The Fist of God

But he was wrong. Black Bear had frowned over his sudden instructions from Riyadh, switched off his power, closed down his transmitter, and folded up his antenna.

The Iraqis monitored the frequency for the rest of the night until dawn, when the Hind at Al Ahmadi shut off its rotors and the stiff, tired soldiers climbed back out.

Simon Paxman was asleep on a cot in his office when the phone rang.

It was a cipher clerk from Communications in the basement.

“I’ll come down,” said Paxman. It was a very short message, just decrypted, from Riyadh. Martin had been in touch and had been given his orders.

From his office Paxman phoned Chip Barber in his CIA flat off Grosvenor Square.

“He’s on his way back,” he said. “We don’t know when he’ll cross the border. Steve says he wants me to go down there. You coming?”

“Right,” said Barber. “The DDO’s going back to Langley on the morning flight. But I’m coming with you. This guy I have to see.”

During October 22 the American embassy and the British Foreign Office each approached the Saudi embassy for a short-notice accreditation of a new junior diplomat to Riyadh. There was no problem. Two passports, neither in the name of Barber or Paxman, were visaed without delay, and the men caught the 8:45 P.M. flight out of Heathrow, arriving at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Riyadh just before dawn.

An American embassy car met Chip Barber and took him straight to the U.S. mission, where the hugely expanded CIA operation was based, while a smaller unmarked sedan took Paxman away to the villa where the British SIS operation had quartered itself. The first news

Paxman got was that Martin had apparently not crossed the border and checked in.

Riyadh’s order to return to base was, from Martin’s point of view, easier said than done. He had returned from the desert well before dawn of October 22 and spent the day closing his operation down.

A message was left under the tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery to explain to Mr. Al-Khalifa that he had regretfully had to leave Kuwait. A further note for Abu Fouad explained where and how to collect the remaining items of arms and explosives that were still stashed in the two of his once-six villas.

By afternoon he had finished, and he drove his battered pickup truck out to the camel farm beyond Sulaibiya, where the last outposts of Kuwait City ran out and the desert began.

His camels were still there and in good condition. The calf had been weaned and was on its way to becoming a valuable animal, so he used it to settle the debt he owed the owner of the farm who had taken care of it.

Shortly before dusk he mounted the she-camel and headed south-southwest, so that when night fell and the chill darkness of the desert enfolded him, Martin was well clear of the last signs of habitation.

It took him four hours instead of the usual one to arrive at the place where he had buried his radio, a site marked by the gutted and rusted wreck of a car that had once, long ago, broken down and been abandoned there.

He hid the radio beneath the consignment of dates that he had stored in the panniers. Even with these, the camel was far less laden than she had been when hauling her load of explosives and weapons into Kuwait nine weeks earlier.

If she was grateful, she gave no sign of it, rumbling and spitting with disgust at having been evicted from her comfortable corral at the farm.

But she never slackened her swaying gait as the miles slipped by in the darkness.

It was a different journey, however, from that of mid-August. As he moved south, Martin saw more and more signs of the huge Iraqi army that now infested the area south of the city, spreading itself farther and farther west toward the Iraqi border.

Usually he could see the glow of the lights of the various oil wells that stud the desert here and, knowing the Iraqis would be likely to occupy them, move away into the sands to avoid them.

On other occasions he smelled the woodsmoke from an Iraqi fire and was able to skirt the encampments in time. Once he almost stumbled onto a battalion of tanks, hull-down behind horseshoe-shaped walls of sand facing the Americans and the Saudis across the border to the south. He heard the clink of metal on metal just in time, pulled the bridle sharply to the right, and slipped away back into the sand dunes.

There had only been two divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard south of Kuwait when he had entered, and they had been farther to the east, due south of Kuwait City.

Now the Hammurabi Division had joined the other two, and eleven further divisions, mainly of the regular army, had been ordered by Saddam Hussein into south Kuwait to match the American and Coalition buildup on the other side.

Fourteen divisions is a lot of manpower, even spread over a desert.

Fortunately for Martin, they seemed to post no sentinels and slept soundly beneath their vehicles, but the sheer numbers of them pushed him farther and farther west.

The short fifty-kilometer hike from the Saudi village of Hamatiyyat to the Kuwaiti camel farm was out of the question; he was being pushed west toward the Iraqi border, marked by the deep cleft of the Wadi el Batin, which he did not really want to have to cross.

Dawn found him well to the west of the Manageesh oil field and still north of the Al Mufrad police station, which marks the border at one of the pre-emergency crossing points.

The ground had become more hilly, and he found a cluster of rocks in which to spend the day. As the sun rose, he hobbled the camel, who sniffed the bare sand and rock in disgust, finding not even a tasty thorn bush for breakfast, rolled himself in the camel blanket, and went to sleep.

Shortly after noon, he was awakened by the clank of tanks quite close by and realized he was too near the main road that runs from Jahra, in Kuwait, due southwest to cross into Saudi Arabia at the Al Salmi customs station. After sundown he waited until almost midnight before setting out. He knew the border could not be more than twelve miles to the south.

His late start enabled him to move between the last Iraqi patrols at about three A.M., that hour when human spirits are lowest and sentries tend to doze.

By the light of the moon, he saw the Qaimat Subah police station slip by to one side, and two miles farther on, he knew he had crossed the border. To be on the safe side, he kept going until he cut into the lateral road that runs east-west between Hamatiyyat and Ar-Rugi.

There he stopped and assembled his radio dish.

Because the Iraqis to the north had dug in several miles on the Kuwait side of the border, and because General Schwarzkopf’s plan called for the Desert Shield forces also to lie back to ensure that, if attacked, they would know the Iraqis had truly invaded Saudi Arabia, Martin found himself in an empty no-man’s-land. One day, that empty land would become a seething torrent of Saudi and American forces streaming north into Kuwait, but in the predawn darkness of October 24 he had it to himself.

Simon Paxman was awakened by-a junior member of the Century House team who inhabited the villa.

“Black Bear has come on the air, Simon. He’s crossed the border.”

Paxman was out of bed and running into the radio room in his pajamas. A radio operator was on a swivel chair facing a console that ran along one complete wall of what had once been quite an elegant bedroom. Because it was now the twenty-fourth, the codes had changed.

“Corpus Christi to Texas Ranger, where are you? Say again, state your position, please.”

The voice sounded tinny when it came out of the console speaker, but it was perfectly clear.

“South of Qaimat Subah, on the Hamatiyyat-to-Ar-Rugi road.”

The operator turned to glance at Paxman. The SIS man pressed the Send button and said:

“Ranger, stay there. There’s a taxi coming for you. Acknowledge.”

“Understood,” said the voice. “I’ll wait for the black cab.”

It was not actually a black cab. It was an American Blackhawk helicopter that swept down the road two hours later, a loadmaster strapped in the open door beside the pilot, masked with a pair of binoculars, scanning the dusty track that purported to be a road. From two hundred feet, the loadmaster spotted a man beside a camel and was about to fly on when the man waved.

The Blackhawk slowed to a hover and watched the Bedou warily. So far as the pilot was concerned, this was uncomfortably close to the border. Still, the map position he had been given by his squadron intelligence officer was accurate, and there was no one else in sight.

It was Chip Barber who had arranged with the U.S. Army detail at the Riyadh military air base to lend a Blackhawk to pick up a Britisher who was due to come over the border out of Kuwait. The Blackhawk had the range, but no one had told the Army pilot about a Bedouin tribesman with a camel.

As the American Army aviators watched from two hundred feet, the man on the ground arranged a series of stones. When he had finished, he stood back. The loadmaster focused his glasses on the display of stones. They said simply: Hi there.

The loadmaster spoke into his mask.

“Must be the guy. Let’s go get him.”

The pilot nodded, and the Blackhawk curved around and down until it hovered a foot off the ground twenty yards from the man and his beast.

Martin had already taken the panniers and the heavy camel saddle off his animal and dumped them by the roadside. The radio set and his personal sidearm, the Browning 9-mm. thirteen-shot automatic favored by the SAS, were in the tote bag slung over his shoulder.

As the helicopter came down, the camel panicked and cantered off.

Martin watched her go. She had served him well, despite her foul temper. She would come to no harm alone in that desert. So far as she was concerned, she was home. She would roam freely, finding her own fodder and water, until some Bedou found her, saw no brand mark, and gleefully took her for his own.

Martin ducked under the whirling blades and ran to the open door.

Over the whine of the rotors, the loadmaster shouted:

“Your name, please?”

“Major Martin.”

A hand came out of the aperture to pull Martin into the hull.

“Welcome aboard, Major.”

At that point the engine noise drowned out further talk, the loadmaster handed Martin a pair of ear-defenders to muffle the roar, and they settled back for the run to Riyadh.

Approaching the city, the pilot was diverted to a villa on the outskirts of the city. Next to it was a patch of waste ground where someone had laid out three rows of bright orange seat-cushions in the form of an H.

As the Blackhawk hovered, the man in Arab robes jumped the three feet to the ground, turned to wave his thanks to the crew, and strode toward the house as the helicopter lifted away. Two house servants began to gather up the cushions.

Martin walked through the arched doorway in the villa wall and found himself in a flagged courtyard. Two men were emerging from the door of the house. One he recognized from the SAS headquarters in West London all those weeks ago.

“Simon Paxman,” said the younger man, holding out his hand.

“Bloody good to have you back. This is Chip Barber, one of our cousins from Langley.”

Barber shook hands and took in the figure before him: a stained, off-white robe from chin to floor, a striped blanket folded and hung over one shoulder, a red-and-white-checked keffiyeh with two black cords to hold it in place, a lean, hard, dark-eyed, black-stubbled face.

“Good to know you, Major. Heard a lot about you.” His nose twitched.

“Guess you could use a hot tub, eh?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll get that sorted out at once,” said Paxman.

Martin nodded, said “Thanks,” and walked into the cool of the villa.

Paxman and Barber came in behind him. Barber was privately elated.

“Damn,” he thought to himself. “I do believe this bastard could even do it.”

It took three consecutive baths in the marble tub of the villa, obtained for the British by Prince Khaled bin Sultan, for Martin to scrape off the dirt and sweat of weeks. He sat with a towel around his waist while a barber summoned for the purpose gave his matted hair a cut, then he shaved with Simon Paxman’s wash-kit.

His keffiyeh, blanket, robes, and sandals had been taken away to the garden, where a Saudi servant had turned them into a satisfactory bonfire. Two hours later, in a pair of Paxman’s light cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, Mike Martin sat at the dining table and contemplated a five-course lunch.

“Would you mind telling me,” he asked, “why you pulled me out?”

It was Chip Barber who answered.

“Good question, Major. Damn good question. Deserves a damn good answer. Right? Fact is, we’d like you to go into Baghdad. Next week.

Salad or fish?”

Chapter 10

Both the CIA and the SIS were in a hurry. Although little mention was made of it then or since, by late October there had been established in Riyadh a very large CIA presence and operation.

Before too long, the CIA presence was at loggerheads with the military chieftaincy a mile away in the warren of planning rooms beneath the

Saudi Defense Ministry. The mood, certainly of the air generals, was one of conviction that with the skillful use of the amazing array of technical wizardry at their disposal, they could ascertain all they needed to know about Iraq’s defenses and preparations.

And an amazing array it was. Apart from the satellites in space supplying their constant stream of pictures of the land of Saddam Hussein; apart from the Aurora and the U-2 doing the same but at closer range, there were other machines of daunting complexity dedicated to providing airborne information.

Another breed of satellite, in geosynchronous position, hovering over the Middle East, was dedicated to listening to what the Iraqis said, and these satellites caught every word uttered on an open line. They could not catch the planning conferences held on those 45,000 miles of buried fiber-optic cables.

Among the airplanes, chief was the Airborne Warning and Control System, known as AWACS. These were Boeing 707 airliners, carrying a huge radar dome mounted on their backs. Turning in slow circles over the northern Gulf, on twenty-four-hour rotating shifts, the AWACS could inform Riyadh within seconds of any air movement over Iraq. Hardly an Iraqi plane could move or mission take off but Riyadh knew its number, heading, course speed, and altitude.

Backing up the AWACS was another Boeing 707 conversion, the E8-A, known as J-STAR, which did for movements on the ground what AWACS did for movements in the air. With its big Norden radar scanning downward and sideways, so that it could cover Iraq without ever entering Iraqi airspace, the J-STAR could pick up almost any piece of metal that began to move.

The combination of these and many more technical miracles on which Washington had spent billions and billions of dollars convinced the generals that if it was said, they could hear it, if it moved, they could see it, and if they knew about it, they could destroy it. They could do it, moreover, come rain or fog, night or day. Never again would the enemy be able to shelter under a canopy of jungle trees and escape detection. The eyes-in-the-sky would see it all.

The intelligence officers from Langley were skeptical, and it showed.

Doubts were for civilians. In the face of this the military became irritable. It had a tough job to do, it was going to do it, and cold water it did not need.

On the British side the situation was different. The SIS operation in the Gulf Theater was nothing like that of the CIA, but it was still a large operation by the standards of Century House, and in the manner of Century it was lower profile and more secretive.

Moreover, the British had appointed as commander of all U.K. forces in the Gulf, and second-in-command to General Schwarzkopf, an unusual soldier of uncommon background.

Norman Schwarzkopf was a big, burly man of considerable military prowess and very much a soldier’s soldier. Known either as Stormin’ Norman or “the Bear,” his mood could vary from genial bonhomie to explosions of temper, always short-lived, which his staff referred to as the general going ballistic. His British counterpart could not have been more different.

Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billière, who had arrived in early October to take command of the Brits, was a deceptively slight, lean, wiry man of diffident manner and reluctant speech. The big American extrovert and the slim British introvert made an odd partnership, which succeeded only because each knew enough of the other to recognize what lay behind the up-front presentation.

Sir Peter, known to the troops as P.B., was the most decorated soldier in the British Army, a matter of which he would never speak under any circumstances. Only those who had been with him in his various campaigns would occasionally mutter into their beer glasses of the icy cool under fire that had caused all those “gongs” to be pinned to his tunic. He had also once been commanding officer of the SAS, a background that gave him a most useful knowledge of the Gulf, of Arabic, and of covert operations.

Because the British commander had worked before with the SIS, the Century House team found in him a more accustomed ear to listen to their reservations than in the CIA group.

The SAS already had a good presence in the Gulf Theater, holed up in their own secluded camp in the corner of a larger military base outside Riyadh. As a former commander of these men, General P.B. was concerned that their remarkable talents should not be wasted on workaday tasks that infantry or paratroopers could do. These men were specialists in deep penetration and hostage-recovery.

Sitting in that villa outside Riyadh during the last week of October, the CIA and SIS team came up with an operation that was very much within the scope of the SAS. The operation was put to the local SAS commander, and he went to work on his planning.

The entire afternoon of Mike Martin’s first day at the villa was spent in explaining to him the discovery by the Anglo-American Allies of the existence of the renegade in Baghdad who had been code-named Jericho. They told him he still had the right to refuse and to rejoin the regiment. During the evening he thought it over. Then he told the CIA-SIS briefing officers:

“I’ll go in. But I have my conditions, and I want them met.”

