Part 2 (2/2)

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 sh.e.l.l, 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 b.u.t.terfly, close the box, rubber-band it, walk up, toss the bomb, and walk away. From the moment you twist the b.u.t.terfly, 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 out quite like that. There were in fact several resistance movements in existence, most of them random and uncoordinated. In the s.h.i.+'a district of Rumaithiya, Iraqi soldiers simply disappeared. The s.h.i.+'a Moslems had special reason to loathe the Iraqis, for their coreligionists, the s.h.i.+'a of Iran, had been slaughtered in hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi soldiers who wandered into the rabbit warren of alleys that make up the Rumaithiya district had their throats cut, and their bodies were dumped in the sewers. They were never recovered. Among the Sunnis, the resistance was centered in the mosques, where the Iraqis seldom ventured. Here messages were pa.s.sed, weapons swapped, and attacks planned. The most organized resistance came from the leaders.h.i.+p of Kuwaiti notables, men of education and wealth. Mr. Al-Khalifa became the banker, using his funds to provide food so that the Kuwaitis could eat, and other cargos hidden beneath the food that came in from outside. The organization aimed at six goals, five of them a form of pa.s.sive resistance, and each had its own branch. One was doc.u.mentation; every resister was supplied with perfect doc.u.mentation forged by resisters within the Interior Ministry. A second branch was for intelligence-keeping a stream of information about Iraqi movements heading in the direction of the Coalition headquarters in Riyadh, particularly about Iraqi manpower and weapon strength, coastal fortifications, and missile deployments. A third branch kept the services functioning-water, electricity, fire brigades, and health. When, finally in defeat, Iraq turned on the oil taps and began to destroy the sea itself, Kuwaiti oil engineers told the American fighter-bombers exactly which valves to hit in order to turn off the flow. Community solidarity committees circulated through all the districts, often contacting Europeans and other First World residents still holed up in their flats and keeping them out of the way of the Iraqi trawl nets.

A satellite phone system was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia in the dummy fuel tank of a jeep. It was not encrypted like Martin's, but by keeping it constantly on the move, the Kuwaiti resistance could avoid Iraqi detection and contact Riyadh whenever there was something to pa.s.s. An elderly radio ham worked throughout the occupation, sending seven thousand messages to another ham in Colorado, which were pa.s.sed on to the State Department. And there was the offensive resistance, mainly under the leaders.h.i.+p of a Kuwaiti colonel who had escaped the Ministry of Defense building on the first day. Because he had a son called Fouad, his code name was Abu Fouad, or Father of Fouad. Saddam Hussein had finally given up trying to form a puppet government and appointed his half-brother Ali Ha.s.san Majid as Governor-General. The resistance was not just a game. A small but extremely dirty war developed underground. The AMAM responded by setting up two interrogation centers, at the Kathma Sports Center and the Qadisiyah Stadium. Here the methods of AMAM chief Omar Khatib were imported from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and used extensively. Before the liberation, five hundred Kuwaitis were dead, of whom two hundred fifty were executed, many after prolonged torture. Counterintelligence chief Ha.s.san Rahmani sat at his desk in the Hilton Hotel and read the reports prepared by his on-the-spot staff. He was making a brief visit from his Baghdad duties on September 15. The reports made gloomy reading. There was a steady increase in attacks on Iraqi outposts on lonely roads, guard huts, vehicles, and roadblocks. This was mainly the AMAM's problem-local resistance came under them, and-predictably, in Rahmani's view-that brutal oaf Khatib was making a camel's breakfast out of it. Rahmani had little time for the torture to which his rival in the Iraqi intelligence structure was so devoted. He preferred to rely on patient detective work, deduction, and cunning, even though he had to concede that in Iraq it was terror and nothing else that had kept the Rais in power all these years. He had to admit, with all his education, that the street-wise, devious psychopath from the alleys of Tikrit frightened him. He had tried to persuade his president to let him have charge of internal intelligence in Kuwait, but the answer had been a firm no. It was a question of principle, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz had explained to him. He, Rahmani, was charged to protect the state from espionage and sabotage from foreign sources. The Rais would not concede that Kuwait was a foreign country-it was the nineteenth province of Iraq. So it was Omar Khatib's job to ensure compliance. As he contemplated his sheaf of reports that morning in the Hilton Hotel, Rahmani was rather relieved that he did not have the task. It was a nightmare, and as he had predicted, Saddam Hussein had played his cards consistently wrong. The taking of Western hostages as human s.h.i.+elds against attack was proving a disaster, totally counterproductive. He had missed his chance to roll south and take the Saudi oil fields, forcing King Fahd to the conference table, and now the Americans were pouring into the theater. All attempts to a.s.similate Kuwait were failing, and within a month, probably less, Saudi Arabia would be impregnable with its American s.h.i.+eld along the northern border. Saddam Hussein, he believed, could neither get out of Kuwait without humiliation, nor stay in there if attacked without a bigger one. Yet the mood around the Rais was still one of confidence, as if he were convinced something would turn up. What on earth did the man expect? Rahmani wondered. That Allah himself would lean down from heaven and smash his enemies in the face? Rahmani rose from his desk and walked to the window. He liked to stroll as he thought; it marshaled his brain. He looked down from the window. The once-sparkling marina was now a garbage dump. There was something about the reports on his desk that disturbed him. He went back and scanned them again. Yes, something odd. Some of the attacks on Iraqis were with handguns and rifles; others with bombs made from industrial TNT. But here were others, a constant niggling stream, that clearly indicated that a plastic explosive had been used. Kuwait had never had plastic explosives, least of all Semtex-H. So who was using it, and where did they get it? Then there were radio reports of an encrypted transmitter somewhere out in the desert that moved all the time, coming on air at different times, talking scrambled nonsense for ten or fifteen minutes and then going silent, and always on different bearings. Then there were these reports of a strange Bedou who seemed to wander about at will, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and always a trail of destruction in his wake. Before they died of wounds, two badly injured soldiers had reported seeing the man, tall and confident in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh, one trailing end drawn across his face. Two Kuwaitis under torture had mentioned the legend of the invisible Bedou but claimed they had never actually seen him. Sabaawi's men were trying to persuade the prisoners with even more pain to admit they had. Fools. Of course, they would invent anything to stop the agony.

The more Ha.s.san Rahmani thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had a foreign infiltrator on his hands, definitely part of his authority. He found it hard to believe that there was any Bedou who knew about plastic explosives and encrypted transceivers-if they were from the same man. He might have trained up a few bomb planters, but he also seemed to be carrying out a lot of the attacks himself. It would just not be possible to pick up every Bedou wandering around the city and the desert-that would be the AMAM way, but they would be pulling out fingernails for years and getting nowhere. For Rahmani, the problem resolved itself into three choices: Capture the man during one of his attacks-but that would be haphazard and possibly never happen. Capture one of his Kuwaiti a.s.sociates and trace the man to his lair. Or take him crouched over his transmitter in the desert. Rahmani decided on the last. He would bring in from Iraq two or three of his best radio-detector teams, post them at different points, and try to triangulate on the source of the broadcast. He would also need an Army helicopter on standby, with a team of Special Forces ready to move. As soon as he got back to Baghdad, he would set it in motion.

Ha.s.san Rahmani was not the only man that day in Kuwait who was interested in the Bedou. In a suburban villa miles away from the Hilton, a handsome, moustached young Kuwaiti Army colonel in a white cotton thob sat in an armchair and listened to a friend who had come to him with an interesting snippet. ”I was just sitting in my car at the traffic light, watching nothing in particular, when I noticed this Iraqi Army truck on the opposite side of the intersection. It was parked there, with a group of soldiers around the hood, eating and smoking. Then a young man, one of our own, walked out of a cafe clutching what looked like a tiny box. It was really small. I thought nothing of it until I saw him flick it under the truck. Then he turned the corner and disappeared. The lights changed, but I stayed where I was.

”In five seconds the truck disintegrated. I mean, it just blew apart. The soldiers were all on the ground with their legs off. I've never seen such a small package do so much damage. I tell you, I hung a U and got out of there before the AMAM came along.”

”Plastic,” mused the Army officer. ”What would I not give for some of that. It must have been one of the Bedou's men. Who is that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, anyway? I'd love to meet him.”

”The point is, I recognized the boy.”

”What?” The young colonel leaned forward, his face alight with interest.

”I wouldn't have come all this way just to tell you what you will have heard already. I tell you, I recognized the bomb-thrower. Abu Fouad, I've been buying cigarettes from his father for years.”

Dr. Reinhart, when he addressed the Medusa Committee in London three days later, looked tired. Even though he had relinquished all his other duties at Porton Down, the doc.u.mentation he had taken away with him from the first meeting and the supplementary information that had come pouring in ever since had given him a monstrous task.

”The study is probably not yet complete,” he said, ”but a fairly comprehensive picture emerges.

”First, of course, we know that Saddam Hussein has a large poison-gas-

production capacity, I estimate at over a thousand tons a year. ”During the Iran-Iraq war, some Iranian soldiers who had been ga.s.sed were treated here in Britain, and I was able to examine them. We could recognize phosgene and mustard gas even then. ”The worse news is that I have no doubt that Iraq now has substantial supplies of two far more lethal gases, nerve agents of German invention called Sarin and Tabun. If these were used in the Iran-Iraq war, and I think they were, there would have been no question of treating the victims in British hospitals. They would be dead.” ”How bad are these-er ... agents, Dr. Reinhart?” asked Sir Paul Spruce. ”Sir Paul, do you have a wife?” The urbane mandarin was startled. ”Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.” ”Does Lady Spruce ever use perfume from a spray atomizer?” ”Yes, I do believe I have seen her do that.” ”Have you ever noticed how fine the spray from an atomizer is? How small the droplets?” ”Yes, indeed, and bearing in mind the price of perfume, I'm very glad of it.” It was a good joke. Anyway, Sir Paul liked it. ”Two of those droplets of Sarin or Tabun on your skin, and you're dead,” said the chemist from Porton Down. No one smiled. ”The Iraqi search for nerve gases goes back to 1976. In that year they approached the British company ICI, explaining they wanted to build a pesticide plant to produce four bug-killers-but the materials they asked for caused ICI to turn them down flat. The specifications the Iraqis showed were for corrosion-resistant reactor vessels, pipes, and pumps that convinced ICI that the real end-goal was not chemical pesticides but nerve gas. The deal was refused.” ”Thank G.o.d for that,” said Sir Paul, and made a note. ”But not everyone refused them,” said the former Viennese refugee. ”Always the excuse was that Iraq needed to produce herbicides and pesticides, which of course need poisons.” ”They could not have really wanted to produce these agricultural products?” asked Paxman. ”No chance,” said Reinhart. ”To a professional chemist, the key lies in the quant.i.ties and the types. In 1981 they got a German firm to build them a laboratory with a very special and unusual layout. It was to produce phosphorus pentachloride, the starter chemical for organic phosphorus, which is one of the ingredients of nerve gas. No normal university research laboratory would need to handle such hideously toxic substances. The chemical engineers involved must have known that. ”Further export licenses show orders for thiodiglycol. Mustard gas is made from it when mixed with hydrochloric acid. Thiodiglycol, in small quant.i.ties, may be used also for making the ink for ball-point pens.” ”How much did they buy?” asked Sinclair. ”Five hundred tons.” ”That's a lot of ball-points,” muttered Paxman. ”That was in early 1983,” said Reinhart. ”In the summer their big Samarra poison gas plant went into operation, producing yperite, which is mustard gas. They began using it on the Iranians in December. ”During the first attacks by the Iranian human waves, the Iraqis used a mixture of yellow rain, yperite, and Tabun. By 1985, they had improved the mixture to one of hydrogen cyanide, mustard gas, Tabun, and Sarin, achieving a sixty percent mortality rate among the Iranian infantry.” ”Could we just look at the nerve gases, Doctor?” asked Sinclair. ”That would seem to be the really deadly stuff.” ”It is,” said Dr. Reinhart. ”From 1984, the chemicals for which they were shopping were phosphorus oxychloride, which is an important precursor chemical for Tabun, and two Sarin precursors, trimethyl phosphite and pota.s.sium fluoride. Of the first of those three, they tried to order 150 tons from a Dutch company. That's enough pesticide to kill every tree, shrub, and blade of gra.s.s in the Middle East. The Dutch turned them down, as ICI had, but they still bought two uncontrolled chemicals at that time: dimethylamine for making Tabun, and isopropanol for Sarin.” ”If they were uncontrolled in Europe, why could they not be used for pesticides?” asked Sir Paul. ”Because of the quant.i.ties,” Dr. Reinhart replied, ”and the chemical manufacturing and handling equipment, and the factory layouts. To a skilled chemist or chemical engineer, none of these purchases could be other than for poison gas.” ”Do you know who the main supplier over the years has been, doctor?” asked Sir Paul. ”Oh, yes. There was some input of a scientific nature from the Soviet Union and East Germany in the early days, and some exports from about eight countries, in most cases of small quant.i.ties of uncontrolled chemicals. But eighty percent of the plants, layouts, machinery, special handling equipment, chemicals, technology, and know-how came from West Germany.” ”Actually,” drawled Sinclair, ”we've been protesting to Bonn for years. They always trashed the protests. Doctor, can you identify the chemical gas plants on those photos we gave you?” ”Yes, of course. Some factories are identified in the paperwork. Others you can see with a magnifying gla.s.s.” The chemist spread five large aerial photos on the table. ”I do not know the Arab names, but these numbers identify the photographs for you, do they not?” ”Yes. You just point out the buildings,” said Sinclair. ”Here, the whole complex of seventeen buildings ... here, this big single plant-you see the air scrubber unit? And here, this one ... and this whole complex of eight buildings ... and this one.” Sinclair studied a list from his attache case. He nodded grimly. ”As we thought. Al Qaim, Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Salman Pak, and Samarra. Doctor, I'm very very grateful to you. Our guys in the States figured out exactly the same. They'll all be targeted for the first wave of attacks.” When the meeting broke up Sinclair, with Simon Paxman and Terry Martin, strolled up to Piccadilly and had a coffee at Richoux. ”I don't know about you guys,” said Sinclair as he stirred his cappuccino, ”but for us the bottom line is the gas threat. General Schwarzkopf is convinced already. That's what he calls the nightmare scenario: ma.s.s gas attacks, a rain of airbursts over all our troops. If they go, they'll go in masks and gas capes, head to foot. The good news is, this gas doesn't live long once it's exposed to air. It touches the desert, it's dead. Terry, you don't look convinced.” ”This rain of airbursts,” said Martin. ”How's Saddam supposed to launch them?” Sinclair shrugged. ”Artillery barrage, I guess. That's what he did against the Iranians.”

”You're not going to pulp his artillery? It's only got a range of thirty kilometers. Must be out there in the desert somewhere.” ”Sure,” said the American, ”we have the technology to locate every gun and tank out there, despite the digging-in and the camouflage.” ”So if his guns are broken, how else does Saddam launch the gas rain?” ”Fighter-bombers, I guess.” ”But you'll have destroyed them too, by the time the ground forces move,” Martin pointed out. ”Saddam will have nothing left flying.” ”Okay, so Scud missiles-whatever. That's what he'll try. And we'll waste them one by one. Sorry, guys, gotta go.” ”What are you getting at, Terry?” asked Paxman when the CIA man had gone. Terry Martin sighed. ”Oh, I don't know. It's just that Saddam and his planners will know all that. They won't underestimate American air power. Simon, can you get me all Saddam's speeches over the past six months? In Arabic-must be in Arabic.” ”Yes, I suppose so. GCHQ in Cheltenham will have them, or the BBC Arabic Service. On tape or transcript?” ”Tape if possible.” For three days Terry Martin listened to the guttural, haranguing voice out of Baghdad. He played and replayed the tapes and could not get rid of the nagging worry that the Iraqi despot was making the wrong noises for a man in such deep trouble. Either he did not know or recognize the depth of his trouble, or he knew something that his enemies did not. On September 21, Saddam Hussein made a new speech, or rather a statement from the Revolutionary Command Council, that used his own particular vocabulary. In the statement he declared there was not the slightest chance of any Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, and that any attempt to eject Iraq would lead to ”the mother of all battles.”

That was how it had been translated. The media had loved it, and the words became quite a catchphrase.

Dr. Martin studied the text and then called Simon Paxman.

”I've been looking at the vernacular of the Upper Tigris valley,” he said.

”Good G.o.d, what a hobby,” replied Paxman.

”The point is, the phrase he used, 'the mother of all battles.' ”

”Yes, what about it?”

”The word translated as 'battle.' Where he comes from, it also means 'casualty' or 'bloodbath.' ”

There was silence down the line for a while.

”Don't worry about it.”

But despite that, Terry Martin did.

Chapter 7.

The tobacconist's son was frightened, and so was his father. ”For pity's sake, tell them what you know, my son,” he begged the boy. The two-man delegation from the Kuwait Resistance Committee had been perfectly polite when they introduced themselves to the tobacconist, but were quite insistent that they wished his son to be frank and truthful with them.

The shopkeeper, though he knew the visitors had given him pseudonyms instead of their real names, had enough wit to realize he was talking to powerful and influential members of his own people. Worse, it had come as a total surprise to him to learn that his son was involved in active resistance at all. Worst of all, he had just learned that his offspring was not even with the official Kuwaiti resistance but had been seen tossing a bomb under an Iraqi truck at the behest of some strange bandit of whom he had never heard. It was enough to give any father a heart attack. The four of them sat in the drawing room of the tobacconist's comfortable house in Keifan while one of the visitors explained that they had nothing against the Bedou but simply wished to contact him so that they could collaborate. So the boy explained what had happened from the moment his friend had been pulled down behind a pile of rubble at the moment he was about to fire at a speeding Iraqi truck. The men listened in silence, only the questioner occasionally interjecting with another query. It was the one who said nothing, the one in dark gla.s.ses, who was Abu Fouad. The questioner was particularly interested in the house where the group met with the Bedou. The boy gave the address, then added: ”I do not think there is much point in going there. He is extremely watchful. One of us went there once to try and talk to him, but the place was locked. We do not think he lives there, but he knew we had been there. He told us never to do that again. If it ever happened, he said, he would break contact, and we would never see him again.” Sitting in his corner, Abu Fouad nodded in approval. Unlike the others, he was a trained soldier, and he thought he recognized the hand of another trained man. ”When will you meet him next?” he asked quietly.

There was a possibility that the boy could pa.s.s a message, an invitation to a parley. ”Nowadays, he contacts one of us. The contacted one brings the rest. It may take some time.” The two Kuwaitis left. They had descriptions of two vehicles: a battered pickup apparently in the disguise of a market gardener bringing his fruit into town from the countryside, and a powerful four-wheel-drive for journeys into the desert. Abu Fouad ran the numbers of both vehicles past a friend in the Ministry of Transportation, but the trace ran out. Both numbers were fictional. The only other lead was through the ident.i.ty cards that the man would have to carry to pa.s.s those ubiquitous Iraqi roadblocks and checkpoints. Through his committee he contacted a civil servant in the Interior Ministry. He was lucky. The man recalled running off a phony ident.i.ty card for a market gardener from Jahra. It was a favor he had done for the millionaire Ahmed Al-Khalifa six weeks earlier. Abu Fouad was elated and intrigued. The merchant was an influential and respected figure in the movement. But it had always been thought that he was strictly confined to the financial, noncombatant side of things. What on earth was he doing as the patron of the mysterious and lethal Bedou?

South of the Kuwaiti border, the incoming tide of American weaponry rolled on. As the last week of September slid by, General Norman Schwarzkopf, buried in the rabbit warren of secret chambers two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry on Old Airport Road in Riyadh, finally realized that he had enough strength at last to declare Saudi Arabia safe from Iraqi attack. In the air, General Charles ”Chuck” Horner had built an umbrella of constantly patrolling steel, a fast-moving and amply provisioned armada of air-superiority fighters, ground-attack fighter-bombers, air-to-air refueling tankers, heavy bombers, and tank-busting Thunderbolts, enough to destroy the incoming Iraqis on the ground and in the air. He had airborne technology that could and did cover by radar every square inch of Iraq, that could sense every movement of heavy metal rolling on the roads, moving through the desert, or trying to take to the air, that could listen to every Iraqi conversation on the airwaves and pinpoint any source of heat. On the ground, Norman Schwarzkopf knew he now had enough mechanized units, light and heavy armor, artillery, and infantry to receive any Iraqi column, hold it, surround it, and liquidate it. In the last week of September, in conditions of such total secrecy that not even its Allies were told, the United States made its plans to move from defensive role to offensive. The a.s.sault on Iraq was planned, even though the United Nations mandate was still limited to securing the safety of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and only that. But he also had problems. One was that the number of Iraqi troops, guns, and tanks deployed against him was double the number when he had arrived in Riyadh six weeks earlier. Another problem was that he would need double the amount of Coalition forces to liberate Kuwait than that needed to secure Saudi Arabia. Norman Schwarzkopf was a man who took George Patton's dictum very seriously: One dead American or Brit or Frenchie or any other Coalition soldier or airman was one too many. Before he would go in, he would want two things: twice the amount of force he presently had, and an air a.s.sault guaranteed to ”degrade” by fifty percent the strength of the Iraqi forces arrayed north of the border. That meant more time, more equipment, more stores, more guns, more tanks, more troops, more airplanes, more fuel, more food, and a lot more money. Then he told the stunned armchair Napoleons on Capitol Hill that if they wanted a victory, they had better let him have it all. Actually, it was the more urbane Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who pa.s.sed the message on, but he softened the language a bit. Politicians love to play the games of soldiers, but they hate to be addressed in the language of soldiers. So the planning in that last week of September was utterly secret. As it turned out, it was just as well. The United Nations, leaking peace plans at every seam, would wait until November 29 before giving the go-ahead to the Coalition to use all necessary force to evict Iraq from Kuwait unless she quit by January 15. Had planning started at the end of November, it could never have been completed in time.

Ahmed Al-Khalifa was deeply embarra.s.sed. He knew Abu Fouad, of course, who and what he was. Further, he sympathized with his request. But he had given his word, he explained, and he could not go back on it. Not even to his fellow-Kuwaiti and fellow-resister did he reveal that the Bedou was in fact a British officer. But he did agree to leave a message for the Bedou in a place he knew the man would find it sooner or later. The following morning he left a letter, with his personal recommendation urging the Bedou to agree to meet Abu Fouad, under the marble tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery.

There were six soldiers in the group, headed by a sergeant, and when the Bedou came around the corner, they were as surprised as he. Mike Martin had parked his small truck in the lock-up garage and was making his way across the city on foot toward the villa he had chosen for that night. He was tired, and unusually, his alertness was blunted. When he saw the Iraqis and knew they had seen him, he cursed himself. In his job, men can die for a moment's lack of alertness. It was well after curfew, and though he was quite used to moving through the city when it was deserted of law-abiding citizens and only the Iraqi patrols were on the prowl, he made a point of moving through the ill-lit side streets, across the darkened patches of waste ground, and down the black alleys, just as the Iraqis made a point of sticking to the main highways and intersections. That way, they never troubled each other. But following Ha.s.san Rahmani's return to Baghdad and his vitriolic report on the uselessness of the Popular Army, some changes were taking place. The Green Berets of the Iraqi Special Forces had begun to appear. Though not cla.s.sed with the elite Republican Guard, the Green Berets were at least more disciplined than the rabble of conscripts called the Popular Army. It was six of these who stood quietly by their truck at a road junction where normally there would have been no Iraqis. Martin just had time to lean heavily on the stick he carried with him and adopt the posture of an old man. It was a good posture, for in the Arab culture the old are given respect or at least, compa.s.sion. ”Hey, you,” shouted the sergeant. ”Come over here.”

There were four a.s.sault rifles trained on the lone figure in the checkered keffiyeh. The old man paused, then hobbled forward.”What are you doing out at this hour, Bedou?””Just an old man trying to get to his home before the curfew, sayidi,” the man whined.”It's past the hour of curfew, fool! Two hours past.”The old man shook his head in bewilderment.”I didn't know, sayidi. I have no watch.”In the Middle East watches are not indispensable, just highly prized, a sign of prosperity. Iraqi soldiers arriving in Kuwait soon acquired them-they just took them. But the word Bedouin comes from bidun, meaning ”without.”The sergeant grunted. The excuse was possible.”Papers,” he said.The old man used his spare hand to pat his soiled robe.”I seem to have lost them,” he pleaded.”Frisk him,” said the sergeant. One of the soldiers moved forward. The hand grenade strapped to the inside of Martin's left thigh felt like one of the watermelons from his truck.”Don't you touch my b.a.l.l.s,” said the old Bedou sharply. The soldier stopped. One in the back let out a giggle. The sergeant tried to keep a straight face.”Well, go on, Zuhair. Frisk him.”The young soldier Zuhair hesitated, embarra.s.sed. He knew the joke was on him.”Only my wife is allowed to touch my b.a.l.l.s,” said the Bedou. Two of the soldiers let out a guffaw and lowered their rifles. The rest did the same. Zuhair still held back.”Mind you, it doesn't do her any good. I'm long past that sort of thing,” said the old man. It was too much. The patrol roared with laughter. Even the sergeant grinned. ”All right, old man. On your way. And don't stay out again after dark.” The Bedou limped off to the corner of the street, scratching under his clothes. At the corner he turned. The grenade, priming arm sticking clumsily out to one side, skittered across the cobbles and came to rest against the toe-cap of Zuhair. All six stared at it. Then it went off. It was the end of the six soldiers. It was also the end of September.

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