The Fist of God

  “Intensity?”

  “Size of a tank shell, I guess, sir.”

  “Okay. Log it. No further action.”

  “You will be able to make these yourselves by the end of today. The detonators and time pencils you will carry and store in these,” the Bedou said.

  He took an aluminum cigar tube, wrapped the detonator in cotton batting, and inserted it into the tube, then screwed the top back on.

  “The plastic you will carry like this.”

  He took the wrapper of a bar of soap, rolled four ounces of explosive into the shape of a soap bar, and wrapped it, sealing it with an inch of sticky tape.

  “The cigar boxes you acquire for yourselves. Not the big kind for Havanas—the small kind for cheroots.

  Always keep two cheroots in the box, in case you are stopped and frisked. If an Iraqi ever wants to take the cigar tube or the box or the’ soap off you, let him.”

  He made them practice under the sun until they could unwrap the “soap,” empty out the cheroots, prepare the bomb, and wind the rubber band around the box in thirty seconds.

  “You can do it in the back of a car, the men’s room of a café, in a doorway, or at night behind a tree,”

  he told them. “Pick your target first. Make sure there are no soldiers standing well to one side who will survive. Then twist the butterfly, close the box, rubber-band it, walk up, toss the bomb, and walk away.

  From the moment you twist the butterfly, count slowly to fifty. If at fifty seconds you have not parted company with it, throw it as far as you can. Now, mostly you will be doing this in darkness, so that’s what we’ll do now.”

  He made the group blindfold each member one by one, then watch as the student fumbled and dropped things. By late afternoon, they could do it by touch. In the early evening he gave them the rest of the contents of the haversack, enough for each student to make six bars of soap and six time pencils. The tobacconist’s son agreed to provide all the small boxes and aluminum tubes. They could acquire cotton batting, soap wrappers, and rubber bands for themselves. Then he drove them back to town.

  Through September, AMAM headquarters in the Hilton Hotel received a stream of reports of a steadily escalating level of attacks on Iraqi soldiers and military equipment. Colonel Sabaawi became more and more enraged as he became more and more frustrated.

  This was not the way it was supposed to be. The Kuwaitis, he had been told, were a cowardly people who would cause no trouble—a touch of the Baghdad methods, and they would do as they were told. It was not working out quite like that.

  There were in fact several resistance movements in existence, most of them random and uncoordinated.

  In the Shi’a district of Rumaithiya, Iraqi soldiers simply disappeared. The Shi’a Moslems had special reason to loathe the Iraqis, for their coreligionists, the Shi’a of Iran, had been slaughtered in hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi soldiers who wandered into the rabbit warren of alleys that make up the Rumaithiya district had their throats cut, and their bodies were dumped in the sewers. They were never recovered.

  Among the Sunnis, the resistance was centered in the mosques, where the Iraqis seldom ventured. Here messages were passed, weapons swapped, and attacks planned.

  The most organized resistance came from the leadership of Kuwaiti notables, men of education and wealth. Mr. Al-Khalifa became the banker, using his funds to provide food so that the Kuwaitis could eat, and other cargos hidden beneath the food that came in from outside.

  The organization aimed at six goals, five of them a form of passive resistance, and each had its own branch. One was documentation; every resister was supplied with perfect documentation forged by resisters within the Interior Ministry. A second branch was for intelligence—keeping a stream of information about Iraqi movements heading in the direction of the Coalition headquarters in Riyadh, particularly about Iraqi manpower and weapon strength, coastal fortifications, and missile deployments.

  A third branch kept the services functioning—water, electricity, fire brigades, and health. When, finally in defeat, Iraq turned on the oil taps and began to destroy the sea itself, Kuwaiti oil engineers told the American fighter-bombers exactly which valves to hit in order to turn off the flow.

  Community solidarity committees circulated through all the districts, often contacting Europeans and other First World residents still holed up in their flats and keeping them out of the way of the Iraqi trawl nets.

