The Fist of God
Twenty minutes later, Mike Martin and the two other SAS men found the body of the dead weapons systems officer. There was nothing they could do, so they moved on.
Ten minutes afterward, they heard behind them the continuous rattle of small-arms fire. It continued for some time. The Al-Ubaidi had found the body too and in their rage had emptied their magazines into it.
The gesture also gave their position away. The SAS men pressed on.
Don Walker hardly felt the blade of Sergeant Stephenson’s knife against his throat. It was light as a thread of silk on the gullet. But he looked up and saw the figure of a man standing over him. He was dark and lean; there was a gun in his right hand pointing at Walker’s chest; and the man wore the uniform of a captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard, Mountain Division. Then the man spoke:
“Bloody silly time to drop in for tea. Shall we just get the hell out of here?”
* * *
That night General Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting alone in his suite on the fourth floor of the Saudi Defense Ministry building.
It was not where he had spent much of the past seven months; most of that time he had been out visiting as many combat units as he could, or down in the subbasement with his staff and planners. But the large and comfortable office was where he went when he wanted to be alone.
That night he sat at his desk, adorned by the red telephone that linked him in a top-security net to Washington, and waited.
At ten minutes before one on the morning of February 24, the other phone rang.
“General Schwarzkopf?” It was a British accent.
“Yes. This is he.”
“I have a message for you, sir.”
“Shoot.”
“It is: ‘Now Barrabas,’ sir. ‘Now Barrabas.’ ”
“Thank you,” said the Commander-in-Chief, and replaced the receiver. At 0400 hours that day, the ground invasion went in.
Chapter 23
The three SAS men marched hard through the rest of the night. They set a pace onward and upward that left Don Walker, who carried no rucksack and thought he was in good physical shape, exhausted and gasping for breath.
Sometimes he would drop to his knees, aware that he could go no farther, that even death would be preferable to the endless pain in every muscle. When that happened, he would feel two steely hands, one under each armpit, and hear the Cockney voice of Sergeant Stephenson in his ear:
“Come on, mate. Only a little farther. See that ridge? We’ll probably rest on the other side of it.”
But they never did. Instead of heading south to the foothills of the Jebal al Hamreen, where he figured they would have met a screen of Republican Guards with vehicles, Mike Martin headed east into the high hills running to the Iranian border. It was a tack that forced the patrols of the Al-Ubaidi mountain men to come after them.
Just after dawn, looking back and down, Martin saw a group of six of them, fitter than the rest, still climbing and closing. When the Republican Guards reached the next crest, they found one of their quarry sitting slumped on the ground, facing away from them.
Dropping behind the rocks, the tribesmen opened up, riddling the foreigner through the back. The corpse toppled over. The six men in the Guard patrol broke cover and ran forward.
Too late, they saw that the body was a Bergen rucksack, draped with a camouflaged smock, topped by Walker’s flying helmet. Three silenced Heckler and Koch MP5s cut them down as they stood around the
“body.”
Above the town of Khanaqin, Martin finally called a halt and made a transmission to Riyadh. Stephenson and Eastman kept watch, facing west, from where any pursuing patrols must come.
Martin simply told Riyadh that there were three SAS men left and they had a single American flier with them. In case the message was intercepted, he did not give their position. Then they pressed on.
High in the mountains, close to the border, they found shelter in a stone hut, used by the local shepherds in summer when the flocks came to the upper pastures. There, with guards posted in rotation, they waited out the four days of the ground war, as far to the south the Allied tanks and air power crushed the Iraqi Army in a ninety-hour blitzkrieg and rolled into Kuwait.
On that same day, the first of the ground war, a lone soldier entered Iraq from the west. He was an Israeli of the Sayeret Matkal commandos, picked for his excellent Arabic.
An Israeli helicopter, fitted with long-range tanks and in the livery of the Jordanian Army, came out of the Negev and skimmed across the Jordanian desert to deposit the man just inside Iraq, south of the Ruweishid crossing point.
When it had left him, it turned and flew back across Jordan and into Israel, unspotted.
Like Martin, the soldier had a lightweight, rugged motorcycle with heavy-duty desert tires. Although disguised to look old, battered, dirty, rusted, and dented, its engine was in superb condition, and it carried extra fuel in two panniers astride the back wheel.
The soldier followed the main road eastward and at sundown entered Baghdad.
The concerns of his superiors for his security had been overcautious. By that amazing bush telegraph that seems able to outstrip even electronics, the people of Baghdad already knew their army was being crushed in the deserts of southern Iraq and Kuwait. By the evening of the first day, the AMAM had taken to its barracks and stayed there.
Now that the bombing had stopped—for all the Allied airplanes were needed over the battlefield—the people of Baghdad circulated freely, talking openly of the imminent arrival of the Americans and British to sweep away Saddam Hussein.
It was a euphoria that would last a week, until it became plain the Allies were not coming, and the rule of the AMAM closed over them again.
The central bus station was a seething mass of soldiers, most stripped down to singlets and shorts, having thrown away their uniforms in the desert. These were the deserters who had evaded the execution squads waiting behind the front line. They were selling their Kalashnikovs for the price of a ticket home to their villages. At the start of the week, these rifles were fetching thirty-five dinars each; four days later, the price was down to seventeen.
The Israeli infiltrator had one job, which he accomplished during the night. The Mossad knew only of the three dead-letter boxes for getting a message to Jericho that had been left behind by Alfonso Benz Moncada in August. As it happened, Martin had discontinued two of them for security reasons, but the third still operated.
The Israeli deposited identical messages in all three drops, made the three appropriate chalk marks, took his motorcycle, and rode west again, joining the throng of refugees heading that way.
It took him another day to reach the border. Here he cut south of the main road into empty desert, crossed into Jordan, recovered his hidden directional beacon, and used it. The bleep-bleep beam was picked up at once by an Israeli aircraft circling over the Negev, and the helicopter returned to the rendezvous to recover the infiltrator.
He did not sleep for those fifty hours and ate little, but he fulfilled his mission and returned home safely.
* * *
On the third day of the ground war, Edith Hardenberg returned to her desk at the Winkler Bank, both puzzled and angry. On the previous morning, just as she had been about to leave for work, she had received a telephone call.
The speaker, in faultless German with a Salzburg accent, introduced himself as the neighbor of her mother. He told her that Frau Hardenberg had had a bad fall down the stairs after slipping on an icy patch and was in a bad way.
She at once tried to call her mother but repeatedly got a busy signal. Finally frantic, she had called the Salzburg exchange, who informed her the phone must be out of order.
Telephoning the bank that she would not be in for work, she had driven to Salzburg through the snow and slush, arriving in the late morning. Her mother, perfectly fit and well, was surprised to see her. There had been no fall, no injury. Worse, some vandal had cut her telephone line outside the flat.
br /> By the time Edith Hardenberg returned to Vienna, it was too late to go in for work.
When she appeared at her desk the next morning, she found Wolfgang Gemütlich in an even worse mood than she. He reproached her bitterly for her absence the previous day and listened to her explanation in a bad humor.
The reason for his own misery was not long in coming. In the midmorning of the previous day, a young man had appeared at the bank and insisted on seeing him.
The visitor explained that his name was Aziz and that he was the son of the owner of a substantial numbered account. His father, explained the Arab, was indisposed but wished his son to act in his place.
At this, Aziz Junior had produced documentation that fully and perfectly authenticated him as his father’s ambassador, with complete authority to operate the numbered account. Herr Gemütlich had examined the documents of authority for the slightest flaw, but there was none. He had been left with no alternative but to concede.
The young wretch had insisted that his father’s wishes were to close down the entire account and transfer the contents elsewhere. This, mind you, Fräulein Hardenberg, just two days after the arrival in the account of a further $3 million credit, bringing the aggregate total to over $10 million.
Edith Hardenberg listened to Gemütlich’s tale of woe very quietly, then asked about the visitor. Yes, she was told, his first name had been Karim. Now that she mentioned it, there had been a signet ring with a pink opal on the small finger of one hand and, indeed, a scar along the chin. Had he been less consumed by his own sense of outrage, the banker might have wondered at such precise questioning by his secretary about a man she could not have seen.
He had known, of course, Gemütlich admitted, that the account-holder must be some sort of Arab, but he had had no idea that the man was from Iraq or had a son.
After work, Edith Hardenberg went home and began to clean her little flat. She scrubbed and scoured it for hours. There were two cardboard boxes that she took to the large rubbish bin a few hundred yards away and dumped. One contained a number of items of makeup, perfumes, lotions, and bath salts; the other, a variety of women’s underwear. Then she returned to her cleaning.
Neighbors said later she played music through the evening and late into the night—not her usual Mozart and Strauss but Verdi, especially something from Nabucco . A particularly keen-eared neighbor identified the piece as the “Slaves’ Chorus,” which she played over and over again.
In the small hours of the morning the music stopped, and she left in her car with two items from her kitchen.
It was a retired accountant, walking his dog in the Prater Park at seven the next morning, who found her.
He had left the Hauptallee to allow his dog to do its business in the park away from the road.
She was in her neat gray tweed coat, with her hair in a bun behind her head, thick lisle stockings on her legs, and sensible flat-heeled shoes on her feet. The clothesline looped over the branch of the oak had not betrayed her, and the kitchen steps were a meter away.
She was quite still and stiff in death, her hands by her side and her toes pointed neatly downward.
Always a very neat lady was Edith Hardenberg.
February 28 was the last day of the ground war. In the Iraqi deserts west of Kuwait, the Iraqi Army had been outflanked and annihilated. South of the city, the Republican Guard divisions that had rolled into Kuwait on August 2 ceased to exist. On that day the forces occupying the city, having set fire to everything that would burn and seeking to destroy what would not, left for the north in a snaking column of halftracks, trucks, vans, cars, and carts.
The column was caught in the place where the highway north cuts through the Mutla Ridge. The Eagles and Jaguars, Tomcats and Hornets, Tornados and Thunderbolts, Phantoms and Apaches hurtled down onto the column and reduced it to charred wreckage. With the head of the column destroyed and blocking the road, the remainder could escape neither forward nor backward, and because of the cut in the ridge could not leave the road. Many died in that column and the rest surrendered. By sundown, the first Arab forces were entering Kuwait to liberate it.
That evening, Mike Martin made contact again with Riyadh and heard the news. He gave his position and that of a reasonably flat meadow nearby.
The SAS men and Walker were out of food, melting snow to drink, and bitterly cold, not daring to light a fire in case it gave away their position. The war was over, but the patrols of mountain guards might well not know that, or care.
Just after dawn, two long-range Blackhawk helicopters loaned by the American 101st Airborne Division came for them. They came from the fire base camp set up by the 101st fifty miles inside Iraq, after the biggest helicopter assault in history. So great was the distance from the Saudi border that even from the fire base on the Euphrates River, it was a long haul to the mountains near Khanaqin.
That was why there were two of them: The second had even more fuel for the journey home.
To be on the safe side, eight Eagles circled above, giving protective cover as the refueling in the meadow was carried out. Don Walker squinted upward.
“Hey, they’re my guys!” he shouted. As the two Blackhawks clattered the way back again, the Strike Eagles rode shotgun until they were south of the border.
They said farewell to each other on a wind-blasted strip of sand, surrounded by the detritus of a defeated army near the Saudi-Iraqi border. The whirling blades of a Blackhawk whipped up the dust and gravel before taking Don Walker to Dhahran and a flight back to Al Kharz. A British Puma stood farther away, to take the SAS men to their own secret cordoned base.
That evening, at a comfortable country house in the rolling downs of Sussex, Dr. Terry Martin was told where his brother had actually been since October and that he was now out of Iraq and safe in Saudi Arabia.
Martin was almost ill with relief, and the SIS gave him a lift back to London, where he resumed his life as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Two days later, on March 3, the commanders of the Coalition forces met in a tent on a small and bare Iraqi airstrip called Safwan with two generals from Baghdad to negotiate the surrender.
The only spokesmen for the Allied side were Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled bin Sultan. At the American general’s side sat the commander of the British forces, General Sir Peter de la Billière.
Both the Western officers to this day believe that only two Iraqi generals came to Safwan. In fact, there were three.
The American security net was extremely tight, to exclude the possibility of any assassin reaching the tent in which the opposing generals met. An entire American division encircled the airfield, facing outward.
Unlike the Allied commanders who had arrived from the south by a series of helicopters, the Iraqi party had been ordered to drive to a road junction north of the airstrip. There they left their cars to transfer to a number of American armored personnel vehicles called humvees and be driven by U.S. drivers the last two miles to the airstrip and the cluster of tents where they were awaited.
Ten minutes after the party of generals entered the negotiation tent with their interpreters, another black Mercedes limousine was coming down the Basra road toward the junction. The roadblock there was commanded by that time by a captain of the U.S. Seventh Armored Brigade, all more senior officers having proceeded to the airstrip. The unexpected limousine was at once stopped.
In the back of the car was the third Iraqi general, albeit only a brigadier, bearing a black attaché case.
Neither he nor his driver spoke English, and the captain spoke no Arabic. He was about to radio the airstrip for orders when a jeep driven by an American colonel and bearing another in the passenger seat pulled up. The driver was in the uniform of the Green Beret Special Forces; the passenger had the insignia of G2, the military intelligence.
Both men flashed their ID at the captain, who examined the cards, recognized their authenticity, and threw up a salute.
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bsp; “It’s okay, Captain. We’ve been expecting this bastard,” said the Green Beret colonel. “Seems he was delayed by a flat tire.”
“That case,” said the G2 officer, pointing at the attaché case of the Iraqi brigadier who now stood uncomprehending by the side of his car, “contains the names of all our POWs, including the missing aircrew. Stormin’ Norman wants it, and now.”
There were no humvees left. The Green Beret colonel gave the Iraqi a rough shove toward the jeep. The captain was perplexed. He knew nothing of any third Iraqi general. He also knew his unit had recently gotten into the Bear’s bad books by having claimed to occupy Safwan when it had not achieved that objective. The last thing he needed was to call down more of General Schwarzkopf’s wrath on the Seventh Armored by detaining the list of missing American aircrew. The jeep drove away in the direction of Safwan. The captain shrugged and gestured the Iraqi driver to park with all the others.
On the road to the airstrip the jeep passed between rows of parked American armored vehicles for up to a mile. Then there was an empty section of road, before the cordon of Apache helicopters surrounding the actual negotiation area.
Clear of the tanks, the G2 colonel turned to the Iraqi and spoke in good Arabic.
“Under your seat,” he said. “Don’t get out of the jeep, but get them on—fast.”
The Iraqi wore the dark green uniform of his country. The rolled clothes beneath his seat were in the light tan of a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. He quickly exchanged trousers, jacket, and beret.
Just before the ring of Apaches on the tarmac, the jeep peeled away into the desert, skirted the airstrip, and drove on south. On the far side of Safwan, the vehicle regained the main road to Kuwait, twenty miles away.
The U.S. tanks were on every side, facing outward. Their job was to forbid the penetration of any infiltrators. Their commanders, atop their turrets, watched one of their own jeeps bearing two of their own colonels and a Saudi officer drive out of the perimeter and away from the protected zone, so it did not concern them.