The Fist of God (79 page)

It took him another day to reach the border. Here he cut south of the main road into empty desert, crossed into Jordan, recovered his hidden directional beacon, and used it. The
bleep-bleep
beam was picked up at once by an Israeli aircraft circling over the Negev, and the helicopter returned to the rendezvous to recover the infiltrator.

He did not sleep for those fifty hours and ate little, but he fulfilled his mission and returned home safely.

* * *

On the third day of the ground war, Edith Hardenberg returned to her desk at the Winkler Bank, both puzzled and angry. On the previous morning, just as she had been about to leave for work, she had received a telephone call.

The speaker, in faultless German with a Salzburg accent, introduced himself as the neighbor of her mother. He told her that Frau Hardenberg had had a bad fall down the stairs after slipping on an icy patch and was in a bad way.

She at once tried to call her mother but repeatedly got a busy signal.

Finally frantic, she had called the Salzburg exchange, who informed her the phone must be out of order.

Telephoning the bank that she would not be in for work, she had driven to Salzburg through the snow and slush, arriving in the late The Fist of God

morning. Her mother, perfectly fit and well, was surprised to see her.

There had been no fall, no injury. Worse, some vandal had cut her telephone line outside the flat.

By the time Edith Hardenberg returned to Vienna, it was too late to go in for work.

When she appeared at her desk the next morning, she found Wolfgang Gemütlich in an even worse mood than she. He reproached her bitterly for her absence the previous day and listened to her explanation in a bad humor.

The reason for his own misery was not long in coming. In the midmorning of the previous day, a young man had appeared at the bank and insisted on seeing him.

The visitor explained that his name was Aziz and that he was the son of the owner of a substantial numbered account. His father, explained the Arab, was indisposed but wished his son to act in his place.

At this, Aziz Junior had produced documentation that fully and perfectly authenticated him as his father’s ambassador, with complete authority to operate the numbered account. Herr Gemütlich had examined the documents of authority for the slightest flaw, but there was none. He had been left with no alternative but to concede.

The young wretch had insisted that his father’s wishes were to close down the entire account and transfer the contents elsewhere. This, mind you, Fräulein Hardenberg, just two days after the arrival in the account of a further $3 million credit, bringing the aggregate total to over $10 million.

Edith Hardenberg listened to Gemütlich’s tale of woe very quietly, then asked about the visitor. Yes, she was told, his first name had been Karim. Now that she mentioned it, there had been a signet ring with a pink opal on the small finger of one hand and, indeed, a scar along the The Fist of God

chin. Had he been less consumed by his own sense of outrage, the banker might have wondered at such precise questioning by his secretary about a man she could not have seen.

He had known, of course, Gemütlich admitted, that the account-holder must be some sort of Arab, but he had had no idea that the man was from Iraq or had a son.

After work, Edith Hardenberg went home and began to clean her little flat. She scrubbed and scoured it for hours. There were two cardboard boxes that she took to the large rubbish bin a few hundred yards away and dumped. One contained a number of items of makeup, perfumes, lotions, and bath salts; the other, a variety of women’s underwear.

Then she returned to her cleaning.

Neighbors said later she played music through the evening and late into the night—not her usual Mozart and Strauss but Verdi, especially something from
Nabucco
. A particularly keen-eared neighbor identified the piece as the “Slaves’ Chorus,” which she played over and over again.

In the small hours of the morning the music stopped, and she left in her car with two items from her kitchen.

It was a retired accountant, walking his dog in the Prater Park at seven the next morning, who found her. He had left the Hauptallee to allow his dog to do its business in the park away from the road.

She was in her neat gray tweed coat, with her hair in a bun behind her head, thick lisle stockings on her legs, and sensible flat-heeled shoes on her feet. The clothesline looped over the branch of the oak had not betrayed her, and the kitchen steps were a meter away.

She was quite still and stiff in death, her hands by her side and her toes pointed neatly downward. Always a very neat lady was Edith Hardenberg.

The Fist of God

February 28 was the last day of the ground war. In the Iraqi deserts west of Kuwait, the Iraqi Army had been outflanked and annihilated.

South of the city, the Republican Guard divisions that had rolled into Kuwait on August 2 ceased to exist. On that day the forces occupying the city, having set fire to everything that would burn and seeking to destroy what would not, left for the north in a snaking column of halftracks, trucks, vans, cars, and carts.

The column was caught in the place where the highway north cuts through the Mutla Ridge. The Eagles and Jaguars, Tomcats and Hornets, Tornados and Thunderbolts, Phantoms and Apaches hurtled down onto the column and reduced it to charred wreckage. With the head of the column destroyed and blocking the road, the remainder could escape neither forward nor backward, and because of the cut in the ridge could not leave the road. Many died in that column and the rest surrendered. By sundown, the first Arab forces were entering Kuwait to liberate it.

That evening, Mike Martin made contact again with Riyadh and heard the news. He gave his position and that of a reasonably flat meadow nearby.

The SAS men and Walker were out of food, melting snow to drink, and bitterly cold, not daring to light a fire in case it gave away their position. The war was over, but the patrols of mountain guards might well not know that, or care.

Just after dawn, two long-range Blackhawk helicopters loaned by the American 101st Airborne Division came for them. They came from the The Fist of God

fire base camp set up by the 101st fifty miles inside Iraq, after the biggest helicopter assault in history. So great was the distance from the Saudi border that even from the fire base on the Euphrates River, it was a long haul to the mountains near Khanaqin.

That was why there were two of them: The second had even more fuel for the journey home.

To be on the safe side, eight Eagles circled above, giving protective cover as the refueling in the meadow was carried out. Don Walker squinted upward.

“Hey, they’re my guys!” he shouted. As the two Blackhawks clattered the way back again, the Strike Eagles rode shotgun until they were south of the border.

They said farewell to each other on a wind-blasted strip of sand, surrounded by the detritus of a defeated army near the Saudi-Iraqi border. The whirling blades of a Blackhawk whipped up the dust and gravel before taking Don Walker to Dhahran and a flight back to Al Kharz. A British Puma stood farther away, to take the SAS men to their own secret cordoned base.

That evening, at a comfortable country house in the rolling downs of Sussex, Dr. Terry Martin was told where his brother had actually been since October and that he was now out of Iraq and safe in Saudi Arabia.

Martin was almost ill with relief, and the SIS gave him a lift back to London, where he resumed his life as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The Fist of God

Two days later, on March 3, the commanders of the Coalition forces met in a tent on a small and bare Iraqi airstrip called Safwan with two generals from Baghdad to negotiate the surrender.

The only spokesmen for the Allied side were Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled bin Sultan. At the American general’s side sat the commander of the British forces, General Sir Peter de la Billière.

Both the Western officers to this day believe that only two Iraqi generals came to Safwan. In fact, there were three.

The American security net was extremely tight, to exclude the possibility of any assassin reaching the tent in which the opposing generals met. An entire American division encircled the airfield, facing outward.

Unlike the Allied commanders who had arrived from the south by a series of helicopters, the Iraqi party had been ordered to drive to a road junction north of the airstrip. There they left their cars to transfer to a number of American armored personnel vehicles called humvees and be driven by U.S. drivers the last two miles to the airstrip and the cluster of tents where they were awaited.

Ten minutes after the party of generals entered the negotiation tent with their interpreters, another black Mercedes limousine was coming down the Basra road toward the junction. The roadblock there was commanded by that time by a captain of the U.S. Seventh Armored Brigade, all more senior officers having proceeded to the airstrip. The unexpected limousine was at once stopped.

In the back of the car was the third Iraqi general, albeit only a brigadier, bearing a black attaché case. Neither he nor his driver spoke English, and the captain spoke no Arabic. He was about to radio the airstrip for orders when a jeep driven by an American colonel and The Fist of God

bearing another in the passenger seat pulled up. The driver was in the uniform of the Green Beret Special Forces; the passenger had the insignia of G2, the military intelligence.

