The Fist of God

She jumped, jerked out of her reverie by the low voice saying “Excuse me.”

If there was one thing Miss Hardenberg would have none of, it was being addressed by a complete stranger. She glanced to her side.

He was young and dark-haired, with soft brown eyes, and his voice had a foreign accent. She was about to look firmly away again when she noticed the young man had an illustrated brochure of some kind in his hand and was pointing at a word in the text. Despite herself she glanced down. The brochure was the illustrated program notes for The Magic Flute.

“Please, this word—it is not German, no?”

His forefinger was pointing at the word portitura.

She should have left there and then, of course, just gotten up and walked away. She began to rewrap her sandwiches.

“No,” she said shortly, “it’s Italian.”

“Ah,” said the man apologetically. “I am learning German, but I do not understand Italian. Does it mean the story, please?”

“No,” she said, “it means the score, the music.”

“Thank you,” he said with genuine gratitude. “It is so hard to understand your Viennese operas, but I do love them so much.”

Her fingers slowed in their flutter to wrap the remaining sandwiches and leave.

“It is set in Egypt, you know,” the young man explained. Such nonsense, to tell her that, she who knew every word of Die Zauberflöte.

“Indeed it is,” she said. This had gone far enough, she told herself.

Whoever he was, he was a very impudent young man. Why, they were almost in conversation. The very idea.

“The same as Aïda,” he remarked, back to studying his program notes.

“I like Verdi, but I think I prefer Mozart.”

Her sandwiches were rewrapped; she was ready to go. She should just stand up and go. She turned to look at him, and he chose that moment to look up and smile.

It was a very shy smile, almost pleading; brown spaniel eyes topped by lashes a model would have killed for.

“There is no comparison,” she said. “Mozart is the master of them all.”

His smile widened, showing even white teeth.

“He lived here once. Perhaps he sat here, right on this bench, and made his music.”

“I’m sure he did no such thing,” she said. “The bench was not here then.”

She rose and turned. The young man rose too and gave a short Viennese bow.

“I am sorry I disturbed you, Fräulein. But thank you for your help.”

She was walking out of the park, back to her desk to finish her lunch, furious with herself. Conversations with young men in parks—whatever next? On the other hand, he was only a foreign student trying to learn about Viennese opera. No harm in that, surely.

But enough is enough. She passed a poster. Of course; the Vienna Opera was staging The Magic Flute in three days. Perhaps it was part of the young man’s study course.

Despite her passion, Edith Hardenberg had never been to an opera in the Staatsoper. She had, of course, roamed the building when it was open in the daytime, but an orchestra ticket had always been beyond her.

They were almost beyond price. Season tickets for the opera were handed down from generation to generation. A season’s abonnement was for the seriously rich. Other tickets could be obtained only by influence, of which she had none. Even ordinary tickets were beyond her means. She sighed and returned to her work.

That one day of warm weather had been the end. The cold and the gray clouds came back. She returned to her habit of lunching at her usual café and at her usual table. She was a very neat lady, a creature of habit.

On the third day after the park she arrived at her table at the usual hour, to the minute, and half-noticed that the one next to her was occupied. There was a pair of student books—she did not bother with the titles—and a half-drunk glass of water.

Hardly had she ordered the meal of the day when the occupant of the table returned from the men’s room. It was not until he sat down that he recognized her and gave a start of surprise.

“Oh, Grüss Gott—again,” he said. Her lips tightened into a disapproving line. The waitress arrived and put down her meal. She was trapped. But the young man was irrepressible.

“I finished the program notes. I think I understand it all now.”

She nodded and began delicately to eat. “Excellent. You are studying here?”

Now why had she asked that? What madness had gotten into her? But the chatter of the restaurant rose all around her. What are you worrying about, Edith? Surely a civilized conversation, even with a foreign student, could do no harm? She wondered what Herr Gemütlich would think. He would disapprove, of course.

The dark young man grinned happily.

“Yes. I study engineering. At the Technical University. When I have my degree, I will go back home and help to develop my country.

Please, my name is Karim.”

“Fräulein Hardenberg,” she said primly. “And where do you come from, Herr Karim?”

“I am from Jordan.”

Oh, good gracious, an Arab. Well, she supposed there were a lot of them at the Technical University, two blocks across the Kärntner Ring.

Most of the ones she saw were street vendors, awful people selling carpets and newspapers at the pavement cafes and refusing to go away.

The young man next to her looked respectable enough. Perhaps he came from a better family. But after all ... an Arab. She finished her meal and signaled for the bill. Time to leave this young man’s company, even though he was remarkably polite. For an Arab.

“Still,” he said regretfully, “I don’t think I’ll be able to go.”

Her bill came. She fumbled for some schilling notes.

“Go where?”

“To the opera. To see The Magic Flute. Not alone—I wouldn’t have the nerve. So many people. Not knowing where to go, where to applaud.”

She smiled tolerantly.

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll go, young man, because you won’t get any tickets.”

He looked puzzled.

“Oh no, it’s not that.”

He reached into his pocket and placed two pieces of paper on the table.

Her table. Beside her bill. Second row of the orchestra. Within feet of the singers. Center aisle.

“I have a friend in the United Nations. They get an allocation, you know. But he didn’t want them, so he gave them to me.”

Gave. Not sold, gave. Beyond price, and he gave them away.

“Would you,” asked the young man pleadingly, “take me with you?

Please?”

It was beautifully phrased, as if she would be taking him.

She thought of sitting in that great, vaulted, gilded, rococo paradise, her spirit rising with the voices of the basses, baritones, tenors, and sopranos high into the painted ceiling above. ...

“Certainly not,” she said.

“Oh, I am sorry, Fräulein. I have offended you.”

He reached out and took the tickets, one half in one strong young hand, the other half in the other, and began to tear.

“No.” Her hand came down on his own before more than half an inch of the priceless tickets had been torn in half. “You mustn’t do that.”

She was bright pink.

“But they are of no use to me.”

“Well, I suppose ...”

His face lit up.

“Then you will show me your Opera House? Yes?”

Show him the Opera. Surely that was different. Not a date. Not the sort of dates people went on who ... accepted dates. More like a tour guide, really. A Viennese courtesy, showing a student from abroad one of the wonders of the Austrian capital. No harm in that ...

They met on the steps by arrangement at seven-fifteen. She had driven in from Grinzing and parked without trouble. They joined the bustle of the moving throng alive already with anticipatory pleasure.

If Edith Hardenberg, spinster of twenty loveless summers, were ever going to have an intimation of paradise, it was that night in 1990 when she sat a few feet from the stage and allowed herself to drown in the music. If she were ever to know the sensation of being drunk, it was that evening when she permitted herself to become utterly intoxicated in the torrent of the rising and falling voices.

In the first half, as Papageno sang and cavorted before her, she felt a dry young hand placed on top of her own. Instinct caused her to withdraw her hand sharply. In the second half, when it happened again, she did nothing and felt, with the music, the warmth seeping into her of another person’s blood-heat.

When it was over, she was still intoxicated. Otherwise she would never have allowed him to walk her across the square to Freud’s old haunt, the Café Landtmann, now restored to its former 1890 glory. There it was the superlative headwaiter Robert himself who showed them to a table, and they ate a late dinner.

Afterward, he walked her back to her car. She had calmed down. Her reserve was reasserting itself.

“I would so like you to show me the real Vienna,” said Karim quietly.

“Your Vienna, the Vienna of fine museums and concerts. Otherwise, I will never understand the culture of Austria, not the way you could show it to me.”

“What are you saying, Karim?”

They stood by her car. No, she was definitely not offering him a lift to his apartment, wherever it was, and any suggestion that he come home with her would reveal exactly what sort of a wretch he really was.

“That I would like to see you again.”

“Why?”

If he tells me I am beautiful, I will hit him, she thought.

“Because you are kind,” he said.

“Oh.”

She was bright pink in the darkness. Without a further word he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he was gone, striding away across the square. She drove home alone.

That night, Edith Hardenberg’s dreams were troubled. She dreamed of long ago. Once there had been Horst, who had loved her through that long hot summer of 1970 when she was nineteen and a virgin. Horst, who had taken her chastity and made her love him. Horst, who had walked out in the winter without a note or an explanation or a word of farewell.

At first she had thought he must have had an accident, and she called all the hospitals. Then that his employment as a traveling salesman had called him away and he would call.

Later, she learned he had married the girl in Graz whom he had also been loving when his rounds took him there.

She had cried until the spring. Then she took all the memories of him, all the signs of his being there, and burned them. She burned the presents and the photos they had taken as they walked in the grounds and sailed on the lakes of the Schlosspark at Laxenburg, and most of all she burned the picture of the tree under which he had loved her first, really loved her and made her his own.

She had had no more men. They just betray you and leave you, her mother had said, and her mother was right. There would be no more men, ever, she vowed.

That night, a week before Christmas, the dreams ebbed away before the dawn, and she slept with the program of The Magic Flute clutched to her thin little bosom. As she slept, some of the lines seemed to ease away from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. And as she slept, she smiled. Surely there was no harm in that.

Chapter 13

The big gray Mercedes was having trouble with the traffic.

Hammering furiously on the horn, the driver had to force a passage through the torrent of cars, vans, market stalls, and pushcarts that create the tangle of life between the streets called Khulafa and Rashid.

This was old Baghdad, where traders and merchants, sellers of cloth, gold, and spices, hawkers and vendors of most known commodities, had plied their trades for ten centuries.

The car turned down Bank Street, where both sides of the road were jammed with parked cars, and finally nosed into Shurja Street. Ahead of it, the street market of spice sellers was impenetrable. The driver half-turned his head.

“This is as far as I can go.”

Leila Al-Hilla nodded and waited for the door to be opened for her.

Beside the driver sat Kemal, General Kadiri’s hulking personal bodyguard, a lumbering sergeant of the Armored Corps who had been attached to Kadiri’s staff for years. She hated him.

After a pause, the sergeant opened his door, straightened his great frame on the sidewalk, and opened the rear passenger door. He knew she had humiliated him once again, and it showed in his eyes. She alighted from the car and gave him not a glance or word of thanks.

One reason she hated the bodyguard was that he followed her everywhere. It was his job, of course, assigned to him by Kadiri, but that did not make her dislike him less. When he was sober, Kadiri was a tough professional soldier; in matters sexual he was also insanely jealous. Hence his rule that she should never be alone in the city.

The other reason for her dislike of the bodyguard was his evident lust for her. A woman of long-degraded tastes, she could well understand that any man might lust for her body, and if the price was right she would indulge any such lust, no matter how bizarre its fulfillment. But Kemal committed the ultimate insult: As a sergeant, he was poor. How dare he entertain such thoughts? Yet he clearly did—a mixture of contempt for her and brutish desire. It showed when he knew General Kadiri was not looking.

For his part he knew of her revulsion, and it amused him to insult her with his glances while verbally maintaining an attitude of formality.

She had complained to Kadiri about his dumb insolence, but he had merely laughed. He could suspect any man of desiring her, but Kemal was allowed many liberties because Kemal had saved his life in the marshes of Al Fao against the Iranians, and Kemal would die for him.

The bodyguard slammed the door and was at her side as they continued on foot down Shurja Street.

This zone is called Agid al Nasara, the Area of the Christians. Apart from St. George’s Church across the river, built by the British for themselves and their Protestant faith, there are three Christian sects in Iraq, representing among them some seven percent of the population.

The largest is the Assyrian or Syriac sect, whose cathedral lies within the Area of the Christians, off Shurja Street. A mile away stands the Armenian church, close to another tangled web of small streets and alleys whose history goes back many centuries called the Camp el Arman, the old Armenian Quarter.

Cheek by jowl with the Syriac cathedral stands St. Joseph’s, the church of the Chaldean Christians, the smallest sect. If the Syriac rite resembles Greek Orthodox, the Chaldeans are an offshoot of the Catholic Church.

The most notable Iraqi of the Chaldean Christians was then Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, although his doglike devotion to Saddam Hussein and his policies of genocide might indicate that Mr. Aziz had somehow gone adrift from the teachings of the Prince of Peace. Leila Al-Hilla had also been born a Chaldean, and now the link was proving useful.

The ill-assorted couple reached the wrought-iron gate giving onto the cobbled yard in front of the arched door of the Chaldean church.

Kemal stopped. As a Moslem, he would not go a step farther. She nodded to him and walked through the gate. Kemal watched her as she bought a small candle from a stall by the door, drew her heavy black lace shawl over her head, and entered the dark, incense-heavy interior.

The bodyguard shrugged and sauntered away a few yards to buy a can of Coke and find a place to sit and watch the doorway. He wondered why his master permitted this nonsense. The woman was a whore; the general would tire of her one day, and he, Kemal, had been promised that he could have his pleasure before she was dismissed. He smiled at the prospect, and a dribble of cola ran down his chin.

Inside the church Leila paused to light her candle from one of the hundreds that burned adjacent to the door, then, head bowed, made her way to the confessional boxes on the far side of the nave. A black-robed priest passed but paid her no attention.

It was always the same confessional box. She entered at the precise hour, dodging ahead of a woman in black who also sought a priest to listen to her litany of sins, probably more banal than those of the younger woman who pushed her aside and took her place.

Leila closed the door behind her, turned, and sat on the penitent’s seat.

To her right was a fretted grille. She heard a rustle behind it. He would be there; he was always there at the appointed hour.

Who was he? she wondered. Why did he pay so handsomely for the information she brought him? He was not a foreigner—his Arabic was too good for that, the Arabic of one born and raised in Baghdad. And his money was good, very good.

“Leila?” The voice was a murmur, low and even. She always had to arrive after him and leave before him. He had warned her not to loiter outside in the hopes of seeing him, but how could she have done that anyway, with Kemal lurking at her shoulder? The oaf would see something and report to his master. It was more than her life was worth.

“Identify yourself, please.”

“Father, I have sinned in matters of the flesh and am not worthy of your absolution.”

It was he who had invented the phrase, because no one else would say that.

“What have you for me?”

She reached between her legs, pulled aside the crotch of her panties, and abstracted the phony tampon he had given her weeks ago. One end unscrewed. From the hollow interior she withdrew a thin roll of paper formed into a tube no larger than a pencil. This she passed through the fret of the grille.

“Wait.”

She heard the rustle of the onionskin paper as the man ran a skilled eye over the notes she had made—a report on the deliberations and conclusions of the previous day’s planning council chaired by Saddam Hussein himself, at which General Abdullah Kadiri had been present.

