Chapter 2
The big Ram Charger sped down the main highway from Qatar toward Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, making good time. The air conditioning kept the interior cool, and the driver had some of his favorite country-and-western tapes filling the interior with back-home sounds.
Beyond Ruweis, they were out in open country, the sea to their left only intermittently visible between the dunes, to their right the great desert stretching away hundreds of bleak and sandy miles toward Dhofar and the Indian Ocean.
Beside her husband Maybelle Walker gazed excitedly at the ochrebrown desert shimmering under the midday sun. Ray Walker kept his eyes on the road. An oil man all his life, he had seen deserts before.
"Seen one, seen 'em all," he would grunt when his wife made one of her frequent exclamations of wonderment at the sights and sounds that were so new to her.
But for Maybelle Walker it was all new, and although she had packed enough medications before leaving Oklahoma to open a new branch of Eckerd, she had loved every minute of her two-week tour of the Arabian Gulf--what used to be called the Persian Gulf.
They had started in the north in Kuwait, then driven the off-road loaned them by the company south into Saudi Arabia through Khafji and Al-Khobar, crossed the causeway into Bahrain, then back and down through Qatar and into the UAE. At each stopover Ray Walker had made a perfunctory "inspection" of his company office--the ostensible reason for the trip--while she had taken a guide from the company office and explored the local sights. She felt very brave going down all those narrow streets with only a single white man for an escort, unaware that she would have been in more danger in any of fifty American cities than among the Gulf Arabs.
The sights enthralled her on her first and perhaps last journey outside the United States. She admired the palaces and the minarets, wondered at the torrent of raw gold on display in the gold soukhs, and was awed by the tide of dark faces and multicolored robes that swirled about her in the Old Quarters.
She had taken photographs of everything and everyone so she could show the ladies' club back home where she had been and what she had seen. She had taken to heart the warning by the company representative in Qatar to be careful of taking a picture of a desert Arab without his permission, as some still believed the taking of a photograph captured part of the target's soul.
She was, she frequently reminded herself, a happy woman and had much to be happy about. Married almost straight out of high school to her steady date of two years, she found herself wedded to a good, solid man with a job in a local oil company who had risen through the ranks as the company expanded, until he was now finishing as one of the vice-presidents.
They had a nice home outside Tulsa and a beach house for summer vacations at Hatteras, between the Atlantic and Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. It had been a good thirty-year marriage, rewarded with one fine son. And now this, a two-week tour at the company's expense of all the exotic sights and sounds, smells, and experiences of another world, the Arabian Gulf.
"It's a good road," she remarked as they crested a rise and the strip of bitumen shimmered and shivered away in front of them. If the temperature inside the vehicle was seventy degrees, it was one hundred and twenty out there in the desert.
"Ought to be," her husband grunted. "We built it."
"The company?"
"Nah. Uncle Sam, goddammit." Ray Walker had a habit of adding the single word goddammit when he dispensed pieces of information.
They sat for a while in companionable silence while Tammy Wynette urged her to stand by her man, which she always had done and intended to do through their retirement.
Nudging sixty, Ray Walker was taking retirement with a good pension and some healthy stock options, and a grateful company had offered him the two-week, all-expense-paid, first-class tour of the Gulf to "inspect" its various outstations along the coast. Though he too had never been there before, he had to admit he was less enthralled by it all than his wife, but he was delighted for her sake.
Personally, he was looking forward to finishing with Abu Dhabi and Dubai, then catching the first-class cabin of an airliner aimed directly at the United States via London. At least he would be able to order a long, cold Bud without having to scuttle into the company office for it.
Islam might be all right for some, he mused, but after staying in the best hotels in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and being told they were completely dry, he wondered what kind of a religion would stop a guy from having a cool beer on a hot day.
He was dressed in what he perceived to be the rig of an oil man in the desert--tall boots, jeans, belt, shirt, and Stetson--which was not entirely necessary, as he was really a chemist in quality control. He checked the odometer: eighty miles to the Abu Dhabi turnoff. "Gonna have to take a leak, honey," he muttered.
"Well then, you be careful," warned Maybelle. "There are scorpions out there."
"But they can't leap two feet," he said, and roared at his own joke.
Being stung on the dick by a high-jumping scorpion--that was a good one for the boys back home.
"Ray, you are a terrible man," replied Maybelle, and laughed also.
Walker swung the Ram Charger to the edge of the empty road and opened the door. The blast of heat came in as if from the door of a furnace. He climbed out and slammed the door behind him to trap the cool air.
Maybelle stayed in the passenger seat as her husband walked to the nearest dune and unzipped his fly. Then she stared out through the windshield and muttered:
"Oh, my God, would you just look at that."
She reached for her Pentax, opened her door, and slithered to the ground.
"Ray, do you think he'd mind if I took his picture?"
Ray was facing the other way, absorbed in one of a middle-aged man's greater satisfactions.
"Be right with you, honey. Who?"
The Bedouin was standing across the road from her husband, having apparently walked out from between two dunes. One minute he was not there, the next he was. Maybelle Walker stood by the front fender of the off-road, her camera in her hand, irresolute. Her husband turned around and zipped himself up. He stared at the man across the road. "Dunno," he said. "Guess not. But don't get too close. Probably got fleas. I'll get the engine started. You take a quick picture, and if he gets nasty, jump right in. Fast."