  A satellite phone system was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia in the dummy fuel tank of a jeep. It was not encrypted like Martin’s, but by keeping it constantly on the move, the Kuwaiti resistance could avoid Iraqi detection and contact Riyadh whenever there was something to pass. An elderly radio ham worked throughout the occupation, sending seven thousand messages to another ham in Colorado, which were passed on to the State Department.

  And there was the offensive resistance, mainly under the leadership of a Kuwaiti colonel who had escaped the Ministry of Defense building on the first day. Because he had a son called Fouad, his code name was Abu Fouad, or Father of Fouad.

  Saddam Hussein had finally given up trying to form a puppet government and appointed his half-brother Ali Hassan Majid as Governor-General.

  The resistance was not just a game. A small but extremely dirty war developed underground. The AMAM responded by setting up two interrogation centers, at the Kathma Sports Center and the Qadisiyah Stadium. Here the methods of AMAM chief Omar Khatib were imported from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and used extensively. Before the liberation, five hundred Kuwaitis were dead, of whom two hundred fifty were executed, many after prolonged torture.

  Counterintelligence chief Hassan Rahmani sat at his desk in the Hilton Hotel and read the reports prepared by his on-the-spot staff. He was making a brief visit from his Baghdad duties on September 15.

  The reports made gloomy reading.

  There was a steady increase in attacks on Iraqi outposts on lonely roads, guard huts, vehicles, and roadblocks. This was mainly the AMAM’s problem—local resistance came under them, and—predictably, in Rahmani’s view—that brutal oaf Khatib was making a camel’s breakfast out of it.

  Rahmani had little time for the torture to which his rival in the Iraqi intelligence structure was so devoted.

  He preferred to rely on patient detective work, deduction, and cunning, even though he had to concede that in Iraq it was terror and nothing else that had kept the Rais in power all these years. He had to admit, with all his education, that the street-wise, devious psychopath from the alleys of Tikrit frightened him.

  He had tried to persuade his president to let him have charge of internal intelligence in Kuwait, but the answer had been a firm no. It was a question of principle, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz had explained to him. He, Rahmani, was charged to protect the state from espionage and sabotage from foreign sources.

  The Rais would not concede that Kuwait was a foreign country—it was the nineteenth province of Iraq.

  So it was Omar Khatib’s job to ensure compliance.

  As he contemplated his sheaf of reports that morning in the Hilton Hotel, Rahmani was rather relieved that he did not have the task. It was a nightmare, and as he had predicted, Saddam Hussein had played his cards consistently wrong.

  The taking of Western hostages as human shields against attack was proving a disaster, totally counterproductive. He had missed his chance to roll south and take the Saudi oil fields, forcing King Fahd to the conference table, and now the Americans were pouring into the theater.

  All attempts to assimilate Kuwait were failing, and within a month, probably less, Saudi Arabia would be impregnable with its American shield along the northern border.

  Saddam Hussein, he believed, could neither get out of Kuwait without humiliation, nor stay in there if attacked without a bigger one. Yet the mood around the Rais was still one of confidence, as if he were convinced something would turn up. What on earth did the man expect? Rahmani wondered. That
Allah himself would lean down from heaven and smash his enemies in the face?

  Rahmani rose from his desk and walked to the window. He liked to stroll as he thought; it marshaled his brain. He looked down from the window. The once-sparkling marina was now a garbage dump.

  There was something about the reports on his desk that disturbed him. He went back and scanned them again. Yes, something odd. Some of the attacks on Iraqis were with handguns and rifles; others with bombs made from industrial TNT. But here were others, a constant niggling stream, that clearly indicated that a plastic explosive had been used. Kuwait had never had plastic explosives, least of all Semtex-H.

  So who was using it, and where did they get it?

  Then there were radio reports of an encrypted transmitter somewhere out in the desert that moved all the time, coming on air at different times, talking scrambled nonsense for ten or fifteen minutes and then going silent, and always on different bearings.