“Good, Leila. Very good.”

Today the money was in Swiss francs, very high-denomination notes, passed through the grille from him to her. She secreted them all in the place she had stored her information, a place she knew most Moslem men deemed unclean at a certain time. Only a doctor or the dreaded AMAM would find them there.

“How long must this go on?” she asked the grille.

“Not long now. War is coming soon. By the end of it, the Rais will fall. Others will take the power. I shall be one of them. Then you will be truly rewarded, Leila. Stay calm, do your job, and be patient.”

She smiled. Really rewarded. Money, lots of money, enough to go far away and be wealthy for the rest of her days.

“Go now.”

She rose and left the booth. The old woman in black had found someone else to hear her confession. Leila recrossed the nave and emerged into the sunshine. The oaf Kemal was beyond the wrought-iron gate, crumpling a tin can in one great fist, sweating in the heat.

Good, let him sweat. He would sweat much more if only he knew. ...

Without glancing at him, she turned down Shurja Street, through the teeming market, toward the parked car. Kemal, furious but helpless, lumbered behind her. She took not the slightest bit of notice of a poor fellagha pushing a bicycle with an open wicker basket on the pillion, and he took not the slightest notice of her. The man was only in the market at the behest of the cook in the household where he worked, buying mace, coriander, and saffron.

Alone in his confessional, the man in the black cassock of a Chaldean priest sat awhile longer to ensure that his agent was clear of the street.

It was extremely unlikely that she would recognize him, but in this game even outside chances were excessive.

He had meant what he said to her. War was coming. The Americans had the bit between their teeth and would not now back off.

So long as that fool in the palace by the river at the Tamuz Bridge did not spoil it all and pull back unilaterally from Kuwait. Fortunately, he seemed hell-bent on his own destruction. The Americans would win the war, and then they would come to Baghdad to finish the job.

Surely they would not just win Kuwait and think that was the end of it? No people could be so powerful and so stupid.

When they came, they would need a new regime. Being Americans, they would gravitate toward someone who spoke fluent English, someone who understood their ways, their thoughts, and their speech, and who would know what to say to please them and become their choice.

The very education, the very cosmopolitan urbanity that now militated against him, would be in his favor. For the moment, he was excluded from the highest counsels and innermost decisions of the Rais—because he was not of the oafish Al-Tikriti tribe, or a lifetime fanatic of the Ba’ath Party, or a full general, or a half-brother of Saddam.

But Kadiri was Tikrit—and trusted. Only a mediocre general of tanks and with the tastes of a rutting camel, he had once played in the dust of the alleys of Tikrit with Saddam and his clan, and that was enough.

Kadiri was present at every decision-making meeting and knew all the secrets. The man in the confessional needed to know these things in order to make his preparations.

When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, the man rose and left.

Instead of crossing the nave, he slipped through a side door into the vestry, nodded at a real priest who was robing for a service, and left the church by a back door.

The man with the bicycle was only twenty feet away. He happened to glance up as the priest emerged in his black cassock into the sunlight and whirled away just in time. The man in the cassock glanced about him, noticed but thought nothing of the fellagha bent over his bicycle adjusting the chain, and walked quickly down the alley toward a small unmarked car.

The spice-shopper had sweat running down his face and his heart pounded. Close, too damn close. He had deliberately avoided going anywhere near the Mukhabarat headquarters in Mansour just in case he ran into that face. What the hell was the man doing as a priest in the Christian quarter?

God, it had been years—years since they played together on the lawn of Mr. Hartley’s Tasisiya prep school, since he had punched the boy on the jaw for insulting his kid brother, since they had recited poetry in class, always excelled by Abdelkarim Badri. It had been a long time since he had seen his old friend Hassan Rahmani, now head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.

It was approaching Christmas, and in the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia, three hundred thousand Americans and Europeans turned their thoughts to home as they prepared to sit out the festival in a deeply Moslem land. But despite the approaching celebration of the birth of Christ, the buildup of the greatest invasion force since Normandy rolled on.

The portion of desert in which the Coalition forces lay was still due south of Kuwait. No hint had been given that eventually half those forces would sweep much farther west.

At the coastal ports the new divisions were still pouring in. The British Fourth Armoured Brigade had joined the Desert Rats, the Seventh, to form the First Armoured Division. The French were boosting their contribution up to ten thousand men, including the Foreign Legion.

The Americans had imported, or were about to, the First Cavalry Division, Second and Third Armored Cavalry Regiments, the First Mechanized Infantry Division and First and Third Armored, two divisions of Marines, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne.

Right up on the border, where they wanted to be, were the Saudi Task Force and Special Forces, aided by Egyptian and Syrian divisions and other units drawn from a variety of smaller Arab nations.

The northern waters of the Arabian Gulf were almost plated with warships from the Coalition navies. Either in the Gulf or the Red Sea on the other side of Saudi Arabia, the United States had positioned five carrier groups, headed by the Eisenhower, Independence, John F.

Kennedy, Midway, and Saratoga, with the America, Ranger, and Theodore Roosevelt still to come.

The air power of these alone, with their Tomcats, Hornets, Intruders, Prowlers, Avengers, and Hawkeyes, was impressive to behold.

In the Gulf the American battleship Wisconsin was on station, to be joined by the Missouri in January.

Throughout the Gulf States and across Saudi Arabia, every airfield worth the name was crammed with fighter, bomber, tanker, freighter, and early-warning aircraft, all of which were already flying around the clock, though not yet invading Iraqi air space, with the exception of the spy planes that cruised overhead unseen.

In several cases the United States Air Force was sharing airfield space with squadrons of the British Royal Air Force. As the aircrews shared a common language, communication was easy, informal, and friendly.

Occasionally, however, misunderstandings did occur. A notable one concerned a secret British location known only as MMFD.

On an early training mission, a British Tornado had been asked by the air traffic controller whether it had reached a certain turning point. The pilot replied that he had not, he was still over MMFD.

As time went by, many American pilots heard of this place and scoured their maps to find it. It was a puzzle for two reasons: The British apparently spent a lot of time over it, and it was not located on any American air map. The theory was floated that it might be a mishearing of KKMC, which stood for King Khaled Military City, a large Saudi base. This was discounted, and the search went on. Finally the Americans gave up. Wherever MMFD was located, it was simply not to be found on the war maps supplied to USAF squadrons by their planners in Riyadh.

Eventually the Tornado pilots admitted the secret of MMFD. It stood for “miles and miles of fucking desert.”

On the ground, the soldiers were living in the heart of MMFD. For many, sleeping under their tanks, mobile guns, and armored cars, life was hard and, worse, boring.

There were distractions, however, and one was visiting neighboring units as the time dragged by. The Americans were equipped with particularly good cots, for which the British lusted. By chance, the Americans were also issued singularly revolting prepacked meals, probably devised by a Pentagon civil servant who would have died rather than eat them three times a day.

They were called MREs, meaning Meals-Ready-to-Eat. The U.S.

soldiery denied this quality in them and decided that MRE really stood for Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. By contrast, the Brits were eating much better, so true to the capitalist ethic, a brisk trade was soon established between American beds and British rations.

Another piece of news from the British lines that bemused the Americans was the order placed by London’s Ministry of Defence for half a million condoms for the soldiers in the Gulf. In the bleak deserts of Arabia such a purchase was deemed to indicate the Brits must know something the GIs did not.

The mystery was resolved the day before the ground war started. The Americans had spent a hundred days cleaning their rifles over and over again to purge them of the all-pervasive sand, dust, grit, and gravel that endlessly blew into the ends of the barrels. The Brits whipped off their condoms to reveal nice shiny barrels gleaming with gun oil.

The other principal development that occurred just before Christmas was the reintegration of the French contingency into the heart of Allied planning.

In the early days, France had had a disaster of a Defense Minister called Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who appeared to enjoy a keen sympathy with Iraq and ordered the French commander to pass all Allied planning decisions on to Paris. When this was made plain to General Schwarzkopf, he and Sir Peter de la Billière almost burst out laughing. Monsieur Chevenement was at that time also a leading light of the France-Iraq Friendship Society. Although the French contingent was commanded by a fine soldier in the form of General Michel Roquejoffre, France had to be excluded from all planning councils.

At the end of the year, Pierre Joxe was appointed French Defense Minister and at once rescinded the order. From then on, General Roquejoffre could be taken into the confidence of the Americans and British.

Two days before Christmas, Mike Martin received from Jericho the answer to a question posed a week earlier. Jericho was adamant: There had been within the previous few days a crisis cabinet meeting containing only the inner core of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet, the

Revolutionary Command Council, and the top generals.

At the meeting the question of Iraq leaving Kuwait voluntarily had been raised. Obviously it had not been raised as a proposal by anyone at the meeting—no one was that stupid. All recalled too well the earlier occasion when, during the Iran-Iraq war, an Iranian suggestion that if Saddam Hussein stepped down there could be peace had been broached. Saddam had asked for opinions.

The Health Minister had suggested such a move might be wise—as a purely temporary ploy, of course. Saddam invited the minister into a side room, pulled out his sidearm, shot him dead, and returned to resume the cabinet meeting.

The matter of Kuwait had been raised in the form of a denunciation of the United Nations for even daring to suggest the idea. All had waited for Saddam to give a lead. He declined, sitting as he so often did at the head of the table like a watching cobra, eyes moving from man to man in an attempt to smoke out some hint of disloyalty.

Not unnaturally, without a lead from the Rais, the conversation had petered out. Then Saddam had begun to speak very quietly, which was when he was at his most dangerous.

Anyone, he said, who let the thought of admitting to such a catastrophic humiliation of Iraq in the face of the Americans cross his mind was a man prepared to play the role of lickspittle to America for the rest of his life. For such a man there could be no place at this table.

That had been the end of it. Everyone present bent over backward to explain that such a thought would never, under any circumstances, occur to any of them.

Then the Iraqi dictator had added something else: Only if Iraq could win and be seen to win would it be possible to withdraw from Iraq’s nineteenth province, he said.

Everyone around the table then nodded sagely, though none could see what he was talking about.

It was a long report, and Mike Martin transmitted it to the villa outside Riyadh that same night.

Chip Barber and Simon Paxman pored over it for hours. Each had decided to take a brief break from Saudi Arabia and fly home for several days, leaving the running of Mike Martin and Jericho from the Riyadh end in the hands of Julian Gray for the British and the local CIA Head of Station for the Americans. There were only twenty-four days to go until the expiration of the United Nations deadline and the start of General Chuck Horner’s air war against Iraq. Both men wanted a short home leave, and Jericho’s powerful report gave them the chance. They could take it with them.

“What do you think he means, ‘win and be seen to win’?” asked Barber.

“No idea,” said Paxman. “We’ll have to get some analysts who are better than we are to have a look at it.”

“We too. I guess nobody will be around for the next few days except the shop-minders. I’ll give it the way it is to Bill Stewart, and he’ll probably have some eggheads try to add an in-depth analysis before it goes on to the Director and the State Department.”

“I know an egghead I’d like to have a look at it,” said Paxman, and on that note they left for the airport to catch their respective flights home.

On Christmas Eve, seated in a discreet wine bar in London’s West End with Simon Paxman, Dr. Terry Martin was shown the whole text of the Jericho message and asked if he would try to work out what, if anything, Saddam Hussein could mean by winning against America as a price for leaving Kuwait.

“By the way,” he asked Paxman, “I know it breaks the rules of need-to-

know, but I really am worried. I do these favors for you—give me one in return. How is my brother Mike doing in Kuwait? Is he still safe?”

Paxman stared at the doctor of Arabic studies for several seconds.

“I can only tell you that he is no longer in Kuwait,” he said. “And that’s more than my job is worth.”

Terry Martin flushed with relief.

“It’s the best Christmas present I could have. Thank you, Simon.” He looked up and waved a waggish finger. “Just one thing—don’t even think of sending him into Baghdad.”

Paxman had been in the business fifteen years. He kept his face immobile, his tone light. The scholar was clearly just joking.

“Really? Why not?”

Martin was finishing his glass of wine and failed to notice the flicker of alarm in the intelligence officer’s eyes.

“My dear Simon, Baghdad’s the one city in the world he mustn’t set foot in. You remember those tapes of Iraqi radio intercepts Sean Plummer let me have? Some of the voices have been identified. I recognized one of the names. A hell of a fluke, but I know I’m right.”

“Really?” said Paxman smoothly. “Tell me more.”

“It’s been a long time, of course, but I know it was the same man. And guess what? He’s now head of Counterintelligence in Baghdad, Saddam’s number-one spy-hunter.”

“Hassan Rahmani,” murmured Paxman. Terry Martin should stay off booze, even before Christmas. He can’t carry it. His tongue’s running away with him.

“That’s the one. They were at school together, you know. We all were.

Good old Mr. Hartley’s prep school. Mike and Hassan were best mates. See? That’s why he can never be seen around Baghdad.”

Paxman left the wine bar and stared at the dumpy figure of the Arabist heading down the street.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh bloody, bloody hell.”

Someone had just ruined his Christmas, and he was about to ruin Steve Laing’s.

Edith Hardenberg had gone to Salzburg to spend the festive season with her mother, a family tradition that went back many years.

Karim, the young Jordanian student, was able to visit Gidi Barzilai at his safe-house apartment, where the controller for Operation Joshua was dispensing drinks to the off-duty members of the yarid and neviot teams working under him. Only one unfortunate was up in Salzburg, keeping an eye on Miss Hardenberg in case she should return suddenly to the capital.

Karim’s real name was Avi Herzog, a twenty-nine-year-old who had been seconded to the Mossad several years earlier from Unit 504, a branch of Army Intelligence specializing in cross-border raids, which accounted for his fluent Arabic. Because of his good looks and the deceptively shy and diffident manner he could affect when he wished, the Mossad had twice used him for honeytrap operations.

“So how’s it going, loverboy?” asked Gidi as he passed around the drinks.

“Slowly,” said Avi.

“Don’t take too long. The old man wants a result, remember.”

“This is one very uptight lady,” replied Avi. “Only interested in a meeting of minds—yet.”

In his cover as a student from Amman, he had been set up in a small flat shared with one other Arab student, in fact a member of the neviot team, a phone-tapper by trade who also spoke Arabic. This was in case

Edith Hardenberg or anyone else took it into their head to check out where and how he lived and with whom.

