The Fist of God

Kuwait, after all, had been a fat pigeon ready for the plucking. But in six weeks, the pigeon had begun to peck and scratch. Over a hundred Iraqi soldiers and eight officers had either disappeared or been found dead. The disappearances could not all be explained by desertions. For the first time, the occupation forces were experiencing fear.

Officers no longer traveled in a single staff car but insisted on a truckload of escorting troops.

Headquarters buildings had to be guarded night and day, to the point where Iraqi officers had taken to firing over the heads of their sleeping sentries to wake them up.

The nights had become periods of no-go for anything less than a substantial troop movement. The roadblock teams huddled inside their redoubts when darkness fell. And still the mines went off, the vehicles burst into flame or seized up with ruined engines, the grenades were thrown, and the soldiers disappeared with cut throats into sewers or garbage dumps.

The escalating resistance had forced the High Command to replace the Popular Army with the Special Forces, good fighting troops who should have been at the front line in case the Americans came. Early October for Kuwait was not, to echo Churchill’s phrase, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.

Martin had no means of replying to Al-Khalifa’s message when he read it in the graveyard, so it was not until the following day that he deposited his answer.

He agreed to meet, he said, but on his own terms. To have the advantage of darkness but to avoid the curfew at tenP.M. , he called for a meeting at half past seven. He gave exact directions as to where Abu Fouad should park his car and the small grove of trees where he would meet. The place he indicated was in the district of Abrak Kheitan, close to the main highway from the city to the now shattered and unused airport.

Martin knew it to be an area of traditional stone-built houses with flat roofs. On one of those roofs he would be waiting for two hours before the rendezvous to see if the Kuwaiti officer was being followed and if so by whom: his own bodyguards, or the Iraqis. In a hostile environment, the SAS officer was still at large and in combat because he took no chances, none at all.

He knew nothing of Abu Fouad’s concept of security and was not prepared to assume it was brilliant.

He established the meeting for the evening of the seventh and left his reply beneath the marble slab.

Ahmed Al-Khalifa retrieved it on the fourth.

* * *

Dr. John Hipwell would never have been taken during a casual meeting for a nuclear physicist, let alone one of those scientists who spent his working days behind the massive security of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston designing plutonium warheads for the soon-to-be-fitted Trident missiles.

A passing observer would have assumed he was a bluff Home Counties farmer, more at home leaning wisely over a pen of fat lambs at the local market than supervising the cladding of lethal disks of plutonium in pure gold.

Although the weather was still mild when Hipwell reappeared before the Medusa Committee, he wore, as in August, his square-patterned shirt, wool tie, and tweed jacket. Without waiting to be asked, he used his big red hands to fill and tamp a briar pipe with shag tobacco before starting into his report. Sir Paul Spruce twitched his pointed nose in distaste and gestured for the air conditioning to be raised a notch.

“Well, gentlemen, the good news is that our friend Mr. Saddam Hussein does not have, an atomic bomb at his disposal. Not yet, not by a long chalk,” said Dr. Hipwell, as he disappeared into a cloud of pale blue smoke.

There was a pause while he attended to his personal bonfire. Perhaps, Terry Martin mused, if you risk collecting a lethal dose of plutonium rays every day, the occasional pipe of tobacco does not really matter. Dr. Hipwell glanced at his notes.

“Iraq has been on the tr

ail of her own nuclear bomb since the mid-1970s, when Saddam Hussein really came to power. It seems to be the man’s obsession. In those years Iraq bought a complete nuclear reactor system from France—which was not bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968—for that very purpose.”

He sucked contentedly and tamped the glowing brushfire at the top of his pipe once again. Drifting embers settled onto his notes.

“Forgive me,” said Sir Paul. “Was this reactor for the purpose of generating electricity?”

“Supposed to be,” agreed Hipwell. “Absolute rubbish, of course, and the French knew it. Iraq has the third-largest oil deposits in the world. They could have had an oil-fired power station for a fraction of the price. No, the point was to fuel the reactor with low-grade uranium, called yellowcake or caramel, that they could persuade people to sell them. After use in a reactor, the end-product is plutonium.”

There were nods around the table. Everyone knew that the British reactor at Sellafield created electricity for the power grid and spewed out the plutonium that went to Hipwell for his warheads.

“So the Israelis went to work,” said Hipwell. “First one of their commando teams blew up the huge turbine at Toulon before it was shipped, setting the project back two years. Then in 1981, when Saddam’s precious Osirak 1 and 2 plants were about to start up, Israeli fighter-bombers swept in and blew the lot to kingdom come. Since then, Saddam has never succeeded in buying another reactor. After a short while, he stopped trying.”

“Why the hell did he do that?” asked Harry Sinclair from his end of the table.

“Because he changed direction,” said Hipwell with a broad smile, like one who has solved a crossword puzzle in record time. “Up until then, he was pursuing the plutonium road. With some success, by the way. But not enough. Yet—”

“I don’t understand,” said Sir Paul Spruce. “What is the difference between a plutonium-based and a uranium-based atomic bomb?”

“Uranium is simpler,” said the physicist. “Look, there are various radioactive substances that can be used for a chain reaction, but for your simple, basic, effective atom bomb, uranium’s the ticket. That’s what Saddam has been after since 1982—a basic uranium-based bomb. He hasn’t got there yet, but he’s still trying, and he’ll get there one day.”

Hipwell sat back with a broad beam, as if he had settled the enigma of the Creation. Like most of those around the table, Spruce was still perplexed.

“If he can buy this uranium for his destroyed reactor, why can’t he make a bomb with it?” he asked.