The Fist of God

“And we’ll be going for his weapons of mass destruction. That’s in your interest, too, Kobi. We need some cooperation here.”

“Chip, we’ve been watching those WMDs for years. Dammit, we’ve been warning about them. Who do you think all that poison gas, those germ and plague bombs, are destined for? Us. We were warning and warning, and no one took any notice. Nine years ago we blew apart his nuclear generators at Osirak, set him back ten years in his quest for a bomb. The world condemned us. America too.”

“That was cosmetic. We all know that.”

“Okay, Chip, so now it’s American lives on the line, it’s not ‘cosmetic’ anymore. Real Americans might die.”

“Kobi, your paranoia is showing.”

“Bullshit. Look, it suits us for you to blow away all his poison gas plants, and his plague laboratories, and his atom bomb research. It suits us fine. And we even get to stay out of it because now Uncle Sam has Arab allies. So who’s complaining? Not Israel. We have passed you everything we have on his secret weapons programs. Everything we have. No holding back.”

“We need more, Kobi. Okay, maybe we neglected Iraq a bit these past years. We had the cold war to deal with. Now it’s Iraq, and we’re short of product. We need information—not street-level garbage, but real, high-level paydirt. So I’m asking you straight: Do you have any asset working for you, high in the Iraqi regime? We have questions to put, and we need answers. And we’ll pay—we know the rules.”

There was silence for a while. Kobi Dror contemplated the tip of his cigarette. The other two senior officers looked at the table in front of them.

“Chip,” said Dror slowly, “I give you my word. If we were running any agent right up inside the councils of Baghdad, I’d tell you. I’d pass it all over. Trust me, I don’t.”

General Dror would later explain to his Prime Minister, a very angry Itzhak Shamir, that at the time he spoke he was not lying. But he really ought to have mentioned Jericho.

Chapter 6

Mike Martin saw the youth first, or the Kuwaiti boy would have died that day. He was driving his battered, stained, and rusty pickup truck, its rear laden with watermelons he had bought at one of the outlying farms near Jahra, when he saw the white-linen-dressed head pop up and down from behind a pile of rubble by the roadside, He also caught the tip of the rifle the boy was carrying before it disappeared behind the rubble.

The truck was serving its purpose well. He had asked for it in its present condition because he guessed, rightly, that sooner or later—probably sooner—the Iraqi soldiers would start confiscating smart-looking cars for their own use.

He glanced in his rearview mirror, braked, and swerved off the Jahra road. Coming up behind him was a truck full of soldiers of the Popular Army.

The Kuwaiti youth was trying to hold the speeding truck in the sights of his rifle when a hard hand closed over his mouth and another pulled the rifle away from his grip.

“I don’t think you really want to die today, do you?” a voice growled in his ear. The truck rolled past, and the moment to take a potshot at it vanished as well. The boy had been frightened enough by his own actions; now he was terrified.

When the truck disappeared, the grip on his face and head relaxed. He twisted free and rolled onto his back. Crouching over him was a tall, bearded, hard-looking Bedou.

“Who are you?” he muttered.

“Someone who knows better than to kill one Iraqi when there are twenty others in the same truck. Where’s your getaway vehicle?”

“Over there,” said the boy, who appeared to be about twenty, trying hard to grow his first beard. It was a motor scooter, on its stand twenty yards away near some trees. The Bedou sighed. He laid down the rifle, an old Lee Enfield .303 that the boy must have gotten from an antique store, and walked the youth firmly to the pickup.

He drove the short distance back to the rock pile; the rifle went under the watermelons. Then he drove to the motor scooter and hefted it on top of the cargo of fruit. Several melons burst.

“Get in,” he said.

They drove to a quiet spot near Shuwaikh Port and stopped.

“Just what did you think you were doing?” asked the Bedou.

The boy stared out through the fly-spotted windshield. His eyes were moist, and his lip trembled.

“They raped my sister. A nurse—at the Al Adan hospital. Four of them. She is destroyed.”

The Bedou nodded.

“There will be much of that,” he said. “So you want to kill Iraqis?”

“Yes, as many as I can. Before I die.”

“The trick is not to die. If that is what you want, I think I had better train you, or you won’t last a day.”

The boy snorted.

“The Bedouin do not fight.”

“Ever heard of the Arab Legion?” The youth was silent. “And before them, Prince Faisal and the Arab Revolt? All Bedouin. Are there any more like you?”

The youth turned out to be a law student, studying at Kuwait University before the invasion.

“There are five of us. We all want the same. I chose to be the first to try.”

“Memorize this address,” said the Bedou. He gave it—a villa in a back street in Yarmuk. The boy got it wrong twice, then right. Martin made him repeat it twenty times.

“Seven o’clock tonight. It will be dark. But curfew is not till ten.

Arrive separately. Park at least two hundred yards away and walk the rest. Enter at two-minute intervals. The gate and door will be open.”

He watched the boy ride away on his scooter and sighed. Pretty basic material, he thought, but for the moment it’s all I’ve got.

The young people turned up on time. He lay on a flat roof across the street and watched them. They were nervous and unsure, glancing over their shoulders, darting into gateways, then out again. Too many Bogart movies. When they were all inside, he gave them ten more minutes. No Iraqi security men appeared. He slipped down from his roof, crossed the road, and entered the house from the back. They were sitting in the main room with the lights on and the curtains undrawn.

Four young men and a girl, dark and very intense.

They were looking toward the door to the hall when he entered from the kitchen. One minute he was not there, and the next he was. The youngsters had one glimpse of him before he reached out and switched off the light.

“Draw the curtains,” he said quietly. The girl did it. Woman’s work.

Then he put the light back on.

“Never sit in a lighted room with the curtains open,” he said. “You do not want to be seen together.”

He had divided his six residences into two groups. In four he lived, flitting from one to another in no particular sequence. Each time, he left tiny signs for himself—a leaf wedged in the doorjamb, a tin can on the step. If ever they were missing, he would know the house had been visited. In the other two he stored half the gear he had brought in from its grave in the desert. The place he had chosen to meet the students was the least important of his dwelling places, and now one he would never use again to sleep in.

They were all students, except one who worked in a bank. He made them introduce themselves.

“Now you need new names.” He gave them each a new name. “You tell no one else—not friends, parents, brothers, anyone—those names.

Whenever they are used, you know the message comes from one of us.

“What do we call you?” asked the girl, who had just become Rana.

“The Bedou,” he said. “It will do. You—what is this address again?”

The young man he pointed at thought, then produced a slip of paper.

Martin took it from him.

“No pieces of paper. Memorize everything. The Popular Army may be stupid but the Secret Police are not. If