He climbed back into the driver's seat and gunned the engine. That boosted the air conditioner, which was a relief.
Maybelle Walker took several steps forward and held up her camera. "May I take your picture?" she asked. "Camera? Picture? Click-click? For my album back home?"
The man just stood and stared at her. His once-white djellaba, stained and dusty, dropped from his shoulders to the sand at his feet. The redand-white flecked keffiyeh was secured on his head by a two-strand black cord, and one of the trailing corners was tucked up under the opposite temple so that the cloth covered his face from the bridge of the nose downward. Above the flecked doth the dark eyes stared back at her. What little skin of forehead and eye sockets she could see was burned brown by the desert. She had many pictures ready for the album she intended to make back home, but none of a tribesman of the Bedouin with the expanse of the Saudi desert behind him.
She raised her camera. The man did not move. She squinted through the aperture, framing the figure in the center of the oblong, wondering if she could make the car in time, should the Arab come running at her. Click.
"Thank you very much," she said. Still he did not move. She backed toward the car, smiling brightly. "Always smile," she recalled the Reader's Digest once advising Americans confronted by someone who cannot understand English.
"Honey, get in the car!" her husband shouted.
"It's all right, I think he's okay," she said, opening the door.
The audiotape had run out while she was taking the picture. That cut the radio station in. Ray Walker's hand reached out and hauled her into the car, which screeched away from the roadside.
The Arab watched them go, shrugged, and walked behind the sand dune, where he had parked his own sand-camouflaged Land-Rover. In a few seconds he too drove off in the direction of Abu Dhabi.
"What's the hurry?" complained Maybelle Walker. "He wasn't going to attack me." "That's not the point, honey." Ray Walker was tight-lipped, the man in control, able to cope with any international emergency. "We're getting into Abu Dhabi and taking the next flight home. It seems this morning Iraq invaded Kuwait, goddammit. They could be here any hour."
It was ten o'clock, Gulf Time, on the morning of August 2, 1990.
Twelve hours earlier, Colonel Osman Badri waited, tense and excited, by the tracks of a stationary T-72 main battle tank near a small airfield called Safwan. Though he could not know it then, the war for Kuwait would begin there and it would end there, at Safwan.
Just outside the airfield, which had runways but no buildings on it, the main highway ran north and south. On the northward road, down which he had traveled three days earlier, was the junction where travelers could turn east for Basra or northwest for Baghdad. South, the road ran straight through the Kuwaiti border post five miles away. From where he stood, looking south, he could see the dim glow of Jahra, and beyond it, farther east across the bay, the glow of the lights of Kuwait City itself.
He was excited because his country's time had come. Time to punish the Kuwaiti scum for what they had done to Iraq, for the undeclared economic warfare, for the financial damage and their haughty arrogance.
Had not his country for eight bloody years held off the hordes of Persia from sweeping into the northern Gulf and ending all their luxury lifestyles? And was her reward now to sit silent while the Kuwaitis stole more than their fair portion of the oil from the shared Rumailah field? Were they now to be beggared as Kuwait overproduced and drove the oil price downward? Should they now meekly succumb as the Al Sabah dogs insisted on repayment of the miserable $15 billion loan they had made to Iraq during the war?
No, the Rais had gotten it right as usual. Kuwait was historically the nineteenth province of Iraq; always had been, until the British drew their damned line in the sand in 1913 and created the richest emirate in the world. Kuwait would be reclaimed this night, this very night, and Osman Badri would be a part of it.
As an Army Engineer, he would not be in the first line, but he would come close behind with his bridging units, earthmovers, bulldozers, and sappers to cut open the path should the Kuwaitis try to block it. Not that aerial surveillance had shown any obstructions. No earthworks, no sand berms, no antitank trenches, no concrete traps. But just in case, the engineers would be there under the command of Osman Badri to cut open the road for the tanks and mechanized infantry of the Republican Guard. A few yards from where he stood, the field command tent was full of the senior officers poring over their maps and making last-minute adjustments to their plan of attack as the hours and minutes ticked by while they waited for the final "go" order from the Rais in Baghdad.
Colonel Badri had already seen and conversed with his own commanding general, All Musuli, who was in charge of the entire Engineering Corps of the Iraqi Army and to whom he owed utter devotion for recommending him for the "special duty" last February. He had been able to assure his chief that his--Badri's--men were fully equipped and ready to go.
As he stood talking with Musuli, another general had strolled up, and he had been introduced to Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the tanks.
In the distance he had seen General Saadi Tumah Abbas, commanding the elite Republican Guard, enter the tent. As a loyal Party member and worshipper of Saddam Hussein, he had been perplexed to hear the tank general Kadiri mutter "political creep" under his breath. How could this be? Was not Tumah Abbas an intimate of Saddam Hussein, and had he not been rewarded for winning the crucial battle of Fao that finally beat the Iranians? Colonel Badri had dismissed from his mind rumors that Fao had actually been won by the now-vanished General Maher Rashid.
All around him, men and officers of the Tawakkulna and Medina divisions of the Guard swarmed in the darkness. His thoughts strayed back to that memorable night in February, when General Musuli had ordered him from his duties putting the finishing touches to the facility at Al Qubai to report to headquarters in Baghdad. He had assumed he would be reassigned. "The President wants to see you," Musuli had said abruptly. "He will send for you. Move into the officers' quarters here, and keep yourself available night and day." Colonel Badri bit his lip. What had he done? What had he said?
