The Fist of God (5 page)

Hussein Kamil cut in. “He is a strange man. He insists on carrying all his most intimate scientific paperwork around with him in a big canvas bag. I instructed our counterintelligence people to have a look at this paperwork and copy it.”

“And this was done?” The President was staring at Hassan Rahmani, his Counterintelligence chief.

“Immediately,
Sayid Rais
. Last month during his visit here. He drinks The Fist of God

much whiskey. It was doped, and he slept long and deep. We took his bag and photocopied every page in it. Also, we have taped all his technical conversations. The papers and the transcripts have all been passed to our comrade Dr. Saadi.”

The presidential stare swiveled back to the scientist.

“So, once again, can you complete the project without him?”

“Yes,
Sayid Rais
, I believe we can. Some of his calculations make sense only to himself, but I have had our best mathematicians studying them for a month. They can understand them. The engineers can do the rest.”

Hussein Kamil shot his deputy a warning look: You had better be right, my friend.

“Where is he now?” asked the President.

“He has left for China,
sayidi
,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. “He is trying to find us a third stage for the Al-Abeid rocket. Alas, he will fail. He is expected back in Brussels in mid-March.”

“You have men there, good men?”

“Yes,
sayidi
. I have had him under surveillance in Brussels for ten months. That is how we know he has been entertaining Israeli delegations at his offices there. We also have keys to his apartment building.”

“Then let it be done. On his return.”

“Without delay,
Sayid Rais
.” Dr. Ubaidi thought of the four men he had in Brussels on arm’s-length surveillance work. One of them had done this before: Abdelrahman Moyeddin. He would give the job to him.

The three intelligence men and Dr. Saadi were dismissed. The rest stayed. When they were alone, Saddam Hussein turned to his son-in-law.

The Fist of God

“And the other matter—when will I have it?”

“I am assured, by the end of the year,
Abu Kusay
.”

Being family, Kamil could use the more intimate title “Father of Kusay.” It reminded the others present who was family and who was not. The President grunted.

“We shall need a place, a new place, a fortress; not an existing place, however secret. A new secret place that no one will know about. No one but a tiny handful, not even all of us here. Not a civil engineering project, but military. Can you do it?”

General Ali Musuli of the Army Engineers straightened his back, staring at the President’s midchest.

“With pride,
Sayid Rais
.”

“The man in charge—your best, your very best.”

“I know the man,
sayidi
. A colonel. Brilliant at construction and deception. The Russian Stepanov said he was the best pupil in
maskirovka
that he had ever taught.”

“Then bring him to me. Not here—in Baghdad, in two days. I will commission him myself. Is he a good Ba’athist, this colonel? Loyal to the party and to me?”

“Utterly,
sayidi
. He would die for you.”

“So would you all, I hope.” There was a pause, then quietly: “Let us hope it does not come to that.”

As a conversation-stopper, it worked. Fortunately that was the end of the meeting anyway.

Dr. Gerry Bull arrived back in Brussels on March 17, exhausted and depressed. His colleagues assumed his depression was caused by his rebuff in China. But it was more than that.

The Fist of God

Ever since he had arrived in Baghdad more than two years earlier, he had allowed himself to be persuaded—because it was what he wanted to believe—that the rocket program and the Babylon gun were for the launch of small, instrument-bearing satellites into earth orbit. He could see the enormous benefits in self-esteem and pride for the whole Arab world if Iraq could do that. Moreover, it would be lucrative, pay its way, as Iraq launched communications and weather satellites for other nations.

As he understood it, the plan was for Babylon to fire its satellite-bearing missile southeast over the length of Iraq, on over Saudi Arabia and the south Indian Ocean, and into orbit. That was what he had designed it for.

He had been forced to agree with his colleagues that no Western nation would see it that way. They would assume it was a military gun.

Hence, the subterfuge in the ordering of the barrel parts, breech, and recoil mechanism.

Only he, Gerald Vincent Bull, knew the truth, which was very simple—the Babylon gun could not be used as a weapon for launching conventional explosive shells, however gigantic those shells might be.

For one thing, the Babylon gun, with its 156-meter barrel, could not stay rigid without supports. It needed one trunnion, or support, for every second of its twenty-six barrel sections, even if, as he foresaw, its barrel ran up the forty-five-degree side of a mountain. Without these supports, the barrel would droop like wet spaghetti and tear itself apart as the joins ripped open.

Therefore, it could not raise or depress its elevation, nor traverse from side to side. So it could not pick a variety of targets. To change its angle, up or down or side to side, it would have to be dismantled, taking weeks. Even to clean out and reload between discharges would The Fist of God

take a couple of days. Moreover, repeated firings would wear out that very expensive barrel. Lastly, Babylon could not be hidden from counterattack.

Every time it fired, a gobbet of flame ninety meters long would leap from its barrel, and every satellite and airplane would spot it. Its map coordinates would be with the Americans in seconds. Also, its reverberation shock waves would reach any good seismograph as far away as California. That was why he told anyone who would listen, “It cannot be used as a weapon.”

His problem was that after two years in Iraq, he had realized that for Saddam Hussein science had one application and one only: It was to be applied to weapons of war and the power they brought him
and to
nothing else
. So why the hell was he financing Babylon? It could only fire once in anger before the retaliatory fighter-bombers blew it to bits, and it could only fire a satellite or a conventional shell.

It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.

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.

The Fist of God

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 ochre-brown 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.

The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 red-and-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 Fist of God

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.