Chapter 5
The Dhahran Airport was choked. It seemed to Mike Martin as he arrived from Riyadh that most of the eastern seaboard wanted to be on the move. Situated at the heart of the great chain of oil fields that brought Saudi Arabia her fabulous wealth, Dhahran had long been accustomed to Americans and Europeans--unlike Taif, Riyadh, Yenbo, and the other cities of the kingdom. Even the bustling port of Jeddah was not accustomed to so many Anglo-Saxon faces on the street, but by the second week of August, Dhahran was reeling from the invasion.
Some were trying to get out; many had driven across the causeway into Bahrain to fly out from there. Others were at the Dhahran airport, wives and families of oil men mainly, heading for Riyadh and a connecting flight home. Others were coming in, a torrent of Americans with their weaponry and stores. Martin's own civilian flight just squeezed in between two lumbering C-5 Galaxies, two of an almost nose-to-tail air convoy from Britain, Germany, and the United States that was engaged in the steady buildup that would transform northeastern Saudi Arabia into one great armed camp.
This was not Desert Storm; the campaign to liberate Kuwait was still five months away. This was Desert Shield, designed to deter the Iraqi Army, now increased to fourteen divisions deployed along the border and throughout Kuwait, from rolling south.
To a watcher at the Dhahran airport, it might seem impressive, but a more intensive study would reveal that the protective skin was paperthin.
The American armor and artillery had not yet arrived--the earliest sea departures were just clearing the U.S. coastline--and the stores carried by the Galaxies, Starlifters, and Hercules were a fraction of the sort of cargo a ship could carry.
The Eagles based at Dhahran and the Hornets of the Marines on Bahrain, plus the British Tornados that had just arrived at Dhahran and hardly cooled down from their journey from Germany, had enough ordnance between them to mount half a dozen missions before running out.
It takes more than that to stop a determined onslaught of massed armor. Despite the impressive show of military hardware at a few airfields, northeastern Saudi Arabia still lay naked under the sun.
Martin shouldered his way out of the milling throng in the arrivals hall, his tote bag over one shoulder, and caught sight of a familiar face among the crowd at the barrier.
On his first selection course for the SAS, when they had told him they were not going to try and train him but instead try and kill him, they had almost succeeded. One day he had marched thirty miles over the Brecons, some of the crudest terrain in Britain, in freezing rain with one hundred pounds of gear in his Bergen rucksack. Like the others, he was beyond exhaustion, locked into a private world where all existence was a miasma of pain and only the will survived.
Then he had seen the truck, that beautiful waiting truck. The end of the march and, in terms of human endurance, the end of the line. A hundred yards, eighty, fifty; an end to the all-consuming agony of his body crept nearer and nearer as his numbed legs drove him and the Bergen those last few yards.
There had been a man sitting in the back of the truck, watching the rainstreaked, pain-wracked face staggering toward him. When the tailboard was ten inches from Martin's outstretched fingers, the man rapped on the rear of the cab and the truck rolled away. It did not roll an extra hundred yards; it rolled another ten miles. Sparky Low had been the man in the truck.
"Hi, Mike. Good to see you." That sort of thing takes an awful lot of forgiving.
"Hi, Sparky. How are things." "Bloody hairy, since you ask."
Sparky hauled his nondescript four-wheel-drive jeep out of the parking lot, and in thirty minutes they were clear of Dhahran and heading north. It was two hundred miles up to Khafji, a three-hour run, but after the port of Jubail slipped by to their right, they at least had some privacy. The road was empty. No one had any appetite for a visit to Khafji, a small oil community on the border of Kuwait, now reduced to a ghost town.
"Refugees still coming over?" asked Martin. "Some," nodded Sparky. "Down to a trickle, though. The main rush has come and gone. Those coming down the main road are mainly women and kids with passes--the Iraqis let them through to get rid of them. Smart enough. If I were running Kuwait, I'd want to get rid of the expatriates too.
"Some Indians get through--the Iraqis seem to ignore them. Not so smart. The Indians have good information, and I've persuaded a couple to turn around and go back with messages for our people."
"Have you got the stuff I asked for?" "Yep. Gray must have pulled some strings. It arrived in a truck with Saudi markings yesterday. I put it in the spare bedroom. We'll have dinner tonight with this young Kuwaiti Air Force pilot I told you about. He claims he has contacts inside, reliable people who might be useful."
Martin grunted. "He doesn't see my face. Might get shot down." Sparky thought it over. "Right."
Sparky Low's commandeered villa was not half bad, thought Martin. It belonged to an American oil executive from Aramco, which had pulled its man out of there and back to Dhahran.
Martin knew better than to ask just what Sparky Low was doing in that neck of the woods. It was obvious that he, too, had been "borrowed" by Century House, and his task seemed to be intercepting the refugees filtering south and, if they would talk, debriefing them on what they had seen and heard.
Khafji was virtually deserted, apart from the Saudi National Guard, who were dug in defensive positions in and around the town. But there were still a few disconsolate Saudis wandering around, and from one stallholder in the market, who could not believe that he actually had a customer, Martin bought the clothes he needed. Electric power was still running in Khafji in mid-August, which meant the air conditioning functioned, as did the water pump from the well and the water heater. There was a bath available, but he knew better than to take one.
