The Fist of God

General Horner told the lieutenant colonel that this was not possible—the Buffs were fully tasked. The squadron commander out in the desert protested, but the answer was still the same. Well, said the lieutenant colonel, in that case you can suck me.

Very few officers can tell a full general to do that and get away with it.

It says much for Chuck Horner’s approach to his flying crews that two weeks later the feisty squadron commander got his promotion to full colonel.

That was where Chip Barber found Horner that night, just before one o’clock, and they met in the general’s private office inside the underground complex forty minutes later.

The general read the transcription of the English language text from Riyadh gloomily. Barber had used the word processor to annotate certain parts—it no longer looked like a radio message.

“This another of your deductions from interviewing businessmen in Europe?” he asked mordantly.

“We believe the information to be accurate, General.”

Horner grunted. Like most combat men, he had little time for the covert world—the people referred to as spooks. It was ever thus. The reason is simple. Combat is dedicated to the pursuit of optimism—cautious optimism perhaps, but nevertheless optimism—or no one would ever take part in it. The covert world is dedicated to the presumption of pessimism. The two philosophies have little in common, and even at this stage of the war the U.S. Air Force was becoming increasingly irritated by the CIA’s repeated suggestions that it was destroying fewer targets than it claimed.

“And is this supposed target associated with what I think it is?” asked the general.

“We just believe it to be very important, sir.”

“Well, first thing, Mr. Barber, we’re going to have a damn good look at it.”

This time it was a TR-1 out of Taif that did the honors. An upgraded version of the old U-2, the TR-1 was being used as a multitask information gatherer, able to overfly Iraq out of sight and sound, using its technology to probe deep into the defenses with radar imaging and listening equipment. But it still had its cameras and was occasionally used not for the broad picture but for a single intimate mission. The task of photographing a location known only as Al Qubai was about as intimate as one can get.

There was a second reason for the TR-1: It can transmit its pictures in real time. No waiting for the mission to come back, download the TARPS, develop the film, and rush it across to Riyadh. As the TR-1 cruised over the designated patch of desert west of Baghdad and south of the Al-Muhammadi air base, the images it saw came straight to a television screen in the basement of the Saudi Air Force headquarters.

There were five men in the room, including the technician who operated the console and who could, at a word from the other four, order the computer to freeze-frame and run off a photographic print for study.

Chip Barber and Steve Laing were there, tolerated in their civilian dress in this mecca of military prowess; the other two were Colonel Beatty of the USAF and Squadron Leader Joe Peck of” the RAF, both experts in target analysis.

The reason for using Al Qubai was simply that this was the nearest village to the target; as it was too small a settlement to show up on their maps, it was the accompanying grid reference and description that mattered to the analysts.

The TR-1 found it a few miles from the grid reference sent by Jericho, but there could be no question that the description was exact, and there were no other locations remotely near that fit the description.

The four men watched the target swim into vision, freeze on the best frame, and hold. The modem punched out a print for study.

“It’s under there?” breathed Laing.

“Must be,” said Colonel Beatty. “There’s nothing else like it for miles around.”

“Cunning buggers,” said Peck.

Al Qubai was in fact the nuclear engineering plant for Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar’s entire Iraqi nuclear program.

A British nuclear engineer once remarked that his craft was “ten percent genius and ninety percent plumbing.” There is rather more to it than that. The engineering plant is where craftsmen take the product of the physicists, the calculations of the mathematicians and the computers, and the results of the chemists and assemble the final product. It is the nuclear engineers who actually make the device into a deliverable piece of metal.

Iraq had buried its Al Qubai plant completely beneath the desert, eighty feet down, and that was just the level of the roof. Beneath the roof, three stories of workshops ran farther downward. What caused Squadron Leader Peck’s “cunning buggers” remark was the skill with which it had been disguised.

It is not all that difficult to build an entire factory underground, but disguising it presents major problems. Once it is constructed in its giant crater, sand may be bulldozed back against the ferroconcrete walls and over the roof until the building is concealed. Sinks beneath the lowest floor may cope with drainage.

But the factory will need air conditioning; that requires a fresh-air intake and a foul-air outlet—both pipes jutting out of the desert floor.

It will also need masses of electric power, implying a powerful diesel generator. That too needs an air intake and exhaust outlet—two more pipes.

There must be a down-ramp or a passenger elevator and a cargo hoist for deliveries and departures of personnel and materials—another above-surface structure. Delivery trucks cannot roll on soft sand; they need a hard road, a spur of tarmac running from the nearest main road.

There will be heat emissions, concealable during the day when the outside air is hot, but not during the chill nights.

How therefore to disguise from aerial surveillance an area of virgin desert entertaining a tarmac road that seems to run to nowhere, four major pipes, an elevator shaft, the constant arrival and departure of trucks, and frequent heat emissions?

It was Colonel Osman Badri, the young genius of Iraq’s Army Engineering Corps, who had cracked it; and his solution fooled the Allies with all their spy planes.

From the air, Al Qubai was a forty-five-acre automobile junkyard.

Though the watchers in Riyadh, even with their best magnifiers, could not see it, four of the heaps of rusting car wrecks were welded frames—solid domes of twisted metal—beneath which pipes sucked in fresh air or filtered out the foul gases through the broken bodies of cars and vans.

The main shed, the cutting shop, with its steel tanks of oxygen and acetylene ostentatiously parked outside, hid the entry to the elevator shafts. The naturalness of welding in such a place would justify a heat source.

The reason for the single-track tarred road was obvious—trucks needed to arrive with car wrecks and leave with scrap steel.

The whole system had actually been seen early on by AWACS, which registered a great mass of metal in the middle of the desert. Was it a tank division? An ammunition dump? An early fly-over had established it was just a car junkyard, and interest had been abandoned.

What the four men in Riyadh could also not see was that four other minimountains of rusted car bodies were also solidly welded frames,

internally shaped like domes, but with hydraulic jacks beneath them.

Two of them housed powerful antiaircraft batteries, multibarreled ZSU-23-4 Russian cannon; the other two concealed SAMs, models 6,8, and 9, not radar-guided but the smaller heat-seeking type—a radar dish would have given the game away.

“So it’s under there,” breathed Beatty.

Even as they watched, a long truck loaded with old car bodies entered the picture. It seemed to move in little jerks, because the TR-1, flying eighty thousand feet above Al Qubai, was running off still frames at the rate of several a second. Fascinated, the two intelligence officers watched until the truck reversed into the welding shed.

“Betcha the food, water, and supplies are under the car bodies,” said Beatty. He sat back. “Trouble is, we’ll never get at the damn factory.

Not even the Buffs can bomb that deep.”

“We could close them down,” said Peck. “Crush the lift shaft, seal ’em in. Then if they try any rescue work to unblock, we shoot them up again.”

“Sounds good,” agreed Beatty. “How many days till the land invasion?”

“Twelve,” said Barber.

“We can do it,” said Beatty. “High-level, laser-guided, a mass of planes, a gorilla.”

Laing shot Barber a warning glance.

“We’d prefer something a little more discreet,” said Barber. “A two-ship raid, low-level, eyeball confirmation of destruction.”

There was silence.

“You guys trying to tell us something?” asked Beatty. “Like, Baghdad is not supposed to know we’re interested?”

“Could you please do it that way?” urged Laing. “There don’t seem to be any defenses. The key here is disguise.”

Beatty sighed. Fucking spooks, he thought. They’re trying to protect someone. Well, none of my business.

“What do you think, Joe?” he asked the squadron leader.

“The Tornados could do it,” said Joe Peck, “with Buccaneers target-marking for them. Six one-thousand-pound bombs right through the door of the shed. I’ll bet that tin shed is ferroconcrete inside. Should contain the blast nicely.”

Beatty nodded. “Okay, you guys have it. I’ll clear it with General Horner. Who do you want to use, Joe?”

“Six-oh-eight Squadron, at Maharraq. I know the CO, Phil Curzon.

Shall I get him over here?”

Wing Commander Philip Curzon commanded twelve of the Royal Air Force’s Panavia Tornados of the 608th Squadron, on the island of Bahrain, where they had arrived two months earlier from their base at Laarbruck, Germany. Just after noon that day, February 8, he received an order that brooked no denial: to report immediately to the CENTAF

headquarters in Riyadh. So great was the urgency that by the time he had acknowledged the message, his orderly officer reported that a Beach King Air from Shakey’s Pizza on the other side of the island had landed and was taxiing in to pick him up. When he boarded the Beach King Air after throwing on a uniform jacket and cap, he discovered that the twin-engined executive plane was assigned to General Horner himself.

“What the hell is going on?” the wing commander asked himself, and with justification.

At Riyadh military air base a USAF staff car was waiting to carry him the mile down Old Airport Road to the Black Hole.

The four men who had been in conference to see the TR-1’s mission pictures at ten that morning were still there. Only the technician was missing. They needed no more pictures. The ones they had were spread all over the table. Squadron Leader Peck made the introductions.

Steve Laing explained what was needed, and Curzon examined the photos.

Philip Curzon was no fool, or he would not have been commanding a squadron of Her Majesty’s very expensive fighter-bombers. In the early low-level missions with JP-233 bombs against Iraqi airfields, he had lost two aircraft and four good men; two he knew were dead. The other two had just been paraded, battered and dazed, on Iraqi TV, another of Saddam’s PR masterpieces.

“Why not put this target on the Air Tasking Order, like all the others?”

he asked quietly. “Why the hurry?”

“Let me be perfectly straight with you,” said Laing. “We now believe this target to house Saddam’s principal and perhaps only store of a particularly vicious poison gas shell. There is evidence that the first stocks are about to be moved to the front. Hence the urgency.”

Beatty and Peck perked up. This was the first explanation they had received to explain the spooks’ interest in the factory beneath the junkyard.

“But two attack planes?” Curzon persisted. “Just two? That makes it a very low-priority mission. What am I supposed to tell my aircrew? I’m not going to lie to them, gentlemen. Please get that quite straight.”

“There’s no need, and I wouldn’t tolerate that either,” said Laing. “Just tell them the truth. That aerial surveillance has indicated movement of trucks to and from the site. The analysts believe them to be military trucks, and they have jumped to the conclusion this apparent scrapyard hides an ammunition dump—principally, inside that big central shed.

So that’s the target. As for a low-level mission, you can see there are no missiles, no triple-A.”

“And that’s the truth?” asked the wing commander.

“I swear it.”

“Then why, gentlemen, the clear intention that if any of my crews are shot down and interrogated, Baghdad should not learn where the information really came from? You don’t believe the military truck story any more than I do.”

Colonel Beatty and Squadron Leader Peck sat back. This man really was squeezing the spooks hard where it hurt most. Good for him.

“Tell him, Chip,” said Laing in resignation.

“Okay, Wing Commander, I’ll level with you. But this is for your ears only. The rest is absolutely true. We have a defector. In the States.

Came over before the war as a graduate student. Now he’s fallen for an American girl and wants to stay. During the interviews with the immigration people, something came up. A smart interviewer passed him over to us.”

“The CIA?” asked Curzon.

“Okay, yes, the CIA. We did a deal with the guy. He gets the green card, he helps us. When he was in Iraq, in Army Engineers, he worked on a few secret projects. Now he’s spilling all. So now you know. But it’s top classification. It doesn’t alter the mission, and it isn’t lying for you not to tell the aircrew that—which, incidentally, you may not do.”

“One last question,” said Curzon. “If the man is safe in the States, why the need to fool Baghdad anymore?”

“There are other targets he’s spilling for us. It takes time, but we may get twenty fresh targets out of him. We alert Baghdad that he’s singing like a canary, they move the goodies somewhere else by night. They can add two and two as well, you know.”

Philip Curzon rose and gathered the photos. Each had its exact grid reference on the map stamped on one side.

“All right. Dawn tomorrow. That shed will cease to exist.”

Then he left. On the flight back he mulled over the mission. Something inside him said it stank like an old cod. But the explanations were perfectly feasible, and he had his orders. He would not lie, but he had been forbidden to disclose everything. The good part was, the target was based on deception, not protection. His men should get in and out unscathed. He already knew who would lead the attack.

Squadron Leader Lofty Williamson was happily sprawled in a chair in the evening sun when the call came. He was reading the latest edition of World Air Power Journal, the combat pilots’ bible, and was annoyed to be torn away from a superbly authoritative article on one of the Iraqi fighters he might run into.

