Chapter 19
Brigadier Hassan Rahmani sat in his private office in the Mukhabarat building in Mansour and contemplated the events of the previous twenty-four hours with near despair.
That the principal military and war-production centers of his country were being systematically torn apart by bombs and rockets did not worry him. These developments, predicted by him weeks before, simply brought closer the pending American invasion and the fall from office of the man from Tikrit.
It was something he had planned for, longed for, and confidently expected, unaware on that midday of February 1991 that it was not going to happen.
Rahmani was a highly intelligent man, but he did not have a crystal ball. What concerned him that morning was his own survival, the odds that he would live to see the day of Saddam Hussein's fall.
The bombing at dawn of the previous day of the nuclear engineering plant at Al Qubai, so cunningly disguised that no one had ever envisaged its discovery, had shaken the power elite of Baghdad to its roots. Within minutes of the departure of the two British bombers, the surviving gunners had been in contact with Baghdad to report the attack.
On hearing of the event, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar had personally leaped into his car and driven to the spot to check on his underground staff. He was beside himself with rage and by noon had complained bitterly to Hussein Kamil, under whose Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization the entire nuclear program reposed.
Here was a program, the diminutive scientist had reportedly screamed at Saddam's son-in-law, that out of a total arms expenditure of $50 billion in a decade had alone consumed $8 billion, and at the very moment of its triumph it was being destroyed. Could the state offer no protection to his people?
The Iraqi physicist might have stood a whisker over five feet and been built like a mosquito, but in terms of influence he packed quite a punch, and the word was that he had gone on and on. A chastened Hussein Kamil had reported to his father-in-law, who had also been consumed by a transport of rage. When that happened, all Baghdad trembled for its life.
The scientists underground had not only survived but escaped, for the factory included a narrow tunnel leading half a mile under the desert and terminating in a circular shaft with handrails in the wall. The personnel had emerged this way, but it would be impossible to move heavy machinery through the same tunnel and shaft.
The main elevator and cargo hoist was a twisted wreck from the surface down to a depth of twenty feet. Restoring it would be a major engineering feat occupying weeks--weeks that Hassan Rahmani suspected Iraq did not have.
Had that been the end of the matter, he would simply have been relieved, for he had been a deeply worried man since that conference at the palace before the air war began, when Saddam had revealed the existence of "his" device. What now worried Rahmani was the crazed rage of his head of state.
Deputy President Izzat Ibrahim had called him shortly after noon of the previous day, and the head of Counterintelligence had never known Saddam's closest confidant to be in such a state. Ibrahim had told him the Rais was beside himself with anger, and when that happened, blood usually spilled. Only this could appease the rage of the man from Tikrit.
The Deputy President had made plain that it was expected that he--Rahmani--would produce results, and fast.
"What results, precisely, did you have in mind?" he had asked Ibrahim. "Find out," Ibrahim had yelled at him, "how they knew."
Rahmani had been in contact with friends in the Army who had talked to their gunners, and the reports were adamant on one thing: The British raid had involved two airplanes. There had been two more higher up, hut it was assumed these were fighters giving cover; certainly they had not dropped any bombs.
From the Army, Rahmani had talked to Air Force Opera-lions Planning. Their view--and several of their officers were Western trained--was that no target of great military significance would ever merit only a two-plane strike.
No way. So, reasoned Rahmani, if the British did not think the car junkyard was a scrap metal dump, what did they think it was? The answer probably lay with the two downed British airmen. Personally, he would have loved to conduct the interrogations, convinced that with certain hallucinogenic drugs he could have them talking within hours, and truthfully.
The Army had confirmed they had caught the pilot and navigator within three hours of the raid, out in the desert, one limping from a broken ankle. Unfortunately, a detail from the AMAM had turned up with remarkable speed and taken the fliers with them. No one argued with the AMAM. So the two Britishers were now with Omar Khatib, and Allah have mercy on them.
Cheated of his chance to shine by producing the information supplied by the fliers, Rahmani realized he would have to contribute something. The question was--what? The only thing that would suffice was what the Rais wanted. And what would he want? Why, a conspiracy. Then a conspiracy he would have. The key would be the transmitter.
He reached for his phone and called Major Mohsen Zayeed, the head of his unit's sigint section, the people charged with intercepting radio transmissions. It was time they talked again.
