The Fist of God

Lest there be any misunderstanding, he read the message slowly and carefully in both Arabic and English into the tape machine before switching the controls to speed-wind and reducing his five-minute message to one and a half seconds.

He transmitted it at twenty minutes after midnight.

Because he knew there was a transmission window between fifteen and thirty minutes after twelve that night, Simon Paxman had not bothered to go to bed. He was playing cards with one of the radio men when the message came in. The second radio operator brought the news from the communications room.

“You’d better come and listen to this now , Simon,” he said.

Although the SIS operation in Riyadh involved a lot more than four men, the running of Jericho was regarded as so secret that only Paxman, the Head of Station Julian Gray, and two radio men were involved. Their three rooms had been virtually sealed off from the rest of the villa.

Simon Paxman listened to the voice on the big tape machine in the radio shack, which was in fact a converted bedroom. Martin spoke in Arabic first, giving the literal handwritten message from Jericho twice, then his own translation twice.

As he listened, Paxman felt a great cold hand moving deep in his stomach. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong. What he was hearing simply could not be. The other two men stood in silence beside him.

“Is it him?” asked Paxman urgently as soon as the message had finished. His first thought was that Martin had been taken and the voice was that of an impostor.

“It’s him—I checked the ossy. There’s no doubt it’s him.”

Speech patterns have varying tones and rhythms, highs and lows, cadences that can be recorded on an oscilloscope that reduces them to a series of lines on a screen, like a heart monitor in a cardiac unit.

Every human voice is slightly different, no matter how good the mimic. Before leaving for Baghdad, Mike Martin’s voice had been recorded on such a machine. Later transmissions out of Baghdad had endured the same fate, in case the slowing-down and speeding-up, together with any distortion by tape machine or satellite transmission, caused distortions.

The voice that came from Baghdad that night checked with the recorded voice. It was Martin speaking and no one else.

Paxman’s second fear was that Martin had been caught, tortured, and turned, that he was now broadcasting under duress. He rejected the idea as very unlikely.

There were preagreed words, a pause, a hesitation, a cough, that would warn the listeners in Riyadh if ever he were not transmitting as a free agent. Besides, his previous broadcast had been only three days earlier.

Brutal the Iraqi Secret Police might be, but they were not quick. And Martin was tough. A man broken and turned at such speed would be shattered, a tortured wreck, and it would show in the speech delivery.

That meant Martin was on the level—the message he had read was precisely what he had received that night from Jericho. Which left more imponderables. Either Jericho was right, mistaken, or lying.

“Get Julian,” Paxman told one of the radio men.

While the man went to fetch the British Head of Station from his bed upstairs, Paxman rang the private line of his American counterpart, Chip Barber.

“Chip, better get your backside over here—fast,” he said.

The CIA man came awake fast. Something in the Englishman’s voice told him this was no time for sleepy banter.

“Problem, ol’ buddy?”

“That’s the way it looks from here,” admitted Paxman.

Barber was across the city and into the SIS house in thirty minutes, sweater and trousers over his pajamas. It was oneA.M.

By then, Paxman had the tape in English and Arabic, plus a transcript in both languages. The two radio men, who had worked for years in the Middle East, were fluent and confirmed Martin’s translation was quite accurate.

“He has to be joking,” breathed Barber when he heard the tape.

Paxman ran through the checks he had already made for authenticity of Martin’s speaking voice.

“Look, Simon,” said Barber, “this is just Jericho reporting what he claims he heard Saddam say this morning—sorry, yesterday morning. Chances are, Saddam’s lying. Let’s face it, he lies like he breathes.”

Lie or not, this was no matter to be dealt with in Riyadh. The local SIS and CIA stations might supply their generals with tactical and even strategic military information from Jericho, but politics went to London and Washington. Barber checked his watch: sevenP.M. in Washington.

“They’ll be mixing their cocktails by now,” he said. “Better make ’em strong, boys. I’ll get this to Langley right away.”

“Cocoa and biscuits in London,” said Paxman. “I’ll have this to Century. Let them sort it out.”