“He still protested to the end,” said Ali. “I swear, if he knew something, we’d have had it out of him.”
“Put him in a bag,” snapped Omar Khatib, “and return him to his wife for burial.”
It was a strong white canvas sack six feet long and two feet wide, and it was dumped on the doorstep of the house in Qadisiyah at ten that evening. Slowly and with great difficulty, for both were old, the widow and the house servant lifted the bag, brought it inside, and laid it on the dining table. The woman took up her station at the end of the table and began to keen her grief.
The bewildered old servant, Talat, went to the telephone, but it had been ripped from the wall and did not work. Taking his mistress’s phone book, which he could not read, he went down the road to the house of the pharmacist and asked the neighbor to try to contact the young master—either of the young masters would do.
At the same hour, as the pharmacist tried to get a call through Iraq’s wrecked internal telephone system, and Gidi Barzilai, back in Vienna, composed a fresh cable to Kobi Dror, Major Zayeed was reporting his day’s lack of progress to Hassan Rahmani.
“It just wasn’t there,” he told the head of Counterintelligence. “If it had been, we’d have found it. So it has to be the fourth villa, the home of the diplomat.”
“You’re sure you can’t be wrong?” asked Rahmani. “It couldn’t be in another house?”
“No, sir. The nearest house to those four is well outside the area indicated by the crossed beams. The source of those burst transmissions was inside that diamond on the map. I’d swear to it.”
Rahmani was hesitant. Diplomats were the very devil to investigate, always prepared to rush to the Foreign Ministry with a complaint. To get inside Comrade Kulikov’s residence, he would have to go high—as high as he could.
When the major was gone, Rahmani phoned the Foreign Ministry. He was in luck; the Foreign Minister, who had been traveling almost constantly for months, was in Baghdad. More, he was still at his desk.
Rahmani secured his interview for ten the next morning.
The pharmacist was a kindly man, and he just kept trying all through the night. He never did reach the older son, but using a contact in the Army, he managed to get a message through to the younger of his dead friend’s two boys. He could not speak to the man himself, but the Army contact passed it on.
The message reached the younger son at his base far away from Baghdad at dawn. As soon as he heard it, the officer took his car and began to drive. Normally it would have taken him no more than two hours.
That day, February 17, it took him six. There were patrols and roadblocks. Using his rank, he could drive to the head of the line, flash his pass, and be waved on.
That did not work for the wrecked bridges. At each one he had to wait for the ferry. It was midday when he arrived at his parents’ house in Qadisiyah.
His mother ran into his embrace and cried against his shoulder. He tried to extract from her details of precisely what had happened, but she was no longer young herself and was hysterical.
Finally, he picked her up and carried her to her room. In the mess of medications the soldiers had left strewn all over the bathroom floor, he found a bottle of sleeping pills his father had used when winter cold brought on the arthritis. He gave his mother two, and soon she slept.
In the kitchen he ordered old Talat to make them both a coffee, and they sat at the table while the servant described what had happened since dawn of the previous day. When he was finished, he showed his dead master’s son the hole in the garden where the soldiers had found the bag with the radio set. The younger man shinnied lip the garden wall and found the scratches where the intruder had come over in the night to bury it. Then he went back to the house.
Hassan Rahmani was kept waiting, which he did not like, but he had his appointment with the Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, just before eleven.
“I don’t think I quite understand you,” said the gray-haired minister, peering owlishly through his glasses.
“Embassies are allowed to communicate with their capitals by radio, and their transmissions are always coded.”
“Yes, Minister, and they come from the Chancery building. That is part of normal diplomatic traffic. This is different. We are talking here about a covert transmitter, as used by spies, sending burst transmissions to a receiver we are sure is not in Moscow but much closer.”
“Burst transmissions?” asked Aziz.
Rahmani explained what they were.
“I still fail to follow you. Why should some agent of the KGB—and presumably this must be a KGB
operation—be sending burst messages from the residence of the First Secretary, when they have a perfect right to send them on much more powerful transmitters from the embassy?”
“I do not know.”
“Then you must offer me some kind of better explanation. Brigadier. Have you any idea what is going on outside your own office? Do you not know that late yesterday I arrived back from Moscow after intensive discussions with Mr. Gorbachev and his representative Yevgeny Primakov, who was here last week? Do you not know that I brought with me a peace proposal that, if the Rais accepts it—and I am presenting it to him in two hours—could cause the Soviet Union to recall the Security Council and forbid the Americans to attack us?
“And in the face of all this, at this precise moment, you expect me to humiliate the Soviet Union by ordering a raid on their First Secretary’s villa? Frankly, Brigadier, you must be mad.”
That was the end of it. Hassan Rahmani left the Ministry seething but helpless. There was one thing, however, that Tariq Aziz had not forbidden. Within the walls of his house, Kulikov might be impregnable.