The Fist of God

  Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping.

  Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam—wasn’t that the object of the exercise? Something had changed.

  Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin’s sleep would not have been so easy.

  In matters of technical skill there are four levels—competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.

  In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Hassan Rahmani tried to get it for him.

  Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani’s office.

  “Any progress?” asked Rahmani.

  “I think so,” replied Zayeed. “He’s there, all right—no doubt about it. The trouble is, he’s using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite. With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long.”

  “How close are you?” said Rahmani.

  “Well, I’ve tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier. Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen.”

  Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office. Rahmani looked perplexed.

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s encrypted, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Rahmani. “Can you break it?”

  “Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry.”

  “It can’t be decoded?” Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer.

  “It’s not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip.

  The permutations are in the hundreds of millions.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “The point, sir, is—I got a bearing on it.”

  Hassan Rahmani leaned forward in excitement.

  “A bearing?”

  “My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There’s more.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s here.”

  “Here in Baghdad?”

  Major Zayeed smiled and shook his head. He had saved his best piece of news till last. He wanted to be appreciated.

  “No, sir, he’s here in the Mansour district. I think he’s inside an area two kilometers by two.”

  Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close. The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose.

  “I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?”

  “With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred.”

  Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car.

  They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the windshield the driver simply followed the motorcycle.

  Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive. Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows.

  Inside the principal sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took assigned places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself.

  The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit.

  For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more pronounced.

  Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid—they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai.

  The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed. None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed.

  There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals—Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff—stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them.

  Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened.

  No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib.

  The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room.

  The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back. They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard. From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas shells. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been assigned to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft assigned to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any. They—the pilot and the navigator—knew nothing more than that.

  The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. “True or false, Rafeek ?”

  “It is normal, Sayid Rais ,” said the man who commanded the artillery and SAM missile sites, “for them to send in first the missile fighters to hit the defenses, then the bombers for the target. They always do that. For a high-priority target, two airplanes only and no support has never happened.”

  Saddam mused on the answer, his dark eyes betraying nothing of his thoughts. That was a part of the power he held over these men; they never knew which way he would react.

  “Is there any chance, Rafeek Khatib, that these men have hidden things from you, that they know more than they have said?”

  “No, Rais. They have been ... persuaded to cooperate completely.”

  “Then that is the end of the matter?” asked the Rais quietly. “The raid was just an unfortunate chance?”

  Heads nodded round the room. The scream when it came paralyzed them all.

  “Wrong! You are all wrong!”

  In a second the voice dropped back to a calm whisper, but the fear had been instilled. They all knew that the softness of the voice could precede the most
terrible of revelations, the most savage of penalties.

  “There have been no trucks, no Army trucks. An excuse given to the pilots in case they were caught.

  There is something more, is there not?”

  Most of them were sweating despite the air conditioning. It had always been thus, since the dawn of history, when the tyrant of a tribe called in the witch-finder and the tribe sat and trembled lest he should be the one at whom the juju-stick pointed.

  “There is a conspiracy,” whispered the Rais. “There is a traitor. Someone is a traitor, who conspires against me.”

  He stayed silent for several minutes, letting them tremble. When he spoke again, it was to the three men who faced him across the room.

  “Find him. Find him and bring him to me. He shall learn the punishment for such crimes. He and all his family.”

  Then he swept from the room followed by his personal bodyguard. The sixteen men left behind did not even look at each other, could not meet another’s gaze. There would be a sacrifice. No one knew who it would be. Each feared for himself, for some chance remark, perhaps not even that.

  Fifteen of the men kept distance from the last, the witch-finder, the one they called Al-Mu’azib, the Tormentor. He would produce the sacrifice.

  Hassan Rahmani too kept silent. This was no time to mention radio intercepts. His operations were delicate, subtle, based on detection and real intelligence. The last thing he needed was to find the thumping boots of the AMAM trampling all over his investigations.

  In a mood of terror the ministers and generals departed back into the night and to their duties.

  “He doesn’t keep them in his office safe,” said Avi Herzog, alias Karim, to his controller Gidi Barzilai over a late breakfast the next morning.

  The meeting was safe, in Barzilai’s own apartment. Herzog had not made the phone call, from a public booth, until Edith Hardenberg was safely in the bank. Shortly after, the yarid team had arrived, boxing in their colleague as they escorted him to the rendezvous to ensure there was no chance he was being followed. Had he grown a tail, they would have seen it. It was their speciality.

  Gidi Barzilai leaned forward across the food-strewn table, eyes alight.

  “Well done, boychick. So now I know where he doesn’t keep the codes. The point is, where?”

  “In his desk.”

  “The desk? You’re mad. Anyone can open a desk.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Gemütlich’s desk? No.”

  “Apparently it is very big, very ornate, and very old. A real antique. Also, it has a compartment, created by the original cabinetmaker, so secret, so hard to find, that Gemütlich thinks it is safer than any safe. He believes a burglar might go for the safe but would never think of the desk. Even if a burglar went through the desk, he would never find the compartment.”

  “And she doesn’t know where it is?”

  “Nope. Never seen it opened. He always locks himself in the office when he has to refer to it.”

  Barzilai thought it over.

  “Cunning bastard. I wouldn’t have given him credit for it. You know, he’s probably right.”

  “Can I break it off now—the affair?”

  “No, Avi, not yet. If you’re right, you’ve done brilliantly. But stick around, keep play-acting. If you vanish now, she will think back to your last conversation, put two and two together, have a fit of remorse, whatever. Stay with her, talk, but never again about banking.”

