The Fist of God (68 page)

“Why not a rocket, General?”

“Payload,” said the flier sarcastically. “Goddam payload. If this is a crude device, we have to be looking at half a ton. A thousand pounds, say. We now know the Al-Abeid and the Al-Tammuz rockets were still only in development when we smashed the facility at Saad-16.

The Fist of God

The Al-Abbas and the Al-Badr, same thing. Inoperative—either smashed up or a too-small payload.”

“What about the Scud?” asked Laing.

“Same thing,” said the general. “The long-range so-called Al-Husayn keeps on breaking up on reentry and has a payload of 160 kilograms.

Even the basic Soviet-supplied Scud has a maximum payload of 600

kilograms. Too small.”

“There’s still an aircraft-launched bomb,” pointed out Barber.

The Air Force general glowered. “Gentlemen, I will give you my personal guarantee, here and now: From henceforth, not one single Iraqi warplane will reach the border. Most won’t even get off the tarmac. Those that do and head south will be shot down halfway to the border. I have enough AWACS, enough fighters—I can guarantee it.”

“And the Fortress?” asked Laing. “The launch pad?”

“A top-secret hangar, probably underground, a single runway leading from the mouth; housing a Mirage, a MiG, a Sukhoi—tooled up and ready to go. But we’ll get it before the border.

The decision rested with the American general at the head of the table.

“Are you going to find the repository of this device, this so-called Fortress?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, sir,” said Barber. “We are trying even now. We figure we may need a few more days.”

“Find it, and we will destroy it.”

“And the invasion in four days, sir?” asked Laing.

“I will let you know.”

* * *

February.

Later, historians gave two alternate reasons for this postponement. One was that the U.S. Marines wanted to alter their main axis of attack a few miles farther west and that this would require troop movements, transfer of stores, and further preparations. That was true, too.

A reason later advanced in the press was that two British computer hackers had cut into the Defence Ministry computer and badly dislocated the collation of weather reports for the attack area, causing confusion over the choice of the best day for the attack from the climatic point of view.

In fact, the weather was fine and clear between the twentieth and the twenty-fourth, and it deteriorated just as the advance began.

General Norman Schwarzkopf was a big and very strong man, physically, mentally, and morally. But he would have been more, or perhaps less, than human if the sheer strain of those last few days had not begun to tell on him.

He had been working up to twenty hours a day for six months without a break. He had not only overseen the biggest and the fastest military buildup in history, a task that alone could have broken a lesser man, but he had coped with the complexities of relationships with the sensitivities of Saudi society, kept the peace when a dozen times internecine feuding could have wrecked the Coalition, and warded off endless well-meant but useless and exhausting interventions from Capitol Hill.

And yet it was not all this that disturbed his much-needed sleep in those last few days. It was the sheer responsibility of being in charge of all those young lives that brought the nightmare.

The Fist of God

In the nightmare, there was the Triangle. Always the Triangle. It was a right-angled triangle of land, lying on its side. What would have been the base of the triangle was the coastline from Khafji down past Jubail to the three linked cities of Dammam, Al Khoba, and Dhahran.

The perpendicular line of the triangle was the border running west from the coast, first between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, then on into the desert to become the Iraqi border.

The hypotenuse was the slanting line linking the last western outpost in the desert to the coast at Dhahran.

Within that triangle almost half a million young men and women sat and waited for his order. Eighty percent of them were Americans. In the east were the Saudis, other Arab contingents, and the Marines. In the center were the great American armored and mechanized infantry units, and among them was the British First Armoured Division. On the extreme flank were the French.

Once, the nightmare had been tens of thousands of young men pouring into the breeches for the attack, to be soaked by a rain of poison gas and to die there between the sand walls and the razor wire. Now it was worse.

Only a week earlier, contemplating the triangle on a battle map, an Army intelligence officer had actually suggested, “Maybe Saddam intends to pop a nuke in there.” The man thought he was joking.

