The Fist of God

  It was time to contact Riyadh again and ask for instructions. In the meanwhile, he would give Abu Fouad almost everything he had. There was more south of the border; he would just have to get it through somehow.

  “Where do you want it delivered?” he asked.

  “We have a warehouse in Shuwaikh Port. It is quite secure. It stores fish. The owner is one of us.”

  “In six days,” said Martin.

  They agreed on the time and the place where a trusted aide of Abu Fouad would meet the Bedou and guide him the rest of the journey to the warehouse. Martin described the vehicle he would be driving and the way he would look.

  That same night, but two hours earlier because of the time difference, Terry Martin sat in a quiet restaurant not far from his apartment and twirled a glass of wine in one hand. The guest he awaited entered a few minutes later, an elderly man with gray hair, glasses, and a spotted bow tie. He looked round inquiringly.

  “Moshe, over here.”

  The Israeli bustled over to where Terry Martin had risen, and greeted him effusively.

  “Terry, my dear boy, how are you?”

  “Better for seeing you, Moshe. Couldn’t let you pass through London without at least a dinner and a chance to chat.”

  The Israeli was old enough to be Martin’s father, but their friendship was based on common interest.

  Both were academics and avid students of ancient Middle Eastern Arab civilizations, their cultures, art, and languages.

  Professor Moshe Hadari went back a long way. As a young man, he had excavated much of the Holy Land with Yigael Yadin, himself both a professor and an Army general. Hadari’s great regret was that, as an Israeli, much of the Middle East was forbidden to him, even for scholarship. Still, in his field he was one of the best, and that field being a small one, it was inevitable that the two scholars should meet at some seminar, as they had ten years earlier.

  It was a good dinner, and the talk flowed over the latest research, the newest tiny fresh perceptions of the way life had been in the kingdoms of the Middle East ten centuries earlier.

  Terry Martin knew he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, so his recent activities on assignment for Century House were not for discussion. But over coffee their conversation came quite naturally around to the crisis in the Gulf and the chances of a war.

  “Do you think he will pull out of Kuwait, Terry?” the professor asked.

  Martin shook his head. “No, he can’t, unless he is given a clearly marked road, concessions he can use to justify withdrawal. To go naked, he falls.”

  Hadari sighed.

  “So much waste,” he said. “All my life, so much waste. All that money, enough to make the Middle East a paradise on earth. All that talent, all those young lives. And for what? Terry, if war comes, will the British fight with the Americans?”

  “Of course. We’ve already sent the Seventh Armoured Brigade, and I believe the Fourth Armoured will follow. That makes a division, apart from the fighters and the warships. Don’t worry about it. This is one Mid-East war in which Israel not only may, but must, sit on her thumbs.”

  “Yes, I know,” said the Israeli gloomily. “But many more young men will have to die.”

  Martin leaned forward and patted his friend on the arm.

  “Look, Moshe, the man has got to be stopped. Sooner or later. Israel of all countries must know how far he has got with his weapons of mass destruction. In a sense, we have just been finding out the true scale of what he has.”

  “But our people have been helping, of course. We are probably his principal target.”

  “Yes, in target analysis,” said Martin. “Our principal problem is in hard, on-the-spot intelligence. We simply don’t have top-level intelligence coming to us out of Baghdad. Not the British, not the Americans, and not even your people either.”

  Twenty minutes later the dinner ended, and Terry Martin saw Professor Hadari into a taxi to take him back to his hotel.

  * * *

  About the hour of midnight, three triangulation stations were implanted in Kuwait on the orders of Hassan Rahmani in Baghdad.

  They were radio dishes designed to track the source of a radio-wave emission and take a compass bearing on it. One was a fixed station, mounted on the roof of a tall building in the district of Ardiya, on the extreme southern outskirts of Kuwait City. Its dish faced toward the desert.

