The Fist of God (47 page)

He might be streetwise, but in all other matters he was a strategic buffoon. And yet, reasoned the British general, how could any man be so stupid?

Even in the face of the air power now ranged against him, Saddam Hussein was making every single wrong move, politically and militarily. Had he no idea what rage from the skies was about to be visited on Iraq? Did he really not comprehend the level of the firepower that was about to set his armory back by ten years in five weeks?

The general stopped and stared across the desert toward the north.

There was no moon that night, but the stars in the desert are so bright that dim outlines can be seen by their light alone. The land was flat, running away to the labyrinth of sand walls, fire ditches, minefields, barbed-wire entanglements, and gullies that made up the Iraqi defensive line, through which the American engineers of the Big Red One would blast a path to let the Challengers roll.

And yet the tyrant of Baghdad had one single ace of which the general knew and which he feared: Saddam could simply pull out of Kuwait.

Time was not on the Allies’ side; it belonged to Iraq. On March 15 the Moslem feast of Ramadan would begin. For a month no food or water The Fist of God

should pass the lips of any Moslem between sunrise and sunset. The nights were for eating and drinking. That made going to war, for a Moslem army in Ramadan, almost impossible.

After April 15, the desert would become an inferno, with temperatures rising to 130 degrees. Pressure would build up back home to bring the boys out; by summer, the pressure at home and the misery of the desert would become irresistible. The Allies would have to pull out and, having done so, would never come back again like this. The Coalition was a one-time-only phenomenon.

So March 15 was the limit. Working backward, the ground war might last up to twenty days. It would have to start, if at all, by February 23.

But Chuck Horner needed his thirty-five days of air war to smash the Iraqi weapons, regiments, and defenses. January 17—that was the latest possible date.

Supposing Saddam pulled out? He would leave half a million Allies looking like fools, strung out in the desert, hanging in the wire, with nowhere to go but back. Yet Saddam was adamant—he would not pull out.

What was that crazy man up to? the general asked himself again. Was he waiting for something, some divine intervention of his own imagining, that would crush his enemies and leave him triumphant?

There was a yell out of the tank camp behind him. He turned. The commanding officer of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, Arthur Denaro, was calling him to supper. Burly, jovial Arthur Denaro, who would be in the first tank through that gap one day.

He smiled and began to walk back. It would be good to squat in the sand with the men, shoveling baked beans and bread out of a mess tin, listening to the voices in the glow of the fire, the flat twang of Lancashire, the rolling burr of Hampshire, and the soft brogue of The Fist of God

Ireland; to laugh at the leg-pulling and the jokes, the crude vocabulary of men who used blunt English to say exactly what they meant, and with good humor.

Lord rot that man in the north. What the hell was he waiting for?

Chapter 14

The answer to the British general’s puzzlement lay on a padded trolley under the fluorescent lights of the factory, eighty feet beneath the desert of Iraq, where it had been built.

An engineer stepped rapidly back to stand at attention as the door to the room opened. Only five men came in before the two armed guards from the presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, closed the door.

Four of the men deferred to the one in the center. He wore, as usual, his combat uniform over gleaming black calf-boots, his personal sidearm at his waist, green cotton kerchief covering the triangle between jacket and throat.

One of the other four was the personal bodyguard who, even in here, where everyone had been checked five times for concealed weapons, would not leave his side. Between the Rais and his bodyguard stood his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, the MIMI. As in so many things, it was the MIMI that had taken over from the Ministry of Defense.

On the other side of the President stood the mastermind of the The Fist of God

program, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar, Iraq’s nuclear genius. Beside him, but a bit to the rear, stood Dr. Salah Siddiqui. Where Jaafar was the physicist, Siddiqui was the engineer.

The steel of their baby gleamed dully in the white light. It was fourteen feet long and just over three feet in diameter.

At the rear, four feet were taken up by an elaborate impact-absorbing device that would be shed as soon as the projectile had been launched.

