The Fist of God (67 page)

He told them the device had gone to the Fortress, whose whereabouts did not concern them, and from the Qa’ala it would be launched, to change all history, on the day the first combat boot of an American soldier stepped onto the holy land of Iraq.

Chapter 20

The news that the British Tornados had missed their real target at Al Qubai badly shook the man known only as Jericho. It was as much as he could do to force himself to his feet and applaud the Rais with the adoration of all the rest.

In the blacked-out bus with the other generals being transported back into central Baghdad, he had sat in silence in back, wrapped in his own thoughts.

That the use of the device now hidden elsewhere—at a place called Qa’ala, the Fortress, of which he had never heard and whose location he did not know—might cause many, many deaths, he cared not a jot.

The Fist of God

It was his own position that absorbed him. For three years he had risked everything—exposure, ruin, and a terrible death—to betray his country’s regime. The point had not simply been to establish a huge personal fortune abroad; that he could probably have done by extortion and theft right here in Iraq, though there would have been risks to that as well.

The point had been to retire abroad with a new identity and background, provided by his foreign paymasters, secure under their mantle, safe from the vengeful assassination squads. He had seen the fate of those who simply stole and fled; they lived constantly in fear until, one day, the Iraqi avengers caught up.

He, Jericho, wanted both his fortune and security, which was why he had welcomed the transfer of his control from Israel to the Americans.

They would look after him, abide by the agreement, and create the new identity, allowing him to become another man with another nationality, buy his mansion by the sea in Mexico, and live out a life of ease and comfort.

Now things had changed. If he kept silent and the device were used, the Americans would think he had lied about Al Qubai. He had not, but in their rage they would never believe that. Come hell or high water, the Americans would reject his account, and it would all have been for nothing. Somehow he had to warn them that there had been a mistake. A few more risks, and it would all be over—Iraq defeated, the Rais brought down, and he, Jericho, out of there and far away.

In the privacy of his office he wrote his message, as always in Arabic, on the thin paper that took up so little space. He explained the conference of that evening; that when he sent his last message, the device had indeed been at Al Qubai, as he had said, but forty-eight hours later when the Tornados struck, it had been moved. That this The Fist of God

was not his fault.

He went on to say all he knew: That there was a secret place called the Fortress; that the device was there, and from Qa’ala it would be launched when the first American crossed the border into Iraq.

Shortly after midnight, he took an unmarked car and disappeared into the back streets of Baghdad. No one queried his right to do so; no one would dare. He planted the message beneath a flagstone in an old courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, then made the chalk mark behind the Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. This time the chalk mark was slightly different. He hoped the unseen man who collected his messages would waste no time.

As it happened, Mike Martin left the Soviet villa early on the morning of February 15. The Russian cook had given him a long list of fresh produce to buy, a list that was going to prove extremely hard to fill.

Food was running short. It was not the farmers in the countryside; it was the transportation problems. Most of the bridges were down. The central Iraqi plain is a land of rivers watering the spread of crops that feed Baghdad. Forced to pay ferry charges across them all, the produce-growers were choosing to stay home.

Luckily, Martin started with the spice market in Shurja Street, then pedaled around the Church of St. Joseph to the alley at the back. When he saw the chalk mark, he was jolted.

The mark of that particular wall was always supposed to be a figure eight on its side, with a single short stroke horizontally through the join of the two circles. But he had warned Jericho previously that if there were ever a real emergency, the single stroke should be replaced by two small crosses, one in each circle of the figure eight. Today the crosses were there.

Martin pedaled hard to the courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, waited till The Fist of God

the coast was clear, stooped as always to adjust his sandal, slid a hand into the hiding place in the wall, and found the slim envelope. By midday, he was back at the villa, explaining to the angry cook that he had done his best but the produce would be later than ever reaching the city. He would have to go back in the afternoon.

