons he had bought at one of the outlying farms near Jahra, when he saw the white-linen-dressed head pop up and down from behind a pile of rubble by the roadside, He also caught the tip of the rifle the boy was carrying before it disappeared behind the rubble.

The truck was serving its purpose well. He had asked for it in its present condition because he guessed, rightly, that sooner or later—probably sooner—the Iraqi soldiers would start confiscating smart-looking cars for their own use.

He glanced in his rearview mirror, braked, and swerved off the Jahra road. Coming up behind him was a truck full of soldiers of the Popular Army.

The Kuwaiti youth was trying to hold the speeding truck in the sights of his rifle when a hard hand closed over his mouth and another pulled the rifle away from his grip.

“I don’t think you really want to die today, do you?” a voice growled in his ear. The truck rolled past, and the moment to take a potshot at it vanished as well. The boy had been frightened enough by his own actions; now he was terrified.

When the truck disappeared, the grip on his face and head relaxed. He twisted free and rolled onto his back. Crouching over him was a tall, bearded, hard-looking Bedou.

“Who are you?” he muttered.

“Someone who knows better than to kill one Iraqi when there are twenty others in the same truck. Where’s your getaway vehicle?”

“Over there,” said the boy, who appeared to be about twenty, trying hard to grow his first beard. It was a motor scooter, on its stand twenty yards away near some trees. The Bedou sighed. He laid down the rifle, an old Lee Enfield .303 that the boy must have gotten from an antique store, and walked the youth firmly to the pickup.

He drove the short distance back to the rock pile; the rifle went under the watermelons. Then he drove to the motor scooter and hefted it on top of the cargo of fruit. Several melons burst.

“Get in,” he said.

They drove to a quiet spot near Shuwaikh Port and stopped.

“Just what did you think you were doing?” asked the Bedou.

The boy stared out through the fly-spotted windshield. His eyes were moist, and his lip trembled.

“They raped my sister. A nurse—at the Al Adan hospital. Four of them. She is destroyed.”

The Bedou nodded.

“There will be much of that,” he said. “So you want to kill Iraqis?”

“Yes, as many as I can. Before I die.”

“The trick is not to die. If that is what you want, I think I had better train you, or you won’t last a day.”

The boy snorted.

“The Bedouin do not fight.”

“Ever heard of the Arab Legion?” The youth was silent. “And before them, Prince Faisal and the Arab Revolt? All Bedouin. Are there any more like you?”

The youth turned out to be a law student, studying at Kuwait University before the invasion.

“There are five of us. We all want the same. I chose to be the first to try.”

“Memorize this address,” said the Bedou. He gave it—a villa in a back street in Yarmuk. The boy got it wrong twice, then right. Martin made him repeat it twenty times.

“Seven o’clock tonight. It will be dark. But curfew is not till ten.

Arrive separately. Park at least two hundred yards away and walk the rest. Enter at two-minute intervals. The gate and door will be open.”

He watched the boy ride away on his scooter and sighed. Pretty basic material, he thought, but for the moment it’s all I’ve got.

The young people turned up on time. He lay on a flat roof across the street and watched them. They were nervous and unsure, glancing over their shoulders, darting into gateways, then out again. Too many Bogart movies. When they were all inside, he gave them ten more minutes. No Iraqi security men appeared. He slipped down from his roof, crossed the road, and entered the house from the back. They were sitting in the main room with the lights on and the curtains undrawn.

Four young men and a girl, dark and very intense.

They were looking toward the door to the hall when he entered from the kitchen. One minute he was not there, and the next he was. The youngsters had one glimpse of him before he reached out and switched off the light.

“Draw the curtains,” he said quietly. The girl did it. Woman’s work.

Then he put the light back on.

“Never sit in a lighted room with the curtains open,” he said. “You do not want to be seen together.”

He had divided his six residences into two groups. In four he lived, flitting from one to another in no particular sequence. Each time, he left tiny signs for himself—a leaf wedged in the doorjamb, a tin can on the step. If ever they were missing, he would know the house had been visited. In the other two he stored half the gear he had brought in from its grave in the desert. The place he had chosen to meet the students was the least important of his dwelling places, and now one he would never use again to sleep in.

They were all students, except one who worked in a bank. He made them introduce themselves.

“Now you need new names.” He gave them each a new name. “You tell no one else—not friends, parents, brothers, anyone—those names.

Whenever they are used, you know the message comes from one of us.

“What do we call you?” asked the girl, who had just become Rana.

“The Bedou,” he said. “It will do. You—what is this address again?”

The young man he pointed at thought, then produced a slip of paper.

Martin took it from him.

“No pieces of paper. Memorize everything. The Popular Army may be stupid but the Secret Police are not. If you are frisked, how do you explain this?”

He made the three who had written down the address burn their slips of paper.

“How well do you know your city?”

