The Fist of God (18 page)

“Because they think he won’t get away with it,” said Martin.

“And he
won’t
get away with it. They’re right.”

“Only because of America, not because of the Arab world. If he is to gain the acclamation of the Arab world, he must humiliate America, not his Arabian neighbor. Have you been to Baghdad?”

“Not recently,” said Paxman.

“It’s full of pictures of Saddam portrayed as the desert warrior on a white charger with raised sword. All bunkum, of course; the man’s a back-street shooter. But that’s how he sees himself.”

Paxman rose.

“It’s all very theoretical,’ Terry. But thanks for your thoughts, anyway.

Trouble is, I have to deal with hard facts. In any case, no one can see how he can humiliate America. The Yanks have all the power, all the technology. When they’re ready, they can go in there and blow his army and air force away.”

Terry Martin squinted up against the sun.

“Casualties, Simon. America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don’t matter to him.”

“But there aren’t enough Americans there yet.”

“Precisely.”

The Rolls-Royce bearing Ahmed Al-Khalifa swept up to the front of the office building that announced itself in English and Arabic as the The Fist of God

headquarters of Al-Khalifa Trading Corporation Ltd. and hissed to a stop.

The driver, a big manservant, half chauffeur and half bodyguard, stepped out of the driver’s seat and went to the rear to open the door for his master.

Perhaps it had been foolish to bring the Rolls, but the Kuwaiti millionaire had brushed aside all pleas to use the Volvo for fear of offending the Iraqi soldiers on the roadblocks.

“Let them rot in hell,” he had growled over breakfast. In fact, the drive had been uneventful from his sumptuous home in its walled garden in the luxurious suburb of Andalus to the office building in Shamiya.

Within ten days of the invasion, the disciplined and professional soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard had been withdrawn from Kuwait City, to be replaced by the conscript rabble of the Popular Army. If he had hated the first, he had nothing but contempt for the latter.

In their first few days, the Guards had looted his city, but systematically and deliberately. He had seen them enter the national bank and remove the $5 billion worth of gold bullion that constituted the national reserve. But this was not looting for personal gain. The bullion bars had been placed in containers, sealed in trucks, and driven to Baghdad.

The gold
Soukh
had yielded another billion dollars in solid gold artifacts, and that had gone the same way.

The roadblocks of the Guards, who were distinguishable by their black berets and general bearing, had been strict and professional. Then, quite suddenly, they had been needed farther south, to take up position on the southern border facing Saudi Arabia.

In their place had come the Popular Army, ragged, unshaven, and The Fist of God

undisciplined and, for that reason, more unpredictable and dangerous.

The occasional killing of a Kuwaiti for refusing to hand over his watch or his car gave testimony to that.

By the middle of August, the heat was coming down like a hammer on an anvil. The Iraqi soldiers, seeking shelter, ripped up paving slabs and built themselves small stone huts down the streets they were supposed to be checking, and crawled inside. In the cool of the dawn and the evening they emerged to pretend to be soldiers. Then they harassed civilians and looted food and valuables under pretense of checking cars for contraband.

Mr. Al-Khalifa normally liked to be at work by seven in the morning but by delaying until ten, when the sun was hot, he had swept past the stone bivouacs with the Popular Army inside them and no one had stopped him. Two soldiers, scruffy and hatless, had actually thrown up an inept salute at the Rolls-Royce, assuming it must contain some notable of their own side.

It could not last, of course. Some thug would steal the Rolls at gunpoint sooner or later. So what? When he had been driven back home—he was convinced he would be, but he did not know how—he would buy another.

He stepped out onto the pavement in gleaming white
thob
, the light cotton material of the
ghutra
, secured around his head with two black cords, falling about his face. The driver closed the door and returned to the other side of the car to take it away to the company garage.

“Alms,
sayidi
, alms. For one who has not eaten for three days.”

He had only half seen the man squatted on the sidewalk close to the door, apparently asleep in the sun, a sight common in any Middle Eastern city. Now the man was beside him, a Bedou in stained robes, hand outstretched.

