The Fist Of God Part 2

"They raped my sister. A nurse-at the Al Adan hospital. Four of them. She is destroyed."

The Bedou nodded.

"There will be much of that," he said. "So you want to kill Iraqis?"

"Yes, as many as I can. Before I die."

"The trick is not to die. If that is what you want, I think I had better train you, or you won't last a day."

The boy snorted.

"The Bedouin do not fight."

"Ever heard of the Arab Legion?" The youth was silent. "And before them, Prince Faisal and the Arab Revolt? All Bedouin. Are there any more like you?"

The youth turned out to be a law student, studying at Kuwait University before the invasion. "There are five of us. We all want the same. I chose to be the first to try." "Memorize this address," said the Bedou. He gave it-a villa in a back street in Yarmuk. The boy got it wrong twice, then right. Martin made him repeat it twenty times. "Seven o'clock tonight. It will be dark. But curfew is not till ten. Arrive separately. Park at least two hundred yards away and walk the rest. Enter at two-minute intervals. The gate and door will be open." He watched the boy ride away on his scooter and sighed. Pretty basic material, he thought, but for the moment it's all I've got. The young people turned up on time. He lay on a flat roof across the street and watched them. They were nervous and unsure, glancing over their shoulders, darting into gateways, then out again. Too many Bogart movies. When they were all inside, he gave them ten more minutes. No Iraqi security men appeared. He slipped down from his roof, crossed the road, and entered the house from the back. They were sitting in the main room with the lights on and the curtains undrawn. Four young men and a girl, dark and very intense. They were looking toward the door to the hall when he entered from the kitchen. One minute he was not there, and the next he was. The youngsters had one glimpse of him before he reached out and switched off the light. "Draw the curtains," he said quietly. The girl did it. Woman's work. Then he put the light back on. "Never sit in a lighted room with the curtains open," he said. "You do not want to be seen together." He had divided his six residences into two groups. In four he lived, flitting from one to another in no particular sequence. Each time, he left tiny signs for himself-a leaf wedged in the doorjamb, a tin can on the step. If ever they were missing, he would know the house had been visited. In the other two he stored half the gear he had brought in from its grave in the desert. The place he had chosen to meet the students was the least important of his dwelling places, and now one he would never use again to sleep in. They were all students, except one who worked in a bank. He made them introduce themselves. "Now you need new names." He gave them each a new name. "You tell no one else-not friends, parents, brothers, anyone-those names. Whenever they are used, you know the message comes from one of us. "What do we call you?" asked the girl, who had just become Rana. "The Bedou," he said. "It will do. You-what is this address again?" The young man he pointed at thought, then produced a slip of paper. Martin took it from him. "No pieces of paper. Memorize everything. The Popular Army may be stupid but the Secret Police are not. If you are frisked, how do you explain this?" He made the three who had written down the address burn their slips of paper. "How well do you know your city?" "Pretty well," said the oldest of them, the twenty-five-year-old bank clerk. "Not good enough. Buy maps tomorrow, street maps. Study as if for your final exams. Learn every street and alley, every square and garden, every boulevard and lane, every major public building, every mosque and courtyard. You know the street signs are coming down?" They nodded. Within fifteen days of the invasion, after recovering from their shock, the Kuwaitis were beginning a form of pa.s.sive resistance, of civil disobedience. It was spontaneous and uncoordinated. One of the moves was the ripping down of street signs. Kuwait is a complicated city to start with; deprived of street signs, it became a maze. Iraqi patrols were already becoming comprehensively lost. For the Secret Police, finding a suspect's address was a nightmare. At main intersections, sign posts were being ripped up in the night or turned around. That first night, Martin gave them two hours on basic security. Always have a cover story that checks out, for any journey and any rendezvous. Never carry incriminating paper. Always treat Iraqi soldiers with respect verging on deference. Confide in no one. "From now on you are two people. One is the original you, the one everyone knows, the student, the clerk. He is polite, attentive, law-abiding, innocent, harmless. The Iraqis will leave him alone because he does not threaten them. He never insults their country, their flag, or their leader. He never comes to the attention of the AMAM. He stays alive and free. Only on a special occasion, on a mission, does the other person appear. He will become skilled and dangerous and still stay alive." He taught them about security. To attend a meeting at a rendezvous, turn up early, park well away. Go into the shadows. Watch for twenty minutes. Look at the surrounding houses. Check for heads on the roof, the waiting ambush party. Be alert for the scuff of a soldier's boot on gravel, the glow of a cigarette, the clink of metal on metal. When they still had time to get home before the curfew, he dismissed them. They were disappointed. "What about the invaders? When do we start killing them?"

"When you know how." "Is there nothing we can do?" "When the Iraqis move about, how do they do it? Do they march?" "No, they use trucks, vans, jeeps, stolen cars," said the law student. "Which have petrol caps," said the Bedou, "which come off with a quick twist. Sugar lumps-twenty lumps per petrol tank. It dissolves in the petrol, pa.s.ses through the carburetor, and turns to hard caramel in the heat of the engine. It destroys the engine. Be careful not to be caught. Work in pairs and after dark. One keeps watch, the other slips in the sugar. Replace the petrol cap. It takes ten seconds. "A piece of plywood, four inches by four, with four sharpened steel nails through it. Drop it down under your thob till it slips out by your feet. Nudge it with your toe under the leading edge of the tire of a stationary vehicle. "There are rats in Kuwait, so there are shops that sell rat poison. Buy the white, strychnine-based kind. Buy dough from a baker. Mix in the poison, using rubber gloves, then destroy the gloves. Bake up the bread in the kitchen oven, but only, when you are alone in the house." The students stared open-mouthed. "We have to give it to the Iraqis?" "No, you carry the loaves in open baskets on scooters, or in the trunks of cars. They will stop you at roadblocks and steal it. We meet here again in six days." Four days later, Iraqi trucks began to break down. Some were towed away and others abandoned, six trucks and four jeeps. The mechanics found out why but could not discover when or by whom. Tires began to blow out and the plywood squares were handed over to the Secret Police, who fumed and beat up several Kuwaitis seized at random on the streets.

