The Fist of God (65 page)

“You can’t have cash when you are talking of millions, People would steal it. So you put it in a bank and invest it.”

“You mean old Gemütlich handles millions? Of other people’s money?”

“Yes, millions and millions.”

“Schillings or dollars?”

“Dollars, pounds, millions and millions.”

“Well, I wouldn’t trust him with
my
money.”

She sat up, genuinely shocked.

“Herr Gemütlich is completely honest. He would never dream of doing that.”

“Maybe not, but somebody else might. Look—say, I know a man who has an account at Winkler. His name is Schmitt. One day I go in and say: Good morning, Herr Gemütlich, my name is Schmitt, and I have an account here. He looks in his book, and he says: Yes, you do. So I say: I’d like to withdraw it all. Then when the real Schmitt turns up, there’s nothing left. That’s why cash is better for me.”

She laughed at his naïveté and pulled him down, nibbling his ear.

“It wouldn’t work. Herr Gemütlich would probably know your precious Schmitt. Anyway, he’d have to identify himself.”

“Passports can be forged. Those damned Palestinians do it all the time.”

“And he’d need a signature, of which he would have a specimen copy.”

The Fist of God

“So, I’d practice forging Schmitt’s signature.”

“Karim, I think you might turn out to be a criminal one day. You’re bad.”

They both giggled at the idea.

“Anyway, if you were a foreigner and living abroad, you’d probably have a numbered account. They are completely impregnable.”

He looked down at her from one elbow, brow furrowed.

“What’s that?”

“A numbered account?”

“Mmmmmm.”

She explained how they worked.

“That’s madness,” he exploded when she had finished. “Anybody could turn up and claim ownership. If Gemütlich has never even seen the owner—”

“There are identity procedures, idiot. Very complex codes, methods of writing letters, certain ways the signatures have to be placed—all sorts of things to verify that the person is really the account owner. Unless they are all complied with—to the letter—Herr Gemütlich will not cooperate. So impersonation is impossible.”

“He must have a hell of a memory.”

“Oh, you are too stupid for words. It is all written down. Are you taking me out to dinner?”

“Do you deserve it?”

“You know I do.”

“Oh, all right. But I want an hors d’oeuvre.”

She was puzzled. “All right, order one.”

“I mean you.”

He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with The Fist of God

delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss. Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed.

“I know what I’d do,” he breathed. “I’d hire a safecracker, break into old Gemütlich’s safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it.”

She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love.

“Wouldn’t work. Mmmmmm. Do that again.”

“Would so.”

“Aaaaaah. Wouldn’t.”

“Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day.”

She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.

“Ooooh, is that all for me? You’re a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemütlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ...”

A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemütlich was.

While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth.

Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20. South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.

The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner’s original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short-The Fist of God

lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track.

Every
known
factory for the production of weapons of mass destruction had been pulverized, and that included twelve new ones added by information from Jericho.

As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try. Some of the cream of the fighter and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open.

At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet.

There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station.

By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself.

From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky “the flying warthog,” were roaming at will doing what they did best—destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of “tank-plinking.”

What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major The Fist of God

facilities dedicated to weapons of mass destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact.

Since the burial of the Al Qubai factory, the mood was lighter both among the four generals who knew what it had really contained, as it was among the men of the CIA and the SIS stationed in Riyadh.

It was a mood mirrored in the brief message Mike Martin received that night. His controllers in Riyadh began by informing him of the success of the Tornado mission despite the loss of one airplane. The transmission went on to congratulate him for staying in Baghdad after being allowed to leave, and on the entire mission. Finally, he was told there was little more to do. Jericho should be sent one final message, to the effect the Allies were grateful, that all his money had been paid, and that contact would be reestablished after the war. Then, Martin was told, he really should escape to safety in Saudi Arabia before it became impossible.

Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping. Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam—wasn’t that the object of the exercise? Something had changed.

Had he been aware of the conference then taking place in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat not half a mile away, Mike Martin’s sleep would not have been so easy.

In matters of technical skill there are four levels—competent, very good, brilliant, and a natural. The last category goes beyond mere skill and into an area where all technical knowledge is backed by an innate feel, a gut instinct, a sixth sense, an empathy with the subject and the The Fist of God

machinery that cannot be taught in textbooks.

In matters of radio, Major Mohsen Zayeed was a natural. Quite young, with owlish spectacles that gave him the air of an earnest student, Zayeed lived, ate, and breathed the technology of radio. His private quarters were strewn with the latest magazines from the West, and when he came across a new device that might increase the efficiency of his radio-interception department, he asked for it. Because he valued the man, Hassan Rahmani tried to get it for him.

Shortly after midnight, the two men sat in Rahmani’s office.

“Any progress?” asked Rahmani.

“I think so,” replied Zayeed. “He’s there, all right—no doubt about it.

The trouble is, he’s using burst transmissions that are almost impossible to capture. They take place so fast. Almost, but not quite.

With skill and patience, one can occasionally find one, even though the bursts may only be a few seconds long.”

“How close are you?” said Rahmani.

“Well, I’ve tracked the transmission frequencies to a fairly narrow band in the ultra-high-frequency range, which makes life easier.

Several days ago, I got lucky. We were monitoring a narrow band on the off-chance, and he came on the air. Listen.”

Zayeed produced a tape recorder and pushed Play. A jumbled mess of sound filled the office. Rahmani looked perplexed.

“That’s it?”

“It’s encrypted, of course.”

“Of course,” said Rahmani. “Can you break it?”

“Almost certainly not. The encryption is by a single silicon chip, patterned with complex microcircuitry.”

“It can’t be decoded?” Rahmani was getting lost; Zayeed lived in his own private world and spoke his own private language. He was The Fist of God

already making a great effort to try and speak plainly to his commanding officer.

“It’s not a code. To convert that jumble back to the original speech would need an identical silicon chip. The permutations are in the hundreds of millions.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point, sir, is—I got a bearing on it.”

Hassan Rahmani leaned forward in excitement.

“A bearing?”

“My second. And guess what? That message was sent in the middle of the night, thirty hours before the bombing of Al Qubai. My guess is, the details of the nuclear plant were in it. There’s more.”

“Go on.”

“He’s here.”

“Here in Baghdad?”

Major Zayeed smiled and shook his head. He had saved his best piece of news till last. He wanted to be appreciated.

“No, sir, he’s here in the Mansour district. I think he’s inside an area two kilometers by two.”

Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close.

The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose.

“I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?”

“With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred.”

Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car.

The Fist of God

They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the windshield the driver simply followed the motorcycle.

Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive. Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows.

Inside the principal sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took assigned places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself.

The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit.

For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more pronounced.

Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid—they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai.

The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed. None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place The Fist of God

except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed.

There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals—Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff—stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them.

Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened.

No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib.

The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room.

The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back.

They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard. From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas shells. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been assigned to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft assigned to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any.

They—the pilot and the navigator—knew nothing more than that.

The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. “True or false,
Rafeek
?”

“It is normal,
Sayid Rais
,” said the man who commanded the artillery and SAM missile sites, “for them to send in first the missile fighters to hit the defenses, then the bombers for the target. They always do that.