The Fist of God

Hassan Rahmani nodded. That was good detective work, if it was true.

And it was unlike Khatib who usually relied on brute force.

“And why was he there?” asked the Rais.

Khatib paused to let the revelation sink in.

“To note a precise description of the aboveground car junkyard, to define the distance from the nearest major landmark and the exact compass bearing—everything an Air Force would need to find it.”

There was a universal exhalation of breath around the room.

“But that came later, Sayid Rais. First I invited the man to join me at AMAM headquarters for a little frank talk.”

Khatib’s mind strayed back to the frank conversation in the basement beneath the AMAM headquarters in Saadun, Baghdad, that basement known as the Gymnasium.

Habitually, Omar Khatib had his underlings conduct interrogations, contenting himself to decree the level of severity and supervise the outcome. But this had been a matter of such delicacy that he had accomplished the task himself, banning all others beyond the soundproof door.

From the roof of the cell jutted two steel hooks, a yard apart, and from them hung two short chains hooked to a timber bar. The wrists of the suspect he had had lashed to the ends of the bar, so the man hung with arms a yard apart. Because the arms were not vertical, the strain was all the greater.

The feet were four inches off the floor, the ankles tied to another yard-long pole. The X-shaped configuration of the prisoner gave access to all parts of the body, and because he hung in the center of the room, he could be approached from all sides.

Omar Khatib had laid the clotted rattan cane on a side table and came around to the front. The manic screaming of the man under the first fifty lashes had ceased, dying to a mumbling burble of pleas. Khatib stared him in the face.

“You are a fool, my friend. You could end all this so easily. You have betrayed the Rais, but he is merciful. All I need is your confession.”

“No, I swear ... wa-Allah-d-Adheem ... by Allah the Great, I have betrayed no one.”

The man was weeping like a child, tears of agony pouring down his face. He was soft, Khatib noted; this will not take long.

“Yes, you have betrayed. Qubth-ut-Allah—you know what that means?”

“Of course,” whimpered the man.

“And you know where it was stored for safety?”

“Yes.”

Khatib brought his knee hard upward into the exposed testicles. The man would have liked to double up but could not. He vomited, the slick running down his bare body to dribble off the end of his penis.

“Yes—what?”

“Yes, sayidi.”

“Better. And where was hidden—that was not known to our enemies?”

“No, sayidi, it is a secret.”

Khatib’s hand flashed out and caught the hanging man across the face.

“Monyouk, filthy monyouk, then how is it that this very morning at dawn, the enemy planes bombed it and destroyed our weapon?”

The prisoner opened his eyes wide, his shock overcoming his shame at the insult. Monyouk in Arabic is the man who plays the female role in a homosexual coupling.

“But that is not possible. No one but a few know about Al Qubai—”

“But the enemy knew. ... They have destroyed it.”

“Sayidi, I swear, this is impossible. They could never find it. The man who built it, Colonel Badri, disguised it too well. ...”

The interrogation had continued for a further half hour until its inevitable conclusion.

Khatib was interrupted from his reverie by the Rais himself.

“And who is he, our traitor?”

“The engineer, Dr. Salah Siddiqui, Rais.”

There was a gasp. The President nodded slowly, as if he had suspected the man all along.

“Might one ask,” said Hassan Rahmani, “who the wretch was working for?”

Khatib darted a look of venom at Rahmani and took his time.

“This he did not say, Sayid Rais.”

“But he will, he will,” said the President.

“Sayid Rais,” murmured Khatib, “I’m afraid I have to report that at this point of his confession, the traitor died.”

Rahmani was on his feet, protocol ignored. “Mr. President, I must protest. This shows the most amazing incompetence. The traitor must have had a link line through to the enemy, some way of sending his messages. Now we may never know.”

Khatib shot him a look of such pure hate that Rahmani, who had read Kipling as a boy in Mr. Hartley’s school, was reminded of Krait, the dust-snake who hissed “Beware, for I am death.”

“What have you to say?” asked the Rais. Khatib was contrite! “Sayid Rais, what can I say? The men who serve under me love you as their own father—nay, more. They would die for you. When they heard this traitorous filth pouring out ... there was an excess of zeal.”

Bullshit, thought Rahmani. But the Rais was nodding slowly. It was the sort of language he liked to hear.

“It is understandable,” the Rais said. “These things happen. And you, Brigadier Rahmani, who criticize your colleague, have you had any success?”

It was noticeable that Rahmani was not referred to as Rafeek,

“Comrade.” He would have to be careful, very careful. “There is a transmitter, Sayid Rais, in Baghdad.”

He went on to reveal what Major Zayeed had told him. He thought of adding one last phrase—“One more transmission, if we can catch it, and I think we will have the sender”—but he decided it could wait.

“Then since the traitor is dead,” said the Rais, “I can reveal to you what I could not say two days ago. is not destroyed, not even buried. Twenty-four hours before the bombing raid, I ordered it to be removed to a safer place.”

It took several seconds for the applause to die down as the inner circle expressed their admiration for the sheer genius of the leader.

He told them the device had gone to the Fortress, whose whereabouts did not concern them, and from the Qa’ala it would be launched, to change all history, on the day the first combat boot of an American soldier stepped onto the holy land of Iraq.

Chapter 20

The news that the British Tornados had missed their real target at Al Qubai badly shook the man known only as Jericho. It was as much as he could do to force himself to his feet and applaud the Rais with the adoration of all the rest.

In the blacked-out bus with the other generals being transported back into central Baghdad, he had sat in silence in back, wrapped in his own thoughts.

That the use of the device now hidden elsewhere—at a place called Qa’ala, the Fortress, of which he had never heard and whose location he did not know—might cause many, many deaths, he cared not a jot.

It was his own position that absorbed him. For three years he had risked everything—exposure, ruin, and a terrible death—to betray his country’s regime. The point had not simply been to establish a huge personal fortune abroad; that he could probably have done by extortion and theft right here in Iraq, though there would have been risks to that as well.