The Fist of God (52 page)

buildings had sustained little more than broken windows and were even now gaping at the mess.

The authorities had to be satisfied with inventing a civilian death toll and claims that American aircraft had been shot out of the skies like autumn leaves. Most Iraqis, stultified by years of propaganda, believed these first reports—for a while.

The generals in charge of air defense knew better. By midday, it was clear to them that they had lost almost all their radar warning ability, that their SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—were blind, and that communication with the outlying units was all but cut. Worse, the radar operators who had survived kept insisting the damage had been done by bombers that simply had not shown up on their screens. The liars were at once put under arrest.

Some civilian casualties had indeed occurred. At least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, their fins damaged by conventional triple-A gunfire rather than SAMs, had crashed off-target. One had demolished two houses and blown tiles off a mosque, an outrage that the press corps was shown during the afternoon.

The other had fallen on waste ground and made a large crater. During the late afternoon the body of a woman was found at the bottom of it, badly smashed by the impact that apparently killed her.

Bombing raids continued throughout the day, so that the ambulance crews were not prepared to do more than wrap the corpse hastily in a blanket, bring it to the morgue of the nearest hospital, and leave it there. The hospital happened to be close to a major Air Force command center that had been demolished, and all beds were occupied by service personnel wounded in the attack. Several scores of bodies were taken to the same morgue, all dead from bomb blasts. The woman’s was just one of them.

The Fist of God

With his resources at the breaking point, the pathologist worked fast and cursorily. Identification and cause of death were his principal priorities, and he had no time for leisured examination. Across the city the crump of more bombs could be heard, and the blast of counterfire was unceasing. He had no doubt the evening and night would bring him more bodies.

What surprised the doctor was that all his dead bodies were service personnel, except the woman. She seemed to be about thirty and had once been comely. The concrete dust clinging to the blood of her smashed face, coupled with the place she had been found, gave cause for no other explanation than that she had been running away when the missile struck the waste ground and killed her. The body was so tagged, then wrapped for burial.

Her handbag had been found next to the body, and it contained a powder compact, lipstick, and her identity cards. Having established that one Leila Al-Hilla was undoubtedly a civilian victim of a bomb blast, the harassed pathologist had her taken away for hasty burial.

The more elaborate post-mortem for which he did not have time that January 17 would have shown the woman had been repeatedly and savagely raped before being systematically beaten to death. The dumping in the crater had come several hours later.

General Abdullah Kadiri had moved from his sumptuous office in the Defense Ministry two days earlier. There was no point in staying to be blown to bits by an American bomb, and he was sure the Ministry would be hit and destroyed before the air war was many days old. He was right.

He had established himself in his villa, which he was reasonably certain was anonymous enough—albeit luxurious—not to be on any American target map. In this too he was right.

The Fist of God

The villa had long since been provided with its own communications room, which staff from the Ministry were now manning. All his communications to the various command headquarters of the Armored Corps around Baghdad were by buried fiber-optic cable, which was also out of reach of the bombers.

Only the farther units had to be contacted by radio, with a threat of intercept—plus, of course, those in Kuwait.

His problem, as darkness fell over Baghdad that night, was not how to contact his Armored Corps commanders or what orders to give them.

They could take no part in the air war, being tasked to disperse their tanks as widely as possible among the rows of dummies or bury them in the subterranean bunkers and wait.

His problem, rather, was his personal security, and it was not the Americans he feared.

Two nights earlier, rising from his bed with a bursting bladder, bleary with arak as usual, he had stumbled to the bathroom. Finding the door, as he thought, stuck, he had pushed hard. His two hundred pounds of body weight had torn the inner bolt from its screws, and the door flew open.

Bleary he might have been, but Abdullah Kadiri had not come from a back street near Tikrit to command all Iraq’s tanks outside the Republican Guard, had not climbed the slippery ladder of Ba’ath Party internal feuding, and had not sustained a trusted place on the Revolutionary Command Council without ample reserves of animal cunning.