* * *
Twenty miles west of Baghdad lies the small town of Abu Ghraib, a most unremarkable place and yet a name known if rarely mentioned throughout Iraq. For in Abu Ghraib stood the great prison, confined almost exclusively to use in the interrogation and confinement of political detainees. As such, it was staffed and run not by the national
prison service but by the Secret Police, the AMAM.
At the time Hassan Rahmani was calling his sigint expert, a long black Mercedes approached the double wooden doors of the prison. Two guards, recognizing the occupant of the car, hurled themselves at the gates and dragged them open. Just in time; the man in the car could respond with icy brutality to those causing him a momentary delay through slackness on the job. The car went through, the gates closed.
The figure in the back acknowledged the efforts of the guards with neither nod nor gesture. They were irrelevant.
At the steps to the main office building, the car stopped, and another guard ran to open the rear passenger door. Brigadier Omar Khatib alighted, trim in a tailored barathea uniform, and stalked up the steps. Doors were hastily opened for him all the way. A junior officer, an aide, brought his attach?case.
To reach his office, Khatib took the elevator to the fifth and top floor, and when he was alone, he ordered Turkish coffee and began to study his papers. The reports of the day detailed progress in the extraction of needed information from those in the basement.
Behind his facade, Omar Khatib was as worried as his colleague across Baghdad--a man whom he loathed with the same venom as the feeling was returned.
Unlike Rahmani, who with his part-English education, grasp of languages, and cosmopolitan airs was bound to be inherently suspect, Khatib could count on the fundamental advantage of being from Tikrit.
So long as he did the job with which he had been tasked by the Rais, and did it well, keeping the confessions of treachery flowing to assuage the unappeasable paranoia, he was safe.
But the last twenty-four hours had been troubling. He too had received
a telephone call the previous day, but from the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil. Like Ibrahim to Rahmani, Kamil had brought news of the Rais's unbounded rage over the bombing of Al Qubai and was demanding results.
Unlike Rahmani, Khatib actually had the British fliers in his hands. That was an advantage on the one hand, a snare on the other. The Rais would want to know, and fast, just how the fliers had been briefed before the mission--just how much did the Allies know about Al Qubai, and how had they learned it? It was up to him, Khatib, to produce that information.
His men had been working on the fliers for fifteen hours, since seven the previous evening, when they had arrived at Abu Ghraib. So far, the fools had held out.
From the courtyard below his window came the sound of a hiss, a thwack, and a low whimper. Khatib's brow furrowed in puzzlement, then cleared as he recalled.
In the inner yard below his window an Iraqi hung by his wrists from a crossbeam, his pointed toes just four inches above the dust. Nearby stood a ewer brimming with brine, once clear, now darkly pink.
Every guard and soldier crossing the yard was under standing orders to pause, take one of the two rattan canes from the jar, and administer a single stroke to the back of the hanging man, between the neck and the knees. A corporal under an awning nearby kept the tally.
The stupid fellow was a market trader who had been heard to refer to the President as the son of a whore and was now learning, albeit a trifle late, the true measure of respect that citizens should maintain at all times in reference to the Rais.
The intriguing thing was that he was still there. It just showed what stamina some of these working-class people had. The trader had sustained more than five hundred strokes already, an impressive record. He would be dead before the thousandth--no one had ever sustained a thousand--but it was interesting all the same. The other interesting thing was that the man had been denounced by his ten-yearold son.
Omar Khatib sipped his coffee, unscrewed his rolled-gold fountain pen, and bent over his papers. Half an hour later, there was a discreet tap at his door. "Enter," he called, and looked up in expectation. He needed good news, and only one man could knock without being announced by the junior officer outside.
The man who entered was burly, and his own mother would have been hard put to call him handsome. The face was deeply pitted by boyhood smallpox, and two circular scars gleamed where cysts had been removed. He closed the door and stood, waiting to be addressed.
Though he was only a sergeant, his stained coveralls carried not even that rank, yet he was one of the few men with whom the brigadier felt any fellow feeling. Alone among the staff of the prison, Sergeant Ali was permitted to sit in his presence, when invited.
Khatib gestured the man to a chair and offered him a cigarette. The sergeant lit up and puffed gratefully; his work was onerous and tiring, the cigarette a welcome break.
