The Fist of God (69 page)

Early that morning, February 16, Major Zayeed and his team presented themselves at the first of the three villas that were to be searched. The other two were sealed, with men posted at all the entrances and the bewildered occupants confined inside.

The major was perfectly polite, but his authority brooked no objection.

Unlike the AMAM team a mile and a half away in Qadisiyah, Zayeed’s men were experts, caused very little permanent damage, and were the more efficient for it.

Beginning at the ground level, searching for access to a hiding place beneath the floor tiles, they worked their way steadily through the house, room by room, cupboard by cupboard, and cavity by cavity.

The garden was also searched, but not a trace was found. Before midday, the major was satisfied at last, made his apologies to the occupants, and left. Next door, he began to work through the second house.

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In the basement beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, the old man was on his back, strapped at his wrists and waist to a stout wooden table and surrounded by the four experts who would extract his confession. Apart from these, there was a doctor present, and Brigadier Omar Khatib consulting in a corner with Sergeant Ali.

It was the head of the AMAM who decided on the menu of afflictions to be undertaken. Sergeant Ali raised an eyebrow; he would, he realized, certainly need his coveralls this day. Omar Khatib nodded curtly and left. He had paperwork to attend to in his upstairs office.

The old man continued to plead that he knew nothing of any transmitter, that he had not been in the garden for days due to the inclement weather. ... The interrogators were not interested. They bound both ankles to a broom handle running across the insteps. Two of the four raised the feet to the required position with the soles facing the room, while Ali and his remaining colleague took down from the walls the heavy quirts of electrical flex.

When the bastinado began, the old man screamed, as they all did, until the voice broke, then fainted. A bucket of icy water from the corner, where a row of them were stacked, brought him around.

Occasionally, through the morning, the men rested, easing the muscles of their arms, which had become tired with their endeavors. While they rested, cups of brine were dashed against the pulpy feet. Then, refreshed, they resumed.

Between bouts of fainting, the old man continued to protest that he could not even operate a radio transmitter and there must have been some mistake.

By midmorning, the skin and meat of the soles of both feet had been The Fist of God

whipped away and the white bones glinted through the blood. Sergeant Ali sighed and nodded that this process should cease. He lit a cigarette and savored the smoke while his assistant used a short iron bar to crack the leg bones from ankle to knees.

The old man pleaded with the doctor, as one medical practitioner to another, but the AMAM physician stared at the ceiling. He had his orders, which were to keep the prisoner alive and conscious.

Across the city, Major Zayeed finished his search of the second villa at four o’clock, just as Gidi Barzilai and Michel Levy were rising from their table in Paris. Again, he had found nothing. Making his courteous apologies to the terrified couple who had watched their home being systematically stripped, he left and with his rummage crew moved on to the third and last villa.

* * *

In Saadun, the old man was fainting more frequently, and the doctor protested to the interrogators that he needed time to recover. An injection was prepared and pumped into the prisoner’s bloodstream. It had an almost immediate effect, bringing him back from his near-coma to wakefulness and rousing the nerves to fresh sensitivity.

When the needles in the brazier glowed red-white, they were driven slowly through the shriveled scrotum and the desiccated testicles within.

Just after six the old man went into a coma again, and this time the doctor was too late. He worked furiously, the sweat of fear pouring down his face, but all his stimulants, injected directly into the heart, failed to suffice.

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Ali left the room and returned after five minutes with Omar Khatib.

The brigadier looked at the body, and years of experience told him something for which he needed no medical degree. He turned, and his open palm caught the cringing doctor a fearsome crack across the side of the face.

The force of the blow as much as the reputation of the man who administered it sent the doctor crashing to the floor among his syringes and vials.

“Cretin,” hissed Khatib. “Get out of here.”

The doctor gathered his bits into his bag and left on hands and knees.

The Tormentor looked at Ali’s handiwork. There was the sweet smell in the air both men knew of old, an admixture of sweat, terror, urine, excrement, blood, vomit, and a faint aroma of burnt meat.

