The Fist of God (60 page)

“When was all this?” asked the DCI.

“Nineteen eighty-two.”

“So what this agent, what’s his name—”

“Jericho,” said Stewart.

“What he said was not a lie?”

“Jericho only reported what he claims he heard Saddam Hussein say at a closed conference. I’m afraid we can no longer exclude the conclusion that this time the man was actually telling the truth.”

The Fist of God

“And we have kicked Jericho out of play?”

“He was demanding a million dollars for his information. We have never paid that amount, and at the time—”

“For God’s sake, Bill, it’s cheap at the price!”

The DCI rose and went over to the picture windows. The aspens were bare now, not as they had been in August, and in the valley the Potomac swept past on its way to the sea.

“Bill, I want you to get Chip Barber back into Riyadh. See if there is any way of reestablishing contact with this Jericho.”

“There is a conduit, sir. A British agent inside Baghdad. He passes for an Arab. But we suggested that the Century people pull him out of there.”

“Just pray they haven’t, Bill. We need Jericho back. Never mind the funds—I’ll authorize them. Wherever this device is secreted, we have to find it and bomb it into oblivion before it is too late.”

“Yes. Er—who is going to tell the generals?”

The Director sighed. “I’m seeing Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft in two hours.”

Rather you than me, thought Stewart as he left.

Chapter 18

The two men from Century House arrived in Riyadh before Chip Barber did from Washington. Steve Laing and Simon Paxman landed before dawn, having taken the night flight from Heathrow.

The Fist of God

Julian Gray, the Riyadh Head of Station, met them in his usual unmarked car and brought them to the villa where he had been virtually living, with only occasional visits home to see his wife, for five months. He was puzzled by the sudden reappearance of Paxman from London, let alone the more senior Steve Laing, to oversee an operation that had effectively been closed down.

In the villa, behind closed doors, Laing told Gray exactly why Jericho had to be traced and brought back into play without delay.

“Jesus. So the bastard’s really managed to do it.”

“We have to assume so, even though we have no proof,” said Laing.

“When does Martin have a listening window?”

“Between eleven-fifteen and eleven forty-five tonight,” said Gray.

“For security, we haven’t sent him anything for five days. We’ve been expecting him to reappear over the border anytime.”

“Let’s hope he’s still there. If not, we’re in deep shit. We’ll have to reinfiltrate him, and that could take forever. The Iraqi deserts are alive with patrols.”

“How many know about this?” asked Gray.

“As few as possible, and it stays that way,” replied Laing.

A very tight need-to-know group had been established between London and Washington, but for the professionals it was still too big.

In Washington there was the President and four members of his Cabinet, plus the Chairman of the National Security Council and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Add to that four men at Langley, of whom one, Chip Barber, was heading for Riyadh. Back in California, the unfortunate Dr. Lomax had an unwanted house guest in his cabin to ensure he made no contact with the outside world.

In London, the news had gone to the new Prime Minister, John Major, the Cabinet Secretary, and two members of the Cabinet; at Century The Fist of God

House, three men knew.

In Riyadh there were now three at the SIS villa, and Barber on his way to join them. Among the military, the information was confined to four generals—three American and one British.

Dr. Terry Martin had developed a diplomatic bout of flu and was residing comfortably in an SIS safe house in the countryside, looked after by a motherly housekeeper and three not-so-motherly minders.

From henceforth, all operations against Iraq that concerned the search for, and destruction of, the device the Allies assumed to be code-named Qubth-ut-Allah, or the Fist of God, would be undertaken under the cover of active measures designed to terminate Saddam Hussein himself, or for some other plausible reason.

Two such attempts had in fact already been made. Two locations had been identified at which the Iraqi President might be expected to reside, at least temporarily. No one could say precisely when, for the Rais moved like a will-o’-the-wisp from hiding place to hiding place when he was not in the bunker in Baghdad.

Continuous overhead surveillance watched the two locations. One was a villa out in the countryside forty miles from Baghdad, the other a big mobile home converted into a war caravan and planning center.

On one occasion the aerial watchers had seen mobile missile batteries and light armor moving into position around the villa. A flight of Strike Eagles went in and blew the villa apart. It was a false alarm—the bird had flown.

On the second occasion, two days before the end of January, the large trailer had been seen to move to a new location. Again an attack went in; again the target was not at home.

On both occasions the fliers took enormous risks in pressing their attacks, for the Iraqi gunners fought back furiously. The failure to The Fist of God

terminate the Iraqi dictator on both occasions left the Allies in a quandary. They simply did not know Saddam Hussein’s precise movements. The fact was, no one knew them, outside of a tiny group of personal bodyguards drawn from the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay.

In reality, he was moving around most of the time. Despite the assumption that Saddam was in his bunker deep underground for the whole of the air war, he was really in residence there for less than half that time. But his safety was assured by a series of elaborate deceptions and false trails. On several occasions he was “seen” by his own cheering troops—cynics said they were cheering because they were the ones not at the front being pounded by the Buffs. The man the Iraqi troops saw on all such occasions was one of the doubles who could pass for Saddam among all but his closest intimates.

At other times, convoys of limousines, up to a dozen, swept through the city of Baghdad with blackened windows, causing the citizenry to believe their Rais was inside one of the cars. Not so; these cavalcades were all decoys. When he moved, he sometimes went in a single unmarked car.

Even among his innermost circle, the security measures prevailed.

Cabinet members alerted for a conference with him would be given just five minutes to leave their residences, get into their cars, and follow a motorcycle outrider. Even then, the destination was not the meeting place.

They would be driven to a parked bus with blackened windows, there to find all the other ministers sitting in the dark. There was a screen between the ministers and the driver. Even the driver had to follow an Amn-al-Khass motorcyclist to the eventual destination.

Behind the driver, the ministers, generals, and advisers sat in darkness The Fist of God

like schoolboys on a mystery tour, never knowing where they were going or, afterward, where they had been.

In most cases these meetings were held in large and secluded villas, commandeered for the day and vacated before nightfall. A special detail of the Amn-al-Khass had no other job than to find such a villa when the Rais wanted a meeting, hold the villa owners incommunicado, and let them return home when the Rais was long gone.

Small wonder the Allies could not find him. But they tried—until the first week of February. After that, all assassination attempts were called off, and the military never understood why.

Chip Barber arrived at the British villa in Riyadh just after midday on the last day of January. After the greetings, the four men sat and waited out the hours until they could contact Martin, if he was still there.

“I suppose we have a deadline on this?” asked Laing. Barber nodded.

“February twentieth. Stormin’ Norman wants to march the troops in there on February twentieth.”

Paxman whistled. “Twenty days, hell. Is Uncle Sam going to pick up the tab for this?”

“Yep. The Director has already authorized Jericho’s one million dollars to go into his account now, today. For the location of the device, assuming there’s one and only one of them, we’ll pay the bastard five.”

“Five million dollars?” expostulated Laing. “Christ, no one had ever paid anything like that for information!”

Barber shrugged. “Jericho, whoever he is, ranks as a mercenary. He The Fist of God

wants money, nothing else. So let him earn it. There’s a catch. Arabs haggle, we don’t. Five days after he gets the message, we drop the ante by half a million a day until he comes up with the precise location. He has to know that.”

The three Britishers mulled over the sums that constituted more than all their salaries combined for a lifetime’s work.

“Well,” remarked Laing, “that should put the breeze up him.”

The message was composed during the late afternoon and evening.

First, contact would have to be established with Martin, who would have to confirm with preagreed code words that he was still there and a free man. Then Riyadh would tell him of the offer to Jericho, in detail, and press on him the massive urgency now involved.

The men ate sparingly, toying with food, hard pressed to cope with the tension in the room. At half past ten Simon Paxman went into the radio shack with the others and spoke the message into the tape machine.

The spoken passage was speeded to two hundred times its real duration and came out at just under two seconds.

At ten seconds after eleven-fifteen, the senior radio engineer sent a brief signal—the “are you there” message. Three minutes later, there was a tiny burst of what sounded like static. The satellite dish caught it, and when it was slowed down, the five listening men heard the voice of Mike Martin: “Black Bear to Rocky Mountain, receiving.

Over.”

There was an explosion of relief in the Riyadh villa, four mature men pumping each other’s backs like football fans whose team has won the Super Bowl.

Those who have never been there can ill imagine the sensation of learning that “one of ours” far behind the lines is still, somehow, alive and free.

The Fist of God

“Fourteen fucking days he’s sat there,” marveled Barber. “Why the hell didn’t the bastard pull out when he was told?”

“Because he’s a stubborn idiot,” muttered Laing. “Just as well.”

The more dispassionate radio man was sending another brief interrogatory. He wanted five words to confirm—even though the oscillograph told him the voice pattern matched that of Martin—that the SAS major was not speaking under duress. Fourteen days is more than enough to break a man.

His message back to Baghdad was as short as it could be:

“Of Nelson and the North, I say again, of Nelson and the North. Out.”

Another three minutes elapsed. In Baghdad, Martin crouched on the floor of his shack at the bottom of First Secretary Kulikov’s garden, caught the brief blip of sound, spoke his reply, pressed the speedup button, and transmitted a tenth-of-a-second burst back to the Saudi capital.

The listeners heard him say “Sing the brilliant day’s renown.” The radio man grinned.

“That’s him, sir. Alive and kicking and free.”

“Is that a poem?” asked Barber.

“The real second line,” said Laing, “is: ‘Sing the glorious day’s renown.’ If he’d got it right, he’d have been talking with a gun to his temple. In which case ...” He shrugged.

The radio man sent the final message, the real message, and closed down. Barber reached into his briefcase.

“I know it may not be strictly according to local custom, but diplomatic life has certain privileges.”

“I say,” murmured Gray. “Dom Perignon. Do you think Langley can afford it?”

“Langley,” said Barber, “has just put five million greenbacks on the The Fist of God

poker table. I guess it can offer you guys a bottle of fizz.”

“Jolly decent,” said Paxman.

A single week had brought about a transformation in Edith Hardenberg—a week, that is, and the effects of being in love.

With Karim’s gentle encouragement she had been to a coiffeur in Grinzing, who had let down her hair and cut and styled it, chin-length, so that it fell about her face, filling out her narrow features and giving her a hint of mature glamour.

Her lover had selected a range of makeup preparations with her shy approval; nothing garish, just a hint of eyeliner, foundation cream, a little powder, and a touch of lipstick at the mouth.

At the bank, Wolfgang Gemütlich was privately aghast, secretly watching her cross the room, taller now in one-inch heels. It was not even the heels or the hair or the makeup that distressed him, though he would have flatly banned them all had Frau Gemütlich even mentioned the very idea. What perturbed him was her air, a sense of self-confidence when she presented him with his letters for signing or took dictation.

He knew, of course, what had happened. One of those foolish girls downstairs had persuaded her to spend money. That was the key to it all, spending money. It always, in his experience, led to ruin, and he feared for the worst.

Her natural shyness had not entirely evaporated, and in the bank she was as retiring as ever in speech if not quite in manner. But in Karim’s presence, when they were alone, she constantly amazed herself with her boldness. For twenty years things physical had been abhorrent to her, and now she was like a traveler on a voyage of slow and The Fist of God

wondering discovery, half abashed and horrified, half curious and excited. So their loving—at first wholly one-sided—became more exploratory and mutual. The first time she touched him “down there,”

she thought she would die of shock and mortification, but to her surprise she had survived.

On the evening of the third of February he brought home to her flat a box wrapped in gift paper with a ribbon.

“Karim, you mustn’t do things like this. You are spending too much.”

He took her in his arms and stroked her hair. She had learned to love it when he did that.