When they were settled at a corner table in a quiet bar in the West End, Martin produced from his attache case a cassette player and a tape.
Showing them to Laing, he explained his request weeks ago to Sean Plummer, and their meeting the previous weekend.
“Shall I play it for you?” he asked.
“Well, if the chaps at GCHQ can’t understand it, I know damned well I can’t,” said Laing. “Look, Sean Plummer’s got Arabs like Al-Khouri on his staff. If
Still, he listened politely.
“Hear it?” asked Martin excitedly. “The ‘k’ sound after
That’s what got the other man so angry. Clearly, no one is supposed to use that title openly. It must be confined to a very tiny circle of people.”
“But what does he actually say?” asked Laing in complete bewilderment.
Martin looked at him blankly. Didn’t Laing understand anything?
“He is saying that the vast American buildup doesn’t matter, because
‘soon we shall have Qubth-ut-Allah.’ ”
Laing still looked perplexed.
“A weapon,” urged Martin. “It must be. Something to be available soon that will hold the Americans.”
“Forgive my poor Arabic,” said Laing, “but what is Qubth-ut-Allah?”
“Oh,” said Martin. “It means ‘.’ ”
After eleven years in power and having won three general elections, the British Prime Minister actually fell on November 20, although she did not announce her decision to resign until two days later.
Her fall from power was triggered by an obscure rule in the Conservative Party constitution requiring her nominal reelection as Party leader at periodic intervals. Such an interval occurred that November. Her reelection should have been just a formality, until an out-of-office former minister chose to run against her. Unaware of her danger, she hardly took the challenge seriously, conducting a lackluster campaign and actually attending a conference in Paris on the day of the vote.
Behind her back a range of old resentments, affronted egos, and nervous fears that she might even lose the forthcoming general election coalesced into an alliance against her, preventing her from being swept back into the Party leadership on the first ballot.
Had she been so returned, there would have been no second ballot, and the challenger would have disappeared into obscurity. In the ballot of November 20 she needed a two-thirds majority; she was just four votes short, forcing a runoff second ballot.
Within hours, what had started as a few dislodged stones tumbling down a hill became a landslide. After consulting her Cabinet, who told her she would now lose, she resigned. To head off the challenger, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major, ran for the top job and won.
The news stunned the soldiers in the Gulf, American and British alike.
Down in Oman, American fighter pilots who were now consorting daily with SAS men from the nearby base asked the British what was going on and received helpless shrugs in return.
Mike Martin heard the news when the Iraqi chauffeur swaggered over and told him. Martin contemplated the news, looked blank, and asked:
“Who is she?”
“Fool,” snapped the chauffeur. “The leader of the Beni Naji. Now we will win.”
He went back to his car to resume listening to Baghdad radio. In a few moments First Secretary Kulikov hurried from the house and was driven straight back to his embassy.
That night, Martin sent a long transmission to Riyadh, containing the latest batch of answers from Jericho and an added request from himself for further instructions. Crouched by the doorway of his shack to ward off any intruders, for the satellite dish was positioned in the doorway facing south, Martin waited for his reply. A low, pulsing light on the console of the small transceiver told him at half past one in the morning that he had his reply.
He dismantled the dish, stored it back beneath the floor with the batteries and transceiver, slowed down the message, and listened to it play back.
There was a fresh list of demands for information from Jericho and an agreement to the agent’s last demand for money, which had now been transferred into his account. In under a month the renegade on the Revolutionary Command Council had earned over a million dollars.
Added to the list were two further instructions for Martin. The first was to send Jericho a message, not in the form of a question, that it was hoped he could somehow filter into the thinking of the planners in Baghdad. It was to the effect that the news from London probably meant that the Coalition action to recover Kuwait would be called off if the Rais stood firm.
Whether this disinformation reached the highest councils of Baghdad will never be known, but within a week Saddam Hussein had claimed that the toppling of Thatcher was due to the revulsion of the British people at her opposition to him.
The final instruction on Mike Martin’s tape that night was to ask Jericho if he had ever heard of a weapon or weapon system referred to as .
By the light of a candle, Martin spent most of the rest of the night writing the questions in Arabic onto two sheets of thin airmail paper.
Within twenty hours, the papers had been secreted behind the loose brick in the wall close to the Imam Aladham shrine in Aadhamiya.
It took a week for the answers to come back. Martin read the spidery Arabic script of Jericho’s handwriting and translated everything into English. From a soldier’s point of view, it was interesting.
The three Republican Guard divisions facing the British and Americans along the border, the Tawakkulna and Medina, now joined by the Hammurabi, were equipped with a mix of T-54/55, T-62, and T-72 main battle tanks, all three Russian.
But on a recent tour, Jericho continued, General Abdullah Kadiri of the Armored Corps had discovered to his horror that most of the crews had removed their batteries and used them to power fans, cookers, radios, and cassette players. It was doubtful if, in combat conditions, any of them would now start. There had been several executions on the spot, and two senior commanders had been relieved and sent home.
Saddam’s half-brother, Ali Hassan Majid, now Governor-General of Kuwait, had reported that the occupation was becoming a nightmare, with attacks on Iraqi soldiers still unquenchable and desertions rising.
The resistance showed no signs of abating, despite vigorous interrogations and numerous executions by Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM and two personal visits by his boss, Omar Khatib.
Worse, the resistance had now somehow acquired the plastic explosive called Semtex, which is much more powerful than industrial dynamite.
Jericho had identified two more major military command posts, both constructed in subterranean caverns and invisible from the air.
The thinking in the immediate circle around Saddam Hussein was definitely that a seminal contribution to the fall of Margaret Thatcher had been his own influence. He had twice reiterated his absolute refusal even to consider pulling out of Kuwait.
Finally, Jericho had never heard of anything code-named but would listen for such a phrase. Personally, he doubted there existed any weapon or weapon system unknown to the Allies.
Martin read the entire message onto tape, speeded it up, and transmitted it. In Riyadh it was seized upon avidly and the radio technicians logged its time of arrival: 2355 hours, November 30, 1990.
Leila Al-Hilla came out of the bathroom slowly, pausing in the doorway with the light behind her to raise her arms to the doorframe on each side and pose for a moment.
The bathroom light, shining through the negligee, showed off her ripe and voluptuous silhouette to full advantage. It should; it was black, of the sheerest lace, and had cost a small fortune, a Paris import acquired from