The main problem, they all acknowledged, would be his cover story.

This was not a quick in-and-out mission, depending on speed and daring to outwit the counterintelligence net. Nor could he count on covert support and assistance such as he had met in Kuwait. Nor could he wander the desert outside Baghdad as an errant Bedou tribesman.

All Iraq was by then a great armed camp. Even areas that on the map seemed desolate and empty were crisscrossed with army patrols. Inside Baghdad, Army and AMAM check-squads were everywhere, the Military Police looking for deserters and the AMAM for anyone at all who might be suspicious.

The fear in which the AMAM was held was well known to everyone at the villa. Reports from businessmen and journalists, and from British and American diplomats before their expulsion, amply testified to the omnipresence of the Secret Police, who kept Iraq’s citizens in dread and trembling.

If Martin went in at all, he would have to stay in. Running an agent like Jericho would not be easy for him. First, the man would have to be traced through the dead-letter boxes and realerted that he was back in operation. The boxes might already be compromised and under surveillance. Jericho might have been caught and forced to confess all.

More, Martin would have to establish a place to live, a base where he could send and receive messages. He would have to prowl the city, servicing the drops if Jericho’s stream of inside information resumed, although it would now be destined for new masters.

Finally, and worst of all, there could be no diplomatic cover, no protective shield to spare him the horrors that would follow capture and exposure. For such a man, the interrogation cells of Abu Ghraib would be ready.

“What—er, exactly did you have in mind?” asked Paxman when Martin had made his demand.

“If I can’t be a diplomat, I want to be attached to a diplomatic household.”

“That’s not easy, old boy. Embassies are watched.”

“I didn’t say embassy. I said diplomatic household.”

“A kind of a chauffeur?” asked Barber.

“No. Too obvious. The driver has to stay at the wheel of the car. He drives the diplomat around and is watched like the diplomat.”

“What, then?”

“Unless things have changed radically, many of the senior diplomats live outside the embassy building, and if the rank is senior enough, they will have a villa in its own walled garden. In the old days such houses always rated a gardener-handyman.”

“A gardener?” queried Barber. “For chrissake, that’s a manual laborer.

You’d be picked up and recruited into the Army.”

“No. The gardener-handyman does everything outside the house. He keeps the garden, goes shopping on his bicycle for fish at the fish market, fruit and vegetables, bread and oil. He lives in a shack at the bottom of the garden.”

“So what’s the point, Mike?” asked Paxman.

“The point is, he’s invisible. He’s so ordinary, no one notices him. If he’s stopped, his ID card is in order and he carries a letter on embassy paper, in Arabic, explaining that he works for the diplomat and is exempt from service, and would the authorities please let him go about his business. Unless he is doing something wrong, any policeman who makes trouble for him is up against a formal complaint from the embassy.”

The intelligence officers thought it over.

“It might work,” admitted Barber. “Ordinary, invisible. What do you think, Simon?”

“Well,” said Paxman, “the diplomat would have to be in on it.”

“Only partly,” said Martin. “He would simply have to have a flat order from his government to receive and employ the man who will present himself, then face the other way and get on with his job. What he suspects is his own affair. He’ll keep his mouth shut if he wants to keep his job and his career. That’s if the order comes from high enough.”

“The British embassy’s out,” said Paxman. “The Iraqis would go out of their way to offend our people.”

“Same with us,” said Barber. “Who do you have in mind, Mike?”

When Martin told them, they stared at him in disbelief.

“You cannot be serious,” said the American.

“But I am,” said Martin calmly.

“Hell, Mike, a request like that would have to go up to—well, the Prime Minister.”

“And the President,” said Barber.

“Well, we’re all supposed to be such pals nowadays, why not? I mean, if Jericho’s product ends up saving Allied lives, is a phone call too much to ask?”

Chip Barber glanced at his watch. The time in Washington was still seven hours earlier than that in the Gulf. Langley would be finishing its lunch. In London it was only two hours earlier, but senior officers might still be at their desks.

Barber went hotfoot back to the U.S. embassy and sent a blitz message in code to the Deputy Director (Operations), Bill Stewart, who, when he had read it, took it to the Director, William Webster. He in turn called the White House and asked for a meeting with his President.

Simon Paxman was lucky. His encrypted phone call caught Steve Laing at his desk at Century House, and after listening, the head of Ops for Mid-East called the Chief at his home.

Sir Colin thought it over and placed a call to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler.

It is accepted that the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service has a right, in cases he deems to be an emergency, to ask for and secure a personal meeting with his Prime Minister, and Margaret Thatcher had always been notable for her accessibility to the men who ran the intelligence services and the Special Forces. She agreed to meet the Chief in her private office in 10 Downing Street the following morning at eight.

She was, as always, at work before dawn and had almost cleared her desk when the Chief was shown in. She listened to his bizarre request with a rather puzzled frown, demanded several explanations, thought it over, and then, in her usual way, made her mind up without delay.

“I’ll confer with President Bush as soon as he rises, and we’ll see what we can do. This, um, man—is he really going to do that?”

“That is his intention. Prime Minister.”

“One of your people, Sir Colin?”

“No, he’s a major in the SAS.”

She brightened perceptibly.

“Remarkable fellow.”

“So I believe, ma’am.”

“When this is over, I would rather like to meet him.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, Prime Minister.”

When the Chief was gone, the Downing Street staff placed the call to the White House, even though it was still the middle of the night, and set up the hotline connection for eight A.M. Washington, one P.M.

London. The Prime Minister’s lunch was rescheduled by thirty minutes.

President George Bush, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, had always found it hard to refuse the British Prime Minister something she wanted when she was firing on all cylinders.

“All right, Margaret,” said the President after five minutes, “I’ll make the call.”

“He can only say no,” Mrs. Thatcher pointed out, “and he shouldn’t.

After all, we’ve jolly well done a lot for him.”

“Yes, we jolly well have,” said the President.

The two heads of government made their calls within an hour of each other, and the reply from the puzzled man at the other end of the line was affirmative. He would see their representatives, in privacy, as soon as they arrived.

That evening Bill Stewart headed out of Washington, and Steve Laing caught the last connection of the day from Heathrow.

If Mike Martin had any idea of the flurry of activity his demand had started, he gave no sign of it. He spent October 26 and 27 resting, eating, and sleeping. But he stopped shaving, allowing the dark stubble to come through again. Work on his behalf, however, was being carried out in a number of different places.

The SIS Station Head in Tel Aviv had visited General Kobi Dror with a final request. The Mossad chief had stared at the Englishman in amazement.

“You really are going to go ahead with this, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I only know what I’ve been told to ask you, Kobi.”

“Bloody hell, on the black? You know he’ll be caught, don’t you?”

“Can you do it, Kobi?”

“Of course we can do it.”

“Twenty-four hours?”

Kobi Dror was playing his Fiddler on the Roof role again.

“For you, boychick, my right arm. But look, this is crazy, what you are proposing.”

He rose and came from behind his desk, draping an arm around the Englishman’s shoulders.

“You know, we broke half our own rules, and we were lucky.

Normally, we never have our people visit a dead-letter box. It could be a trap. For us, a dead-letter box is one-way: from the katsa to the spy.

For Jericho, we broke that rule. Moncada picked up the product that way because there was no other way. And he was lucky—for two years he was lucky. But he had diplomatic cover. Now you want ...

this?”

He held up the small photograph of a sad-looking Arab-featured man with tufted black hair and stubble, the photo the Englishman had just received from Riyadh, brought in (since there are no commercial routes between the two capitals) by General de la Billière’s personal HS-125 twin-jet communications plane. The 125 was standing at Sde Dov military airfield, where its livery markings had been extensively photographed.

Dror shrugged.

“All right. By tomorrow morning. My life.”

The Mossad has, beyond any room for quarrel, some of the best technical services in the world. Apart from a central computer with almost two million names and their appropriate data, apart from one of the best lock-picking services on earth, there exists in the basement and subbasement of Mossad headquarters a series of rooms where the temperature is carefully controlled.

These rooms contain paper. Not just any old paper—very special paper. Originals of just about every kind of passport in the world lie there, along with myriad other identity cards, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and suchlike.

Then there are the blanks, the unfilled identity cards on which the penmen can work at will, using the originals as a guide to produce forgeries of superb quality.

Identity cards are not the only speciality. Banknotes of virtually foolproof likeness can be and are produced in great quantities, either to help ruin the currencies of neighboring but hostile nations, or to fund the Mossad’s black operations, the ones neither the Prime Minister nor the Knesset knows about nor wishes to.

It had only been after some soul-searching that the CIA and SIS had agreed to go to the Mossad for the favor, but they simply could not produce the identity card of a forty-five-year-old Iraqi laborer with the certainty of knowing it would pass any inspection in Iraq. No one had bothered to find and abstract an original one to copy.

Fortunately, the Sayeret Matkal, a cross-border reconnaissance group so secret that its name cannot even be printed in Israel, had made an incursion into Iraq two years earlier to drop an Arab oter who had some low-level contact to make there. While on Iraqi soil, the agents had surprised two working men in the fields, tied them up, and relieved them of their identity cards.

As promised, Dror’s forgers worked through the night and by dawn had produced an Iraqi identity card, convincingly dirty and smudged as if from long use, in the name of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, age forty-five, from a village in the hills north of Baghdad, working in the capital as a laborer.

The forgers did not know that Martin had taken the name of the Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested his Arabic in a Chelsea restaurant in early August; nor could they know that he had chosen the village from which his father’s gardener had come, the old man who, long ago beneath a tree in Baghdad, had told the little English boy of the place where he was born, of its mosque and coffee shop and the fields of alfalfa and melons that surrounded it. And there was one more thing the forgers did not know.

In the morning Kobi Dror handed the identity card to the Tel Aviv-based SIS man.

“This will not let him down. But I tell you, this”—he tapped the photo with a stubby forefinger—“this, your tame Arab, will betray you or be caught within a week.”

The SIS man could only shrug. Not even he knew that the man in the smudged photo was not an Arab at all. He had no need to know, so he had not been told. He just did what he was told—put the card on the HS-125, by which it was flown back to Riyadh.

Clothes had also been prepared, the simple dish-dash of an Iraqi working man, a dull brown keffiyeh, and tough, rope-soled canvas shoes.

A basket weaver, without knowing what he was doing or why, was creating a wicker crate of osier strands to a most unusual design. He was a poor Saudi craftsman, and the money the strange infidel was prepared to pay was very good, so he worked with a will.

Outside the city of Riyadh, at a secret army base, two rather special vehicles were being prepared. They had been brought by a Hercules of the RAF from the main SAS base farther down the Arabian Peninsula in Oman and were being stripped down and reequipped for a long and rough ride.

The essence of the conversion of the two long-base Land-Rovers was not armor and firepower but speed and range. Each vehicle would have to carry its normal complement of four SAS men, and one would carry a passenger. The other would carry a big-tired cross-country motorcycle, itself fitted with extra-long-range fuel tanks.

The American Army again loaned its power on request, this time in the form of two of its big twin-rotor Chinook workhorse helicopters. They were just told to stand by.

Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev was sitting as usual at his desk in his personal office on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee building on Novaya Ploshad, attended by two male secretaries, when the intercom buzzed to announce the arrival of the two emissaries from London and Washington.

For twenty-four hours he had been intrigued by the requests of both the American President and the British Prime Minister that he receive a personal emissary from each of them. Not a politician, not a diplomat—just a messenger. In this day and age, he wondered, what message cannot be passed through the normal diplomatic channels?

They could even use a hotline that was utterly secure from interception, although interpreters and technicians did have access.

He was intrigued and curious, and as curiosity was one of his most notable features, he was eager to solve the enigma.

Ten minutes later, the two visitors were shown into the private office of the General Secretary of the CPSU and President of the Soviet Union. It was a long, narrow room with a row of windows along one side only, facing out onto New Square. There were no windows behind the President, who sat with his back to the wall at the end of a long conference table.

In contrast to the gloomy, heavy style preferred by his two predecessors, Andropov and Chernenko, the younger Gorbachev preferred a light, airy decor. The desk and table were of light beech, flanked by upright but comfortable chairs. The windows were masked by net curtains.

When the two men entered, he gestured his secretaries to leave. He rose from his desk and came forward.

“Greetings, gentlemen,” he said in Russian. “Do either of you speak my language?”

One, whom he judged to be English, replied in halting Russian, “An interpreter would be advisable, Mr. President.”

“Vitali,” Gorbachev called to one of the departing secretaries, “send Yevgeny in here.”

In the absence of language, he smiled and gestured to his visitors to take a seat. His personal interpreter joined them in seconds and sat to one side of the presidential desk.

“My name, sir, is William Stewart. I am Deputy Director (Operations) for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington,” said the American.

Gorbachev’s mouth tightened and his brow furrowed.

“And I, sir, am Stephen Laing, Director for Operations, Mid-East Division, of British Intelligence.”

Gorbachev’s perplexity deepened. Spies, chekisti—what on earth was this all about?

“Each of our agencies,” said Stewart, “made a request to its respective government to ask you if you would receive us. The fact is, sir, the Middle East is moving toward war. We all know this. If it is to be avoided, we need to know the inner counsels of the Iraqi regime. What they say in public and what they discuss in private, we believe to be radically different.”

“Nothing new about that,” observed Gorbachev dryly.

“Nothing at all, sir. But this is a highly unstable regime.

Dangerous—to us all. If we could only know what the real thinking inside the cabinet of President Saddam Hussein is today, we might better be able to plan a strategy to head off the coming war,” said Laing.

“Surely that is what diplomats are for,” Gorbachev pointed out.

“Normally, yes, Mr. President. But there are times when even diplomacy is too open, too public a channel for innermost thoughts to be expressed. You recall the case of Richard Sorge?”

Gorbachev nodded. Every Russian knew of Sorge. His face had appeared on postage stamps. He was a posthumous hero of the Soviet Union.

“At the time,” pursued Laing, “Sorge’s information that Japan would not attack in Siberia was utterly crucial to your country. But it could not have come to you via the embassy.

“The fact is, Mr. President, we have reason to believe there exists in Baghdad a source, quite exceptionally highly placed, who is prepared to reveal to us all the innermost counsels of Saddam Hussein. Such knowledge could mean the difference between war and a voluntary Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.”

Mikhail Gorbachev nodded. He was no friend of Saddam Hussein either. Once a docile client of the USSR, Iraq had become increasingly independent, and of late its erratic leader had been gratuitously offensive to the USSR.

Moreover, the Soviet leader was well aware that if he wanted to carry through his reforms, he would need financial and industrial support.

That meant the goodwill of the West. The cold war was over—that was a reality. That was why he had joined the USSR in the Security Council condemnation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“So, gentlemen, make contact with this source,” Gorbachev replied.

“Produce us information that the powers can use to defuse this situation, and we will all be grateful. The USSR does not wish to see a war in the Middle East either.”

“We would like to make contact, sir,” said Stewart. “But we cannot.

The source declines to disclose himself, and one can understand why.

For him, the risks must be very great. To make contact, we have to avoid the diplomatic route. He has made plain he will use only covert communications with us.”

“So what do you ask of me?”

The two Westerners took a deep breath.

