Chapter 13
Chapter 13
The big gray Mercedes was having trouble with the traffic. Hammering furiously on the horn, the driver had to force a passage through the torrent of cars, vans, market stalls, and pushcarts that create the tangle of life between the streets called Khulafa and Rashid. This was old Baghdad, where traders and merchants, sellers of cloth, gold, and spices, hawkers and vendors of most known commodities, had plied their trades for ten centuries.
The car turned down Bank Street, where both sides of the road were jammed with parked cars, and finally nosed into Shurja Street. Ahead of it, the street market of spice sellers was impenetrable.
The driver half-turned his head. "This is as far as I can go." Leila Al-Hilla nodded and waited for the door to be opened for her. Beside the driver sat Kemal, General Kadiri's hulking personal bodyguard, a lumbering sergeant of the Armored Corps who had been attached to Kadiri's staff for years. She hated him.
After a pause, the sergeant opened his door, straightened his great frame on the sidewalk, and opened the rear passenger door. He knew she had humiliated him once again, and it showed in his eyes. She alighted from the car and gave him not a glance or word of thanks.
One reason she hated the bodyguard was that he followed her everywhere. It was his job, of course, assigned to him by Kadiri, but that did not make her dislike him less. When he was sober, Kadiri was a tough professional soldier; in matters sexual he was also insanely jealous. Hence his rule that she should never be alone in the city.
The other reason for her dislike of the bodyguard was his evident lust for her. A woman of long-degraded tastes, she could well understand that any man might lust for her body, and if the price was right she would indulge any such lust, no matter how bizarre its fulfillment.
But Kemal committed the ultimate insult: As a sergeant, he was poor. How dare he entertain such thoughts? Yet he clearly did--a mixture of contempt for her and brutish desire. It showed when he knew General Kadiri was not looking. For his part he knew of her revulsion, and it amused him to insult her with his glances while verbally maintaining an attitude of formality.
She had complained to Kadiri about his dumb insolence, but he had merely laughed. He could suspect any man of desiring her, but Kemal was allowed many liberties because Kemal had saved his life in the marshes of Al Fao against the Iranians, and Kemal would die for him.
The bodyguard slammed the door and was at her side as they continued on foot down Shurja Street. This zone is called Agid al Nasara, the Area of the Christians. Apart from St. George's Church across the river, built by the British for themselves and their Protestant faith, there are three Christian sects in Iraq, representing among them some seven percent of the population.
The largest is the Assyrian or Syriac sect, whose cathedral lies within the Area of the Christians, off Shurja Street. A mile away stands the Armenian church, close to another tangled web of small streets and alleys whose history goes back many centuries called the Camp el Arman, the old Armenian Quarter.
Cheek by jowl with the Syriac cathedral stands St. Joseph's, the church of the Chaldean Christians, the smallest sect. If the Syriac rite resembles Greek Orthodox, the Chaldeans are an offshoot of the Catholic Church.
The most notable Iraqi of the Chaldean Christians was then Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, although his doglike devotion to Saddam Hussein and his policies of genocide might indicate that Mr. Aziz had somehow gone adrift from the teachings of the Prince of Peace.
Leila Al-Hilla had also been born a Chaldean, and now the link was proving useful. The ill-assorted couple reached the wrought-iron gate giving onto the cobbled yard in front of the arched door of the Chaldean church. Kemal stopped. As a Moslem, he would not go a step farther. She nodded to him and walked through the gate.
Kemal watched her as she bought a small candle from a stall by the door, drew her heavy black lace shawl over her head, and entered the dark, incense-heavy interior. The bodyguard shrugged and sauntered away a few yards to buy a can of Coke and find a place to sit and watch the doorway.
He wondered why his master permitted this nonsense. The woman was a whore; the general would tire of her one day, and he, Kemal, had been promised that he could have his pleasure before she was dismissed. He smiled at the prospect, and a dribble of cola ran down his chin.
Inside the church Leila paused to light her candle from one of the hundreds that burned adjacent to the door, then, head bowed, made her way to the confessional boxes on the far side of the nave. A blackrobed priest passed but paid her no attention. It was always the same confessional box.
She entered at the precise hour, dodging ahead of a woman in black who also sought a priest to listen to her litany of sins, probably more banal than those of the younger woman who pushed her aside and took her place. Leila closed the door behind her, turned, and sat on the penitent's seat. To her right was a fretted grille. She heard a rustle behind it. He would be there; he was always there at the appointed hour.
