The Fist of God

Rahmani thought furiously. This was getting close, amazingly close. The phone rang. He listened for several seconds, then put it down and rose.

“I am summoned. One last thing. How many more intercepts until you can pin it right down? To a block, or even a house?”

“With luck, one. I may not catch him the first time, but at the first intercept I think I can find him. I pray he will send a long message, several seconds on the air. Then I can give you a square one hundred meters by one hundred.”

Rahmani was breathing heavily as he descended to the waiting car.

They came to the meeting with the Rais in two blacked-out buses. The seven ministers came in one, the six generals and the three intelligence chiefs in another. None saw where they were going, and beyond the windshield the driver simply followed the motorcycle.

Only when the bus drew to a halt in a walled courtyard were the nine men in the second bus allowed to emerge. It had been a forty-minute, indirect drive. Rahmani estimated they were in the country about thirty miles from Baghdad. There were no sounds of traffic noise, and the stars above showed the dim outline of a large villa with black-screened windows.

Inside the principal sitting room the seven ministers were already waiting. The generals took assigned places and sat in silence. Guards showed Dr. Ubaidi of Foreign Intelligence, Hassan Rahmani of Counterintelligence, and Omar Khatib of the Secret Police to three seats facing the single large padded chair reserved for the Rais himself.

The man who had sent for them entered a few minutes later. They all rose and were gestured to sit.

For some, it had been over three weeks since they had seen the President. He seemed strained, the bags under his eyes and jowls more pronounced.

Without preamble, Saddam Hussein launched into the business of their meeting. There had been a bombing raid—they all knew about it, even those who before the raid had known nothing of a place called Al Qubai.

The place was so secret that no more than a dozen men in Iraq knew exactly where it was. Yet it had been bombed. None but the highest in the land and a few dedicated technicians had ever visited the place except blindfolded or in sealed transportation, yet it had been bombed.

There was silence in the room, the silence of fear. The generals—Radi of the Infantry, Kadiri of the Armored Corps, Ridha of the Artillery, and Musuli of the Engineers, and the other two, the head of the Republican Guard and the Chief of Staff—stared fixedly at the carpet ahead of them.

Our comrade, Omar Khatib, had interrogated the two British fliers, intoned the Rais. He would now explain what had happened.

No one had stared at the Rais, but now all eyes went to the rake-thin form of Omar Khatib.

The Tormentor kept his gaze on the midsection of the head of state, facing him across the room.

The airmen had talked, he said flatly. They had held nothing back. They had been told by their squadron commander that Allied aircraft had seen trucks, Army trucks, moving into and out of a certain automobile junkyard. From this, the Sons of Dogs had gained the impression that the yard disguised an ammunition dump, specifically a depository for poison gas shells. It was not regarded as high priority and was not thought to have any antiaircraft defenses. So only two planes had been assigned to the mission, with two more above them to mark the target. There had been no protecting aircraft assigned to suppress the triple-A, because it was not thought there was any. They—the pilot and the navigator—knew nothing more than that.

The Rais nodded at General Farouk Ridha. “True or false, Rafeek ?”

“It is normal, Sayid Rais ,” said the man who commanded the artillery and SAM missile sites, “for them to send in first the missile fighters to hit the defenses, then the bombers for the target. They always do that. For a high-priority target, two airplanes only and no support has never happened.”

Saddam mused on the answer, his dark eyes betraying nothing of his thoughts. That was a part of the power he held over these men; they never knew which way he would react.

“Is there any chance, Rafeek Khatib, that these men have hidden things from you, that they know more than they have said?”

“No, Rais. They have been ... persuaded to cooperate completely.”

“Then that is the end of the matter?” asked the Rais quietly. “The raid was just an unfortunate chance?”

Heads nodded round the room. The scream when it came paralyzed them all.

“Wrong! You are all wrong!”

In a second the voice dropped back to a calm whisper, but the fear had been instilled. They all knew that the softness of the voice could precede the most

terrible of revelations, the most savage of penalties.

“There have been no trucks, no Army trucks. An excuse given to the pilots in case they were caught.

There is something more, is there not?”

Most of them were sweating despite the air conditioning. It had always been thus, since the dawn of history, when the tyrant of a tribe called in the witch-finder and the tribe sat and trembled lest he should be the one at whom the juju-stick pointed.

“There is a conspiracy,” whispered the Rais. “There is a traitor. Someone is a traitor, who conspires against me.”