That night, the commanding general tried again to sleep and failed.

Always the Triangle. Too many men, too small a space.

At the SIS villa, Laing, Paxman, and the two radio technicians shared a crate of beer brought covertly from the British embassy. They too studied the map; they too saw the Triangle. They too felt the strain.

The Fist of God

“One bloody bomb, one fucking small, crude, first-attempt sub-Hiroshima bomb in there, air burst or ground burst ...,” said Laing.

They did not need to be scientists to know that the first explosion would kill more than a hundred thousand young soldiers. Within hours, the radiation cloud, sucking up billions of tons of active sand from the desert, would begin to drift, covering everything in its path with death.

The ships at sea would have time to batten down, but not the ground troops or the people of the Saudi cities. Eastward it would drift, widening as it went, over Bahrain and the Allied airfields, poisoning the sea, across to the coast of Iran, there to exterminate one of the categories Saddam Hussein had pronounced to be unworthy of life—“Persians, Jews, and flies.”

“He can’t bloody launch it,” said Paxman. “He hasn’t a rocket or plane that can do it.”

Far to the north, hidden in the Jebal al Hamreen, deep inside the breech of a gun with a barrel one hundred and eighty meters long and a range of a thousand kilometers, the Fist of God lay inert but ready to be called to fly.

The house in Qadisiyah was only half awake and quite unprepared for the visitors who came at dawn. When the owner had built it many years before, it had been set in the midst of orchards. It stood three miles away from the four villas in Mansour that Major Zayeed of Counterintelligence was even then preparing to put under surveillance.

The spread of the southwestern suburbs of Baghdad had enveloped the The Fist of God

old house, and the new Qadisiyah Expressway roared through what had once been fields growing peaches and apricots.

Still, it was a fine house, owned by a prosperous man now long retired, walled within its grounds and still retaining some fruit trees at the bottom of the garden.

There were two truckloads of AMAM soldiers under the command of a major, and they did not stand on ceremony. The lock of the main gate was shot off, the gate kicked open, and the soldiers poured in, smashing the front door and beating the decrepit servant who tried to stop them.

They ran through the house, ripping open cupboards and tearing down hangings, while the terrified old man who owned the house tried to shield and protect his wife.

The soldiers stripped the place almost bare and found nothing. When the old man pleaded with them to say what it was they wanted or sought, the major roughly told him he knew perfectly well, and the search went on.

After the house, the soldiers tried the garden. It was at the bottom near the wall that they found the freshly turned earth. Two of them held the old man while the soldiers dug. He protested he did not know why the earth was freshly turned; he had buried nothing. But they found it all the same.

It was in a burlap sack and all could see, when they emptied it out, that it was a radio set.

The major knew nothing of radio sets, nor would he have cared, had he known, that the broken-down Morse-sender model in the burlap bag was a world away from the ultramodern satellite-based transmitter used by Mike Martin and still beneath the floor of his shack in First Secretary Kulikov’s garden. For the AMAM major, radios were the The Fist of God

tricks of spies, and that was all that mattered.

The old man began to wail that he had never seen it before, that someone must have come over the wall in the night to bury it there, but the AMAM soldiers knocked him down with their rifle butts, and his wife also when she screamed.

The major examined the trophy, and even he could see that some hieroglyphics on the containing sack appeared to be characters in Hebrew.

They did not want the house servant or the old woman—just the man.

He was over seventy, but they carried him out facedown, gripped at each ankle and wrist by four soldiers, and threw him in the back of one of the trucks like a sack of figs.

The major was happy. Acting on an anonymous tip, he had done his duty. His superiors would be pleased. This was not a case for the Abu Ghraib prison. He took his prisoner to the AMAM headquarters and the Gymnasium. That, he reasoned, was the only place for Israeli spies.

That same day, February 16, Gidi Barzilai was in Paris, showing his painting to Michel Levy. The old antiquarian
sayan
was delighted to help. Only once had he been asked before, and that was to lend some furniture to a
katsa
trying to gain entry to a certain house, posing as an antique dealer.

For Michel Levy it was a pleasure and an excitement, something to enliven the existence of an old man, to be consulted by the Mossad, to be able to help in some way.

“Boulle,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” said Barzilai, who thought he was being rude.

“Boulle,” repeated the old man. “Also spelled B-u-h-l. The great The Fist of God

French cabinetmaker. His style, you see, definitely. Mind you, this isn’t
by
him. The period is too late for him.”

“Then who is it by?”

Monsieur Levy was over eighty, with thin white hair plastered on a wrinkled scalp, but he had pink apple cheeks and bright eyes that sparkled with the pleasure of being alive. He had said
kaddish
for so many of his own generation.

“Well, Boulle when he died handed over his workshop to his protégé, the German Oeben. He in turn handed the tradition over to another German, Riesener. I would think this is from the Riesener period.

Certainly by a pupil, perhaps by the master himself. Are you going to buy it?”

He was teasing, of course. He knew the Mossad did not buy works of art. His eyes danced with merriment.

“Let’s just say I am interested in it,” said Barzilai.

Levy was delighted. They were up to their naughty tricks again. He would never know what, but it was fun anyway.

“Do these desks—”

“
Bureaux
,” said Levy, “it’s a
bureau
.”

“All right, do these
bureaux
ever have secret compartments in them?”

Better and better—delightful! Oh, the excitement!

“Ah, you mean a
cachette
. Of course. You know, young man, many years ago, when a man could be called out and killed in a duel over a matter of honor, a lady having an affair had to be very discreet. No telephones, then, no fax, no videos. All her lover’s naughty thoughts had to be put on paper. Then where should she hide them from her husband?

“Not in a wall safe—there weren’t any. Nor an iron box—her husband would demand the key. So the society people of those days The Fist of God

commissioned pieces of furniture with a
cachette
. Not all the time, but sometimes. Had to be good workmanship, mind, or it would be too visible.”

“How would one know if a piece one was ... thinking of buying had such a
cachette
.

Oh, this was wonderful. The man from the Mossad was not going to buy a Riesener
bureau
, he was going to break into one.

“Would you like to see one?” asked Levy.

He made several phone calls, and at length they left his shop and took a cab. It was another dealer. Levy had a whispered conversation, and the man nodded and left them alone. Levy had said if he could secure a sale, there’d be a small finder’s fee, nothing more. The dealer was satisfied; it is often thus in the antique world.

The desk they examined was remarkably like the one in Vienna.

“Now,” said Levy, “the
cachette
will not be large, or it would be detectable in the measurements, external as opposed to internal. So it will be slim, vertical or horizontal. Probably no more than two centimeters thick, hiding in a panel that appears to be solid, three centimeters thick, but is in fact two wafers of wood with the
cachette
between them. The clue is the release knob.”

He took out one of the top drawers.

“Feel in there,” he said.

Barzilai reached in until his fingertips touched the back.

“Feel around.”

“Nothing,” said the
katsa
.

“That’s because there isn’t anything,” said Levy. “Not in this one. But there might be a knob, a catch, or a button. A smooth button, you press it; a knob, you turn it; a catch, move it from side to side, and see what happens.”

The Fist of God

“What should happen?”

“A low click, and a small piece of marquetry pops out, spring-loaded.

Behind that is the
cachette
.”

Even the ingenuity of the cabinetmakers of the eighteenth century had its limits. Within an hour, Monsieur Levy had taught the
katsa
the basic ten places to look for the hidden catch that would release the spring to open the compartment.

“Never try to use force to find one,” Levy insisted. “You won’t anyway, with force, and besides, it leaves traces on the woodwork.”

He nudged Barzilai and grinned. Barzilai gave the old man a good lunch at the Coupole, then took a taxi back to the airport to return to Vienna.