Hospital wards began to fill with sick soldiers, all with vomiting and stomach pain. As they were hardly ever given food rations by their own army and lived hand-to-mouth at their roadblocks and in their stone-slab cantonments up and down the streets, it was a.s.sumed they had been drinking polluted water.

Then at the Amiri hospital in Dasman, a Kuwaiti lab technician ran an a.n.a.lysis of a sample of vomit from one of the Iraqis. He approached his departmental chief in great perplexity.

"He's been eating rat poison, professor. But he says he only had bread for three days, and some fruit."

The professor was puzzled.

"Iraq Army bread?"

"No, they didn't deliver any for some days. He took it from a pa.s.sing Kuwaiti baker's boy."

"Where are your samples?"

"On the bench, in the lab. I thought it best to see you first."

"Quite right. You have done well. Destroy them. You have seen nothing, you understand?"

The professor walked back into his office shaking his head. Rat poison. Who the h.e.l.l had thought of that?

The Medusa Committee met again on August 30, because the bacteriologist from Porton Down felt he had discovered all he could at that point about Iraq's germ warfare program, such as it was or appeared to be.

"I'm afraid we are looking at somewhat slim pickings," Dr. Bryant told his listeners. "The main reason is that the study of bacteriology can quite properly be carried out at any forensic or veterinary

laboratory using the same equipment that you would find in any chemical lab and that won't show up on export permits. "You see, the overwhelming majority of the product is for the benefit of mankind, for the curing of diseases, not the spreading of them. So nothing could be more natural than for a developing country to want to study bilharzia, beri-beri, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, or hepat.i.tis. These are human diseases. There is another range of animal diseases that the veterinary colleges might quite properly want to study." "So there's virtually no way of establis.h.i.+ng whether Iraq today has a germ-bomb facility or not?" asked Sinclair of the CIA. "Virtually not," said Bryant. "There's a record to show that way back in 1974, when Saddam Hussein was not on the throne, so to speak-" "He was vice-president, then, and the power behind the throne," said Terry Martin. Bryant was fl.u.s.tered. "Well, whatever. Iraq signed a contract with the Inst.i.tut Merieux in Paris to build them a bacteriological research project. It was supposed to be for veterinary research into animal diseases, and it may have been." "What about the stories of anthrax cultures for use against humans?" the American asked. "Well, it's possible. Anthrax is a particularly virulent disease. It mainly affects cattle and other livestock, but it can infect humans if they handle or ingest products from infected sources. You may recall the British government experimented with anthrax on the Hebridean island of Grainard during the Second World War. It's still out of bounds." "That bad, eh? Where would he get this stuff?" "That's the point, Mr. Sinclair. You'd hardly go to a reputable European or American laboratory and say 'Can I have some nice anthrax cultures because I want to throw them at people?' Anyway, he wouldn't need to. There are diseased cattle all over the Third World. One would only have to note an outbreak and buy a couple of diseased carca.s.ses. But it wouldn't show up on government paperwork." "So he could have cultures of this disease for use in bombs or sh.e.l.ls, but we don't know. Is that the position?" asked Sir Paul Spruce. His rolled-gold pen was poised above his note pad. "That's about it," said Bryant. "But that's the bad news. The better news is, I doubt if it would work against an advancing army. I suppose that if you had an army advancing against you and you were ruthless enough, you'd want to stop them in their tracks." "That's about the shape of it," said Sinclair. "Well, anthrax wouldn't do that. It would impregnate the soil if dropped from a series of air bursts above and ahead of the army. Anything growing from that soil-gra.s.s, fruit, vegetables-would be infected. Any beast feeding on the gra.s.s would succ.u.mb. Anyone eating the meat, drinking the milk, or handling the hide of any such beast would catch it. But the desert is not a good vehicle for such spore cultures. Presumably our soldiers will be eating prepacked meals and drinking bottled water?" "Yep, they are already," said Sinclair. "Then anthrax wouldn't have much effect, unless they breathed the spores in. The disease has to enter humans by ingestion into the lungs or the food pa.s.sages. Bearing in mind the gas hazard, I suspect they will be wearing gas masks anyway." "We plan on it, yes," replied Sinclair. "So do we," added Sir Paul. "Then I don't really see why anthrax," said Bryant. "It wouldn't stop the soldiers in their tracks, like a variety of gases, and those who did catch it could be cured with powerful antibiotics. There is an incubation period, you see. The soldiers could win the war and then fall sick. Frankly, it's a terrorist weapon rather than a military one. Now, if you dropped a vial of anthrax concentrate in the water supply on which a city depended, you might start a catastrophic epidemic that would overwhelm the medical services, But if you're going to spray something on fighting men in a desert, I'd choose one of the various nerve gases instead. Invisible and fast." "So no indication, if Saddam has a germ warfare lab, where it might be?" asked Sir Paul Spruce. "Frankly, I'd check with all the West's veterinary inst.i.tutes and colleges. See if there have been any visiting professors.h.i.+ps or delegations to Iraq over the past ten years. Ask those who went whether there was any facility that was absolutely off-limits to them and surrounded by quarantine precautions. If there was, that will be it," said Bryant. Sinclair and Paxman wrote furiously. Another job for the checkers. "Failing that," concluded Bryant, "you could try human intelligence. An Iraqi scientist in this field who has quit and settled in the West. Researchers in bacteriology tend to be thin on the ground, quite a tight group-like a village, really. We usually know what's going on in our own countries, even in a dictators.h.i.+p like Iraq. Such a man might have heard, if Saddam has got this facility, where he put it." "Well, I'm sure we are deeply grateful, Dr. Bryant," said Sir Paul as they rose. "More work for our governments' detectives, eh, Mr. Sinclair? I have heard that our other colleague at Porton Down, Dr. Reinhart, will be able to give us his deductions on the matter of poison gases in about two weeks. I shall of course stay in touch, gentlemen.

Thank you for your attendance."