Nothing disloyal--that would have been impossible. Had he been falsely denounced? No, the President would not send for such a man. The wrongdoer would simply be picked up by one of the goon squads of Brigadier Khatib's Amn-al-Amm and taken away to be taught a lesson.
Seeing his face, General Musuli burst out laughing, his teeth flashing beneath the heavy black moustache that so many senior officers wore in imitation of Saddam Hussein. "Don't worry. He has a task for you, a special task."
And he had. Within twenty-four hours Badri had been summoned to the lobby of the officers' quarters, where a long black staff car was waiting for him, with two men from the Amn-al-Khass, the presidential security detail. He was whisked straight to the Presidential Palace for the most thrilling and momentous meeting of his life. The palace was then situated in the angle of Kindi Street and July 14 Street, near the bridge of the same name, both celebrating the date of the first of the two coups of July 1968 that had brought the Ba'ath Party to power and broken the rule of the generals. Badri was shown into a waiting room and kept there for two hours. He was frisked thoroughly, twice, before being shown into the Presence.
As soon as the guards beside him stopped, he stopped, then threw up a quivering salute and held it for three seconds, before whipping off his beret and swinging it under his left arm. After that he remained at attention. "So you are the genius of maskirovka?"
He had been told not to look the Rais straight in the eyes, but when he was spoken to he could not help it.
Saddam Hussein was in a good mood. The eyes of the young officer in front of him shone with love and admiration. Good, nothing to fear. In measured tones the Rais told the engineer what he wanted. Badri's chest swelled with pride and gratitude.
For five months after that, he had worked against the impossible deadline and succeeded with days to spare. He had had all the facilities the Rais had promised him. Everything and everyone was at his disposal. If he needed more concrete or steel, he had but to call Kamil on his personal number, and the President's son-in-law would provide it at once from Ministry of Industry sources. If he needed more manpower, hundreds of laborers would arrive, and always indentured Koreans or Vietnamese. They cut and they dug, they lived in miserable cantonments down in the valley during that summer, and then they were taken away, he did not know where. Apart from the coolies, no one came in by road, for the single rough track, eventually to be obliterated itself, was only for the trucks bringing steel and cargo, and the cement-mixers. Every other human being except the truck drivers came in by one of the Russian MIL helicopters, and only when they arrived were their blindfolds removed, to be replaced when they left. This applied to the most senior as to the humblest Iraqi.
Badri had chosen the site himself, after days of scouting by helicopter over the mountains. He had finally picked his spot high in the Jebal al Hamreen, north and farther into the mountains from Kifri, where the hills of the Hamreen range become mountains on the road to Sulaymaniyam.
He had worked twenty hours a day, slept rough on the site, bullied, threatened, cajoled, and bribed amazing work performances from his men, and finally it had been done before the end of July. The area had been cleared of every trace of work, every brick and lump of concrete, every piece of steel that might glint in the sun, every scrape and scratch on the rocks. The three guardian villages had been completed and inhabited with their goats and sheep. Finally, the single track had been obliterated, tumbled in rough rubble and scree into the valley beneath by an earthmover trundling backward, and the three valleys and the raped mountain had been restored to what they once were. Almost.
For he, Osman Badri, colonel of engineers, inheritor of the building skills that had erected Nineveh and Tyre, student of the great Stepanov of Russia, master of maskirovka, the art of disguising something to look like nothing or something else, had built for Saddam Hussein the Qa'ala, the Fortress. No one could see it, and no one knew where it was.
Before it was closed over, Badri had watched the others, the gun assemblers and the scientists, build that awesome cannon whose barrel seemed to reach up to the very stars. When all was complete they left, and only the garrison remained behind. They would stay and live there.
None would walk out. Those who had to arrive or leave would do so by helicopter. None of these would land; they would hover over a small patch of grass away from the mountain. The few arriving or leaving would always be blindfolded. The pilots and crew would be sealed inside one single air base with neither visitors nor phones. The last wild grass seeds were scattered, the last shrubs planted, and the Fortress was left alone to its isolation. Though Badri did not know it, the workers who had arrived by truck were finally driven away, then transferred to buses with blackened windows. Far away in a gulch the buses containing the three thousand Asian workers were stopped, and the guards ran away. When the detonations brought down the mountain side all the buses were buried forever. Then the guards were shot by others. They had all seen the Qa'ala.
Badri's reverie was interrupted by an eruption of shouting from the command tent, and word ran quickly through the crowds of waiting soldiers that the attack was "go." The engineer ran to his truck and hauled himself into the passenger seat as his driver gunned the engine. They held position as the tank crews of the two Guard divisions that would spearhead the invasion filled the air with ear-shattering noise and the Russian T-72s rumbled off the airfield and onto the road to Kuwait. It was, he would later tell his brother Abdelkarim, a fighter pilot and colonel in the Air Force, like a turkey shoot. The miserable police post on the border was brushed aside and crushed. By two A.M. the column was over the border and rolling south. If the Kuwaitis were kidding themselves that this army, the fourth-largest standing army in the world, was going to advance to the Mutla Ridge and rattle its sabers until Kuwait acceded to the demands of the Rais, they were out of luck. If the West thought this army would just capture the desired islands of Warbah and Bubiyan, giving Iraq its long-lusted-for access to the Gulf, they too were up the wrong tree. The orders from Baghdad were: Take it all.