“Pretty well,” said the oldest of them, the twenty-five-year-old bank clerk.

“Not good enough. Buy maps tomorrow, street maps. Study as if for your final exams. Learn every street and alley, every square and garden, every boulevard and lane, every major public building, every mosque and courtyard. You know the street signs are coming down?”

They nodded. Within fifteen days of the invasion, after recovering from their shock, the Kuwaitis were beginning a form of passive resistance, of civil disobedience. It was spontaneous and uncoordinated. One of the moves was the ripping down of street signs.

Kuwait is a complicated city to start with; deprived of street signs, it became a maze.

Iraqi patrols were already becoming comprehensively lost. For the Secret Police, finding a suspect’s address was a nightmare. At main intersections, sign posts were being ripped up in the night or turned around.

That first night, Martin gave them two hours on basic security. Always have a cover story that checks out, for any journey and any rendezvous. Never carry incriminating paper. Always treat Iraqi soldiers with respect verging on deference. Confide in no one.

“From now on you are two people. One is the original you, the one everyone knows, the student, the clerk. He is polite, attentive, law-abiding, innocent, harmless. The Iraqis will leave him alone because he does not threaten them. He never insults their country, their flag, or their leader. He never comes to the attention of the AMAM. He stays alive and free. Only on a special occasion, on a mission, does the other person appear. He will become skilled and dangerous and still stay alive.”

He taught them about security. To attend a meeting at a rendezvous, turn up early, park well away. Go into the shadows. Watch for twenty minutes. Look at the surrounding houses. Check for heads on the roof, the waiting ambush party. Be alert for the scuff of a soldier’s boot on gravel, the glow of a cigarette, the clink of metal on metal.

When they still had time to get home before the curfew, he dismissed them. They were disappointed.

“What about the invaders? When do we start killing them?”

“When you know how.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

“When the Iraqis move about, how do they do it? Do they march?”

“No, they use trucks, vans, jeeps, stolen cars,” said the law student.

“Which have petrol caps,” said the Bedou, “which come off with a quick twist. Sugar lumps—twenty lumps per petrol tank. It dissolves in the petrol, passes through the carburetor, and turns to hard caramel in the heat of the engine. It destroys the engine. Be careful not to be caught. Work in pairs and after dark. One keeps watch, the other slips in the sugar. Replace the petrol cap. It takes ten seconds.

“A piece of plywood, four inches by four, with four sharpened steel nails through it. Drop it down under your thob till it slips out by your feet. Nudge it with your toe under the leading edge of the tire of a stationary vehicle.

“There are rats in Kuwait, so there are shops that sell rat poison. Buy the white, strychnine-based kind. Buy dough from a baker. Mix in the poison, using rubber gloves, then destroy the gloves. Bake up the bread in the kitchen oven, but only, when you are alone in the house.”

The students stared open-mouthed.

“We have to give it to the Iraqis?”

“No, you carry the loaves in open baskets on scooters, or in the trunks of cars. They will stop you at roadblocks and steal it. We meet here again in six days.”

Four days later, Iraqi trucks began to break down. Some were towed away and others abandoned, six trucks and four jeeps. The mechanics found out why but could not discover when or by whom. Tires began to blow out and the plywood squares were handed over to the Secret Police, who fumed and beat up several Kuwaitis seized at random on the streets.

Hospital wards began to fill with sick soldiers, all with vomiting and stomach pain. As they were hardly ever given food rations by their own army and lived hand-to-mouth at their roadblocks and in their stone-slab cantonments up and down the streets, it was assumed they had been drinking polluted water.

Then at the Amiri hospital in Dasman, a Kuwaiti lab technician ran an analysis of a sample of vomit from one of the Iraqis. He approached his departmental chief in great perplexity.

“He’s been eating rat poison, professor. But he says he only had bread for three days, and some fruit.”

The professor was puzzled.

“Iraq Army bread?”

“No, they didn’t deliver any for some days. He took it from a passing Kuwaiti baker’s boy.”

“Where are your samples?”

“On the bench, in the lab. I thought it best to see you first.”

“Quite right. You have done well. Destroy them. You have seen nothing, you understand?”

The professor walked back into his office shaking his head. Rat poison. Who the hell had thought of that?

The Medusa Committee met again on August 30, because the bacteriologist from Porton Down felt he had discovered all he could at that point about Iraq’s germ warfare program, such as it was or appeared to be.

“I’m afraid we are looking at somewhat slim pickings,” Dr. Bryant told his listeners. “The main reason is that the study of bacteriology can quite properly be carried out at any forensic or veterinary laboratory using the same equipment that you would find in any chemical lab and that won’t show up on export permits.

“You see, the overwhelming majority of the product is for the benefit of mankind, for the curing of diseases, not the spreading of them. So nothing could be more natural than for a developing country to want to study bilharzia, beri-beri, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, or hepatitis. These are human diseases. There is another range of animal diseases that the veterinary colleges might quite properly want to study.”