The shared flat would pass any inspection—it was littered with textbooks on engineering and strewn with Jordanian newspapers and magazines. Both men had genuinely been enrolled in the Technical University in case a check were made there also. It was Herzog’s flat-mate who spoke.

“Meeting of minds? Screw that.”

“That’s the point,” said Avi. “I can’t.”

When the laughter died down, he added:

“By the way, I’m going to want danger money.”

“Why?” asked Gidi. “Think she’s going to bite it off when you drop your jeans?”

“Nope. It’s the art galleries, concerts, operas, recitals. I could die of boredom before I get that far.”

“You just carry on the way you know how, boychick. You’re only here because the Office says you’ve got something we don’t.”

“Yes,” said the woman member of the yarid tracking team. “About nine inches.”

“That’s enough of that, young Yael. You can be back on traffic duty in Hayarkon Street any time you like.”

The drink, the laughter, and the banter in Hebrew flowed. Late that evening, Yael discovered she was right. It was a good Christmas for the Mossad team in Vienna.

“So what do you think, Terry?”

Steve Laing and Simon Paxman had invited Terry Martin to join them in one of the Firm’s apartments in Kensington. They needed more privacy than they could get in a restaurant. It was two days before the New Year.

“Fascinating,” said Martin. “Absolutely fascinating. This is for real?

Saddam really said all this?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, if you’ll forgive my saying so, it’s a strange telephone tap. The narrator seems to be reporting to someone else on a meeting he attended. ... The other man on the line doesn’t seem to say a thing.”

There was simply no way the Firm was going to tell Terry Martin how they had come by the report.

“The other man’s interventions were perfunctory,” said Laing smoothly. “Just grunts and expressions of interest. There seemed no point in including them.”

“But this is the language Saddam used?”

“So we understand, yes.”

“Fascinating. The first time I’ve ever seen anything he said that was not destined for publication or a wider audience.”

Martin had in his hands not the handwritten report by Jericho, which had been destroyed by his own brother in Baghdad as soon as it had been read, word for word, into the tape recorder. It was a typewritten transcript in Arabic of the text that had reached Riyadh in the burst transmission before Christmas. He also had the Firm’s own English translation.

“That last phrase,” said Paxman, who would be heading back to Riyadh the same evening, “where he says ‘win and be seen to win’—does that tell you anything?”

“Of course. But you know, you’re still using the word win in its European or North American connotation. I would use the word succeed in English.”

“All right, Terry, how does he think he can succeed against America and the Coalition?” asked Laing.

“By humiliation. I told you before, he must leave America looking like a complete fool.”

“But he won’t pull out of Kuwait in the next twenty days? We really need to know, Terry.”

“Look, Saddam went in there because his claims would not be met,”

said Martin. “He demanded four things: takeover of Warba and Bubiyan Islands to have access to the sea, compensation for the excess oil he claims Kuwait snitched from the shared oil field, an end to Kuwait’s overproduction, and a writeoff of the fifteen-billion-dollar war debt. If he can get these, he can pull back with honor, leaving America hanging in the breeze. That’s winning.”

“Any hint that he thinks he might get them?”

Martin shrugged.

“He thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He’s gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out, the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right.”

“The man doesn’t make sense,” snapped Laing. “He has the deadline.

January fifteenth, not twenty days away. He’s going to be crushed.”

“Unless,” suggested Paxman, “one of the permanent members of the Security Council comes up with a last-minute peace plan to put the deadline on hold.”

Laing looked gloomy.

“Paris or Moscow, or both,” he predicted.

“If it comes to war, does he still think he could win? Beg your pardon,

‘succeed’?” asked Paxman.

“Yes,” said Terry Martin. “But it’s back to what I told you before—American casualties. Don’t forget, Saddam is a back-street gunman. His constituency is not the diplomatic corridors of Cairo and Riyadh. It’s all those alleys and bazaars crammed with Palestinians and other Arabs who resent America, the backer of Israel. Any man who can leave America bleeding, whatever the damage to his own country, will be the toast of those millions.”

“But he can’t do it,” insisted Laing.

“He thinks he can,” Martin countered. “Look, he’s smart enough to have worked out that in America’s eyes, America cannot lose, must not lose. It is simply not acceptable. Look at Vietnam. The veterans came home, and they were pelted with garbage. For America, terrible casualties at the hands of a despised enemy are a form of loss.

Unacceptable loss. Saddam can waste fifty thousand men anytime, anyplace. He doesn’t care. Uncle Sam does. If America takes that kind of loss, she’ll be shaken to the core. Heads have to roll, careers to be smashed, governments to fall. The recriminations and the self-blame would last a generation.”

“He can’t do that,” said Laing again.

“He thinks he can,” repeated Martin.

“It’s the gas weapon,” muttered Paxman.

“Maybe. By the bye, did you ever find out what that phrase on the phone intercept meant?”

Laing glanced across at Paxman. Jericho again. There must be no mention of Jericho.

“No. Nobody we asked had ever heard of it. No one could work it out.”

“It could be important, Steve. Something else—not gas.”

“Terry,” said Laing patiently, “in less than twenty days the Americans, with us, the French, Italians, Saudis, and others, are going to throw at Saddam Hussein the biggest air armada the world has ever seen.

Enough firepower to exceed in a further twenty days all the tonnage dropped in the Second World War. The generals down in Riyadh are kind of busy. We really can’t go down there and say ‘Hold everything, guys. We have a phrase in a phone intercept we can’t work out.’ Let’s face it, it was just an excitable man on a phone suggesting that God was on their side.”

“There’s nothing strange in that, Terry,” said Paxman. “People going to war have claimed they had God’s support since time began. That was all it was.”

“The other man told the speaker to shut up and get off the line,” Martin reminded them.

“So he was busy and irritable.”

“He called him the son of a whore.”

“So he didn’t like him much.”

“Maybe.”

“Terry, please, leave it alone. It was just a phrase. It’s the gas weapon.

That’s what he’s counting on. All the rest of your analysis we agree with.”

Martin left first, the two intelligence officers twenty minutes later.

Shrugged into their coats, collars up, they went down the sidewalk looking for a taxi.

“You know,” said Laing, “he’s a clever little bugger, and I quite like him. But he really is a terrible fusspot. You’ve heard about his private life?”

A cab went by, empty, its light off. Tea break time. Laing swore at it.

“Yes, of course, the Box ran a check.”

The Box, or Box 500, is slang for the Security Service, MI-5. Once, long ago, the address of MI-5 really was P.O. Box 500, London.

“Well, there you are then,” said Laing.

“Steve, I really don’t think that’s got anything to do with it.”

Laing stopped and turned to his subordinate.

“Simon, trust me. He’s got a bee in his bonnet, and he’s just wasting our time. Take a word of advice. Just drop the professor.”

“It will be the poison gas weapon, Mr. President.”

Three days after the New Year, such festivities as there had been in the White House—and for most there had been no pause at all—had long died away. The whole West Wing, the heart of the Bush administration, was humming with activity.

In the quiet of the Oval Office, George Bush sat behind the great desk, backed by the tall narrow windows, five inches of pale green bulletproof glass, and beneath the seal of the United States.

Facing him was Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser.

The President glanced down at the digest of the analyses that had just been presented to him.

“Everyone is agreed on this?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. The stuff that just came in from London shows their people completely concur with ours. Saddam Hussein will not pull out of Kuwait unless he is given an out, a face-saver, which we will ensure he does not get. For the rest, he will rely on mass gas attacks on the Coalition ground forces, either before or during their invasion across the border.”

George Bush was the first American President since John F. Kennedy who had actually been in combat. He had seen American bodies killed in action. But there was something particularly hideous, especially foul, in the thought of young combat soldiers writhing through their last moments of life as gas tore at their lung tissues and crippled their central nervous systems.

“And how will he launch this gas?” he asked.

“We believe there are four options, Mr. President. The obvious one is by canisters launched from fighters and strike bombers, Colin Powell has just been on the line to Chuck Horner in Riyadh. General Horner says he needs thirty-five days of unceasing air war. After day twenty, no Iraqi airplane will reach the border. By day thirty, no Iraqi plane will take off for more than sixty seconds. He says he guarantees it, sir.

You can have his stars on it.”

“And the rest?”

“Saddam has a number of MLRS batteries. That would seem to be the second line of possibility.”

Iraq’s multilaunch rocket systems were Soviet-built and based on the old Katyushkas used with devastating effect by the Soviet Army in the Second World War. Now much updated, these rockets, launched in rapid sequence from a rectangular “pack” on the back of a truck or from a fixed position, had a range of one hundred kilometers.

“Naturally, Mr. President, because of their range, they would have to be launched from within Kuwait or the Iraqi desert to the west. We believe the J-STARs will find them on their radars and they will be taken out. The Iraqis can camouflage them all they like, but the metal will show up.

“For the rest, Iraq has stockpiles of gas-tipped shells for use by tanks and artillery. Range, under thirty-seven kilometers—nineteen miles.

We know the stockpiles are already on site, but at that range it’s all desert—no cover. The Air boys are confident they can find them and destroy them. And then there are the Scuds—they’re being taken care of even as we speak.”

“And the preventive measures?”

“They’re completed, Mr. President. In case of an anthrax attack, every man is being inoculated. The Brits have done it too. We are increasing production of the anti-anthrax vaccine every hour. And every man and woman has a gas mask and a coverall gas cape. If he tries it ...”

The President rose, turned, and stared up at the seal. The bald eagle, clutching its arrows, stared back.

Twenty years earlier, there had been those awful zip-up body bags coming back from Vietnam, and he knew that a supply was even now stored in discreet unmarked containers under the Saudi sun. Even with all the precautions, there would be patches of exposed skin, masks that could not be reached and pulled on in time.

The following year would be the reelection campaign. But that was not the point. Win or lose, he had no intention of going down in history as the American President who consigned tens of thousands of soldiers to die, not as in Vietnam over nine years, but over a few weeks or even days.

“Brent ...”

“Mr. President.”

“James Baker is due to see Tariq Aziz shortly.”

“In six days in Geneva.”

“Ask him to come and see me, please.”

In the first week of January, Edith Hardenberg began to enjoy herself, really enjoy herself, for the first time in years. There was a thrill in exploring and explaining to her eager young friend the wonders of culture that lay within her city.

The Winkler Bank was permitting its staff a four-day break to include

New Year’s Day; after that, they would have to confine their cultural outings to the evenings, which still gave the promise of theater, concerts, and recitals, and weekends, when the museums and galleries were still open.

They spent half a day at the Jugendstil, admiring the Art Nouveau, and another half-day in the Sezession, where hangs the permanent exhibition of the works of Klimt.

The young Jordanian was delighted and excited, a fund of questions pouring from him, and Edith Hardenberg caught the enthusiasm, her eyes alight as she explained that there was another wonderful exhibition at the Künstlerhaus that was definitely a must for the next weekend.

After the Klimt viewing, Karim took her to dine at the Rotisserie Sirk.

She protested at the expense, but her new friend explained that his father was a wealthy surgeon in Amman and that his allowance was generous.

Amazingly, she allowed him to pour her a glass of wine and failed to notice when he refilled it. Her talk became more animated, and there was a small flush on each pale cheek.

Over coffee, Karim leaned forward and placed his hand on hers. She looked flustered and glanced hastily around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one bothered. She withdrew her hand, but quite slowly.

By the end of the week, they had visited four of the cultural treasures she had in mind, and when they walked back through the cold darkness toward her car after an evening at the Musikverein, he took her gloved hand in his and kept it there. She did not pull it away, feeling the warmth seep through the cotton glove.

“You are very kind to do all this for me,” he said gravely. “I am sure it must be boring for you.”

“Oh, no, it’s not at all,” she said earnestly. “I enjoy seeing and hearing all these beautiful things. I’m so glad you do too. Quite soon, you’ll be an expert on European art and culture.”

When they reached her car, he smiled down at her, took her wind-chilled face between both his bare but surprisingly hot hands, and kissed her lightly on the lips.

“Danke, Edith.”

Then he walked away. She drove herself home as usual, but her hands were trembling and she nearly hit a tram.

Secretary of State James Baker met Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva on January 9. It was not a long meeting, and it was not a friendly one. It was not intended to be. There was a single English-Arabic interpreter present, though Tariq Aziz’s English was perfectly up to the task of understanding the American, who spoke slowly and with great clarity. His message was quite simple.

If, during the course of any hostilities that may occur between our countries, your government chooses to employ the internationally banned weapon of poison gas, I am authorized to inform you and President Hussein that my country will use a nuclear device. We will, in short, nuke Baghdad.

The dumpy, gray-haired Iraqi took in the sense of the message but at first could not believe it. For one thing, no man in his senses would dare convey such a barefaced threat to the Rais. He had a habit, in the manner of former Babylonian kings, of taking out his displeasure on the message-bearer.

For another, he was not sure at first that the American was serious. The fallout, the collateral damage of a nuclear bomb, would not be confined to Baghdad, surely? It would devastate half the Middle East, would it not?

Tariq Aziz, as he headed home for Baghdad a deeply troubled man, did not know three things.

One was that the so-called “theater” nuclear bombs of modern science are a far cry from the Hiroshima bomb of 1945. The new, limited-damage “clean” bombs are called thus because although their heat-and-blast damage is as appalling as ever, the radioactivity they leave behind is of extremely short duration.

The second thing was that within the hull of the battleship Wisconsin, then stationed in the Gulf and joined by the Missouri, were three very special steel-and-concrete caissons, strong enough, if the ship went down, not to degrade for ten thousand years. Inside them were three Tomahawk cruise missiles the United States hoped never to have to use.

The third was that the Secretary of State was not joking at all.

General Sir Peter de la Billière walked alone in the darkness of the desert night, accompanied only by the crunch of sand beneath his feet and his troubled private thoughts.

A lifelong professional soldier and a combat veteran, his tastes were as ascetic as his frame was spare. Unable to take much pleasure in the luxury offered by cities, he felt more at home and at ease in camps and bivouacs and the company of fellow soldiers. Like others before him, he appreciated the Arabian desert—its vast horizons, blazing heat, and numbing cold, and many times its awesome silence.

That night, on a visit to the front lines—one of the treats he permitted himself as often as possible—he had walked away from St. Patrick’s

Camp, leaving behind him the brooding Challenger tanks beneath their nets, crouching animals patiently waiting for their time, and the hussars preparing the evening meal beneath them.