The reason Khatib tolerated such familiarity from a man of such low rank was that he harbored a genuine admiration for Ali. Khatib held efficiency in high esteem, and his trusted sergeant was one who had never failed him. Calm, methodical, a good husband and father, Ali was a true professional.
"Well?" he asked. "The navigator is close, very close, sir. The pilot ..." He shrugged. "An hour or more."
"I remind you they must both be broken, Ali, nothing held back. And
their stories must conform to each other. The Rais himself is counting on us. "
"Perhaps you should come, sir. I think in ten minutes you will have your answer. The navigator first, and when the pilot learns this, he will follow." "Very well."
Khatib rose, and the sergeant held the door open for him. Together they descended past the ground floor to the first basement level, where the elevator stopped. There was a passage leading to the stairs to the subbasement.
Along the passage were steel doors, and behind them, squatting amid their filth, were seven American aircrew, four British, one Italian, and a Kuwaiti Sky hawk pilot. At the next level down were more cells, two occupied.
Khatib peered through the Judas-hole in the door of the first. A single unshaded light bulb illuminated the cell, its walls encrusted with hardened excrement and other brown stains of old blood.
In the center, on a plastic office chair, sat a man, quite naked, down whose chest ran slicks of vomit, blood, and saliva. His hands were cuffed behind him, and a cloth mask with no eye-slits covered his face.
Two AMAM men in coveralls similar to those of Sergeant Ali flanked the man in the chair, their hands caressing yard-long plastic tubes packed with bitumen, which adds weight without reducing flexibility.
They were standing back, taking a break. Before their interruption, they had apparently been concentrating on the shins and kneecaps, which were skinned raw and turning blue-yellow. Khatib nodded and passed to the next door.
Through the hole he could see that the second prisoner was not masked. One eye was completely closed, the pulped meat of the brow and cheek knit together by crusted blood. When he opened his mouth, there were gaps where two broken teeth had been, and a froth of blood emerged from the mashed lips.
"Tyne," the navigator whispered, "Nicholas Tyne. Flight lieutenant. Five oh one oh nine six eight."
"The navigator," whispered the sergeant.
Khatib whispered back, "Which of our men is the Englishspeaker?"
Ali gestured--the one on the left. "Bring him out." Ali entered the cell of the navigator and emerged with one of the interrogators.
Khatib had a conference with the man in Arabic. The man nodded, reentered the cell, and masked the navigator. Only then would Khatib allow both cell doors to be opened.
The English-speaker bent toward Nicky Tyne's head and spoke through the cloth. His English was heavily accented but passable.
"All right, Flight Lieutenant, that is it. For you, it is over. No more punishment."
The young navigator heard the words. His body seemed to slump in relief. "But your friend, he is not so lucky. He is dying now. So we can take him to the hospital--clean white sheets, doctors, everything he needs; or we can finish the job. Your choice. When you tell us, we stop and rush him to hospital."
Khatib nodded down the corridor to Sergeant Ali, who entered the other cell. From the open door came the sounds of a plastic quirt lashing a bare chest. Then the pilot began to scream.
"All right, shells!" shouted Nicky Tyne under his cowl. "Stop it, you bastards! It was an ammunition dump, for poison gas shells. ..."
The beating ceased. Ali emerged, breathing heavily, from the pilot's cell. "You are a genius, Sayid Brigadier."
Khatib shrugged modestly.
"Never underestimate the sentimentality of the British and the Americans," he told his pupil. "Get the translators now. Get all the details, every last one. When you have the transcripts, bring them to my office."
Back in his sanctum, Brigadier Khatib made a personal phone call to Hussein Kamil. An hour later, Kamil called him back. His father-in-law was delighted; a meeting would be summoned, probably that night. Omar Khatib should hold himself available for the summons.
That evening, Karim was teasing Edith again, gently and without malice, this time about her job. "Don't you ever get bored at the bank, darling?"
"No, it's an interesting job. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, I don't know. I just don't understand how you can think it interesting. For me, it would be the most boring job in the world."
"Well, it's not so there."
"All right. What's so interesting about it?"
"You know, handling accounts, placing investments, that sort of thing. It's important work."
"Nonsense. It's about saying 'Good morning, yes sir, no sir, of course sir' to lots of people running in and out to cash a fifty-schilling check. Boring."
He was lying on his back on her bed. She walked over and lay beside him, pulling one of his arms around her shoulders so that they could cuddle. She loved to cuddle.
"You are crazy sometimes, Karim. But I love you crazy. Winkler Bank isn't an issuing bank--it's a merchant bank."
"What's the difference?"
"We have no checking accounts, customers with checkbooks running
in and out. It doesn't work like that."
"So you have no money, without customers."
"Of course we have money, but in deposit accounts."
"Never had one of those," admitted Karim. "Just a small current account. I prefer cash anyway."
"You can't have cash when you are talking of millions, People would steal it. So you put it in a bank and invest it."
"You mean old Gemuetlich handles millions? Of other people's money?" "Yes, millions and millions."
"Schillings or dollars?"
"Dollars, pounds, millions and millions."
"Well, I wouldn't trust him with my money."
She sat up, genuinely shocked. "Herr Gemuetlich is completely honest. He would never dream of doing that."
"Maybe not, but somebody else might. Look--say, I know a man who has an account at Winkler. His name is Schmitt. One day I go in and say: Good morning, Herr Gemuetlich, my name is Schmitt, and I have an account here. He looks in his book, and he says: Yes, you do. So I say: I'd like to withdraw it all. Then when the real Schmitt turns up, there's nothing left. That's why cash is better for me."
She laughed at his na飗et?and pulled him down, nibbling his ear.
"It wouldn't work. Herr Gemuetlich would probably know your precious Schmitt. Anyway, he'd have to identify himself."
"Passports can be forged. Those damned Palestinians do it all the time."
"And he'd need a signature, of which he would have a specimen copy."
"So, I'd practice forging Schmitt's signature."
"Karim, I think you might turn out to be a criminal one day. You're bad."
They both giggled at the idea. "Anyway, if you were a foreigner and living abroad, you'd probably have a numbered account. They are completely impregnable."
He looked down at her from one elbow, brow furrowed.
"What's that?" "A numbered account?" "Mmmmmm."
She explained how they worked.
"That's madness," he exploded when she had finished. "Anybody could turn up and claim ownership. If Gemuetlich has never even seen the owner--"
"There are identity procedures, idiot. Very complex codes, methods of writing letters, certain ways the signatures have to be placed--all sorts of things to verify that the person is really the account owner. Unless they are all complied with--to the letter--Herr Gemuetlich will not cooperate. So impersonation is impossible."
"He must have a hell of a memory." "Oh, you are too stupid for words. It is all written down. Are you taking me out to dinner?"
"Do you deserve it?"
"You know I do."
"Oh, all right. But I want an hors d'oeuvre."
She was puzzled. "All right, order one."
"I mean you." He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss.
Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed. "I know what I'd do," he breathed. "I'd hire a safecracker, break into old Gemuetlich's safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it."
She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love. "Wouldn't work. Mmmmmm. Do that again."
"Would so."
"Aaaaaah. Wouldn't."
"Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day."
She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.
"Ooooh, is that all for me? You're a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemuetlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ..."
A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemuetlich was.
While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth. Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20.
South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.
The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner's original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track. Every known factory for the production of weapons of mass destruction had been pulverized, and that included twelve new ones added by information from Jericho.
As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try.
Some of the cream of the fighter and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open.
At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet. There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station.
By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself. From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky "the flying warthog," were roaming at will doing what they did best--destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of "tank-plinking."
What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major facilities dedicated to weapons of mass destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact.
Since the burial of the Al Qubai factory, the mood was lighter both among the four generals who knew what it had really contained, as it was among the men of the CIA and the SIS stationed in Riyadh. It was a mood mirrored in the brief message Mike Martin received that night.
His controllers in Riyadh began by informing him of the success of the Tornado mission despite the loss of one airplane. The transmission went on to congratulate him for staying in Baghdad after being allowed to leave, and on the entire mission.
Finally, he was told there was little more to do. Jericho should be sent one final message, to the effect the Allies were grateful, that all his money had been paid, and that contact would be reestablished after the war.
Then, Martin was told, he really should escape to safety in Saudi Arabia before it became impossible.
Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping. Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam--wasn't that the object of the exercise? Something had changed. Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin's sleep would not have been so easy.
In matters of technical skill there are four levels--competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the
machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.
In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Hassan Rahmani tried to get it for him.
Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani's office. "Any progress?" asked Rahmani.
"I think so," replied Zayeed. "He's there, all right--no doubt about it. The trouble is, he's using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite. With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long."
"How close are you?" said Rahmani. "Well, I've tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier. Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen." Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office.
Rahmani looked perplexed. "That's it?"
"It's encrypted, of course."
"Of course," said Rahmani. "Can you break it?"
"Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry."
"It can't be decoded?" Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer. "It's not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip. The permutations are in the hundreds of millions."
"Then what's the point?"
"The point, sir, is--I got a bearing on it."
Hassan Rahmani leaned forward in excitement. "A bearing?"
"My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There's more."
"Go on."
"He's here."
"Here in Baghdad?"
Major Zayeed smiled and shook his head. He had saved his best piece of news till last. He wanted to be appreciated. "No, sir, he's here in the Mansour district. I think he's inside an area two kilometers by two."
Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close. The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose. "I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?"
"With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred."
Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car. They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the windshield the driver simply followed the motorcycle. Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive.
Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows.
Inside the principal sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took assigned places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself.
The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit. For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more pronounced.
Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid--they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai. The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed.
None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed.
There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals--Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff--stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them.
Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened.
No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib. The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room.
The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back. They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard.
From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas shells. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been assigned to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft assigned to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any. They--the pilot and the navigator--knew nothing more than that.
The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. "True or false, Rafeek?"
"It is normal, Sayid Rais," said the man who commanded the artillery and SAM missile sites, "for them to send in first the missile fighters to hit the defenses, then the bombers for the target. They always do that. For a high-priority target, two airplanes only and no support has never happened."
Saddam mused on the answer, his dark eyes betraying nothing of his thoughts. That was a part of the power he held over these men; they never knew which way he would react. "Is there any chance, Rafeek Khatib, that these men have hidden things from you, that they know more than they have said?"
"No, Rais. They have been ... persuaded to cooperate completely."
"Then that is the end of the matter?" asked the Rais quietly.
"The raid was just an unfortunate chance?"
Heads nodded round the room. The scream when it came paralyzed them all. "Wrong! You are all wrong!"
In a second the voice dropped back to a calm whisper, but the fear had been instilled. They all knew that the softness of the voice could precede the most terrible of revelations, the most savage of penalties. "There have been no trucks, no Army trucks. An excuse given to the pilots in case they were caught. There is something more, is there not?"
Most of them were sweating despite the air conditioning. It had always been thus, since the dawn of history, when the tyrant of a tribe called in the witch-finder and the tribe sat and trembled lest he should be the one at whom the juju-stick pointed.
"There is a conspiracy," whispered the Rais. "There is a traitor. Someone is a traitor, who conspires against me." He stayed silent for several minutes, letting them tremble.
When he spoke again, it was to the three men who faced him across the room. "Find him. Find him and bring him to me. He shall learn the punishment for such crimes. He and all his family." Then he swept from the room followed by his personal bodyguard.
The sixteen men left behind did not even look at each other, could not
meet another's gaze. There would be a sacrifice. No one knew who it would be. Each feared for himself, for some chance remark, perhaps not even that.
Fifteen of the men kept distance from the last, the witch-finder, the one they called Al-Mu'azib, the Tormentor. He would produce the sacrifice.
Hassan Rahmani too kept silent. This was no time to mention radio intercepts. His operations were delicate, subtle, based on detection and real intelligence. The last thing he needed was to find the thumping boots of the AMAM trampling all over his investigations. In a mood of terror the ministers and generals departed back into the night and to their duties.
"He doesn't keep them in his office safe," said Avi Herzog, alias Karim, to his controller Gidi Barzilai over a late breakfast the next morning.
The meeting was safe, in Barzilai's own apartment. Herzog had not made the phone call, from a public booth, until Edith Hardenberg was safely in the bank.
Shortly after, the yarid team had arrived, boxing in their colleague as they escorted him to the rendezvous to ensure there was no chance he was being followed. Had he grown a tail, they would have seen it. It was their speciality.
Gidi Barzilai leaned forward across the food-strewn table, eyes alight. "Well done, boychick. So now I know where he doesn't keep the codes. The point is, where?"
"In his desk."
"The desk? You're mad. Anyone can open a desk." "Have you seen it?"
"Gemuetlich's desk? No."
"Apparently it is very big, very ornate, and very old. A real antique. Also, it has a compartment, created by the original cabinetmaker, so secret, so hard to find, that Gemuetlich thinks it is safer than any safe. He believes a burglar might go for the safe but would never think of the desk. Even if a burglar went through the desk, he would never find the compartment."