“So there’s virtually no way of establishing whether Iraq today has a germ-bomb facility or not?” asked Sinclair of the CIA.

“Virtually not,” said Bryant. “There’s a record to show that way back in 1974, when Saddam Hussein was not on the throne, so to speak—”

“He was vice-president, then, and the power behind the throne,” said Terry Martin. Bryant was flustered.

“Well, whatever. Iraq signed a contract with the Institut Merieux in Paris to build them a bacteriological research project. It was supposed to be for veterinary research into animal diseases, and it may have been.”

“What about the stories of anthrax cultures for use against humans?” the American asked.

“Well, it’s possible. Anthrax is a particularly virulent disease. It mainly affects cattle and other livestock, but it can infect humans if they handle or ingest products from infected sources. You may recall the British government experimented with anthrax on the Hebridean island of Grainard during the Second World War. It’s still out of bounds.”

“That bad, eh? Where would he get this stuff?”

“That’s the point, Mr. Sinclair. You’d hardly go to a reputable

European or American laboratory and say ‘Can I have some nice anthrax cultures because I want to throw them at people?’ Anyway, he wouldn’t need to. There are diseased cattle all over the Third World.

One would only have to note an outbreak and buy a couple of diseased carcasses. But it wouldn’t show up on government paperwork.”

“So he could have cultures of this disease for use in bombs or shells, but we don’t know. Is that the position?” asked Sir Paul Spruce. His rolled-gold pen was poised above his note pad.

“That’s about it,” said Bryant. “But that’s the bad news. The better news is, I doubt if it would work against an advancing army. I suppose that if you had an army advancing against you and you were ruthless enough, you’d want to stop them in their tracks.”

“That’s about the shape of it,” said Sinclair.

“Well, anthrax wouldn’t do that. It would impregnate the soil if dropped from a series of air bursts above and ahead of the army.

Anything growing from that soil—grass, fruit, vegetables—would be infected. Any beast feeding on the grass would succumb. Anyone eating the meat, drinking the milk, or handling the hide of any such beast would catch it. But the desert is not a good vehicle for such spore cultures. Presumably our soldiers will be eating prepacked meals and drinking bottled water?”

“Yep, they are already,” said Sinclair.

“Then anthrax wouldn’t have much effect, unless they breathed the spores in. The disease has to enter humans by ingestion into the lungs or the food passages. Bearing in mind the gas hazard, I suspect they will be wearing gas masks anyway.”

“We plan on it, yes,” replied Sinclair.

“So do we,” added Sir Paul.

“Then I don’t really see why anthrax,” said Bryant. “It wouldn’t stop the soldiers in their tracks, like a variety of gases, and those who did catch it could be cured with powerful antibiotics. There is an incubation period, you see. The soldiers could win the war and then fall sick. Frankly, it’s a terrorist weapon rather than a military one.

Now, if you dropped a vial of anthrax concentrate in the water supply on which a city depended, you might start a catastrophic epidemic that would overwhelm the medical services, But if you’re going to spray something on fighting men in a desert, I’d choose one of the various nerve gases instead. Invisible and fast.”

“So no indication, if Saddam has a germ warfare lab, where it might be?” asked Sir Paul Spruce.

“Frankly, I’d check with all the West’s veterinary institutes and colleges. See if there have been any visiting professorships or delegations to Iraq over the past ten years. Ask those who went whether there was any facility that was absolutely off-limits to them and surrounded by quarantine precautions. If there was, that will be it,” said Bryant.

Sinclair and Paxman wrote furiously. Another job for the checkers.

“Failing that,” concluded Bryant, “you could try human intelligence.

An Iraqi scientist in this field who has quit and settled in the West.

Researchers in bacteriology tend to be thin on the ground, quite a tight group—like a village, really. We usually know what’s going on in our own countries, even in a dictatorship like Iraq. Such a man might have heard, if Saddam has got this facility, where he put it.”

“Well, I’m sure we are deeply grateful, Dr. Bryant,” said Sir Paul as they rose. “More work for our governments’ detectives, eh, Mr.

Sinclair? I have heard that our other colleague at Porton Down, Dr. Reinhart, will be able to give us his deductions on the matter of poison gases in about two weeks. I shall of course stay in touch, gentlemen.

Thank you for your attendance.”

The group in the desert lay quietly watching dawn steal across the sand dunes. The youngsters had not realized when they went to the house of the Bedou the previous evening that they would be away all night.

They had thought they would get another lecture.

They had brought no warm clothing, and nights in the desert are bitter, even at the end of August. They shivered and wondered how they would explain their absence to their distraught parents. Caught by the curfew? Then why not telephone? Out of order ... it would have to do.

