The Fist of God (12 page)

“Good to see you back, Mike.”

“Thank you, sir.” He shook hands with Colonel Craig.

“Let me introduce these two gentlemen,” said the DSF. “Mr. Laing and Mr. Paxman, both from Century. They have a—er—proposition they would like to put to you. Gentlemen, fire ahead. Would you prefer The Fist of God

to have Major Martin in private?”

“Oh, no, please,” said Laing hastily. “The Chief is hoping that if anything results from this meeting, it will definitely be a joint operation.”

Nice touch, thought J.P., mentioning Sir Colin. Just to show how much clout these bastards intend to exercise if they have to.

All five sat down. Laing talked, explaining the political background, the uncertainty as to whether Saddam Hussein would get out of Kuwait quickly, slowly, or not at all unless thrown out. But the political analysis was that Iraq would first strip Kuwait of every valuable, then stick around demanding concessions that the United Nations was simply not in a mood to concede. One might be looking at months and months.

Britain needed to know what was going on inside Kuwait—not gossip and rumor, nor the lurid stories flying around the media, but rock-hard information: about the British citizens still stuck there, about the occupation forces, and if force had eventually to be used, whether a Kuwaiti resistance could be useful in pinning down more and more of Saddam’s otherwise frontline troops.

Martin nodded and listened and asked a few pertinent questions but otherwise stayed silent. The two senior officers gazed out the window.

Laing concluded just after twelve.

“That’s about it, Major. I don’t expect an answer immediately, right now, but time is of the essence.”

“Do you mind if we have a few words with our colleague in private?”

asked J.P.

“Of course not. Look, Simon and I will trot back to the office. You have my desk number. Perhaps you’d let me know this afternoon?”

Sergeant Sid showed the two civilians out and escorted them down to The Fist of God

the street, where he watched them hail a taxi. Then he climbed back to his aerie under the roof beams behind the scaffolding.

J.P. went to a small fridge and extracted three cold beers. When the tabs were off, all three men took a swig.

“Look, Mike, you know what’s what. That’s what they want. If you think it’s crazy, we’ll go along with that.”

“Absolutely,” said Craig. “In the Regiment you get no black marks for saying no. This is their idea, not ours.”

“But if you want to go with them,” said J.P., “walk through the door, so to speak, then you’re with them till you come back. We’ll be involved, of course. They probably can’t run it without us. But you’ll be under them. They’ll be in charge. When it’s over, you come back to us as if you’d been on leave.”

Martin knew how it worked. He’d heard of others who had worked for Century. You just ceased to exist for the Regiment until you came back. Then they all said, “Good to see you again,” and never mentioned or asked where you had been.

“I’ll take it,” he said. Colonel Craig rose. He had to get back to Hereford. He held out his hand.

“Good luck, Mike.”

“By the way,” said the brigadier, “you have a lunch date. Just down the street. Century set it up.”

He handed Martin a slip of paper and bade him farewell.

Mike Martin went back down the stairs. The paper said his lunch was at a small restaurant four hundred yards away, and his host was Mr.

Wane Al-Khouri.

Apart from MI-S and MI-6 the third major arm of British intelligence is the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a complex of buildings in a guarded compound outside the staid town of The Fist of God

Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

GCHQ is the British version of America’s National Security Agency, with which it cooperates very closely—the listeners whose antennae eavesdrop on almost every radio broadcast and telephone, conversation in the world if they so wish.

Through its cooperation with GCHQ, the American NSA has a number of outstations inside Britain, apart from its other listening posts all over the world, and GCHQ has its own overseas stations, notably a very large one on British sovereign territory at Akrotiri in Cyprus.

The Akrotiri station, being closer to the scene, monitors the Middle East, but it passes all its product back to Cheltenham for analysis.

Among the analysts are a number of experts who, although Arabs by birth, are cleared to a very high level. Such a one was Mr. Al-Khouri, who had long before elected to settle in Britain, naturalize, and marry an English wife.

This genial former Jordanian diplomat now worked as a senior analyst in the Arabic Service of GCHQ where, even though there were many British scholars of Arabic, he could often read a meaning behind the meaning of a taped speech by a leader in the Arab world. It was he who, at the request of Century, was waiting for Mike Martin at the restaurant.

