The Fist of God (13 page)

“Hi, Grandpa. It’s me, Don.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In between he had fought his way through a dozen miserable atolls in the Marianas and survived the hell of Iwo Jima. He carried seventeen The Fist of God

scars on his body, all from combat, and was entitled to wear the ribbons of a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and seven Purple Hearts on his chest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was already dark by then in London. Terry Martin had worked late, for although the undergraduates were away for the long summer vacation, he had lectures to prepare, and because of the specialized vacation courses the school also ran, he was kept quite busy even The Fist of God

through the summer months. But that evening he was forcing himself to find something to do, to keep his mind off his worry.

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

At ten, while Don Walker was beginning his drive north from Hatteras, Terry left the school, bidding a courteous good night to the old janitor who locked up after him, and walked down Gower Street and St.

Martin’s Lane toward Trafalgar Square. Perhaps, he thought, the bright lights would cheer him up. It was a warm and balmy evening.

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

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

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

He could remember Fatima, their
dada
or nanny, a plump gentle girl The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By then, there had already been one coup d’état in Iraq. The boy king and Nuri as Said had been slaughtered and the nee-Communist General Kassem had taken absolute power. Though the two young The Fist of God

English boys were unaware of it all, their parents and the English community were becoming worried. Favoring the Iraq Communist Party, Kassem was carrying out a vicious pogrom against the nationalist Ba’ath Party members, who in turn tried to assassinate the general. One of those in the group that failed to machine-gun the dictator was a young firebrand called Saddam Hussein.

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

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

“I’m not a grub,” he sniffled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout their prep school years, they were inseparable. The tall The Fist of God

boy’s name was Hassan Rahmani. The third member of Mike’s gang was Abdelkarim Badri, who had a younger brother, Osman, the same age as Terry. So Terry and Osman became friends as well, which was useful because Badri Senior was often to be found at their parents’

house. He was a doctor, and the Martins were happy to have him as their family physician. It was he who helped Mike and Terry Martin through the usual childhood ailments of measles, mumps, and chicken pox.

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

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

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

But in 1966, at the age of thirteen, Mike had been sent to complete his education at an English public school called Haileybury. Terry duly followed in 1968. In late June that summer, his parents took him over to England so they could all spend the long vacation together there before Terry joined Mike at school. That way they missed by chance The Fist of God

the two coups, on July 14 and 30, that toppled the Army and swept the Ba’ath Party to power under President Bakr, with a vice-president called Saddam Hussein.

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

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

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

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

He left the bus and scurried down Chepstow Gardens. Hilary, who had The Fist of God

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

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

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

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