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At the rear, four feet were taken up by an elaborate impact-absorbing device that would be shed as soon as the projectile had been launched. Even the remainder of the ten-foot-long casing was in fact a sabot, a sleeve in eight identical sections. Tiny explosive bolts would cause this to break away as the projectile departed on its mission, leaving the slimmer, two-foot-diameter core to carry on alone.

The sabot was only there to fill out the twenty-four-inch projectile to the thirty-nine inches needed to occupy the bore of the launcher, and to protect the four rigid tail fins it concealed.

Iraq did not possess the telemetry necessary to operate movable fins by radio signals from the earth, but the rigid fins would serve to stabilize the projectile in flight and prevent it from wobbling or tumbling.

At the front, the nose cone was on ultratough maraging steel and needle-pointed. This too would eventually become dispensable.

When a rocket, having entered inner space on its flight, reenters the earth’s atmosphere, the air becoming denser on the downward flight creates a friction heat enough to melt the nose cone away. That is why reentering astronauts need that heat shield—to prevent their capsule from being incinerated.

The device the five Iraqis surveyed that night was similar. The steel nose cone would ease its flight upward but could not survive reentry. Were it retained, the melting metal would bend and buckle, causing the falling body to sway, swerve, turn broadside onto the rushing air, and burn up. The steel nose was designed to blow apart at the apogee of flight, revealing beneath it a reentry cone, shorter, blunter, and made of carbon fiber.

In the days when Dr. Gerald Bull was alive, he had tried to buy, on behalf of Baghdad, a British firm in Northern Ireland called LearFan. It was an aviation company gone bust. It had tried to build executive jets with many components made of carbon fiber. What interested Dr. Bull and Baghdad was not executive airplanes, but the carbon-fiber filament-winding machines at LearFan.

Carbon fiber is extremely heat-resistant, but it is also very hard to work. The carbon is first reduced to a sort of wool, from which a thread or filament is spun. The thread is laid and cross-plaited many times over a mold, then bonded into a shell to create the desired shape.

Because carbon fiber is vital in rocket technology, and that technology is classified, great care is taken in monitoring the export of such machines. When the British intelligence people learned where the LearFan equipment was destined and consulted Washington, the deal had been killed. It was then assumed that Iraq would not acquire her carbon-filament technology.

The experts were wrong. Iraq tried another tack, which worked. An American supplier of air-conditioning and insulation products was unwittingly persuaded to sell to an Iraqi front company the machinery for spinning rock-wool. In Iraq this was modified by Iraqi engineers to spin carbon fiber.

Between the impact-absorber at the back and the nose cone rested the work of Dr. Siddiqui—a small, workaday, but perfectly functioning atomic bomb, to be triggered on the gun-barrel principle, using the catalysts of lithium and polonium to create the blizzard of neutrons necessary to start the chain reaction.

Inside the engineering of Dr. Siddiqui was the real triumph, a spherical ball and a tubular plug, between them weighing thirty-five kilograms and produced under the aegis of Dr. Jaafar. Both were of pure enriched uranium-235.

A slow smile of satisfaction spread beneath the thick black moustache. The President advanced and ran a forefinger down the burnished steel.

“It will work? It will really work?” he whispered.

“Yes, Sayid Rais ,” said the physicist.

The head in the black beret nodded slowly several times.

“You are to be congratulated, my brothers.”

Beneath the projectile, on a wooden stand, was a simple plaque. It read: Qubth-ut-Allah.

* * *

Tariq Aziz had contemplated long and hard as to how, if at all, he could convey to his President the American threat so brutally put before him in Geneva.

Twenty years they had known each other, twenty years during which the Foreign Minister had served his master with doglike devotion, always taking his side during those early struggles within the Ba’ath Party hierarchy when there had been other claimants for power, always following his personal judgment that the utter ruthlessness of the man from Tikrit would triumph, and always being proved right.

They had climbed the greasy pole of power in a Middle East dictatorship together, the one always in the shadow of the other. The gray-haired, stubby Aziz had managed to overcome the initial disadvantage of his higher education and grasp of two European languages by sheer blind obedience.

Leaving the actual violence to others, he had watched and approved, as all must do in the court of Saddam Hussein, as purge after purge had seen columns of Army officers and once-trusted Party men disgraced and taken away for execution, a sentence often preceded by agonized hours with the tormentors at Abu Ghraib.

He had seen good generals removed and shot for trying to stand up for the men under their command, and he knew that real conspirators had died more horribly than he cared to imagine.

He had watched the Al-Juburi tribe, once so powerful in the Army that no one dared to offend them, stripped and humbled, the survivors brought to heel and obedience. He had stayed silent as Saddam’s half-brother Ali Hassan Majid, then Interior Minister, had masterminded the genocide of the Kurds, not simply at Halabja but at fifty other towns and villages, wiped away with bombs, artillery, and gas.

Tariq Aziz, like all those in the entourage of the Rais, knew that there was nowhere else for him to go. If anything happened to his master, he too would be finished for all time.

Unlike some around the throne, he was too smart to believe that this was a popular regime. His real fear was not the foreigners but the awful revenge of the people of Iraq if ever the veil of Saddam’s protection were removed from him.

His problem that January 11, as he waited for the personal appointment to which he had been summoned on his return from Europe, was how to phrase the American threat without attracting the inevitable rage onto himself. The Rais, he knew, could easily suspect that it was he, the Foreign Minister, who had really suggested the threat to the Americans. There is no logic to paranoia, only gut instinct, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Many innocent men had died, and their families with them, on the basis of some inspirational suspicion by the Rais.

Two hours later, returning to his car, he was relieved, smiling and puzzled.

The reason for his relief was easy; his President had proved to be relaxed and genial. He had listened with approval to Tariq Aziz’s glowing report of his mission to Geneva, of the widespread sympathy he detected in all those he spoke to with regard to Iraq’s position, and of the general anti-American feeling that appeared to be growing in the West.