“We wish to slip a man into Baghdad to act as a conduit between the source and ourselves,” said Barber.

“An agent?”

“Yes, Mr. President, an agent. Posing as an Iraqi.”

Gorbachev stared at them hard.

“You have such a man?”

“Yes, sir. But he must be able to live somewhere—quietly, discreetly, innocently—while he picks up the messages and delivers our own inquiries. We ask that he be allowed to pose as an Iraqi on the staff of a senior member of the Soviet embassy.”

Gorbachev steepled his chin on the tips of his fingers. He was anything but a stranger to covert operations; his own KGB had mounted more than a few. Now he was being asked to assist the KGB’s old antagonists in mounting one, and to lend the Soviet embassy as their man’s umbrella. It was so outrageous, he almost laughed.

“If this man of yours is caught, my embassy will be compromised.

“No, sir. Your embassy will have been cynically duped by Russia’s traditional Western enemies. Saddam will believe that,” said Laing.

Gorbachev thought it over. He recalled the personal entreaty of one president and one prime minister in this matter. They evidently held it to be important, and he had no choice but to regard their goodwill to him as important. Finally he nodded.

“Very well. I will instruct General Vladimir Kryuchkov to give you his full cooperation.”

Kryuchkov was, at that time, Chairman of the KGB. Ten months later, while Gorbachev was on vacation on the Black Sea, Kryuchkov, with Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and others, would launch a coup d’état against their own President.

The two Westerners shifted uncomfortably.

“With the greatest respect, Mr. President,” asked Laing, “could we ask that it be your Foreign Minister and him only in whom you confide?”

Eduard Shevardnadze was then Foreign Minister and a trusted friend of Mikhail Gorbachev.

“Shevardnadze and him alone?” asked the President.

“Yes, sir, if you please.”

“Very well. The arrangements will be made only through the Foreign Ministry.”

When the Western intelligence officers had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev sat lost in thought. They had wanted only him and Eduard to know about this. Not Kryuchkov. Did they, he wondered, know something that the President of the USSR did not?

There were eleven Mossad agents in all—two teams of five and the mission controller, whom Kobi Dror had picked personally, pulling him off a boring stint as lecturer to the recruits at the training school outside Herzlia.

One of the teams was from the yarid branch, a section of the Mossad concerned with operational security and surveillance. The other was from neviot, whose speciality is bugging, breaking and entering—in short, anything where inanimate or mechanical objects are concerned.

Eight of the ten had reasonable or good German, and the mission controller was fluent. The other two were technicians anyway. The advance group for Operation Joshua slipped into Vienna over three days, arriving from different European points of departure, each with a perfect passport and cover story.

As he had with Operation Jericho, Kobi Dror was bending a few rules, but none of his subordinates were going to argue. Joshua had been designated ain efes, meaning a no-miss affair, which, coming from the boss himself, meant top priority.

Yarid and neviot teams normally have seven to nine members each, but because the target was deemed to be civilian, neutral, amateur, and unsuspecting, the numbers had been slimmed down.

Mossad’s Head of Station in Vienna had allocated three of his safe houses and three bodlim to keep them clean, tidy, and provisioned at all times.

A bodel, plural bodlim, is usually a young Israeli, often a student, engaged as a gofer after a thorough check of his parentage and background. His job is to run errands, perform chores, and ask no questions. In return he is allowed to live rent-free in a Mossad safe house, a major benefit for a short-of-money student in a foreign capital. When visiting “firemen” move in, the bodel has to move out but can be retained to do the cleaning, laundry, and shopping.

Though Vienna may not seem a major capital, for the world of espionage it has always been very important. The reason goes back to 1945, when Vienna, as the Third Reich’s second capital, was occupied by the victorious Allies and divided into four sectors—French, British, American, and Russian.

Unlike Berlin, Vienna regained her freedom—even the Russians agreed to move out—but the price was complete neutrality for Vienna and all Austria. With the cold war getting under way during the Berlin blockade of 1948, Vienna soon became a hotbed of espionage. Nicely neutral, with virtually no counterintelligence net of its own, close to the Hungarian and Czech borders, open to the West but seething with East Europeans, Vienna was a perfect base for a variety of agencies.

Shortly after its formation in 1951, the Mossad also saw the advantages of Vienna and moved in with such a presence that the Head of Station outranks the ambassador.

The decision was more than justified when the elegant and world-weary capital of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire became a center for ultradiscreet banking, the home of three separate United Nations agencies, and a favored entry point into Europe for Palestinian and other terrorists.

Dedicated to its neutrality, Austria has long had a counterintelligence and internal security apparatus that is so simple to evade that Mossad agents refer to these well-intentioned officers as fertsalach, a not terribly complimentary word meaning a fart.

Kobi Dror’s chosen mission controller was a tough katsa with years of European experience behind him in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels.

Gideon Barzilai had also served time in one of the kidon execution units that had pursued the Arab terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. Fortunately for his own career, he had not been involved in one of the biggest fiascos in Mossad history, when a kidon unit shot down a harmless Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, after wrongly identifying the man as

Ali Hassan Salameh, the brains behind the massacre.

Gideon “Gidi” Barzilai was now Ewald Strauss, representing a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures in Frankfurt. Not only were his papers in perfect order, but a search of the contents of his briefcase would have revealed the appropriate brochures, order books, and correspondence on company stationery.

Even a phone call to his head office in Frankfurt would have confirmed his cover story, for the telephone number on the stationery gave an office in Frankfurt manned by the Mossad.

Gidi’s paperwork, along with that of the other ten on his team, was the product of another division of the Mossad’s comprehensive backup services. In the same subbasement in Tel Aviv that housed the forgery department is another series of rooms dedicated to storing details of a truly amazing number of companies, real and fictional. Company records, audits, registrations, and letterhead stationery are stored in such abundance that any katsa on a foreign operation can be equipped with a corporate identity virtually impossible to penetrate.

After establishing himself in his own apartment, Barzilai had an extended conference with the local Head of Station and began his mission with a relatively simple task: finding out everything he could about a discreet and ultratraditional private bank called the Winkler Bank, just off the Franziskanerplatz.

That same weekend, two American Chinook helicopters lifted into the air from a military base outside Riyadh and headed north to cut into the Tapline Road that runs along the Saudi-Iraq border from Khafji all the way to Jordan.

Squeezed inside the hull of each Chinook was a single long-base Land-

Rover, stripped down to basic essentials but equipped with extralong-range fuel tanks. There were four SAS men traveling with each vehicle, squeezed into the area behind the flight crews.

Their final destination was beyond their normal range, but waiting for them on the Tapline Road were two large tankers, driven up from Dammam on the Gulf coast.

When the thirsty Chinooks set down on the road, the tanker crews went to work until the helicopters were again brimming with fuel.

Taking off, they headed up the road in the direction of Jordan, keeping low to avoid the Iraqi radar situated across the border.

Just beyond the Saudi town of Badanah, approaching the spot where the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan converge, the Chinooks set down again. There were two more tankers waiting to refuel them, but it was at this point they unloaded their cargoes and their passengers.

If the American aircrew knew where the silent Englishmen were going, they gave no sign, and if they did not know, they did not inquire. The loadmasters eased the sand-camouflaged trucks down the ramps and onto the road, shook hands, and said, “Hey, good luck, you guys.” Then they refueled and set off back the way they had come. The tankers followed them.

The eight SAS men watched them go, then headed in the other direction, farther up the road toward Jordan. Fifty miles northwest of Badanah they stopped and waited.

The captain commanding the two-vehicle mission checked his position. Back in the days of Colonel David Stirling in the Western Desert of Libya, this had been done by taking bearings of the sun, moon, and stars. The technology of 1990 made it much easier and more precise.

In his hand the captain held a device the size of a paperback book. It was called a Global Positioning System, or SATNAV, or Magellan.

Despite its size, the GPS can position its holder to a square no bigger than ten yards by ten yards anywhere on the earth’s surface.

The captain’s hand-held GPS could be switched to either the Q-Code or the P-Code. The P-Code was accurate to the ten-by-ten-yard square, but it needed four of the American satellites called NAVSTAR to be above the horizon at the same time. The Q-Code needed only two NAVSTARs above the horizon but was accurate only to a hundred yards by a hundred.

That day there were only two satellites to track by, but they were enough. No one was going to miss anyone else a hundred yards away in that howling wilderness of sand and shale, miles from anywhere between Badanah and the Jordanian border. Satisfied that he was on the rendezvous site, the captain switched off the GPS and crawled under the camouflage nets spread by his men between the two vehicles to shield them from the sun. The temperature gauge said it was 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

An hour later, the British Gazelle helicopter came in from the south.

Major Mike Martin had flown from Riyadh in an RAF Hercules transport to the Saudi town of Al Jawf, the place nearest to the border at that point that had a municipal airport. The Hercules had carried the Gazelle with its rotors folded, its pilot, its ground crew, and the extra fuel tanks needed to get the Gazelle from Al Jawf to the Tapline Road and back.

In case of watching Iraqi radar even in this abandoned place, the Gazelle was skimming the desert, but the pilot quickly saw the Very starshell fired by the SAS captain when he heard the approaching engine.

The Gazelle settled on the road fifty yards from the Land-Rovers, and Martin climbed out. He carried a kitbag over his shoulder and a wicker basket in his left hand, the contents of which had caused the Gazelle pilot to wonder if he had joined the Royal Army Air Corps—or some branch of the Farmers Union. The basket contained two live hens.

Otherwise, Martin was dressed like the eight SAS men waiting for him: desert boots, loose trousers of tough canvas, shirt, sweater, and desert-camouflage combat jacket. Round his neck was a checkered keffiyeh that could be pulled up to shield his face from the swirling dust, and on his head a round knitted woolen helmet surmounted by a pair of heavy-duty goggles.

The pilot wondered why the man did not die of heat in all that gear, but then, he had never experienced the chill of the desert night.

The SAS men hauled from the rear of the Gazelle the plastic gasoline cans that had given the little reconnaissance chopper its maximum all-up weight, and they refilled the tanks. When he was full up again, the pilot waved good-bye and took off, heading south for Al Jawf, the ride back to Riyadh, and a return to sanity from these madmen in the desert.

Only when he was gone did the SAS men feel at ease. Though the eight with the Land-Rovers were D Squadron men—light-vehicle experts—and Martin was an A Squadron freefaller, he knew all but two. With greetings exchanged, they did what British soldiers do when they have the time: they brewed up a strong pot of tea.

The point where the captain had chosen to cross the border into Iraq was wild and bleak for two reasons. The rougher the country they were running over, the less chance there would be of running into an Iraqi patrol. His job was not to outpace the Iraqis over open ground but to escape detection completely.

The second reason was that he had to deposit his charge as near as possible to the long Iraqi highway that snakes its way from Baghdad westward across the great plains of desert to the Jordanian border crossing at Ruweishid.

That miserable outpost in the desert had become very familiar to television viewers after the conquest of Kuwait, because it was where the hapless tide of refugees—Filipinos, Bengalis, Palestinians, and others—were wont to cross after fleeing the chaos that the conquest had caused.

In this far northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, the distance from the border to the Baghdad road was at its shortest. The captain knew that to his east, from Baghdad down to the Saudi border, the land tended to be flat desert, smooth as a billiard table for the most part, lending itself to a fast run from the border to the nearest road heading for Baghdad.

But it was also likely to be occupied by Army patrols and watching eyes. Here in the west of Iraq’s deserts, the land was hillier, cut by ravines that would carry flash floods during the rains and that still had to be carefully negotiated in the dry season but were virtually empty of Iraqi patrols.

The chosen crossing point was fifty kilometers north of where they stood, and beyond the unmarked border only another hundred to the Baghdad-Ruweishid road. But the captain decided he would need a full night, a layup under camouflage nets during the next day, and the night after, in order to deliver his charge to a point within walking distance of the road.

They set off at four in the afternoon. The sun still blazed, and the heat made driving seem like moving past the door of a blast furnace. At six the dusk approached, and the air temperature began to drop—fast. At seven it was completely black, and the chill set in. The sweat dried on them, and they were grateful for the thick sweaters that the Gazelle pilot had mocked.

In the lead vehicle the navigator sat beside the driver and ran a constant series of checks on their position and course. Back at their base, he and the captain had spent hours poring over a series of large-scale, high-definition photographs, kindly provided by an American U-2 mission out of their Taif base, which formed a picture better than a mere map.

They were driving without lights, but with a penlight the navigator kept track of their swerving passage, correcting every time a gully or defile forced them to divert several kilometers east or west.

Every hour, they stopped to confirm position with the Magellan. The navigator had already calibrated the sides of his photographs with minutes and seconds of longitude and latitude, so that the figures produced by the Magellan’s digital display told them exactly where they were on the photos.

Progress was slow because at each ridge one of the men had to run forward and peer over, to ensure that there was no unpleasant surprise on the other side.

An hour before dawn, they found a steep-sided wadi, drove in, and covered themselves with netting. One of the men withdrew to a nearby prominence to look down on the camp and order a few adjustments until he was satisfied a spotter plane would practically have to crash into the wadi to see them.

During the day they ate, drank, and slept, two always on guard in case of a wandering shepherd or another lonely traveler. Several times they heard Iraqi jets high overhead, and once the bleating of goats ranging a nearby hill. But the goats, which seemed to have no herdsman with them, wandered off in the opposite direction. After sundown they moved on.

There is a small Iraqi town called Ar-Rutba that straddles the highway, and shortly before four A.M. they saw its lights dimly in the distance.

The Magellan confirmed they were where they wanted to be, just south of the town, a five-mile hike to the road.

Four of the men scouted around until one found a wadi with a soft, sandy bottom. Here they dug their hole, silently, using the trenching tools slung on the sides of the Land-Rovers for digging them out of drifts. They buried the cross-country motorcycle with its reinforced tires, and the jerrycans of spare fuel to get it to the border, should the need arise. All were wrapped in tough polyethylene bags to protect against sand and water, for the rains had still to come.

To protect the cache from being washed away, they erected a cairn of rocks to prevent water erosion.

The navigator climbed to the hill above the wadi and took an exact bearing from the spot to the radio mast above Ar-Rutba, whose red warning light could be seen in the distance.

While they worked, Mike Martin stripped to the buff and from his kitbag took the robe, headdress, and sandals of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, the Iraqi laborer and gardener-handyman. With a cloth tote bag containing bread, oil, cheese, and olives for breakfast, a tattered wallet with identity card and pictures of Mahmoud’s elderly parents, and a battered tin box with some money and a penknife, he was ready to go.

The Land-Rovers needed an hour to get clear of the site before turning in for the day.

“Break a leg,” said the captain,

“Good hunting, boss,” said the navigator.

“At least you’ll have a fresh egg for breakfast,” said another, and there was a subdued rumble of laughter. Mike Martin waved a hand and began to hike across the desert to the road. Minutes later, the Land-Rovers had gone, and the wadi was empty again.

The Head of Station in Vienna had on his books a sayan who was himself in banking, a senior executive with one of the nation’s leading clearing banks. It was he who was asked to prepare a report, as full as he could make it, upon the Winkler Bank. The sayan was told only that certain Israeli enterprises had entered into a relationship with Winkler and wished to be reassured as to its solidity, antecedents, and banking practices. There was, he was told regretfully, so much fraud going on these days.

