The Fist of God

Simon Paxman was asleep on a cot in his office when the phone rang. It was a cipher clerk from Communications in the basement.

“I’ll come down,” said Paxman. It was a very short message, just decrypted, from Riyadh. Martin had been in touch and had been given his orders.

From his office Paxman phoned Chip Barber in his CIA flat off Grosvenor Square.

“He’s on his way back,” he said. “We don’t know when he’ll cross the border. Steve says he wants me to go down there. You coming?”

“Right,” said Barber. “The DDO’s going back to Langley on the morning flight. But I’m coming with you. This guy I have to see.”

During October 22 the American embassy and the British Foreign Office each approached the Saudi embassy for a short-notice accreditation of a new junior diplomat to Riyadh. There was no problem.

Two passports, neither in the name of Barber or Paxman, were visaed without delay, and the men caught the 8:45P.M. flight out of Heathrow, arriving at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Riyadh just before dawn.

An American embassy car met Chip Barber and took him straight to the U.S. mission, where the hugely expanded CIA operation was based, while a smaller unmarked sedan took Paxman away to the villa where the British SIS operation had quartered itself. The first news Paxman got was that Martin had apparently not crossed the border and checked in.

Riyadh’s order to return to base was, from Martin’s point of view, easier said than done. He had returned from the desert well before dawn of October 22 and spent the day closing his operation down.

A message was left under the tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery to explain to Mr. Al-Khalifa that he had regretfully had to leave Kuwait. A further note for Abu Fouad explained where and how to collect the remaining items of arms and explosives that were still stashed in the two of his once-six villas.

By afternoon he had finished, and he drove his battered pickup truck out to the camel farm beyond Sulaibiya, where the last outposts of Kuwait City ran out and the desert began.

His camels were still there and in good condition. The calf had been weaned and was on its way to becoming a valuable animal, so he used it to settle the debt he owed the owner of the farm who had taken care of it.

Shortly before dusk he mounted the she-camel and headed south-southwest, so that when night fell and the chill darkness of the desert enfolded him, Martin was well clear of the last signs of habitation.

It took him four hours instead of the usual one to arrive at the place where he had buried his radio, a site marked by the gutted and rusted wreck of a car that had once, long ago, broken down and been abandoned there.

He hid the radio beneath the consignment of dates that he had stored in the panniers. Even with these, the camel was far less laden than she had been when hauling her load of explosives and weapons into Kuwait nine weeks earlier.

If she was grateful, she gave no sign of it, rumbling and spitting with

disgust at having been evicted from her comfortable corral at the farm. But she never slackened her swaying gait as the miles slipped by in the darkness.

It was a different journey, however, from that of mid-August. As he moved south, Martin saw more and more signs of the huge Iraqi army that now infested the area south of the city, spreading itself farther and farther west toward the Iraqi border.

Usually he could see the glow of the lights of the various oil wells that stud the desert here and, knowing the Iraqis would be likely to occupy them, move away into the sands to avoid them.

On other occasions he smelled the woodsmoke from an Iraqi fire and was able to skirt the encampments in time. Once he almost stumbled onto a battalion of tanks, hull-down behind horseshoe-shaped walls of sand facing the Americans and the Saudis across the border to the south. He heard the clink of metal on metal just in time, pulled the bridle sharply to the right, and slipped away back into the sand dunes.

There had only been two divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard south of Kuwait when he had entered, and they had been farther to the east, due south of Kuwait City.

Now the Hammurabi Division had joined the other two, and eleven further divisions, mainly of the regular army, had been ordered by Saddam Hussein into south Kuwait to match the American and Coalition buildup on the other side.

Fourteen divisions is a lot of manpower, even spread over a desert. Fortunately for Martin, they seemed to post no sentinels and slept soundly beneath their vehicles, but the sheer numbers of them pushed him farther and farther west.

The short fifty-kilometer hike from the Saudi village of Hamatiyyat to the Kuwaiti camel farm was out of the question; he was being pushed west toward the Iraqi border, marked by the deep cleft of the Wadi el Batin, which he did not really want to have to cross.

Dawn found him well to the west of the Manageesh oil field and still north of the Al Mufrad police station, which marks the border at one of the pre-emergency crossing points.

The ground had become more hilly, and he found a cluster of rocks in which to spend the day. As the sun rose, he hobbled the camel, who sniffed the bare sand and rock in disgust, finding not even a tasty thorn bush for breakfast, rolled himself in the camel blanket, and went to sleep.

Shortly after noon, he was awakened by the clank of tanks quite close by and realized he was too near the main road that runs from Jahra, in Kuwait, due southwest to cross into Saudi Arabia at the Al Salmi customs station. After sundown he waited until almost midnight before setting out. He knew the border could not be more than twelve miles to the south.

His late start enabled him to move between the last Iraqi patrols at about threeA.M. , that hour when human spirits are lowest and sentries tend to doze.

By the light of the moon, he saw the Qaimat Subah police station slip by to one side, and two miles farther on, he knew he had crossed the border. To be on the safe side, he kept going until he cut into the lateral road that runs east-west between Hamatiyyat and Ar-Rugi. There he stopped and assembled his radio dish.

Because the Iraqis to the north had dug in several miles on the Kuwait side of the border, and because General Schwarzkopf’s plan called for the Desert Shield forces also to lie back to ensure that, if attacked, they would know the Iraqis had truly invaded Saudi Arabia, Martin found himself in an empty no-man’s-land. One day, that empty land would become a seething torrent of Saudi and American forces streaming north into Kuwait, but in the predawn darkness of October 24 he had it to himself.