  Then there were these reports of a strange Bedou who seemed to wander about at will, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and always a trail of destruction in his wake. Before they died of wounds, two badly injured soldiers had reported seeing the man, tall and confident in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh , one trailing end drawn across his face.

  Two Kuwaitis under torture had mentioned the legend of the invisible Bedou but claimed they had never actually seen him. Sabaawi’s men were trying to persuade the prisoners with even more pain to admit they had. Fools. Of course, they would invent anything to stop the agony.

  The more Hassan Rahmani thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had a foreign infiltrator on his hands, definitely part of his authority. He found it hard to believe that there was any Bedou who knew about plastic explosives and encrypted transceivers—if they were from the same man.

  He might have trained up a few bomb planters, but he also seemed to be carrying out a lot of the attacks himself.

  It would just not be possible to pick up every Bedou wandering around the city and the desert—that would be the AMAM way, but they would be pulling out fingernails for years and getting nowhere.

  For Rahmani, the problem resolved itself into three choices: Capture the man during one of his attacks—but that would be haphazard and possibly never happen. Capture one of his Kuwaiti associates and trace the man to his lair. Or take him crouched over his transmitter in the desert.

  Rahmani decided on the last. He would bring in from Iraq two or three of his best radio-detector teams, post them at different points, and try to triangulate on the source of the broadcast. He would also need an Army helicopter on standby, with a team of Special Forces ready to move. As soon as he got back to Baghdad, he would set it in motion.

  Hassan Rahmani was not the only man that day in Kuwait who was interested in the Bedou. In a suburban villa miles away from the Hilton, a handsome, moustached young Kuwaiti Army colonel in a white cotton thob sat in an armchair and listened to a friend who had come to him with an interesting snippet.

  “I was just sitting in my car at the traffic light, watching nothing in particular, when I noticed this Iraqi Army truck on the opposite side of the intersection. It was parked there, with a group of soldiers around the hood, eating and smoking. Then a young man, one of our own, walked out of a café clutching what looked like a tiny box. It was really small. I thought nothing of it until I saw him flick it under the truck.

  Then he turned the corner and disappeared. The lights changed, but I stayed where I was.

  “In five seconds the truck disintegrated. I mean, it just blew apart. The soldiers were all on the ground with their legs off. I’ve never seen such a small package do so much damage. I tell you, I hung a U and got out of there before the AMAM came along.”

  “Plastic,” mused the Army officer. “What would I not give for some of that. It must have been one of the Bedou’s men. Who is that bastard, anyway? I’d love to meet him.”

  “The point is, I recognized the boy.”

  “What?” The young colonel leaned forward, his face alight with interest.

  “I wouldn’t have come all this way just to tell you what you will have heard already. I tell you, I recognized the bomb-thrower. Abu Fouad, I’ve been buying cigarettes from his father for years.”

  Dr. Reinhart, when he addressed the Medusa Committee in London three days later, looked tired. Even though he had relinquished all his other duties at Porton Down, the documentation he had taken away with him from the first meeting and the supplementary information that had come pouring in ever since had given him a monstrous task.

  “The study is probably not yet complete,” he said, “but a fairly comprehensive picture emerges.

  “First, of course, we know that Saddam Hussein has a large poison-gas-production capacity, I estimate at over a thousand tons a year.

  “During the Iran-Iraq war, some Iranian soldiers who had been gassed were treated here in Britain, and I was able to examine them. We could recognize phosgene and mustard gas even then.

  “The worse news is that I have no doubt that Iraq now has substantial supplies of two far more lethal gases, nerve agents of German invention called Sarin and Tabun. If these were used in the Iran-Iraq war, and I think they were, there would have been no question of treating the victims in British hospitals. They would be dead.”

  “How bad are these—er ... agents, Dr. Reinhart?” asked Sir Paul Spruce.

  “Sir Paul, do you have a wife?”

  The urbane mandarin was startled.

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

  “Does Lady Spruce ever use perfume from a spray atomizer?”

  “Yes, I do believe I have seen her do that.”