Even the remainder of the ten-foot-long casing was in fact a sabot, a sleeve in eight identical sections. Tiny explosive bolts would cause this to break away as the projectile departed on its mission, leaving the slimmer, two-foot-diameter core to carry on alone.

The sabot was only there to fill out the twenty-four-inch projectile to the thirty-nine inches needed to occupy the bore of the launcher, and to protect the four rigid tail fins it concealed.

Iraq did not possess the telemetry necessary to operate movable fins by radio signals from the earth, but the rigid fins would serve to stabilize the projectile in flight and prevent it from wobbling or tumbling.

At the front, the nose cone was on ultratough maraging steel and needle-pointed. This too would eventually become dispensable.

When a rocket, having entered inner space on its flight, reenters the earth’s atmosphere, the air becoming denser on the downward flight creates a friction heat enough to melt the nose cone away. That is why reentering astronauts need that heat shield—to prevent their capsule from being incinerated.

The device the five Iraqis surveyed that night was similar. The steel nose cone would ease its flight upward but could not survive reentry.

Were it retained, the melting metal would bend and buckle, causing the falling body to sway, swerve, turn broadside onto the rushing air, and burn up. The steel nose was designed to blow apart at the apogee of The Fist of God

flight, revealing beneath it a reentry cone, shorter, blunter, and made of carbon fiber.

In the days when Dr. Gerald Bull was alive, he had tried to buy, on behalf of Baghdad, a British firm in Northern Ireland called LearFan.

It was an aviation company gone bust. It had tried to build executive jets with many components made of carbon fiber. What interested Dr.

Bull and Baghdad was not executive airplanes, but the carbon-fiber filament-winding machines at LearFan.

Carbon fiber is extremely heat-resistant, but it is also very hard to work. The carbon is first reduced to a sort of wool, from which a thread or filament is spun. The thread is laid and cross-plaited many times over a mold, then bonded into a shell to create the desired shape.

Because carbon fiber is vital in rocket technology, and that technology is classified, great care is taken in monitoring the export of such machines. When the British intelligence people learned where the LearFan equipment was destined and consulted Washington, the deal had been killed. It was then assumed that Iraq would not acquire her carbon-filament technology.

The experts were wrong. Iraq tried another tack, which worked. An American supplier of air-conditioning and insulation products was unwittingly persuaded to sell to an Iraqi front company the machinery for spinning rock-wool. In Iraq this was modified by Iraqi engineers to spin carbon fiber.

Between the impact-absorber at the back and the nose cone rested the work of Dr. Siddiqui—a small, workaday, but perfectly functioning atomic bomb, to be triggered on the gun-barrel principle, using the catalysts of lithium and polonium to create the blizzard of neutrons necessary to start the chain reaction.

Inside the engineering of Dr. Siddiqui was the real triumph, a spherical The Fist of God

ball and a tubular plug, between them weighing thirty-five kilograms and produced under the aegis of Dr. Jaafar. Both were of pure enriched uranium-235.

A slow smile of satisfaction spread beneath the thick black moustache.

The President advanced and ran a forefinger down the burnished steel.

“It will work? It will really work?” he whispered.

“Yes,
Sayid Rais
,” said the physicist.

The head in the black beret nodded slowly several times.

“You are to be congratulated, my brothers.”

Beneath the projectile, on a wooden stand, was a simple plaque. It read: Qubth-ut-Allah.

* * *

Twenty years they had known each other, twenty years during which the Foreign Minister had served his master with doglike devotion, always taking his side during those early struggles within the Ba’ath Party hierarchy when there had been other claimants for power, always following his personal judgment that the utter ruthlessness of the man from Tikrit would triumph, and always being proved right.

They had climbed the greasy pole of power in a Middle East dictatorship together, the one always in the shadow of the other. The gray-haired, stubby Aziz had managed to overcome the initial disadvantage of his higher education and grasp of two European languages by sheer blind obedience.

Leaving the actual violence to others, he had watched and approved, as all must do in the court of Saddam Hussein, as purge after purge had The Fist of God

seen columns of Army officers and once-trusted Party men disgraced and taken away for execution, a sentence often preceded by agonized hours with the tormentors at Abu Ghraib.

