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A lifelong professional soldier and a combat veteran, his tastes were as ascetic as his frame was spare.

Unable to take much pleasure in the luxury offered by cities, he felt more at home and at ease in camps and bivouacs and the company of fellow soldiers. Like others before him, he appreciated the Arabian desert—its vast horizons, blazing heat, and numbing cold, and many times its awesome silence.

That night, on a visit to the front lines—one of the treats he permitted himself as often as possible—he had walked away from St. Patrick’s Camp, leaving behind him the brooding Challenger tanks beneath their nets, crouching animals patiently waiting for their time, and the hussars preparing the evening meal beneath them.

By then a close friend of General Schwarzkopf and privy to all the planning staff’s innermost councils, the general knew that war was coming. Less than a week before the expiration of the United Nations deadline, there was not a hint that Saddam Hussein had any intention of pulling out of Kuwait.

What worried him that night under the stars of the Saudi desert was that he could not understand what the tyrant of Baghdad thought he was up to. As a soldier, the British general liked to understand his enemy, to plumb his intentions, his motivations, his tactics, his overall strategy.

Personally, he had nothing but contempt for the man in Baghdad. The amply documented files depicting genocide, torture, and murder revolted him. Saddam was not a soldier, never had been, and what real military talent he had had in his army he had largely wasted by overruling his generals or having the best of them executed.

That was not the problem; the problem was that Saddam Hussein had clearly taken overall command of every aspect—political and military—and nothing he did made a fraction of sense.

He had invaded Kuwait at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. That done, he had blown away his chances of reassuring his fellow Arabs that he was open to diplomacy, susceptible to reason, and that the problem could be resolved within the ambit of inter-Arab negotiations. Had he taken that road, he could probably have counted quite rightly on the oil continuing to flow, and the West gradually losing interest as the inter-Arab conferences bogged down for years.

It was the dictator’s own stupidity that had brought in the West, and to cap it, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, with its multiple rapes and brutality and its attempt to use Westerners as human shields, had guaranteed his utter isolation.

In the early days Saddam Hussein had had the rich oil fields of northeastern Saudi Arabia at his mercy, and he had hung back. With his army and air force under good generalship, he could even have reached Riyadh and dictated his terms. He had failed, and Desert Shield had been put in place while he masterminded one public relations disaster after another in Baghdad.

He might be streetwise, but in all other matters he was a strategic buffoon. And yet, reasoned the British general, how could any man be so stupid?

Even in the face of the air power now ranged against him, Saddam Hussein was making every single wrong move, politically and militarily. Had he no idea what rage from the skies was about to be visited on Iraq? Did he really not comprehend the level of the firepower that was about to set his armory back by ten years in five weeks?

The general stopped and stared across the desert toward the north. There was no moon that night, but the stars in the desert are so bright that dim outlines can be seen by their light alone. The land was flat, running away to the labyrinth of sand walls, fire ditches, minefields, barbed-wire entanglements, and gullies that made up the Iraqi defensive line, through which the American engineers of the Big Red One would blast a path to let the Challengers roll.

And yet the tyrant of Baghdad had one single ace of which the general knew and which he feared: Saddam could simply pull out of Kuwait.

Time was not on the Allies’ side; it belonged to Iraq. On March 15 the Moslem feast of Ramadan would begin. For a month no food or water should pass the lips of any Moslem between sunrise and sunset.

The nights were for eating and drinking. That made going to war, for a Moslem army in Ramadan, almost impossible.

After April 15, the desert would become an inferno, with temperatures rising to 130 degrees. Pressure would build up back home to bring the boys out; by summer, the pressure at home and the misery of the desert would become irresistible. The Allies would have to pull out and, having done so, would never come back again like this. The Coalition was a one-time-only phenomenon.

So March 15 was the limit. Working backward, the ground war might last up to twenty days. It would have to start, if at all, by February 23. But Chuck Horner needed his thirty-five days of air war to smash the Iraqi weapons, regiments, and defenses. January 17—that was the latest possible date.

/> Supposing Saddam pulled out? He would leave half a million Allies looking like fools, strung out in the desert, hanging in the wire, with nowhere to go but back. Yet Saddam was adamant—he would not pull out.

What was that crazy man up to? the general asked himself again. Was he waiting for something, some divine intervention of his own imagining, that would crush his enemies and leave him triumphant?

There was a yell out of the tank camp behind him. He turned. The commanding officer of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, Arthur Denaro, was calling him to supper. Burly, jovial Arthur Denaro, who would be in the first tank through that gap one day.

He smiled and began to walk back. It would be good to squat in the sand with the men, shoveling baked beans and bread out of a mess tin, listening to the voices in the glow of the fire, the flat twang of Lancashire, the rolling burr of Hampshire, and the soft brogue of Ireland; to laugh at the leg-pulling and the jokes, the crude vocabulary of men who used blunt English to say exactly what they meant, and with good humor.

Lord rot that man in the north. What the hell was he waiting for?

Chapter 14

The answer to the British general’s puzzlement lay on a padded trolley under the fluorescent lights of the factory, eighty feet beneath the desert of Iraq, where it had been built.

An engineer stepped rapidly back to stand at attention as the door to the room opened. Only five men came in before the two armed guards from the presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, closed the door.

Four of the men deferred to the one in the center. He wore, as usual, his combat uniform over gleaming black calf-boots, his personal sidearm at his waist, green cotton kerchief covering the triangle between jacket and throat.

One of the other four was the personal bodyguard who, even in here, where everyone had been checked five times for concealed weapons, would not leave his side. Between the Rais and his bodyguard stood his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, the MIMI. As in so many things, it was the MIMI that had taken over from the Ministry of Defense.

On the other side of the President stood the mastermind of the program, Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar, Iraq’s nuclear genius. Beside him, but a bit to the rear, stood Dr. Salah Siddiqui. Where Jaafar was the physicist, Siddiqui was the engineer.

The steel of their baby gleamed dully in the white light. It was fourteen feet long and just over three feet in diameter.