  The other two were mobile stations, large vans with the dishes on the roof, an in-built generator for the electrical power, and a darkened interior where the scanners could sit at their consoles and trawl the airwaves for the transmitter they sought, which they had been told would probably send from somewhere out in the desert between the city and the Saudi border.

  One of these vans was outside Jahra, well to the west of its colleague in Ardiya, and the third was down the coast, in the grounds of the Al Adan hospital, where the law student’s sister had been raped in the first days of the invasions. The Al Adan tracker could get a full cross-bearing on those reported by the scanners farther north, pinning the source of the transmission down to a square a few hundred yards across.

  At Ahmadi air base, where once Khaled Al-Khalifa had flown his Skyhawk, a Soviet-built Hind helicopter gunship waited on twenty-four-hour standby. The crew of the Hind was from the Air Force, a concession Rahmani had had to squeeze out of the general commanding it. The radio-tracking crews were from Rahmani’s own Counterintelligence wing, drafted in from Baghdad and the best he had.

  Professor Hadari spent a sleepless night. Something his friend had told him worried him deeply. He regarded himself as a completely loyal Israeli, born of an old Sephardic family who had emigrated just after the turn of the century along with men like Ben-Yehuda and Ben-Gurion. He himself had been born outside Jaffa, when it was still a bustling port of Palestinian Arabs, and he had learned Arabic as a small boy.

  He had raised two sons and seen one of them die in a miserable ambush in South Lebanon. He was grandfather to five small children. Who should tell him that he did not love his country?

  But there was something wrong. If war came, many young men might die, as his Ze’ev had died, even if they were British and Americans and French. Was this the time for Kobi Dror to show vindictive, small-power chauvinism?

  He rose early, settled his bill, packed, and ordered a taxi for the airport. Before he left the hotel, he hovered for a while by the bank of phones in the lobby, then changed his mind.

  Halfway to the airport, he ordered his cab driver to divert off the M4 and find a phone booth. Grumbling at the time and trouble this would take, the driver did so, eventually finding one on a corner in Chiswick.

  Hadari was in luck. It was Hilary who answered the phone at the Bayswater flat.

  “Hold on,” he said, “he’s halfway out the door.”

  Terry Martin came on the line.

  “It’s Moshe. Terry, I don’t have much time. Tell your people the Institute does have a high source inside Baghdad. Tell them to ask what happened to Jericho. Good-bye, my friend.”

  “Moshe, one moment. Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You never heard this from me. Goodbye.”

  The phone went dead. In Chiswick the elderly scholar climbed back into his taxi and proceeded to Heathrow. He was trembling at the enormity of what he had done. And how could he tell Terry Martin that it was he, the professor of Arabic from Tel Aviv University, who had crafted that first reply to Jericho in Baghdad?

  Terry Martin’s call found Simon Paxman at his desk at Century House just after ten.

  “Lunch? Sorry, I can’t. Hell of a day. Tomorrow perhaps,” said Paxman.

  “Too late. It’s urgent, Simon.”

  Paxman sighed. No doubt his tame academic had come up with some fresh interpretation of a phrase in an Iraqi broadcast that was supposed to change the meaning of life.

  “Still can’t make lunch. Major conference here, in-house. Look, a quick drink. The Hole-in-the-Wall, it’s a
pub underneath Waterloo Bridge, quite close to here. Say twelve o’clock? I can give you half an hour, Terry.”

  “More than enough. See you,” said Martin.

  Just after noon, they sat over beers in the alehouse above which the trains of the Southern Region rumbled to Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. Martin, without revealing his source, narrated what he had been told that morning.

  “Bloody hell,” whispered Paxman. There were people in the next booth. “Who told you?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Well, you must.”

  “Look, he went out on a limb. I gave my word. He’s an academic and senior. That’s all.”

  Paxman thought. Academic, and mixing with Terry Martin. Certainly another Arabist. Could have been on assignment with the Mossad. Whatever, the information had to go back to Century and without delay.

  He thanked Martin, left his beer, and scuttled back down the road to Century.

