The Fist of God

ving America hanging in the breeze. That’s winning.”

“Any hint that he thinks he might get them?”

Martin shrugged.

“He thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He’s gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out, the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right.”

“The man doesn’t make sense,” snapped Laing. “He has the deadline. January fifteenth, not twenty days away. He’s going to be crushed.”

“Unless,” suggested Paxman, “one of the permanent members of the Security Council comes up with a last-minute peace plan to put the deadline on hold.”

Laing looked gloomy.

“Paris or Moscow, or both,” he predicted.

“If it comes to war, does he still think he could win? Beg your pardon, ‘succeed’?” asked Paxman.

“Yes,” said Terry Martin. “But it’s back to what I told you before—American casualties. Don’t forget, Saddam is a back-street gunman. His constituency is not the diplomatic corridors of Cairo and Riyadh.

It’s all those alleys and bazaars crammed with Palestinians and other Arabs who resent America, the backer of Israel. Any man who can leave America bleeding, whatever the damage to his own country, will be the toast of those millions.”

“But he can’t do it,” insisted Laing.

“He thinks he can,” Martin countered. “Look, he’s smart enough to have worked out that in America’s eyes, America cannot lose, must not lose. It is simply not acceptable. Look at Vietnam. The veterans came home, and they were pelted with garbage. For America, terrible casualties at the hands of a despised enemy are a form of loss. Unacceptable loss. Saddam can waste fifty thousand men anytime, anyplace. He doesn’t care. Uncle Sam does. If America takes that kind of loss, she’ll be shaken to the core. Heads have to roll, careers to be smashed, governments to fall. The recriminations and the self-blame would last a generation.”

“He can’t do that,” said Laing again.

“He thinks he can,” repeated Martin.

“It’s the gas weapon,” muttered Paxman.

“Maybe. By the bye, did you ever find out what that phrase on the phone intercept meant?”

Laing glanced across at Paxman. Jericho again. There must be no mention of Jericho.

“No. Nobody we asked had ever heard of it. No one could work it out.”

“It could be important, Steve. Something else—not gas.”

“Terry,” said Laing patiently, “in less than twenty days the Americans, with us, the French, Italians, Saudis, and others, are going to throw at Saddam Hussein the biggest air armada the world has ever seen. Enough firepower to exceed in a further twenty days all the tonnage dropped in the Second World War. The generals down in Riyadh are kind of busy. We really can’t go down there and say ‘Hold everything, guys. We have a phrase in a phone intercept we can’t work out.’ Let’s face it, it was just an excitable man on a phone suggesting that God was on their side.”

“There’s nothing strange in that, Terry,” said Paxman. “People going to war have claimed they had God’s support since time began. That was all it was.”

“The other man told the speaker to shut up and get off the line,” Martin reminded them.

“So he was busy and irritable.”

“He called him the son of a whore.”

“So he didn’t like him much.”

“Maybe.”

“Terry, please, leave it alone. It was just a phrase. It’s the gas weapon. That’s what he’s counting on.

All the rest of your analysis we agree with.”

Martin left first, the two intelligence officers twenty minutes later. Shrugged into their coats, collars up, they went down the sidewalk looking for a taxi.