The Fist of God (8 page)

So he smiled at the question and shrugged and replied: I am an Iraqi and proud of it; which government would you have me serve?

Privately, he knew perfectly well why he served a regime most of whose luminaries he privately despised. If he had any emotion in him, which he frequently claimed he did not, then it came out in a genuine affection for his country and its people, the ordinary people whom the Ba’ath Party had long ceased to represent.

But the principal reason was that he wanted to get on in life. For an Iraqi of his generation there were few options. He could oppose the regime and quit, to earn a hand-to-mouth living abroad dodging the hit squads and making pennies translating from Arabic into English and back, or he could stay inside Iraq.

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That left three alternatives. Oppose the regime again, and end up in one of the torture chambers of that animal Omar Khatib, a creature he personally loathed in the full knowledge that the feeling was mutual; or try to survive as a free-lance businessman in an economy that was being systematically run into the ground; or keep smiling at the idiots and rise within their ranks through brains and talent.

He could see nothing wrong with the latter. Like Reinhard Gehlen, who served first Hitler, then the Americans, and then the West Germans; like Marcus Wolf, who served the East German Communists without believing a word they said, he was a chess player. He lived for the game, the intricate moves of spy and counterspy. Iraq was his personal chessboard. He knew that other professionals the world over could understand that.

Hassan Rahmani returned from the window, sat in the chair behind the desk, and began to make notes. There was one hell of a lot to do if Kuwait were ever to be even reasonably secure as the nineteenth province of Iraq.

His first problem was that he did not know how long Saddam Hussein intended to stay in Kuwait. He doubted the man knew himself. There was no point in mounting a huge counterintelligence operation, sealing all the leaks and security holes that he could, if Iraq was going to pull out.

Privately, he believed Saddam could get away with it. But it would mean boxing cleverly, making the right moves, saying the right things.

The first ploy had to be to attend that conference tomorrow in Jeddah, to flatter King Fahd until he could take no more, to claim Iraq wanted no more than a just treaty over oil, Gulf access, and the outstanding loan, and he would go home to Baghdad. That way, keeping the whole thing in Arab hands and at all costs keeping the Americans and the The Fist of God

Brits out, Saddam could rely on the Arab preference to keep talking until hell freezes over.

The West, with its attention span of a few weeks, would get fed up and leave it to the four Arabs—two kings and two presidents—and so long as the oil kept flowing to create the smog that was choking them, the Anglo-Saxons would stay happy. Unless Kuwait was savagely brutalized, the media would drop the subject, the Al Sabah regime would be forgotten in exile somewhere in Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaitis would get on with their lives under a new government, and the quit-Kuwait conference could chew words for a decade until it didn’t matter anymore.

It could be done, but it would need the right touch. Hitler’s touch—“I only seek a peaceful settlement to my just demands. This is absolutely my last territorial ambition.” King Fahd would fall for it—no one had any love for the Kuwaitis anyway, let alone the Al Sabah lotus-eaters.

King Fahd and King Hussein would drop them, as Chamberlain had dropped the Czechs in 1938.

The trouble was, although Saddam was street-smart as hell or he wouldn’t still be alive, strategically and diplomatically he was a buffoon. Somehow, Hassan Rahmani reasoned, the Rais would get it wrong; he would neither pull out nor roll on, seize the Saudi oil field, and present the Western world with a fait accompli that they could do nothing about except destroy the oil and their own prosperity for a generation.

“The West” meant the Americans, with the Brits at their side, and they were all Anglo-Saxons. He knew about Anglo-Saxons. Five years at Mr. Hartley’s Tasisiya prep school had taught him his perfect English, his understanding of the British, and his wariness of that Anglo-Saxon habit of giving you a very hard punch on the jaw without warning.

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He rubbed his chin where he had collected such a punch long ago, and laughed out loud. His aide across the room jumped a foot. Mike bloody Martin, where are you now?

Hassan Rahmani—clever, cultured, cosmopolitan, educated, and refined, an upper-class scion who served a regime of thugs—bent to his task. It was quite a task. Of the 1.8 million people in Kuwait that August, only 600,000 were Kuwaitis. To them you could add 600,000

Palestinians, some of whom would stay loyal to Kuwait, some of whom would side with Iraq because the PLO had done so, and most of whom would keep their heads down and try to survive. Then 300,000

Egyptians, some of them no doubt working for Cairo, which nowadays was the same as working for Washington or London, and 250,000

Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and Filipinos, mainly blue-collar laborers or domestic servants—as an Iraqi, he believed the Kuwaitis could not scratch a fleabite on their arse without summoning a foreign servant.

And then 50,000 First World citizens—Brits, Americans, French, Germans, Spanish, Swedes, Danes—name it. And he was supposed to suppress foreign espionage. ... He sighed for the days when messages meant messengers or telephones. As head of Counterintelligence, he could seal the borders and cut the phone lines. But now any fool with a satellite could punch numbers into a cellular phone or a computer modem and talk to California. Hard to intercept or track the source, except with the best equipment, which he did not have.

He knew he could not control the outflow of information or the steady dribble of refugees escaping over the border. Nor could he affect the overflights of American satellites, all of which he suspected had now been reprogrammed to swing their orbits over Kuwait and Iraq every few minutes. (He was right.)

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There was no point in attempting the impossible, even though he would have to pretend he had, and had succeeded. The main target would have to be to prevent active sabotage, the actual killing of Iraqis and destruction of their equipment, and the formation of a real resistance movement. And he would have to prevent help from outside, in the form of men, know-how, or equipment, from reaching any resistance.

