Chapter 8
Mike Martin visited the tomb of Able Seaman Shepton in the cemetery of Sulaibikhat on the first of October and discovered the plea from Ahmed Al-Khalifa.
He was not particularly surprised. If Abu Fouad had heard of him, he had also heard of the steadily growing and spreading Kuwaiti resistance movement and its shadowy leading light. That they should eventually have to meet was probably inevitable.
In six weeks, the position of the Iraqi occupation forces had changed dramatically. In their invasion they had had a pushover, and they had begun their occupation with a sloppy confidence, assured that their stay in Kuwait would be as effortless as the conquest. The looting had been easy and profitable, the destruction amusing, and the using of the womenfolk pleasurable. It had been the way of conquerors that went back to the days of Babylon.
Kuwait, after all, had been a fat pigeon ready for the plucking. But in six weeks, the pigeon had begun to peck and scratch. Over a hundred Iraqi soldiers and eight officers had either disappeared or been found dead. The disappearances could not all be explained by desertions. For the first time, the occupation forces were experiencing fear.
Officers no longer traveled in a single staff car but insisted on a truckload of escorting troops. Headquarters buildings had to be guarded night and day, to the point where Iraqi officers had taken to firing over the heads of their sleeping sentries to wake them up.
The nights had become periods of no-go for anything less than a substantial troop movement. The roadblock teams huddled inside their redoubts when darkness fell. And still the mines went off, the vehicles burst into flame or seized up with ruined engines, the grenades were thrown, and the soldiers disappeared with cut throats into sewers or garbage dumps.
The escalating resistance had forced the High Command to replace the Popular Army with the Special Forces, good fighting troops who should have been at the front line in case the Americans came. Early October for Kuwait was not, to echo Churchill's phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.
Martin had no means of replying to Al-Khalifa's message when he read it in the graveyard, so it was not until the following day that he deposited his answer.
He agreed to meet, he said, but on his own terms. To have the advantage of darkness but to avoid the curfew at ten P.M., he called for a meeting at half past seven. He gave exact directions as to where Abu Fouad should park his car and the small grove of trees where he would meet. The place he indicated was in the district of Abrak Kheitan, close to the main highway from the city to the now shattered and unused airport.
Martin knew it to be an area of traditional stone-built houses with flat roofs. On one of those roofs he would be waiting for two hours before the rendezvous to see if the Kuwaiti officer was being followed and if so by whom: his own bodyguards, or the Iraqis. In a hostile environment, the SAS officer was still at large and in combat because he took no chances, none at all.
He knew nothing of Abu Fouad's concept of security and was not prepared to assume it was brilliant. He established the meeting for the evening of the seventh and left his reply beneath the marble slab. Ahmed Al-Khalifa retrieved it on the fourth. * * * Dr. John Hipwell would never have been taken during a casual meeting for a nuclear physicist, let alone one of those scientists who spent his working days behind the massive security of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston designing plutonium warheads for the soon-to-be-fitted Trident missiles.
A passing observer would have assumed he was a bluff Home Counties farmer, more at home leaning wisely over a pen of fat lambs at the local market than supervising the cladding of lethal disks of plutonium in pure gold.
Although the weather was still mild when Hipwell reappeared before the Medusa Committee, he wore, as in August, his square-patterned shirt, wool tie, and tweed jacket. Without waiting to be asked, he used his big red hands to fill and tamp a briar pipe with shag tobacco before starting into his report. Sir Paul Spruce twitched his pointed nose in distaste and gestured for the air conditioning to be raised a notch. "Well, gentlemen, the good news is that our friend Mr. Saddam Hussein does not have, an atomic bomb at his disposal. Not yet, not by a long chalk," said Dr. Hipwell, as he disappeared into a cloud of pale blue smoke. There was a pause while he attended to his personal bonfire. Perhaps, Terry Martin mused, if you risk collecting a lethal dose of plutonium rays every day, the occasional pipe of tobacco does not really matter. Dr. Hipwell glanced at his notes. "Iraq has been on the trail of her own nuclear bomb since the mid- 1970s, when Saddam Hussein really came to power. It seems to be the man's obsession. In those years Iraq bought a complete nuclear reactor system from France--which was not bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968--for that very purpose."
He sucked contentedly and tamped the glowing brushfire at the top of his pipe once again. Drifting embers settled onto his notes. "Forgive me," said Sir Paul. "Was this reactor for the purpose of generating electricity?"
"Supposed to be," agreed Hipwell. "Absolute rubbish, of course, and the French knew it. Iraq has the third-largest oil deposits in the world. They could have had an oil-fired power station for a fraction of the price. No, the point was to fuel the reactor with low-grade uranium, called yellowcake or caramel, that they could persuade people to sell them. After use in a reactor, the end-product is plutonium."
There were nods around the table. Everyone knew that the British reactor at Sellafield created electricity for the power grid and spewed out the plutonium that went to Hipwell for his warheads.
"So the Israelis went to work," said Hipwell. "First one of their commando teams blew up the huge turbine at Toulon before it was shipped, setting the project back two years. Then in 1981, when Saddam's precious Osirak 1 and 2 plants were about to start up, Israeli fighter-bombers swept in and blew the lot to kingdom come. Since then, Saddam has never succeeded in buying another reactor. After a short while, he stopped trying."
"Why the hell did he do that?" asked Harry Sinclair from his end of the table.
"Because he changed direction," said Hipwell with a broad smile, like one who has solved a crossword puzzle in record time.
"Up until then, he was pursuing the plutonium road. With some success, by the way. But not enough. Yet--"
"I don't understand," said Sir Paul Spruce. "What is the difference between a plutonium-based and a uranium-based atomic bomb?"
"Uranium is simpler," said the physicist. "Look, there are various radioactive substances that can be used for a chain reaction, but for your simple, basic, effective atom bomb, uranium's the ticket. That's what Saddam has been after since 1982--a basic uranium-based bomb. He hasn't got there yet, but he's still trying, and he'll get there one day."
Hipwell sat back with a broad beam, as if he had settled the enigma of the Creation. Like most of those around the table, Spruce was still perplexed.
"If he can buy this uranium for his destroyed reactor, why can't he make a bomb with it?" he asked.
Hipwell pounced upon the question like a farmer on a bargain. "Different kinds of uranium, my dear man. Funny stuff, uranium. Very rare. From a thousand tons of uranium ore, all you get is a block the size of a cigar box. Yellowcake. It's called natural uranium, with an isotope number of 238. You can power an industrial reactor with it, but not make a bomb. Not pure enough. For a bomb you need the lighter isotope, uranium-235."
"Where does that come from?" asked Paxman. "It's inside the yellowcake. In that one cigar-box-size block there is enough uranium-235 to stick under one fingernail without discomfort. The devil is getting the two separated. It's called isotope separation. Very difficult, very technical, very expensive, and very slow."
"But you said Iraq is getting there," pointed out Sinclair.
"He is, but he's not there yet," said Hipwell. "There's only one viable way of purifying and refining the yellowcake to the required ninetythree percent pure. Years ago, in the Manhattan Project, your chaps tried several methods. They were experimenting, see? Ernest Lawrence tried one way, Robert Oppenheimer tried another. In those days they used both methods in complementary fashion and created enough uranium-235 to make Little Boy.
"After the war the centrifuge method was invented and slowly perfected. Nowadays only this method is used. Basically, you put the feedstock into a thing called a centrifuge, which spins so fast that the whole process has to be done in a vacuum or the bearings would turn to jelly. Slowly the heavier isotopes, the ones you don't want, are drawn to the outer wall of the centrifuge and bled off. What's left is a little bit purer than when you started. Just a little bit. You have to do it over and over again, thousands of hours, just to get a wafer of bombgrade uranium the size of a postage stamp."
"But he is doing it?" pressed Sir Paul. "Yep. Been doing it for about a year. These centrifuges ... to save time we link them in series, called cascades. But you need thousands of centrifuges to make up a cascade."
"If they've been going down that road since 1982, why has it taken so long?" asked Terry Martin.
"You don't go into the hardware store and buy a uranium gas diffusion centrifuge off the shelf," Hipwell pointed out. "They tried at first but were turned down--the documents show that. Since 1985 they have been buying the component parts to build their own on-site. They got about five hundred tons of basic uranium yellowcake, half of it from Portugal. They bought much of the centrifuge technology from West Germany--"
"I thought Germany had signed a whole range of international agreements limiting the spread of nuclear bomb technology," protested Paxman.
"Maybe they have. I wouldn't know about the politics," said the scientist. "But they got the bits and pieces from all over the place. You need designer lathes, special ultrastrong maraging steel, anticorrosion vessels, special valves, high-temperature furnaces called 'skull' furnaces because that's what they look like, plus vacuum pumps and bellows--this is serious technology we are talking about. Quite a bit, plus the know-how, came fromGermany."
"Let me get this straight," said Sinclair. "Has Saddam got any isotope separation centrifuges working yet?"
"Yes, one cascade. It's been functioning for about a year. And another one is coming on stream soon."
"Do you know where all this stuff is?" "The centrifuge assembly plant is at a place called Taji--here." The scientist passed a large aerial photo over to the American and circled a series of industrial buildings.
"The working cascade seems to be underground somewhere not far from the old wrecked French reactor at Tuwaitha, the reactor they called Osirak. I don't know whether you'll ever find it with a bomber--it's certainly underground and camouflaged."
"And the new cascade?" "No idea," said Hipwell. "Could be anywhere."
"Probably somewhere else," suggested Terry Martin. "The Iraqis have been practicing duplication and dispersal ever since they put all their eggs in one basket and the Israelis blew the basket away." Sinclair grunted.
"How sure are you," asked Sir Paul, "that Saddam Hussein cannot have his bomb yet?"
"Very," said the physicist. "It's a question of time. He hasn't had long enough. For a basic but usable atomic bomb, he will need thirty to thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium-235. Starting cold a year ago, even assuming the working cascade can function twenty-four hours a day--which it can't--a spinning program needs at least twelve hours per centrifuge. You need a thousand spins to get from zero percent pure to the required ninety-three percent. That's five hundred days of spinning. But then there's cleaning, servicing, maintenance, breakdowns. Even with a thousand centrifuges operating in a cascade now and for the past year, you'd need five years. Bring in another cascade next year--shorten it to three years."
"So he won't have his thirty-five kilograms until 1993 at the earliest?" interjected Sinclair. "No, he can't."
"One final question: If he gets the uranium, how much longer to an atomic bomb?" "Not long. A few weeks. You see, a country undertaking to make its own bomb will have the nuclear engineering side running in parallel. Bomb engineering is not all that complicated, so long as you know what you are doing. And Jaafar does--he will know how to build one and trigger it. Dammit, we trained him at Harwell. But the point is, on a time-scale alone, Saddam Hussein cannot have enough pure uranium ready yet. Ten kilograms, tops. He's three years short, minimum."
Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of analysis, and the meeting ended.
Sinclair would return to his embassy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the analyses of the American counterparts--physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and principally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon.
Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree.
Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine.
"Quite a relief," said Paxman. "Old Hipwell was quite adamant. Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That bastard is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about."
They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin's Lane toward Gower Street.
Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing. Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them.
By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it.
Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner space, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball--the ramjet effect--far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.
Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged "old faithful" was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev's phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction.
The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a "listener" rather than a "watcher" and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography.
All this information, from the professors and scientists, analysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became.
From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military brass sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply "the Black Hole."
It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner's air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military--in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, arsenals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction--research facilities, assembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots.
The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, assumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex. But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them.
A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth analyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and Analysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of analytical hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.
Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad.
At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street. The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic, and into darkness.
He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot.
Abu Fouad and the woman had been told to wait up to half an hour. If the Bedou had not shown up, they were to abort and go home. They actually waited forty minutes before returning to the car. Both were frustrated.
"He must have been detained," said Abu Fouad to his companion. "An Iraqi patrol, perhaps. Who knows? Anyway, damn. I'll have to start again." "I think you're crazy to trust him," said the woman. "You have no idea who he is."
They spoke softly, the Kuwaiti resistance leader looking up and down the street to ensure no Iraqi soldiers had appeared while he was away. "He's successful and cunning, and he works like a professional. That's all I need to know. I would like to collaborate with him, if he's willing." "Then I have nothing against that."
The woman uttered a short scream. Abu Fouad jerked in his seat. "Don't turn round. Let's just talk," said the voice from the back seat.
In his rearview mirror the Kuwaiti saw the dim outline of a Bedouin keffiyeh and caught the odor of one who lives rough. He let out his breath in a long exhalation.
"You move quietly, Bedou." "No need to make a noise, Abu Fouad. It attracts Iraqis. I don't like that, except when I am ready."
Abu Fouad's teeth flashed under his black moustache. "Very well. Now we have found each other. Let us talk. By the way, why hide in the car?"
"If this meeting had been a trap for me, your first words when you got back into the car would have been different."
"Self-incriminating--" "Of course." "And then?" "You would be dead." "Understood."
"Who is your companion? I made no mention of companions." "You set up the rendezvous. It was I who had to trust you also. She is a trusted colleague. Asrar Qabandi."
"Very well. Greetings, Miss Qabandi. What do you want to talk about?" "Guns, Bedou. Kalashnikov machine pistols, modern hand grenades, Semtex-H. My people could do so much more with that sort of thing."
"Your people are being caught, Abu Fouad. Ten were surrounded in the same house by an entire company of Iraqi infantry under AMAM leadership. All shot. All youngsters."
Abu Fouad was silent. It had been a major disaster. "Nine," he said at last. "The tenth played dead and crept away later. He is injured, and we are taking care of him. It was he who told us."
"What?" "That they were betrayed. If he had died, we would not have known."
"Ah, betrayal. Always the danger in any resistance movement. And the traitor?" "We know him, of course. We thought we could trust him."
"But he is guilty?" "It seems so." "Only seems?" Abu Fouad sighed.
"The survivor swears that only the eleventh man knew of the meeting, and the address. But it could be there was a leak somewhere else, or one of them was tailed. ..."
"Then he must be tested, this suspect. And if guilty, punished. Miss Qabandi, would you leave us for a while, please."
The young woman glanced at Abu Fouad, who nodded. She left the car and walked back to the grove of trees. The Bedou told Abu Fouad carefully and in detail what he wanted him to do.
"I will not be leaving the house until seven o'clock," he finished. "So under no circumstances must you make the phone call until half past seven. Understood?"
The Bedou slipped out of the car and disappeared among the dark alleys running between the houses. Abu Fouad drove up the street and picked up Miss Qabandi. Together they drove home. The Bedou never saw the woman again. Before the liberation of Kuwait, Asrar Qabandi was caught by the AMAM, rigorously tortured, gang-raped, shot, and decapitated. Before she died, she never said a thing.
Terry Martin was on the phone to Simon Paxman, who was still inundated with work and could have done without the interruption. It was only because he had taken a liking to the fussy professor of Arabic studies that Paxman took the call.
"I know I'm being a bother, but do you have any contacts at GCHQ?"
"Yes, of course," said Paxman. "In the Arabic Service, mainly. Know the Director of it, come to that."
"Could you possibly give him a call and ask if he'd see me?" "Well, yes, I suppose so. What have you in mind?"
"It's the stuff coming out of Iraq these days. I've studied all Saddam's speeches, of course, and watched the announcements about hostages and human shields and seen their ghastly attempts at PR on the television. But I'd like to see if there's anything else being picked up, stuff that hasn't been cleared by their Propaganda Ministry."
"Well, that's what GCHQ does," admitted Paxman. "I don't see why not. If you've been sitting in with the Medusa people, you've got the clearance. I'll give him a call."
That afternoon, by appointment, Terry Martin drove west to Gloucestershire and presented himself at the well-guarded gate of the sprawl of buildings and antennae that constitute the third main arm of British intelligence alongside MI-6 and MI-5, the Government Communications Headquarters.
The Director of the Arabic Service was Sean Plummer, under whom worked that same Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested Mike Martin's Arabic in the Chelsea restaurant eleven weeks earlier, though neither Terry Martin nor Plummer knew that.
The Director had agreed to see Martin in the midst of a busy day because, as a fellow Arabist, he had heard of the young scholar of the SOAS and admired his original research on the Abassid Caliphate. "Now, what can I do for you?" he asked when they were both seated with a glass of mint tea, a luxury Plummer permitted himself to escape the miseries of institution coffee. Martin explained that he was surprised at the paucity of the intercepts he had been shown corning out of Iraq. Plummer's eyes lit up.
"You're right, of course. As you know, our Arab friends tend to chatter like magpies on open circuits. The last couple of years, the interceptable traffic has slumped. Now, either the whole national character has changed, or--" "Buried cables," said Martin.
"Precisely. Apparently Saddam and his boys have buried over fortyfive thousand miles of fiber-optic communication cables. That's what they're talking on. For me, it's an absolute bastard. How can I keep giving the spooks in London another round of Baghdad weather reports and Mother Hussein's bloody laundry lists?"
It was his manner of speaking, Martin realized. Plummer's service delivered a lot more than that.
"They still talk of course--ministers, civil servants, generals--right down to chitchat between tank commanders on the Saudi border. But the serious, top-secret phone calls are off the air. Never used to be. What do you want to see?"
For the next four hours, Terry Martin ran his eye over a range of intercepts. Radio broadcasts were too obvious; he was looking for something in an inadvertent phone call, a slip of the tongue, a mistake.
Finally he closed the files of digests. "Would you," he asked, "just keep an eye open for anything really odd, anything that just doesn't make sense?"
Mike Martin was beginning to think he should one day write a tourist's guide to the flat roofs of Kuwait City. He seemed to have spent an impressive amount of time lying on one of them surveying the area beneath him. On the other hand, they did make superb places for LUPs, or lying-up positions.
He had been on this particular one for almost two days, surveying the house whose address he had given to Abu Fouad. It was one of the six he had been lent by Ahmed Al-Khalifa, and one he would now never use again.
Although it was two days since he had given the address to Abu Fouad and nothing was supposed to happen until tonight, October 9, he had still watched, night and day, living off a handful of bread and fruit.
If Iraqi soldiers arrived before seven-thirty on the evening of the ninth, he would know who had betrayed him--Abu Fouad himself. He glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty. The Kuwaiti colonel should be making his call about now, as instructed.
Across the city, Abu Fouad was indeed lifting the phone. He dialed a number, which was answered on the third ring.
"Salah?" "Yes, who is this?" "We have never met, but I have heard many good things about you--that you are loyal and brave, one of us. People know me as Abu Fouad." There was a gasp at the end of the phone.
"I need your help, Salah. Can we, the movement, count on you?" "Oh, yes, Abu Fouad. Please tell me what it is you want."
"Not I personally, but a friend. He is wounded and sick. I know you are a pharmacist. You must at once take medications to him--bandages, antibiotics, pain-killers. Have you heard of the one they call the Bedou?" "Yes, of course. But do you mean to say you know him?"
"Never mind, but we have been working together for weeks. He is hugely important to us." "I will go downstairs to the shop right now and select the things he needs, and take them to him. Where do I find him?" "He is holed up in a house in Shuwaikh and cannot move. Take pencil and paper."
Abu Fouad dictated the address he had been given. At the other end of the phone it was noted. "I will drive over at once, Abu Fouad. You can trust me," said Salah the pharmacist.
"You are a good man. You will be rewarded." Abu Fouad hung up. The Bedou had said he would phone at dawn if nothing happened, and the pharmacist would be in the clear.
Mike Martin saw, rather than heard, the first truck just before half past eight. It was rolling on its own momentum, the engine off to make no sound, and it trundled past the intersection of the street before coming to a halt a few yards farther on and just out of sight. Martin nodded in approval.
The second truck did the same a few moments later. From each vehicle, twenty men descended quietly, Green Berets who knew what they were doing. The men moved in a column up the street, headed by an officer who grasped a civilian. The man's white dish-dash glimmered in the half-darkness. With all the street names ripped down, the soldiers had needed a civilian guide to find this road. But the house numbers were still up.
The civilian stopped at a house, studied the number plate, and pointed.
The captain in charge had a hurried, whispered conversation with his sergeant, who took fifteen men down a side alley to cover the back. Followed by the remaining soldiers, the captain tried the steel door to the small garden. It opened. The men surged through.
Inside the garden the captain could see that a low light burned in an upstairs room. Much of the ground floor was taken up by the garage, which was empty. At the front door all pretense of stealth vanished.
The captain tried the handle, found it was locked, and gestured to a soldier behind him. The man fired a brief burst from his automatic rifle at the lock in the wooden setting, and the door swung open.
With the captain leading, the Green Berets rushed in. Some went for the darkened ground-floor rooms; the captain and the rest went straight up for the master bedroom.
From the landing the captain could see the interior of the low-lit bedroom, the armchair with its back to the door, and the checkered keffiyeh peeping out over the top. He did not fire. Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM had been specific: This one he wanted alive for questioning.
As he rushed forward, the young officer did not feel the snag of the nylon fishing line against his shins. He heard his own men bursting in through the back and others pounding up the stairs. He saw the slumped form in the soiled white robe, filled out by cushions, and the big watermelon wrapped in the keffiyeh. His face contorted with anger, and he had the time to snarl an insult at the trembling pharmacist who stood in the doorway.
Five pounds of Semtex-H may not sound like much, and it does not look very large. The houses of that neighborhood are built of stone and concrete, which was what saved the surrounding residences, some of which were occupied by Kuwaitis, from more than superficial damage. But the house in which the soldiers stood virtually disappeared. Tiles from its roof were later found several hundred yards away.
The Bedou had not waited around to watch his handiwork. He was already two streets away, shuffling along, minding his own business, when he heard the muffled boom, like a door being slammed, then the one-second hollow silence, then the crash of masonry.
Three things happened the following day, all after dark. In Kuwait, the Bedou had his second meeting with Abu Fouad. This time, the Kuwaiti came alone to the rendezvous, in the shadow of a deep arched doorway only two hundred yards from the Sheraton, which had been taken over by dozens of senior Iraqi officers.
"You heard, Abu Fouad?" "Of course. The whole city is buzzing. They lost over twenty men and the rest injured." He sighed. "There will be more random reprisals."
"You wish to stop now?" "No. We cannot. But how much longer must we suffer?" "The Americans and the British will come. One day."
"Allah make it soon. Was Salah with them?" "He brought them. There was only one civilian. You told no one else?"
"No, just him. It must have been him. He has the lives of nine young men on his head. He will not see Paradise."
"So. What more do you want of me?" "I do not ask who you are or where you come from. As a trained Army officer, I know you cannot be just a simple Bedou camel-drover from the desert. You have supplies of explosives, guns, ammunition, grenades. My people could also do much with these things."
"And your offer?" "Join with us and bring your supplies. Or stay on your own but share your supplies. I am not here to threaten, only to ask. But if you want to help our resistance, this is the way to do it."
Mike Martin thought for a while. After eight weeks he had half his supplies left, still buried in the desert or scattered through the two villas he used not for living but for storage. Of his other four houses, one was destroyed and the other, where he had met with his pupils, compromised.
He could hand over his stores and ask for more by night drop--risky but feasible, so long as his messages to Riyadh were not being intercepted, which he could not know. Or he could make another camel trip across the border and return with two more panniers. Even that would not be easy--there were now sixteen divisions of Iraqis ranged along that border, three times the number when he had entered.
It was time to contact Riyadh again and ask for instructions. In the meanwhile, he would give Abu Fouad almost everything he had. There was more south of the border; he would just have to get it through somehow.
"Where do you want it delivered?" he asked. "We have a warehouse in Shuwaikh Port. It is quite secure. It stores fish. The owner is one of us." "In six days," said Martin.
They agreed on the time and the place where a trusted aide of Abu Fouad would meet the Bedou and guide him the rest of the journey to the warehouse. Martin described the vehicle he would be driving and the way he would look.
That same night, but two hours earlier because of the time difference,
Terry Martin sat in a quiet restaurant not far from his apartment and twirled a glass of wine in one hand. The guest he awaited entered a few minutes later, an elderly man with gray hair, glasses, and a spotted bow tie. He looked round inquiringly. "Moshe, over here."
The Israeli bustled over to where Terry Martin had risen, and greeted him effusively. "Terry, my dear boy, how are you?" "Better for seeing you, Moshe. Couldn't let you pass through London without at least a dinner and a chance to chat."
The Israeli was old enough to be Martin's father, but their friendship was based on common interest. Both were academics and avid students of ancient Middle Eastern Arab civilizations, their cultures, art, and languages.
Professor Moshe Hadari went back a long way. As a young man, he had excavated much of the Holy Land with Yigael Yadin, himself both a professor and an Army general.
Hadari's great regret was that, as an Israeli, much of the Middle East was forbidden to him, even for scholarship. Still, in his field he was one of the best, and that field being a small one, it was inevitable that the two scholars should meet at some seminar, as they had ten years earlier.
It was a good dinner, and the talk flowed over the latest research, the newest tiny fresh perceptions of the way life had been in the kingdoms of the Middle East ten centuries earlier.
Terry Martin knew he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, so his recent activities on assignment for Century House were not for discussion. But over coffee their conversation came quite naturally around to the crisis in the Gulf and the chances of a war.
"Do you think he will pull out of Kuwait, Terry?" the professor asked.
Martin shook his head. "No, he can't, unless he is given a clearly marked road, concessions he can use to justify withdrawal. To go naked, he falls."
Hadari sighed. "So much waste," he said. "All my life, so much waste. All that money, enough to make the Middle East a paradise on earth. All that talent, all those young lives. And for what? Terry, if war comes, will the British fight with the Americans?"
"Of course. We've already sent the Seventh Armoured Brigade, and I believe the Fourth Armoured will follow. That makes a division, apart from the fighters and the warships. Don't worry about it. This is one Mid-East war in which Israel not only may, but must, sit on her thumbs."
"Yes, I know," said the Israeli gloomily. "But many more young men will have to die."
Martin leaned forward and patted his friend on the arm. "Look, Moshe, the man has got to be stopped. Sooner or later. Israel of all countries must know how far he has got with his weapons of mass destruction. In a sense, we have just been finding out the true scale of what he has."
"But our people have been helping, of course. We are probably his principal target."
"Yes, in target analysis," said Martin. "Our principal problem is in hard, on-the-spot intelligence. We simply don't have top-level intelligence coming to us out of Baghdad. Not the British, not the Americans, and not even your people either."
Twenty minutes later the dinner ended, and Terry Martin saw Professor Hadari into a taxi to take him back to his hotel.
* * * About the hour of midnight, three triangulation stations were implanted in Kuwait on the orders of Hassan Rahmani in Baghdad.
They were radio dishes designed to track the source of a radio-wave emission and take a compass bearing on it. One was a fixed station, mounted on the roof of a tall building in the district of Ardiya, on the extreme southern outskirts of Kuwait City. Its dish faced toward the desert.
The other two were mobile stations, large vans with the dishes on the roof, an in-built generator for the electrical power, and a darkened interior where the scanners could sit at their consoles and trawl the airwaves for the transmitter they sought, which they had been told would probably send from somewhere out in the desert between the city and the Saudi border.
One of these vans was outside Jahra, well to the west of its colleague in Ardiya, and the third was down the coast, in the grounds of the Al Adan hospital, where the law student's sister had been raped in the first days of the invasions. The Al Adan tracker could get a full crossbearing on those reported by the scanners farther north, pinning the source of the transmission down to a square a few hundred yards across.
At Ahmadi air base, where once Khaled Al-Khalifa had flown his Skyhawk, a Soviet-built Hind helicopter gunship waited on twentyfour-hour standby. The crew of the Hind was from the Air Force, a concession Rahmani had had to squeeze out of the general commanding it. The radio-tracking crews were from Rahmani's own Counterintelligence wing, drafted in from Baghdad and the best he had.
Professor Hadari spent a sleepless night. Something his friend had told him worried him deeply. He regarded himself as a completely loyal Israeli, born of an old Sephardic family who had emigrated just after the turn of the century along with men like Ben-Yehuda and Ben- Gurion. He himself had been born outside Jaffa, when it was still a bustling port of Palestinian Arabs, and he had learned Arabic as a small boy.
He had raised two sons and seen one of them die in a miserable ambush in South Lebanon. He was grandfather to five small children. Who should tell him that he did not love his country?
But there was something wrong. If war came, many young men might die, as his Ze'ev had died, even if they were British and Americans and French. Was this the time for Kobi Dror to show vindictive, smallpower chauvinism?
He rose early, settled his bill, packed, and ordered a taxi for the airport.
Before he left the hotel, he hovered for a while by the bank of phones in the lobby, then changed his mind.
Halfway to the airport, he ordered his cab driver to divert off the M4 and find a phone booth. Grumbling at the time and trouble this would take, the driver did so, eventually finding one on a corner in Chiswick.
Hadari was in luck. It was Hilary who answered the phone at the Bayswater flat. "Hold on," he said, "he's halfway out the door."
Terry Martin came on the line. "It's Moshe. Terry, I don't have much time. Tell your people the Institute does have a high source inside Baghdad. Tell them to ask what happened to Jericho. Good-bye, my friend."
"Moshe, one moment. Are you sure? How do you know?" "It doesn't matter. You never heard this from me. Goodbye."
The phone went dead. In Chiswick the elderly scholar climbed back into his taxi and proceeded to Heathrow. He was trembling at the enormity of what he had done. And how could he tell Terry Martin that it was he, the professor of Arabic from Tel Aviv University, who had crafted that first reply to Jericho in Baghdad?
Terry Martin's call found Simon Paxman at his desk at Century House just after ten.
"Lunch? Sorry, I can't. Hell of a day. Tomorrow perhaps," said Paxman. "Too late. It's urgent, Simon."
Paxman sighed. No doubt his tame academic had come up with some fresh interpretation of a phrase in an Iraqi broadcast that was supposed to change the meaning of life.
"Still can't make lunch. Major conference here, in-house. Look, a quick drink. The Hole-in-the-Wall, it's a pub underneath Waterloo Bridge, quite close to here. Say twelve o'clock? I can give you half an hour, Terry." "More than enough. See you," said Martin.
Just after noon, they sat over beers in the alehouse above which the trains of the Southern Region rumbled to Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. Martin, without revealing his source, narrated what he had been told that morning.
"Bloody hell," whispered Paxman. There were people in the next booth. "Who told you?"
"Can't say." "Well, you must."
"Look, he went out on a limb. I gave my word. He's an academic and senior. That's all."
Paxman thought. Academic, and mixing with Terry Martin. Certainly another Arabist. Could have been on assignment with the Mossad. Whatever, the information had to go back to Century and without delay. He thanked Martin, left his beer, and scuttled back down the road to Century.
Because of the lunchtime conference, Steve Laing had not left the building. Paxman drew him aside and told him. Laing took it straight to the Chief himself.
Sir Colin, who was never given to overstatement, pronounced General Kobi Dror to be a most tiresome fellow, forsook his lunch, ordered something to be brought to his desk, and retired to the top floor. There he put in a personal call on an extremely secure line to Judge William Webster, Director of the CIA.
It was only half past eight in Washington, but the Judge was a man who liked to rise with the dawn, and he was at his desk to take the call.
He asked his British colleague a couple of questions about the source of the information, grunted at the lack of one, but agreed it was something that could not be let slide.
Webster told his Deputy Director (Operations) Bill Stewart, who exploded with rage, and then had a half-hour conference with Chip Barber, head of Operations for the Middle East Division. Barber was even angrier, for he was the man who had sat facing General Dror in the bright room on the top of a hill outside Herzlia and had, apparently, been told a lie.
Between them, they worked out what they wanted done, and took the idea back to the Director.
In mid afternoon William Webster had a conference with Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the National Security Council, and he took the matter to President Bush. Webster had asked for what he wanted and was given full authority to go ahead. The cooperation of Secretary of State James Baker was sought, and he gave it immediately. That night, the State Department sent an urgent request to Tel Aviv, which was presented to its recipient the following morning, only three hours away due to the time gap.
The Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel at that time was Benjamin Netanyahu, a handsome, elegant, silver-haired diplomat and the brother of that Jonathan Netanyahu who was the only Israeli killed during the raid on Idi Amin's Entebbe airport, in which Israeli commandos rescued the passengers of a French airliner hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists.
