Chapter 9
Chapter 9
The roadblock that got him was at the corner of Mohammed Ibn Kassem Street and the Fourth Ring Road. When he saw it in the distance, Mike Martin was tempted to hang a U-turn and head back the way he had come. But there were Iraqi soldiers stationed down the road on each side at the approaches to the checkpoint, apparently just for that purpose, and it would have been crazy to try and outrun their rifle fire at the slow speed necessary for a U-turn. He had no choice but to drive on, joining the end of the line of vehicles waiting for check-through.
As usual, driving through Kuwait City, he had tried to avoid the major roads where roadblocks were likely to be set up, but crossing any of the six Ring Roads that envelop Kuwait City in a series of concentric bands could only be done at a major junction.
He had also hoped, by driving in the middle of the morning, to be lost in the jumble of traffic or to find the Iraqis sheltering from the heat. But mid-October had cooled the weather and the green-bereted Special Forces were proving a far cry from the useless Popular Army. So he sat at the wheel of the white Volvo station wagon and waited.
It had still been black and deepest night when he had driven the offroad far out into the desert to the south and dug up the remainder of his explosives, guns, and ammunition, the equipment he had promised to Abu Fouad. It had been before dawn when he made the transfer at the lockup garage in the back streets of Firdous from the jeep to the station wagon.
Between the transfer from vehicle to vehicle and the moment when he judged the sun to be high enough and hot enough to send the Iraqis to seek shelter in the shade, he had even managed a two-hour nap at the wheel of the car inside the garage.
Then he had driven the station wagon out and put the jeep inside the garage, aware that such a prized vehicle would soon be confiscated.
Finally he had scrubbed his face and hands and changed his clothes, swapping the stained and desert-soiled robes of the Bedou tribesman for the clean white dish-dash of the Kuwaiti doctor.
The cars in front of him inched forward toward the Iraqi infantry grouped around the concrete-filled barrels up ahead. In some cases the soldiers simply glanced at the driver's identity card and waved him on; in other cases the car was pulled to one side for a search. Usually, it was those vehicles that carried some kind of cargo that were ordered to the curb.
He was uncomfortably aware of the two big wooden trunks behind him on the floor of the cargo area, whose contents were enough to ensure his instant arrest and hand-over to the tender mercies of the AMAM.
Finally the last car ahead of him surged away, and he pulled up to the barrels. The sergeant in charge did not bother to ask for identity papers. Seeing the big boxes in the rear of the Volvo, the soldier waved the station wagon to the side of the road and shouted an order to his colleagues who waited there.
An olive-drab uniform appeared at the driver's side window, which Martin had already rolled down. The uniform bent, and a stubbled face appeared in the open window.
"Out," said the soldier. Martin got out and straightened up. He smiled politely. A sergeant with a hard, pockmarked face walked up. The private soldier wandered round to the rear door and peered in at the boxes.
"Papers," said the sergeant. He studied the ID card that Martin offered, and his glance flickered from the blurred face behind the plastic to the one standing in front of him. If he saw any difference between the British officer facing him and the store clerk of the Al-Khalifa Trading Corporation whose portrait had been used for the card, he gave no sign.
The identity card had been dated as issued a year earlier, and in a year a man can decide to shave his beard.
"You are a doctor?" "Yes, Sergeant. I work at the hospital." "Where?" "On the Jahra road." "Where are you going?" "To the Amiri hospital, in Dasman."
The sergeant was clearly not of great education, and within his culture a doctor rated as a man of considerable learning and stature. He grunted and walked to the back of the station wagon. "Open," he said.
Martin unlocked the rear door, and it swung up above their heads. The sergeant stared at the two trunks.
"What are these?" "Samples, Sergeant. They are needed by the research laboratory at the Amiri." "Open."
Martin withdrew several small brass keys from the pocket of his dishdash. The boxes were of the cabin-trunk or portmanteau type, purchased from a luggage store, and each had two brass locks. "You know these trunks are refrigerated?" said Martin conversationally, as he fiddled with the keys.
"Refrigerated?" The sergeant was mystified by the word.
"Yes, Sergeant. The interiors are cold. They keep the cultures at a constant low temperature. That guarantees that they remain inert. I'm afraid if I open up, the cold air will escape and they will become very active. Better stand back."
At the phrase "stand back," the sergeant scowled and unslung his carbine, pointing it at Martin, suspecting the boxes must contain some kind of weapon. "What do you mean?" he snarled.
Martin shrugged apologetically. "I'm sorry, but I can't prevent it. The germs will just escape into the air around us."
"Germs--what germs?" The sergeant was confused and angry, as much with his own ignorance as with the doctor's manner.
"Didn't I say where I worked?" he asked mildly. "Yes, at the hospital." "True. The isolation hospital. These are full of smallpox and cholera samples for analysis."
This time the sergeant did jump back, a clear two feet. The marks on his face were no accident--as a child he had nearly died of smallpox. "Get that stuff out of here, damn you!"
Martin apologized again, closed the rear door, slid behind the wheel, and drove away. An hour later, he was guided into the fish warehouse in Shuwaikh Port and handed over his cargo to Abu Fouad.
United States Department of State Washington, D.C. 20520
October 16, 1990
MEMORANDUM TO: James Baker FROM: Political Intelligence and Analysis Group SUBJECT: Destruction of Iraqi War Machine CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY
In the ten weeks since the invasion by Iraq of the Emirate of Kuwait, the most rigorous investigation has been undertaken, both by ourselves and our British allies, of the precise size, nature, and state of preparation of the war machine presently at the disposal of President Saddam Hussein.
Critics will doubtless say, with the usual benefit of hindsight, that such an analysis should have been accomplished prior to this date. Be that as it may, the findings of the various analyses are now before us, and they present a very disturbing picture. The conventional forces of Iraq alone, with its standing army of a million and a quarter men, its guns, tanks, rocket batteries, and modern air force, combine to make Iraq far and away the most powerful military force in the Middle East.
Two years ago, it was estimated that if the effect of the war with Iran had been to reduce the Iranian war machine to the point where it could no longer realistically threaten its neighbors, the damage inflicted by Iran on the Iraqi war machine was of similar importance.
It is now clear that, in the case of Iran, the severe purchasing embargo deliberately created by ourselves and our British colleagues has caused the situation to remain much the same.
In the case of Iraq, however, the two intervening years have been filled by a rearmament program of appalling vigor.
You will recall, Mr. Secretary, that Western policy in the Gulf area and indeed the entire Middle East has long been based upon the concept of balance: the notion that stability and therefore the status quo can only be maintained if no nation in the area is permitted to acquire such power as to threaten into submission all its neighbors and thus establish dominance.
On the conventional warfare front alone, it is now clear that Iraq has acquired such a power and now bids to create such dominance.
But this report is even more concerned with another aspect of Iraqi preparations: the establishment of an awesome stock of weapons of mass destruction, coupled with continuing plans for even more, and their appropriate international, and possibly intercontinental, delivery systems. In short, unless the utter destruction of these weapons, those still in development, and their delivery systems is accomplished, the immediate future demonstrates a catastrophic prospect.
Within three years, according to studies presented to the Medusa Committee and with which the British completely concur, Iraq will possess its own atomic bomb and the ability to launch it anywhere within a two-thousand-kilometer radius of Baghdad.
To this prospect must be added that of thousands of tons of deadly poison gas and a bacteriological war potential involving anthrax, tularemia, and possibly bubonic and pneumonic plague.
Were Iraq ruled by a benign and reasonable regime, the prospect would still be daunting. The reality is that Iraq is ruled solely by President Saddam Hussein, who is clearly in the grip of two identifiable psychiatric conditions: megalomania and paranoia.
Within three years, failing preventive action, Iraq will be able to dominate by threat alone all the territory from the north coast of Turkey to the Gulf of Aden, from the seas off Haifa to the mountains of Kandahar. The effect of these revelations must be to change Western policy radically. The destruction of the Iraqi war machine and particularly the weapons of mass destruction must now become the overriding aim of Western policy. The liberation of Kuwait has now become irrelevant, serving only as a justification.
The desired aim can be frustrated only by a unilateral withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait, and every effort must be made to ensure that this does not happen.
U.S. policy, in alliance with our British allies, must therefore be dedicated to four goals: 1. Insofar as it is possible, covertly to present provocations and arguments to Saddam Hussein aimed at causing him to refuse to pull out of Kuwait. 2. To reject any compromise he may offer in exchange for leaving Kuwait, thus removing the justification for our planned invasion and the destruction of his war machine. 3. To urge the United Nations to pass without further procrastination the long-delayed Security Council Resolution 678, authorizing the Coalition Allies to begin the air war as soon as they are ready. 4. To appear to welcome but in fact to frustrate any peace plan that might enable Iraq to escape unscathed from her present dilemma. Clearly the UN Secretary-General, Paris, and Moscow are the principal dangers here, likely to propose at any time some naive scheme capable of preventing what must be done. The public, of course, will continue to be assured of the opposite.
Respectfully submitted, PIAG
"Itzhak, we really have to go along with them on this one." The Prime Minister of Israel seemed, as always, dwarfed by the big swivel chair and the desk in front of it, as his Deputy Foreign Minister confronted him in the premier's fortified private office beneath the Knesset in Jerusalem. The two Uzi-toting paratroopers outside the heavy, steel-lined timber door could hear nothing of what went on inside.
Itzhak Shamir glowered across the desk, his short legs swinging free above the carpet, although there was a specially fitted footrest if he needed it. His lined, pugnacious face beneath the grizzled gray hair made him seem even more like some northern troll.
His Deputy Foreign Minister was different from the Prime Minister in every way: tall where the national leader was short, well-tailored where Shamir was rumpled, urbane where he was choleric. Yet they got along extremely well, sharing the same uncompromising vision of their country and of Palestinians, so that the Russian-born Prime Minister had had no hesitation in picking and promoting the cosmopolitan diplomat.
Benjamin Netanyahu had made his case well. Israel needed America: her goodwill, which had once been automatically guaranteed by the power of the Jewish lobby but was now under siege on Capitol Hill and in the American media; her donations, her weaponry, her veto in the Security Council. That was an awful lot to jeopardize for one alleged Iraqi agent being run by Kobi Dror from down there in Tel Aviv.
"Let them have this Jericho, whoever he is," urged Netanyahu. "If he helps them destroy Saddam Hussein, the better for us."
The Prime Minister grunted, nodded, and reached for his intercom. "Get on to General Dror, and tell him I need to see him here in my office," he told his private secretary. "No, not when he's free. Now."
Four hours later, Kobi Dror left his Prime Minister's office. He was seething. Indeed, he told himself as his car swung down the hill out of Jerusalem and onto the broad highway back to Tel Aviv, he did not recall when he had been so angry.
To be told by your own Prime Minister that you were wrong was bad enough. To be told he was a stupid asshole was something he could have done without.
Normally he took pleasure in looking at the pine forests where, during the siege of Jerusalem when the highway of today had been a rutted track, his father and others had battled to punch a hole through the Palestinian lines and relieve the city. But not today.
Back in his office, he summoned Sami Gershon and told him the news. "How the hell did the Americans know?" he shouted. "Who leaked?"
"No one inside the Office," Gershon said with finality. "What about that professor? I see he's just got back from London." "Damned traitor," snarled Dror. "I'll break him."
"The Brits probably got him drunk," suggested Gershon. "Boasting in his cups. Leave it, Kobi. The damage is done. What have we got to do?"
"Tell them everything about Jericho," snapped Dror. "I won't do it. Send Sharon. Let him do it. The meeting's in London, where the leak took place."
Gershon thought it over and grinned. "What's so funny?" asked Dror.
"Just this. We can't contact Jericho anymore. Just let them try. We still don't know who the bastard is. Let them find out. With any luck, they'll make a camel's ass out of it."
Dror thought it over, and eventually a sly smile spread across his face. "Send Sharon tonight," he said.
"Then we launch another project. I've had it in my mind for some time. We'll call it Operation Joshua." "Why?" asked Gershon, perplexed. "Don't you remember exactly what Joshua did to Jericho?"
The London meeting was deemed important enough for Bill Stewart, Langley's Deputy Director (Operations) to cross the Atlantic personally, accompanied by Chip Barber of the Middle East Division.
They stayed at one of the Company's safe houses, an apartment not far from the embassy in Grosvenor Square, and had dinner with a Deputy Director of the SIS and Steve Laing. The Deputy Director was for protocol, given Stewart's rank; he would be replaced at the debriefing of David Sharon by Simon Paxman, who was in charge of Iraq.
David Sharon flew in from Tel Aviv under another name and was met by a katsa from the Israeli embassy in Palace Green. The British counter-intelligence service MI-5--which does not like foreign agents, even friendly ones, playing games at the port of entry--had been alerted by SIS and spotted the waiting katsa from the embassy. As soon as he greeted the new arrival, "Mr. Eliyahu," off the Tel Aviv flight, the MI-5 group moved in, warmly welcoming Mr. Sharon to London, and offering every facility to make his stay pleasant.
The two angry Israelis were escorted to their car, waved away from the concourse entrance, and then followed sedately into central London. The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards could not have done a better job.
The debriefing of David Sharon began the following morning, and it took the whole day and half the night. The SIS elected to use one of their own safe houses, a well-protected and efficiently "wired" apartment in South Kensington.
It was (and still is) a large and spacious place, of which the dining room served as the site for the conference. One of the bedrooms housed the banks of tape recorders, and two technicians who recorded every word spoken.
A trim young woman brought over from Century commandeered the kitchen and masterminded a convoy of trays of coffee and sandwiches to the six men grouped around the dining table.
Two fit-looking men in the lobby downstairs spent the day pretending to mend the perfectly functioning elevator, while in fact ensuring that none but the other known inhabitants of the building got above the ground-floor level.
At the dining table were David Sharon and the katsa from the London embassy, who was a declared agent anyway; the two Americans, Stewart and Barber from Langley; and the two SIS men, Laing and Paxman.
At the Americans' bidding, Sharon started at the beginning of the tale and told it the way it had happened. "A mercenary? A walk-in mercenary?" queried Stewart at one point. "You're not putting me on?" "My instructions are to be absolutely frank," said Sharon. "That was the way it happened."
The Americans had nothing against a mercenary. Indeed, it was an advantage. Among all the motives for betraying one's country, money is the simplest and easiest for the recruiter agency. With a mercenary one knows where one is. There are no tortured feelings of regret, no angst of self-disgust, no fragile ego to be massaged and flattered, no ruffled feathers to be smoothed.
A mercenary in the intelligence world is like a whore. No tiresome candle-lit dinners and sweet nothings are necessary. A fistful of dollars on the dressing table will do nicely.
Sharon described the frantic search for someone who could live inside Baghdad under diplomatic cover on extended stay, and the Hobson's choice selection of Alfonso Benz Moncada, his intensive training in Santiago, and his reinfiltration to run Jericho for two years.
"Hang on," said Stewart. "This amateur ran Jericho for two years? Made seventy collections from the drops and got away with it?" "Yep. On my life," said Sharon.
"What do you figure, Steve?" Laing shrugged. "Beginner's luck. Wouldn't have liked to try it in East Berlin or Moscow." "Right," said Stewart. "And he never got tailed to a drop? Never compromised?"
"No," said Sharon. "He was tailed a few times, but always in a sporadic and clumsy way. Going from his home to the Economic Commission building or back, and once when he was heading for a drop. But he saw them and aborted." "Just supposing," said Laing, "he actually was tailed to a drop by a real team of watchers. Rahmani's Counterintelligence boys stake out the drop and roll up Jericho himself. Under persuasion, Jericho has to cooperate. ..."
"Then the product would have gone down in value," said Sharon. "But Jericho really was doing a lot of damage. Rahmani wouldn't have allowed that to go on. We'd have seen a public trial and hanging of Jericho, and Moncada would have been expelled, if lucky.
"It seems the trackers were AMAM people, even though foreigners are supposed to be Rahmani's turf. Whatever, they were as clumsy as usual. Moncada spotted them without trouble. You know how the AMAM is always trying to move into counterintelligence work."
The listeners nodded. Interdepartmental rivalry was nothing new--it happened in their own countries.
When Sharon reached the point where Moncada was abruptly withdrawn from Iraq, Bill Stewart let out an expletive.
"You mean he's switched off, out of contact? Are you telling us Jericho is on the loose with no controller?"
"That's the point," said Sharon patiently. He turned to Chip Barber. "When General Dror said he was running no agent in Baghdad, he meant it. The Mossad was convinced that Jericho, as an ongoing operation, was belly-up."
Barber shot the young katsa a look that said, "Pull the other leg, son. It's got bells on."
"We want to reestablish contact," said Laing smoothly. "How?"
Sharon laid out all six of the locations of the dead-letter boxes. During his two years Moncada had changed two of them; in one case because a location was bulldozed for redevelopment, in another because a derelict shop was refurbished and reoccupied. But the six functioning drops and the six places where the alerting chalk marks had to be placed were the up-to-date ones that had come from his final briefing after his expulsion.
The exact location of these drops and of the sites for the chalk marks were noted to the inch. "Maybe we could get a friendly diplomat to approach him at a function, tell him he's back in action and the money's better," suggested Barber. "Get around all this crap under bricks and flagstones."
"No," said Sharon. "It's the drops, or you can't contact him." "Why?" asked Stewart. "You're going to find this hard to believe, but I swear it's true. We never found out who he is."
The four Western agents stared at Sharon for several minutes. "You never identified him?" asked Stewart slowly. "No. We tried. We asked him to identify himself for his own protection. He refused, threatened to shut off if we persisted. We did handwriting analyses, psychoportraits. We cross-indexed the information he could produce and the stuff he couldn't get at. We ended up with a list of thirty, maybe forty men, all around Saddam Hussein, all within the Revolutionary Command Council, the Army High Command, or the senior ranks of the Ba'ath Party.
"Never could get closer than that. Twice we slipped a technical term in English into our demands. Each time they came back with a query. It seems he only speaks no or very limited English. But that could be a blind. He could be fluent, but if we knew that, it would narrow the field to two or three. So he always writes in script, in Arabic."
Stewart grunted, convinced. "Sounds like Deep Throat." "Surely Woodward and Bernstein identified Deep Throat?" suggested Paxman. "So they claim, but I doubt it," said Stewart. "I figure the guy stayed in deep shadow, like Jericho."
Darkness had long fallen by the time the four of them finally let an exhausted David Sharon go back to his embassy. If there was anything more he could have told them, they were not going to get it out of him. But Steve Laing was certain that this time the Mossad had come clean. Bill Stewart had told him of the level of the pressure that had been exercised in Washington.
The two British and two American intelligence officers, tired of sandwiches and coffee, adjourned to a restaurant half a mile away. Bill Stewart, who had an ulcer that twelve hours of sandwiches and high stress had not improved, toyed with a plate of smoked salmon.
"It's a bastard, Steve. It's a real four-eyed bastard. Like the Mossad, we'll have to try and find an accredited diplomat already trained in all the tradecraft and get him to work for us. Pay him if we have to. Langley's prepared to spend a lot of money on this. Jericho's information could save us a lot of lives when the fighting starts."
"So who does that leave us?" said Barber. "Half the embassies in Baghdad are closed down already. The rest must be under heavy surveillance. The Irish, Swiss, Swedes, Finns?"
"The neutrals won't play ball," said Laing. "And I doubt they've got a trained agent posted to Baghdad on their own account. Forget Third World embassies--it means starting a whole recruiting and training program."
"We don't have the time, Steve. This is urgent. We can't go down the same road the Israelis went. Three weeks is crazy. It might have worked then, but Baghdad is on a war footing now. Things have to be much tighter in there. Starting cold, I'd want a minimum three months to give a diplomat the tradecraft."
Stewart nodded agreement. "Failing that, someone with legitimate access. Some businessmen are still going in and out, especially the Germans. We could produce a convincing German, or a Japanese."
"The trouble is, they're short-stay chappies. Ideally, one wants someone to mother-hen this Jericho for the next--what? Four months. What about a journalist?" suggested Laing.
Paxman shook his head. "I've been talking with them all when they come out; being journalists, they get total surveillance. Snooping around back alleys won't work for a foreign correspondent--they all have a minder from the AMAM with them, all the time. Besides, don't forget that outside an accredited diplomat, we're talking about a black operation. Anyone want to dwell on what happens to an agent falling into Omar Khatib's hands?"
The four men at the table had heard of the brutal reputation of Khatib, head of the AMAM, nicknamed Al-Mu'azib, "the Tormentor."
"Risks just may have to be taken," observed Barber.
"I was referring more to acceptance," Paxman pointed out. "What businessman or reporter would ever agree, knowing what would be in store if he were caught? I'd prefer the KGB to the AMAM."
Bill Stewart put down his fork in frustration and called for another glass of milk. "Well, that's it then--short of finding a trained agent who can pass for an Iraqi."
Paxman shot a glance at Steve Laing, who thought for a moment and slowly nodded. "We've got a guy who can," said Paxman.
"A tame Arab? So has the Mossad, so have we," said Stewart, "but not at this level. Message-carriers, gofers. This is high-risk, high-value."
"No, a Brit, a major in the SAS." Stewart paused, his milk glass halfway to his mouth. Barber put down his knife and fork and ceased chewing his steak.
"Speaking Arabic is one thing. Passing for an Iraqi inside Iraq is a whole different ball game," said Stewart.
"He's dark-skinned, black-haired, brown-eyed, but he's a hundred percent British. He was born and raised there. He can pass for one."
"And he's fully trained in covert operations?" asked Barber. "Shit, where the hell is he?" "Actually, he's in Kuwait at the moment," said Laing.
"Damn. You mean he's stuck in there, holed up?" "No. He seems to be moving about quite freely."
"So if he can get out, what the hell's he doing?" "Killing Iraqis, actually."
Stewart thought it over and nodded slowly. "Big balls," he murmured. "Can you get him out of there? We'd like to borrow him."
"I suppose so, next time he comes on the radio. We would have to run him, though. And share the product." Stewart nodded again. "I guess so. You guys brought us Jericho. It's a deal. I'll clear it with the Judge."
Paxman rose and wiped his mouth. "I'd better go tell Riyadh," he said.
Mike Martin was a man accustomed to making his own luck, but his life was saved that October by a fluke.
He was due to make a radio call to the designated SIS house in the outskirts of Riyadh during the night of the nineteenth, the same night the four senior intelligence officers from the CIA and Century House were dining in South Kensington. Had he done so, he would have been off the air, due to the two-hour time difference, before Simon Paxman could return to Century House and alert Riyadh that he was wanted.
Worse, he would have been on the air for five to ten minutes, discussing with Riyadh ways of securing a resupply of arms and explosives.
In fact, he was in the lockup garage where he kept his jeep just before midnight, only to discover that the vehicle had a flat tire.
Cursing, he spent an hour with the jeep jacked-up, struggling to remove the wheel nuts, which had been almost cemented into place by a mixture of grease and desert sand. At a quarter to one he rolled out of the garage, and within half a mile he noticed that even his spare tire had developed a slow leak.
There was nothing for it but to return to the garage and abandon the radio call to Riyadh.
It took two days to have both tires repaired, and it was not until the night of the twenty-first that he found himself deep in the desert, far to the south of the city, turning his small satellite dish in the direction of the Saudi capital many hundreds of miles away, using the Send button to transmit a series of quick blips to indicate it was he who was calling and that he was about to come on the air. His radio was basic, a ten-channel fixed-crystal set, with one channel designated for each day of the month in rotation. On the twenty-first, he was using channel one. Having identified himself, he switched to Receive and waited.
Within seconds a low voice replied: "Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, read you five."
The codes identifying both Riyadh and Martin corresponded with the date and the channel, just in case someone hostile tried to muscle in on the waveband.
Martin went to Send and spoke several sentences.
On the outskirts of Kuwait City to the north, a young Iraqi technician was alerted by a pulsing light on the console he was monitoring in the commandeered apartment on top of a residential building. One of his sweepers had caught the transmission and locked on.
"Captain," he called urgently. An officer from Hassan Rahmani's Counterintelligence signals section strode over to the console. The light still pulsed, and the technician was easing a dial to secure a bearing.
"Someone has just come on the air." "Where?" "Out in the desert, sir."
The technician listened through his earphones as his direction-finders stabilized on the source of the transmission.
"Electronically scrambled transmission, sir." "That has to be him. The boss was right. What's the bearing?"
The officer was reaching for the telephone to alert his other two monitoring units, the trailer trucks parked at Jahra and the Al Adan hospital down near the coast.
"Two-oh-two degrees compass." Two-oh-two degrees was twenty-two degrees west of due south, and there was absolutely nothing out in that direction but the Kuwaiti desert, which ran all the way to join the Saudi desert at the border.
"Frequency?" barked the officer as the Jahra trailer came on the line.
The tracker gave it to him, a rare channel down in the very-low frequency range.
"Lieutenant," he called over his shoulder, "get on to Ahmadi air base. Tell them to get that helicopter airborne. We've got a fix."
Far away in the desert, Martin finished what he had to say and switched to Receive to get the answer from Riyadh. It was not what he had expected. He himself had spoken for only fifteen seconds.
"Rocky Mountain, Black Bear, return to the cave. I say again, return to the cave. Top urgent. Over and out."
The Iraqi captain gave the frequency to both his other monitoring stations. In Jahra and the hospital grounds other technicians rolled their source-tracers to the indicated frequency, and above their heads four-foot-diameter dishes swung from side to side. The one on the coast covered the area from Kuwait's northern border with Iraq down to the border with Saudi Arabia. The Jahra scanners swept east to west, from the sea in the east to the Iraqi deserts in the west.
Between the three of them, they could triangulate a fix to within a hundred yards and give a heading and distance to the Hind helicopter and its ten armed soldiers. "Still there?" asked the captain.
The technician scanned the circular screen in front of him, calibrated around its edge with the points of the compass. The center of the dish represented the point where he sat. Seconds earlier, there had been a glittering line across the screen, running from the center to compass heading 202. Now the screen was blank. It would only light up when the man out there transmitted again.
"No, sir. He's gone off the air. Probably listening to the reply." "He'll come back," said the captain.
But he was wrong. Black Bear had frowned over his sudden instructions from Riyadh, switched off his power, closed down his transmitter, and folded up his antenna.
The Iraqis monitored the frequency for the rest of the night until dawn, when the Hind at Al Ahmadi shut off its rotors and the stiff, tired soldiers climbed back out.
Simon Paxman was asleep on a cot in his office when the phone rang. It was a cipher clerk from Communications in the basement.
"I'll come down," said Paxman. It was a very short message, just decrypted, from Riyadh. Martin had been in touch and had been given his orders.
From his office Paxman phoned Chip Barber in his CIA flat off Grosvenor Square. "He's on his way back," he said. "We don't know when he'll cross the border. Steve says he wants me to go down there. You coming?"
"Right," said Barber. "The DDO's going back to Langley on the morning flight. But I'm coming with you. This guy I have to see."
During October 22 the American embassy and the British Foreign Office each approached the Saudi embassy for a short-notice accreditation of a new junior diplomat to Riyadh. There was no problem. Two passports, neither in the name of Barber or Paxman, were visaed without delay, and the men caught the 8:45 P.M. flight out of Heathrow, arriving at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Riyadh just before dawn.
An American embassy car met Chip Barber and took him straight to the U.S. mission, where the hugely expanded CIA operation was based, while a smaller unmarked sedan took Paxman away to the villa where the British SIS operation had quartered itself.
The first news Paxman got was that Martin had apparently not crossed the border and checked in.
Riyadh's order to return to base was, from Martin's point of view, easier said than done. He had returned from the desert well before dawn of October 22 and spent the day closing his operation down. A message was left under the tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery to explain to Mr. Al-Khalifa that he had regretfully had to leave Kuwait. A further note for Abu Fouad explained where and how to collect the remaining items of arms and explosives that were still stashed in the two of his once-six villas.
By afternoon he had finished, and he drove his battered pickup truck out to the camel farm beyond Sulaibiya, where the last outposts of Kuwait City ran out and the desert began.
His camels were still there and in good condition. The calf had been weaned and was on its way to becoming a valuable animal, so he used it to settle the debt he owed the owner of the farm who had taken care of it.
Shortly before dusk he mounted the she-camel and headed southsouthwest, so that when night fell and the chill darkness of the desert enfolded him, Martin was well clear of the last signs of habitation. It took him four hours instead of the usual one to arrive at the place where he had buried his radio, a site marked by the gutted and rusted wreck of a car that had once, long ago, broken down and been abandoned there.
He hid the radio beneath the consignment of dates that he had stored in the panniers. Even with these, the camel was far less laden than she had been when hauling her load of explosives and weapons into Kuwait nine weeks earlier.
If she was grateful, she gave no sign of it, rumbling and spitting with disgust at having been evicted from her comfortable corral at the farm. But she never slackened her swaying gait as the miles slipped by in the darkness.
It was a different journey, however, from that of mid-August. As he moved south, Martin saw more and more signs of the huge Iraqi army that now infested the area south of the city, spreading itself farther and farther west toward the Iraqi border. Usually he could see the glow of the lights of the various oil wells that stud the desert here and, knowing the Iraqis would be likely to occupy them, move away into the sands to avoid them. On other occasions he smelled the woodsmoke from an Iraqi fire and was able to skirt the encampments in time. Once he almost stumbled onto a battalion of tanks, hull-down behind horseshoe-shaped walls of sand facing the Americans and the Saudis across the border to the south. He heard the clink of metal on metal just in time, pulled the bridle sharply to the right, and slipped away back into the sand dunes.
There had only been two divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard south of Kuwait when he had entered, and they had been farther to the east, due south of Kuwait City.
Now the Hammurabi Division had joined the other two, and eleven further divisions, mainly of the regular army, had been ordered by Saddam Hussein into south Kuwait to match the American and Coalition buildup on the other side. Fourteen divisions is a lot of manpower, even spread over a desert.
Fortunately for Martin, they seemed to post no sentinels and slept soundly beneath their vehicles, but the sheer numbers of them pushed him farther and farther west.
The short fifty-kilometer hike from the Saudi village of Hamatiyyat to the Kuwaiti camel farm was out of the question; he was being pushed west toward the Iraqi border, marked by the deep cleft of the Wadi el Batin, which he did not really want to have to cross.
Dawn found him well to the west of the Manageesh oil field and still north of the Al Mufrad police station, which marks the border at one of the pre-emergency crossing points. The ground had become more hilly, and he found a cluster of rocks in which to spend the day. As the sun rose, he hobbled the camel, who sniffed the bare sand and rock in disgust, finding not even a tasty thorn bush for breakfast, rolled himself in the camel blanket, and went to sleep.
Shortly after noon, he was awakened by the clank of tanks quite close by and realized he was too near the main road that runs from Jahra, in Kuwait, due southwest to cross into Saudi Arabia at the Al Salmi customs station. After sundown he waited until almost midnight before setting out. He knew the border could not be more than twelve miles to the south.
His late start enabled him to move between the last Iraqi patrols at about three A.M., that hour when human spirits are lowest and sentries tend to doze.
By the light of the moon, he saw the Qaimat Subah police station slip by to one side, and two miles farther on, he knew he had crossed the border. To be on the safe side, he kept going until he cut into the lateral road that runs east-west between Hamatiyyat and Ar-Rugi. There he stopped and assembled his radio dish.
Because the Iraqis to the north had dug in several miles on the Kuwait side of the border, and because General Schwarzkopf's plan called for the Desert Shield forces also to lie back to ensure that, if attacked, they would know the Iraqis had truly invaded Saudi Arabia, Martin found himself in an empty no-man's-land. One day, that empty land would become a seething torrent of Saudi and American forces streaming north into Kuwait, but in the predawn darkness of October 24 he had it to himself.
Simon Paxman was awakened by-a junior member of the Century House team who inhabited the villa. "Black Bear has come on the air, Simon. He's crossed the border."
Paxman was out of bed and running into the radio room in his pajamas. A radio operator was on a swivel chair facing a console that ran along one complete wall of what had once been quite an elegant bedroom. Because it was now the twenty-fourth, the codes had changed. "Corpus Christi to Texas Ranger, where are you? Say again, state your position, please."
The voice sounded tinny when it came out of the console speaker, but it was perfectly clear. "South of Qaimat Subah, on the Hamatiyyat-to-Ar-Rugi road."
The operator turned to glance at Paxman. The SIS man pressed the Send button and said: "Ranger, stay there. There's a taxi coming for you. Acknowledge." "Understood," said the voice. "I'll wait for the black cab."
It was not actually a black cab. It was an American Blackhawk helicopter that swept down the road two hours later, a loadmaster strapped in the open door beside the pilot, masked with a pair of binoculars, scanning the dusty track that purported to be a road. From two hundred feet, the loadmaster spotted a man beside a camel and was about to fly on when the man waved.
The Blackhawk slowed to a hover and watched the Bedou warily. So far as the pilot was concerned, this was uncomfortably close to the border. Still, the map position he had been given by his squadron intelligence officer was accurate, and there was no one else in sight. It was Chip Barber who had arranged with the U.S. Army detail at the Riyadh military air base to lend a Blackhawk to pick up a Britisher who was due to come over the border out of Kuwait. The Blackhawk had the range, but no one had told the Army pilot about a Bedouin tribesman with a camel.
As the American Army aviators watched from two hundred feet, the man on the ground arranged a series of stones. When he had finished, he stood back. The loadmaster focused his glasses on the display of stones. They said simply: Hi there.
The loadmaster spoke into his mask. "Must be the guy. Let's go get him." The pilot nodded, and the Blackhawk curved around and down until it hovered a foot off the ground twenty yards from the man and his beast.
Martin had already taken the panniers and the heavy camel saddle off his animal and dumped them by the roadside. The radio set and his personal sidearm, the Browning 9-mm. thirteen-shot automatic favored by the SAS, were in the tote bag slung over his shoulder.
As the helicopter came down, the camel panicked and cantered off. Martin watched her go. She had served him well, despite her foul temper. She would come to no harm alone in that desert. So far as she was concerned, she was home. She would roam freely, finding her own fodder and water, until some Bedou found her, saw no brand mark, and gleefully took her for his own.
Martin ducked under the whirling blades and ran to the open door. Over the whine of the rotors, the loadmaster shouted: "Your name, please?" "Major Martin." A hand came out of the aperture to pull Martin into the hull. "Welcome aboard, Major."
At that point the engine noise drowned out further talk, the loadmaster handed Martin a pair of ear-defenders to muffle the roar, and they settled back for the run to Riyadh.
Approaching the city, the pilot was diverted to a villa on the outskirts of the city. Next to it was a patch of waste ground where someone had laid out three rows of bright orange seat-cushions in the form of an H.
As the Blackhawk hovered, the man in Arab robes jumped the three feet to the ground, turned to wave his thanks to the crew, and strode toward the house as the helicopter lifted away. Two house servants began to gather up the cushions.
Martin walked through the arched doorway in the villa wall and found himself in a flagged courtyard. Two men were emerging from the door of the house. One he recognized from the SAS headquarters in West London all those weeks ago. "Simon Paxman," said the younger man, holding out his hand. "Bloody good to have you back. This is Chip Barber, one of our cousins from Langley."
Barber shook hands and took in the figure before him: a stained, offwhite robe from chin to floor, a striped blanket folded and hung over one shoulder, a red-and-white-checked keffiyeh with two black cords to hold it in place, a lean, hard, dark-eyed, black-stubbled face.
"Good to know you, Major. Heard a lot about you." His nose twitched. "Guess you could use a hot tub, eh?" "Oh, yes, I'll get that sorted out at once," said Paxman. Martin nodded, said "Thanks," and walked into the cool of the villa.
Paxman and Barber came in behind him. Barber was privately elated. "Damn," he thought to himself. "I do believe this bastard could even do it."
It took three consecutive baths in the marble tub of the villa, obtained for the British by Prince Khaled bin Sultan, for Martin to scrape off the dirt and sweat of weeks. He sat with a towel around his waist while a barber summoned for the purpose gave his matted hair a cut, then he shaved with Simon Paxman's wash-kit.
His keffiyeh, blanket, robes, and sandals had been taken away to the garden, where a Saudi servant had turned them into a satisfactory bonfire. Two hours later, in a pair of Paxman's light cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, Mike Martin sat at the dining table and contemplated a five-course lunch.
"Would you mind telling me," he asked, "why you pulled me out?"
It was Chip Barber who answered. "Good question, Major. Damn good question. Deserves a damn good answer. Right? Fact is, we'd like you to go into Baghdad. Next week. Salad or fish?"