  Because of the lunchtime conference, Steve Laing had not left the building. Paxman drew him aside and told him. Laing took it straight to the Chief himself.

  Sir Colin, who was never given to overstatement, pronounced General Kobi Dror to be a most tiresome fellow, forsook his lunch, ordered something to be brought to his desk, and retired to the top floor. There he put in a personal call on an extremely secure line to Judge William Webster, Director of the CIA.

  It was only half past eight in Washington, but the Judge was a man who liked to rise with the dawn, and he was at his desk to take the call. He asked his British colleague a couple of questions about the source of the information, grunted at the lack of one, but agreed it was something that could not be let slide.

  Webster told his Deputy Director (Operations) Bill Stewart, who exploded with rage, and then had a half-hour conference with Chip Barber, head of Operations for the Middle East Division. Barber was even angrier, for he was the man who had sat facing General Dror in the bright room on the top of a hill outside Herzlia and had, apparently, been told a lie.

  Between them, they worked out what they wanted done, and took the idea back to the Director.

  In midafternoon William Webster had a conference with Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the National Security Council, and he took the matter to President Bush. Webster had asked for what he wanted and was given full authority to go ahead.

  The cooperation of Secretary of State James Baker was sought, and he gave it immediately. That night, the State Department sent an urgent request to Tel Aviv, which was presented to its recipient the following morning, only three hours away due to the time gap.

  The Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel at that time was Benjamin Netanyahu, a handsome, elegant, silver-haired diplomat and the brother of that Jonathan Netanyahu who was the only Israeli killed during the raid on Idi Amin’s Entebbe airport, in which Israeli commandos rescued the passengers of a French airliner hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists.

  Benjamin Netanyahu had been born a third-generation sabra and partly educated in the United States.

  Because of his fluency and articulateness and his passionate nationalism, he was a member of Itzhak Shamir’s Likud government and often Israel’s persuasive spokesman in interviews with the Western media.

  He arrived at Washington Dulles two days later, on October 14, somewhat perplexed by the urgency of the State Department’s invitation that he fly to the United States for discussions of considerable importance.

  He was even more perplexed when two hours of private talks with Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger revealed no more than a comprehensive overview of developments in the Middle East since August 2. He finished the talks thoroughly frustrated, then faced a late-night plane back to Israel.

  It was as he was leaving the State Department that an aide slipped an expensive vellum card into his hand. The card was headed with a personal crest, and the writer, in elegant cursive script, asked him not to leave Washington without coining to the writer’s house for a short visit, to discuss a matter of some urgency “to both our countries and all our people.”

  He knew the signature, knew the man, and knew the power and wealth of the hand that wrote it. The writer’s limousine was at the door. The Israeli minister made a decision and ordered his secretary to return to the embassy for both sets of luggage and to rendezvous with him at a house in Georgetown two hours later. From there they would proceed to Dulles. Then he entered the limousine.

  He had never been to the house before, but it was as he would have expected, a handsome building at the better end of M Street, not three hundred yards from the campus of Georgetown University. He was shown into a paneled library with pictures and books of superlative rarity and taste. A few moments later his host entered, advancing over the Kashan rug with hand outstretched.

  “My dear Bibi, how kind of you to spare the time.”

  Saul Nathanson was both banker and financier, professions that had made him extremely wealthy, but his true fortune was hinted at rather than declared, and the man himself was far too cultivated to dwell upon it. The Van Dykes and Breughels on his walls were not copies, and his donations to charity, including some in the State of Israel, were legendary.

  Like the Israeli minister, he was elegant and gray-haired, but unlike the slightly younger man, he was tailored by Savile Row, London, and his silk shirts were from Sulka.

  He showed his guest to one of a pair of leather club chairs before the log fire, and an English butler entered with a bottle and two wineglasses on a silver tray.

  “Something I thought you might enjoy, my friend, while we chat.”