The sayan accepted the reason for the inquiry and did his best, which was pretty good considering that the first thing he discovered was that Winkler operated along lines of almost obsessive secrecy.

The bank had been founded almost a hundred years earlier by the father of the present sole owner and president. The Winkler of 1990 was himself ninety-one and known in Viennese banking circles as der Alte, “the Old Man.” Despite his age, he refused to relinquish the presidency or sole controlling interest. Being widowed but childless, there was no natural family successor, so the eventual disposal of the controlling interest would have to await the reading of his will.

Nevertheless, day-to-day running of the bank rested with three vice-presidents. Meetings with Old Man Winkler took place about once a month at his private house, during which his principal concern seemed to be to ensure that his own stringent standards were being maintained.

Executive decisions were with the vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemütlich, and Blei. It was not a clearing bank, of course, had no current account holders, and issued no checkbooks. Its business was as a depository for clients’ funds, which would be placed in rock-solid, safe investments, mainly on the European market.

If interest yields from such investments were never going to enter the top ten performers league, that was not the point. Winkler’s clients did not seek rapid growth or sky-high interest earnings. They sought safety and absolute anonymity. This Winkler guaranteed them, and his bank delivered.

The standards on which Old Man Winkler placed such stress included utter discretion as to the identity of the owners of its numbered accounts, coupled with a complete avoidance of what the Old Man termed “new-fangled nonsense.”

It was this distaste for modern gimmickry that banned computers for the storage of sensitive information or account control, fax machines, and where possible, telephones. The Winkler Bank would accept instructions and information by telephone, but it would never divulge it over a phone line. Where possible, the Winkler Bank liked to use old-fashioned letter-writing on its expensive cream linenfold stationery, or personal meetings within the bank itself.

Within Vienna the bank messenger would deliver all letters and statements in wax-sealed envelopes, and only for national and international letters would the bank trust the public mailing system.

As for numbered accounts owned by foreign clients—the sayan had been asked to touch upon these—no one knew quite how many there were, but rumor hinted at deposits of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Clearly, if this was so, and given that a percentage of the secretive clients would occasionally die without telling anyone else how to operate the account, the Winkler Bank was doing quite nicely, thank you.

Gidi Barzilai, when he read the report, swore long and loud. Old Man

Winkler might know nothing of the latest techniques of phone-tapping and computer-hacking, but his gut instincts were right on target.

During the years of Iraq’s buildup of her poison gas technology, every one of the purchases from Germany had been cleared through one of three Swiss banks. The Mossad knew that the CIA had hacked into the computers of all three banks—originally the search had been for laundered drug money—and it was this inside information that had enabled Washington to file its endless succession of protests to the German government about the exports. It was hardly the CIA’s fault that Chancellor Helmut Kohl had contemptuously rejected every one of the protests; the information had been perfectly accurate.

If Gidi Barzilai thought he was going to hack into the Winkler Bank central computer, he was mistaken; there wasn’t one. That left room-bugging, mail-interception, and phone-tapping. The chances were, none of these would solve his problem.

Many bank accounts need a Losungswort, a coded password, to operate them, to effect withdrawals and transfers. But account holders can usually use such a password to identify themselves in a phone call or a fax, as well as in a letter. The way the Winkler Bank seemed to operate, a high-value numbered account owned by a foreign client such as Jericho would have had a much more complicated system for its operation; either a formal appearance with ample identification by the account holder, or a written mandate prepared in a precise form and manner, with precise coded words and symbols appearing at precisely the preagreed places.

Clearly, the Winkler Bank would accept an in-payment from anyone, anytime, anywhere. The Mossad knew that because it had been paying Jericho his blood money by transfers to an account inside Winkler that was identified to them by a single number. Persuading the Winkler

Bank to make a transfer out would be a whole different affair.

Somehow, from inside the dressing gown where he spent most of his life listening to church music, Old Man Winkler seemed to have guessed that illegal information-interception technology would outpace normal information-transfer techniques. Damn and blast the man.

The only other thing the sayan could vouchsafe was that such high-value numbered accounts would certainly be handled personally by one of the three vice-presidents and no one else. The Old Man had chosen his subordinates well: The reputation of all three was that they were humorless, tough, and well-paid. In a word, impregnable. Israel, the sayan had added, need have no worries about the Winkler Bank.

He had, of course, missed the point. Gidi Barzilai, that first week of November, was already getting extremely fed up with the Winkler Bank.

There was a bus an hour after dawn, and it slowed for the single passenger sitting on a rock by the road three miles short of Ar-Rutba when he got up and waved. He handed over two grubby dinar notes, took a seat in the back, balanced his basket of chickens on his lap, and fell asleep.

There was a police patrol in the center of the town, where the bus jolted to a halt on its old springs and a number of passengers got off to go to work or to the market, while others got on. But while the police checked the ID cards of those getting on, they contented themselves with glancing through the dusty windows at the few who remained inside and ignored the peasant with his chickens in back. They were looking for subversives, suspicious characters.

After a further hour, the bus rumbled on to the east, rocking and swaying, occasionally pulling onto the hard shoulder as a column of Army vehicles roared past, their stubbled conscripts sitting morosely in the back, staring at the swirling dust clouds they raised.

With his eyes closed, Mike Martin listened to the chatter around him, latching on to an unaccustomed word or a hint of accent that he might have forgotten. The Arabic of this part of Iraq was markedly different from that of Kuwait. If he were to pass for an ill-educated and harmless fellagha in Baghdad, these out-of-town provincial accents and phrases would prove useful. Few things disarm a city cop more quickly than a hayseed accent.

The hens in their cage on his lap had had a rough ride, even though he had scattered corn from his pocket and shared the water from his flask, now inside a Land-Rover baking under netting in the desert behind him. With each lurch the birds clucked in protest or squatted and crapped into the litter beneath them.

It would have taken a keen eye to observe that the base of the cage on its external measurement was four inches more than on the inside. The deep litter around the hens’ feet hid the difference. The litter was only an inch deep. Inside the four-inch-deep cavity beneath the twenty-by-twenty-inch cage were a number of items that those police at Ar-Rutba would have found puzzling but interesting.

One was a fold-away satellite dish, turned into a stumpy rod like a collapsible umbrella. Another was a transceiver, more powerful than that Martin had used in Kuwait. Baghdad would not offer the facility of being able to broadcast while wandering around the desert. Lengthy transmissions would be out, which accounted, apart from the rechargeable cadmium-silver battery, for the last item in the cavity. It was a tape recorder, but a rather special one.

New technology tends to start large, cumbersome, and difficult to use.

As it develops, two things happen. The innards become more and more complicated, although smaller and smaller, and the operation becomes simpler.

The radio sets hauled into France by agents for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War were a nightmare by modern standards. Occupying a suitcase, they needed an aerial strung for yards up a drainpipe, had cumbersome valves the size of light bulbs, and could only transmit messages on a Morse-sender. This kept the operator tapping for ages, while German detector units could triangulate on the source and close in.

Martin’s tape recorder was simple to operate but also carried some useful features inside. A ten-minute message could be read slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. Before it was recorded on the spool, a silicon chip would encrypt it into a garble that, even if intercepted, the Iraqis could probably not decode.

At the push of a button, the tape would rewind. Another button would cause it to rerecord, but at one two-hundredth of the speed, reducing the message to a three-second burst that would be just about impossible to trace.

It was this burst that the transmitter would send out when linked to the satellite dish, the battery, and the tape recorder. In Riyadh the message would be caught, slowed down, decrypted, and replayed in clear.

Martin left the bus at Ramadi, where it stopped, and took another one on past Lake Habbaniyah and the old Royal Air Force base, now converted to a modern Iraqi fighter station. The bus was stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, and all identity cards were checked.

Martin stood humbly in the line, clutching his chickens, as the passengers approached the table where the police sergeant sat. When it was his turn, he set the wicker basket on the floor and produced his ID

card. The sergeant glanced at it. He was hot and thirsty. It had been a long day. He gestured to the place of origin of the card-bearer.

“Where is this?”

“It is a small village north of Baji. Well known for its melons, bey.”

The sergeant’s mouth twitched. Bey was a respectful form of address that dated back to the Turkish empire, only occasionally heard, and then only from people out of the real backwoods. He flicked a dismissive hand; Martin picked up his chickens and went back to the bus.

Shortly before seven, the bus rolled to a stop and Major Martin stepped out into the main bus station in Kadhimiya, Baghdad.

Chapter 11

It was a long walk through the early evening from the bus station in the north of the city to the house of the Soviet First Secretary in the district of Mansour, but Martin welcomed it.

For one thing, he had been cooped up in two separate buses for twelve hours, covering the 240 miles from Ar-Rutba to the capital, and they had not been luxury coaches. For another, the walk gave him the chance to inhale once again the feel of the city he had not seen since leaving on an airliner for London as a very nervous schoolboy of thirteen, and that had been twenty-four years earlier.

Much had changed. The city he remembered had been very much an

Arab city, much smaller, grouped around the central districts of Shaikh Omar and Saadun on the northwestern bank of the Tigris in Risafa, and the district of Aalam across the river in Karch. Within this inner city was where most of life had been; here narrow streets, alleys, markets, mosques, and their minarets had dominated the skyline to remind the people of their subservience to Allah.

Twenty years of oil revenue had brought long divided highways plunging through the once-open spaces, with rotaries, overpasses, and cloverleaf intersections. Cars had proliferated, and skyscrapers pushed upward into the night sky, Mammon nudging his old adversary.

Mansour, when he reached it down the long stretch of Rabia Street, was hardly recognizable. He recalled wide open spaces around the Mansour Club where his father had taken the family on weekend afternoons. Mansour was still clearly an upscale suburb, but the open spaces had been filled with streets and residences for those who could afford to live in style.

He passed within a few hundred yards of Mr. Hartley’s old preparatory school, where he had learned his lessons and played during the breaks with his friends Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, but in the darkness he did not recognize the street.

He knew just what job Hassan was doing now, but of Dr Badri’s two sons he had heard no word in almost a quarter of a century. Had the little one, Osman, with his taste for mathematics, ever become an engineer after all? he wondered. And Abdelkarim, who had won prizes for reciting English poetry—had he in turn become a poet or a writer?

If Martin had marched in the manner of the SAS, heel-and-toe, shoulders swinging to assist his moving legs, he could have covered the distance in half the time. He could also have been reminded, like those two engineers in Kuwait, that “you may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like an Englishman.”

But his shoes were not laced marching boots. They were canvas slippers with rope soles, the footwear of a poor Iraqi fellagha, so he shuffled along with bowed shoulders and head down.

In Riyadh they had shown him an up-to-date map of the city of Baghdad, and many photographs taken from high altitude but magnified until, with a magnifying glass, one could look into the gardens behind the walls, picking out the swimming pools and cars of the wealthy and powerful.

All these he had memorized. He turned left into Jordan Street and just past Yarmuk Square took a right into the tree-lined avenue where the Soviet diplomat lived.

In the sixties, under Kassem and the generals who followed him, the USSR had occupied a favored and prestigious position in Baghdad, pretending to espouse Arab nationalism because it was seen to be anti-Western, while trying to convert the Arab world to Communism. In those years the Soviet embassy had purchased several large residences outside its main compound, which could not accommodate the swelling staff, and as a concession these residences and their grounds had been accorded the status of Soviet territory. It was a privilege even Saddam Hussein had never gotten around to rescinding, the more so as until the mid-eighties his principal arms supplier had been Moscow, and six thousand Soviet military advisers had trained his Air Force and Armored Corps with their Russian equipment.

Martin found the villa and identified it from the small brass plaque that announced this was a residence belonging to the embassy of the USSR. He pulled on the chain beside the gate and waited.

After several minutes the gate opened to reveal a burly, crop-haired Russian in the white tunic of a steward.

“Da?” he said.

Martin replied in Arabic, the wheedling whine of a supplicant who speaks to a superior. The Russian scowled. Martin fumbled inside his robe and produced his identity card. This made sense to the steward; in his country they knew about internal passports. He took the card, said,

“Wait,” in Arabic, and closed the gate.

He was back in five minutes, beckoning the Iraqi in the soiled dish-dash through the gate into the forecourt. He led Martin toward the steps leading to the main door of the villa. As they reached the bottom of the steps a man appeared at the top.

“That will do. I will handle this,” he said in Russian to the manservant, who glowered at the Arab one last time and went back into the house.

Yuri Kulikov, First Secretary to the Soviet embassy, was a wholly professional diplomat who had found the order he received from Moscow outrageous but unavoidable. He had evidently been caught at dinner, for he clutched a napkin with which he dabbed his lips as he descended the steps.

“So here you are,” he said in Russian. “Now listen, if we have to go through with this charade, so be it. But I personally will have nothing to do with it. Panimayesh?”

Martin, who did not speak Russian, shrugged helplessly and said in Arabic:

“Please, bey?”

Kulikov took the change of language as dumb insolence. Martin realized with a delicious irony that the Soviet diplomat really thought his unwelcome new staff member was a fellow-Russian who had been sicced onto him by those wretched spooks up at the Lubyanka in Moscow.

“Oh, very well then, Arabic if you wish,” he said testily. He too had trained in Arabic, which he spoke well with a harsh Russian accent. He was damned if he was going to be shown up by this agent of the KGB.

So he continued in Arabic.

“Here is your card. Here is the letter I was ordered to prepare for you.

Now, you will live in the shack at the far end of the garden, keep the grounds in order, and do the shopping as the chef instructs. Apart from that, I do not want to know. If you are caught, I know nothing except that I took you on in good faith. Now, go about your business and get rid of those damned hens. I will not have chickens ruining the garden.”

Some chance, he thought bitterly as he turned back to resume his interrupted dinner. If the oaf is caught up to some mischief, the AMAM will soon know he is a Russian, and the idea that he is on the First Secretary’s personal staff by accident will be as likely as a skating party on the Tigris. Yuri Kulikov was privately furious with Moscow.

Mike Martin found his quarters up against the rear wall of the quarter-acre garden, a one-room bungalow with a cot, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks on one wall, and a washbasin set in a shelf in a corner.

Further examination revealed an earth-closet close by and a cold-water tap in the garden wall. Hygiene would clearly be pretty basic and food presumably served from the kitchen door at the rear of the villa. He sighed. The house outside Riyadh seemed a long way away.

He found a number of candles and some matches. By their dim light, he slung blankets across the windows and went to work on the rough tiles of the floor with his penknife. An hour of scratching at the moldy mortar brought four of the tiles up, and a further hour of digging with a. trowel from the nearby potting shed produced a hole to take his radio transmitter, batteries, tape recorder, and satellite dish. A mixture of mud and spittle rubbed into the cracks between the tiles hid the last traces of his excavation.

Just before midnight, he used his knife to cut away the false bottom of the chicken cage and set the litter into the real base, so that no trace remained of the four-inch cavity. While he worked the chickens scratched around the floor, looking hopefully for a nonexistent grain of wheat but finding and consuming several bugs.

Martin finished off the last of his olives and cheese and shared the remaining fragments of pita bread with his traveling companions, along with a bowl of water drawn from the outside tap.

The hens went back into their cage, and if they found their home now four inches deeper than it used to be, they made no complaint. It had been a long day, and they went to sleep.

In a last gesture, Martin peed all over Kulikov’s roses in the darkness before blowing out the candles, wrapping himself in his blanket, and doing the same.

His body clock caused him to wake up at four A.M. Extracting the transmitting gear in its plastic bags, he recorded a brief message for Riyadh, speeded it up by two hundred times, connected the tape recorder to the transmitter, and erected the satellite dish, which occupied much of the center of the shack but pointed out the open door.

At four forty-five A.M. he sent a single-burst transmission on the channel of the day, then dismantled it all and put it back under the floor.

The sky was still pitch-black over Riyadh when a similar dish on the roof of the SIS residence caught the one-second signal and fed it down to the communications room. The transmitting time “window” was from four-thirty until five A.M., and the listening watch was awake.

Two spinning tapes caught the burst from Baghdad, and a warning light flashed to alert the technicians. They slowed the message down by two hundred times until it came over the headphones in clear. One noted it down in shorthand, typed it up, and left the room.

Julian Gray, the Head of Station, was shaken awake at five fifteen.

“It’s Black Bear, sir. He’s in.”

Gray read the transcript with mounting excitement and went to wake Simon Paxman. The head of the Iraq Desk was now on extended assignment to Riyadh, his duties in London having been taken over by his subordinate. He too sat up, wide awake, and read it.

“Bloody hell, so far so good.”

“The problem could start,” said Gray, “when he tries to raise Jericho.”

It was a sobering thought. The former Mossad asset in Baghdad had been switched off for three full months. He might have been compromised or caught, or simply changed his mind. He could have been posted far away, especially if he turned out to be a general now commanding troops in Kuwait. Anything could have happened.

Paxman stood up.

“Better tell London. Any chance of coffee?”

“I’ll tell Mohammed to get it together,” said Gray.

Mike Martin was watering the flowerbeds at five-thirty, when the house began to stir. The cook, a bosomy Russian woman, saw him from her window and, when water was hot, called him over to the kitchen window.

“Kak mazyvaetes?” she asked, then thought for a moment and used the Arabic word: “Name?”

“Mahmoud,” said Martin.

“Well, here’s a cup of coffee, Mahmoud.”

Martin bobbed his head several times in delighted acceptance, muttering “shukran” and taking the hot mug in two hands. He was not joking; it was delicious real coffee and his first hot drink since the tea on the Saudi side of the border.

Breakfast was at seven, a bowl of lentils and pita bread, which he devoured. It appeared that the houseman of the previous evening and his wife, the cook, looked after First Secretary Kulikov, who seemed to be single. By eight, Martin had met the chauffeur, an Iraqi who spoke a smattering of Russian and would be useful translating simple messages to the Russians.

Martin decided not to get too close to the chauffeur, who might be a plant by the AMAM Secret Police or even Rahmani’s counterintelligence people. That turned out to be no problem; agent or not, the chauffeur was a snob and treated the new gardener with contempt. He agreed, however, to explain to the cook that Martin had to leave for a while because their employer had ordered him to get rid of his chickens.

Back on the street, Martin headed for the bus station, liberating his hens onto a patch of waste ground on the way.

As in so many Arab cities, the bus station in Baghdad is not simply a place for boarding vehicles leaving for the provinces. It is a seething maelstrom of working-class humanity where people have things to buy and sell. Running along the south wall is a useful flea market. It was here that Martin, after the appropriate haggle, bought a rickety bicycle that squeaked piteously when he rode it but was soon grateful for a shot of oil.

He had known he could not get around in a car, and even a motorcycle would be too grand for a humble gardener. He recalled his father’s houseman pedaling through the city from market to market, buying the daily provisions, and from what he could see, a bicycle was still a perfectly normal way for working people to get around.

A little work with the penknife sawed off the top of the chicken cage, converting it into an open-topped square basket, which he secured to the rear pillion of the bicycle with two stout rubber cords, former car fan belts, that he bought from a back-street garage.

He bicycled back into the city center and bought four different-colored sticks of chalk from a stationer in Shurja Street, just across from St.

Joseph’s Catholic Church, where the Chaldean Christians meet to worship.

He recalled the area from his boyhood, the Agid al Nasara, or Area of the Christians, and Shurja and Bank streets were still full of illegally parked cars and foreigners prowling through the shops selling herbs and spices.

When he was a boy, there had only been three bridges across the Tigris: the Railway Bridge in the north, the New Bridge in the middle, and the King Faisal Bridge in the south. Now there were nine. Four days after the start of the air war still to come, there would be none, for all had been targeted inside the Black Hole in Riyadh, and destroyed they duly were. But that first week of November, the life of the city flowed across them ceaselessly.

The other thing he noticed was the presence everywhere of the AMAM

Secret Police, though most of them made no attempt to be secret. They watched on street corners and from parked cars. Twice he saw foreigners stopped and required to produce their identity cards, and twice saw the same thing happen to Iraqis. The demeanor of the foreigners was of resigned irritation, but that of the Iraqis was of visible fear.

On the surface the city life went on, and the people of Baghdad were as good-humored as he recalled them; but his antennae told him that beneath the surface, the river of fear imposed by the tyrant in the great palace down by the river near the Tammuz Bridge ran strong and deep.

Only once that morning did he come across a hint of what many Iraqis felt every day of their lives. He was in the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, still across the river from his new home, haggling over the price of some fresh fruit with an old stallholder. If the Russians were going to feed him lentils and bread, he could at least back up this diet with some fruit.

Nearby, four AMAM men frisked a youth roughly before sending him on his way. The old fruit seller hawked and spat in the dust, narrowly missing one of his own eggplants.

“One day the Beni Naji will come back and chase this filth away,” he muttered.

“Careful, old man, these are foolish words,” whispered Martin, testing some peaches for ripeness. The old man stared at him.

“Where are you from, brother?”

“Far away. A village in the north, beyond Baji.”

“Go back there, if you take an old man’s advice. I have seen much.

The Beni Naji will come from the sky—aye, and the Beni el Kalb.”

He spat again, and this time the eggplants were not so fortunate.

Martin made his purchase of peaches and lemons and pedaled away.

He was back at the house of the Soviet First Secretary by noon.

Kulikov was long gone to the embassy and his driver with him, so though Martin was rebuked by the cook, it was in Russian, so he shrugged and got on with the garden.

But he was intrigued by what the old greengrocer had said. Some, it seemed, could foresee their own invasion and did not oppose it. The phrase “chase this filth away” could only refer to the Secret Police and,

by inference, to Saddam Hussein.

On the streets of Baghdad, the British are referred to as the Beni Naji.

Exactly who Naji was remains lost in the mists of time, but it is believed he was a wise and holy man. Young British officers posted in those parts under the empire used to come to see him, to sit at his feet and listen to his wisdom. He treated them like his sons, even though they were Christians and therefore infidel, so people called them the

“Sons of Naji.”

The Americans are referred to as the Beni el Kalb. Kalb in Arabic is a dog, and the dog, alas, is not a highly regarded creature in Arab culture.

Gideon Barzilai could at least take one comfort from the report on the Winkler Bank provided by the embassy’s banking sayan. It showed him the direction he had to take.

His first priority had to be to identify which of the three vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemütlich, or Blei, was the one who controlled the account owned by the Iraqi renegade Jericho.

The fastest route would be by a phone call, but judging from the report, Barzilai was sure none of them would admit anything over an open line.

He made his request by heavily encoded signal from the fortified underground Mossad station beneath the Vienna embassy and received his reply from Tel Aviv as fast as it could be prepared.

It was a letter, forged on genuine letterhead extracted from one of Britain’s oldest and most reputable banks, Coutts of The Strand, London, bankers to Her Majesty the Queen.

The signature was even a perfect facsimile of the autograph of a genuine senior officer of Coutts, in the overseas section. There was no addressee by name, either on the envelope or the letter, which began simply, “Dear Sir.”

The text of the letter was simple and to the point. An important client of Coutts would soon be making a substantial transfer into the numbered account of a client of the Winkler Bank—to wit, account number so-and-so. Coutts’s client had now alerted them that due to unavoidable technical reasons, there would be a delay of several days in the effecting of the transfer. Should Winkler’s client inquire as to its nonarrival on time, Coutts would be eternally grateful if Messrs.

Winkler could inform their client that the transfer was indeed on its way and would arrive without a moment’s unnecessary delay. Finally, Coutts would much appreciate an acknowledgment of the safe arrival of their missive.

Barzilai calculated that as banks love the prospect of incoming money, and few more than Winkler, the staid old bank in the Ballgasse would give the bankers of the Royal House of Windsor the courtesy of a reply—by letter. He was right.

The Coutts envelope from Tel Aviv matched the stationery and was stamped with British stamps, apparently postmarked at the Trafalgar Square post office two days earlier. It was addressed simply to

“Director, Overseas Client Accounts, Winkler Bank.” There was, of course, no such position within the Winkler Bank, since the job was divided among three men.

The envelope was delivered, in the dead of night, by being slipped through the mail slot of the bank in Vienna.

The yarid surveillance team had been watching the bank for a week by that time, noting and photographing its daily routine, its hours of opening and closing, the arrival of the mail, the departure of the messenger on his rounds, the positioning of the receptionist behind her desk in the ground-floor lobby, and the positioning of the security guard at a smaller desk opposite her.

The Winkler Bank did not occupy a new building. Ballgasse—and indeed, the whole of the Franziskanerplatz area—lies in the old district just off Singerstrasse. The bank building must once have been the Vienna dwelling of a rich merchant family, solid and substantial, secluded behind a heavy wooden door adorned with a discreet brass plaque. To judge from the layout of a similar house on the square which the yarid team had examined while posing as clients of the accountant who dwelt there, it had only five floors, with about six offices per floor.

Among their observations, the yarid team had noted that the outgoing mail was taken each evening, just before the hour of closing, to a mailbox on the square. This was a chore performed by the commissionaire or guard, who then returned to the building to hold the door open while the staff trooped out. Finally he let in the nightwatchman before going home himself. It was the nightwatchman who shut himself in, slamming enough bolts across the wooden door to keep out an armored car.

Before the envelope from Coutts of London was dropped through the bank’s door, the head of the neviot technical team had examined the mailbox on Franziskanerplatz and snorted with disgust. It was hardly a challenge. One of his team was a crack lockpick and had the mailbox open and reclosed inside three minutes. From what he learned the first time he did it, he could make up a key to fit, which he did. After a couple of minor adjustments, it worked as well as the postman’s key.

Further surveillance revealed that the bank guard always dropped off the bank’s outgoing mail between twenty and thirty minutes ahead of the regular six P.M. pickup from the mailbox by the official post office van.

The day the Coutts letter went into the mail slot in the door, the yarid team and the neviot lockpick worked together. As the bank guard returned to the bank down the alley after making the dropoff that evening, the lockpick had the door of the mailbox open. The twenty-two letters going out from the Winkler Bank lay on top. It took thirty seconds to abstract the one addressed to Messrs. Coutts of London, replace the rest, and relock the box.

All five of the yarid team had been posted in the square in case anyone tried to interfere with the “postman,” whose uniform, hurriedly purchased in a secondhand shop, bore a marked resemblance to the real uniforms of Viennese mailmen.

But the good citizens of Vienna are not accustomed to agents from the Middle East breaking the sanctity of a mailbox. There were only two people in the square at the time, and neither took any notice of what appeared to be a post office employee going about his lawful business.

Twenty minutes later, the real postman did his job, but by then the passersby were gone and replaced with fresh ones.

Barzilai opened Winkler’s reply to Coutts and noted that it was a brief but courteous reply of acknowledgment, written in passable English, and signed by Wolfgang Gemütlich. The Mossad team leader now knew exactly who handled the Jericho account. All that remained was to break him or penetrate him. What Barzilai did not know was that his problems were just beginning.

It was well after dark when Mike Martin left the compound in Mansour. He saw no reason to disturb the Russians by going out through the main gate; there was a much smaller wicket gate in the rear wall, with a rusty lock to which he had been given the key. He wheeled his bicycle out into the alley, relocked the gate, and began to pedal.

It would be, he knew, a long night. The Chilean diplomat Moncada had described perfectly well to the Mossad officers who debriefed him when he came out just where he had sited the three dead-letter boxes destined for messages from him to Jericho and where to put the chalk marks to alert the invisible Jericho that a message awaited him. Martin felt he had no choice but to use all three at once, with an identical message in each.

He had written out those messages in Arabic on flimsy airmail paper and folded each one into a square glassine bag. The three bags were taped to his inner thigh. The chalk sticks resided in a side pocket.

The first drop was the Alwazia cemetery, across the river in Risafa. He knew it already, remembered from long ago and studied at length on photographs in Riyadh. Finding the loose brick in darkness was another matter.

It took ten minutes, scrabbling with fingertips in the darkness of the walled cemetery compound, before he found the right one. But it was just where Moncada had said. He eased the brick from its niche, slipped one glassine bag behind it, and replaced the brick.

His second drop was in another old and crumbling wall, this time near the ruined citadel in Aadhamiya, where a stagnant pond is all that remains of the ancient moat. Not far from the citadel is the Imam Aladham shrine, and between them a wall, as old and crumbled as the citadel itself. Martin found the wall and the single tree growing against it. He reached behind the tree and counted ten rows of bricks down from the top. The tenth brick down rocked like an old tooth. The second envelope went behind it, and the brick went back. Martin checked to see if anyone was watching, but he was completely alone; no one would want to come to this deserted place after dark.

The third and last drop was in another cemetery, but this time the British one, long abandoned, in Waziraya, near the Turkish embassy.

As in Kuwait, it was a grave, but not a scrape beneath the marble of the tomb; rather, it was the inside of a small stone jar cemented where the headstone would be, at one end of a long-abandoned plot.

“Never mind,” murmured Martin to whatever long-dead warrior of the empire lay beneath. “Just carry on, you’re doing fine.”

Because Moncada had been based at the United Nations building, miles down the Matar Sadam Airport road, he had wisely made his chalk-mark sites closer to the wider-spaced roads of Mansour, where they could be seen from a passing car. The rule was that whoever—Moncada or Jericho—saw a chalk mark, he should note which drop it referred to, then erase it with a damp cloth. The placer of the mark, passing a day or so later, would see that it was gone and know his message had been received and (presumably) the drop visited and the package retrieved.

In this way both agents had communicated with each other for two years and never met.

Martin, unlike Moncada, had no car, so he cycled the whole distance.

His first mark, a Saint Andrew’s cross in the figure of an X, was made with blue chalk on a stone post of the gate of an abandoned mansion.

The second was in white chalk, on the rusty-red sheet-iron door of a garage at the back of a house in Yarmuk. It took the form of a cross of Lorraine. The third was in red chalk—a crescent of Islam with a horizontal bar through the middle—placed on the wall of the compound building of the Union of Arab Journalists, on the edge of

Mutanabi district. Iraqi journalists are not encouraged to be a very investigative crowd, and a chalk mark on their wall would hardly make headlines.

Martin could not know whether Jericho, despite Moncada’s warning that he could return, was still patrolling the city, peering from his car window to see if marks had been placed on walls. All Martin could now do was check daily and wait.

It was the seventh of November when he noticed that the white chalk mark was gone. Had the garage door owner decided to clean up his sheet of rusty metal of his own accord?

Martin cycled on. The blue chalk on the mansion gatepost was missing; so was the red mark on the journalists’ wall.

That night, he serviced the three dead-letter boxes dedicated to messages from Jericho to his controller.

One was behind a loose brick in the rear of the wall enclosing the Kasra vegetable market off Saadun Street. There was a folded sheet of onionskin paper for him. The second drop, under the loose stone windowsill of a derelict house up an alley in that maze of tacky streets that make up the soukh on the north bank of the river near Shuhada Bridge, yielded the same offering. The third and last, under the loose flagstone of an abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, gave up a third square of thin paper.

Martin hid them under sticky tape around his left thigh and pedaled home to Mansour.

By the light of a flickering candle, he read them all. The message was the same: Jericho was alive and well. He was prepared to work again for the West, and he understood that the British and Americans were now the recipients of his information. But the risks had now increased immeasurably, and so would his fees. He awaited agreement to this and an indication of what was wanted.

Martin burned all three messages and crushed the ashes to powder. He already knew the answer to both queries. Langley was prepared to be generous, really generous, if the product was good. As for the information needed, Martin had memorized a list of questions concerning Saddam’s mood, his concept of strategy, and the locations of major command centers and sites of manufacture for weapons of mass destruction.

Just before dawn, he let Riyadh know that Jericho was back in the game.

It was on November 10 that Dr. Terry Martin returned to his small and cluttered office in the School of Oriental and African Studies to find a scrap of paper from his secretary placed foursquare on his blotter:

“A Mr. Plummer called; said you had his number and would know what it was about.”

The abruptness of the text indicated that Miss Wordsworth was miffed.

She was a lady who liked to protect her academic charges with the possessive wraparound security of a mother hen. Clearly, this meant knowing what was going on at all times. Callers who declined to tell her why they were phoning or what the matter concerned did not meet with her approval.

With the autumn term in full swing and a whole cast of new students to cope with, Terry Martin had almost forgotten his request to the Director of the Arabic Services at Government Communications Headquarters.

When Martin called, Plummer was out at lunch; then afternoon lectures kept him busy until four. His connection with Gloucestershire found its target just before he went home at five.

“Ah, yes,” said Plummer. “You recall you asked for anything odd, anything that did not make sense? We picked up something yesterday at our outstation in Cyprus that seems to be a bit of a stinker. You can listen to it, if you like.”

“Here in London?” asked Martin.

“Ah, no, afraid not. It’s on tape here, of course, but frankly you’d need to hear it on the big machine, with all the enhancement we can get. A simple tape player wouldn’t have the quality. It’s rather muffled; that’s why even my Arab staff can’t work it out.”

The rest of the week was fully booked for both of them. Martin agreed to drive over on Sunday, and Plummer offered to stand him lunch at a

“quite decent little pub about a mile from the office.”

The two men in tweed jackets caused no raised eyebrows in the beamed hostelry, and each ordered the Sunday-roast dish of the day, beef and Yorkshire pudding.

“We don’t know who is talking to whom,” said Plummer, “but clearly they are pretty senior men. For some reason the caller is using an open telephone line and appears to have returned from a visit to forward headquarters in Kuwait. Perhaps he was using his car phone; we know it wasn’t on a military net, so probably the person being spoken to was not a military man. Senior bureaucrat, perhaps.”

The beef arrived, and they ceased talking while it was served with roast potatoes and parsnips. When the waitress left their corner booth, Plummer went on.

“The caller seems to be commenting on Iraqi Air Force reports that the Americans and Brits are flying an increasing number of aggressive fighter patrols right up to the Iraqi border, then veering away at the last minute.”

Martin nodded. He had heard of the tactic. It was designed to monitor Iraqi air-defense reactions to such seeming attacks on their air space, forcing them to “illuminate” their radar screens and SAM missile sights, thus revealing their exact positions to the watching AWACS

circling out over the Gulf.

“The speaker refers to the Beni el Kalb, ‘the sons of dogs,’ meaning the Americans, and the listener laughs and suggests Iraq is wrong to respond to these tactics, which are evidently meant to trap them into revealing their defensive positions.

“Then the speaker says something that we can’t work out. There’s some garbling at this point, static or something. We can enhance most of the message to clear the interference, but the speaker muffles his words at this point.

“Anyway, the listener gets very annoyed and tells him to shut up and get off the line. Indeed, the listener—who we believe to be in Baghdad—slams the phone down. It’s the last two sentences I’d like you to hear.”

After lunch, Plummer drove Martin over to the monitoring complex, which was still functioning precisely as on a weekday. GCHQ operates on a seven-days-per-week schedule. In a soundproofed room rather like a recording studio, Plummer asked one of the technicians to play the mystery tape. He and Martin sat in silence as the guttural voices from Iraq filled the room.

The conversation began as Plummer had described. Toward the end, the Iraqi who had initiated the call appeared to become excited. The voice pitch rose.

“Not for long, Rafeek. Soon we shall ...”

Then the clutter began, and the words were garbled. But their effect on the man in Baghdad was electric. He cut in.

“Be silent, ibn-al-gahba.”

Then he slammed the phone down, as if suddenly and horribly aware that the line was not secure.

The technician played the tape three times and at slightly different speeds.

“What do you think?” asked Plummer.

“Well, they’re both members of the Party,” said Martin. “Only Party hierarchs use the address Rafeek, or Comrade.”

“Right, so we have two bigwigs chatting about the American arms buildup and the U.S. Air Force provocations against the border.”

“Then the speaker gets excited, probably angry, with a hint of exultation. Uses the phrase ‘not for long.’ ”

“Indicating some changes are going to be made?” asked Plummer.

“Sounds like it,” said Martin.

“Then the garbled bit. But look at the listener’s reaction, Terry. He not only slams the phone down, he calls his colleague ‘son of a whore.’

That’s pretty strong stuff, eh?”

“Very strong. Only the senior man of the two could use that phrase and get away with it,” said Martin. “What the hell provoked it?”

“It’s the garbled phrase. Listen again.”

The technician played the single phrase again.

“Something about Allah?” suggested Plummer. “ ‘Soon we shall be with Allah? Be in the hands of Allah?’ ”

“It sounds to me like: ‘Soon we shall have ... something ... something

... Allah.’

“All right, Terry. I’ll go along with that. ‘Have the help of Allah,’

perhaps?”

“Then why would the other man explode in rage?” asked Martin.

“Attributing the goodwill of the Almighty to one’s own cause is nothing new. Nor particularly offensive. I don’t know. Can you let me have a duplicate tape to take home with me?”

“Sure.”

“Have you asked our American cousins about it?”

“Of course. Fort Meade caught the same conversation, off a satellite.

They can’t work it out, either. In fact, they don’t rate it highly. For them it’s on the back burner.”

Terry Martin drove home with the small cassette tape in his pocket. To Hilary’s considerable annoyance, he insisted on playing and replaying the brief conversation over and over again on their bedside cassette player. When he protested, Terry pointed out that Hilary sometimes worried and worried over a single missing answer in the Times crossword puzzle. Hilary was outraged at the comparison.

“At least I get the answer the following morning,” he snapped, and rolled over and went to sleep.

Terry Martin did not get the answer the following morning, or the next. He played his tape during breaks between lectures, and at other times when he had a few spare moments, jotting down possible alternatives for the jumbled words. But always the sense eluded him.

Why had the other man in that conversation been so angry about a harmless reference to Allah?

It was not until five days later that the two gutturals and the sibilant contained in the garbled phrase made sense.

When they did, he tried to get hold of Simon Paxman at Century House, but he was told his contact was away until further notice. He asked to be put through to Steve Laing, but the head of Ops for the Mid-East was also not available.

Though he could not know it, Paxman was on an extended stay at the SIS headquarters in Riyadh, and Laing was visiting the same city for a major conference with Chip Barber of the CIA.

The man they called the “spotter” flew into Vienna from Tel Aviv via London and Frankfurt, was met by no one, and took a taxi from Schwechat Airport to the Sheraton Hotel, where he had a reservation.

The spotter was rubicund and jovial, an all-American lawyer from New York with documents to prove it. His American-accented English was flawless—not surprising, as he had spent years in the United States—and his German passable.

Within hours of arriving in Vienna, he had employed the secretarial services of the Sheraton to compose and draft a courteous letter on his law firm’s letterhead to a certain Wolfgang Gemütlich, vice-president of the Winkler Bank.

The stationery was perfectly genuine, and should a phone check be made, the signatory really was a senior partner at that most prestigious New York law firm, although he was away on vacation (something the Mossad had checked out in New York) and was certainly not the same man as the visitor to Vienna.

The letter was both apologetic and intriguing, as it was meant to be.

The writer represented a client of great wealth and standing who now wished to make substantial lodgements of his fortune in Europe.

It was the client who had personally insisted, apparently after hearing from a friend, that the Winkler Bank be approached in the matter, and specifically the person of the good Herr Gemütlich.

The writer would have made a prior appointment, but both his client and the law firm placed immense importance upon utter discretion, avoiding open phone lines and faxes to discuss client business, so the writer had taken advantage of a European visit to divert to Vienna personally.

His schedule, alas, only permitted him three days in Vienna, but if Herr Gemütlich would be gracious enough to spare him an interview, he—the American—would be delighted to come to the bank.

The letter was dropped by the American personally through the bank’s mail slot during the night, and by noon of the next day, the bank’s messenger had deposited the reply at the Sheraton. Herr Gemütlich would be delighted to see the American lawyer at ten the following morning.

From the moment the spotter was shown in, his eyes missed nothing.

He took no notes, but no detail escaped and none were forgotten. The receptionist checked his credentials, phoned upstairs to confirm he was expected, and the commissionaire took him up—all the way to the austere wooden door, upon which he knocked. Never was the spotter out of sight.

Upon the command “Herein,” the commissionaire opened the door and ushered the American visitor in, withdrawing and closing it behind him before returning to his desk in the lobby.

Herr Wolfgang Gemütlich rose from his desk, shook hands, gestured his guest to a chair opposite him, and resumed his place behind his desk.

The word Gemütlich in German means “comfortable,” with a hint of geniality. Never was a man less aptly named. This Gemütlich was thin to the point of cadaverous, in his early sixties, gray-suited, gray-tied, with thinning hair and face to match. He exuded grayness. There was not a hint of humor in the pale eyes, and the welcoming smile of the papery lips was less a grin than the rictus of something on a slab.

The office conveyed the same austerity as its occupier; dark paneled walls, framed degrees in banking in place of pictures, and a large ornate desk, whose surface was bare of any hint of clutter.

Wolfgang Gemütlich was not a banker for fun; clearly, all forms of fun were something of which he disapproved. Banking was serious—more, it was life itself. If there was one thing that Herr Gemütlich seriously deplored, it was the spending of money. Money was for saving, preferably under the aegis of the Winkler Bank. A withdrawal could cause him serious acidic pain, and a major transfer from a Winkler account to somewhere else would ruin his entire week.

The spotter knew he was there to note and report back. His primary task, now accomplished, was to identify the person of Gemütlich for the yarid team out in the street. He was also looking for any safe that might contain the operational details of the Jericho account, as well as security locks, door bolts, alarm systems—in short, he was there to case the joint for an eventual burglary.

Avoiding specifics of the amounts his client wished to transfer to Europe but hinting at their immense size, the spotter kept the conversation to inquiring as to the level of security and discretion maintained by the Winkler Bank. Herr Gemütlich was happy to explain that numbered accounts with Winkler were impregnable and discretion was obsessive.

Only once during the conversation were they interrupted. A side door opened to admit a mouse of a woman, bearing three letters for signature. Gemütlich frowned at the nuisance.

“You did say they were important, Herr Gemütlich. Otherwise ...” said the woman. At second glance, she was not as old as her appearance would have indicated—perhaps forty. It was the scraped-back hair, the bun, the tweed suit, the lisle stockings, and flat shoes that suggested more.

“Ja, ja, ja ...” said Gemütlich, and held out his hand for the letters.

“Entschuldigung ...,” he asked his guest.

He and the spotter had been using German, after establishing that Gemütlich spoke only halting English. The spotter, however, got to his feet and bobbed a small bow at the newcomer.

“Grüss Gott, Fräulein,” he said. She looked flustered. Gemütlich’s guests did not usually rise for a secretary. However, the gesture forced Gemütlich to clear his throat and mutter:

“Ah, yes, er—my private secretary, Miss Hardenberg.”

The spotter noted that, too, as he sat down.

When he was shown out, with assurances that he would offer his client in New York a most favorable account of the Winkler Bank, the regimen was the same as for entry. The commissionaire was summoned from the front hall and appeared at the door. The spotter made his farewells and followed the man out.

Together they went to the small, grille-fronted elevator, which clanked its way downward. The spotter asked if he might use the men’s room before he left. The commissionaire frowned as if such bodily functions were not really expected within the Winkler Bank, but he stopped the elevator at the mezzanine. Close to the elevator doors, he indicated to the spotter an unmarked wooden door, and the spotter went in.

It was clearly for the bank’s male employees: a single stall, a single booth, a handbasin and towel roll, and a closet. The spotter ran the taps to create noise and did a quick check of the room. A barred, sealed window, run through with the wires of an alarm system—possible, but not easy. Ventilation by automatic fan. The closet contained brooms, pans, cleaning fluids, and a vacuum cleaner. So they did have a cleaning staff. But when did they work? Nights or weekends? If his own experience was anything to go by, even the cleaner would work inside the private offices only under supervision. Clearly, the commissionaire or the nightwatch could easily be taken care of, but that was not the point. Kobi Dror’s orders had been specific: No clues to be left behind.

When he emerged from the men’s room, the commissionaire was still outside. Seeing that the broad marble steps to the lobby half a floor down were farther along the corridor, the spotter smiled, gestured to it, and strode along the corridor rather than take the elevator for such a short ride.

The commissionaire trotted after him, escorted him down to the lobby, and ushered him out of the door. The spotter heard the big brass tongue of the self-locking mechanism close behind him. If the commissionaire were upstairs, he wondered, how would the female receptionist admit a client or messenger boy?

He spent two hours briefing Gidi Barzilai on the internal workings of the bank, so far as he had been able to observe them, and the report was gloomy. The head of the neviot team sat in, shaking his head.

They could break in, he said. No problem. Find the alarm system and neutralize it. But as for leaving no trace—that would be a bastard.

There was a nightwatchman who probably prowled at intervals. And then, what would they be looking for? A safe? Where? What type?

How old? Key or combination or both? It would take hours. And they would have to silence the nightwatch. That would leave a trace. But Dror had forbidden it.

The spotter flew out of Vienna and back to Tel Aviv the next day. That afternoon, from a series of photographs, he identified Wolfgang Gemütlich and, for good measure, Fräulein Hardenberg. When he had gone, Barzilai and the neviot team leader conferred again.

“Frankly, I need more inside information, Gidi. There’s too much I don’t know still. The papers you need—he must keep them in a safe.

Where? Behind the paneling? A floor safe? In the secretary’s office?

In a special vault in the basement? We need inside information here.”

Barzilai grunted. Long ago, in training, one of the instructors had told them all: There is no such thing as a man with no weak point. Find that point, press the nerve, and he’ll cooperate. The following morning the whole yarid and neviot teams began an intensive surveillance of Wolfgang Gemütlich.

But the acidulous Viennese was about to prove the instructor wrong.

Steve Laing and Chip Barber had a major problem. By mid-November, Jericho had come up with his first response to the questions put to him via a dead-letter box in Baghdad. His price had been high, but the American government had made the transfer into the Viennese account without a murmur.

If Jericho’s information was accurate—and there was no reason to suspect it was not—then it was extremely useful. He had not answered all the questions, but he had answered some and confirmed others already half-answered.

Principally, he had named quite specifically seventeen locations linked to the production of weapons of mass destruction. Eight of these were locations already suspected by the Allies; of these, he had corrected the locations of two. The other nine were new information, chief among them the exact spot of the buried laboratory in which operated the functioning gas-diffusion centrifuge cascade for the preparation of bomb-grade uranium-235.

The problem was: How to tell the military, without blowing away the fact that Langley and Century had a high-ranking asset who was betraying Baghdad from the inside?

Not that the spymasters distrusted the military. Far from it, they were senior officers for a reason. But in the covert world there is an old and well-tested rule called “need to know.” A man who does not know something cannot let it slip, however inadvertently. If the men in civilian clothes simply produced a list of fresh targets out of nowhere, how many generals, brigadiers, and colonels would work out where it had come from?

In the third week of the month, Barber and Laing had a private meeting in the basement of the Saudi Defense Ministry, with General Buster Glosson, deputy to General Chuck Horner, who commanded the air war in the Gulf Theater.

Though he must have had a first name, no one ever referred to General Glosson as anything other than “Buster,” and it was he who had planned and continued to plan the eventual comprehensive air attack on Iraq that everyone knew would have to precede any ground invasion.

London and Washington had long since concurred in the view that, regardless of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s war machine simply had to be destroyed, and that very much included the manufacturing capabilities for gas, germs, and nuclear bombs.

Before Desert Shield had finally destroyed any chance of a successful Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia, the plans for the eventual air war were well under way, under the secret code name of Instant Thunder. The true architect of that air war was Buster Glosson.

By November 16, the United Nations and various diplomatic chancelleries around the world were still scratching around for a

“peace plan” to end the crisis without a shot being fired, a bomb dropped, or a rocket launched. The three men in the subterranean room that day all knew that such a call-it-all-off plan was just not going to happen.

Barber was concise and to the point: “As you know, Buster, we and the Brits have been trying to get hard identification of Saddam’s WMD

facilities for months now.” The Air Force general nodded warily. He had a map along the corridor with more pins than a porcupine, and each one was a separate bombing target. What now?

“So we started with the export licenses and traced the exporting countries, then the companies in those countries that had fulfilled the contracts. Then the scientists who fitted out the interiors of these facilities, but many of them were taken to the sites in black-windowed buses, lived on base, and never really knew where they had been.

“Finally, Buster, we checked with the construction people, the ones who actually built most of Saddam’s poison gas palaces. And some of them have come up roses. Real paydirt.”

Barber passed the new list of targets across to the general. Glosson studied them with interest. They were not identified with map grid references, such as a bomb-campaign plotter would need, but the descriptions would be enough to identify them from the air photos already available.

Glosson grunted. He knew some of the listings were already targets; others, with question marks, were now being confirmed; others were new. He raised his eyes.

“This is for real?”

“Absolutely,” said the Englishman. “We are convinced that the construction people are a good source, maybe the best yet, because they are hard-hats who knew what they were doing when they built these places, and they talk freely,, more so than the bureaucrats.”

Glosson rose.

“Okay. You going to have any more for me?”

“We’ll just keep digging up there in Europe, Buster,” said Barber. “We get any more hard-fact targets, we’ll pass them on. They’ve buried a hell of a lot of stuff, you know. Deep under the desert. We’re talking major construction projects.”

“You tell me where they’ve put ’em, and we’ll blow the roof down on them,” said the general.

Later, Glosson took the list to Chuck Horner. The USAF chief was shorter than Glosson, a gloomy-looking, crumpled man with a bloodhound face and all the diplomatic subtlety of a rhino with piles.

But he adored his aircrew and ground crew, and they responded in kind.

It was known that he would fight on their behalf against the contractors, the bureaucrats, and the politicians right up to the White House if he thought he had to, and never once moderate his language.

What you saw was what you got.

Visiting the Gulf States of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, where some of his crews were posted, he avoided the fleshpots of the Sheratons and Hiltons where the good life flowed (literally) in order to chow with the flight crews down at the base and sleep in a cot in the bunkhouse.

Servicemen and women have no appetite for dissembling; they know quickly what they like and what they despise. The USAF pilots would have flown string-and-wire biplanes against Iraq for Chuck Horner.

Horner studied the list from the covert intelligence people and grunted.

Two of the sites showed up on the maps as bare desert.

“Where did they get this from?” he asked Glosson.

“Interviewing the construction teams who built them, so they say,”

said Glosson.

“Bullshit,” said General Horner. “Those cocksuckers have got themselves someone in Baghdad. Buster, we don’t say anything about this—to anyone. Just take their goodies and rack ’em up on the hit list.” He paused and thought, then added, “Wonder who the bastard is.”

Steve Laing made it home to London on the eighteenth, a London in frenzied turmoil over the crisis gripping the Conservative government as a back-bench Member of Parliament sought to use the party rules to topple Margaret Thatcher from the premiership.

Despite his tiredness, Laing took the message on his desk from Terry Martin and called him at the school. Because of Martin’s excitement, Laing agreed to see him for a brief drink after work, delaying Laing’s return to his home in the outer suburbs by as little as possible.

When they were settled at a corner table in a quiet bar in the West End, Martin produced from his attaché case a cassette player and a tape.

Showing them to Laing, he explained his request weeks ago to Sean Plummer, and their meeting the previous weekend.

“Shall I play it for you?” he asked.

“Well, if the chaps at GCHQ can’t understand it, I know damned well I can’t,” said Laing. “Look, Sean Plummer’s got Arabs like Al-Khouri on his staff. If they can’t work it out ...”

Still, he listened politely.

“Hear it?” asked Martin excitedly. “The ‘k’ sound after have? The man’s not invoking the help of Allah in Iraq’s cause. He’s using a title.

That’s what got the other man so angry. Clearly, no one is supposed to use that title openly. It must be confined to a very tiny circle of people.”

“But what does he actually say?” asked Laing in complete bewilderment.

Martin looked at him blankly. Didn’t Laing understand anything?

“He is saying that the vast American buildup doesn’t matter, because

‘soon we shall have Qubth-ut-Allah.’ ”

Laing still looked perplexed.

“A weapon,” urged Martin. “It must be. Something to be available soon that will hold the Americans.”

“Forgive my poor Arabic,” said Laing, “but what is Qubth-ut-Allah?”

“Oh,” said Martin. “It means ‘.’ ”

Chapter 12

After eleven years in power and having won three general elections, the British Prime Minister actually fell on November 20, although she did not announce her decision to resign until two days later.

Her fall from power was triggered by an obscure rule in the Conservative Party constitution requiring her nominal reelection as Party leader at periodic intervals. Such an interval occurred that November. Her reelection should have been just a formality, until an out-of-office former minister chose to run against her. Unaware of her danger, she hardly took the challenge seriously, conducting a lackluster campaign and actually attending a conference in Paris on the day of the vote.

Behind her back a range of old resentments, affronted egos, and nervous fears that she might even lose the forthcoming general election coalesced into an alliance against her, preventing her from being swept back into the Party leadership on the first ballot.

Had she been so returned, there would have been no second ballot, and the challenger would have disappeared into obscurity. In the ballot of November 20 she needed a two-thirds majority; she was just four votes short, forcing a runoff second ballot.

Within hours, what had started as a few dislodged stones tumbling down a hill became a landslide. After consulting her Cabinet, who told her she would now lose, she resigned. To head off the challenger, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major, ran for the top job and won.

The news stunned the soldiers in the Gulf, American and British alike.

Down in Oman, American fighter pilots who were now consorting daily with SAS men from the nearby base asked the British what was going on and received helpless shrugs in return.

Mike Martin heard the news when the Iraqi chauffeur swaggered over and told him. Martin contemplated the news, looked blank, and asked:

“Who is she?”

“Fool,” snapped the chauffeur. “The leader of the Beni Naji. Now we will win.”

He went back to his car to resume listening to Baghdad radio. In a few moments First Secretary Kulikov hurried from the house and was driven straight back to his embassy.

That night, Martin sent a long transmission to Riyadh, containing the latest batch of answers from Jericho and an added request from himself for further instructions. Crouched by the doorway of his shack to ward off any intruders, for the satellite dish was positioned in the doorway facing south, Martin waited for his reply. A low, pulsing light on the console of the small transceiver told him at half past one in the morning that he had his reply.

He dismantled the dish, stored it back beneath the floor with the batteries and transceiver, slowed down the message, and listened to it play back.

There was a fresh list of demands for information from Jericho and an agreement to the agent’s last demand for money, which had now been transferred into his account. In under a month the renegade on the Revolutionary Command Council had earned over a million dollars.

Added to the list were two further instructions for Martin. The first was to send Jericho a message, not in the form of a question, that it was hoped he could somehow filter into the thinking of the planners in Baghdad. It was to the effect that the news from London probably meant that the Coalition action to recover Kuwait would be called off if the Rais stood firm.

Whether this disinformation reached the highest councils of Baghdad will never be known, but within a week Saddam Hussein had claimed that the toppling of Thatcher was due to the revulsion of the British people at her opposition to him.

The final instruction on Mike Martin’s tape that night was to ask Jericho if he had ever heard of a weapon or weapon system referred to as .

By the light of a candle, Martin spent most of the rest of the night writing the questions in Arabic onto two sheets of thin airmail paper.

Within twenty hours, the papers had been secreted behind the loose brick in the wall close to the Imam Aladham shrine in Aadhamiya.

It took a week for the answers to come back. Martin read the spidery Arabic script of Jericho’s handwriting and translated everything into English. From a soldier’s point of view, it was interesting.

The three Republican Guard divisions facing the British and Americans along the border, the Tawakkulna and Medina, now joined by the Hammurabi, were equipped with a mix of T-54/55, T-62, and T-72 main battle tanks, all three Russian.

But on a recent tour, Jericho continued, General Abdullah Kadiri of the Armored Corps had discovered to his horror that most of the crews had removed their batteries and used them to power fans, cookers, radios, and cassette players. It was doubtful if, in combat conditions, any of them would now start. There had been several executions on the spot, and two senior commanders had been relieved and sent home.

Saddam’s half-brother, Ali Hassan Majid, now Governor-General of Kuwait, had reported that the occupation was becoming a nightmare, with attacks on Iraqi soldiers still unquenchable and desertions rising.

The resistance showed no signs of abating, despite vigorous interrogations and numerous executions by Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM and two personal visits by his boss, Omar Khatib.

Worse, the resistance had now somehow acquired the plastic explosive called Semtex, which is much more powerful than industrial dynamite.

Jericho had identified two more major military command posts, both constructed in subterranean caverns and invisible from the air.

The thinking in the immediate circle around Saddam Hussein was definitely that a seminal contribution to the fall of Margaret Thatcher had been his own influence. He had twice reiterated his absolute refusal even to consider pulling out of Kuwait.

Finally, Jericho had never heard of anything code-named but would listen for such a phrase. Personally, he doubted there existed any weapon or weapon system unknown to the Allies.

Martin read the entire message onto tape, speeded it up, and transmitted it. In Riyadh it was seized upon avidly and the radio technicians logged its time of arrival: 2355 hours, November 30, 1990.

Leila Al-Hilla came out of the bathroom slowly, pausing in the doorway with the light behind her to raise her arms to the doorframe on each side and pose for a moment.

The bathroom light, shining through the negligee, showed off her ripe and voluptuous silhouette to full advantage. It should; it was black, of the sheerest lace, and had cost a small fortune, a Paris import acquired from a boutique in Beirut.

The big man on the bed stared hungrily, ran a furred tongue along a thick lower lip, and grinned.

Leila liked to dawdle in the bathroom before a session of sex. There were places to be washed and anointed, eyes to be accentuated with mascara, lips to be etched in red, and perfumes to be applied, different aromas for different parts of her body.

It was a good body at thirty summers, the sort clients liked: not fat, but well-curved where it ought to be, full-hipped and breasted, with muscle beneath the curves.

She lowered her arms and advanced toward the dim-lit bed, swinging her hips, the high-heeled shoes adding four inches to her height and exaggerating the hip-swing.

But the man on the bed, on his back and naked, covered like a bear in black fur from chin to ankles, had closed his eyes.

Don’t go to sleep on me now, you oaf, she thought, not tonight when I need you. Leila sat on the side of the bed and ran sharp red fingernails up through the hair of the belly to the chest, tweaked each nipple hard, then ran her hand back again, beyond the stomach to the groin.

She leaned forward and kissed the man on the lips, her tongue prying an opening. But the man’s lips responded halfheartedly, and she caught the strong odor of arak.

Drunk again, she thought—why can’t the fool stay off the stuff. Still, it had its advantages, that bottle of arak every evening. Oh well, to work.

Leila Al-Hilla was a good courtesan, and she knew it. The best in the Middle East, some said, and certainly among the most expensive.

She had trained years ago, as a child, in a very private academy in Lebanon where the sexual wiles and tricks of the ouled-nails of Morocco, of the nautch girls of India, and the subtle technocrats of Fukutomi-cho were practiced by the older girls while the children watched and learned.

After fifteen years as a professional on her own, she knew that ninety percent of the skill of a good whore had nothing to do with the problem of coping with insatiable virility. That was for porn magazines and films.

Her talent was to flatter, compliment, praise, and indulge, but mainly to elicit a real male erection out of an endless succession of jaded appetites and faded powers.

She ran her probing hand out of the groin and felt the man’s penis.

Sighed inwardly. Soft as a marshmallow. General Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the Armored Corps of the Army of the Republic of Iraq, was going to need a little encouraging this evening.

From beneath the bed where she had secreted it earlier, she took a soft cloth bag and tipped its contents onto the sheet beside her.

Smearing her fingers with a thick, creamy jelly, she lubricated a medium-size dildo-vibrator, lifted one of the general’s thighs, and slipped it expertly into his anus.

General Kadiri grunted, opened his eyes, glanced down at the naked woman crouching beside his genitals, and grinned again, the teeth flashing beneath the thick black moustache.

Leila pressed the disk on the base of the vibrator, and the insistent pulsing throb began to fill the general’s lower body. Beneath her hand the woman felt the limp organ begin to swell.

From a flask with a tube sticking through the seal she half-filled her mouth with a swig of tasteless, odorless petroleum jelly, then leaned forward and took the man’s stirring penis into her mouth.

The combination of the oily smoothness of the jelly and rapid probing of her skillful pointed tongue began to have an effect. For ten minutes, until her jaw ached, she caressed and sucked until the general’s erection was as good as it was ever going to be.

