Part 2 (1/2)

”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 you are frisked, how do you explain this?” He made the three who had written down the address burn their slips of paper. ”How well do you know your city?” ”Pretty well,” said the oldest of them, the twenty-five-year-old bank clerk. ”Not good enough. Buy maps tomorrow, street maps. Study as if for your final exams. Learn every street and alley, every square and garden, every boulevard and lane, every major public building, every mosque and courtyard. You know the street signs are coming down?” They nodded. Within fifteen days of the invasion, after recovering from their shock, the Kuwaitis were beginning a form of pa.s.sive resistance, of civil disobedience. It was spontaneous and uncoordinated. One of the moves was the ripping down of street signs. Kuwait is a complicated city to start with; deprived of street signs, it became a maze. Iraqi patrols were already becoming comprehensively lost. For the Secret Police, finding a suspect's address was a nightmare. At main intersections, sign posts were being ripped up in the night or turned around. That first night, Martin gave them two hours on basic security. Always have a cover story that checks out, for any journey and any rendezvous. Never carry incriminating paper. Always treat Iraqi soldiers with respect verging on deference. Confide in no one. ”From now on you are two people. One is the original you, the one everyone knows, the student, the clerk. He is polite, attentive, law-abiding, innocent, harmless. The Iraqis will leave him alone because he does not threaten them. He never insults their country, their flag, or their leader. He never comes to the attention of the AMAM. He stays alive and free. Only on a special occasion, on a mission, does the other person appear. He will become skilled and dangerous and still stay alive.” He taught them about security. To attend a meeting at a rendezvous, turn up early, park well away. Go into the shadows. Watch for twenty minutes. Look at the surrounding houses. Check for heads on the roof, the waiting ambush party. Be alert for the scuff of a soldier's boot on gravel, the glow of a cigarette, the clink of metal on metal. When they still had time to get home before the curfew, he dismissed them. They were disappointed. ”What about the invaders? When do we start killing them?”

”When you know how.” ”Is there nothing we can do?” ”When the Iraqis move about, how do they do it? Do they march?” ”No, they use trucks, vans, jeeps, stolen cars,” said the law student. ”Which have petrol caps,” said the Bedou, ”which come off with a quick twist. Sugar lumps-twenty lumps per petrol tank. It dissolves in the petrol, pa.s.ses through the carburetor, and turns to hard caramel in the heat of the engine. It destroys the engine. Be careful not to be caught. Work in pairs and after dark. One keeps watch, the other slips in the sugar. Replace the petrol cap. It takes ten seconds. ”A piece of plywood, four inches by four, with four sharpened steel nails through it. Drop it down under your thob till it slips out by your feet. Nudge it with your toe under the leading edge of the tire of a stationary vehicle. ”There are rats in Kuwait, so there are shops that sell rat poison. Buy the white, strychnine-based kind. Buy dough from a baker. Mix in the poison, using rubber gloves, then destroy the gloves. Bake up the bread in the kitchen oven, but only, when you are alone in the house.” The students stared open-mouthed. ”We have to give it to the Iraqis?” ”No, you carry the loaves in open baskets on scooters, or in the trunks of cars. They will stop you at roadblocks and steal it. We meet here again in six days.” Four days later, Iraqi trucks began to break down. Some were towed away and others abandoned, six trucks and four jeeps. The mechanics found out why but could not discover when or by whom. Tires began to blow out and the plywood squares were handed over to the Secret Police, who fumed and beat up several Kuwaitis seized at random on the streets.

Hospital wards began to fill with sick soldiers, all with vomiting and stomach pain. As they were hardly ever given food rations by their own army and lived hand-to-mouth at their roadblocks and in their stone-slab cantonments up and down the streets, it was a.s.sumed they had been drinking polluted water.

Then at the Amiri hospital in Dasman, a Kuwaiti lab technician ran an a.n.a.lysis of a sample of vomit from one of the Iraqis. He approached his departmental chief in great perplexity.

”He's been eating rat poison, professor. But he says he only had bread for three days, and some fruit.”

The professor was puzzled.

”Iraq Army bread?”

”No, they didn't deliver any for some days. He took it from a pa.s.sing Kuwaiti baker's boy.”

”Where are your samples?”

”On the bench, in the lab. I thought it best to see you first.”

”Quite right. You have done well. Destroy them. You have seen nothing, you understand?”

The professor walked back into his office shaking his head. Rat poison. Who the h.e.l.l had thought of that?

The Medusa Committee met again on August 30, because the bacteriologist from Porton Down felt he had discovered all he could at that point about Iraq's germ warfare program, such as it was or appeared to be.

”I'm afraid we are looking at somewhat slim pickings,” Dr. Bryant told his listeners. ”The main reason is that the study of bacteriology can quite properly be carried out at any forensic or veterinary

laboratory using the same equipment that you would find in any chemical lab and that won't show up on export permits. ”You see, the overwhelming majority of the product is for the benefit of mankind, for the curing of diseases, not the spreading of them. So nothing could be more natural than for a developing country to want to study bilharzia, beri-beri, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, or hepat.i.tis. These are human diseases. There is another range of animal diseases that the veterinary colleges might quite properly want to study.” ”So there's virtually no way of establis.h.i.+ng whether Iraq today has a germ-bomb facility or not?” asked Sinclair of the CIA. ”Virtually not,” said Bryant. ”There's a record to show that way back in 1974, when Saddam Hussein was not on the throne, so to speak-” ”He was vice-president, then, and the power behind the throne,” said Terry Martin. Bryant was fl.u.s.tered. ”Well, whatever. Iraq signed a contract with the Inst.i.tut Merieux in Paris to build them a bacteriological research project. It was supposed to be for veterinary research into animal diseases, and it may have been.” ”What about the stories of anthrax cultures for use against humans?” the American asked. ”Well, it's possible. Anthrax is a particularly virulent disease. It mainly affects cattle and other livestock, but it can infect humans if they handle or ingest products from infected sources. You may recall the British government experimented with anthrax on the Hebridean island of Grainard during the Second World War. It's still out of bounds.” ”That bad, eh? Where would he get this stuff?” ”That's the point, Mr. Sinclair. You'd hardly go to a reputable European or American laboratory and say 'Can I have some nice anthrax cultures because I want to throw them at people?' Anyway, he wouldn't need to. There are diseased cattle all over the Third World. One would only have to note an outbreak and buy a couple of diseased carca.s.ses. But it wouldn't show up on government paperwork.” ”So he could have cultures of this disease for use in bombs or sh.e.l.ls, but we don't know. Is that the position?” asked Sir Paul Spruce. His rolled-gold pen was poised above his note pad. ”That's about it,” said Bryant. ”But that's the bad news. The better news is, I doubt if it would work against an advancing army. I suppose that if you had an army advancing against you and you were ruthless enough, you'd want to stop them in their tracks.” ”That's about the shape of it,” said Sinclair. ”Well, anthrax wouldn't do that. It would impregnate the soil if dropped from a series of air bursts above and ahead of the army. Anything growing from that soil-gra.s.s, fruit, vegetables-would be infected. Any beast feeding on the gra.s.s would succ.u.mb. Anyone eating the meat, drinking the milk, or handling the hide of any such beast would catch it. But the desert is not a good vehicle for such spore cultures. Presumably our soldiers will be eating prepacked meals and drinking bottled water?” ”Yep, they are already,” said Sinclair. ”Then anthrax wouldn't have much effect, unless they breathed the spores in. The disease has to enter humans by ingestion into the lungs or the food pa.s.sages. Bearing in mind the gas hazard, I suspect they will be wearing gas masks anyway.” ”We plan on it, yes,” replied Sinclair. ”So do we,” added Sir Paul. ”Then I don't really see why anthrax,” said Bryant. ”It wouldn't stop the soldiers in their tracks, like a variety of gases, and those who did catch it could be cured with powerful antibiotics. There is an incubation period, you see. The soldiers could win the war and then fall sick. Frankly, it's a terrorist weapon rather than a military one. Now, if you dropped a vial of anthrax concentrate in the water supply on which a city depended, you might start a catastrophic epidemic that would overwhelm the medical services, But if you're going to spray something on fighting men in a desert, I'd choose one of the various nerve gases instead. Invisible and fast.” ”So no indication, if Saddam has a germ warfare lab, where it might be?” asked Sir Paul Spruce. ”Frankly, I'd check with all the West's veterinary inst.i.tutes and colleges. See if there have been any visiting professors.h.i.+ps or delegations to Iraq over the past ten years. Ask those who went whether there was any facility that was absolutely off-limits to them and surrounded by quarantine precautions. If there was, that will be it,” said Bryant. Sinclair and Paxman wrote furiously. Another job for the checkers. ”Failing that,” concluded Bryant, ”you could try human intelligence. An Iraqi scientist in this field who has quit and settled in the West. Researchers in bacteriology tend to be thin on the ground, quite a tight group-like a village, really. We usually know what's going on in our own countries, even in a dictators.h.i.+p like Iraq. Such a man might have heard, if Saddam has got this facility, where he put it.” ”Well, I'm sure we are deeply grateful, Dr. Bryant,” said Sir Paul as they rose. ”More work for our governments' detectives, eh, Mr. Sinclair? I have heard that our other colleague at Porton Down, Dr. Reinhart, will be able to give us his deductions on the matter of poison gases in about two weeks. I shall of course stay in touch, gentlemen.

Thank you for your attendance.”

The group in the desert lay quietly watching dawn steal across the sand dunes. The youngsters had not realized when they went to the house of the Bedou the previous evening that they would be away all night. They had thought they would get another lecture. They had brought no warm clothing, and nights in the desert are bitter, even at the end of August. They s.h.i.+vered and wondered how they would explain their absence to their distraught parents. Caught by the curfew? Then why not telephone? Out of order ... it would have to do. Three of the five wondered if they had made the right choice after all, but it was too late to go back now. The Bedou had simply told them it was time they saw some action and had led them from the house to a rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle parked two streets away. They had been out of town and off the road into the flat, hard desert before curfew. Since entering the desert, they had seen no one. They had driven south for twenty miles across the sand until they intercepted a narrow road that they suspected ran from the Manageesh oil field to their west toward the Outer Motorway in the east. All the oil fields, they knew, were garrisoned by Iraqis and the main highways were infested with patrols. Somewhere to their south sixteen divisions of Army and Republican Guard were dug in, facing Saudi Arabia and the growing tide of Americans pouring in. They felt nervous. Three of the group lay in the sand beside the Bedou, watching the road in the growing light. It was quite narrow. Approaching vehicles would have to swerve to the graveled edge to pa.s.s each other. Extending halfway across the road was a plank studded with nails. The Bedou had taken it from his truck and laid it there, covering it with a blanket made from old Hessian sacks. He had made them scoop sand over the blanket until it looked just like a small drift of sand blown in from the desert by the wind. The other two pupils, the bank clerk and the law student, were spotters. Each lay on a sand dune a hundred yards up and down the road looking for approaching vehicles. They had been told that if the vehicle was a large Iraqi truck or were several in number, they should wave in a certain way. Just after six, the law student waved. His signal meant ”Too much to handle.” The Bedou pulled at the fis.h.i.+ng line he held in his hand. The plank slithered off the road. Thirty seconds later, two trucks crammed with Iraqi soldiers went by unharmed. The Bedou ran to the road and replaced the plank, the sacks, and the sand. Then minutes later, the bank clerk waved. It was the right signal. From the direction of the highway a staff car came bowling down the road toward the oil field. The driver never thought to swerve to avoid the bar of sand but still only caught the nails with one front wheel. It was enough. The tire blew out, the blanket wrapped around the wheel and the car swerved violently. The driver caught the swerve in time and steadied the car, and it rolled to a stop half on and half off the road. The side that was off the road bogged down. The driver sprang out of the front and two officers emerged from the back, a major and a junior lieutenant. They shouted at the driver, who shrugged and whined, pointing at the wheel. The jack would never get under it-the car was at a crazy angle. To his stunned pupils the Bedou muttered, ”Stay here,” rose, and walked down the sand to the road. He had a Bedouin camel blanket over his right shoulder, covering his right arm. He smiled broadly and hailed the major. ”Salaam aleikhem, Sayid Major. I see you have a problem. Perhaps I can help. My people are just a short distance away.” The major reached for his pistol, then relaxed. He glowered and nodded. ”Aleikhem salaam, Bedou. This sp.a.w.n of a camel has driven my car off the road.” ”It will have to be pulled back, sayidi. I have many brothers.” The distance had closed to eight feet when the Bedou's arm came up. He fired in the SAS fas.h.i.+on, two round bursts, pause, two rounds, pause ... The major was. .h.i.t in the heart at a range of eight feet. A slight move of the AK to the right caught the lieutenant in the breastbone, causing him to fall on the driver, who was rising from his tattered front wheel. When the man straightened, he was just in time to die from the third pair of bullets in the chest. The noise of the firing seemed to echo in the dunes, but the desert and the road were empty. He summoned the three terrified students from their hiding places. ”Put the bodies back in the car-the driver behind the wheel, the officers in the back,” he told the two males. To the girl he gave a short screwdriver, its blade honed to a needle point. ”Stab the petrol tank three times.” He looked to his spotters. They signaled nothing was coming. He told the girl to take her handkerchief, wrap it around a stone, knot it, and soak it in petrol. When the three bodies were back in the car, he lit the soaking handkerchief and tossed it into the pool of petrol spurting from the tank. ”Now, move.” They needed no further bidding, running through the sand dunes to where he had parked the four-wheel-drive. Only the Bedou thought to pick up the plank and bring it with him. As he turned into the dunes, the main body of petrol in the burning car caught and fireballed. The staff car disappeared in flames.

They drove back toward Kuwait in awed silence. Two of the five were with him in the front, the other three behind.

”Did you see?” asked Martin at last. ”Did you watch?”

”Yes, Bedou.”

”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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 pinp.r.i.c.ks 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 ma.s.s. ”Now when you twist the b.u.t.terfly 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?”