The portion of desert in which the Coalition forces lay was still due south of Kuwait. No hint had been given that eventually half those forces would sweep much farther west.
At the coastal ports the new divisions were still pouring in. The British Fourth Armoured Brigade had joined the Desert Rats, the Seventh, to form the First Armoured Division. The French were boosting their contribution up to ten thousand men, including the Foreign Legion.
The Americans had imported, or were about to, the First Cavalry Division, Second and Third Armored Cavalry Regiments, the First Mechanized Infantry Division and First and Third Armored, two divisions of Marines, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne.
Right up on the border, where they wanted to be, were the Saudi Task Force and Special Forces, aided by Egyptian and Syrian divisions and other units drawn from a variety of smaller Arab nations.
The northern waters of the Arabian Gulf were almost plated with warships from the Coalition navies.
Either in the Gulf or the Red Sea on the other side of Saudi Arabia, the United States had positioned five carrier groups, headed by the Eisenhower, Independence, John F. Kennedy, Midway , and Saratoga , with the America, Ranger , and Theodore Roosevelt still to come.
The air power of these alone, with their Tomcats, Hornets, Intruders, Prowlers, Avengers, and Hawkeyes, was impressive to behold.
In the Gulf the American battleship Wisconsin was on station, to be joined by the Missouri in January.
Throughout the Gulf States and across Saudi Arabia, every airfield worth the name was crammed with fighter, bomber, tanker, freighter, and early-warning aircraft, all of which were already flying around the clock, though not yet invading Iraqi air space, with the exception of the spy planes that cruised overhead unseen.
In several cases the United States Air Force was sharing airfield space with squadrons of the British Royal Air Force. As the aircrews shared a common language, communication was easy, informal, and friendly. Occasionally, however, misunderstandings did occur. A notable one concerned a secret British location known only as MMFD.
On an early training mission, a British Tornado had been asked by the air traffic controller whether it had reached a certain turning point. The pilot replied that he had not, he was still over MMFD.
As time went by, many American pilots heard of this place and scoured their maps to find it. It was a puzzle for two reasons: The British apparently spent a lot of time over it, and it was not located on any American air map. The theory was floated that it might be a mishearing of KKMC, which stood for King Khaled Military City, a large Saudi base. This was discounted, and the search went on. Finally the Americans gave up. Wherever MMFD was located, it was simply not to be found on the war maps supplied to USAF squadrons by their planners in Riyadh.
Eventually the Tornado pilots admitted the secret of MMFD. It stood for “miles and miles of fucking desert.”
On the ground, the soldiers were living in the heart of MMFD. For many, sleeping under their tanks, mobile guns, and armored cars, life was hard and, worse, boring.
There were distractions, however, and one was visiting neighboring units as the time dragged by. The Americans were equipped with particularly good cots, for which the British lusted. By chance, the Americans were also issued singularly revolting prepacked meals, probably devised by a Pentagon civil servant who would have died rather than eat them three times a day.
They were called MREs, meaning Meals-Ready-to-Eat. The U.S. soldiery denied this quality in them and decided that MRE really stood for Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. By contrast, the Brits were eating much better, so true to the capitalist ethic, a brisk trade was soon established between American beds and British rations.
Another piece of news from the British lines that bemused the Americans was the order placed by London’s Ministry of Defence for half a million condoms for the soldiers in the Gulf. In the bleak deserts of Arabia such a purchase was deemed to indicate the Brits must know something the GIs did not.
The mystery was resolved the day before the ground war started. The Americans had spent a hundred days cleaning their rifles over and over again to purge them of the all-pervasive sand, dust, grit, and gravel that endlessly blew into the ends of the barrels. The Brits whipped off their condoms to reveal nice shiny barrels gleaming with gun oil.
The other principal development that occurred just before Christmas was the reintegration of the French contingency into the heart of Allied planning.
In the early days, France had had a disaster of a Defense Minister called Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who appeared to enjoy a keen sympathy with Iraq and ordered the French commander to pass all Allied planning decisions on to Paris. When this was made plain to General Schwarzkopf, he and Sir Peter de la Billière almost burst out laughing. Monsieur Chevenement was at that time also a leading light of the France-Iraq Friendship Society. Although the French contingent was commanded by a fine soldier in the form of General Michel Roquejoffre, France had to be excluded from all planning councils.
At the end of the year, Pierre Joxe was appointed French Defense Minister and at once rescinded the order. From then on, General Roquejoffre could be taken into the confidence of the Americans and British.
Two days before Christmas, Mike Martin received from Jericho the answer to a question posed a week earlier. Jericho was adamant: There had been within the previous few days a crisis cabinet meeting containing only the inner core of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet, the Revolutionary Command Council, and the top generals.
At the meeting the question of Iraq leaving Kuwait voluntarily had been raised. Obviously it had not been raised as a proposal by anyone at the meeting—no one was that stupid. All recalled too well the earlier occasion when, during the Iran-Iraq war, an Iranian suggestion that if Saddam Hussein stepped down there could be peace had been broached. Saddam had asked for opinions.
The Health Minister had suggested such a move might be wise—as a purely temporary ploy, of course.