  The butler poured two Lalique glasses of the red wine, and the Israeli sipped. Nathanson raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Superb, of course,” said Netanyahu. Château Mouton Rothschild ’61 is not easy to come by and not to be gulped. The butler left the bottle within reach and withdrew.

  Saul Nathanson was far too subtle to barge into the meat of what he wanted to say. Conversational hors d’oeuvres were served first. Then the Middle East.

  “There’s going to be a war, you know,” he said sadly.

  “I have no doubt about it,” agreed Netanyahu.

  “Before it is over many young Americans may well be dead, fine young men who do not deserve to die.

  We must all do what we can to keep that number as low as humanly possible, wouldn’t you say? More wine?”

  “I could not agree more.”

  What on earth was the man driving at? Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister genuinely had no idea.

  “Saddam,” said Nathanson, staring at the fire, “is a menace. He must be stopped. He is probably more of a menace to Israel than to any other neighboring state.”

  “We have been saying that for years. But when we bombed his nuclear reactor, America condemned us.”

  Nathanson made a dismissive gesture with one hand.

  “Nonsense, of course, all cosmetic nonsense for the face of things. We both know that, and we both know better. I have a son serving in the Gulf.”

  “I didn’t know. May he return safely.”

  Nathanson was genuinely touched.

  “Thank you, Bibi, thank you. I pray so every day. My firstborn, my only son. I just feel that ... at this point in time ... cooperation between us all must be without stint.”

  “Unarguable.” The Israeli had the uncomfortable feeling that bad news was coming.

  “To keep the casualties down, you see. That’s why I ask for your help, Bibi, to keep the casualties down. We are on the same side, are we not? I am an American and a Jew.”

  The order of precedence in which he had used the words hung in the air.

  “And I am an Israeli and a Jew,” murmured Netanyahu. He too had his order of precedence. The financier was in no way fazed.

  “Precisely. But because of your education here, you will understand how—well, how shall I phrase it?—emotional Americans can sometimes be. May I be blunt?”

  A welcome relief, thought the Israeli.

/>   “If anything were done that could in some small way keep the number of casualties down, even by a handful, both I and my fellow-countrymen would be eternally grateful to whoever had contributed that anything.”

  The other half of the sentiment remained unsaid, but Netanyahu was far too experienced a diplomat to miss it. And if anything were done or not done that might increase those casualties, America’s memory would be long and her revenge unpleasant.

  “What is it you want from me?” he asked.

  Saul Nathanson sipped his wine and gazed at the flickering logs.

  “Apparently, there is a man in Baghdad. Code name—Jericho. ...”

  When he had finished, it was a thoughtful Deputy Foreign Minister who sped out to Dulles to catch the flight home.

  Chapter 9

  The roadblock that got him was at the corner of Mohammed Ibn Kassem Street and the Fourth Ring Road. When he saw it in the distance, Mike Martin was tempted to hang a U-turn and head back the way he had come.

  But there were Iraqi soldiers stationed down the road on each side at the approaches to the checkpoint, apparently just for that purpose, and it would have been crazy to try and outrun their rifle fire at the slow speed necessary for a U-turn. He had no choice but to drive on, joining the end of the line of vehicles waiting for check-through.

  As usual, driving through Kuwait City, he had tried to avoid the major roads where roadblocks were likely to be set up, but crossing any of the six Ring Roads that envelop Kuwait City in a series of concentric bands could only be done at a major junction.

  He had also hoped, by driving in the middle of the morning, to be lost in the jumble of traffic or to find the Iraqis sheltering from the heat. But mid-October had cooled the weather and the green-bereted Special Forces were proving a far cry from the useless Popular Army. So he sat at the wheel of the white Volvo station wagon and waited.

  It had still been black and deepest night when he had driven the off-road far out into the desert to the south and dug up the remainder of his explosives, guns, and ammunition, the equipment he had promised to Abu Fouad. It had been before dawn when he made the transfer at the lockup garage in the back streets of Firdous from the jeep to the station wagon.