Benjamin Netanyahu had been born a third-generation sabra and partly educated in the United States. Because of his fluency and articulateness and his passionate nationalism, he was a member of Itzhak Shamir's Likud government and often Israel's persuasive spokesman in interviews with the Western media.
He arrived at Washington Dulles two days later, on October 14, somewhat perplexed by the urgency of the State Department's invitation that he fly to the United States for discussions of considerable importance.
He was even more perplexed when two hours of private talks with Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger revealed no more than a comprehensive overview of developments in the Middle East since August 2. He finished the talks thoroughly frustrated, then faced a latenight plane back to Israel.
It was as he was leaving the State Department that an aide slipped an expensive vellum card into his hand. The card was headed with a personal crest, and the writer, in elegant cursive script, asked him not to leave Washington without coming to the writer's house for a short visit, to discuss a matter of some urgency "to both our countries and all our people."
He knew the signature, knew the man, and knew the power and wealth of the hand that wrote it. The writer's limousine was at the door.
The Israeli minister made a decision and ordered his secretary to return to the embassy for both sets of luggage and to rendezvous with him at a house in Georgetown two hours later. From there they would proceed to Dulles. Then he entered the limousine.
He had never been to the house before, but it was as he would have expected, a handsome building at the better end of M Street, not three hundred yards from the campus of Georgetown University.
He was shown into a paneled library with pictures and books of superlative rarity and taste. A few moments later his host entered, advancing over the Kashan rug with hand outstretched.
"My dear Bibi, how kind of you to spare the time." Saul Nathanson was both banker and financier, professions that had made him extremely wealthy, but his true fortune was hinted at rather than declared, and the man himself was far too cultivated to dwell upon it. The Van Dykes and Breughels on his walls were not copies, and his donations to charity, including some in the State of Israel, were legendary.
Like the Israeli minister, he was elegant and gray-haired, but unlike the slightly younger man, he was tailored by Savile Row, London, and his silk shirts were from Sulka.
He showed his guest to one of a pair of leather club chairs before the log fire, and an English butler entered with a bottle and two wineglasses on a silver tray.
"Something I thought you might enjoy, my friend, while we chat." The butler poured two Lalique glasses of the red wine, and the Israeli sipped. Nathanson raised an inquiring eyebrow.
"Superb, of course," said Netanyahu. Ch鈚eau Mouton Rothschild '61 is not easy to come by and not to be gulped. The butler left the bottle within reach and withdrew.
Saul Nathanson was far too subtle to barge into the meat of what he wanted to say. Conversational hors d'oeuvres were served first. Then the Middle East.
"There's going to be a war, you know," he said sadly. "I have no doubt about it," agreed Netanyahu.
"Before it is over many young Americans may well be dead, fine young men who do not deserve to die. We must all do what we can to keep that number as low as humanly possible, wouldn't you say? More wine?" "I could not agree more."
What on earth was the man driving at? Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister genuinely had no idea.
"Saddam," said Nathanson, staring at the fire, "is a menace. He must be stopped. He is probably more of a menace to Israel than to any other neighboring state." "We have been saying that for years. But when we bombed his nuclear reactor, America condemned us."
Nathanson made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Nonsense, of course, all cosmetic nonsense for the face of things. We both know that, and we both know better. I have a son serving in the Gulf." "I didn't know. May he return safely."
Nathanson was genuinely touched. "Thank you, Bibi, thank you. I pray so every day. My firstborn, my only son. I just feel that ... at this point in time ... cooperation between us all must be without stint." "Unarguable." The Israeli had the uncomfortable feeling that bad news was coming.
"To keep the casualties down, you see. That's why I ask for your help, Bibi, to keep the casualties down. We are on the same side, are we not? I am an American and a Jew." The order of precedence in which he had used the words hung in the air.
"And I am an Israeli and a Jew," murmured Netanyahu. He too had his order of precedence. The financier was in no way fazed.
"Precisely. But because of your education here, you will understand how--well, how shall I phrase it?--emotional Americans can sometimes be. May I be blunt?" A welcome relief, thought the Israeli.
"If anything were done that could in some small way keep the number of casualties down, even by a handful, both I and my fellow countrymen would be eternally grateful to whoever had contributed that anything."
The other half of the sentiment remained unsaid, but Netanyahu was far too experienced a diplomat to miss it. And if anything were done or not done that might increase those casualties, America's memory would be long and her revenge unpleasant.
"What is it you want from me?" he asked. Saul Nathanson sipped his wine and gazed at the flickering logs.
"Apparently, there is a man in Baghdad. Code name--Jericho. ..." When he had finished, it was a thoughtful Deputy Foreign Minister who sped out to Dulles to catch the flight home.