The Fist of God (61 page)

“Look, little kitten, my father is wealthy. He makes me a generous allowance. Would you prefer me to spend it in nightclubs?”

She liked it also when he teased her. Of course, Karim would never go to one of those terrible places. So she accepted the perfumes and the toiletries that once, only two weeks ago, she would never have touched.

“Can I open it?” she asked.

“That’s what it’s there for.”

At first she did not understand what they were. The contents of the box seemed to be a froth of silks and lace and colors. When she understood, because she had seen advertisements in magazines—not the sort she bought, of course—she turned bright pink.

“Karim, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“Yes, you could,” he said, and grinned. “Go on, kitten. Go into the bedroom and try. Close the door—I won’t look.”

She laid the things out on the bed and stared at them. She, Edith Hardenberg? Never. There were stockings and girdles, panties and bras, garters and short nighties, in black, pink, scarlet, cream, and beige. Things in filmy lace or trimmed with it, silky-smooth fabrics The Fist of God

over which the fingertips ran as over ice.

She was an hour alone in that room before she opened the door in a bathrobe. Karim put down his coffee cup, rose, and walked over. He stared down at her with a kind smile and began to undo the sash that held the robe together. She blushed red again and could not meet his gaze. She looked away. He let the robe fall open.

“Oh, kitten,” he said softly, “you are sensational.”

She did not know what to say, so she just put her arms around his neck, no longer frightened or horrified when her thigh touched the hardness in his jeans.

When they had made love, she rose and went to the bathroom. On her return she stood and looked down at him. There was no part of him that she did not love. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran a forefinger down the faint scar along one side of his chin, the one he said he had sustained when falling through a greenhouse in his father’s orchard outside Amman.

He opened his eyes, smiled, and reached up for her face; she gripped his hand and nuzzled the fingers, stroking the signet ring on the smallest finger, the ring with the pale pink opal that his mother had given him.

“What shall we do tonight?” she asked.

“Let’s go out,” he said. “Sirk’s at the Bristol.”

“You like steak too much.”

He reached behind her and held her small buttocks under the filmy gauze.

“That’s the steak I like.” He grinned.

“Stop it—you’re terrible, Karim!” she said. “I must dress.”

She pulled away and caught sight of herself in the mirror. How could she have changed so much? she thought. How could she ever have The Fist of God

brought herself to wear lingerie? Then she realized why. For Karim, her Karim, whom she loved and who loved her, she would do anything. Love might have come late in her life, but it had come with the force of a mountain torrent.

United States Department of State

Washington, D.C. 20520

February 5, 1991

MEMORANDUM FOR: Mr. James Baker

FROM: Political Intelligence and Analysis Group SUBJECT: Assassination of Saddam Hussein

CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY

It will certainly not have escaped your attention that since the inception of hostilities between the Coalition Air Forces flying out of Saudi Arabia and neighboring states, and the Republic of Iraq, at least two and possibly more attempts have been made to achieve the demise of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein.

All such attempts have been by aerial bombardment and exclusively by the United States. This group therefore considers it urgent to spell out the likely consequences of a successful attempt to assassinate Mr. Hussein.

The ideal outcome would, of course, be for any successor regime to the present Ba’ath Party dictatorship, set up under the auspices of the victorious Coalition forces, to take the form of a humane and democratic government.

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We believe such a hope to be illusory.

In the first place, Iraq is not nor ever was a united country. It is barely a generation away from being a patchwork quilt of rival, often warring tribes. It contains in almost equal parts two potentially hostile sects of Islam, the Sunni and Shi’a faiths, plus three Christian minorities. To these one should add the Kurdish nation in the north, vigorously pursuing its search for separate independence.

In the second place, there has never been a shred of democratic experience in Iraq, which has passed from Turkish to Hashemite to Ba’ath Party rule without the benefit of an intervening interlude of democracy as we understand it.

In the event, therefore, of the sudden end of the present dictatorship by assassination, there are only two realistic scenarios.

The first would be an attempt to impose from outside a consensus government embracing all the principal factions along the lines of a broadly based coalition.

In the view of this group, such a structure would survive in power for an extremely limited period. Traditional and age-old rivalries would need little time literally to pull it apart.

The Kurds would certainly use the opportunity, so long denied, to opt for secession and the establishment of their own republic in the north. A weak central government in Baghdad based upon agreement by consensus would be impotent to prevent such a move.

The Turkish reaction would be predictable and furious, since Turkey’s own Kurdish minority along the border areas would lose no time in joining their fellow Kurds across the border in The Fist of God

a much invigorated resistance to Turkish rule.

