The Fist of God

Low held out his hand.

“Sorry about the Brecons.”

Martin shook it.

“No sweat. I survived.”

Low laughed, a short bark.

“Yeah, that’s what we do. We fucking survive. Stay lucky, Mike.”

He drove away. The camel rolled an eye, belched, regurgitated some cud, and began to chew. The calf tried to get at her teats, failed, and lay down by her side.

Martin propped himself against the camel saddle, drew his keffiyeh around his face, and thought about the days to come. The desert would not be a problem; the bustle of occupied Kuwait City might be. How tight were the controls, how tough the roadblocks, how astute the soldiers who manned them? Century had offered to try and get him forged papers, but he had turned them down. The Iraqis might change the ID cards.

He was confident that the cover he had chosen was one of the best in the Arab world. The Bedouin come and go as they please. They offer no resistance to invading armies, for they have seen too many—Saracen and Turk, Crusader and Knight Templar, German and French, British and Egyptian, Israeli and Iraqi. They have survived them all because they stay out of all matters political and military.

Many regimes have tried to tame them, all without success. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, decreeing that all his citizens should have houses, built a handsome village called Escan, equipped with all modern facilities—a swimming pool, toilets, baths, running water. Some Bedouin were rounded up and moved in.

They drank the pool (it looked like an oasis), crapped on the patio, played with the water faucets, and then moved out, explaining politely to their monarch that they preferred to sleep under the stars. Escan was cleaned up and used by the Americans during the Gulf crisis.

Martin knew that his real problem was his height. He was an inch under six feet, but most Bedouin are far shorter than that. Centuries of sickness and malnourishment have left most of them disease-ridden and stunted. Water in the desert is only for drinking, by man, goat, or camel; hence, Martin’s avoiding the bath. The glamour of desert living, he knew, is strictly for Westerners.

He had no identification papers, but that was not a problem. Several governments have tried to issue the Bedouin with ID papers. The tribesmen are usually delighted because they make such good toilet paper, better than a handful of gravel. For a policeman or soldier to insist on seeing a Bedou’s ID papers is a waste of time, and both parties know it. From the authorities’ point of view, the main thing is that the Bedouin cause no trouble. They would never dream of getting involved in any Kuwaiti resistance movement. Martin knew that; he hoped the Iraqis did, too.

He dozed until sundown, then mounted the camel. At his “hut hut hut,”

she rose to her feet. Her baby suckled for a while, tethered behind her, and they set off at that ambling, rolling pace that seems to be very slow but covers an amazing amount of ground. The she-camel had been well fed and watered at the corral and would not tire for days.

He was well to the northwest of the Ruqaifah police station, where a track road passes from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, when he crossed the border shortly before eight. The night was black, save for a low gleam from the stars. The glow of Kuwait’s Manageesh oil field lay to his right and would probably have an Iraqi patrol in it, but the desert ahead of him was empty.

On the map it was thirty-five miles to the camel farms just south of Sulaibiya, the outlying district of Kuwait City where he intended to leave his beasts until he needed them again. But before that, he would bury the gear in the desert and mark the spot.

Unless he was stopped and delayed, he would do this in darkness before sunrise, which was nine hours away. The tenth hour would bring him to the camel farms.

When the Manageesh oil field dropped behind him, he steered by his hand compass in a straight line for his destination. The Iraqis, as he had surmised, might patrol the roads, even the tracks, but never the empty desert. No refugee would try to escape that way, nor enemy to enter.

From the camel farms, after sunrise, he knew he could scramble onboard a truck heading into the heart of town, twenty miles farther on.

Far above him, silent in the night sky, a KH-11 satellite of the National Reconnaissance Office slid across the sky. Years earlier, previous generations of American spy satellites had had to take their pictures and at intervals spit out the capsules in reentry vehicles, to be laboriously recovered and the film processed.

The KH-11s, sixty-four feet long and weighing thirty thousand pounds each, are smarter. As they take their images of the ground below them, they automatically encrypt the pictures into a series of electronic pulses that are beamed upward to another satellite.

The receiver satellite above is one of a network positioned in geosynchronous orbit, meaning they drift through space at a speed and on a course that keeps them always above the same spot on the earth.

In effect, they hover. Having received the images from the KH-11, the hovering satellite either beams them straight down to the United States or, if the curve of the earth gets in the way, bounces them across space to another hovering “bird” that sends the pictures down to its American masters. Thus the NRO can collect its photographic information in real time, just seconds after the pictures are taken.

The bonus in war is huge. The KH-11 can see, for example, an enemy convoy on the move well in advance, in time to call up an air strike to blast the trucks into oblivion. The unfortunate soldiers inside them would never know how the fighter-bombers found them. For the KH-11s can work through night and day, in cloud or fog.

The phrase has been used about them: all-seeing. Alas, it is a self-delusion. The KH-11 that night swept out of Saudi Arabia and over Kuwait. But it did not see the lone Bedou tribesman entering forbidden territory, nor would it have cared if it had. It moved over Kuwait and into Iraq. It saw many buildings, great sprawls of industrial minicities around Al-Hillah and Tarmiya, Al-Atheer and Tuwaitha, but it did not see what was in those buildings. It did not see the vats of poison gas in preparation, nor the uranium hexafluoride destined for the gas-diffusion centrifuges of the isotope separation plant.

It moved north, picking out the airfields, the highways, and the bridges. It even saw the automobile junkyard at Al Qubai, but took no notice. It saw the industrial centers of Al Qaim, Jazira, and Al-Shirqat west and north of Baghdad, but not the devices of mass death that were being prepared inside them. It passed over the Jebel al Hamreen, but it did not see the Fortress that had been built by the engineer Osman Badri. It saw only a mountain among other mountains, hill villages among other hill villages. Then it passed on over Kurdistan and into Turkey.

Mike Martin plodded on through the night toward Kuwait City, invisible in robes he had not worn for almost two weeks. He smiled on recalling the moment when, returning to his Land-Rover from a hike in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, he had been surprised to be intercepted by a plump American lady pointing a camera and shouting “click click” at him.

It had been agreed that the British Medusa Committee should meet for its preliminary conference in a room beneath the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. The main reason was that the building was secure, being regularly swept against listening devices, although it did seem that with Russians being so terribly nice these days, they might have stopped at last attempting such tiresome practices.

The room to which the eight guests were led was two floors below ground level. Terry Martin had heard of the warren of shockproof, bugproof chambers where the most delicate matters of state could be discussed in complete discretion below the innocent-looking building opposite the Cenotaph.

Sir Paul Spruce took the chair, an urbane and experienced bureaucrat with the rank of Assistant Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet. He introduced himself and then everyone to everyone. The American embassy and thus the United States was represented by the Assistant Defense Attache and Harry Sinclair, an astute and experienced officer from Langley who had headed the CIA’s London station for the past three years. Sinclair was a tall, angular man who favored tweed jackets, frequented the opera, and got along extremely well with his British counterparts.

The CIA man nodded and winked at Simon Paxman, whom he had met once at a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee, on which the CIA has a permanent seat in London.

Sinclair’s job would be to note anything of interest that the British scientists might come up with and convey that information back to Washington, where the considerably larger American end of the Medusa Committee was