He had seen good generals removed and shot for trying to stand up for the men under their command, and he knew that real conspirators had died more horribly than he cared to imagine.

He had watched the Al-Juburi tribe, once so powerful in the Army that no one dared to offend them, stripped and humbled, the survivors brought to heel and obedience. He had stayed silent as Saddam’s half-brother Ali Hassan Majid, then Interior Minister, had masterminded the genocide of the Kurds, not simply at Halabja but at fifty other towns and villages, wiped away with bombs, artillery, and gas.

Tariq Aziz, like all those in the entourage of the Rais, knew that there was nowhere else for him to go. If anything happened to his master, he too would be finished for all time.

Unlike some around the throne, he was too smart to believe that this was a popular regime. His real fear was not the foreigners but the awful revenge of the people of Iraq if ever the veil of Saddam’s protection were removed from him.

His problem that January 11, as he waited for the personal appointment to which he had been summoned on his return from Europe, was how to phrase the American threat without attracting the inevitable rage onto himself. The Rais, he knew, could easily suspect that it was he, the Foreign Minister, who had really suggested the threat to the Americans. There is no logic to paranoia, only gut instinct, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Many innocent men had died, and their families with them, on the basis of some inspirational suspicion by the Rais.

Two hours later, returning to his car, he was relieved, smiling and The Fist of God

puzzled.

The reason for his relief was easy; his President had proved to be relaxed and genial. He had listened with approval to Tariq Aziz’s glowing report of his mission to Geneva, of the widespread sympathy he detected in all those he spoke to with regard to Iraq’s position, and of the general anti-American feeling that appeared to be growing in the West.

He had nodded understandingly as Tariq heaped blame on the American warmongers, and when, finally consumed with his own sense of outrage, he mentioned what James Baker had actually said to him, the awaited explosion of rage from the Rais had not come.

While others around the table glowered and fumed, Saddam Hussein had continued to nod and smile.

The Foreign Minister was smiling as he left because at the last his Rais had actually congratulated him on his European mission. The fact that, by any normal diplomatic standards, that mission had been a disaster—rebuffed on every side, treated with freezing courtesy by his hosts, unable to dent the resolve of the Coalition ranged against his country—did not seem to matter.

His puzzlement stemmed from something the Rais had said at the end of the audience. It had been an aside, a muttered remark to the Foreign Minister alone as the President had seen him to the door.

“
Rafeek
, dear Comrade, do not worry. Soon I shall have a surprise for the Americans. Not yet. But if the Beni el Kalb ever try to cross the border, I shall respond not with gas, but with the Fist of God.”

Tariq Aziz had nodded in agreement, even though he did not know what the Rais was talking about. With others, he found out twenty-four hours later.

The Fist of God

The morning of January 12 saw the last meeting of the full Revolutionary Command Council to be held in the Presidential Palace, at the corner of July 14 Street and Kindi Street. A week later it was bombed to rubble, but the bird inside was long flown.

As usual, the summons to the meeting came at the last moment. No matter how high one rose in the hierarchy, no matter how trusted one might be, no one but a tiny handful of family, intimates, and personal bodyguards ever knew exactly where the Rais would be at a given hour on any day.

If he was still alive at all after seven major, serious attempts at assassination, it was because of his obsession with personal security.

Neither Counterintelligence nor the Secret Police of Omar Khatib, and certainly not the Army; not even the Republican Guard were entrusted with that security. That task fell to the Amn-al-Khass. Young they might be, most barely out of their teens, but their loyalty was fanatical and absolute. Their commander was the Rais’s own son Kusay.

No conspirator could ever know upon what road the Rais would be traveling, when, or in what vehicle. His visits to army bases or industrial installations were always surprises, not only to the visited but also to those around him. Even in Baghdad he flitted from location to location on a whim, sometimes spending a few days in the palace, at other times retiring to his bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel.