Part 1 (2/2)

That winter he received a strange phone call from the Iraqi emba.s.sy in Bonn: Would Dr. Bull like to visit Baghdad as Iraq's guest? What he did not know was that in the mid-1980s, Iraq had witnessed Operation Staunch, a concerted American effort to shut off all sources of weapons imports destined for Iran. This followed the carnage among American Marines in Beirut when Iranian-backed Hezbollah fanatics attacked their barracks. Iraq's reaction, although they benefited in their war with Iran from Operation Staunch, was: If the Americans can do that to Iran, they can do it to us. From then on, Iraq determined to import not the arms but wherever possible the technology to make their own. Bull was first and foremost a designer; he interested them. The mission to recruit him went to Amer Saadi, who was number two at the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, known as MIMI. When Bull arrived in Baghdad in January 1988, Amer Saadi, a smooth, cosmopolitan diplomat/scientist speaking English, French, and German as well as Arabic, played him beautifully. The Iraqis, he said, wanted Bull's help with their dream of putting peaceful satellites into s.p.a.ce. To do this, they had to design a rocket that could put the payload up there. Their Egyptian and Brazilian scientists had suggested that the first step would be to tie together five Scud missiles, of which Iraq had bought nine hundred from the Soviet Union. But there were technical problems, many problems. They needed access to a supercomputer. Could Bull help them? Bull loved problems-they were his raison d'etre. He did not have access to a supercomputer, but on two legs he himself was the nearest thing. Besides, he told Amer Saadi, if Iraq really wanted to be the first Arab nation to put satellites into s.p.a.ce, there was another way-cheaper, simpler, faster than rockets starting from scratch. Tell me all, said the Iraqi. So Bull did. For just three million dollars, he said, he could produce a giant gun that would do the job. It would be a five-year program. He could beat the Americans at Livermore to the punch. It would be an Arab triumph. Dr. Saadi glowed with admiration. He would put the idea to his government and recommend it strongly. In the meantime, would Dr. Bull look at the Iraqi artillery? By the end of his one-week visit, Bull had agreed to crack the problems of tying five Scuds together to form the first stage of a rocket of intercontinental or s.p.a.ce-reaching performance; to design two new artillery pieces for the Army; and to put a formal proposal for his payload-into-orbit Supergun. As with South Africa, he was able to block his mind to the nature of the regime he was about to serve. Friends had told him of Saddam Hussein's record as the man with the bloodiest hands in the Middle East. But in 1988 there were thousands of respectable companies and dozens of governments clamoring to do business with big-spending Iraq. For Bull, the bait was his gun, his beloved gun, his life's dream, at last with a backer who was prepared to help him bring it to fulfillment and join the pantheon of scientists. In March 1988, Amer Saadi sent a diplomat to Brussels to talk to Bull. Yes, said the gun designer, he had made progress on the technical problems of the first stage of the Iraqi rocket. He would be glad to hand them over on signature of a contract with his company, once again the s.p.a.ce Research Corporation. The deal was done. The Iraqis realized that his offer of a gun for only three million dollars was silly; they raised it to ten million but asked for more speed. When Bull worked fast, he worked amazingly fast. In one month he put together a team of the best available free-lancers he could find. Heading the Supergun team in Iraq was a British projects engineer called Christopher Cowley. Bull himself christened the rocket program, based at Saad 16 in northern Iraq, Project Bird. The Supergun task was named Project Babylon. By May, the exact specifications of Babylon had been worked out. It would be an incredible machine. One meter of bore; a barrel 156 meters long and weighing 1,665 tons-the height of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument. Bull had already made plain to Baghdad that he would have to make a smaller prototype, a Mini-Babylon, with a 350-mm. bore weighing only 113 tons. But in this he could test nose cones that would also be useful for the rocket project. The Iraqis liked this-they needed nose-cone technology as well. The full significance of the insatiable Iraqi appet.i.te for nose-cone technology seems to have escaped Gerry Bull at the time. Maybe, in his limitless enthusiasm to see his life's dream realized at last, he just suppressed it. Nose cones of very advanced design are needed to prevent a payload from burning up from friction heat as it reenters earth's atmosphere. But orbiting payloads in s.p.a.ce do not return; they stay up there. By late May 1988, Christopher Cowley was placing his first orders with Walter Somers of Birmingham for the tube sections that would make up the barrel of Mini-Babylon. The sections for full-scale Babylons 1, 2, 3, and 4 would come later. Other strange steel orders were placed all around Europe. The pace at which Bull was working was awesome. Within two months he covered ground that would have taken a government enterprise two years. By the end of 1988, he had designed for