He had not washed, shaved, or brushed his teeth for three days. If Mrs. Gray, his hostess back in Riyadh, had noticed the increasing odor, which she certainly had, she was too well bred to mention it. For dental hygiene Martin just picked his teeth with a splint of wood after a meal. Sparky Low did not mention it, either, but then, he knew the reason.
The Kuwaiti officer turned out to be a handsome young man of twentysix who was consumed with rage at what had been done to his country and was clearly a supporter of the ousted Al Sabah royal dynasty, which was now lodged in a luxury hotel in Taif as guests of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
He was also bewildered to find that though his host was what he expected--a British officer in civilian casual dress--the third person at the meal appeared to be a fellow Arab but was dressed in a soiled offwhite thob with a speckled keffiyeh on his head, one trailing corner tucked across the lower half of his face. Low introduced them.
"You are really British?" asked the young man in surprise. It was explained to him why Martin was dressed the way he was and why he kept his face covered. Captain Khaled Al-Khalifa nodded. "My apologies, Major. Of course I understand."
The captain's story was clear and straightforward. He had been called at his home on the evening of August 1 and told to report to Ahmadi air base, where he was stationed.
Through the night, he and his fellow officers had listened to radio reports of the invasion of their country from the north. By dawn, his squadron of Skyhawk fighters had been fueled, armed, and ready for takeoff. The American Skyhawk, though by no means a modern fighter, could still prove quite useful in a ground attack. It would never be any match for the Iraqi MiG 23, 25, or 29 or the French-built Mirage, but fortunately, on his one combat mission to date, he had never met any.
He had found his targets in the northern suburbs of Kuwait City just after dawn.
"I got one of their tanks with my rockets," he explained excitedly. "I know, because I saw it brew. Then I'd only the cannon left, so I went for the trucks behind. Got the first one--it swerved into a ditch and rolled over. Then I was out of ammo, so I flew back. But over Ahmadi, the control tower told us to head south for the border and save the planes. I had just enough fuel to make Dhahran.
"We got over sixty of our aircraft out, you know. Skyhawks, Mirages, and the British Hawk trainers. Plus Gazelles, Puma and Super-Puma helicopters. Now I'll fight from here and go back when we are liberated. When do you think the attack will start?"
Sparky Low smiled cautiously. The boy was so blissfully certain. "Not yet, I'm afraid. You must be patient. There is preparatory work to be done. Tell us about your father."
The pilot's father, it seemed, was an extremely wealthy merchant, a friend of the royal family and a power in the land.
"Will he favor the invasion forces?" asked Low. The young Al-Khalifa was incensed.
"Never, never! He will do anything he can to assist the liberation!" He turned to the dark eyes above the checkered cloth. "Will you see my father? You can rely on him." "Possibly," said Martin. "Will you give him a message from me?" He wrote for several minutes on a sheet of paper and gave it to Martin. When he had driven back to Dhahran, Martin burned the sheet in an ashtray. He could carry nothing incriminating into Kuwait City.
On the following morning, he and Low packed the gear he had asked for into the rear of the jeep, and they drove south again as far as Manifah, then turned west along the Tapline Road, which shadows the Iraqi border all the way across Saudi Arabia. It was called Tapline because TAP stands for Trans Arabian Pipeline, and the road serviced the pipeline carrying so much Saudi crude to the west.
Later, the Tapline Road would become the main transport artery for the biggest military land armada ever seen, as 400,000 American, 70,000 British, 10,000 French, and 200,000 Saudi and other Arab soldiers massed for the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait from the south. But that day it was empty.
A few miles along it, the jeep turned north again, back to the Saudi- Kuwaiti border but at a different place, well inland. Near the fly-blown desert village of Hamatiyyat on the Saudi side, the border is at its nearest point to Kuwait City itself.
Moreover, American photoreconnaissance pictures obtained by Gray in Riyadh showed that the mass of Iraqi forces were grouped just above the border but near the coast. The farther inland one went, the thinner the scattering of Iraqi outposts. They were concentrating their forces between the Nuwaisib crossing point on the coast and the Al- Wafra border post forty miles inland.
The village of Hamatiyyat was a hundred miles into the desert, tucked up into a kink in the line of the border that shortens the distance to Kuwait City.
The camels that Martin had asked for were waiting for them at a small farm outside the village, a rangy female in her prime, and her offspring, a cream-colored calf with a velvet muzzle and gentle eyes, still at the suck. She would grow up to become as foul-tempered as the rest of her genus, but not yet.
"Why the calf?" asked Low as they sat in the jeep and watched the animals in the corral.
"Cover story. If anyone asks, I'm taking her to the camel farms outside Sulaibiya for sale. The prices are better there." He slid out of the jeep and shuffled on sandaled feet to rouse the camel drover, who dozed in the shade of his shack. For thirty minutes the two men squatted in the dust and haggled the price of the two beasts. It never occurred to the drover, glancing at the dark face, the stained teeth, and the stubble, squatting in the dust in his dirty shift and his odor, that he was not talking to a trader of the Bedouin with money to spend on two good camels.
When the deal was settled, Martin paid up from a roll of Saudi riyals that he had taken from Low and held under one armpit for a while until they were soiled. Then he led the two camels a mile away and stopped when they were shielded from prying eyes by the sand dunes. Low caught up in the jeep.
He had sat a few hundred yards from the drover's corral and watched. Though he knew the Arabian Peninsula well, he had never worked with Martin, and he was impressed. The man did not just pretend to be an Arab; when he had slipped from the jeep, he had simply become a Bedou in every line and gesture.
Though Low did not know it, the previous day in Kuwait two British engineers, seeking to escape, had left their apartment dressed in the white neck-to-floor Kuwaiti thob with the ghutra headdress on their heads. They got halfway to their car fifty feet away when a child called up from the gutter: "You may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like English." The engineers went back to their flat and stayed there.
Sweating in the sun but out of sight of any who might be surprised at such labor being carried out in the heat of the day, the two SAS men transferred the gear into the baggage panniers that hung on either side of the she-camel. She was hunkered down on all fours but still protested at the extra weight, spitting and snarling at the men who worked on her.
The two hundred pounds of Semtex-H explosive went into one, each five-pound block wrapped in cloth, with some Hessian sacks of coffee beans on top in case any curious Iraqi soldier insisted on looking. The other pannier took the submachine guns, ammunition, detonators, timepencils, and grenades, along with Martin's small but powerful transceiver with its fold-away satellite dish and spare cadmium-nickel batteries. These too were topped with coffee bags.
When they were finished, Low asked: "Anything more I can do?" "No, that's it, thanks. I'll stay here till sundown. No need for you to wait."
Low held out his hand. "Sorry about the Brecons." Martin shook it. "No sweat. I survived."
Low laughed, a short bark. "Yeah, that's what we do. We fucking survive. Stay lucky, Mike."
He drove away. The camel rolled an eye, belched, regurgitated some cud, and began to chew. The calf tried to get at her teats, failed, and lay down by her side.
Martin propped himself against the camel saddle, drew his keffiyeh around his face, and thought about the days to come. The desert would not be a problem; the bustle of occupied Kuwait City might be. How tight were the controls, how tough the roadblocks, how astute the soldiers who manned them? Century had offered to try and get him forged papers, but he had turned them down. The Iraqis might change the ID cards.
He was confident that the cover he had chosen was one of the best in the Arab world. The Bedouin come and go as they please. They offer no resistance to invading armies, for they have seen too many--Saracen and Turk, Crusader and Knight Templar, German and French, British and Egyptian, Israeli and Iraqi. They have survived them all because they stay out of all matters political and military.
Many regimes have tried to tame them, all without success. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, decreeing that all his citizens should have houses, built a handsome village called Escan, equipped with all modern facilities--a swimming pool, toilets, baths, running water. Some Bedouin were rounded up and moved in.
They drank the pool (it looked like an oasis), crapped on the patio, played with the water faucets, and then moved out, explaining politely to their monarch that they preferred to sleep under the stars. Escan was cleaned up and used by the Americans during the Gulf crisis.
Martin knew that his real problem was his height. He was an inch under six feet, but most Bedouin are far shorter than that. Centuries of sickness and malnourishment have left most of them disease-ridden and stunted. Water in the desert is only for drinking, by man, goat, or camel; hence, Martin's avoiding the bath. The glamour of desert living, he knew, is strictly for Westerners.
He had no identification papers, but that was not a problem. Several governments have tried to issue the Bedouin with ID papers. The tribesmen are usually delighted because they make such good toilet paper, better than a handful of gravel. For a policeman or soldier to insist on seeing a Bedou's ID papers is a waste of time, and both parties know it. From the authorities' point of view, the main thing is that the Bedouin cause no trouble. They would never dream of getting involved in any Kuwaiti resistance movement. Martin knew that; he hoped the Iraqis did, too.
He dozed until sundown, then mounted the camel. At his "hut hut hut," she rose to her feet. Her baby suckled for a while, tethered behind her, and they set off at that ambling, rolling pace that seems to be very slow but covers an amazing amount of ground. The she-camel had been well fed and watered at the corral and would not tire for days.
He was well to the northwest of the Ruqaifah police station, where a track road passes from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, when he crossed the border shortly before eight. The night was black, save for a low gleam from the stars. The glow of Kuwait's Manageesh oil field lay to his right and would probably have an Iraqi patrol in it, but the desert ahead of him was empty.
On the map it was thirty-five miles to the camel farms just south of Sulaibiya, the outlying district of Kuwait City where he intended to leave his beasts until he needed them again. But before that, he would bury the gear in the desert and mark the spot.
Unless he was stopped and delayed, he would do this in darkness before sunrise, which was nine hours away. The tenth hour would bring him to the camel farms.
When the Manageesh oil field dropped behind him, he steered by his hand compass in a straight line for his destination. The Iraqis, as he had surmised, might patrol the roads, even the tracks, but never the empty desert. No refugee would try to escape that way, nor enemy to enter.
From the camel farms, after sunrise, he knew he could scramble onboard a truck heading into the heart of town, twenty miles farther on.
Far above him, silent in the night sky, a KH-11 satellite of the National Reconnaissance Office slid across the sky. Years earlier, previous generations of American spy satellites had had to take their pictures and at intervals spit out the capsules in reentry vehicles, to be laboriously recovered and the film processed.
The KH-11s, sixty-four feet long and weighing thirty thousand pounds each, are smarter. As they take their images of the ground below them, they automatically encrypt the pictures into a series of electronic pulses that are beamed upward to another satellite.
The receiver satellite above is one of a network positioned in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they drift through space at a speed and on a course that keeps them always above the same spot on the earth. In effect, they hover. Having received the images from the KH-11, the hovering satellite either beams them straight down to the United States or, if the curve of the earth gets in the way, bounces them across space to another hovering "bird" that sends the pictures down to its American masters. Thus the NRO can collect its photographic information in real time, just seconds after the pictures are taken.
The bonus in war is huge. The KH-11 can see, for example, an enemy convoy on the move well in advance, in time to call up an air strike to blast the trucks into oblivion. The unfortunate soldiers inside them would never know how the fighter-bombers found them. For the KH- 11s can work through night and day, in cloud or fog.
The phrase has been used about them: all-seeing. Alas, it is a self- delusion.
The KH-11 that night swept out of Saudi Arabia and over Kuwait. But it did not see the lone Bedou tribesman entering forbidden territory, nor would it have cared if it had. It moved over Kuwait and into Iraq. It saw many buildings, great sprawls of industrial minicities around Al-Hillah and Tarmiya, Al-Atheer and Tuwaitha, but it did not see what was in those buildings. It did not see the vats of poison gas in preparation, nor the uranium hexafluoride destined for the gasdiffusion centrifuges of the isotope separation plant. It moved north, picking out the airfields, the highways, and the bridges. It even saw the automobile junkyard at Al Qubai, but took no notice. It saw the industrial centers of Al Qaim, Jazira, and Al-Shirqat west and north of Baghdad, but not the devices of mass death that were being prepared inside them. It passed over the Jebel al Hamreen, but it did not see the Fortress that had been built by the engineer Osman Badri. It saw only a mountain among other mountains, hill villages among other hill villages. Then it passed on over Kurdistan and into Turkey.
Mike Martin plodded on through the night toward Kuwait City, invisible in robes he had not worn for almost two weeks. He smiled on recalling the moment when, returning to his Land-Rover from a hike in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, he had been surprised to be intercepted by a plump American lady pointing a camera and shouting "click click" at him.
It had been agreed that the British Medusa Committee should meet for its preliminary conference in a room beneath the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. The main reason was that the building was secure, being regularly swept against listening devices, although it did seem that with Russians being so terribly nice these days, they might have stopped at last attempting such tiresome practices.
The room to which the eight guests were led was two floors below ground level. Terry Martin had heard of the warren of shockproof, bugproof chambers where the most delicate matters of state could be discussed in complete discretion below the innocent-looking building opposite the Cenotaph.
Sir Paul Spruce took the chair, an urbane and experienced bureaucrat with the rank of Assistant Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet. He introduced himself and then everyone to everyone. The American embassy and thus the United States was represented by the Assistant Defense Attach?and Harry Sinclair, an astute and experienced officer from Langley who had headed the CIA's London station for the past three years. Sinclair was a tall, angular man who favored tweed jackets, frequented the opera, and got along extremely well with his British counterparts.
The CIA man nodded and winked at Simon Paxman, whom he had met once at a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee, on which the CIA has a permanent seat in London.
Sinclair's job would be to note anything of interest that the British scientists might come up with and convey that information back to Washington, where the considerably larger American end of the Medusa Committee was also in session. All the findings would then be collated and compared in the continuing search to analyze Iraq's potential to cause appalling casualties.
There were two scientists from Aldermaston, the Weapons Research Establishment in Berkshire--they like to drop the word atomic in front of WRE, but that is what Aldermaston is all about. Their job would be to try and elucidate from information out of the United States, Europe, and anywhere else it could be gleaned, plus air photographs of possible Iraqi nuclear research facilities, just how far, if at all, Iraq had proceeded in its quest to crack the technology of making an atomic bomb of her own.
There were two other scientists, from Porton Down. One was a chemist, the other a biologist specializing in bacteriology.
Porton Down has often been accused in the press of researching chemical and bacteriological weapons for British use. In fact, its research has for years been concentrated on seeking antidotes to any and all forms of gas and germ warfare that might be leveled at British and allied troops. Unfortunately, it is impossible to develop antidotes to anything without first studying the properties of the toxin. The two scientists from Porton therefore had under their aegis, and in conditions of massive security, some very nasty substances. But then so, that August 13, had Mr. Saddam Hussein. The difference was, the Allies had no intention of using them on Iraqis, but it was felt that Mr. Hussein might not be so forbearing.
The Porton men's job would be to see if, from lists of chemicals purchased by Iraq over a period of years, they could deduce what he had, how much, how nasty, and if it was usable. They would also study air photographs of a range of factories and plants in Iraq to see if any telltale signs in the form of structures of certain size and shape--decontamination units, emission scrubbers--might identify the poison gas factories.
"Now, gentlemen," Sir Paul began, addressing the four scientists, "the principal burden rests upon you. The rest of us will assist and support where we can.
"I have here two volumes of intelligence so far received from our people abroad, embassy staff, trade missions, and the--ah--covert gentlemen. Early days yet. These are the first results from the cull of export licenses to Iraq over the past decade, and needless to say, they come from governments that are being most promptly helpful. "We have thrown the net as wide as possible. Reference is made to exports of chemicals, building materials, laboratory equipment, specialized engineering products--just about everything but umbrellas, knitting wool, and cuddly toys.
"Some of these exports, indeed probably the majority, will turn out to be quite normal purchases by a developing Arab country for peaceful purposes, and I apologize for what may turn out to be wasted time studying them. But please concentrate not only on specialized purchases for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, but also on dual-use purchases--items that could be adapted or cannibalized for a purpose other than that stated.
"Now, I believe our American colleagues have also been at work."
Sir Paul handed one of his files to the men from Porton Down and one to those from Aldermaston. The man from the CIA produced two files and did the same. The bewildered scientists sat facing a block of paperwork.
"We have tried," explained Sir Paul, "not to duplicate--the Americans and ourselves--but, alas, there may be some element of duplication. I apologize again. And now, Mr. Sinclair."
The CIA Head of Station, unlike the Whitehall civil servant who had almost sent the scientists to sleep with his verbosity, was direct and to the point.
"The thing is, gentlemen, we may have to fight these bastards."
This was more like it. Sinclair spoke as the British like to think Americans speak--direct, and unafraid to mince words. The four scientists gave him their rapt attention.
"If that day ever comes, we will go in first with air power. Like the British, we will want to lose the absolute minimum possible in casualties. So we'll go for their infantry, their guns, tanks, and planes. We'll target their SAM missile sites, communications links, command centers. But if Saddam uses weapons of mass destruction, we would take awful casualties, both of us. So we need to know two things.
"One, what has he got? Then we can plan for gas masks, capes, chemical antidotes. Two, where the hell has he put it? Then we can target the factories and the storage depots--destroy it all before he can use it. So study the photographs, use magnifying glasses, look for the telltale signs. We'll keep tracing and interviewing the contractors who built him these factories and the scientists who equipped them. That should tell us a lot. But the Iraqis may have moved it around a bit. So it comes back to you gentlemen, the analysts. You could get to save a lot of lives here, so give it your best shot. Identify the WMD for us, and we'll go in and bomb seven shits out of it."
The four scientists were smitten. They had a job to do, and they knew what it was. Sir Paul was looking slightly shell-shocked.
"Yes, well, I'm sure we're all deeply grateful to Mr. Sinclair for his--er--explanation. May I suggest we reconvene when either Aldermaston or Porton Down has something for us?"
When they left the building, Simon Paxman and Terry Martin strolled in the warm August sunshine out of Whitehall and into Parliament Square. It was thronged with the usual columns of tourist buses. They found an empty bench close to the marble statue of Winston Churchill, glowering down on the impudent mortals who clustered beneath him.
"You've seen the latest from Baghdad?" asked Paxman. "Of course."
Saddam Hussein had just offered to pull out of Kuwait if Israel pulled out of the West Bank and Syria out of Lebanon. An attempt at linkage. The United Nations had rejected it out of hand. The resolutions continued to roll out of the Security Council: cutting off Iraq's trade, oil exports, currency movements, air travel, resources. And the systematic destruction of Kuwait by the occupying army went on.
"Any significance?" "No, just the usual huff and puff. Predictable. Playing to the audience. The PLO liked it, of course, but that's all. It's not a game plan." "Has he got a game plan?" asked Paxman. "If so, no one can work it out. The Americans think he's crazy." "I know. I saw Bush last night on TV." "Is he crazy, Saddam?" "Like a fox." "Then why doesn't he move south into the Saudi oil fields while he has the chance? The American buildup is only starting--ours, too. A few squadrons, carriers in the Gulf, but nothing on the ground. Air power alone can't stop him. That American general they've just appointed ..."
"Schwarzkopf," said Martin. "Norman Schwarzkopf."
"That's the chap. He reckons he'll need two full months before he has the forces to stop and roll back a full-scale invasion. So why not attack now?"
"Because that would be attacking a fellow Arab state with which he has no quarrel. It would bring shame. It would alienate every Arab. It is against the culture. He wants to rule the Arab world, to be acclaimed by it, not reviled by it."
"He invaded Kuwait," Paxman pointed out. "That was different. He could claim that was correcting an imperialist injustice because Kuwait was always historically part of Iraq. Like Nehru invading Portuguese Goa." "Oh, come on, Terry. Saddam invaded Kuwait because he's bankrupt. We all know it." "Yes, that's the real reason. But the up-front reason is that he was reclaiming rightful Iraqi territory. Look, it happens all over the world. India took Goa, China took Tibet, Indonesia has taken East Timor. Argentina tried for the Falklands. Each time, the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory. It's very popular with the home crowd, you know."