Just before dawn, there was a tank engagement at the small Kuwaiti oil town of Jahra, north of Kuwait City. The only Kuwaiti armored brigade had been rushed northward, having been held back in the week before the invasion in order not to provoke the Iraqis. It was one-sided. The Kuwaitis, who were supposed to be no more than merchants and oil profiteers, fought hard and well. They held up the cream of the Republican Guard for an hour, which allowed some of their Skyhawk and Mirage fighters farther south at the Ahmadi air base to get airborne, but the Kuwaitis did not stand a chance. The huge Soviet T-72s cut to pieces the smaller Chinese T-55s used by the Kuwaitis. The defenders lost twenty tanks in as many minutes, and finally the survivors pulled out and back.
Osman Badri, watching from a mile away as the mastodons swerved and fired in the belching clouds of dust and smoke while a pink line touched the sky over Iran, could not know that one day these same T-72s of the Medina and Tawakkulna divisions would themselves be blown apart by the Challengers and Abramses of the British and Americans.
By dawn, the first point units were rumbling into the northwestern outskirts of Kuwait City, dividing their forces to cover the four highways that gave access to the city from that quarter; the Abu Dhabi road along the seashore, the Jahra road between Granada and Andalus suburbs, and the Fifth and Sixth Ring highways farther south. After the split, the four prongs headed into central Kuwait. Colonel Badri was hardly needed. There were no ditches for his sappers to fill in, nor obstructions to be blown away with dynamite, nor concrete bollards to be bulldozed. Only once did he have to dive for his life.
Rolling along through Sulaibikhat, quite close (though he did not know it) to the Christian cemetery, a single Sky hawk wheeled out of the sun and targeted the tank ahead of him with four air-to-ground rockets. The tank jolted, lost a track, and began to burn. The panicking crew poured from the turret. Then the Skyhawk was back, going for the following trucks, flames flickering from its nose. Badri saw the tarmac erupt in front of him and hurled himself from the door just as his screaming driver hauled the truck off the road, into a ditch, and turned it over.
No one was hurt, but Badri was furious. The impudent dog. He finished the journey in another truck. There was sporadic gunfire all through the day as the two divisions, with their armor, artillery, and mechanized infantry, rolled through the sprawl of Kuwait City. At the Defense Ministry a group of Kuwaiti officers shut themselves in and tried to take on the invaders with some small arms they found inside.
One of the Iraqi officers, in a spirit of sweet reason, pointed out that they were dead men if he opened up with his tank gun. While a few Kuwaiti resisters argued with him before surrendering, the rest changed out of their uniforms into dish-dash and ghutra and slipped away out the back. One of these would later become the leader of the Kuwaiti resistance.
The principal opposition occurred at the residence of the Emir Al Sabah, even though he and his family had long before fled south to seek sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. It was crushed. At sundown Colonel Osman Badri stood with his back to the sea at the northernmost point of Kuwait City on Arabian Gulf Street and stared at the facade of that residence, the Dasman Palace. Already a few Iraqi soldiers were inside the palace, and now and then one would emerge carrying a priceless artifact torn from the walls, stepping over the bodies on the steps and the lawn to place the booty in a truck.
He was tempted to take something himself, a gift fine and worthy for his father at the old man's home in Qadisiyah, but something held him back: the heritage of that damned English school he had attended all those years ago in Baghdad, and all because of his father's friendship with the Englishman Martin and his admiration of all things British. "Looting is stealing, boys, and stealing is wrong. The Bible and the Koran forbid it. So do not do it."
Even to this day, he could recall Mr. Hartley, the headmaster of the Tasisiya Foundation Preparatory School, run by the British Council, lecturing his pupils, English and Iraqi, at their desks.
How often had he reasoned with his father since joining the Ba'ath Party that the English had always been imperialist aggressors, holding the Arabs in chains for centuries to reap their own profits?
And his father, who was now seventy and so much older because Osman and his brother had been born to the second marriage, had always smiled and said: "Maybe they are foreigners and infidel, but they are courteous and they have standards, my son. And what standards does your Mr. Saddam Hussein have, pray?" It had been impossible to get through the old man's thick skull how important the Party was to Iraq and how its leader would bring Iraq to glory and triumph. Eventually he ceased these conversations, lest his father say something about the Rais that would be overheard by a neighbor and get them all into trouble. He disagreed with his father on this alone, for he loved him very much. So because of a headmaster twenty-five years before, Colonel Badri now stood back and did not join in the looting of the Dasman Palace, even though it was in the tradition of all his ancestors and the English were fools.
At least his years at the Tasisiya school had taught him fluent English, which had turned out to be useful because it was the language in which he could best communicate with Colonel Stepanov, who had for a long time been the senior engineering officer with the Soviet Military Advisory Group before the cold war came to its end and he went back to Moscow. Osman Badri was thirty-five, and the year 1990 was proving to be the greatest of his whole life. As he told his elder brother later: "I just stood there with my back to the Gulf and the Dasman Palace in front of me and thought, 'By the Prophet, we've done it. We've taken Kuwait at last. And in just one day.' And that was the end of it." He was wrong, as it happened. That was just the beginning. While Ray Walker was, in his own phrase, hauling ass through the Abu Dhabi airport, hammering the sales counter to insist on the American's constitutional right to an instant airline ticket, a number of his fellow countrymen were ending a sleepless night.
