The Fist of God (34 page)

“A gardener?” queried Barber. “For chrissake, that’s a manual laborer.

You’d be picked up and recruited into the Army.”

“No. The gardener-handyman does everything outside the house. He keeps the garden, goes shopping on his bicycle for fish at the fish market, fruit and vegetables, bread and oil. He lives in a shack at the bottom of the garden.”

“So what’s the point, Mike?” asked Paxman.

“The point is, he’s invisible. He’s so ordinary, no one notices him. If he’s stopped, his ID card is in order and he carries a letter on embassy paper, in Arabic, explaining that he works for the diplomat and is exempt from service, and would the authorities please let him go about his business. Unless he is doing something wrong, any policeman who makes trouble for him is up against a formal complaint from the embassy.”

The intelligence officers thought it over.

“It might work,” admitted Barber. “Ordinary, invisible. What do you think, Simon?”

“Well,” said Paxman, “the diplomat would have to be in on it.”

The Fist of God

“Only partly,” said Martin. “He would simply have to have a flat order from his government to receive and employ the man who will present himself, then face the other way and get on with his job. What he suspects is his own affair. He’ll keep his mouth shut if he wants to keep his job and his career. That’s if the order comes from high enough.”

“The British embassy’s out,” said Paxman. “The Iraqis would go out of their way to offend our people.”

“Same with us,” said Barber. “Who do you have in mind, Mike?”

When Martin told them, they stared at him in disbelief.

“You cannot be serious,” said the American.

“But I am,” said Martin calmly.

“Hell, Mike, a request like that would have to go up to—well, the Prime Minister.”

“And the President,” said Barber.

“Well, we’re all supposed to be such pals nowadays, why not? I mean, if Jericho’s product ends up saving Allied lives, is a phone call too much to ask?”

Chip Barber glanced at his watch. The time in Washington was still seven hours earlier than that in the Gulf. Langley would be finishing its lunch. In London it was only two hours earlier, but senior officers might still be at their desks.

Barber went hotfoot back to the U.S. embassy and sent a blitz message in code to the Deputy Director (Operations), Bill Stewart, who, when he had read it, took it to the Director, William Webster. He in turn called the White House and asked for a meeting with his President.

Simon Paxman was lucky. His encrypted phone call caught Steve Laing at his desk at Century House, and after listening, the head of Ops for Mid-East called the Chief at his home.

The Fist of God

Sir Colin thought it over and placed a call to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler.

It is accepted that the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service has a right, in cases he deems to be an emergency, to ask for and secure a personal meeting with his Prime Minister, and Margaret Thatcher had always been notable for her accessibility to the men who ran the intelligence services and the Special Forces. She agreed to meet the Chief in her private office in 10 Downing Street the following morning at eight.

She was, as always, at work before dawn and had almost cleared her desk when the Chief was shown in. She listened to his bizarre request with a rather puzzled frown, demanded several explanations, thought it over, and then, in her usual way, made her mind up without delay.

“I’ll confer with President Bush as soon as he rises, and we’ll see what we can do. This, um, man—is he really going to do that?”

“That is his intention. Prime Minister.”

“One of your people, Sir Colin?”

“No, he’s a major in the SAS.”

She brightened perceptibly.

“Remarkable fellow.”

“So I believe, ma’am.”

“When this is over, I would rather like to meet him.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, Prime Minister.”

When the Chief was gone, the Downing Street staff placed the call to the White House, even though it was still the middle of the night, and set up the hotline connection for eight A.M. Washington, one P.M.

London. The Prime Minister’s lunch was rescheduled by thirty minutes.

President George Bush, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, had The Fist of God

always found it hard to refuse the British Prime Minister something she wanted when she was firing on all cylinders.

“All right, Margaret,” said the President after five minutes, “I’ll make the call.”

“He can only say no,” Mrs. Thatcher pointed out, “and he shouldn’t.

After all, we’ve jolly well done a lot for him.”

