The Fist of God (37 page)

The hens in their cage on his lap had had a rough ride, even though he had scattered corn from his pocket and shared the water from his flask, now inside a Land-Rover baking under netting in the desert behind him. With each lurch the birds clucked in protest or squatted and crapped into the litter beneath them.

It would have taken a keen eye to observe that the base of the cage on its external measurement was four inches more than on the inside. The deep litter around the hens’ feet hid the difference. The litter was only an inch deep. Inside the four-inch-deep cavity beneath the twenty-by-twenty-inch cage were a number of items that those police at Ar-Rutba would have found puzzling but interesting.

One was a fold-away satellite dish, turned into a stumpy rod like a collapsible umbrella. Another was a transceiver, more powerful than that Martin had used in Kuwait. Baghdad would not offer the facility of being able to broadcast while wandering around the desert. Lengthy transmissions would be out, which accounted, apart from the rechargeable cadmium-silver battery, for the last item in the cavity. It was a tape recorder, but a rather special one.

The Fist of God

New technology tends to start large, cumbersome, and difficult to use.

As it develops, two things happen. The innards become more and more complicated, although smaller and smaller, and the operation becomes simpler.

The radio sets hauled into France by agents for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War were a nightmare by modern standards. Occupying a suitcase, they needed an aerial strung for yards up a drainpipe, had cumbersome valves the size of light bulbs, and could only transmit messages on a Morse-sender. This kept the operator tapping for ages, while German detector units could triangulate on the source and close in.

Martin’s tape recorder was simple to operate but also carried some useful features inside. A ten-minute message could be read slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. Before it was recorded on the spool, a silicon chip would encrypt it into a garble that, even if intercepted, the Iraqis could probably not decode.

At the push of a button, the tape would rewind. Another button would cause it to rerecord, but at one two-hundredth of the speed, reducing the message to a three-second burst that would be just about impossible to trace.

It was this burst that the transmitter would send out when linked to the satellite dish, the battery, and the tape recorder. In Riyadh the message would be caught, slowed down, decrypted, and replayed in clear.

Martin left the bus at Ramadi, where it stopped, and took another one on past Lake Habbaniyah and the old Royal Air Force base, now converted to a modern Iraqi fighter station. The bus was stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, and all identity cards were checked.

Martin stood humbly in the line, clutching his chickens, as the passengers approached the table where the police sergeant sat. When it The Fist of God

was his turn, he set the wicker basket on the floor and produced his ID

card. The sergeant glanced at it. He was hot and thirsty. It had been a long day. He gestured to the place of origin of the card-bearer.

“Where is this?”

“It is a small village north of Baji. Well known for its melons,
bey
.”

The sergeant’s mouth twitched.
Bey
was a respectful form of address that dated back to the Turkish empire, only occasionally heard, and then only from people out of the real backwoods. He flicked a dismissive hand; Martin picked up his chickens and went back to the bus.

Shortly before seven, the bus rolled to a stop and Major Martin stepped out into the main bus station in Kadhimiya, Baghdad.

Chapter 11

It was a long walk through the early evening from the bus station in the north of the city to the house of the Soviet First Secretary in the district of Mansour, but Martin welcomed it.

For one thing, he had been cooped up in two separate buses for twelve hours, covering the 240 miles from Ar-Rutba to the capital, and they had not been luxury coaches. For another, the walk gave him the chance to inhale once again the feel of the city he had not seen since leaving on an airliner for London as a very nervous schoolboy of thirteen, and that had been twenty-four years earlier.

Much had changed. The city he remembered had been very much an The Fist of God

Arab city, much smaller, grouped around the central districts of Shaikh Omar and Saadun on the northwestern bank of the Tigris in Risafa, and the district of Aalam across the river in Karch. Within this inner city was where most of life had been; here narrow streets, alleys, markets, mosques, and their minarets had dominated the skyline to remind the people of their subservience to Allah.