He had stared in silence at his mistress, sitting wrapped in a robe on the toilet seat, her paper sustained by the back of a Kleenex box, her mouth in a round O of horror and surprise, her pen still poised in midair. Then he had hauled her to her feet and hit her on the point of The Fist of God

the jaw.

When she came to, with a jug of water dashed in the face, he had had time to read the report she was preparing and to summon the trusty Kemal from his quarters across the yard. It was Kemal who had taken the whore down to the basement.

Kadiri had read and reread the report she had almost finished. Had it concerned his personal habits and preferences, a lever for future blackmail, he would have dismissed it and simply had her killed. In any case, no blackmail would ever have worked. The personal baseness of some of the entourage of the Rais was greater than his own, he knew. He also knew that the Rais did not care.

This was worse. Apparently he had talked of things that had happened within the government and the Army. That she was spying was obvious. He needed to know for how long and what she had reported already, but most of all, for whom.

Kemal took his long-awaited pleasures first, with his master’s permission. No man would lust after what remained when Kemal had finished the interrogation. It had taken several hours. Then, Kadiri knew, Kemal had gotten it all—at least, all the courtesan knew.

After that, Kemal had continued for his own amusement until she was dead.

Kadiri was convinced that she had not known the real identity of the man who had recruited and ran her to spy on him, but the picture had to fit Hassan Rahmani.

The description of the information-against-money exchanges in the confessional of St. Joseph’s showed the man was professional, and Rahmani was certainly that.

That he should be watched did not worry Kadiri. All those around the Rais were watched; indeed, they watched each other. The rules of the The Fist of God

Rais were simple and clear. Every figure of high rank was watched and reported on by three of his peers. A denunciation for treachery could and probably would lead to ruin. Thus, few conspiracies could get very far. One of those confided in would report the matter, and it would come to the ears of the Rais.

To complicate matters, each member of the entourage was occasionally provoked, to see what his reaction would be. A colleague, briefed to do so, would take his friend aside and propose treason.

If the friend agreed, he was finished. If he failed to report the proposer, he was finished. So any approach could be a provocation—it was simply too unsafe to assume otherwise. Thus, each reported on the others.

But this was different. Rahmani was head of Counterintelligence. Had he taken the initiative on his own, and if so, why? Was it an operation with the knowledge and approval of the Rais himself, and if so, why?

What had he said? the general wondered. Things indiscreet, no doubt.

But traitorous?

The body had stayed in the basement until the bombs fell, then Kemal had found a crater on a patch of waste ground to dump it. The general had insisted the handbag be placed nearby. Let that bastard Rahmani know what had happened to his slut.

As midnight passed, General Abdullah Kadiri sweated alone, tipping a few drops of water into his tenth tumbler of arak. If it was Rahmani alone, he would finish the bastard. But how could he know how far up the ladder he was distrusted? He would have to be careful henceforth, more careful than he had ever been before. Those late-night trips into the city would end. In any case, with the air war started, it was time to cease.

The Fist of God

Simon Paxman had flown back again to London. There was no point in staying in Riyadh. Jericho had been kicked firmly into touch by the CIA, although the unseen renegade in Baghdad would not know it yet, and Mike Martin was confined to quarters until he could escape to the desert and find his way to safety across the border.

Later, Paxman could swear with his hand on his heart the meeting on the evening of the eighteenth with Dr. Terry Martin had been a true coincidence. He knew Martin lived in Bayswater, as he did himself, but it is a large borough with many shops.

With his wife away at the bedside of her sick mother and his own return unforeseen, Paxman had come home to an empty flat and an empty fridge, so he went shopping at an open-late supermarket on Westbourne Grove.

Terry Martin’s cart nearly crashed into his own as he came around the corner of pastas and pet food. Both men were startled.

“Am I allowed to know you?” asked Martin with an embarrassed grin.

There was no one else in that aisle at the time.

“Why not?” said Paxman. “I’m just a humble civil servant shopping for his evening meal.”

They finished their purchases together and agreed to adjourn to an Indian restaurant for a meal rather than cook at home alone. Hilary, it seemed, was also away.