  Barzilai thought over his problem. No one of his team in Vienna had ever seen the safe, but there was one man who had.

  Barzilai sent a heavily coded message to Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. The spotter was brought in and sat in a room with an artist.

  The spotter was not multitalented, but he had one amazing skill: He had a photographic memory. For over five hours he sat with his eyes closed and cast his mind back to the interview he had had with Gemütlich while posing as a lawyer from New York. His principal task had been to look for alarm catches on windows and doors, for a wall safe, wires indicating pressure pads—all the tricks for keeping a room secure. These he had noted and reported. The desk had not interested him too much. But sitting in a room beneath King Saul Boulevard weeks later, he could close his eyes and see it all again.

  Line by line, he described the desk to the artist. Sometimes the spotter would look at the drawing, make a correction, and resume. The artist worked in India ink with a fine pen and colored the desk with watercolors. After five hours the artist had a sheet of the finest cartridge paper on which was an exact colored picture of the desk then sitting in the office of Herr Wolfgang Gemütlich at the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, Vienna.

  The drawing went to Gidi Barzilai in the diplomatic pouch from Tel Aviv to the Israeli embassy in Austria. He had it within two days.

  Before then a check on the list of sayanim across all Europe had revealed the existence of Monsieur Michel Levy, an antiquarian on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, noted as one of the leading experts on classical furniture on the continent.

  It was not until the night of the fourteenth, the same day Barzilai received his watercolor painting in Vienna, that Saddam Hussein reconvened his meeting of ministers, generals, and intelligence chiefs.

  Again the meeting was called at the behest of AMAM chief Omar Khatib, who had passed news of his success via the son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and again it was in a villa in the dead of night.

  The Rais simply entered the room and gestured to Khatib to report upon his findings.

  “What can I say, Sayid Rais ?” The head of the Secret Police raised his hands and let them drop in a gesture of helplessness. It was a masterpiece in the acting of self-deprecation.

  “The Rais was, as ever, right, and we were all wrong. The bombing of Al Qubai was indeed no accident. There was a traitor, and he has been found.”

  There was a buzz of sycophantic amazement around the room. The man in the upright padded chair with his back to the windowless wall beamed and held up his hands for such unnecessary applause to cease.

  It did, but not too quickly.

  Was I not right? the smile said. Am I not always right?

  “How did you discover this, Rafeek ?” asked the Rais.

  “A combination of good luck and detective work,” admitted Khatib modestly. “As for the good fortune, this as we know is the gift of Allah, who smiles upon our Rais.”

  There was an assenting rumble around the room.

  “Two days before the attack by the bombers of the Beni Naji, a traffic control point was established on a road nearby. It was a routine spot check by my men on movements by possible deserters, contraband goods. ... The vehicle numbers were noted.

  “Two days ago I checked these and found that most of the vehicles were local—vans and trucks. But one was an expensive car, registered here in Baghdad. The owner was traced, a man who might have had reason to visit Al Qubai. But a telephone call ascertained that he had not visited the facility. Why, I wondered, had he been in the area, then?”

  Hassan Rahmani nodded. That was good detective work, if it was true. And it was unlike Khatib who usually relied on brute force.

  “And why was he there?” asked the Rais.

  Khatib paused to let the revelation sink in.

  “To note a precise description of the aboveground car junkyard, to define the distance from the nearest major landmark and the exact compass bearing—everything an Air Force would need to find it.”

  There was a universal exhalation of breath around the room.

  “But that came later, Sayid Rais . First I invited the man to join me at AMAM headquarters for a little frank talk.”

  Khatib’s mind strayed back to the frank conversation in the basement beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, Baghdad, that basement known as the Gymnasium.

  Habitually, Omar Khatib had his underlings conduct interrogations, contenting himself to decree the level of severity and supervise the outcome. But this had been a matter of such del
icacy that he had accomplished the task himself, banning all others beyond the soundproof door.

  From the roof of the cell jutted two steel hooks, a yard apart, and from them hung two short chains hooked to a timber bar. The wrists of the suspect he had had lashed to the ends of the bar, so the man hung with arms a yard apart. Because the arms were not vertical, the strain was all the greater.

  The feet were four inches off the floor, the ankles tied to another yard-long pole. The X-shaped configuration of the prisoner gave access to all parts of the body, and because he hung in the center of the room, he could be approached from all sides.

  Omar Khatib had laid the clotted rattan cane on a side table and came around to the front. The manic screaming of the man under the first fifty lashes had ceased, dying to a mumbling burble of pleas. Khatib stared him in the face.

  “You are a fool, my friend. You could end all this so easily. You have betrayed the Rais, but he is merciful. All I need is your confession.”

  “No, I swear ... wa-Allah-d-Adheem ... by Allah the Great, I have betrayed no one.”

  The man was weeping like a child, tears of agony pouring down his face. He was soft, Khatib noted; this will not take long.

  “Yes, you have betrayed. Qubth-ut-Allah—you know what that means?”

  “Of course,” whimpered the man.

  “And you know where it was stored for safety?”

  “Yes.”

  Khatib brought his knee hard upward into the exposed testicles. The man would have liked to double up but could not. He vomited, the slick running down his bare body to dribble off the end of his penis.

  “Yes—what?”

  “Yes, sayidi .”

  “Better. And where the Fist of God was hidden—that was not known to our enemies?”

  “No, sayidi , it is a secret.”

  Khatib’s hand flashed out and caught the hanging man across the face.

  “Monyouk, filthy monyouk , then how is it that this very morning at dawn, the enemy planes bombed it and destroyed our weapon?”