Saddam invited the minister into a side room, pulled out his sidearm, shot him dead, and returned to resume the cabinet meeting.
The matter of Kuwait had been raised in the form of a denunciation of the United Nations for even daring to suggest the idea. All had waited for Saddam to give a lead. He declined, sitting as he so often did at the head of the table like a watching cobra, eyes moving from man to man in an attempt to smoke out some hint of disloyalty.
Not unnaturally, without a lead from the Rais, the conversation had petered out. Then Saddam had begun to speak very quietly, which was when he was at his most dangerous.
Anyone, he said, who let the thought of admitting to such a catastrophic humiliation of Iraq in the face of the Americans cross his mind was a man prepared to play the role of lickspittle to America for the rest of his life. For such a man there could be no place at this table.
That had been the end of it. Everyone present bent over backward to explain that such a thought would never, under any circumstances, occur to any of them.
Then the Iraqi dictator had added something else: Only if Iraq could win and be seen to win would it be possible to withdraw from Iraq’s nineteenth province, he said.
Everyone around the table then nodded sagely, though none could see what he was talking about.
It was a long report, and Mike Martin transmitted it to the villa outside Riyadh that same night.
Chip Barber and Simon Paxman pored over it for hours. Each had decided to take a brief break from Saudi Arabia and fly home for several days, leaving the running of Mike Martin and Jericho from the Riyadh end in the hands of Julian Gray for the British and the local CIA Head of Station for the Americans. There were only twenty-four days to go until the expiration of the United Nations deadline and the start of General Chuck Horner’s air war against Iraq. Both men wanted a short home leave, and Jericho’s powerful report gave them the chance. They could take it with them.
“What do you think he means, ‘win and be seen to win’?”
asked Barber.
“No idea,” said Paxman. “We’ll have to get some analysts who are better than we are to have a look at it.”
“We too. I guess nobody will be around for the next few days except the shop-minders. I’ll give it the way it is to Bill Stewart, and he’ll probably have some eggheads try to add an in-depth analysis before it goes on to the Director and the State Department.”
“I know an egghead I’d like to have a look at it,” said Paxman, and on that note they left for the airport to catch their respective flights home.
On Christmas Eve, seated in a discreet wine bar in London’s West End with Simon Paxman, Dr. Terry Martin was shown the whole text of the Jericho message and asked if he would try to work out what, if anything, Saddam Hussein could mean by winning against America as a price for leaving Kuwait.
“By the way,” he asked Paxman, “I know it breaks the rules of need-to-know, but I really am worried. I do these favors for you—give me one in return. How is my brother Mike doing in Kuwait? Is he still safe?”
Paxman stared at the doctor of Arabic studies for several seconds.
“I can only tell you that he is no longer in Kuwait,” he said. “And that’s more than my job is worth.”
Terry Martin flushed with relief.
“It’s the best Christmas present I could have. Thank you, Simon.” He looked up and waved a waggish finger. “Just one thing—don’t even think of sending him into Baghdad.”
Paxman had been in the business fifteen years. He kept his face immobile, his tone light. The scholar was clearly just joking.
“Really? Why not?”
Martin was finishing his glass of wine and failed to notice the flicker of alarm in the intelligence officer’s eyes.
“My dear Simon, Baghdad’s the one city in the world he mustn’t set foot in. You remember those tapes of Iraqi radio intercepts Sean Plummer let me have? Some of the voices have been identified. I recognized one of the names. A hell of a fluke, but I know I’m right.”
“Really?” said Paxman smoothly. “Tell me more.”
“It’s been a long time, of course, but I know it was the same man. And guess what? He’s now head of Counterintelligence in Baghdad, Saddam’s number-one spy-hunter.”
“Hassan Rahmani,” murmured Paxman. Terry Martin should stay off booze, even before Christmas. He can’t carry it. His tongue’s running away with him.
“That’s the one. They were at school together, you know. We all were. Good old Mr. Hartley’s prep school. Mike and Hassan were best mates. See? That’s why he can never be seen around Baghdad.”
Paxman left the wine bar and stared at the dumpy figure of the Arabist heading down the street.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh bloody, bloody hell.”
Someone had just ruined his Christmas, and he was about to ruin Steve Laing’s.
Edith Hardenberg had gone to Salzburg to spend the festive season with her mother, a family tradition that went back many years.
Karim, the young Jordanian student, was able to visit Gidi Barzilai at his safe-house apartment, where the controller for Operation Joshua was dispensing drinks to the off-duty members of the yarid and neviot teams working under him. Only one unfortunate was up in Salzburg, keeping an eye on Miss Hardenberg in case she should return suddenly to the capital.
Karim’s real name was Avi Herzog, a twenty-nine-year-old who had been seconded to the Mossad several years earlier from Unit 504, a branch of Army Intelligence specializing in cross-border raids, which accounted for his fluent Arabic. Because of his good looks and the deceptively shy and diffident manner he could affect when he wished, the Mossad had twice used him for honeytrap operations.
“So how’s it going, loverboy?” asked Gidi as he passed around the drinks.
“Slowly,” said Avi.
“Don’t take too long. The old man wants a result, remember.”
