The Fist of God (10 page)

Apart from their own speciality, SAS men must have a good working knowledge of the other disciplines, so that inter-changeability is common. They have to master more besides—radio, first aid, and languages.

The basic combat unit consists of only four men. If one is ever out of action, his tasks will be quickly shared among the surviving three, The Fist of God

whether they be radio operators or unit medics.

They pride themselves on a far higher educational level than any other unit in the Army, and because they travel the world, languages are a must. Every soldier must learn one, apart from English. For years Russian was a favorite, now going out of fashion since the end of the cold war. Malay is very useful in the Far East, where the regiment for years fought in Borneo. Spanish is on the increase since the covert operations in Colombia against the cocaine lords of Medellin and Cali.

French is learned—just in case.

And because the regiment had spent years assisting Sultan Qaboos of Oman in his war with Communist infiltrators from South Yemen into the interior of Dhofar, plus other training missions up and down the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia, many SAS men speak passable Arabic. The sergeant who had asked for some action was one of them, but he had to admit: “The boss is bloody amazing. I’ve never heard anyone like him.

He even looks the part.”

Mike Martin straightened and ran a nut-brown hand through jet-black hair.

“Time to turn in.”

It was just after ten. They would be up before dawn for the usual ten-mile run with their charges before the sun became too hot. It was a chore the Abu Dhabis loathed but upon which their sheikh insisted. If these strange soldiers from England said it was good for them, it was good for them. Besides, he was paying for it, and he wanted value for his money.

Major Martin retired to his own quarters and slept quickly and deeply.

The sergeant was right; he
did
look the part. His men often wondered if he got his olive skin, dark eyes, and deep black hair from some Mediterranean forebears. He never told them, but they were wrong.

The Fist of God

The maternal grandfather of both Martin boys had been a British tea planter at Darjeeling in India. As kids they had seen pictures of him—tall, pink-faced, blond-moustached, pipe in mouth, gun in hand, standing over a shot tiger. Very much the
pukka sahib
, the Englishman of the Indian Raj.

Then in 1928 Terence Granger had done the unthinkable: He had fallen in love with and insisted on marrying an Indian girl. That she was gentle and beautiful was not the point. It was simply not done.

The tea company did not fire him—that would have brought it out in the open. They sent him into internal exile (that was what they actually called it) to an isolated plantation in faraway Assam.

If it was supposed to be a punishment, it did not work. Granger and his new bride, the former Miss Indira Bohse, loved it there—the wild, ravined countryside teeming with game and tigers, the deep green tea slopes, the climate, the people. And there Susan was born in 1930.

They raised her there, an Anglo-Indian girl with Indian playmates.

By 1943 war had rolled toward India, with the Japanese advancing through Burma to the border. Granger was old enough not to have to volunteer, but he insisted, and after basic training at Delhi he was posted as a major to the Assam Rifles. All British cadets were promoted straight to major; they were not supposed to serve
under
an Indian officer, but Indians could make lieutenant or captain.

In 1945 he died in the crossing of the Irrawaddy. His body was never brought back; it vanished in those drenched Burmese jungles, one of tens of thousands who had seen some of the most vicious hand-to-hand fighting of the war.

With a small company pension, his widow retreated back into her own culture. Two years later, more trouble came. India was being partitioned in 1947. The British were leaving. Ali Jinnah insisted on The Fist of God

his Moslem Pakistan in the north, Pandit Nehru settled for mainly Hindu India in the south. As waves of refugees of the two religions rolled north and south, violent fighting broke out. Over a million died.

Mrs. Granger, fearful for her daughter’s safety, sent her to complete her education with her late father’s younger brother, a very proper architect of Haslemere, Surrey. Six months later, the mother died in the rioting.

So at seventeen Susan Granger came to England, the land of her fathers that she had never seen. She spent one year at a girls’ school near Haslemere and then two years as a trainee nurse at Farnham General Hospital, followed by one more as a secretary to a Farnham solicitor.

At twenty-one, the youngest permitted age, she applied as a stewardess with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. She trained with the other girls at the BOAC school, the old converted St. Mary’s Convent at Heston, just outside London. Her nursing training was the clincher, and her looks and manner an added plus.

At twenty-one she was beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and skin like a European with a permanent golden suntan. On graduation she was assigned to Number 1 Line, London to India—an obvious choice for a girl speaking fluent Hindi.

It was a long, long trip in those days aboard the four-propeller Argonaut. The route was London-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi-Bombay. Then on to Delhi, Calcutta, Colombo, Rangoon, Bangkok, and finally Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Of course, one crew could not do it all, and the first crew stopover was Basra in the south of Iraq, where another crew took over.

It was there in 1951, over a drink at the Port Club, that she met a rather shy young accountant with the Iraq Petroleum Company, then owned The Fist of God

and run by the British. His name was Nigel Martin, and he asked her to dinner. She had been warned about wolves—among the passengers, the crew, and during the stopovers. But he seemed nice, so she accepted. When he took her back to the BOAC station house, where the stewardesses were quartered, he held out his hand. She was so surprised, she shook it.

Then she lay awake in the awful heat wondering what it would be like to kiss Nigel Martin.

On her next stopover in Basra, he was there again. Only after they were married did he admit he had been so smitten that he found out through the BOAC Station Officer Alex Reid when she was due next.

That autumn of 1951 they played tennis, swam at the Port Club, and walked through the bazaars of Basra. At his suggestion she took a leave and came with him to Baghdad, where he was based.

She soon realized it was a place where she could settle down. The swarming throngs of brightly colored robes, the sights and smells of the street, the cooking meats by the edge of the Tigris, the myriad little shops selling herbs and spices, gold, and jewels—all reminded her of her native India. When he proposed to her, she accepted at once.

