Hussein can be persuaded to pull out.”
“The Americans will not come quickly?”
“The Americans and the British and the French and the rest of the Coalition will need time to build up their forces. Saddam has the fourth-largest standing army in the world, over a million men. Some are rubbish, but many are not. This occupation force will not be dislodged by a handful of soldiers.”
“Very well. I understand.”
“In the meantime, it is felt that every Iraqi soldier and tank and gun that can be pinned down in the occupation of Kuwait cannot be used on the frontier—”
“You are talking of resistance, armed resistance, fighting back,” said Al-Khalifa. “Some wild boys have tried. They have shot at Iraqi patrols. They were gunned down like dogs.”
“Yes, so I believe. They were brave but foolish. There are ways of doing these things. The point is not to kill hundreds, or be killed. The point is to make the Iraqi occupation army constantly nervous, always afraid, needing to escort every officer whenever he travels, never able to sleep in peace.”
“Look, Mr. English, I know you mean well, but I suspect you are a man accustomed to these things and skilled at them. I am not. These Iraqis are a cruel and savage people. We know them of old. If we do what you say, there will be reprisals.”
“It is like rape, Mr. Al-Khalifa.”
“Rape?”
“When a woman is to be raped, she can fight back or succumb. If she is docile, she will be violated, probably beaten, maybe killed. If she fights, she will be violated, certainly beaten, maybe killed.”
“Kuwait is the woman, Iraq the rapist. This I already know. So why fight back?”
“Because there is tomorrow. Tomorrow Kuwait will look in the mirror.
Your son will see the face of a warrior.”
Ahmed Al-Khalifa stared at the dark-faced, bearded Englishman for a long time, then he said:
“So will his father. Let Allah have mercy on my people. What is it you want? Money?”
“Thank you, no. I have money.”
He had in fact ten thousand Kuwaiti dinars, abstracted from the ambassador in London, who had drawn it from the Bank of Kuwait, on the corner of Baker Street and George Street.
“I need houses to stay in. Six of them.”
“No problem. There are already thousands of abandoned apartments—”
“Not apartments. Detached villas. Apartments have neighbors. No one will investigate a poor man engaged to caretake an abandoned villa.”
“I will find them.”
“Also identity papers. Real Kuwaiti ones. Three in all. One for a Kuwaiti doctor, one for an Indian accountant, and one for a market gardener from out of town.
“All right. I have friends in the Interior Ministry. I think they still control the presses that produce the ID cards. What about the picture on them?”
“For the market gardener, find an old man on the street. Pay him. For the doctor and the accountant, choose men among your staff who look roughly like me but are clean-shaven. These photographs are notoriously bad.
“Lastly, cars. Three. One white station wagon, one four-wheel-drive jeep, one old and battered pickup truck. All in lock-up garages, all with new plates.”
“Very well, it will be done. The ID cards and the keys to the garages and houses—where will you collect them?”
“Do you know the Christian cemetery?”
Al-Khalifa frowned.
“I’ve heard of it, I’ve never been there. Why?”
“It’s on the Jahra road in Sulaibikhat, next to the main Moslem cemetery. A very obscure gate with a tiny notice saying: For Christians. Most of the tombstones are for Lebanese and Syrians, with some Filipinos and Chinese. In the far right-hand corner is one for a merchant seaman, Shepton. The marble slab is loose. Under it I have scraped a cavity in the gravel. Leave them there. If you have a message for me, same thing. Check the grave once a week for messages from me.”
Al-Khalifa shook his head in bewilderment.
“I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”
Mike Martin disappeared into the maelstrom of people who teemed through the narrow streets and alleys of the Bneid-al-Qar district. Five days later, under Able Seaman Shepton’s tombstone he found three identity cards, three sets of garage keys with locations, three sets of ignition keys, and six sets of house keys with addresses on their tags.
Two days later, an Iraqi truck coming back into town from the Umm Gudayr oil field was blown to fragments by something it ran over.
Chip Barber, the head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, had been in Tel Aviv for two days when the phone in the office they had given him at the U.S. embassy rang. It was the CIA’s Head of Station on the line.
“Chip, it’s okay. He’s back in town. I fixed a meeting for four o’clock.
That gives you time to grab the last flight out of Ben-Gurion for Stateside. The guys say they’ll come by the office and pick us up.”
The Head of Station was calling from outside the embassy, so he spoke in generalities in case the line was tapped. It was tapped, of course, but only by the Israelis, who knew anyway.
The “he” was General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror, head of the Mossad; the office was the embassy itself, and the guys were the two men from Dror’s personal staff, who arrived in an anonymous car at ten minutes after three.
Barber thought fifty minutes was a lot of time to get from the embassy compound to the headquarters of the Mossad, which is situated in an office tower called the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard.
But that was not where the meeting was to be. The car sped northward out of town, past Sde Dov military airfield, until it picked up the coastal highway to Haifa.
Just outside Herzlia is situated a large apartment-and-hotel resort called simply the Country Club. It is a place where some Israelis but mainly elderly Jews from abroad come to relax and enjoy the numerous health and spa facilities the place boasts. These happy folk seldom glance up the hill above the resort.
If they did, they would see, perched on the top, a rather splendid building commanding fine views over the surrounding countryside and the sea. If they asked what it was, they would be told it is the Prime Minister’s summer residence.
The Prime Minister of Israel is indeed permitted to come there, one of very few who are, for this is the Mossad training school, known inside the Mossad as the Midrasha.
Yaacov Dror received the two Americans in his top-floor office, a light, airy room with the air conditioning turned up high. A short, chunky man, he wore the regulation Israeli short-sleeve, open-neck shirt and smoked the regulation sixty cigarettes a day.
Barber was glad for the air conditioning; smoke played havoc with his sinuses.
The Israeli spy chief rose from his desk and came lumbering forward.
“Chip, my old friend, how are you these days?”
He embraced the tall American in a hug. It pleased him to rumble like a bad Jewish character actor and play the friendly, genial bear. All an act. In previous missions as a senior operative, as a
Chip Barber greeted him back. The smiles were as fixed as the memories were long. And it had not been that long since an American court had sentenced Jonathan Pollard of Navy Intelligence to a very long prison term for spying for Israel, an operation that had certainly been run against America by the genial Kobi Dror.
After ten minutes they came to the grist: Iraq.
“Let me tell you, Chip, I think you are playing it exactly right,” said Dror, helping his guest to another cup of coffee that would keep him awake for days. He stubbed his third cigarette into a big glass ashtray.
Barber tried not to breathe but had to give up. “If we have to go in,” he said, “if he won’t quit Kuwait and we have to go in, we’ll start with air power.”
“Of course.”