The Fist of God

“I seem to have lost them,” he pleaded.

“Frisk him,” said the sergeant. One of the soldiers moved forward. The hand grenade strapped to the inside of Martin’s left thigh felt like one of the watermelons from his truck.

“Don’t you touch my balls,” said the old Bedou sharply. The soldier stopped. One in the back let out a giggle. The sergeant tried to keep a straight face.

“Well, go on, Zuhair. Frisk him.”

The young soldier Zuhair hesitated, embarrassed. He knew the joke was on him.

“Only my wife is allowed to touch my balls,” said the Bedou. Two of the soldiers let out a guffaw and lowered their rifles. The rest did the same. Zuhair still held back.

“Mind you, it doesn’t do her any good. I’m long past that sort of thing,” said the old man.

It was too much. The patrol roared with laughter. Even the sergeant grinned.

“All right, old man. On your way. And don’t stay out again after dark.”

The Bedou limped off to the corner of the street, scratching under his clothes. At the corner he turned.

The grenade, priming arm sticking clumsily out to one side, skittered across the cobbles and came to rest against the toe-cap of Zuhair. All six stared at it. Then it went off. It was the end of the six soldiers. It was also the end of September.

That night, far away in Tel Aviv, General Kobi Dror of the Mossad sat in his office in the Hadar Dafna building, taking a late-night drink after work with an old friend and colleague, Shlomo Gershon, always known as Sami.

Sami Gershon was head of the Mossad’s Combatants or Komemiute Division, the section responsible for running illegal agents, the dangerous cutting edge of espionage. He had been one of the other two present when his chief had lied to Chip Barber.

“You don’t think we should have told them?” Gershon asked, because the subject had come up again.

Dror swirled his beer in the bottle and took a swig. “Screw them,” he growled. “Let them recruit their own bloody assets.”

As a teenage soldier in the spring of 1967, Dror had crouched under his Patton tank in the desert and waited while four Arab states prepared to settle accounts with Israel once and for all. He still recalled how the outside world had confined itself to muttering, “Tut tut.”

With the rest of his crew, commanded by a twenty-year-old, he had been one of those under Israel Tal who had punched a hole straight through the Mitla Pass and driven the Egyptian Army back to the Suez Canal.

And he recalled how, w

hen Israel had destroyed four armies and four air forces in six days, the same Western media that had wrung its hands at his country’s impending obliteration in May had accused Israel of bully-boy tactics by winning.

From then on, Kobi Dror’s philosophy had been made: Screw them all. He was a sabra, born and raised in Israel, and had none of the breadth of vision nor forbearance of people like David Ben-Gurion.

His political loyalty lay with the far-right Likud Party, with Menachem Begin, who had been in the Irgun, and Itzhak Shamir, formerly of the Stern Gang.

Once, sitting at the back of a classroom, listening to one of his staff lecture the new recruits, he had heard the man use the phrase “friendly intelligence agencies.” He had risen and taken over the class.

“There is no such thing as a friend of Israel, except maybe a diaspora Jew,” he told them. “The world is divided into two: our enemies and neutrals. Our enemies we know how to deal with. As for neutrals, take everything, give nothing. Smile at them, slap them on the back, drink with them, flatter them, thank them for their tipoffs, and tell them nothing.”

“Well, Kobi, let’s hope they never find out,” said Gershon.

“How can they? There’s only eight of us who know. And we’re all in the Office.”

It must have been the beer. He was overlooking someone.

In the spring of 1988 a British businessman called Stuart Harris was attending an industrial fair in Baghdad. He was sales director of a company in Nottingham that made and sold road-grading equipment. The fair was under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of Transport. Like almost all Westerners, he had been staying at the Rashid Hotel on Yafa Street, which had been built mainly for foreigners and was always under surveillance.

On the third day of the exhibition, Harris had returned to his room to find a plain envelope pushed under his door. It had no name on it, just his room number, and the number was correct.

Inside was a single sheet of paper and another completely plain envelope of the airmail type. The slip of paper said in English and in block capitals: “On your return to London pass this envelope unopened to Norman at the Israeli embassy.”

That was all. Stuart Harris had been panic-stricken, terrified. He knew the reputation of Iraq, of its dreaded Secret Police. Whatever was in the plain envelope could get him arrested, tortured, even killed.