The Fist of God

“Under your seat,” he said. “Don’t get out of the jeep, but get them on—fast.”

The Iraqi wore the dark green uniform of his country. The rolled clothes beneath his seat were in the light tan of a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. He quickly exchanged trousers, jacket, and beret.

Just before the ring of Apaches on the tarmac, the jeep peeled away into the desert, skirted the airstrip, and drove on south. On the far side of Safwan, the vehicle regained the main road to Kuwait, twenty miles away.

The U.S. tanks were on every side, facing outward. Their job was to forbid the penetration of any infiltrators. Their commanders, atop their turrets, watched one of their own jeeps bearing two of their own colonels and a Saudi officer drive out of the perimeter and away from the protected zone, so it did not concern them.

It took the jeep almost an hour to reach the Kuwait airport, then a devastated wreck, gutted by the Iraqis and covered by a black pall of smoke from the oil field fires blazing all over the emirate. The journey took so long because, to avoid the carnage of the Mutla Ridge road, it had diverted in a big sweep through the desert west of the city.

Five miles short of the airport, the G2 colonel took a hand-communicator from the glove compartment and keyed in a series of bleeps . Over the airport a single airplane began its approach.

The makeshift airport control tower was a trailer manned by Americans. The incoming aircraft was a British Aerospace HS-125. Not only that, it was the personal airplane of the British Commander, General de la Billière. It must have been; it had all the right markings and the right call-sign. The air traffic controller cleared it to land.

The HS-125 did not taxi to the wreckage of the airport building but to a distant dispersal point, where it made rendezvous with an American jeep. The door opened, the ladder came down, and three men boarded the twin-jet.

“Granby One, clearance for takeoff,” the traffic controller heard. He was handling an incoming Canadian Hercules with medicines for the hospital on board.

“Hold, Granby One. ... What is your flight plan?”

He meant: That was damn fast—where the hell do you think you’re going?

“Sorry, Kuwait Tower.” The voice was clipped and precise, pure Royal Air Force. The controller had heard the RAF before, and they all sounded the same—preppy.

“Kuwait Tower, we’ve just taken on board a colonel of the Saudi Special Forces. Feeling very sick.

One of the staff of Prince Khaled. General Schwarzkopf asked for his immediate evacuation, so Sir Peter offered his-own plane. Clearance takeoff, please, old boy.”

In two breaths the British pilot had mentioned one general, one prince, and one knight of the realm. The controller was a master sergeant, and good at his job. He had a fine career in the United States Air Force. Refusing to evacuate a sick Saudi colonel on the staff of a prince at the request of a general in the plane of the British commander might not do that career any good.

“Granby One, clear takeoff,” he said.

The HS-125 lifted away from Kuwait, but instead of heading for Riyadh, which has one of the finest hospitals in the Middle East, it set course due west along the kingdom’s northern border.

The ever-alert AWACS saw it and called up, asking for its destination. This time the pukka British voice came back explaining that they were flying to the British base at Akrotiri in Cyprus to evacuate back home a close friend and fellow officer of General de la Billière who had been badly wounded by a land mine. The mission commander in the AWACS knew nothing of this, but wondered how exactly he should object. Have it shot down?

Fifteen minutes later, the HS-125 left Saudi air space and crossed the border of Jordan.

The Iraqi sitting in the back of the executive jet knew nothing of all this but was impressed by the efficiency of the British and Americans. He had been dubious on receiving the last message from his paymasters in the West, but on reflection he agreed it would be wise to quit now rather than wait for later and have to do it on his own, without help. The plan outlined to him in that message had worked like a dream.

One of the two pilots in RAF tropical uniforms came back from the flight deck and muttered in English to the American G2 colonel, who grinned.

“Welcome to freedom, Brigadier,” he said in Arabic to his guest. “We are out of Saudi air space. Soon we’ll have you in an airliner to America. By the way, I have something for you.”

He withdrew a slip of paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the Iraqi, who read it with great pleasure. It was a simple total: the sum lodged in his bank account in Vienna, now over $10 million.

The Green Beret reached into a locker and produced several glasses and a collection of miniatures of Scotch. He poured one bottle into each glass and passed them around.

“Well, my friend, to retirement and prosperity.”

He drank; the other American drank. The Iraqi smiled and drank.

“Have a rest,” said the G2 colonel in Arabic. “We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

After that, they left him alone. He leaned his head back onto the cushion of his seat and let his mind drift back over the past twenty weeks mat had made his fortune.

He had taken great risks, but they had paid off. He recalled the day he had sat in that conference room in the Presidential Palace and heard the Rais announce that at last Iraq possessed, in the nick of time, her own nuclear bomb. That had come as a genuine shock, as had the sudden cut-off of all communications after he had told the Americans.

Then they had suddenly come back, more insistent than ever, demanding to know where the device was stored.