Seven time zones away in Washington, the National Security Council had been up all night. In earlier days they used to have to meet personally in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House; newer technology now meant they could confer by secure videolink from their various locations.
The previous evening, still August 1 in Washington, early reports had indicated some firing along Kuwait's northern border. It was not unexpected. For days sweeps by the great KH-11 satellites over the northern Gulf had shown the buildup of the Iraqi forces, telling Washington more than the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait actually knew.
The problem was, What were Saddam Hussein's intentions: to threaten or to invade?
Frantic requests had been sent the previous day to the CIA headquarters at Langley, but the Agency had been less than helpful, turning in "maybe" analyses on the basis of the satellite pictures garnered by the National Reconnaissance Office and political savvy already known to the State Department's Middle East Division. "Any half-ass can do that," growled Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the NSC. "Don't we have anyone right inside the Iraqi regime?" The answer to that was a regretful no. It was a problem that would recur for months.
The answer to the conundrum came before ten P.M., when President George Bush went to bed and took no further calls from Scowcroft.
That was after dawn Gulf Time, and the Iraqi tanks were beyond Jahra, entering the northwestern suburbs of Kuwait City.
It was, the participants would recall later, quite a night. There were eight on the videolink, representing the NSC, the Treasury, the State Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Pentagon. A flurry of orders went out and were implemented. A similar series was coming out of a hastily convened COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room Annex) committee meeting in London, which was five hours away from Washington but Only two from the Gulf.
Both governments froze all Iraqi financial assets lodged abroad, as well as (with the agreement of the Kuwaiti ambassadors in both cities) all Kuwaiti assets, so that any new puppet government working for Baghdad could not get its hands on the funds. These decisions froze billions and billions of petrodollars. President Bush was awakened at 4:45 A.M. on August 2 to sign the documents. In London, Margaret Thatcher, long up and about and raising seven levels of Cain, had already done the same before going to catch her plane for the States. Another major step was to hustle together the United Nations Security Council in New York to condemn the invasion and call for an immediate withdrawal by Iraq. This was achieved with Resolution 660, signed at four-thirty A.M. that same morning.
Around dawn the videolink conference ended, and the participants had two hours to get home, wash, change, shave, and be back at the White House for the eight A.M. full meeting of the NSC, chaired by President Bush in person.
Newcomers at the full meeting included Richard Cheney of Defense, Nicholas Brady of Treasury, and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Bob Kimmitt continued to stand in for the State Department because Secretary James Baker and Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger were both out of town. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had arrived back from Florida, bringing with him the general in charge of Central Command, a big burly man of whom more would be heard later.
Norman Schwarzkopf was at General Powell's side when they walked in.
George Bush left the meeting at 9:15 A.M., when Ray and Maybelle Walker were thankfully airborne and somewhere over Saudi Arabia heading northwest for home and safety. The President took a helicopter from the south lawn to Andrews Air Force base, where he transferred to Air Force One and flew to Aspen, Colorado. He was scheduled to give an address on U.S. defense needs. As it turned out, it was an appropriate topic, but the day would be much busier than foreseen.
In midair he took a long call from King Hussein of Jordan, monarch of Iraq's smaller and much-overshadowed neighbor. The Hashemite King was in Cairo, conferring with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
King Hussein was desperate that the United States give the Arab states a few days to try to sort things out without a war. He himself proposed a four-state conference, including President Mubarak, himself, and Saddam Hussein and as chairman His Majesty King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. He was confident that such a conference would persuade the Iraqi dictator to withdraw from Kuwait peaceably. But he needed three, maybe four days, and no public condemnation of Iraq by any of the nations participant to the conference.
President Bush told him: "You got it. I defer to you." The unfortunate George had not yet met the lady from London, who was waiting for him in Aspen. They met that evening. The Iron Lady soon got the impression that her good friend was about to start wavering again. Within two hours she put a broom handle so far up the President's left trouser leg that it came out near the collar line.
"He cannot, he simply cannot, be allowed to get away with it, George."
Faced with those flashing blue eyes and the cut-crystal tones slicing through the hum of the air conditioner, George Bush admitted that this was not America's intention either. His intimates later felt he had been less worried by Saddam Hussein with his artillery and tanks than by that daunting handbag. On August 3, the United States had a quiet word with Egypt. President Mubarak was reminded just how much his armed forces were dependent on American weaponry, just how much Egypt owed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and just how much
U.S. aid came his way. On August 4 the Egyptian government issued a public statement roundly condemning Saddam Hussein's invasion. To the Jordanian King's dismay but not to his surprise, the Iraqi despot at once refused to go to the Jeddah conference and sit beside Hosni Mubarak under the chairmanship of King Fahd. For the King of Saudi Arabia it was a brutal snub, delivered within a culture that prides itself on elaborate courtesy. King Fahd, who conceals a shrewd political brain behind an unfailingly gracious persona, was not pleased.
This was one of the two factors that blew away the Jeddah conference. The other was the fact that the Saudi monarch had been shown American photographs taken from space that proved that the Iraqi Army, far from halting its advance, was still in full battle order and moving south toward the Saudi border on the southern fringes of Kuwait.
Would the Iraqis really dare to sweep on and invade Saudi Arabia itself? The arithmetic added up. Saudi Arabia has the biggest oil reserves in the world. Second comes Kuwait, with over a hundred years of reserves at present production levels. Third is Iraq. By taking Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had reversed the balance.
Moreover, ninety percent of Saudi oil wells and reserves are locked into the far northeastern corner of the Kingdom, around Dhahran, Al-Khobar, Dammam, and Jubail, and inland from these ports. The triangle lay right in the path of the advancing Republican Guard divisions, and the photos proved that more divisions were pouring into Kuwait.
Fortunately, His Majesty never discovered that the photos had been doctored. The divisions close to the border were digging in, but the bulldozers that made this evident had been airbrushed out.
On August 6 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia formally asked U.S. forces to enter the Kingdom for its defense. The first squadrons of fighter-bombers left for the Middle East the same day. Desert Shield had begun.
Brigadier Hassan Rahmani jumped out of his staff car and ran up the steps of the Hilton Hotel, which had quickly been taken over as the headquarters of the Iraqi security forces in occupied Kuwait. It amused him, as he swung through the glass doors into the lobby that morning of August 4, that the Hilton was right next to the American embassy, both on the seashore with lovely views over the glittering blue waters of the Arabian Gulf.
The view was all that the staff of the embassy were going to get for a while--at his suggestion the building had been immediately ringed with Republican Guards and would stay that way. He could not prevent foreign diplomats from transmitting messages from inside their sovereign territory to their governments back home, and he knew he did not have the supercomputers needed to break the more sophisticated codes that the British and Americans would be using.
But as head of Counterintelligence for the Mukhabarat, he could ensure they had little of interest to send home by confining their observations to the views from their windows.
That left, of course, the possibility of their obtaining information from fellow nationals still at large in Kuwait by telephone. Another top priority: Ensure that all outside telephone lines were cut or tapped--tapped would be better, but most of his best men were fully engaged back in Baghdad. He swung into the suite of rooms that had been set aside for the Counterintelligence team, took off his Army jacket, tossed it to the sweating aide who had brought up his two suitcases of documents, and walked to the window to gaze down into the pool of the Hilton Marina.
A nice idea to have a swim later, he thought, then noticed that two soldiers were filling their water bottles from it and that two more were peeing into it. He sighed. At thirty-seven, Rahmani was a trim, handsome, clean-shaven man--he could not be bothered with the affectation of a Saddam Hussein--like moustache. He was where he was, and he knew it, because he was good at his job, not because of political clout; he was a technocrat in a world of politically elevated cretins.
Why, he had been asked by foreign friends, do you serve this regime? The question was usually asked when he had got them partly drunk at the bar of the Rashid Hotel or in a more private place. He was allowed to mix with them because it was part of his job. But every time he remained quite sober. He had no objection to liquor on religious grounds--he just ordered a gin and tonic, but he made sure the bartender knew to give him only tonic.
So he smiled at the question and shrugged and replied: I am an Iraqi and proud of it; which government would you have me serve?
Privately, he knew perfectly well why he served a regime most of whose luminaries he privately despised. If he had any emotion in him, which he frequently claimed he did not, then it came out in a genuine affection for his country and its people, the ordinary people whom the Ba'ath Party had long ceased to represent. But the principal reason was that he wanted to get on in life. For an Iraqi of his generation there were few options. He could oppose the regime and quit, to earn a hand-to-mouth living abroad dodging the hit squads and making pennies translating from Arabic into English and back, or he could stay inside Iraq.
That left three alternatives. Oppose the regime again, and end up in one of the torture chambers of that animal Omar Khatib, a creature he personally loathed in the full knowledge that the feeling was mutual; or try to survive as a free-lance businessman in an economy that was being systematically run into the ground; or keep smiling at the idiots and rise within their ranks through brains and talent. He could see nothing wrong with the latter. Like Reinhard Gehlen, who served first Hitler, then the Americans, and then the West Germans; like Marcus Wolf, who served the East German Communists without believing a word they said, he was a chess player. He lived for the game, the intricate moves of spy and counterspy. Iraq was his personal chessboard. He knew that other professionals the world over could understand that.
Hassan Rahmani returned from the window, sat in the chair behind the desk, and began to make notes. There was one hell of a lot to do if Kuwait were ever to be even reasonably secure as the nineteenth province of Iraq.
His first problem was that he did not know how long Saddam Hussein intended to stay in Kuwait. He doubted the man knew himself. There was no point in mounting a huge counterintelligence operation, sealing all the leaks and security holes that he could, if Iraq was going to pull out. Privately, he believed Saddam could get away with it. But it would mean boxing cleverly, making the right moves, saying the right things.
The first ploy had to be to attend that conference tomorrow in Jeddah, to flatter King Fahd until he could take no more, to claim Iraq wanted no more than a just treaty over oil, Gulf access, and the outstanding loan, and he would go home to Baghdad. That way, keeping the whole thing in Arab hands and at all costs keeping the Americans and the Brits out, Saddam could rely on the Arab preference to keep talking until hell freezes over. The West, with its attention span of a few weeks, would get fed up and leave it to the four Arabs--two kings and two presidents--and so long as the oil kept flowing to create the smog that was choking them, the Anglo-Saxons would stay happy.
Unless Kuwait was savagely brutalized, the media would drop the subject, the Al Sabah regime would be forgotten in exile somewhere in Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaitis would get on with their lives under a new government, and the quit--Kuwait conference could chew words for a decade until it didn't matter anymore.