  “Have you ever noticed how fine the spray from an atomizer is? How small the droplets?”

  “Yes, indeed, and bearing in mind the price of perfume, I’m very glad of it.”

  It was a good joke. Anyway, Sir Paul liked it.

  “Two of those droplets of Sarin or Tabun on your skin, and you’re dead,” said the chemist from Porton Down.

  No one smiled.

  “The Iraqi search for nerve gases goes back to 1976. In that year they approached the British company ICI, explaining they wanted to build a pesticide plant to produce four bug-killers—but the materials they asked for caused ICI to turn them down flat. The specifications the Iraqis showed were for corrosion-resistant reactor vessels, pipes, and pumps that convinced ICI that the real end-goal was not chemical pesticides but nerve gas. The deal was refused.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Sir Paul, and made a note.

  “But not everyone refused them,” said the former Viennese refugee. “Always the excuse was that Iraq needed to produce herbicides and pesticides, which of course need poisons.”

  “They could not have really wanted to produce these agricultural products?” asked Paxman.

  “No chance,” said Reinhart. “To a professional chemist, the key lies in the quantities and the types. In 1981 they got a German firm to build them a laboratory with a very special and unusual layout. It was to produce phosphorus pentachloride, the starter chemical for organic phosphorus, which is one of the ingredients of nerve gas. No normal university research laboratory would need to handle such hideously toxic substances. The chemical engineers involved must have known that.

  “Further export licenses show orders for thiodiglycol. Mustard gas is made from it when mixed with hydrochloric acid. Thiodiglycol, in small quantities, may be used also for making the ink for ball-point pens.”

  “How much did they buy?” asked Sinclair.

  “Five hundred tons.”

  “That’s a lot of ball-points,” muttered Paxman.

  “That was in early 1983,” said Reinhart. “In the summer their big Samarra poison gas plant went into operation, producing yperite, which is mustard gas. They began using it on the Iranians in December.

  “During the first attacks by the Iranian human waves, the Iraqis used a mixture of
yellow rain, yperite, and Tabun. By 1985, they had improved the mixture to one of hydrogen cyanide, mustard gas, Tabun, and Sarin, achieving a sixty percent mortality rate among the Iranian infantry.”

  “Could we just look at the nerve gases, Doctor?” asked Sinclair. “That would seem to be the really deadly stuff.”

  “It is,” said Dr. Reinhart. “From 1984, the chemicals for which they were shopping were phosphorus oxychloride, which is an important precursor chemical for Tabun, and two Sarin precursors, trimethyl phosphite and potassium fluoride. Of the first of those three, they tried to order 150 tons from a Dutch company. That’s enough pesticide to kill every tree, shrub, and blade of grass in the Middle East. The Dutch turned them down, as ICI had, but they still bought two uncontrolled chemicals at that time: dimethylamine for making Tabun, and isopropanol for Sarin.”

  “If they were uncontrolled in Europe, why could they not be used for pesticides?” asked Sir Paul.

  “Because of the quantities,” Dr. Reinhart replied, “and the chemical manufacturing and handling equipment, and the factory layouts. To a skilled chemist or chemical engineer, none of these purchases could be other than for poison gas.”

  “Do you know who the main supplier over the years has been, doctor?” asked Sir Paul.

  “Oh, yes. There was some input of a scientific nature from the Soviet Union and East Germany in the early days, and some exports from about eight countries, in most cases of small quantities of uncontrolled chemicals. But eighty percent of the plants, layouts, machinery, special handling equipment, chemicals, technology, and know-how came from West Germany.”

  “Actually,” drawled Sinclair, “we’ve been protesting to Bonn for years. They always trashed the protests. Doctor, can you identify the chemical gas plants on those photos we gave you?”

  “Yes, of course. Some factories are identified in the paperwork. Others you can see with a magnifying glass.”

  The chemist spread five large aerial photos on the table.

  “I do not know the Arab names, but these numbers identify the photographs for you, do they not?”