When he read Jericho’s message, it became all too plain why the man was in a panic. Martin composed a message of his own, explaining to Riyadh why he now felt he had been forced to take matters into his own hands and make his own decision. There was no time left for conferences in Riyadh and a further interchange of messages. The worst part, for him, was Jericho’s revelation that Iraqi Counterintelligence was aware of an illegal transmitter sending burst signals. He could not know how close they were, but he had to assume there could be no further extended exchange of messages with Riyadh.

Therefore he was making the decision himself.

Martin read the Jericho message in Arabic first, then his own translation, into the tape recorder. He added his own message and prepared to send.

He had no transmission window until late in the night—the night was always chosen so that the Kulikov household would be fast asleep.

But, like Jericho, he did have an emergency procedure.

It was the transmission of a single long blast of sound, in this case a high-pitched whistle, on a completely different frequency, well outside the usual VHF band.

He checked that the Iraqi chauffeur was with First Secretary Kulikov at the embassy in the city center and that the Russian houseman and his wife were at lunch. Then, despite the risk of discovery, he erected the satellite dish near the open doorway and sent the whistle blast.

In the radio shack, a former bedroom in the SIS villa in Riyadh, a The Fist of God

single light flashed on. It was half past one in the afternoon. The duty radio operator, handling the normal traffic between the villa and Century House in London, dropped what he was doing, yelled through the door for backup, and tuned to Receive on Martin’s frequency-of-the-day.

The second operator put his head around the door.

“What’s up?”

“Get Steve and Simon. Black Bear’s coming on, and it’s an emergency.”

The man left. Martin gave Riyadh fifteen minutes, then ran his main transmission.

Riyadh was not the only radio mast that caught the burst. Outside Baghdad, another satellite dish, sweeping the VHF band relentlessly, caught part of it. The message was so long that, even shortened, it lasted four seconds. The Iraqi listeners caught the last two and got a fix.

As soon as he had sent, Martin closed down and packed away his equipment beneath the tiles of his floor. Hardly had he done so than he heard footsteps on the gravel. It was the Russian houseman who, in a fit of generosity, had crossed the yard to offer him a Balkan cigarette.

Martin accepted it with much bobbing and bowing and mutterings of

“
Shukran
.”

The Russian, proud of his good nature, walked back to the house.

“Poor bastard,” he thought. “What a life.”

When he was alone again, the poor bastard began to write in closely scripted Arabic on the pad of airmail paper he kept under his pallet. As he did so, the radio genius called Major Zayeed pored over a very-large-scale map of the city, particularly of the district of Mansour.

When he had finished his calculations, he double-checked them and The Fist of God

called Brigadier Hassan Rahmani at the Mukhabarat headquarters, barely five hundred yards from the diamond-shaped lozenge of Mansour that had been traced out in green ink. His appointment was fixed for four o’clock.

In Riyadh, Chip Barber was stomping around the main sitting room of the villa with a print-out in his hand, swearing in a manner he had not done since leaving the Marines thirty years earlier.

“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” he demanded of the two British intelligence officers in the room with him.

“Easy, Chip,” said Laing. “He’s had a hell of a long run. He’s under massive strain. The bad guys are closing in. All our tradecraft tells us we should get him out of there—now.”

“Yeah, I know, he’s a great guy. But he has no right to do this. We’re the people picking up the tab, remember?”

“We do remember,” said Paxman, “but he’s our man, and he’s miles out in the cold. If he chooses to stay on, it’s to finish the job, as much for you as for us.”

Barber calmed down.

“Three million dollars. How the hell am I to tell Langley he has offered Jericho a further three million greenbacks to get it right this time? That Iraqi asshole should have gotten it right the first time. For all we know, he could be dealing from the bottom of the deck, just to make more money.”

“Chip,” said Laing, “we’re talking about a nuke here.”