Three of the five wondered if they had made the right choice after all, but it was too late to go back now. The Bedou had simply told them it was time they saw some action and had led them from the house to a rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle parked two streets away. They had been out of town and off the road into the flat, hard desert before curfew. Since entering the desert, they had seen no one.

They had driven south for twenty miles across the sand until they intercepted a narrow road that they suspected ran from the Manageesh oil field to their west toward the Outer Motorway in the east. All the oil fields, they knew, were garrisoned by Iraqis and the main highways were infested with patrols. Somewhere to their south sixteen divisions of Army and Republican Guard were dug in, facing Saudi Arabia and the growing tide of Americans pouring in. They felt nervous.

Three of the group lay in the sand beside the Bedou, watching the road in the growing light. It was quite narrow. Approaching vehicles would have to swerve to the graveled edge to pass each other.

Extending halfway across the road was a plank studded with nails. The Bedou had taken it from his truck and laid it there, covering it with a blanket made from old Hessian sacks. He had made them scoop sand over the blanket until it looked just like a small drift of sand blown in from the desert by the wind.

The other two pupils, the bank clerk and the law student, were spotters.

Each lay on a sand dune a hundred yards up and down the road looking for approaching vehicles. They had been told that if the vehicle was a large Iraqi truck or were several in number, they should wave in a certain way.

Just after six, the law student waved. His signal meant “Too much to handle.” The Bedou pulled at the fishing line he held in his hand. The plank slithered off the road. Thirty seconds later, two trucks crammed with Iraqi soldiers went by unharmed. The Bedou ran to the road and replaced the plank, the sacks, and the sand.

Then minutes later, the bank clerk waved. It was the right signal. From the direction of the highway a staff car came bowling down the road toward the oil field.

The driver never thought to swerve to avoid the bar of sand but still only caught the nails with one front wheel. It was enough. The tire blew out, the blanket wrapped around the wheel and the car swerved violently. The driver caught the swerve in time and steadied the car, and it rolled to a stop half on and half off the road. The side that was off the road bogged down.

The driver sprang out of the front and two officers emerged from the back, a major and a junior lieutenant. They shouted at the driver, who shrugged and whined, pointing at the wheel. The jack would never get under it—the car was at a crazy angle.

To his stunned pupils the Bedou muttered, “Stay here,” rose, and walked down the sand to the road. He had a Bedouin camel blanket over his right shoulder, covering his right arm. He smiled broadly and hailed the major.

“Salaam aleikhem, Sayid Major. I see you have a problem. Perhaps I can help. My people are just a short distance away.”

The major reached for his pistol, then relaxed. He glowered and nodded.

“Aleikhem salaam, Bedou. This spawn of a camel has driven my car off the road.”

“It will have to be pulled back, sayidi. I have many brothers.”

The distance had closed to eight feet when the Bedou’s arm came up.

He fired in the SAS fashion, two round bursts, pause, two rounds, pause ... The major was hit in the heart at a range of eight feet. A slight move of the AK to the right caught the lieutenant in the breastbone, causing him to fall on the driver, who was rising from his tattered front wheel. When the man straightened, he was just in time to die from the third pair of bullets in the chest.

The noise of the firing seemed to echo in the dunes, but the desert and the road were empty. He summoned the three terrified students from their hiding places.

“Put the bodies back in the car—the driver behind the wheel, the officers in the back,” he told the two males. To the girl he gave a short screwdriver, its blade honed to a needle point.

“Stab the petrol tank three times.”

He looked to his spotters. They signaled nothing was coming. He told the girl to take her handkerchief, wrap it around a stone, knot it, and soak it in petrol. When the three bodies were back in the car, he lit the soaking handkerchief and tossed it into the pool of petrol spurting from the tank.

“Now, move.”

They needed no further bidding, running through the sand dunes to where he had parked the four-wheel-drive. Only the Bedou thought to pick up the plank and bring it with him. As he turned into the dunes, the main body of petrol in the burning car caught and fireballed. The staff car disappeared in flames.

They drove back toward Kuwait in awed silence. Two of the five were with him in the front, the other three behind.

“Did you see?” asked Martin at last. “Did you watch?”

“Yes, Bedou.”

“What did you think?”

“It was ... so quick,” said the girl Rana at last.

“I thought it was a long time,” said the banker.

“It was quick, and it was brutal,” said Martin. “How long do you think we were on the road?”

“Half an hour?”

“Six minutes. Were you shocked?”

“Yes, Bedou.”

“Good. Only psychopaths are not shocked the first time. There was an American general once, Patton. Ever heard of him?”

“No, Bedou.”

“He said that it was not his job to ensure that his soldiers died for their country. It was his job to make sure the other poor bastards died for theirs. Understand?”

George Patton’s philosophy does not translate well into Arabic, but they worked it out.

“When you go to war, there is a point up to which you can hide. After that point you have a choice. You die or he dies. Make your choice now, all of you. You can go back to your studies or go to war.”

