No device of this kind was worth a jot unless your friends—and more important, your enemies—knew that you had it. Then only did potential enemies come crawling as friends.
Some nations who had developed the weapon had simply announced the fact with a major test and let the rest of the world work out the consequences. Others, like Israel and South Africa, had simply hinted at what they possessed but never confirmed, leaving the world and particularly the neighbors to guess.
Sometimes that worked better; imaginations ran riot.
But that, Rahmani became convinced, would simply not work for Iraq. If what he had been told was true—and he was not convinced that the whole exercise was not another ploy, counting on an eventual leak to gain another stay of execution—then no one outside Iraq would believe it.
The only way for Iraq to deter would be to prove it. This the Rais apparently now refused to do. There were, of course, major problems to proving any such claim.
To test on home territory would be out of the question, utter madness. To send a ship deep into the southern Indian Ocean, abandon it, and let the test happen there might have been possible once, but not now. All ports were firmly blockaded. But a team from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna could be invited to examine and satisfy themselves that this was no lie. After all, the IAEA had been visiting almost yearly for a decade and had always been consummately fooled as to what was going on. Given visual evidence, they would have to believe their own eyes and tests, eat humble pie over their past gullibility, and confirm the truth.
Yet he, Rahmani, had just heard that that route was formally forbidden. Why? Because it was all a lie?
Because the Rais had something else in mind? And more important, what was in it for him, Rahmani?
For months he had counted on Saddam Hussein to bluster his way into a war he could not win; now he had done it. Rahmani had counted on the defeat culminating in the American-engineered downfall of the Rais and his own elevation in the American-sponsored successor regime. Now things had changed. He needed, he realized, time to think, to work out how best to play this amazing new card.
That evening, when darkness had fallen, a chalk sign appeared on a wall behind the Chaldean Church of St. Joseph in the Area of the Christians. It resembled a figure eight on its side.
The citizens of Baghdad trembled that night. Despite the ceaseless blast of propaganda on the local Iraqi radio and the blind faith of many that it was all true, there were others who quietly listened to the BBC
World Service in Arabic, prepared in London but broadcast out of Cyprus, and knew that the Beni Naji were telling the truth. War was coming.
The assumption in the city was that the Americans would start with the carpet-bombing of Baghdad, an assumption that went right up to the Presidential Palace itself. There would be massive civilian casualties.
The regime assumed this but did not mind. In high places the calculation was that the global effect of such massive slaughter of civilians in their homes would cause a worldwide revulsion against the United States, forcing her to desist and depart. That was why such a heavy foreign press contingent was still allowed and indeed encouraged to occupy the Rashid Hotel. Guides were on standby to hurry the foreign TV cameras to the scenes of the genocide as soon as it started.
The subtlety of this argument somehow escaped those who were actually living in the homes of Baghdad. Many had already fled, the non-Iraqis heading for the Jordanian border to swell the five-month-long tide of refugees from Kuwait, the Iraqis seeking sanctuary in the countryside.
No one suspected, including the millions of couch potatoes glued to their screens across the United States and Europe, the true level of sophistication that was now within the grasp of the lugubrious Chuck Horner down in Riyadh. Nobody then could envisage that most of the targets would be selected from a menu prepared by the cameras of satellites in space and demolished by laser-guided bombs that rarely hit what they were not aimed at.
What the citizens of Baghdad did know, as the truth gleaned from the BBC filtered through the bazaars and markets, was that four days from midnight January 12, the deadline to quit Kuwait would expire and the American warplanes would come. So the city was quiet in expectation.
Mike Martin pedaled his bicycle slowly out of Shurja Street and around the back of the church. He saw the chalk mark on the wall as he pedaled by, and went on. At the end of the alley he paused, stepped off the bicycle, and spent some time adjusting the chain while he looked back the way he had come to see if there was any movement behind him.
None. No shifting of the feet of the Secret Police in their doorways, no heads poking over the skyline of the roofs. He pedaled back, reached out with the damp cloth, erased the mark, and rode away.
The figure eight meant that a message awaited him under the flagstone in the abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, down by the river barely half a mile away.
As a boy he had played down there, running along the quaysides with Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, where the vendors cooked the delicious mosgouf over beds of camelthorn embers, selling the tender portions of the Tigris river carp to passersby.
Now the shops were closed, the tea houses shuttered; few people wandered along the quays as they used to. The silence served him well. At the top of Abu Nawas he saw a group of AMAM plainclothes guards, but they took no notice of the fellagha pedaling on his master’s business. He was heartened by the sight of them; the AMAM was nothing if not clumsy. If they were going to stake out a dead-letter box, they would not put a group of men so obviously at the head of the street. Their stake-out would be an attempt at sophistication, but flawed.
The message was there. The brick went back into its place in a second, the folded paper into the crotch of his underpants. Minutes later, he was crossing the Ahrar Bridge over the Tigris, back from Risafa into Karch, and on to the Soviet diplomat’s house in Mansour.
In nine weeks his life had settled down in the walled villa. The Russian cook and her husband treated him fairly, and he had picked up a smattering of their language. He shopped every day for fresh produce, which gave him good reason to service all his dead-letter boxes. He had transmitted fourteen messages to the unseen Jericho and had received fifteen from him.
Eight times he had been stopped by the AMAM, but each time his humble demeanor, his bicycle and basket of vegetables, fruit, coffee, spices, and groceries, plus his letter from the diplomatic household and his visible poverty had caused him to be sent on his way.
He could not know what war plans were shaping up in Riyadh, but he had to write all the questions and queries for Jericho in his own Arabic script after listening to them on the incoming tapes, and he had to read Jericho’s answers in order to send them back in burst transmissions to Simon Paxman.
As a soldier, he could only estimate that Jericho’s information, political and military, had to be invaluable to a commanding general preparing to attack Iraq.
He had already acquired an oil heater for his shack and a kerosene lamp to light it. Hessian sacks from the market now made curtains for all the windows, and the crunch of feet on the gravel warned him if anyone approached the door.
That night, he returned gratefully to the warmth of his home, bolted the door, made sure all the curtains covered every square inch of the windows, lit his lamp, and read Jericho’s latest message. It was shorter than usual, but that did not lessen its impact. Martin read it twice to make sure that even he had not suddenly lost his grasp of Arabic, muttered “Jesus Christ,” and removed his loose tiles to reveal the tape recorder.