By then a close friend of General Schwarzkopf and privy to all the planning staff’s innermost councils, the general knew that war was coming. Less than a week before the expiration of the United Nations deadline, there was not a hint that Saddam Hussein had any intention of pulling out of Kuwait.

What worried him that night under the stars of the Saudi desert was that he could not understand what the tyrant of Baghdad thought he was up to. As a soldier, the British general liked to understand his enemy, to plumb his intentions, his motivations, his tactics, his overall strategy.

Personally, he had nothing but contempt for the man in Baghdad. The amply documented files depicting genocide, torture, and murder revolted him. Saddam was not a soldier, never had been, and what real military talent he had had in his army he had largely wasted by overruling his generals or having the best of them executed.

That was not the problem; the problem was that Saddam Hussein had clearly taken overall command of every aspect—political and military—and nothing he did made a fraction of sense.

He had invaded Kuwait at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons.

That done, he had blown away his chances of reassuring his fellow Arabs that he was open to diplomacy, susceptible to reason, and that the problem could be resolved within the ambit of inter-Arab negotiations. Had he taken that road, he could probably have counted quite rightly on the oil continuing to flow, and the West gradually losing interest as the inter-Arab conferences bogged down for years.

It was the dictator’s own stupidity that had brought in the West, and to cap it, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, with its multiple rapes and brutality and its attempt to use Westerners as human shields, had guaranteed his utter isolation.

In the early days Saddam Hussein had had the rich oil fields of northeastern Saudi Arabia at his mercy, and he had hung back. With his army and air force under good generalship, he could even have reached Riyadh and dictated his terms. He had failed, and Desert Shield had been put in place while he masterminded one public relations disaster after another in Baghdad.

He might be streetwise, but in all other matters he was a strategic buffoon. And yet, reasoned the British general, how could any man be so stupid?

Even in the face of the air power now ranged against him, Saddam Hussein was making every single wrong move, politically and militarily. Had he no idea what rage from the skies was about to be visited on Iraq? Did he really not comprehend the level of the firepower that was about to set his armory back by ten years in five weeks?

The general stopped and stared across the desert toward the north.

There was no moon that night, but the stars in the desert are so bright that dim outlines can be seen by their light alone. The land was flat, running away to the labyrinth of sand walls, fire ditches, minefields, barbed-wire entanglements, and gullies that made up the Iraqi defensive line, through which the American engineers of the Big Red One would blast a path to let the Challengers roll.

And yet the tyrant of Baghdad had one single ace of which the general knew and which he feared: Saddam could simply pull out of Kuwait.

Time was not on the Allies’ side; it belonged to Iraq. On March 15 the Moslem feast of Ramadan would begin. For a month no food or water should pass the lips of any Moslem between sunrise and sunset. The nights were for eating and drinking. That made going to war, for a Moslem army in Ramadan, almost impossible.

After April 15, the desert would become an inferno, with temperatures rising to 130 degrees. Pressure would build up back home to bring the boys out; by summer, the pressure at home and the misery of the desert would become irresistible. The Allies would have to pull out and, having done so, would never come back again like this. The Coalition was a one-time-only phenomenon.

So March 15 was the limit. Working backward, the ground war might last up to twenty days. It would have to start, if at all, by February 23.

But Chuck Horner needed his thirty-five days of air war to smash the Iraqi weapons, regiments, and defenses. January 17—that was the latest possible date.

Supposing Saddam pulled out? He would leave half a million Allies looking like fools, strung out in the desert, hanging in the wire, with nowhere to go but back. Yet Saddam was adamant—he would not pull out.

What was that crazy man up to? the general asked himself again. Was he waiting for something, some divine intervention of his own imagining, that would crush his enemies and leave him triumphant?

There was a yell out of the tank camp behind him. He turned. The commanding officer of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, Arthur Denaro, was calling him to supper. Burly, jovial Arthur Denaro, who would be in the first tank through that gap one day.

He smiled and began to walk back. It would be good to squat in the sand with the men, shoveling baked beans and bread out of a mess tin, listening to the voices in the glow of the fire, the flat twang of Lancashire, the rolling burr of Hampshire, and the soft brogue of

Ireland; to laugh at the leg-pulling and the jokes, the crude vocabulary of men who used blunt English to say exactly what they meant, and with good humor.

Lord rot that man in the north. What the hell was he waiting for?

Chapter 14

The answer to the British general’s puzzlement lay on a padded trolley under the fluorescent lights of the factory, eighty feet beneath the desert of Iraq, where it had been built.

An engineer stepped rapidly back to stand at attention as the door to the room opened. Only five men came in before the two armed guards from the presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, closed the door.

Four of the men deferred to the one in the center. He wore, as usual, his combat uniform over gleaming black calf-boots, his personal sidearm at his waist, green cotton kerchief covering the triangle between jacket and throat.

One of the other four was the personal bodyguard who, even in here, where everyone had been checked five times for concealed weapons, would not leave his side. Between the Rais and his bodyguard stood his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, the MIMI. As in so many things, it was the MIMI that had taken over from the Ministry of Defense.

On the other side of the President stood the mastermind of the program, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar, Iraq’s nuclear genius. Beside him, but a bit to the rear, stood Dr. Salah Siddiqui. Where Jaafar was the physicist, Siddiqui was the engineer.

The steel of their baby gleamed dully in the white light. It was fourteen feet long and just over three feet in diameter.

At the rear, four feet were taken up by an elaborate impact-absorbing device that would be shed as soon as the projectile had been launched.

Even the remainder of the ten-foot-long casing was in fact a sabot, a sleeve in eight identical sections. Tiny explosive bolts would cause this to break away as the projectile departed on its mission, leaving the slimmer, two-foot-diameter core to carry on alone.

The sabot was only there to fill out the twenty-four-inch projectile to the thirty-nine inches needed to occupy the bore of the launcher, and to protect the four rigid tail fins it concealed.

Iraq did not possess the telemetry necessary to operate movable fins by radio signals from the earth, but the rigid fins would serve to stabilize the projectile in flight and prevent it from wobbling or tumbling.

At the front, the nose cone was on ultratough maraging steel and needle-pointed. This too would eventually become dispensable.

When a rocket, having entered inner space on its flight, reenters the earth’s atmosphere, the air becoming denser on the downward flight creates a friction heat enough to melt the nose cone away. That is why reentering astronauts need that heat shield—to prevent their capsule from being incinerated.

The device the five Iraqis surveyed that night was similar. The steel nose cone would ease its flight upward but could not survive reentry.

Were it retained, the melting metal would bend and buckle, causing the falling body to sway, swerve, turn broadside onto the rushing air, and burn up. The steel nose was designed to blow apart at the apogee of flight, revealing beneath it a reentry cone, shorter, blunter, and made of carbon fiber.

In the days when Dr. Gerald Bull was alive, he had tried to buy, on behalf of Baghdad, a British firm in Northern Ireland called LearFan.

It was an aviation company gone bust. It had tried to build executive jets with many components made of carbon fiber. What interested Dr.

Bull and Baghdad was not executive airplanes, but the carbon-fiber filament-winding machines at LearFan.

Carbon fiber is extremely heat-resistant, but it is also very hard to work. The carbon is first reduced to a sort of wool, from which a thread or filament is spun. The thread is laid and cross-plaited many times over a mold, then bonded into a shell to create the desired shape.

Because carbon fiber is vital in rocket technology, and that technology is classified, great care is taken in monitoring the export of such machines. When the British intelligence people learned where the LearFan equipment was destined and consulted Washington, the deal had been killed. It was then assumed that Iraq would not acquire her carbon-filament technology.

The experts were wrong. Iraq tried another tack, which worked. An American supplier of air-conditioning and insulation products was unwittingly persuaded to sell to an Iraqi front company the machinery for spinning rock-wool. In Iraq this was modified by Iraqi engineers to spin carbon fiber.

Between the impact-absorber at the back and the nose cone rested the work of Dr. Siddiqui—a small, workaday, but perfectly functioning atomic bomb, to be triggered on the gun-barrel principle, using the catalysts of lithium and polonium to create the blizzard of neutrons necessary to start the chain reaction.

Inside the engineering of Dr. Siddiqui was the real triumph, a spherical ball and a tubular plug, between them weighing thirty-five kilograms and produced under the aegis of Dr. Jaafar. Both were of pure enriched uranium-235.

A slow smile of satisfaction spread beneath the thick black moustache.

The President advanced and ran a forefinger down the burnished steel.

“It will work? It will really work?” he whispered.

“Yes, Sayid Rais,” said the physicist.

The head in the black beret nodded slowly several times.

“You are to be congratulated, my brothers.”

Beneath the projectile, on a wooden stand, was a simple plaque. It read: Qubth-ut-Allah.

Tariq Aziz had contemplated long and hard as to how, if at all, he could convey to his President the American threat so brutally put before him in Geneva.

Twenty years they had known each other, twenty years during which the Foreign Minister had served his master with doglike devotion, always taking his side during those early struggles within the Ba’ath Party hierarchy when there had been other claimants for power, always following his personal judgment that the utter ruthlessness of the man from Tikrit would triumph, and always being proved right.

They had climbed the greasy pole of power in a Middle East dictatorship together, the one always in the shadow of the other. The gray-haired, stubby Aziz had managed to overcome the initial disadvantage of his higher education and grasp of two European languages by sheer blind obedience.

Leaving the actual violence to others, he had watched and approved, as all must do in the court of Saddam Hussein, as purge after purge had seen columns of Army officers and once-trusted Party men disgraced and taken away for execution, a sentence often preceded by agonized hours with the tormentors at Abu Ghraib.

He had seen good generals removed and shot for trying to stand up for the men under their command, and he knew that real conspirators had died more horribly than he cared to imagine.

He had watched the Al-Juburi tribe, once so powerful in the Army that no one dared to offend them, stripped and humbled, the survivors brought to heel and obedience. He had stayed silent as Saddam’s half-brother Ali Hassan Majid, then Interior Minister, had masterminded the genocide of the Kurds, not simply at Halabja but at fifty other towns and villages, wiped away with bombs, artillery, and gas.

Tariq Aziz, like all those in the entourage of the Rais, knew that there was nowhere else for him to go. If anything happened to his master, he too would be finished for all time.

Unlike some around the throne, he was too smart to believe that this was a popular regime. His real fear was not the foreigners but the awful revenge of the people of Iraq if ever the veil of Saddam’s protection were removed from him.

His problem that January 11, as he waited for the personal appointment to which he had been summoned on his return from Europe, was how to phrase the American threat without attracting the inevitable rage onto himself. The Rais, he knew, could easily suspect that it was he, the Foreign Minister, who had really suggested the threat to the Americans. There is no logic to paranoia, only gut instinct, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Many innocent men had died, and their families with them, on the basis of some inspirational suspicion by the Rais.

Two hours later, returning to his car, he was relieved, smiling and puzzled.

The reason for his relief was easy; his President had proved to be relaxed and genial. He had listened with approval to Tariq Aziz’s glowing report of his mission to Geneva, of the widespread sympathy he detected in all those he spoke to with regard to Iraq’s position, and of the general anti-American feeling that appeared to be growing in the West.

He had nodded understandingly as Tariq heaped blame on the American warmongers, and when, finally consumed with his own sense of outrage, he mentioned what James Baker had actually said to him, the awaited explosion of rage from the Rais had not come.

While others around the table glowered and fumed, Saddam Hussein had continued to nod and smile.

The Foreign Minister was smiling as he left because at the last his Rais had actually congratulated him on his European mission. The fact that, by any normal diplomatic standards, that mission had been a disaster—rebuffed on every side, treated with freezing courtesy by his hosts, unable to dent the resolve of the Coalition ranged against his country—did not seem to matter.

His puzzlement stemmed from something the Rais had said at the end of the audience. It had been an aside, a muttered remark to the Foreign Minister alone as the President had seen him to the door.

“Rafeek, dear Comrade, do not worry. Soon I shall have a surprise for the Americans. Not yet. But if the Beni el Kalb ever try to cross the border, I shall respond not with gas, but with .”

Tariq Aziz had nodded in agreement, even though he did not know what the Rais was talking about. With others, he found out twenty-four hours later.

The morning of January 12 saw the last meeting of the full Revolutionary Command Council to be held in the Presidential Palace, at the corner of July 14 Street and Kindi Street. A week later it was bombed to rubble, but the bird inside was long flown.

As usual, the summons to the meeting came at the last moment. No matter how high one rose in the hierarchy, no matter how trusted one might be, no one but a tiny handful of family, intimates, and personal bodyguards ever knew exactly where the Rais would be at a given hour on any day.

If he was still alive at all after seven major, serious attempts at assassination, it was because of his obsession with personal security.

Neither Counterintelligence nor the Secret Police of Omar Khatib, and certainly not the Army; not even the Republican Guard were entrusted with that security. That task fell to the Amn-al-Khass. Young they might be, most barely out of their teens, but their loyalty was fanatical and absolute. Their commander was the Rais’s own son Kusay.

No conspirator could ever know upon what road the Rais would be traveling, when, or in what vehicle. His visits to army bases or industrial installations were always surprises, not only to the visited but also to those around him. Even in Baghdad he flitted from location to location on a whim, sometimes spending a few days in the palace, at other times retiring to his bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel.

Every plate set before him had to be tasted first, and the food-taster was the first-born son of the chef. Every drink came from a bottle with an unbroken seal.

That morning the summons to the meeting at the palace came to each member of the RCC by special messenger one hour before the meeting. No time was thus left for preparations for an assassination.

The limousines swerved through the gate, deposited their charges, and went away to a special parking garage. Each member of the RCC

passed through a metal-detecting arch; no personal sidearms were allowed.

When they were assembled in the large conference room with its T-shaped table, there were thirty-three of them. Eight sat at the top of the T, flanking the empty throne at the center. The rest faced each other down the length of the stem of the T.

Seven of those present were related to the Rais by blood and three more by marriage. These plus eight more were from Tikrit or its immediate surroundings. All were long-standing members of the Ba’ath Party.

Ten of the thirty-three were cabinet ministers and nine were Army or Air Force generals. Saadi Tumah Abbas, former commander of the Republican Guard, had been promoted to Defense Minister that very morning and sat beaming on the top table. He had replaced Abd Al-Jabber Shenshall, the renegade Kurd who had long since thrown in his lot with the butcher of his own people.

Among the Army generals were Mustafa Radi for the Infantry, Farouk Ridha of the Artillery, Ali Musuli of the Engineers, and Abdullah Kadiri of the Armored Corps.

At the far end of the table were the three men controlling the intelligence apparatus: Dr. Ubaidi of the Foreign Intelligence arm of the Mukhabarat, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police.

When the Rais entered, everyone rose and clapped. He smiled, took his chair, bade them be seated, and began his statement. They were not here to discuss anything; they were here to be told something.

Only the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, showed no surprise when the

Rais made his peroration. When, after forty minutes of speech invoking the unbroken series of triumphs that had marked his leadership, he gave them his news, the immediate reaction was of stunned silence.

That Iraq had been trying for years, they knew. That fruition in this one area of technology that alone seemed capable of inspiring a thrill of fear throughout the world and awe even among the mighty Americans had been achieved—now, on the very threshold of war—seemed unbelievable. Divine intervention. But the Divinity was not in heaven above; he sat right here, with them, smiling quietly.

It was Hussein Kamil, forewarned, who rose and led the ovation. The others scrambled to follow, each fearing to be last to his feet or most subdued in his applause. Then no one was prepared to be first to stop.

When he returned to his office two hours later, Hassan Rahmani, the urbane and cosmopolitan head of Counterintelligence, cleared his desk, ordered no interruptions, and sat at his desk with a strong black coffee. He needed to think, and think deeply.

As with everyone else in that room, the news had shaken him. At a stroke the balance of power in the Middle East had changed, even though no one else yet knew. After the Rais, who with raised hands called with admirable self-deprecation for the ovation to cease, had resumed his chairmanship, every man in the room had been sworn to silence.

This Rahmani could understand. Despite the raging euphoria that had enveloped them all as they left and in which he had unstintingly joined, he could foresee major problems.

No device of this kind was worth a jot unless your friends—and more important, your enemies—knew that you had it. Then only did potential enemies come crawling as friends.

Some nations who had developed the weapon had simply announced the fact with a major test and let the rest of the world work out the consequences. Others, like Israel and South Africa, had simply hinted at what they possessed but never confirmed, leaving the world and particularly the neighbors to guess. Sometimes that worked better; imaginations ran riot.

But that, Rahmani became convinced, would simply not work for Iraq.

If what he had been told was true—and he was not convinced that the whole exercise was not another ploy, counting on an eventual leak to gain another stay of execution—then no one outside Iraq would believe it.

The only way for Iraq to deter would be to prove it. This the Rais apparently now refused to do. There were, of course, major problems to proving any such claim.

To test on home territory would be out of the question, utter madness.

To send a ship deep into the southern Indian Ocean, abandon it, and let the test happen there might have been possible once, but not now. All ports were firmly blockaded. But a team from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna could be invited to examine and satisfy themselves that this was no lie. After all, the IAEA had been visiting almost yearly for a decade and had always been consummately fooled as to what was going on. Given visual evidence, they would have to believe their own eyes and tests, eat humble pie over their past gullibility, and confirm the truth.

Yet he, Rahmani, had just heard that that route was formally forbidden. Why? Because it was all a lie? Because the Rais had something else in mind? And more important, what was in it for him, Rahmani?

For months he had counted on Saddam Hussein to bluster his way into a war he could not win; now he had done it. Rahmani had counted on the defeat culminating in the American-engineered downfall of the Rais and his own elevation in the American-sponsored successor regime. Now things had changed. He needed, he realized, time to think, to work out how best to play this amazing new card.

That evening, when darkness had fallen, a chalk sign appeared on a wall behind the Chaldean Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. It resembled a figure eight on its side.

The citizens of Baghdad trembled that night. Despite the ceaseless blast of propaganda on the local Iraqi radio and the blind faith of many that it was all true, there were others who quietly listened to the BBC

World Service in Arabic, prepared in London but broadcast out of Cyprus, and knew that the Beni Naji were telling the truth. War was coming.

The assumption in the city was that the Americans would start with the carpet-bombing of Baghdad, an assumption that went right up to the Presidential Palace itself. There would be massive civilian casualties.

The regime assumed this but did not mind. In high places the calculation was that the global effect of such massive slaughter of civilians in their homes would cause a worldwide revulsion against the United States, forcing her to desist and depart. That was why such a heavy foreign press contingent was still allowed and indeed encouraged to occupy the Rashid Hotel. Guides were on standby to hurry the foreign TV cameras to the scenes of the genocide as soon as it started.

The subtlety of this argument somehow escaped those who were actually living in the homes of Baghdad. Many had already fled, the non-Iraqis heading for the Jordanian border to swell the five-month-long tide of refugees from Kuwait, the Iraqis seeking sanctuary in the countryside.

No one suspected, including the millions of couch potatoes glued to their screens across the United States and Europe, the true level of sophistication that was now within the grasp of the lugubrious Chuck Horner down in Riyadh. Nobody then could envisage that most of the targets would be selected from a menu prepared by the cameras of satellites in space and demolished by laser-guided bombs that rarely hit what they were not aimed at.

What the citizens of Baghdad did know, as the truth gleaned from the BBC filtered through the bazaars and markets, was that four days from midnight January 12, the deadline to quit Kuwait would expire and the American warplanes would come. So the city was quiet in expectation.

Mike Martin pedaled his bicycle slowly out of Shurja Street and around the back of the church. He saw the chalk mark on the wall as he pedaled by, and went on. At the end of the alley he paused, stepped off the bicycle, and spent some time adjusting the chain while he looked back the way he had come to see if there was any movement behind him.

None. No shifting of the feet of the Secret Police in their doorways, no heads poking over the skyline of the roofs. He pedaled back, reached out with the damp cloth, erased the mark, and rode away.

The figure eight meant that a message awaited him under the flagstone in the abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, down by the river barely half a mile away.

As a boy he had played down there, running along the quaysides with Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, where the vendors cooked the delicious mosgouf over beds of camelthorn embers, selling the tender portions of the Tigris river carp to passersby.

Now the shops were closed, the tea houses shuttered; few people wandered along the quays as they used to. The silence served him well. At the top of Abu Nawas he saw a group of AMAM plainclothes guards, but they took no notice of the fellagha pedaling on his master’s business. He was heartened by the sight of them; the AMAM was nothing if not clumsy. If they were going to stake out a dead-letter box, they would not put a group of men so obviously at the head of the street. Their stake-out would be an attempt at sophistication, but flawed.

The message was there. The brick went back into its place in a second, the folded paper into the crotch of his underpants. Minutes later, he was crossing the Ahrar Bridge over the Tigris, back from Risafa into Karch, and on to the Soviet diplomat’s house in Mansour.

In nine weeks his life had settled down in the walled villa. The Russian cook and her husband treated him fairly, and he had picked up a smattering of their language. He shopped every day for fresh produce, which gave him good reason to service all his dead-letter boxes. He had transmitted fourteen messages to the unseen Jericho and had received fifteen from him.

Eight times he had been stopped by the AMAM, but each time his humble demeanor, his bicycle and basket of vegetables, fruit, coffee, spices, and groceries, plus his letter from the diplomatic household and his visible poverty had caused him to be sent on his way.

He could not know what war plans were shaping up in Riyadh, but he had to write all the questions and queries for Jericho in his own Arabic script after listening to them on the incoming tapes, and he had to read Jericho’s answers in order to send them back in burst transmissions to Simon Paxman.

As a soldier, he could only estimate that Jericho’s information, political and military, had to be invaluable to a commanding general preparing to attack Iraq.

He had already acquired an oil heater for his shack and a kerosene lamp to light it. Hessian sacks from the market now made curtains for all the windows, and the crunch of feet on the gravel warned him if anyone approached the door.

That night, he returned gratefully to the warmth of his home, bolted the door, made sure all the curtains covered every square inch of the windows, lit his lamp, and read Jericho’s latest message. It was shorter than usual, but that did not lessen its impact. Martin read it twice to make sure that even he had not suddenly lost his grasp of Arabic, muttered “Jesus Christ,” and removed his loose tiles to reveal the tape recorder.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, he read the message slowly and carefully in both Arabic and English into the tape machine before switching the controls to speed-wind and reducing his five-minute message to one and a half seconds.

He transmitted it at twenty minutes after midnight.

Because he knew there was a transmission window between fifteen and thirty minutes after twelve that night, Simon Paxman had not bothered to go to bed. He was playing cards with one of the radio men when the message came in. The second radio operator brought the news from the communications room.

“You’d better come and listen to this now, Simon,” he said.

Although the SIS operation in Riyadh involved a lot more than four men, the running of Jericho was regarded as so secret that only

Paxman, the Head of Station Julian Gray, and two radio men were involved. Their three rooms had been virtually sealed off from the rest of the villa.

Simon Paxman listened to the voice on the big tape machine in the radio shack, which was in fact a converted bedroom. Martin spoke in Arabic first, giving the literal handwritten message from Jericho twice, then his own translation twice.

As he listened, Paxman felt a great cold hand moving deep in his stomach. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong. What he was hearing simply could not be. The other two men stood in silence beside him.

“Is it him?” asked Paxman urgently as soon as the message had finished. His first thought was that Martin had been taken and the voice was that of an impostor.

“It’s him—I checked the ossy. There’s no doubt it’s him.”

Speech patterns have varying tones and rhythms, highs and lows, cadences that can be recorded on an oscilloscope that reduces them to a series of lines on a screen, like a heart monitor in a cardiac unit.

Every human voice is slightly different, no matter how good the mimic. Before leaving for Baghdad, Mike Martin’s voice had been recorded on such a machine. Later transmissions out of Baghdad had endured the same fate, in case the slowing-down and speeding-up, together with any distortion by tape machine or satellite transmission, caused distortions.

The voice that came from Baghdad that night checked with the recorded voice. It was Martin speaking and no one else.

Paxman’s second fear was that Martin had been caught, tortured, and turned, that he was now broadcasting under duress. He rejected the idea as very unlikely.

There were preagreed words, a pause, a hesitation, a cough, that would warn the listeners in Riyadh if ever he were not transmitting as a free agent. Besides, his previous broadcast had been only three days earlier.

Brutal the Iraqi Secret Police might be, but they were not quick. And Martin was tough. A man broken and turned at such speed would be shattered, a tortured wreck, and it would show in the speech delivery.

That meant Martin was on the level—the message he had read was precisely what he had received that night from Jericho. Which left more imponderables. Either Jericho was right, mistaken, or lying.

“Get Julian,” Paxman told one of the radio men.

While the man went to fetch the British Head of Station from his bed upstairs, Paxman rang the private line of his American counterpart, Chip Barber.

“Chip, better get your backside over here—fast,” he said.

The CIA man came awake fast. Something in the Englishman’s voice told him this was no time for sleepy banter.

“Problem, ol’ buddy?”

“That’s the way it looks from here,” admitted Paxman.

Barber was across the city and into the SIS house in thirty minutes, sweater and trousers over his pajamas. It was one A.M.

By then, Paxman had the tape in English and Arabic, plus a transcript in both languages. The two radio men, who had worked for years in the Middle East, were fluent and confirmed Martin’s translation was quite accurate.

“He has to be joking,” breathed Barber when he heard the tape.

Paxman ran through the checks he had already made for authenticity of Martin’s speaking voice.

“Look, Simon,” said Barber, “this is just Jericho reporting what he claims he heard Saddam say this morning—sorry, yesterday morning.

Chances are, Saddam’s lying. Let’s face it, he lies like he breathes.”

Lie or not, this was no matter to be dealt with in Riyadh. The local SIS

and CIA stations might supply their generals with tactical and even strategic military information from Jericho, but politics went to London and Washington. Barber checked his watch: seven P.M. in Washington.

“They’ll be mixing their cocktails by now,” he said. “Better make ’em strong, boys. I’ll get this to Langley right away.”

“Cocoa and biscuits in London,” said Paxman. “I’ll have this to Century. Let them sort it out.”

Barber left to send his copy of the transmission in heavily encrypted code to Bill Stewart, with an urgency rating of “flash,” the highest known. That would mean that wherever he was, the cipher people would find him and tell him to go to a secure line.

Paxman did the same for Steve Laing, who would be awakened in the middle of the night and told to leave his warm bed to step into a freezing night and head back to London.

There was one last thing Paxman could do, which he did. Martin had a transmission window for listening only, and it was at four A.M. Paxman waited up and sent his man in Baghdad a very short but very explicit message. It said Martin should make no attempt until further notice to approach any of his six dead-letter boxes. Just in case.

Karim, the Jordanian student, was making slow but steady progress in his courtship of Fräulein Edith Hardenberg. She allowed him to hold her hand when they walked through the streets of Old Vienna, the sidewalks crackling with frost beneath their feet. She even admitted to herself that she found the hand-holding pleasant.

In the second week of January she obtained tickets at the Burgtheater—Karim paid. The performance was of a play by Grillparzer, Gygus und sein Ring.

She explained excitedly before they went in that it was about an old king with several sons, and the one to whom he bequeathed his ring would be the successor. Karim sat through the performance entranced and asked for several explanations in the text, to which he referred constantly during the play.

During the intermission Edith was happy to answer them. Later, Avi Herzog would tell Barzilai it was all as exciting as watching paint dry.

“You’re a philistine,” said the Mossad man. “You have no culture.”

“I’m not here for my culture,” said Avi.

“Then get on with it, boy.”

On Sunday Edith, a devout Catholic, went to morning mass at the Votivkirche. Karim explained that as a Moslem he could not accompany her but would wait at a café across the square.

Afterward, over coffee that he deliberately laced with a slug of schnapps that brought a pink flush to her cheeks, he explained the differences and similarities between Christianity and Islam—the common worship of the one true God, the line of patriarchs and prophets, the teachings of the holy books and the moral codes. Edith was fearful but fascinated. She wondered if listening to all this might imperil her immortal soul, but she was amazed to learn that she had been wrong in thinking Moslems bowed down to idols.

“I would like dinner,” said Karim three days later.

“Well, yes, but you spend too much on me,” said Edith. She found she could gaze into his young face and his soft brown eyes with pleasure, while constantly warning herself that the ten-year age gap between them made anything more than a platonic friendship quite ridiculous.

“Not in a restaurant.”

“Where then?”

“Will you cook a meal for me, Edith? You can cook? Real Viennese food?”

She went bright red at the thought. Each evening, unless she was going alone to a concert, she prepared herself a modest snack that she ate in the small alcove of her flat that served as a dining area. But yes, she thought, she could cook. It had been so long.