They thought for several minutes. It was Rana who spoke first.

“I will go to war, if you will show me how, Bedou.”

After that the young men had to agree.

“Very well. But first I will teach you how to destroy, kill, and stay alive. My house, in two days’ time, at dawn, when curfew is lifted.

Bring school textbooks, all of you, including you, banker. If you are stopped, be natural; you are just students going to study. True, in a way, but different studies.

“You have to get off here. Find your way into town by different trucks.”

They had rejoined the tarred roads and reached the Fifth Ring Motorway. Martin pointed out a garage where trucks would stop and the drivers would give them lifts. When they had gone, he went back to the desert, uncovered his buried radio, drove three miles from the burial site, opened the satellite dish, and began to talk on his encrypted Motorola to the designated house in Riyadh.

An hour after the ambush the burnt-out staff car was found by the next patrol. The bodies were taken to the nearest hospital, Al Adan.

The forensic pathologist who did the autopsy under the eyes of a glowering colonel of the AMAM spotted the bullet holes—tiny pinpricks in the sealed-over charred flesh. He was a family man, with daughters of his own. He knew the young nurse who had been raped.

He drew the sheet back over the third body and began to peel off his gloves.

“I’m afraid they died of asphyxia when the car caught fire after the crash,” he said. “May Allah have mercy.”

The colonel grunted and left.

At his third meeting with his band of volunteers, the Bedou drove them far out into the desert, to a spot west of Kuwait City and south of

Jahra where they could be alone. Seated in the sand like a picnic party, the five youngsters watched as their teacher took out a haversack and poured out onto his camel blanket an array of strange devices. One by one he identified them.

“Plastic explosive. Easy to handle, very stable.”

They went several shades paler when he squeezed the substance in his hands like modeling clay. One of the young men, whose father owned a tobacco shop, had brought on request a number of old cigar boxes.

“This,” said the Bedou, “is a time pencil, a detonator with timer combined. When you twist this butterfly screw at the top, a phial of acid is crushed. The acid begins to burn its way through a copper diaphragm. It will do so in sixty seconds. After that, the mercury fulminate will detonate the explosive. Watch.”

He had their undivided attention. Taking a piece of Semtex-H the size of a cigarette pack, he placed it in the small cigar box and inserted the detonator into the heart of the mass.

“Now when you twist the butterfly like this, all you have to do is close the box and wrap a rubber band around the box ... so ... to hold it closed. You only do this at the last moment.”

He placed the box on the sand in the center of the circle.

“However, sixty seconds is a lot longer than you think. You have time to walk to the Iraqi truck, or bunker or half-track, toss in the box, and walk away. Walk—never run. A running man is at once the start of an alarm. Leave enough time to walk around one corner. Continue walking, not running, even after you hear the explosion.”

He had half an eye on the watch on his wrist. Thirty seconds.

“Bedou,” said the banker.

“Yes?”

“That’s not a real one, is it?”

“What?”

“The bomb you just made. It’s a dummy, right?”

Forty-five seconds. He reached forward and picked it up.

“Oh, no. It’s a real one. I just wanted to show you how long sixty seconds really is. Never panic with these things. Panic will kill you, get you shot, just stay calm at all times.”

With a deft flick of the wrist he sent the cigar box spinning away over the dunes. It dropped behind one and exploded. The bang rocked the sitting group, and fine sand drifted back on the wind.

High over the northern Gulf, an American AWACS plane noted the explosion on one of its heat sensors. The operator drew it to the attention of the mission controller, who peered at the screen. The glow from the heat source was dying away.

“Intensity?”

“Size of a tank shell, I guess, sir.”

“Okay. Log it. No further action.”

“You will be able to make these yourselves by the end of today. The detonators and time pencils you will carry and store in these,” the Bedou said.

He took an aluminum cigar tube, wrapped the detonator in cotton batting, and inserted it into the tube, then screwed the top back on.

“The plastic you will carry like this.”

He took the wrapper of a bar of soap, rolled four ounces of explosive into the shape of a soap bar, and wrapped it, sealing it with an inch of sticky tape.

“The cigar boxes you acquire for yourselves. Not the big kind for Havanas—the small kind for cheroots. Always keep two cheroots in the box, in case you are stopped and frisked. If an Iraqi ever wants to take the cigar tube or the box or the’ soap off you, let him.”

He made them practice under the sun until they could unwrap the “soap,” empty out the cheroots, prepare the bomb, and wind the rubber band around the box in thirty seconds.

“You can do it in the back of a car, the men’s room of a café, in a doorway, or at night behind a tree,” he told them. “Pick your target first. Make sure there are no soldiers standing well to one side who will survive. Then twist the butterfly, close the box, rubber-band it, walk up, toss the bomb, and walk away. From the moment you twist the butterfly, count slowly to fifty. If at fifty seconds you have not parted company with it, throw it as far as you can. Now, mostly you will be doing this in darkness, so that’s what we’ll do now.”