Twenty years of oil revenue had brought long divided highways plunging through the once-open spaces, with rotaries, overpasses, and cloverleaf intersections. Cars had proliferated, and skyscrapers pushed upward into the night sky, Mammon nudging his old adversary.

Mansour, when he reached it down the long stretch of Rabia Street, was hardly recognizable. He recalled wide open spaces around the Mansour Club where his father had taken the family on weekend afternoons. Mansour was still clearly an upscale suburb, but the open spaces had been filled with streets and residences for those who could afford to live in style.

He passed within a few hundred yards of Mr. Hartley’s old preparatory school, where he had learned his lessons and played during the breaks with his friends Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, but in the darkness he did not recognize the street.

He knew just what job Hassan was doing now, but of Dr Badri’s two sons he had heard no word in almost a quarter of a century. Had the little one, Osman, with his taste for mathematics, ever become an engineer after all? he wondered. And Abdelkarim, who had won prizes for reciting English poetry—had he in turn become a poet or a writer?

If Martin had marched in the manner of the SAS, heel-and-toe, shoulders swinging to assist his moving legs, he could have covered the distance in half the time. He could also have been reminded, like those two engineers in Kuwait, that “you may dress like an Arab, but The Fist of God

you still walk like an Englishman.”

But his shoes were not laced marching boots. They were canvas slippers with rope soles, the footwear of a poor Iraqi
fellagha
, so he shuffled along with bowed shoulders and head down.

In Riyadh they had shown him an up-to-date map of the city of Baghdad, and many photographs taken from high altitude but magnified until, with a magnifying glass, one could look into the gardens behind the walls, picking out the swimming pools and cars of the wealthy and powerful.

All these he had memorized. He turned left into Jordan Street and just past Yarmuk Square took a right into the tree-lined avenue where the Soviet diplomat lived.

In the sixties, under Kassem and the generals who followed him, the USSR had occupied a favored and prestigious position in Baghdad, pretending to espouse Arab nationalism because it was seen to be anti-Western, while trying to convert the Arab world to Communism. In those years the Soviet embassy had purchased several large residences outside its main compound, which could not accommodate the swelling staff, and as a concession these residences and their grounds had been accorded the status of Soviet territory. It was a privilege even Saddam Hussein had never gotten around to rescinding, the more so as until the mid-eighties his principal arms supplier had been Moscow, and six thousand Soviet military advisers had trained his Air Force and Armored Corps with their Russian equipment.

Martin found the villa and identified it from the small brass plaque that announced this was a residence belonging to the embassy of the USSR. He pulled on the chain beside the gate and waited.

After several minutes the gate opened to reveal a burly, crop-haired Russian in the white tunic of a steward.

The Fist of God

“
Da
?” he said.

Martin replied in Arabic, the wheedling whine of a supplicant who speaks to a superior. The Russian scowled. Martin fumbled inside his robe and produced his identity card. This made sense to the steward; in his country they knew about internal passports. He took the card, said,

“Wait,” in Arabic, and closed the gate.

He was back in five minutes, beckoning the Iraqi in the soiled
dish-dash
through the gate into the forecourt. He led Martin toward the steps leading to the main door of the villa. As they reached the bottom of the steps a man appeared at the top.

“That will do. I will handle this,” he said in Russian to the manservant, who glowered at the Arab one last time and went back into the house.

Yuri Kulikov, First Secretary to the Soviet embassy, was a wholly professional diplomat who had found the order he received from Moscow outrageous but unavoidable. He had evidently been caught at dinner, for he clutched a napkin with which he dabbed his lips as he descended the steps.

“So here you are,” he said in Russian. “Now listen, if we have to go through with this charade, so be it. But I personally will have nothing to do with it.
Panimayesh
?”

Martin, who did not speak Russian, shrugged helplessly and said in Arabic:

“Please,
bey
?”

Kulikov took the change of language as dumb insolence. Martin realized with a delicious irony that the Soviet diplomat really thought his unwelcome new staff member was a fellow-Russian who had been sicced onto him by those wretched spooks up at the Lubyanka in Moscow.

“Oh, very well then, Arabic if you wish,” he said testily. He too had The Fist of God

trained in Arabic, which he spoke well with a harsh Russian accent. He was damned if he was going to be shown up by this agent of the KGB.

So he continued in Arabic.

“Here is your card. Here is the letter I was ordered to prepare for you.

Now, you will live in the shack at the far end of the garden, keep the grounds in order, and do the shopping as the chef instructs. Apart from that, I do not want to know. If you are caught, I know nothing except that I took you on in good faith. Now, go about your business and get rid of those damned hens. I will not have chickens ruining the garden.”

Some chance, he thought bitterly as he turned back to resume his interrupted dinner. If the oaf is caught up to some mischief, the AMAM will soon know he is a Russian, and the idea that he is on the First Secretary’s personal staff by accident will be as likely as a skating party on the Tigris. Yuri Kulikov was privately furious with Moscow.

Mike Martin found his quarters up against the rear wall of the quarter-acre garden, a one-room bungalow with a cot, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks on one wall, and a washbasin set in a shelf in a corner.

Further examination revealed an earth-closet close by and a cold-water tap in the garden wall. Hygiene would clearly be pretty basic and food presumably served from the kitchen door at the rear of the villa. He sighed. The house outside Riyadh seemed a long way away.

He found a number of candles and some matches. By their dim light, he slung blankets across the windows and went to work on the rough tiles of the floor with his penknife. An hour of scratching at the moldy mortar brought four of the tiles up, and a further hour of digging with
a.
trowel from the nearby potting shed produced a hole to take his radio transmitter, batteries, tape recorder, and satellite dish. A mixture of mud and spittle rubbed into the cracks between the tiles hid the last The Fist of God

traces of his excavation.

Just before midnight, he used his knife to cut away the false bottom of the chicken cage and set the litter into the real base, so that no trace remained of the four-inch cavity. While he worked the chickens scratched around the floor, looking hopefully for a nonexistent grain of wheat but finding and consuming several bugs.

Martin finished off the last of his olives and cheese and shared the remaining fragments of pita bread with his traveling companions, along with a bowl of water drawn from the outside tap.

The hens went back into their cage, and if they found their home now four inches deeper than it used to be, they made no complaint. It had been a long day, and they went to sleep.

In a last gesture, Martin peed all over Kulikov’s roses in the darkness before blowing out the candles, wrapping himself in his blanket, and doing the same.

His body clock caused him to wake up at four A.M. Extracting the transmitting gear in its plastic bags, he recorded a brief message for Riyadh, speeded it up by two hundred times, connected the tape recorder to the transmitter, and erected the satellite dish, which occupied much of the center of the shack but pointed out the open door.

At four forty-five A.M. he sent a single-burst transmission on the channel of the day, then dismantled it all and put it back under the floor.

The sky was still pitch-black over Riyadh when a similar dish on the roof of the SIS residence caught the one-second signal and fed it down to the communications room. The transmitting time “window” was from four-thirty until five A.M., and the listening watch was awake.

Two spinning tapes caught the burst from Baghdad, and a warning The Fist of God

light flashed to alert the technicians. They slowed the message down by two hundred times until it came over the headphones in clear. One noted it down in shorthand, typed it up, and left the room.

Julian Gray, the Head of Station, was shaken awake at five fifteen.

“It’s Black Bear, sir. He’s in.”

Gray read the transcript with mounting excitement and went to wake Simon Paxman. The head of the Iraq Desk was now on extended assignment to Riyadh, his duties in London having been taken over by his subordinate. He too sat up, wide awake, and read it.

“Bloody hell, so far so good.”

“The problem could start,” said Gray, “when he tries to raise Jericho.”

It was a sobering thought. The former Mossad asset in Baghdad had been switched off for three full months. He might have been compromised or caught, or simply changed his mind. He could have been posted far away, especially if he turned out to be a general now commanding troops in Kuwait. Anything could have happened.