Besides, she argued with herself, he had taken her to several expensive meals in restaurants ... and he was an extremely well-brought-up and courteous young man. Surely there could be no harm in it.

To say that the Jericho report of the night of January 12-13 caused consternation in certain covert circles in London and Washington would be an understatement. Controlled panic would be nearer the mark.

One of the problems was the tiny circle of people who knew of Jericho’s existence, let alone the details. The need-to-know principle may sound persnickety or even obsessive, but it works for a reason.

All agencies feel an obligation to an asset working for them in a very high-risk situation, no matter how ignoble that asset may be as a human being. The fact that Jericho was clearly a mercenary and no high-minded ideologue was not the point. The fact that he was cynically betraying his country and its government was irrelevant. The government of Iraq was perceived to be repulsive anyway, so one rogue was playing traitor to another bunch.

The point was, apart from his obvious value and the fact that his information might well save Allied lives on the battlefield, Jericho was a high-value asset, and both the agencies running him had kept his very existence known only to a tiny circle of initiates. No government ministers, no politicians, no civil servants, and no soldiers had been formally told that any Jericho existed. His product therefore had been disguised in a variety of ways. A whole range of cover stories had been devised to explain where this torrent of information was coming from.

Military dispositions were supposed to stem from a series of defections by Iraqi soldiers from the Kuwait theater, including a nonexistent major being extensively debriefed at a secret intelligence facility in the Middle East but outside Saudi Arabia.

Scientific and technical information regarding weapons of mass destruction was said to have been gleaned from an Iraqi science graduate who had defected to the British after studying at Imperial College, London, and falling in love with an English girl, and an intensive second run-through of European technicians who had worked inside Iraq between 1985 and 1990.

Political intelligence was attributed to a mix of refugees pouring out of Iraq, covert radio messages from occupied Kuwait, and brilliant signals intelligence and electronic intelligence—sigint and elint—listening-in, and aerial surveillance.

But how to explain a direct report of Saddam’s own words, however bizarre their claim, conducted within a closed meeting inside his own palace, without admitting to an agent in the highest circles of Baghdad?

The dangers of making such an admission were appalling. For one thing, there are leaks. There are leaks all the time. Cabinet documents leak, civil service memoranda leak, and interdepartmental messages leak.

Politicians, so far as the covert community is concerned, are the worst.

To believe the nightmares of the master spooks, they talk to their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, hairdressers, drivers, and bartenders.

They even talk confidentially to each other with a waiter bending over the table.

Add to that the fact that Washington and London have press and other media veterans whose investigative talents make the FBI and Scotland Yard seem slow on the uptake, and one has a problem explaining away Jericho’s product without admitting to a Jericho.

Finally, London still had hundreds of Iraqi students—some certainly agents of Dr. Ismail Ubaidi’s Foreign Intelligence arm of the Mukhabarat—prepared to report back anything they saw or heard.

It was not just a question of someone denouncing Jericho by name; that would be impossible. But one hint that information had come out of Baghdad that should not have come, and Rahmani’s counterintelligence net would go into overdrive to detect and isolate the source. At best, that could ensure Jericho’s future silence as he clammed up to protect himself; at worst, his capture.

As the countdown for the start of the air war rolled on, the two agencies recontacted all their former experts in the matter of nuclear physics and asked for a rapid reassessment of the information already given. Was there, after all, any conceivable possibility that Iraq might have a greater and faster isotope separation facility than previously thought?

In America experts at Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos were consulted again and in Britain experts at Harwell and Aldermaston. Department Z at Livermore, the people who constantly monitor Third World nuclear proliferation, was especially pressed.

The experts came back, rather testily, to reconfirm their advice. Even taking a worst-case scenario, they said—assuming not one but two entire gas diffusion centrifuge cascades operating not for one but for two years—there was no way in creation Iraq could have more than half the uranium-235 she would need for a single medium-yield device.

That left the agencies with a menu of options.

Saddam was mistaken because he had been lied to himself.

Conclusion: unlikely. Those responsible would pay with their lives for such an outrage against the Rais.

Saddam had said it, but he was lying. Conclusion: quite feasible—to boost morale among his flagging and apprehensive supporters. But why confine the news to the innermost fanatics, who were not flagging and who were not apprehensive? Morale-boosting propaganda is for the masses and abroad. Unanswerable.

Saddam did not say it. Conclusion: the whole report was a farrago of lies. Secondary conclusion: Jericho lied because he is greedy for money and thinks with the war coming his time will soon be over. He had put a million-dollar price tag on his information.

Jericho lied because he has been unmasked and has revealed all.

Conclusion: also possible, and this option posed horrendous personal hazard to the man in Baghdad to maintain the link.

At this point the CIA moved firmly into the driver’s seat. Langley, being the paymaster, had a perfect right to do so.

“I’ll give you the bottom line, Steve,” said Bill Stewart to Steve Laing on a secure line from the CIA to Century House on the evening of January 14. “Saddam’s wrong or he’s lying; Jericho’s wrong or he’s lying. Whatever, Uncle Sam is not going to pay a million greenbacks into an account in Vienna for this kind of trash.”

“There’s no way the unconsidered option might be right after all,

Bill?”

“Which one’s that?”

“That Saddam said it and he’s right.”

“No way. It’s a three-card trick. We’re not going to swallow it. Look, Jericho’s been great for nine weeks, even though we’re now going to have to recheck what he gave us. Half has already been proved, and it’s good stuff. But he’s blown it with this last report. We think that’s the end of the line. We don’t know why, but that’s the wisdom from the top of the mountain.”

“Creates problems for us, Bill.”

“I know, pal, and that’s why I’m calling within minutes of the end of the conference with the Director. Either Jericho has been taken and has told the goon squad everything, or he’s up and running. But if he gets to know we’re not sending him any million dollars, I guess he’ll turn nasty. Either way, that’s bad news for your man in there. He’s a good man, right?”

“The best. Hell of a nerve.”

“So get him out of there, Steve. Fast.”

“I think that’s what we’ll have to do, Bill. Thanks for the tip. Pity—it was a good op.”

“The best, while it lasted.”

Stewart hung up. Laing went upstairs to see Sir Colin. The decision was made within an hour.

By the hour of breakfast on the morning of January 15 in Saudi Arabia, every aircrew member, American, British, French, Italian, Saudi, and Kuwaiti, knew that they were going to war. The politicians and the diplomats, they believed, had failed to prevent it. Through the day all air units moved to prebattle alert.

The nerve centers of the campaign were located in three establishments in Riyadh.

On the outskirts of Riyadh military air base was a collection of huge air-conditioned tents, known because of the green light that suffused them through the canvas as the Barn. This was the first filter for the tidal wave of air intelligence photographs that had been flowing in for weeks and that would double and triple in the weeks to come.

The product of the Barn—a synthesis of the most important photographic information pouring in from so many reconnaissance sorties—went a mile up the road to the headquarters of the Royal Saudi Air Force, a great chunk of which had been made over to Central Air Force, or CENTAF.

A giant building of gray mottled concrete and glass built on piles a hundred fifty meters long, the headquarters has a basement running its full length, and it was here, one level below ground, that CENTAF

was based.

Despite the size of the basement, there was still not enough space, so the parking lot had been crammed with an array of more green tents and prefab buildings, where further interpretation took place.

In the basement was the focal point of it all, the Joint Imagery Production Center, a warren of interconnecting rooms in which worked throughout the war two hundred and fifty analysts, American and British, of all three armed forces, and of all ranks. This was the Black Hole.

The overall air commander, General Chuck Horner, was technically in charge, but as he was often called to the Defense Ministry a mile farther up the road, the more usual presence was that of his deputy, General Buster Glosson.

The air war planners in the Black Hole consulted on a daily and even hourly basis a document called the Basic Target Graphic, a list and map of everything in Iraq that was targeted for a hit. From this they derived the daily bible of every air commander, squadron intelligence officer, planning ops officer, and aircrew in the Gulf Theater—the Air Tasking Order.

Each day’s ATO was an immensely detailed document, running to over a hundred pages of typescript. It took three days to prepare.

First came Apportionment—the decision on the percentages of the target types in Iraq that could be struck in a single day and the available aircraft suitable for such a strike.

Day two saw Allocation—the conversion of the percentage of Iraqi targets into actual numbers and locations. Day three was for Distribution—the “who gets what” decision. It was in the distribution process that it might be decided, for example, that this one is for the British Tornados, this for the American Strike Eagles, this one for the Navy Tomcats, this for the Phantoms, and that one for the B-52

Stratofortresses.

Only then would each squadron and wing be sent its menu for the following day. After that, it was up to them to do it—find the target, work out the route, link up with the air-refueling tankers, plan the strike direction, calculate the secondary targets in case of a no-go, and work out their way home.

The squadron commander would choose his crews—many squadrons had multiple targets designated in a single day—and pick his flight leaders and their wingmen. The weapons officers, of which Don Walker was one, would select the ordnance—“iron” or “dumb” bombs, which are unguided bombs, laser-guided bombs, laser-guided rockets, and so forth.

A mile down Old Airport Road was the third building. The Saudi Defense Ministry is immense, five linked main buildings of shimmering white cement, seven stories high, with fluted columns up to the fourth.

It was on this fourth floor that General Norman Schwarzkopf had been allocated a handsome suite that he hardly ever saw, frequently bunking down on a cot in the subbasement where he could be near his command post.

In all, the Ministry is four hundred meters long and a hundred feet high, a lavishness that paid dividends in the Gulf War, when Riyadh had to play host to so many unexpected foreigners.

Belowground are two more floors of rooms running the length of the building, and of the four hundred meters, Coalition Command was allocated sixty. It was here that the generals sat in conclave throughout the war, watching on a giant map as staff officers pointed out what had been done, what had been missed, what had shown up, what had moved, and what the Iraqi response and dispositions had been.

Shielded from the hot sun that January day, a British squadron leader stood before the wall map showing the seven hundred targets listed in Iraq, 240 primaries and the rest secondary, and remarked:

“Well, that’s about it,”

Alas, that was not it. Unbeknownst to the planners, for all the satellites and all the technology, sheer human ingenuity in the form of camouflage and maskirovka had deceived them.

In hundreds of emplacements across Iraq and Kuwait, Iraqi tanks sat and brooded under their netting, well-targeted by the Allies due to their metal content, picked up by overhead radars. They were in many cases made of matchboard, plywood, and tinplate, the drums of scrap iron inside giving the appropriate metallic response to the sensors.

Scores of old truck chassis now mounted replica launching tubes for Scud missiles. These mobile “launchers” would all be solemnly blown apart by the Allies.

But more seriously, seventy primary targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction had not been spotted because they were buried deep or cunningly disguised as something else. Only later would planners puzzle over how the Iraqis had managed to reconstitute entire destroyed divisions with such unbelievable speed; only later would United Nations inspectors discover plant after plant and store after store that had escaped, and come away knowing there were yet more buried underground.

But that hot day in 1990 no one knew these things. What the young men out on the flight lines from Tabuq in the west to Bahrain in the east and down to the ultrasecret Khamis Mushait in the south knew was that in forty hours they would go to war and some of them would not come back.

In the last full day before final briefings began, most of them wrote home. Some chewed on their pencils and wondered what to say.

Others thought of their wives and children and cried as they wrote; hands accustomed to controlling many tons of deadly metal sought to craft inadequate words into saying what they felt; lovers tried to express what they should have whispered before, fathers urged their sons to look after their mothers if the worst should happen.

Captain Don Walker heard the news with all the other pilots and aircrew of the Rocketeers of the 336th TFS in a terse announcement from the wing commander at Al Kharz. It was just before nine in the morning, and the sun was already beating down on the desert like a sledgehammer on a waiting anvil.

There was none of the usual banter as the men filed out of the tented briefing hall, each plunged in his private thoughts. For each, these thoughts were much the same: the last attempt to avoid a war had been tried and had failed; the politicians and the diplomats had shuttled from conference to conference, postured and declaimed, urged, bullied, pleaded, threatened, and cajoled in order to avoid a war—and had failed.

So at least they believed, those young men who had just learned that the talking was over at last, failing to understand that they had for months past been destined for this day.

Walker watched Squadron Commander Steve Turner stump away to his tent to write what he genuinely believed might be his last letter to Betty Jane back in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Randy Roberts had a brief, muttered few words with Boomer Henry, then they parted and walked away.

The young Oklahoman looked at the pale blue vault of sky where he had lusted to be since he was a small boy in Tulsa and where he soon might die in this thirtieth year, and turned his steps toward the perimeter. Like the others, he wanted to be alone.

There was no fence to the base at Al Kharz, just the ochre sea of sand, shale, and gravel stretching away to the horizon and beyond that to the next and the next. Walker passed the clamshell hangars grouped around the concrete apron, where the mechanics were by then working on their charges and the crew chiefs were passing among each team, conferring and checking to ensure that when each of their babies finally went to war, they would be machines as perfect as the hand of man could make them.

Walker spotted his own Eagle among them and was awed as always when he contemplated the F-15E from afar by its air of quiet menace.

It crouched silently amid the teeming swarm of men and women in coveralls who crawled all over its burly frame, immune to love or lust, hate or fear, patiently waiting for the moment when it would finally do what it had been designed to do all those years ago on the drawing board—bring flame and death to the people designated as its target by the President of the United States. Walker envied his Eagle; for all its myriad complexity, it could not feel anything, it could never be afraid.

He left the city of canvas behind him and walked across the plain of shale, his eyes shaded by the peak of his baseball cap and the aviator glasses, hardly feeling the heat of the sun on his shoulders.

For eight years he had flown the aircraft of his country and done so because he loved it. But never once had he really, truly contemplated the prospect that he might die in battle. Part of every combat pilot muses with the notion of testing his skill, his nerve, and the excellence of his airplane against another man in a real rather than a dummy contest. But another part always assumes that it will never happen. It will never really come to killing other mothers’ sons, or being killed by them.

That morning, like all the others, he realized at last that it truly had come to this: that all those years of study and training had finally led to this day and this place; that in forty hours he would take his Eagle into the sky again, and that this time he might not come back.

Like the others, he thought of home. Being an only child and a single man, he thought of his mother and father. He remembered all the times and places of his boyhood in Tulsa, the things he and his parents had done together in the yard behind the house, the day he had been given his first catcher’s mitt and forced his father to pitch to him until the sun went down.

His thoughts strayed back to the vacations they had shared before he left home to go to college and then to the Air Force. The one he recalled best was the time his father took him on a men-only fishing trip to Alaska the summer he was twelve.

