The listeners nodded. Interdepartmental rivalry was nothing new—it happened in their own countries.
When Sharon reached the point where Moncada was abruptly withdrawn from Iraq, Bill Stewart let out an expletive.
“You mean he’s switched off, out of contact? Are you telling us Jericho is on the loose with no controller?”
“That’s the point,” said Sharon patiently. He turned to Chip Barber. “When General Dror said he was running no agent in Baghdad, he meant it. The Mossad was convinced that Jericho, as an ongoing operation, was belly-up.”
Barber shot the young katsa a look that said, “Pull the other leg, son. It’s got bells on.”
“We want to reestablish contact,” said Laing smoothly. “How?”
Sharon laid out all six of the locations of the dead-letter boxes. During his two years Moncada had changed two of them; in one case because a location was bulldozed for redevelopment, in another because a derelict shop was refurbished and reoccupied. But the six functioning drops and the six places where the alerting chalk marks had to be placed were the up-to-date ones that had come from his final briefing after his expulsion.
The exact location of these drops and of the sites for the chalk marks were noted to the inch.
“Maybe we could get a friendly diplomat to approach him at a function, tell him he’s back in action and the money’s better,” suggested Barber. “Get around all this crap under bricks and flagstones.”
“No,” said Sharon. “It’s the drops, or you can’t contact him.”
“Why?” asked Stewart.
“You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. We never found out who he is.”
The four Western agents stared at Sharon for several minutes.
“You never identified him?” asked Stewart slowly.
“No. We tried. We asked him to identify himself for his own protection. He refused, threatened to shut off if we persisted. We did handwriting analyses, psychoportraits. We cross-indexed the information he could produce and the stuff he couldn’t get at. We ended up with a list of thirty, maybe forty men, all around Saddam Hussein, all within the Revolutionary Command Council, the Army High Command, or the senior ranks of the Ba’ath Party.
“Never could get closer than that. Twice we slipped a technical term in English into our demands. Each time they came back with a query. It seems he only speaks no or very limited English. But that could be a blind. He could be fluent, but if we knew that, it would narrow the field to two or three. So he always writes in script, in Arabic.”
Stewart grunted, convinced. “Sounds like Deep Throat.”
“Surely Woodward and Bernstein identified Deep Throat?” suggested Paxman.
“So they claim, but I doubt it,” said Stewart. “I figure the guy stayed in deep shadow, like Jericho.”
Darkness had long fallen by the time the four of them finally let an exhausted David Sharon go back to his embassy. If there was anything more he could have told them, they were not going to get it out of him.
But Steve Laing was certain that this time the Mossad had come clean. Bill Stewart had told him of the level of the pressure that had been exercised in Washington.
The two British and two American intelligence officers, tired of sandwiches and coffee, adjourned to a restaurant half a mile away. Bill Stewart, who had an ulcer that twelve hours of sandwiches and high stress had not improved, toyed with a plate of smoked salmon.
“It’s a bastard, Steve. It’s a real four-eyed bastard. Like the Mossad, we’ll have to try and find an accredited diplomat already trained in all the tradecraft and get him to work for us. Pay him if we have to.
Langley’s prepared to spend a lot of money on this. Jericho’s information could save us a lot of lives when the fighting starts.”
“So who does that leave us?” said Barber. “Half the embassies in Baghdad are closed down already.
The rest must be under heavy surveillance. The Irish, Swiss, Swedes, Finns?”
“The neutrals won’t play ball,” said Laing. “And I doubt they’ve got a trained agent posted to Baghdad on their own account. Forget Third World embassies—it means starting a whole recruiting and training program.”
“We don’t have the time, Steve. This is urgent. We can’t go down the same road the Israelis went.
Three weeks is crazy. It might have worked then, but Baghdad is on a war footing now. Things have to be much tighter in there. Starting cold, I’d want a minimum three months to give a diplomat the tradecraft.”
Stewart nodded agreement.
“Failing that, someone with legitimate access. Some businessmen are still going in and out, especially the Germans. We could produce a convincing German, or a Japanese.”
“The trouble is, they’re short-stay chappies. Ideally, one wants someone to mother-hen this Jericho for the next—what? Four months. What about a journalist?” suggested Laing.
Paxman shook his head. “I’ve been talking with them all when they come out; being journalists, they get total surveillance. Snooping around back alleys won’t work for a foreign correspondent—they all have a minder from the AMAM with them, all the time. Besides, don’t forget that outside an accredited diplomat, we’re talking about a black operation. Anyone want to dwell on what happens to an agent falling into Omar Khatib’s hands?”
The four men at the table had heard of the brutal reputation of Khatib, head of the AMAM, nicknamed Al-Mu’azib, “the Tormentor.”
“Risks just may have to be taken,” observed Barber.
“I was referring more to acceptance,” Paxman pointed out. “What businessman or reporter would ever agree, knowing what would be in store if he were caught? I’d prefer the KGB to the AMAM.”
Bill Stewart put down his fork in frustration and called for another glass of milk.
“Well, that’s it then—short of finding a trained agent who can pass for an Iraqi.”
Paxman shot a glance at Steve Laing, who thought for a moment and slowly nodded.
