The Fist of God

“But our people have been helping, of course. We are probably his principal target.”

“Yes, in target analysis,” said Martin. “Our principal problem is in hard, on-the-spot intelligence. We simply don’t have top-level intelligence coming to us out of Baghdad. Not the British, not the Americans, and not even your people either.”

Twenty minutes later the dinner ended, and Terry Martin saw Professor Hadari into a taxi to take him back to his hotel.

* * *

About the hour of midnight, three triangulation stations were implanted in Kuwait on the orders of Hassan Rahmani in Baghdad.

They were radio dishes designed to track the source of a radio-wave emission and take a compass bearing on it. One was a fixed station, mounted on the roof of a tall building in the district of Ardiya, on the extreme southern outskirts of Kuwait City. Its dish faced toward the desert.

The other two were mobile stations, large vans with the dishes on the roof, an in-built generator for the electrical power, and a darkened interior where the scanners could sit at their consoles and trawl the airwaves for the transmitter they sought, which they had been told would probably send from somewhere out in the desert between the city and the Saudi border.

One of these vans was outside Jahra, well to the west of its colleague in Ardiya, and the third was down the coast, in the grounds of the Al Adan hospital, where the law student’s sister had been raped in the first days of the invasions. The Al Adan tracker could get a full cross-bearing on those reported by the scanners farther north, pinning the source of the transmission down to a square a few hundred yards across.

At Ahmadi air base, where once Khaled Al-Khalifa had flown his Skyhawk, a Soviet-built Hind helicopter gunship waited on twenty-four-hour standby. The crew of the Hind was from the Air Force, a concession Rahmani had had to squeeze out of the general commanding it. The radio-tracking crews were from Rahmani’s own Counterintelligence wing, drafted in from Baghdad and the best he had.

Professor Hadari spent a sleepless night. Something his friend had told him worried him deeply. He regarded himself as a completely loyal Israeli, born of an old Sephardic family who had emigrated just after the turn of the century along with men like Ben-Yehuda and Ben-Gurion. He himself had been born outside Jaffa, when it was still a bustling port of Palestinian Arabs, and he had learned Arabic as a small boy.

He had raised two sons and seen one of them die in a miserable ambush in South Lebanon. He was grandfather to five small children. Who should tell him that he did not love his country?

But there was something wrong. If war came, many young men might die, as his Ze’ev had died, even if they were British and Americans and French. Was this the time for Kobi Dror to show vindictive, small-power chauvinism?

He rose early, settled his bill, packed, and ordered a taxi for the airport. Before he left the hotel, he hovered for a while by the bank of phones in the lobby, then changed his mind.

Halfway to the airport, he ordered his cab driver to divert off the M4 and find a phone booth. Grumbling at the time and trouble this would take, the driver did so, eventually finding one on a corner in Chiswick.

Hadari was in luck. It was Hilary who answered the phone at the Bayswater flat.

“Hold on,” he said, “he’s halfway out the door.”

Terry Martin came on the line.

“It’s Moshe. Terry, I don’t have much time. Tell your people the Institute does have a high source inside Baghdad. Tell them to ask what happened to Jericho. Good-bye, my friend.”

“Moshe, one moment. Are you sure? How do you know?”

“It doesn’t matter. You never heard this from me. Goodbye.”

The phone went dead. In Chiswick the elderly scholar climbed back into his taxi and proceeded to Heathrow. He was trembling at the enormity of what he had done. And how could he tell Terry Martin that it was he, the professor of Arabic from Tel Aviv University, who had crafted that first reply to Jericho in Baghdad?

Terry Martin’s call found Simon Paxman at his desk at Century House just after ten.

“Lunch? Sorry, I can’t. Hell of a day. Tomorrow perhaps,” said Paxman.

“Too late. It’s urgent, Simon.”

Paxman sighed. No doubt his tame academic had come up with some fresh interpretation of a phrase in an Iraqi broadcast that was supposed to change the meaning of life.

“Still can’t make lunch. Major conference here, in-house. Look, a quick drink. The Hole-in-the-Wall, it’s a

pub underneath Waterloo Bridge, quite close to here. Say twelve o’clock? I can give you half an hour, Terry.”

“More than enough. See you,” said Martin.

Just after noon, they sat over beers in the alehouse above which the trains of the Southern Region rumbled to Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. Martin, without revealing his source, narrated what he had been told that morning.

“Bloody hell,” whispered Paxman. There were people in the next booth. “Who told you?”