"Then why are his fellow Arabs turning against him?" "Because they think he won't get away with it," said Martin.
"And he won't get away with it. They're right." "Only because of America, not because of the Arab world. If he is to gain the acclamation of the Arab world, he must humiliate America, not his Arabian neighbor. Have you been to Baghdad?" "Not recently," said Paxman.
"It's full of pictures of Saddam portrayed as the desert warrior on a white charger with raised sword. All bunkum, of course; the man's a back-street shooter. But that's how he sees himself."
Paxman rose. "It's all very theoretical, Terry. But thanks for your thoughts, anyway. Trouble is, I have to deal with hard facts. In any case, no one can see how he can humiliate America. The Yanks have all the power, all the technology. When they're ready, they can go in there and blow his army and air force away."
Terry Martin squinted up against the sun. "Casualties, Simon. America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don't matter to him."
"But there aren't enough Americans there yet." "Precisely." The Rolls-Royce bearing Ahmed Al-Khalifa swept up to the front of the office building that announced itself in English and Arabic as the headquarters of Al-Khalifa Trading Corporation Ltd. and hissed to a stop.
The driver, a big manservant, half chauffeur and half bodyguard, stepped out of the driver's seat and went to the rear to open the door for his master.
Perhaps it had been foolish to bring the Rolls, but the Kuwaiti millionaire had brushed aside all pleas to use the Volvo for fear of offending the Iraqi soldiers on the roadblocks.
"Let them rot in hell," he had growled over breakfast. In fact, the drive had been uneventful from his sumptuous home in its walled garden in the luxurious suburb of Andalus to the office building in Shamiya.
Within ten days of the invasion, the disciplined and professional soldiers of the Iraqi Republican Guard had been withdrawn from Kuwait City, to be replaced by the conscript rabble of the Popular Army. If he had hated the first, he had nothing but contempt for the latter.
In their first few days, the Guards had looted his city, but systematically and deliberately. He had seen them enter the national bank and remove the $5 billion worth of gold bullion that constituted the national reserve. But this was not looting for personal gain. The bullion bars had been placed in containers, sealed in trucks, and driven to Baghdad.
The gold Soukh had yielded another billion dollars in solid gold artifacts, and that had gone the same way.
The roadblocks of the Guards, who were distinguishable by their black berets and general bearing, had been strict and professional. Then, quite suddenly, they had been needed farther south, to take up position on the southern border facing Saudi Arabia.
In their place had come the Popular Army, ragged, unshaven, and undisciplined and, for that reason, more unpredictable and dangerous. The occasional killing of a Kuwaiti for refusing to hand over his watch or his car gave testimony to that.
By the middle of August, the heat was coming down like a hammer on an anvil. The Iraqi soldiers, seeking shelter, ripped up paving slabs and built themselves small stone huts down the streets they were supposed to be checking, and crawled inside. In the cool of the dawn and the evening they emerged to pretend to be soldiers. Then they harassed civilians and looted food and valuables under pretense of checking cars for contraband.
Mr. Al-Khalifa normally liked to be at work by seven in the morning but by delaying until ten, when the sun was hot, he had swept past the stone bivouacs with the Popular Army inside them and no one had stopped him.
Two soldiers, scruffy and hatless, had actually thrown up an inept salute at the Rolls-Royce, assuming it must contain some notable of their own side.
It could not last, of course. Some thug would steal the Rolls at gunpoint sooner or later. So what? When he had been driven back home--he was convinced he would be, but he did not know how--he would buy another.
He stepped out onto the pavement in gleaming white thob, the light cotton material of the ghutra, secured around his head with two black cords, falling about his face. The driver closed the door and returned to the other side of the car to take it away to the company garage.
"Alms, sayidi, alms. For one who has not eaten for three days." He had only half seen the man squatted on the sidewalk close to the door, apparently asleep in the sun, a sight common in any Middle Eastern city. Now the man was beside him, a Bedou in stained robes, hand outstretched.
His driver was striding back around the Rolls to send the mendicant away with a stream of curses. Ahmed Al-Khalifa held up his hand. He was a practicing Moslem who tried to abide by the teachings of the Holy Koran, one of which is that a man should give alms as generously as he can.
