The Fist of God

“He says it every bloody night, it’s like he’s been saying it for thirty years,” complained the neviot man.

“Any sex?” asked Barzilai.

“You must be joking, Gidi. They don’t even talk, let alone screw.”

All other leads to a flaw in the character of Wolfgang Gemütlich came up zero. There was no gambling, no small boys, no socializing, no nightclubbing, no mistress, no scuttling through the red-light district. On one occasion he left the house, and the spirits of the trailing team rose. Gemütlich was in a dark coat and hat, on foot, after dark and after supper, moving through the darkened suburb until he came to a private house five blocks away.

He knocked and waited. The door opened, he was admitted, and it closed. Soon a ground-floor light came on, behind heavy drapes. Before the door closed, one of the Israeli watchers caught a glimpse of a grim-looking woman in a white nylon tunic.

Aesthetic baths, perhaps? Assisted showers, mixed sauna with two hefty wenches to handle the birch twigs? A check the next morning revealed that the woman in the tunic was an elderly chiropodist who ran a small practice from her own home. Wolfgang Gemütlich had been having his corns trimmed.

On the first of December, Gidi Barzilai received a rocket from Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. This was not an operation without a limit of time, he was warned. The United Nations had given Iraq till January 16 to get out of Kuwait. After that, there would be war. Anything might happen. Get on with it.

“Gidi, we can follow this bastard till hell freezes over,” the two team leaders told their controller.

“There’s just no dirt in his life. I don’t understand the bastard. Nothing—he does nothing we can use on him.”

Barzilai was in a dilemma. They could kidnap the wife and threaten the husband that he had better cooperate or else. ... Trouble was, the sleaze would trade her in rather than steal a luncheon voucher.

Worse, he would call the cops.

They could kidnap Gemütlich and work him over. The trouble there was, the man would have to go back to the bank to make the transfer to close down the Jericho account. Once inside the bank, he’d yell blue murder. Kobi Dror had said, no miss and no traces.

“Let’s switch to the secretary,” Barzilai said. “Confidential secretaries often know everything their boss knows.”

So the two teams switched their attentions to the equally dull-looking Fräulein Edith Hardenberg.

She took even less time, just ten days. They tailed her to her home, a small apartment in a staid old house just off Trautenauplatz far out in the Nineteenth District, the northwestern suburb of Grinzing.

She lived alone. No lover, no boyfriend, not even a pet. A search of her private papers revealed a modest bank account, a mother in retirement in Salzburg. The apartment itself had once been rented by the mother, as the rent book showed, but the daughter had moved in seven years earlier when the mother returned to her native Salzburg.

Edith drove a small Seat car, which she parked on the street outside the flat, but she mainly commuted to work by public transportation, no doubt due to the parking difficulties in the city center.

Her pay stubs revealed a stingy salary—“mean bastards,” exploded the neviot searcher when he saw the sum—and her birth certificate revealed she was thirty-nine—“and looking fifty,” remarked the searcher.

There were no pictures of men in the flat, just one of her mother, one of them both on vacation by some lake, and one of her apparently deceased father in the uniform of the customs service.

If there was any man in her life, it appeared to be Mozart.

“She’s an opera buff, and that’s all,” the neviot team leader reported back to Barzilai, after the flat had been left exactly as they found it. “There’s a big collection of LP records—she hasn’t gotten around to compact disks yet—and they’re all opera. Must spend most of her spare cash on them. Books on opera, on composers, singers, and conductors. Posters of the Vienna Opera winter calendar, though she couldn’t begin to afford a ticket.”

“No man in her life, eh?” mused Barzilai.

“She might fall for Pavarotti, if you can get him. Apart from that, forget it.”

But Barzilai did not forget it. He recalled a case in London, long ago. A civil servant in Defence, real spinster type; then the Sovs had produced this stunning young Yugoslav ... even the judge had been sympathetic at her trial.

That evening Barzilai sent a long encrypted cable to Tel Aviv.

By the middle of December, the buildup of the Coalition army south of the Kuwaiti border had become a great, inexorable tidal wave of men and steel.

Three hundred thousand men and women of thirty nations stretched in a series of lines across the Saudi desert from the coast and westward for over a hundred miles.

At the ports of Jubail, Dammam, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai the cargo ships came in from the sea to disgorge guns and tanks, fuel and stores, food and bedding, ammunition and spares in endless succession.

From the docks the convoys rolled west along the Tapline Road to establish the vast logistic bases that would one day supply the invading army.

A Tornado pilot from Tabuq, flying south from a feint attack on the Iraqi border, told his squadron colleagues he had flown over the nose of a convoy of trucks and then on to the tail of the line. At five hundred miles per hour, it had taken him six minutes to reach the end of the line of trucks fifty miles away, and they had been rolling nose to tail.