The Fist of God

His driver was striding back around the Rolls to send the mendicant away with a stream of curses. Ahmed Al-Khalifa held up his hand. He was a practicing Moslem who tried to abide by the teachings of the Holy Koran, one of which is that a man should give alms as generously as he can.

“Park the car,” he ordered. From the side pocket of his robe, he withdrew his wallet and extracted a ten-dinar note. The Bedou took the bill in both hands, the gesture indicating that the gift of the benefactor is so weighty that it needs two hands to support it.

“
Shukron, sayidi, shukran
.” Then without changing his tone of voice, the man added, “When you are in your office, send for me. I have news from your son in the south.”

The merchant thought he must have misheard. The man was shuffling away down the pavement, pocketing the banknote. Al-Khalifa entered the office building, nodded in greeting to the commissionaire, and went up to his top-floor office in something of a daze. When he was seated at his desk, he thought for a moment, then pressed the intercom.

“There is a Bedouin tribesman on the pavement outside. I wish to speak to him. Please send him up.”

If his private secretary thought her employer had gone mad, she gave no sign of it. Only her wrinkled nose, as she showed the Bedou into the cool of the office five minutes later, indicated what she thought of the personal odor of her boss’s unlikely guest.

When she left, the merchant gestured to a chair.

“You said you had seen my son?” he asked shortly. He half thought the man might be here for an even bigger banknote.

“Yes, Mr. Al-Khalifa. I was with him two days ago in Khafji.”

The Kuwaiti’s heart leaped. It had been two weeks and no news. He had learned only indirectly that his only son had taken off that morning The Fist of God

from Ahmadi air base, and after that—nothing. None of his contacts seemed to know what had happened. There had been much confusion that day, August 2.

“You have a message from him?”

“Yes,
sayidi
.”

Al-Khalifa held out his hand.

“Please give it to me. I will reward you well.”

“It is in my head. I could bring no paper with me, so I memorized it.”

“Very well. Please tell me what he said.”

Mike Martin recited the one-page letter that the Skyhawk pilot had written, word for word.

“ ‘My dear father, despite his appearance the man in front of you is a British officer. ...’ ”

Al-Khalifa jerked in his chair and stared at Martin, having some difficulty believing his eyes or ears.

“ ‘He has come into Kuwait under cover. Now that you know this, you hold his life in your hands. I beg you to trust him, as he must now trust you, for he will seek your help.

“ ‘I am safe and well and based with the Saudi Air Force at Dhahran. I was able to fly one mission against the Iraqis, destroying one tank and a truck. I will fly with the Royal Saudi Air Force until the liberation of our country.

“ ‘Each day I pray to Allah that the hours will speed by until I can return and embrace you again. Your dutiful son, Khaled.’ ”

Martin stopped. Ahmed Al-Khalifa rose, walked to the window, and stared out. He took several long, deep breaths. When he had composed himself, he returned to his chair.

“Thank you. Thank you. What is it you wish?”

“The occupation of Kuwait will not last a few hours or a few days. It The Fist of God

will take some months, unless Saddam Hussein can be persuaded to pull out.”

“The Americans will not come quickly?”

“The Americans and the British and the French and the rest of the Coalition will need time to build up their forces. Saddam has the fourth-largest standing army in the world, over a million men. Some are rubbish, but many are not. This occupation force will not be dislodged by a handful of soldiers.”

“Very well. I understand.”

“In the meantime, it is felt that every Iraqi soldier and tank and gun that can be pinned down in the occupation of Kuwait cannot be used on the frontier—”

“You are talking of resistance, armed resistance, fighting back,” said Al-Khalifa. “Some wild boys have tried. They have shot at Iraqi patrols. They were gunned down like dogs.”

“Yes, so I believe. They were brave but foolish. There are ways of doing these things. The point is not to kill hundreds, or be killed. The point is to make the Iraqi occupation army constantly nervous, always afraid, needing to escort every officer whenever he travels, never able to sleep in peace.”

“Look, Mr. English, I know you mean well, but I suspect you are a man accustomed to these things and skilled at them. I am not. These Iraqis are a cruel and savage people. We know them of old. If we do what you say, there will be reprisals.”

