remained inside and ignored the peasant with his chickens in back. They were looking for subversives, suspicious characters.
After a further hour, the bus rumbled on to the east, rocking and swaying, occasionally pulling onto the hard shoulder as a column of Army vehicles roared past, their stubbled conscripts sitting morosely in the back, staring at the swirling dust clouds they raised.
With his eyes closed, Mike Martin listened to the chatter around him, latching on to an unaccustomed word or a hint of accent that he might have forgotten. The Arabic of this part of Iraq was markedly different from that of Kuwait. If he were to pass for an ill-educated and harmless
The hens in their cage on his lap had had a rough ride, even though he had scattered corn from his pocket and shared the water from his flask, now inside a Land-Rover baking under netting in the desert behind him. With each lurch the birds clucked in protest or squatted and crapped into the litter beneath them.
It would have taken a keen eye to observe that the base of the cage on its external measurement was four inches more than on the inside. The deep litter around the hens’ feet hid the difference. The litter was only an inch deep. Inside the four-inch-deep cavity beneath the twenty-by-twenty-inch cage were a number of items that those police at Ar-Rutba would have found puzzling but interesting.
One was a fold-away satellite dish, turned into a stumpy rod like a collapsible umbrella. Another was a transceiver, more powerful than that Martin had used in Kuwait. Baghdad would not offer the facility of being able to broadcast while wandering around the desert. Lengthy transmissions would be out, which accounted, apart from the rechargeable cadmium-silver battery, for the last item in the cavity. It was a tape recorder, but a rather special one.
New technology tends to start large, cumbersome, and difficult to use.
As it develops, two things happen. The innards become more and more complicated, although smaller and smaller, and the operation becomes simpler.
The radio sets hauled into France by agents for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War were a nightmare by modern standards. Occupying a suitcase, they needed an aerial strung for yards up a drainpipe, had cumbersome valves the size of light bulbs, and could only transmit messages on a Morse-sender. This kept the operator tapping for ages, while German detector units could triangulate on the source and close in.
Martin’s tape recorder was simple to operate but also carried some useful features inside. A ten-minute message could be read slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. Before it was recorded on the spool, a silicon chip would encrypt it into a garble that, even if intercepted, the Iraqis could probably not decode.
At the push of a button, the tape would rewind. Another button would cause it to rerecord, but at one two- hundredth of the speed, reducing the message to a three-second burst that would be just about impossible to trace.
It was this burst that the transmitter would send out when linked to the satellite dish, the battery, and the tape recorder. In Riyadh the message would be caught, slowed down, decrypted, and replayed in clear.
Martin left the bus at Ramadi, where it stopped, and took another one on past Lake Habbaniyah and the old Royal Air Force base, now converted to a modern Iraqi fighter station. The bus was stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, and all identity cards were checked.
Martin stood humbly in the line, clutching his chickens, as the passengers approached the table where the police sergeant sat. When it was his turn, he set the wicker basket on the floor and produced his ID
card. The sergeant glanced at it. He was hot and thirsty. It had been a long day. He gestured to the place of origin of the card-bearer.
“Where is this?”
“It is a small village north of Baji. Well known for its melons,
The sergeant’s mouth twitched.
Shortly before seven, the bus rolled to a stop and Major Martin stepped out into the main bus station in Kadhimiya, Baghdad.
It was a long walk through the early evening from the bus station in the north of the city to the house of the Soviet First Secretary in the district of Mansour, but Martin welcomed it.
For one thing, he had been cooped up in two separate buses for twelve hours, covering the 240 miles from Ar-Rutba to the capital, and they had not been luxury coaches. For another, the walk gave him the chance to inhale once again the feel of the city he had not seen since leaving on an airliner for London as a very nervous schoolboy of thirteen, and that had been twenty-four years earlier.
Much had changed. The city he remembered had been very much an
Arab city, much smaller, grouped around the central districts of Shaikh Omar and Saadun on the northwestern bank of the Tigris in Risafa, and the district of Aalam across the river in Karch. Within this inner city was where most of life had been; here narrow streets, alleys, markets, mosques, and their minarets had dominated the skyline to remind the people of their subservience to Allah.
Twenty years of oil revenue had brought long divided highways plunging through the once-open spaces, with rotaries, overpasses, and cloverleaf intersections. Cars had proliferated, and skyscrapers pushed upward into the night sky, Mammon nudging his old adversary.
Mansour, when he reached it down the long stretch of Rabia Street, was hardly recognizable. He recalled wide open spaces around the Mansour Club where his father had taken the family on weekend afternoons. Mansour was still clearly an upscale suburb, but the open spaces had been filled with streets and residences for those who could afford to live in style.
He passed within a few hundred yards of Mr. Hartley’s old preparatory school, where he had learned his lessons and played during the breaks with his friends Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, but in the darkness he did not recognize the street.
He knew just what job Hassan was doing now, but of Dr Badri’s two sons he had heard no word in almost a quarter of a century. Had the little one, Osman, with his taste for mathematics, ever become an engineer after all? he wondered. And Abdelkarim, who had won prizes for reciting English poetry—had he in turn become a poet or a writer?
If Martin had marched in the manner of the SAS, heel-and-toe, shoulders swinging to assist his moving legs, he could have covered the distance in half the time. He could also have been reminded, like those two engineers in Kuwait, that “you may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like an Englishman.”
But his shoes were not laced marching boots. They were canvas slippers with rope soles, the footwear of a poor Iraqi
In Riyadh they had shown him an up-to-date map of the city of Baghdad, and many photographs taken from high altitude but magnified until, with a magnifying glass, one could look into the gardens behind the walls, picking out the swimming pools and cars of the wealthy and powerful.
All these he had memorized. He turned left into Jordan Street and just past Yarmuk Square took a right into the tree-lined avenue where the Soviet diplomat lived.
In the sixties, under Kassem and the generals who followed him, the USSR had occupied a favored and prestigious position in Baghdad, pretending to espouse Arab nationalism because it was seen to be anti-Western, while trying to convert the Arab world to Communism. In those years the Soviet embassy had purchased several large residences outside its main compound, which could not accommodate the swelling staff, and as a concession these residences and their grounds had been accorded the status of Soviet territory. It was a privilege even Saddam Hussein had never gotten around to rescinding, the more so as until the mid-eighties his principal arms supplier had been Moscow, and six thousand Soviet military advisers had trained his Air Force and Armored Corps with their Russian equipment.
Martin found the villa and identified it from the small brass plaque that announced this was a residence