“Yes, we jolly well have,” said the President.

The two heads of government made their calls within an hour of each other, and the reply from the puzzled man at the other end of the line was affirmative. He would see their representatives, in privacy, as soon as they arrived.

That evening Bill Stewart headed out of Washington, and Steve Laing caught the last connection of the day from Heathrow.

If Mike Martin had any idea of the flurry of activity his demand had started, he gave no sign of it. He spent October 26 and 27 resting, eating, and sleeping. But he stopped shaving, allowing the dark stubble to come through again. Work on his behalf, however, was being carried out in a number of different places.

The SIS Station Head in Tel Aviv had visited General Kobi Dror with a final request. The Mossad chief had stared at the Englishman in amazement.

“You really are going to go ahead with this, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I only know what I’ve been told to ask you, Kobi.”

“Bloody hell, on the black? You know he’ll be caught, don’t you?”

“Can you do it, Kobi?”

“Of course we can do it.”

“Twenty-four hours?”

The Fist of God

Kobi Dror was playing his
Fiddler on the Roof
role again.

“For you, boychick, my right arm. But look, this is crazy, what you are proposing.”

He rose and came from behind his desk, draping an arm around the Englishman’s shoulders.

“You know, we broke half our own rules, and we were lucky.

Normally, we never have our people visit a dead-letter box. It could be a trap. For us, a dead-letter box is one-way: from the
katsa
to the spy.

For Jericho, we broke that rule. Moncada picked up the product that way because there was no other way. And he was lucky—for two years he was lucky. But he had diplomatic cover. Now you want ...

this
?”

He held up the small photograph of a sad-looking Arab-featured man with tufted black hair and stubble, the photo the Englishman had just received from Riyadh, brought in (since there are no commercial routes between the two capitals) by General de la Billière’s personal HS-125 twin-jet communications plane. The 125 was standing at Sde Dov military airfield, where its livery markings had been extensively photographed.

Dror shrugged.

“All right. By tomorrow morning. My life.”

The Mossad has, beyond any room for quarrel, some of the best technical services in the world. Apart from a central computer with almost two million names and their appropriate data, apart from one of the best lock-picking services on earth, there exists in the basement and subbasement of Mossad headquarters a series of rooms where the temperature is carefully controlled.

These rooms contain paper. Not just any old paper—very special paper. Originals of just about every kind of passport in the world lie The Fist of God

there, along with myriad other identity cards, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and suchlike.

Then there are the blanks, the unfilled identity cards on which the penmen can work at will, using the originals as a guide to produce forgeries of superb quality.

Identity cards are not the only speciality. Banknotes of virtually foolproof likeness can be and are produced in great quantities, either to help ruin the currencies of neighboring but hostile nations, or to fund the Mossad’s black operations, the ones neither the Prime Minister nor the Knesset knows about nor wishes to.

It had only been after some soul-searching that the CIA and SIS had agreed to go to the Mossad for the favor, but they simply could not produce the identity card of a forty-five-year-old Iraqi laborer with the certainty of knowing it would pass any inspection in Iraq. No one had bothered to find and abstract an original one to copy.

Fortunately, the Sayeret Matkal, a cross-border reconnaissance group so secret that its name cannot even be printed in Israel, had made an incursion into Iraq two years earlier to drop an Arab
oter
who had some low-level contact to make there. While on Iraqi soil, the agents had surprised two working men in the fields, tied them up, and relieved them of their identity cards.

As promised, Dror’s forgers worked through the night and by dawn had produced an Iraqi identity card, convincingly dirty and smudged as if from long use, in the name of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, age forty-five, from a village in the hills north of Baghdad, working in the capital as a laborer.

The forgers did not know that Martin had taken the name of the Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested his Arabic in a Chelsea restaurant in early August; nor could they know that he had chosen the village from The Fist of God

which his father’s gardener had come, the old man who, long ago beneath a tree in Baghdad, had told the little English boy of the place where he was born, of its mosque and coffee shop and the fields of alfalfa and melons that surrounded it. And there was one more thing the forgers did not know.