They had a convivial lunch that lasted two hours and spoke nothing but Arabic. When they parted, Martin left and strolled back toward the SAS building. There would be hours of briefings before he was ready to leave for Riyadh with a passport he knew Century would by then have ready, complete with visas in a false name.

Before he left the restaurant Mr. Al-Khouri called a number from the wall phone by the men’s room.

“No problem, Steve. He’s perfect. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard The Fist of God

anyone like him. It’s not scholar’s Arabic, you know; it’s even better, from your point of view. Street Arabic, every swearword, slang, piece of jargon. ... No, not a trace of an accent. ... Yes, he can pass all right

... on just about any street in the Middle East. No, no, not at all, old chap. Glad to be of assistance.”

Thirty minutes later, Mike Martin had retrieved his rental car and was on the M4 heading back to Cheltenham. Before he entered the headquarters, he also made a call, to a number just off Gower Street.

The man he was calling picked up the phone, since it was in his office in the SOAS, where he was working over papers on an afternoon that called for no lectures.

“Hullo, bro. It’s me.”

The soldier had no need to introduce himself. Since they had been at prep school together in Baghdad, he had always called his younger brother “bro.” There was a gasp at the other end of the line.

“Mike? Where the hell are you?”

“In London, in a phone booth.”

“I thought you were somewhere in the Gulf.”

“Got back this morning. Probably leave again tonight.”

“Look, Mike, don’t go. It’s all my fault. ... I should have kept my bloody mouth shut—”

His elder brother’s deep laugh came across the line.

“I wondered why the buggers suddenly got interested in me. Take you to lunch, did they?”

“Yes, we were talking about something else. It just cropped up, sort of slipped out. Look, you don’t have to go. Tell them I was mistaken.”

“Too late. Anyway, I’ve accepted.”

“Oh God. ...” In his office, surrounded by erudite tomes on medieval Mesopotamia, the younger man was almost in tears.

The Fist of God

“Mike, look after yourself. I’ll pray for you.”

Mike thought for a moment. Yes, Terry had always had a touch of religion. He probably would.

“You do that, bro. See you when I get back.”

He hung up. Alone in his office, the ginger-haired scholar who hero-worshiped his soldier brother put his head in his hands.

When the British Airways 8:45 P.M. flight for Saudi Arabia lifted off from Heathrow that night, right on time, Mike Martin was on it with a fully visa-ed passport in another name. He would be met just before dawn by Century’s Head of Station at the Riyadh embassy.

Chapter 4

Don Walker eased down on the brake pedal and the ’63 vintage Corvette Stingray paused for a moment at the main entrance to Seymour Johnson Air Force base to let a couple of campers pass before emerging onto the highway.

It was hot. The August sun blasted down up ahead on the small North Carolina town of Goldsboro so that the tarmac seemed to shimmer like moving water. It was good to have the top down and feel the wind, warm though it was, running through his short blond hair.

He maneuvered the classic sports car over which he had lavished so much attention up through the slumbering town to Highway 70, then pulled onto Highway 13 heading northeast.

Don Walker, that hot summer of 1990, was twenty-nine years old, The Fist of God

single, a fighter jockey, and had just learned that he was going to war.

Well, maybe. Apparently it would depend on some weird Arab called Saddam Hussein.

That same morning the wing commander, Colonel (later General) Hal Hornburg, had laid it out: In three days, on August 9, his squadron, the 336th Rocketeers of the Ninth Air Force of Tactical Air Command was shipping out to the Arabian Gulf. The orders had come through from TAC command at Langley Air Force base in Hampton, Virginia. So it was on. The elation among the pilots had been ecstatic. What was the point of all those years of training if you never got to fire the goodies?

With three days to go there was a mess of work to get through, and for him as squadron weapons officer more than most. But he had begged for just twenty-four hours’ furlough to go and say good-bye to his folks, and Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, chief of weapons, had told him if there was one tiny detail missing on August 9 when the F-15E

Eagles rolled, he—Turner—would personally kick ass. Then he had grinned and told Walker if he wanted to get back by sun-up, he had better get moving.

