The Fist of God (48 page)

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

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

The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, showed no surprise when the The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For months he had counted on Saddam Hussein to bluster his way into The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

The subtlety of this argument somehow escaped those who were actually living in the homes of Baghdad. Many had already fled, the The Fist of God

non-Iraqis heading for the Jordanian border to swell the five-month-long tide of refugees from Kuwait, the Iraqis seeking sanctuary in the countryside.

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

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

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

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

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

As a boy he had played down there, running along the quaysides with Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, where the vendors cooked the delicious
mosgouf
over beds of camelthorn embers, selling the tender The Fist of God

portions of the Tigris river carp to passersby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He transmitted it at twenty minutes after midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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