In this he would come up against his rivals of the AMAM, the Secret Police, who were installed two floors below him. Khatib, he had learned that morning, was installing that thug Sabaawi, an oaf as brutal as himself, as head of the AMAM in Kuwait. If resisting Kuwaitis fell into
their
hands, they would learn to scream as loudly as dissidents back home. So he, Rahmani, would just stick to the foreigners. That was his brief.

* * *

“Oh, Dr. Martin, there’s been a message for you.”

She fumbled in her attaché case, propping it up on one tweed-skirted knee, and produced a slip of paper.

“This gentleman rang for you. He said it was rather urgent if you could call him back.

Inside the common room Martin dumped his lecture notes on the Abassid Caliphate and used a pay phone on the wall. The number answered on the second ring, and a bright female voice just repeated The Fist of God

the number back. No company name, just the number.

“Is Mr. Stephen Laing there?” asked Martin.

“May I say who is calling?”

“Er—Dr. Martin. Terry Martin. He called me.”

“Ah, yes, Dr. Martin. Would you hold on?”

Martin frowned. She knew about the call, knew his name. For the life of him, he could not recall any Stephen Laing.

A man came on the phone. “Steve Laing here. Look, it’s
awfully
good of you to call back so promptly. I know it’s incredibly short notice, but we met some time ago at the Institute for Strategic Studies. Just after you gave that brilliant paper on the Iraqi arms-procurement machine. I was wondering what you’re doing for lunch.”

Laing, whoever he was, had adopted that mode of self-expression that is at once diffident and persuasive, hard to turn down.

“Today? Now?”

“Unless you have anything fixed. What had you in mind?”

“Sandwiches in the canteen,” said Martin.

“Couldn’t possibly offer you a decent sole meunière at Scott’s, could I? You know it, of course. Mount Street.”

Martin knew of it, one of the best and most expensive fish restaurants in London. Twenty minutes away by cab. It was half-past twelve. And he loved fish. And Scott’s was way beyond his academic salary. Did Laing by any chance know these things?

“Are you actually with the ISS?” he asked.

“Explain over lunch, doctor. Say one o’clock. Looking forward to it.”

The phone went down.

When Martin entered the restaurant, the headwaiter came forward to greet him personally.

“Dr. Martin? Mr. Laing is at his table. Please follow me.”

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It was a quiet table in a corner, very discreet. One could talk unoverheard. Laing, whom by now Martin was sure he had never met, rose to greet him, a bony man in dark suit and sober tie with thinning gray hair. He ushered his guest to a seat and gestured with a raised eyebrow to a bottle of fine chilled Meursault that sat in the ice bucket.

Martin nodded.

“You’re not with the Institute, are you, Mr. Laing?”

Laing was not in the least fazed. He watched the crisp cool liquid poured and the waiter move away, leaving them a menu each. He raised his glass to his guest.

“Century House, actually. Does that bother you?”

The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy.

“No, just interested,” said Martin.

“Actually, it’s we who are interested. I’m quite a fan of yours. I try to keep abreast, but I’m not as clued up as you.”

“I find that hard to believe,” said Martin, but he was flattered. When an academic is told he is admired, it is pleasing.

“Quite true,” insisted Laing. “Sole for two? Excellent. I hope I have read all your papers delivered to the Institute, and the United Services people and Chatham. Plus, of course, those two articles in
Survival
.”

Over the previous five years, despite his youth at only thirty-five, Dr.

Martin had become more and more in demand as a speaker presenting erudite papers to such establishments as the Institute for Strategic Studies, the United Services Institute, and that other body for the The Fist of God

intensive study of foreign affairs, Chatham House.
Survival
is the magazine of the ISS, and of each issue twenty-five copies go automatically to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in King Charles Street, of which five filter down to Century House.

Terry Martin’s interest for these people was not because of his scholastic excellence in medieval Mesopotamia, but for the second hat he wore. Quite as a private interest, he had begun years earlier to study the armed forces of the Middle East, attending defense exhibitions and cultivating friendships among manufacturers and their Arab clients, where his fluent Arabic had made him many contacts. After ten years he was a walking encyclopedia in his chosen pastime subject and was listened to with respect by the top professionals, much as the American novelist Tom Clancy is regarded as a world expert on the defense equipment of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact.

The two soles meunière arrived, and they began to eat with appreciation.

Eight weeks earlier Laing, who was at that time Director of Operations for the Mid-East Division at Century House, had called up a pen portrait of Terry Martin from the Research people. He had been impressed with what he saw.

Born in Baghdad, raised in Iraq, then schooled in England, Martin had left Haileybury with three advanced levels, all with distinction, in English, history, and French. Haileybury had had him down as a brilliant scholar, destined for a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge.

But the boy, already a fluent Arab speaker, wanted to go on to Arabic studies, so he had applied as a graduate to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, attending the spring interview of 1973.

Accepted at once, he had joined in the autumn term of 1973, studying history of the Middle East.

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He walked through a first-class degree in three years and then put in a further three years for his doctorate, specializing in Iraq of the eighth to fifteenth centuries, with particular reference to the Abassid Caliphate from A.D. 750 to 1258. He took his Ph.D. in 1979, then one year off for a sabbatical—he had been in Iraq in 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran, triggering the eight-year war, and this experience began his interest in Middle Eastern military forces.

On his return he was offered a lectureship at the age of only twenty-six, a signal honor at the SOAS, which happens to be one of the best and therefore one of the toughest schools of Arabic learning in the world. He was promoted to a readership in recognition of his excellence in original research, and he became a reader in Middle East history at the age of thirty-four, clearly earmarked for a professorship by the age of forty.

So much had Laing read in the written biography. What interested him even more was the second string, the compendium of knowledge about Middle Eastern arms arsenals. For years, it had been a peripheral subject, dwarfed by the cold war, but now ...