Iraq two new guns-self-propelled guns, as opposed to the towed machines supplied by South Africa. Both pieces would be so powerful, they could crush the guns of the surrounding nations of Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who purchased theirs from NATO and America. Bull also managed to crack the problems of tying the five Scuds together to form the first stage of the Bird rocket, to be called Al-Abeid, ”the Believer.” He had discovered that the Iraqis and Brazilians at Saad 16 were working on faulty data, produced by a wind tunnel that was itself malfunctioning. After that, he handed over his fresh calculations and left the Brazilians to get on with it. In May 1989 most of the world's armaments industry and press, along with government observers and intelligence officers, attended a great weapons exhibition in Baghdad. Considerable interest was shown in the mock-up prototypes of the two great guns. In December, the Al-Abeid was test-fired to great media hoopla, seriously jolting Western a.n.a.lysts. Heavily covered by Iraqi TV cameras, the great three-stage rocket roared off from the Al-Anbar s.p.a.ce Research Base, climbed away from the earth, and disappeared. Three days later, Was.h.i.+ngton admitted that the rocket did indeed appear capable of putting a satellite into s.p.a.ce. But the a.n.a.lysts worked out more. If Al-Abeid could do that, it could also be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly, Western intelligence agencies were jerked out of their a.s.sumption that Saddam Hussein was no real danger, years away from being a serious threat. The three main intelligence agencies, the CIA in America, the Secret Intelligence Service-SIS-in Britain, and the Mossad in Israel, came to the view that of the two systems, the Babylon gun was an amusing toy and the Bird rocket a real threat. All three got it wrong. It was the Al-Abeid that did not work. Bull knew why, and he told the Israelis what had happened. The Al-Abeid had soared to twelve thousand meters and been lost to view. The second stage had refused to separate from the first. The third stage had not existed. It had been a dummy. He knew because he had been charged with trying to persuade China to provide a third stage and would be going to Beijing in February. He did indeed go, and the Chinese turned him down flat. While he was there, he met and talked at length with his old friend George Wong. Something had gone wrong with the Iraqi business, something that was worrying the h.e.l.l out of Gerry Bull, and it was not the Israelis. Several times he insisted he wanted out of Iraq, and in a hurry. Something had happened inside his own head, and he wanted out of Iraq. In this decision he was entirely right, but too late.

* * * On February 15,1990, President Saddam Hussein called a full meeting of his group of inner advisers at his palace at Sa.r.s.eng, high up in the Kurdish mountains. He liked Sa.r.s.eng. It stands on a hilltop, and through its triple-glazed windows he could gaze out and down to the surrounding countryside, where the Kurdish peasants huddled through the bitter winters in their shacks and hovels. It was not many miles from here to the terrified town of Halabja, where for the two days of March 17 and 18 in the year 1988, he had ordered the seventy thousand citizens to be punished for their alleged collaboration with the Iranians. When his artillery had finished, five thousand Kurdish dogs were dead and seven thousand maimed for life. Personally, he had been quite impressed with the effects of the hydrogen cyanide sprayed out from the artillery sh.e.l.ls. The German companies that had helped him with the technology to acquire and create the gas-along with the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin-had his grat.i.tude. They had earned it with their gas, similar to the Zyklon-B which had so properly been used on the Jews years before and might well be again. He stood before the windows of his dressing room and gazed down that morning. He had been in power, undisputed power, for sixteen years, and he had been forced to punish many people. But much also had been achieved. A new Sennacherib had risen out of Nineveh and another Nebuchadnezzar out of Babylon. Some had learned the easy way, by submission. Others had learned the hard, the very hard way and were mostly dead. Still others, many others, had yet to learn. But they would, they would. He listened as the convoy of helicopters clattered in from the south, while his dresser fussed to adjust the green kerchief he liked to wear in the V above his combat jacket to hide his jowls. When all was to his satisfaction, he took his personal sidearm, a gold-plated Beretta of Iraqi make, bolstered and belted, and secured it around his waist. He had used it before on a cabinet minister and might wish to again. He always carried it. A flunky tapped on the door and informed the President that those he had summoned awaited him in the conference room. When he entered the long room with the plate-gla.s.s windows dominating the snowy landscape, everyone rose in unison. Only up here at Sa.r.s.eng did his fear of a.s.sa.s.sination diminish. He knew that the palace was ringed by three lines of the best of his presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Kha.s.s, commanded by his own son Kusay, and that no one could approach those great windows. On the roof were French