"And she doesn't know where it is?" "Nope. Never seen it opened. He always locks himself in the office when he has to refer to it."
Barzilai thought it over. "Cunning bastard. I wouldn't have given him credit for it. You know, he's probably right."
"Can I break it off now--the affair?" "No, Avi, not yet. If you're right, you've done brilliantly. But stick around, keep play-acting. If you vanish now, she will think back to your last conversation, put two and two together, have a fit of remorse, whatever. Stay with her, talk, but never again about banking."
Barzilai thought over his problem. No one of his team in Vienna had ever seen the safe, but there was one man who had. Barzilai sent a heavily coded message to Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. The spotter was brought in and sat in a room with an artist.
The spotter was not multitalented, but he had one amazing skill: He had a photographic memory. For over five hours he sat with his eyes closed and cast his mind back to the interview he had had with Gemuetlich while posing as a lawyer from New York.
His principal task had been to look for alarm catches on windows and doors, for a wall safe, wires indicating pressure pads--all the tricks for keeping a room secure. These he had noted and reported.
The desk had not interested him too much. But sitting in a room beneath King Saul Boulevard weeks later, he could close his eyes and see it all again. Line by line, he described the desk to the artist. Sometimes the spotter would look at the drawing, make a correction, and resume.
The artist worked in India ink with a fine pen and colored the desk with watercolors. After five hours the artist had a sheet of the finest cartridge paper on which was an exact colored picture of the desk then sitting in the office of Herr Wolfgang Gemuetlich at the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, Vienna.
The drawing went to Gidi Barzilai in the diplomatic pouch from Tel Aviv to the Israeli embassy in Austria. He had it within two days. Before then a check on the list of sayanim across all Europe had revealed the existence of Monsieur Michel Levy, an antiquarian on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, noted as one of the leading experts on classical furniture on the continent.
It was not until the night of the fourteenth, the same day Barzilai received his watercolor painting in Vienna, that Saddam Hussein reconvened his meeting of ministers, generals, and intelligence chiefs.
Again the meeting was called at the behest of AMAM chief Omar Khatib, who had passed news of his success via the son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and again it was in a villa in the dead of night. The Rais simply entered the room and gestured to Khatib to report upon his findings.
"What can I say, Sayid Rais?" The head of the Secret Police raised his hands and let them drop in a gesture of helplessness. It was a masterpiece in the acting of self-deprecation. "The Rais was, as ever, right, and we were all wrong. The bombing of Al Qubai was indeed no accident. There was a traitor, and he has been found."
There was a buzz of sycophantic amazement around the room. The man in the upright padded chair with his back to the windowless wall beamed and held up his hands for such unnecessary applause to cease. It did, but not too quickly.
Was I not right? The smile said. Am I not always right?
"How did you discover this, Rafeek?" asked the Rais.
"A combination of good luck and detective work," admitted Khatib modestly. "As for the good fortune, this as we know is the gift of Allah, who smiles upon our Rais."
There was an assenting rumble around the room.
"Two days before the attack by the bombers of the Beni Naji, a traffic control point was established on a road nearby. It was a routine spot check by my men on movements by possible deserters, contraband goods. ... The vehicle numbers were noted.
"Two days ago I checked these and found that most of the vehicles were local--vans and trucks. But one was an expensive car, registered here in Baghdad. The owner was traced, a man who might have had reason to visit Al Qubai. But a telephone call ascertained that he had not visited the facility. Why, I wondered, had he been in the area, then?"
Hassan Rahmani nodded. That was good detective work, if it was true. And it was unlike Khatib who usually relied on brute force.
"And why was he there?" asked the Rais.
Khatib paused to let the revelation sink in. "To note a precise description of the aboveground car junkyard, to define the distance from the nearest major landmark and the exact compass bearing--everything an Air Force would need to find it."
There was a universal exhalation of breath around the room.
"But that came later, Sayid Rais. First I invited the man to join me at AMAM headquarters for a little frank talk."
Khatib's mind strayed back to the frank conversation in the basement beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, Baghdad, that basement known as the Gymnasium.
Habitually, Omar Khatib had his underlings conduct interrogations, contenting himself to decree the level of severity and supervise the outcome. But this had been a matter of such delicacy that he had accomplished the task himself, banning all others beyond the soundproof door.