The squadron commander was in his office, photos spread out before him. For an hour he briefed his senior flight commander on what was wanted.

“You’ll have two Bucks to mark target for you, so you should be able to loft and get the hell out of there before the ungodly know what’s hit

’em.”

Williamson found his navigator, the rear-seat man the Americans call the wizzo, who nowadays does a lot more than navigate, being in charge of air electronics and weapons systems. Flight Lieutenant Sid Blair was reputed to be able to find a tin can in the Sahara if it needed bombing.

Between them, with the aid of the Operations people, they mapped out the mission. The exact location of the junkyard was found, from its grid reference, on their air maps.

The pilot made plain that he wanted to attack from the east at the very moment of the rising of the sun, so that any Iraqi gunners would have the light in their eyes while he, Williamson, would see the target with complete clarity.

Blair insisted he wanted a “stone bonker,” some unmistakable landmark along the run-in track by which he could make tiny last-minute adjustments on his course-to-steer. They found one twelve miles back from the target in an easterly direction—a radio mast exactly one mile from the run-in track.

Going in at dawn would give them the vital Time on Target, or TOT, that they needed. The reason the TOT must be followed to the second is that precision makes the difference between success and failure. If the first pilot is late even by one second, the follow-up pilot could run right into the explosion of his colleague’s bombs; worse, the first pilot will have a Tornado coming up on his rear at nearly ten miles a minute—not a pretty sight. Finally, if the first pilot is too early or the second pilot too late, the gunners will have time to wake up, man their guns, and aim them. So the second fliers go in just as the shrapnel of the first explosions subside.

Williamson brought in his wingman and the second navigator, two young flight lieutenants, Peter Johns and Nicky Tyne. The precise moment the sun should rise over the low hills to the east of the target was agreed at 0708 hours, and the attack heading at 270 degrees due west.

Two Buccaneers from the 12th Squadron, also based at Maharraq, had been assigned. Williamson would liaise with their pilots in the morning. The armorers had been instructed to fit three one-thousand-pound bombs equipped with PAVEWAY laser-guidance noses to each Tornado. At eight that night, the four aircrew ate and went to bed, with a morning call set for three A.M.

It was still pitch-black when an aircraftman in a truck came to the 608th Squadron’s sleeping quarters to take the four crewmen to the flight hut.

If the Americans at Al Kharz were roughing it under canvas, those based on Bahrain enjoyed the comfort of civilized living. Some were bunking two to a room at the Sheraton Hotel. Others were in brick-built bachelor quarters nearer the air base. The food was excellent, drink was available, and the worst loneliness of the combat life was assuaged by the presence of three hundred female trainee flight attendants at the nearby training school of Gulf Air.

The Buccaneers had been brought out to the Gulf only a week earlier, having first been told they were not wanted. Since then, they had more than proved their worth. Essentially submarine-busters, the Bucks were more accustomed to skimming the waters of the North Sea looking for Soviet submersibles, but they did not mind the desert either.

Their speciality was low flying, and although they were thirty-year-old veterans, they had been known, in interservice war games with the USAF at the Navy Fighter School in Miramar, California, to evade the much faster American fighters simply by “eating dirt”—flying so low as to become impossible to follow through the buttes and mesas of the desert.

The inter-air-force rivalry will have it that the Americans do not like low flying and under five hundred feet tend to lower their undercarriages, whereas the Royal Air Force love it and above one hundred feet complain of altitude sickness. In fact, both can fly low or high, but the Bucks, not supersonic but amazingly maneuverable, figure they can go lower than anyone and survive.

The reason for their appearance in the Gulf was the original losses sustained by the Tornados on their first ultra-low-level missions.

Working alone, the Tornados had to launch their bombs and then follow them all the way to the target, right into the heart of the triple-A. But when they and the Buccaneers worked together, the Tornados’

bombs carried the laser-seeking PAVEWAY nose cone, while the Bucks bore the laser transmitter, called PAVESPIKE. Riding above and behind a Tornado, a Buck could “mark” the target, letting the Tornado release the bomb and then get the hell out without delay.

Moreover, the Buck’s PAVESPIKE was mounted in a gyroscopically stabilized gimbal in its belly, so that it too could twist and weave, while keeping the laser beam right on the target until the bomb arrived and hit.

In the flight hut, Williamson and the two Buck pilots agreed to set their IP—Initial Point, the start of the bomb run—at twelve miles east of the target shed. Then they went to change into flying gear. As usual, they had arrived in civilian clothes; the policy on Bahrain was that too much military out on the streets might alarm the locals.

When they were all changed, Williamson as mission commander completed the briefing. It was still two hours to takeoff. The thirty-second “scramble” of Second World War pilots was a long way gone.

There was time for coffee and the next stage of preparations. Each man picked up his handgun, a small Walther PPK that they all loathed, figuring that if attacked in the desert they might as well throw it at an Iraqi’s head and hope to knock him out that way.

They also drew their £1000 in five gold sovereigns and the “goolie chit.” This remarkable document was first introduced to the Americans in the Gulf War, but the British, who have been flying combat in those parts since the 1920s, understood them well. A goolie chit is a letter in Arabic and six kinds of Bedouin dialect. It says in effect, “Dear Mr.

Bedou, the presenter of this letter is a British officer. If you return him to the nearest British patrol, complete with his testicles and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with £5000 in gold.” Sometimes it works.

The flying uniforms had reflective shoulder patches that could possibly be detected by Allied seekers if a pilot came down in the desert; but no wings above the left breast pocket, just a Velcroed Union Jack patch.

After coffee came sterilization—not as bad as it sounds. All rings, cigarettes, lighters, letters, and family photos were removed, anything that might give an interrogator a lever on the personality of his prisoner. The strip search was carried out by a stunning WAAF named Pamela Smith—the aircrew figured this was the best part of the mission, and younger pilots dropped their valuables into the most surprising places to see if Pamela could find them. Fortunately, she had once been a nurse and accepted this nonsense with calm good humor.

One hour to takeoff. Some men ate, some couldn’t, some cat-napped, some drank coffee and hoped they would not have to pee halfway through the mission, and some threw up. The bus took the eight men to their aircraft, already buzzing with riggers, fitters, and armorers. Each pilot walked around his ship, checking through the pretakeoff ritual.

Finally they climbed aboard.

The first task was to get settled, fully strapped in, and linked to the Have-quick radio so that they could talk. Then the APU—the auxiliary power unit that set all the instruments dancing.

In the rear the inertial navigation platform came alive, giving Sid Blair the chance to punch in his planned courses and turns. Williamson started his right engine, which began to howl softly, then the left.

Close canopy, taxi to number one, the holding point. Clearance from the tower, taxi to takeoff point. Williamson glanced to his right. Peter Johns’s Tornado was beside him and a bit back, and beyond him the two Buccaneers. He raised a hand. Three white-gloved hands rose in return.

Foot brakes on, run up to maximum “dry” power. The Tornado was trembling gently. Through the throttle gate into afterburn, now she was shuddering against the brakes. A final thumbs-up and three acknowledgments. Brakes off, the surge, the roll, the tarmac flashing by faster and faster, and then they were up, four in formation, banking over the dark sea, the lights of Manama dropping behind, setting course for the rendezvous with the tanker waiting for them somewhere over the Saudi border with Iraq.

Williamson brought the power setting out of afterburn and settled into a climb at 300 knots to twenty thousand feet. With radar, they found the tanker in the darkness, closed behind her, and inserted their fuel nozzles into the trailing drogues. Once topped up, all four turned and dropped away down to the desert.

Williamson leveled his detail at two hundred feet, setting a maximum cruise at 480 knots, and thus they sped into Iraq. He was flying with the aid of TIALD, the Thermal Imaging and Laser Designator, which was the British equivalent of the LANTIRN system. Low over the black desert, the pilots could see everything ahead of them, the rocks, the cliffs, the outcrops, the hills, as if they glowed.

Just before the sun rose, they turned at the IP onto the bombing run.

Sid Blair saw the radio mast and told his pilot to adjust course by one degree.

Williamson flicked his bomb-release catches to slave mode and glanced at his Head-Up Display, which was running off the miles and seconds to release point. He was down to a hundred feet, over flat ground and holding steady. Somewhere behind him, his wingman was doing the same. Time on Target was exact. He was easing the throttle in and out of afterburn to maintain an attack speed of 540 knots.

The sun cleared the hills, the first beams sliced across the plain, and there it was at six miles. He could see the metal glinting, the mounds of junked cars, and the great gray shed in the center, the double doors pointing toward him.

The Bucks were a hundred feet above and a mile back. The talk-through from the Bucks, which had begun at the IP, continued in his ears. Six miles and closing, five miles, some movement in the target area, four miles.

“I am marking,” said the first Buck navigator. The laser beam from the Buck was right on the door of the shed. At three miles, Williamson began his “loft,” easing the nose up, blanking out his vision of the target. No matter, the technology would do the rest. At three hundred feet his HUD told him to release. He flicked the bomb switch, and all three one-thousand-pound bombs flew away from his underside.

Because he was lofting, the bombs rose slightly with him before gravity took over and they began a graceful downward parabola toward the shed.

With his plane one and a half tons lighter, he rose fast to a thousand feet, then threw on 135 degrees of bank and kept pulling at the control column. The Tornado was diving and turning, back to the earth and back the way it had come. His Buck flashed over him, then pulled away in its turn.

Because he had a TV camera in the belly of his aircraft, the Buccaneer navigator could see the bombs’ impact right on the doors of the shed.

The entire area in front of the shed dissolved in a sheet of flame and smoke, while a pillar of dust rose from the place where the shed had been. As it began to settle. Peter Johns in the second Tornado was coming in, thirty seconds behind his leader.

The Buck navigator saw more than that. The movements he had seen earlier codified into a pattern. Guns were visible.

“They’ve got triple-A!” he shouted. The second Tornado was lofting.

The second Buccaneer could see it all. The shed, blown to pieces under the impact of the first three bombs, revealed an inner structure twisted and bent. But there were antiaircraft cannon blazing among the mounds of wrecked cars.

“Bombs gone!” yelled Johns, and hauled his Tornado into a maximum-G turn. His own Buccaneer was also pulling away from the target, but its belly PAVESPIKE kept the beam on the remains of the shed.

“Impact!” screamed the Buck’s navigator.

There was a flicker of fire among the car wrecks. Two shoulder-borne SAMs hared off after the Tornado.

Williamson had leveled from his turning dive, back to one hundred feet above the desert but heading the other way, toward the now-risen sun. He heard Peter Johns’s voice shout, “We’re hit!”

Behind him, Sid Blair was silent. Swearing in his anger, Williamson pulled the Tornado around again, thinking there might be a chance of holding off the Iraqi gunners with his cannon. He was too late.

He heard one of the Bucks say, “They’ve got missiles down there,”

and then he saw Johns’s Tornado, climbing, streaming smoke from a blazing engine, heard the twenty-five-year-old say quite clearly,

“Going down ... ejecting.”

There was nothing more any of them could do. In earlier missions the Bucks used to accompany the Tornados home. By this date, it had been agreed the Bucks could go home on their own. In silence the two target markers did what they did best: They got their bellies right on the desert in the morning sun and kept them there all the way home.

Lofty Williamson was in a blind rage, convinced he had been lied to.

He had not; no one knew about the triple-A and the missiles hidden at Al Qubai.

High above, a TR-1 sent real-time pictures of the destruction back to Riyadh. An E-3 Sentry had heard all the in-air talk and told Riyadh they had lost a Tornado crew.

Lofty Williamson came home alone, to debrief and vent his anger on the target selectors in Riyadh.

In the CENTAF headquarters on Old Airport Road, the delight of Steve Laing and Chip Barber that had been buried in the womb where it had been created was marred by the loss of the two young men.

Chapter 19

Brigadier Hassan Rahmani sat in his private office in the Mukhabarat building in Mansour and contemplated the events of the previous twenty-four hours with near despair.

That the principal military and war-production centers of his country were being systematically torn apart by bombs and rockets did not worry him. These developments, predicted by him weeks before, simply brought closer the pending American invasion and the fall from office of the man from Tikrit.

It was something he had planned for, longed for, and confidently expected, unaware on that midday of February 1991 that it was not going to happen. Rahmani was a highly intelligent man, but he did not have a crystal ball.

What concerned him that morning was his own survival, the odds that he would live to see the day of Saddam Hussein’s fall.

The bombing at dawn of the previous day of the nuclear engineering plant at Al Qubai, so cunningly disguised that no one had ever envisaged its discovery, had shaken the power elite of Baghdad to its roots.

Within minutes of the departure of the two British bombers, the surviving gunners had been in contact with Baghdad to report the attack. On hearing of the event, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar had personally leaped into his car and driven to the spot to check on his underground staff. He was beside himself with rage and by noon had complained bitterly to Hussein Kamil, under whose Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization the entire nuclear program reposed.

Here was a program, the diminutive scientist had reportedly screamed at Saddam’s son-in-law, that out of a total arms expenditure of $50 billion in a decade had alone consumed $8 billion, and at the very moment of its triumph it was being destroyed. Could the state offer no protection to his people?

The Iraqi physicist might have stood a whisker over five feet and been built like a mosquito, but in terms of influence he packed quite a punch, and the word was that he had gone on and on.

A chastened Hussein Kamil had reported to his father-in-law, who had also been consumed by a transport of rage. When that happened, all Baghdad trembled for its life.

The scientists underground had not only survived but escaped, for the factory included a narrow tunnel leading half a mile under the desert and terminating in a circular shaft with handrails in the wall. The personnel had emerged this way, but it would be impossible to move heavy machinery through the same tunnel and shaft.

The main elevator and cargo hoist was a twisted wreck from the surface down to a depth of twenty feet. Restoring it would be a major engineering feat occupying weeks—weeks that Hassan Rahmani suspected Iraq did not have.

Had that been the end of the matter, he would simply have been relieved, for he had been a deeply worried man since that conference at the palace before the air war began, when Saddam had revealed the existence of “his” device.

What now worried Rahmani was the crazed rage of his head of state.

Deputy President Izzat Ibrahim had called him shortly after noon of the previous day, and the head of Counterintelligence had never known Saddam’s closest confidant to be in such a state.

Ibrahim had told him the Rais was beside himself with anger, and when that happened, blood usually spilled. Only this could appease the rage of the man from Tikrit. The Deputy President had made plain that it was expected that he—Rahmani—would produce results, and fast.

“What results, precisely, did you have in mind?” he had asked Ibrahim. “Find out,” Ibrahim had yelled at him, “how they knew.”

Rahmani had been in contact with friends in the Army who had talked to” their gunners, and the reports were adamant on one thing: The British raid had involved two airplanes. There had been two more higher up, hut it was assumed these were fighters giving cover; certainly they had not dropped any bombs.

From the Army, Rahmani had talked to Air Force Opera-lions Planning. Their view—and several of their officers were Western-

trained—was that no target of great military significance would ever merit only a two-plane strike. No way.

So, reasoned Rahmani, if the British did not think the car junkyard was a scrap metal dump, what did they think it was? The answer probably lay with the two downed British airmen. Personally, he would have loved to conduct the interrogations, convinced that with certain hallucinogenic drugs he could have them talking within hours, and truthfully.

The Army had confirmed they had caught the pilot and navigator within three hours of the raid, out in the desert, one limping from a broken ankle. Unfortunately, a detail from the AMAM had turned up with remarkable speed and taken the fliers with them. No one argued with the AMAM. So the two Britishers were now with Omar Khatib, and Allah have mercy on them.

Cheated of his chance to shine by producing the information supplied by the fliers, Rahmani realized he would have to contribute something.

The question was—what? The only thing that would suffice was what the Rais wanted. And what would he want? Why, a conspiracy. Then a conspiracy he would have. The key would be the transmitter.

He reached for his phone and called Major Mohsen Zayeed, the head of his unit’s sigint section, the people charged with intercepting radio transmissions. It was time they talked again.

Twenty miles west of Baghdad lies the small town of Abu Ghraib, a most unremarkable place and yet a name known if rarely mentioned throughout Iraq. For in Abu Ghraib stood the great prison, confined almost exclusively to use in the interrogation and confinement of political detainees. As such, it was staffed and run not by the national prison service but by the Secret Police, the AMAM.

At the time Hassan Rahmani was calling his sigint expert, a long black Mercedes approached the double wooden doors of the prison. Two guards, recognizing the occupant of the car, hurled themselves at the gates and dragged them open. Just in time; the man in the car could respond with icy brutality to those causing him a momentary delay through slackness on the job.

The car went through, the gates closed. The figure in the back acknowledged the efforts of the guards with neither nod nor gesture.

They were irrelevant.

At the steps to the main office building, the car stopped, and another guard ran to open the rear passenger door. Brigadier Omar Khatib alighted, trim in a tailored barathea uniform, and stalked up the steps.

Doors were hastily opened for him all the way. A junior officer, an aide, brought his attaché case.

To reach his office, Khatib took the elevator to the fifth and top floor, and when he was alone, he ordered Turkish coffee and began to study his papers. The reports of the day detailed progress in the extraction of needed information from those in the basement.

Behind his facade, Omar Khatib was as worried as his colleague across Baghdad—a man whom he loathed with the same venom as the feeling was returned.

Unlike Rahmani, who with his part-English education, grasp of languages, and cosmopolitan airs was bound to be inherently suspect, Khatib could count on the fundamental advantage of being from Tikrit.

So long as he did the job with which he had been tasked by the Rais, and did it well, keeping the confessions of treachery flowing to assuage the unappeasable paranoia, he was safe.

But the last twenty-four hours had been troubling. He too had received a telephone call the previous day, but from the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil. Like Ibrahim to Rahmani, Kamil had brought news of the Rais’s unbounded rage over the bombing of Al Qubai and was demanding results.

Unlike Rahmani, Khatib actually had the British fliers in his hands.

That was an advantage on the one hand, a snare on the other. The Rais would want to know, and fast, just how the fliers had been briefed before the mission—just how much did the Allies know about Al Qubai, and how had they learned it?

It was up to him, Khatib, to produce that information. His men had been working on the fliers for fifteen hours, since seven the previous evening, when they had arrived at Abu Ghraib. So far, the fools had held out.

From the courtyard below his window came the sound of a hiss, a thwack, and a low whimper. Khatib’s brow furrowed in puzzlement, then cleared as he recalled.

In the inner yard below his window an Iraqi hung by his wrists from a crossbeam, his pointed toes just four inches above the dust. Nearby stood a ewer brimming with brine, once clear, now darkly pink.

Every guard and soldier crossing the yard was under standing orders to pause, take one of the two rattan canes from the jar, and administer a single stroke to the back of the hanging man, between the neck and the knees. A corporal under an awning nearby kept the tally.

The stupid fellow was a market trader who had been heard to refer to the President as the son of a whore and was now learning, albeit a trifle late, the true measure of respect that citizens should maintain at all times in reference to the Rais.

The intriguing thing was that he was still there. It just showed what stamina some of these working-class people had. The trader had sustained more than five hundred strokes already, an impressive record. He would be dead before the thousandth—no one had ever sustained a thousand—but it was interesting all the same. The other interesting thing was that the man had been denounced by his ten-year-old son. Omar Khatib sipped his coffee, unscrewed his rolled-gold fountain pen, and bent over his papers.

Half an hour later, there was a discreet tap at his door.

“Enter,” he called, and looked up in expectation. He needed good news, and only one man could knock without being announced by the junior officer outside.

The man who entered was burly, and his own mother would have been hard put to call him handsome. The face was deeply pitted by boyhood smallpox, and two circular scars gleamed where cysts had been removed. He closed the door and stood, waiting to be addressed.

Though he was only a sergeant, his stained coveralls carried not even that rank, yet he was one of the few men with whom the brigadier felt any fellow feeling. Alone among the staff of the prison, Sergeant Ali was permitted to sit in his presence, when invited.

Khatib gestured the man to a chair and offered him a cigarette. The sergeant lit up and puffed gratefully; his work was onerous and tiring, the cigarette a welcome break. The reason Khatib tolerated such familiarity from a man of such low rank was that he harbored a genuine admiration for Ali. Khatib held efficiency in high esteem, and his trusted sergeant was one who had never failed him. Calm, methodical, a good husband and father, Ali was a true professional.

“Well?” he asked.

“The navigator is close, very close, sir. The pilot ...” He shrugged. “An hour or more.”

“I remind you they must both be broken, Ali, nothing held back. And their stories must conform to each other. The Rais himself is counting on us.

“Perhaps you should come, sir. I think in ten minutes you will have your answer. The navigator first, and when the pilot learns this, he will follow.”

“Very well.”

Khatib rose, and the sergeant held the door open for him. Together they descended past the ground floor to the first basement level, where the elevator stopped. There was a passage leading to the stairs to the subbasement. Along the passage were steel doors, and behind them, squatting amid their filth, were seven American aircrew, four British, one Italian, and a Kuwaiti Sky hawk pilot.

At the next level down were more cells, two occupied. Khatib peered through the Judas-hole in the door of the first.

A single unshaded light bulb illuminated the cell, its walls encrusted with hardened excrement and other brown stains of old blood. In the center, on a plastic office chair, sat a man, quite naked, down whose chest ran slicks of vomit, blood, and saliva. His hands were cuffed behind him, and a cloth mask with no eye-slits covered his face.

Two AMAM men in coveralls similar to those of Sergeant Ali flanked the man in the chair, their hands caressing yard-long plastic tubes packed with bitumen, which adds weight without reducing flexibility.

They were standing back, taking a break. Before their interruption, they had apparently been concentrating on the shins and kneecaps, which were skinned raw and turning blue-yellow.

Khatib nodded and passed to the next door. Through the hole he could see that the second prisoner was not masked. One eye was completely closed, the pulped meat of the brow and cheek knit together by crusted blood. When he opened his mouth, there were gaps where two broken teeth had been, and a froth of blood emerged from the mashed lips.

“Tyne,” the navigator whispered, “Nicholas Tyne. Flight lieutenant.

Five oh one oh nine six eight.” “The navigator,” whispered the sergeant. Khatib whispered back, “Which of our men is the English-speaker?”

Ali gestured—the one on the left. “Bring him out.”

Ali entered the cell of the navigator and emerged with one of the interrogators. Khatib had a conference with the man in Arabic. The man nodded, reentered the cell, and masked the navigator. Only then would Khatib allow both cell doors to be opened.

The English-speaker bent toward Nicky Tyne’s head and spoke through the cloth. His English was heavily accented but passable.

“All right, Flight Lieutenant, that is it. For you, it is over. No more punishment.”

The young navigator heard the words. His body seemed to slump in relief.

“But your friend, he is not so lucky. He is dying now. So we can take him to the hospital—clean white sheets, doctors, everything he needs; or we can finish the job. Your choice. When you tell us, we stop and rush him to hospital.”

Khatib nodded down the corridor to Sergeant Ali, who entered the other cell. From the open door came the sounds of a plastic quirt lashing a bare chest. Then the pilot began to scream.

“All right, shells!” shouted Nicky Tyne under his cowl. “Stop it, you bastards! It was an ammunition dump, for poison gas shells. ...”

The beating ceased. Ali emerged, breathing heavily, from the pilot’s cell.

“You are a genius, Sayid Brigadier.”

Khatib shrugged modestly.

“Never underestimate the sentimentality of the British and the Americans,” he told his pupil. “Get the translators now. Get all the details, every last one. When you have the transcripts, bring them to my office.”

Back in his sanctum, Brigadier Khatib made a personal phone call to Hussein Kamil. An hour later, Kamil called him back. His father-in-law was delighted; a meeting would be summoned, probably that night. Omar Khatib should hold himself available for the summons.

That evening, Karim was teasing Edith again, gently and without malice, this time about her job.

“Don’t you ever get bored at the bank, darling?” “No, it’s an interesting job. Why do you ask?” “Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t understand how you can think it interesting. For me, it would be the most boring job in the world.”

“Well, it’s not, so there.” “All right. What’s so interesting about it?”

“You know, handling accounts, placing investments, that sort of thing.

It’s important work.”

“Nonsense. It’s about saying ‘Good morning, yes sir, no sir, of course sir’ to lots of people running in and out to cash a fifty-schilling check.

Boring.”

He was lying on his back on her bed. She walked over and lay beside him, pulling one of his arms around her shoulders so that they could cuddle. She loved to cuddle.

