definitely be a joint operation.”
Nice touch, thought J.P., mentioning Sir Colin. Just to show how much clout these bastards intend to exercise if they have to.
All five sat down. Laing talked, explaining the political background, the uncertainty as to whether Saddam Hussein would get out of Kuwait quickly, slowly, or not at all unless thrown out. But the political analysis was that Iraq would first strip Kuwait of every valuable, then stick around demanding concessions that the United Nations was simply not in a mood to concede. One might be looking at months and months.
Britain needed to know what was going on inside Kuwait—not gossip and rumor, nor the lurid stories flying around the media, but rock-hard information: about the British citizens still stuck there, about the occupation forces, and if force had eventually to be used, whether a Kuwaiti resistance could be useful in pinning down more and more of Saddam’s otherwise frontline troops.
Martin nodded and listened and asked a few pertinent questions but otherwise stayed silent. The two senior officers gazed out the window.
Laing concluded just after twelve.
“That’s about it, Major. I don’t expect an answer immediately, right now, but time is of the essence.”
“Do you mind if we have a few words with our colleague in private?” asked J.P.
“Of course not. Look, Simon and I will trot back to the office. You have my desk number. Perhaps you’d let me know this afternoon?”
Sergeant Sid showed the two civilians out and escorted them down to the street, where he watched them hail a taxi. Then he climbed back to his aerie under the roof beams behind the scaffolding.
J.P. went to a small fridge and extracted three cold beers. When the tabs were off, all three men took a swig.
“Look, Mike, you know what’s what. That’s what they want. If you think it’s crazy, we’ll go along with that.”
“Absolutely,” said Craig. “In the Regiment you get no black marks for saying no. This is their idea, not ours.”
“But if you want to go with them,” said J.P., “walk through the door, so to speak, then you’re with them till you come back. We’ll be involved, of course. They probably can’t run it without us. But you’ll be under them. They’ll be in charge. When it’s over, you come back to us as if you’d been on leave.”
Martin knew how it worked. He’d heard of others who had worked for Century. You just ceased to exist for the Regiment until you came back. Then they all said, “Good to see you again,” and never mentioned or asked where you had been.
“I’ll take it,” he said. Colonel Craig rose. He had to get back to Hereford. He held out his hand.
“Good luck, Mike.”
“By the way,” said the brigadier, “you have a lunch date. Just down the street. Century set it up.”
He handed Martin a slip of paper and bade him farewell.
Mike Martin went back down the stairs. The paper said his lunch was at a small restaurant four hundred yards away, and his host was Mr.
Wane Al-Khouri.
Apart from MI-S and MI-6 the third major arm of British intelligence is the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a complex of buildings in a guarded compound outside the staid town of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.
GCHQ is the British version of America’s National Security Agency, with which it cooperates very closely—the listeners whose antennae eavesdrop on almost every radio broadcast and telephone, conversation in the world if they so wish.
Through its cooperation with GCHQ, the American NSA has a number of outstations inside Britain, apart from its other listening posts all over the world, and GCHQ has its own overseas stations, notably a very large one on British sovereign territory at Akrotiri in Cyprus.
The Akrotiri station, being closer to the scene, monitors the Middle East, but it passes all its product back to Cheltenham for analysis.
Among the analysts are a number of experts who, although Arabs by birth, are cleared to a very high level. Such a one was Mr. Al-Khouri, who had long before elected to settle in Britain, naturalize, and marry an English wife.
This genial former Jordanian diplomat now worked as a senior analyst in the Arabic Service of GCHQ where, even though there were many British scholars of Arabic, he could often read a meaning behind the meaning of a taped speech by a leader in the Arab world. It was he who, at the request of Century, was waiting for Mike Martin at the restaurant.
They had a convivial lunch that lasted two hours and spoke nothing but Arabic. When they parted, Martin left and strolled back toward the SAS building. There would be hours of briefings before he was ready to leave for Riyadh with a passport he knew Century would by then have ready, complete with visas in a false name.
Before he left the restaurant Mr. Al-Khouri called a number from the wall phone by the men’s room.
“No problem, Steve. He’s perfect. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone like him. It’s not scholar’s Arabic, you know; it’s even better, from your point of view. Street Arabic, every swearword, slang, piece of jargon. ... No, not a trace of an accent. ... Yes, he can pass all right... on just about any street in the Middle East. No, no, not at all, old chap. Glad to be of assistance.”
Thirty minutes later, Mike Martin had retrieved his rental car and was on the M4 heading back to Cheltenham. Before he entered the headquarters, he also made a call, to a number just off Gower Street.
The man he was calling picked up the phone, since it was in his office in the SOAS, where he was working over papers on an afternoon that called for no lectures.
“Hullo, bro. It’s me.”
The soldier had no need to introduce himself. Since they had been at prep school together in Baghdad, he had always called his younger brother “bro.” There was a gasp at the other end of the line.
“Mike? Where the hell are you?”
“In London, in a phone booth.”
“I thought you were somewhere in the Gulf.”
“Got back this morning. Probably leave again tonight.”
“Look, Mike, don’t go. It’s all my fault. ... I should have kept my bloody mouth shut—”
His elder brother’s deep laugh came across the line.
“I wondered why the buggers suddenly got interested in me. Take you to lunch, did they?”
“Yes, we were talking about something else. It just cropped up, sort of slipped out. Look, you don’t have to go. Tell them I was mistaken.”
“Too late. Anyway, I’ve accepted.”
“Oh God. ...” In his office, surrounded by erudite tomes on medieval Mesopotamia, the younger man was almost in tears.
“Mike, look after yourself. I’ll pray for you.”
Mike thought for a moment. Yes, Terry had always had a touch of religion. He probably would.
“You do that, bro. See you when I get back.”
He hung up. Alone in his office, the ginger-haired scholar who hero-worshiped his soldier brother put his head in his hands.
When the British Airways 8:45 P.M. flight for Saudi Arabia lifted off from Heathrow that night, right on time, Mike Martin was on it with a fully visa-ed passport in another name. He would be met just before dawn by Century’s Head of Station at the Riyadh embassy.
Don Walker eased down on the brake pedal and the ’63 vintage Corvette Stingray paused for a moment at the main entrance to Seymour Johnson Air Force base to let a couple of campers pass before emerging onto the highway.