“Maybe,” growled Barber, “
maybe
we’re talking about a nuke.
Maybe
Saddam got enough uranium in time,
maybe
he put it all together in time. All we really have are the calculations of some scientists and The Fist of God

Saddam’s claim—if indeed he ever made the claim at all. Dammit, Jericho is a mercenary, he could be lying in his teeth. Scientists can be wrong, Saddam lies as he breathes. What have we actually
gotten
for all this money?”

“You want to take the risk?” asked Laing.

Barber slumped in a chair.

“No,” he said at length, “no, I don’t. Okay, I’ll clear it with Washington. Then we tell the generals. They have to know this. But I tell you guys one thing: One day I’m going to meet this Jericho, and if he’s putting us on, I’m going to pull his arms off and beat him to death with the soggy end.”

At four that afternoon, Major Zayeed brought his maps and his calculations to Hassan Rahmani’s office. Carefully he explained that he had that day secured his third triangulation and narrowed the area down to the lozenge shown on the map of Mansour. Rahmani gazed at it dubiously.

“It’s a hundred yards by a hundred yards,” he said. “I thought modern technology could get these emission sources down to a square yard.”

“If I get a long transmission, yes, I can,” explained the young major patiently. “I can get a beam from the intercepting receiver no wider than a yard. Cross that with another intercept from a different point, and you get your square yard. But these are terribly short transmissions. They’re on the air and off within two seconds. The best I can get is a very narrow cone, its point on the receiver, running out across country and getting wider as it goes. Maybe an angle of one second of one degree on the compass. But a couple of miles away, that becomes a hundred yards. Look, it’s still a small area.”

Rahmani peered at the map. The marked lozenge had four buildings in it.

The Fist of God

“Let’s get down there and look at it,” he suggested.

The two men prowled Mansour with the map until they had traced the area shown. It was residential and very prosperous. The four residences were all detached, walled, and standing in their own grounds. It was getting dark by the time they finished.

“Raid them in the morning,” said Rahmani. “I’ll seal the area with troops, quietly. You know what you’re looking for. You go in with your specialists and take all four places apart. You find it, we have the spy.”

“One problem,” said the major. “See that brass plaque over there?

That’s a Soviet embassy residence.”

Rahmani thought it over. He would get no thanks for starting an international incident.

“Do the other three first,” he ordered. “If you get nothing, I’ll clear the Soviet building with the Foreign Ministry.”

While they talked, one of the staff of that Soviet villa was three miles away. The gardener Mahmoud Al-Khouri was in the old British cemetery, placing a slim envelope in a stone jar by a long-untended gravestone. Later, he made a chalk mark on the wall of the Union of Journalists building. On a late-night tour of the district, he noticed just before midnight that the chalk mark had been expunged.

That evening, there was a conference in Riyadh, a very private conference in a sealed office two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry building. There were four generals present, one of them seated at the head of the table, and two civilians, Barber and Laing.

When the civilians had finished speaking, the four military men sat in gloomy silence.

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“Is this for real?” asked one of the Americans.

“In terms of one hundred percent proof, we don’t have that,” said Barber. “But we think there is a very high likelihood that the information is accurate.”

“What makes you so sure?” asked the USAF general.

“As you gentlemen have probably already guessed, we have for some months past had an asset working for us high in the hierarchy in Baghdad.”

There was a series of assenting grunts.

“Didn’t figure all that target information was coming from Langley’s crystal ball,” said the Air Force general, who still resented the CIA doubting his pilots’ hit record.

“The point is,” said Laing, “so far, we have never found his information to be anything but bang-on accurate. If he’s lying now, it’s a hell of a scam. Second point is, can we take that risk?”

There was silence for several minutes.

“There’s one thing you guys are overlooking,” said the USAF man.

“Delivery.”

“Delivery?” asked Barber.

“Right. Having a weapon is one thing; delivering it right on top of your enemy is another. Look, no one can believe Saddam is into miniaturization yet. That’s hypertech. So he can’t launch this thing, if he has it, from a tank gun. Or an artillery piece—same caliber. Or a Katyushka-type battery. Or a rocket.”