“You are crazy sometimes, Karim. But I love you crazy. Winkler Bank isn’t an issuing bank—it’s a merchant bank.”

“What’s the difference?”

“We have no checking accounts, customers with checkbooks running in and out. It doesn’t work like that.”

“So you have no money, without customers.”

“Of course we have money, but in deposit accounts.”

“Never had one of those,” admitted Karim. “Just a small current account. I prefer cash anyway.”

“You can’t have cash when you are talking of millions, People would steal it. So you put it in a bank and invest it.”

“You mean old Gemütlich handles millions? Of other people’s money?”

“Yes, millions and millions.”

“Schillings or dollars?”

“Dollars, pounds, millions and millions.”

“Well, I wouldn’t trust him with my money.”

She sat up, genuinely shocked.

“Herr Gemütlich is completely honest. He would never dream of doing that.”

“Maybe not, but somebody else might. Look—say, I know a man who has an account at Winkler. His name is Schmitt. One day I go in and say: Good morning, Herr Gemütlich, my name is Schmitt, and I have an account here. He looks in his book, and he says: Yes, you do. So I say: I’d like to withdraw it all. Then when the real Schmitt turns up, there’s nothing left. That’s why cash is better for me.”

She laughed at his naïveté and pulled him down, nibbling his ear.

“It wouldn’t work. Herr Gemütlich would probably know your precious Schmitt. Anyway, he’d have to identify himself.”

“Passports can be forged. Those damned Palestinians do it all the time.”

“And he’d need a signature, of which he would have a specimen copy.”

“So, I’d practice forging Schmitt’s signature.”

“Karim, I think you might turn out to be a criminal one day. You’re bad.”

They both giggled at the idea.

“Anyway, if you were a foreigner and living abroad, you’d probably have a numbered account. They are completely impregnable.”

He looked down at her from one elbow, brow furrowed.

“What’s that?”

“A numbered account?”

“Mmmmmm.”

She explained how they worked.

“That’s madness,” he exploded when she had finished. “Anybody could turn up and claim ownership. If Gemütlich has never even seen the owner—”

“There are identity procedures, idiot. Very complex codes, methods of writing letters, certain ways the signatures have to be placed—all sorts of things to verify that the person is really the account owner. Unless they are all complied with—to the letter—Herr Gemütlich will not cooperate. So impersonation is impossible.”

“He must have a hell of a memory.”

“Oh, you are too stupid for words. It is all written down. Are you taking me out to dinner?”

“Do you deserve it?”

“You know I do.”

“Oh, all right. But I want an hors d’oeuvre.”

She was puzzled. “All right, order one.”

“I mean you.”

He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss. Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed.

“I know what I’d do,” he breathed. “I’d hire a safecracker, break into old Gemütlich’s safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it.”

She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love.

“Wouldn’t work. Mmmmmm. Do that again.”

“Would so.”

“Aaaaaah. Wouldn’t.”

“Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day.”

She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.

“Ooooh, is that all for me? You’re a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemütlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ...”

A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemütlich was.

While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth.

Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20. South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.

The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner’s original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short-

lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track.

Every known factory for the production of weapons of mass destruction had been pulverized, and that included twelve new ones added by information from Jericho.

As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try. Some of the cream of the fighter and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open.

At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet.

There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station.

By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself.

From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky “the flying warthog,” were roaming at will doing what they did best—destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of “tank-plinking.”

What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major facilities dedicated to weapons of mass destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact.

Since the burial of the Al Qubai factory, the mood was lighter both among the four generals who knew what it had really contained, as it was among the men of the CIA and the SIS stationed in Riyadh.

It was a mood mirrored in the brief message Mike Martin received that night. His controllers in Riyadh began by informing him of the success of the Tornado mission despite the loss of one airplane. The transmission went on to congratulate him for staying in Baghdad after being allowed to leave, and on the entire mission. Finally, he was told there was little more to do. Jericho should be sent one final message, to the effect the Allies were grateful, that all his money had been paid, and that contact would be reestablished after the war. Then, Martin was told, he really should escape to safety in Saudi Arabia before it became impossible.

Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping. Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam—wasn’t that the object of the exercise? Something had changed.

Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin’s sleep would not have been so easy.

In matters of technical skill there are four levels—competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.

In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Hassan Rahmani tried to get it for him.

Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani’s office.

“Any progress?” asked Rahmani.

“I think so,” replied Zayeed. “He’s there, all right—no doubt about it.

The trouble is, he’s using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite.

With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long.”

“How close are you?” said Rahmani.

“Well, I’ve tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier.

Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen.”

Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office. Rahmani looked perplexed.

“That’s it?”

“It’s encrypted, of course.”

“Of course,” said Rahmani. “Can you break it?”

“Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry.”

“It can’t be decoded?” Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer.

“It’s not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip. The permutations are in the hundreds of millions.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point, sir, is—I got a bearing on it.”

Hassan Rahmani leaned forward in excitement.

“A bearing?”

“My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There’s more.”

“Go on.”

“He’s here.”

“Here in Baghdad?”

Major Zayeed smiled and shook his head. He had saved his best piece of news till last. He wanted to be appreciated.

“No, sir, he’s here in the Mansour district. I think he’s inside an area two kilometers by two.”

Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close.

The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose.

“I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?”

“With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred.”

Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car.

They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the windshield the driver simply followed the motorcycle.

Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive. Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows.

Inside the principal sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took assigned places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself.

The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit.

For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more pronounced.

Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid—they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai.

The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed. None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed.

There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals—Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff—stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them.

Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened.

No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib.

The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room.

The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back.

They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard. From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas shells. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been assigned to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft assigned to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any.

They—the pilot and the navigator—knew nothing more than that.

The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. “True or false, Rafeek?”

“It is normal, Sayid Rais,” said the man who commanded the artillery and SAM missile sites, “for them to send in first the missile fighters to hit the defenses, then the bombers for the target. They always do that.

For a high-priority target, two airplanes only and no support has never happened.”

Saddam mused on the answer, his dark eyes betraying nothing of his thoughts. That was a part of the power he held over these men; they never knew which way he would react.

“Is there any chance, Rafeek Khatib, that these men have hidden things from you, that they know more than they have said?”

“No, Rais. They have been ... persuaded to cooperate completely.”

“Then that is the end of the matter?” asked the Rais quietly. “The raid was just an unfortunate chance?”

Heads nodded round the room. The scream when it came paralyzed them all.

“Wrong! You are all wrong!”

In a second the voice dropped back to a calm whisper, but the fear had been instilled. They all knew that the softness of the voice could precede the most terrible of revelations, the most savage of penalties.

“There have been no trucks, no Army trucks. An excuse given to the pilots in case they were caught. There is something more, is there not?”

Most of them were sweating despite the air conditioning. It had always been thus, since the dawn of history, when the tyrant of a tribe called in the witch-finder and the tribe sat and trembled lest he should be the one at whom the juju-stick pointed.

“There is a conspiracy,” whispered the Rais. “There is a traitor.

Someone is a traitor, who conspires against me.”

He stayed silent for several minutes, letting them tremble. When he spoke again, it was to the three men who faced him across the room.

“Find him. Find him and bring him to me. He shall learn the punishment for such crimes. He and all his family.”

Then he swept from the room followed by his personal bodyguard.

The sixteen men left behind did not even look at each other, could not meet another’s gaze. There would be a sacrifice. No one knew who it would be. Each feared for himself, for some chance remark, perhaps not even that.

Fifteen of the men kept distance from the last, the witch-finder, the one they called Al-Mu’azib, the Tormentor. He would produce the sacrifice.

Hassan Rahmani too kept silent. This was no time to mention radio intercepts. His operations were delicate, subtle, based on detection and real intelligence. The last thing he needed was to find the thumping boots of the AMAM trampling all over his investigations.

In a mood of terror the ministers and generals departed back into the night and to their duties.

“He doesn’t keep them in his office safe,” said Avi Herzog, alias Karim, to his controller Gidi Barzilai over a late breakfast the next morning.

The meeting was safe, in Barzilai’s own apartment. Herzog had not made the phone call, from a public booth, until Edith Hardenberg was safely in the bank. Shortly after, the yarid team had arrived, boxing in their colleague as they escorted him to the rendezvous to ensure there was no chance he was being followed. Had he grown a tail, they would have seen it. It was their speciality.

Gidi Barzilai leaned forward across the food-strewn table, eyes alight.

“Well done, boychick. So now I know where he doesn’t keep the codes. The point is, where?”

“In his desk.”

“The desk? You’re mad. Anyone can open a desk.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Gemütlich’s desk? No.”

“Apparently it is very big, very ornate, and very old. A real antique.

Also, it has a compartment, created by the original cabinetmaker, so secret, so hard to find, that Gemütlich thinks it is safer than any safe.

He believes a burglar might go for the safe but would never think of the desk. Even if a burglar went through the desk, he would never find the compartment.”

“And she doesn’t know where it is?”

“Nope. Never seen it opened. He always locks himself in the office when he has to refer to it.”

Barzilai thought it over.

“Cunning bastard. I wouldn’t have given him credit for it. You know, he’s probably right.”

“Can I break it off now—the affair?”

“No, Avi, not yet. If you’re right, you’ve done brilliantly. But stick around, keep play-acting. If you vanish now, she will think back to your last conversation, put two and two together, have a fit of remorse, whatever. Stay with her, talk, but never again about banking.”

Barzilai thought over his problem. No one of his team in Vienna had ever seen the safe, but there was one man who had.

Barzilai sent a heavily coded message to Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. The spotter was brought in and sat in a room with an artist.

The spotter was not multitalented, but he had one amazing skill: He had a photographic memory. For over five hours he sat with his eyes closed and cast his mind back to the interview he had had with Gemütlich while posing as a lawyer from New York. His principal task had been to look for alarm catches on windows and doors, for a wall safe, wires indicating pressure pads—all the tricks for keeping a room secure. These he had noted and reported. The desk had not interested him too much. But sitting in a room beneath King Saul Boulevard weeks later, he could close his eyes and see it all again.

Line by line, he described the desk to the artist. Sometimes the spotter would look at the drawing, make a correction, and resume. The artist worked in India ink with a fine pen and colored the desk with watercolors. After five hours the artist had a sheet of the finest cartridge paper on which was an exact colored picture of the desk then sitting in the office of Herr Wolfgang Gemütlich at the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, Vienna.

The drawing went to Gidi Barzilai in the diplomatic pouch from Tel Aviv to the Israeli embassy in Austria. He had it within two days.

Before then a check on the list of sayanim across all Europe had revealed the existence of Monsieur Michel Levy, an antiquarian on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, noted as one of the leading experts on classical furniture on the continent.

It was not until the night of the fourteenth, the same day Barzilai received his watercolor painting in Vienna, that Saddam Hussein reconvened his meeting of ministers, generals, and intelligence chiefs.

Again the meeting was called at the behest of AMAM chief Omar Khatib, who had passed news of his success via the son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and again it was in a villa in the dead of night.

The Rais simply entered the room and gestured to Khatib to report upon his findings.

“What can I say, Sayid Rais?” The head of the Secret Police raised his hands and let them drop in a gesture of helplessness. It was a masterpiece in the acting of self-deprecation.

“The Rais was, as ever, right, and we were all wrong. The bombing of

Al Qubai was indeed no accident. There was a traitor, and he has been found.”

There was a buzz of sycophantic amazement around the room. The man in the upright padded chair with his back to the windowless wall beamed and held up his hands for such unnecessary applause to cease.

It did, but not too quickly.

Was I not right? the smile said. Am I not always right?

“How did you discover this, Rafeek?” asked the Rais.

“A combination of good luck and detective work,” admitted Khatib modestly. “As for the good fortune, this as we know is the gift of Allah, who smiles upon our Rais.”

There was an assenting rumble around the room.

“Two days before the attack by the bombers of the Beni Naji, a traffic control point was established on a road nearby. It was a routine spot check by my men on movements by possible deserters, contraband goods. ... The vehicle numbers were noted.

“Two days ago I checked these and found that most of the vehicles were local—vans and trucks. But one was an expensive car, registered here in Baghdad. The owner was traced, a man who might have had reason to visit Al Qubai. But a telephone call ascertained that he had not visited the facility. Why, I wondered, had he been in the area, then?”

Hassan Rahmani nodded. That was good detective work, if it was true.