Who was he? she wondered. Why did he pay so handsomely for the information she brought him? He was not a foreigner--his Arabic was too good for that, the Arabic of one born and raised in Baghdad. And his money was good, very good.
"Leila?" The voice was a murmur, low and even. She always had to arrive after him and leave before him. He had warned her not to loiter outside in the hopes of seeing him, but how could she have done that anyway, with Kemal lurking at her shoulder? The oaf would see something and report to his master. It was more than her life was worth.
"Identify yourself, please."
"Father, I have sinned in matters of the flesh and am not worthy of your absolution."
It was he who had invented the phrase, because no one else would say that. "What have you for me?"
She reached between her legs, pulled aside the crotch of her panties, and abstracted the phony tampon he had given her weeks ago. One end unscrewed. From the hollow interior she withdrew a thin roll of paper formed into a tube no larger than a pencil. This she passed through the fret of the grille.
"Wait." She heard the rustle of the onionskin paper as the man ran a skilled eye over the notes she had made--a report on the deliberations and conclusions of the previous day's planning council chaired by Saddam Hussein himself, at which General Abdullah Kadiri had been present.
"Good, Leila. Very good." Today the money was in Swiss francs, very high-denomination notes, passed through the grille from him to her. She secreted them all in the place she had stored her information, a place she knew most Moslem men deemed unclean at a certain time. Only a doctor or the dreaded AMAM would find them there.
"How long must this go on?" she asked the grille. "Not long now. War is coming soon. By the end of it, the Rais will fall. Others will take the power. I shall be one of them. Then you will be truly rewarded, Leila. Stay calm, do your job, and be patient."
She smiled. Really rewarded. Money, lots of money, enough to go far away and be wealthy for the rest of her days.
"Go now." She rose and left the booth. The old woman in black had found someone else to hear her confession. Leila recrossed the nave and emerged into the sunshine. The oaf Kemal was beyond the wroughtiron gate, crumpling a tin can in one great fist, sweating in the heat. Good, let him sweat. He would sweat much more if only he knew. ...
Without glancing at him, she turned down Shurja Street, through the teeming market, toward the parked car. Kemal, furious but helpless, lumbered behind her.
She took not the slightest bit of notice of a poor fellagha pushing a bicycle with an open wicker basket on the pillion, and he took not the slightest notice of her. The man was only in the market at the behest of the cook in the household where he worked, buying mace, coriander, and saffron.
Alone in his confessional, the man in the black cassock of a Chaldean priest sat awhile longer to ensure that his agent was clear of the street. It was extremely unlikely that she would recognize him, but in this game even outside chances were excessive.
He had meant what he said to her. War was coming. The Americans had the bit between their teeth and would not now back off. So long as that fool in the palace by the river at the Tamuz Bridge did not spoil it all and pull back unilaterally from Kuwait.
Fortunately, he seemed hell-bent on his own destruction. The Americans would win the war, and then they would come to Baghdad to finish the job. Surely they would not just win Kuwait and think that was the end of it? No people could be so powerful and so stupid.
When they came, they would need a new regime. Being Americans, they would gravitate toward someone who spoke fluent English, someone who understood their ways, their thoughts, and their speech, and who would know what to say to please them and become their choice. The very education, the very cosmopolitan urbanity that now militated against him, would be in his favor.
For the moment, he was excluded from the highest counsels and innermost decisions of the Rais--because he was not of the oafish Al-Tikriti tribe, or a lifetime fanatic of the Ba'ath Party, or a full general, or a half-brother of Saddam.
But Kadiri was Tikrit--and trusted. Only a mediocre general of tanks and with the tastes of a rutting camel, he had once played in the dust of the alleys of Tikrit with Saddam and his clan, and that was enough.
Kadiri was present at every decision-making meeting and knew all the secrets. The man in the confessional needed to know these things in order to make his preparations. When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, the man rose and left. Instead of crossing the nave, he slipped through a side door into the vestry, nodded at a real priest who was robing for a service, and left the church by a back door.
The man with the bicycle was only twenty feet away. He happened to glance up as the priest emerged in his black cassock into the sunlight and whirled away just in time. The man in the cassock glanced about him, noticed but thought nothing of the fellagha bent over his bicycle adjusting the chain, and walked quickly down the alley toward a small unmarked car.
The spice-shopper had sweat running down his face and his heart pounded. Close, too damn close. He had deliberately avoided going anywhere near the Mukhabarat headquarters in Mansour just in case he ran into that face. What the hell was the man doing as a priest in the Christian quarter?
God, it had been years--years since they played together on the lawn of Mr. Hartley's Tasisiya prep school, since he had punched the boy on the jaw for insulting his kid brother, since they had recited poetry in class, always excelled by Abdelkarim Badri. It had been a long time since he had seen his old friend Hassan Rahmani, now head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.
It was approaching Christmas, and in the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia, three hundred thousand Americans and Europeans turned their thoughts to home as they prepared to sit out the festival in a deeply Moslem land. But despite the approaching celebration of the birth of Christ, the buildup of the greatest invasion force since Normandy rolled on.
The portion of desert in which the Coalition forces lay was still due south of Kuwait. No hint had been given that eventually half those forces would sweep much farther west. At the coastal ports the new divisions were still pouring in. The British Fourth Armoured Brigade had joined the Desert Rats, the Seventh, to form the First Armoured Division. The French were boosting their contribution up to ten thousand men, including the Foreign Legion.
The Americans had imported, or were about to, the First Cavalry Division, Second and Third Armored Cavalry Regiments, the First Mechanized Infantry Division and First and Third Armored, two divisions of Marines, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne.
Right up on the border, where they wanted to be, were the Saudi Task Force and Special Forces, aided by Egyptian and Syrian divisions and other units drawn from a variety of smaller Arab nations.
The northern waters of the Arabian Gulf were almost plated with warships from the Coalition navies. Either in the Gulf or the Red Sea on the other side of Saudi Arabia, the United States had positioned five carrier groups, headed by the Eisenhower, Independence, John F. Kennedy, Midway, and Saratoga, with the America, Ranger, and Theodore Roosevelt still to come.
The air power of these alone, with their Tomcats, Hornets, Intruders, Prowlers, Avengers, and Hawkeyes, was impressive to behold. In the Gulf the American battleship Wisconsin was on station, to be joined by the Missouri in January.
Throughout the Gulf States and across Saudi Arabia, every airfield worth the name was crammed with fighter, bomber, tanker, freighter, and early-warning aircraft, all of which were already flying around the clock, though not yet invading Iraqi air space, with the exception of the spy planes that cruised overhead unseen.
In several cases the United States Air Force was sharing airfield space with squadrons of the British Royal Air Force. As the aircrews shared a common language, communication was easy, informal, and friendly. Occasionally, however, misunderstandings did occur.
A notable one concerned a secret British location known only as MMFD. On an early training mission, a British Tornado had been asked by the air traffic controller whether it had reached a certain turning point. The
pilot replied that he had not, he was still over MMFD.
As time went by, many American pilots heard of this place and scoured their maps to find it. It was a puzzle for two reasons: The British apparently spent a lot of time over it, and it was not located on any American air map. The theory was floated that it might be a mishearing of KKMC, which stood for King Khaled Military City, a large Saudi base. This was discounted, and the search went on.
Finally the Americans gave up. Wherever MMFD was located, it was simply not to be found on the war maps supplied to USAF squadrons by their planners in Riyadh. Eventually the Tornado pilots admitted the secret of MMFD. It stood for "miles and miles of fucking desert."
On the ground, the soldiers were living in the heart of MMFD. For many, sleeping under their tanks, mobile guns, and armored cars, life was hard and, worse, boring. There were distractions, however, and one was visiting neighboring units as the time dragged by.
The Americans were equipped with particularly good cots, for which the British lusted. By chance, the Americans were also issued singularly revolting prepacked meals, probably devised by a Pentagon civil servant who would have died rather than eat them three times a day. They were called MREs, meaning Meals-Ready-to-Eat. The U.S. soldiery denied this quality in them and decided that MRE really stood for Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.
By contrast, the Brits were eating much better, so true to the capitalist ethic, a brisk trade was soon established between American beds and British rations.
Another piece of news from the British lines that bemused the Americans was the order placed by London's Ministry of Defence for half a million condoms for the soldiers in the Gulf. In the bleak deserts of Arabia such a purchase was deemed to indicate the Brits must know something the GIs did not. The mystery was resolved the day before the ground war started.
The Americans had spent a hundred days cleaning their rifles over and over again to purge them of the all-pervasive sand, dust, grit, and gravel that endlessly blew into the ends of the barrels. The Brits whipped off their condoms to reveal nice shiny barrels gleaming with gun oil.
The other principal development that occurred just before Christmas was the reintegration of the French contingency into the heart of Allied planning. In the early days, France had had a disaster of a Defense Minister called Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who appeared to enjoy a keen sympathy with Iraq and ordered the French commander to pass all Allied planning decisions on to Paris.
When this was made plain to General Schwarzkopf, he and Sir Peter de la Billi鑢e almost burst out laughing. Monsieur Chevenement was at that time also a leading light of the France-Iraq Friendship Society. Although the French contingent was commanded by a fine soldier in the form of General Michel Roquejoffre, France had to be excluded from all planning councils.
At the end of the year, Pierre Joxe was appointed French Defense Minister and at once rescinded the order. From then on, General Roquejoffre could be taken into the confidence of the Americans and British.
Two days before Christmas, Mike Martin received from Jericho the answer to a question posed a week earlier. Jericho was adamant: There had been within the previous few days a crisis cabinet meeting containing only the inner core of Saddam Hussein's cabinet, the
Revolutionary Command Council, and the top generals.
At the meeting the question of Iraq leaving Kuwait voluntarily had been raised. Obviously it had not been raised as a proposal by anyone at the meeting--no one was that stupid.
All recalled too well the earlier occasion when, during the Iran-Iraq war, an Iranian suggestion that if Saddam Hussein stepped down there could be peace had been broached. Saddam had asked for opinions. The Health Minister had suggested such a move might be wise--as a purely temporary ploy, of course. Saddam invited the minister into a side room, pulled out his sidearm, shot him dead, and returned to resume the cabinet meeting.
The matter of Kuwait had been raised in the form of a denunciation of the United Nations for even daring to suggest the idea. All had waited for Saddam to give a lead. He declined, sitting as he so often did at the head of the table like a watching cobra, eyes moving from man to man in an attempt to smoke out some hint of disloyalty.
Not unnaturally, without a lead from the Rais, the conversation had petered out. Then Saddam had begun to speak very quietly, which was when he was at his most dangerous. Anyone, he said, who let the thought of admitting to such a catastrophic humiliation of Iraq in the face of the Americans cross his mind was a man prepared to play the role of lickspittle to America for the rest of his life. For such a man there could be no place at this table.
That had been the end of it. Everyone present bent over backward to explain that such a thought would never, under any circumstances, occur to any of them. Then the Iraqi dictator had added something else: Only if Iraq could win and be seen to win would it be possible to withdraw from Iraq's nineteenth province, he said. Everyone around the table then nodded sagely, though none could see what he was talking about.
It was a long report, and Mike Martin transmitted it to the villa outside Riyadh that same night. Chip Barber and Simon Paxman pored over it for hours. Each had decided to take a brief break from Saudi Arabia and fly home for several days, leaving the running of Mike Martin and Jericho from the Riyadh end in the hands of Julian Gray for the British and the local CIA Head of Station for the Americans.
There were only twenty-four days to go until the expiration of the United Nations deadline and the start of General Chuck Horner's air war against Iraq. Both men wanted a short home leave, and Jericho's powerful report gave them the chance. They could take it with them.
"What do you think he means, 'win and be seen to win'?" asked Barber. "No idea," said Paxman. "We'll have to get some analysts who are better than we are to have a look at it."
"We too. I guess nobody will be around for the next few days except the shop-minders. I'll give it the way it is to Bill Stewart, and he'll probably have some eggheads try to add an in-depth analysis before it goes on to the Director and the State Department."
"I know an egghead I'd like to have a look at it," said Paxman, and on that note they left for the airport to catch their respective flights home.
On Christmas Eve, seated in a discreet wine bar in London's West End with Simon Paxman, Dr. Terry Martin was shown the whole text of the Jericho message and asked if he would try to work out what, if anything, Saddam Hussein could mean by winning against America as a price for leaving Kuwait.
"By the way," he asked Paxman, "I know it breaks the rules of need-to
know, but I really am worried. I do these favors for you--give me one in return. How is my brother Mike doing in Kuwait? Is he still safe?"
Paxman stared at the doctor of Arabic studies for several seconds.
"I can only tell you that he is no longer in Kuwait," he said. "And that's more than my job is worth."
Terry Martin flushed with relief. "It's the best Christmas present I could have. Thank you, Simon." He looked up and waved a waggish finger. "Just one thing--don't even think of sending him into Baghdad."
Paxman had been in the business fifteen years. He kept his face immobile, his tone light. The scholar was clearly just joking. "Really? Why not?"
Martin was finishing his glass of wine and failed to notice the flicker of alarm in the intelligence officer's eyes. "My dear Simon, Baghdad's the one city in the world he mustn't set foot in. You remember those tapes of Iraqi radio intercepts Sean Plummer let me have? Some of the voices have been identified. I recognized one of the names. A hell of a fluke, but I know I'm right."
"Really?" said Paxman smoothly. "Tell me more."
"It's been a long time, of course, but I know it was the same man. And guess what? He's now head of Counterintelligence in Baghdad, Saddam's number-one spy-hunter."
"Hassan Rahmani," murmured Paxman.
Terry Martin should stay off booze, even before Christmas. He can't carry it. His tongue's running away with him. "That's the one. They were at school together, you know. We all were. Good old Mr. Hartley's prep school. Mike and Hassan were best mates. See? That's why he can never be seen around Baghdad."
Paxman left the wine bar and stared at the dumpy figure of the Arabist
heading down the street. "Oh shit," he said. "Oh bloody, bloody hell."
Someone had just ruined his Christmas, and he was about to ruin Steve Laing's.
Edith Hardenberg had gone to Salzburg to spend the festive season with her mother, a family tradition that went back many years. Karim, the young Jordanian student, was able to visit Gidi Barzilai at his safe-house apartment, where the controller for Operation Joshua was dispensing drinks to the off-duty members of the yarid and neviot teams working under him. Only one unfortunate was up in Salzburg, keeping an eye on Miss Hardenberg in case she should return suddenly to the capital.
Karim's real name was Avi Herzog, a twenty-nine-year-old who had been seconded to the Mossad several years earlier from Unit 504, a branch of Army Intelligence specializing in cross-border raids, which accounted for his fluent Arabic. Because of his good looks and the deceptively shy and diffident manner he could affect when he wished, the Mossad had twice used him for honeytrap operations.
"So how's it going, loverboy?" asked Gidi as he passed around the drinks. "Slowly," said Avi.
"Don't take too long. The old man wants a result, remember."
"This is one very uptight lady," replied Avi. "Only interested in a meeting of minds--yet."
In his cover as a student from Amman, he had been set up in a small flat shared with one other Arab student, in fact a member of the neviot team, a phone-tapper by trade who also spoke Arabic. This was in case Edith Hardenberg or anyone else took it into their head to check out where and how he lived and with whom.
The shared flat would pass any inspection--it was littered with textbooks on engineering and strewn with Jordanian newspapers and magazines. Both men had genuinely been enrolled in the Technical University in case a check were made there also.
It was Herzog's flatmate who spoke. "Meeting of minds? Screw that." "That's the point," said Avi. "I can't."
When the laughter died down, he added: "By the way, I'm going to want danger money." "Why?" asked Gidi. "Think she's going to bite it off when you drop your jeans?" "Nope. It's the art galleries, concerts, operas, recitals. I could die of boredom before I get that far."
"You just carry on the way you know how, boychick. You're only here because the Office says you've got something we don't."
"Yes," said the woman member of the yarid tracking team. "About nine inches."
"That's enough of that, young Yael. You can be back on traffic duty in Hayarkon Street any time you like."
The drink, the laughter, and the banter in Hebrew flowed. Late that evening, Yael discovered she was right. It was a good Christmas for the Mossad team in Vienna.
* * *
"So what do you think, Terry?" Steve Laing and Simon Paxman had invited Terry Martin to join them in one of the Firm's apartments in Kensington. They needed more
privacy than they could get in a restaurant. It was two days before the New Year.
"Fascinating," said Martin. "Absolutely fascinating. This is for real? Saddam really said all this?"
"Why do you ask?" "Well, if you'll forgive my saying so, it's a strange telephone tap. The narrator seems to be reporting to someone else on a meeting he attended. ... The other man on the line doesn't seem to say a thing."
There was simply no way the Firm was going to tell Terry Martin how they had come by the report.
"The other man's interventions were perfunctory," said Laing smoothly. "Just grunts and expressions of interest. There seemed no point in including them."
"But this is the language Saddam used?" "So we understand, yes." "Fascinating. The first time I've ever seen anything he said that was not destined for publication or a wider audience."
Martin had in his hands not the handwritten report by Jericho, which had been destroyed by his own brother in Baghdad as soon as it had been read, word for word, into the tape recorder. It was a typewritten transcript in Arabic of the text that had reached Riyadh in the burst transmission before Christmas. He also had the Firm's own English translation.
"That last phrase," said Paxman, who would be heading back to Riyadh the same evening, "where he says 'win and be seen to win'--does that tell you anything?"
"Of course. But you know, you're still using the word win in its European or North American connotation. I would use the word succeed in English."
"All right, Terry, how does he think he can succeed against America and the Coalition?" asked Laing. "By humiliation. I told you before, he must leave America looking like a complete fool."
"But he won't pull out of Kuwait in the next twenty days? We really need to know, Terry."
"Look, Saddam went in there because his claims would not be met," said Martin. "He demanded four things: takeover of Warba and Bubiyan Islands to have access to the sea, compensation for the excess oil he claims Kuwait snitched from the shared oil field, an end to Kuwait's overproduction, and a writeoff of the fifteen-billion-dollar war debt. If he can get these, he can pull back with honor, leaving America hanging in the breeze. That's winning."
"Any hint that he thinks he might get them?"
Martin shrugged. "He thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He's gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out, the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right."
"The man doesn't make sense," snapped Laing. "He has the deadline. January fifteenth, not twenty days away. He's going to be crushed."
"Unless," suggested Paxman, "one of the permanent members of the Security Council comes up with a last-minute peace plan to put the deadline on hold."
Laing looked gloomy. "Paris or Moscow, or both," he predicted. "If it comes to war, does he still think he could win? Beg your pardon, 'succeed'?" asked Paxman.
"Yes," said Terry Martin. "But it's back to what I told you before--American casualties. Don't forget, Saddam is a back-street gunman. His constituency is not the diplomatic corridors of Cairo and Riyadh. It's all those alleys and bazaars crammed with Palestinians and other Arabs who resent America, the backer of Israel. Any man who can leave America bleeding, whatever the damage to his own country, will be the toast of those millions."
"But he can't do it," insisted Laing. "He thinks he can," Martin countered. "Look, he's smart enough to have worked out that in America's eyes, America cannot lose, must not lose. It is simply not acceptable. Look at Vietnam. The veterans came home, and they were pelted with garbage. For America, terrible casualties at the hands of a despised enemy are a form of loss. Unacceptable loss. Saddam can waste fifty thousand men anytime, anyplace. He doesn't care. Uncle Sam does. If America takes that kind of loss, she'll be shaken to the core. Heads have to roll, careers to be smashed, governments to fall. The recriminations and the self-blame would last a generation."
"He can't do that," said Laing again. "He thinks he can," repeated Martin. "It's the gas weapon," muttered Paxman.
"Maybe. By the bye, did you ever find out what that phrase on the phone intercept meant?" Laing glanced across at Paxman. Jericho again. There must be no mention of Jericho.
"No. Nobody we asked had ever heard of it. No one could work it out." "It could be important, Steve. Something else--not gas."
"Terry," said Laing patiently, "in less than twenty days the Americans, with us, the French, Italians, Saudis, and others, are going to throw at Saddam Hussein the biggest air armada the world has ever seen.
Enough firepower to exceed in a further twenty days all the tonnage dropped in the Second World War. The generals down in Riyadh are kind of busy. We really can't go down there and say 'Hold everything, guys. We have a phrase in a phone intercept we can't work out.' Let's face it, it was just an excitable man on a phone suggesting that God was on their side."
"There's nothing strange in that, Terry," said Paxman. "People going to war have claimed they had God's support since time began. That was all it was."
"The other man told the speaker to shut up and get off the line," Martin reminded them. "So he was busy and irritable."
"He called him the son of a whore." "So he didn't like him much." "Maybe."
"Terry, please, leave it alone. It was just a phrase. It's the gas weapon. That's what he's counting on. All the rest of your analysis we agree with."
Martin left first, the two intelligence officers twenty minutes later. Shrugged into their coats, collars up, they went down the sidewalk looking for a taxi.
"You know," said Laing, "he's a clever little bugger, and I quite like him. But he really is a terrible fusspot. You've heard about his private life?"
A cab went by, empty, its light off. Tea break time. Laing swore at it. "Yes, of course, the Box ran a check."
The Box, or Box 500, is slang for the Security Service, MI-5. Once, long ago, the address of MI-5 really was P.O. Box 500, London. "Well, there you are then," said Laing.
"Steve, I really don't think that's got anything to do with it." Laing stopped and turned to his subordinate. "Simon, trust me. He's got a bee in his bonnet, and he's just wasting our time. Take a word of advice. Just drop the professor."
"It will be the poison gas weapon, Mr. President." Three days after the New Year, such festivities as there had been in the White House--and for most there had been no pause at all--had long died away. The whole West Wing, the heart of the Bush administration, was humming with activity.
In the quiet of the Oval Office, George Bush sat behind the great desk, backed by the tall narrow windows, five inches of pale green bulletproof glass, and beneath the seal of the United States. Facing him was Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser.
The President glanced down at the digest of the analyses that had just been presented to him. "Everyone is agreed on this?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. The stuff that just came in from London shows their people completely concur with ours. Saddam Hussein will not pull out of Kuwait unless he is given an out, a face-saver, which we will ensure he does not get. For the rest, he will rely on mass gas attacks on the Coalition ground forces, either before or during their invasion across the border."
George Bush was the first American President since John F. Kennedy who had actually been in combat. He had seen American bodies killed in action. But there was something particularly hideous, especially foul, in the thought of young combat soldiers writhing through their last moments of life as gas tore at their lung tissues and crippled their central nervous systems.
"And how will he launch this gas?" he asked. "We believe there are four options, Mr. President. The obvious one is by canisters launched from fighters and strike bombers, Colin Powell has just been on the line to Chuck Horner in Riyadh. General Horner says he needs thirty-five days of unceasing air war. After day twenty, no Iraqi airplane will reach the border. By day thirty, no Iraqi plane will take off for more than sixty seconds. He says he guarantees it, sir. You can have his stars on it."
"And the rest?" "Saddam has a number of MLRS batteries. That would seem to be the second line of possibility."
Iraq's multilaunch rocket systems were Soviet-built and based on the old Katyushkas used with devastating effect by the Soviet Army in the Second World War. Now much updated, these rockets, launched in rapid sequence from a rectangular "pack" on the back of a truck or from a fixed position, had a range of one hundred kilometers.
"Naturally, Mr. President, because of their range, they would have to be launched from within Kuwait or the Iraqi desert to the west. We believe the J-STARs will find them on their radars and they will be taken out. The Iraqis can camouflage them all they like, but the metal will show up.
"For the rest, Iraq has stockpiles of gas-tipped shells for use by tanks and artillery. Range, under thirty-seven kilometers--nineteen miles. We know the stockpiles are already on site, but at that range it's all desert--no cover. The Air boys are confident they can find them and destroy them. And then there are the Scuds--they're being taken care of even as we speak."
"And the preventive measures?" "They're completed, Mr. President. In case of an anthrax attack, every man is being inoculated. The Brits have done it too. We are increasing production of the anti-anthrax vaccine every hour. And every man and woman has a gas mask and a coverall gas cape. If he tries it ..."
The President rose, turned, and stared up at the seal. The bald eagle, clutching its arrows, stared back. Twenty years earlier, there had been those awful zip-up body bags coming back from Vietnam, and he knew that a supply was even now stored in discreet unmarked containers under the Saudi sun.
Even with all the precautions, there would be patches of exposed skin, masks that could not be reached and pulled on in time. The following year would be the reelection campaign. But that was not the point. Win or lose, he had no intention of going down in history as the American President who consigned tens of thousands of soldiers to die, not as in Vietnam over nine years, but over a few weeks or even days.
"Brent ..." "Mr. President." "James Baker is due to see Tariq Aziz shortly." "In six days in Geneva." "Ask him to come and see me, please."
In the first week of January, Edith Hardenberg began to enjoy herself, really enjoy herself, for the first time in years. There was a thrill in exploring and explaining to her eager young friend the wonders of culture that lay within her city.
The Winkler Bank was permitting its staff a four-day break to include New Year's Day; after that, they would have to confine their cultural outings to the evenings, which still gave the promise of theater, concerts, and recitals, and weekends, when the museums and galleries were still open.
They spent half a day at the Jugendstil, admiring the Art Nouveau, and another half-day in the Sezession, where hangs the permanent exhibition of the works of Klimt.
The young Jordanian was delighted and excited, a fund of questions pouring from him, and Edith Hardenberg caught the enthusiasm, her eyes alight as she explained that there was another wonderful exhibition at the K黱stlerhaus that was definitely a must for the next weekend.
After the Klimt viewing, Karim took her to dine at the Rotisserie Sirk. She protested at the expense, but her new friend explained that his father was a wealthy surgeon in Amman and that his allowance was generous.
Amazingly, she allowed him to pour her a glass of wine and failed to notice when he refilled it. Her talk became more animated, and there was a small flush on each pale cheek.
Over coffee, Karim leaned forward and placed his hand on hers. She looked flustered and glanced hastily around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one bothered. She withdrew her hand, but quite slowly.
By the end of the week, they had visited four of the cultural treasures she had in mind, and when they walked back through the cold darkness toward her car after an evening at the Musikverein, he took her gloved hand in his and kept it there. She did not pull it away, feeling the warmth seep through the cotton glove.
"You are very kind to do all this for me," he said gravely. "I am sure it must be boring for you."
"Oh, no, it's not at all," she said earnestly. "I enjoy seeing and hearing all these beautiful things. I'm so glad you do too. Quite soon, you'll be an expert on European art and culture."
When they reached her car, he smiled down at her, took her windchilled face between both his bare but surprisingly hot hands, and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Danke, Edith."
Then he walked away. She drove herself home as usual, but her hands were trembling and she nearly hit a tram.
Secretary of State James Baker met Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva on January 9. It was not a long meeting, and it was not a friendly one. It was not intended to be.
There was a single English- Arabic interpreter present, though Tariq Aziz's English was perfectly up to the task of understanding the American, who spoke slowly and with great clarity. His message was quite simple. If, during the course of any hostilities that may occur between our countries, your government chooses to employ the internationally banned weapon of poison gas, I am authorized to inform you and President Hussein that my country will use a nuclear device. We will, in short, nuke Baghdad.
The dumpy, gray-haired Iraqi took in the sense of the message but at first could not believe it. For one thing, no man in his senses would dare convey such a barefaced threat to the Rais. He had a habit, in the manner of former Babylonian kings, of taking out his displeasure on the message-bearer.
For another, he was not sure at first that the American was serious. The fallout, the collateral damage of a nuclear bomb, would not be confined to Baghdad, surely? It would devastate half the Middle East, would it not?
Tariq Aziz, as he headed home for Baghdad a deeply troubled man, did not know three things. One was that the so-called "theater" nuclear bombs of modern science are a far cry from the Hiroshima bomb of 1945. The new, limited damage "clean" bombs are called thus because although their heat-and-blast damage is as appalling as ever, the radioactivity they leave behind is of extremely short duration.
The second thing was that within the hull of the battleship Wisconsin, then stationed in the Gulf and joined by the Missouri, were three very special steel-and-concrete caissons, strong enough, if the ship went down, not to degrade for ten thousand years. Inside them were three Tomahawk cruise missiles the United States hoped never to have to use.
The third was that the Secretary of State was not joking at all.
General Sir Peter de la Billi鑢e walked alone in the darkness of the desert night, accompanied only by the crunch of sand beneath his feet and his troubled private thoughts.
A lifelong professional soldier and a combat veteran, his tastes were as ascetic as his frame was spare. Unable to take much pleasure in the luxury offered by cities, he felt more at home and at ease in camps and bivouacs and the company of fellow soldiers.
Like others before him, he appreciated the Arabian desert--its vast horizons, blazing heat, and numbing cold, and many times its awesome silence. That night, on a visit to the front lines--one of the treats he permitted himself as often as possible--he had walked away from St. Patrick's Camp, leaving behind him the brooding Challenger tanks beneath their nets, crouching animals patiently waiting for their time, and the hussars preparing the evening meal beneath them.
By then a close friend of General Schwarzkopf and privy to all the planning staff's innermost councils, the general knew that war was coming. Less than a week before the expiration of the United Nations deadline, there was not a hint that Saddam Hussein had any intention of pulling out of Kuwait.
What worried him that night under the stars of the Saudi desert was that he could not understand what the tyrant of Baghdad thought he was up to. As a soldier, the British general liked to understand his enemy, to plumb his intentions, his motivations, his tactics, his overall strategy.
Personally, he had nothing but contempt for the man in Baghdad. The amply documented files depicting genocide, torture, and murder revolted him. Saddam was not a soldier, never had been, and what real military talent he had had in his army he had largely wasted by overruling his generals or having the best of them executed.
That was not the problem; the problem was that Saddam Hussein had clearly taken overall command of every aspect--political and military--and nothing he did made a fraction of sense.
He had invaded Kuwait at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. That done, he had blown away his chances of reassuring his fellow Arabs that he was open to diplomacy, susceptible to reason, and that the problem could be resolved within the ambit of inter-Arab negotiations.
Had he taken that road, he could probably have counted quite rightly on the oil continuing to flow, and the West gradually losing interest as the inter-Arab conferences bogged down for years. It was the dictator's own stupidity that had brought in the West, and to cap it, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, with its multiple rapes and brutality and its attempt to use Westerners as human shields, had guaranteed his utter isolation.
In the early days Saddam Hussein had had the rich oil fields of northeastern Saudi Arabia at his mercy, and he had hung back. With his army and air force under good generalship, he could even have reached Riyadh and dictated his terms. He had failed, and Desert Shield had been put in place while he masterminded one public relations disaster after another in Baghdad. 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 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 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?