From the roof of the cell jutted two steel hooks, a yard apart, and from them hung two short chains hooked to a timber bar. The wrists of the suspect he had had lashed to the ends of the bar, so the man hung with arms a yard apart. Because the arms were not vertical, the strain was all the greater. The feet were four inches off the floor, the ankles tied to another yardlong pole.
The X-shaped configuration of the prisoner gave access to all parts of the body, and because he hung in the center of the room, he could be approached from all sides.
Omar Khatib had laid the clotted rattan cane on a side table and came around to the front. The manic screaming of the man under the first fifty lashes had ceased, dying to a mumbling burble of pleas.
Khatib stared him in the face. "You are a fool, my friend. You could end all this so easily. You have betrayed the Rais, but he is merciful. All I need is your confession."
"No, I swear ... wa-Allah-d-Adheem ... by Allah the Great, I have betrayed no one." The man was weeping like a child, tears of agony pouring down his
face. He was soft, Khatib noted; this will not take long.
"Yes, you have betrayed. Qubth-ut-Allah--you know what that means?" "Of course," whimpered the man. "And you know where it was stored for safety?" "Yes."
Khatib brought his knee hard upward into the exposed testicles. The man would have liked to double up but could not. He vomited, the slick running down his bare body to dribble off the end of his penis.
"Yes--what?" "Yes, sayidi." "Better. And where the Fist of God was hidden--that was not known to our enemies?"
"No, sayidi, it is a secret."
Khatib's hand flashed out and caught the hanging man across the face. "Monyouk, filthy monyouk, then how is it that this very morning at dawn, the enemy planes bombed it and destroyed our weapon?"
The prisoner opened his eyes wide, his shock overcoming his shame at the insult. Monyouk in Arabic is the man who plays the female role in a homosexual coupling.
"But that is not possible. No one but a few know about Al Qubai--"
"But the enemy knew. ... They have destroyed it."
"Sayidi, I swear, this is impossible. They could never find it. The man who built it, Colonel Badri, disguised it too well. ..."
The interrogation had continued for a further half hour until its inevitable conclusion. Khatib was interrupted from his reverie by the Rais himself.
"And who is he, our traitor?" "The engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqui, Rais."
There was a gasp. The President nodded slowly, as if he had suspected the man all along.
"Might one ask," said Hassan Rahmani, "who the wretch was working for?"
Khatib darted a look of venom at Rahmani and took his time. "This he did not say, Sayid Rais."
"But he will, he will," said the President.
"Sayid Rais," murmured Khatib, "I'm afraid I have to report that at this point of his confession, the traitor died."
Rahmani was on his feet, protocol ignored. "Mr. President, I must protest. This shows the most amazing incompetence. The traitor must have had a link line through to the enemy, some way of sending his messages. Now we may never know."
Khatib shot him a look of such pure hate that Rahmani, who had read Kipling as a boy in Mr. Hartley's school, was reminded of Krait, the dust-snake who hissed "Beware, for I am death."
"What have you to say?" asked the Rais.
Khatib was contrite! "Sayid Rais, what can I say? The men who serve under me love you as their own father--nay, more. They would die for you. When they heard this traitorous filth pouring out ... there was an excess of zeal."
Bullshit, thought Rahmani. But the Rais was nodding slowly. It was the sort of language he liked to hear. "It is understandable," the Rais said. "These things happen. And you, Brigadier Rahmani, who criticize your colleague, have you had any success?"
It was noticeable that Rahmani was not referred to as Rafeek, "Comrade." He would have to be careful, very careful.
"There is a transmitter, Sayid Rais, in Baghdad." He went on to reveal what Major Zayeed had told him. He thought of adding one last phrase--"One more transmission, if we can catch it, and I think we will have the sender"--but he decided it could wait.
"Then since the traitor is dead," said the Rais, "I can reveal to you what I could not say two days ago. The Fist of God is not destroyed, not even buried. Twenty-four hours before the bombing raid, I ordered it to be removed to a safer place."
It took several seconds for the applause to die down as the inner circle expressed their admiration for the sheer genius of the leader. He told them the device had gone to the Fortress, whose whereabouts did not concern them, and from the Qa'ala it would be launched, to change all history, on the day the first combat boot of an American soldier stepped onto the holy land of Iraq.