It could be done, but it would need the right touch. Hitler's touch--"I only seek a peaceful settlement to my just demands. This is absolutely my last territorial ambition." King Fahd would fall for it--no one had any love for the Kuwaitis anyway, let alone the Al Sabah lotus-eaters.
King Fahd and King Hussein would drop them, as Chamberlain had dropped the Czechs in 1938. The trouble was, although Saddam was street-smart as hell or he wouldn't still be alive, strategically and diplomatically he was a buffoon.
Somehow, Hassan Rahmani reasoned, the Rais would get it wrong; he would neither pull out nor roll on, seize the Saudi oil field, and present the Western world with a fait accompli that they could do nothing about except destroy the oil and their own prosperity for a generation.
"The West" meant the Americans, with the Brits at their side, and they were all Anglo-Saxons. He knew about Anglo-Saxons. Five years at Mr. Hartley's Tasisiya prep school had taught him his perfect English, his understanding of the British, and his wariness of that Anglo-Saxon habit of giving you a very hard punch on the jaw without warning.
He rubbed his chin where he had collected such a punch long ago, and laughed out loud. His aide across the room jumped a foot. Mike bloody Martin, where are you now?
Hassan Rahmani--clever, cultured, cosmopolitan, educated, and refined, an upper-class scion who served a regime of thugs--bent to his task. It was quite a task.
Of the 1.8 million people in Kuwait that August, only 600,000 were Kuwaitis. To them you could add 600,000 Palestinians, some of whom would stay loyal to Kuwait, some of whom would side with Iraq because the PLO had done so, and most of whom would keep their heads down and try to survive.
Then 300,000 Egyptians, some of them no doubt working for Cairo, which nowadays was the same as working for Washington or London, and 250,000 Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and Filipinos, mainly blue-collar laborers or domestic servants--as an Iraqi, he believed the Kuwaitis could not scratch a fleabite on their arse without summoning a foreign servant. And then 50,000 First World citizens--Brits, Americans, French, Germans, Spanish, Swedes, Danes--name it. And he was supposed to suppress foreign espionage. ... He sighed for the days when messages meant messengers or telephones. As head of Counterintelligence, he could seal the borders and cut the phone lines. But now any fool with a satellite could punch numbers into a cellular phone or a computer modem and talk to California. Hard to intercept or track the source, except with the best equipment, which he did not have. He knew he could not control the outflow of information or the steady dribble of refugees escaping over the border. Nor could he affect the overflights of American satellites, all of which he suspected had now been reprogrammed to swing their orbits over Kuwait and Iraq every few minutes. (He was right.)
There was no point in attempting the impossible, even though he would have to pretend he had, and had succeeded. The main target would have to be to prevent active sabotage, the actual killing of Iraqis and destruction of their equipment, and the formation of a real resistance movement. And he would have to prevent help from outside, in the form of men, know-how, or equipment, from reaching any resistance. In this he would come up against his rivals of the AMAM, the Secret Police, who were installed two floors below him. Khatib, he had learned that morning, was installing that thug Sabaawi, an oaf as brutal as himself, as head of the AMAM in Kuwait. If resisting Kuwaitis fell into their hands, they would learn to scream as loudly as dissidents back home. So he, Rahmani, would just stick to the foreigners. That was his brief. * * * That morning, Dr. Terry Martin finished his lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a faculty of London University off Gower Street, shortly before noon and retired to the senior staff common room. Just outside the door he ran into Mabel, the secretary he shared with two other senior lecturers in Arabic studies. "Oh, Dr. Martin, there's been a message for you." She fumbled in her attach?case, propping it up on one tweed-skirted knee, and produced a slip of paper. "This gentleman rang for you. He said it was rather urgent if you could call him back." Inside the common room Martin dumped his lecture notes on the Abassid Caliphate and used a pay phone on the wall. The number answered on the second ring, and a bright female voice just repeated
the number back. No company name, just the number. "Is Mr. Stephen Laing there?" asked Martin. "May I say who is calling?" "Er--Dr. Martin. Terry Martin. He called me." "Ah, yes, Dr. Martin. Would you hold on?"
Martin frowned. She knew about the call, knew his name. For the life of him, he could not recall any Stephen Laing. A man came on the phone. "Steve Laing here. Look, it's awfully good of you to call back so promptly. I know it's incredibly short notice, but we met some time ago at the Institute for Strategic Studies. Just after you gave that brilliant paper on the Iraqi arms-procurement machine. I was wondering what you're doing for lunch."
Laing, whoever he was, had adopted that mode of self-expression that is at once diffident and persuasive, hard to turn down. "Today? Now?" "Unless you have anything fixed. What had you in mind?" "Sandwiches in the canteen," said Martin. "Couldn't possibly offer you a decent sole meuni鑢e at Scott's, could I? You know it, of course. Mount Street." Martin knew of it, one of the best and most expensive fish restaurants in London. Twenty minutes away by cab. It was half-past twelve. And he loved fish. And Scott's was way beyond his academic salary. Did Laing by any chance know these things? "Are you actually with the ISS?" he asked. "Explain over lunch, doctor. Say one o'clock. Looking forward to it." The phone went down. When Martin entered the restaurant, the headwaiter came forward to greet him personally. "Dr. Martin? Mr. Laing is at his table. Please follow me."