“We’ve got a guy who can,” said Paxman.
“A tame Arab? So has the Mossad, so have we,” said Stewart, “but not at this level. Message-carriers, gofers. This is high-risk, high-value.”
“No, a Brit, a major in the SAS.”
Stewart paused, his milk glass halfway to his mouth. Barber put down his knife and fork and ceased chewing his steak.
“Speaking Arabic is one thing. Passing for an Iraqi inside Iraq is a whole different ball game,” said Stewart.
“He’s dark-skinned, black-haired, brown-eyed, but he’s a hundred percent British. He was born and raised there. He can pass for one.”
“And he’s fully trained in covert operations?” asked Barber. “Shit, where the hell is he?”
“Actually, he’s in Kuwait at the moment,” said Laing.
“Damn. You mean he’s stuck in there, holed up?”
“No. He seems to be moving about quite freely.”
“So if he can get out, what the hell’s he doing?”
“Killing Iraqis, actually.”
Stewart thought it over and nodded slowly.
“Big balls,” he murmured. “Can you get him out of there? We’d like to borrow him.”
“I suppose so, next time he comes on the radio. We would have to run him, though. And share the product.”
Stewart nodded again.
“I guess so. You guys brought us Jericho. It’s a deal. I’ll clear it with the Judge.”
Paxman rose and wiped his mouth.
“I’d better go tell Riyadh,” he said.
Mike Martin was a man accustomed to making his own luck, but his life was saved that October by a fluke.
He was due to make a radio call to the designated SIS house in the outskirts of Riyadh during the night of the nineteenth, the same night the four senior intelligence officers from the CIA and Century House were dining in South Kensington.
Had he done so, he would have been off the air, due t
o the two-hour time difference, before Simon Paxman could return to Century House and alert Riyadh that he was wanted.
Worse, he would have been on the air for five to ten minutes, discussing with Riyadh ways of securing a resupply of arms and explosives.
In fact, he was in the lockup garage where he kept his jeep just before midnight, only to discover that the vehicle had a flat tire.
Cursing, he spent an hour with the jeep jacked-up, struggling to remove the wheel nuts, which had been almost cemented into place by a mixture of grease and desert sand. At a quarter to one he rolled out of the garage, and within half a mile he noticed that even his spare tire had developed a slow leak.
There was nothing for it but to return to the garage and abandon the radio call to Riyadh.
It took two days to have both tires repaired, and it was not until the night of the twenty-first that he found himself deep in the desert, far to the south of the city, turning his small satellite dish in the direction of the Saudi capital many hundreds of miles away, using the Send button to transmit a series of quick blips to indicate it was he who was calling and that he was about to come on the air.
His radio was basic, a ten-channel fixed-crystal set, with one channel designated for each day of the month in rotation. On the twenty-first, he was using channel one. Having identified himself, he switched to Receive and waited. Within seconds a low voice replied:
“Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, read you five.”
The codes identifying both Riyadh and Martin corresponded with the date and the channel, just in case someone hostile tried to muscle in on the waveband.
Martin went to Send and spoke several sentences.
On the outskirts of Kuwait City to the north, a young Iraqi technician was alerted by a pulsing light on the console he was monitoring in the commandeered apartment on top of a residential building. One of his sweepers had caught the transmission and locked on.
“Captain,” he called urgently. An officer from Hassan Rahmani’s Counterintelligence signals section strode over to the console. The light still pulsed, and the technician was easing a dial to secure a bearing.
“Someone has just come on the air.”
“Where?”
“Out in the desert, sir.”
The technician listened through his earphones as his direction-finders stabilized on the source of the transmission.
“Electronically scrambled transmission, sir.”
“That has to be him. The boss was right. What’s the bearing?”
The officer was reaching for the telephone to alert his other two monitoring units, the trailer trucks parked at Jahra and the Al Adan hospital down near the coast.
“Two-oh-two degrees compass.”
Two-oh-two degrees was twenty-two degrees west of due south, and there was absolutely nothing out in that direction but the Kuwaiti desert, which ran all the way to join the Saudi desert at the border.
“Frequency?” barked the officer as the Jahra trailer came on the line.
The tracker gave it to him, a rare channel down in the very-low-frequency range.
“Lieutenant,” he called over his shoulder, “get on to Ahmadi air base. Tell them to get that helicopter airborne. We’ve got a fix.”
Far away in the desert, Martin finished what he had to say and switched to Receive to get the answer from Riyadh. It was not what he had expected. He himself had spoken for only fifteen seconds.
“Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, return to the cave. I say again, return to the cave. Top urgent. Over and out.”
The Iraqi captain gave the frequency to both his other monitoring stations. In Jahra and the hospital grounds other technicians rolled their source-tracers to the indicated frequency, and above their heads four-foot-diameter dishes swung from side to side. The one on the coast covered the area from Kuwait’s northern border with Iraq down to the border with Saudi Arabia. The Jahra scanners swept east to west, from the sea in the east to the Iraqi deserts in the west.
Between the three of them, they could triangulate a fix to within a hundred yards and give a heading and distance to the Hind helicopter and its ten armed soldiers.