Crotale antiaircraft missiles, and his fighters ranged the skies above the mountains. He sat himself down in the throne-like chair at the center of the top table that formed the crossbar of the T. Flanking him, two on each side, were four of his most trusted aides. For Saddam Hussein there was only one quality he demanded of a man in his favor: loyalty. Absolute, total, slavish loyalty. Within this quality, experience had taught him, there were gradations. At the top of the list came family; after that the clan; then the tribe. There is an Arabic saying: ”I and my brother against our cousin; I and my cousin against the world.” He believed in it. It worked. He had come from the gutters of a small town called Tikrit and from the tribe of the Al-Tikriti. An extraordinary number of his family and the Al-Tikriti were in high office in Iraq, and they could be forgiven any brutality, any failure, any personal excess, provided they were loyal to him. Had not his second son, the psychopathic Uday, beaten a servant to death and been forgiven? To his right sat Izzat Ibrahim, his first deputy, and beyond was his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of MIMI, the man in charge of weapons procurement. To his left were Taha Ramadam, the Prime Minister, and beyond him Sadoun Hammadi, the Deputy Premier and devout s.h.i.+'a Moslem. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, but his one and only area of tolerance was in matters of religion. As a non-observer (except when it suited), he did not care. His Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian. So what? He did what he was told. The Army chiefs were near the top of the stem of the T, the generals commanding the Republican Guard, the Infantry, the Armor, the Artillery, and the Engineers. Further down came the four experts whose reports and expertise were the reason he had called the meeting. Two sat to the right of the table: Dr. Amer Saadi, technologist and deputy to his son-in-law, and beside him Brigadier Ha.s.san Rahmani, head of the Counterintelligence wing of the Mukhabarat, or Intelligence Service. Facing them were Dr. Ismail Ubaidi, controlling the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat, and Brigadier Omar Khatib, boss of the feared Secret Police, the Amn-al-Amm, or AMAM. The three secret service men had clearly denned tasks. Dr. Ubaidi conducted espionage abroad; Rahmani counterattacked foreign-mounted espionage inside Iraq; Khatib kept the Iraqi population in order, crus.h.i.+ng all possible internal opposition through a combination of his vast network of watchers and informers and the sheer, stark terror generated by the rumors of what he did to opponents arrested and dragged to the Abu Ghraib jail west of Baghdad or to his personal interrogation center known jokingly as the Gymnasium beneath the AMAM headquarters. Many had been the complaints brought to Saddam Hussein about the brutality of his Secret Police chief, but he always chuckled and waved them away. It was rumored that he personally had given Khatib his nickname Al-Mu'azib, ”the Tormentor.” Khatib, of course, was Al-Tikriti and loyal to the end. Some dictators, when delicate matters are to be discussed, like to keep the meeting small. Saddam thought the opposite; if there was dirty work to be done, they should all be involved. No man could say: ”I have clean hands, I did not know.” In this way, all around him would get the message: ”If I fall, you fall.”When all had resumed their seats, the President nodded to his son-inlaw Hussein Kamil, who called on Dr. Saadi to report. The technocrat read his report without raising his eyes. No wise man raised his eyes to stare Saddam in the face. The President claimed he could read into a man's soul through his eyes, and many believed it. Staring into his face might signify courage, defiance, disloyalty. If the President suspected disloyalty, the offender usually died horribly.When Dr. Saadi had finished, Saddam thought for a while.”This man, this Canadian. How much does he know?””Not all, but enough, I believe, to work it out, sayidi.”Saadi used the honorific Arabic address equivalent to the Western sir, but more respectful. An alternative acceptable t.i.tle was Sayid Rais, or ”Mr. President.””How soon?””Soon, if not already, sayidi.””And he has been talking to the Israelis?””Constantly, Sayid Rais,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. ”He has been friends of theirs for years. Visited Tel Aviv and given lectures on ballistics to their artillery staff officers. He has many friends there, possibly among the Mossad, though he may not know that.””Could we finish the project without him?” asked Saddam Hussein.Hussein Kamil cut in. ”He is a strange man. He insists on carrying all his most intimate scientific paperwork around with him in a big canvas bag. I instructed our counterintelligence people to have a look at this paperwork and copy it.””And this was done?” The President was staring at Ha.s.san Rahmani, his Counterintelligence chief.”Immediately, Sayid Rais. Last month during his visit here. He drinks much whiskey. It was doped, and he slept long and deep. We took his bag and photocopied every page in it. Also, we have taped all his technical conversations. The papers and the transcripts have all been pa.s.sed to our comrade Dr. Saadi.” The presidential stare swiveled back to the scientist. ”So, once again, can you complete the project without him?” ”Yes, Sayid Rais, I believe we can. Some of his calculations make sense only to himself, but I have had our best mathematicians studying them for a month. They can understand them. The engineers can do the rest.” Hussein Kamil shot his deputy a warning look: You had better be right, my friend. ”Where is he now?” asked the President. ”He has left for China, sayidi,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. ”He is trying to find us a third stage for the Al-Abeid rocket. Alas, he will fail. He is expected back in Brussels in mid-March.” ”You have men there, good men?” ”Yes, sayidi. I have had him under surveillance in Brussels for ten months. That is how we know he has been entertaining Israeli delegations at his offices there. We also have keys to his apartment building.” ”Then let it be done. On his return.” ”Without delay, Sayid Rais.” Dr. Ubaidi thought of the four men he had in Brussels on arm's-length surveillance work. One of them had done this before: Abdelrahman Moyeddin. He would give the job to him. The three intelligence men and Dr. Saadi were dismissed. The rest stayed. When they were alone, Saddam Hussein turned to his son-inlaw.

”And the other matter-when will I have it?””I am a.s.sured, by the end of the year, Abu Kusay.”Being family, Kamil could use the more intimate t.i.tle ”Father of Kusay.” It reminded the others present who was family and who was not. The President grunted.”We shall need a place, a new place, a fortress; not an existing place, however secret. A new secret place that no one will know about. No one but a tiny handful, not even all of us here. Not a civil engineering project, but military. Can you do it?”General Ali Musuli of the Army Engineers straightened his back, staring at the President's midchest.”With pride, Sayid Rais.””The man in charge-your best, your very best.””I know the man, sayidi. A colonel. Brilliant at construction and deception. The Russian Stepanov said he was the best pupil in maskirovka that he had ever taught.””Then bring him to me. Not here-in Baghdad, in two days. I will commission him myself. Is he a good Ba'athist, this colonel? Loyal to the party and to me?””Utterly, sayidi. He would die for you.””So would you all, I hope.” There was a pause, then quietly: ”Let us hope it does not come to that.”As a conversation-stopper, it worked. Fortunately that was the end of the meeting anyway.

Dr. Gerry Bull arrived back in Brussels on March 17, exhausted and depressed. His colleagues a.s.sumed his depression was caused by his rebuff in China. But it was more than that.

Ever since he had arrived in Baghdad more than two years earlier, he had allowed himself to be persuaded-because it was what he wanted to believe-that the rocket program and the Babylon gun were for the launch of small, instrument-bearing satellites into earth orbit. He could see the enormous benefits in self-esteem and pride for the whole Arab world if Iraq could do that. Moreover, it would be lucrative, pay its way, as Iraq launched communications and weather satellites for other nations. As he understood it, the plan was for Babylon to fire its satellite-bearing missile southeast over the length of Iraq, on over Saudi Arabia and the south Indian Ocean, and into orbit. That was what he had designed it for. He had been forced to agree with his colleagues that no Western nation would see it that way. They would a.s.sume it was a military gun. Hence, the subterfuge in the ordering of the barrel parts, breech, and recoil mechanism. Only he, Gerald Vincent Bull, knew the truth, which was very simple-the Babylon gun could not be used as a weapon for launching conventional explosive sh.e.l.ls, however gigantic those sh.e.l.ls might be. For one thing, the Babylon gun, with its 156-meter barrel, could not stay rigid without supports. It needed one trunnion, or support, for every second of its twenty-six barrel sections, even if, as he foresaw, its barrel ran up the forty-five-degree side of a mountain. Without these supports, the barrel would droop like wet spaghetti and tear itself apart as the joins ripped open. Therefore, it could not raise or depress its elevation, nor traverse from side to side. So it could not pick a variety of targets. To change its angle, up or down or side to side, it would have to be dismantled, taking weeks. Even to clean out and reload between discharges would take a couple of days. Moreover, repeated firings would wear out that very expensive barrel. Lastly, Babylon could not be hidden from counterattack. Every time it fired, a gobbet of flame ninety meters long would leap from its barrel, and every satellite and airplane would spot it. Its map coordinates would be with the Americans in seconds. Also, its reverberation shock waves would reach any good seismograph as far away as California. That was why he told anyone who would listen, ”It cannot be used as a weapon.” His problem was that after two years in Iraq, he had realized that for Saddam Hussein science had one application and one only: It was to be applied to weapons of war and the power they brought him and to nothing else. So why the h.e.l.l was he financing Babylon? It could only fire once in anger before the retaliatory fighter-bombers blew it to bits, and it could only fire a satellite or a conventional sh.e.l.l. It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.