He made the group blindfold each member one by one, then watch as the student fumbled and dropped things. By late afternoon, they could do it by touch. In the early evening he gave them the rest of the contents of the haversack, enough for each student to make six bars of soap and six time pencils. The tobacconist’s son agreed to provide all the small boxes and aluminum tubes. They could acquire cotton batting, soap wrappers, and rubber bands for themselves. Then he drove them back to town.

Through September, AMAM headquarters in the Hilton Hotel received a stream of reports of a steadily escalating level of attacks on Iraqi soldiers and military equipment. Colonel Sabaawi became more and more enraged as he became more and more frustrated.

This was not the way it was supposed to be. The Kuwaitis, he had been told, were a cowardly people who would cause no trouble—a touch of the Baghdad methods, and they would do as they were told. It was not working out quite like that.

There were in fact several resistance movements in existence, most of them random and uncoordinated. In the Shi’a district of Rumaithiya,

Iraqi soldiers simply disappeared. The Shi’a Moslems had special reason to loathe the Iraqis, for their coreligionists, the Shi’a of Iran, had been slaughtered in hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi soldiers who wandered into the rabbit warren of alleys that make up the Rumaithiya district had their throats cut, and their bodies were dumped in the sewers. They were never recovered.

Among the Sunnis, the resistance was centered in the mosques, where the Iraqis seldom ventured. Here messages were passed, weapons swapped, and attacks planned.

The most organized resistance came from the leadership of Kuwaiti notables, men of education and wealth. Mr. Al-Khalifa became the banker, using his funds to provide food so that the Kuwaitis could eat, and other cargos hidden beneath the food that came in from outside.

The organization aimed at six goals, five of them a form of passive resistance, and each had its own branch. One was documentation; every resister was supplied with perfect documentation forged by resisters within the Interior Ministry. A second branch was for intelligence—keeping a stream of information about Iraqi movements heading in the direction of the Coalition headquarters in Riyadh, particularly about Iraqi manpower and weapon strength, coastal fortifications, and missile deployments. A third branch kept the services functioning—water, electricity, fire brigades, and health.

When, finally in defeat, Iraq turned on the oil taps and began to destroy the sea itself, Kuwaiti oil engineers told the American fighter-bombers exactly which valves to hit in order to turn off the flow.

Community solidarity committees circulated through all the districts, often contacting Europeans and other First World residents still holed up in their flats and keeping them out of the way of the Iraqi trawl nets.

A satellite phone system was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia in the dummy fuel tank of a jeep. It was not encrypted like Martin’s, but by keeping it constantly on the move, the Kuwaiti resistance could avoid Iraqi detection and contact Riyadh whenever there was something to pass. An elderly radio ham worked throughout the occupation, sending seven thousand messages to another ham in Colorado, which were passed on to the State Department.

And there was the offensive resistance, mainly under the leadership of a Kuwaiti colonel who had escaped the Ministry of Defense building on the first day. Because he had a son called Fouad, his code name was Abu Fouad, or Father of Fouad.

Saddam Hussein had finally given up trying to form a puppet government and appointed his half-brother Ali Hassan Majid as Governor-General.

The resistance was not just a game. A small but extremely dirty war developed underground. The AMAM responded by setting up two interrogation centers, at the Kathma Sports Center and the Qadisiyah Stadium. Here the methods of AMAM chief Omar Khatib were imported from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and used extensively. Before the liberation, five hundred Kuwaitis were dead, of whom two hundred fifty were executed, many after prolonged torture.

Counterintelligence chief Hassan Rahmani sat at his desk in the Hilton Hotel and read the reports prepared by his on-the-spot staff. He was making a brief visit from his Baghdad duties on September 15. The reports made gloomy reading.

There was a steady increase in attacks on Iraqi outposts on lonely roads, guard huts, vehicles, and roadblocks. This was mainly the AMAM’s problem—local resistance came under them, and—predictably, in Rahmani’s view—that brutal oaf Khatib was making a camel’s breakfast out of it.

Rahmani had little time for the torture to which his rival in the Iraqi intelligence structure was so devoted. He preferred to rely on patient detective work, deduction, and cunning, even though he had to concede that in Iraq it was terror and nothing else that had kept the Rais in power all these years. He had to admit, with all his education, that the street-wise, devious psychopath from the alleys of Tikrit frightened him.

He had tried to persuade his president to let him have charge of internal intelligence in Kuwait, but the answer had been a firm no. It was a question of principle, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz had explained to him. He, Rahmani, was charged to protect the state from espionage and sabotage from foreign sources. The Rais would not concede that Kuwait was a foreign country—it was the nineteenth province of Iraq.

So it was Omar Khatib’s job to ensure compliance.