It was a quiet table in a corner, very discreet. One could talk unoverheard. Laing, whom by now Martin was sure he had never met, rose to greet him, a bony man in dark suit and sober tie with thinning gray hair. He ushered his guest to a seat and gestured with a raised eyebrow to a bottle of fine chilled Meursault that sat in the ice bucket. Martin nodded. "You're not with the Institute, are you, Mr. Laing?" Laing was not in the least fazed. He watched the crisp cool liquid poured and the waiter move away, leaving them a menu each. He raised his glass to his guest.
"Century House, actually. Does that bother you?" The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy.
"No, just interested," said Martin. "Actually, it's we who are interested. I'm quite a fan of yours. I try to keep abreast, but I'm not as clued up as you."
"I find that hard to believe," said Martin, but he was flattered. When an academic is told he is admired, it is pleasing. "Quite true," insisted Laing. "Sole for two? Excellent. I hope I have read all your papers delivered to the Institute, and the United Services people and Chatham. Plus, of course, those two articles in Survival." Over the previous five years, despite his youth at only thirty-five, Dr. Martin had become more and more in demand as a speaker presenting erudite papers to such establishments as the Institute for Strategic Studies, the United Services Institute, and that other body for the intensive study of foreign affairs, Chatham House.
Survival is the magazine of the ISS, and of each issue twenty-five copies go automatically to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in King Charles Street, of which five filter down to Century House.
Terry Martin's interest for these people was not because of his scholastic excellence in medieval Mesopotamia, but for the second hat he wore. Quite as a private interest, he had begun years earlier to study the armed forces of the Middle East, attending defense exhibitions and cultivating friendships among manufacturers and their Arab clients, where his fluent Arabic had made him many contacts. After ten years he was a walking encyclopedia in his chosen pastime subject and was listened to with respect by the top professionals, much as the American novelist Tom Clancy is regarded as a world expert on the defense equipment of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact. The two soles meuni鑢e arrived, and they began to eat with appreciation.
Eight weeks earlier Laing, who was at that time Director of Operations for the Mid-East Division at Century House, had called up a pen portrait of Terry Martin from the Research people. He had been impressed with what he saw.
Born in Baghdad, raised in Iraq, then schooled in England, Martin had left Haileybury with three advanced levels, all with distinction, in English, history, and French. Haileybury had had him down as a brilliant scholar, destined for a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. But the boy, already a fluent Arab speaker, wanted to go on to Arabic studies, so he had applied as a graduate to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, attending the spring interview of 1973. Accepted at once, he had joined in the autumn term of 1973,studying history of the Middle East.
He walked through a first-class degree in three years and then put in a further three years for his doctorate, specializing in Iraq of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, with particular reference to the Abassid Caliphate from A.D. 750 to 1258. He took his Ph.D. in 1979, then one year off for a sabbatical--he had been in Iraq in 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran, triggering the eight-year war, and this experience began his interest in Middle Eastern military forces. On his return he was offered a lectureship at the age of only twentysix, a signal honor at the SOAS, which happens to be one of the best and therefore one of the toughest schools of Arabic learning in the world. He was promoted to a readership in recognition of his excellence in original research, and he became a reader in Middle East history at the age of thirty-four, clearly earmarked for a professorship by the age of forty.
So much had Laing read in the written biography. What interested him even more was the second string, the compendium of knowledge about Middle Eastern arms arsenals. For years, it had been a peripheral subject, dwarfed by the cold war, but now ...
"It's about this Kuwait business," he said at last. The remains of the fish had been cleared away. Both men had declined a dessert. The Meursault had gone down very nicely, and Laing had deftly ensured that Martin had most of it. Now two vintage ports appeared as if unbidden.
"As you may imagine, there's been a hell of a flapdoodle going on these past few days." Laing was understating the case. The Lady had returned from Colorado in what the mandarins referred to as her Boadicea mode, a reference to that ancient British queen who used to chop Romans off at the knees with the swords sticking out of her chariot wheels if they got in the way. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was reputed to be drinking of taking to wearing a steel helmet, and the demands for instant enlightenment had rained down on the spooks of Century House.
"The fact is, we would like to slip someone into Kuwait to find out exactly what is going on."
"Under Iraqi occupation?" asked Martin. "I'm afraid so, since they seem to be in charge."
"So why me?" "Let me be frank," said Laing, who intended to be anything but. "We really do need to know what is going on inside. The Iraqi occupation army--how many, how good, what equipment. Our own nationals--how are they coping, are they in danger, can they realistically be got out in safety. We need a man in on the ground. This information is vital. So--someone who speaks Arabic like an Arab, a Kuwaiti or Iraqi. Now, you spend your life among Arabic-speakers, far more than I do--" "But surely there must be hundreds of Kuwaitis right here in Britain who could slip back in," Martin suggested. Laing sucked leisurely at a piece of sole that had stuck between two teeth. "Actually," he murmured, "one would prefer one of one's own people."
"A Brit? Who can pass for an Arab, right in the middle of them?"
"That's what we need. I'm afraid we doubt if there is one."
It must have been the wine, or the port. Terry Martin was not used to Meursault and port with his lunch. Later, he would willingly have bitten off his own tongue if he could turn the clock back a few seconds. But he spoke, and then it was too late.
"I know one. My brother Mike. He's a major in the SAS. He can pass for an Arab."
Laing hid the stab of excitement that jumped inside him as he removed the toothpick and the offending morsel of sole.
"Can he now," he murmured. "Can he now?"