The Fist of God (44 page)

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

The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fist of God

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

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

“Identify yourself, please.”

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

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

“What have you for me?”

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

“Wait.”

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

“Good, Leila. Very good.”

Today the money was in Swiss francs, very high-denomination notes, passed through the grille from him to her. She secreted them all in the The Fist of God

place she had stored her information, a place she knew most Moslem men deemed unclean at a certain time. Only a doctor or the dreaded AMAM would find them there.

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

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

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

“Go now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

So long as that fool in the palace by the river at the Tamuz Bridge did The Fist of God

not spoil it all and pull back unilaterally from Kuwait. Fortunately, he seemed hell-bent on his own destruction. The Americans would win the war, and then they would come to Baghdad to finish the job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man with the bicycle was only twenty feet away. He happened to glance up as the priest emerged in his black cassock into the sunlight and whirled away just in time. The man in the cassock glanced about The Fist of God

him, noticed but thought nothing of the
fellagha
bent over his bicycle adjusting the chain, and walked quickly down the alley toward a small unmarked car.

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

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

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

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

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

The Fist of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On an early training mission, a British Tornado had been asked by the air traffic controller whether it had reached a certain turning point. The The Fist of God

pilot replied that he had not, he was still over MMFD.

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

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

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

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

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

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