As he contemplated his sheaf of reports that morning in the Hilton Hotel, Rahmani was rather relieved that he did not have the task. It was a nightmare, and as he had predicted, Saddam Hussein had played his cards consistently wrong.

The taking of Western hostages as human shields against attack was proving a disaster, totally counterproductive. He had missed his chance to roll south and take the Saudi oil fields, forcing King Fahd to the conference table, and now the Americans were pouring into the theater.

All attempts to assimilate Kuwait were failing, and within a month, probably less, Saudi Arabia would be impregnable with its American shield along the northern border.

Saddam Hussein, he believed, could neither get out of Kuwait without humiliation, nor stay in there if attacked without a bigger one. Yet the mood around the Rais was still one of confidence, as if he were convinced something would turn up. What on earth did the man expect? Rahmani wondered. That Allah himself would lean down from heaven and smash his enemies in the face?

Rahmani rose from his desk and walked to the window. He liked to stroll as he thought; it marshaled his brain. He looked down from the window. The once-sparkling marina was now a garbage dump.

There was something about the reports on his desk that disturbed him.

He went back and scanned them again. Yes, something odd. Some of the attacks on Iraqis were with handguns and rifles; others with bombs made from industrial TNT. But here were others, a constant niggling stream, that clearly indicated that a plastic explosive had been used.

Kuwait had never had plastic explosives, least of all Semtex-H. So who was using it, and where did they get it?

Then there were radio reports of an encrypted transmitter somewhere out in the desert that moved all the time, coming on air at different times, talking scrambled nonsense for ten or fifteen minutes and then going silent, and always on different bearings.

Then there were these reports of a strange Bedou who seemed to wander about at will, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and always a trail of destruction in his wake. Before they died of wounds, two badly injured soldiers had reported seeing the man, tall and confident in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh, one trailing end drawn across his face.

Two Kuwaitis under torture had mentioned the legend of the invisible Bedou but claimed they had never actually seen him. Sabaawi’s men were trying to persuade the prisoners with even more pain to admit they had. Fools. Of course, they would invent anything to stop the agony.

The more Hassan Rahmani thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had a foreign infiltrator on his hands, definitely part of his authority. He found it hard to believe that there was any Bedou who knew about plastic explosives and encrypted transceivers—if they were from the same man. He might have trained up a few bomb planters, but he also seemed to be carrying out a lot of the attacks himself.

It would just not be possible to pick up every Bedou wandering around the city and the desert—that would be the AMAM way, but they would be pulling out fingernails for years and getting nowhere.

For Rahmani, the problem resolved itself into three choices: Capture the man during one of his attacks—but that would be haphazard and possibly never happen. Capture one of his Kuwaiti associates and trace the man to his lair. Or take him crouched over his transmitter in the desert.

Rahmani decided on the last. He would bring in from Iraq two or three of his best radio-detector teams, post them at different points, and try to triangulate on the source of the broadcast. He would also need an Army helicopter on standby, with a team of Special Forces ready to move. As soon as he got back to Baghdad, he would set it in motion.

Hassan Rahmani was not the only man that day in Kuwait who was interested in the Bedou. In a suburban villa miles away from the Hilton, a handsome, moustached young Kuwaiti Army colonel in a white cotton thob sat in an armchair and listened to a friend who had come to him with an interesting snippet.

“I was just sitting in my car at the traffic light, watching nothing in particular, when I noticed this Iraqi Army truck on the opposite side of the intersection. It was parked there, with a group of soldiers around the hood, eating and smoking. Then a young man, one of our own, walked out of a café clutching what looked like a tiny box. It was really small. I thought nothing of it until I saw him flick it under the truck. Then he turned the corner and disappeared. The lights changed, but I stayed where I was.

“In five seconds the truck disintegrated. I mean, it just blew apart. The soldiers were all on the ground with their legs off. I’ve never seen such a small package do so much damage. I tell you, I hung a U and got out of there before the AMAM came along.”

“Plastic,” mused the Army officer. “What would I not give for some of that. It must have been one of the Bedou’s men. Who is that bastard, anyway? I’d love to meet him.”

“The point is, I recognized the boy.”

“What?” The young colonel leaned forward, his face alight with interest.

“I wouldn’t have come all this way just to tell you what you will have heard already. I tell you, I recognized the bomb-thrower. Abu Fouad, I’ve been buying cigarettes from his father for years.”

Dr. Reinhart, when he addressed the Medusa Committee in London three days later, looked tired. Even though he had relinquished all his other duties at Porton Down, the documentation he had taken away with him from the first meeting and the supplementary information that had come pouring in ever since had given him a monstrous task.

“The study is probably not yet complete,” he said, “but a fairly comprehensive picture emerges.

“First, of course, we know that Saddam Hussein has a large poison-gas- production capacity, I estimate at over a thousand tons a year.