In the morning Kobi Dror handed the identity card to the Tel Aviv-based SIS man.

“This will not let him down. But I tell you, this”—he tapped the photo with a stubby forefinger—“this, your tame Arab, will betray you or be caught within a week.”

The SIS man could only shrug. Not even he knew that the man in the smudged photo was not an Arab at all. He had no need to know, so he had not been told. He just did what he was told—put the card on the HS-125, by which it was flown back to Riyadh.

Clothes had also been prepared, the simple
dish-dash
of an Iraqi working man, a dull brown
keffiyeh
, and tough, rope-soled canvas shoes.

A basket weaver, without knowing what he was doing or why, was creating a wicker crate of osier strands to a most unusual design. He was a poor Saudi craftsman, and the money the strange infidel was prepared to pay was very good, so he worked with a will.

Outside the city of Riyadh, at a secret army base, two rather special vehicles were being prepared. They had been brought by a Hercules of the RAF from the main SAS base farther down the Arabian Peninsula in Oman and were being stripped down and reequipped for a long and rough ride.

The essence of the conversion of the two long-base Land-Rovers was not armor and firepower but speed and range. Each vehicle would have to carry its normal complement of four SAS men, and one would carry The Fist of God

a passenger. The other would carry a big-tired cross-country motorcycle, itself fitted with extra-long-range fuel tanks.

The American Army again loaned its power on request, this time in the form of two of its big twin-rotor Chinook workhorse helicopters. They were just told to stand by.

Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev was sitting as usual at his desk in his personal office on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee building on Novaya Ploshad, attended by two male secretaries, when the intercom buzzed to announce the arrival of the two emissaries from London and Washington.

For twenty-four hours he had been intrigued by the requests of both the American President and the British Prime Minister that he receive a personal emissary from each of them. Not a politician, not a diplomat—just a messenger. In this day and age, he wondered, what message cannot be passed through the normal diplomatic channels?

They could even use a hotline that was utterly secure from interception, although interpreters and technicians did have access.

He was intrigued and curious, and as curiosity was one of his most notable features, he was eager to solve the enigma.

Ten minutes later, the two visitors were shown into the private office of the General Secretary of the CPSU and President of the Soviet Union. It was a long, narrow room with a row of windows along one side only, facing out onto New Square. There were no windows behind the President, who sat with his back to the wall at the end of a long conference table.

In contrast to the gloomy, heavy style preferred by his two predecessors, Andropov and Chernenko, the younger Gorbachev The Fist of God

preferred a light, airy decor. The desk and table were of light beech, flanked by upright but comfortable chairs. The windows were masked by net curtains.

When the two men entered, he gestured his secretaries to leave. He rose from his desk and came forward.

“Greetings, gentlemen,” he said in Russian. “Do either of you speak my language?”

One, whom he judged to be English, replied in halting Russian, “An interpreter would be advisable, Mr. President.”

“Vitali,” Gorbachev called to one of the departing secretaries, “send Yevgeny in here.”

In the absence of language, he smiled and gestured to his visitors to take a seat. His personal interpreter joined them in seconds and sat to one side of the presidential desk.

“My name, sir, is William Stewart. I am Deputy Director (Operations) for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington,” said the American.

Gorbachev’s mouth tightened and his brow furrowed.

“And I, sir, am Stephen Laing, Director for Operations, Mid-East Division, of British Intelligence.”

Gorbachev’s perplexity deepened. Spies,
chekisti
—what on earth was this all about?

“Each of our agencies,” said Stewart, “made a request to its respective government to ask you if you would receive us. The fact is, sir, the Middle East is moving toward war. We all know this. If it is to be avoided, we need to know the inner counsels of the Iraqi regime. What they say in public and what they discuss in private, we believe to be radically different.”