The Fist of God

At twenty-one she was beautiful, with tumbling chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and skin like a European with a permanent golden suntan. On graduation she was assigned to Number 1 Line, London to India—an obvious choice for a girl speaking fluent Hindi.

It was a long, long trip in those days aboard the four-propeller Argonaut. The route was London-Rome-Cairo-Basra-Bahrain-Karachi-Bombay. Then on to Delhi, Calcutta, Colombo, Rangoon, Bangkok, and finally Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Of course, one crew could not do it all, and the first crew stopover was Basra in the south of Iraq, where another crew took over.

It was there in 1951, over a drink at the Port Club, that she met a rather shy young accountant with the Iraq Petroleum Company, then owned and run by the British. His name was Nigel Martin, and he asked her to dinner. She had been warned about wolves—among the passengers, the crew, and during the stopovers. But he seemed nice, so she accepted. When he took her back to the BOAC station house, where the stewardesses were quartered, he held out his hand. She was so surprised, she shook it.

Then she lay awake in the awful heat wondering what it would be like to kiss Nigel Martin.

On her next stopover in Basra, he was there again. Only after they were married did he admit he had been so smitten that he found out through the BOAC Station Officer Alex Reid when she was due next.

That autumn of 1951 they played tennis, swam at the Port Club, and walked through the bazaars of Basra. At his suggestion she took a leave and came with him to Baghdad, where he was based.

She soon realized it was a place where she could settle down. The swarming throngs of brightly colored robes, the sights and smells of the street, the cooking meats by the edge of the Tigris, the myriad little shops selling herbs and spices, gold, and jewels—all reminded her of her native India. When he proposed to her, she accepted at once.

They married in. 1952 at St. George’s Cathedral, the Anglican church off Haifa Street, and although she had no one on her side of the church, many people came from the IPC and the embassy to fill both rows of pews.

It was a good time to live in Baghdad. Life was slow and easy, the boy king Faisal was on the throne with Nuri as Said running the country, and the overwhelming foreign influence was British. This was partly because of the powerful contribution of the IPC to the economy and partly because most of the Army officers were British-taught, but mainly because the entire upper class had been potty-trained by starched English nannies, which always leaves a lasting impression.

In time the Martins had two sons, born in 1953 and 1955. Christened Michael and Terry, they were as unlike as chalk and cheese. In Michael the genes of Miss Indira Bohse came through; he was black-haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned; wags from the British community said he looked more like an Arab. Terry, two years younger, took after his father: short, stocky, pink-skinned, and ginger-haired.

At three in the morning, Major Mike Martin was shaken awake by an orderly.

“There is a message, sayidi .”

It was quite a simple message, but the urgency coding was “blitz,” and the signoff meant it came personally from the Director of Special Forces. It required no answer. It just ordered him back to London on the first available plane.

He handed over his duties to the SAS captain, who was on his first tour with the regiment and was his second-in-command for the training assignment, and raced to the airport in civilian clothes.

The 2:55A.M. for London should have left. Over a hundred passengers snored or grumbled on board as the stewardess brightly announced that the operational reason for the ninety-minute delay would soon be sorted out.

When the doors opened again to admit a single, lean man in jeans, desert boots, shirt, and bomber jacket with a tote bag over one shoulder, a number of those still awake glared at him. The man was shown to an empty seat in business class, made himself comfortable, and within minutes of takeoff tilted back his seat and fell fast asleep.

A businessman next to him who had dined copiously and with much illicit liquid refreshment, then waited two hours in the airport and two more on the plane, fed himself another antacid tablet and glowered

at the relaxed, sleeping figure beside him.

“Bloody Arab,” he muttered, and tried in vain to sleep.

Dawn came over the Gulf two hours later, but the British Airways jet was racing it toward the northwest, landing at Heathrow just before ten local time. Mike Martin came out of the customs hall among the first because he had no baggage in the aircraft hold. There was no one to meet him; he knew there would not be. He also knew where to go.

It was not even dawn in Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince Georges County, where the Patuxent River flows down to join the Chesapeake. On the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as Langley, the lights still burned.

Judge William Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence, rubbed fingertips over tired eyes, rose, and walked to the picture windows. The swath of silver birches that masked his view of the Potomac when they were in full leaf, as they were now, still lay shrouded in darkness. Within an hour the rising sun would bring them back to pale green. It had been another sleepless night. Since the invasion of Kuwait he had been catnapping between calls from the President, the National Security Council, the State Department, and so it seemed, just about anyone else who had his number.

Behind him, as tired as he, sat Bill Stewart, his Deputy Director (Operations), and Chip Barber, head of the Middle East Division.

“So that’s about it?” asked the DCI, as if asking the question again might produce a better answer.

But there was no change. The position was that the President, the NSC, and State were all clamoring for deep-mined hypersecret intelligence from inside the heart of Baghdad, from the innermost councils of Saddam Hussein himself. Was he going to stay in Kuwait? Would he pull out under threat of the United Nations resolutions that were rolling out of the Security Council? Would he buckle in the face of the oil embargo and the trade blockade? What was he thinking? What was he planning? Damn it, where was he anyway?

And the Agency did not know. They had a Head of Station in Baghdad, of course. But the man had been frozen out for weeks past. The Agency man was known to that bastard Rahmani who headed Iraqi Counterintelligence, and it was now plain that what had been fed to the Head of Station for weeks had all been bullshit. His best “sources” were apparently working for Rahmani and had been telling him trash.

Of course, they had the pictures—enough pictures to drown in. The satellites, KH-11 and KH-12, were rolling over Iraq every few minutes taking happy snapshots of everything in the entire country. Analysts were working around the clock identifying what might be a poison gas factory, what might be a nuclear facility—or might be what it claimed to be, a bicycle workshop.

Fine. The analysts of the National Reconnaissance Office, a part-CIA and part-Air Force enterprise, along with the scientists at ENPIC, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, were putting together a picture that would one day be complete. This here is a major command post, this is a SAM

missile site, this is a fighter base. Good, because the pictures tell us so. And one day, maybe, they would all have to be bombed back to the Stone Age. But what else did Saddam have? Hidden away, stashed deep underground?

Years of neglect of Iraq were now bearing fruit. The men who were slumped in their chairs behind Webster were old-time spooks who had made their bones on the Berlin wall when the concrete was not even dry. They went back a long way, before electronics had taken over the business of intelligence-gathering.