And it was unlike Khatib who usually relied on brute force.

“And why was he there?” asked the Rais.

Khatib paused to let the revelation sink in.

“To note a precise description of the aboveground car junkyard, to define the distance from the nearest major landmark and the exact compass bearing—everything an Air Force would need to find it.”

There was a universal exhalation of breath around the room.

“But that came later, Sayid Rais. First I invited the man to join me at AMAM headquarters for a little frank talk.”

Khatib’s mind strayed back to the frank conversation in the basement beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, Baghdad, that basement known as the Gymnasium.

Habitually, Omar Khatib had his underlings conduct interrogations, contenting himself to decree the level of severity and supervise the outcome. But this had been a matter of such delicacy that he had accomplished the task himself, banning all others beyond the soundproof door.

From the roof of the cell jutted two steel hooks, a yard apart, and from them hung two short chains hooked to a timber bar. The wrists of the suspect he had had lashed to the ends of the bar, so the man hung with arms a yard apart. Because the arms were not vertical, the strain was all the greater.

The feet were four inches off the floor, the ankles tied to another yard-long pole. The X-shaped configuration of the prisoner gave access to all parts of the body, and because he hung in the center of the room, he could be approached from all sides.

Omar Khatib had laid the clotted rattan cane on a side table and came around to the front. The manic screaming of the man under the first fifty lashes had ceased, dying to a mumbling burble of pleas. Khatib stared him in the face.

“You are a fool, my friend. You could end all this so easily. You have betrayed the Rais, but he is merciful. All I need is your confession.”

“No, I swear ... wa-Allah-d-Adheem ... by Allah the Great, I have betrayed no one.”

The man was weeping like a child, tears of agony pouring down his face. He was soft, Khatib noted; this will not take long.

“Yes, you have betrayed. Qubth-ut-Allah—you know what that means?”

“Of course,” whimpered the man.

“And you know where it was stored for safety?”

“Yes.”

Khatib brought his knee hard upward into the exposed testicles. The man would have liked to double up but could not. He vomited, the slick running down his bare body to dribble off the end of his penis.

“Yes—what?”

“Yes, sayidi.”

“Better. And where was hidden—that was not known to our enemies?”

“No, sayidi, it is a secret.”

Khatib’s hand flashed out and caught the hanging man across the face.

“Monyouk, filthy monyouk, then how is it that this very morning at dawn, the enemy planes bombed it and destroyed our weapon?”

The prisoner opened his eyes wide, his shock overcoming his shame at the insult. Monyouk in Arabic is the man who plays the female role in a homosexual coupling.

“But that is not possible. No one but a few know about Al Qubai—”

“But the enemy knew. ... They have destroyed it.”

“Sayidi, I swear, this is impossible. They could never find it. The man who built it, Colonel Badri, disguised it too well. ...”

The interrogation had continued for a further half hour until its inevitable conclusion.

Khatib was interrupted from his reverie by the Rais himself.

“And who is he, our traitor?”

“The engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqui, Rais.”

There was a gasp. The President nodded slowly, as if he had suspected the man all along.

“Might one ask,” said Hassan Rahmani, “who the wretch was working for?”

Khatib darted a look of venom at Rahmani and took his time.

“This he did not say, Sayid Rais.”

“But he will, he will,” said the President.

“Sayid Rais,” murmured Khatib, “I’m afraid I have to report that at this point of his confession, the traitor died.”

Rahmani was on his feet, protocol ignored. “Mr. President, I must protest. This shows the most amazing incompetence. The traitor must have had a link line through to the enemy, some way of sending his messages. Now we may never know.”

Khatib shot him a look of such pure hate that Rahmani, who had read Kipling as a boy in Mr. Hartley’s school, was reminded of Krait, the dust-snake who hissed “Beware, for I am death.”

“What have you to say?” asked the Rais. Khatib was contrite! “Sayid Rais, what can I say? The men who serve under me love you as their own father—nay, more. They would die for you. When they heard this traitorous filth pouring out ... there was an excess of zeal.”

Bullshit, thought Rahmani. But the Rais was nodding slowly. It was the sort of language he liked to hear.

“It is understandable,” the Rais said. “These things happen. And you, Brigadier Rahmani, who criticize your colleague, have you had any success?”

It was noticeable that Rahmani was not referred to as Rafeek,

“Comrade.” He would have to be careful, very careful. “There is a transmitter, Sayid Rais, in Baghdad.”

He went on to reveal what Major Zayeed had told him. He thought of adding one last phrase—“One more transmission, if we can catch it, and I think we will have the sender”—but he decided it could wait.

“Then since the traitor is dead,” said the Rais, “I can reveal to you what I could not say two days ago. is not destroyed, not even buried. Twenty-four hours before the bombing raid, I ordered it to be removed to a safer place.”

It took several seconds for the applause to die down as the inner circle expressed their admiration for the sheer genius of the leader.

He told them the device had gone to the Fortress, whose whereabouts did not concern them, and from the Qa’ala it would be launched, to change all history, on the day the first combat boot of an American soldier stepped onto the holy land of Iraq.

Chapter 20

The news that the British Tornados had missed their real target at Al Qubai badly shook the man known only as Jericho. It was as much as he could do to force himself to his feet and applaud the Rais with the adoration of all the rest.

In the blacked-out bus with the other generals being transported back into central Baghdad, he had sat in silence in back, wrapped in his own thoughts.

That the use of the device now hidden elsewhere—at a place called Qa’ala, the Fortress, of which he had never heard and whose location he did not know—might cause many, many deaths, he cared not a jot.

It was his own position that absorbed him. For three years he had risked everything—exposure, ruin, and a terrible death—to betray his country’s regime. The point had not simply been to establish a huge personal fortune abroad; that he could probably have done by extortion and theft right here in Iraq, though there would have been risks to that as well.

The point had been to retire abroad with a new identity and background, provided by his foreign paymasters, secure under their mantle, safe from the vengeful assassination squads. He had seen the fate of those who simply stole and fled; they lived constantly in fear until, one day, the Iraqi avengers caught up.

He, Jericho, wanted both his fortune and security, which was why he had welcomed the transfer of his control from Israel to the Americans.

They would look after him, abide by the agreement, and create the new identity, allowing him to become another man with another nationality, buy his mansion by the sea in Mexico, and live out a life of ease and comfort.

Now things had changed. If he kept silent and the device were used, the Americans would think he had lied about Al Qubai. He had not, but in their rage they would never believe that. Come hell or high water, the Americans would reject his account, and it would all have been for nothing. Somehow he had to warn them that there had been a mistake. A few more risks, and it would all be over—Iraq defeated, the Rais brought down, and he, Jericho, out of there and far away.

In the privacy of his office he wrote his message, as always in Arabic, on the thin paper that took up so little space. He explained the conference of that evening; that when he sent his last message, the device had indeed been at Al Qubai, as he had said, but forty-eight hours later when the Tornados struck, it had been moved. That this was not his fault.

He went on to say all he knew: That there was a secret place called the Fortress; that the device was there, and from Qa’ala it would be launched when the first American crossed the border into Iraq.

Shortly after midnight, he took an unmarked car and disappeared into the back streets of Baghdad. No one queried his right to do so; no one would dare. He planted the message beneath a flagstone in an old courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, then made the chalk mark behind the Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. This time the chalk mark was slightly different. He hoped the unseen man who collected his messages would waste no time.

As it happened, Mike Martin left the Soviet villa early on the morning of February 15. The Russian cook had given him a long list of fresh produce to buy, a list that was going to prove extremely hard to fill.

Food was running short. It was not the farmers in the countryside; it was the transportation problems. Most of the bridges were down. The central Iraqi plain is a land of rivers watering the spread of crops that feed Baghdad. Forced to pay ferry charges across them all, the produce-growers were choosing to stay home.

Luckily, Martin started with the spice market in Shurja Street, then pedaled around the Church of St. Joseph to the alley at the back. When he saw the chalk mark, he was jolted.

The mark of that particular wall was always supposed to be a figure eight on its side, with a single short stroke horizontally through the join of the two circles. But he had warned Jericho previously that if there were ever a real emergency, the single stroke should be replaced by two small crosses, one in each circle of the figure eight. Today the crosses were there.

Martin pedaled hard to the courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, waited till the coast was clear, stooped as always to adjust his sandal, slid a hand into the hiding place in the wall, and found the slim envelope. By midday, he was back at the villa, explaining to the angry cook that he had done his best but the produce would be later than ever reaching the city. He would have to go back in the afternoon.

When he read Jericho’s message, it became all too plain why the man was in a panic. Martin composed a message of his own, explaining to Riyadh why he now felt he had been forced to take matters into his own hands and make his own decision. There was no time left for conferences in Riyadh and a further interchange of messages. The worst part, for him, was Jericho’s revelation that Iraqi Counterintelligence was aware of an illegal transmitter sending burst signals. He could not know how close they were, but he had to assume there could be no further extended exchange of messages with Riyadh.

Therefore he was making the decision himself.

Martin read the Jericho message in Arabic first, then his own translation, into the tape recorder. He added his own message and prepared to send.

He had no transmission window until late in the night—the night was always chosen so that the Kulikov household would be fast asleep.

But, like Jericho, he did have an emergency procedure.

It was the transmission of a single long blast of sound, in this case a high-pitched whistle, on a completely different frequency, well outside the usual VHF band.

He checked that the Iraqi chauffeur was with First Secretary Kulikov at the embassy in the city center and that the Russian houseman and his wife were at lunch. Then, despite the risk of discovery, he erected the satellite dish near the open doorway and sent the whistle blast.

In the radio shack, a former bedroom in the SIS villa in Riyadh, a single light flashed on. It was half past one in the afternoon. The duty radio operator, handling the normal traffic between the villa and Century House in London, dropped what he was doing, yelled through the door for backup, and tuned to Receive on Martin’s frequency-of-the-day.

The second operator put his head around the door.

“What’s up?”

“Get Steve and Simon. Black Bear’s coming on, and it’s an emergency.”

The man left. Martin gave Riyadh fifteen minutes, then ran his main transmission.

Riyadh was not the only radio mast that caught the burst. Outside Baghdad, another satellite dish, sweeping the VHF band relentlessly, caught part of it. The message was so long that, even shortened, it lasted four seconds. The Iraqi listeners caught the last two and got a fix.

As soon as he had sent, Martin closed down and packed away his equipment beneath the tiles of his floor. Hardly had he done so than he heard footsteps on the gravel. It was the Russian houseman who, in a fit of generosity, had crossed the yard to offer him a Balkan cigarette.

Martin accepted it with much bobbing and bowing and mutterings of

“Shukran.”

The Russian, proud of his good nature, walked back to the house.

“Poor bastard,” he thought. “What a life.”

When he was alone again, the poor bastard began to write in closely scripted Arabic on the pad of airmail paper he kept under his pallet. As he did so, the radio genius called Major Zayeed pored over a very-large-scale map of the city, particularly of the district of Mansour.

When he had finished his calculations, he double-checked them and called Brigadier Hassan Rahmani at the Mukhabarat headquarters, barely five hundred yards from the diamond-shaped lozenge of Mansour that had been traced out in green ink. His appointment was fixed for four o’clock.

In Riyadh, Chip Barber was stomping around the main sitting room of the villa with a print-out in his hand, swearing in a manner he had not done since leaving the Marines thirty years earlier.

“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” he demanded of the two British intelligence officers in the room with him.

“Easy, Chip,” said Laing. “He’s had a hell of a long run. He’s under massive strain. The bad guys are closing in. All our tradecraft tells us we should get him out of there—now.”

“Yeah, I know, he’s a great guy. But he has no right to do this. We’re the people picking up the tab, remember?”

“We do remember,” said Paxman, “but he’s our man, and he’s miles out in the cold. If he chooses to stay on, it’s to finish the job, as much for you as for us.”

Barber calmed down.

“Three million dollars. How the hell am I to tell Langley he has offered Jericho a further three million greenbacks to get it right this time? That Iraqi asshole should have gotten it right the first time. For all we know, he could be dealing from the bottom of the deck, just to make more money.”

“Chip,” said Laing, “we’re talking about a nuke here.”