“Still there?” asked the captain.
The technician scanned the circular screen in front of him, calibrated around its edge with the points of the compass. The center of the dish represented the point where he sat. Seconds earlier, there had been a glittering line across the screen, running from the center to compass heading 202. Now the screen was blank. It would only light up when the man out there transmitted again.
“No, sir. He’s gone off the air. Probably listening to the reply.”
“He’ll come back,” said the captain.
But he was wrong. Black Bear had frowned over his sudden instructions from Riyadh, switched off his power, closed down his transmitter, and folded up his antenna.
The Iraqis monitored the frequency for the rest of the night until dawn, when the Hind at Al Ahmadi shut off its rotors and the stiff, tired soldiers climbed back out.
Simon Paxman was asleep on a cot in his office when the phone rang. It was a cipher clerk from Communications in the basement.
“I’ll come down,” said Paxman. It was a very short message, just decrypted, from Riyadh. Martin had been in touch and had been given his orders.
From his office Paxman phoned Chip Barber in his CIA flat off Grosvenor Square.
“He’s on his way back,” he said. “We don’t know when he’ll cross the border. Steve says he wants me to go down there. You coming?”
“Right,” said Barber. “The DDO’s going back to Langley on the morning flight. But I’m coming with you. This guy I have to see.”
During October 22 the American embassy and the British Foreign Office each approached the Saudi embassy for a short-notice accreditation of a new junior diplomat to Riyadh. There was no problem.
Two passports, neither in the name of Barber or Paxman, were visaed without delay, and the men caught the 8:45P.M. flight out of Heathrow, arriving at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Riyadh just before dawn.
An American embassy car met Chip Barber and took him straight to the U.S. mission, where the hugely expanded CIA operation was based, while a smaller unmarked sedan took Paxman away to the villa where the British SIS operation had quartered itself. The first news Paxman got was that Martin had apparently not crossed the border and checked in.
Riyadh’s order to return to base was, from Martin’s point of view, easier said than done. He had returned from the desert well before dawn of October 22 and spent the day closing his operation down.
A message was left under the tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery to explain to Mr. Al-Khalifa that he had regretfully had to leave Kuwait. A further note for Abu Fouad explained where and how to collect the remaining items of arms and explosives that were still stashed in the two of his once-six villas.
By afternoon he had finished, and he drove his battered pickup truck out to the camel farm beyond Sulaibiya, where the last outposts of Kuwait City ran out and the desert began.
His camels were still there and in good condition. The calf had been weaned and was on its way to becoming a valuable animal, so he used it to settle the debt he owed the owner of the farm who had taken care of it.
Shortly before dusk he mounted the she-camel and headed south-southwest, so that when night fell and the chill darkness of the desert enfolded him, Martin was well clear of the last signs of habitation.
It took him four hours instead of the usual one to arrive at the place where he had buried his radio, a site marked by the gutted and rusted wreck of a car that had once, long ago, broken down and been abandoned there.
He hid the radio beneath the consignment of dates that he had stored in the panniers. Even with these, the camel was far less laden than she had been when hauling her load of explosives and weapons into Kuwait nine weeks earlier.
If she was grateful, she gave no sign of it, rumbling and spitting with
disgust at having been evicted from her comfortable corral at the farm. But she never slackened her swaying gait as the miles slipped by in the darkness.
It was a different journey, however, from that of mid-August. As he moved south, Martin saw more and more signs of the huge Iraqi army that now infested the area south of the city, spreading itself farther and farther west toward the Iraqi border.
Usually he could see the glow of the lights of the various oil wells that stud the desert here and, knowing the Iraqis would be likely to occupy them, move away into the sands to avoid them.
On other occasions he smelled the woodsmoke from an Iraqi fire and was able to skirt the encampments in time. Once he almost stumbled onto a battalion of tanks, hull-down behind horseshoe-shaped walls of sand facing the Americans and the Saudis across the border to the south. He heard the clink of metal on metal just in time, pulled the bridle sharply to the right, and slipped away back into the sand dunes.
There had only been two divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard south of Kuwait when he had entered, and they had been farther to the east, due south of Kuwait City.
Now the Hammurabi Division had joined the other two, and eleven further divisions, mainly of the regular army, had been ordered by Saddam Hussein into south Kuwait to match the American and Coalition buildup on the other side.
Fourteen divisions is a lot of manpower, even spread over a desert. Fortunately for Martin, they seemed to post no sentinels and slept soundly beneath their vehicles, but the sheer numbers of them pushed him farther and farther west.
The short fifty-kilometer hike from the Saudi village of Hamatiyyat to the Kuwaiti camel farm was out of the question; he was being pushed west toward the Iraqi border, marked by the deep cleft of the Wadi el Batin, which he did not really want to have to cross.
Dawn found him well to the west of the Manageesh oil field and still north of the Al Mufrad police station, which marks the border at one of the pre-emergency crossing points.
The ground had become more hilly, and he found a cluster of rocks in which to spend the day. As the sun rose, he hobbled the camel, who sniffed the bare sand and rock in disgust, finding not even a tasty thorn bush for breakfast, rolled himself in the camel blanket, and went to sleep.