"Park the car," he ordered. From the side pocket of his robe, he withdrew his wallet and extracted a ten-dinar note. The Bedou took the bill in both hands, the gesture indicating that the gift of the benefactor is so weighty that it needs two hands to support it. "Shukron, sayidi, shukran." Then without changing his tone of voice, the man added, "When you are in your office, send for me. I have news from your son in the south." The merchant thought he must have misheard. The man was shuffling away down the pavement, pocketing the banknote. Al-Khalifa entered the office building, nodded in greeting to the commissionaire, and went up to his top-floor office in something of a daze. When he was seated at his desk, he thought for a moment, then pressed the intercom. "There is a Bedouin tribesman on the pavement outside. I wish to speak to him. Please send him up." If his private secretary thought her employer had gone mad, she gave no sign of it. Only her wrinkled nose, as she showed the Bedou into the cool of the office five minutes later, indicated what she thought of the personal odor of her boss's unlikely guest. When she left, the merchant gestured to a chair. "You said you had seen my son?" he asked shortly. He half thought the man might be here for an even bigger banknote. "Yes, Mr. Al-Khalifa. I was with him two days ago in Khafji." The Kuwaiti's heart leaped. It had been two weeks and no news. He had learned only indirectly that his only son had taken off that morning from Ahmadi air base, and after that--nothing. None of his contacts seemed to know what had happened. There had been much confusion that day, August 2. "You have a message from him?" "Yes, sayidi." Al-Khalifa held out his hand. "Please give it to me. I will reward you well." "It is in my head. I could bring no paper with me, so I memorized it." "Very well. Please tell me what he said." Mike Martin recited the one-page letter that the Skyhawk pilot had written, word for word. " 'My dear father, despite his appearance the man in front of you is a British officer. ...' " Al-Khalifa jerked in his chair and stared at Martin, having some difficulty believing his eyes or ears. " 'He has come into Kuwait under cover. Now that you know this, you hold his life in your hands. I beg you to trust him, as he must now trust you, for he will seek your help.
" 'I am safe and well and based with the Saudi Air Force at Dhahran. I was able to fly one mission against the Iraqis, destroying one tank and a truck. I will fly with the Royal Saudi Air Force until the liberation of our country.
" 'Each day I pray to Allah that the hours will speed by until I can return and embrace you again. Your dutiful son, Khaled.' " Martin stopped. Ahmed Al-Khalifa rose, walked to the window, and stared out. He took several long, deep breaths. When he had composed himself, he returned to his chair. "Thank you. Thank you. What is it you wish?" "The occupation of Kuwait will not last a few hours or a few days. It will take some months, unless Saddam Hussein can be persuaded to pull out."
"The Americans will not come quickly?" "The Americans and the British and the French and the rest of the Coalition will need time to build up their forces. Saddam has the fourth-largest standing army in the world, over a million men. Some are rubbish, but many are not. This occupation force will not be dislodged by a handful of soldiers." "Very well. I understand."
"In the meantime, it is felt that every Iraqi soldier and tank and gun that can be pinned down in the occupation of Kuwait cannot be used on the frontier--" "You are talking of resistance, armed resistance, fighting back," said Al-Khalifa. "Some wild boys have tried. They have shot at Iraqi patrols. They were gunned down like dogs."
"Yes, so I believe. They were brave but foolish. There are ways of doing these things. The point is not to kill hundreds, or be killed. The point is to make the Iraqi occupation army constantly nervous, always afraid, needing to escort every officer whenever he travels, never able to sleep in peace." "Look, Mr. English, I know you mean well, but I suspect you are a man accustomed to these things and skilled at them. I am not. These Iraqis are a cruel and savage people. We know them of old. If we do what you say, there will be reprisals."
"It is like rape, Mr. Al-Khalifa." "Rape?" "When a woman is to be raped, she can fight back or succumb. If she is docile, she will be violated, probably beaten, maybe killed. If she fights, she will be violated, certainly beaten, maybe killed."
"Kuwait is the woman, Iraq the rapist. This I already know. So why fight back?" "Because there is tomorrow. Tomorrow Kuwait will look in the mirror. Your son will see the face of a warrior." Ahmed Al-Khalifa stared at the dark-faced, bearded Englishman for a long time, then he said: "So will his father. Let Allah have mercy on my people. What is it you want? Money?" "Thank you, no. I have money."
He had in fact ten thousand Kuwaiti dinars, abstracted from the ambassador in London, who had drawn it from the Bank of Kuwait, on the corner of Baker Street and George Street. "I need houses to stay in. Six of them." "No problem. There are already thousands of abandoned apartments--"
"Not apartments. Detached villas. Apartments have neighbors. No one will investigate a poor man engaged to caretake an abandoned villa." "I will find them."
"Also identity papers. Real Kuwaiti ones. Three in all. One for a Kuwaiti doctor, one for an Indian accountant, and one for a market gardener from out of town."
"All right. I have friends in the Interior Ministry. I think they still control the presses that produce the ID cards. What about the picture on them?"
"For the market gardener, find an old man on the street. Pay him. For the doctor and the accountant, choose men among your staff who look roughly like me but are clean-shaven. These photographs are notoriously bad. "Lastly, cars. Three. One white station wagon, one four-wheel-drive jeep, one old and battered pickup truck. All in lock-up garages, all with new plates."
"Very well, it will be done. The ID cards and the keys to the garages and houses--where will you collect them?"
"Do you know the Christian cemetery?" Al-Khalifa frowned.
"I've heard of it, I've never been there. Why?" "It's on the Jahra road in Sulaibikhat, next to the main Moslem cemetery. A very obscure gate with a tiny notice saying: For Christians. Most of the tombstones are for Lebanese and Syrians, with some Filipinos and Chinese. In the far right-hand corner is one for a merchant seaman, Shepton. The marble slab is loose. Under it I have scraped a cavity in the gravel. Leave them there. If you have a message for me, same thing. Check the grave once a week for messages from me."