Walker was hammering up through Snow Hill and Greenville by nine that morning, heading for the chain of islands east of Pamlico Sound.

He was lucky his parents were not back in Tulsa, or he could never have made it. Being August, they were taking their annual vacation at the family beach house near Hatteras, a five-hour drive from the base.

Don Walker knew he was a hotshot pilot, and he reveled in it. To be twenty-nine and do the thing you love best in the world and do it supremely well is a good feeling. He liked the base, he liked the guys, and he adored the exhilaration and power of the McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle that he flew. It was, he thought, the best piece of airplane in the whole U.S. Air Force, and the hell with what the men The Fist of God

on the Fighting Falcons said. Only the Navy’s F-18 Hornet might compare, or so they said, but he had never flown the Hornet, and the Eagle was just fine by him.

At Bethel he turned due east for Columbia and Whalebone, which was where the highway turned into the island chain; with Kitty Hawk behind him to his left, he turned south toward Hatteras, where the road finally ran out and the sea was on all sides. He had had good vacations at Hatteras as a boy, going out to sea in the early dawn with his grandfather for bluefish, until the old man got sick and could not go anymore.

Now that his dad was retiring from the oil job in Tulsa maybe he and Mom would spend more time at the beach house and he could get down there more often. He was young enough that the thought that he might not come back from the Gulf, if there was a war, did not cross his mind.

Walker had graduated from high school in Tulsa at the age of eighteen with only one burning ambition—he wanted to fly. So far as he could recall, he had always wanted to fly. He spent four years at Oklahoma State, majoring in aeronautical engineering, and he graduated in June 1983. He had done his time with the ROTC, and that fall he was inducted into the Air Force.

He underwent pilot training at Williams AFB, near Phoenix, flying the T-33 and the T-38, and after eleven months, at wings parade, he learned he had passed as a distinguished graduate, fourth out of forty pupils. To his abiding joy, the top five graduates went to fighter leadin school at Holloman AFB, near Alamagordo, New Mexico. The rest of the pupils, he thought with the supreme arrogance of a young man destined to fly fighters, would be sent to become bomb-droppers or trash-carriers.

The Fist of God

At the replacement training unit at Homestead, Florida, he finally quit the T-38 and converted to the F-4 Phantom, a big, powerful brute of a plane, but a real fighter at last.

Nine months at Homestead ‘terminated with his first squadron posting, to Osan in South Korea, flying the Phantoms for a year. He was good and he knew it, and so apparently did the brass. After Osan, they sent him to the Fighter Weapons School at McConnell AFB in Wichita, Kansas.

Fighter Weapons runs arguably the toughest course in the USAF. It marks out the high-fliers, career-wise. The technology of the new weapons is awe-inspiring. Graduates of McConnell have to understand every nut and bolt, every silicon chip and microcircuit of the bewildering array of ordnance that a modern fighter plane can launch at its opponents, in the air or on the ground. Walker emerged again as a distinguished graduate, which meant that every fighter squadron in the Air Force would be happy to have him.

The 336th Squadron at Goldsboro got him in the summer of ’87, flying Phantoms for a year, followed by four months at Luke AFB in Phoenix, then converting to the Strike Eagle with which the Rocketeers were being reequipped. He had been flying the Eagle for more than a year when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

The Stingray turned just before midday into the island chain; a few miles to his north stood the monument at Kitty Hawk where Orville and Wilbur Wright had hauled their string-and-wire contraption into the air for a few yards to prove that man really could fly in a powered airplane. If they only knew ...

Through Nag’s Head he followed the crawl of campers and trailers until they finally petered out and the road emptied past Cape Hatteras onto the tip of the island. He ran the Stingray onto the driveway of his The Fist of God

parents’ timber-clad frame house just before one. He found them on the porch that faced out over the calm blue sea.

Ray Walker caught sight of his son first and let out a shout of pleasure.

Maybelle came out from the kitchen, where she had been preparing lunch, and rushed into his embrace. His grandfather was sitting in his rocking chair, looking at the sea. Don walked over and said: