The Fist of God (42 page)

If Gidi Barzilai had been frustrated by the security procedures of the Winkler Bank, two weeks of trailing Wolfgang Gemütlich were driving him to distraction. The man was impossible.

After the spotter’s identification, Gemütlich had quickly been followed The Fist of God

to his house out beyond the Prater Park. The next day, while he was at work, the yarid team had watched the house until Frau Gemütlich left to go shopping. The girl member of the team went after her, staying in touch with her colleagues by personal radio so that she could warn them of the lady’s return. In fact, the banker’s wife was away for two hours—more than ample time.

The break-in by the neviot experts was no problem, and bugs were quickly planted in sitting room, bedroom, and telephone. The search—quick, skilled, and leaving no trace—yielded nothing. There were the usual papers: deeds to the house, passports, birth certificates, marriage license, even a series of bank statements. Everything was photographed, but a glance at the private bank account revealed no evidence of embezzlement from the Winkler Bank—there was even a horrible chance that the man would turn out to be completely honest.

The wardrobe and bedroom drawers revealed no sign of bizarre personal habits—always a good blackmail lever among the respectable middle classes—and indeed the neviot team leader, having watched Frau Gemütlich leave the house, was not surprised.

If the man’s personal secretary was a mousy little thing, his wife was like a scrap of discarded paper. The Israeli thought he had seldom seen such a downcast little shrimp.

By the time the yarid girl came on the radio with a muttered warning that the banker’s wife was heading home, the neviot break-in experts were finished and out. The front door was relocked by the man in the telephone company uniform after the rest had scuttled out the back and through the garden.

From then on, the neviot team would man the tape recorders in the van down the street to listen to the goings-on inside the house.

Two weeks later a despairing team leader told Barzilai they had hardly The Fist of God

filled one tape. On the first evening they had recorded eighteen words.

She had said: “Here’s your dinner, Wolfgang”—no reply. She had asked for new curtains—refused. He had said, “Early day tomorrow, I’m off to bed.”

“He says it every bloody night, it’s like he’s been saying it for thirty years,” complained the neviot man.

“Any sex?” asked Barzilai.

“You must be joking, Gidi. They don’t even talk, let alone screw.”

All other leads to a flaw in the character of Wolfgang Gemütlich came up zero. There was no gambling, no small boys, no socializing, no nightclubbing, no mistress, no scuttling through the red-light district.

On one occasion he left the house, and the spirits of the trailing team rose. Gemütlich was in a dark coat and hat, on foot, after dark and after supper, moving through the darkened suburb until he came to a private house five blocks away.

He knocked and waited. The door opened, he was admitted, and it closed. Soon a ground-floor light came on, behind heavy drapes.

Before the door closed, one of the Israeli watchers caught a glimpse of a grim-looking woman in a white nylon tunic.

Aesthetic baths, perhaps? Assisted showers, mixed sauna with two hefty wenches to handle the birch twigs? A check the next morning revealed that the woman in the tunic was an elderly chiropodist who ran a small practice from her own home. Wolfgang Gemütlich had been having his corns trimmed.

On the first of December, Gidi Barzilai received a rocket from Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. This was not an operation without a limit of time, he was warned. The United Nations had given Iraq till January 16 to get out of Kuwait. After that, there would be war. Anything might happen.

Get on with it.

The Fist of God

“Gidi, we can follow this bastard till hell freezes over,” the two team leaders told their controller. “There’s just no dirt in his life. I don’t understand the bastard. Nothing—he does nothing we can use on him.”

Barzilai was in a dilemma. They could kidnap the wife and threaten the husband that he had better cooperate or else. ... Trouble was, the sleaze would trade her in rather than steal a luncheon voucher. Worse, he would call the cops.

They could kidnap Gemütlich and work him over. The trouble there was, the man would have to go back to the bank to make the transfer to close down the Jericho account. Once inside the bank, he’d yell blue murder. Kobi Dror had said, no miss and no traces.

“Let’s switch to the secretary,” Barzilai said. “Confidential secretaries often know everything their boss knows.”

So the two teams switched their attentions to the equally dull-looking Fräulein Edith Hardenberg.

She took even less time, just ten days. They tailed her to her home, a small apartment in a staid old house just off Trautenauplatz far out in the Nineteenth District, the northwestern suburb of Grinzing.

She lived alone. No lover, no boyfriend, not even a pet. A search of her private papers revealed a modest bank account, a mother in retirement in Salzburg. The apartment itself had once been rented by the mother, as the rent book showed, but the daughter had moved in seven years earlier when the mother returned to her native Salzburg.

Edith drove a small Seat car, which she parked on the street outside the flat, but she mainly commuted to work by public transportation, no doubt due to the parking difficulties in the city center.

Her pay stubs revealed a stingy salary—“mean bastards,” exploded the neviot searcher when he saw the sum—and her birth certificate revealed she was thirty-nine—“and looking fifty,” remarked the The Fist of God

searcher.

There were no pictures of men in the flat, just one of her mother, one of them both on vacation by some lake, and one of her apparently deceased father in the uniform of the customs service.

If there was any man in her life, it appeared to be Mozart.

“She’s an opera buff, and that’s all,” the neviot team leader reported back to Barzilai, after the flat had been left exactly as they found it.

“There’s a big collection of LP records—she hasn’t gotten around to compact disks yet—and they’re all opera. Must spend most of her spare cash on them. Books on opera, on composers, singers, and conductors. Posters of the Vienna Opera winter calendar, though she couldn’t begin to afford a ticket.”

“No man in her life, eh?” mused Barzilai.

“She might fall for Pavarotti, if you can get him. Apart from that, forget it.”

But Barzilai did not forget it. He recalled a case in London, long ago.

A civil servant in Defence, real spinster type; then the Sovs had produced this stunning young Yugoslav ... even the judge had been sympathetic at her trial.

That evening Barzilai sent a long encrypted cable to Tel Aviv.

By the middle of December, the buildup of the Coalition army south of the Kuwaiti border had become a great, inexorable tidal wave of men and steel.

Three hundred thousand men and women of thirty nations stretched in a series of lines across the Saudi desert from the coast and westward for over a hundred miles.

At the ports of Jubail, Dammam, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and The Fist of God

Dubai the cargo ships came in from the sea to disgorge guns and tanks, fuel and stores, food and bedding, ammunition and spares in endless succession.

From the docks the convoys rolled west along the Tapline Road to establish the vast logistic bases that would one day supply the invading army.

A Tornado pilot from Tabuq, flying south from a feint attack on the Iraqi border, told his squadron colleagues he had flown over the nose of a convoy of trucks and then on to the tail of the line. At five hundred miles per hour, it had taken him six minutes to reach the end of the line of trucks fifty miles away, and they had been rolling nose to tail.

At Logistic Base Alpha one compound had oil drums stacked three high on top of each other, on pallets six feet by six, with lines between them the width of a forklift truck. The compound was forty kilometers by forty.

And that was just for fuel. Other compounds at Log Alpha had shells, rockets, mortars, caissons of machine-gun rounds, armor-piercing antitank warheads, and grenades. Others contained food and water, machinery and spares, tank batteries and mobile workshops.

At that time the Coalition forces were confined by General Schwarzkopf to the portion of desert due south of Kuwait. What Baghdad could not know was that before he attacked, the American general intended to send more forces across the Wadi al Batin and another hundred miles farther west into the desert, to invade Iraq itself, pushing due north and then east to take the Republican Guard in flank and destroy it.

On December 13 the Rocketeers, the 336th Squadron of the USAF

Tactical Air Command, left their base at Thumrait in Oman and The Fist of God

transferred to Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia. It was a decision that had been made on December 1.

Al Kharz was a bare-bones airfield, constructed with runways and taxi tracks but nothing else. No control tower, no hangars, no workshops, no accommodations for anyone—just a flat sheet in the desert with strips of concrete.

But it
was
an airfield. With amazing foresight, the Saudi government had commissioned and built enough air bases to host an air power totaling more than five times the Royal Saudi Air Force.

After December 1 the American construction teams moved in. In just thirty days a tented city capable of housing five thousand people and five fighter squadrons had been built.

Principal among the builders were the heavy engineers, the Red Horse teams, backed by forty huge electric generators from the Air Force.

Some of the equipment came by road on low-loaders, but most by air.

They built the clamshell hangars, workshops, fuel stores, ordnance depots, flight and briefing rooms, operations rooms, control towers, store tents, and garages.

For the aircrew and ground crew they erected streets of tents with roadways between, latrines, bathhouses, kitchens, mess halls, and a water tower to be replenished by convoys of trucks from the nearest water source.

Al Kharz lies fifty miles southeast of Riyadh, which turned out to be just three miles beyond the maximum range of the Scud missiles in Iraq’s possession. It would be home for three months to five squadrons: two of F-15E Strike Eagles—the 336th Rocketeers and the Chiefs, the 335th Squadron out of Seymour Johnson, who joined at this point; one of F-15C pure-fighter Eagles; and two of F-16 Falcon fighters.

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There was a special street for the 250 female personnel in the wing; these included the lawyer, ground-crew chiefs, truck drivers, clerks, nurses, and two squadron intelligence officers.

The aircrew flew themselves up from Thumrait; the ground crew and other staff came by cargo airplane. The entire transshipment took two days, and when they arrived, the engineers were still at work and would remain so until Christmas.

Don Walker had enjoyed his time in Thumrait. Living conditions were modern and excellent, and in the relaxed atmosphere of Oman, alcoholic drinks were permitted within the base.

For the first time, he had met the British SAS, who have a permanent training base there, and other “contract officers” serving with the Omani forces of Sultan Qaboos. Some memorable parties were held, members of the opposite sex were eminently datable, and flying the Eagles on feint missions up to the Iraqi border had been great.

Of the SAS, after a trip into the desert with them in light scout cars, Walker had remarked to the newly appointed squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner:

“These guys are certifiably insane.”

Al Kharz would turn out to be different from Thumrait. As the home of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia enforces strict teetotalism, as well as any exposure of the female form below the chin, excluding hands and feet.

In his General Order Number, One, General Schwarzkopf had banned all alcohol for the entire Coalition forces under his command. All American units abided by that order, and it strictly applied at Al Kharz.

At the port of Dammam, however, the American off-loaders were bemused by the amount of shampoo destined for the British Royal Air The Fist of God

Force. Crate after crate of the stuff was unloaded, put onto trucks or C-130 Hercules air-freighters, and brought to the RAF squadrons. They remained puzzled that in a largely waterless environment, the British aircrew could spend so much time washing their hair. It was an enigma that would continue to puzzle them until the end of the war.

At the other side of the peninsula, on the desert base of Tabuq, which British Tornados shared with American Falcons, the USAF pilots were even more intrigued to see the British at sundown, seated beneath their awnings, decanting a small portion of shampoo into a glass and topping it up with bottled water.

At Al Kharz the problem did not arise—there was no shampoo.

Conditions, moreover, were more cramped than at Thumrait. Apart from the wing commander, who had a tent to himself, the others from colonel on down shared on the basis of two, four, six, eight, or twelve to a tent, according to rank.

Even worse, the female personnel were out of bounds, a problem made even more frustrating by the fact that the American women, true to their culture and with no Saudi Mutawa—religious police—to see them, took to sun-bathing in bikinis behind low fences that they erected around their tents.

This led to a rush by the aircrew to commandeer all the hilux trucks on the base, vehicles with their chassis set high above the wheels. Only from the top of these, standing on tiptoe, could a real patriot proceed from his tent to the flight lines, passing through an enormous diversion to drive down the street between the female tents, and check that the women were in good shape.

Apart from these civic obligations, for most it was back to a creaking cot and the “happy sock.”

There was also a new mood for another reason. The United Nations The Fist of God

had issued its January 15 deadline to Saddam Hussein. The declarations coming out of Baghdad remained defiant. For the first time it became clear that they were going to go to war. The training missions took on a new and urgent edge.