The group in the desert lay quietly watching dawn steal across the sand dunes. The youngsters had not realized when they went to the house of the Bedou the previous evening that they would be away all night. They had thought they would get another lecture. They had brought no warm clothing, and nights in the desert are bitter, even at the end of August. They s.h.i.+vered and wondered how they would explain their absence to their distraught parents. Caught by the curfew? Then why not telephone? Out of order ... it would have to do. Three of the five wondered if they had made the right choice after all, but it was too late to go back now. The Bedou had simply told them it was time they saw some action and had led them from the house to a rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle parked two streets away. They had been out of town and off the road into the flat, hard desert before curfew. Since entering the desert, they had seen no one. They had driven south for twenty miles across the sand until they intercepted a narrow road that they suspected ran from the Manageesh oil field to their west toward the Outer Motorway in the east. All the oil fields, they knew, were garrisoned by Iraqis and the main highways were infested with patrols. Somewhere to their south sixteen divisions of Army and Republican Guard were dug in, facing Saudi Arabia and the growing tide of Americans pouring in. They felt nervous. Three of the group lay in the sand beside the Bedou, watching the road in the growing light. It was quite narrow. Approaching vehicles would have to swerve to the graveled edge to pa.s.s each other. Extending halfway across the road was a plank studded with nails. The Bedou had taken it from his truck and laid it there, covering it with a blanket made from old Hessian sacks. He had made them scoop sand over the blanket until it looked just like a small drift of sand blown in from the desert by the wind. The other two pupils, the bank clerk and the law student, were spotters. Each lay on a sand dune a hundred yards up and down the road looking for approaching vehicles. They had been told that if the vehicle was a large Iraqi truck or were several in number, they should wave in a certain way. Just after six, the law student waved. His signal meant "Too much to handle." The Bedou pulled at the fis.h.i.+ng line he held in his hand. The plank slithered off the road. Thirty seconds later, two trucks crammed with Iraqi soldiers went by unharmed. The Bedou ran to the road and replaced the plank, the sacks, and the sand. Then minutes later, the bank clerk waved. It was the right signal. From the direction of the highway a staff car came bowling down the road toward the oil field. The driver never thought to swerve to avoid the bar of sand but still only caught the nails with one front wheel. It was enough. The tire blew out, the blanket wrapped around the wheel and the car swerved violently. The driver caught the swerve in time and steadied the car, and it rolled to a stop half on and half off the road. The side that was off the road bogged down. The driver sprang out of the front and two officers emerged from the back, a major and a junior lieutenant. They shouted at the driver, who shrugged and whined, pointing at the wheel. The jack would never get under it-the car was at a crazy angle. To his stunned pupils the Bedou muttered, "Stay here," rose, and walked down the sand to the road. He had a Bedouin camel blanket over his right shoulder, covering his right arm. He smiled broadly and hailed the major. "Salaam aleikhem, Sayid Major. I see you have a problem. Perhaps I can help. My people are just a short distance away." The major reached for his pistol, then relaxed. He glowered and nodded. "Aleikhem salaam, Bedou. This sp.a.w.n of a camel has driven my car off the road." "It will have to be pulled back, sayidi. I have many brothers." The distance had closed to eight feet when the Bedou's arm came up. He fired in the SAS fas.h.i.+on, two round bursts, pause, two rounds, pause ... The major was. .h.i.t in the heart at a range of eight feet. A slight move of the AK to the right caught the lieutenant in the breastbone, causing him to fall on the driver, who was rising from his tattered front wheel. When the man straightened, he was just in time to die from the third pair of bullets in the chest. The noise of the firing seemed to echo in the dunes, but the desert and the road were empty. He summoned the three terrified students from their hiding places. "Put the bodies back in the car-the driver behind the wheel, the officers in the back," he told the two males. To the girl he gave a short screwdriver, its blade honed to a needle point. "Stab the petrol tank three times." He looked to his spotters. They signaled nothing was coming. He told the girl to take her handkerchief, wrap it around a stone, knot it, and soak it in petrol. When the three bodies were back in the car, he lit the soaking handkerchief and tossed it into the pool of petrol spurting from the tank. "Now, move." They needed no further bidding, running through the sand dunes to where he had parked the four-wheel-drive. Only the Bedou thought to pick up the plank and bring it with him. As he turned into the dunes, the main body of petrol in the burning car caught and fireballed. The staff car disappeared in flames.

They drove back toward Kuwait in awed silence. Two of the five were with him in the front, the other three behind.

"Did you see?" asked Martin at last. "Did you watch?"

"Yes, Bedou."

"What did you think?"

"It was ... so quick," said the girl Rana at last.

"I thought it was a long time," said the banker.

"It was quick, and it was brutal," said Martin. "How long do you think we were on the road?"

"Half an hour?"

"Six minutes. Were you shocked?"

"Yes, Bedou."

"Good. Only psychopaths are not shocked the first time. There was an American general once, Patton. Ever heard of him?"

"No, Bedou."

"He said that it was not his job to ensure that his soldiers died for their country. It was his job to make sure the other poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds died for theirs. Understand?"

George Patton's philosophy does not translate well into Arabic, but they worked it out.

"When you go to war, there is a point up to which you can hide. After that point you have a choice. You die or he dies. Make your choice now, all of you. You can go back to your studies or go to war."

They thought for several minutes. It was Rana who spoke first.

"I will go to war, if you will show me how, Bedou."

After that the young men had to agree. "Very well. But first I will teach you how to destroy, kill, and stay alive. My house, in two days' time, at dawn, when curfew is lifted. Bring school textbooks, all of you, including you, banker. If you are stopped, be natural; you are just students going to study. True, in a way, but different studies. "You have to get off here. Find your way into town by different trucks." They had rejoined the tarred roads and reached the Fifth Ring Motorway. Martin pointed out a garage where trucks would stop and the drivers would give them lifts. When they had gone, he went back to the desert, uncovered his buried radio, drove three miles from the burial site, opened the satellite dish, and began to talk on his encrypted Motorola to the designated house in Riyadh. An hour after the ambush the burnt-out staff car was found by the next patrol. The bodies were taken to the nearest hospital, Al Adan. The forensic pathologist who did the autopsy under the eyes of a glowering colonel of the AMAM spotted the bullet holes-tiny pinp.r.i.c.ks in the sealed-over charred flesh. He was a family man, with daughters of his own. He knew the young nurse who had been raped. He drew the sheet back over the third body and began to peel off his gloves. "I'm afraid they died of asphyxia when the car caught fire after the crash," he said. "May Allah have mercy." The colonel grunted and left.

At his third meeting with his band of volunteers, the Bedou drove them far out into the desert, to a spot west of Kuwait City and south of Jahra where they could be alone. Seated in the sand like a picnic party, the five youngsters watched as their teacher took out a haversack and poured out onto his camel blanket an array of strange devices. One by one he identified them. "Plastic explosive. Easy to handle, very stable." They went several shades paler when he squeezed the substance in his hands like modeling clay. One of the young men, whose father owned a tobacco shop, had brought on request a number of old cigar boxes. "This," said the Bedou, "is a time pencil, a detonator with timer combined. When you twist this b.u.t.terfly screw at the top, a phial of acid is crushed. The acid begins to burn its way through a copper diaphragm. It will do so in sixty seconds. After that, the mercury fulminate will detonate the explosive. Watch." He had their undivided attention. Taking a piece of Semtex-H the size of a cigarette pack, he placed it in the small cigar box and inserted the detonator into the heart of the ma.s.s. "Now when you twist the b.u.t.terfly like this, all you have to do is close the box and wrap a rubber band around the box ... so ... to hold it closed. You only do this at the last moment." He placed the box on the sand in the center of the circle. "However, sixty seconds is a lot longer than you think. You have time to walk to the Iraqi truck, or bunker or half-track, toss in the box, and walk away. Walk-never run. A running man is at once the start of an alarm. Leave enough time to walk around one corner. Continue walking, not running, even after you hear the explosion." He had half an eye on the watch on his wrist. Thirty seconds. "Bedou," said the banker. "Yes?" "That's not a real one, is it?"

"What?"

"The bomb you just made. It's a dummy, right?"

Forty-five seconds. He reached forward and picked it up.

"Oh, no. It's a real one. I just wanted to show you how long sixty seconds really is. Never panic with these things. Panic will kill you, get you shot, just stay calm at all times."

With a deft flick of the wrist he sent the cigar box spinning away over the dunes. It dropped behind one and exploded. The bang rocked the sitting group, and fine sand drifted back on the wind.

High over the northern Gulf, an American AWACS plane noted the explosion on one of its heat sensors. The operator drew it to the attention of the mission controller, who peered at the screen. The glow from the heat source was dying away.

"Intensity?"

"Size of a tank sh.e.l.l, I guess, sir."

"Okay. Log it. No further action."

"You will be able to make these yourselves by the end of today. The detonators and time pencils you will carry and store in these," the Bedou said.

He took an aluminum cigar tube, wrapped the detonator in cotton batting, and inserted it into the tube, then screwed the top back on.

"The plastic you will carry like this."

He took the wrapper of a bar of soap, rolled four ounces of explosive into the shape of a soap bar, and wrapped it, sealing it with an inch of sticky tape.

"The cigar boxes you acquire for yourselves. Not the big kind for Havanas-the small kind for cheroots. Always keep two cheroots in the box, in case you are stopped and frisked. If an Iraqi ever wants to take the cigar tube or the box or the' soap off you, let him."

He made them practice under the sun until they could unwrap the "soap," empty out the cheroots, prepare the bomb, and wind the rubber band around the box in thirty seconds. "You can do it in the back of a car, the men's room of a cafe, in a doorway, or at night behind a tree," he told them. "Pick your target first. Make sure there are no soldiers standing well to one side who will survive. Then twist the b.u.t.terfly, close the box, rubber-band it, walk up, toss the bomb, and walk away. From the moment you twist the b.u.t.terfly, count slowly to fifty. If at fifty seconds you have not parted company with it, throw it as far as you can. Now, mostly you will be doing this in darkness, so that's what we'll do now." He made the group blindfold each member one by one, then watch as the student fumbled and dropped things. By late afternoon, they could do it by touch. In the early evening he gave them the rest of the contents of the haversack, enough for each student to make six bars of soap and six time pencils. The tobacconist's son agreed to provide all the small boxes and aluminum tubes. They could acquire cotton batting, soap wrappers, and rubber bands for themselves. Then he drove them back to town. Through September, AMAM headquarters in the Hilton Hotel received a stream of reports of a steadily escalating level of attacks on Iraqi soldiers and military equipment. Colonel Sabaawi became more and more enraged as he became more and more frustrated. This was not the way it was supposed to be. The Kuwaitis, he had been told, were a cowardly people who would cause no trouble-a touch of the Baghdad methods, and they would do as they were told. It was not working out quite like that. There were in fact several resistance movements in existence, most of them random and uncoordinated. In the s.h.i.+'a district of Rumaithiya, Iraqi soldiers simply disappeared. The s.h.i.+'a Moslems had special reason to loathe the Iraqis, for their coreligionists, the s.h.i.+'a of Iran, had been slaughtered in hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi soldiers who wandered into the rabbit warren of alleys that make up the Rumaithiya district had their throats cut, and their bodies were dumped in the sewers. They were never recovered. Among the Sunnis, the resistance was centered in the mosques, where the Iraqis seldom ventured. Here messages were pa.s.sed, weapons swapped, and attacks planned. The most organized resistance came from the leaders.h.i.+p of Kuwaiti notables, men of education and wealth. Mr. Al-Khalifa became the banker, using his funds to provide food so that the Kuwaitis could eat, and other cargos hidden beneath the food that came in from outside. The organization aimed at six goals, five of them a form of pa.s.sive resistance, and each had its own branch. One was doc.u.mentation; every resister was supplied with perfect doc.u.mentation forged by resisters within the Interior Ministry. A second branch was for intelligence-keeping a stream of information about Iraqi movements heading in the direction of the Coalition headquarters in Riyadh, particularly about Iraqi manpower and weapon strength, coastal fortifications, and missile deployments. A third branch kept the services functioning-water, electricity, fire brigades, and health. When, finally in defeat, Iraq turned on the oil taps and began to destroy the sea itself, Kuwaiti oil engineers told the American fighter-bombers exactly which valves to hit in order to turn off the flow. Community solidarity committees circulated through all the districts, often contacting Europeans and other First World residents still holed up in their flats and keeping them out of the way of the Iraqi trawl nets.

A satellite phone system was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia in the dummy fuel tank of a jeep. It was not encrypted like Martin's, but by keeping it constantly on the move, the Kuwaiti resistance could avoid Iraqi detection and contact Riyadh whenever there was something to pa.s.s. An elderly radio ham worked throughout the occupation, sending seven thousand messages to another ham in Colorado, which were pa.s.sed on to the State Department. And there was the offensive resistance, mainly under the leaders.h.i.+p of a Kuwaiti colonel who had escaped the Ministry of Defense building on the first day. Because he had a son called Fouad, his code name was Abu Fouad, or Father of Fouad. Saddam Hussein had finally given up trying to form a puppet government and appointed his half-brother Ali Ha.s.san Majid as Governor-General. The resistance was not just a game. A small but extremely dirty war developed underground. The AMAM responded by setting up two interrogation centers, at the Kathma Sports Center and the Qadisiyah Stadium. Here the methods of AMAM chief Omar Khatib were imported from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and used extensively. Before the liberation, five hundred Kuwaitis were dead, of whom two hundred fifty were executed, many after prolonged torture. Counterintelligence chief Ha.s.san Rahmani sat at his desk in the Hilton Hotel and read the reports prepared by his on-the-spot staff. He was making a brief visit from his Baghdad duties on September 15. The reports made gloomy reading. There was a steady increase in attacks on Iraqi outposts on lonely roads, guard huts, vehicles, and roadblocks. This was mainly the AMAM's problem-local resistance came under them, and-predictably, in Rahmani's view-that brutal oaf Khatib was making a camel's breakfast out of it. Rahmani had little time for the torture to which his rival in the Iraqi intelligence structure was so devoted. He preferred to rely on patient detective work, deduction, and cunning, even though he had to concede that in Iraq it was terror and nothing else that had kept the Rais in power all these years. He had to admit, with all his education, that the street-wise, devious psychopath from the alleys of Tikrit frightened him. He had tried to persuade his president to let him have charge of internal intelligence in Kuwait, but the answer had been a firm no. It was a question of principle, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz had explained to him. He, Rahmani, was charged to protect the state from espionage and sabotage from foreign sources. The Rais would not concede that Kuwait was a foreign country-it was the nineteenth province of Iraq. So it was Omar Khatib's job to ensure compliance. As he contemplated his sheaf of reports that morning in the Hilton Hotel, Rahmani was rather relieved that he did not have the task. It was a nightmare, and as he had predicted, Saddam Hussein had played his cards consistently wrong. The taking of Western hostages as human s.h.i.+elds against attack was proving a disaster, totally counterproductive. He had missed his chance to roll south and take the Saudi oil fields, forcing King Fahd to the conference table, and now the Americans were pouring into the theater. All attempts to a.s.similate Kuwait were failing, and within a month, probably less, Saudi Arabia would be impregnable with its American s.h.i.+eld along the northern border. Saddam Hussein, he believed, could neither get out of Kuwait without humiliation, nor stay in there if attacked without a bigger one. Yet the mood around the Rais was still one of confidence, as if he were convinced something would turn up. What on earth did the man expect? Rahmani wondered. That Allah himself would lean down from heaven and smash his enemies in the face? Rahmani rose from his desk and walked to the window. He liked to stroll as he thought; it marshaled his brain. He looked down from the window. The once-sparkling marina was now a garbage dump. There was something about the reports on his desk that disturbed him. He went back and scanned them again. Yes, something odd. Some of the attacks on Iraqis were with handguns and rifles; others with bombs made from industrial TNT. But here were others, a constant niggling stream, that clearly indicated that a plastic explosive had been used. Kuwait had never had plastic explosives, least of all Semtex-H. So who was using it, and where did they get it? Then there were radio reports of an encrypted transmitter somewhere out in the desert that moved all the time, coming on air at different times, talking scrambled nonsense for ten or fifteen minutes and then going silent, and always on different bearings. Then there were these reports of a strange Bedou who seemed to wander about at will, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and always a trail of destruction in his wake. Before they died of wounds, two badly injured soldiers had reported seeing the man, tall and confident in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh, one trailing end drawn across his face. Two Kuwaitis under torture had mentioned the legend of the invisible Bedou but claimed they had never actually seen him. Sabaawi's men were trying to persuade the prisoners with even more pain to admit they had. Fools. Of course, they would invent anything to stop the agony.

The more Ha.s.san Rahmani thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had a foreign infiltrator on his hands, definitely part of his authority. He found it hard to believe that there was any Bedou who knew about plastic explosives and encrypted transceivers-if they were from the same man. He might have trained up a few bomb planters, but he also seemed to be carrying out a lot of the attacks himself. It would just not be possible to pick up every Bedou wandering around the city and the desert-that would be the AMAM way, but they would be pulling out fingernails for years and getting nowhere. For Rahmani, the problem resolved itself into three choices: Capture the man during one of his attacks-but that would be haphazard and possibly never happen. Capture one of his Kuwaiti a.s.sociates and trace the man to his lair. Or take him crouched over his transmitter in the desert. Rahmani decided on the last. He would bring in from Iraq two or three of his best radio-detector teams, post them at different points, and try to triangulate on the source of the broadcast. He would also need an Army helicopter on standby, with a team of Special Forces ready to move. As soon as he got back to Baghdad, he would set it in motion.

Ha.s.san Rahmani was not the only man that day in Kuwait who was interested in the Bedou. In a suburban villa miles away from the Hilton, a handsome, moustached young Kuwaiti Army colonel in a white cotton thob sat in an armchair and listened to a friend who had come to him with an interesting snippet. "I was just sitting in my car at the traffic light, watching nothing in particular, when I noticed this Iraqi Army truck on the opposite side of the intersection. It was parked there, with a group of soldiers around the hood, eating and smoking. Then a young man, one of our own, walked out of a cafe clutching what looked like a tiny box. It was really small. I thought nothing of it until I saw him flick it under the truck. Then he turned the corner and disappeared. The lights changed, but I stayed where I was.

"In five seconds the truck disintegrated. I mean, it just blew apart. The soldiers were all on the ground with their legs off. I've never seen such a small package do so much damage. I tell you, I hung a U and got out of there before the AMAM came along."

"Plastic," mused the Army officer. "What would I not give for some of that. It must have been one of the Bedou's men. Who is that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, anyway? I'd love to meet him."

"The point is, I recognized the boy."

"What?" The young colonel leaned forward, his face alight with interest.

"I wouldn't have come all this way just to tell you what you will have heard already. I tell you, I recognized the bomb-thrower. Abu Fouad, I've been buying cigarettes from his father for years."

Dr. Reinhart, when he addressed the Medusa Committee in London three days later, looked tired. Even though he had relinquished all his other duties at Porton Down, the doc.u.mentation he had taken away with him from the first meeting and the supplementary information that had come pouring in ever since had given him a monstrous task.

"The study is probably not yet complete," he said, "but a fairly comprehensive picture emerges.

"First, of course, we know that Saddam Hussein has a large poison-gas-

production capacity, I estimate at over a thousand tons a year. "During the Iran-Iraq war, some Iranian soldiers who had been ga.s.sed were treated here in Britain, and I was able to examine them. We could recognize phosgene and mustard gas even then. "The worse news is that I have no doubt that Iraq now has substantial supplies of two far more lethal gases, nerve agents of German invention called Sarin and Tabun. If these were used in the Iran-Iraq war, and I think they were, there would have been no question of treating the victims in British hospitals. They would be dead." "How bad are these-er ... agents, Dr. Reinhart?" asked Sir Paul Spruce. "Sir Paul, do you have a wife?" The urbane mandarin was startled. "Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do." "Does Lady Spruce ever use perfume from a spray atomizer?" "Yes, I do believe I have seen her do that." "Have you ever noticed how fine the spray from an atomizer is? How small the droplets?" "Yes, indeed, and bearing in mind the price of perfume, I'm very glad of it." It was a good joke. Anyway, Sir Paul liked it. "Two of those droplets of Sarin or Tabun on your skin, and you're dead," said the chemist from Porton Down. No one smiled. "The Iraqi search for nerve gases goes back to 1976. In that year they approached the British company ICI, explaining they wanted to build a pesticide plant to produce four bug-killers-but the materials they asked for caused ICI to turn them down flat. The specifications the Iraqis showed were for corrosion-resistant reactor vessels, pipes, and pumps that convinced ICI that the real end-goal was not chemical pesticides but nerve gas. The deal was refused." "Thank G.o.d for that," said Sir Paul, and made a note. "But not everyone refused them," said the former Viennese refugee. "Always the excuse was that Iraq needed to produce herbicides and pesticides, which of course need poisons." "They could not have really wanted to produce these agricultural products?" asked Paxman. "No chance," said Reinhart. "To a professional chemist, the key lies in the quant.i.ties and the types. In 1981 they got a German firm to build them a laboratory with a very special and unusual layout. It was to produce phosphorus pentachloride, the starter chemical for organic phosphorus, which is one of the ingredients of nerve gas. No normal university research laboratory would need to handle such hideously toxic substances. The chemical engineers involved must have known that. "Further export licenses show orders for thiodiglycol. Mustard gas is made from it when mixed with hydrochloric acid. Thiodiglycol, in small quant.i.ties, may be used also for making the ink for ball-point pens." "How much did they buy?" asked Sinclair. "Five hundred tons." "That's a lot of ball-points," muttered Paxman. "That was in early 1983," said Reinhart. "In the summer their big Samarra poison gas plant went into operation, producing yperite, which is mustard gas. They began using it on the Iranians in December. "During the first attacks by the Iranian human waves, the Iraqis used a mixture of yellow rain, yperite, and Tabun. By 1985, they had improved the mixture to one of hydrogen cyanide, mustard gas, Tabun, and Sarin, achieving a sixty percent mortality rate among the Iranian infantry." "Could we just look at the nerve gases, Doctor?" asked Sinclair. "That would seem to be the really deadly stuff." "It is," said Dr. Reinhart. "From 1984, the chemicals for which they were shopping were phosphorus oxychloride, which is an important precursor chemical for Tabun, and two Sarin precursors, trimethyl phosphite and pota.s.sium fluoride. Of the first of those three, they tried to order 150 tons from a Dutch company. That's enough pesticide to kill every tree, shrub, and blade of gra.s.s in the Middle East. The Dutch turned them down, as ICI had, but they still bought two uncontrolled chemicals at that time: dimethylamine for making Tabun, and isopropanol for Sarin." "If they were uncontrolled in Europe, why could they not be used for pesticides?" asked Sir Paul. "Because of the quant.i.ties," Dr. Reinhart replied, "and the chemical manufacturing and handling equipment, and the factory layouts. To a skilled chemist or chemical engineer, none of these purchases could be other than for poison gas." "Do you know who the main supplier over the years has been, doctor?" asked Sir Paul. "Oh, yes. There was some input of a scientific nature from the Soviet Union and East Germany in the early days, and some exports from about eight countries, in most cases of small quant.i.ties of uncontrolled chemicals. But eighty percent of the plants, layouts, machinery, special handling equipment, chemicals, technology, and know-how came from West Germany." "Actually," drawled Sinclair, "we've been protesting to Bonn for years. They always trashed the protests. Doctor, can you identify the chemical gas plants on those photos we gave you?" "Yes, of course. Some factories are identified in the paperwork. Others you can see with a magnifying gla.s.s." The chemist spread five large aerial photos on the table. "I do not know the Arab names, but these numbers identify the photographs for you, do they not?" "Yes. You just point out the buildings," said Sinclair. "Here, the whole complex of seventeen buildings ... here, this big single plant-you see the air scrubber unit? And here, this one ... and this whole complex of eight buildings ... and this one." Sinclair studied a list from his attache case. He nodded grimly. "As we thought. Al Qaim, Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Salman Pak, and Samarra. Doctor, I'm very very grateful to you. Our guys in the States figured out exactly the same. They'll all be targeted for the first wave of attacks." When the meeting broke up Sinclair, with Simon Paxman and Terry Martin, strolled up to Piccadilly and had a coffee at Richoux. "I don't know about you guys," said Sinclair as he stirred his cappuccino, "but for us the bottom line is the gas threat. General Schwarzkopf is convinced already. That's what he calls the nightmare scenario: ma.s.s gas attacks, a rain of airbursts over all our troops. If they go, they'll go in masks and gas capes, head to foot. The good news is, this gas doesn't live long once it's exposed to air. It touches the desert, it's dead. Terry, you don't look convinced." "This rain of airbursts," said Martin. "How's Saddam supposed to launch them?" Sinclair shrugged. "Artillery barrage, I guess. That's what he did against the Iranians."

"You're not going to pulp his artillery? It's only got a range of thirty kilometers. Must be out there in the desert somewhere." "Sure," said the American, "we have the technology to locate every gun and tank out there, despite the digging-in and the camouflage." "So if his guns are broken, how else does Saddam launch the gas rain?" "Fighter-bombers, I guess." "But you'll have destroyed them too, by the time the ground forces move," Martin pointed out. "Saddam will have nothing left flying." "Okay, so Scud missiles-whatever. That's what he'll try. And we'll waste them one by one. Sorry, guys, gotta go." "What are you getting at, Terry?" asked Paxman when the CIA man had gone. Terry Martin sighed. "Oh, I don't know. It's just that Saddam and his planners will know all that. They won't underestimate American air power. Simon, can you get me all Saddam's speeches over the past six months? In Arabic-must be in Arabic." "Yes, I suppose so. GCHQ in Cheltenham will have them, or the BBC Arabic Service. On tape or transcript?" "Tape if possible." For three days Terry Martin listened to the guttural, haranguing voice out of Baghdad. He played and replayed the tapes and could not get rid of the nagging worry that the Iraqi despot was making the wrong noises for a man in such deep trouble. Either he did not know or recognize the depth of his trouble, or he knew something that his enemies did not. On September 21, Saddam Hussein made a new speech, or rather a statement from the Revolutionary Command Council, that used his own particular vocabulary. In the statement he declared there was not the slightest chance of any Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, and that any attempt to eject Iraq would lead to "the mother of all battles."

That was how it had been translated. The media had loved it, and the words became quite a catchphrase.

Dr. Martin studied the text and then called Simon Paxman.

"I've been looking at the vernacular of the Upper Tigris valley," he said.

"Good G.o.d, what a hobby," replied Paxman.

"The point is, the phrase he used, 'the mother of all battles.' "

"Yes, what about it?"

"The word translated as 'battle.' Where he comes from, it also means 'casualty' or 'bloodbath.' "

There was silence down the line for a while.

"Don't worry about it."

But despite that, Terry Martin did.

Chapter 7.

The tobacconist's son was frightened, and so was his father. "For pity's sake, tell them what you know, my son," he begged the boy. The two-man delegation from the Kuwait Resistance Committee had been perfectly polite when they introduced themselves to the tobacconist, but were quite insistent that they wished his son to be frank and truthful with them.

The shopkeeper, though he knew the visitors had given him pseudonyms instead of their real names, had enough wit to realize he was talking to powerful and influential members of his own people. Worse, it had come as a total surprise to him to learn that his son was involved in active resistance at all. Worst of all, he had just learned that his offspring was not even with the official Kuwaiti resistance but had been seen tossing a bomb under an Iraqi truck at the behest of some strange bandit of whom he had never heard. It was enough to give any father a heart attack. The four of them sat in the drawing room of the tobacconist's comfortable house in Keifan while one of the visitors explained that they had nothing against the Bedou but simply wished to contact him so that they could collaborate. So the boy explained what had happened from the moment his friend had been pulled down behind a pile of rubble at the moment he was about to fire at a speeding Iraqi truck. The men listened in silence, only the questioner occasionally interjecting with another query. It was the one who said nothing, the one in dark gla.s.ses, who was Abu Fouad. The questioner was particularly interested in the house where the group met with the Bedou. The boy gave the address, then added: "I do not think there is much point in going there. He is extremely watchful. One of us went there once to try and talk to him, but the place was locked. We do not think he lives there, but he knew we had been there. He told us never to do that again. If it ever happened, he said, he would break contact, and we would never see him again." Sitting in his corner, Abu Fouad nodded in approval. Unlike the others, he was a trained soldier, and he thought he recognized the hand of another trained man. "When will you meet him next?" he asked quietly.

There was a possibility that the boy could pa.s.s a message, an invitation to a parley. "Nowadays, he contacts one of us. The contacted one brings the rest. It may take some time." The two Kuwaitis left. They had descriptions of two vehicles: a battered pickup apparently in the disguise of a market gardener bringing his fruit into town from the countryside, and a powerful four-wheel-drive for journeys into the desert. Abu Fouad ran the numbers of both vehicles past a friend in the Ministry of Transportation, but the trace ran out. Both numbers were fictional. The only other lead was through the ident.i.ty cards that the man would have to carry to pa.s.s those ubiquitous Iraqi roadblocks and checkpoints. Through his committee he contacted a civil servant in the Interior Ministry. He was lucky. The man recalled running off a phony ident.i.ty card for a market gardener from Jahra. It was a favor he had done for the millionaire Ahmed Al-Khalifa six weeks earlier. Abu Fouad was elated and intrigued. The merchant was an influential and respected figure in the movement. But it had always been thought that he was strictly confined to the financial, noncombatant side of things. What on earth was he doing as the patron of the mysterious and lethal Bedou?

