The Fist of God (80 page)

The ever-alert AWACS saw it and called up, asking for its destination.

This time the pukka British voice came back explaining that they were flying to the British base at Akrotiri in Cyprus to evacuate back home a close friend and fellow officer of General de la Billière who had been badly wounded by a land mine. The mission commander in the AWACS knew nothing of this, but wondered how exactly he should object. Have it shot down?

The Fist of God

Fifteen minutes later, the HS-125 left Saudi air space and crossed the border of Jordan.

The Iraqi sitting in the back of the executive jet knew nothing of all this but was impressed by the efficiency of the British and Americans.

He had been dubious on receiving the last message from his paymasters in the West, but on reflection he agreed it would be wise to quit now rather than wait for later and have to do it on his own, without help. The plan outlined to him in that message had worked like a dream.

One of the two pilots in RAF tropical uniforms came back from the flight deck and muttered in English to the American G2 colonel, who grinned.

“Welcome to freedom, Brigadier,” he said in Arabic to his guest. “We are out of Saudi air space. Soon we’ll have you in an airliner to America. By the way, I have something for you.”

He withdrew a slip of paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the Iraqi, who read it with great pleasure. It was a simple total: the sum lodged in his bank account in Vienna, now over $10 million.

The Green Beret reached into a locker and produced several glasses and a collection of miniatures of Scotch. He poured one bottle into each glass and passed them around.

“Well, my friend, to retirement and prosperity.”

He drank; the other American drank. The Iraqi smiled and drank.

“Have a rest,” said the G2 colonel in Arabic. “We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

After that, they left him alone. He leaned his head back onto the cushion of his seat and let his mind drift back over the past twenty weeks mat had made his fortune.

He had taken great risks, but they had paid off. He recalled the day he The Fist of God

had sat in that conference room in the Presidential Palace and heard the Rais announce that at last Iraq possessed, in the nick of time, her own nuclear bomb. That had come as a genuine shock, as had the sudden cut-off of all communications after he had told the Americans.

Then they had suddenly come back, more insistent than ever, demanding to know where the device was stored.

He had not had the faintest idea, but for the offered bounty of $5

million, it had clearly been the time to stake everything. Then it had been easier than he could have imagined.

The wretched nuclear engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqi, had been picked up on the streets of Baghdad and accused, amid the sea of his own pain, of betraying the location of the device. Protesting his innocence, he had given away the site of Al Qubai and the camouflage of the car junkyard. How could the scientist have known that he was being interrogated three days before the bombing, not two days after it?

Jericho’s next shock had been to learn of the shooting down of the two British fliers. That had not been foreseen. He desperately needed to know whether, in their briefing, they had been given any indication as to how the information had arrived in the hands of the Allies.

His relief, when it became plain they knew nothing beyond their brief and that as far as they knew the place might be a store of artillery ammunition, had been short-lived, when the Rais insisted there must have been a traitor. From then on Dr. Siddiqi, chained in a cell beneath the Gymnasium, had had to be dispatched, which he was with a massive injection of air into the heart, causing a coronary embolism.

The records of the time of his interrogation, from three days before the bombing to two days after it, had been duly changed.

But the greatest of all the shocks had been to learn that the Allies had missed, that the bomb had been removed to some hidden place called The Fist of God

Qa’ala, the Fortress. What fortress? Where?

A chance remark by the nuclear engineer before he died had revealed that the ace of camouflage was a certain Colonel Osman Badri of the Engineers, but a check of records showed the young officer was a passionate fan of the President. How to change that view?

The answer lay in the arrest on trumped-up charges and messy murder of his much-loved father. After that, the disillusioned Badri had been putty in Jericho’s hands, during the meeting in the back of the car following the funeral.

The man called Jericho, also nicknamed Mu’azib the Tormentor, felt at peace with the world. A drowsy numbness crept over him, the effect perhaps of the strain of the past few days. He tried to move but found his limbs would not function. The two American colonels were looking down at him, talking in a language he could not understand but knew was not English. He tried to respond but his mouth would not frame any words.

The HS-125 had turned southwest, dropping across the Jordanian coast and down to ten thousand feet. Over the Gulf of Aqaba the Green Beret pulled back the passenger door, and a rushing torrent of air filled the cabin, even though the twin-jet had slowed almost to the point of stall.

The two colonels eased him up, unprotesting, limp and helpless, trying to say something but unable to. Over the blue water south of Aqaba, Brigadier Omar Khatib left the airplane and plunged to the water, there to break apart on impact. The sharks did the rest.

The HS-125 turned north, passed over Eilat after reentering Israeli air space, finally landing at Sde Dov, the military airfield north of Tel Aviv. There the two pilots stripped off their British uniforms and the colonels their American dress. All four returned to their habitual Israeli The Fist of God

ranks. The executive jet was stripped of its Royal Air Force livery, repainted as it used to be, and returned to the air charter
sayan
in Cyprus who had loaned it.

The money from Vienna was transferred first to the Kanoo Bank in Bahrain, then on to another in the United States. Part was retransferred to the Hapoalim Bank in Tel Aviv and returned to the Israeli government; it was what Israel had paid Jericho until the transfer to the CIA. The balance, over $8 million, went into what the Mossad calls The Fun Fund.