“This is one very uptight lady,” replied Avi. “Only interested in a meeting of minds—yet.”
In his cover as a student from Amman, he had been set up in a small flat shared with one other Arab student, in fact a member of the neviot team, a phone-tapper by trade who also spoke Arabic. This was in case Edith Hardenberg or anyone else took it into their head to check out where and how he lived and with whom.
The shared flat would pass any inspection—it was littered with textbooks on engineering and strewn with Jordanian newspapers and magazines. Both men had genuinely been enrolled in the Technical University in case a check were made there also. It was Herzog’s flat-mate who spoke.
“Meeting of minds? Screw that.”
“That’s the point,” said Avi. “I can’t.”
When the laughter died down, he added:
“By the way, I’m going to want danger money.”
“Why?” asked Gidi. “Think she’s going to bite it off when you drop your jeans?”
“Nope. It’s the art galleries, concerts, operas, recitals. I could die of boredom before I get that far.”
“You just carry on the way you know how, boychick. You’re only here because the Office says you’ve got something we don’t.”
“Yes,” said the woman member of the yarid tracking team. “About nine inches.”
“That’s enough of that, young Yael. You can be back on traffic duty in Hayarkon Street any time you like.”
The drink, the laughter, and the banter in Hebrew flowed. Late that evening, Yael discovered she was right. It was a good Christmas for the Mossad team in Vienna.
* * *
“So what do you think, Terry?”
Steve Laing and Simon Paxman had invited Terry Martin to join them in one of the Firm’s apartments in Kensington. They needed more privacy than they could get in a restaurant. It was two days before the New Year.
“Fascinating,” said Martin. “Absolutely fascinating. This is for real? Saddam really said all this?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, if you’ll forgive my saying so, it’s a strange telephone tap. The narrator seems to be reporting to someone else on a meeting he attended. ... The other man on the line doesn’t seem to say a thing.”
There was simply no way the Firm was going to tell Terry Martin how they had come by the report.
“The other man’s interventions were perfunctory,” said Laing smoothly. “Just grunts and expressions of interest. There seemed no point in including them.”
“But this is the language Saddam used?”
“So we understand, yes.”
“Fascinating. The first time I’ve ever seen anything he said that was not destined for publication or a wider audience.”
Martin had in his hands not the handwritten report by Jericho, which had been destroyed by his own brother in Baghdad as soon as it had been read, word for word, into the tape recorder. It was a typewritten transcript in Arabic of the text that had reached Riyadh in the burst transmission before Christmas. He also had the Firm’s own English translation.
“That last phrase,” said Paxman, who would be heading back to Riyadh the same evening, “where he says ‘win and be seen to win’—does that tell you anything?”
“Of course. But you know, you’re still using the word win in its European or North American connotation. I would use the word succeed in English.”
“All right, Terry, how does he think he can succeed against America and the Coalition?” asked Laing.
“By humiliation. I told you before, he must leave America looking like a complete fool.”
“But he won’t pull out of Kuwait in the next twenty days? We really need to know, Terry.”
“Look, Saddam went in there because his claims would not be met,” said Martin. “He demanded four things: takeover of Warba and Bubiyan Islands to have access to the sea, compensation for the excess oil he claims Kuwait snitched from the shared oil field, an end to Kuwait’s overproduction, and a writeoff of the fifteen-billion-dollar war debt. If he can get these, he can pull back with honor, lea
ving America hanging in the breeze. That’s winning.”
“Any hint that he thinks he might get them?”
Martin shrugged.
“He thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He’s gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out, the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right.”
“The man doesn’t make sense,” snapped Laing. “He has the deadline. January fifteenth, not twenty days away. He’s going to be crushed.”
“Unless,” suggested Paxman, “one of the permanent members of the Security Council comes up with a last-minute peace plan to put the deadline on hold.”
Laing looked gloomy.
“Paris or Moscow, or both,” he predicted.
“If it comes to war, does he still think he could win? Beg your pardon, ‘succeed’?” asked Paxman.
“Yes,” said Terry Martin. “But it’s back to what I told you before—American casualties. Don’t forget, Saddam is a back-street gunman. His constituency is not the diplomatic corridors of Cairo and Riyadh.
It’s all those alleys and bazaars crammed with Palestinians and other Arabs who resent America, the backer of Israel. Any man who can leave America bleeding, whatever the damage to his own country, will be the toast of those millions.”
“But he can’t do it,” insisted Laing.
“He thinks he can,” Martin countered. “Look, he’s smart enough to have worked out that in America’s eyes, America cannot lose, must not lose. It is simply not acceptable. Look at Vietnam. The veterans came home, and they were pelted with garbage. For America, terrible casualties at the hands of a despised enemy are a form of loss. Unacceptable loss. Saddam can waste fifty thousand men anytime, anyplace. He doesn’t care. Uncle Sam does. If America takes that kind of loss, she’ll be shaken to the core. Heads have to roll, careers to be smashed, governments to fall. The recriminations and the self-blame would last a generation.”
“He can’t do that,” said Laing again.
“He thinks he can,” repeated Martin.
“It’s the gas weapon,” muttered Paxman.