Chapter 2.

The big Ram Charger sped down the main highway from Qatar toward Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, making good time. The air conditioning kept the interior cool, and the driver had some of his favorite country-and-western tapes filling the interior with back-home sounds.

Beyond Ruweis, they were out in open country, the sea to their left only intermittently visible between the dunes, to their right the great desert stretching away hundreds of bleak and sandy miles toward Dhofar and the Indian Ocean. Beside her husband Maybelle Walker gazed excitedly at the ochre-brown desert s.h.i.+mmering under the midday sun. Ray Walker kept his eyes on the road. An oil man all his life, he had seen deserts before. ”Seen one, seen 'em all,” he would grunt when his wife made one of her frequent exclamations of wonderment at the sights and sounds that were so new to her. But for Maybelle Walker it was all new, and although she had packed enough medications before leaving Oklahoma to open a new branch of Eckerd, she had loved every minute of her two-week tour of the Arabian Gulf-what used to be called the Persian Gulf. They had started in the north in Kuwait, then driven the off-road loaned them by the company south into Saudi Arabia through Khafji and Al-Khobar, crossed the causeway into Bahrain, then back and down through Qatar and into the UAE. At each stopover Ray Walker had made a perfunctory ”inspection” of his company office-the ostensible reason for the trip-while she had taken a guide from the company office and explored the local sights. She felt very brave going down all those narrow streets with only a single white man for an escort, unaware that she would have been in more danger in any of fifty American cities than among the Gulf Arabs. The sights enthralled her on her first and perhaps last journey outside the United States. She admired the palaces and the minarets, wondered at the torrent of raw gold on display in the gold soukhs, and was awed by the tide of dark faces and multicolored robes that swirled about her in the Old Quarters.

She had taken photographs of everything and everyone so she could show the ladies' club back home where she had been and what she had seen. She had taken to heart the warning by the company representative in Qatar to be careful of taking a picture of a desert Arab without his permission, as some still believed the taking of a photograph captured part of the target's soul. She was, she frequently reminded herself, a happy woman and had much to be happy about. Married almost straight out of high school to her steady date of two years, she found herself wedded to a good, solid man with a job in a local oil company who had risen through the ranks as the company expanded, until he was now finis.h.i.+ng as one of the vice-presidents. They had a nice home outside Tulsa and a beach house for summer vacations at Hatteras, between the Atlantic and Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. It had been a good thirty-year marriage, rewarded with one fine son. And now this, a two-week tour at the company's expense of all the exotic sights and sounds, smells, and experiences of another world, the Arabian Gulf. ”It's a good road,” she remarked as they crested a rise and the strip of bitumen s.h.i.+mmered and s.h.i.+vered away in front of them. If the temperature inside the vehicle was seventy degrees, it was one hundred and twenty out there in the desert. ”Ought to be,” her husband grunted. ”We built it.” ”The company?” ”Nah. Uncle Sam, G.o.ddammit.” Ray Walker had a habit of adding the single word G.o.ddammit when he dispensed pieces of information. They sat for a while in companionable silence while Tammy Wynette urged her to stand by her man, which she always had done and intended to do through their retirement. Nudging sixty, Ray Walker was taking retirement with a good pension and some healthy stock options, and a grateful company had offered him the two-week, all-expense-paid, first-cla.s.s tour of the Gulf to ”inspect” its various outstations along the coast. Though he too had never been there before, he had to admit he was less enthralled by it all than his wife, but he was delighted for her sake. Personally, he was looking forward to finis.h.i.+ng with Abu Dhabi and Dubai, then catching the first-cla.s.s cabin of an airliner aimed directly at the United States via London. At least he would be able to order a long, cold Bud without having to scuttle into the company office for it. Islam might be all right for some, he mused, but after staying in the best hotels in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and being told they were completely dry, he wondered what kind of a religion would stop a guy from having a cool beer on a hot day. He was dressed in what he perceived to be the rig of an oil man in the desert-tall boots, jeans, belt, s.h.i.+rt, and Stetson-which was not entirely necessary, as he was really a chemist in quality control. He checked the odometer: eighty miles to the Abu Dhabi turnoff. ”Gonna have to take a leak, honey,” he muttered. ”Well then, you be careful,” warned Maybelle. ”There are scorpions out there.” ”But they can't leap two feet,” he said, and roared at his own joke. Being stung on the d.i.c.k by a high-jumping scorpion-that was a good one for the boys back home. ”Ray, you are a terrible man,” replied Maybelle, and laughed also. Walker swung the Ram Charger to the edge of the empty road and opened the door. The blast of heat came in as if from the door of a furnace. He climbed out and slammed the door behind him to trap the cool air. Maybelle stayed in the pa.s.senger seat as her husband walked to the nearest dune and unzipped his fly. Then she stared out through the winds.h.i.+eld and muttered: ”Oh, my G.o.d, would you just look at that.” She reached for her Pentax, opened her door, and slithered to the ground. ”Ray, do you think he'd mind if I took his picture?” Ray was facing the other way, absorbed in one of a middle-aged man's greater satisfactions. ”Be right with you, honey. Who?” The Bedouin was standing across the road from her husband, having apparently walked out from between two dunes. One minute he was not there, the next he was. Maybelle Walker stood by the front fender of the off-road, her camera in her hand, irresolute. Her husband turned around and zipped himself up. He stared at the man across the road. ”Dunno,” he said. ”Guess not. But don't get too close. Probably got fleas. I'll get the engine started. You take a quick picture, and if he gets nasty, jump right in. Fast.” He climbed back into the driver's seat and gunned the engine. That boosted the air conditioner, which was a relief. Maybelle Walker took several steps forward and held up her camera. ”May I take your picture?” she asked. ”Camera? Picture? Click-click? For my alb.u.m back home?” The man just stood and stared at her. His once-white djellaba, stained and dusty, dropped from his shoulders to the sand at his feet. The red-and-white flecked keffiyeh was secured on his head by a two-strand black cord, and one of the trailing corners was tucked up under the opposite temple so that the cloth covered his face from the bridge of the nose downward. Above the flecked doth the dark eyes stared back at her. What little skin of forehead and eye sockets she could see was burned brown by the desert. She had many pictures ready for the alb.u.m she intended to make back home, but none of a tribesman of the Bedouin with the expanse of the Saudi desert behind him. She raised her camera. The man did not move. She squinted through the aperture, framing the figure in the center of the oblong, wondering if she could make the car in time, should the Arab come running at her. Click. ”Thank you very much,” she said. Still he did not move. She backed toward the car, smiling brightly. ”Always smile,” she recalled the Reader's Digest once advising Americans confronted by someone who cannot understand English. ”Honey, get in the car!” her husband shouted. ”It's all right, I think he's okay,” she said, opening the door. The audiotape had run out while she was taking the picture. That cut the radio station in. Ray Walker's hand reached out and hauled her into the car, which screeched away from the roadside. The Arab watched them go, shrugged, and walked behind the sand dune, where he had parked his own sand-camouflaged Land-Rover. In a few seconds he too drove off in the direction of Abu Dhabi. ”What's the hurry?” complained Maybelle Walker. ”He wasn't going to attack me.” ”That's not the point, honey.” Ray Walker was tight-lipped, the man in control, able to cope with any international emergency. ”We're getting into Abu Dhabi and taking the next flight home. It seems this morning Iraq invaded Kuwait, G.o.ddammit. They could be here any hour.” It was ten o'clock, Gulf Time, on the morning of August 2, 1990.

Twelve hours earlier, Colonel Osman Badri waited, tense and excited, by the tracks of a stationary T-72 main battle tank near a small airfield called Safwan. Though he could not know it then, the war for Kuwait would begin there and it would end there, at Safwan. Just outside the airfield, which had runways but no buildings on it, the main highway ran north and south. On the northward road, down which he had traveled three days earlier, was the junction where travelers could turn east for Basra or northwest for Baghdad. South, the road ran straight through the Kuwaiti border post five miles away. From where he stood, looking south, he could see the dim glow of Jahra, and beyond it, farther east across the bay, the glow of the lights of Kuwait City itself. He was excited because his country's time had come. Time to punish the Kuwaiti sc.u.m for what they had done to Iraq, for the undeclared economic warfare, for the financial damage and their haughty arrogance. Had not his country for eight b.l.o.o.d.y years held off the hordes of Persia from sweeping into the northern Gulf and ending all their luxury lifestyles? And was her reward now to sit silent while the Kuwaitis stole more than their fair portion of the oil from the shared Rumailah field? Were they now to be beggared as Kuwait overproduced and drove the oil price downward? Should they now meekly succ.u.mb as the Al Sabah dogs insisted on repayment of the miserable $15 billion loan they had made to Iraq during the war? No, the Rais had gotten it right as usual. Kuwait was historically the nineteenth province of Iraq; always had been, until the British drew their d.a.m.ned line in the sand in 1913 and created the richest emirate in the world. Kuwait would be reclaimed this night, this very night, and Osman Badri would be a part of it. As an Army Engineer, he would not be in the first line, but he would come close behind with his bridging units, earthmovers, bulldozers, and sappers to cut open the path should the Kuwaitis try to block it. Not that aerial surveillance had shown any obstructions. No earthworks, no sand berms, no ant.i.tank trenches, no concrete traps. But just in case, the engineers would be there under the command of Osman Badri to cut open the road for the tanks and mechanized infantry of the Republican Guard. A few yards from where he stood, the field command tent was full of the senior officers poring over their maps and making last-minute adjustments to their plan of attack as the hours and minutes ticked by while they waited for the final ”go” order from the Rais in Baghdad. Colonel Badri had already seen and conversed with his own commanding general, All Musuli, who was in charge of the entire Engineering Corps of the Iraqi Army and to whom he owed utter devotion for recommending him for the ”special duty” last February. He had been able to a.s.sure his chief that his-Badri's-men were fully equipped and ready to go. As he stood talking with Musuli, another general had strolled up, and he had been introduced to Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the tanks. In the distance he had seen General Saadi Tumah Abbas, commanding the elite Republican Guard, enter the tent. As a loyal Party member and wors.h.i.+pper of Saddam Hussein, he had been perplexed to hear the tank general Kadiri mutter ”political creep” under his breath. How could this be? Was not Tumah Abbas an intimate of Saddam Hussein, and had he not been rewarded for winning the crucial battle of Fao that finally beat the Iranians? Colonel Badri had dismissed from his mind rumors that Fao had actually been won by the now-vanished General Maher Ras.h.i.+d. All around him, men and officers of the Tawakkulna and Medina divisions of the Guard swarmed in the darkness. His thoughts strayed back to that memorable night in February, when General Musuli had ordered him from his duties putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches to the facility at Al Qubai to report to headquarters in Baghdad. He had a.s.sumed he would be rea.s.signed. ”The President wants to see you,” Musuli had said abruptly. ”He will send for you. Move into the officers' quarters here, and keep yourself available night and day.” Colonel Badri bit his lip. What had he done? What had he said? Nothing disloyal-that would have been impossible. Had he been falsely denounced? No, the President would not send for such a man. The wrongdoer would simply be picked up by one of the goon squads of Brigadier Khatib's Amn-al-Amm and taken away to be taught a lesson. Seeing his face, General Musuli burst out laughing, his teeth flas.h.i.+ng beneath the heavy black moustache that so many senior officers wore in imitation of Saddam Hussein. ”Don't worry. He has a task for you, a special task.” And he had. Within twenty-four hours Badri had been summoned to the lobby of the officers' quarters, where a long black staff car was waiting for him, with two men from the Amn-al-Kha.s.s, the presidential security detail. He was whisked straight to the Presidential Palace for the most thrilling and momentous meeting of his life. The palace was then situated in the angle of Kindi Street and July 14 Street, near the bridge of the same name, both celebrating the date of the first of the two coups of July 1968 that had brought the Ba'ath Party to power and broken the rule of the generals. Badri was shown into a waiting room and kept there for two hours. He was frisked thoroughly, t

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