“It is like rape, Mr. Al-Khalifa.”

“Rape?”

“When a woman is to be raped, she can fight back or succumb. If she is docile, she will be violated, probably beaten, maybe killed. If she fights, she will be violated, certainly beaten, maybe killed.”

The Fist of God

“Kuwait is the woman, Iraq the rapist. This I already know. So why fight back?”

“Because there is tomorrow. Tomorrow Kuwait will look in the mirror.

Your son will see the face of a warrior.”

Ahmed Al-Khalifa stared at the dark-faced, bearded Englishman for a long time, then he said:

“So will his father. Let Allah have mercy on my people. What is it you want? Money?”

“Thank you, no. I have money.”

He had in fact ten thousand Kuwaiti dinars, abstracted from the ambassador in London, who had drawn it from the Bank of Kuwait, on the corner of Baker Street and George Street.

“I need houses to stay in. Six of them.”

“No problem. There are already thousands of abandoned apartments—”

“Not apartments. Detached villas. Apartments have neighbors. No one will investigate a poor man engaged to caretake an abandoned villa.”

“I will find them.”

“Also identity papers. Real Kuwaiti ones. Three in all. One for a Kuwaiti doctor, one for an Indian accountant, and one for a market gardener from out of town.

“All right. I have friends in the Interior Ministry. I think they still control the presses that produce the ID cards. What about the picture on them?”

“For the market gardener, find an old man on the street. Pay him. For the doctor and the accountant, choose men among your staff who look roughly like me but are clean-shaven. These photographs are notoriously bad.

“Lastly, cars. Three. One white station wagon, one four-wheel-drive The Fist of God

jeep, one old and battered pickup truck. All in lock-up garages, all with new plates.”

“Very well, it will be done. The ID cards and the keys to the garages and houses—where will you collect them?”

“Do you know the Christian cemetery?”

Al-Khalifa frowned.

“I’ve heard of it, I’ve never been there. Why?”

“It’s on the Jahra road in Sulaibikhat, next to the main Moslem cemetery. A very obscure gate with a tiny notice saying: For Christians. Most of the tombstones are for Lebanese and Syrians, with some Filipinos and Chinese. In the far right-hand corner is one for a merchant seaman, Shepton. The marble slab is loose. Under it I have scraped a cavity in the gravel. Leave them there. If you have a message for me, same thing. Check the grave once a week for messages from me.”

Al-Khalifa shook his head in bewilderment.

“I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”

Mike Martin disappeared into the maelstrom of people who teemed through the narrow streets and alleys of the Bneid-al-Qar district. Five days later, under Able Seaman Shepton’s tombstone he found three identity cards, three sets of garage keys with locations, three sets of ignition keys, and six sets of house keys with addresses on their tags.

Two days later, an Iraqi truck coming back into town from the Umm Gudayr oil field was blown to fragments by something it ran over.

Chip Barber, the head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, had been in Tel Aviv for two days when the phone in the office they had given him at the U.S. embassy rang. It was the CIA’s Head of Station on the line.

The Fist of God

“Chip, it’s okay. He’s back in town. I fixed a meeting for four o’clock.

That gives you time to grab the last flight out of Ben-Gurion for Stateside. The guys say they’ll come by the office and pick us up.”

The Head of Station was calling from outside the embassy, so he spoke in generalities in case the line was tapped. It was tapped, of course, but only by the Israelis, who knew anyway.

The “he” was General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror, head of the Mossad; the office was the embassy itself, and the guys were the two men from Dror’s personal staff, who arrived in an anonymous car at ten minutes after three.

Barber thought fifty minutes was a lot of time to get from the embassy compound to the headquarters of the Mossad, which is situated in an office tower called the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard.

But that was not where the meeting was to be. The car sped northward out of town, past Sde Dov military airfield, until it picked up the coastal highway to Haifa.

Just outside Herzlia is situated a large apartment-and-hotel resort called simply the Country Club. It is a place where some Israelis but mainly elderly Jews from abroad come to relax and enjoy the numerous health and spa facilities the place boasts. These happy folk seldom glance up the hill above the resort.