Paxman should, of course, not have done it. He should never have felt uncomfortable that Terry Martin’s elder brother was in a situation of appalling danger and that he, with others, had sent him into it. It should not have worried him that the trusting scholar should really believe that his adored sibling was safe inside Saudi Arabia. All tradecraft insists that one does not worry about that sort of thing. But The Fist of God

he did.

There was another worry. Steve Laing was his superior at Century House, but Laing had never been to Iraq. His background was in Egypt and Jordan. Paxman knew Iraq—and Arabic. Not like Terry Martin, of course, but Martin was exceptional. Paxman knew enough, from several visits before he had been made head of the Iraq Desk, to form a sincere respect for the quality of Iraqi scientists and the ingenuity of their engineers. It was no secret that most British technical institutes considered their graduates from Iraq the best in the Arab world.

The worry that had nagged at him since he was told by his superiors that the last Jericho report could be none other than a load of nonsense was simply the fear that, despite all the odds, Iraq might actually be further ahead than the Western scientists were prepared to credit.

He waited until the two meals had arrived, surrounded by small pots of the accessories without which no Indian meal is complete, then made up his mind.

“Terry,” he said, “I am going to do something which, if it ever got out, would mean the end of my career in the Service.”

Martin was startled.

“That sounds drastic. Why?”

“Because I have been officially warned off you.”

The scholar was about to spoon some mango chutney onto his plate, then stopped.

“I am not thought to be reliable anymore? It was Steve Laing who pulled me into all this.”

“It’s not that. The view is that—you worry too much.”

Paxman was not prepared to use Laing’s word
fusspot
.

“Perhaps I do. It’s the training. Academics do not like puzzles that seem to have no answer. We have to go on worrying at it until the The Fist of God

jumbled hieroglyphic makes sense. Was it that business of the phrase in the intercept?”

“Yes, that and other things.”

Paxman had chosen chicken khorma; Martin liked his hotter—vindaloo. Because he knew his eastern food, Martin drank hot black tea, not ice-cold beer, which only makes things worse. He blinked at Paxman over the edge of his mug.

“All right. So what is the great confession?”

“Will you give me your word that this goes no further?”

“Of course.”

“There’s been another intercept.”

Paxman had not the slightest intention of revealing the existence of Jericho. The group who knew of that asset in Iraq was still tiny and would stay that way.

“Can I listen to it?”

“No. It’s been suppressed. Don’t approach Sean Plummer. He’d have to deny it, and that would reveal where you got the information.”

Martin helped himself to more raita to cool down the flaming curry.

“What does it say, this new intercept?”

Paxman told him. Martin put down his fork and wiped his face, which was bright pink beneath the ginger thatch of his hair.

“Can it—could it, under any circumstances, be true?” asked Paxman.

“I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. The brass has given it a no-no?”

“Absolutely. The nuclear scientists all agree it simply cannot be true.

So Saddam was lying.”

Privately, Martin thought it was a very odd radio intercept. It sounded more like information from inside a closed meeting.

“Saddam lies,” Martin said, “all the time. But usually for public consumption. This was to his own inner core of confidants? I wonder The Fist of God

why? Morale booster on the threshold of war?”

“That’s what the powers think,” said Paxman.

“Have the generals been told?”

“No. The reasoning is, they are extremely busy right now and do not need to be bothered by something that simply has to be rubbish.”

“So what do you want from me, Simon?”

“Saddam’s mind. No one can figure it out. Nothing he does makes sense in the West. Is he certifiably insane or crazy like a fox?”

“In his world, the latter. In his world, what he does makes sense. The terror that revolts us has no moral downside for him, and it makes sense. The threats and the bluster make sense to him. Only when he tries to enter our world—with those ghastly PR exercises in Baghdad, ruffling that little English boy’s hair, playing the benign uncle, that sort of thing—only when he tries that does he look a complete fool. In his own world he is not a fool. He survives, he stays in power, he keeps Iraq united, his enemies fail and perish.”