“What did you think?”
“It was ... so quick,” said the girl Rana at last.
“I thought it was a long time,” said the banker.
“It was quick, and it was brutal,” said Martin. “How long do you think we were on the road?”
“Half an hour?”
“Six minutes. Were you shocked?”
“Yes, Bedou.”
“Good. Only psychopaths are not shocked the first time. There was an American general once, Patton. Ever heard of him?”
“No, Bedou.”
“He said that it was not his job to ensure that his soldiers died for their country. It was his job to make sure the other poor bastards died for theirs. Understand?”
George Patton’s philosophy does not translate well into Arabic, but they worked it out.
“When you go to war, there is a point up to which you can hide. After that point you have a choice. You die or he dies. Make your choice now, all of you. You can go back to your studies or go to war.”
They thought for several minutes. It was Rana who spoke first.
“I will go to war, if you will show me how, Bedou.”
After that the young men had to agree.
“Very well. But first I will teach you how to destroy, kill, and stay alive. My house, in two days’ time, at dawn, when curfew is lifted.
Bring school textbooks, all of you, including you, banker. If you are stopped, be natural; you are just students going to study. True, in a way, but different studies.
“You have to get off here. Find your way into town by different trucks.”
They had rejoined the tarred roads and reached the Fifth Ring Motorway. Martin pointed out a garage where trucks would stop and the drivers would give them lifts. When they had gone, he went back to the desert, uncovered his buried radio, drove three miles from the burial site, opened the satellite dish, and began to talk on his encrypted Motorola to the designated house in Riyadh.
An hour after the ambush the burnt-out staff car was found by the next patrol. The bodies were taken to the nearest hospital, Al Adan.
The forensic pathologist who did the autopsy under the eyes of a glowering colonel of the AMAM spotted the bullet holes—tiny pinpricks in the sealed-over charred flesh. He was a family man, with daughters of his own. He knew the young nurse who had been raped.
He drew the sheet back over the third body and began to peel off his gloves.
“I’m afraid they died of asphyxia when the car caught fire after the crash,” he said. “May Allah have mercy.”
The colonel grunted and left.
At his third meeting with his band of volunteers, the Bedou drove them far out into the desert, to a spot west of Kuwait City and south of
Jahra where they could be alone. Seated in the sand like a picnic party, the five youngsters watched as their teacher took out a haversack and poured out onto his camel blanket an array of strange devices. One by one he identified them.
“Plastic explosive. Easy to handle, very stable.”
They went several shades paler when he squeezed the substance in his hands like modeling clay. One of the young men, whose father owned a tobacco shop, had brought on request a number of old cigar boxes.
“This,” said the Bedou, “is a time pencil, a detonator with timer combined. When you twist this butterfly screw at the top, a phial of acid is crushed. The acid begins to burn its way through a copper diaphragm. It will do so in sixty seconds. After that, the mercury fulminate will detonate the explosive. Watch.”
He had their undivided attention. Taking a piece of Semtex-H the size of a cigarette pack, he placed it in the small cigar box and inserted the detonator into the heart of the mass.
“Now when you twist the butterfly like this, all you have to do is close the box and wrap a rubber band around the box ... so ... to hold it closed. You only do this at the last moment.”
He placed the box on the sand in the center of the circle.
“However, sixty seconds is a lot longer than you think. You have time to walk to the Iraqi truck, or bunker or half-track, toss in the box, and walk away. Walk—never run. A running man is at once the start of an alarm. Leave enough time to walk around one corner. Continue walking, not running, even after you hear the explosion.”
He had half an eye on the watch on his wrist. Thirty seconds.
“Bedou,” said the banker.
“Yes?”
“That’s not a real one, is it?”
“What?”
“The bomb you just made. It’s a dummy, right?”
Forty-five seconds. He reached forward and picked it up.
“Oh, no. It’s a real one. I just wanted to show you how long sixty seconds really is. Never panic with these things. Panic will kill you, get you shot, just stay calm at all times.”
With a deft flick of the wrist he sent the cigar box spinning away over the dunes. It dropped behind one and exploded. The bang rocked the sitting group, and fine sand drifted back on the wind.
High over the northern Gulf, an American AWACS plane noted the explosion on one of its heat sensors. The operator drew it to the attention of the mission controller, who peered at the screen. The glow from the heat source was dying away.
“Intensity?”
“Size of a tank shell, I guess, sir.”
“Okay. Log it. No further action.”
“You will be able to make these yourselves by the end of today. The detonators and time pencils you will carry and store in these,” the Bedou said.
He took an aluminum cigar tube, wrapped the detonator in cotton batting, and inserted it into the tube, then screwed the top back on.
“The plastic you will carry like this.”
He took the wrapper of a bar of soap, rolled four ounces of explosive into the shape of a soap bar, and wrapped it, sealing it with an inch of sticky tape.
“The cigar boxes you acquire for yourselves. Not the big kind for Havanas—the small kind for cheroots. Always keep two cheroots in the box, in case you are stopped and frisked. If an Iraqi ever wants to take the cigar tube or the box or the’ soap off you, let him.”
He made them practice under the sun until they could unwrap the “soap,” empty out the cheroots, prepare the bomb, and wind the rubber band around the box in thirty seconds.
“You can do it in the back of a car, the men’s room of a cafe, in a doorway, or at night behind a tree,” he told them. “Pick your target first. Make sure there are no soldiers standing well to one side who will survive. Then twist the butterfly, close the box, rubber-band it, walk up, toss the bomb, and walk away. From the moment you twist the butterfly, count slowly to fifty. If at fifty seconds you have not parted company with it, throw it as far as you can. Now, mostly you will be doing this in darkness, so that’s what we’ll do now.”
He made the group blindfold each member one by one, then watch as the student fumbled and dropped things. By late afternoon, they could do it by touch. In the early evening he gave them the rest of the contents of the haversack, enough for each student to make six bars of soap and six time pencils. The tobacconist’s son agreed to provide all the small boxes and aluminum tubes. They could acquire cotton batting, soap wrappers, and rubber bands for themselves. Then he drove them back to town.
Through September, AMAM headquarters in the Hilton Hotel received a stream of reports of a steadily escalating level of attacks on Iraqi soldiers and military equipment. Colonel Sabaawi became more and more enraged as he became more and more frustrated.
This was not the way it was supposed to be. The Kuwaitis, he had been told, were a cowardly people who would cause no trouble—a touch of the Baghdad methods, and they would do as they were told. It was not working