* * *

The body of the Strike Eagle’s weapons systems officer. Lieutenant Tim Nathanson, was never found. The Guards had torn it apart with their machine-gun bursts, and the jackals, foxes, crows, and kites had done the rest.

To this day his bones must lie somewhere in those cold valleys, not a hundred miles from where his forefathers once toiled and wept by the waters of Babylon.

His father received the news in Washington, sat shiva for him and said
kaddish
, and grieved alone in the mansion in Georgetown.

The body of Corporal Kevin Norm
was
recovered. As Blackhawks stood by, British hands tore apart the cairn and recovered the corporal, who was put in a body bag and flown first to Riyadh and thence home to England in a Hercules transport.

In the middle of April a brief ceremony was held at the SAS

headquarters camp on the outskirts of Hereford.

The Fist of God

There is no graveyard for the SAS; no cemetery collects their dead.

Many of them lie in fifty foreign battlefields whose very names are unknown to most.

Some are under the sands of the Libyan Desert, where they fell fighting Rommel in 1941 and 1942. Others are among the Greek islands, the Abruzzi mountains, the Jura, and the Vosges. They lie scattered in Malaysia and Borneo, in Yemen, Muscat and Oman, in jungles and freezing wastes and beneath the cold waters of the Atlantic off the Falklands.

When bodies were recovered, they came home to Britain, but always to be handed to the families for burial. Even then, no headstone ever mentions the SAS, for the regiment accredited is the original unit from which the soldier came to the SAS—Fusiliers, Paras, Guards, whatever.

There is only one monument. In the heart of the Stirling Lines at Hereford stands a short and stocky tower, clad in wood and painted a dull chocolate brown. At its peak a clock keeps the hours, so the edifice is known simply as the Clocktower.

Around its base are sheets of dull bronze, on which are etched all the names and the places where they died.

That April, there were five new names to be unveiled. One had been shot by the Iraqis in captivity, two killed in a firefight as they tried to slip back over the Saudi border. A fourth had died of hypothermia after days in soaking clothes and freezing weather. The fifth was Corporal Kevin North.

There were several former commanders of the regiment there, that day in the rain. John Simpson came, and Viscount Johnny Slim and Sir Peter. The Director of Special Forces, J. P. Lovat was there, and Colonel Bruce Craig, then the CO. And Major Mike Martin and a few The Fist of God

others.

Because they were now at home, those still serving could wear the rarely seen sand-colored beret with its emblem of the winged dagger and the motto “Who Dares Wins.”

It was not a long ceremony. The officers and men saw the fabric pulled aside, the newly etched names stood out bold and white against the bronze. They saluted and left to walk back to the various mess buildings.

Shortly after, Mike Martin went to his small hatchback car in the park, drove out through the guarded gates, and turned toward the cottage he still kept in a village in the hills of Herefordshire.

He thought as he drove of all the things that had happened in the streets and sands of Kuwait; and in the skies above; and in the alleys and bazaars of Baghdad; and in the hills of the Hamreen. Because he was a secretive man, he was glad at least of one thing: That no one would ever know.

THE END.

A Final Note

All wars must teach lessons. If they do not do so, they were fought in vain and those who died in them did so for naught.

The Fist of God

The Gulf War taught two clear lessons, if the powers have the wit to learn them.

The first is that it is madness for the thirty most industrially developed nations of the world, who dispose between them of ninety-five percent of high-tech weaponry and the means for its production, to sell these artifacts to the crazed, the aggressive, and the dangerous for short-term financial profit.

For a decade the regime of the Republic of Iraq was allowed to arm itself to a frightening level by a combination of political foolishness, bureaucratic blindness, and corporate greed. The eventual destruction, in part, of that war machine cost vastly more than its provision.

A recurrence could easily be prevented by the establishment of a central register of all exports to certain regimes, with draconian penalties for nondisclosure. Analysts able to examine the broad picture would soon see, by the type and quantity of materials ordered or delivered, whether weapons of mass destruction were in preparation.

The alternative will be a proliferation of high-tech weaponry that will make the years of the cold war seem like an age of peace and tranquillity.

The second lesson concerns the gathering of information. At the end of the cold war, many hoped this could safely be curbed. The reality shows the opposite.

During the 1970s and 1980s technical advances in the gathering of electronic and signals intelligence were so impressive that governments of the Free World were led to believe, as the scientists produced their expensive miracles, that machines alone could do the job. The role of “humint,” the gathering of information by people, was downgraded.

In the Gulf War the full panoply of Western technical wizardry was The Fist of God

brought to bear and, partly because of its impressive cost, presumed to be virtually infallible.

It was not. With a combination of skill, ingenuity, guile, and hard work, large parts of Iraq’s arsenal and the means of its production had been hidden or so disguised that the machines could not see them.

The pilots flew with great courage and skill, but often they too were deceived by the cunning of those who had devised the replicas and the camouflage.

The fact that germ warfare, poison gas, or the nuclear possibility was never employed was, like the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, “a damn close-run thing.”

What became plain by the end was that for certain tasks in certain places, there is still no substitute for the oldest information-gathering device on earth: the human eyeball, Mark One.

About The Author

FREDERICK FORSYTE
is the author of nine bestselling novels:
The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The
Shepherd, The Devil’s Alternative, The Fourth Protocol, The
Negotiator, The Deceiver
, and
The Fist of God
. He lives outside London.

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