They married in. 1952 at St. George’s Cathedral, the Anglican church off Haifa Street, and although she had no one on her side of the church, many people came from the IPC and the embassy to fill both rows of pews.

It was a good time to live in Baghdad. Life was slow and easy, the boy king Faisal was on the throne with Nuri as Said running the country, and the overwhelming foreign influence was British. This was partly because of the powerful contribution of the IPC to the economy and partly because most of the Army officers were British-taught, but mainly because the entire upper class had been potty-trained by The Fist of God

starched English nannies, which always leaves a lasting impression.

In time the Martins had two sons, born in 1953 and 1955. Christened Michael and Terry, they were as unlike as chalk and cheese. In Michael the genes of Miss Indira Bohse came through; he was black-haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned; wags from the British community said he looked more like an Arab. Terry, two years younger, took after his father: short, stocky, pink-skinned, and ginger-haired.

At three in the morning, Major Mike Martin was shaken awake by an orderly.

“There is a message,
sayidi
.”

It was quite a simple message, but the urgency coding was “blitz,” and the signoff meant it came personally from the Director of Special Forces. It required no answer. It just ordered him back to London on the first available plane.

He handed over his duties to the SAS captain, who was on his first tour with the regiment and was his second-in-command for the training assignment, and raced to the airport in civilian clothes.

The 2:55 A.M. for London should have left. Over a hundred passengers snored or grumbled on board as the stewardess brightly announced that the operational reason for the ninety-minute delay would soon be sorted out.

When the doors opened again to admit a single, lean man in jeans, desert boots, shirt, and bomber jacket with a tote bag over one shoulder, a number of those still awake glared at him. The man was shown to an empty seat in business class, made himself comfortable, and within minutes of takeoff tilted back his seat and fell fast asleep.

A businessman next to him who had dined copiously and with much illicit liquid refreshment, then waited two hours in the airport and two The Fist of God

more on the plane, fed himself another antacid tablet and glowered at the relaxed, sleeping figure beside him.

“Bloody Arab,” he muttered, and tried in vain to sleep.

Dawn came over the Gulf two hours later, but the British Airways jet was racing it toward the northwest, landing at Heathrow just before ten local time. Mike Martin came out of the customs hall among the first because he had no baggage in the aircraft hold. There was no one to meet him; he knew there would not be. He also knew where to go.

It was not even dawn in Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince Georges County, where the Patuxent River flows down to join the Chesapeake. On the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as Langley, the lights still burned.

Judge William Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence, rubbed fingertips over tired eyes, rose, and walked to the picture windows.

The swath of silver birches that masked his view of the Potomac when they were in full leaf, as they were now, still lay shrouded in darkness.

Within an hour the rising sun would bring them back to pale green. It had been another sleepless night. Since the invasion of Kuwait he had been catnapping between calls from the President, the National Security Council, the State Department, and so it seemed, just about anyone else who had his number.

Behind him, as tired as he, sat Bill Stewart, his Deputy Director (Operations), and Chip Barber, head of the Middle East Division.

“So that’s about it?” asked the DCI, as if asking the question again might produce a better answer.

The Fist of God

But there was no change. The position was that the President, the NSC, and State were all clamoring for deep-mined hypersecret intelligence from inside the heart of Baghdad, from the innermost councils of Saddam Hussein himself. Was he going to stay in Kuwait?

Would he pull out under threat of the United Nations resolutions that were rolling out of the Security Council? Would he buckle in the face of the oil embargo and the trade blockade? What was he thinking?

What was he planning? Damn it, where was he anyway?

And the Agency did not know. They had a Head of Station in Baghdad, of course. But the man had been frozen out for weeks past.

The Agency man was known to that bastard Rahmani who headed Iraqi Counterintelligence, and it was now plain that what had been fed to the Head of Station for weeks had all been bullshit. His best

“sources” were apparently working for Rahmani and had been telling him trash.

Of course, they had the pictures—enough pictures to drown in. The satellites, KH-11 and KH-12, were rolling over Iraq every few minutes taking happy snapshots of everything in the entire country. Analysts were working around the clock identifying what
might
be a poison gas factory, what
might
be a nuclear facility—or might be what it claimed to be, a bicycle workshop.

Fine. The analysts of the National Reconnaissance Office, a part-CIA and part-Air Force enterprise, along with the scientists at ENPIC, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, were putting together a picture that would one day be complete. This here is a major command post, this is a SAM missile site, this is a fighter base. Good, because the pictures tell us so. And one day, maybe, they would all have to be bombed back to the Stone Age. But what
else
did Saddam have?

Hidden away, stashed deep underground?

The Fist of God

Years of neglect of Iraq were now bearing fruit. The men who were slumped in their chairs behind Webster were old-time spooks who had made their bones on the Berlin wall when the concrete was not even dry. They went back a long way, before electronics had taken over the business of intelligence-gathering.

And they had told him that the cameras of the NRO and the listening ears of the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade could not reveal plans, they could not spy out intentions, they could not go inside a dictator’s head.

So the NRO was taking pictures and the ears of Fort Meade were listening and taping every word on every telephone call and radio message into, out of, and inside Iraq. And still he had no answers.

The same administration, the same Capitol Hill that had been so mesmerized with electronic gadgetry that they had spent billions of dollars developing and sending up every last gizmo that the ingenious mind of man could devise, were now clamoring for answers that the gizmos did not seem to be giving them.

And the men behind the DCI were saying that elint, the name for electronic intelligence, was a backup and a supplement to humint, or human intelligence-gathering, but not a substitute for it. Which was nice to know, but no solution to his problem.

Which was that the White House was demanding answers that could only be given with authority by a source, an asset, a spook, a spy, a traitor, whatever, placed high inside the Iraqi hierarchy.
Which he did
not have
.