“Maybe,” growled Barber, “maybe we’re talking about a nuke. Maybe Saddam got enough uranium in time, maybe he put it all together in time. All we really have are the calculations of some scientists and

Saddam’s claim—if indeed he ever made the claim at all. Dammit, Jericho is a mercenary, he could be lying in his teeth. Scientists can be wrong, Saddam lies as he breathes. What have we actually gotten for all this money?”

“You want to take the risk?” asked Laing.

Barber slumped in a chair.

“No,” he said at length, “no, I don’t. Okay, I’ll clear it with Washington. Then we tell the generals. They have to know this. But I tell you guys one thing: One day I’m going to meet this Jericho, and if he’s putting us on, I’m going to pull his arms off and beat him to death with the soggy end.”

At four that afternoon, Major Zayeed brought his maps and his calculations to Hassan Rahmani’s office. Carefully he explained that he had that day secured his third triangulation and narrowed the area down to the lozenge shown on the map of Mansour. Rahmani gazed at it dubiously.

“It’s a hundred yards by a hundred yards,” he said. “I thought modern technology could get these emission sources down to a square yard.”

“If I get a long transmission, yes, I can,” explained the young major patiently. “I can get a beam from the intercepting receiver no wider than a yard. Cross that with another intercept from a different point, and you get your square yard. But these are terribly short transmissions. They’re on the air and off within two seconds. The best I can get is a very narrow cone, its point on the receiver, running out across country and getting wider as it goes. Maybe an angle of one second of one degree on the compass. But a couple of miles away, that becomes a hundred yards. Look, it’s still a small area.”

Rahmani peered at the map. The marked lozenge had four buildings in it.

“Let’s get down there and look at it,” he suggested.

The two men prowled Mansour with the map until they had traced the area shown. It was residential and very prosperous. The four residences were all detached, walled, and standing in their own grounds. It was getting dark by the time they finished.

“Raid them in the morning,” said Rahmani. “I’ll seal the area with troops, quietly. You know what you’re looking for. You go in with your specialists and take all four places apart. You find it, we have the spy.”

“One problem,” said the major. “See that brass plaque over there?

That’s a Soviet embassy residence.”

Rahmani thought it over. He would get no thanks for starting an international incident.

“Do the other three first,” he ordered. “If you get nothing, I’ll clear the Soviet building with the Foreign Ministry.”

While they talked, one of the staff of that Soviet villa was three miles away. The gardener Mahmoud Al-Khouri was in the old British cemetery, placing a slim envelope in a stone jar by a long-untended gravestone. Later, he made a chalk mark on the wall of the Union of Journalists building. On a late-night tour of the district, he noticed just before midnight that the chalk mark had been expunged.

That evening, there was a conference in Riyadh, a very private conference in a sealed office two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry building. There were four generals present, one of them seated at the head of the table, and two civilians, Barber and Laing.

When the civilians had finished speaking, the four military men sat in gloomy silence.

“Is this for real?” asked one of the Americans.

“In terms of one hundred percent proof, we don’t have that,” said Barber. “But we think there is a very high likelihood that the information is accurate.”

“What makes you so sure?” asked the USAF general.

“As you gentlemen have probably already guessed, we have for some months past had an asset working for us high in the hierarchy in Baghdad.”

There was a series of assenting grunts.

“Didn’t figure all that target information was coming from Langley’s crystal ball,” said the Air Force general, who still resented the CIA doubting his pilots’ hit record.

“The point is,” said Laing, “so far, we have never found his information to be anything but bang-on accurate. If he’s lying now, it’s a hell of a scam. Second point is, can we take that risk?”

There was silence for several minutes.

“There’s one thing you guys are overlooking,” said the USAF man.

“Delivery.”

“Delivery?” asked Barber.

“Right. Having a weapon is one thing; delivering it right on top of your enemy is another. Look, no one can believe Saddam is into miniaturization yet. That’s hypertech. So he can’t launch this thing, if he has it, from a tank gun. Or an artillery piece—same caliber. Or a Katyushka-type battery. Or a rocket.”

“Why not a rocket, General?”

“Payload,” said the flier sarcastically. “Goddam payload. If this is a crude device, we have to be looking at half a ton. A thousand pounds, say. We now know the Al-Abeid and the Al-Tammuz rockets were still only in development when we smashed the facility at Saad-16.

The Al-Abbas and the Al-Badr, same thing. Inoperative—either smashed up or a too-small payload.”

“What about the Scud?” asked Laing.

“Same thing,” said the general. “The long-range so-called Al-Husayn keeps on breaking up on reentry and has a payload of 160 kilograms.

Even the basic Soviet-supplied Scud has a maximum payload of 600 kilograms. Too small.”

“There’s still an aircraft-launched bomb,” pointed out Barber.

The Air Force general glowered. “Gentlemen, I will give you my personal guarantee, here and now: From henceforth, not one single Iraqi warplane will reach the border. Most won’t even get off the tarmac. Those that do and head south will be shot down halfway to the border. I have enough AWACS, enough fighters—I can guarantee it.”

“And the Fortress?” asked Laing. “The launch pad?”

“A top-secret hangar, probably underground, a single runway leading from the mouth; housing a Mirage, a MiG, a Sukhoi—tooled up and ready to go. But we’ll get it before the border.

The decision rested with the American general at the head of the table.

“Are you going to find the repository of this device, this so-called Fortress?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, sir,” said Barber. “We are trying even now. We figure we may need a few more days.”

“Find it, and we will destroy it.”

“And the invasion in four days, sir?” asked Laing.

“I will let you know.”

That evening, it was announced that the ground invasion of Kuwait and Iraq had been postponed and rescheduled for the twenty-fourth of

February.

Later, historians gave two alternate reasons for this postponement. One was that the U.S. Marines wanted to alter their main axis of attack a few miles farther west and that this would require troop movements, transfer of stores, and further preparations. That was true, too.

A reason later advanced in the press was that two British computer hackers had cut into the Defence Ministry computer and badly dislocated the collation of weather reports for the attack area, causing confusion over the choice of the best day for the attack from the climatic point of view.

In fact, the weather was fine and clear between the twentieth and the twenty-fourth, and it deteriorated just as the advance began.

General Norman Schwarzkopf was a big and very strong man, physically, mentally, and morally. But he would have been more, or perhaps less, than human if the sheer strain of those last few days had not begun to tell on him.

He had been working up to twenty hours a day for six months without a break. He had not only overseen the biggest and the fastest military buildup in history, a task that alone could have broken a lesser man, but he had coped with the complexities of relationships with the sensitivities of Saudi society, kept the peace when a dozen times internecine feuding could have wrecked the Coalition, and warded off endless well-meant but useless and exhausting interventions from Capitol Hill.

And yet it was not all this that disturbed his much-needed sleep in those last few days. It was the sheer responsibility of being in charge of all those young lives that brought the nightmare.

In the nightmare, there was the Triangle. Always the Triangle. It was a right-angled triangle of land, lying on its side. What would have been the base of the triangle was the coastline from Khafji down past Jubail to the three linked cities of Dammam, Al Khoba, and Dhahran.

The perpendicular line of the triangle was the border running west from the coast, first between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, then on into the desert to become the Iraqi border.

The hypotenuse was the slanting line linking the last western outpost in the desert to the coast at Dhahran.

Within that triangle almost half a million young men and women sat and waited for his order. Eighty percent of them were Americans. In the east were the Saudis, other Arab contingents, and the Marines. In the center were the great American armored and mechanized infantry units, and among them was the British First Armoured Division. On the extreme flank were the French.

Once, the nightmare had been tens of thousands of young men pouring into the breeches for the attack, to be soaked by a rain of poison gas and to die there between the sand walls and the razor wire. Now it was worse.

Only a week earlier, contemplating the triangle on a battle map, an Army intelligence officer had actually suggested, “Maybe Saddam intends to pop a nuke in there.” The man thought he was joking.

That night, the commanding general tried again to sleep and failed.

Always the Triangle. Too many men, too small a space.

At the SIS villa, Laing, Paxman, and the two radio technicians shared a crate of beer brought covertly from the British embassy. They too studied the map; they too saw the Triangle. They too felt the strain.

“One bloody bomb, one fucking small, crude, first-attempt sub-Hiroshima bomb in there, air burst or ground burst ...,” said Laing.

They did not need to be scientists to know that the first explosion would kill more than a hundred thousand young soldiers. Within hours, the radiation cloud, sucking up billions of tons of active sand from the desert, would begin to drift, covering everything in its path with death.

The ships at sea would have time to batten down, but not the ground troops or the people of the Saudi cities. Eastward it would drift, widening as it went, over Bahrain and the Allied airfields, poisoning the sea, across to the coast of Iran, there to exterminate one of the categories Saddam Hussein had pronounced to be unworthy of life—“Persians, Jews, and flies.”

“He can’t bloody launch it,” said Paxman. “He hasn’t a rocket or plane that can do it.”

Far to the north, hidden in the Jebal al Hamreen, deep inside the breech of a gun with a barrel one hundred and eighty meters long and a range of a thousand kilometers, lay inert but ready to be called to fly.

The house in Qadisiyah was only half awake and quite unprepared for the visitors who came at dawn. When the owner had built it many years before, it had been set in the midst of orchards. It stood three miles away from the four villas in Mansour that Major Zayeed of Counterintelligence was even then preparing to put under surveillance.

The spread of the southwestern suburbs of Baghdad had enveloped the old house, and the new Qadisiyah Expressway roared through what had once been fields growing peaches and apricots.

Still, it was a fine house, owned by a prosperous man now long retired, walled within its grounds and still retaining some fruit trees at the bottom of the garden.

There were two truckloads of AMAM soldiers under the command of a major, and they did not stand on ceremony. The lock of the main gate was shot off, the gate kicked open, and the soldiers poured in, smashing the front door and beating the decrepit servant who tried to stop them.

They ran through the house, ripping open cupboards and tearing down hangings, while the terrified old man who owned the house tried to shield and protect his wife.

The soldiers stripped the place almost bare and found nothing. When the old man pleaded with them to say what it was they wanted or sought, the major roughly told him he knew perfectly well, and the search went on.

After the house, the soldiers tried the garden. It was at the bottom near the wall that they found the freshly turned earth. Two of them held the old man while the soldiers dug. He protested he did not know why the earth was freshly turned; he had buried nothing. But they found it all the same.

It was in a burlap sack and all could see, when they emptied it out, that it was a radio set.

The major knew nothing of radio sets, nor would he have cared, had he known, that the broken-down Morse-sender model in the burlap bag was a world away from the ultramodern satellite-based transmitter used by Mike Martin and still beneath the floor of his shack in First Secretary Kulikov’s garden. For the AMAM major, radios were the tricks of spies, and that was all that mattered.

The old man began to wail that he had never seen it before, that someone must have come over the wall in the night to bury it there, but the AMAM soldiers knocked him down with their rifle butts, and his wife also when she screamed.

The major examined the trophy, and even he could see that some hieroglyphics on the containing sack appeared to be characters in Hebrew.

They did not want the house servant or the old woman—just the man.

He was over seventy, but they carried him out facedown, gripped at each ankle and wrist by four soldiers, and threw him in the back of one of the trucks like a sack of figs.

The major was happy. Acting on an anonymous tip, he had done his duty. His superiors would be pleased. This was not a case for the Abu Ghraib prison. He took his prisoner to the AMAM headquarters and the Gymnasium. That, he reasoned, was the only place for Israeli spies.

That same day, February 16, Gidi Barzilai was in Paris, showing his painting to Michel Levy. The old antiquarian sayan was delighted to help. Only once had he been asked before, and that was to lend some furniture to a katsa trying to gain entry to a certain house, posing as an antique dealer.

For Michel Levy it was a pleasure and an excitement, something to enliven the existence of an old man, to be consulted by the Mossad, to be able to help in some way.

“Boulle,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” said Barzilai, who thought he was being rude.

“Boulle,” repeated the old man. “Also spelled B-u-h-l. The great

French cabinetmaker. His style, you see, definitely. Mind you, this isn’t by him. The period is too late for him.”

“Then who is it by?”

Monsieur Levy was over eighty, with thin white hair plastered on a wrinkled scalp, but he had pink apple cheeks and bright eyes that sparkled with the pleasure of being alive. He had said kaddish for so many of his own generation.

“Well, Boulle when he died handed over his workshop to his protégé, the German Oeben. He in turn handed the tradition over to another German, Riesener. I would think this is from the Riesener period.