Ray Walker had been almost twenty years younger then, leaner and fitter, stronger than his son, before the years reversed the difference.

They had taken a kayak, with a guide and other vacationers, and skimmed the icy waters of Glacier Bay, watched the black bears gathering berries on the mountain slopes, the harbor seals basking on the last remaining floes of August, and the sun rising over the Mendenhall Glacier behind Juneau. Together they had hauled two seventy-pound monsters out of Halibut Hole and taken the deep-running king salmon out of the channel off Sitka.

Now he found himself walking across a sea of baking sand in a land far from home with tears running down his face, unwiped, drying in the sun. If he died, he would never marry or have children of his own.

Twice he had almost proposed; once to a girl in college, but that was when he was very young and infatuated, the second time to a more mature woman he had met off-base near McConnell, who let him know she could never be the wife of a jet jockey.

Now he wanted, as he had never wanted before, to have children of his own; he wanted a woman to come home to at the end of the day, and a daughter to tuck up in her crib with a bedtime story, and a son to teach how to catch a spinning football, to bat and pitch, to hike and fish, the way his father had taught him. More than that, he wanted to go back to Tulsa and embrace his mother again, who had worried so much over the things he had done and had bravely pretended not to. ...

The young pilot finally returned to the base, sat down at a rickety table in his shared tent, and sought to write a letter home. He was not a good letter writer. Words did not come easily. He usually tended to describe the things that had happened recently in the squadron, his friends, the state of the weather. This was different.

He wrote two pages to his parents, like so many sons that day. He sought to explain what was going on in his head, which was not easy.

He told them about the news that had been announced that morning and what it meant, and he asked them not to worry about him. He had had the best training in the world and flew the best fighter in the world for the best air force in the world.

He wrote that he was sorry for all the times he had been a pain, and he thanked them for all they had done for him over the years, from the first day they had had to wipe his bottom to the time they had come to be present when the general pinned those coveted flier’s wings on his chest.

In forty hours, he explained., he would take his Eagle off the runway again, but this time it would be different. This time, for the first time, he would seek to kill other human beings, and they would seek to kill him.

He would not see their faces or sense their fear, as they would not know his, for that is not the way of modern war. But if they succeeded and he failed, he wanted his parents to know how much he had loved them, and he hoped he had been a good son.

When he had finished, he sealed his letter. Many other letters were sealed mat day across the length and breadth of Saudi Arabia. Then the military postal services took them, and they were delivered to Trenton and Tulsa and London and Rouen and Rome.

That night Mike Martin received a burst from his controllers in Riyadh. When he played the tape back, it was Simon Paxman speaking. It was not a long message, but it was clear and to the point.

In his previous message, Jericho had been wrong, completely and utterly wrong. Every scientific check proved there was no way he could be right.

He had been wrong either deliberately or inadvertently. In the first case he must have turned, lured by the lust for money, or been turned.

In the second he would be aggrieved because the CIA absolutely refused to pay him a further dollar for this sort of product.

That being so, there was no choice but to believe either that, with Jericho’s cooperation, the whole operation had been blown to Iraqi Counterintelligence, now in the hands of “your friend Hassan Rahmani”; or that it soon would be, if Jericho sought revenge by sending Rahmani an anonymous tip.

All six dead-letter boxes must now be assumed to be compromised.

Under no circumstances were they to be approached. Martin should make his own preparations to escape Iraq at the first safe opportunity, perhaps under the mantle of the chaos that would ensue in twenty-four hours. End of message.

Martin thought it through for the remainder of the night. He was not surprised that the West disbelieved Jericho. That the mercenary’s payments were now to cease was a blow. The man had only reported the contents of a conference at which Saddam had spoken. So Saddam had lied—nothing new in that. What else was Jericho to do—ignore it?

It was the cheek of the man in asking for a million dollars that had done it.

Beyond that, Paxman’s logic was impeccable. Within four days, maybe five, Jericho would have checked and found no more money.

He would become angry, resentful. If he were not himself blown away and in the hands of Omar Khatib the Tormentor, he might well respond by making an anonymous tipoff.

Yet it would be foolish for Jericho to do that. If Martin were caught and broken—and he was uncertain how much pain he could take at the hands of Khatib and his professionals in the Gymnasium—his own information could point the finger at Jericho, whoever he was.

Still, people do foolish things. Paxman was right, the drops might be under surveillance.

As for escaping Baghdad, that was easier said than done. From gossip in the markets, Martin had heard that the roads out of town were thick with patrols of the AMAM and the Military Police, looking for deserters and draft-dodgers. His own letter from the Soviet diplomat Kulikov authorized him only to serve the man as gardener in Baghdad.

Hard to explain to a patrol checkpoint what he was doing heading west into the desert, where his motorcycle was buried.

On balance he decided to stay inside the Soviet compound for a while.

It was probably the safest place in Baghdad.

Chapter 15

The deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait expired at midnight on January 15. In a thousand rooms, huts, tents, and cabins across Saudi Arabia, and in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, men glanced at their watches and then at each other. There was very little to say.

Two floors beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry, behind the steel doors that would have protected any bank vault in the world, there was almost a sense of anticlimax. After all that work, all that planning,

there was nothing more to do—for a couple of hours. Now it was down to the younger men. They had their tasks, and they would carry them out in the pitch blackness far above the generals’ heads.

At 2:15 A.M., General Schwarzkopf entered the war room. Everyone stood. He read aloud a message to the troops, the chaplain said a prayer, and the commander-in-chief said, “Okay, let’s get to work.”

Far out across the desert, men were already at work. First across the border were not the warplanes but a flight of eight Apache helicopters belonging to the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Their task was limited but crucial.

North of the border but short of Baghdad were two powerful Iraqi radar bases, whose dishes commanded all the skies from the Gulf in the east to the western desert.

The helicopters had been chosen, despite their slow speed compared with supersonic jet fighters, for two reasons. Skimming the desert, they could pass under the radar and approach the bases unseen; further, the commanders wanted human-eyeball confirmation that the bases were really wrecked, and from close range. Only the choppers could give that. It would cost a lot of lives if those radars were left functioning.

The Apaches did all that was asked. They had still not been noticed when they opened fire. All their crew had night-vision helmets, which look as if they have short binoculars sticking out the front. They give the pilot complete night vision, so that in utter darkness to the naked eye he can see everything as if it were illuminated by a brilliant moon.

First they shattered the electrical generators that powered the radars, then the communications facilities from which their presence could be reported to missile sites farther inland; finally, they blew away the radar dishes.

In less than two minutes they had loosed twenty-seven Hellfire laser-guided missiles, a hundred 70-mm. rockets, and four thousand rounds of heavy-duty cannon fire. Both radar sites were left smoldering ruins.

The mission opened a huge hole in the air defense system of Iraq, and through this hole poured the remainder of the night’s attack.

Those who saw General Chuck Horner’s air-war plan later suggested it was probably one of the most brilliant ever devised. It contained a surgical, step-by-step precision and enough flexibility to cope with any contingency that required a variation.

Stage one was quite clear in its objectives and led on to the other three stages. It was to destroy all Iraq’s air defense systems and convert the Allies’ air superiority, with which they started, into air supremacy. For the other three stages to succeed within the self-imposed thirty-five-day time limit, Allied aircraft had to have the absolute run of Iraqi air space without hindrance.

In suppressing the air defense of Iraq, the key was radar. In modern warfare, radar is the single most important and most used tool, despite the brilliance of all the others in the armory.

Radar detects incoming warplanes; radar guides your own fighters to intercept; radar guides the antiaircraft missiles; and radar aims the guns.

Destroying the radar makes the enemy blind, like a heavyweight boxer in the ring with no eyes. He may be big and powerful still, he may pack a fearsome punch, but his enemy can move around the sightless Samson, jabbing and slashing at the helpless giant until the foregone conclusion is reached.

With the great hole punched in the forward radar cover of Iraq, the Tornados and Eagles, the F-111 Aardvarks and F-4G Wild Weasels powered through the gap, going for the radar sites farther inland,

heading for the missile bases guided by those radars, aiming for the command centers where the Iraqi generals sat, and blowing away the communications posts through which the generals were trying to talk to their outlying units.

From the battleships Wisconsin and Missouri and the cruiser San Jacinto out in the Gulf, fifty-two Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched that night. Guiding themselves by a combination of computerized memory bank and television nose camera, Tomahawks hug the contours of the landscape, swerving on preordained courses to where they have to go. When in the area, they “see” the target, compare it with the one in their memory, identify the exact building, and home in.

The Wild Weasel is a version of the Phantom, but specializing in radar-destruction. It carries HARMs, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.

When a radar dish lights up or “illuminates,” it emits electromagnetic waves, including infrared. It can’t help it. The HARM’s job is to find those waves with its sensors and go straight to the heart of the radar before exploding.

Perhaps strangest of all the warplanes slipping northward through the sky that night was the F-117A, known as the Stealth fighter. All black, created in such a shape that its multiple angles reflect most of the radar waves directed at it and absorb the rest into its own body, the Stealth fighter refuses to bounce hostile radar waves back to the receiver and thereby betray its existence to the enemy.

Thus invisible, the American F-117As that night simply slid unnoticed through Iraqi radar screens to drop their two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs precisely onto thirty-four targets associated with the national air defense system. Thirteen of those targets were in and around Baghdad.

When the bombs landed, the Iraqis fired blindly upward but could see nothing and missed. In Arabic, the Stealths were called shabah; it means “ghost.”

They came from the secret base of Khamis Mushait deep in the south of Saudi Arabia, where they had been transferred from their equally secret home at Tonopah, Nevada. While less fortunate American airmen had to live in tents, Khamis Mushait had been built miles from anywhere but with hardened aircraft shelters and air-conditioned accommodation, which was why the prized Stealths had been put there.

Because they flew so far, theirs were among the longest missions of the war, up to six hours from takeoff to landing, and all under strain.

They threaded their way undetected through some of the most intense air defense systems in the world—those of Baghdad—and not one was ever touched, on that or any other night.

When they had done what they came to do, they slipped away again, cruising like stingrays in a calm sea, and went back to Khamis Mushait.

The most dangerous job of the night went to the British Tornados.

Their task then, and for the next week until it was discontinued, was

“airfield denial,” using their big, heavy JP-233 runway-busting bombs.

Their problem was twofold. The Iraqis had built their military airfields to be absolutely vast. Tallil was four times the size of Heathrow, with sixteen runways and taxi tracks that could be used for takeoff and landing as well. It was simply impossible to destroy it all.

The second problem was one of height and speed. The JP-233s had to be launched from a Tornado in stabilized straight and level flight.

Even after bomb launch, the Tornados had no choice but to overfly the target. Even if the radars were knocked out, the gunners weren’t;

antiaircraft artillery, known as triple-A, came up at them in rolling waves as they approached, so that one pilot described those missions as “flying through tubes of molten steel.”

The Americans had abandoned tests on the JP-233 bomb, judging it to be a pilot-killer. They were right. But the RAF crews pressed on, losing planes and crews until they were called off and given other duties.

The bomb-droppers were not the only planes aloft that night. Behind them and with them flew an extraordinary array of backup services.

Air superiority fighters flew cover on and over the strike bombers. The Iraqi ground controllers’ instructions to their own pilots—the few who managed to take off that night—were jammed by the American Air Force Ravens and the Navy equivalent Prowlers. Iraqi pilots aloft got no verbal instructions and no radar guidance. Most, wisely, went straight back home.

Circling south of the border were sixty tankers: American KC-135s and KC-10s, U.S. Navy KA-6Ds, and British Victors and VC-10s.

Their job was to receive the warplanes coming up from Saudi Arabia, refuel them for the mission, then meet them on the way back to give them more fuel to get home. This may sound routine, but actually doing it in pitch darkness was described by one flier as “trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat’s backside.”

And out over the Gulf, where they had been for five months, the U.S.

Navy’s E-2 Hawkeyes and the USAF’s E-3 Sentry AWACS circled around and around, their radars picking up every friendly and every enemy aircraft in the sky, warning, advising, guiding, and watching.

By dawn, Iraq’s radars had mostly been crushed, her missile bases blinded, and her main command centers ruined. It would take four more days and nights to complete the job, but air supremacy was already in sight. Later would come the power-generating stations, telecommunications towers, telephone exchanges, relay stations, aircraft shelters, control towers, and all those known facilities for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.

Later still would come the systematic “degradation” to less than fifty percent of its fighting power of the Iraqi Army south and southwest of the Kuwaiti border, a condition on which General Schwarzkopf insisted before he would attack with ground troops.

Two then-unknown factors would later cause changes to the course of the war. One was Iraq’s decision to launch a barrage of Scud missiles at Israel; the other would be triggered by an act of sheer frustration on the part of Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.

Dawn broke on the morning of January 17 over a Baghdad that was very badly shaken.

The ordinary citizens had not slept a wink from three A.M. on, and when daylight came, some of them ventured out to peer curiously at the rubble of a score of major sites across their city. That they had survived the night seemed to many miraculous, for they were simple folk who did not realize that the twenty smoking mounds of rubble had been carefully selected and hit with such precision that the citizenry had been in no mortal danger.

But the real sense of shock was among the hierarchs. Saddam Hussein had left the Presidential Palace and was lodged in his extraordinary multistory bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel, which was still full of Westerners, mainly from the media.

The bunker had been built years earlier inside a vast crater dug by earth-movers, with mainly Swedish technology. So sophisticated were its security measures that it was in fact a box within a box, and beneath and around the inner box were springs of such strength as to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear bomb, reducing shock waves that would flatten the city above into a minor tremor down below.

Although access was via a hydraulically operated ramp set in waste ground behind the hotel, the main structure was beneath the Rashid, which had deliberately been built on the ground above as a specific repose for Westerners in Baghdad. Any enemy wishing to attempt a deep-penetration bombing of the bunker would have to obliterate the Rashid first.

Try as they might, the sycophants surrounding the Rais were hard put to create a gloss over the night’s disasters. Slowly, the level of the catastrophe penetrated all their minds.

They had all counted on a blanket bombing of the city, which would have left residential areas flattened and thousands of innocent civilians dead. This carnage would then be shown to the media, who would film it all and show it to the sickened audiences back home. Thus would begin the global wave of revulsion against President Bush and the United States, culminating in an emergency session of the UN Security Council and the veto of China and Russia against further massacre.