To the southeast, the Shi’a majority around Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab would certainly find good reason to make overtures to Teheran. Iran would be sorely tempted to avenge the slaughter of its young people in the recent Iran-Iraq war by entertaining those overtures in the hope of annexing southeastern Iraq in the face of the helplessness of Baghdad.

The pro-Western Gulf States and Saudi Arabia would be precipitated into something approaching panic at the thought of an Iran reaching to the very border of Kuwait.

Farther north, the Arabs of Iranian Arabistan would find common cause with their fellow Arabs across the border in Iraq, a move that would be vigorously repressed by the Ayatollahs in Teheran.

In the rump of Iraq we would almost certainly see an outbreak of intertribal fighting to settle old scores and establish supremacy over what was left.

We have all observed with distress the civil war now raging between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia. So far, this fighting has not yet spread to Bosnia, where a third component force in the form of the Bosnian Moslems awaits.

When the fighting enters Bosnia, as one day it will, the slaughter will be even more appalling and even more intractable.

Nonetheless, this group believes that the misery of Yugoslavia will pale into insignificance compared with the scenario now painted for an Iraq in full disintegration. In such a case, one can look forward to a major civil war in the rump of the Iraqi heartland, four border wars, and the complete destabilization The Fist of God

of the Gulf. The refugee problem alone would amount to millions.

The only other viable scenario is for Saddam Hussein to be succeeded by another general or senior member of the Ba’ath hierarchy. But as all those in the present hierarchy are as bloodstained as their leader, it is hard to see what benefits would accrue from the replacement of one monster by another, possibly even a cleverer despot.

The ideal, though admittedly not perfect, solution must therefore be the retention of the status quo in Iraq, except that all weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed and the conventional weapons power be so degraded as not to present a threat to any neighboring state for a minimum of a decade.

It could well be argued that the continuing human rights abuses of the present Iraqi regime, if it is allowed to survive, will prove most distressing. This is beyond any doubt. Yet the West has been required to witness terrible scenes in China, Russia, Vietnam, Tibet, East Timor, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world. It is simply not possible for the United States to impose humanity on a worldwide scale unless it is prepared to enter into permanent global war.

The least catastrophic outcome of the present war in the Gulf and the eventual invasion of Iraq is therefore the survival in power of Saddam Hussein as sole master of a unified Iraq, albeit militarily emasculated as regards foreign aggression.

For all the stated reasons, this group urges an end to all the efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein, or to march to Baghdad and occupy Iraq.

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Respectfully submitted,

PIAG

Mike Martin found the chalk mark on February 7 and retrieved the slim glassine envelope from the dead-letter box that same evening.

Shortly after midnight, he set up his satellite dish pointing out of the doorway of his shack and read the spidery Arabic script on the single page of onionskin paper straight into the tape machine. After the Arabic, he added his own English translation and sent the message at 0016 A.M., one minute into his window.

When the burst came through and the satellite caught it in Riyadh, the radio man on duty shouted:

“He’s here. Black Bear’s coming through!”

The four sleepy men in the adjoining room ran in. The big tape machine against the wall slowed down and decrypted the message.

When the technician punched the playback button, the room was filled with the sound of Martin speaking Arabic. Paxman, whose Arabic was best, listened to the halfway point and hissed:

“He’s found it. Jericho says he’s found it.”

“Quiet, Simon.”

The Arabic stopped, and the English text began. When the voice stopped and signed off, Barber smacked one bunched fist into the palm of his other hand in excitement.

“Boy, he’s done it. Guys, can you get me a transcript of that—like,
now
?”

The technician ran the tape back, put on earphones, turned to his word processor, and began to type.

Barber went to a telephone in the living room and called the underground headquarters of CENTAF. There was only one man he The Fist of God

needed to talk to.

General Chuck Horner apparently needed very little sleep. No one either in the Coalition Command offices beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry or the CENTAF headquarters beneath the Saudi Air Force building on Old Airport Road was getting much sleep during those weeks, but General Horner seemed to get less than most.

Perhaps when his beloved aircrew was aloft and flying deep into enemy territory, he did not feel able to sleep. As the flying was going on twenty-four hours per day, that left little sleeping time.

He had a habit of prowling the offices of the CENTAF complex in the middle of the night, ambling from the analysts of the Black Hole along to the Tactical Air Control Center. If a telephone rang unattended and he was near it, he would answer it. Several bemused Air Force officers out in the desert, calling up for a clarification or with a query and expecting a duty major to come on the line, found themselves speaking to the boss himself.

It was a very democratic habit, but it occasionally brought surprises.

On one occasion a squadron commander, who will have to remain nameless, called to complain that his pilots were nightly running a gauntlet of triple-A fire on their way to their targets. Could not the Iraqi gunners be squashed by a visit from the heavy bombers, the Buffs?

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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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