Certainly by a pupil, perhaps by the master himself. Are you going to buy it?”

He was teasing, of course. He knew the Mossad did not buy works of art. His eyes danced with merriment.

“Let’s just say I am interested in it,” said Barzilai.

Levy was delighted. They were up to their naughty tricks again. He would never know what, but it was fun anyway.

“Do these desks—”

“Bureaux,” said Levy, “it’s a bureau.”

“All right, do these bureaux ever have secret compartments in them?”

Better and better—delightful! Oh, the excitement!

“Ah, you mean a cachette. Of course. You know, young man, many years ago, when a man could be called out and killed in a duel over a matter of honor, a lady having an affair had to be very discreet. No telephones, then, no fax, no videos. All her lover’s naughty thoughts had to be put on paper. Then where should she hide them from her husband?

“Not in a wall safe—there weren’t any. Nor an iron box—her husband would demand the key. So the society people of those days commissioned pieces of furniture with a cachette. Not all the time, but sometimes. Had to be good workmanship, mind, or it would be too visible.”

“How would one know if a piece one was ... thinking of buying had such a cachette.

Oh, this was wonderful. The man from the Mossad was not going to buy a Riesener bureau, he was going to break into one.

“Would you like to see one?” asked Levy.

He made several phone calls, and at length they left his shop and took a cab. It was another dealer. Levy had a whispered conversation, and the man nodded and left them alone. Levy had said if he could secure a sale, there’d be a small finder’s fee, nothing more. The dealer was satisfied; it is often thus in the antique world.

The desk they examined was remarkably like the one in Vienna.

“Now,” said Levy, “the cachette will not be large, or it would be detectable in the measurements, external as opposed to internal. So it will be slim, vertical or horizontal. Probably no more than two centimeters thick, hiding in a panel that appears to be solid, three centimeters thick, but is in fact two wafers of wood with the cachette between them. The clue is the release knob.”

He took out one of the top drawers.

“Feel in there,” he said.

Barzilai reached in until his fingertips touched the back.

“Feel around.”

“Nothing,” said the katsa.

“That’s because there isn’t anything,” said Levy. “Not in this one. But there might be a knob, a catch, or a button. A smooth button, you press it; a knob, you turn it; a catch, move it from side to side, and see what happens.”

“What should happen?”

“A low click, and a small piece of marquetry pops out, spring-loaded.

Behind that is the cachette.”

Even the ingenuity of the cabinetmakers of the eighteenth century had its limits. Within an hour, Monsieur Levy had taught the katsa the basic ten places to look for the hidden catch that would release the spring to open the compartment.

“Never try to use force to find one,” Levy insisted. “You won’t anyway, with force, and besides, it leaves traces on the woodwork.”

He nudged Barzilai and grinned. Barzilai gave the old man a good lunch at the Coupole, then took a taxi back to the airport to return to Vienna.

Early that morning, February 16, Major Zayeed and his team presented themselves at the first of the three villas that were to be searched. The other two were sealed, with men posted at all the entrances and the bewildered occupants confined inside.

The major was perfectly polite, but his authority brooked no objection.

Unlike the AMAM team a mile and a half away in Qadisiyah, Zayeed’s men were experts, caused very little permanent damage, and were the more efficient for it.

Beginning at the ground level, searching for access to a hiding place beneath the floor tiles, they worked their way steadily through the house, room by room, cupboard by cupboard, and cavity by cavity.

The garden was also searched, but not a trace was found. Before midday, the major was satisfied at last, made his apologies to the occupants, and left. Next door, he began to work through the second house.

In the basement beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, the old man was on his back, strapped at his wrists and waist to a stout wooden table and surrounded by the four experts who would extract his confession. Apart from these, there was a doctor present, and Brigadier Omar Khatib consulting in a corner with Sergeant Ali.

It was the head of the AMAM who decided on the menu of afflictions to be undertaken. Sergeant Ali raised an eyebrow; he would, he realized, certainly need his coveralls this day. Omar Khatib nodded curtly and left. He had paperwork to attend to in his upstairs office.

The old man continued to plead that he knew nothing of any transmitter, that he had not been in the garden for days due to the inclement weather. ... The interrogators were not interested. They bound both ankles to a broom handle running across the insteps. Two of the four raised the feet to the required position with the soles facing the room, while Ali and his remaining colleague took down from the walls the heavy quirts of electrical flex.

When the bastinado began, the old man screamed, as they all did, until the voice broke, then fainted. A bucket of icy water from the corner, where a row of them were stacked, brought him around.

Occasionally, through the morning, the men rested, easing the muscles of their arms, which had become tired with their endeavors. While they rested, cups of brine were dashed against the pulpy feet. Then, refreshed, they resumed.

Between bouts of fainting, the old man continued to protest that he could not even operate a radio transmitter and there must have been some mistake.

By midmorning, the skin and meat of the soles of both feet had been whipped away and the white bones glinted through the blood. Sergeant Ali sighed and nodded that this process should cease. He lit a cigarette and savored the smoke while his assistant used a short iron bar to crack the leg bones from ankle to knees.

The old man pleaded with the doctor, as one medical practitioner to another, but the AMAM physician stared at the ceiling. He had his orders, which were to keep the prisoner alive and conscious.

Across the city, Major Zayeed finished his search of the second villa at four o’clock, just as Gidi Barzilai and Michel Levy were rising from their table in Paris. Again, he had found nothing. Making his courteous apologies to the terrified couple who had watched their home being systematically stripped, he left and with his rummage crew moved on to the third and last villa.

In Saadun, the old man was fainting more frequently, and the doctor protested to the interrogators that he needed time to recover. An injection was prepared and pumped into the prisoner’s bloodstream. It had an almost immediate effect, bringing him back from his near-coma to wakefulness and rousing the nerves to fresh sensitivity.

When the needles in the brazier glowed red-white, they were driven slowly through the shriveled scrotum and the desiccated testicles within.

Just after six the old man went into a coma again, and this time the doctor was too late. He worked furiously, the sweat of fear pouring down his face, but all his stimulants, injected directly into the heart, failed to suffice.

Ali left the room and returned after five minutes with Omar Khatib.

The brigadier looked at the body, and years of experience told him something for which he needed no medical degree. He turned, and his open palm caught the cringing doctor a fearsome crack across the side of the face.

The force of the blow as much as the reputation of the man who administered it sent the doctor crashing to the floor among his syringes and vials.

“Cretin,” hissed Khatib. “Get out of here.”

The doctor gathered his bits into his bag and left on hands and knees.

The Tormentor looked at Ali’s handiwork. There was the sweet smell in the air both men knew of old, an admixture of sweat, terror, urine, excrement, blood, vomit, and a faint aroma of burnt meat.

“He still protested to the end,” said Ali. “I swear, if he knew something, we’d have had it out of him.”

“Put him in a bag,” snapped Omar Khatib, “and return him to his wife for burial.”

It was a strong white canvas sack six feet long and two feet wide, and it was dumped on the doorstep of the house in Qadisiyah at ten that evening. Slowly and with great difficulty, for both were old, the widow and the house servant lifted the bag, brought it inside, and laid it on the dining table. The woman took up her station at the end of the table and began to keen her grief.

The bewildered old servant, Talat, went to the telephone, but it had been ripped from the wall and did not work. Taking his mistress’s phone book, which he could not read, he went down the road to the house of the pharmacist and asked the neighbor to try to contact the young master—either of the young masters would do.

At the same hour, as the pharmacist tried to get a call through Iraq’s wrecked internal telephone system, and Gidi Barzilai, back in Vienna, composed a fresh cable to Kobi Dror, Major Zayeed was reporting his day’s lack of progress to Hassan Rahmani.

“It just wasn’t there,” he told the head of Counterintelligence. “If it had been, we’d have found it. So it has to be the fourth villa, the home of the diplomat.”

“You’re sure you can’t be wrong?” asked Rahmani. “It couldn’t be in another house?”

“No, sir. The nearest house to those four is well outside the area indicated by the crossed beams. The source of those burst transmissions was inside that diamond on the map. I’d swear to it.”

Rahmani was hesitant. Diplomats were the very devil to investigate, always prepared to rush to the Foreign Ministry with a complaint. To get inside Comrade Kulikov’s residence, he would have to go high—as high as he could.

When the major was gone, Rahmani phoned the Foreign Ministry. He was in luck; the Foreign Minister, who had been traveling almost constantly for months, was in Baghdad. More, he was still at his desk.

Rahmani secured his interview for ten the next morning.

The pharmacist was a kindly man, and he just kept trying all through the night. He never did reach the older son, but using a contact in the Army, he managed to get a message through to the younger of his dead friend’s two boys. He could not speak to the man himself, but the Army contact passed it on.

The message reached the younger son at his base far away from Baghdad at dawn. As soon as he heard it, the officer took his car and began to drive. Normally it would have taken him no more than two hours. That day, February 17, it took him six. There were patrols and roadblocks. Using his rank, he could drive to the head of the line, flash his pass, and be waved on.

That did not work for the wrecked bridges. At each one he had to wait for the ferry. It was midday when he arrived at his parents’ house in Qadisiyah.

His mother ran into his embrace and cried against his shoulder. He tried to extract from her details of precisely what had happened, but she was no longer young herself and was hysterical.

Finally, he picked her up and carried her to her room. In the mess of medications the soldiers had left strewn all over the bathroom floor, he found a bottle of sleeping pills his father had used when winter cold brought on the arthritis. He gave his mother two, and soon she slept.

In the kitchen he ordered old Talat to make them both a coffee, and they sat at the table while the servant described what had happened since dawn of the previous day. When he was finished, he showed his dead master’s son the hole in the garden where the soldiers had found the bag with the radio set. The younger man shinnied lip the garden wall and found the scratches where the intruder had come over in the night to bury it. Then he went back to the house.

Hassan Rahmani was kept waiting, which he did not like, but he had his appointment with the Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, just before eleven.

“I don’t think I quite understand you,” said the gray-haired minister, peering owlishly through his glasses. “Embassies are allowed to communicate with their capitals by radio, and their transmissions are always coded.”

“Yes, Minister, and they come from the Chancery building. That is part of normal diplomatic traffic. This is different. We are talking here about a covert transmitter, as used by spies, sending burst transmissions to a receiver we are sure is not in Moscow but much closer.”

“Burst transmissions?” asked Aziz.

Rahmani explained what they were.

“I still fail to follow you. Why should some agent of the KGB—and presumably this must be a KGB operation—be sending burst messages from the residence of the First Secretary, when they have a perfect right to send them on much more powerful transmitters from the embassy?”

“I do not know.”

“Then you must offer me some kind of better explanation. Brigadier.

Have you any idea what is going on outside your own office? Do you not know that late yesterday I arrived back from Moscow after intensive discussions with Mr. Gorbachev and his representative Yevgeny Primakov, who was here last week? Do you not know that I brought with me a peace proposal that, if the Rais accepts it—and I am presenting it to him in two hours—could cause the Soviet Union to recall the Security Council and forbid the Americans to attack us?

“And in the face of all this, at this precise moment, you expect me to humiliate the Soviet Union by ordering a raid on their First Secretary’s villa? Frankly, Brigadier, you must be mad.”

That was the end of it. Hassan Rahmani left the Ministry seething but helpless. There was one thing, however, that Tariq Aziz had not forbidden. Within the walls of his house, Kulikov might be impregnable. Inside his car he might be untouchable. But the streets did not belong to Kulikov.

“I want it surrounded,” Rahmani told his best surveillance team, when he returned to his office. “Keep it quiet, discreet, low-profile. But I want total surveillance of that building. When visitors come and go—and there must be visitors—I want them tailed.”

By noon, the watcher teams were in place. They sat in parked cars beneath the trees covering all four walls of the Kulikov compound and monitored both ends of the only street that led to it. Others, farther away but linked by radio, would report on anyone approaching and follow anyone who left.

The younger son sat in the dining room of his parents’ house and looked at the long canvas bag that contained his father. He let the tears run down his face to make damp marks on the jacket of his uniform, and he thought of the good days long ago. His father had been a prosperous doctor then, with a large practice, even tending to the families of some of the British community after being introduced to them by his friend Nigel Martin.

He thought of the times he and his brother had played in the Martins’

garden with Mike and Terry, and he wondered what had ever happened to those two.

After an hour he noticed some stains on the canvas that seemed to be larger than they had been. He rose and went to the door.