By midday, it was plain that the Sons of Dogs from across the Atlantic were not obliging. So far as the Iraqi generals were aware, the bombs fell approximately where they had been aimed, but that was all. With every major military installation in Baghdad deliberately sited in densely populated housing areas, it should have been impossible for massive civilian casualties to be avoided. Yet while a tour of the city revealed twenty command posts, missile sites, radar bases, and communication centers blasted to rubble, those not in the targeted buildings had sustained little more than broken windows and were even now gaping at the mess.

The authorities had to be satisfied with inventing a civilian death toll and claims that American aircraft had been shot out of the skies like autumn leaves. Most Iraqis, stultified by years of propaganda, believed these first reports—for a while.

The generals in charge of air defense knew better. By midday, it was clear to them that they had lost almost all their radar warning ability, that their SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—were blind, and that communication with the outlying units was all but cut. Worse, the radar operators who had survived kept insisting the damage had been done by bombers that simply had not shown up on their screens. The liars were at once put under arrest.

Some civilian casualties had indeed occurred. At least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, their fins damaged by conventional triple-A gunfire rather than SAMs, had crashed off-target. One had demolished two houses and blown tiles off a mosque, an outrage that the press corps was shown during the afternoon.

The other had fallen on waste ground and made a large crater. During the late afternoon the body of a woman was found at the bottom of it, badly smashed by the impact that apparently killed her.

Bombing raids continued throughout the day, so that the ambulance crews were not prepared to do more than wrap the corpse hastily in a blanket, bring it to the morgue of the nearest hospital, and leave it there. The hospital happened to be close to a major Air Force command center that had been demolished, and all beds were occupied by service personnel wounded in the attack. Several scores of bodies were taken to the same morgue, all dead from bomb blasts. The woman’s was just one of them.

With his resources at the breaking point, the pathologist worked fast and cursorily. Identification and cause of death were his principal priorities, and he had no time for leisured examination. Across the city the crump of more bombs could be heard, and the blast of counterfire was unceasing. He had no doubt the evening and night would bring him more bodies.

What surprised the doctor was that all his dead bodies were service personnel, except the woman. She seemed to be about thirty and had once been comely. The concrete dust clinging to the blood of her smashed face, coupled with the place she had been found, gave cause for no other explanation than that she had been running away when the missile struck the waste ground and killed her. The body was so tagged, then wrapped for burial.

Her handbag had been found next to the body, and it contained a powder compact, lipstick, and her identity cards. Having established that one Leila Al-Hilla was undoubtedly a civilian victim of a bomb blast, the harassed pathologist had her taken away for hasty burial.

The more elaborate post-mortem for which he did not have time that January 17 would have shown the woman had been repeatedly and savagely raped before being systematically beaten to death. The dumping in the crater had come several hours later.

General Abdullah Kadiri had moved from his sumptuous office in the Defense Ministry two days earlier. There was no point in staying to be blown to bits by an American bomb, and he was sure the Ministry would be hit and destroyed before the air war was many days old. He was right.

He had established himself in his villa, which he was reasonably certain was anonymous enough—albeit luxurious—not to be on any American target map. In this too he was right.

The villa had long since been provided with its own communications room, which staff from the Ministry were now manning. All his communications to the various command headquarters of the Armored Corps around Baghdad were by buried fiber-optic cable, which was also out of reach of the bombers.

Only the farther units had to be contacted by radio, with a threat of intercept—plus, of course, those in Kuwait.

His problem, as darkness fell over Baghdad that night, was not how to contact his Armored Corps commanders or what orders to give them.

They could take no part in the air war, being tasked to disperse their tanks as widely as possible among the rows of dummies or bury them in the subterranean bunkers and wait.

His problem, rather, was his personal security, and it was not the Americans he feared.

Two nights earlier, rising from his bed with a bursting bladder, bleary with arak as usual, he had stumbled to the bathroom. Finding the door, as he thought, stuck, he had pushed hard. His two hundred pounds of body weight had torn the inner bolt from its screws, and the door flew open.

Bleary he might have been, but Abdullah Kadiri had not come from a back street near Tikrit to command all Iraq’s tanks outside the Republican Guard, had not climbed the slippery ladder of Ba’ath Party internal feuding, and had not sustained a trusted place on the Revolutionary Command Council without ample reserves of animal cunning.

He had stared in silence at his mistress, sitting wrapped in a robe on the toilet seat, her paper sustained by the back of a Kleenex box, her mouth in a round O of horror and surprise, her pen still poised in midair. Then he had hauled her to her feet and hit her on the point of the jaw.

When she came to, with a jug of water dashed in the face, he had had time to read the report she was preparing and to summon the trusty Kemal from his quarters across the yard. It was Kemal who had taken the whore down to the basement.

Kadiri had read and reread the report she had almost finished. Had it concerned his personal habits and preferences, a lever for future blackmail, he would have dismissed it and simply had her killed. In any case, no blackmail would ever have worked. The personal baseness of some of the entourage of the Rais was greater than his own, he knew. He also knew that the Rais did not care.

This was worse. Apparently he had talked of things that had happened within the government and the Army. That she was spying was obvious. He needed to know for how long and what she had reported already, but most of all, for whom.

Kemal took his long-awaited pleasures first, with his master’s permission. No man would lust after what remained when Kemal had finished the interrogation. It had taken several hours. Then, Kadiri knew, Kemal had gotten it all—at least, all the courtesan knew.

After that, Kemal had continued for his own amusement until she was dead.

Kadiri was convinced that she had not known the real identity of the man who had recruited and ran her to spy on him, but the picture had to fit Hassan Rahmani.

The description of the information-against-money exchanges in the confessional of St. Joseph’s showed the man was professional, and Rahmani was certainly that.

That he should be watched did not worry Kadiri. All those around the Rais were watched; indeed, they watched each other. The rules of the

Rais were simple and clear. Every figure of high rank was watched and reported on by three of his peers. A denunciation for treachery could and probably would lead to ruin. Thus, few conspiracies could get very far. One of those confided in would report the matter, and it would come to the ears of the Rais.

To complicate matters, each member of the entourage was occasionally provoked, to see what his reaction would be. A colleague, briefed to do so, would take his friend aside and propose treason.

If the friend agreed, he was finished. If he failed to report the proposer, he was finished. So any approach could be a provocation—it was simply too unsafe to assume otherwise. Thus, each reported on the others.

But this was different. Rahmani was head of Counterintelligence. Had he taken the initiative on his own, and if so, why? Was it an operation with the knowledge and approval of the Rais himself, and if so, why?

What had he said? the general wondered. Things indiscreet, no doubt.

But traitorous?

The body had stayed in the basement until the bombs fell, then Kemal had found a crater on a patch of waste ground to dump it. The general had insisted the handbag be placed nearby. Let that bastard Rahmani know what had happened to his slut.

As midnight passed, General Abdullah Kadiri sweated alone, tipping a few drops of water into his tenth tumbler of arak. If it was Rahmani alone, he would finish the bastard. But how could he know how far up the ladder he was distrusted? He would have to be careful henceforth, more careful than he had ever been before. Those late-night trips into the city would end. In any case, with the air war started, it was time to cease.

Simon Paxman had flown back again to London. There was no point in staying in Riyadh. Jericho had been kicked firmly into touch by the CIA, although the unseen renegade in Baghdad would not know it yet, and Mike Martin was confined to quarters until he could escape to the desert and find his way to safety across the border.

Later, Paxman could swear with his hand on his heart the meeting on the evening of the eighteenth with Dr. Terry Martin had been a true coincidence. He knew Martin lived in Bayswater, as he did himself, but it is a large borough with many shops.

With his wife away at the bedside of her sick mother and his own return unforeseen, Paxman had come home to an empty flat and an empty fridge, so he went shopping at an open-late supermarket on Westbourne Grove.

Terry Martin’s cart nearly crashed into his own as he came around the corner of pastas and pet food. Both men were startled.

“Am I allowed to know you?” asked Martin with an embarrassed grin.

There was no one else in that aisle at the time.

“Why not?” said Paxman. “I’m just a humble civil servant shopping for his evening meal.”

They finished their purchases together and agreed to adjourn to an Indian restaurant for a meal rather than cook at home alone. Hilary, it seemed, was also away.

Paxman should, of course, not have done it. He should never have felt uncomfortable that Terry Martin’s elder brother was in a situation of appalling danger and that he, with others, had sent him into it. It should not have worried him that the trusting scholar should really believe that his adored sibling was safe inside Saudi Arabia. All tradecraft insists that one does not worry about that sort of thing. But he did.

There was another worry. Steve Laing was his superior at Century House, but Laing had never been to Iraq. His background was in Egypt and Jordan. Paxman knew Iraq—and Arabic. Not like Terry Martin, of course, but Martin was exceptional. Paxman knew enough, from several visits before he had been made head of the Iraq Desk, to form a sincere respect for the quality of Iraqi scientists and the ingenuity of their engineers. It was no secret that most British technical institutes considered their graduates from Iraq the best in the Arab world.

The worry that had nagged at him since he was told by his superiors that the last Jericho report could be none other than a load of nonsense was simply the fear that, despite all the odds, Iraq might actually be further ahead than the Western scientists were prepared to credit.

He waited until the two meals had arrived, surrounded by small pots of the accessories without which no Indian meal is complete, then made up his mind.

“Terry,” he said, “I am going to do something which, if it ever got out, would mean the end of my career in the Service.”

Martin was startled.

“That sounds drastic. Why?”

“Because I have been officially warned off you.”

The scholar was about to spoon some mango chutney onto his plate, then stopped.

“I am not thought to be reliable anymore? It was Steve Laing who pulled me into all this.”

“It’s not that. The view is that—you worry too much.”

Paxman was not prepared to use Laing’s word fusspot.

“Perhaps I do. It’s the training. Academics do not like puzzles that seem to have no answer. We have to go on worrying at it until the jumbled hieroglyphic makes sense. Was it that business of the phrase in the intercept?”

“Yes, that and other things.”

Paxman had chosen chicken khorma; Martin liked his hotter—vindaloo. Because he knew his eastern food, Martin drank hot black tea, not ice-cold beer, which only makes things worse. He blinked at Paxman over the edge of his mug.

“All right. So what is the great confession?”

“Will you give me your word that this goes no further?”

“Of course.”

“There’s been another intercept.”

Paxman had not the slightest intention of revealing the existence of Jericho. The group who knew of that asset in Iraq was still tiny and would stay that way.

“Can I listen to it?”

“No. It’s been suppressed. Don’t approach Sean Plummer. He’d have to deny it, and that would reveal where you got the information.”

Martin helped himself to more raita to cool down the flaming curry.

“What does it say, this new intercept?”

Paxman told him. Martin put down his fork and wiped his face, which was bright pink beneath the ginger thatch of his hair.

“Can it—could it, under any circumstances, be true?” asked Paxman.

“I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. The brass has given it a no-no?”

“Absolutely. The nuclear scientists all agree it simply cannot be true.

So Saddam was lying.”

Privately, Martin thought it was a very odd radio intercept. It sounded more like information from inside a closed meeting.

“Saddam lies,” Martin said, “all the time. But usually for public consumption. This was to his own inner core of confidants? I wonder why? Morale booster on the threshold of war?”

“That’s what the powers think,” said Paxman.

“Have the generals been told?”

“No. The reasoning is, they are extremely busy right now and do not need to be bothered by something that simply has to be rubbish.”

“So what do you want from me, Simon?”

“Saddam’s mind. No one can figure it out. Nothing he does makes sense in the West. Is he certifiably insane or crazy like a fox?”

“In his world, the latter. In his world, what he does makes sense. The terror that revolts us has no moral downside for him, and it makes sense. The threats and the bluster make sense to him. Only when he tries to enter our world—with those ghastly PR exercises in Baghdad, ruffling that little English boy’s hair, playing the benign uncle, that sort of thing—only when he tries that does he look a complete fool. In his own world he is not a fool. He survives, he stays in power, he keeps Iraq united, his enemies fail and perish.”

“Terry, as we sit here, his country is being pulverized.”

“It doesn’t matter, Simon. It’s all replaceable.”

“But why did he say what he is supposed to have said?”

“What do the powers think?”

“That he lied.”

“No,” said Martin, “he lies for public consumption. To his inner core, he doesn’t have to. They are his, anyway. Either the source of the information lied and Saddam never said that; or he said it because he believed it was true.”

“Then he was himself lied to?”

“Possibly. Whoever did that will pay dearly when he finds out. But then, the intercept could be phony. A deliberate bluff, designed to be intercepted.”

Paxman could not say what he knew: that it was not an intercept. It came from Jericho. And in two years under the Israelis and three months under the Anglo-Americans, Jericho had never been wrong.

“You’ve got doubts, haven’t you?” said Martin.

“I suppose I have,” admitted Paxman.

Martin sighed.

“Straws in the wind, Simon. A phrase in an intercept, a man told to shut up and called a son of a whore, a phrase from Saddam about succeeding and being seen to succeed—in the hurting of America—and now this. We need a piece of string.”

“String?”

“Straw only makes up a bale when you can wrap it around with string.

There has to be something else as to what he really has in mind.

Otherwise, the powers are right, and he will go for the gas weapon he already has.”

“All right. I’ll look for a piece of string.”

“And I,” said Martin, “did not meet you this evening, and we have not spoken.”

“Thank you,” said Paxman.

Hassan Rahmani heard of the death of his agent Leila two days after it happened, on January 19. She had not appeared for a scheduled handover of information from General Kadiri’s bed, and fearing the worst, he had checked morgue records.

The hospital in Mansour had produced the evidence, though the corpse had been buried, with many others from the destroyed military buildings, in a mass grave.

Hassan Rahmani no more believed that his agent had been hit by a stray bomb while crossing a piece of waste ground in the middle of the night than he believed in ghosts. The only ghosts in the skies above Baghdad were the invisible American bombers of which he had read in Western defense magazines, and they were not ghosts but logically contrived inventions. So was the death of Leila Al-Hilla.

His only logical conclusion was that Kadiri had discovered her extramural activities and put a stop to them. Which meant she would have talked before she died.

That meant, for him, that Kadiri had become a powerful and dangerous enemy. Worse, his principal conduit into the inner councils of the regime had been closed down.

Had he known that Kadiri was as worried as he himself, Rahmani would have been delighted. But he did not know. He only knew that from thenceforward he was going to have to be extremely careful.