Both men flashed their ID at the captain, who examined the cards, recognized their authenticity, and threw up a salute.

“It’s okay, Captain. We’ve been expecting this bastard,” said the Green Beret colonel. “Seems he was delayed by a flat tire.”

“That case,” said the G2 officer, pointing at the attaché case of the Iraqi brigadier who now stood uncomprehending by the side of his car,

“contains the names of all our POWs, including the missing aircrew.

Stormin’ Norman wants it, and now.”

There were no humvees left. The Green Beret colonel gave the Iraqi a rough shove toward the jeep. The captain was perplexed. He knew nothing of any third Iraqi general. He also knew his unit had recently gotten into the Bear’s bad books by having claimed to occupy Safwan when it had not achieved that objective. The last thing he needed was to call down more of General Schwarzkopf’s wrath on the Seventh Armored by detaining the list of missing American aircrew. The jeep drove away in the direction of Safwan. The captain shrugged and gestured the Iraqi driver to park with all the others.

On the road to the airstrip the jeep passed between rows of parked American armored vehicles for up to a mile. Then there was an empty section of road, before the cordon of Apache helicopters surrounding the actual negotiation area.

Clear of the tanks, the G2 colonel turned to the Iraqi and spoke in good Arabic.

“Under your seat,” he said. “Don’t get out of the jeep, but get them on—fast.”

The Iraqi wore the dark green uniform of his country. The rolled The Fist of God

clothes beneath his seat were in the light tan of a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. He quickly exchanged trousers, jacket, and beret.

Just before the ring of Apaches on the tarmac, the jeep peeled away into the desert, skirted the airstrip, and drove on south. On the far side of Safwan, the vehicle regained the main road to Kuwait, twenty miles away.

The U.S. tanks were on every side, facing outward. Their job was to forbid the penetration of any infiltrators. Their commanders, atop their turrets, watched one of their own jeeps bearing two of their own colonels and a Saudi officer drive out of the perimeter and away from the protected zone, so it did not concern them.

It took the jeep almost an hour to reach the Kuwait airport, then a devastated wreck, gutted by the Iraqis and covered by a black pall of smoke from the oil field fires blazing all over the emirate. The journey took so long because, to avoid the carnage of the Mutla Ridge road, it had diverted in a big sweep through the desert west of the city.

Five miles short of the airport, the G2 colonel took a hand-communicator from the glove compartment and keyed in a series of
bleeps
. Over the airport a single airplane began its approach.

The makeshift airport control tower was a trailer manned by Americans. The incoming aircraft was a British Aerospace HS-125.

Not only that, it was the personal airplane of the British Commander, General de la Billière. It must have been; it had all the right markings and the right call-sign. The air traffic controller cleared it to land.

The HS-125 did not taxi to the wreckage of the airport building but to a distant dispersal point, where it made rendezvous with an American jeep. The door opened, the ladder came down, and three men boarded the twin-jet.

“Granby One, clearance for takeoff,” the traffic controller heard. He The Fist of God

was handling an incoming Canadian Hercules with medicines for the hospital on board.

“Hold, Granby One. ... What is your flight plan?”

He meant: That was damn fast—where the hell do you think you’re going?

“Sorry, Kuwait Tower.” The voice was clipped and precise, pure Royal Air Force. The controller had heard the RAF before, and they all sounded the same—preppy.

“Kuwait Tower, we’ve just taken on board a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. Feeling very sick. One of the staff of Prince Khaled.

General Schwarzkopf asked for his immediate evacuation, so Sir Peter offered his-own plane. Clearance takeoff, please, old boy.”

In two breaths the British pilot had mentioned one general, one prince, and one knight of the realm. The controller was a master sergeant, and good at his job. He had a fine career in the United States Air Force.

Refusing to evacuate a sick Saudi colonel on the staff of a prince at the request of a general in the plane of the British commander might not do that career any good.

“Granby One, clear takeoff,” he said.

The HS-125 lifted away from Kuwait, but instead of heading for Riyadh, which has one of the finest hospitals in the Middle East, it set course due west along the kingdom’s northern border.