Al-Khalifa shook his head in bewilderment. "I'm not cut out for this sort of thing." Mike Martin disappeared into the maelstrom of people who teemed through the narrow streets and alleys of the Bneid-al-Qar district.
Five days later, under Able Seaman Shepton's tombstone he found three identity cards, three sets of garage keys with locations, three sets of ignition keys, and six sets of house keys with addresses on their tags.
Two days later, an Iraqi truck coming back into town from the Umm Gudayr oil field was blown to fragments by something it ran over.
Chip Barber, the head of the CIA's Middle East Division, had been in Tel Aviv for two days when the phone in the office they had given him at the U.S. embassy rang. It was the CIA's Head of Station on the line.
"Chip, it's okay. He's back in town. I fixed a meeting for four o'clock. That gives you time to grab the last flight out of Ben-Gurion for Stateside. The guys say they'll come by the office and pick us up." The Head of Station was calling from outside the embassy, so he spoke in generalities in case the line was tapped. It was tapped, of course, but only by the Israelis, who knew anyway.
The "he" was General Yaacov "Kobi" Dror, head of the Mossad; the office was the embassy itself, and the guys were the two men from Dror's personal staff, who arrived in an anonymous car at ten minutes after three.
Barber thought fifty minutes was a lot of time to get from the embassy compound to the headquarters of the Mossad, which is situated in an office tower called the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard. But that was not where the meeting was to be. The car sped northward out of town, past Sde Dov military airfield, until it picked up the coastal highway to Haifa.
Just outside Herzlia is situated a large apartment-and-hotel resort called simply the Country Club. It is a place where some Israelis but mainly elderly Jews from abroad come to relax and enjoy the numerous health and spa facilities the place boasts. These happy folk seldom glance up the hill above the resort.
If they did, they would see, perched on the top, a rather splendid building commanding fine views over the surrounding countryside and the sea. If they asked what it was, they would be told it is the Prime Minister's summer residence. The Prime Minister of Israel is indeed permitted to come there, one of very few who are, for this is the Mossad training school, known inside the Mossad as the Midrasha.
Yaacov Dror received the two Americans in his top-floor office, a light, airy room with the air conditioning turned up high. A short, chunky man, he wore the regulation Israeli short-sleeve, open-neck shirt and smoked the regulation sixty cigarettes a day.
Barber was glad for the air conditioning; smoke played havoc with his sinuses.
The Israeli spy chief rose from his desk and came lumbering forward. "Chip, my old friend, how are you these days?"
He embraced the tall American in a hug. It pleased him to rumble like a bad Jewish character actor and play the friendly, genial bear. All an act. In previous missions as a senior operative, as a katsa, he had proved he was very clever and extremely dangerous.
Chip Barber greeted him back. The smiles were as fixed as the memories were long. And it had not been that long since an American court had sentenced Jonathan Pollard of Navy Intelligence to a very long prison term for spying for Israel, an operation that had certainly been run against America by the genial Kobi Dror.
After ten minutes they came to the grist: Iraq. "Let me tell you, Chip, I think you are playing it exactly right," said Dror, helping his guest to another cup of coffee that would keep him awake for days. He stubbed his third cigarette into a big glass ashtray.
Barber tried not to breathe but had to give up. "If we have to go in," he said, "if he won't quit Kuwait and we have to go in, we'll start with air power." "Of course." "And we'll be going for his weapons of mass destruction. That's in your interest, too, Kobi. We need some cooperation here."
"Chip, we've been watching those WMDs for years. Dammit, we've been warning about them. Who do you think all that poison gas, those germ and plague bombs, are destined for? Us. We were warning and warning, and no one took any notice. Nine years ago we blew apart his nuclear generators at Osirak, set him back ten years in his quest for a bomb. The world condemned us. America too."
"That was cosmetic. We all know that."
"Okay, Chip, so now it's American lives on the line, it's not 'cosmetic' anymore. Real Americans might die."
"Kobi, your paranoia is showing." "Bullshit. Look, it suits us for you to blow away all his poison gas plants, and his plague laboratories, and his atom bomb research. It suits us fine. And we even get to stay out of it because now Uncle Sam has Arab allies. So who's complaining? Not Israel. We have passed you everything we have on his secret weapons programs. Everything we have. No holding back."
"We need more, Kobi. Okay, maybe we neglected Iraq a bit these past years. We had the cold war to deal with. Now it's Iraq, and we're short of product. We need information--not street-level garbage, but real, high-level paydirt. So I'm asking you straight: Do you have any asset working for you, high in the Iraqi regime? We have questions to put, and we need answers. And we'll pay--we know the rules."
There was silence for a while. Kobi Dror contemplated the tip of his cigarette. The other two senior officers looked at the table in front of them.
"Chip," said Dror slowly, "I give you my word. If we were running any agent right up inside the councils of Baghdad, I'd tell you. I'd pass it all over. Trust me, I don't."
General Dror would later explain to his Prime Minister, a very angry Itzhak Shamir, that at the time he spoke he was not lying. But he really ought to have mentioned Jericho.