“He still protested to the end,” said Ali. “I swear, if he knew something, we’d have had it out of him.”

“Put him in a bag,” snapped Omar Khatib, “and return him to his wife for burial.”

It was a strong white canvas sack six feet long and two feet wide, and it was dumped on the doorstep of the house in Qadisiyah at ten that evening. Slowly and with great difficulty, for both were old, the widow and the house servant lifted the bag, brought it inside, and laid it on the dining table. The woman took up her station at the end of the table and began to keen her grief.

The bewildered old servant, Talat, went to the telephone, but it had been ripped from the wall and did not work. Taking his mistress’s phone book, which he could not read, he went down the road to the house of the pharmacist and asked the neighbor to try to contact the young master—either of the young masters would do.

At the same hour, as the pharmacist tried to get a call through Iraq’s The Fist of God

wrecked internal telephone system, and Gidi Barzilai, back in Vienna, composed a fresh cable to Kobi Dror, Major Zayeed was reporting his day’s lack of progress to Hassan Rahmani.

“It just wasn’t there,” he told the head of Counterintelligence. “If it had been, we’d have found it. So it has to be the fourth villa, the home of the diplomat.”

“You’re sure you can’t be wrong?” asked Rahmani. “It couldn’t be in another house?”

“No, sir. The nearest house to those four is well outside the area indicated by the crossed beams. The source of those burst transmissions was inside that diamond on the map. I’d swear to it.”

Rahmani was hesitant. Diplomats were the very devil to investigate, always prepared to rush to the Foreign Ministry with a complaint. To get inside Comrade Kulikov’s residence, he would have to go high—as high as he could.

When the major was gone, Rahmani phoned the Foreign Ministry. He was in luck; the Foreign Minister, who had been traveling almost constantly for months, was in Baghdad. More, he was still at his desk.

Rahmani secured his interview for ten the next morning.

The pharmacist was a kindly man, and he just kept trying all through the night. He never did reach the older son, but using a contact in the Army, he managed to get a message through to the younger of his dead friend’s two boys. He could not speak to the man himself, but the Army contact passed it on.

The message reached the younger son at his base far away from Baghdad at dawn. As soon as he heard it, the officer took his car and began to drive. Normally it would have taken him no more than two The Fist of God

hours. That day, February 17, it took him six. There were patrols and roadblocks. Using his rank, he could drive to the head of the line, flash his pass, and be waved on.

That did not work for the wrecked bridges. At each one he had to wait for the ferry. It was midday when he arrived at his parents’ house in Qadisiyah.

His mother ran into his embrace and cried against his shoulder. He tried to extract from her details of precisely what had happened, but she was no longer young herself and was hysterical.

Finally, he picked her up and carried her to her room. In the mess of medications the soldiers had left strewn all over the bathroom floor, he found a bottle of sleeping pills his father had used when winter cold brought on the arthritis. He gave his mother two, and soon she slept.

In the kitchen he ordered old Talat to make them both a coffee, and they sat at the table while the servant described what had happened since dawn of the previous day. When he was finished, he showed his dead master’s son the hole in the garden where the soldiers had found the bag with the radio set. The younger man shinnied lip the garden wall and found the scratches where the intruder had come over in the night to bury it. Then he went back to the house.

Hassan Rahmani was kept waiting, which he did not like, but he had his appointment with the Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, just before eleven.

“I don’t think I quite understand you,” said the gray-haired minister, peering owlishly through his glasses. “Embassies are allowed to communicate with their capitals by radio, and their transmissions are always coded.”

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“Yes, Minister, and they come from the Chancery building. That is part of normal diplomatic traffic. This is different. We are talking here about a covert transmitter, as used by spies, sending burst transmissions to a receiver we are sure is not in Moscow but much closer.”

“Burst transmissions?” asked Aziz.

Rahmani explained what they were.

“I still fail to follow you. Why should some agent of the KGB—and presumably this must be a KGB operation—be sending burst messages from the residence of the First Secretary, when they have a perfect right to send them on much more powerful transmitters from the embassy?”

“I do not know.”

“Then you must offer me some kind of better explanation. Brigadier.

Have you any idea what is going on outside your own office? Do you not know that late yesterday I arrived back from Moscow after intensive discussions with Mr. Gorbachev and his representative Yevgeny Primakov, who was here last week? Do you not know that I brought with me a peace proposal that, if the Rais accepts it—and I am presenting it to him in two hours—could cause the Soviet Union to recall the Security Council and forbid the Americans to attack us?

“And in the face of all this, at this precise moment, you expect me to humiliate the Soviet Union by ordering a raid on their First Secretary’s villa? Frankly, Brigadier, you must be mad.”

That was the end of it. Hassan Rahmani left the Ministry seething but helpless. There was one thing, however, that Tariq Aziz had not forbidden. Within the walls of his house, Kulikov might be impregnable. Inside his car he might be untouchable. But the streets did not belong to Kulikov.

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“I want it surrounded,” Rahmani told his best surveillance team, when he returned to his office. “Keep it quiet, discreet, low-profile. But I want total surveillance of that building. When visitors come and go—and there must be visitors—I want them tailed.”

By noon, the watcher teams were in place. They sat in parked cars beneath the trees covering all four walls of the Kulikov compound and monitored both ends of the only street that led to it. Others, farther away but linked by radio, would report on anyone approaching and follow anyone who left.

The younger son sat in the dining room of his parents’ house and looked at the long canvas bag that contained his father. He let the tears run down his face to make damp marks on the jacket of his uniform, and he thought of the good days long ago. His father had been a prosperous doctor then, with a large practice, even tending to the families of some of the British community after being introduced to them by his friend Nigel Martin.

He thought of the times he and his brother had played in the Martins’

garden with Mike and Terry, and he wondered what had ever happened to those two.

After an hour he noticed some stains on the canvas that seemed to be larger than they had been. He rose and went to the door.

“Talat.”

“Master?”

“Bring scissors and a kitchen knife.”

Alone in the room, Colonel Osman Badri cut open the canvas bag, along the top, down one side and along the bottom. Then he pulled the top of the sack away and rolled it back. His father’s body was still The Fist of God

quite naked.

According to tradition, it was supposed to be woman’s work, but this was no task for his mother. He called for water and bandages, bathed and cleaned the ravaged body, bound up the broken feet, straightened and swaddled the shattered legs, and covered the blackened genitalia.

As he worked, he cried; and as he cried, he changed.

At dusk he called the Imam at the Alwazia cemetery in Risafa and made arrangements for a funeral the next morning.

Mike Martin had in fact been into the city on his bicycle that Sunday morning, February 17, but he had returned after buying his groceries and checking the three walls for any chalk marks, arriving back at the villa just before midday. During the afternoon he was kept busy tending the garden. Mr. Kulikov, while neither Christian nor Moslem and celebrating neither the Moslem holy day on Friday nor the Christian sabbath on Sunday, was at home with a cold, complaining about the state of his roses.

While Martin worked over the flower beds, the Mukhabarat watcher teams were quietly sliding into place beyond the wall. Jericho, he reasoned, could not possibly have news in less than two days; Martin would patrol his chalk marks again the following evening.

The burial of Dr. Badri took place at Alwazia shortly after nine o’clock. The cemeteries of Baghdad were busy in those times, and the Imam had much to do. Only a few days earlier, the Americans had bombed a public air raid shelter, causing more than three hundred deaths. Feelings were running high. Several mourners at another funeral close by asked the silent colonel if his relative had died from American bombs. He replied shortly that death had been by natural The Fist of God

causes.

In Moslem custom, burial takes place quickly, with no long period of waiting between death and interment. And mere was no wooden coffin in the manner of Christians; the body was wrapped in cloth. The pharmacist came, supporting Mrs. Badri, and they left in a group when the brief ceremony was over. Colonel Badri was barely yards from the gate of Alwazia when he heard his name called. Standing a few yards away was a limousine with blackened windows. One at the rear was half open. The voice called him again.