“During the Iran-Iraq war, some Iranian soldiers who had been gassed were treated here in Britain, and I was able to examine them. We could recognize phosgene and mustard gas even then.

“The worse news is that I have no doubt that Iraq now has substantial supplies of two far more lethal gases, nerve agents of German invention called Sarin and Tabun. If these were used in the Iran-Iraq war, and I think they were, there would have been no question of treating the victims in British hospitals. They would be dead.”

“How bad are these—er ... agents, Dr. Reinhart?” asked Sir Paul Spruce.

“Sir Paul, do you have a wife?”

The urbane mandarin was startled.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

“Does Lady Spruce ever use perfume from a spray atomizer?”

“Yes, I do believe I have seen her do that.”

“Have you ever noticed how fine the spray from an atomizer is? How small the droplets?”

“Yes, indeed, and bearing in mind the price of perfume, I’m very glad of it.”

It was a good joke. Anyway, Sir Paul liked it.

“Two of those droplets of Sarin or Tabun on your skin, and you’re dead,” said the chemist from Porton Down.

No one smiled.

“The Iraqi search for nerve gases goes back to 1976. In that year they approached the British company ICI, explaining they wanted to build a pesticide plant to produce four bug-killers—but the materials they asked for caused ICI to turn them down flat. The specifications the Iraqis showed were for corrosion-resistant reactor vessels, pipes, and pumps that convinced ICI that the real end-goal was not chemical pesticides but nerve gas. The deal was refused.”

“Thank God for that,” said Sir Paul, and made a note.

“But not everyone refused them,” said the former Viennese refugee.

“Always the excuse was that Iraq needed to produce herbicides and pesticides, which of course need poisons.”

“They could not have really wanted to produce these agricultural products?” asked Paxman.

“No chance,” said Reinhart. “To a professional chemist, the key lies in the quantities and the types. In 1981 they got a German firm to build them a laboratory with a very special and unusual layout. It was to produce phosphorus pentachloride, the starter chemical for organic phosphorus, which is one of the ingredients of nerve gas. No normal university research laboratory would need to handle such hideously toxic substances. The chemical engineers involved must have known that.

“Further export licenses show orders for thiodiglycol. Mustard gas is made from it when mixed with hydrochloric acid. Thiodiglycol, in small quantities, may be used also for making the ink for ball-point pens.”

“How much did they buy?” asked Sinclair.

“Five hundred tons.”

“That’s a lot of ball-points,” muttered Paxman.

“That was in early 1983,” said Reinhart. “In the summer their big Samarra poison gas plant went into operation, producing yperite, which is mustard gas. They began using it on the Iranians in December.

“During the first attacks by the Iranian human waves, the Iraqis used a mixture of yellow rain, yperite, and Tabun. By 1985, they had improved the mixture to one of hydrogen cyanide, mustard gas, Tabun, and Sarin, achieving a sixty percent mortality rate among the Iranian infantry.”

“Could we just look at the nerve gases, Doctor?” asked Sinclair. “That would seem to be the really deadly stuff.”

“It is,” said Dr. Reinhart. “From 1984, the chemicals for which they were shopping were phosphorus oxychloride, which is an important precursor chemical for Tabun, and two Sarin precursors, trimethyl phosphite and potassium fluoride. Of the first of those three, they tried to order 150 tons from a Dutch company. That’s enough pesticide to kill every tree, shrub, and blade of grass in the Middle East. The Dutch turned them down, as ICI had, but they still bought two uncontrolled chemicals at that time: dimethylamine for making Tabun, and isopropanol for Sarin.”

“If they were uncontrolled in Europe, why could they not be used for pesticides?” asked Sir Paul.

“Because of the quantities,” Dr. Reinhart replied, “and the chemical manufacturing and handling equipment, and the factory layouts. To a skilled chemist or chemical engineer, none of these purchases could be other than for poison gas.”

“Do you know who the main supplier over the years has been, doctor?” asked Sir Paul.

“Oh, yes. There was some input of a scientific nature from the Soviet Union and East Germany in the early days, and some exports from about eight countries, in most cases of small quantities of uncontrolled chemicals. But eighty percent of the plants, layouts, machinery, special handling equipment, chemicals, technology, and know-how came from West Germany.”

“Actually,” drawled Sinclair, “we’ve been protesting to Bonn for years. They always trashed the protests. Doctor, can you identify the chemical gas plants on those photos we gave you?”

“Yes, of course. Some factories are identified in the paperwork. Others you can see with a magnifying glass.”

The chemist spread five large aerial photos on the table.

“I do not know the Arab names, but these numbers identify the photographs for you, do they not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sinclair shrugged.

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

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

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

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

“Fighter-bombers, I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Tape if possible.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, what about it?”

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

‘casualty’ or ‘bloodbath.’ ”

There was silence down the line for a while.

“Don’t worry about it.”