Before he could lose it, she lifted her head, swung an ample thigh across him, inserted him into her, and settled across his hips. She had felt bigger and better ones, but it was working—just.

Leila leaned forward and swung her breasts over his face.

“Ah, my big strong black bear,” she cooed, “you are superb, as ever.”

He smiled up at her. She began to rise and settle, not too fast, rising until the helmet was just still between the labia, settling slowly until she had enveloped everything he had. As she moved, she used developed and practiced vaginal muscles to grip and squeeze, relax, grip and squeeze.

She knew the effect of the double incitement. General Kadiri began to grunt and then shout, short harsh cries forced out of him by the sensation of the deep pulsing throb in his sphincter area and the woman rising and falling on his shaft with steadily increasing rhythm.

“Yes, yes, oh yes, this is so good, keep going, darling,” she panted into his face until finally he had his orgasm. While he climaxed into her hips, Leila straightened her torso, towering over him, jerking in spasm, screaming with pleasure, faking her own tremendous climax.

When he was spent, he deflated at once and in seconds she had removed herself and his dildo, tossing it to one side lest he fall asleep too soon. That was the last thing she wanted after all her hard work.

There was yet more work to do.

So she lay beside him and drew the sheet over them both, propping herself on one elbow, letting her bosom press against the side of his face, smoothing his hair and stroking his cheek with her free right hand.

“Poor bear,” she murmured. “Are you very tired? You work too hard, my magnificent lover. They work you too hard. What was it today, eh?

More problems on the Council, and always you who has to solve them? Mmmmmm? Tell Leila, you know you can tell little Leila.”

So before he slept, he did.

Later, when General Kadiri was snoring away the effects of arak and sex, Leila retired to the bathroom where, with the door locked and seated on the toilet with a tray across her lap, she noted everything down in a neat, crabbed Arabic script.

Later still, in the morning, the sheets of flimsy paper rolled into a hollowed-out tampon to avoid the security checks, she would hand it over to the man who paid her.

It was dangerous, she knew, but it was lucrative, double earnings for the same job, and one day she intended to be rich—rich enough to leave Iraq forever and set up her own academy, perhaps in Tangier, with a string of nice girls to sleep with and Moroccan houseboys to whip whenever she felt the need.

If Gidi Barzilai had been frustrated by the security procedures of the Winkler Bank, two weeks of trailing Wolfgang Gemütlich were driving him to distraction. The man was impossible.

After the spotter’s identification, Gemütlich had quickly been followed to his house out beyond the Prater Park. The next day, while he was at work, the yarid team had watched the house until Frau Gemütlich left to go shopping. The girl member of the team went after her, staying in touch with her colleagues by personal radio so that she could warn them of the lady’s return. In fact, the banker’s wife was away for two hours—more than ample time.

The break-in by the neviot experts was no problem, and bugs were quickly planted in sitting room, bedroom, and telephone. The search—quick, skilled, and leaving no trace—yielded nothing. There were the usual papers: deeds to the house, passports, birth certificates, marriage license, even a series of bank statements. Everything was photographed, but a glance at the private bank account revealed no evidence of embezzlement from the Winkler Bank—there was even a horrible chance that the man would turn out to be completely honest.

The wardrobe and bedroom drawers revealed no sign of bizarre personal habits—always a good blackmail lever among the respectable middle classes—and indeed the neviot team leader, having watched Frau Gemütlich leave the house, was not surprised.

If the man’s personal secretary was a mousy little thing, his wife was like a scrap of discarded paper. The Israeli thought he had seldom seen such a downcast little shrimp.

By the time the yarid girl came on the radio with a muttered warning that the banker’s wife was heading home, the neviot break-in experts were finished and out. The front door was relocked by the man in the telephone company uniform after the rest had scuttled out the back and through the garden.

From then on, the neviot team would man the tape recorders in the van down the street to listen to the goings-on inside the house.

Two weeks later a despairing team leader told Barzilai they had hardly filled one tape. On the first evening they had recorded eighteen words.

She had said: “Here’s your dinner, Wolfgang”—no reply. She had asked for new curtains—refused. He had said, “Early day tomorrow, I’m off to bed.”

“He says it every bloody night, it’s like he’s been saying it for thirty years,” complained the neviot man.

“Any sex?” asked Barzilai.

“You must be joking, Gidi. They don’t even talk, let alone screw.”

All other leads to a flaw in the character of Wolfgang Gemütlich came up zero. There was no gambling, no small boys, no socializing, no nightclubbing, no mistress, no scuttling through the red-light district.

On one occasion he left the house, and the spirits of the trailing team rose. Gemütlich was in a dark coat and hat, on foot, after dark and after supper, moving through the darkened suburb until he came to a private house five blocks away.

He knocked and waited. The door opened, he was admitted, and it closed. Soon a ground-floor light came on, behind heavy drapes.

Before the door closed, one of the Israeli watchers caught a glimpse of a grim-looking woman in a white nylon tunic.

Aesthetic baths, perhaps? Assisted showers, mixed sauna with two hefty wenches to handle the birch twigs? A check the next morning revealed that the woman in the tunic was an elderly chiropodist who ran a small practice from her own home. Wolfgang Gemütlich had been having his corns trimmed.

On the first of December, Gidi Barzilai received a rocket from Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. This was not an operation without a limit of time, he was warned. The United Nations had given Iraq till January 16 to get out of Kuwait. After that, there would be war. Anything might happen.

Get on with it.

“Gidi, we can follow this bastard till hell freezes over,” the two team leaders told their controller. “There’s just no dirt in his life. I don’t understand the bastard. Nothing—he does nothing we can use on him.”

Barzilai was in a dilemma. They could kidnap the wife and threaten the husband that he had better cooperate or else. ... Trouble was, the sleaze would trade her in rather than steal a luncheon voucher. Worse, he would call the cops.

They could kidnap Gemütlich and work him over. The trouble there was, the man would have to go back to the bank to make the transfer to close down the Jericho account. Once inside the bank, he’d yell blue murder. Kobi Dror had said, no miss and no traces.

“Let’s switch to the secretary,” Barzilai said. “Confidential secretaries often know everything their boss knows.”

So the two teams switched their attentions to the equally dull-looking Fräulein Edith Hardenberg.

She took even less time, just ten days. They tailed her to her home, a small apartment in a staid old house just off Trautenauplatz far out in the Nineteenth District, the northwestern suburb of Grinzing.

She lived alone. No lover, no boyfriend, not even a pet. A search of her private papers revealed a modest bank account, a mother in retirement in Salzburg. The apartment itself had once been rented by the mother, as the rent book showed, but the daughter had moved in seven years earlier when the mother returned to her native Salzburg.

Edith drove a small Seat car, which she parked on the street outside the flat, but she mainly commuted to work by public transportation, no doubt due to the parking difficulties in the city center.

Her pay stubs revealed a stingy salary—“mean bastards,” exploded the neviot searcher when he saw the sum—and her birth certificate revealed she was thirty-nine—“and looking fifty,” remarked the searcher.

There were no pictures of men in the flat, just one of her mother, one of them both on vacation by some lake, and one of her apparently deceased father in the uniform of the customs service.

If there was any man in her life, it appeared to be Mozart.

“She’s an opera buff, and that’s all,” the neviot team leader reported back to Barzilai, after the flat had been left exactly as they found it.

“There’s a big collection of LP records—she hasn’t gotten around to compact disks yet—and they’re all opera. Must spend most of her spare cash on them. Books on opera, on composers, singers, and conductors. Posters of the Vienna Opera winter calendar, though she couldn’t begin to afford a ticket.”

“No man in her life, eh?” mused Barzilai.

“She might fall for Pavarotti, if you can get him. Apart from that, forget it.”

But Barzilai did not forget it. He recalled a case in London, long ago.

A civil servant in Defence, real spinster type; then the Sovs had produced this stunning young Yugoslav ... even the judge had been sympathetic at her trial.

That evening Barzilai sent a long encrypted cable to Tel Aviv.

By the middle of December, the buildup of the Coalition army south of the Kuwaiti border had become a great, inexorable tidal wave of men and steel.

Three hundred thousand men and women of thirty nations stretched in a series of lines across the Saudi desert from the coast and westward for over a hundred miles.

At the ports of Jubail, Dammam, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and

Dubai the cargo ships came in from the sea to disgorge guns and tanks, fuel and stores, food and bedding, ammunition and spares in endless succession.

From the docks the convoys rolled west along the Tapline Road to establish the vast logistic bases that would one day supply the invading army.

A Tornado pilot from Tabuq, flying south from a feint attack on the Iraqi border, told his squadron colleagues he had flown over the nose of a convoy of trucks and then on to the tail of the line. At five hundred miles per hour, it had taken him six minutes to reach the end of the line of trucks fifty miles away, and they had been rolling nose to tail.

At Logistic Base Alpha one compound had oil drums stacked three high on top of each other, on pallets six feet by six, with lines between them the width of a forklift truck. The compound was forty kilometers by forty.

And that was just for fuel. Other compounds at Log Alpha had shells, rockets, mortars, caissons of machine-gun rounds, armor-piercing antitank warheads, and grenades. Others contained food and water, machinery and spares, tank batteries and mobile workshops.

At that time the Coalition forces were confined by General Schwarzkopf to the portion of desert due south of Kuwait. What Baghdad could not know was that before he attacked, the American general intended to send more forces across the Wadi al Batin and another hundred miles farther west into the desert, to invade Iraq itself, pushing due north and then east to take the Republican Guard in flank and destroy it.

On December 13 the Rocketeers, the 336th Squadron of the USAF

Tactical Air Command, left their base at Thumrait in Oman and transferred to Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia. It was a decision that had been made on December 1.

Al Kharz was a bare-bones airfield, constructed with runways and taxi tracks but nothing else. No control tower, no hangars, no workshops, no accommodations for anyone—just a flat sheet in the desert with strips of concrete.

But it was an airfield. With amazing foresight, the Saudi government had commissioned and built enough air bases to host an air power totaling more than five times the Royal Saudi Air Force.

After December 1 the American construction teams moved in. In just thirty days a tented city capable of housing five thousand people and five fighter squadrons had been built.

Principal among the builders were the heavy engineers, the Red Horse teams, backed by forty huge electric generators from the Air Force.

Some of the equipment came by road on low-loaders, but most by air.

They built the clamshell hangars, workshops, fuel stores, ordnance depots, flight and briefing rooms, operations rooms, control towers, store tents, and garages.

For the aircrew and ground crew they erected streets of tents with roadways between, latrines, bathhouses, kitchens, mess halls, and a water tower to be replenished by convoys of trucks from the nearest water source.

Al Kharz lies fifty miles southeast of Riyadh, which turned out to be just three miles beyond the maximum range of the Scud missiles in Iraq’s possession. It would be home for three months to five squadrons: two of F-15E Strike Eagles—the 336th Rocketeers and the Chiefs, the 335th Squadron out of Seymour Johnson, who joined at this point; one of F-15C pure-fighter Eagles; and two of F-16 Falcon fighters.

There was a special street for the 250 female personnel in the wing; these included the lawyer, ground-crew chiefs, truck drivers, clerks, nurses, and two squadron intelligence officers.

The aircrew flew themselves up from Thumrait; the ground crew and other staff came by cargo airplane. The entire transshipment took two days, and when they arrived, the engineers were still at work and would remain so until Christmas.

Don Walker had enjoyed his time in Thumrait. Living conditions were modern and excellent, and in the relaxed atmosphere of Oman, alcoholic drinks were permitted within the base.

For the first time, he had met the British SAS, who have a permanent training base there, and other “contract officers” serving with the Omani forces of Sultan Qaboos. Some memorable parties were held, members of the opposite sex were eminently datable, and flying the Eagles on feint missions up to the Iraqi border had been great.

Of the SAS, after a trip into the desert with them in light scout cars, Walker had remarked to the newly appointed squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner:

“These guys are certifiably insane.”

Al Kharz would turn out to be different from Thumrait. As the home of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia enforces strict teetotalism, as well as any exposure of the female form below the chin, excluding hands and feet.

In his General Order Number, One, General Schwarzkopf had banned all alcohol for the entire Coalition forces under his command. All American units abided by that order, and it strictly applied at Al Kharz.

At the port of Dammam, however, the American off-loaders were bemused by the amount of shampoo destined for the British Royal Air

Force. Crate after crate of the stuff was unloaded, put onto trucks or C-130 Hercules air-freighters, and brought to the RAF squadrons. They remained puzzled that in a largely waterless environment, the British aircrew could spend so much time washing their hair. It was an enigma that would continue to puzzle them until the end of the war.

At the other side of the peninsula, on the desert base of Tabuq, which British Tornados shared with American Falcons, the USAF pilots were even more intrigued to see the British at sundown, seated beneath their awnings, decanting a small portion of shampoo into a glass and topping it up with bottled water.

At Al Kharz the problem did not arise—there was no shampoo.

Conditions, moreover, were more cramped than at Thumrait. Apart from the wing commander, who had a tent to himself, the others from colonel on down shared on the basis of two, four, six, eight, or twelve to a tent, according to rank.

Even worse, the female personnel were out of bounds, a problem made even more frustrating by the fact that the American women, true to their culture and with no Saudi Mutawa—religious police—to see them, took to sun-bathing in bikinis behind low fences that they erected around their tents.

This led to a rush by the aircrew to commandeer all the hilux trucks on the base, vehicles with their chassis set high above the wheels. Only from the top of these, standing on tiptoe, could a real patriot proceed from his tent to the flight lines, passing through an enormous diversion to drive down the street between the female tents, and check that the women were in good shape.

Apart from these civic obligations, for most it was back to a creaking cot and the “happy sock.”

There was also a new mood for another reason. The United Nations had issued its January 15 deadline to Saddam Hussein. The declarations coming out of Baghdad remained defiant. For the first time it became clear that they were going to go to war. The training missions took on a new and urgent edge.

For some reason, December 15 in Vienna was quite warm. The sun shone, and the temperature rose. At the lunch hour Fräulein Hardenberg left the bank as usual for her modest lunch and decided on a whim to buy sandwiches and eat them in the Stadtpark a few blocks away from the Ballgasse.

It was her habit to do this through the summer and even into the autumn, and for this she always brought her sandwiches with her. On December 15 she had none.

Nevertheless, looking at the bright blue sky above Franzis-kanerplatz and protected by her neat tweed coat, she decided that if nature was going to offer, even for one day, a bit of Altweibersommer—old ladies’

summer, to the Viennese—she would take advantage and eat in the park.

There was a special reason she loved the small park across the Ring.

At one end is the Hübner Kursalon, a glass-walled restaurant like a large conservatory. Here during the lunch hour a small orchestra is wont to play the melodies of Strauss, that most Viennese of composers.

Without being able to afford to lunch there, others can sit outside the enclosure and enjoy the music for free. Moreover, in the center of the park, protected by his stone arch, stands the statue of the great Johann himself.

Edith Hardenberg bought her sandwiches at a local lunch-bar, found a park bench in the sun, and nibbled away while she listened to the waltz tunes.

“Entschuldigung.”