South of the Kuwaiti border, the incoming tide of American weaponry rolled on. As the last week of September slid by, General Norman Schwarzkopf, buried in the rabbit warren of secret chambers two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry on Old Airport Road in Riyadh, finally realized that he had enough strength at last to declare Saudi Arabia safe from Iraqi attack. In the air, General Charles "Chuck" Horner had built an umbrella of constantly patrolling steel, a fast-moving and amply provisioned armada of air-superiority fighters, ground-attack fighter-bombers, air-to-air refueling tankers, heavy bombers, and tank-busting Thunderbolts, enough to destroy the incoming Iraqis on the ground and in the air. He had airborne technology that could and did cover by radar every square inch of Iraq, that could sense every movement of heavy metal rolling on the roads, moving through the desert, or trying to take to the air, that could listen to every Iraqi conversation on the airwaves and pinpoint any source of heat. On the ground, Norman Schwarzkopf knew he now had enough mechanized units, light and heavy armor, artillery, and infantry to receive any Iraqi column, hold it, surround it, and liquidate it. In the last week of September, in conditions of such total secrecy that not even its Allies were told, the United States made its plans to move from defensive role to offensive. The a.s.sault on Iraq was planned, even though the United Nations mandate was still limited to securing the safety of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and only that. But he also had problems. One was that the number of Iraqi troops, guns, and tanks deployed against him was double the number when he had arrived in Riyadh six weeks earlier. Another problem was that he would need double the amount of Coalition forces to liberate Kuwait than that needed to secure Saudi Arabia. Norman Schwarzkopf was a man who took George Patton's dictum very seriously: One dead American or Brit or Frenchie or any other Coalition soldier or airman was one too many. Before he would go in, he would want two things: twice the amount of force he presently had, and an air a.s.sault guaranteed to "degrade" by fifty percent the strength of the Iraqi forces arrayed north of the border. That meant more time, more equipment, more stores, more guns, more tanks, more troops, more airplanes, more fuel, more food, and a lot more money. Then he told the stunned armchair Napoleons on Capitol Hill that if they wanted a victory, they had better let him have it all. Actually, it was the more urbane Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who pa.s.sed the message on, but he softened the language a bit. Politicians love to play the games of soldiers, but they hate to be addressed in the language of soldiers. So the planning in that last week of September was utterly secret. As it turned out, it was just as well. The United Nations, leaking peace plans at every seam, would wait until November 29 before giving the go-ahead to the Coalition to use all necessary force to evict Iraq from Kuwait unless she quit by January 15. Had planning started at the end of November, it could never have been completed in time.

Ahmed Al-Khalifa was deeply embarra.s.sed. He knew Abu Fouad, of course, who and what he was. Further, he sympathized with his request. But he had given his word, he explained, and he could not go back on it. Not even to his fellow-Kuwaiti and fellow-resister did he reveal that the Bedou was in fact a British officer. But he did agree to leave a message for the Bedou in a place he knew the man would find it sooner or later. The following morning he left a letter, with his personal recommendation urging the Bedou to agree to meet Abu Fouad, under the marble tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery.

There were six soldiers in the group, headed by a sergeant, and when the Bedou came around the corner, they were as surprised as he. Mike Martin had parked his small truck in the lock-up garage and was making his way across the city on foot toward the villa he had chosen for that night. He was tired, and unusually, his alertness was blunted. When he saw the Iraqis and knew they had seen him, he cursed himself. In his job, men can die for a moment's lack of alertness. It was well after curfew, and though he was quite used to moving through the city when it was deserted of law-abiding citizens and only the Iraqi patrols were on the prowl, he made a point of moving through the ill-lit side streets, across the darkened patches of waste ground, and down the black alleys, just as the Iraqis made a point of sticking to the main highways and intersections. That way, they never troubled each other. But following Ha.s.san Rahmani's return to Baghdad and his vitriolic report on the uselessness of the Popular Army, some changes were taking place. The Green Berets of the Iraqi Special Forces had begun to appear. Though not cla.s.sed with the elite Republican Guard, the Green Berets were at least more disciplined than the rabble of conscripts called the Popular Army. It was six of these who stood quietly by their truck at a road junction where normally there would have been no Iraqis. Martin just had time to lean heavily on the stick he carried with him and adopt the posture of an old man. It was a good posture, for in the Arab culture the old are given respect or at least, compa.s.sion. "Hey, you," shouted the sergeant. "Come over here."

There were four a.s.sault rifles trained on the lone figure in the checkered keffiyeh. The old man paused, then hobbled forward."What are you doing out at this hour, Bedou?""Just an old man trying to get to his home before the curfew, sayidi," the man whined."It's past the hour of curfew, fool! Two hours past."The old man shook his head in bewilderment."I didn't know, sayidi. I have no watch."In the Middle East watches are not indispensable, just highly prized, a sign of prosperity. Iraqi soldiers arriving in Kuwait soon acquired them-they just took them. But the word Bedouin comes from bidun, meaning "without."The sergeant grunted. The excuse was possible."Papers," he said.The old man used his spare hand to pat his soiled robe."I seem to have lost them," he pleaded."Frisk him," said the sergeant. One of the soldiers moved forward. The hand grenade strapped to the inside of Martin's left thigh felt like one of the watermelons from his truck."Don't you touch my b.a.l.l.s," said the old Bedou sharply. The soldier stopped. One in the back let out a giggle. The sergeant tried to keep a straight face."Well, go on, Zuhair. Frisk him."The young soldier Zuhair hesitated, embarra.s.sed. He knew the joke was on him."Only my wife is allowed to touch my b.a.l.l.s," said the Bedou. Two of the soldiers let out a guffaw and lowered their rifles. The rest did the same. Zuhair still held back."Mind you, it doesn't do her any good. I'm long past that sort of thing," said the old man. It was too much. The patrol roared with laughter. Even the sergeant grinned. "All right, old man. On your way. And don't stay out again after dark." The Bedou limped off to the corner of the street, scratching under his clothes. At the corner he turned. The grenade, priming arm sticking clumsily out to one side, skittered across the cobbles and came to rest against the toe-cap of Zuhair. All six stared at it. Then it went off. It was the end of the six soldiers. It was also the end of September.