“Talat.”

“Master?”

“Bring scissors and a kitchen knife.”

Alone in the room, Colonel Osman Badri cut open the canvas bag, along the top, down one side and along the bottom. Then he pulled the top of the sack away and rolled it back. His father’s body was still quite naked.

According to tradition, it was supposed to be woman’s work, but this was no task for his mother. He called for water and bandages, bathed and cleaned the ravaged body, bound up the broken feet, straightened and swaddled the shattered legs, and covered the blackened genitalia.

As he worked, he cried; and as he cried, he changed.

At dusk he called the Imam at the Alwazia cemetery in Risafa and made arrangements for a funeral the next morning.

Mike Martin had in fact been into the city on his bicycle that Sunday morning, February 17, but he had returned after buying his groceries and checking the three walls for any chalk marks, arriving back at the villa just before midday. During the afternoon he was kept busy tending the garden. Mr. Kulikov, while neither Christian nor Moslem and celebrating neither the Moslem holy day on Friday nor the Christian sabbath on Sunday, was at home with a cold, complaining about the state of his roses.

While Martin worked over the flower beds, the Mukhabarat watcher teams were quietly sliding into place beyond the wall. Jericho, he reasoned, could not possibly have news in less than two days; Martin would patrol his chalk marks again the following evening.

The burial of Dr. Badri took place at Alwazia shortly after nine o’clock. The cemeteries of Baghdad were busy in those times, and the Imam had much to do. Only a few days earlier, the Americans had bombed a public air raid shelter, causing more than three hundred deaths. Feelings were running high. Several mourners at another funeral close by asked the silent colonel if his relative had died from American bombs. He replied shortly that death had been by natural causes.

In Moslem custom, burial takes place quickly, with no long period of waiting between death and interment. And mere was no wooden coffin in the manner of Christians; the body was wrapped in cloth. The pharmacist came, supporting Mrs. Badri, and they left in a group when the brief ceremony was over. Colonel Badri was barely yards from the gate of Alwazia when he heard his name called. Standing a few yards away was a limousine with blackened windows. One at the rear was half open. The voice called him again.

Colonel Badri asked the pharmacist to take his mother home to Qadisiyah; he would join them later. When they had gone, he walked over to the car.

The voice said: “Please join me, Colonel. We need to talk.” He opened the car door and peered inside. The sole occupant had moved to the far side to make space. Badri thought he knew the face, but vaguely. He had seen it somewhere. He climbed in and closed the door. The man in the dark gray suit pressed a button, and the window rose, shutting out the sounds from outside.

“You have just buried your father.”

“Yes.” Who was this man? Why could he not place the face?

“It was foul, what was done to him. If I had learned in time, I might have stopped it. I learned too late.”

Osman Badri felt something like a punch in the stomach. He realized to whom he was talking—a man who had been pointed out to him at a military reception two years earlier. “I am going to say something to you, Colonel, that, if you were to report it, would cause me to die more terribly than your father.”

There was only one such thing, thought Badri. Treason.

“Once,” said the man quietly, “I loved the Rais.”

“So did I,” said Badri.

“But things change. He has gone mad. In his madness he piles cruelty upon cruelty. He must be stopped. You know about the Qa’ala, of course.”

Badri was surprised again, this time by the sudden change of subject.

“Of course. I built it.”

“Exactly. Do you know what now resides within it?”

“No.”

The senior officer told him.

“He cannot be serious,” said Badri.

“He is completely serious. He intends to use it against the Americans.

That may not be our concern. But do you know what America will do in return? It will reply in kind. Not a brick here will stand on brick, not a stone on stone. The Rais alone will survive. Do you want to be part of this?”

Colonel Badri thought of the body in the cemetery, over which the sextons were even then still heaping the dry earth.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Tell me about Qa’ala.”

“Why?”

“The Americans will destroy it.”

“You can get this information to them?”

“Trust me, there are ways. The Qa’ala ...”

So Colonel Osman Badri, the young engineer who had once wanted to design fine buildings to last for centuries, as his ancestors had done, told the man called Jericho.

“Grid reference.”

Badri gave him that too.

“Go back to your post, Colonel. You will be safe.”

Colonel Badri left the car and walked away. His stomach was heaving, turning and turning. Within a hundred yards he began to ask himself, over and again: What have I done? Suddenly, he knew he had to talk to his brother, that older brother who had always had the cooler head, the wiser counsel.

The man the Mossad team called the spotter arrived back in Vienna that Monday, summoned from Tel Aviv. Once again he was a prestigious lawyer from New York, with all the necessary identifying paperwork to prove it.

Even though the real lawyer was no longer on vacation, the chances that Gemütlich, who hated telephones and fax machines, would telephone New York to check were regarded as minimal. It was a risk the Mossad was prepared to take.

Once again the spotter installed himself at the Sheraton and wrote a personal letter to Herr Gemütlich. He again apologized for his unannounced arrival in the Austrian capital but explained he was accompanied by his firm’s accountant, and that the pair of them wished to make a first substantial deposit on behalf of their client.

The letter was delivered by hand in the late afternoon, and the following morning Gemütlich’s reply arrived at the hotel, offering a meeting at ten in the morning.

The spotter was indeed accompanied. The man with him was known simply as the cracksman, for that was his speciality.

If the Mossad possesses at its Tel Aviv headquarters a virtually unrivaled collection of dummy companies, false passports, letterhead stationery, and all the other paraphernalia for deception, pride of place must still go to its safecrackers and locksmiths. The Mossad’s ability to break into locked places has its own niche in the covert world. At the science of burglary, the Mossad has long been regarded simply as the best. Had a neviot team been in charge at the Watergate, no one would ever have known.

So high is the reputation of Israeli lock-pickers that when British manufacturers sent a new product to the SIS for their comments, Century House would pass it on to Tel Aviv. The Mossad, devious to a fault, would study it, find how to pick it, then return it to London as

“impregnable.” The SIS found out about this.

The next time a British lock company came up with a particularly brilliant new lock, Century House asked them to take it back, keep it, but provide a slightly easier one for analysis. It was the easier one that was sent to Tel Aviv. There it was studied and finally picked, then returned to London as “unbreakable.” But it was the original lock that the SIS advised the manufacturer to market.

This led to an embarrassing incident a year later, when a Mossad locksmith spent three sweaty and infuriating hours working at such a lock in the corridor of an office building in a European capital before emerging livid with rage. Since then, the British have tested their own locks and left the Mossad to work it out for themselves.

The lock-picker brought from Tel Aviv was not the best in Israel but the second best. There was a reason for this: He had something the best lock-pick did not have.

During the night the young man underwent a six-hour briefing from Gidi Barzilai on the subject of the eighteenth-century work of the German-French cabinetmaker Riesener, and a full description by the spotter of the internal layout of the Winkler building. The yarid, surveillance team completed his education with a rundown of the movements of the nightwatch, as observed by the times and places of lights going on and off inside the bank during the night.

That same Monday, Mike Martin waited until five in the afternoon before he wheeled his bone-shaker bicycle across the graveled yard to the rear gate of the Kulikov garden, opened the gate, and let himself out.

He mounted and began to ride down the road in the direction of the nearest ferry crossing of the river, at the place where the Jumhuriya Bridge used to be before the Tornados offered it their personal attention.

He turned the corner, out of sight of the villa, and saw the first parked car. Then the second, farther on. When the two men emerged from the second car and took up position in the center of the road, his stomach began to tighten. He risked a glance behind him; two men from the other car had blocked any retreat. Knowing it was all over, he pedaled on. There was nothing else to do. One of the men ahead of him pointed to the side of the road.

“Hey you!” he shouted. “Over here!”

He came to a stop under the trees by the side of the road. Three more men emerged, soldiers. Their guns pointed straight at him. Slowly he raised his hands.

Chapter 21

That afternoon in Riyadh, the British and American ambassadors met, apparently informally, for the purpose of indulging in the peculiarly

English habit of taking tea and cakes.

Also present on the lawn of the British embassy were Chip Barber, supposedly on the U.S. embassy staff, and Steve Laing, who would tell any casual inquirer that he was with his country’s Cultural Section. A third guest, in a rare break from his duties belowground, was General Norman Schwarzkopf.

Within a short time, all five men found themselves together in a corner of the lawn, nursing their cups of tea. It made life easier when everyone knew what everyone else really did for a living.

Among all the guests, the sole topic of talk was the imminent war, but these five men had information denied to all the rest. One piece of information was the news of the details of the peace plan presented that day by Tariq Aziz to Saddam Hussein, the plan brought back from Moscow and the talks with Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a subject of worry for each of the five guests, but for different reasons.

General Schwarzkopf had already that day headed off a suggestion out of Washington that he might attack earlier than planned. The Soviet peace plan called for a declared cease-fire, and an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait on the following day.

Washington knew these details not from Baghdad but from Moscow.

The immediate reply from the White House was that the plan had merits but failed to address key issues. It made no mention of Iraq’s annulment forever of its claim on Kuwait; it did not bear in mind the unimaginable damage done to Kuwait—the five hundred oil fires, the millions of tons of crude oil gushing into the Gulf to poison its waters, the two hundred executed Kuwaitis, the sacking of Kuwait City.

“Colin Powell tells me,” said the general, “that the State Department is pushing for an even harder line. They want to demand unconditional surrender.”

“So they do, to be sure,” murmured the American envoy.

“So I told ’em,” said the general, “I told ’em, you need an Arabist to look at this.”

“Indeed,” replied the British ambassador, “and why should that be?”

Both the ambassadors were consummate diplomats who had worked for years in the Middle East. Both were Arabists.

“Well,” said the Commander-in-Chief, “that kind of ultimatum does not work with Arabs. They’ll die first.”

There was silence in the group. The ambassadors searched the general’s guileless face for a hint of irony.

The two intelligence officers stayed quiet, but both men had the same thought in their minds: That is precisely the point, my dear general.

“You have come from the house of the Russian.”

It was a statement, not a question. The Counterintelligence man was in plain clothes but clearly an officer.

“Yes, bey.”

“Papers.”

Martin rummaged through the pockets of his dish-dash and produced his ID card and the soiled and crumpled letter originally issued to him by First Secretary Kulikov. The officer studied the card, glanced up to compare the faces, and looked at the letter.

The Israeli forgers had done their work well. The simple, stubbled face of Mahmoud Al-Khouri stared through the grubby plastic.

“Search him,” said the officer.

The other plainclothesman ran his hands over the body under the dish-dash, then shook his head. No weapons.

“Pockets.”

The pockets revealed some dinar notes, some coins, a penknife, different colored pieces of chalk, and a plastic bag. The officer held up the last piece.

“What is this?”

“The infidel threw it away. I use it for my tobacco.”

“There is no tobacco in it.”

“No, bey, I have run out. I was hoping to buy some in the market.”

“And don’t call me bey. That went out with the Turks. Where do you come from, anyway?”

Martin described the small village far in the north. “It is well known thereabouts for its melons,” he added helpfully.

“Be quiet about your thrice-damned melons!” snapped the officer, who had the impression his soldiers were trying not to smile.

A large limousine cruised into the far end of the street and stopped, two hundred yards away.

The junior officer nudged his superior and nodded. The senior man turned, looked, and told Martin, “Wait here.”

He walked back to the large car and stooped to address someone through the rear window.

“Who have you got?” asked Hassan Rahmani.

“Gardener-handyman, sir. Works there. Does the roses and the gravel, shops for the cook.”

“Smart?”

“No, sir, practically simpleminded. A peasant from up-country, comes from some melon patch in the north.”

Rahmani thought it over. If he detained the fool, the Russians would wonder why their man had not come back. That would alert them. He hoped that if the Russian peace initiative failed, he would get his permission to raid the place. If he let the man complete his errands and return, he might alert his Soviet employers. In Rahmani’s experience there was one language every poor Iraqi spoke and spoke well. He produced a wallet and peeled out a hundred dinars.

“Give him this. Tell him to complete his shopping and return. Then he is to keep his eyes open for someone with a big, silver umbrella. If he keeps silent about us and reports tomorrow on what he has seen, he will be well rewarded. If he tells the Russians, I will hand him over to the AMAM.”

“Yes, Brigadier.”

The officer took the money, walked back, and instructed the gardener as to what he had to do. The man looked puzzled.

“An umbrella, sayidi?”